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Article written by Bret Prebula, city manager of Suisun City
A $3.2 billion shipyard, 10,000 jobs, and a lesson Solano County cannot afford to ignore
Opinion and Analysis
On July 16, 2026, the Governor of Texas and the Port of Brownsville stepped to a podium and announced that Saronic Technologies, a defense technology company barely four years old, would build a $3.2 billion shipyard called Port Alpha on the Texas coast. Ten thousand jobs. Vessels up to 850 feet long, with room to build ships longer than 1,200 feet someday. Construction starts this year. Operations begin in 2028.
Read that timeline again. Announced in July. Shovels in the ground before New Year. That is not a typo. That is Texas.
Here in Northern California, we should be furious. Not at Texas. At ourselves. Because everything Saronic said it was looking for exists, almost word for word, in southeastern Solano County. The company ran a national search and said it chose Brownsville for its infrastructure readiness, its scale of available land, and its logistics. Deep water access. Hundreds of waterfront acres. Room to grow for decades. A region willing to move fast.
Solano County has all of it. Deep water on the Sacramento River at Collinsville, where a shipyard site has already been proposed. Tens of thousands of acres of open land. Travis Air Force Base, one of the most important military logistics hubs in America, a few miles away. And the greatest workforce and innovation engine on the planet. Saronic builds autonomous vessels. Software defined ships. The talent that writes that software lives here, not in the Rio Grande Valley.
The company that builds robot ships with Silicon Valley software just chose to build them 1,800 miles from Silicon Valley. Ask yourself why.
What Brownsville actually did
It is tempting to wave this off as another Texas subsidy story. It is not. Brownsville earned this, and the way they earned it should be taught in every California city hall.
Start with the port. The Port of Brownsville is the only deep water port on the border with Mexico and anchors one of the largest foreign trade zones in the country. But the port alone did not win the deal. The region built a machine around it. The Greater Brownsville Economic Development Corporation, the port, Cameron County, and a local school district worked as one team through the entire recruitment. When the deal landed, the EDC put $10 million of its own money into workforce training so local residents could actually fill the jobs.
Then look at what they built before Saronic ever called. Brownsville is developing a 700 acre tech park designed specifically to house the suppliers and manufacturers that follow anchor companies like Saronic and SpaceX. At the separate 730 acre Greater Brownsville Tech District, the mayor reported this spring that 19 of the 24 available lots were already under letters of intent, with nearly 9,000 jobs projected. They graded the dirt, ran the utilities, and secured the land before the customers showed up. That is what readiness looks like.
The payoff is staggering. Local officials estimate the Saronic project alone will generate roughly $168 billion in economic impact for Cameron County over the life of the project, including about $5.6 billion per year across three decades of operations and more than $200 million in direct fiscal benefit to the city of Brownsville. One deal. One announcement. Generational money for one of the poorest regions in America.
What California did instead
Now the uncomfortable part. California had a live, credible offer on the table for exactly this kind of company. California Forever has spent nearly a decade and more than $900 million assembling about 68,500 acres in southeastern Solano County. In 2025 it unveiled the Solano Foundry, a 2,100 acre advanced manufacturing park designed for 40 million square feet of factory space and roughly 40,000 jobs in defense, robotics, energy, and advanced transportation. The pitch included a proposed shipyard at Collinsville, abundant power, housing for the workforce, and permitting in as little as 90 days once the land is entitled.
A commercial real estate analysis by JLL benchmarked the Foundry against 13 major industrial parks nationwide and concluded it was the strongest opportunity California has to bring manufacturing jobs back to the state. The strongest. In the whole state.
And yet when a shipbuilder with $9 billion in valuation and $1.8 billion in fresh capital went shopping for a home, California was not in a position to say yes. Why not? Because in California, land is not ready until it has survived years of environmental review, boundary commission proceedings, ballot fights, and litigation. Every one of those steps was designed with good intentions. Together they function as a wall. A company that needs to start building this year cannot wait for a process that measures itself in election cycles.
Texas offered certainty. California offered a hearing schedule.
This is the argument for the Suisun City Expansion Exploration
Suisun City is the one place in Solano County trying to change this math. Through the Suisun City Expansion Exploration, the city is studying whether to bring roughly 22,873 acres of adjacent land into its boundaries and plan an expanded community in partnership with California Forever, one that includes the homes, the infrastructure, and the industrial land that projects like the Solano Foundry require.
Critics say the process is moving too fast. The Saronic decision is the answer to that criticism. The process is not moving too fast. The rest of the world is. While Solano County debates whether to plan, Brownsville signed letters of intent on 19 lots, committed workforce dollars, and landed the largest industrial investment in its history. The jobs that could have anchored a generation of Solano County families, welders, machinists, software engineers, naval architects, are now Texas jobs. The property tax revenue that could have funded Solano County schools and roads will now fund Cameron County schools and roads for 30 years.
This will keep happening. Saronic was not the last defense manufacturer looking for a home. It was one of the first in a wave of American reindustrialization backed by both political parties and hundreds of billions in federal spending. Every one of those companies will run the same search Saronic ran. Every one will weigh the same two options: a state that says yes in months, or a state that says maybe in years.
The scoreboard is a choice
Texas does not kick California around because it has better land, better weather, or better people. It does not. Solano County sits closer to more engineering talent, more venture capital, and more military infrastructure than Brownsville could dream of. Texas wins because it decided that saying yes is a public value, and it built its institutions to deliver a yes quickly, together, and in writing.
California can make the same decision. Suisun City is trying to make it right now. The Expansion Exploration is not a threat to Solano County. It is Solano County finally entering the game that Brownsville has been winning without us. The next Port Alpha will be announced somewhere in the next few years. Whether the podium sits in Texas or on the Sacramento River is up to us.
Sources
Manufacturing Dive, Saronic Technologies picks Texas for $3.2B autonomous shipyard, July 20, 2026. Greater Brownsville EDC announcement, July 16, 2026. Rio Grande Guardian and Brownsville State of the City coverage of the Greater Brownsville Tech District, 2026. California Forever, Solano Foundry announcement and materials, 2025 and 2026. KQED, Bloomberg, and TechCrunch coverage of California Forever and the Solano Foundry.