Longmeadow residents will vote Tuesday on the next step toward building out and offering a town-wide fiber network.
If voters pass Article 7 at the annual town meeting, it means moving ahead with funding significant construction after years of advocacy.
However, the vote comes on the heels of what some are calling a “dark money” campaign to undermine the project.
“It’s not really different than any number of other political struggles we're seeing in the country right now, where big money is at play,” says Brian Zayatz, managing editor of The Shoestring. “Where we have a community that is trying to decide something on its own and big money is coming to town and trying to put a finger on the scale.”
Chances are, if you live in western Massachusetts and logged into Facebook over the past few years, you may have seen a certain series of ads in your feed – spots paid for by the “Domestic Policy Caucus.”
The campaign largely consists of posts from “Mass Priorities,” often with graphics decrying tight town budgets and the risks of funding “government-owned broadband” projects – money the group argues would be better on schools and roads.
As Zayatz tells WAMC, the money behind them has been adding up as the years have gone on
“If you look through the ad library on Facebook, you can look up Mass Priorities and the archive goes back to 2019, and according to Facebook, they've spent about $320,000 in that time,” the managing editor tells WAMC. “And almost all of their messaging is focused on this issue of municipal broadband, even though, if you go to their website, they have a little bit of a front that it's more of just ‘Oh, we just are talking about fiscal responsibility.’ But the deeper you dig, the more you see… it’s really laser-focused on this issue, of communities that are trying to create their own municipal broadband utilities.”
Where exactly that money is coming from isn’t totally clear, but as Zayatz’s independent, investigative news outlet and others have noted, the campaigns tend to target markets where Comcast is operating and where municipalities are looking to offer residents other options.
Enter Longmeadow.
For the last few years, the Hampden County town has been laying the groundwork for offering a new fiber internet option. On Tuesday, two-thirds of town meeting voters will need to approve the next big step: appropriating $8.6 million to cover construction costs for the "initial phases of a town wide fiber network."
Longtime fiber optic advocate and Select Board Vice Chair Vineeth Hemavathi says ahead of the vote, Mass Priorities and others were stepping up their efforts.
“The flood of dark money that we're seeing here is unprecedented, and I think folks are really interested to see how Longmeadow responds to that," he said at a May 4 select board meeting. "Last year, Southwick went through the same thing that we're going through now, when they had a town meeting vote that needed a two-thirds majority, and they were also flooded with the same kind of money. When talking with some of the select board [in] Southwick, what they told me was ‘Watch out for this last week, before town meeting, because this is when things kind of just get really out of hand.’"
"They had Mass Priorities door knockers going to homes, representing themselves as town of Southwick employees, which caused a lot of problems for them, and [select board members] said ‘be on the lookout for things like that…’" he continued
It's all led to Hemavathi calling out the campaign over the past year. The Shoestring was among the first to do a deep-dive on who's behind it all.
“If you go to the Mass Priorities website and you try to find out who is in their leadership or who is involved, you won’t find that information there. What you will find is that it's a project of the Domestic Policy Caucus... a group registered in Minnesota," Zayatz tells WAMC. "They have similar… I guess you could call them ‘front-like,’ things elsewhere in the country. Some of them are focused on issues like popular votes in elections or universal basic income. They have this entity, which is a 501(c)(4), they don't have to disclose who their donors are, and the amount of information that you can really find out about what's going on there is pretty limited."
"They're having a pretty big impact in communities like Longmeadow, where they have a lot of money coming in, but it's actually hard to trace where that's coming from," he added.
As Zayatz explains, Comcast is not clearly linked to the group, though as The Shoestring reports, it has given significant sums of money to the New England Connectivity and Telecommunications Association in the past, which has also lobbied against western Mass. community broadband projects before.
The Shoestring also notes Comcast’s disclosure policies “does not require it to list contributions of under $50,000” to 501(c)(4)’s.
Getting either Mass Priorities or Comcast to comment on Longmeadow has been difficult, as well, though Mass Priorities Director Christopher Thrasher has previously told the Springfield Republican newspaper that his organization was focused on supporting Longmeadow residents concerned about what could end up being what he believed to be a $30 million project,
Regardless of dark money, the project has had critics and concerns voiced in recent months.
Longmeadow’s Finance Committee did not recommend Article 7 ahead of town meeting, due in-part due to concerns listed in the town meeting’s warrant.
Reasons ranged from the length of debt service, who bears the risk of that debt and how “at the time of the finance committee vote, the [the project’s] financial model had not been fully vetted and finalized.”
“This should have been a requirement for moving the warrant forward,” the committee’s warrant report stated.
At an April Select Board meeting, Finance Committee Chair Erica Weida also touched on the risk of counting on residents switching to the new service over Comcast, given that Comcast could hypothetically improve its offerings and undercut whatever becomes of the project and its revenues.
“At this moment, I don't think we have done the work we need to do to protect the town and bring people the service that they're asking for,” she said. “[All] in a way that it is sustainable and supportable by the town going forward.”
The same Finance Committee report, submitted by Weida, also noted that “the Finance Committee is not against [the] project moving forward in the future and appreciates the work that has been invested."
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This piece originally aired on Monday, May 11, 2026. Some audio for this story was provided by Longmeadow TV.
