Solano County's big-bet year ends with the shipyard in Texas and the new city in limbo
Saronic chose Texas for its $3.2 billion shipyard. Supervisors killed the fast-track bill 3-2. The East Solano Plan waits on environmental review. 2026 was the year Solano reached for the future and missed.
FAIRFIELD: No North Bay county spent 2026 reaching further into the future than Solano County. And no county has less to show for it.
The year opened with the shipyard. Saronic, the defense shipbuilder, was weighing sites for a reported $3.2 billion shipyard, and Solano County, allied with the California Forever backers of the East Solano Plan, made its pitch: a greenfield waterfront site, a friendly county, and state legislation to fast-track the approvals. In July, Saronic chose Texas.
The legislative vehicle died with the deal's momentum. The Solano County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 against advancing the fast-track legislation for the shipyard project, sinking the bill for the year, in a vote that split the board and the county's business community.
The statement from Senator Christopher Cabaldon's office framed the Texas decision as California's loss: thousands of jobs, billions in investment, gone to a state that moved faster. The subtext was aimed at Sacramento as much as Solano: the permitting state lost to the permitting state that permits.
The city that is not a city yet
Behind the shipyard fight stands the larger and stranger project: the East Solano Plan, the California Forever-backed proposal to build a new city from scratch on farmland in the eastern county. The plan's backers withdrew their 2024 ballot initiative and promised a full environmental review and a development agreement with the county instead, with a possible return to voters in 2026.
That review is the whole game now. A project of this scale, tens of thousands of homes on agricultural land, lives or dies in the environmental impact report: water supply, traffic, farmland conversion, and the fiscal terms of the development agreement. The plan's opponents, organized and funded, are waiting for the draft to give them something to sue over. Its supporters are waiting for the draft to give them something to campaign on.
Solano's 2026 is a case study in the difference between announcements and outcomes. The shipyard announcement made national news; the outcome is a Texas shipyard. The new-city announcement made international news; the outcome is a draft EIR that has not been released. The county reached for transformation and got process.
None of this means the bets were wrong. Solano is the North Bay's affordable county, its logistics county, its room-to-grow county, and the economic logic that attracted Saronic and California Forever has not changed. But 2026 proved that logic is not enough. In California, the future has to survive environmental review, and the review has barely begun.
None to date. The Tribune corrects errors promptly and transparently. Read our corrections policy.