Quabbin Squabble: Compensation Conversation Continues for Reservoir Towns

---

FRANKLIN COUNTY – Communities surrounding the Quabbin reservoir help protect a watershed that has supplied fresh water to the Boston area for nearly 80 years. Today, as more communities in the eastern part of the state are considering tapping into Quabbin water, officials in a dozen towns surrounding the reservoir are asking that the state first support their local water needs.

“My stance on eastern Massachusetts getting any more of western Massachusetts’s water is ‘Hell no – until they pay up,’” state senator Jo Comerford told the Reporter on Wednesday. “We for too long have not had fair recompense for this water, that we sacrifice for and we steward. I think we’re proud of stewarding it, but our communities are stressed, and stretched thin.”

Since 2022, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) has conducted three feasibility studies exploring the expansion of its Quabbin water service to dozens of communities in the eastern part of the state. The MWRA currently pumps about 200 million gallons per day from the reservoir, and tries to stay under a “safe yield” of 300 million gallons per day, fed mostly by the Swift River. 

In 2023 Comerford and state representative Aaron Saunders filed a bill, An Act relative to the Quabbin watershed and regional equity, to assert the needs of Quabbin communities. The bill proposes taxing existing users of Quabbin water – over three million people and 5,500 businesses – to help western and central Massachusetts towns maintain local water systems. It would also change the formula by which payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) are made to watershed communities.

The bill would add three Quabbin representatives to the MWRA board of directors, and would direct the agency to assess all viable drinking water sources in the four western Massachusetts counties. Comerford says she wants to see a “generational” study that would chart a course for the next 50 years. 

“We clearly have potable water challenges right now, but we know those challenges are going to increase,” Comerford told the Reporter. “The state can’t fix what it can’t see, and we can’t see it until we measure and analyze it.”

The bill did not pass in the most recent legislative session, but MWRA decided to study the region anyway, albeit with a narrower scope. The engineering firms Tighe & Bond and Hazen and Sawyer were hired to produce a fourth feasibility study, which was presented in draft form on Tuesday to about 50 municipal leaders from the region.

Pumping Uphill

According to the study, it would cost a total of $498 million to build the water pipes, pumps, treatment systems, and storage capacity needed to directly provide Quabbin surface water to Barre, Belchertown, Hardwick, Ludlow, New Salem, Orange, Pelham, Petersham, Phillipston, Shutesbury, Ware, and Wendell.

One section of that plan would serve 7,000 people in Wendell, Shutesbury, New Salem, and Orange, requiring 27 miles of transmission and distribution pipes and seven storage tanks and costing $215 million.

Two other “intakes” considered were at the eastern edge of the Quabbin in Hardwick and on the southern tip in Ware. A fourth was considered at Petersham, but the study determined it would not be viable under drought conditions.

“There’s a lot of pumping that’s required to service these areas,” MWRA director of environmental and regulatory affairs Colleen Rizzi told the attendees at Tuesday’s meeting. “As you pump, you also need to reduce the pressure as you come to some of these services, so there’s a lot of energy associated with these concepts.”

The western section in particular, Rizzi said, has “quite a bit of storage and pumping associated with it. This is largely due to the size of the areas that we’re trying to reach from the Quabbin, but also the geography…. In drought conditions, the Quabbin drops in elevation.” 

Two alternative aquifers were also investigated. The first, in Wendell, could serve 550 residents of Wendell, Shutesbury, and New Salem at a cost of $112 million; a second in Petersham could serve 315 residents of that town and Phillipston for $70 million.

During the meeting, Saunders asked whether any of the $6 billion in capital infrastructure investment the MWRA is planning over the next 40 years would benefit central or western Massachusetts communities, and whether historical data is available for PILOT payments to watershed communities. MWRA staff said they would provide answers at a later date.

“There is very little interest in paying for robust pumping infrastructure to the tune of several hundred million dollars, and it certainly did not sound like the MWRA leadership was offering to pay for it,” Saunders told the Reporter.

Another attendee asked who would bear the cost to connect these communities to the Quabbin. The MWRA officials replied that it would ultimately be the municipalities’ responsibility. 

“I thought the study was incomplete and insufficient, but it was a first step – it was a marker, and a chance for our communities to be heard from by the MWRA,” Comerford told the Reporter. “There isn’t a solution that is going to fit all communities. We knew that. But it’s still really important for Boston to listen.”

Comerford said the study failed to assess the whole of western Massachusetts’ water resources, or consider MWRA’s capacity to treat, protect, and draw from existing groundwater sources. The senator said she and Saunders offered to help MWRA gather information from the 12 assessed communities, but the agency did not take them up on the offer. 

“[Eastern Massachusetts municipalities] don’t have the water resources proximate to their communities to do what they’re doing, and we facilitate that for them,” Saunders said. “We do that through preserving and restricting our land.” 

Cash Please

Jane Peirce, a member of the Orange selectboard and board of health and a former Department of Environmental Protection employee, also attended the virtual meeting.

“I’m struck by the irony of the idea that you would take water from Quabbin, pump it uphill to us, and sell it back to us after it was our water to start with,” Peirce said. “It would be very interesting to me to know what the value of the raw water is…. Our water system works just fine, but could you give us some consideration for every gallon of water that we are donating to you that can be sold to somebody else?”

Several people echoed these sentiments, including Bill Pula, a member of the Quabbin Watershed Advisory Committee, longtime chair of the Pelham board of health, and former director of the Quabbin and Ware watersheds for the state Department of Conservation and Recreation. 

“To me, it was a waste of money to do that study,” Pula told the Reporter. “The idea of taking water out and pumping it up to a town like Pelham is ridiculous. We don’t have a distribution system, and there’s no way to get it anywhere.”

Pula said the MWRA could instead use its resources to help towns like his, where some wells are running dry in the current drought, and others are contaminated with PFAS chemicals. 

“We have quite a bit of water on our side of the hill here, but there are water quality issues, and there’s probably more coming, too,” he said. 

In Shutesbury, at least 60 wells have been found to be contaminated with PFAS from fire-suppressing foam used many years ago at the fire station the center of town. Selectboard member Eric Stoker told the Reporter the town has been paying residents for filtration systems, with some financial aid from the state, but he has concerns for the long-term viability of the groundwater.

“This treatment is expensive and ongoing,” Stoker said. “There may come a time when it’s cheap, or cheaper, for Shutesbury to say, ‘Let’s be a water district.’”

In 2020 the well at Swift River School, on the border of Wendell and New Salem, was found to be contaminated with dangerous levels of PFAS. Treatment systems have been installed at the school, as well as at the Petersham Country Store and on a well serving the offices of the Harvard Forest.

According to the MWRA study, water from the Petersham aquifer could be piped several miles to the center of Phillipston, where unsafe PFAS levels were detected at the now-shuttered elementary school. 

“Safeguarding water sources is going to need a really nuanced approach,” Comerford told the Reporter. “Some of our community need help testing for PFAS, they need filters, they need support for things that are much more localized…. The study was supposed to contemplate access to potable water, not necessarily only taking it from the Quabbin. That was a decision made that I disagree with.”

Recompense

Comerford and Saunders say they plan to re-file their bill when the legislature reconvenes in January. 

“The communities that steward this watershed are in Hampshire, Franklin and Worcester counties, and we need representation from all of those counties so that there’s strength in numbers, and so that a different perspective can be acknowledged,” Comerford said. 

When the legislature was debating a major housing bond bill earlier this year, House speaker Ronald Mariano tried to insert a $1 billion appropriation to fund MWRA expansion into eastern Massachusetts. 

“I found it outrageous and insulting, and we killed it in conference,” Comerford said. “I’m not interested in sending one more drop of water east until we have been fully seen for what we need out in western Massachusetts, and until we get more just financial recompense for this water.”

Eight of the watershed towns already receive PILOT payments for land that cannot be developed or taxed because it serves as a recharge area for the reservoir, but supporters of the bill argue that these payments do not reflect the true value of the resource the communities provide to the state – or their needs.

By Pula’s calculations, the proposed surcharge of 5 cents per thousand gallons would currently generate about $3.65 million annually to support these towns. If the MWRA sold an additional 20 to 30 million gallons per day to new customers in the east, it would bring in additional revenue of $29 to $44 million per year to the agency, and another $365,000 to $547,500 in surcharges.

The final version of the MWRA study is expected to be released next month, at which time a public information session will be scheduled. 

Mike Jackson contributed additional writing.

---

The Shoestring is committed to bringing you ad-free content. We rely on readers to support our work! You can support independent news for Western Mass by visiting our Donate page.