Solano County's Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 on July 28 to put Measure E on the November ballot — a business-license tax that would raise fees on wind turbines for the first time since 1994 and, for the first time ever, tax solar farms, battery storage, natural gas extraction and data centers, whether or not a single server rack has yet been switched on.

The measure is being sold not as a revenue grab but as a weapon. As California fast-tracks batteries and energy infrastructure over local objections — often through a state permitting pathway that sidesteps county authority entirely — Solano is reaching for the one lever it still controls: the tax code. Measure E would add an estimated $353,000 a year to the county's general fund, a modest sum that county leaders openly frame as a way to make unwanted projects "as painful as possible" to build.

The Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 to place the measure on the ballot, with Supervisor John Vasquez absent — as he has been from board meetings since 2025 following a cancer diagnosis, an absence that has drawn its own public criticism in District 4. If voters approve it, Measure E would update the county's business-license tax across five categories of energy and industrial development.

According to the ballot language read at the meeting and reported by The Vacaville Reporter, the commercial wind-turbine rate would rise from $0.00003 to $0.00008 per kilowatt-hour. New levies would hit commercial solar ($0.00008 per kWh), battery energy storage systems ($1.50 per megawatt-hour), natural gas extraction ($0.30 per thousand cubic feet), and data centers ($5.00 per building square foot), all with annual inflation adjustments and no sunset until voters end it.

The wind-turbine figure is the tell. Solano's turbine tax has not moved since 1994; the county currently collects roughly $56,496 a year from it, county staff said in June — money that, had it simply tracked inflation, would top $300,000 by now. Four of the county's wind projects are owned by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and are not taxable under a business-license tax at all.

The politics are unusually blunt. Board Chair Mitch Mashburn, a Republican, has been the measure's loudest champion, casting it less as fiscal policy than as resistance to Sacramento. The taxes, he said at the July 28 meeting, are "not about enriching the county" but about pushing back on state mandates for battery storage, energy extraction and data centers that he argues do not benefit residents.

"I want to make sure it is as painful as possible for them to do that," Mashburn said. "I want to make sure it is as expensive as possible for them to do that."

He struck the same note in June, when the board first directed staff to draft the measure, complaining that outside interests "pillage" Solano's natural resources and dismissing an early staff proposal as too "modest." "I don't want modest," he said. Supervisor Wanda Williams pushed to write data centers into the tax before the industry establishes itself locally: "We need to be prepared if data centers come."

That preparation is not hypothetical. Solano is ground zero for California Forever's East Solano Plan, the billionaire-backed proposal to build a new city — and, increasingly, data-center and industrial capacity — on ranchland near Rio Vista. Meanwhile, the Corby battery-storage project near Interstate 80 has drawn fierce local opposition and a preliminary approval from the California Energy Commission.

The battery fight exposes the limits of what a tax can do. The Corby applicant is using the state's AB 205 alternate permitting pathway, which lets large energy projects bypass local land-use control. At a packed Vacaville City Council meeting the night after the board vote, officials confronted the same bind: Vacaville's own battery ordinance does not reach beyond the city limits, and the county's own legal recourse against the Corby project may be limited by that same state pathway. Councilmember Roy Stockton, who praised the city for adopting "one of the most stringent and safest" battery ordinances in the region, acknowledged the commission's preliminary approval but insisted the city was not powerless. "That's not to say we don't still have a voice," he said, urging residents to keep filing comments with the state.

"You already did the right thing by passing an ordinance," Sarah Dunn, founder of the group Keep Vacaville Safe, told supervisors — while urging them to use "every tool, including legal action," to stop the Corby project. County counsel has signaled its legal options may be narrow.

Which is what makes Measure E revealing: when a county cannot say no, it can at least send a bill. As a general tax, the measure needs only a simple majority to pass in November. Whether Solano voters see it as principled resistance or a symbolic surcharge on infrastructure the state will build anyway is the question now headed to the ballot.