SEVILLE -- Turn on the tap in Seville. Sand might pour into sinks, toilets and shower stalls. Children aren't allowed to use drinking fountains at school. Water pipes lie cracked and exposed in a murky irrigation ditch.

It doesn't take a water engineer to see something has gone terribly wrong here. And it's not just sand and bacteria in the pipes. There are chemicals in this water that can cause a possibly fatal blood disease in babies.

For more than a decade, people have been using this dirty water for bathing, cooking and sometimes drinking.

Seville's problem would be a dark chapter for any California county, even without the spotlight that came with a U.N. investigation in March. But this is not just an isolated mess in a small town off the beaten track. Seville is a poster child for many small communities lost in a bureaucratic maze, asking for help from state, federal and local agencies.

Even something as simple as drilling a new well can take years.

"Do people have to wait their whole lives for changes?" asked Susana DeAnda, co-director of the Community Water Center, a nonprofit environmental group in Visalia.

Many residents of Seville and dozens of other small, San Joaquin Valley towns consider themselves victims of neglect.

"We need help, but no one has been listening," said Seville resident Rebecca Quintana.

They say no agency has the responsibility to respond to their pleas for help. They want a one-stop solution with little political interference. And they say it should not take years.

Engineers say the people of Seville and other small communities are not asking for rocket science. There are fixes readily available.

For Seville and surrounding towns, there already are plans on the books to build a regional treatment plant that could provide water from the Kings River.

The real hurdle is navigating rules to apply for the money -- which means towns must hire engineers and lawyers to cross a bureaucratic minefield. Miss a step, enter the wrong project number, misunderstand a technical communication, and the application blows up.

Frustrated in Seville

There are few better examples of small-town frustration than Seville, a citrus-belt community named after a type of orange that is considered bitter.

Just this year, funding to fix the town's chronic problems seems to have been available, then yanked away, then made available again -- on two different projects.

Seville's water problems could easily be addressed by hooking up with a regional treatment plant that would provide Kings River water. Many towns in the north Tulare region also could benefit.

But the California Department of Public Health in January gave the project low priority on the funding list for an essential $500,000 study -- due to a technicality.

"This was a short-sighted decision," said engineer Dennis Keller, who works with the cities in the area. "A regional solution helps everyone involved."

State lawmaker Henry T. Perea, whose Assembly district includes the town, wrote a letter a few months later asking state health officials to move the north county area back up the priority list to fund the study for water treatment.

"If the state public health department continues to turn a blind eye to Tulare County, I will be looking at legislation to correct it," he said at the time.

But by the time Perea had sent his letter, health agency officials said they had already moved the $500,000 study back up the funding priority list. The funding has not yet been granted, but it is under consideration.