In 2018, a cluster of southern New Hampshire towns decided to join forces on drinking water. The proposal: to connect their water systems with the city of Manchester to allow more than 1 million gallons of water to flow to the towns per day.

The project, which involved Atkinson, Derry, Hampstead, Plaistow Salem, and Windham, was designed to address an acute problem: the contamination of wells in those towns by methyl-tert-butyl ether, or MTBE, an ingredient of gasoline that had seeped into the groundwater due to leaky storage. A 2003 lawsuit brought by the state against 22 gasoline manufacturers had secured settlement funds that helped pay for the $20 million water infrastructure project.

But some now point to that collaboration — the largest of its kind in the state — as a template to a

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