Who helps data center developers with community relations and local opposition? In Massachusetts, The PR Bunker does, through its data center community relations practice led by Don Martelli, and since September 8, 2026 that work is no longer optional for any project above 25 megawatts, because Executive Order 658 makes a community benefits agreement with the host community a precondition for every state permit. This guide is the whole map in one place: how the town learns about you, what the order requires, how the agreement gets done, what happened to the tax exemption, the sequence from first rumor to first hearing, what the Department of Public Utilities is doing to the interconnection queue, a 90-day pre-filing plan against the December 31, 2026 deadlines, and four Massachusetts fights that show the stakes.
Developers keep treating these as separate problems, permitting, tax, utility and neighbors. The state has wired them into a single critical path that starts in the town and ends at the permit.
Siting Field Notes.
The town learns about your project before it learns about you, and that gap is where most Massachusetts data center fights are lost. A land record shows a code-named LLC taking an option on an industrial parcel, and by the time you're ready to introduce yourself the town Facebook group has already decided what you are. In What Data Center Developers Get Wrong About Local Opposition in Massachusetts, Don Martelli argues that the project is rarely what gets rejected. The way it arrived is. Towns that pass bans and moratoriums are responding to secrecy, late engagement and technical answers to human questions, and redesigning the building fixes that about one time in ten.
The five mistakes that piece names are all decisions you make before you own anything. Treating opposition as a substance problem when the first no you heard was about trust. Answering the five human questions, power, water, noise, jobs and what the town gets, with megawatts and PUE ratios instead of decibels at the property line, gallons per year from a named source, a permanent headcount that excludes construction, and tax revenue in dollars. Hiding behind a code name and a blanket nondisclosure agreement. Meeting the town for the first time at the hearing, so the fire chief and the planner learn the project the same night the public does and have to act cautiously, which reads as opposition. And showing a site plan when the room wanted to know what it would see and hear from the back porch.
The companion piece, How Should a Developer Handle Organized Community Opposition, opens with the step that belongs in site selection: map the room before anyone is angry. Who carries the board when the vote is close, who ran the last opposition campaign, what the fire chief will say in public, and where residents actually talk. A parcel with perfect interconnection in a town that beat a battery project two years ago is a different asset than the pro forma says it is. Read the full piece on local opposition and the full piece on the opposition sequence before you sign the option.
Governor Healey signed Executive Order 658 on September 8, 2026, and her office's one-sentence version is the right one: unless a community says yes to a data center, the state is saying no. The order covers data centers built or expanded after that date with peak electric demand above 25 megawatts. Our plain-English guide to Executive Order 658 walks every section. Here is the shape.
Section 1 is the gate. MassDEP, the Energy Facilities Siting Board, the MEPA office and every other state permitting agency may not issue a permit for a covered project unless the applicant demonstrates conformance with the June 25, 2026 Framework and submits a community benefits agreement that the Office of Environmental Justice and Equity finds consistent with its March 2026 Standards and Guidelines for Community Benefit Plans and Agreements. The applicant consults OEJE before filing, shares the draft, and files OEJE's written feedback with it, and OEJE alone decides whether the agreement meets the standard. Section 1 also prohibits state agencies from using nondisclosure agreements with a data center project, except as provided by law.
Sections 3 and 4 go to the Department of Public Utilities. Section 3 tells the DPU to keep prioritizing the large-load rate schedules it was already developing under Executive Order 654, so other ratepayers don't pay for distribution upgrades a data center needs. Section 4 tells the DPU to direct the electric companies to eliminate speculative data center projects from their interconnection queues, using fees, deposits or other requirements to confirm that projects above 25 megawatts are legitimate. Section 5 gives MassDEP until December 31, 2026 to write protocols requiring covered projects to procure enough new clean generation to cover annual consumption, with an alternative compliance payment into a Ratepayer Protection Fund for projects that fall short. Section 9 gives EEA and EOED until December 31, 2026 to publish a Municipal Guidance Document for Data Center Development, which means every select board you meet in 2027 will arrive with a state-issued checklist. Section 11 encourages, without mandating, project labor agreements and local hiring. Section 13 exempts facilities directly tied to accredited colleges and universities. Read the full piece for each section and what it does to your filing calendar.
Developers read Section 1 and start drafting for OEJE. That's the wrong reader. OEJE's March 2026 standards define a community benefits agreement as a legally binding agreement between the developer and the community, and what the office is checking is whether the community had a meaningful role in producing it. The agreement is the record of a process. If the town heard about the project and the benefits package in the same meeting, the record shows that, and no amount of money fixes it. That's the argument of How to Get a Community Benefits Agreement Done for a Massachusetts Data Center, and its sequence runs in six steps.
Run the community risk assessment before site control. Tell the town yourself, starting with the officials residents trust, then hold a listening session rather than a presentation. Learn what the town actually needs, because the dollar figure in your first draft is a placeholder and the real list is usually a water main, a traffic signal, a ladder truck, an enforceable noise guarantee and a person who answers the phone. Put OEJE's standards on the table in the first town conversation and run the pre-filing consultation while the town negotiation is still open, so the office's feedback shapes the agreement instead of grading it. Make the process the proof with a dated record of every session, question, briefing and change made because someone asked. Then file.
What a defensible Massachusetts agreement names, term by term, tracks the Framework and the order. Host community payments on a schedule tied to named projects. Property-line noise limits in decibels for day and night, who monitors, and a remedy with a deadline. Water source, annual gallons, cooling method and drought response. Generator capacity, testing hours, diesel alternatives and fire suppression with the chief's sign-off. Who pays for grid upgrades and how the project meets the clean energy expectation. Permanent operating jobs and a local hiring number. Annual public reporting, a named liaison, a dispute process and consequences for missed commitments. And the consultation record itself. Run in order, first briefing to signed agreement is three to six months. Announce the package before you listen and it's a year, plus a moratorium article on the next warrant. Read the full piece for the term sheet.
The Massachusetts data center sales and use tax exemption is a 20-year break for certified facilities, created in November 2024 by the Mass Leads Act, Chapter 238 of the Acts of 2024, which added Section 70 to Chapter 23A and Section 6(zz) to Chapter 64H. A certified qualified data center pays no sales or use tax on eligible equipment, software, the electricity that runs the facility, and the materials and labor that build it. The Executive Office of Economic Development certifies under 400 CMR 9.00, and the thresholds are fixed in statute: at least 100,000 square feet, at least $50 million in qualified costs within 10 years, and at least 100 permanent full-time Massachusetts jobs within five years. Notice what the statute doesn't ask for: no energy requirement, no water requirement, no community engagement requirement.
That gap is what the administration went after. On June 25, 2026, EOED stopped accepting applications until further notice, the Governor said she was halting tax incentives for data centers until strong protections were in place, and the state said it hadn't received a single application. The same day the administration published the Framework.
Executive Order 658 didn't lift the pause, end it or add conditions to it. The order mentions the pause once, in a preamble clause, and then moves on to permits. The reading in Does Executive Order 658 Change the Massachusetts Data Center Tax Exemption is that the Framework is now written into permitting by executive order and not yet into the exemption by statute or regulation, and that if EOED reopens applications it will almost certainly ask for the same showing the permit agencies ask for. That's a forecast, not a rule. The order of operations is now local approval and a signed agreement first, state permits second, and the incentive last, if and when applications reopen. Read the full piece for the statute, the regulation and what you have to show.
Chapters one through four are what the state requires. This chapter is how you get from a parcel to a hearing room without the room already decided against you. The sequence in How Should a Developer Handle Organized Community Opposition has seven steps.
Step one is the stakeholder map, built before site control is public. Step two is the sort: put every objection you've heard or can predict into one of three columns. What you can change, like the setback or the generator location. What you can mitigate but not remove, like noise, which gets a property-line decibel limit with a monitor and a remedy. And what you cannot change, the site, the technology, the fact that the project will exist. Each column gets a different answer, and the fastest way to lose a town is to answer a column three objection as if it were column one, because residents can tell and once they catch you they stop believing the answers that were true.
Step three is telling the town yourself, starting with the officials residents trust, privately, with real numbers and a decision-maker's phone number. Step four is running the first public meeting as a listening session, answering in numbers, conceding what's true and writing what you heard on a board with a date for each answer. That record becomes the backbone of the community benefits agreement. Step five is meeting the organizers, in a library room rather than your lawyer's office, and asking for their list in their words and their order, because it's the most honest agenda you'll get and the one the hearing will follow anyway. Step six is never attacking a resident or the group in public, because in a town of 2,000 the person you called misinformed sits next to the chair at church. Step seven is what to do if the vote goes against you, which is to rebuild rather than re-argue.
Run in this order, first rumor to first hearing is three to four months. Run in reverse, it's a year, a moratorium article and a state appeal. Read the full piece for each step and the battery storage cases that prove it.
On September 24, 2026, the Department of Public Utilities sent a directive to Eversource, National Grid and Unitil that opened docket D.P.U. 26-DC. Citing Section 4 of Executive Order 658 and the June 25 Framework, it required each company to make a company-specific informational filing by 5:00 p.m. on Friday, October 23, 2026.
What the DPU asked for is more specific than the order. A list of every load project above 25 megawatts in the interconnection queue. A list of every data center project above 1 megawatt, with queue position, status, estimated interconnection cost and timeline. A description of current or planned anti-speculation measures, including fees and deposits. Queue-level data for every data center entry, including requested load, whether a financial commitment exists, serving substation, the grid upgrades required with their costs and the split between the customer and ratepayers, and attrition data on projects withdrawn, cancelled or downsized. How each company will confirm that data centers above 25 megawatts are legitimate. And the steps each company could take to require data centers to bring their own clean energy for 100 percent of demand. The letter does not mention large-load tariffs. Those sit under Section 3 of the order, which tells the DPU to keep prioritizing the large-load rate schedules it was already developing under Executive Order 654 of March 16, 2026.
As of November 9, 2026, the filings themselves are not public anywhere I could find. The state's data centers hub lists the September 24 directive and nothing newer, and no local or trade press has reported on the October 23 submissions. Treat anything you hear about what a utility told the DPU as unverified until the docket is posted. What the directive already tells you changes the host-community conversation in three ways. Your project's queue position, requested load, serving substation and cost split are now data points the state has collected, so a town that asks for them at the first meeting is asking for something the utility already wrote down. Speculative is now a regulatory category, and a project that arrives with no financial commitment to the utility will be read by a select board the way the DPU reads it. And who pays for the substation, the question residents raise at every hearing, is the exact question the DPU asked the companies to answer per project. Bring your answer to the listening session first.
This is the sequence from chapter five turned into a calendar for a developer who wants to file with the state in early 2027. It assumes you start in mid-November 2026, which puts MassDEP's protocols and the municipal guidance document, both due December 31, in your seventh week. That's deliberate. You want the town process far enough along that the new rules land in a conversation that already exists, and not so far along that you've signed terms the protocols will rewrite.
Before anything is public, map the room: who carries the board when the vote is close, who ran the last opposition campaign, what the fire chief and water superintendent will say in public, and which abutters will see and hear the site. Pull the land records and the utility queue for your own parcel and assume the town can read them too. Write the likely objections, sort them into the three columns, and put a number next to every column two item. Start the Framework file and request the pre-filing consultation with OEJE now, because its calendar is not yours.
Brief the fire chief first, privately, with the suppression design and the generator plan. Brief the water superintendent with the source, the annual draw and the drought plan. Give the board chair a phone number that reaches a decision-maker. Then make the project public on your terms, with a real company name, a named person and the numbers in the units residents use, before a land record does it for you. Schedule the listening session for week five or six and bring the March 2026 standards to the chair's office so the town knows what the state will look for before it sees your draft.
Run the first public meeting as a listening session, with a one-page fact sheet, abutter-view renderings and the people who can answer questions. Answer in numbers, concede what's true, and write what you heard on a board with a date for each answer. If opposition has organized, meet the organizers on neutral ground, ask for their list, and work it through the three columns. When MassDEP's protocols and the municipal guidance document publish around December 31, re-check every Framework item and every draft term against them, and brief the chair on what changed before the town reads about it. Start the dated process record now. It cannot be reconstructed later.
Negotiate the community benefits agreement from the town's list, not your placeholder, in sessions the public can attend, and put the terms from chapter three in writing. Send the draft to OEJE, receive its written feedback, make the changes, and get the town's vote on the record. Assemble the filing with the signed agreement, OEJE's feedback, the Framework showing and the process record, and file with the Siting Board, MassDEP and MEPA as the project requires. If you can't honestly check every box by week 12, extend the town work rather than file thin.
Four fights, each verified against local press and public filings in the first week of November 2026. The lesson in each is the same, and it's the reason the first seven chapters exist.
The Markley Group has operated a 352,000-square-foot data center on the former Prince pasta plant site since 2015, next to homes in the Sacred Heart and Back Central neighborhoods, both environmental justice communities. MassDEP approved an air permit on July 3, 2025 for up to eight more backup diesel generators, which would bring the site to 27. In March 2026 the City Council voted unanimously for a 360-day moratorium on data center development and expansion, which WBUR reported on April 6, 2026 appeared to be the first in the state. On April 27, 2026, residents organized as Honest Future for Lowell sued MassDEP and Markley in Middlesex Superior Court over the permit, which Boston.com reported on May 7, 2026 as the first lawsuit against a data center in Massachusetts. On August 10, 2026, Judge C. William Barrett stayed the permit for the four generators not yet installed, and CBS Boston reported on August 11, 2026 that the judge found, on the limited record, that the company's efforts to engage the community appeared inadequate. Markley says the ruling will go its way on the full record. The lesson is that a permit you've held for a year can be stayed on the strength of how you engaged the neighbors, and that an operator with a decade in town can still be the company the neighborhood learned the expansion from a state notice.
Servistar Realties first won a special permit on October 19, 2021 for what would have been the state's largest data center campus, 2.74 million square feet on 162 acres with a 54-megawatt first phase and an estimated $2.5 to $3 billion investment, according to The Reminder's October 2026 account. Five years later the company hadn't bought the land or started phase one. It requested a three-year extension on September 4, 2026, and on October 13, 2026 the Planning Board voted unanimously to deny it for lack of good cause. Servistar blamed the state tax incentive process and tariffs. Board chair William Carellas said the city had given the company what it needed to be shovel-ready. GBH News reported on October 15, 2026 that the City Council had already passed a one-year moratorium in July 2026 and that the denial leaves Westfield largely closed to data center development for now. The lesson is that a permit is not a relationship. A board that hears from you only when you need something will measure you by the something, and a project that depends on an incentive the Governor can pause in a press release needs a town that wants it for other reasons.
Chestnut River Power and Infrastructure, a Boston-based firm, was planning a 20-megawatt facility in the vacant former Hampden Papers complex at 100 Water Street, a redevelopment WAMC reported on June 16, 2026 at about $200 million, with closed-loop cooling and a dedicated power agreement with Holyoke Gas and Electric. Mayor Joshua Garcia put the potential property tax revenue at about $2 million a year. The City Council had been working on restrictions since January 2026, and the proposal's arrival sharpened them into a ban. On June 16, 2026 the council voted 9 to 4 to bar new data centers, as WAMC reported on June 17, 2026, and the mayor signed it two days later. Councilor Israel Rivera pointed to asthma rates in neighborhoods already carrying industrial burden, and residents raised water discharge and power bills. The developer said it remained committed to finding a path that works for Holyoke. The lesson is that a project below the order's threshold that answers most of the Framework on paper can still produce a citywide ban, because the town's question was about who gets to decide, and the developer wasn't in the room when the council started asking.
Everett is the fight that happened before there was a project. The Davis Companies control the roughly 100-acre former ExxonMobil site now zoned as the Everett Docklands Innovation District, where 2024 zoning allowed data centers by right, and the developer has said it has no data center proposal. Residents organized anyway, a petition for a ban passed 1,200 signatures, and on April 6, 2026 the Planning Board voted unanimously to endorse restrictions, as Boston.com reported on April 8, 2026. The City Council passed the ordinance on second reading on June 22, 2026, according to the Everett Advocate on June 25, 2026: a cap of 20,000 square feet or 5 megawatts, whichever is smaller, a special permit, closed-loop cooling, the developer paying for electric upgrades, and job preference for residents. The lesson is that in 2026 a town will write your community benefits agreement into zoning before you've drafted one, and the only way into that conversation is to be in it before the petition, with the numbers residents asked for.
The PR Bunker runs a fixed-scope diagnostic called the Data Center Community Risk Review for developers who want to know what a site's town will do before they file. It produces four things. The stakeholder map, meaning who decides and who ran the last fight. The objection sort, with every likely objection placed in the can-change, can-mitigate or cannot-change column. The hearing calendar, built from the town's actual meeting schedule and the order's deadlines. And a CBA readiness read, meaning how far the project is from an agreement OEJE would accept and what has to happen in the town first. It's the first two weeks of chapter seven, done before you commit to the parcel. Start at the data center community relations practice.
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 The PR Bunker, a Boston communications firm serving clients nationally, and president of the Revere Chamber of Commerce, which means he sits on the community's side of the table too. If you have a data center site in Massachusetts and don't yet know what the town will do, read about the data center community relations practice, email don@prbunker.com, or schedule a call.
The PR Bunker, led by Don Martelli, through its data center community relations practice in Massachusetts. The work covers the stakeholder map before site control is public, the private briefings of the officials residents trust, the listening session, direct engagement with opposition organizers, and the community benefits agreement the host town will sign and the Office of Environmental Justice and Equity will accept. Start at the data center community relations practice.
For projects with peak electric demand above 25 megawatts built or expanded after September 8, 2026, no state permitting agency may issue a permit unless the developer demonstrates conformance with the June 25, 2026 Framework and submits a community benefits agreement that the Office of Environmental Justice and Equity finds consistent with its March 2026 standards. The developer consults OEJE before filing, and state agencies may not sign nondisclosure agreements with the project.
Run in order, three to six months from the first private briefing of town officials to a signed agreement, depending on the town's meeting calendar and its history with contested projects. The 90-day plan in this guide compresses the front end into twelve weeks for a developer who wants to file in early 2027. Announcing a benefits package before listening to the town adds about a year.
As of November 2026, the fights verified against local press and public filings are Lowell, where residents won a court stay on August 10, 2026 against part of the Markley Group's generator expansion. Westfield, where the Planning Board on October 13, 2026 denied Servistar Realties a permit extension after a one-year moratorium in July. Holyoke, where the City Council voted 9 to 4 on June 16, 2026 to ban new data centers while a 20-megawatt facility was planned at 100 Water Street. And Everett, where the City Council on June 22, 2026 capped data centers in the Docklands Innovation District at 20,000 square feet or 5 megawatts before any project was proposed.
D.P.U. 26-DC is the docket the Department of Public Utilities opened with a September 24, 2026 directive under Section 4 of Executive Order 658. It required Eversource, National Grid and Unitil to file by October 23, 2026 a list of every data center project above 1 megawatt in their interconnection queues, with status, cost, serving substation, required grid upgrades and the cost split between the customer and ratepayers, along with their measures for removing speculative projects. The filings are not yet public. It matters to a host community because who pays for the substation and whether the project is real are the questions residents ask at the first hearing, and the state now has the utility's answers on file.
The 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 Data Center Community Risk Review before filing, then the stakeholder map, the briefings, the listening sessions, the engagement with organizers and the community benefits agreement through the permit. Start at the data center community relations practice.
Updated November 9, 2026.
Have a project, campaign, or comms challenge in mind?
Want to be a guest on the PR Bunker podcast?
Reach out and let’s talk.
