Middleboro Review 2: Towns surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir protect the water for 2.7 million people in Eastern Mass. They're getting financially starved in the process.

Sunday, August 2, 2026

Towns surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir protect the water for 2.7 million people in Eastern Mass. They're getting financially starved in the process.

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Towns surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir protect the water for 2.7 million people in Eastern Mass. They're getting financially starved in the process.

August 2, 2026

By Matteo Pangallo

For nearly a century, residents in the towns around the Quabbin Reservoir have faithfully upheld one of our Commonwealth’s most profound collective commitments: safeguarding clean, reliable water for Eastern Massachusetts. Although residents of those towns are, ironically, not given access to the water they protect and provide to some 2.7 million fellow Massachusetts residents, they have done this responsibly and at tremendous cost. Now, that cost has become unsustainable.

Take the town of Shutesbury, a Massachusetts community of 1,800 people on the western shore of Quabbin. One of every three acres in the town is held by the Commonwealth to protect the reservoir. That land is permanently blocked from development, permanently removed from the town’s tax base—and permanently vital to the survival of Boston and the other Eastern Massachusetts communities the reservoir serves. Yet the financial arrangement that compensates Shutesbury for this sacrifice treats the land as almost worthless, and costs Shutesbury residents over $3 million every year.

Shutesbury’s fiscal year 2026 town budget was $7.8 million. Like many towns, it depends on ever-increasing residential property taxes to pay that cost. Unlike many towns, it cannot slow those tax increases through development.

Shutesbury lacks a commercial or industrial tax base and the capacity to build substantial amounts of new housing because it has no public water supply (even with Quabbin literally in the town) and because most land suitable for such development is within the one-third of town taken by the Commonwealth for the reservoir. The result for all the Quabbin towns is a budget crisis that has become an existential threat, with schools facing closure, roads and bridges left unrepaired, and fire, police, and safety departments understaffed.

In towns where the Commonwealth takes land off local tax rolls, it provides payments in lieu of taxes – or PILOTs. In FY26, Shutesbury received a PILOT of $299,392 for the 4,979 acres of the town held by the Commonwealth. That’s 4 percent of the town’s FY26 budget revenue in exchange for 30 percent of its land and comes to just $60.13 per acre.

Statewide, by contrast, the average PILOT is about $130 per acre.

Every Quabbin town suffers this disparity. Pelham, for example, gives up 35 percent of its land for the reservoir and gets $56.59 per acre. Hardwick gives up 20 percent and gets $26.24 per acre. New Salem gives up 91 percent for just $21.21 per acre.

Shutesbury’s Quabbin land has the potential to generate tax revenue of $510 per acre. That means its PILOT of $60.13 per acre is just 11.8 percent of the land’s actual tax value. In FY26 alone, then, Shutesbury was forced to forgo revenue of up to $3.1 million because of Quabbin. In FY26, the 12 Quabbin watershed towns altogether gave up a total of $54.5 million in potential tax revenue because of Quabbin and received just PILOTs of just $3.2 million, or 6 percent of that land’s tax value—a loss of $51.3 million.

And while the actual tax value of this land has increased exponentially over the past five years, the amount of the Quabbin PILOTs has not. Between FY21 and FY26, the total budget for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has increased $128.3 million (16.2 percent) while the amount set aside from that budget for PILOTs to the 12 Quabbin towns has increased just $111,597 (3.6 percent). The portion of the MWRA budget set aside for Quabbin PILOTs has in fact gone down over those five years, from 0.39 percent in FY21 to 0.35 percent in FY26.

The state’s PILOT system treats Quabbin land as nearly worthless. In reality, Quabbin land is the most valuable land in Massachusetts, because without it, more than 2.7 million people in 53 communities throughout Eastern Massachusetts -- 40 percent of the state's population -- would have no water.