The temperature is continuing to climb in the growing feud between the state’s largest drinking water provider and communities that surround its main water source.

The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority is seeking approval from state officials for a high-stakes push to draw an additional 20 million gallons of water per day from the Quabbin Reservoir so that, the agency says, it can serve new communities in the eastern part of the state.

It would by far be the largest such request since the MWRA was formed in 1984 — three times as much as the next-highest approved plan to pull more water out of the state’s largest drinking water source in order to serve a new community.

The proposal is further stoking tensions that are already playing out in a separate dispute between rural, financially strapped communities that surround the Quabbin Reservoir and the agency charged with providing clean drinking water to its customers mostly in Eastern Massachusetts. The focus of that dispute is the towns’ agreement not to develop land in the Quabbin watershed in exchange for payments in lieu of taxes from the state that grossly undervalue what the land would be worth if the municipalities were able to collect property tax revenue on it.

For the MWRA, a quasi-public agency that serves 61 municipalities mostly in and around Greater Boston, the new water withdrawal plan, which requires the green light from the state Water Resources Commission, makes sense all around.

As the state pursues more housing and as municipal water sources and private wells suffer from contamination and dwindling supplies due to a two-year drought that’s only now starting to subside, the MWRA believes it can be the answer, selling more high-quality water from a Quabbin Reservoir that can withstand greater withdrawals.

Those living near the Quabbin disagree — and are mobilizing to kill the proposal. They fear the precedent such a move would set, and it feeds their sense that the agency will only continue to take the water that they protect and send it east to support growth there while their towns in Central Massachusetts face an increasingly alarming budgetary crunch.

“We’re not giving up until there’s fairness,” state Sen. Jo Comerford, a Democrat who represents Quabbin-area towns, said in an interview. “This is not what fairness looks like. This would set a really dangerous precedent — that’s not hyperbolic — that an entity like the MWRA can get basically a lock on the water to use at its discretion without the transparent, accountable public oversight on this precious resource.”

More Context

• Healey, in new letter, urges MWRA to meet the ‘pressing needs’ of Quabbin Reservoir communities (August 2026)
• ‘It’s like the Hunger Games’: Quabbin Reservoir towns take funding fight to Beacon Hill amid extended drought (August 2026)