Massachusetts’ East Longmeadow Votes to Fund $43.5 Million Network
Voters rejected a smaller proposal in neighboring Longmeadow in May.
August 12, 2026 – East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, is moving forward with a town-owned fiber network.
The town council voted Tuesday to appropriate more than $43.5 million to fund construction of the fiber buildout, setting in motion a project that has been years in the making.
Under the arrangement, the town will own the physical fiber infrastructure and the network equipment. Whip City Fiber, the fiber optic subsidiary of Westfield Gas and Electric, will operate the network and handle installations, repairs, billing and customer service.
During the council’s August 11 meeting, a Whip City Fiber financial official told councilors the total combines an estimated $31 million project cost, roughly $4 million in earmarked free cash, and projected interest on the borrowing.
The official described a plan to issue bonds in tranches over three years and roll them over a 10-year repayment window. Under the repayment plan, the town would draw on free cash in the first year of borrowing, capitalized interest in the second, and subscriber revenue from years three through ten.
If revenue falls short, officials said the town would fall back on free cash and stabilization funds.
“This has been thought about in every possible way,” Town Council Vice President James Leydon. “We’ve got it all planned out. We are in a position to make this happen, and I think we should be optimistic that this is going to work out really, really well.”
Revenue projections now assume a 50 percent subscriber take rate, based on current figures from Westfield’s own network, officials said at the meeting. Whip City had projected back in 2023 that just a 33 percent subscriber take rate would be needed to cover the network’s costs.
The financial assumptions were still being scrutinized as recently as Tuesday’s meeting.
Make-ready work, originally expected to begin this year, has been pushed to January 2027, with completion now projected roughly six months later than earlier estimates, a delay officials attributed to permitting timelines with National Grid and Eversource.
Officials have estimated it would take about two years before the first residential connections went live. Construction is set to begin with the town’s highest-density fiber service areas, covering roughly 21 of the town’s 34 total service areas, where cost per household is lowest.
The town joins a growing list of Western Massachusetts communities, including Chicopee, Westfield, and South Hadley, which already operate municipal networks, and Hampden, Northampton, West Springfield, and Wilbraham, which are at earlier stages, betting that publicly owned fiber can succeed.
East Longmeadow’s approval stands out against a very different outcome one town over.
In May, voters in neighboring Longmeadow rejected a smaller borrowing request, $8.6 million for the first phase of a planned $27 million network, falling short of the two-thirds majority required at town meeting.
That vote followed a campaign by Mass Priorities, an outside advocacy group that has also opposed municipal broadband efforts in West Springfield and Southwick, and which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on political advertising in the region since 2019.
