“Dark money” group takes aim at Longmeadow municipal fiber vote

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When Vineeth Hemavathi ran for a vacated seat on Longmeadow’s Select Board in 2023, he spent months on the campaign trail knocking on doors. Though it hadn’t been an issue he had considered previously, the topic he said his neighbors mentioned most during those conversations was the poor quality of internet service.

“In Longmeadow, there are a lot of remote workers, and I just kept hearing over and over again how disruptive it was to their workdays,” he told The Shoestring.

After he was elected to the Select Board, Hemavathi volunteered to represent the body on the town’s Municipal Fiber Task Force, which began meeting that year to explore creating a public utility to bring much faster fiber internet to town. It wasn’t long before he heard from other towns that Longmeadow would likely face some well-funded opposition to the creation of a new public utility.

Longmeadow is only the latest among dozens of municipalities in western Massachusetts building out publicly owned fiber networks, most of which have partnered either with Whip City Fiber, Westfield’s public utility, or Fiberspring, part of the South Hadley Electric Light Department. But while building a municipal fiber network in the region’s more rural towns has faced little opposition, as private internet service providers have little intention of building infrastructure for small customer bases, a shadowy, difficult-to-trace group calling itself Mass Priorities has run apparently well-funded campaigns against municipal broadband in communities like West Springfield and Southwick.

Sure enough, Mass Priorities made its presence known in Longmeadow in the weeks before the town’s second vote to create a municipal light plant, the public utility that owns a public fiber network, in November 2024. The group spent over $10,000 on Facebook ads, according to listings on that site’s ad library, and, Hemavathi said, started phone-banking residents from out-of-town phone numbers.

“People were skeptical,” Hemavathi said.

Ultimately, the town voted by a 10-1 margin both to create the municipal light plant and to fund an initial design phase at that special Town Meeting.

According to Sean Fitzgerald, the general manager of the South Hadley Electric Light District and developer of Fiberspring, this kind of enthusiasm is not uncommon, especially in communities with lots of professionals who work from home or families with school-aged children. With more and more “cord-cutters” swapping out home appliances like TVs with modern, internet-connected replacements, Fitzgerald said Fiberspring doesn’t even do town-by-town market research anymore to confirm demand for more reliable fiber internet.

“You just need to ask your neighbor, ‘Is your internet failing while you were watching the Celtics last night?'” he joked.

The problem, Fitzgerald says, is that conglomerates like Comcast — the dominant internet service provider in Longmeadow through its division Xfinity — are not investing in “last mile” fiber, connecting homes to broader fiber networks, which use light signals to transfer information more quickly and reliably. And without fiber, lags and buffering are more common.

“The customer at home is still getting their bandwidth over an antiquated copper system,” he said. “Eventually, that capability is gonna hit its cap.”

Longmeadow faces one more hurdle to setting its fiber buildout in motion: a debt exclusion of $8.5 million that will require a two-thirds majority vote from the upcoming annual Town Meeting on May 12. That borrowing will fund the first phase of the buildout, after which time additional phases will be funded by revenue from customers.

“Getting two-thirds for anything is always difficult,” Hemavathi said. Though he’s hopeful that the momentum that municipal fiber has had among voters in Longmeadow will continue, he added that he’s “very well aware that Mass Priorities is not just throwing away their money. They’re doing it in a very strategic way that has worked before.”

According to Meta’s ad library, Mass Priorities has spent an estimated $319,000 on political ads since 2019, including over $3,000 just in the last week. While some of these ad buys come cheap — under $100 spent for fewer than 100 impressions — others were seen hundreds of thousands of times. One ad from May 2024 targeting Southwick voters was viewed over half a million times, Facebook estimates, and cost between $4,500 and $5,000. Mass Priorities spent as much as $20,000 the following year targeting ads to Southwick voters in the month leading up to a Town Meeting vote on borrowing money for their own municipal fiber buildout.

Voters in Southwick, a town of fewer than 10,000 residents, defeated a spending proposal to build out municipal broadband at the ballot box by a margin of 15 votes at that meeting, but the town is now moving forward with a scaled-back effort.

Mass Priorities bills itself on its website as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of concerned Massachusetts residents advocating for smart, responsible use of taxpayer dollars,” with a focus on “supporting responsible local spending that protects schools, infrastructure, public safety, and essential community services.” But of the six “problem” towns listed at the bottom of the site’s homepage, five are explicitly called out for their municipal fiber projects. The website’s “About Us” section names no leadership and provides no contact information, but bills Mass Priorities as a project of the Domestic Policy Caucus.

Domestic Policy Caucus is a registered 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which means it is not obligated to disclose its funding sources, can raise unlimited money, and can engage in political activity as long as it’s not the group’s primary purpose. Based in Minnesota, the group’s “initiatives” include Mass Priorities as well as others focused on supporting universal income, removing interest rate caps on consumer loans, and “Conservatives for National Popular Vote,” which does not, in fact, argue for a national popular vote. According to the group’s most recent tax filing, its primary expense was over $1 million spent “to educate the public on economic freedom.”

On that same document, among the group’s highest paid independent contractors are Ainsley Shea, a PR firm that appears to be owned and managed by Domestic Policy Caucus board members and boasts of its work on Mass Priorities web, mail, and door-knocking materials on its website, and Ballot Access Marketing, a consulting firm based in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, owned by Christopher Thrasher.

In 2023, the Cape Cod-based publication The Enterprise conducted their own investigation of Mass Priorities. At the time, they reported that Thrasher himself was on Domestic Policy Caucus’ board, and Thrasher spoke to them on behalf of Mass Priorities. Since then, he spent almost $25,000 of his own money in a campaign for a seat in the state Legislature, winning a write-in campaign for the Republican nomination but losing the general election to a Democrat, and explored a campaign to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator Ed Markey, which he apparently decided against. He has held a number of local volunteer and elected positions in Westport.

Calls to Domestic Policy Caucus, Ainsley Shea, and Christopher Thrasher all went unanswered this week.

Hemavathi noted that all six campaigns listed on the Mass Priorities site are in municipalities where Comcast provides internet service. In nearby Hampden, which considered and narrowly defeated its own municipal broadband proposal, Mass Priorities has been silent.

Comcast releases a list each year of 501(c)(4) contributions, and Mass Priorities does not appear on those lists, but the company’s policy does not require it to list contributions of under $50,000. Comcast has given significant sums to other groups, like over $1 million to the New England Connectivity and Telecommunications Association between 2023 and 2024, which does lobby on behalf of the industry but does not appear to have ties to Mass Priorities, though a dubiously-worded survey question echoes the group’s talking points.

Hemavathi and reporting by the Springfield Republican contend a lobbying group tied to Charter Communications called Alliance for Broadband was behind the Hampden defeat, but The Shoestring could not confirm this. Alliance for Quality Broadband is a group that lists Charter as one of its “partners,” and like Mass Priorities, argues for “protecting taxpayers from risky investments made at the expense of more pressing local needs.” The Shoestring was not able to link this group directly to the lobbying efforts in Hampden.

Electioneering, meanwhile, is not something that a public utility can do.

“Because we’re a municipal light plant, we have limitations,” Fitzgerald said of SHELD. “We don’t get involved in elections. We can’t be like them and go out there and spread information to voters.”

For Hemavathi, the deep-pocketed opposition shows the power of creating a public utility.

“While they’re casting doubt on it, it also shows that they believe in it more than anyone else,” he said. “They know that if this project gets off the ground, there’s no way they could compete with it.”

With no funding, Hemavathi said he and others in Longmeadow are trying to get accurate information out to voters as best as they can, via social media and at in-person gatherings. At an information session about the entire Town Meeting warrant on Monday, Hemavathi said, attendance exceeded expectations, and people of all ages came in to learn about municipal fiber.

“Some people walked in holding the Mass Priorities mailer, talking about how disgusted they were that this outside group was trying to sway this vote,” he said.

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