The city of Longmeadow, Massachusetts has failed to get a two-thirds voting majority necessary to move forward with its plan to deploy affordable fiber to every city resident.
The vote comes after local telecom monopolies were caught funding an out of town dark money nonprofit to sow doubt about the benefits of the project in the minds of the local electorate.
Longmeadow officials were exploring whether to take out an $8.6 million loan for the initial phase of the $27 million fiber project, paid for by a property tax increase of $97 per year.
The city is just the latest Western Massachusetts municipality to explore the option after decades of dissatisfaction with regional monopolies Comcast and Verizon.
The $8.6 billion would have financed a central fiber hub, an initial pilot area, and a second construction phase expected to connect around 1,600 homes and about 50 businesses and multi-dwelling units (MDUs). The network would have been run by the city as a utility.
Ben Brown, a member of the original Longmeadow Municipal Fiber Task Force, had pushed the network’s potential benefits before the vote.
“With town-owned fiber, you actually get what you pay for,” Brown said. “Speed that doesn’t slow down at peak hours, reliability that doesn’t drop when it rains, pricing that’s transparent, no promotional rates that quietly double after a year, no random fees, no surprises on your bill … the fiber we put in the ground today, is the same fiber that will carry whatever speed comes next.”
But the idea of a tax hike proved too much for the project, which was voted down on May 12 in a 374-270 vote at the annual city town hall meeting.
In the months before the vote, local journalists reported that a dark money Minnesota nonprofit named “Mass Priorities” had been calling, texting, and visiting locals attempting to mislead them about the project.
It’s impossible to state whether the group swayed the vote, especially given the unpopularity of tax hikes and the difficulty in obtaining a two-thirds majority vote.
The project’s success was also impacted by the Longmeadow finance committee’s failure to endorse the project due to potential risks associated with the debt, and questions about whether subscriber revenues alone would be enough to fund the full network project.
But the presence of a telecom industry backed “astroturf” campaign likely didn’t help matters. Industry-backed nonprofits can openly lobby the public without limit, but Longmeadow officials representing the planned utility are prohibited from doing so by law.
Mass Priorities sells itself as “a nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of concerned Massachusetts residents” on its website, claiming it exists to “educate and engage communities on the local policy decisions that affect their lives and to advocate for smart, responsible use of taxpayer dollars by local elected officials.”
But the organization is actually an extension of the Minnesota-based Domestic Policy Caucus, a 501(c)(4) “dark money” nonprofit that obscures its funding sources. Regional monopolies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Charter have a history of covertly funding such organizations in order to sow public distrust in the idea of community-owned broadband.
As Gigi Sohn, Executive Director of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB) recently noted, this lack of transparency into the group’s funding harms the democratic process.
“Communities like Longmeadow deserve an honest debate about costs, governance, and accountability, not recycled myths designed to spread misinformation, protect the status quo, and discourage local choice,” she said.
Inline image of streetview in Longmeadow MA courtesy of Town of Longmeadow Facebook page
