r/vacaville

This is land by Travis Air Force Base, the Vanden/Leisure Town, Southtown, and northern most area of Fairfield

Looking for friends and fun things to do around here! Message me

Last month I launched this to help Bay Area homeowners file an informal decline in value assessment. The response was overwhelming: over 2,000 people have checked their property, and dozens have filed, averaging over $3,000 in estimated annual savings.

I've now opened it up for Solano County. The county's deadline is November 30.

Checking is free and you pay a flat $29 to file. You can only file if there are savings estimated, and about 80% of checks come back with none.

The site pulls comps based on Publication 30 rules, fills out Solano's own Assessment Review Request, attaches a comparable sales worksheet, and mails it to the assessor for you. I close Solano filings on November 14 so every letter is postmarked in good time.

One thing worth knowing: Solano's informal review and its formal appeal both close on November 30, so waiting for the informal result leaves no room to appeal afterwards.

Go check if you qualify: https://saveproptax.com/

And if you'd rather not pay to automate it, feel free to use the comps from the website and file directly with the county for free. The estimates are conservative, and the county's own page is linked on the site.

Hey everyone, I’m looking for some local advice on the best neighborhoods/areas to consider for buying a home.
Budget is roughly $500k–$650k, with safety being one of the biggest priorities. We’re looking for a family-friendly area(young family), ideally with a decent yard, relatively quiet surroundings, and reasonable access to jobs/amenities.
I already have some ideas but still want local opinions.
Which neighborhoods would you recommend at this price point? And equally important, which areas or specific neighborhoods would you avoid, especially because of crime, bad surroundings, or other issues that might not be obvious to someone who doesn’t know the area well?
Would really appreciate opinions from people who actually live there or know the area well.

A Vacaville resident called Mary Heiser told Jan Sramek at a town hall that he needed to work on his soft skills. That line stuck with me, so I went through the Solano County growth rules, the Suisun Expansion application and the CEQA filings to understand what she was actually objecting to. Posting what I found in case it's useful. I made a video about it too, linked at the bottom, but the substance is all here.

The rule everyone knows about

Solano County has had an orderly growth ordinance since 1984, reaffirmed by voters as recently as 2008. It requires a countywide vote before agriculturally zoned land in unincorporated areas converts to urban use. That word is doing a lot of work.

The part that gets left out

The ordinance only reaches unincorporated land. Annex a parcel into an existing city and the county rule stops applying to it. Solano County's own administrator, Bill Emlen, has said on the record that if a city successfully annexed the land, California Forever would not be required to present its plan to Solano voters.

So in late 2025 the company applied to annex roughly 22,873 acres into Suisun City. The decision would ultimately go to LAFCO, the Local Agency Formation Commission, under the Cortese-Knox-Hertzberg Act.

The safety valve, and why it's narrow here

Residents of an annexed area can force a protest hearing. But California Forever owns nearly all of the land in question, which makes organising objections difficult in practice. LAFCO's own deputy executive has described protest hearings as usually not a big deal, because developers either work with the property owners or already own the land.

What this doesn't mean

It does not mean review disappears. The environmental impact report is still coming, Suisun City still has to approve, revenue-sharing still has to be negotiated, and LAFCO still has to sign off. What changes is which body decides, and which electorate — if any — gets a vote.

The bit I keep coming back to

The 2024 ballot measure qualified, and was then withdrawn on 22 July 2024, one day before the county supervisors were due to vote on it. Everyone remembers that as a defeat at the polls. It wasn't. No Solano County voter has ever cast a ballot on this project, and under the current route none will.

Polling on it is contested and worth treating carefully. A January 2026 poll of 400 likely Suisun City voters, commissioned by an opposition group, found 58% opposed, rising to 65% after hearing arguments from both sides. California Forever's own countywide poll of 800 voters, run in April, found 51% support rising to 59%. Each poll favoured the side that commissioned it, which is normal and not an accusation. Neither is binding.

Where it stands

The draft EIR still hasn't been released. Suisun expects to finish annexation and EIR processing by the end of 2026, followed by a 60-day comment period. That comment period is the realistic window for public input, and it's worth knowing it's coming.

I made a documentary going through the whole sequence from 2018 onward if you want the longer version, but the above is the part I thought was most worth having on its own: https://youtu.be/NkXKp6zTGV8

Anyone else think the mega church off of 505 is a cult? All the journey coffees they have… an amphitheater… live streams… not to mention now chains of them. Anyway, quick story. I was doing a home loan for a family and we were trying to figure out how they can budget for a $3,000/month payment. Went through their finances with them and they do weekly donations of $1,600 ($6,400 a month) to the i-505 mega church… asked about it since it’s a donation and if they can cut back on that for their future home and they said that is absolutely non-negotiable and to not ask about that again….

Good morning fellow townmates.

I've lived in Vacaville since 1999, growing up in a nearby town. We have four kids, and for years the only things we knew were going on around here were the big ones. Farmer's Market, Fiesta Days, Merriment on Main. So most weekends we'd load everybody up and go do something in another town.

Stuff was happening, I just wasn't aware. My wife is on social media and would mention things to me (usually after the fact), but it was all scattered across a dozen accounts and groups. I barely use social media, so unless I happened to follow exactly the right page, I never saw any of it. There was no one place to just look and see what's going on this weekend.

So I built one: eventsinvacaville.com

It's been live since February, and it's a plain calendar of what's happening around town. Right now there are a little over 100 upcoming events on it, and about two thirds of them are free. Community events, arts and culture, live music, classes and workshops, theater, sports, fundraisers, the markets. You can browse by date or by category, and there's a form to submit anything I've missed.

I have a tech background, so this was really just a way to put it toward something I actually wanted to exist.

Six months in, it is definitely not complete. I know for a fact I'm light on Spanish-language events, and past that, I don't know what I don't know. That's mostly why I'm posting. If you run something, or you know about something that isn't on there, send it my way and I'll add it.

That's all this is. I wanted to share it in case it saves somebody else a few years of driving out of town on a weekend.

I live off Alamo near buck ave and these soliciting salespersons are genuinely so obnoxious. I never answer the door but they knock and ring the doorbell multiple times. Do they really think that knocking for 30 seconds straight will encourage someone to open the front door??? I had a no soliciting sign at my old house and it was always disregarded so I haven’t put one up at my current house but is there a way I can deter them? I’m about to remove the wiring on my doorbell 🙄