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This story was produced with support from the Markham-Nathan Fund for Social Justice.

For Tommy Stang, a Hampshire County resident who says they spend over 100 hours a year chasing deer, hunting is much more than just a sporting activity. 

“It’s not just a hobby, it’s a way we feed each other,” they told The Shoestring 

Stang recalled how their first experiences trying hunted meat — gifted white-tailed venison and home-cooked moose — came from friends. 

“Much like how your neighbor may show up on your doorstep every July with an armload of zucchini and they’re practically begging you to take it off their hands… hunting is similar. There’s an entire gift economy that revolves around it.”

Venison from white-tailed deer hunting makes up an estimated 4.4 million meals per year in Massachusetts, according to the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. Hunting is also tied to government programs like Hunters Share the Harvest, which has distributed up to 90,000 meals through food banks, many of which — such as the Northampton Survival Center and Pequoig Farm — are right here in western Massachusetts. 

But even as the annual deer harvest has trended upwards across the state for decades, the animal’s population has swollen well above target numbers in some parts of eastern Mass, bringing with them public health and ecological concerns. 

The issue has become so pronounced that the state’s Division of Fisheries and Wildlife has proposed relaxing some hunting regulations to boost harvest numbers. Massachusetts’ hunting regulations remain among the most restrictive in the United States, particularly because it is one of only two states with an all-out ban on Sunday hunting, a restriction dating back to the 19th century to ensure a Sunday day of rest. 

Under the directive of the administration of Gov. Maura Healey, the division, known as MassWildlife for short, announced proposed changes in January that would lift the ban on Sunday hunting, expand allowable crossbow use, and relax minimum setback limits for hunting near human settlements. 

***

In the weeks following its announcement of the proposed changes, MassWildlife hosted five listening sessions — both virtually and in person — and collected written comments. 

The first listening session, a three-hour virtual speak-by-turn on Jan. 27, drew passionate public response both in support and in opposition to the changes, with Sunday hunting emerging as the main point of contention.

Dennis Rochon, a hunter from South Hadley, referred to the ban lift as “long overdue.” 

“I hunt public property along with hikers every day, and there’s never an issue. We coexist,” he said.

Several resident non-hunters cited safety concerns, arguing that Sunday is the one day in the week when hikers, runners, and bikers can enjoy the outdoors without the fear of getting shot. 

Jennifer Jackman, a Lynn resident, claimed that hunters make up just 1% of the state’s population. “The 1% can hunt for six days a week [during hunting seasons]. Why does 99% of the population who do not hunt not merit one day to be able to enjoy the woods free from guns and other weapons?” 

Stang, who also volunteers as a hunting education instructor for MassWildlife, supports Sunday hunting and told The Shoestring that the majority of hunting-related injuries actually don’t involve guns. 

“They involve people falling out of trees,” they said.

MassWildlife’s basic hunting education courses are mandatory for first-time adult hunters and can last up to 16 hours. The curriculum, Stang said, emphasizes tree-stand safety and dedicates half of the course to gun safety, including handling and carrying firearms and shot placement. 

As for gun-related hunting accidents, Stang said most are incurred by hunters themselves or other members of their party. 

The last reported incident of a hunting-related injury occurred in December of last year from an accidental shooting of a hunter by another member of his party on Martha’s Vineyard, according to Stang. 

Stang also said that despite hunting exclusively on public land for nine years, they have never had a negative encounter with a non-hunter. 

***

Before opening for public comment, MassWildlife Acting Director Eve Schlüter provided background on the proposed changes and their potential benefits. According to Schlüter, the proposed changes mirror hunting laws already in place across the country and in the Northeast. 

Whereas Massachusetts currently has a full ban on crossbow hunting, except for those with a permanent disability who are unable to draw a traditional bow and arrow, recent decisions by several northeastern states, including New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, now allow all hunters to use crossbows.

Current Massachusetts setback limits prohibit hunting within 500 feet of a building or residence and 150 feet of a road. The proposed change — to halve setback limits for buildings to 250 feet while maintaining the setback limit for roads — would match limits set in neighboring states.

Schlüter further suggested that expanding regulated hunting opportunities could better support family food security, further connect communities to nature, and boost the state’s economy and conservation by funding them through hunting license fees. 

Officials also hope the changes, if implemented, would address issues associated with deer overpopulation in Massachusetts. 

“Overabundant deer contribute to increased human-wildlife conflict, vehicle collisions, the spread of tick-borne disease, degradation of forests, and crop damage at local farms,” MassWildlife Assistant Director of Outreach and Education Nicole McSweeney wrote in a statement to The Shoestring. 

According to Stang, once natural predators like wolves and cougars became locally extinct in Massachusetts, humans became the main predator of deer. “Human hunting of white-tailed deer is an ecological process … it can play one very important role in mitigating some of those effects [of deer pressure].” 

During listening sessions, residents went back and forth on this. Karen Schwable, who spoke on behalf of the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation, outlined the effects of wildlife overabundance on crop and livestock. “Wildlife is managed by the state, but the costs of overpopulation fall almost entirely on farmers with limited tools and no compensation.”

Schwable argued in favor of all three proposed changes, stating that Sunday hunting, reduced setback distances, and crossbow hunting would more successfully manage wildlife populations and reduce damage to farms.

Nelson Sigelmen, a hunter from Martha’s Vineyard, referenced an ongoing crisis in tick-borne diseases on the island, where rates of Lyme disease are 11 times higher than on the mainland, and deer density is the highest in the state. To help alleviate the crisis, state officials recently announced an expansion to winter and fall deer hunting seasons on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, starting this year. 

“State lawmakers would be wrong to conclude that these changes only concern hunters,” Sigelmen said. “If approved, residents and communities across the state where deer numbers continue to rise stand to benefit.” 

Other residents disagreed. 

“One additional day of hunting a week would have no appreciable impact whatsoever on the deer population,” said Director of Western Mass Wildlife Advocates Sheryl Becker, arguing that populations tend to quickly bounce back due to a sudden abundance in food, allowing a higher rate of offspring in surviving deer. 

Bruce Spencer, a now-retired local forester who managed both the Quabbin district’s forest as well as a hobby woodlot in Leverett for decades, noted that the ecological impacts of deer have become more visible even in western Mass, where populations are closer to MassWildlife’s targets. According to Spencer, increasing deer numbers in Leverett have long been slowing forest regeneration, and the problem has only worsened as the number of active hunters in the town has dropped. 

“When I first purchased the wood lot in 1973, I was getting oak regeneration. But there were a lot more hunters hunting on that property at that time than there are now,” he told The Shoestring. Forest-dominating hardwood trees like oak and maple are especially preferred by deer, Spencer said. Deer often target young saplings, which prevents native vegetation and forests from regenerating and replacing themselves. 

“Hunting is hard work,” Spencer said. “It’s cold winters … and it’s something that doesn’t appeal to enough people.” 

And even among active hunters, many described time constraints as a major barrier. At the listening sessions, several hunters said that a busy workweek leaves little time for hunting. 

“Weekends are the primary time that I can hunt with friends and family. When Sundays are off-limits, I effectively lose 50% of my available days to hunt,” Tony Vinciguerra, a hunter from Canton, said.

Even so, Spencer had mixed feelings when asked about Sunday hunting. “[Hunters] have the whole month of December, so that makes it difficult for people wanting to roam the woods during that month, to [also] not have Sundays now,” he said. 

Spencer supported allowing crossbow hunting as a more accurate and easier-to-shoot alternative to a regular bow, and argued that it can often be more successful at taking deer than shotgun hunting. Stang agreed but argued that crossbow use should be added to the hunting license safety curriculum at the same time. 

As for setback distances, Spencer acknowledged that increased housing in Leverett has restricted hunting areas, but still understands the implications for gun safety. 

Ultimately, Spencer said he would support less restrictive setback distances for archery but not for firearms. Stang echoed this, saying that shotgun safety concerns should keep setbacks at 50 feet, but argued that bows are less dangerous and loosening these setbacks would allow suburban areas to better manage deer overpopulation. 

Considering all three changes, Spencer suggested increasing doe permits, which allow hunters to shoot one female deer per permit, as the most effective way to control deer populations in the state. 

“At Quabbin, [Fish and Wildlife] gave everyone a doe permit … and they were able to bring the deer population down very quickly to the numbers they wanted,” he said. “I think the key to it is really just opening up the doe permits.” 

With the conclusion of the feedback period last week, MassWildlife will begin evaluating public input and wildlife management impacts before issuing its recommendations sometime in the coming months.

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Early this month, Holyoke’s City Council took what Mayor Joshua Garcia described as a “giant step in Holyoke history” by passing the Municipal Finance Modernization Act.

“After more than a year of deliberation, and four years of me convincing the public why this is important, this reform will modernize our financial management,” he wrote on social media. 

According to several members of the council, the act will “streamline” the process for the organization of the city’s finances — something many have felt has been in disarray for a long time. Late last year, the state froze funding to Holyoke after the city failed to submit financial reports dating back to 2023. The act makes changes that the state has long recommended, including creating a financial administration department to oversee the city’s finances. 

It’s the first major change coming from a City Council that witnessed a transformation at the beginning of this year after Holyoke residents voted in several new councilors: Anne Thalheimer, Nicole Maisonent, Mimi Panitch, and Richard Purcell. The new members flipped several seats previously held by a more conservative faction that included longtime incumbents Kevin Jourdain and David Bartley, making the council more left-leaning in its politics. 

For many council members, new and returning, the change presents an opportunity to improve Holyoke and the way it is governed. 

“I want to change the reputation that our council has had in neighboring communities,” said Tessa Murphy-Romboletti, an at-large councilor who served as council president last term and was reelected to that position last month. “We created a mockery for ourselves over the last couple years, the way that we would argue. I want to change that because there’s such little hope right now in government.”

Screaming matches and a breakdown of decorum were frequent occurrences in recent years on the Holyoke City Council. Whereas the new councilors just passed a major reform during their first meeting, two years ago the newly elected body spent 45 minutes of its first meeting arguing about their seating assignments.

Murphy-Romboletti said that people need to be able to depend on local government. She said it’s the role of mayors and city councilors to help them navigate “weird, unprecedented times” through more public participation. When the City Council passed its municipal finance act, Murphy-Romboletti and others described it as a major win for the new council. 

This term, councilors continue to tackle issues from the city’s finances, the affordability crisis plaguing the entire state, and ongoing conversations concerning community safety. 

***

While passage of the Municipal Finance Modernization Act was a major step for City Council, it was not without dissent from the remaining members of the body’s conservative bloc, who expressed concerns about ballooning budgets and overall affordability. 

In an interview with The Shoestring, Ward 5 Councilor Linda Vacon called the city’s budget growth “unsustainable.” On her Facebook page, Vacon — a member of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee and vocal supporter of President Donald Trump — has also referred to the act as the “big bureaucratic bill.” 

She added that the increase in city government positions is “too big and too much” at a time where she said taxpayers are unable to support the increased costs to pay for the new positions.

Under the new law, the position of city treasurer will become an appointed position, rather than elected. According to Michael Sullivan, at-large councilor, winning an elected position doesn’t ensure that the person is qualified for the job

“That made no sense at all,” Sullivan said. “
That’s a pretty archaic way of doing things.”

Sullivan said that the mayor needs “good financial information” based on “true and accurate data” and that it’s not something that a mayor is always qualified to do.

Vacon was one of five councilors who thwarted the municipal finance legislation as recently as late last year over a majority of councilors in favor. Of those five, only Vacon and Howard Greaney, an at-large councilor, were re-elected. Bartley and Jourdain, meanwhile, were voted off the council, and Ward 2’s representative, Carmen Occasio, didn’t run for re-election.

Left-leaning politicians now make up a supermajority of the council, and may be able to pass more of their agenda as they did with the municipal finance act. In interviews in recent weeks, some highlighted what they described as a drastic shift of tone within council meetings, and several emphasized their commitment to newfound efficiency and civility — something they consider a major opening for the progression of the city.

Purcell, the Ward 4 councilor, told The Shoestring that the state has been telling Holyoke to pass the municipal finance act for years, and that councilors have “been trying to do it for years.” 

“But, there’s been a lot of — I’ll just call it obstruction,” Purcell said. “There’s obstruction from a certain part of the City Council that, for whatever reason, decided they didn’t want this. They stranglehold the City Council, as far as I’m concerned, about updating it.”

But there are still a lot of constituent concerns that councilors brought up in conversations with The Shoestring, like affordability.

One of Purcell’s top priorities is establishing a tenants’ rights office. He said that the majority of residents in the city’s Ward 4 are renters. 

Recently, Purcell said he and Garcia were in a meeting with a renter facing a rat infestation in her public housing apartment. The constituent wanted to move, but her landlord had allegedly denied her a copy of their signed lease, which is necessary to transfer housing vouchers. 

According to Purcell, a tenants’ rights office is exactly the kind of place that would protect the rights of the resident and other renters like her. He said that he’s gotten the co-sign of many council members and local grassroots organizations, like Neighbor to Neighbor and the Chestnut Hill Community Association. In 2023, Garcia said that he would be working on establishing an Office of Tenant Protection, according to MassLive. 

Affordability is on the minds of many councilors. Vacon, for example, said that one of her top priorities is the impact of affordability on renters in the city and increasing taxes. She said that renters indirectly pay their landlords for the increase on a landlord’s property tax bill. Vacon added that people often seek restrictions on how costs rise, but it’s the property owners who bear the burden of high taxes in a city that isn’t growing. 

“The reality is, it starts with the city budget,” Vacon said. “If every year we are increasing the city budget by $2 to $3 million, it is creating increases for both the homeowners and the renters. It’s a cycle that we must address.”

Vacon thinks that the budget has inflated too much too quickly. She said the local city budget shouldn’t just stop increasing, but should actually decrease overall. According to her, the rest of the City Council doesn’t seem to have the same “appetite” for that.

***

There are plenty more upcoming decisions that the council will have to make regarding the city’s budget — particularly concerning policing.

In late 2023, after a stray bullet from a nearby shooting struck a pregnant woman and resulted in the death of her unborn child, Garcia released a public safety proposal — called Ezekiel’s Plan to honor the child — that the City Council didn’t pass at the time. It was a split vote, with seven councilors against, including Bartley and Jourdain, and six in favor. The package would have hired 13 new police officers, a crime analyst position at the department, spent a quarter million dollars on city-wide cameras connected to Holyoke’s gunshot detection technology, Shotspotter, and increased other parts of the police budget by another half million. 

One of the major concerns some had about the proposal was the increased funding for the police department after members in recent years had called for more transparency about the officers’ overtime and spending. Several Council members also emphasized that they were not “anti-police,” but had major reservations about the plan’s emphasis on policing. 

One of those who voted against the proposal at the time was at-large Councilor Israel Rivera. Rivera declined an interview for this article, but speaking on The Shoestring’s podcast in 2024 after voting against Ezekiel’s plan, he said he respected where the mayor’s proposal was coming from but would have done things differently. He also expressed concern about overpolicing in the city’s communities of color — the neighborhoods where he grew up. 

Rivera is now at the center of controversy as the council is set to consider such issues again.

Holyoke’s two police unions have been calling for his resignation after his arrest for operating under the influence last month. Since then, Rivera has stepped down from his elected position as the council’s vice president. Murphy-Romboletti also removed Rivera from his post as the chair of the Committee on Public Safety.

The patrol officers’ and supervisors’ unions have filed an ethics complaint regarding comments that Rivera made during his initial arrests — among them that he’s “best friends” with Garcia and that he would cut the police budget. They’ve said he should not be involved with any police-related matters on the council.

It’s not the first time that the city’s police unions have waded into city politics, especially when it concerns their department’s budget. In 2014, patrol-officer union president wrote to the City Council to criticize two of its members for marching in a Black Lives Matter protest because of “anti-police rhetoric” at the rally.

In 2022, the supervisors’ and patrol officers’ unions called for another at-large councilor, ​​José Maldonado Velez, to recuse himself from votes related to the department after he called police a “gang” during a debate about funding Shotspotter.

“They’re there to protect each other, to look out for each other, and to come out with force in our community,” Maldonado Velez, one of only a handful of Latino residents ever elected to an at-large seat in the city’s history, said at the time. “The police, for me, was used as a reminder to stay in my place. I am a Latino. You’re supposed to act a certain way, talk a certain way. That’s what police was for. It was not there to help me.”

The unions have also endorsed candidates for office, including Jourdain — a delegate to Trump’s Republican National Convention in 2016 — during the last election cycle.

Policing and gun violence continue to affect many residents in Holyoke, including members of the council. Anne Thalheimer is Ward 3’s new councilor, and a survivor of gun violence herself. She said that public safety is something she holds closely and that she would like to see more community-based resources that address the root causes of gun violence — ones that she already sees implemented, like the city’s emergency response teams. According to Thalheimer, she would like more evidence on the efficacy of technologies like Shotspotter and would prefer that they are used in conjunction with other resources.

Shotspotter, now known as SoundThinking, has been the subject of controversy. According to two years of records obtained by the Massachusetts ACLU, in about 70% of the system’s alerts in the city of Boston, police found no gunfire. 

“In Boston, ShotSpotter microphones are installed primarily in Dorchester and Roxbury, in areas where some neighborhoods are over 90 percent Black and/or Latine,” the ACLU found.

Mimi Panitch, a newly elected at-large city councilor and the chair of the Committee on Charter and Rules, wants more community-centered dialogue around public safety. According to Panitch, she’s been getting questions from the public suggesting that “it’s time for another intense community conversation that will bring everybody in.”

She’s heard inquiries from people who want more police, those who are skeptical about the manner in which public safety services are delivered, and those who have doubts about police intervention in an emergency. 

“The goodwill to have those conversations is there on all sides,” she said. “I’m ridiculously idealistic about this, but I think we can do it.”

Another of Purcell’s major priorities this term is implementing a community-run police commission.

According to him, Holyoke police are lacking an oversight committee — and is the only city department not to have one. In the past few years, there’s been a few votes to establish a committee. However, because those were non-binding referendums — meaning that city officials weren’t mandated to implement them — no such committee was established. 

“It’s just the right thing to do,” Purcell said. 

***

Councilors say that changing the rules of the City Council is another priority.

For example, in order for a community member to make a public comment during a City Council meeting, they are required to state their full name and address. During a full City Council meeting last month, one community member requested that the council reconsider this rule, citing the harassment they faced as backlash to public comments they’ve made in the past. 

Council members will sometimes motion to suspend this rule. Councilors like Thalheimer are asking why there seems to be emphasis placed on some rules over others.

“The rules also say that we’re supposed to have a youth lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance once a month,” she said. “And I have never seen that happen in all of the years that we have been doing public comment.”

To Thalheimer, requiring residents to state their full name and address is an accessibility issue — one that feels like an “unnecessary hurdle” to public participation, given that some residents reported being harassed in connection to public comment and because she feels unhoused should be given the opportunity to participate. It’s something she says is important to break down if the council wants more constituent involvement.

“I’ll speak frankly: if people haul ass in the winter down to City Hall for uncomfortable seating in the dark in the wintertime to say two minutes worth of what’s on their mind — and two minutes is not a lot of time — I think we can extend this particular courtesy,” she said. “I think we can break down that particular barrier to participation.”

Thalheimer said that she believes the root is ensuring that commenters are Holyoke residents, but that there are other ways to verify that: commenters can state their ward or neighborhood.

Amidst federal agents’ shooting of protestors and activists like Keith Porter, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti — among others — and the Trump administration’s nationwide mass deportation efforts, concerns of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are prevalent in Holyoke. The city is known for its diversity and large Puerto Rican population. 

Panitch said that she’s gotten “heartbreaking” notes from community members about their interactions with ICE. It’s part of the reason she ran for her seat.

“Privilege is real, and I can get away with it — I can say: ‘This is bad and we should not be inviting ICE to come into our community,’” she said. 

Vacon and Jourdain, the former at-large councilor, filed a resolution last session that they said would re-affirm Holyoke’s position as a non-sanctuary city. The federal administration had released a statement recognizing Holyoke as a sanctuary city, though that term has no legal designation. A copy of the resolution would’ve also been sent to the White House and requested notification if there was anything in the city’s policy that would be considered “sanctuary city policies.” One of the stated concerns from the council’s conservatives was the potential loss of federal funding.

Vacon said that at the time she had filed the resolution, the context was different. She said that she requested it be removed from the council’s business but did not have the power to change when it was heard. 

***

Though tension on the council remains, local officials are cautiously hopeful. In light of recent changes, many of them want more connectedness in Holyoke through building trust and community between residents and local officials. 

For Murphy-Romboletti, it means getting more people involved, and getting them to stay.

“Apathy is the biggest threat,” she said. “It’s so easy to just say: ‘It doesn’t matter.’ And so if I can get more people to pay attention, if I can get more people to care, I’ll feel like I’ve done some good work.”

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This article is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

Last year, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism reported a bombshell about remediation funds that are intended to help curb the ongoing opioid epidemic in Mass. Of the $92.1 million that cities and towns had received in the first two years of efforts to tackle the problem, they only spent about 8%.

These millions of dollars come from companies that played a part in aggressively marketing painkillers while systematically downplaying their addiction risks.

In Fiscal Year 2024, the majority of municipalities did not report making any expenditures at all. During that same period, between July 2023 and June 2024, there were 1,763 opioid-related deaths in the state, more than 95% of them from overdoses.

As local governments have contemplated how to use this money, some have increased spending. Records obtained by BINJ show that of the $113.7 million disbursed to municipalities between 2023 and 2025, cities and towns have collectively spent $19.8 million, or about 17%.

It was a chore to secure the most recent opioid recovery fund spending data. State officials went to great lengths to withhold the numbers, and missed the required legal deadline to make remediation spending info public. But after wrestling with the Department of Public Health for months, Mass reluctantly provided follow-up data that covers FY25 (July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025).

Major takeaways include:

• Some local governments are still using opioid remediation dollars to fund police departments in ways that run afoul of state guidelines.
• Nearly half of Mass municipalities reported no expenditures in this realm in FY25.
• Many cities that spent relatively little last fiscal year are among the biggest recipients.

As for those who did spend (or at least reported money encumbered for specific projects), the largest municipal expenditures were in Boston ($2,586,642), Cambridge ($1,820,420), Lawrence ($1,192,029), Worcester ($1,099,417), and Westfield ($566,353).

But what they spent it on, and how much of the total funding those and others received so much spending represents, is another story.

How opioid settlements are disbursed

Massachusetts anticipates receiving approximately $1 billion by 2038 for opioid abatement efforts, with more than $250 million already disbursed between statewide and municipal commitments. With that funding now arriving, state and local officials have been tasked with mitigating a public health crisis that continues morphing with strange new lethal substances killing hundreds every month.

Settlement funds are divided between local governments and the commonwealth under the State-Subdivision Agreement for Statewide Opioid Settlements. Under this agreement, 60% of abatement settlements go to the Opioid Remediation and Recovery Fund, under the control of the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS), while cities and towns get the remaining 40%, which is supposed to be allocated toward recovery efforts. To date, more than $113 million has been distributed to municipalities, including about $22 million to 336 out of 351 cities and towns in FY25.

Under the settlement agreement, municipalities are supposed to use these funds only in ways that can supplement and strengthen efforts to recover from the opioid epidemic, without replacing existing funding sources for substance use disorder treatment. As one program manager for opioid response at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office said in a webinar with town and city fund recipients last year: “They’re not grant dollars and they’re not federal funds.” 

Furthermore, the way in which appropriations from these funds are made vary from place to place. Some municipalities delegate decision making to the public health department, while others require council approval. Guidance issued by the Office of the Inspector General in August notes that in most cases, cities and towns are still required to follow state laws about procurement. 

Our communications with dozens of municipal workers, as well as the latest DPH data, also show that many have formed ad-hoc boards to field ideas and award grants. That’s within bounds and even encouraged by state fund administrators, but in most cases, such processes have halted spending thus far.

Who isn’t spending

Slightly less than half of municipalities—45%—reported no opioid funding-related expenditures in FY25. Overall, however, spending is on the rise.

Comparatively, in FY23, 92% of cities and towns reported no expenditures from their settlement fund accounts. In FY24, that number dropped to about 60%.

The overall number of municipalities reporting zero spending actually rose in FY25, from 143 to 164, but the total number of reporting municipalities also rose. DPH did not respond to a request for further explanation.

According to department numbers obtained for this article, there was more than $16 million in unspent opioid remediation dollars sitting in municipal coffers at the end of FY25. The biggest non-spenders with the most money sitting idle were Holyoke ($1,115,846), Shrewsbury ($747,142), Waltham ($614,536), Westborough ($585,408), and West Springfield ($524,645).

Who is spending, and how much

Many smaller and near-zero spenders are also among the largest settlement funding recipients. Across the state, 185 cities and towns with nearly $40 million combined all reported spending at levels under 5% of their allocations. Salem spent less than $10,000 in FY25, and still had more than $700,000 in the bank, while Brockton spent in excess of $88,000 with nearly $2 million remaining. Brookline used only $4,000 in FY25, but was able to leverage its spending via a matched $50,000 grant, but still had nearly $900,000 left.

Some cities are beginning to spend these funds in FY26. Holyoke, for example, will soon announce the awardees of grants totalling $1 million. In neighboring Springfield, officials reported expenditures equal to about 2% of the nearly $4 million it has set aside, as of last July. That city’s reported expenditures are seemingly contrary to an announcement made in March about intentions to spend about $450,000 per year on substance use treatment grants for nonprofits. A spokesperson for the City of Springfield didnot respond to a request for comment. 

Overall, broken down by category, municipalities across the commonwealth combined spent in the following general categories in FY25: subcontracts ($8,446,773); program support ($3,674,081); salaries ($2,846,054); program supplies ($1,669,320); administrative costs ($455,785); program facilities ($374,717).

Spending on police

In prior coverage, we also highlighted the amount of opioid remediation funding that is going to police departments—in some cases, for expenditures that skirt the spirit of the program.

Guidance issued by the DPH advises municipalities against funding law enforcement to engage people who use drugs, because “mistrust of police among [drug users] can prevent access to services, and police presence can inadvertently intensify harms and create barriers for meaningful engagement.” However, a review of these new expenditure reports shows that not all local governments are following directions, including some we highlighted in prior reporting.

In FY24, Lawrence spent about $40,000 for “homeless camp cleanups,” including a $3,000 bill to repair a backhoe which broke down during an eviction. In FY25, the city in the Merrimack Valley further funded police “outreach to encampments” to the tune of $77,564. On top of that, Lawrence used $125,419 in opioid remediation dollars to dismantle camps, including $30,000 for “dumpsters.”

Lawrence additionally used $65,000 from its settlement bag for environmental cleanup through the Clean River Project. Neighboring Haverhill also reported spending, about $8,000 total, with the nonprofit, in coordination with the evictions of people living under bridges. Clean River Project President Rocky Morrison defended the expenditures, saying, “Lawrence is a mess, it’s like the hub of homelessness. … Once they pollute an area, they’ll leave and then get a brand new tent and go pollute a new area.”

Also up near the New Hampshire border, the Lowell Police Department allocated $20,000 to assist in the purchase of supplies related to opioid users, while Methuen funded “two patrol officers to support the city’s efforts in expanding availability of support for substance abuse, recovery and mental health efforts, for a total cost up to $60,000.”

Closer to Boston, Arlington spent more than $45,000 on a police department clinician and recovery coach, and on the South Shore, Hingham used $6,000 for “speaker/events/sponsorships” related to National Police Night Out. 

In western Mass, Chicopee spent nearly $25,000 “to implement a data-aggregation and coordination platform through the Chicopee Police Department’s Real Time Information Center.” Agawam spent $17,164 on an AI-powered system for recording and transcribing 911 calls.

This article is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. If you want to see more reporting like this, make a contribution at givetobinj.org.

Our ongoing reporting on opioid settlement funds is supported by a grant from the Data-Driven Reporting Project (DDRP) at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

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Editor’s note: This investigation is a collaboration between The Shoestring and The Republican newspaper.

SPRINGFIELD — When it comes to listening in to private phone conversations to investigate crime, one district attorney’s office in the state relies on the tactic far more than others.

Compared to other prosecutors, the Hampden District Attorney’s Office consistently filed the most wiretap applications in the state from 2021 to 2024. That’s according to somewhat obscure reports that DA’s offices are required to file annually to the Statehouse. 

The reports — obtained from the state Legislature and through public records requests to individual DA’s offices — show that during those four years, Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni’s office submitted 83 wiretap applications to judges. Every other DA’s office in the state, together with the Office of the Attorney General, submitted a combined 86 applications during that same period. 

The practice of listening into someone’s phone calls without their knowledge is “probably the most invasive form of government surveillance,” said Kade Crockford, the director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. That’s a sentiment echoed by Maria Villegas Bravo, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research group in Washington, D.C. 

“Wiretapping supercharges any of the issues we would worry about,” Villegas Bravo said.

But compared to other states, the commonwealth’s wiretapping law is strict, she said. 

“Massachussetts is really one of the most progressive states when it comes to wiretapping laws,” she said. “It’s one of the most protective.”

That could change. Several legislators, including one from western Massachusetts, are attempting to loosen the law. Those are efforts the ACLU of Massachusetts opposes. Gulluni said he generally supports changes that would expand the situations in which prosecutors can tap into people’s phone calls.

“There’s a lot of aspects of it that don’t reflect modern technology, of course, and don’t reflect the ways in which investigators could leverage that technology to investigate violent crimes, murders — things of that nature outside of really just narcotics and organized crime,” he said. 

Last month, 2025 wiretapping data from the state’s 12 prosecutors’ offices started to trickle in. Although a complete picture is not yet available on the Legislature’s website, previous years’ trends appear to have held. The Hampden County DA’s office filed 29 applications for wiretaps in 2025. Several other DA’s offices reported no wiretaps last year, and the attorney general’s office reported two. Other reports are not yet available. 

When asked about the trend, Gulluni said he views wiretapping as an effective mechanism for combatting drug trafficking and gun violence in the region. 

“This is a tool we’re using lawfully to do the best work that we can to save lives and keep our community safe,” he said.

It’s a tool that prosecutors could use more frequently if the state’s wiretapping law was expanded. 

One western Massachusetts legislator is trying to update the law — enacted more than 50 years ago — to make it less strict and add to the list of crimes prosecutors can use wiretapping to investigate. That proposal, from state Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield, is one of several filed with the Statehouse that seek to make similar changes.

Under the current statute, law enforcement can listen to people’s phone calls or intercept their text messages, but a judge has to approve it first. In order to get that approval, prosecutors have to show that “normal” investigative techniques have been tried and failed, or are likely to fail if attempted.

Prosecutors in Massachusetts also have to prove that the alleged crime they’re investigating has a connection to organized crime before a judge will sign off on a wiretap. That’s a provision that Velis’ bill would drop for investigations of first-degree murder. Other legislation would expand even further the list of suspected offenses not required to be connected to organized crime. 

Though prosecutors could use the wiretap law to bug a home or car, the Hampden DA’s office has not done that, according to spokesperson Payton North.

Some, like Crockford, think the organized-crime component of the current law is important. 

“If lawmakers were to widen the application of the wiretap statute to a host of offenses that have nothing to do with organized criminal activity, it could open the door to inappropriate uses of the wiretap act for political or personally corrupt purposes, and that would be extremely dangerous to our democracy and our free society,” Crockford said.

Gulluni’s wiretapping has raised eyebrows for some, like defense attorney Vincent Bongiorni, who has practiced in Springfield for five decades and estimates he has dealt with more than 100 wiretapping cases. He said people don’t understand that wiretaps don’t just affect the subject of a police investigation, but also anyone innocent who might be communicating with the wiretapped person.

How Hampden County wiretaps

In Massachusetts in 2024, the most recent year with statewide data available, Gulluni’s office filed 23 wiretap applications — nearly double the second-most filed by the Berkshire County DA.

Those are just the initial applications for a wiretap warrant, however. If granted, those warrants are good for 15 days, but prosecutors can apply to renew them and, in the process, add additional phone numbers to the case. So in 2023, for example, Hampden prosecutors made 29 initial applications for wiretaps but ultimately ended up listening into 63 separate phone lines, according to the office’s report.

The office’s 23 applications in 2024 were part of three cases that each started smaller and then branched to more phone numbers, Gulluni said. 

The DA’s office has specialized technical wiretapping equipment, including computers and software, Gulluni said. “I don’t want to lay out too much of a playbook,” he said when asked how wiretapping works.

However, it’s difficult to track down complete information about the applications the Hampden DA’s office has made for wiretaps and the criminal cases that resulted from them.

Through a public records request, The Shoestring and The Republican asked the DA’s office for any documents tracking criminal cases using wiretaps. The DA’s office denied the request saying the only relevant record was an employee’s personal record, which is protected under the law. When The Shoestring and The Republican appealed that denial, the state agreed with Gulluni’s office. 

District attorneys’ wiretapping disclosures don’t always say how many people prosecutors charged with crimes as a result of the wiretapping. The Hampden County office’s 2023 report, though, says that prosecutors secured 94 indictments as a result of wiretapping that year, the vast majority of which were related to either the possession or sale of narcotics or conspiracy to commit murder. That came after making at least 309,780 “interceptions” that year, the report said. 

Geography is one reason why the office has a relatively high wiretap application number, Gulluni said. The Springfield region sits at the intersection of two major interstates connecting to New York City, Boston, and elsewhere. Gulluni has used wiretapping to tackle the region’s significant drug trade, he said.

“When I came in (to office), I decided that that was a way that we could most efficiently and effectively dismantle drug trafficking organizations that fueled the narcotics and addiction and overdose epidemics,” he said.

Gulluni said his office often investigates for months before seeking wiretap approval from a judge. 

“This notion that this is a ‘Big Brother’ thing and that surveillance is widespread,” he said, “that these wire investigations kind of happen quickly or without a lot involved, is just not true.”

He said he does understand public concern about wiretapping, though. “There is a tension, or balancing, between those privacy rights — the legitimate concerns around privacy rights — versus the government’s ability to keep people safe.”

District attorneys themselves have to sign off on a wiretapping petition — a rare requirement, Gulluni said. 

“I think it speaks to the fact that the Massachusetts Legislature, even many, many years ago in the late 60s, saw this as a serious incursion,” he said. “And there was some tension between the desire to protect privacy rights and the desire to equip law enforcement to make sure that the public is safe.”

He estimated at least 95% of the time, a wiretap leads to criminal charges. If someone is wiretapped and not charged with a crime, a district attorney has to notify them in a letter saying that they were targeted, Gulluni said. 

But that doesn’t always happen, some defense attorneys say.

Ashley Allen is a lawyer who has represented clients indicted based on wiretapping evidence. She said there are exemptions to that rule. As one example, prosecutors can claim notifying a wiretapping target would impair an ongoing investigation.

“There’s lots of people that don’t know that they’ve been wiretapped,” she said.

Last year, Allen filed a petition to the state’s top court that alleged prosecutors had wiretapped four defendants but, because the defendants had changed their phone numbers, the prosecutors never disclosed to a judge that they had previously wiretapped them.

Allen’s petition also alleged that Gulluni’s office has engaged in the “frequent and targeted use of wiretaps against Hispanic individuals,” describing that practice as “discriminatory” and infringing on privacy rights.

Ultimately, the Supreme Judicial Court denied that petition. Some of those cases are still playing out in Hampden Superior Court.

Gulluni denied those accusations.

“We never target communities or certain populations. We’re targeting criminal behavior,” Gulluni said. “It is often a blind process as well, where we just know phone numbers.”

The DA’s office does not keep data on race and ethnicity for cases, he added. 

“Whatever the ethnic breakdown is,” Gulluni said of wiretapping, “we’re targeting the activity, not the community or not the person.”

But Bongiorni, the Springfield lawyer, said that there is a pattern: a “substantial majority” of the many clients he has represented in wiretapping cases over his career as a defense attorney have been Hispanic. 

Bongiorni didn’t want to speculate as to why Gulluni’s office has filed as many wiretap applications as it has in recent years. But he found the difference “glaring.” 

Bongiorni explained that before law enforcement applies for a wiretap, they typically begin with a “softer mode of electronic surveillance” that is possible with today’s technology: GPS tracking on a subject’s car, a camera outside their residence, and geolocation pings from their cell phones, for example. Given that reality, he questions how well the 1968 statute protects people from electronic surveillance today. 

“I can’t think of one instance in 50 years where a judge has denied a wiretap application,” Bongiorni said.

Proposed changes

Under current law, wiretapping can be used only when investigating “organized crime” and for specific suspected offenses. Some think that’s too restrictive.

“This is an extraordinarily limiting set of rules and circumstances,” said state Sen. Michael Moore, D-Worcester, at a September legislative hearing. “And they very often prevent the investigation and prosecution of many serious crimes that fall outside the definition, such as hate crimes, civil rights violations, and illegal firearms trafficking.” 

Moore has filed legislation that would loosen those restrictions. 

Another bill filed by state Sen. Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester, seeks to expand the list of suspected offenses that don’t need to be connected to organized crime to include murder, manslaughter, rape, some civil rights violations, and drug trafficking.

Velis, the state senator from Westfield, filed legislation that would expand the crimes covered by the wiretap law to include gun-related crimes. It would also remove the requirement that organized crime be involved in investigations of first-degree murder. 

“Our wiretap statute was created decades ago with the narrow intent of combating organized criminal enterprises,” Velis said in written testimony submitted to the Legislature. “At that time, lawmakers could not have anticipated the evolving threats we face today — particularly the devastating rise in acts of gun violence and homicides carried out by individuals or loosely affiliated groups outside of traditional organized crime networks.”

Velis was not available for an interview in early 2026 because he’s deployed with the National Guard, his office said. 

Others are skeptical of the proposed changes. 

Groups including the ACLU of Massachusetts testified against some of the proposed legislation, arguing that the current wiretapping law’s restrictions are important. 

“We today live in a golden era of surveillance,” said Crockford, the ACLU technology expert, who explained that police have widespread access to cell phone data, license plate readers, surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, and many more digital records about the people they’re investigating.

“The crisis that we face right now is not a crisis born from police and prosecutors having not enough access to our private information,” Crockford said. “It is, in fact, that they have far too much access, too easily in too many scenarios, and that our laws ought to better protect our privacy instead of further eroding it.”

It’s far from the first time lawmakers and law enforcement officials have proposed changes to broaden when wiretaps can be used. To date, however, no legislative reforms have been successful. 

When Gov. Maura Healey was the state’s attorney general, she supported a similar bill that would have made it easier to wiretap, like removing the requirement for activity to be connected to organized crime.  

“Not only is this an effort to update and modernize the law,” State House News Service reported Healey saying in 2017. “It’s also a recognition of what our Supreme Judicial Court has signaled for a while now … that the nature and the structure and the shape of criminal activity and organized criminal enterprises has changed over time. And we need the tools in law enforcement to be able to confront that.”

Since taking over as governor, it doesn’t appear that it’s been an issue Healey has worked on. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.

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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.”

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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.”

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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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For nearly four years, the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office has declined to release the names of some local police officers accused of criminal offenses. But last week, a judge ruled in favor of an independent journalist who has sought to make that information public.

Reporter Andrew Quemere had filed a public records request in 2022 seeking documents the DA’s office keeps that identify police officers who have been accused of misconduct. District Attorney David Sullivan — the top law enforcement official in Hampshire and Franklin counties — refused to release those records in unredacted form, and so Quemere sued Sullivan’s office in 2023. Known as Brady disclosures, district attorneys keep those records because their offices’ prosecutors are required to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to defendants in criminal cases.

After Quemere filed his lawsuit, Sullivan’s office did release some of its Brady disclosures — those related to civil misconduct. However, the DA’s office argued that Brady disclosures related to criminal offenses that police committed were protected under the state’s Criminal Offender Record Information law, or CORI, which seeks to prevent the release of criminal records to unauthorized parties.

But in a decision last Tuesday, Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Julie Green sided with Quemere, ruling that Sullivan’s office must turn over all of its Brady disclosures in unredacted form.

“After review and a hearing, the Court concludes that the information at issue is a public record and must be produced,” Green wrote. 

Green also ruled that the DA’s office has to pay Quemere’s attorney’s fees and costs, though she did not rule that Sullivan acted in bad faith in withholding the documents, which would have allowed her to levy punitive damages against Sullivan’s office.

“CORI protections serve important interests in safeguarding privacy and promoting rehabilitation of criminal defendants,” Green wrote, noting that violations of that law can have serious consequences. “It was not bad faith for the NWDAO to proceed with caution where the confidentiality of potential CORI was at stake.”

Quemere, who writes The Mass Dump newsletter, told The Shoestring that the decision marks a “total victory” in his pursuit of transparency. He said he was heartened that the judge found no legal merit to the arguments Sullivan’s office made in court.

“What this ruling does is it basically vindicates what I have been saying this whole time: people have a right to know when police officers have been accused of misconduct and crimes,” he said.

It’s unclear whether Sullivan intends to appeal the decision. 

“We continue to review the Court’s decision to determine whether to pursue an appeal,” a spokesperson for the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, Melissa Sippel, said in an emailed statement. “Given the pending litigation, we cannot comment further at this time.”

Sippel said that the DA’s office was “pleased the Court found that we acted in good faith in attempting to prevent the unlawful disclosure of Criminal Offender Record Information.”

In a 2024 interview with radio hosts Bill Newman and Buz Eisenberg, Sullivan hinted at the possibility of appealing the case.

“I think the public records law could be clearer as to whether these specific records are available,” Sullivan said. “If it’s got to go up to the supreme court for them to make that decision whether the public records law overrides the CORI law, then we’ll let the supreme court decide — or some maybe lesser court, maybe appellate court or maybe even a superior court justice.”

Sullivan’s office also weighed in on another public records case elsewhere in the state in 2023, making a legal argument that, if accepted, would have significantly restricted the public’s access to records about police misconduct statewide.

In that case, which involved the Bristol County district attorney, Sullivan’s office filed an amicus brief that argued that only the state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission — an agency created in the wake of the 2020 racial justice uprisings — should be authorized to release records of police misconduct. The state’s Supreme Judicial Court rejected that logic the following year.

Quemere said he hopes Sullivan’s office turns over the records, as the judge ordered. If Sullivan does plan to appeal, he has to file notice within 30 days of the court’s decision, which is dated Dec. 30, 2025.

“The DA’s office has been wasting public money to keep the public in the dark, using taxpayer money to prevent taxpayers from seeing what their tax dollars are being spent on,” he said. “I think that’s very unfortunate.”

Sippel, the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office spokesperson, did not answer The Shoestring’s inquiry about how much Sullivan has spent litigating the case since the lawsuit was filed.

Quemere, however, says he’s used public records requests to obtain invoices that show the office has spent at least $16,000 on outside legal counsel. And that’s not including charges from December, he said, when both sides presented oral arguments before the court.

Quemere said it was obvious from the beginning that the Brady disclosures were public records. And he said that although the DA’s office argued that it wasn’t giving special treatment to police officers by protecting information about their criminal offenses, he found that hard to believe. He said that the office often issues public press releases about civilians with the same kind of information contained in the Brady disclosures.

Quemere said the case showed how public entities like Sullivan’s office can use the weakness of Massachusetts’ public records law, which gives no ability to the state’s supervisor of records to enforce her decisions about what records should be public. That leaves journalists like Quemere with two choices: drop their pursuit of public records or sue for them.

“I think part of the problem with our state’s public records law is that it doesn’t serve as a very good deterrent of obstructing the release of information that everyone knows should be public,” he said.

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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. 

***

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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