The city of Syracuse gets most of its water from Skaneateles Lake, a small lake southwest of the city. It’s very clean water, and the city has a filtration waiver that allows them to use unfiltered water from the lake (it’s widely considered to be some of the best municipal water in the country). The city’s treated (and sometimes untreated, depending on how much rain we’ve had) waste water is dumped into Onondaga Lake, which is not part of the Skaneateles Lake watershed.
Most of the rest of the area, outside the city limits (and a few surrounding towns that are connected with the Syracuse water system for legacy reasons), gets its water from Lake Ontario, which is where this plant’s water would be coming from as well.
If anyone is curious, I am happy to ramble on for quite a while about the municipal water systems of the greater Syracuse area (occupational hazard of a couple decades as a firefighter in the area).
When the area was first colonized by Europeans, the major hubs in the area were actually south of Syracuse, along the Seneca and Cherry Valley Turnpikes, which were the original east/west routes through the state, prior to the construction of the Erie Canal (the canal is a significant contributing reason Syracuse became the major settlement and the southern towns are just suburbs now). Due to those earlier settlements though, there were a number of water districts that predate the Syracuse city water district in the southern part of Onondaga County.
Those districts have now all been rolled into the county water authority, which coordinates with the Syracuse Department of Water to deliver water to the surrounding area.
Of interest to firefighting though, this patchwork of water districts that combined over time has resulted in a variety of different threads on fire hydrants, with "Syracuse Standard" and "National Standard" hydrants often being found within the same fire districts. Pretty much every fire truck/engine in the area carries adapters to convert from one to the other.
