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When Matthew Warwick was younger, police arrested him for something that is no longer a crime: marijuana possession. That criminal background did lasting damage to his life, he said, preventing him from joining the military and complicating his path to higher education. 

But now, Warwick works in the legal cannabis industry — a job he has held since the doors opened to the state’s first recreational dispensaries in 2018. He also has ambitions to do much more in the industry. He wants to be among the first to open a lounge in western Massachusetts where patrons can smoke or ingest cannabis legally. And thanks to the state’s “social equity program,” and brand-new regulations opening the possibility for “social consumption” businesses in Massachusetts, his past criminal charges might help him get a head start.

If he can raise the money and navigate the red tape, that is. 

Almost a decade after Massachusetts residents voted to allow recreational cannabis sales, the state’s Cannabis Control Commission approved rules last month that will allow businesses to open cafes and other similar venues for the consumption of cannabis on-site. 

Three separate license types will be created under the new regulations: “supplemental,” which will allow existing retailers to offer on-site consumption of their products; “hospitality,” which will allow applicants to open new businesses or expand non-cannabis businesses to sell cannabis for on-site consumption; and “event organizers,” which will be permitted to host temporary events like festivals and concerts where consumption will be permitted. All three new license categories allow for indoor smoking, outdoor patios, or non-smoking consumption areas. 

When voters legalized the sale of recreational-use marijuana through a ballot measure in 2016, they also approved the implementation of on-site consumption, but regulatory hurdles significantly delayed this aspect of the industry. The Cannabis Control Commission originally created regulations in 2019, but changes to state law were necessary in order to enable municipalities to opt in to hosting on-site consumption, and those didn’t pass until 2022.

The original 2017 legislation gave regulatory relief to people the state identified as targeted by the War on Drugs — disproportionately Black and Hispanic communities, according to state sentencing data. The Cannabis Control Commission established a social equity program, for example, that helped people who either had past drug convictions or live in parts of the state disproportionately impacted by drug prohibition move more quickly through the permitting process. 

For the first years of the commission’s existence, applicants to their social equity program were provided resources such as training and waived administrative fees. 

However, the state didn’t provide any of those applicants with capital. Because federal law limited growers and retailers access to traditional banking, the initial wave of cannabis businesses in Massachusetts was dominated by multi-state operators with private equity backing. Those businesses consolidated market share while social equity applicants remained stuck in provisional licensure.

Updates to the law in 2022 sought to remedy this by establishing a Social Equity Trust Fund, which channels 15% of cannabis tax revenue to grants and loans for people harmed by  prohibition.

After bureaucratic delay, the fund began awarding money in late 2024. It distributed $26.5 million to 181 businesses, with grants ranging from $50,000 emergency payments to $500,000 for expansion. From that, $3.5 million went to 10 cannabis businesses across Springfield, Holyoke, and Northampton, MassLive reported. 

The timing of the trust fund coincides with a stipulation on who can open social consumption establishments. For three years after the first lounge opens in each license category, only social equity participants, economic empowerment priority applicants, microbusinesses, and craft marijuana cooperatives can obtain licenses. Established cannabis businesses controlled by non-equity owners must wait.

The exclusivity window is meant to give a head start to applicants like Warwick, who qualifies for the social equity program because of his prior marijuana possession charges. 

An alumnus of western Massachusetts’ well-established metalcore music scene, Warwick has also worked as a studio engineer on tracks for hip hop acts such as Freeway and Jae Millz. He said he wants to open an intimate 420-friendly music venue. He hopes to do so in Chicopee or possibly Springfield.

“I feel Chicopee would be easier to deal with than Springfield,” he said.

And some think there is an appetite for those kinds of establishments.

Chicopee City Councilor Jessica Avery told The Shoestring that she believed residents of the city would be receptive to such businesses. Avery, who was a staffer for former state Rep. Frank Smizik, D-Norfolk, worked on legislation related to medical marijuana.

Avery said residents are favorable toward existing cannabis industry businesses in the city, and that she believed the “same energy would apply to social consumption lounges.” She added that she hoped to see “an open and robust conversation” on the subject in City Council in the future.

Warwick said his next step is finding real estate and then talking to the municipality where the building is located.

“I’d honestly love for anything with real instruments that’s original,” he said of the type of acts he’d want to book.

But there are many challenges that lay in the way of applicants like Warwick. For example, he said that he’s currently “in a fight” with the state over the fact that “nothing” has happened with his paperwork since November. State House News Service reported that commissioners believe it will take around 18 months for on-site cannabis consumption businesses to open. That estimate, the outlet reported, is based on the recent rollout of cannabis delivery licenses, which commissioners said took 11 months to process from application to operation.

Expensive and complex regulatory hurdles have prevented other social-equity applicants from opening their businesses, too, despite help from the state. 

There are also other requirements that businesses must meet that may make it complicated, and costly, to open a venue like Warwick has in mind. 

For indoor smoking venues, for example, the ventilation requirements are demanding: negative air pressure relative to adjacent spaces, 20 complete air changes per hour, and a high air filtration standard. These requirements exceed the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers specifications for isolating hospital patients with airborne infectious diseases.

The regulations also prohibit alcohol on premises — a significant moneymaker for such establishments — require ID scanning at entrances and mandate that staff have procedures for helping impaired customers get home safely.

Outdoor smoking areas are less stringent, allowing for a ceiling and two walls, as long as the rest of the area has unimpeded air flow from outside. 

For both inside and outside smoking areas, employees are required to have either an unobstructed view through a window into the area, or closed-circuit television monitoring. Businesses are required to supply personal protective equipment for employees entering smoking areas.

If the ventilation system fails, the smoking area is forced to shut down for a 48-hour period to allow for the dissipation of smoke while the social consumption establishment works to repair the system. Additionally, if police or first responders need to enter a smoking area for any reason, the business must cease all smoking activities if requested by such officials. 

Those regulations, though perhaps cumbersome, are designed to keep workers and others safe from the serious health hazards of secondhand smoke.

“I don’t think it should be treated differently to other jobs in terms of health risks,” said 

Drew Weisse, the organizing director for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1459 — a union that represents cannabis workers across western Massachusetts. 

Weisse said he worries that while personal protective equipment might be an adequate solution initially, he is wary of the potential long-term effects of even tiny amounts of exposure over time. But he noted that on the cultivation and manufacturing side of the industry, occupational risks already exist.   

“I apply the same considerations [to jobs in the cannabis industry] as to any job,” Weisse said. “If workers have what they need to do their jobs, the risks are appropriately mitigated, and the job is a good job, that allows you to live a full, stable, and consistent life.” 

Despite the challenges, though, Warwick is undeterred. 

“With the way that they’re dragging out the regulations, we want to be ready so right when we get the green light we’re good to go,” he said. “We’re going to try to be the first one in the area, have a live event space. But it’s all on the commission and then how fast I can get my end ironed out.”

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Around 8 a.m. on Dec. 2, 2025, Glorisel Cordero was making scrambled eggs for her three children when she smelled something.

“Like a faint, sweet burning plastic,” she said. “Maybe a minute later, the alarms started going off in the hallways.”

A neighbor outside her family’s second-floor apartment at 733 High St. screamed that there was a fire.

“I opened the door, and it was very heavy, thick, blackish-gray smoke already coming up into the hallways,” she said. “I quickly slammed the door.”

Cordero grabbed her keys and herded her children out the back door, down the stairs, and across the street.

“I deal with anxiety, and I had to work really hard not to get a panic attack because I had my kids,” she said.

The three-alarm fire at 733 High St., connected to 27 Franklin St., broke out nearly 16 hours after a fire about a half-mile away at 131 Roberto Clemente St. Both four-story, early-1900s apartment buildings were left uninhabitable, according to Holyoke Fire Department Capt. David Rex.

Jeffrey Trask, the city’s emergency management director, said the two fires displaced between 120 and 130 people. About 36 to 40 apartments were affected. 

“While it is tragic that dozens lost their homes, we are thankful that no one was injured or lost a life,” Rex said.

He credited working alarm systems that warned residents in time to escape.

Neither building, however, had an automatic sprinkler system, according to fire department incident reports obtained through public records requests. Rex and Holyoke Building Commissioner Leslie Ward said Massachusetts law did not require sprinklers at either property. 

Rex said the same rules apply to many of the city’s older apartment buildings.

“It makes me angry,” Cordero said. “I feel like sprinklers should be a mandatory thing.”

After the fire, Virgilio Property Management, which manages Cordero’s former building, paid for her family’s hotel costs for more than a week until they found a new apartment a few blocks away.

“I don’t know if it’s something we’ll ever really be able to fix,” Cordero said in mid-December, describing lingering fear in her daughters, 14 and 10, and her 7-year-old son. “My son is scared to be alone, even in the daytime.”

***

Fire sprinklers are meant to control a blaze in its early stages and buy people time to get out. Research shows they sharply reduce fire deaths and limit how far flames spread. But they are not a guarantee. In Amherst, town officials said the Olympia Drive fire in November started at a nearby construction site and spread to an occupied apartment building. They said sprinklers were activated, but the system was designed to suppress fires that start inside the building and was not effective against a blaze of that size that began outside.

Investigators with the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services have not determined the exact cause of either Holyoke fire but expect to wrap up the investigations in the next few weeks, according to agency spokesperson Jake Wark. They said the blaze at 733 High St. and 27 Franklin St. began in a first-floor bedroom, where they found a power strip plugged into a multi-plug adapter amid numerous electrical wires. They said the other fire started in a second-floor apartment at 131 Roberto Clemente St., but clutter and damage made it difficult to pinpoint an exact origin.

“Investigators are looking at accidental causes in both, but they have multiple potential factors, and they are trying to narrow them down,” Wark wrote in a Jan. 7 email. Rex said arson had been ruled out, and investigators were also considering discarded smoking materials in the Clemente Street fire, though the damage made it difficult to be certain.

Harrison Bonner, who represents the ownership group tied to 131 Clemente St., said upgrades beyond what code requires, including sprinklers, can demand “substantial structural work and financing.”

At 733 High St. and 27 Franklin St., Greg Virgilio, an owner representative and president of Virgilio Property Management, said sprinklers were not installed because of cost.

“[It’s] prohibitively expensive,” he wrote in an email. “The people who live in these apartments … often fall behind in rent as it is. If the cost of sprinklers is added to the rent, most simply could not afford it.”

In 1996, Holyoke opted into a state law that requires sprinklers in residential buildings with four or more units if they are newly constructed or “substantially rehabilitated so as to constitute the equivalent of new construction.” However, neither of the properties in question has seen upgrades that would meet the standard, Ward wrote to The Shoestring.

“I went back to 1933 on 131 Clemente and 1959 on the 727-733 High Street property,” she wrote. “The improvements to the buildings have been on the level of a new roof, rebuilding the porches, the occasional refacing of the facade and some minor alterations to interior spaces.”

Rex said the same limits apply across much of Holyoke’s older housing stock, but neither he nor Ward could say precisely how many older buildings lack sprinklers.

“At this point, I would say we have a few dozen buildings that are in the same situation,” he explained in a Dec. 15 email.

Debate over the application of the sprinkler law in Holyoke even made it to the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2016. In that case, Robert MacLaurin, a property owner, sued the city after the fire chief ordered sprinklers during rehabilitation work on two vacant, abandoned apartment buildings.

The court sided with MacLaurin and said the state sprinkler law’s “equivalent of new construction” language sets a strict standard, requiring renovations “considerably more extensive” than “major alterations” before sprinklers can be required. It said the work must be so substantial that the building is “in essence as good as new.”

Michael Joanis, the chief operating officer of the National Fire Sprinkler Association, said most apartment renovations don’t meet that standard, leaving many older buildings without sprinklers.

“Right now, the threshold is really high,” he said. “I mean, you basically have to completely take that building apart, put it back together.”

National Fire Protection Association research found that the civilian fire death rate per 1,000 reported fires was about 90% lower in properties with automatic sprinkler systems than in those without. The association also found that when sprinklers are present, fire spread is confined to the room or object of origin in about 94% of reported structure fires, compared with about 70% without an automatic sprinkler system. 

Arguments over sprinkler requirements often come down to cost. The National Fire Sprinkler Association points to retrofit examples it says show that sprinkler installations can be added in occupied buildings, including a 180-unit high-rise in Philadelphia, where installation was estimated at about $2,866 per unit. But Joanis said retrofits can be “expensive” and “a huge mountain to climb” for many owners, with costs ranging from “$2 to $10 a square foot,” depending on factors like water supply and asbestos. The association’s guide also lists three low-rise, three-story projects at roughly $13,800 per unit.

“It’s cheaper than your granite countertops. It’s cheaper than going in and putting all new carpet in,” Joanis said. “But … it’s a significant investment.”

Doug Quattrochi, the executive director of MassLandlords, said adding sprinklers can keep some renovation projects from moving forward, especially for small landlords. He estimated a retrofit can cost $10,000 to $30,000 per project, including new water service lines and connections.

“It’s not that we’re flush with cash and we’re refusing to pay out,” Quattrochi said. “It’s not that people don’t want to have a nice modern apartment with all the latest safety features; it’s that we can’t.”

***

The fight also plays out at the State House, where real estate interests have resisted bills to require sprinklers. 

The state’s lobbying database, however, does not show exactly how much any group spent on a single bill. The filings report what groups paid in lobbyists’ salaries and fees during a year. Debra O’Malley, a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, said lobbyists must disclose their activity and, when practicable, list bill numbers and positions. Many filings, she said, use broad topics that “can be very vague,” or cite large measures like the annual budget bill, making bill-by-bill searches incomplete.

One proposal, House bill 2289, would let cities and towns require sprinklers in new one- and two-family homes. The Massachusetts Association of Realtors, the Greater Boston Real Estate Board and the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts, which tagged the bill in state filings, reported paying about $447,000 in total lobbyist salaries and fees in 2023 and about $435,000 in 2024, state records show. Those totals are not bill-specific, and the disclosures do not make clear whether a group supported or opposed a bill, though the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts testified against H.2289.

Fire service and fire-safety groups reported about $233,000 in lobbying in 2023 and about $211,000 in 2024. Those totals are not tied to any single bill, and none of the groups tagged H.2289 in their filings. The Fire Chiefs Association of Massachusetts and local fire officials backed the measure in committee testimony.

After passing the House in June 2024, H.2289 was sent to the Senate Committee on Rules, where it saw no further action. Former Rep. Ruth Balser, a Newton Democrat, was one of the bill’s sponsors. She attributed the stalemate to politics. 

“As I understand it, the Senate president has consistently sided with the real estate industry, rather than with the fire professionals,” Balser said.

A spokesperson for Senate President Karen Spilka said the bill “did not receive enough broad support to advance past the Rules committee last session.” Asked whether the committee took a formal vote or recorded any tally, Spilka’s office and the office of Sen. Joan Lovely, the committee chair, did not provide details.

Campaign finance records compiled by OpenSecrets list real estate among the top donor industries to Spilka’s campaign committee. The industry ranked sixth in 2023 with $7,300 and fifth in 2024 with $7,700, according to the site. The donations do not show whether contributions affected the bill’s path, and Spilka’s office did not address the figures when asked for comment.

Cordero, meanwhile, said the fire cost her family nearly everything: clothes, books and keepsakes, including irreplaceable photos of her mother. She said her daughter’s school tablet was ruined, and for a while, she and her husband thought they had lost their cat, Binx. He was found alive two weeks after the fire, hiding in a closet.

“I really think that it shouldn’t matter how old the buildings are. You want the safety. These are people’s lives living there,” she said. “I understand it might bring up the cost of rent, but our cost of rent went up, and we didn’t see anything change because of it. So I don’t understand why they can’t just suck it up and just do it. In the long run, it might save the building, and it will cost them less when it comes to fixing the damages.”

Records Cordero provided show that on Aug. 1, 2025, the rent for her three-bedroom apartment increased from $1,195 to $1,245 a month. Asked about the increase, Virgilio pointed to rising operating costs, but did not provide specifics.

“The market rent for a 3 Br apartment with heat and hot water is $$1395 and up,” he wrote in an email. “Why didn’t she have renters insurance?”

Cordero confirmed her family didn’t have renters’ insurance before the fire but has it now for $30 a month.

Federal housing data shows higher rents in the area than Virgilio described. In Holyoke’s 01040 ZIP code, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development lists the fiscal 2026 small-area fair market rent for a three-bedroom apartment at $2,110 a month, a figure used to help set voucher payments.

Despite the fire, Cordero said her family’s new apartment does not have sprinklers, either, and she has rarely seen them in Holyoke unless a building is brand new. Asked whether she could prioritize fire suppression systems when searching for a new home, she was blunt.

“Unfortunately, we can’t,” she said. “We can’t be picky at all.”

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WESTFIELD — When in May 2021 a group of developers approached the city of Westfield with a big plan for a big data center, an early release of OpenAI’s GPT3 — a precursor model to what would become ChatGPT — was still six months away from opening to software developers for testing. Some at the time wondered if the data center would be used for mining cryptocurrencies and NFTs. 

Now five years later, AI companies’ demand for computing power and electricity has exploded. An August report from consulting firm McKinsey found that “to deliver the required data center infrastructure, the United States alone will need to more than triple its annual power capacity over the next five years.”

Amid that AI-infrastructure boom, Servistar Realties’ proposal to build a “state-of-the-art hyper-scale data center campus” in Westfield seems practically clairvoyant. Last November, The Boston Globe mused about which tech giant would set up shop at the new facility: “Will it be Amazon, Alphabet, or maybe Microsoft?”

To call it the largest data center in Massachusetts would have been an understatement. At the estimated loads, it would draw 10 times more power than the existing largest data center in the state — a 30-megawatt facility located in the heart of Boston’s financial district owned by the Markley Group. It would also eclipse the electricity draw of all existing data centers in the state combined. It would draw four to five times more power than the entire city of Westfield, which consumes 85 megawatts at its peak, according to Westfield Gas and Electric General Manager Tom Flaherty.

But years after the Westfield City Council approved big tax cuts for the project — and even following the state approving a sales and use tax exemption for large data centers last year — the project is not yet shovel ready. In fact, it appears to be abandoned, according to The Shoestring’s investigation of public records. 

Emails The Shoestring obtained through a public records request found that following the approval of Servistar’s special permit in October 2021, a mailed copy of the permit was returned to the city as “refused” delivery, and there has been no contact between the developers and the city of Westfield since. 

While it’s unclear why the permit was refused, a copy was later emailed to Servistar members, and it still remains active due to a two-year state extension on permitting because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, according to city planner Jay Vinskey, time is running out.  

“If they don’t at least pull a building permit by next October, they’d need to show cause or re-permit,” Vinskey said. 

Additional permitting required by the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act was never filed either. Originally, Servistar told city officials it planned to file those permit applications in January 2022. Instead, that February it withdrew from a site study related to necessary grid improvements on the property, which has two high voltage power lines owned by Eversource running through it.

According to Flaherty, re-entering the queue for service with ISO New England to complete the grid study would itself take at least two years. 

None of these prerequisites can currently be addressed because, at the end of 2024, Servistar’s limited liability corporation was administratively dissolved by the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office for failing to file annual reports two years in a row. While reinstatement is possible after such dissolutions, as things currently stand the company is only legally allowed to conduct business related to liquidating its assets and winding down its affairs. 

None of the three equal members of Servistar — Erik Bartone, Paul Corey, and Connecticut state Sen. John Fonfara — responded to multiple requests for comment from The Shoestring. In March, Fonfara told the news outlet CT Insider that the project had been dead for two years due to a lack of financing, and he was no longer involved. 

The men are all from Connecticut’s energy sector. Fonfara and Bartone had previously partnered on a separate venture. Wattifi was an electric supplier in Connecticut that collapsed in 2023 under $1.17 million in state fines. That scandal, which came to light last March while Fonfara was seeking to become chair of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Agency, lead some at that agency to recommend the company’s leadership “should not be permitted to engage with the electric supplier market or electric utility customers in any capacity in the future,” according to reporting by the Energy and Policy Institute.

***

The data-center project promised to be a big development for Westfield. Proponents noted that it would have made Servistar the city’s biggest tax payer “from day one.” 

It would have been set on a sprawling 156-acres assembled from 16 unrelated lots into a shape not dissimilar to the state of Texas. The land is bisected by two 115,000 volt Eversource transmission lines, on top of the Barnes Aquifer and marshy endangered turtle habitat, and next to the airport. 

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Planning documents show that the developers envisioned building 2.7 million square feet of slab-on-grade, steel framed, “modern” glass and wall panels for “data server space, office and conference room space, loading dock, high-efficiency and redundant heating, ventilating, cooling and plumbing systems” across a campus of 10 data center buildings. Each building would measure 86 feet tall from elevator penthouse to curb, flanked on one exterior wall by backup diesel generators and fuel tanks sized between 6,500 to 13,000 gallons. 

“I would guess it wouldn’t change per building,” Servistar Realties member Erik Bartone told the Westfield Planning Board in 2021, referring to the size of the fuel tanks. 

(Environmentalists have been critical of the recent data center boom, which has seen tech companies go to extreme measures to run the power-hungry facilities, largely using fossil fuels. In April, xAI was allegedly found to be operating double the number of natural gas turbines it was permitted for in order to power its “Colossus” super computer facility. xAI is the Elon Musk-owned company behind the Grok chatbot.)

Fencing and block walls would have surrounded a new electrical substation with a dedicated transmission interconnect to the two 115 kV high-voltage transmission lines, according to a project narrative submitted to the city of Westfield. 

“The substation would exclusively serve the project,” the documents say. “Onsite transformers will be used to step down the power to 34.5 kV voltage that will be supplied to each of the data center buildings through a loop system” supported by an additional 200,000 square feet of accessory buildings housing electrical load balancing equipment, battery storage, and 2N redundant natural gas generators.

The project seemed to be advancing smoothly at first. 

“As always, bicycle parking accommodation should be considered,” Vinskey, the city planner, noted in his 2021 review of Servistar’s special permit application. 

However, when The Shoestring contacted city officials recently, they said they were in the dark about the project’s future. 

“I don’t have any insight on the status of this,” is how Vinskey put it.

***

While little has been done in terms of progress towards building any data center, Servistar has shown they are skilled at negotiating favorable terms for these projects. 

Massachusetts law allows municipalities to exempt development projects on “blighted” or “decadent” land from standard property taxes in exchange for negotiated alternative payments, called “payment in lieu of taxes” or “PILOT” agreements. MGM Springfield, for example, negotiated a PILOT agreement for building its casino in an area damaged by a tornado in 2011. It provides tax certainty to the developer — often for 40 years — while guaranteeing revenue to the municipality on land that might otherwise sit vacant.

Servistar secured favorable tax breaks from the city of Westfield under a PILOT agreement after arguing that the wet and loose soil on the site, and the presence of the same high voltage power lines it needed to supply the vast amount of energy for its project, contributed to it being a “blighted open area.” In October 2021, the City Council conditionally approved a 40-year PILOT agreement. Under the deal, Servistar would pay $372 million over four decades, a small fraction of what a similarly sized project would otherwise owe in taxes. The agreement also exempted the project from personal property taxes on computer hardware.  

Westfield’s agreement with Servistar has no deadline requiring the developer to break ground. The 40-year clock on the tax exemption doesn’t start until the company receives a certificate of occupancy and begins commercial operations. 

This is not standard practice. For example, in Boston, under the same law, the city reserves the right to rescind approval if construction doesn’t begin within one year.

A representative for the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office said that as long as a corporation is reinstated, an administrative dissolution would not inherently alter any municipal tax agreements. The state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities confirmed that the agreement between Servistar Realties LLC and the city of Westfield is not currently in effect, because it has not received all required state, local, and federal approvals.

“We recommend reaching out to the municipality for more information,” a spokesperson said.

***

In 2024, the state legislature passed a sales tax exemption for qualified data centers lasting up to 20 years — a provision sponsored by state representatives Michael Finn, D-West Springfield, and Kelly Pease, R-Westfield, and state Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield. 

Servistar and Westmass Area Development Corporation, who served as consultants on the project, were both instrumental in the passage of this bill. In 2022, only Servistar and Westmass reported lobbying activities related to the bill to exempt data centers from sales and use tax. 

Both were represented on Beacon Hill by Boston’s busiest lobbying firm: Smith, Costello & Crawford. 

Between 2021 and 2024, Westmass, a quasi-public agency, spent $352,000 on lobbying, including payments to Smith, Costello & Crawford, according to state lobbying disclosure reports. Those reports show that Erik Bartone’s company DBS Energy spent $145,000 to have Smith, Costello & Crawford lobby the executive offices of Energy and Environmental Affairs, and Housing and Economic Development, the latter of which oversees PILOT agreements, “regarding proposed western MA project.” 

DBS Energy engaged in these activities despite the fact that The Shoestring could not locate any filing indicating that the company registered with Massachusetts as a foreign corporation. Debra O’Malley, the communications director for the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office, told The Shoestring that any out-of-state corporation is required to register in Massachusetts if they are a lobbying client, but that the rule wasn’t being strictly enforced in 2021, in part due to disruptions caused by COVID. 

Starting in 2022, Bartone and associates’ lobbying switched to Servistar Realties LLC, which is registered in Massachusetts. Between 2022 and 2024, records show that Servistar spent an additional $180,000 to have Smith, Costello & Crawford lobby for their interests. Talking to The Boston Globe in 2024, Jeff Daley, the president of Westmass Area Development Corporation, estimated the exemption could save operators up to $30 million annually on equipment purchases. 

“None of this would have moved forward without these tax incentives,” Daley told the Globe. “They won’t even look at Massachusetts without that being on the books.”

At that time, Daley also told The Boston Globe that Servistar was in conversation with “several potential anchor tenants for the data center complex.” Then, in August 2025, NBC Boston quoted Daley saying that pre-development work could begin within six months. 

But when The Shoestring reached out to Daley in December, he declined an interview. 

“We were a consultant on the project and we are not under contract at the moment, so I have no comment on the project,” Daley said in an email. 

Westmass Vice President of Operations Dan Knapik, who in November was elected to an at-large seat on Westfield’s City Council, told The Shoestring “I’m not a city councilor yet” and declined to comment on the project. Knapik will take office in January. Knapik formerly served as mayor of Westfield between 2010 and 2015. 

Daley and Westmass played a significant role in securing the city’s approval of Servistar’s PILOT agreement in 2021. According to at-large City Councilor Kristen Mello, Daley served as the primary liaison between the developers and elected officials. 

“He’s the one who presented it to us,” Mello said. “All the questions we asked were answered by him.” 

Mello is one of three city councilors who voted against the project in 2021.

“This data center, as proposed, is an environmental nightmare,” she said at the time in an email to a constituent. “It is not in the best interest of the City to use the lungs of our residents as Amazon’s (or any other similar entity’s) toilet bowl.” 

Dave Flaherty — no relation to Tom Flaherty, the Westfield Gas and Electric general manager — was at the time a city councilor himself. He also voted against the project. 

In a recent interview with The Shoestring, Flaherty said the tax arrangement was “ridiculous — way more than any other business, in both dollars and percentage.” He criticized the city’s failure to negotiate, saying the developers and their lawyers presented the deal as “take it or leave it” and “really pushed their way around.” Flaherty noted that he had spoken with state officials at the time who confirmed the City Council had full authority to negotiate terms or reject the agreement outright. 

“Many communities, like Westfield, don’t have the expertise or gumption to negotiate,” he said. “The lawyers know this.” 

Flaherty added that some councilors suspected during the negotiations that Servistar was “using us as a tool to get better deals in other locations.” At that time, Connecticut had exempted data centers from state sales tax, but Massachusetts had not. 

Flaherty, who ran an IT business for years, was critical of the state tax break as well. He said it creates “unfair situations for smaller data centers or for companies like MassMutual who have their own on-premise data centers.” Only new data centers larger than 100,000 square feet that spend more than $10 million are eligible for the exemption. 

“Why should a million dollar device be charged no tax in one place and full tax if it’s located in another place? Same use, different tax burden,” he said.

In July 2024, following the passage of that bill, Adam Winstanley, noticing that Servistar had not made any progress on breaking ground, looked at building a data center at a different location in Westfield, according to email records obtained from Westfield. He didn’t proceed. 

In an interview with The Shoestring, Winstanley, a commercial real estate developer with 33 years of experience and roughly $1 billion in active projects with clients including Amazon, said that he abandoned the idea because he found that “a data center does not work in Westfield or anywhere in New England.”

While he is not opposed to them, he found that regional infrastructure constraints make them “impossible” to build. Electricity makes up a significant portion of a data center’s operating expenses, so operators want to run them in places with cheap power, typically between 5 and 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. According to Winstanley, New England’s average rate runs around 24 cents, and the grid cannot support the massive capacity of power the data centers draw. The substations date to 1975 and run at 90% capacity, he said. 

“It’s not a real estate project, it’s an energy project,” Winstanley said. Green energy projects replaced fossil fuel capacity but didn’t add net generation. Vermont Yankee was shuttered because it couldn’t sell capacity into the grid — now demand outpaces supply. “It’ll never happen in New England,” Winstanley concluded. “Too many factors working against you.”

In late December, President Donald Trump’s administration ordered a pause on nearly 6 gigawatts of offshore wind projects along the east coast, citing national security concerns including radar disruption. Among the paused energy projects were two in New England that are nearly complete. The order came just days after the baffling announcement of a $6 billion merger between Trump Media & Technology, the parent company to Truth Social, and the California-based nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies. 

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Starting in 2022, Pease, the Westfield state representative, filed a series of bills proposing sales tax exemptions for data centers — legislation that would benefit projects like the one Servistar was trying to build in his district. 

The bills drew lobbying from Servistar and, by 2024, from Amazon. Pease’s campaigns have drawn support from the Massachusetts Majority Independent Expenditure PAC, which spent over $21,000 on his behalf in 2020. State campaign finance records show that the PAC’s donor rolls include: John Fish, whose Suffolk Construction runs a data center building division; Robert Hale of Granite Telecommunications, which owns data center infrastructure; and the Markley Group, New England’s largest data center operator.  

The PAC ran afoul of campaign finance law in 2021 when it accepted a $25,000 contribution via treasurer’s check — a payment method Massachusetts caps at $100. By the time the state’s Office of Campaign & Political Finance issued its ruling in January 2024, the PAC had dissolved with no money left. The chairperson cut a personal $25,000 check to an undisclosed charity to make the problem go away, state records say. 

Velis, the Westfield state senator, sponsored the Senate companion to Pease’s data center tax exemption bill, while Finn, the West Springfield Democrat whose district includes parts of Westfield, co-sponsored the House version. In July 2022, Finn and Pease issued a joint press release when the House passed legislation providing economic incentives for the Westfield data center.

“I was excited to cosponsor this important piece of legislation with Rep. Finn, and work with my Western Massachusetts colleagues to pass language that will allow for hyperscale data centers in Westfield,” Pease said. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for Pease told The Shoestring that “he was asked to cosponsor the bill by the city council, and he does support it.” 

“He said that we need to support data centers to stay relevant going forward, and it is good business to have in the state,” the statement said.

Finn did not respond to inquiries from The Shoestring for comment on this article. 

A spokesperson for Velis said he was unable to respond, because he was sent to the southwest border as a member of the Massachusetts National Guard.

Correction: This piece has been updated to correct the spelling of Dan Knapik’s name.

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