Drive Lake Poway Road this summer and you'll notice something missing: the two water tanks that have sat on the old softball field for years are gone. Crews started dismantling them in early July, and if you've been waiting for your softball field back, that sounds like the finish line. It isn't. It's the second-to-last step in a project that was never really about a ballfield at all, and understanding why tells you something about how this city gets things done.
Why Your Field Became a Water Tank Site
The clearwell at Poway's water treatment plant was built in 1964. By the 2020s it had reached the end of its useful life, and the city needed to replace it without shutting off water to anyone's tap. That meant building a temporary bypass first: two 1.4-million-gallon aboveground tanks to hold treated water while the real clearwell got rebuilt underneath. The city evaluated its options and landed on the softball field at Lake Poway, the one plot of land graded, adjacent to the treatment plant, and large enough to hold them without major modification. So the field you'd played on disappeared behind chain link, and Poway's largest capital improvement program in its history got underway in earnest. City staff describe the closure as having run almost five years.
The clearwell replacement itself, two new four-million-gallon prestressed concrete tanks, went out to bid in 2023. The city awarded a $31.6 million contract to Gateway Pacific Contractors at the September 19, 2023 council meeting. Construction moved through 2024 and 2025, and by early 2026 the project was already about 95 percent complete, with the new tanks expected online by late spring.
On Time, Under Budget, and Not a Headline Anywhere Else
Here's the detail that's easy to miss if you only skim the newsflash: the temporary bypass phase, the part that closed your ballfield, came in on time and under budget, with total negotiated change orders under 4.5 percent of the construction contract. That's the city's own accounting, not a marketing line. For a project that required excavating rock next to a live water treatment plant and active recreation areas without a single interruption in service, a change-order rate that low is the kind of thing water agencies elsewhere would put in a press release. Poway buried it in a project update page.
At the July 7, 2026 council meeting, Public Works Director Eric Heidemann told the council the new clearwell tanks had passed state water quality testing and were officially in service.
"The tanks are working as designed, which is a very exciting time for us."
He also made a point of crediting the staff who ran the temporary system without a hitch for nearly three years: Principal Engineer Rob Weber, Water Treatment Plant Manager Aaron Huff, Assistant Director Troy DePriest, and former Principal Engineer Shadi Sami. That's not boilerplate. Running a bypass system built from scratch, one that "isn't something you buy out of a catalog and assemble" as Heidemann put it, for years without a service interruption is the unglamorous work that made the fast, uneventful sounding announcement possible.
Tanks Down Doesn't Mean Field Open
This is where the misconception creeps in. Now that the temporary tanks are being dismantled, it's tempting to assume the ballfield reopens any day. It doesn't work that way. Tank removal has to finish, then the site has to be regraded and restored to its original condition, which is a separate scope of work from swapping out a water tank. The city's own project page targets ballfield restoration for fall 2026, several months after the tanks themselves came down. The parking lot next to the volleyball courts, which lost 38 spaces to staging equipment for the clearwell project, is part of that same restoration and won't fully reopen until the field does.
So if you've been checking Lake Poway hoping to see a rebuilt diamond this summer, the honest answer is: not yet, but the hardest, longest part is now behind it.
Meanwhile, the Rest of the Lake Never Stopped
The ballfield closure was real, but it was also narrow. The rest of Lake Poway Recreation Area kept running through all five years of construction fencing, and this summer's programming is worth knowing about whether or not you've thought about the softball field in months.
- Summer Concert Series: Free Sunday shows from 5:30 to 7 p.m. alternated between Old Poway Park and Lake Poway all season, wrapping its final date on August 16. The Lookout at Lake Poway stayed open during shows for food, beer and wine, and soft serve, with parking at $10 for non-residents and free for Poway residents and active military with ID.
- Night Fishing: Still running Fridays and Saturdays through the end of August, with the lake open until 11:30 p.m. and boats allowed out until 11 p.m. Catfish are stocked on a rotating schedule.
- Poway Midland Railroad: The volunteer-run steam train and cable car at Old Poway Park, the only operating railroad at a city park in California, recently got its first ticket price increase in nine years following an updated cost-sharing agreement between the city and the Poway-Midland Railroad Volunteers approved at a council meeting last fall. Adult tickets on the steam locomotive and cable car went from $3.50 to $5, kids from $1 to $2.
That last one is a small thing next to a $31.6 million reservoir project, but it fits a pattern. This is a city that adjusts things rarely and deliberately, whether the number in question has six zeroes or one. Nine years between train ticket increases. Nearly five years to get a ballfield back because the sequencing matters more than the calendar.
What This Actually Means If You Use the Lake
If you've avoided Lake Poway because you associate it with construction fencing, that association is about to be out of date. The water side of the project is done. The field side is close. And everything that wasn't fenced off, the fishing, the boating, the concerts, the train at Old Poway Park down the road, has been fully operational the entire time, which is easy to forget when a five-year closure sign dominates your memory of the place.
The bigger takeaway isn't really about a softball field. It's that when Poway takes something offline for years, it tends to be because the underlying job, keeping treated water flowing to every tap in the city without interruption, was worth the wait. The receipts on that one, on time, under budget, no service gaps, are already in. The field is the visible proof still catching up.
If you live near Lake Poway and you're weighing what a home in this part of town is actually worth, day to day, this is the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a listing description. A city that runs its water infrastructure this carefully is usually running everything else the same way. If you're thinking about buying, selling, or just want a straight read on what's happening in your corner of Poway, O'Rourke Realty is easy to reach. Contact John & Yani.
