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.”

Locals in Longmeadow, Massachusetts say they’re being bombarded with misleading mailers, texts, and phone calls from a telecom-industry linked group trying to mislead the public ahead of a key vote on the city’s plan to begin construction of a municipal broadband fiber network.

U.S. telecom monopolies have a long and sordid history of paying proxy organizations to try and undermine popular municipal broadband deployment projects. The goal is always to mislead, confuse, and disorient the public ahead of key municipal votes in order to shield regional telecom monopolies from reform and meaningful competition.

Such groups almost always pretend to be objective third parties trying to protect taxpayers from harm. But in reality they’re an extension of the lobbying efforts of unpopular regional monopolies, who know that publicly opposing these popular networks isn’t a great look.

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These tactics are popping up yet again this month in Longmeadow, where “dark money” group “Mass Priorities” is working overtime to derail the city’s effort to build its own fiber network.

Longmeadow residents are voting today (May 12) on whether to approve an $8.6 million loan to construct the first phase of what will ultimately be a town-wide fiber broadband network.