MAY 14, 2026 | FREE
Longmeadow voters say no to town-owned fiber IN THIS
EDITION
EAST LONGMEADOW
Resident takes home Howdy Award for transportation A Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative bus driver received the award for transportation at the 29th Annual Howdy Awards.
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LONGMEADOW
Longmeadow student wins Congressional Art Competition The Annual Town Meeting begins at Longmeadow High School on May 12. Reminder Publishing photo by Peter Tuohy
By Peter Tuohy
ptuohy@thereminder.com
LONGMEADOW — A townowned fiber network has been a hot topic of debate in Longmeadow since the idea began in 2024, and especially for the months leading up to the Annual Town Meeting. Now that the meeting has come and gone, the debate has as well. The Longmeadow High School lobby was filled with chatter from voters before the May 12 meeting began murmuring that Article 7 was “the big
one.” Discussion took place for an hour and the article was shot down in a 374-270 vote. Article 7 was looking to see if the town would approve the appropriation of $8.6 million for the initial phases of the $27 million fiber project, paid for by a property tax increase of $97 per year. Ben Brown, a member of the original Municipal Fiber Task Force, was chosen as the Select Board’s designated speaker. Brown presented a final look into the benefits of approving the project, how the town got here, why it matters and what the town
would have owned after the fact. Brown said that other companies had filed pole applications but nobody had built anything yet, stating that the town couldn’t wait for “someone else to decide we’re worth their investment, we have to decide for ourselves.” “Here’s the real consequences if we don’t vote yes tonight,” Brown said. “The pole applications expire, the engineering work we paid for becomes obsolete, the window closes. If we want to restart in two or three years, we reapply, we pay another quarter million for new appli-
cations. We start from scratch, and while we’re waiting, someone else builds to the profitable neighborhoods, probably less than half of the town and leaves the rest of the town behind forever. We lose our chance to build equitably, to control it and to own it. We can’t get that back.” Brown also compared the asking rate of roughly $90 a month for one gig speeds of town-owned fiber to Comcast’s same speed for $110. He said one gig at Comcast is actually slower than promised
A Longmeadow High School student’s artwork is slated to hang on the walls of the U.S. Capitol for the next year.
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HAMPDENWILBRAHAM
Residents vote at Town Meetings On May 11 residents in Hampden and Wilbraham voted on various articles as part of the towns’ Town Meetings.
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See VOTERS on page 6
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