Why I'm Running for Zone 7

I filed my candidacy for the Zone 7 Water Agency Board of Directors this morning. Four seats are on the June 2 ballot — three are open — and this is the most competitive Zone 7 race in decades. Eight candidates for four seats.

I'm a computer engineer with 25 years managing complex technical infrastructure at scale, from SLAC National Lab to GE Digital. I've been elected three times to the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors, where I chaired the Finance and Tax Affairs Committee and oversaw multi-million-dollar budgets. That combination — engineering discipline and board-level financial oversight — is exactly what Zone 7 needs on its board.

Zone 7 serves 265,000 people across Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, and parts of San Ramon. It manages our drinking water, our groundwater basin, and 37 miles of flood channels. The decisions this board makes over the next four years will shape our water infrastructure for a generation.

I'm focused on three priorities:

PFAS Remediation. Zone 7 has built two PFAS treatment facilities and has a third in the pipeline. That's serious execution. I want to make sure the monitoring program keeps pace with the treatment buildout — if a test well turns up something the model didn't simulate, the board's job is to ask the engineering team to run it again and publish the results.

Water Reliability. The State Water Project delivers less than 54% of what Zone 7 is entitled to under current conditions, and that number is projected to drop to 43–48% by 2043. Local storage, aquifer stewardship, and new regional sources like Sites Reservoir are not optional — they are the foundation of the Tri-Valley's water future.

Flood Management. Every year we defer maintenance on these channels, the next rate hike gets bigger and the damage from the next storm gets closer to home. Sustained investment in our flood infrastructure is the responsible path — for residents and for ratepayers.

Build for today, plan for tomorrow. That's the approach I'll bring to Zone 7.