Water Systems of the Future

For our final project in Water Systems of the Future, our five-person team developed an integrated "One Water" plan for East Palo Alto — a small Bay Area city whose water utilities depend almost entirely on the SFPUC's Hetch Hetchy system, with limited drought reserves, no formal affordability program, and population growth outpacing the current Urban Water Management Plan projections.

The plan organizes four coordinated interventions. First, expanding local groundwater supply beyond the existing Gloria Way Well (currently less than 1% of total supply) to reduce import dependence and create real drought and outage resilience. Second, stormwater capture and aquifer recharge to treat winter rainfall as a managed local resource rather than a flooding liability, following the One Water principle of treating all water flows as parts of a single system. Third, financial reform — moving the utility from flat volumetric rates to budget-based rates, introducing drought surcharges that align price signals with scarcity, and formalizing a low-income affordability program. Fourth, equity-centered communication: multilingual websites and bills, plain-language guides to rate structures, and smart-metering tools that give customers real-time visibility into their usage and leaks.

The deliverable was framed as a grant proposal — a presentation deck and short video designed to fund the next phase of utility planning, with the argument that water security in East Palo Alto requires treating supply, finance, and equity as one system rather than as separate workstreams. The substantive engineering build-out remains for a follow-on phase.