East Longmeadow History

1894: The Split

Quarrying created a lopsided arrangement. The town’s own history records that the East Village, the part that is now East Longmeadow, paid one third of the taxes while holding two thirds of the population, and the rest of Longmeadow, known then as The Street, held the balance of the money and the votes. In 1894, on a petition brought by The Street’s residents, the State Legislature granted a partition, and a 13.4 square mile tract of former Longmeadow land became the new town of East Longmeadow.

The quarry economy carried the new town into the early twentieth century, and then steel framing and cement made sandstone too expensive to compete with. East Longmeadow shifted from an industrial town to a suburban one on the edge of Springfield, and it has been growing slowly ever since: 10,294 residents in 1960, 15,720 in 2010, 16,430 in 2020.

2015: The Town Redesigns Itself

For more than a century after the split, East Longmeadow ran on a Board of Selectmen and an Open Town Meeting, with seven independent elected boards of roughly equal power and a town budget that had grown past $52 million. A group of residents gathered roughly 1,700 signatures and put a question on the April 14, 2015 ballot asking whether the town should elect a commission to write a charter. It carried 462 to 90, and voters elected nine of their neighbors to do the writing.

The commission worked for ten months. It interviewed department heads and elected and appointed boards, visited comparable communities, hired a consultant, held three public hearings, and read charters from across the Commonwealth. It filed its final report on February 2, 2016 with the unanimous support of all nine members, and asked the town to vote on it at the Annual Town Election of April 12, 2016.

It passed 2,406 to 1,621, with 21 blanks, on 4,048 ballots out of 11,114 registered voters. That is a turnout of 36.42 percent, and the residents who came out that day replaced their town’s entire form of government. The charter took effect on July 1, 2016. After a special election on June 7, 2016 a seven member Town Council with an appointed Town Manager took the place of the three member executive board and the annual meeting of the voters, and the town’s other elected boards became appointed ones.

What the Town Has Done With It Since

• 2020 to 2021, the first review. The Council appointed a Charter Review Committee in May 2020. It met from June 23, 2020 through March 5, 2021, the Council approved its amendments on March 24, 2021, the Attorney General’s office reviewed them, and voters approved every one of them at the June 8, 2021 town election.
• 2022, the code. On April 12, 2022 the Council approved a codification of the town’s general and zoning bylaws into a single searchable Town Code, the product of two years of work by an appointed subcommittee.
• 2023, the high school. At a special election on November 7, 2023, voters approved a debt exclusion for a new East Longmeadow High School, 3,598 to 1,618, and a second one for an attached pool, 3,240 to 1,949, on a turnout of 39.6 percent.
• 2025 and 2026, the charter again. A proposed amendment to let the Council take up multiple bylaw changes at once was defeated 658 to 631 in June 2025. A charter amendment question on the June 2, 2026 ballot passed 685 to 468.