When Christina DiMeglio decided to move back home to Rhode Island in 2016, she thought she’d found the perfect house on Conanicut Island. It has a wide backyard with sweeping views of the East Passage and the Newport Pell Bridge.
“I bought the house, moved home, and it all kind of happened all at once,” DiMeglio said. “It really was too good to be true.”
What DiMeglio didn’t know is that Conanicut Island has a low supply of drinking water, and her roughly 1,600-square-foot house would soon run out. By the time the pandemic hit, DiMeglio’s partner had moved in, and the couple had a newborn. Then, their water supply trickled to a near-halt. And the water that remained was of increasingly poor quality.
“Daily, we were running out of water,” DiMeglio said. “And we were getting sick. Our dog and cat were throwing up all the time.”
After an inspection, engineers said that the DiMeglios’ well had run almost completely dry, and her neighbors’ wells would likely follow suit.
Their homes, and their wells, sit on a shallow outer shelf of the island. This is a problem because Jamestown’s wells drill down to pockets of freshwater in the bedrock called fractures. If your well runs dry and you live on just a shallow shelf of bedrock, you can’t drill deeper to look for more water.
Assuming this was just a matter of asking the town to connect to its municipal water system, which is piped from a reservoir not far from their homes, DiMeglio and her neighbors formally applied to connect to town water through the Jamestown Board of Water and Sewer Commissioners.
At a commission meeting in May 2021, the neighbors and DiMeglio pleaded their case. DiMeglio told commissioners that her son was sick. He was born with three tumors and had vision loss in his eye. He had to wear an eye patch.
“I’m not blaming the water for it, but I don’t need any other health scares with him,” she said.
DiMeglio told commissioners she was worried about how the poor water quality could affect her son. She held up two baby bottles for the commissioners to see that when she washed dishes, they ended up with a crusty white film on them.
“I can’t give my son a bath at the house. When I do, it’s in an inch or two of water. If we do give him a bath, we don’t shower, we don’t do dishes, we don’t do laundry,” she said. “We need a solution.”
About a month later, the commissioners unanimously denied all of the applications. They said the island didn’t have enough water.
“These applications fail,” said Water and Sewer Commissioner Randall White. ”They fail on their face and they must be rejected.”
A 1993 drought shaped what Jamestown looks like today
Looming over Jamestown politicians and residents is a devastating drought that struck the island, and much of the state, in 1993.
The reservoir went dry, and for several weeks, the National Guard had to be called in to make water deliveries. Headlines from the Providence Journal at the time read “Those who rely on wells dig deeper for water ,” “Guard to bring water tomorrow,” and “Emergency water shipments to the island could go on for weeks.”
Since that time, the town of Jamestown has tried to save whatever water it can by implementing strict conservation measures. It previously mandated that residents upgrade to washing machines that use little water; it has asked residents to switch to low-flow toilets; and it has been vigilant about monitoring for and addressing leaks in its municipal water system – reducing leakage by about 70-85% over the past decade. It also has a deal to purchase water from North Kingstown in the case of an emergency shortage on the island.
The town has also conserved water by purchasing tracts of land to prevent further development. Having more nature and less concrete in an area makes it easier for heavy rains to be absorbed back into the ground, and ultimately contribute to Jamestown’s freshwater supply, rather than running off of impervious surfaces into the bay. This is important, because scientists say climate change is leading to longer periods of heavy rainfall, but also longer periods of drought. If towns can capture and preserve the rainwater when it does come, they will be better situated during the dry periods.
However, prioritizing conservation has had consequences for the town. Home prices have skyrocketed. Jamestown now has the second-highest median home prices in the state, and it falls far short of the state’s requirements for rates of “affordable” homes.
Jamestown Town Manager Ed Mello acknowledged these challenges for the town in an interview with Rhode Island PBS and The Public’s Radio.
“It is counterproductive to each other, I would suggest,” he said. “You cannot buy up tracts of land to avoid development, yet support affordable housing, right? That may be at the unintended consequence of investments from years past of keeping open space.”
To conserve its water, the town has mostly enforced its own rules about who’s allowed to connect to municipal water service. Those in the urban water district drink municipal water, piped in from a reservoir. Those in the rural district drink water from private wells, which drill down to pockets in the bedrock filled with fresh water. The DiMeglios and their neighbors are in the rural district, just four houses away from the urban district, which is why the Jamestown Water and Sewer Commissioners barred them from tying into town water.
Jamestown has relied on conservation policies and stringent rules despite a lack of clarity about how much water the island currently holds. No one has completed a hydrological study of the island since 1997. The town has not opted into a groundwater monitoring program through the U.S. Geological Survey, which costs between $3,500 and $6,000 a year to see how the water table responds to rainwater.
Town Manager Mello said the town is focused on securing a future water supply instead.
“We can’t change the hydrology,” Mello said. “It’s great to study it, but we can’t change what it is, right?”
But University of Rhode Island Professor of Hydrogeology Thomas Boving says the study from 1997 would be inaccurate for the present moment, and that the lack of data is a problem for any community.
“All this information would be very helpful for any municipality that is reliant on groundwater — or largely on groundwater, or surface water — to understand where are the problem areas or where are the areas that we are pretty safe,” Boving said.
How island communities can try to protect themselves amid climate change
Boving said that conservation is one good method of buffering the water supply, but that there are other solutions the town could look to. Block Island experienced the same drought as Conanicut Island in 1993 and turned to a process called desalination, which can remove the salt from water. Block Island has an abundant water supply, but it can be brackish. Desalination is energy-intensive, however, and Boving says depending on what kind of energy is used, it can feed back into the larger issue of climate change if it further causes emissions.
Another method is to recycle and consume wastewater, which some communities in California have been doing for years.
“There are these technologies that can turn pee water into drinkable water,” said Boving. “Think about the astronauts: All the water on the space station is constantly recycled. It has to be because there is no other water resource.”
Boving said that communities such as Jamestown that are disconnected from the well-supplied Scituate Reservoir, should be doing a better job of planning for their future.
“If we manage our water resources, we can stretch them out to address these issues of droughts,” he said. “The water resources are unevenly distributed.”
But the town of Jamestown argues it needs to keep rural district customers off of town water. Mello says the town produced a water-usage analysis that shows if every bedroom in the urban water district were occupied and using the full amount of water, the reservoir would go dry.
Mello also said that Jamestown is in the early stages of looking into desalination. But it will take years and cost many millions of dollars.
Resolution for the homeowners
After the state passed a law in 2022 standardizing rules about who could tie into municipal water, Christina DiMeglio and several of her neighbors reapplied to the Jamestown Board of Water and Sewer Commissioners. When she was denied again, DiMeglio sued the town. As a part of an eventual settlement, DiMeglio agreed to pay to extend the water main to her property. It took them time to save up the money, but work has begun, and the DiMeglios expect to have water service restored soon.
Between 2021 and 2025, they were living primarily with Christina DiMeglio’s parents in Providence — her father is former Providence Mayor Joe Paolino. Even as they lived elsewhere, the DiMeglios brought their kids to their house in Jamestown when possible.
“We fought really hard to remain members of this community, and for our children to know that they’re accepted as members of this community,” she said.
And a silver lining, DiMeglio says, is that the bonds between her and her neighbors have strengthened, since they’ve needed to rely on one another through this process. Her next-door neighbors have not had their well run dry, and have allowed the DiMeglios to come and go to shower, collect water for things like pasta and coffee, and do laundry.
“They helped us survive here as long as we could until we couldn’t anymore. We have a key to their home,” DiMeglio said.
DiMeglio’s other neighbors whose wells are running low have also recently been granted the ability to connect to town water. An arm of the State Board of Water Resources Board wrote in its decision that Jamestown’s legal interpretation that the town has the final call over who can and cannot connect to municipal water was “absurd,” and that state law supersedes municipal law in cases like these.
The board also said that Jamestown had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner in denying these applicants, who it said had provided sufficient evidence to prove they had a need to connect to town water. An attorney for DiMeglio and one of her neighbors filed paperwork showing that the town had previously allowed four other residents outside of the urban water district to connect to town water, including one who had yet to purchase a home in Jamestown.
Jamestown looks to the future
To prevent additional homeowners from being allowed to tie into municipal water, Jamestown asked the state legislature to amend state law to allow the Jamestown Water and Sewer Commission to make final decisions on who can connect to municipal water. The bill failed to pass through the legislature during both the 2024 and 2025 legislative sessions.
As town manager, Mello inherited Jamestown’s water issue recently. He started the job in 2023. Over the past several years, Jamestown has amassed legal fees fighting homeowners who want to tie into the town’s water. Yet Mello did not say he wishes his predecessors had done a better job of planning for the future.
“Monday Morning Quarterbacks can be critical of what’s happened in the past. But at the end of the day, we have a limited, finite source of water,” he said. “With that being said, we do have a responsibility to try to find the future of water for Jamestown.”
Mello says Jamestown’s efforts to protect its municipal water supply don’t stem from a spirit of exclusion, just reality.
“I don’t think there’d be any hesitation or reservation by the commission to offer water if we had it,” Mello said. “But the reality is we just don’t. Today.”
