The Chain of Lakes: Zone 7's Local Water Future
If you want to understand Zone 7's strategy for the next twenty years, start with the Chain of Lakes Conveyance System.
COLCS is a 6.5-mile, 42-inch pipeline connecting Lake I to the Del Valle Water Treatment Plant and the South Bay Aqueduct. At $356.5 million, it's the single largest project in Zone 7's newly adopted ten-year Capital Improvement Plan — and it's the keystone of the local water supply strategy.
Why it matters
The State Water Project currently delivers about 54% of Zone 7's contractual allocation, and that number is projected to decline to 43–48% by 2043. The Tri-Valley can't build its future on a supply source that's losing capacity.
Chain of Lakes changes the math. It unlocks roughly 36,400 acre-feet of local storage capacity by connecting Zone 7's reservoirs into a functional system. That's water stored here, managed here, and available regardless of what happens with state deliveries.
The cost
$356.5 million is a serious number. It'll be financed through bonds, adding about $17 million per year in debt service — $9.1 million from ratepayer funds and $7.9 million from developer fees. The board hasn't approved construction funding yet, so the financing terms and timeline are still ahead.
An engineer's perspective
I've spent my career building and managing systems at scale. The principle behind Chain of Lakes is one I've seen validated again and again: systems that depend on a single supply source are fragile. Redundancy costs more up front. It costs far less than a failure.
Zone 7's portfolio approach — Chain of Lakes for local storage, Sites Reservoir for new regional supply, continued groundwater management, and ongoing participation in the state system — is the right architecture. Chain of Lakes is the piece that makes the local leg of that portfolio actually work.
I'll be watching the financing structure, the construction timeline, and the integration with PFAS treatment capacity as this project moves forward. These are the kinds of engineering and financial oversight decisions that drew me to this race.
