The Gateway Pundit previously reported that US Air Force officials are investigating a series of major land purchases worth over $1 billion by Flannery Associates LLC, a mysterious investment group.

The company, Flannery Associates LLC, has acquired approximately 55,000 acres of dry farmland in Solano County, California, over the last five years, ABC7 News reported.

The Flannery Associates purchases amount to approximately 52,000 acres of land surrounding Travis Air Force Base in California.

These land acquisitions, which have included parcels on three sides of the critical military base, began in 2018 and have amounted to around $800 million.

Local and federal authorities have expressed concern over the ongoing purchases, dubbing them from suspicious to intimidating.

“Their intention isn’t to grow olive trees,” said Sarah Donnelly, a city councilmember for Rio Vista, a town encompassed by the acquired land.

“It feels nefarious to need all of the land to the point where you’re going to sue them to intimidate to sell to you – those aren’t farmers,” she continued, indicating that the company’s motives might extend beyond agricultural purposes.

“There seems like there’s something larger in the works,” said Donnelly.

Investigators have failed to identify the backers behind the group after an eight month investigation.

Via Benzinga – “We don’t know who Flannery is, and their extensive purchases do not make sense to anybody in the area,” Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee’s readiness panel, told The Wall Street Journal. “The fact that they’re buying land purposefully right up to the fence at Travis raises significant questions.”

According to the New York Times, Flannery Associates, supported by a consortium of Silicon Valley elites, discreetly acquired $800 million in agricultural and undeveloped land. The group aims to construct an eco-friendly, utopian community featuring robust public transit and urban amenities, all powered by renewable energy.

The Guardian reported:

The project was spearheaded by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former trader for the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, and is backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors including Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linkedin; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the philanthropic group Emerson Collective and wife of Steve Jobs; Marc Andreessen, an investor and software developer; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payment processor Stripe; and the entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, the Times reported.

Recently, Flannery has been meeting with local officials and representatives, according to the Times. It has also been sending out opinion polls to local residents to gauge their feelings on an initiative that could appear on Solano county voter’s ballots, according to the newspaper SF Gate.

“This project would include a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over ten thousand acres of new parks and open space,” a screenshot of the survey obtained by the newspaper reads.

The poll also asks if residents would support the project if it was placed in an area with “bad soil that only contributes 5% of the county’s agricultural production,” according to a Facebook post from Catherine Moy, the mayor of Fairfield, the closest city to Flannery’s purchases.

Despite the lofty goals set forth by Flannery, the group faces an uphill battle that will affect each step of the process of creating a new city from scratch. The firm has been sued by farmers who sold their land to the group over what the land owners describe as an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy”. Flannery would have to get the blessing of officials at the local and state levels and residents. It will also have to navigate environmental and zoning roadblocks. according the San Francisco Chronicle.