My name is Will Anderson, I'm with the CUD Association. You're welcome Will. Will is the new Executive Director for the CUD Association. And I'll be sure to make some comments at the end as well, but please. And Tim is with Mansfield Community Fiber. We also have several folks attending virtually. We're not going to go through the roll call of all attending virtually, but we will have a public comment or public input at time certain 12.15 today. All right. With that, we are going to begin. Do the first item on the agenda is to check the agenda for requests in any vote to approve the agenda. Are there, first of all, any changes to the agenda? So Laura. Patty, if we have time, I'd like to add a question, some sort of discussion about how we can ask maybe be queued up more present in these meetings. And I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I know that, you know, some of that instant feedback, if it's possible, or, you know, asking them to come back to us and, you know, in a regular way. So just asking if we could discuss that in this meeting or at the next meeting. Okay. Let's add this to the agenda. If we get to it today, we'll take it up in terms of the QQ, Qtas involvement. Yeah. On our regular scheduled meetings, and if now we will add it to subsequent meeting. Yeah. And I have a second. Okay. And a third. So the second is when we get there, I'm going to ask that we actually not ratify the policies today and that we discuss them and specifically ask VQ to come back to us as a group with recommendations on this. And the third would be with regard to the overarching standards, again, talking about what is our way of getting some sort of formal so that and so that there's more efficiency around feedback on these things. So it was with, you know, asking VQ to react to these standards or what, but just so that we're not trying to shuffle through. Okay. So the two agenda items, ratification of policies in work on overarching standards, you would like to make some changes to those, but we can do that during those agenda items. So the only addition then to the agenda would be consideration of Qtas role in our meetings on a regular basis. Yes. Are there any other changes to the agenda? Hearing none. Do I have a motion to approve the agenda? So moved. Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Agenda is ratified and approved. First item on our agenda in terms of action is to approve two sets of minutes, one from August 26th meeting and the other from the September 2nd meeting. Do we have any discussion? Yes. I don't have the August 26th ready for you today with Christine's input. So if we could post on that to our next meeting. Just the 26th? Yes. Okay. I am fine doing that. Is there any other discussion? I'm just making some notes. Cool. Do I have a motion to approve September 2nd meeting minutes as presented in our board packets? So moved. Do I have a second? I'll second that. Any other discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. The meeting minutes of September 2nd are approved. Meeting minutes of August 26th, 2021 we will come back to the next agenda. Next item on our agenda is ratification of policies. There were eight policies in the board packet. I'm going to start this by saying. I am doing some catch up in terms of looking at best past and other material that have been circulated in review of the policies. I read these not necessarily as policies. Like some of them are more like operational. Directive stuff. They're not positive. I think about policies of broad general overarching statement that I think we need to look at. I think we need to look at the best guidance to do XYZ or some going someplace forward. To me, these are less policy and more specific. So I wanted to have some discussion around that. And I know Laura brought up as far as agenda items, not taking action on the policies. But I think let's have some general discussion around the policies and just open it up. So let me first start by saying I captured these in the public. I think it's better to identify it as a standard. And so they may not have policies, but they may be standards. And I think it is important for the. Board to decide what its process is going to be. When it's making decisions. When it's making decisions. When it's making decisions. When it's making decisions. When it's making decisions. When it's making decisions or providing guidance. So, you know, we have public meetings. People are commenting real time. It's been two meetings since that time we have received some commentary. I worry. My only worry. Only great. Is that. We try to clarify where we're at with regard to our intentions. And that we do that as quickly as possible because it has to do with what we're doing. And that's what we're doing for everything we're doing. I didn't have when we're ready specific commentary. Or response to some of the. Comments that were provided by any case. Any case CD. My comments were not meant to. No, to be negative in terms of the work that you did in pulling these policies together. So you first of all want to state that be on the record. So intentionally. You know, just want to thank you and give you give you a shout out. No, it's taken, but it is important that we not just make passing comments. And then some people take that guidance and some people don't agree. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I just want to, as we roll up our sleeves, we're going to be clunky because we're going at warp speed and we are working and trying to. Get ourselves together, so to speak, in terms of organization at the same time. And that's very difficult, very difficult to set up policies while also trying to dig a ditch. It's basically what we're doing. We're in the weeds. And at the same time, we're trying to digest and read this 100 times, which is act 71 that I'm holding up. And we're just not there yet. So just to everybody that's listening, you know, this is a work in progress and appreciate your patience. And we will get through this and do it in a way that we come out in a good place, but at the same time, we're not going to hold things up. We want to move forward so that we can get processes in place and ultimately get grant dollars out the door. That's a real virgin perspective on that. So to that point, what should our process be with regard to making decisions not on the grant applications, but rather on how we want to proceed with our guideline time? You know, like, I don't know. So I think it's a great start. It's a flying start for us. I agree. Policy feels like the wrong term, but I think the intent of what's probably documented is a great start. Exactly. So I don't know if we want to just... There's some of these statements, by the way, that I don't particularly agree with. Yeah, but that's part of the dialogue. So I don't know if we want to call them guidelines or like what's... So I think we should just come up with a term that is something less than policy because policy feels too heavy. Yeah. And then describe how we intend to use these things, whatever we turn them, because I'm sure we're going to add more as we go when we learn the obstacles that need to be removed and all those things. So I think it's a good, healthy start. Let's just name it and then have clarity as to how we expect these things to be used going forward. What I would propose, I would like time to read these again and digest, is as I was going to... I want to talk about the content I've had here. Agreed. I'm just talking about, like, what are they and how do we expect them to be used? And then, because I want to get into the content discussion, too, what do these things are? Maybe they're goals, guidelines. I think they may be guidelines. The thing, the word that I want to use to frame this is that it has the ability to change. That they're not, you know, this is not entrenched. We can, on the fly, we can change these. Exactly. So if guidelines hits that. So like, just take the first one. I'm not going to get into the content. Just as an example, first one is a commitment you're making as the board that we will make certain data available. And we expect that data to be incorporated and used by anyone who's going to be submitting an application to us, right? That's effectively what that thing is. Actually, I heard the intention of the board a little differently on this first guideline is how are we setting our baseline? So, yes, we're beholden to serve a number of unserved and underserved locations and how shall we know what they are? Yeah. And then this to me says that in the conversation that I was recalling was that there's locations identified by the DPS. I think the statute assumes that we're going to follow DPS location reporting. And that we asked that we compare those to what the locations are for the CDs. And that we report the RDOF locations separately. You know, not just roll all locations reported by the DPS into one. And then separately, there was the question of what do we do about the fact that there's about to be new DPS data? Right. So that's to me, but the guideline we're giving is that we're going to manage all of that. We're going to cause it to be managed. We may not manage it, but we're going to cause it to be managed so that there is a single baseline off of which the people that are going to be generating applications will work off of to provide us the data about what their work's going to do and who it's going to affect, right? That's the high level. And I think that that's an important and meaningful guideline for this board that says we're going to and we've got a GIS resource budgeted to help us do this, right? But we're going to cause those numbers reconciling RDOF and all the complexity colleges said we're going to cause that to be an available baseline for CUD or even public consumption. That's what this guideline says to me. And if the typographical error in the last sentence were corrected to say the board shall publish its baseline location count by district, that's pretty much what the guideline is. There is one other, the new public service department data will be the 2020 data, not the 2021 data. That's the latest data. It's going to get updated periodically because as more and better data becomes available, we're going to want to incorporate that. So are we though? Because I think that's some question. We don't want the baseline to move. Well, the baseline is for tracking progress, not necessary for allocating funds. It's just showing how far we've come since we've begun, correct? But I think the point is to measure how far you've come, you've got a set of fixed baseline. So that you can measure again. Central element to this thing, which is at this point in time, this is the baseline 12 months from now, that baseline will have changed due to the activity on the ground. And we'll have a different snapshot of that. And that's the progress of that 12 month period, right? I don't think you'd call it baseline. Okay, so whatever term we want to use. Progress. You're redirecting your efforts to whatever is left over, always redirecting. But at the highest level, this guideline is saying we're going to cause this type of data to be available. I mean, I can't say it more simply than that. And that's exactly what Holly captured and she talked about. It's not easy. It's complicated. You've got a bunch of, not competing, you've got a bunch of moving parts in here that are going to affect the calculation of the baseline. But that's one of our obligations, right? If I may. Are we envision creating board policies or will we, because this is going to move fast and I feel that it should be fluid because we're going to have to adjust and adjust continuously. And I just feel created guidelines and working with those is good. But if we ever envision actually creating policy. In the event we do create a policy X71 should be our construct to do that. And Holly, I apologize. I am trying to keep up to speed with like regular work and this work at the same time. And it's, it's clunky to say the least. I'm not going to go into the matrix, which is super handy. So there's circulated that generally. So there's what I'd like to do is spend more time with it. It's just I'm time constraint right now. Time constraint. But in the event we have policies, I want it to be framed on act 71 and the purposes laid out in act 71 and the policies should be driven by that and we can, if I can spend a little bit more time on that matrix and give some, maybe we go back and forth on it and share that with a group and that can help us. But there's the we can be short and sweet with the purposes outlined in act 71 and let that guide us for some policy statements and not get bogged down too much in that. And so the, where the attorney is that comes on board can take that, translate it and formulate it with the policies and that's a piece of work that's done in the policy. Thank you. In this particular guideline I think it is really useful because it helps staff. It helps the CUDs helps us and it does say that we will incorporate DPS data to reinforce the statute. I would add too that this is very helpful for staff because getting clear direction and having those actions helps us a lot. I think I mean, I just want to go back to what we call this and I'm really good with the word guidelines as a short, but I'd like to call it work practice guidelines. We can use shorthand guidelines but I just wanted this to be clear that this is it's not a directive if you guys discover something if staff discover something in the process they're like, oh that doesn't fit. They should bring it back. When you say something is a work practice guidelines that takes a very different connotation even compared to just guidelines in my head. I actually really kind of don't care what we call them. I'm okay with them being called policies even. That word policy makes people squirm. I mean, I think that they actually are our understandings between points of clarity between the board and the staff and the CUDs who we are the board and staff are here to make sure are moving forward and completing this historic mission that team Vermont, we're all part of team Vermont on this. So understandings which is again why I think it would be helpful for us we don't have to accept we can certainly push back but I think it's important for us to take these and in the most efficient way possible and any delay will only stress out the CUDs themselves. Ask, be queued up. Here are understandings that we want to make sure exist between us and the staff and do you have any feedback? We're taking it up and we're going to move forward with these at the next meeting. But give asking them specifically. I think the value of that understanding helps us all stay together at this warp speed that we're all trying to move back. Now a difference to the fact that N.E.K. bothered to write some comments on these guidelines I did want to acknowledge those which is very helpful and one of the things that got mentioned in the context of those comments is this question about RDOF and what to do with RDOF sites. To me that's not part of these guidelines. That's like are we going to adopt an RDOF practice and I think it really comes, that comes into play when we talk about construction grants and yes it has to do with our site perhaps our baseline because we have to know what to do with those RDOF sites. The suggestion N.E.K. is that we get written agreements for service. I don't think that we're going to affect the federal award process in that way but I think we need to know of the baseline count how many of those are RDOF. Yes and I think we need to know that RDOF is not a promise which I think they N.E.K. put forward pretty eloquently like it's an award and it may never get built or it may never get built to the standard it may never happen and the CUDs on the ground have to really again I'd like some feedback from them I appreciate that N.E.K. took time to do this how do we deal with this because we could be setting up really expensive pockets within these CUDs if we completely ignore them or isolate them so I think it's an important question. I think on this one so this is going to be derived from the GIS data in the GIS data we should have the RDOF census blocks and the locations in those blocks that again no judgment on whether RDOF is going to deliver or not deliver we just tag it so that we know that that location is part of an RDOF census block and we have that context as we move forward in our process and all that data is on the public service department GIS form as well as we have that data Patty I would just bring up one other issue with regard to the policies and this was something that I think we all got from DV Fiber which was in addition to Act 71 Act 79 created these CUDs which is who we are now trying to support and so I think it's important for all of us to keep that in mind keep that in mind as well so in addition to Act 71 I would encourage everyone to read Act 79 and also Act 169 those are two other guiding legislative position statements or not position status laws that we need to adhere to Marie and Royals testimony to the Joint Information Tech Committee is that what it's called? Yeah does do a nice outline of pertinent laws too if you want to listen to something all this conversation that's a great comment all this conversation about Ardoff is sort of begging this question of are we going to what the goal is and we count the locations what are we going to do about the Ardoff census spots it's not clear that we should you know the department would say there's a plan for those I don't feel comfortable saying there's a point especially given the number that are assigned to Starlink I don't feel comfortable saying that there's a plan for that but I think we ought to say how are we going to address it does the other Starlink wasn't included in the planned addresses we're just looking at wired projects in the DPS today yeah so this is where this is where I have one more thing too because the thing about Ardoff is you know you've got a really poor business case in these areas which is less than nine passings per mile and only about 20% of the funds come from Ardoff so it's still a bad business case which is why I think any K-Rays of the issue is like they may still walk away from those Ardoff blocks to say it's not worth it I don't work in any position to make judgments on Ardoff today and I think we identify that we need to have an Ardoff discussion we need to bring in the right Ardoff experts who can explain what it is and where the opportunity lies and where the exposures lie and then once we have that informative discussion along us then we can take on how do we allow that to affect the baseline data how we view the Ardoff locations in the context of the grant application that's exactly right and so for the listening public it's important for them to know that this is still an open area that it would be of interest to me to know whoever the person is that's making the determination in the department how they're deciding what they're doing with Ardoff information because that's the information we're going to receive and so just there's Ardoff information places that have been awarded so how are the CUDs handling so are they do they view these addresses well I think that's a separate question for me I would say we should be keeping track of all of the addresses that have an Ardoff award period along with the CUD I'd like to see what the DPS says what the CUD says and what the Ardoff award is straight period as a next set of information I think that would help inform our discussions and maybe have some feedback from and we might not get to that until we have a GIS person or contract just to clarify a question maybe the dots have not connected yet in my head folks that have Ardoff accountability so they're going to get I call the 10% off coupon not even 20% but they're getting like 10% for their project costs and like you said they may not move forward with that because it's not enough they're not precluded from also getting grant dollars from VCVB correct they can get both they can get Ardoff funds and they can get VCVB funds if they qualify for the CUD so that's assuming that's a CUD coming in I think there's only one that's doing both that falls into that category well no any so I would say that any CUD could be working with an Ardoff awardee it could be working with an Ardoff awardee to cover the cost of that so they're subcontracting there they're getting the award but they're giving it to somebody and many of the entities that have also bid into Ardoff auctions so they're going to get some they being this subcontractor essentially is going to get some money from Ardoff they're also going to get some money from the CUD through us that should be part of the whole picture for them in order to make this a go because a 10% off coupon is not going to motivate me to go spend billions of dollars necessarily but if I've got a 35% off coupon or 45% or some bigger number that's going to affect change so we're not cutting out Ardoff folks from our grants it's part of the puzzle it's a pancaking and layering of a series of grant opportunities I think the next step is so we're all speculating here so I would propose and I'm throwing this out as a question is the department the right body or expert to come in and give us the Ardoff primer on what it is and what it is not or do we need the current expert to come in and give us that I don't know the answer to that I know the department has looked at this a lot but I don't know if that's the source of Ardoff it might be appropriate to get FCC council to come in and I think there's people who have volunteered to do that for us I think maybe you can phrase this as who is the expert but I think the real problem is and I might take that back because it's not that we want a primer on Ardoff it's that we want to know what is the status of those locations but also does Ardoff require that they serve them and I think that that's really where we need to be focused two things first one of the challenges with just having an FCC lawyer is the department went through matching those locations the census blocks with E911 locations which is our baseline for data so the numbers the FCC provides aren't going to match up to what the reality is on the ground in Vermont the second thought was if we want to know what the status of these bills are if they're going forward and all of that information maybe it's I think it's four different winners in Vermont have one census box maybe we should hear from them and find out what their plans are in the context it's just I'm just throwing out ideas when you take in a phone call back from Starlink let me know well I think maybe we do need to make a decision whether we are counting or only counted wired locations that is one of the guidance down the road so I heard that we should have a discussion on this that maybe is department driven data goes and that this guidance is really about creating a baseline and we need to figure out the art off before we can know how we're creating that baseline and the baseline has to be acknowledge where the CUDs, how the CUDs are counting locations and figure out if there's a difference between how the department counts locations and how the CUDs because we need to account for that difference and it might be that the difference is that it's not grid addresses it could be that the differences the E911 addresses are clear there's so many data driven reasons right I just don't want to get into a position I think our position is we're using the DPS data as a starting point and we're going to create a baseline that we make available to everyone if people want to give us feedback on whether that's the right thing to do the wrong thing to do or what other considerations we need to take while doing that that's what I'm interested in I don't have any interest in saying here's what we have what do you have let's do the difference we're going to create a source of truth that's the baseline for all of our activity and we want feedback while we do that so that we get it as right as we can but if we get into this competing our data because of this your data says that I'm out we'll never get anything done we'll just argue about it you argue about data the whole time so that's I can't see your face but I can feel your body language there I'm on board with that and I feel that if the CUDs are using different numbers that they need to justify they just need to take it so my expectations they're going to use our numbers and if there's a problem with that they're going to tell us what it is and we're going to factor that into our data set if we buy into it so that we continue to have one source of truth that's multiple sources of truth we are we are going to lose steam quickly and recreating the data wheel is a long long path and so again in that source of truth all I care about right now is like remember ARDOF doesn't talk about locations it talks about census blocks which are geographic areas there are locations inside of those geographic areas that are presumed to be covered by the awarding of that census block so the GIS data should just simply and I know this can be done if it hasn't been done already it knows where the census blocks are and then it can look at what are the locations in those census blocks and it's just a layer that says by the way these locations in Vermont fall within ARDOF census blocks and then it will identify the awardee of that census block so that we can then look at what's your project what's the timeframe has it been done is it complete, is it in process is it still on the drawing board and what's the likelihood that it will ever get built and what's the technology your description earlier the pancaking effect a good GIS analyst will be able to apply or you're giving this much money well these addresses have the pancaking effect that's stacked this high and these have it this high and you can do the math right in the tool it's just layers and sticking with the baseline and informing it as as we learn more people are putting fiber out right now and there are areas that we may be pulling out as we go and just don't need to do construction in those areas the CUD has done it's wrong that we don't need to duplicate what's already there so that tool in terms of ARDOF in terms if there's a carrier that's putting fiber to a home today we don't need to award in my opinion a CUD money to over build that infrastructure to reach the furthest homes that have nothing and redirect that money to get to the really unserved areas and the statute has a standard for what it takes to over build incidental to the overall project plan so if you have it well I think it's worth discussing if you have a territory that there's a carrier that's clearly going to build every home do we award a CUD money to build every home in that territory can I suggest that we need to have a discussion about guidance on over builds and get into this I think that's another one to add to our list and I see that it's showing up in the grant application scoring because if you have a project that's got a ton of over building going on over existing capacity like why for what purpose it's also going to get into the affordability discussion just because the carrier is there doesn't mean it's an affordable retail offering so we're going to have to get into that so to be clear I don't think we're going to be taking addresses I don't think we should be picking addresses because I don't think we can but in the matrix of what our values are or how we choose that's a factor as Brian is describing if you're over building 90% of your territory well what are we achieving here are you really accomplishing the unserved or are you just going seeking to compete head to head and I think it's a factor in the decision not choosing addresses I'm going to encourage any CUDs that have a thought on this to bring that out in the public comment period because if you're planning stuff now if you're doing work now in anticipation that you're going to get a grant from VCBB I'd want to know that because there are folks that are already rolling their business model may be they have a placeholder for grants coming from us but they could be checked off on the list as they're already building does that make sense where the various CUDs are like we talked about in the last two meetings and staff it hasn't been updated I'm actually preparing a survey that I'll be sending out to all the CUDs that mirrors the information we're asking so they don't have to do it twice that'll be able to be used to make a scorecard that'll be easily updated it takes them to account not just what was in that previous spreadsheet but also measures of capacity I did want to throw one other complication in there a lot is happening in between these data updates from the public service department and how do we want to deal with that do we want to seek out getting data on what an incumbent telephone company was a fiver since the start of the year anything that's been built in 2021 will not be reflected in this data that's going to come in in October how do we want to deal with that I think that's just another issue we'll have to address before we leave this topic the panic on my face is we've had a donut homelink strategy by the private providers that has gotten us into this mess and so it is impossible for the CUDs and I know you know this so I think understanding 100% where you're at it is impossible for the CUDs to build to the unserved and underserved the addresses that cost the most without overbuilding these private providers who could not be could not make the investment to get there I mean we have to overbuild them at some locations yes yes yes there's kind of if however you're overbuilding so that you can get a core aggregate of households or using strategies with most of these existing providers because you know you're Comcast you're consolidating it's at the ability to drop the price right so okay okay so that started off as a should we call these guidelines for discussion well yeah the first thing is why are these we weren't even talking about content right we built content on one as we tried to use it as an example so do we want to continue to get into additional content or did we so that we can have conversation then we then come back and formulate because I'm not even sure where we left off at number one if we had a content discussion we were a little bit unclear of how and then we're going to identify art off with patients I think it's a factor in funding but I don't think it's a it just I don't think it needs to be in the baseline because it's not in form or thinking in our discussion so it needs to be in the baseline that's it let me throw this proposal out and I want to lean on Rob and Christine here is to come back with this list of guidelines and frame it a little differently so we can have some more substantive discussion yeah and rather than us do it now because we would spend the entire meeting just dealing with this I just don't want to I don't want to lose sight of these but I also don't want it to take the entire meeting time so Christina Robb let's talk after this in terms of I want to give you some thoughts of what I have in mind it's totally going to be your job to do it but you know just I'm putting my analyst hat on I'm a very logical linear thinking type of person I'd want a name for the guideline that maybe the first guidelines baseline data and then underneath that baseline data some criteria you're going to use to come up with baseline data you would like bullet points I like bullet points too so make it less wordy or stars or dots or hyphens like that can I get those little cues this is a valuable discussion right but just to give you some idea of what we're thinking but I want this to be coming from staff because these are guidelines with which you are going to work from they're not you know it's not the 10 commandments it's you know some some work some work boundary so to speak so what I'd like to do is get for each one of these what is the nugget it's trying to deal with and underneath that nugget some bullet points to lay that out so Laura first and then we'll go to Holly okay and so Patty is it your intention that before we get that back that the CUDs would also have an opportunity to comment or would it come to us and then we would ask them to comment and then we would I have no objection to hearing their comments what we have so far yeah let them understand that these are going to look completely different yeah and they can choose to hold their comments and wait to see what we come back with but they've got something on the paper that they can they can react to so I'm going to leave it to the CUDs to express thoughts and I would encourage that they express those thoughts before our next meeting if at all possible so that we can get to a place where we put this down knowing of course that we can always come back and revisit something but so that we can pass this is in a word file that can be edited and applied as we go it is not this is not the ten commandments said in a stone that can never be modified okay was that wrong? yeah so that's a great idea but I think it's got to be said that the board has to make some of these decisions and it has to make decisions and they've got to be clear enough to be applied and so they can evolve but they have to be clear to actives I agree once we get to yep these look good we're going to ratify them go but it doesn't mean that they're set and they can't be modified on the fly as we move on for good reason we'll change them and so just among my colleagues here as we make comments and some of them really will come up organically like they shouldn't be overpills or whatever we need to like have a methodology the parking lot that is a concept that we need to discuss and we need to track it and we need to come back to the meeting with the right information to make because we have to because there were just six part attacks yeah well you know there's the more tech factor then there's the are we all on the same page question yeah okay you know I would this would be really helpful for me is to have a large sheet of paper that we call parking lot issues and then every every meeting we bring the parking lot issue put it on the wall and we can see what we have left to deal with or we just keep adding to it just to keep that constant reminder of what's in the parking lot exactly you know I can't keep you know I'm going to be just you know blunt my own lack of organization I'm looking back at minutes but I've taken on the back of board packets we're all trying to get our feet grounded so as we get a little more organized a little more together and as new staff are coming on we're going to be able to do more but I just think that would be helpful I put it on the white board but then you erase it and it goes away just have a large piece of paper we'll bring it to the board we also include that as a part of the minutes each week as well list of parking lot issues I like that I like that that's great I would normally volunteer to be who would do that but I have many skills handwriting is not penmanship is not one of them I can certainly attempt to write on it but I wouldn't expect anybody we could use a board like this that's what I was thinking yeah in our goal we will have the administrative board help just capture that handwriting these days except for personal use makes no sense in terms of enjoyment you can share can we just because I'm a visual person let's do a parking lot today I'm happy to be the writer or Laura since you're just close to it at the end of the meeting these will be put into the minutes the parking lot will always be part of the minutes this is our list of parking lot issues parking lot can move from here's the list items if they are done let's take a look at that hand we also wanted to capture concepts that will be discussed at later meetings that's really what the parking lot is right yeah and so I guess thank you I'm thinking if something is going to be a guideline at some point I'm not ready to discuss it I want to capture that right there it's just so we don't lose sight of things that we said we wanted to talk about that and just because the other thing staff is going to take this concept of baseline put some language and bullets points around it so that we can look at it and see if it hits the mark policies I put in quote two guidelines you know the arrow guidelines and we'll talk about that after this meeting a little bit more and then we're also going to invite someone with enough insights to come talk to us about what it is what it is not so that we have that knowledge right thank you as long as we're doing it like this yeah it was either the department or local thank you so one of the reasons why it's really important that we get these down though is like for example there's a conversation in the comments about whether or not the date in the legislation June 21 2021 is arbitrary and and it may be arbitrary and may not be arbitrary but in fact it's in the legislation and there's rules of interpretation here that suggest that a specific date should be followed in legislation and we've talked about this now three times so what I'm hoping we can do through this process is get it down and close the door on that conversation so that we're not cycling tell me again this is the issue of guideline 4 label this policy number 4 and this is where we said are the towns the ones in the CUDs June 21 June 1 2021 or is it are we morphing CUDs as towns come and go June 1 I can tell you what June 1 is June 1 is an eligibility deadline for towns that are going on their own that's what it was intended for so that you don't have when we included small providers as being eligible for this that they were not going to CUDs and dismantling them and encouraging them to leave the CUD so if you're part of a CUD and you're leaving a CUD to go work one on one with a provider that is not eligible at June 1 that's what that was unfortunately it doesn't say that but I take your advice on that but how does that change how we look at June 1 so I think the question here is around how grant funds are allocated and we talked about Waterbury last time and so Waterbury in and Waterbury out and we said Waterbury out I don't think we want to do anything that's going to discourage CUDs from accepting new talents I think that's the challenge here in finding the Bouncing Act but dealing with a limited amount of funds so I don't know if it's something that we update quarterly or something we should have some type of schedule so I think what I heard was we're not updating so this is my mind I'm trying in a sea of information with to create some finite guidelines like this is the number of locations for CUD and CUD can add a town but on June 1 there's a certain number of locations in that CUD and that's how we're looking at what a universal service plan looks like for funding purposes and I think we do want to know how they're addressing additional towns and they might apply for money for additional towns but how do you start making some sort of rational methodical plan out of this I think that's why I took the wisdom of the legislation to be we know you need to put a stake in the ground so here's the stake and there's not a lot of June 1st towns actually so that might be another thing for us to understand from the CUDs post June 1st towns I don't expect there to be a lot of expansion and if we break it down to the amount of money per address we're allocating that could be one approach it's not going to change formulas all that much that's what you've said all along but I think it's still important for them to I'm just worried about the incentive factor this is the conversation to the word that we've had twice I'm just trying to say and I am offering this you all on staff in making these guidelines know what we're trying to do is to just put some benchmarks in so that we can operate within a context if we find out that it causes us to do unnatural acts we can modify the guideline yeah but anyway I think ultimate fluidity here is the name of being I don't think it discourages anybody from doing the right thing and in fact CUDs might merge but they would still be whatever they were on June 1st let me add something to it I think we haven't discussed this so we might disagree but I actually think this is workable because when it comes to the grant application that can be written into the grant application I'm curious your thoughts so we have a guideline here but someone gets a town for example in LaMoyle is a member of NAK and LaMoyle Fiber so ultimately when the grant application comes in we can make those decisions is that workable? I think it speaks to the larger question how do we allocate funds for construction in general which may take not just one meeting but several to figure out so maybe it's not an issue at this point since the pre-construction we have a set amount now we can address that we have the power to change that as necessary we want to keep it pretty close and we know the number of addresses if one or two towns join or switch it's not going to shift we're talking thousands we're not talking a few million dollars in shifting so one other approach could be allocations stay the same unless there's a 2% change or a 5% change in the number of addresses in the district or we can just deal with this when we're figuring out the constructions we may not go by the number of unserved addresses when we figure out how we're allocating construction funding it might have to do with road miles if the network needs to be built there's a lot of different factors the IAIS person that's another question I didn't ask the agenda changes to the agenda and update on staffing I would love to hear that even if we get that report we do get that reported but yeah we'll include it all right so we don't have resolution on this we're going to put this in the per-healon June 1st, 2021 date, whether the allocation and that refers to the formulas and allocation of dollars, if that changes, we need to nail this down and just be make them need to make a decision on it. Because as Holly said, we've talked about it several times. Make a decision not to not to include water bearing. Well, except we shouldn't make a decision based on the town, we should make a decision based on. But I think we did make a decision not to just for pre construction alone, right so far. I thought it was everything was allocation of funds, right? It was allocation of funds for the for the broadband pre construction. I don't think we have a consensus for the construction of whether we're even using addresses and setting in the case of waterbury. It was a rounding. It was a rounding. I rounded it. It didn't make any difference. And that's going to be the case in most towns, right? That's what drove the drove the discussion because you said it was a rounding error. So because of that, it was such a minuscule impact. So just as of June 1st, 2021, or the pre construction in dollars that are rolling out and if we do construction based on mileage, well, that doesn't affect our decision of June 1st towns and locations. So we is the board okay with specifying this June 1, 2021 date for formulation allocation of construction funds, not the pre construction dollars, but construction funds. But almost I'm not understanding it wrong. So I'm fine with June 1st for pre construction. I'm using that exact same methodology for construction as well. You wouldn't change it. You would not change it for construction dollars. I would like that's what we've already made a decision for pre construction. So that's off the table that we revisit this only relative to we're only going to change the formula for the construction dollars. We're going to have a discussion about that. Talk about it. But the pre construction dollars is not out there now for we can address it another time if we feel there's a need to readdress it or for petition to readdress it. Okay, we're all on the same page. We're actually saying the same thing. Yeah, but just to just to project ahead like I don't expect a CUD to make an application for construction costs further for the entire territory all at once. Right, I expected to be a series of projects with a series of applications for each bill segment, right? Yeah, that's right. Don't make a decision on that because I think there's some flaws in that statement. And I think we'll need to talk about that later. Okay, okay. And I just want to put it in asterisk. There may be flaws. Exactly. Okay. Just that whether or not you do project by project financing, it should all be subject to a universal service plan that considers the number of towns and locations within those towns. Sure. Sure. But in terms of the awarding of funding and how we do it. Yeah. It's all subject to a plan and a business plan. Okay. And that's actually why I care so much is that we're saying that this pre-construction phase, some of the CUDs are done actually with operational agreements and business planning. And yet I'm wondering, done with what? Because until we say, these are your locations, we agree, right? And these are your towns, we agree, right? What have they planned for? I'm not sure. That's right. To me, the baseline, I want the baseline data, I want it yesterday, so we can have intelligent conversations where they challenge us back or we challenge them and we try to settle on what's in the field today and what's the gap and what's the plan to fill to get to address the gap. That's... And there's the universal service. Yeah. Well, an Act 79 is a key part of this. Act 79 told them what to plan for. And there's a previous section item. Yeah. There's a previous parking lot item that we have, which is to bring in those business plans to the board, you know, and I'm not sure how we'll do that. I would be waiting for them to be part of the dashboard now, to put the need to be reviewed. Yeah. Is that being the parking lot? What? Bring in the business plans. Bring in the business plans and the dashboard. So the question with the business plans is often the business plans contain a model that's considered a confidential and proprietary. Yes. So you're going to be reviewing actual business plans that may require an executive session for some elements. Because it contains a commercial partner's data. Can they redact? They can redact as well. The other way we can use their... I mean, I want to be careful what we think is confidential here, right? So, I mean, they are acting as... They have competitors. Well, they do, but they're also municipalities. That's right. I mean, there's a tension there. So what are we putting up here? We're going to start with the redaction that we're attacking the business plans. Business plans and... And... CUD business plans. And the... And the dashboard. And the dashboard. And this might be something we want to wait till we have an attorney on staff that can advise us. Although... I know. Well, we can solve that problem in the near term. Anyway, that's another... That's a staffing discussion. Okay. Okay. So, are we done for now with our guidelines? We still have seven minutes. Okay. In place of that seven minutes and before our break, what I'd like to do is ask for Christine to do an update on staff. And I just learned, staff, that I'll send you comments on the N and K comments that you can consider as you're making your guidelines, your guideline outlines. Well, we should wait till the next meeting. We shouldn't be able to reply all. That's right. Yeah. But my understanding from what Patty said is that you all will synthesize input. You'll start with your needs, synthesize input. Hopefully they will also come from VQTA as well as board members and bring something back for us to work to. To our original message and that you're not creating these guidelines and then circulating them for additional comment before we comment here in our next meeting. I mean, the draft that they're doing isn't... We're going to get first crack at that to go through that. I just want to be sure that we're staying in sync with staff and then getting feedback rather than staff makes a comment and the public comments and then we come back. Is that how you want it to go? So that sounds like pandemonium. I think my definition, we're going to get CUD input because we've been asked to do that. The only thing that this question keeps bringing up is we've been making these board packets public. You're getting kind of the public does. If that's not acceptable, please let me know. The public should be getting the board packets. The public should be getting the board packets. Even though it is a bit of pandemonium and it's a little bit chaotic, this is the process that we vet things and I do want to hear... I'm just asking how many times you want the CUDs. Do you want them to respond to this? I'm asking for them. I'm not going to respond to this thing called policies. You want to wait for the staff to sort. If I were in their shoes, I'd wait, but they can do it. They can give us comments during the public input period. They know we're going to be working on this to put it into a different context. It's not a policy. It is a guideline. It's a working task guideline and they can choose to give us feedback after we come back at it and reformat it and recharacterize it. Or if they want to do in the public input session, they can do that now. But I feel it is important to get that. Just like lawmakers here point counterpoint. That's what I want to hear. It doesn't mean they're deciding. We are going to take that information in and let that affect our decision making. We're not. Yeah. And I think this... You can rest assured that we're going to... You're going to... It's going to be in the board packet. We're not going to... Rob will not work the language, but that's just a matter of speed here. I'm just trying to find when we're done. Yeah. So I would say we're done when... I mean, I think we have... Because this work is in service to the Vermonters, who are volunteering to stand up this critical infrastructure that we have to make sure that we've heard from them prior to us ratify. Yes. Exactly. I agree with that. Yeah. And we won't... We're not going to finalize it until we get the board packet ready any time. So it's kind of like you're out of it. It's great. Okay. How much time do we have left for staffing now? Madam Chair. Okay. We have four minutes. In addition to staff update, also a status of the RFP if we can do that. Okay. So from a staffing standpoint, we're... The jobs are being posted... For administrative assistant, general counselor, and the grant administrator. I've been trying to go through the state information, and I've been very confused in terms of how we contract for a GIS person, because apparently there's a statewide approved vendor list. You still have to go through administrative bulletin 3.5. Spent a lot of time in that bulletin. It's very confused. Tomorrow morning at 8 a.m., I've got a phone call where I'm... That's all going to get clarified. We should be able to bring in the GIS person relatively quickly using... Because there's already an approved contractor list for the state. So we don't have to redo that, but we do have to do an RFP. Is it a person or a contractor? It's a contractor. Okay. And I'm sorry. You said the administrator, the general counsel, and what was the third one? It's posted by the grant administrator. We have not done additional work yet on the other two positions that will ask for your approval on. It's just with meeting every weekend, a holiday weekend, everything else going on. We're a little bit overwhelmed right now. Just to be clear and frank about it. What are those last two positions that you have in mind? It would be the Broadband Project Developer. This is that would work with the CUDs on financing, whether it's raising additional funds, making sure they're ready to leverage the network they build to get to the bond market. And then another position that... It's a basically a finance position. However, I'm not going to bring that to you until I get to clarify, clarification on what administrator roles are. Because, you know, what's going to provide that to you? To attorneys. We have to come to understanding because what I don't want to do is create duplicate roles, right? The grant administrator is going to handle all this. Then we should be okay. Yeah, I'm just going to... It's totally different. Thank you. I agree. I just want to understand where the grant administrator role is, where our finance support begins. And what's the other one? The other position. That was the finance supporters. And the Broadband Project Developer, whose job is going to be to help the CUDs get other funding, including all the processes that need to be in place in order to be able to go to the bond market. That's the finance person, right? Or are these two separate? These are two separate positions. One is... And that's... So thank you. That's exactly why we have to get a little clarity around what each one of these... Yeah, those two positions, I see like some of the grant administrator and the finance person. Yep. So the point being, we don't need to have every... CUD have a CFO. I kind of see a one CFO position. You know, monitoring accounts receivable, accounts payable, making sure that, you know, we've got things logged in the correct chart of accounts. I see that different than the person who's going out and helping CUDs put the process in place to raise funding. You don't think each CUD will have their own finance person? Well, I... They need to make financial controls. The state's not going to provide that. All right. Well, that's... The problem is some of these are so small, maybe what we do is we encourage them to share resources. Or that's a great CUD opportunity to have a shared resource of some sort. You're not set up to do that. Neither is the state. The state cannot be financial controls to a bunch of independent unions. That's true. We could... The CUD or we could help identify some resources to share. You know, at the end of the day, you need somebody internal to each entity accountable for the money, because that's where bad things happen when you don't. I think they have that largely. Oh, the question is coming on. Yeah. But all these... Yeah. When there's money passing around, somebody has to be watching that because bad things will happen without that. Yeah, I think so. And you know, that brings up a point that was raised last week at risk of wearing out your pen there. We talked about looking at what the objectives for the bond market would be. Like, how do you know when you're qualified to go to the bond market and setting that as a kind of Holy Grail structure out there? I requested an easy number of effects to send us what their bond requirements are since I think that will help inform us. I know. I have them. I think we need a person, actually. Yeah, that was a good discussion. That's kind of... That's the issue trying to wrap up. How do we... How do we ensure all the CUDs have the proper financial controls in place? How do we do that in a way that is efficient where we're not paying, you know, for a smaller CUD for full time? We don't want to come to the ground. But I think you've captured it. That's the issue. Thank you. Okay. Any other things on staffing you want to bring up? No. Are we backing into a budget here without actually approving a budget? Well, ultimately we're going to bring you budget. I think you're right. I mean, I think we're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this. But I think the director is not singing it. But it's, you know, I think it is what it is because we're just, we're running. We're running a hundred miles an hour, but it's a good point to bring out that. The ideal world is we have, here's our budget and here's our plan. And then we proceed accordingly. But this is, we're, we're going a hundred miles an hour. Yeah. Remember this started with a budget discussion. Ultimately you will provide. Okay. RFP update. RFP is out. I'll make, I want you to. Okay. Yes. Yes. The RFP is out for the broadband reconstruction program. Thank you for all the feedback. I believe I integrated all of those ideas and. We haven't received any applications yet. I'm expecting in the next few weeks, we'll start receiving those applications. I think that's, that's really about it on that, but there also is the next step. The next step is going to be the scoring criteria, which I am working on and we'll bring back. It's clear it's laid out in the RFP, but then there's also the grant agreement. We have a model grant agreement that was used for the H3, 15 funds. I've. Heard that there were challenges with that grant agreement and it would be, it would be helpful for me if the, if we could create a working group or somebody to work with. So we can be ready with a grant agreement when the funds are awarded. So there's not an additional delay at that point. I have marked up the H3, 15 grant agreement. And I'll just send you those comments. We actually love your help. If we talk about working, working board, when we talk, this is probably a good place for a working committee. Even if it's a committee of one and that's highly. Thank you. Like, there is the potential. We may have an application for the board to review next week. If not, I, I would be shocked if we didn't have one by the, the following board meeting, if not several. And have you gotten any feedback? Like, you know, like, Oh, good. This works for us or, or we don't get what this RFP means. Any, any feedback? Yeah, there's a concern. And this right goes right to what you were talking about. Which I, which again, I'm not prepared to bring this to the board, but I'll give you some foreshadow on what the concern is. And it's, it's the dilemma that. Do you know, do we. Do we design. The entire network. For each CUD. Which. If you do that up front, I'm going to give you some feedback. For each CUD. Which if you do that up front, you run this problem over time, the type that design gets stale. But if you don't do it up front, then you have this problem where. Well, you haven't got to make ready started at the right time. You don't know exactly what the costs are. We haven't figured, you know, I personally don't have a recommendation at this point, but that's the, that's the dilemma I'm talking about here. We've heard from one CUD that the amount that's allocated is not enough. But that I don't believe that CUD is. Only one so far. But the point of this, the one thing that's really important for the CUDs and for the board to remember with this RFP is we're asking for over the next 18 months. We're also asking for a very detailed timeline of when during those 18 months, you're going to engage in certain activities. We're looking for a phased approach. Is where we had initially landed on this, on these applications. And that's something that will review when we review the applications. But that, that is one area that there seems to be a debate within the CUDs of whether they want all their pre-construction funding now, which the 30 million will not cover. Or if it's for phase one and phase two. Well, the 30 million may cover all because it depends if we have someone. I think I kind of want to talk with one of the CUDs about that issue. And we might, you know, or within a million dollars and there might be a million dollars available somewhere else. But I think the real issue here is trying to make a decision around, do we do the detailed design all up front? Or we do that phased approach. I was originally going into, we were originally going to this point. He would do this in phases. But there are some weaknesses in that discussion. And there may be no clean answer. It's another one of those things. We gotta make a decision recognizing that there are problems with. I don't think that's for us to decide. Honestly, I think it's for them to decide. And the way I think about it is if I'm scoring an application, if you're, if you're coming to me with an ask for the entire territory build out, right? We're going to have to get into this concept of like, you know, risk and likelihood of success. Right. Cause every application is going to come with some risk. And if someone's doing an entire build out all at once, that is much riskier than if they're doing it in a phase, you know, kind of segment by segment basis. And so if someone is someone, let's say their target is 7,000 locations. If they come to us with a plan for 7,000 locations all at once. That is in my experience. That's going to be riskier than someone who comes to us with, Hey, I've got 7,000 locations and I'm asking you for 1,500. Project to hit the first 1500 first. That's, that's a less risky proposition to me in terms of. Cost in terms of execution in terms of timeframe, in terms of resource availability, in terms of materials, availability, all of that stuff. So that's, that's the same approach that we, that we had taken and we'd encourage the CUDs to come back. Like, don't ask for everything now. You've come back in six months later as you get your next design. Like it's like those, it's all about accountability at this point. We all another change in the RFP was reflecting on some of the, some of the conversation we had with the commissioner last week about how there's different ways to distribute funds based on where the CUD is at that can ensure accountability and that flexibility is something that we can do. Every single grants agreement doesn't need to be the same. It can be informed by our individual risk assessment of each CUD. And at the same time, Brian, I would like to say you could, you could spin that and say there might be an RFP response that comes back where they've got funding. They're ready to roll. That it makes sense that actually doing the whole 7,001 shot looks good. Their proposal. And what we know about them is less risky because it's all in one just because of what they have in place. So it could cut, it could cut both ways. But what you said a spot on, I think it's their responsibility to propose it. Yeah. We're supposed to, we're supposed to help them. We're not supposed to do for them. Exactly. So we provide them guidance. We give them suggestions and guardrails. They come to us with how they want to do it. And we, and then ours is to, fortunately we get to assess that, right? Tell your story until it will. And we get to assess and figure out if this is good to go the way it is or not, but let them do the proposal. Right. The amount of funding is also going to change over time, not necessarily the total amount, but the allocation. Like if we have a district that partners, partners and gets a grant from a whole other entity that takes care of all those addresses, that's going to make additional money available for other, other districts. When we get the updated data, we may find that that one of the districts had a 30% or 40% reduction in the number of on-served addresses. Those are decisions we're going to have to make in order to get the money to go to where it needs to be to make this happen. So because we're talking about pre-construction grants and whether it's heart, hearts or all, and I just bring your attention to page three of the NEK feedback on the guidance, which is a request to expand section 8085B under the language and any other costs seemed appropriate to allow them under pre-construction grants to make dollar commitments to fiber through materials. And that either gets parking lotted or we're going to have to take it up in the process of being ready to evaluate these pre-construction applications. But I didn't want it to go unnoticed that it was specifically mentioned as a request. Thank you. And their suggestion was that the state does both purchasing, which I know there's not necessarily agreement among the CUDs. I don't believe on that question. We did hear from them early on. I think that that is a thing that the staff really has to recommend as a result. We can't be on the fence about that. We're either doing it or we're not. Okay. The bill of purchasing. Yeah, but again, I feel like it's not ours to impose on them. It's ours to say we would like to facilitate this opportunity if you would like to take advantage of it. And if consensus is not attained by the members, then we say we weren't able to do that. Yes. Okay. That's a good question. But could we even do it if we wanted to? Okay. So it's kind of that. I was talking to Chris. So this just seems to be a parking lot issue to me, the CUDA, their role, what they can bring to the table. And these are, you know, there are standards that we've talked about. Keep coming up. The both purchase. If there's a consortium that wants to get in and say, hey, let's. Yeah. I think that's a good question. Yeah. So. One of the parking lot issues is what is the role of the CUDA?  Exactly. But I actually, I mean, to be clarified, my hope is more that they are less worried about them and, you know, borrowing or raising money. I'm worried. I'm more looking to them to be consensus builders and facilitators. Right. Yeah. I mean, if we're dealing with nine separate entities, it feels more like we're dealing with a smaller or a line number. And I so agree with you, Brian, but I think rather than us just talking about this, we bring it up all the time. We should have an official conversation and bring them in the room. Totally agree. Say, boy, would we have a lot of benefit out of. Yeah. Their new program manager is in the room. Yeah. You know, the idea that the CODA wants to be a tool for consensus for decision making for the CUDs. But what that does mean is that we need to have an opportunity to have time to be abreast of the decisions that your board is even considering so that we can be able to, so that I can be able to present our united voice. That has to be a voice that's considered and has to be one that, you know, has time to formulate those points. As for what our organization is going to look like besides voicing the CUDs views to your board. We're also looking at organizing shared services. This is something that's going to take time. I'm going to be meeting with all the CUDs to evaluate their different needs and desires in this realm. So with regard to financial controls, this is going to take time. With regard to the RFP as well, we're going to be working to make sure that all the CUDs are on track with that. Not the CUDs are going to be doing their own grant administration grant applications, but the organization will be helping facilitate that as well. But the key point I'd like to make is that the CODA would like to be a tool for decision making. And that's going to be a tool for decision making. But the key point I'd like to make is that the CODA would like to be the united front for the CUDs to interact with this board. So to get policies ahead of time, to potentially have a voice at the table would be key for what we're looking at, but our board desires. But I can have some more comments along the slide during the public input period. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Back to the agenda, what we do with the CUD and its roll. And I think we still discuss that if we have time. But let's, let's have. Okay. We are now at 1055. We had break scheduled for 1040. Does everybody need a break? Does anybody need to break? All right. Let's take five. And then I would like to go to affordability so that we don't keep punting and pushing that off. Okay. The recording will be stopped now. Okay, we are resuming at 1102 and before we move to affordability discussion, they do want to take up next board meeting and to spend a few minutes on this item. And board, we are all running really fast in terms of trying to get up to speed and work on things, but we're also noticing that we don't have enough time in between meetings. So the proposal is rather than meet weekly and we have a scheduled meeting next week and then we have a break. And the question for the board is whether we hold the meeting next week or if we give a couple of weeks break here and reconvene at the 28th. So rather than hold the 16th, the week of the 20th, if we don't have a meeting, we have a planned meeting for the 16th. I'm just wondering if we cancel the 16th and go for the 28th and make that an all day meeting. Make the 28th an all day meeting. Yes. What was the reason we didn't have a meeting the week after the 20th? We had two shifts to go every other week and now Thursday, Tuesday. Yeah, it was a scheduling issue. It's a scheduling issue. I don't know what happened, but I can't meet on the 28th. Is that something we've said before? Yeah. Yeah, we know it's Tuesday afternoons. I'm fine to go to, you know, every two weeks with a longer meeting. I do wonder if we should keep our next meeting for something like a, we should hear from the, from, you know, VQDA and the CUDs.  So take some workload off staff and have other people present. Yeah. For the next meeting. For the 16th. That'd be fine. Do you think you guys have the speakers in? I think that would be fine. And like, there's a chance that there will be a grain application where V2, V2, V2 if it comes in the end of this week. But we have no evaluation criteria. We've got to get, we're working, you and I are working on the evaluation. Put that on the agenda as well. It was described in the RFP, but not the point process. That's what, that's something for the agenda next week. I would say that. You want the evaluation criteria on the agenda for next week? Yes. To confirm how we're going to score. So we're in between that. So we're developing the agenda. We have evaluation criteria.  So we're here. Art off and locations, the intersection. And locations, okay. You want, We want to meet with the CUDs. Do you want, okay. Do we want all the CUDs or just VQDA or the VQDA executive committee? To what purpose? Well, we keep saying we, we should meet with them. I'm not saying that. I'm saying. I'd like to hear from VQDA, especially with a new executive director. Yeah. Is it an ED? Are you an ED? No, no. Whatever your role is. I'd like to. Program coordinators. Okay. I'd like to hear from him next week. Yeah. And give you an opportunity to spend half an hour with us. If I may, perhaps to invite the executive board of VQDA as well to be there with me. But that would be great. All right. We'll consider that. I'm not saying yes or no at this point, but we'll consider. So let's leave a placeholder for VQDA for the 16th. Again, I'm mindful of trying to take workload off you. But the matrix and the evaluation matrix is going to be something we do have to look at because we have proposals coming in from the RFP. All right. So when I, when I send a survey of VQDA, make sure you fill it out quick. Yeah. I think ultimately Rob and I are going to have to sit down Monday and put that criteria together, just speaking to the CUDs. Make sure we get that back by the end of Monday morning. Right. I'll get that posted tonight. And so are there anything, is there anything else on the parking lot list that should be on our next agenda? I'm going to suggest we make the policies and guidelines not ready for the 16th, but that's later. Yes, please. Okay. You've got time for that. Okay. I would love to see if, I mean, I don't know how much worth the dashboard is, but you know, it's going to be hard to even do the grant evaluations without it. So. That's, we're getting there. It's just an expansion on what the previous spreadsheet that was provided. I don't know if we're going to be at a point of having, I guess we can get links to the public version of the business plans, if that's helpful at this point. And then if there's questions, we can have them come in and we can talk to them. Okay. So the 16th will be a half day. The next meeting is the 28th. The 16th is a half day starting at 9 a.m. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. Yes. And on the 28th, we had planned for one o'clock. I think there was a reason we couldn't do the mornings. I don't know why on the 28th. I've got a conflict. That's why. And you have a conflict the afternoon. I have a conflict in the morning. So I think the proposal is to move to two weeks. So are we going to hold the 28th? Are we going to keep it for the afternoon then? If we do it on the afternoon of the 20th, I will miss a chunk of the meeting and I'll be virtual. Okay. Is there any chance that we, did we decide? I mean, Thursday is such a rather day for me anyway. Did we decide specifically that the 30th does not work? Patty has a conflict sometimes. I'm on the third. What about the 29th? There I said, we threw another day in the midst. I can't do the 29th. What were the first? First of October. Yeah. We will have gone one, two, three weeks. And we were not doing the 23rd because, which would have been every other week. 23rd, I'm away. I'm away 22nd, 23rd and 24th, three days. I will want to know your vacation schedule so that I can plan mine to be one year's. Excellent. Come to Maine with me. The 21st wasn't, this is like, the 21st wasn't available Tuesday, the 21st. We've gone backwards in terms of every other week. How about the 27th? I can do the 21st. Wait. I can do the after, I cannot do the 21st, but you can meet without me. I can always. I recorded me. I'll make some more. Morning.  Yeah. So I would prefer we stick to the 28th unless like half of us can't make it for some reason. Is it the afternoon of the 28th? Yes. Okay. And Brian, if you can't make that one because it was originally planned, I'd prefer to stick with that then. That's fine. I'll just, I need to step out for about an hour in the middle of the meeting. Okay. And I'll be virtual. Well, let's keep the 28th at one. And then after that, we move to every other week, but we move to full days. So full day is nine to four, five. Do we want to start earlier on the 28th? Like at noon, perhaps, is that running up? I know, I don't know what time the commitment's more in the morning. I can. Okay. I could, I mean, I could squeak out 12, 30. And so, that's what we're going to do. So we'll just keep it at one o'clock. Okay. But then starting the 5th of October. One to five. We want to, still one to five. We don't want to switch to one full day. No, October, it's 28th is one to five. Okay, yes. And then we're going to go nine, two, five. And then beginning on the 12th. Oh, the 12th. We would go, this might be a problem. Yeah, the 12th is the day. It's, this room is, this room is available every other week, but it's the first week. So it'll be the fifth that's available. And then it's another, it's not available on the 12th. I did learn that they are going to be doing some improvements next door in terms of audio and visual. When that happens, I don't have an answer. So. The question is, could we take the PUC hearing room on an all day every other week? If we could, you can do that. I don't know about the PUC. I know we could take this room every other week, but it's, the 12th isn't an option. We're not doing Thursday, Patty, because they have conflicts on Thursdays beginning in October. And I can't do Wednesdays and I can't do Thursdays. And I have a conflict in the morning on Tuesdays until the end of October. So. Friday? I got a Tuesday afternoon conflict pretty much every week. Fridays. Friday. How does Friday work? Okay, Friday. Friday is the eighth. Friday is the eighth? Yeah, so already into the. Fridays are actually probably the best day for me. Fine for me. Eventually run into some challenges. Yeah, I could make Friday's work. I could make Friday's work. It looks to me. Friday's going to be tough. I got a bunch of weekends. Put them out. I got a wedding. I got a... What about Mondays? I know that Vakuta just shifted their board meeting. And I think there'd be a... It's a 10 o'clock.  What is the department's meeting with Vakuta? The standing meeting. It's just the annual, it's the weekly Vakuta meeting. That's all. It's not a standing meeting with the department. Oh, okay. Yeah. But the department was supported. I mean, that was Rob's judgment. Yeah. Yeah. What time is that Vakuta meeting? 10 a.m. this Monday. So 10 a.m. every... And every two weeks. Every two weeks. So is there a way that we could do it on every other Monday that they're not meeting? I don't know. I don't have it in a recurring thing in my calendar for when it is. I don't believe it. Do I? I do now. Nice. Do we have a recurring place for the round? Perfect. So like Monday the first is open. I still am not... No, sorry. I went to the end of October now. Great. So Monday the fourth is open. Monday the fourth is open. And that means that we would be on that schedule. So do we want to do this for Mondays? So every other week on Mondays. Starting on... The fourth. Starting on the fourth. Because it does appear that this room is open. So that's... That's... Other folks. Looking good. I'm fine to move to Mondays on the fourth. I would have to be virtual. Okay. And what time during that period? So these would be all day meetings. All day meetings. So can we just like... I can't do seven hours. It's a menacing return of a seven hour meeting. It's just great. Like four is solid. We can get... Yeah, I feel the urgency too. But seven is not a solution. It's just not set, frankly. I don't think you can plan an agenda for seven hours actually. I can't keep an attention span for seven hours. I have to be... That's the limit on me. But that's just... How long is three? I think four hours is solid. If you want to go five for special circumstances, then we've got to have a really productive agenda. But anything over four. You've got to have four with a break. You can crank some stuff out. After that, you're just playing games with time. So we'll have to... I will have to manage the time to be more... The agenda is going to have to have a time intervals on them. And we lay the agenda out with time zones. Because otherwise... Because we're not making the agenda now. In our four hours, we're not making the agenda. Or we're doing three hours now. There are three hours, but we're still not making the agenda. Well, yeah. We can also create work groups to try to address some of these issues outside of meetings and bring back the policies. Yeah, to notice their meetings. It has to, I mean... Well, if it's a work group, that's not an official meeting. We're not going to have a four. If we don't have a four. Right, exactly. That's why this... If we get a one or two board members to help us with the agreement. Yeah, up to two. And I think that would work well, I think, because of... That's true. Yeah. All right, let's call this because we need to move along here. So we're going to move to the fourth. To the fourth. We're going to do half-day meetings every other Monday. One time. Half-standing Monday. Afternoons. Afternoons. Okay. One to five. Is that it? One to... And now it's 12 to four. 12 to four? 12 to four is gonna... Okay, we'll have to do it again. Is it every other week? No, it's certainly better. I just have to try to be a one-part household on daycare. So I'll have to figure it out. Every other Monday? Every other Monday. Not this, if only one can work. So starting Monday to fourth. 12 to four, you said? 12 to four. 12 to four and Giga, okay. And I'm just gonna do this right now to make sure that it's... Can you invite us? Yes. Invite us using our... Anyway, I'll forward it. I'm gonna get one for starters and then I'll do the rest. Okay, so our next meeting is the 16th. We are not meeting on the 28th, correct? Correct. We are not meeting on the 28th. Is that accurate? No, we are meeting on the 28th. Our next meeting is the 16th. And then the 28th and then the fourth. That's what I have. Or are we going six, we're getting rid of the 28th is that what we're doing? That's what I heard, but... Close it to the 16th. The 16th of September. Is that the cleanup meeting? Yep. And then we move. And then we move.  We had the 28th on the schedule, but we also are talking moving to the fourth. So let's cancel the 28th. This is a question. That was the day when one of us can come in the morning. One of us can come in the afternoon. Right, and maybe we reserve the 28th for working group meetings if that's necessary. So any subcommittee meeting activity we could keep on the 28th, but not full board. It also makes sense, I think to do a working group on the evaluation criteria. Maybe we could do that virtually, but certainly. There's some important numbers to help with that once we have a proposal. Okay, are we good? So no meeting on the 28th. We have the 16th and it will start every other week on 10th floor. Okay, with that, let's move to affordability discussion. Holly is going to lead us through this. Okay, Holly, let me get your presentation set up here. Okay, anybody else can do that? Hold on one second. I want to make sure that there's something funky with team so that I want to make sure that I do this the right way. Let me do this one more time. It doesn't show up in the video. Pretty backwards, Laura. So that's actually the last page. Yes, I read, oh, right, I read it first one. Oh, goodness. Yeah. Okay, good to go. That's my answer. Okay. So thank you for offering this opportunity for me to lead you in discussion, but let me say out front that we definitely need some discussion on this and I'm not here to tell you what I think the right answer is. I come to this work after a year of standing up a new nonprofit. Hold on a second here. I'm sorry, Holly. I'm going to keep talking, Rob, it's okay. Called Equal Access to Broadband. Equal Access to Broadband was started with funding from EC-Fiber because during the COVID crisis, they were unsure how to meet the urgent demands of families who couldn't afford fiber service and were basically blocked out of school access because they weren't online. And so Equal Access to Broadband started studying this problem and for a year, I've been speaking with social services agencies and getting the lay of the land in the general environment on affordability questions in broadband. I'm here to tell you there's no national strategy on this. Equal Access to Broadband has seen the need for a bridge between ISPs and social services to meet the needs of low income families, but that's not necessarily an answer to what is affordability. So let's talk about what affordability really means and I've got some ideas for you. Next page, please. So in the world of broadband, we talk about availability, meaning let's build the network. We talked about affordability. We don't always say what that means and we talk about adoption. How do we get people using broadband effectively? Affordability appears in the purpose and intent of Act 71. And in fact, it appears pretty often. Next page, please. But I'm gonna talk to you about just for a moment to set some context, why do we care? And I'm really saying this to you as a former executive at a public media company. We really, in order to keep democracy together, we really need to be sure that everyone is able to connect. We are moving towards a new world order where education, telemedicine, public benefits, employment and culture are all accessed through the internet. And this is old news to everybody in the room, but it bears just registering how important understanding availability is. And the Pew Charitable Trust went out and did a survey of low-income parents. And what they basically concluded was where people see internet as too expensive, they just push it aside and say, I can't go there. And that means we effectively created not just a digital divide, which by the way goes all the way back to the Clinton administration. And so the digital divide has been a problem for decades. Now we're just feeding into a digital divider and we don't need more divisions. Next page, please. So there's a lot of people in the marketplace working on affordability. These are just a handful of websites of people who are doing it. You've got the Benton Institute and something called the Web Foundation and you've got something called Access Now and all kinds of broadband now. There's a gazillions of them out there. Working to create guidelines for access and working on this concept of what affordability means. And on the right, you've got the FCC and their emergency broadband benefit, which was funded by an act of Congress at the end of 2020. Next page, please. So it's important to recognize that in Vermont we have two different populations. One is a low income population of about 40,000 people and there's Vermont's unserved or underserved households, a population of approximately 60,000 people and they're not necessarily the same people. So when we talk about affordability, we may not be talking necessarily about low income households. We could be talking about a concept of affordability that's not just qualified by a public benefit standard. Availability says, let's serve the 60,000 addresses. That's what Act 71 says. Let's serve those 60,000 addresses. And then it talks about affordability, but it doesn't say what that means. So here's my little cheat sheet on affordability from Act 71. There seems to be two goals. Affordable service, whatever that means, and support for low income and disadvantaged communities. So in the findings, there's references to affordability in the purpose. There's a mention of the state's goal of affordable broadband. And then when we get to the powers of the VCBV, we talk about affordable access and we have to, by the way, make recommendations for affordable access in our annual report to the legislature. And then specifically in the construction grants, and this is where the rubber starts to meet the road. We are directed to support affordable service options and support low income and disadvantaged communities. Next page, please. So going back, some of this goes to work of these other nonprofit organizations and one called the WEB Foundation, which sort of is the good cop on the worldwide web, talks about affordable access. And they go so far as to say that access is the ability of people to connect physically. I think of that as availability. And then affordable access is the cost of access on a baseline amount for a specific quantity of data. And they're so specific and they've done a world study on this. And they've said, well, really affordability comes to play when you can buy one gigabyte of data for less than 2% of your annual income. So... That capacity, is that storage? That's capacity. So I'm looking at them, just did the math for you there. I mean, that's a rate of 58 bucks a month if you're on what is a low income household standard for four people of 35,000 a year. Another organization, the Benton Organization which reports on broadband and digital equity talks about finding high performance broadband and talks more about how to make that broadband available to people and supports programs for availability. Like, how do you figure out how to use broadband instead of also buying telephone service and also buying cable service? And how do you figure out what speed you need to buy? All of this is baked into some people's concepts of digital equity. And I'm just mentioning these to you here so that you have some context for what the discussion is out in the public realm. Here's everything from the very specific affordable access to a broader concept of what digital equity might look like. I submit that we're kind of faced with this tough situation because we're asked to include factors that actually increase the cost of service and may, if left unaddressed, reduce affordability and equity. So we're asked, you know, first of all, we're asked to build in areas where the finance construction operation cost in drops and the customers per mile are not commercial. In other words, and that's my parlance for, nobody wants to do that on a profit making business plan. We have capital costs that might be imputed to our system goals of universal service and sustainability for a fixed speed, high quality system. And we also are obligated to consider net neutrality and that other cost, that interesting cost factor of if this network isn't performing, do we transfer it on default back to the state or back to this organization? That's not going to help your cost of capital necessarily. So there's all of these factors that could impact affordability. And then on a more pedestrian level there's the consumer access costs. I mean, it's not just your bill from your ISP, it's the cost of power and equipment and how you transfer to a new age of technology where you used to have a cable service and a landline telephone. There's a lot of education required if you get you from point A, point B. Thanks, Ryan. So there is federal assistance for qualified households. It's called the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program and it applies to people who fall into these various categories. There is a lot of latitude there in terms of qualification, but you have to either go to a broadband provider who's willing to work with you to apply or you have to have internet access and documentation that is proof that you qualify. And you know, in my experience is that that documentation in a population, we're talking for low income families. This is not general affordability. This is how we're addressing low income families as a nation. And if you don't have that letter that arrived saying that you were eligible for free and reduced lunch, you're not applying for the system. And by the way, if you're an ISP that wasn't delivering broadband services as of December and filing a 477, you weren't an ETC, an eligible telecom company in December of 2020, you're not eligible to collect the subsidy that's made available from the FCC. Now this is still being modified by Congress. The appropriation is going from 3.2 billion to 14.2 billion and it's part of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act. So the book's not written on this yet, but I think we need to, and the benefit is going down from up to $50 a month to up to $30 a month. I'm bringing this to your attention because in terms of talking about affordability, we wanna build, in my opinion, a process that leans on these federal dollars that are available for certain populations in Vermont. And where there's an intersection between that group of people, the 60,000 that are un- and underserved and that group of people who qualify as low income families or households, the 40,000, there's some subset of those people that we can access these dollars to help. And it's just gonna take us some work. So as of July of 2021, only one in 12 eligible households had it been approved for these EVP subsidies and that speaks to how difficult it is to access this program. 35 ISPs in Vermont have registered to collect the subsidy. This is money that is approved to a household that the money goes directly to the ISP. So 35 ISPs have registered. I will tell you, when you look at that list, there are many companies I've never heard of before. And 13 of them are fixed broadband. So a lot of mobile providers. 55,688 for Monters or just 14% of that pool of 40,000 have registered for this program. Okay, next page please. 14% of the pool of 40,000 eligible low income. Yes. And then there's the question of, well, that's the federal program. And by the way, that's administered by the FCC. You register with a thing called USAC, the Universal Service Access Corporation. And it's basically administered by the carriers themselves. Hi, you're qualified, you have your form. I'll help you get service. The social services providers that I've talked to, they have literally said to me, I don't understand it. I just send them to this website and tell them to talk to Comcast. And that's really the level of development of our support mechanism here in Vermont. So there are companies here in Vermont that are offering discounted rates that are actually below the subsidies offered. So Comcast, 9.95 a month, Charter, 14.99 a month. Consolidated is participating in Lifeline. And I'm not even sure that they have a special rate. I'm just saying that they do participate here. But this is a whole area where commercial carriers have said, yeah, we can bring qualified low income households onto our network. Why do they do it? I just want you to be aware, why did they do it? Well, they do it because every additional household is support on the system, support on the network. And if it's going to be paid for by federal dollars, even better, right? It's all additive to the value of an existing network. And they do it for social cause reasons. I'm not saying that there's no positive public benefit. Of course there is. But I make a suggestion here for your consideration that CUDs, serving areas that are non-commercial, should not be expected to offer discount rates that are basically supported by other customers. That's the kind of thing that a big system like Comcast can afford. And it's a commercial system with a return and shareholders. And I'm not sure that our CUDs in the pockets that we're trying to serve can really expect to do that. So that's one question of affordability for you to consider. So just putting some perspective on this, if we were considering affordability to be just about the 40,000 low income for moderates, if we had them at $50 a month per household, it would cost us as a state $24 million annually. Now that's not the 60,000. That's assuming that the 40,000 were something we were going to support through our program. And this is just an illustration. And my point is that if you made a household contribution made of 22 bucks a month, that would offer you about 10.5 million. And then that public cost then, or the balance would be 13 million a year. And isn't it interesting that that would be covered by that FCC subsidy? So we could effectuate a rate of $50 a month per household. And it would only cost individual low income households $22 a month. Is that making sense to you? And we would have that would be funded from somewhere at the rate of 10.5 million dollars a year. It would be funded by low income households at a rate of 10.5 million dollars a year. I'm saying there would be a contribution by low income households. And my experience in talking to social services agencies is 22 bucks a month is doable for many. I'm not saying it's doable for all. It's doable for many. And so in developing programs around equal access to broadband, that's the benchmark we've been using. And it's certainly substantially below most retail monthly charges. Certainly it's not less than 9.95 a month from Comcast. So if you're in a Comcast service area, you would go for that. You would be more participated in that if you're a low income household. Next slide, please. So I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about what it's like to be on the edge of not being able to afford broadband in Vermont, because this is something I've come to understand fairly well. The barriers are huge. This is a population that moves a lot. So I moved again. And how do I find out who provides service? That's a baseline question for many Vermonters. I don't even know who my service provider is or how to find out. Another question is, is this an essential service? And can I afford another expense? This is a population, given any question that Pew Research showed this, that if you're asking me to pick up another cost, I'm not going to do it. So I can't necessarily manipulate between myself phone bill and my cable bill and figure out how to get to this new cost without incurring a lot of additional angst and expense. The third thing is, is there a subsidy? Where do I register and how? This is an open question. There's not a lot of information on it. Although the FCC is promoting packages to explain this now. How much is my conduit and drop? Huge barrier to service. It is the drop. And so often, in my experience, low-income residential locations require conduit. It's ironic that people can afford conduit, at least get assigned a conduit standard often. And so one of the things that we need to talk about if we're assigning standards for deployment is if we're going to include cost of connection in our construction, what are those standards for conduit and how do they impact affordability? And then this population is also often waiting for the landlord and waiting for the ISP because while the ISPs are taking the subsidies or creating a low-cost package, they're not necessarily putting these customers at the top of the list for connection. And so there's a lot of difficult orchestration. Has my landlord approved the conduit? Has my ISP come to do a survey? Most people don't even understand all that complexity. And finally, there's the barrier of how do I use broadband? Why do I use broadband? And is this new equipment that I have to buy? When you put all of that together, you can understand, well, families who are just trying to make ends meet are not rushing to broadband. Even though I could maintain, we could save them a lot of money and deliver services better if they understood this as a connection tool. And one of my poster children for this is Pat Gable who runs the state court system. Pat used to be a partner at Downs-Rackland and Pat used to be a partner at Downs-Rackland. And we got talking about how the participation of people named in suits in our state court system has grown since COVID because instead of taking a day off work to try to attend to defend a parking ticket or a child custody case or whatever the issue is, social services issue, they are able to participate over broadband where they have it. So as I said, I've been working with Equal Assets to broadband on this and we've done an enrollment trial based on a web-based social services delivery tool. And what we did was we took, we worked with a group called RISI down in Central Vermont and we did a web-based tool that identifies who the provider is at an E911 address and we helped consumers get qualified for their federal benefit and we did a web-broadband training for our partner in this trial, a social services agency called the Orange County Parent Child Center. And then we made a bridge to the CUD service provider and said, here's a person qualified for a subsidy, here's an address, it's within your system and they would like to be connected. And the missing piece here is just making sure that we have enough money to do the connection itself. I think I've spoken to a lot of these issues but one of the biggest problems that you all should be aware of is if we're talking about not just affordability generally but affordability specifically but the income folks not only are they flummoxed by the barriers that I've mentioned but they don't raise their hand and say, hi I'm a low income household and I really need your help and most of the information that identifies these people is subject to confidentiality and rules around disclosure and so it is really hard for an ISP to do this service work unless the individual household identifies themselves. Thanks Ben. So I'm wondering how we can create a broadband system that helps deliver social services gets low income families online because I think that if we encourage adoption by both sides of that equation social services and low income families it will help support these networks that we're trying to build that are in non-commercial areas. It's additional revenue that can be supported and we might find cost savings from the agencies that we're able to add back into these networks. So ultimately I think VCVV has this question will the VCVV define affordability in terms of service pricing like a quantity of data or storage or access for a particular price or will affordability be defined by creating sustainable network operating costs that keeps the cost of service down as low as it can be and how do we express that in a way that ensures our CUD collaborators implement on that low cost structure. Okay I hope that was helpful. I have a question. Early on you talked about low income and disadvantage. Could you explain with those that term disadvantage what that means? Well I don't know which context it was in but I'm thinking of that as the same thing. And really my bigger question to you is are we going to talk about affordability as trying to keep the costs down or are we going to talk about affordability as low income families and if we're going to talk about affordability as low income families then we have to talk about how to qualify them and get involved in a standard setting and all that sort of thing. So let me jump in. My head is in the space of the business model has to make sense. I would love to have these problems to address low income issues in that we have a network already built and established so we have something to deal with but first and foremost you got to build the wire you get the fiber out there you got to have the network. So the business case has to be sustainable. It has to be affordable if you price it too high no one's going to come. We have eight customers per mile in WEK service territory a lot of our service territory is this exactly what you're talking. The CUD's challenge is to build this and build it so it's affordable to everybody so you get enough uptake that it makes sense to string the fiber and then in addition to that there's folks that are low income that can't afford the affordable and then what to do in that space and how to leverage FCC funds and federal programs and federal dollars to bring that in but the first crux of this is that the business case has to stand up that affordability means normal person regardless of income is going to buy this product and I use the number if it's $200 a month I'm not buying it. If it's $89.90 yes but like there's a normal standard that the CUD's have to build this to that gets the fiber deployed and if that doesn't happen then there's no low income problem to solve because we don't have the fiber to even attach them to. To attempt to take the word affordability out of what your definition this was is it fair to say that what you're looking for is a business plan where the expectation of customers per mile will be met like it's priced so that you will attain what the business plan is for customers per mile. I'm going to go steal Brian's line again but I think the CUD's or whoever's building this have to put forward a plan that's viable however they figure that out and I don't want to put so the pricing has to be the pricing has to be the plan like you said and that by definition has to be affordable enough so that people actually do what the plan proposes and we're going to need to see evidence of their take rate of 50% or 60% is backed by this business case because at the end of the day they have to go to the bank too they're going to grant dollars to help they're going to get 25-35% off coupon but they still have to go to the bond markets. The bond markets are going to want to say if you're going to charge 100 bucks and you're saying your take rate is 90% they're going to challenge them on that if you're going to charge 100 bucks and your take rate is 40% that passes the left test so to speak. So the business plan that they put forward I want to give them enough room to sell for affordability and then they can then roll out and then what we should be talking about is potentially okay as part of their submission for construction funds what do they plan to do on low income space and let them come to us with their ideas that's my suggestion. That suggestion I think it's imperative for us you know the sustainable network operating cost I think is So, you know, in watching this and thinking about this for a long time, you know, this is, we are supporting public entities delivering critical infrastructure, which is not the model that currently exists for delivering broadband. And so, you know, when we think about these questions, I think about like, well, how does the, how do the electric utilities, you know, but how do they deal with this, which is the frame that I want to be in when thinking about policy for the CUDs? The other thing I would note just in case everyone has not heard my rant on the FCC funding, I mean, those, those programs largely have been driven by the Comcast, the AT&T, the private providers in order to take dollars away from building community broadband infrastructure. So, the first programs that, the 3.2 billion, those funds, you know, we had a sense that those funds were coming to support the building of community broadband. We had a good sense that that's what was happening, and it changed within a few days to become a temporary subsidy for broadband, for those that are providing it, right? So, for those who are already providing it. So, they used the 3.2 million for low income, sorry, 3.2 billion for low income. So, it was that 3.2 billion was going to go out to states and block grants for the building of community broadband potentially, and other, you know, working with private providers, but to build infrastructure. And that was scuttled. That was the first round of funds that came out at the end of the Trump administration. That was scuttled and put into this temporary subsidy program, the 3.2 billion. So, it will build nothing. It is not sustainable. It doesn't last forever. And now, so then we had another tranche that came through, which has funded the work that we'll see now. And we're potentially seeing another tranche coming through that's going to double down on that.  I would like to believe that that is all being done for low income. It is not. That's a horrible thing that happened was because it's administered through the existing mechanism that's called lifeline. Some of the carriers, and this has been addressed in the subsequent bill, some of the carriers actually required people to take certain kinds of services, high price services, so they can maximize the subsidy they got against the cost of that service. Things happen. I don't think we have to spend a lot of time on it because it's going to exist. I think the real challenge is we may need to create some ways to ensure that our little CUDs can access the federal subsidy money. And the new bill is 2,077 pages, so I didn't get it all read last night. But kind of working on that, you know, how to, working on what I think will be a letter to Senator Leahy's office about how does, how do we work together with that system? Patty, I apologize. I have to leave for a legislative hearing. Okay, okay. I'll watch those comments after. Thank you very much for all your work and feedback. I'm going to propose that we have for our next meeting, we have for September 16th, we're going to invite Mikuta, Tim, and potentially friends, is to have them address the affordability issue and thoughts about how to deal with it. Let's hear from the folks on that side for affordability and low income. I think that'd be great. I mean, there is some need to do low income. I will say this, you know, equal access to broadband is trying to create a mechanism that other CUDs can plug into so that everyone doesn't have to recreate the wheel of how to do this. But there is a lot of interest among the CUDs of how to do low income. It is incredibly, administratively intensive. One thing I should note in the pre-construction RFP that was put out, they were asked to just give their thoughts on it. Like we listed a variety of different conditions in Act 71 and it's kind of putting it out to them like you need to start thinking about this. We want to see evidence that you've started thinking. We don't expect you to have a full plan at this point. Like that's impossible, but we want to know that you're thinking about it. So that's information we will be all viewing as we review applications. It may be hard for them to even get the information that says how many low income families they have or where that is impactful on their network. Well, they should certainly elaborate on any of the challenges that they face such as that in their applications. We just want to understand this better and know they're thinking about it. That's right. But I think my personal opinion is that affordability does need to just be generally addressed to the business plan. And the system has to be sustainable and that addressing extreme need. Like everybody won't find the benchmark pricing in whatever network affordable. I mean, you know, if it's 50 bucks, if it's 50 bucks, I may not be in a household that says, yeah, I have a spare 50 bucks I want to spend. But I think this group and Vecuda are going to have to help down the road in getting affordability education together or make proposals to the legislature about that. And the FCC is starting to work on this too. How do you afford broadband internet service in and cut costs in other places? How can you make that work? Dan or Brian, do you have any comments? I think it should be this the way a grant application addresses affordability should be part of the criteria we're looking at pretty hard. Okay. Roll it into the matrix, roll it into the again, I don't think we should provide them as much information as we can. It's not ours to solve, it's ours to help them factor into their planning. But I do hear you saying that it's not like we're going to sit here and determine for them what affordability is in terms of a price point. I agree. That's exactly what I'm saying. I think it's theirs to present and figure out a way around that. Because they have to make a business model stand-out. I agree with that. I think having a sustainable network got to the very baseline to get started and then it will evolve. If they don't get the right take rate, it won't be sustainable. And then we'll be taking on a network that we don't be able to come back. And so that affordability, I think it's very important for a whole host of equity issues. And I think it'll evolve and improve as it starts to spin as the fight goes. So that's really a conversation about what the rate is for service and what about the connection cost? I mean, do we have consensus in terms of affordability about, and this was among our guidelines that we are going to look to staff to create. But I just want to be aware that it's not just a great discussion. It's also a connection discussion. I have a comment that goes back to the same. Each CED should make a proposal because they're right there at the ground. And if you're talking about a trailer park, they should be working with a landlord and getting access to the conduits and building their infrastructure, which stays in the facility, but it's repeatedly usable or that CED or an apartment building or what have you, but creating those arrangements and then addressing that in their response. Okay, any other comments? So we have 15 minutes before the public input. Do we have time to do the website? Why don't we just punt on the website right now? I'm not going to have time to work on it in the next few weeks. And this might be something that we can do. Can you just give an update of what website with this? So we do have a domain now. It's not active. It's still in draft form. That's just bcvd at vermont.gov. Our current website is still on the public service department website, and it just contains the list of board members, contact information, just email for all the board members, the minutes, the agendas, the board materials, and then just a list of links like the RFP is posted there. What I'm envisioning for our larger website is to have all the information about the CUDs, potentially even have a page for each CUD, to have all the materials that were, all the public materials that we're collecting to allow for greater transparency. Is it not possible to do that through the PPS website spots that you're that we're occupying now? Is it like iView having that transparency and access to public information, high value, us having a separate website, low value, if we can accomplish it through the DPS location, you know what I mean? We would have to talk to the public service department whether we can have a separate section where we can break out different menu items as opposed to just a single page that's linked. There's the whole question that concerns them wanting to make sure that there is that barrier. That's evident and I think that's a question for public service department. Either way we're still within the state framework of what the site needs to look like, so it's not either way it involves building content and linking content and figuring out how it's set up there, so it's not like one project is 100 hours, another project is 10 hours unfortunately. Any other questions on website comments? All right we are a little early but let's move to before we move to public input. Is there anything from the executive director that you want to violate? Just make sure you have ample time because we have a few extra minutes. Let's move to public input and hopefully nobody is signing on at 12.15 to get public input. We'll probably still be going to them. We will allocate three minutes per speaker in the event somebody, if we have sufficient time because we're early, will come back around and give more time if folks would like to have more time. I'm going to suggest, Tim, that we wait till the end for you. My name is Will. I'm sorry. It's quite all right. Yes, I think that's good. Does anyone else from the CDs that would like to speak first I think that would probably be best. Yeah, Tim, that's the other gentleman. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I bet you guys mixed up. So I guess if there's anybody online please raise your hand and I'll unmute you and put you on video. Anybody? Okay, Christa. One second, Christa. Can you unmute yourself in on video or is that something I'm going to have to change in settings again? There you go. Thank you. Sorry, I didn't know. Yeah. Okay. Are we all set? You can hear me? Thanks. So I guess responding to a couple of the questions that you were looking for input on are things that were discussed today. One of them was around phasing and what is responsible. And so I just wanted to provide a quick comment on that. There's no doubt in our mind that construction needs to be phased and you have to really look at that in a phased manner. And that is the only way to do that responsibly. But the design is different. The design informs when you when you have an area that's as large as the Northeast Kingdom. And I think that this is true for most of the CUDs. You have to take your whole design into consideration in order to understand certain portions of it. Where are you going to put things? How are things going to interact?  And that helps us understand where are the areas that have a lot of make ready because somebody hasn't done their maintenance or where are the areas that are great because they're solely owned or they're easy to do. And that informs it and that's connected to the whole territory. The other piece is that we're looking at 25% of our project being funded with grant funds, which means the remainder has to be done through finances. And when we look at finances and we look at what does that time frame take, it takes a good deal of time in order to do that. So if you want to get a very thorough business plan versus the high level business plans that we're starting with, if you really want to go in and understand what do you have to do? How are you going to do it? And how are you going to bring this to the bond market? And what are the thresholds that you have to meet in order to get there? And how are you going to get there with the different parts of your CUD district? Then you have to be able to understand that whole picture and that whole design. So we feel pretty strongly that, yes, we will have our entire design done within the 18 months. Yes, we do understand that there are portions of it that will have to be refreshed if, you know, in a couple of years things have changed or been modified. But those locations that are out on the edges that are the unserved, pretty sure they're still going to be unserved in a couple of years in that, you know, consolidated or others aren't going to step up beyond what obligations they've already committed themselves to over the next 10 months. So that's the piece on that. In terms of the June 1st question, I think we can provide additional comments on that. But I, so I'll leave that. And I think there was a third one, but I don't have it in my notes right here. It must be on my online notes. So I think that's all I have right now. Thank you, Krista. You're welcome. Okay, next up, it looks like it's Kristen. Let me spotlight you. You can unmute yourself and I will take you off. You can use the state who you're representing just so we have that clear Krista was with N.E.K. Broadband and Kristen was with N.E.K. Broadband. Oh, you're muted, Kristen. So Krista is our interim executive director at N.E.K. Broadband. I'm the vice chair of N.E.K. Broadband and also the vice chair of Vicuda. And I know that Will is going to bring a lot of items to the table, but since Krista wasn't able to address the June 1st question, I would say that I can speak both from an N.E.K. Broadband perspective and a Vicuda perspective that, you know, if we need to go in and make some legislative word changes in the new session, we can do that. But our understanding of intent and I assume everyone's hope is that towns will continue to join the CUDs. And if we don't update the date that you're considering, you know, the number of addresses unserved, if that is the primary metric by which you are distributing funds, if we can't update that as the I understand you need a date when you're starting around a funding. You need a date so you can distribute things. But that needs to be updated for each round or else you're basically asking CUDs to accept members that they won't get any funding to to serve. So, you know, we need to work together, Vicuda, and your board to figure out if they're, you know, if we need to request legislative changes. I think we, I think personally, I think it's clear that the June 1st deadline was intended to be towns that can't leave a CUD at that point, not that towns can't join a CUD at that point. But in any case, that's my primary comment. Thank you. Is there anybody else online? Given that we at this point we have, we have plenty of time. So what I'd like to do is turn it to Tim and Will. Rob, I'm going to let you tee this up, but we can give you more time because with the, we have sufficient time with which to give you. So let's start with six minutes each, if needed. Sounds right to me. All right. Tim, would you like to go first? Yeah. These are relatively random thoughts about points that came up during the discussion. And I'd like to talk. Tim, just stay for the record. Who you're representing. I'm the CEO of Mastio Community Fiber. Thank you. And I used to be the CEO of B-Cycle from Mastio Community Fiber. And before that I was the CEO of Burlington Telephone. And I had the long checkered history way back beyond that that you don't want to hear about. But you might, I don't know. On the overbuilt question, we're getting a lot of approaches from small communities in areas that are assured by somebody else. Comcast consolidated. So consider an area, typically it's Comcast, like that.  And we have a policy. We will not build or compete with Comcast. And that's not ideological. We're a small local company doing this with our own money. I have a million dollars of my own money in it. And we are simply not in a position to poke the dragon in his way. So here we are. Now, overbuilt is not really about building the whole thing in reality for a competitor, somebody like us. Overbuilt is how do we get a single wine from our territory to theirs? If this is a single wine, and we can theoretically do it with one single fiber, we could in fact do it with one lambda on a single fiber. Lambda is a particular color. But one single line will do. They don't make quality cables with one. So we do having something like six. That is very cheap. A single wine down in there, not serving anybody here, let alone here. Just one single wine like that. Very cheap. No drops along the way. If you have to do drops, it's a completely different undertaking. Furthermore, if the shortest way is on a major road, you know, route 15, so we could go down to here along here and be there. That's the shortest way, let's say. That's not the cheapest usually because it's very expensive to build on major thoroughfare. It might very well be cheaper to go like this on small roads. In fact, frequently it is. This is hardly any make ready. There's nobody on those poles. You just strangle on them. That is not overbuilding, not in any meaningful way. That's the real question. The point that Ms. Sibilia brought up about overbuilding writ large is not really on the table. That's on the table. Can we run a line, a single line, typically with six fibers in it, down to a point of presence here from which we can serve that. That's really the question. It's cheap, relatively speaking, but for us, who have, you know, I was a husband of any very gravely, cheap ain't cheap. My mother used to say, I come from a very low income family originally. And while I had to go shopping with my mom and I'd say, it's hot. I was out of fishing boats. It's actually happened. I was out of fish hooks. Mom, I need some fish hooks. And there's a package on the head. It's only a quarter for 23 fish hooks. Can't we spend it? And she said, Tim, how much have you got from your allowance? And so my allowance was a dime a week. I was going to die. She said, Timothy, a quarter ain't cheap if you only got a dime. And she didn't buy it. So that's my hometown is Lunenburg in the Northeast Kingdom. So the way, based on what you're saying, the way we should look at this concept of Overville is if it's getting from one location to a point of presence, no drops along the way, six strand or some smaller than you would, you'd never built six strand to do retail service. Then even if it winds along some back roads where there is existing infrastructure, as long as it's not creating drops along the way, your recommendation would be don't really look at that as Overville. Okay, thank you. And the distinction is huge. And you have to have been in the business a long time. I understand that distinction. Building a network that serves everybody along the line and building a network that just goes down the road is orders of magnitude. But in that scenario, if space needs to be created on a pole for your six strands, that's still a reality. But usually on these back roads it's not a problem. I would say 60% or 80% of back roads need no macro data. Our builds typically has no more than 60% of the of the builds need any make ready and usually is 60% don't need any.  It's cheaper because there isn't any make ready, right? And that the shorter route is presumably congested. Yeah, because you're going down route 15, there's 17 things on there. There's going to be a lot of movement, a lot of poles will have to be replaced. Let alone building in a town. That's a fortune. Is that a short term, long term differential though, because you're going to have many more feet of maintenance in the neandering route? Maintenance is a small problem. Okay. If you build a decent network and it's fiber, maintenance was a much bigger deal with copper. Because copper deteriorates. Fiber doesn't, this fiber up in the United States was put up in 1955 and still there and working. Believe it or not, not very good, but it's still there because glass is one of the most durable non, what was the last time you saw a pane of glass put in in 1755 anything wrong with it at all? Well, actually you don't want to go there. Well, there's the there's the wiggles because they didn't make glass very well, but the glass didn't deteriorate. So will you also be looking at off road versus on road? So I work at Washington Electric Co-op. So we have 50% of our lines. Let me finish this thought. 50% of our lines are off road, not roadside through the hills, through the valley, like super rural. And it's very cheap to put a line up. It is super expensive to maintain it because it's off road. If you if you use, you know, 10,000 pounds strands, okay. Even that isn't very hard. I mean, nothing breaks that stuff. I've seen I've seen that stuff stop a truck that was going down the road with something a little too high hit across. It was a little too low and it was going 30 miles an hour and it was stopped by the strand. And usually usually the trees, the faith, the electric lines stopped it before because of the fiber. Yeah, exactly because the electric lines are on the top. So you have a problem, but not the telecom. It's a very, I mean, it's actually because it's more expensive to put it people out there in level four by fours and climb the bulls. That's a serious issue. But most, it isn't too hard if you're looking to find a route that doesn't have off road stuff for very little and doesn't have any make right. Yeah. But we are getting a lot of these calls in our territories. And we're saying, look, we're happy to serve you. We'll even take the chance that Comcast will get mad at us and come in and fill it. But we need some help with this. And I'm just saying, if you get those kind of calls, be sympathetic. That's very helpful. Nine minutes. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Sam. We're going to turn it over to Will. All right. Thank you. If you can just say your name and yeah, yeah, of course, I'll briefly introduce myself as well, just for everyone online. My name is Will Anderson. And as of yesterday, I'm full time the first full time employee of the Cuda, which is the CUD, Vermont CUD Association. And I've been charged by the board generally with administration and policy side issues for the association. And thus, all nine of the CUDs.  And I'll just try to address a couple of points about that and certainly expand on them more when I am ideally at the table for the meeting next week on the 16th. Next week? Yes. So the key issue that we want to figure out as the Cuda right now is what kind of relationship we can have with this board, how we can interact and how we can feedback on policy recommendations. This has been something that we found pretty nebulous so far. We have requested that there be a procedure established for how we can receive your proposals and how we can influence your decisions. Because we believe that as the board is designated to monitor the CUDs, the CUDs should at least have a prominent seat at the table of influence in those decisions. So, can I clarify? Are you asking for seat at this VCBB? I think that's, I think that this is something I'd like to continue to discuss at our meeting on Monday, of course on Thursday the 16th. We're slated t