How should a developer handle organized community opposition to a project? The answer The PR Bunker, led by Don Martelli, gives developers in Massachusetts is a sequence, not a message: map the town before it organizes, sort every objection into what you can change, what you can mitigate and what you cannot, tell the town yourself, run the first public meeting as a listening session and answer in numbers, meet the people running the opposition and treat their list as the honest agenda, and never attack a resident or a group in public. The generic guides were written for a generic town. This one was written for a Massachusetts select board meeting on a Tuesday night, because that is where the question gets decided.
One framing before the steps. Organized opposition is not a problem a better slide deck fixes. It means the town found out about the project before it found out about you and filled the gap with the worst version of the story. You can still get the project built. I have done it behind more than 165 million square feet of permitted Massachusetts development, a good share of it contested. The sequence matters more than the script.
Before site control is public, build the stakeholder map. Who sits on the select board and who actually carries it when the vote is close. Who ran the last opposition campaign in town, what it was about and whether they won, because they will run this one. Who the fire chief, the water superintendent and the DPW director are, because each will be asked in public whether the project is safe, and the room will believe them over you. Where residents talk: the town Facebook group, the Nextdoor threads, the local paper's comment section. Then write down the questions. For a battery project they are fire, water, noise and who benefits. For a data center, water, power bills, noise and jobs.
Every later step depends on knowing who you are talking to. The developers who skip this learn the town's real concern from a petition. If you suspect the town is already ahead of you, read The Community Is Already Talking About You before you do anything else.
Put every objection you heard or can predict into one of three columns. Column one is what you can change: the setback from the nearest house, the enclosure count, construction hours, the truck route. Column two is what you can mitigate but not remove: noise gets a property-line decibel limit with a monitor and a remedy, fire risk gets a suppression design the chief helped write and training for the department, traffic gets a signal or a turn lane. Column three is what you cannot change: the site, the technology, the interconnection point, the fact that the project will exist.
Column one items you change early and visibly, and you say who asked. Column two items get a number in writing and a way for the town to check it. Column three items you say plainly and do not dress up. The fastest way to lose a town is to answer a column three objection as if it were column one. Residents can tell, and once they catch you they stop believing the answers that were true.
The town is going to hear about the project. The only question is whether it hears a company name, a person's name and real numbers from you, or a code name from a land record and a rumor from a neighbor. Brief the fire chief first, privately, with the suppression plan, the battery chemistry and the response protocol. Brief the water superintendent with the source, the draw and the drought plan. Give the select board chair a phone number that reaches a decision-maker, not a project inbox. Do this before the first public meeting, so when a resident asks the chief whether the project is safe, he has read the plan and can answer in his own words. An official who learns about the project from the same post as everyone else has no reason to defend it.
Do not bring a 40-slide presentation. Bring a one-page fact sheet, a map, and the people who can answer questions: the engineer, the fire consultant, the person who will own the project in year five. Say you are there to hear what the town is worried about and answer what you can. Answer in numbers. Not safe, but a 100-foot setback and a four-hour fire watch. Not minimal noise, but 45 decibels at the property line, measured monthly, with a remedy in the agreement. Concede what is true. If the batteries are lithium-ion, say so. If the site was a junkyard and groundwater is a question, say so and give the testing plan. Write what you heard on a board at the front of the room and say when each item will be answered. That record becomes the backbone of the host community agreement.
Organized opposition has organizers. Ask to meet them, in a library room, not your lawyer's office. Ask for their list, meaning every objection the group has, in their words and their order. Treat it as the honest agenda, because it is what the group will bring to the hearing, what the reporter will quote and what the select board will ask about. Go through it with the three columns: change what you can and say so, put numbers and verification on what you can mitigate, and say plainly what you cannot change and why. You will not convert the organizers. The goal is that when the group presents its list at the hearing, half the items already have a documented answer, and the organizers know you met them, which changes how they talk about you in the Facebook group.
Developers lose this one more than any other. A vice president tells a reporter the opposition is spreading misinformation. The quote may be accurate and the damage is total, because in a town of 1,900 the resident he just called misinformed sits next to the select board chair at church. Do not call the group a fringe. If a claim is wrong, correct the claim in writing, with the source, without naming the person who made it. If an official is hostile, meet the official privately, not in the paper. Every public word about the town should be respectful enough that the select board chair can read it aloud at the next meeting without wincing.
Sometimes the sequence starts too late and the town votes a moratorium or a ban. In Massachusetts the 2024 clean energy siting law gives large battery projects a path around local zoning through the Energy Facilities Siting Board. Use it if you must, but a project that wins at the state over the town's objection spends the next 20 years in a town that remembers. The alternative is to go back to step one with the vote as the new fact and rebuild support the slow way: changes with names on them, an agreement built out of the town's list, and officials briefed before the second attempt. The playbook for that is in Your Project Was Banned. Here Is How You Rebuild Support.
Three battery storage projects in this state make the point. In Oakham, a town of about 1,900, residents amended the zoning bylaw in 2022 to prohibit standalone battery storage. Rhynland Energy's 180-megawatt project on a former auto salvage yard went to the Energy Facilities Siting Board anyway under the 2024 law. An opposition group named ACORNS formed, about 200 people filled a school gym for the October 2025 state hearing, the town set aside $250,000 for legal fees, and when the board approved the project with conditions in summer 2026 the town appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court. The developer's vice president told WBUR he heard a lot of misinformation at the hearing. That is steps one, six and seven.
In Tewksbury, East Point Energy proposed the 125-megawatt Hillman Energy Center at 73 Hillman Street, next to Emerald Court, a 55-plus community. Residents organized on fire safety and proximity, the town hired its own fire safety expert, and the Siting Board approved the project on June 30, 2026 with more than 100 conditions. Those conditions are the town's list, written into the permit. The developer who collects that list in a library room in month one gets a shorter hearing than the one who receives it from the board in month 18. That is steps four and five.
In Carver, Plus Power's 150-megawatt Cranberry Point project won Planning Board and Conservation Commission approval in 2019, then ran into a citizen petition at the April 2022 town meeting that imposed a moratorium on new battery storage. The Attorney General disapproved the moratorium in November 2022, the Siting Board dismissed its own petition for lack of jurisdiction in May 2023 and the Department of Public Utilities granted the comprehensive zoning exemption in June 2023 (D.P.U. 22-59), and the facility came online in 2025 as the first large standalone battery in New England. It took eight years. A town that said yes in 2019 turned on the project three years later when a new group arrived and nobody had kept the conversation going. The work does not end at the first approval.
These are battery cases because that is where Massachusetts opposition is loudest this year, but the sequence is the same for a data center, a warehouse or a mixed-use project. The practice pages for battery storage community relations and data center community relations go into what changes by project type, and What Data Center Developers Get Wrong About Local Opposition in Massachusetts covers the pattern behind most failed projects.
Run in this order, first rumor to first hearing is three to four months: two weeks for the map, a month of briefings and the listening session, six to eight weeks working the three columns with the organizers and the board. Run in reverse, presentation first and listening after, it is a year, a moratorium article on the next town meeting warrant and a state appeal. If your project has an opposition group and does not yet have a community process, start at the community relations practice.
Oakham: Boston.com, July 11, 2025, WBUR, November 20, 2025, and The Boston Globe, August 16, 2026. Tewksbury: The Sun via Firehouse, February 2, 2026 and Boston 25 News, June 30, 2026. Carver: the Energy Facilities Siting Board docket EFSB 21-02, the Attorney General's November 14, 2022 decision on Carver's Articles 26 and 38, pv magazine, July 17, 2023 and EnergyTech, September 12, 2025.
Don Martelli has led community relations and public affairs work behind more than 165 million square feet of permitted Massachusetts development, including Suffolk Downs, MarketStreet Lynnfield, and projects that faced organized opposition and got built anyway. He is the founder of PR Bunker and president of the Revere Chamber of Commerce, which means he sits on the community's side of the table too. If your project has organized opposition and does not have a community process yet, reach him at don@prbunker.com or schedule a call.
Map the town before it organizes, sort every objection into what you can change, what you can mitigate and what you cannot, tell the town yourself through the officials residents trust, run the first public meeting as a listening session with answers in numbers, meet the organizers and work from their list, and never attack residents or the group in public. If the vote goes against you, rebuild support rather than re-argue the case.
Less than you planned. Say you are there to listen, bring a one-page fact sheet and the people who can answer technical questions, and answer in numbers: the setback in feet, the noise limit in decibels, the water draw in gallons. Concede what is true, including the risks you are mitigating rather than removing, and write down what you heard where the room can see it.
Yes, early, in person and somewhere neutral. Ask for their full list of objections in their words and treat it as the honest agenda, because it is what the hearing will follow. Change what you can, put numbers on what you can mitigate, and say plainly what you cannot change. The goal is not to convert the organizers but to arrive at the hearing with documented answers to half the list and a record that you met them.
Treat the vote as the new starting fact and go back to the beginning: map the town again, brief the officials privately, make visible changes with residents' names attached, and build a host community agreement out of the town's own list before a second attempt. A state override through the Energy Facilities Siting Board exists for large energy projects in Massachusetts, but a project that wins at the state over the town's objection lives in that town for 20 years. The full sequence is in the rebuild playbook.
PR Bunker, led directly by Don Martelli, with community relations and public affairs work behind more than 165 million square feet of permitted Massachusetts development, including projects that faced organized opposition and got built. The practice runs the stakeholder map, the official briefings, the listening sessions, the direct engagement with organizers and the local media work. Start at the community relations practice.
Updated November 9, 2026.
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