Emily Hill works not from one town hall, but from what has become a collection of them.

Along with the rest of the small municipal staff, Hill, the town coordinator of New Salem, a 1,000-person rural town in central Massachusetts, is operating out of multiple offices. Some of them are rented from a local church.

The reason? The old well serving the original town hall building ran dry, rendering the building without water and workable restrooms.

It’s all the more dissonant because a body of water spanning 39 square miles and holding 412 billion gallons of water laps against the town’s shores.

The impossible decisions that Hill is faced with follow her whichever building she happens to call her workspace that day. The town tries to stretch its meager $3.7 million annual budget as far as it’ll go, but officials recently had to let go three elementary school classroom aides in just the latest instance of penny-pinching by necessity.

New Salem is one of a handful of small towns that surround a giant reservoir of clean fresh water dug out a century ago in the middle of the nation’s worst-ever economic collapse in order to hydrate Greater Boston.

The creation of the Quabbin Reservoir, as it’s called, is nothing short of an engineering marvel. Because of it, Boston has not, and likely will not, ever go thirsty.

But, in the communities that are home to the Quabbin, there’s an undercurrent of anxiety and frustration.

“There’s so much rage,” Hill said. “We sacrifice so much. And we are not getting compensated for it.”

A perfect storm of long-held resentments, the well-known story of the financial crunch squeezing small towns across the state, and an act of blameless chance — weather — is raising the stakes and stoking new tensions between these sparse towns and the powers that be in state government.

The Quabbin communities, despite protecting the water source, don’t drink from it themselves.

That means that when water levels drop in their private wells or municipal sources due to drought, as much of the state has dealt with drier-than-normal conditions over the past two years, Quabbin-area residents can feel the impact of drought more than the 2.7 million residents to the east that drink water from the reservoir and are served by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.

One glaring example: Recent rainfall notwithstanding, the first half of 2026 has been so dry that it won’t be safe for youth athletes in the Quabbin town of Belchertown to play soccer and football on their home fields this fall.

At the same time, aid that the 29 towns across the watershed system receive as a form of compensation for state-owned land around the reservoir and the streams that feed it and the mandatory development bans that come with it has, for some, barely budged over the years — especially for the Quabbin’s seven “host communities.”