Okay, we call the meeting in order at 8.34. There we go. Welcome everybody to our second meeting. In a jam packed small room. Roll call. Christie, what it roll call. Just make sure everybody's here. I'm just for the record, no, all board members are in attendance. The staff, Rob and Christine. You don't have any other meeting ground rules to discuss unless anybody has anything they want to bring up. Okay, that brings us to approval of the minutes. We have drafted minutes that were circulated. Like Christine. And Monday the 9th. I'll take a motion to approve. Second. Second. Any discussion. I would like to know that to me, it would be helpful if it wasn't. By the minute organized by the minutes or a chronology. But rather a topic. Subheader. This is this goes 1001, 1005, 1015. If you ever needed to review minutes. It would be much easier. If there was subject matter that. Tracked with the agenda. Who's the, who's the minute. For now. Oh dear. Okay. Sorry. Yeah, we'll deal with it then. We'll deal with it then. I'm having a hard time just keeping track of the times. I never got the minutes. So. We have. We're asking people to wear masks. In here. We're going to ask you. For you to be careful. Deviately. Yeah. Last one. Last night. We're in here. Attached to the revised agenda or something. 252. I also want to make sure my email address. Laura. No, that just goes to my phone. What's your email address. To my left side address. Sure. Would it be helpful if I hold a, would it be helpful if I pull the drop. It's up on the, up on the screen. Yeah, we're ready. Thanks. Yeah, we're fine. Cause I think we're going to focus our discussion. Yeah. So the only other thing before we move into staffing discussion and presentation. We will add to. Standing item on all agendas and executive session. Just in case. Sure. Sure. Would it be helpful if I hold it? Would it be helpful if I pull the drop minutes up on the agenda or something? Okay. So we're going to move into the second session. Just in case we need to go into the second session. Okay. We can open as. Like for some of the entities that I've worked for, you just have a standing in the second session. No time certain. Right. Sure. So, okay. Who moved. To support. I did. Emotion. Okay. I'll emotion. The second. Okay. Thank you. It's hard to participate. So what you're saying is a possible executive session. Just put that generally at the top of a. Agenda. I haven't put it last. Put it last. Okay. So. Look at our organization. We have a standing executive session at the top. Time certain. But we don't go into it at the very beginning of the meeting. It just. It leads notice that there potentially could be an executive session. Okay. So we can put. You know, Behind it to be determined or anything like that. So it's not a. People aren't feeling like there's going to be some private discussion happening. Okay. All right. So we can move on now to stepping. Did we get an approval of the agenda? I missed that. Take action on the agenda. Okay. All right. Let's, let's take, let's go follow the agenda as you've laid out. Let's come back to the item one. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the changes and request. Does anybody have any discussion on the agenda? I would like to propose that we do go into executive session on the staffing. Discussion. Yeah, we go. From an organization design standpoint, we should probably do that public. I'm not talking about organization design. Issues when I'm thinking about this staffing issue, though, I didn't know that it was. You know, I don't know. I don't know. As an agenda item. Yeah, I'm just saying. Why don't we cross the bridge when we get there? When we get into. Point being this is not. I don't expect this to be. In. In private and executive section. Yeah. So what we can do is if there are any personnel matters that are specific to a person. Or. Potentially could cause a concern in terms of a human resource related matter. We'll discuss if that subject warrants going to, into executive session, but it's a general discussion. We'll keep it in open. Right. And I think some will be on the scale to keep everything in open session. And I'm just letting you know that I would like to have the opportunity to consider going to executive session. And it's definitely discussion today. Absolutely. Okay. All right. Going back to the minutes. I'm sorry. The agenda. I have a motion to approve the agenda. Second. Thank you. All those in favor. I. Any post. Gender passes. Okay. Now we are into staffing discussions. Christine will turn that over to you. Yes. So what I've done is the first page. This is the staffing discussion. Take action. And share that for everybody else. So I've been having Robin. I've been having discussions. I've been having discussions with you. Her staff. About the elimination of responsibilities. And what you're seeing by this. Slide here. Is. Kind of a. Assimilation of all the thoughts and ideas. So, you know, one of the things that we talked about, I'm not sure where this comes from, but when it comes to grant administration. The, when I say administration, I'm referring to Scott's administration. They're taking full responsibility for ensuring that all grants in the state comply. With the ARPA requirements. So there's a chain that kind of goes from federal requirements to state requirements. To state requirements. To state requirements. Through the DPS. To us. So. Jewish group. Plans on continuing. To take responsibility for the regulatory side. Of grant administration. You would have to explain what. What a regulatory side of grant administration means. I'm going to ask that question. Thank you. Let's go to the real discussion. Right. We're, there's a level of. Discipline. That. The administrator wants to ensure. That these crats fall. So, and, and, and. And even if you're more. Since you would help break the bill. The position statement is that, hey. We didn't want. Regulatory oversight. I don't believe that we're housed under the DPS except for the fact that we happen to share a facility that is allocated by the DPS. There is nothing about this group that is under the DPS. This role is part of the DPS, right? You are an employee of the DPS, but the governor appoints the executive director and then this board can decide to dismiss that executive director and hire another one. There is no oversight by the commissioner of this group, this in particular person. I see no basis in the legislation to say that we are under the DPS. I don't know if you have some comments. I don't, but my question is with regard to grant management and grant reporting. So what is the experience of the CUD? I don't think, I would say that we made a decision, I guess we're determining that, right? Yeah, the experience of the CUDs, I think they just got through this. We had to pull the spaghetti piles, that's my answer. Your question is, you know, I think you've got a really good question there as well. At the point, I don't think the CUDs, and I certainly won't say that I have, well, but we had a grant administrator at DPC, we did about $35 million in grants. So I've had some experience, but the ARPA requirements, all grant requirements, you know, it's fairly straightforward, you analyze the grant, you do the reporting quarter, what the grant says, right? I don't think the CUD, that all said, when you say how much experience, you know, it's a judgment call, I would say that the CUDs have limited experience. What would you say, Rob? It's the wrong question. I think I'm being misunderstood. So my point will be, and the place that I want to start from is, how do the CUDs experience this process? That's the place that I want to start from. So, you know, who are they, where's the application for the grant funding going to? You know, we make the determination, and then, but how is the communication going back and forth? And then my bias will be towards simplicity as well as a good government, accountability. Well, maybe it would be helpful if I give what's happening now versus what we may be envisioning happening. There's still a lot of unanswered questions that we're seeking some clarification on. So what has been happening prior to the creation of the BCBB is that an RFP is issued by the state, by the department, to all the different possible applicants. In the case of the pre-instruction loans in 315, that was just communication in the districts and their partners. They submit an application. That application is reviewed by staff and a recommendation was made to the director in telecom and the commissioner that the grant was awarded, was announced. There's a whole other step after that in terms of developing the grant agreement, which we went through a process with the lawyers to make sure we had a strong grant agreement that took into account all the federal and state guidelines, the ARPA funds. They're challenging. There's a lot of different rules that have to be followed. That has been a challenge for me in explaining to the CUDs. That's not my official background in grant management. It's been a challenge for them understanding that. Once the way the grant agreement is executed, it was routed through the public service department, through the admin department, and then sent through, not SharePoint, one sign to the CUDs to sign off. And then the final signature came from the commissioner. Then they have to submit an invoice and any other steps in between within the grant agreement. So it is quite the process. What I'm still unclear about is what role the department is going to play in this new process going forward. A lot of those steps aren't optional. It may be a question of who's going to do what. When it comes to writing the grant agreement, for instance, that might be something that is a combination. When it comes to actually routing it through OneSpan, that's something that's more technical in nature. What is OneSpan? Just to get the signatures, to entering all the data into the state grant tracking systems. That's something that's not where there is qualitative changes being made or anything. It's getting things done, getting the signatures done, making sure everything is there that needs to be done. But the person signing these grant agreements is Christine as the executive director. That is my understanding. I'm just following the legislation here. The group approving these grant agreements is this board. The form of document, which includes the ARPA, I've read the grant agreement that went to NECA as a COD. It's got all kinds of errors in it, but it does have a section that distills ARPA requirements and lists them. As long as you have that format approved for the boilerplate, there isn't a lot. It's just like the Attorney General's Office puts out a boilerplate of a set of terms that has to go into the grant agreement. You don't want to bother negotiating with that. It's more pain than it's worth, although it's a pretty direct problem for private enterprise to comply with some of those state requirements. Okay. One thing I have to put out there is if it's attachment C, we are not, that is set by the state as a whole. That is not something that is set by DPS and that is a requirement. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. These are boilerplate terms, so we don't need review of those for every grant agreement. We just need to comply with the set of terms. I'd still ask you the question, what's the role of the DPS and what's regulatory review? Yeah, and that's my decision on deliberation, because we're also going to be, all of the CUDs and us will be required for a single audit, the Republic of the single audit. I've talked to Doug Hopper's office, and he plans on randomly auditing some of the CUDs over time, which I think it's all checks and balances. So the question becomes, I really want to get a process flow diagram here. We don't need to do that today, that's our decision. The outcome should be what's the process flow diagram. Does it stop here with our board, or does it continue to flow to the DPS and then to the administration? For review, do you mean an approval? Yes. Why would the legislature bother creating this organization? The funds have to come from, no, no, the funds are. The funds are here. The funds are at the department. Yes. Funds are at the department, so the fund has been established at the department. That's my plan right now. But we allocate it. Yes. So to the extent that the department needs to reconcile the fund balance sheet, because that keeps it connected to the state budgeting process, I see it. I see that. But that it is an administrative check at best. When it comes to the content, I believe that stays with the board and at the board recommendations, but that is something where there may need to be some clarification or reiterating a board's position. By whom? I think we just go with the way we interpreted and somebody wants to challenge us on a headscrew. Yeah. That's what I think. Christine, this conversation makes me think we should have presentation done maybe by a lawyer regarding this. What is the role of the PST in this process? I'm just looking at staffing-wise. Are we planning to review every grant? Are we going to be doing? Yeah. I think that's why we're here. We're digging in. What is the administrative support that we have through the PST? Because I think we are going to need some. We are going to need help. That's why we're having this. I know. But as we start to build this, as we start pulling apart the onions and we see the details of it, I think some legal guidance going through the legislation would help. Yeah. So that's why you see in the DCP staff a legal component. You know, when that lawyer comes a question of, do we hire a full-time lawyer, which is the DPS's interpretation, or do we contract for legal services? This is why I was going to request executive session because I have an answer for you. Okay. Unless it's a particular person, I'm going to suggest we stay in a full-time session. And it is contract negotiation as well. But I just want to have at least buy-in of the board and then we can be public about what we were doing or not doing. So at this point, we're talking about whether we need a person or... So I think that we're getting confused here, though, because the question on the table was, to your point, legislative interpretation. For my money, we would invite Maria Royal, who was out of staff council during the creation of the bill, in and we would ask questions. And she would say, well, you know, it was my direction to do this or I thought we drafted it so it would do that. You know, she could give us a real-time feedback from both chambers, which is useful. I agree. I think that would be really helpful to have each council come in and do that presentation. And we have a different discussion about our legal expertise. And our staffing. Our staffing, exactly. That's a different discussion. Yeah, so focusing right now is, what do we want the process to be for the grants? And what I'd like to do is bring that process flow diagram into a meeting for your approval. So that, you know, puts your blessing on it to make sure we've interpreted correctly. But what I hear you say is that you believe the role of the DPS is really to reconcile the funds between the grants that we approve and the ARPA funds. Is that what I hear? I think the board asked to have Ledge Council. Okay, so we'll have Ledge Council come in and then we'll define the process flow. We can all interpret it in our own way, but I think it would be helpful to have that grounding discussion. Okay, so we'll bring Ledge Council in. Future meeting. And is that... Yeah, I mean, we're talking about three steps, right? I think the highlight responsibilities are we need to gather together and make public all the grant funding opportunities there are. And that will change over time, hopefully, right? So make that public, in one place, make that publicly aware and what's available and what we're overseeing. The second step is what's the process that you can apply to gain access to those funds. Fully transparent, that's the process what Christine is talking about. And we're the administrators, or Christine's the administrator of that process while we're involved in the review of it. And then the third thing is after funds have been awarded to have transparency on what's been awarded, the content of the award, and then tracking the performance of the award against the reality on the ground. Because we have to reconcile those because we're not going to waste money. I think that is a great summarization of our next steps. Yeah, it's like my understanding is that it's like we deal with all that side of things, deciding what to approve. And in terms of getting the grant agreement out, getting the funds out, and accounting for those funds that more stays with the department. So anything that's subjective is with us. The thing, I mean... Except for grant performance, is not with the department. The grant performance is not, no. Not, I think, is where we are looking at having some grant in, financing grant hadn't been support within our staff here as to be able to deal with that side of things in terms of reviewing contracts, going through any contract review process of accepting the reports, of being that point person. This comes down to where it's, for the past few months, I've been wearing about 1,000 hats. And I think I've been doing a darn good job, but there's a few things that are not... Nobody, I'm so curious about that. There's a few things that are not where I'm the expert on and where they need dedicated support. And this is where we start getting that help. Exactly. Absolutely. But in my experience, so I did this five years ago, I did this on the healthcare side where we were administering healthcare innovation grant money. The biggest thing we're going to get challenged on is what is the criteria that you are judging between applications against and are you being consistent and transparent in the application of that criteria on the awards and your decision-making for the awards? That is where we got wrapped around the axle about 1,000 times because we never said, we never had a nice clean black and white. Here are the criteria and everyone will be assessed on these. So it was all in fighting and you're favoring them versus us. I think that will be useful is later on in the agenda. We are actually going through a draft RFP for the pre-construction program. The construction program is going to take a lot more discussion, but this will help you see of what's in an RFP and how we lay all that out. And how you're interpreting the grant requirements. Yes. But that's an RFP you're issuing out. That's not incoming grant applications for monies that we are responsible to distribute, right? No, this would be in state government, they seem to call that issuing an RFP, but it's issuing the grant, it's issuing the request for applications for the grant program. So that's where the criteria will be listed and determine like how we're gonna judge those applications. Great, thanks. I do think that there's a policy decision that comes before all of that process of specific RFP requirements for pre-construction and construction. And that's to get straight some of our interpretation of our role as an aggregator, as the partnership facilitator, as the state plan administrator, are there things that happen at the umbrella level that then sets up grant criteria? On the state umbrella level, I'm sorry. I mean, there are criteria in the legislation. There are, and I think we can't just slide right to the allocation of funds without considering some of those roles. So when you talk about the umbrella level, that would be this board? Yes. So since we're gonna be speaking about later in the agenda, I feel like we may have moved away from the staffing discussion. Yeah, so there's really had some good debate around some of the issues that we were struggling with. I mean, I think the GIS professionalism probably shouldn't be there, there's some technical application. And I see this as a question when it says shared. I see this as a question of the best resource may not be an employee. Yeah, I think where we have examples of potential shared resources, that is something we will determine what is whether it's an employee, whether it's contract or otherwise. So just on the GIS, I would recommend against hiring full-time dedicated GIS professional and I would strongly recommend we figure out how to leverage existing GIS talent both at the state and the private sector to get what we want. Yeah, the state, we're not, we aren't gonna get it from the state level. I've had a lot of deliberation on that because of the load that they have, but he certainly has some strong local resources. Yeah, but I just, again, I'm gonna make a pre-judgment and so I reserve the right to be wrong later, but I'm not gonna, it'll be a hard sell on me to hire a full-time GIS person to serve this board. And why? Well, that's not true. That's not what I thought you saw here before. Just because there is, that is a, that is, Dan's stopped back me up on this one, buddy, that is an available skill set that we have adjacent interest with whether it's in the utility sector or some of the other private companies that, green energy companies, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of organizations that I know would love to collaborate with us on this and provide out-of-the-box skill set technology and data that all aligns with what we're trying to do. This is, this should not be a high. Right, so just for clarity though, the need for that function is there. We just don't need to hire it. I don't think we need to hire it per se. Because it exists at a lot of different companies and we just need to allocate the time. And so to get it, to get that resource and apply it, perhaps almost full-time here, I think is important, but to hire it full-time. There's a lot of risk in doing that because there's tool set up and integration. It's a vital skill set. We agree, vital function. And we're not saying, just to put a cherry on top, we're not saying that we don't need a central repository and standard bearer for the data that this board uses. We do, you agree. And so it's really about getting an RFP. Laura had a comment before. Yeah, I'm sorry. So I just want to confirm what I heard, which was there are no state GIS resources available for contracting for this board. Not enough level that we need. What we're doing is we're providing this service to the CUDs. Each CUD needs to do analysis based on root design and all that. So instead of each CUD hire the GIS professional, we centralize it, get the data centralized. There is no state resources available to do that. In fact, we had a strong discussion about keeping a firewall between the DPS data and our data because of much of the DPS data is confidential. So trying to split that confidentiality makes it difficult. We're going to have different applications for the use of this information. So we're really talking about carrier data, ISP data? Well, that's a subset of the fact that what we're looking for is far more than what, right now there's a shared resource. And you should know that I've been doing this myself with the CUDs. I certainly don't plan on doing it in this position, but it's, there's a lot of work there in terms of GIS and it's more work than the department can handle. That's the highest level issue. And just talking about a little bit more, it's also, we have it up here twice. One is for the GIS stuff that the board will be doing. We also wanted to have as a shared resource, GIS tools and licenses for all the CUDs. That's one area where every CUD doesn't need to be doing it. It's better to have a single place. So it's going to be quite the contract or a full-time position. I know a previous to be CVDA working for the department and very closely with their GIS person, where it's about a thousand other hats too. And it's fresh to the limit and been incredibly helpful, but it's something where we need to have our own GIS resources and as soon as possible, frankly. So I'm glad you made that point, Rob, really good point. I think we need to be very deliberate about separating. Are we looking at resources that are dedicated to serving the mission of this board? Versus, are we looking at resources to help supplement the competencies of the CUDs? Because those, they can be shared resource, but they need to be chartered separately. So I would say on this top left, right? The way I read that, this is just my interpretation, my first impression of it. The DPS is responsible for the E911 database, right? And we said last time we met, and if this has changed, please let me know. There's a separate E911 board and VCGI deals with that. I'm just talking about, we said- The broadband availability data. Yeah, we said the DPS is gonna be the source of truth for that. We're gonna rely on that and that's, we're not gonna allow competing sources of truth to be developed, right? So that's what that GIS position or skill set needs to own. I think that's a DPS function, and that is something that the DPS in collaboration with this board have to make sure that we have the resource and that they're chartered properly in addition to whatever else they're doing. You're looking to be funny. I'm just saying they don't have the resource to provide the additional support or even a lot of the support that I can be pretty demanding. And I've been pretty demanding on making sure I get the support that we need. How have they kept the list of locations of today so far? They have a GIS person that does that as long as one of their other tasks. But as the board, there's gonna be a lot of other GIS- Not to see you these days. No, even the DPS has the board.  Off of that data?  It's all in there. I should have taken it. Yeah, but somebody's got to compile it. And we're not gonna ask the department to do that. Because- Well, that's a different thing. The department is- The department is- Yeah, well, all right. You tell, but you won't get your data on time because there's long delays between request and response. And I'm fine with that as long as you're fine with that. Let me unpack this real quick. I think we're not talking about, we don't wanna do another dataset of the broadband availability. As we start having projects, we need the GIS skills to be able to evaluate those projects. That is where the GIS skills that's with our staff comes in. We're not talking about creating a whole new dataset. We don't wanna go there. It's like a, it's a months-long process. The new GIS data, the new broadband availability data won't be available till October at the, at the soonest on the state level. That's not what we're gonna take on. This is more for being able to take that data, take other data, synthesize it together so we can make good decisions and have that, have that in-house is what the proposal- Are projects designs, like, or like routing, or is that what you're talking about? Those types of things. Yeah, and for example, you know, one of the things we're looking at, you'll see later on the presentation is, percentage of unserved by CUD, right?  Christine, you said something about, I believe everything here is gonna be public reference. You said something about some of this data might be sensitive. Massive data we're using. We're gonna use all public data. We don't need it. I don't even want the sensitive data. I don't wanna be able to do everything here based on public data. I'd like you to tell us categorically, though, what the sensitive data you won't be using is. And that's, so that's a debate I don't wanna get into, but we can hire a lawyer for that one. The issue I'm told is not the including part of this. The table. I'm sorry. Yes. No, I know there's some. One at a time. Go ahead, Molly. I'm thinking that this is labeled staff and your question is will we need professional GIS services? And I hear lots of, yes. On staff. On staff. Well, I consider staff to be by contract. Okay, great. Yeah, we do too. Yeah, or by employee. But if you want us to vote right now, whether it's an employer or a contractor, okay. But there's also a conversation that's inherent to what's going on. That's about the topic at 1130 baseline data presentation. Because we're really talking about what your baseline data will be, where it comes from, who houses it, and how we get it. I think we've been jumping around a lot on different things that we're gonna touch on all this later. I also do know looking at the agenda, I know at 930 we're gonna have updates from the CUDS. And I know one of them, DB5er, has a very short period of time and we would need to present first. So I don't know how we wanna switch things. We've invited them to give us direct input. To give us direct input on pre-construction and where they're at based on them. Let me just say, look, I think we could summarize this. And I think we're in agreement that we need GIS resources. Is that correct? Yeah, we need in GIS capacity. Yeah, okay. And see, I look at GIS data maybe a little differently. I'm looking at GIS data in terms of poll counts. This is different than your GIS data sounds more like manual one addresses. Well, it's also. We need a combination of. It's all designed. It's all designed. Get down to the design, it's gonna be public locations. It's going to be splitter locations. Right, but the 911 data set is not gonna have, there's a utility poll located on this site. We're going to supplement address data with what we know about internet at that address with electric infrastructure because we need that information to string fiber from point A to point B to get to the members of us. There's another reason just to support your logic there. The definition of universal personal service will be driven by the electric distribution system. So it's E911 plus electric. And it should also be driven by existing assets. So that should be part of the data set. So Mike, I can tell you 100%. So VEC and GMP both have all of that data in one place. They have the E911 locations by service type or by speed. Of course, all the electric assets are there. The telecom assets are not in there. They exist so you couldn't do a hub thing. But if that's available, it can be added. And so in those service territories, you're able to get exactly what you want. What was supposed to be added to that was, what are the CUD service territories within all of those electric territories? You could see the overlap and. Right, but this goes to support Christine's comment about, this is not where Christine is going to sit there and crunch data on. We need to outsource this or capacity within our system that we can build up this infrastructure GIS data. So it's beneficial. It's very close to existing already. That's why I'm happy to have a discussion on some of the data later on. I'm happy to show you all the different layers and of what there. I think this is more about the act of synthesizing data wherever the data comes from that we need the support that comes to staffing. So after we talk about baseline, maybe we come back to this. Exactly. I think the baseline, we need to deal with the baseline ASAP because that helps drive the rest of the decision-making. Does that make sense? Yeah, if I could switch before we leave this topic, I also want to say that I would like to make Rob the deputy director in terms of this organization. We work hand-in-hand and certainly, we'll divide up our responsibilities between each other. But, and that's when we can have, if you want to have that in executive session. We can. Is there a direct, I apologize. I do not have the act 71 memorized yet. Is there a space for a deputy director? Yeah, it's just wide open. It's up to us. That seems like appropriate for executive session. Yeah. Not that I'm not expressing an opinion against it. I'm just saying. I think the position of executive director is in public session. If we appoint Rob, that's a staffing issue. That's a separate. We can talk about the deputy director role generally in public session. We can talk about Rob in that role. We should go to executive session. Agreed. Or that's delegated to Christine to appoint. You deal with it. We appoint the position, you deal with hiring. So the, so are you trying? I'm a little confused. Are you, is your approach here to get to the point of publishing an org chart? Well, ultimately that's not to happen. It doesn't need to happen today. Right. Well, and that's really, you brought it up as a position. So are you asking that the board vote on that today? I don't think we're prepared to do that, Christine. This is a little bit of a jerky right now. There's a lot of moving parts. I'm not saying that we won't have an executive. No, I was not requesting approval. So we're presenting this for deliberation. That's what all these things we could decide when we want to approve these things. Laura. So I would love to see a high level job description. I mean, not in the weeds, but what are the responsibilities? Because for instance, I think about if you're hiring from within, there are some key roles here. So I'd want to make sure that the activities, you know, if you ended up hiring somebody from within, those key roles were identified or that we knew we were gonna have to replace. For instance, if you were to bring in somebody like Rob, you know, do Rob's current activities continue or do we bring in someone behind? So again, I don't need like a, what are the responsibilities that you envision? Again, we need a presentation of the staffing and what exactly what this position would do. And there's Rob's position now, you know, what does that happen with Rob's position? We just need an overall umbrella picture of what are the staffing needs? What are you proposing for staffing needs? And what's the budget also for staff? I think that's what I'm showing here is the overall umbrella. What I'm hearing is you'd like a specific job description for the deputy director. So I- Or would you like job description for each party? See, I'm not ready to deal with this because I don't think we're talking about this. So I don't think we're talking about this. We need to agree, but there's some baseline stuff. We need to come up the learning curve together. And then very quickly thereafter, this is, we're gonna hit this. So we appreciate that. Do I have an action item coming out of this discussion? Sure. And just be clear what it is. Less than one page, right? Yeah, no, I'm looking for bullet points. I am not looking for, you know, a two page, three page. Not the HR. So the action item is to develop high level job description. For each of the positions that you think capacities that you would like us to bring in just so that we understand how the pieces come together. Does that make sense? Yes, and I'd also like a budget how this is funded. So we've got a pot of money. Thank you. And we also have to assign dollars to this. Okay. And it's gonna be difficult to have that discussion without that process document. Christine is gonna develop, which is, you know, what is our process to take the funds that we're responsible for, make them make them make people aware that they're available, take in the grant applications and then award attractive performance, right? I mean, that that's the work. This is the staffing to do that work. So those two have to kind of go hand in hand. Exactly, exactly. I will now make a comment about legal, okay? In open session. Now, let me also ask you another question. Christine probably has the floor. Oh, sorry. So I've heard from people at the department about legal services. I've spoken with you a little bit, Christine. I've talked to some very experienced counsel in the outside world. My best advice to this board and to you, Christine, is that we have a type of a general counsel that advises the board and advises the staff on grant documents, on open meeting laws, on various kinds of compliance, right? In terms of paper production, it could be the case that that general counsel is able to source that as required. And that's if we take a law firm and make a contract with somebody to provide those legal services. Yes, I have somebody in mind. It's also practical to house a person that does grant administration and documentation in-house that is supporting that function. I don't see it as part of a finance job description. Just so you... That's not going on legal in finance. Drafting grants agreements under finance does not compute... Okay. Very definitely. And so that's just a generic way of saying there's more than one way to skin the cat. And I think outsourcing high level advice, even if it's daily advice can be accomplished. Okay. I will just say coming from an entity in my real-world experience that does a lot of granting, we have a grants and finance person who have that work reviewed legally. So the grants are not developed there, which is to say, I think we have options. We have options. And part of it is the fact that we might start with a... If we're worried about the grant documentation, we're going to start with a lot of that in a format that's been used here. Right. Okay. Before we leave this gap discussion, we don't have the legal questions for you to turn out. Yeah. The administration, hiring the administrative assistant has already, the process has already begun. That actually began before I came on because the recognition of the deed was there. Question for the board is, should I halt that process until we come to an agreement on the staffing and budget and the... And the administrative assistant's going to do... Well... How does it fit into the work to be done? Okay. So... That's a whole level of supporting this board that's administrative. Yeah. All right. So question I have for the board is, shall I halt that process? So, this is... I'm just going to jump in and go around the room. Let's do it that way. I'm not suggesting we halt the process. I think there's a clear need for help here. Just, I think it would be some flush on the bones what that person would do initially in their first month. What are they doing? What has the administrative assistant doing? In addition to supporting us, they are doing XYZ. Okay. That's my question. I don't know if you're prepared to answer that. Can I ask that, I mean? Okay. For me, actually, I think if we had an understanding, if I had an understanding of the flow of how they expected all of this, what's the process that we're going to use? And then we can start staffing. These are the people we need to make this process work. If we agree on the process, then we can find the resources to make the process work. I would prefer to do that and I agree that we need a lot of this. I just don't know to what extent and permanency or contract all that. So a process would be the best way to start in my mind. And then we staff the process according. So this administrative person may have multiple duties if we knew what the process was. And maybe that's the best place to start. I don't know. I'll offer that. Thank you. Thank you. I would like to have that kind of administrative capacity continue moving, but I agree. I mean, I think we have to have some sense of, and also some understanding that we're building something from scratch and quickly. Is there a higher imminent? Like, where are we in the process? Job description. No, but is it like somebody has to be made an offer? No, no, no. The question is, I discovered the process was started. I discovered this yesterday. So, okay, so question it becomes, that's exactly why I'm asking the question. All right, so some of this, the legal process started, I held them that two weeks ago. The administrative process started, I can hold that as well. Who started these processes? The DPS? The DPS, yeah. I think in the legislation that was supposed to be a transition of the idea was to get the board up and running and have some support when it started, the way the timeframe worked out, that didn't happen. I think with the administrative assistant, I think within the classified system, there's set job descriptions for it, and then you could put within that what those job responsibilities are. So, I, sorry, I know we were going around the board. Yeah, let's go around for a second. This is helpful, Rob, on that too, but let's go, I agree with what Dan said, ideally. If we can't have perfect clarity on process to then fit the team and the roles into it, if the timing doesn't work for that, then it's, you know, I'm less worried about administrative support because it will benefit all of us. But I think I just, you're gonna hear a recurring theme from me in all those state work I've done, especially around grant administration, you know, I've always been unimpressed with the sanctity of the value of the dollar.  So this one probably doesn't make that radar, but that's the lens I was looking stuff through. I agree with what's being said about process first, comma, and while the legislation provided for the DPS to make inquiries into legal hires and administrative support, it wasn't clear that it was implied, I believe, in the legislation, that that was to get ready for this board to come together and begin to act. We're here now, they should stop whatever they're doing. We should take it down, we should hire our own people, we should do our own work, and they didn't get it done before we got here. So that's fine, let's do it. One other point of information, this is clarification that we need to get from PSD is another part of the legislation provides PSD with additional funds to be able to cover the administrative support. This administrative assistant that they may be hiring from the little that I've heard so far would be with them. We need an additional administrative assistant here to support the board, to support Christine and I, to go down and let people in and answer the phone and not be the auto warranty people. They didn't want to join our meeting, that's why I laughed. There's a lot of just that basic level as well as preparing the board for each meeting. I think since Friday, Christine and I and I have worked nonstop to just try to get ready for this meeting. It's not always gonna be like this, but there's a lot to be done in order to keep all of us informed. I'm gonna ask, can I ask one question before you jump in? With this, Christine, do you envision like if you were to hire somebody today, exactly how Rob described it, we've got a bunch of like on the ground work that needs to be done, setting up some meetings, preparing packets, getting material out and getting that to start spinning smoothly. Finding a place to file the minutes. Exactly, finding a room. Getting us set up with emails. I wouldn't want the two of you doing that. Somebody else should do that. It's hours, two, three hours each. Friday just trying to find a room. Meeting management is a time sink. But once that person gets up and running, is it, would it be envisioned they're doing other things after that? So who you hire is not just an administrative assistant but can grow into other capacities. And I don't know if we have that capability to have that type of person come on board. State employees tend to be very boxy. It's not in my job description. I'm not going to do it. I don't want to hire that person of the grade. Can I comment on that, Patty? I don't think that there's, we'll get this setting up stuff done and then that goes away. It's quite the... There's total management but there's gonna be a continuing need of basic administration or baseline administration. It could be the case that somebody who's doing administrative work helps log in grant responses and tracks deadlines on grant responses and RFPs. And does some of that process work in addition to board administration and other administration. But I don't think it goes away. I don't think it goes away but instead of six hours, it's an hour. Eventually it gets into your humming along. No longer set up emails, the emails are done. Zoom, once you have a Zoom account set up and whatever, that's done. And then it's just, it's quick management. The time sink shrinks. Yeah. And then that person needs to evolve into other things. So whoever we hire, it needs to be set up such that it grows into other things. Like you said, database management. Assistance with GIS. It's a, to me, the administrative assistant should be a broader than just... Fielding calls for all the CUDs and what they made. Yeah, I mean, right now that's route. Right. As intended. As intended. That's a thousand balls. But that's something that we can try to discuss later on as we're reorganizing some of these things. There's also like, just the basics of posting minutes updating the website. I'm trying to do all of this right now and everything else. It's a lot. A challenge for myself personally and a challenge for the board and this effort. So this is really a support person for Christine and I that should be a Jack or Jill or whatever of all trades to some extent. So the reason I asked these questions is personally, I would be fine moving ahead with an administrative assistant. With that hire knowing, their job is going to evolve. It's not a, here's my box, I'm gonna stay in these four corners. I don't need to have the whole objectives, everything plainly laid out and mapped out because I know we need this immediately right now that I'll finish with that. I'm also, I'm also fine with that but I want to go back to Rob's point, make sure that, or something he had said earlier, make sure we're all clear. I think you were talking about two administrative assistants a few minutes ago. Yes, I was talking, I think I believe the department is hiring one to deal with what they expect via the additional load that they're gonna, whether it's processing or payments or the running them through one span or those types of things. And that we might need some clarification but then there's another role that is supporting you all the board and it's supporting Christine and I. And so, so Patty, it would be great, I think for us to have a sense of what that person will do for the PSD in the future if we could get some, just some knowledge about what that support role will be. And then I want to be clear that what you were asking us should I continue was to support person for you and Bob. Yeah, yes. And the board. And the board. And the board, except one thing. Yes, that's what I was talking about tonight. And I, and this discussion reveals that I will get more clarification, you know, whether you ask me or not, clear idea, more clarification on who they plan on hiring and what the role is because it's going to be built to us. Right, and where that fits in the process. Well, and I do recall this from the commissioner, I have the legislation. Good, because I'm wondering, to me it seemed like the administration reference was you have administrative capacity because you won't be doing the same things you were doing. So please share with the nascent board until they're set up. That's how I heard it, not go hire a new person. That's confusing though. So we're going to have to admin people. We, yeah. So one's for the PSD. So why would you do anything that's going through here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. For good reason. I guess it's a larger question of what we want to take on. Is that a question for Ledge Council? Or can we just, can we tell the department what their administrative support responsibilities will be in collaboration with what we're expecting the staff ourselves so that there's a definition that we make, they can respond to and it's coordinated. Let's do that. Laura, can we do that? I mean, I think we certainly can try. I mean, I know the commissioner, I'm sure the commissioner will have an opinion. Oh, absolutely. Does that mean I'll lose track of productive conversation? That's big forgiveness, not our permission. Yes. Thank you. Okay, so I'll take an action on this. We're going to subscribe what we need from an administrative assistant. I'm going to share that with the department. I think we're going to describe what we need from an administrative support standpoint between the department and the board. And then we'll look at those responsibilities, where, which responsibilities sit on which side and then think about how do we now get the people to provide that, or person to provide that. And maybe we're sharing the same person. Yes, exactly. It may be to have position, 0.5 FTEs. Perfect. And the goal here is to A, be effective. We know we need administrative support right now. That's like, that's clear. We need to be effective. We need to be cost accountable. So if we all of a sudden have two administrative assistants that begs the question of, it makes us pause. It just, it complicates this. Makes me want to. There was a certain amount of funds appropriated to the department to support this effort that's separate from the funds that were given to us in order to step up and to build the board. But those funds will be built back up to the board, correct? Yes. So let's just use those funds all together and make the right solution. Hopefully it's one person. Exactly. Okay. And to your point earlier, Patty, it should be a growth position. They should, they'll start with some blocking and tackling, but ideally there'll be some growth opportunities and skill development for the right intervention.  Not my job, Scripps can't do that. I don't want to deal with that. Thank you. We want Rob clones. Yes. We can talk about that. I don't know if we have that technology yet. That's on the session. I think, so I feel like you've given me adequate direction. Okay. All right. Do we need to talk, do we need to talk about staffing more in an executive session? And what I've had that, I also wouldn't be adding it because it would be extending this elsewhere in the agenda and move on to hearing about the pre-instructions. So we do have some guests. I would suggest for now we park the staffing and come back to it, see if we need it to address anymore, but we have a time certain 930. So let's do that. Yes. Okay. And then if need be, we can come back to stopping. Thanks. Okay. I'm going to stop presenting now and I'm going to make sure, sorry to talk to myself through this everybody. So I am going to make David Jones a presenter. He's with a Deerfield Valley. CUD. David, are you there? David. David, can we see David? I see DJ. I see DJ. Yes, I'm here, Rob. Sorry. We're in between screens. No worries. So this was added to the agenda just to get an idea of there's been a general need to better understand where the CUDs are at, to understand the pre-construction needs, understand where things are going. So that's why several different CUDs are going to provide a few minutes of that and be open for questions. So I'll start with, Dave, do you want to introduce yourself and share your screen for your slide? I will try to share my screen. I am not quite, let's see how I do that. I can see if I can pull it up as well. Screen share. Okay. Right next to the leave button. There you go. Maybe. Can you see that? Okay. We don't see it yet. It might be how else it goes. Let's see. Let's see. Oh, here we go. We'll see you to use David for my screen. Here you go. Thank you. Rob, I don't think I'm going to be able to share my screen. Okay, let me open it. You did share this with me this morning. So let me, I'll put it on mine and share mine. It's just one slide, so. Okay. While I'm working on that, I'll introduce myself. I'm David Jones. I am the Vendor Committee Chair of the Deerfield Valley Communications Union District, which is primarily in Wyndham County plus several towns in Bennington County and one in Windsor. Our Chair and Man Wearing and our Vice Chair, Stephen John, are unable to attend today. And so I am representing TV Fiber. My goal in the three minutes that I have is to describe succinctly what we have been up to for the last year and a half and where we're going hopefully with the Board's help. After one year of organizing, research, planning, we ran an RFP process to select our private sector partner or partners. And then after several months of review and discussion with the leading candidates, we selected GreatWorks Internet of Bitterford, Maine, GWI. We're working with GWI to prepare an engineering and pre-construction contract that we intend to have ready for signature when we have a pre-construction grant agreement. Our key goal is to have a full season of construction next year, which requires that we make substantial progress on the pre-construction tasks this year. And those tasks include completing a high level design for all 24 towns, completing utility poll surveys in the remaining phase one towns. We completed four in part with help from our CARES Act grant last year. We need to complete the detailed engineering for the construction to be done in 2022. That would be a subset of towns. We'll need to iterate our financial plan based on the findings from the design and engineering process. Planning is iterative, as I think you all know. We will need to then prepare the RFPs for the construction subcontractors. We understand that there has been a discussion of whether pre-construction grants should not be awarded until there is a comprehensive statewide design of some kind. And as a practical matter, the way we see at the time required to develop a comprehensive statewide plan would consume at least months and would set us back as much of the year if we're not able to accomplish substantial utility make ready this year as the result of the planning and poll applications. So our recommendation and our hope is that the board will focus statewide design efforts on middle mile connections between the major carrier interconnection points and CUD networks, CUD islands, that is sections of CUDs that are separated by wide expanses and electric utility fiber. All of these are fiber assets to be owned and constructed or are owned and have been constructed by municipalities and regulated utilities. Our immediate next step is to clarify the pre-construction grant RFP requirements and process so that we can be ready when the process is open so that we can bring our contract to you and our proposal and hopefully get the funding we need to begin work. Thank you, David. And this is a question on the board. Do we wanna do questions now after each one or do we wanna do questions at the end? Yes, let's do individually. Hi, David, thank you for that overview. I'm wondering if you know how many locations in your district need to be served in your planning process? Right. We have approximately 8,000 underserved or unserved addresses in our 24 towns. And we have roughly 800 miles of fiber, 800 miles of what we anticipate to be fiber roots. Thank you. We will know this when we go, and those numbers come from our ability to use Department of Public Service, public data and to do some GIS work on our own. We are going to be reviewing all of our numbers in the pre-construction process in high level design and the detail engineering plans so that we have the very clear picture of what we're building to. And David, just to clarify that, the number you gave of unserved addresses, is that the base 2019 data or does that account for wired addresses served by the connectivity initiative addresses that are gonna be funded through the FCC IRDOF program? I just wanna just make sure we're talking about the same numbers. We're gonna talk about numbers later in the presentation, later in the meeting as well. Right. Rob, to be perfectly honest, I don't have a cheat sheet of numbers in front of me and my memory is such that I gave you numbers off the top of my head and would not trust them. But I can provide those numbers in an email in the course of the meeting or after we have done substantial work to study the DPS numbers to study the mileage of our area. And that work has been the basis for our original business plan when we had 15 towns, our internal financial models when we were making decisions about which vendors to hire and will be constantly part of our decision process. David, this is Patty Richards. Thank you for joining us today. Just wanted to dig a little bit into the 800 miles. Is that 800 represent backbone, middle mile and to the house? Can you describe the 800 miles and a little bit more granularity? Right. When you look at our district, there's really two sets of premises and miles that you'll be concerned with. One is the total in every area, cabled and uncabled. And the other is the unserved and underserved areas. There are, to the best of my recollection, somewhere in the range of 35,000 total addresses in our service area. But only a minority of those are currently uncabled. It's our goal to provide universal service to those uncabled areas. We will inevitably pass some of the cable areas when we're getting from one uncabled area to another and we do intend to serve addresses along those routes. And then there is the possibility that even though areas are served now, they're later on after we have completed our work to serve the unserved and underserved, there may be a demand for us to serve currently served areas that we can serve in a economically profitable manner that would subsidize the unserved and underserved areas. So our order of operation is unserved and underserved and then discretion to look at other addresses. But of the 800 miles, will you be doing the full middle mile? Help me with the 800 miles, I still don't understand. Yeah, that's an estimate. Basically, the starting point estimate for required fiber miles is the number of road miles. And that is an estimate of the road miles in the uncabled areas, plus a small amount of miles in cable areas that we need to, that are the routes between the uncabled areas. So it's the reach all premises in your district that aren't served by cable. It's where you come up with that 800 mile figure. Yes. But not partnering with other cable entities. So there's no fiber in this area. There is some fiber in this area that, actually, it's your area, that Duncan cable provides some fiber coverage and some cable coverage in two of the towns. And notably consolidated is built fiber in Brattleboro and has, as I think you know, announced plans to build fiber in other cabled areas. And then there is fiber through FirstNet, formerly SovereignNet, other fiber that's not available for residential service in that area. Yeah. So that could be middle mile. That could be middle mile, yes. Yeah, yeah, yes, there will be substantial middle mile mileage necessary just to get from here to there. And to the extent that we can make use of existing assets in a cost effective way, we certainly aim to do that. And that will be part of the high level design and engineering process. Without the professional help of the designers at GWI, we would be unable to say just how much of our mileage can be sourced from existing sources cost effectively. I have other questions that I would ask David that I might hope that we have other presenters. Any other quick questions? Just on the immediate next step. I just want to clarify, so David, the immediate next step is that you all are waiting, oops, now it's gone for clarification from us on the pre-construction RFP. Yes, our hope is to get going on our work as soon as possible so that we can do the pre-construction work this year to enable the construction work next year. If we understand the RFP requirements and process, we will make application just as soon as we can so we can get going. Last one from me, David, it's Holly Groscher.  What is the scope of that partnership? Is that your design build partner, your system operating partner? What is GWI to your CUD? Right, we are contracting with GWI to, well, first of all, I should preface it by saying we are going to own our assets. We will be the network owner. We will be the policy decision maker regarding the construction plans, the pricing, the quality, and every service policy. GWI is our contracted partner to accomplish this on our behalf. And they will be our engineer. They will be our construction manager. They will be our network operator and they will be a standard offer internet and voice services provider. Thank you. Other questions? Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll have next. Jane, would you like to go next from the while? Are you here? I am here. It's telling me I can't share my screen. I'm changing that right now. Okay. Okay, you should be able to now. Okay. Let's go to the speaker. Are you able to see my screen? Not yet. Okay. Sometimes there's a bit of a delay. Not again. I will pull it off. I'm sorry. We're still trying to figure out all this technology here. I can, it's easier. Oh, here we are. Can you see it now? Oh, no. We just... It says I'm sharing. It says I can stop sharing. Let me... Oh, there you go. Perfect. We ready? Yeah, we are ready. Great. Thank you. I'm Jane Campbell and I'm the chair of Lamoille Fibernet CUD. And as you can see at the top, we now have nine towns. Wilkett has joined our CUD recently. What we've been doing, we've done the feasibility study, high level design, the business plan, business plan review. We co-authored an RFP with NEK Broadband and we're currently in discussions with potential partners. At the same time, we're transitioning to all the systems that we need for management. In the next few months, we assume we will select and negotiate an MOU with a partner or partners. It would be the same sort of setup that David just talked about. And of course, we'll do the legal review financial analysis, et cetera. And that will lead next to the high level design and redo the business plan as needed. Once we get the VCBB funding, then we'll create the detailed design and we will start working on getting the make ready, the equipment, the construction services, et cetera. The key to our business plan, and this is really important, is that we need to go into the areas that are the higher take rate areas. And that's relatively speaking. We are one of those rural areas that for-profits haven't addressed because the take rates have been so low. But we need those higher take rate areas which will give us higher revenues to then be able to fund the network building in the lower take rate areas. And as you can see in the bottom of this screen, our phase one, phase two, phase three, we're assuming we'll build our asset base with grant funds and then we'll leverage those assets to be able to start borrowing to extend the network and then we'll eventually go to the bond market to build the rest of the network. The context that we're working in and this is why that higher take rate, higher revenue area is so important, is that as we are every, ever since we started, we've been facing other organizations, other companies building in our area and taking some of those higher take rate, higher revenue areas. We are talking to some of those folks, we've opened conversation channels there. We at the same time, obviously, we're having conversations with the organizations that responded to our RFP. And then we're very aware that as we're moving forward, we all feel this sense of urgency. I think I can say that for all the CUDs because as we're moving forward, we're very aware that rural areas all over the country have gotten broadband funding and are vying for the exact same partners and specialized personnel and materials. In Rob's email, he kind of posed the question, well, what if we waited? What if we delayed things further to be able to do statewide design or something like that? And the assumption that funding will be available has been really key as we're able to talk to these potential partners. It helps them know that yes, our CUD will be able to follow through with what we're saying. It's also going to impact our ability to develop strategic and operational plans, which is some of our work in the next year. And obviously, competing for the needed materials and labor as the competition goes up, the pricing is gonna go up and the supplies will be more and more limited. So that's in a nutshell. I'm happy to take any questions. Okay, thank you. Just one clarifying thing on your slide, you said the pre-construction funding so far will get you to construction. You're not talking about the pre-construction funding from H315, the grants that have already been administered. You're talking about the need for this additional grant funding. Right. Okay. It's challenging we have some programs at the same time. The funding that we already, the H315 funding will get us to the end of the year, will get us through the MOU process. We'll get us through hiring where this week we're interviewing finalist candidates for our executive director position, et cetera. Did that answer your question? Yes. Laura. Thanks, Jane. With regards to the higher take rate areas and the need to hit those first, can you tell me are those primarily cabled or do they have fiber or are those higher take rates underserved at this point? These are underserved areas. Okay. We're assuming, yeah, no, no. Some of our district is cabled. In one area, one town in our district, the cable company is stringing fiber and we have said, let us know how we can help when you get to the edges, if you need help there. The other cabled areas will likely be the last areas that we go to, but we're really starting with those high priority areas where it's unserved or underserved. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Jane, this is Patty Richards. Thank you for being with us today. One question that I will ask, I'm a remiss that I did not ask David and maybe Rob would know this, but did you participate in the Airdolf auction? We did not. We did not. Consolidated is in a lot of our district and their Airdolf territory is in a lot of our district. Okay, thank you. Do you know, in terms of Deerfield? They also did not end up participating. Their partner did not bid for those areas. Some of those areas were won by Consolidated. Okay. Some were won by SpaceX. I think the only CUD that participated and in fact was awarded under Airdolf was ECFiber. I think it's ECFiber in collaboration with various utilities. So we're gonna hear from CB Fiber and NAK and they both have regions as well. They might be able to provide additional clarification and later in the agenda, we have a map that will bring up as well. Any other questions? Jane. Okay, thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Jane. So let's move back to Addison County, Maple Broadband. I believe Steve is presenting. I am here. Let's try if I can share the screen. Make sure that you have those abilities. Once again, I apologize. I'm still learning teams here. I believe I gave you that, but let me find out for sure. Yeah. Not, it'll appear momentarily. I did. So you do have the ability to share. Should be right next to the leave button. Well, let's just see how this goes. Oh, this looks good. There you go. Okay. Do we have something there? Success. Oh, great. Okay. Okay. I'm actually quite surprised that we're going to have you do it again, Rob. My name is Steve Huffaker. I'm the chair of Maple Broadband. We represent 20 Addison County towns and municipalities, we'll say. And like Jane, we're acting with a sense of urgency to try to work our way through all these pre-construction tasks so we can begin construction. So there's two slides here. This first slide kind of gives you some background about how we got to where we are. One item on that first bullet, we did spend quite a bit of time on an RFP process and actually had a misstep at one point, but which resulted in kind of a delay in that process. But the one big lesson I think that we learned was that we originally were hoping that we could cherry pick, if you will, assigning high-level network design, say, to one entity, possibly sold post-surveys to another. And after a kind of thorough interview with our bidders, we concluded that that was just going to dilute accountability. So we decided that it was in our best interest to award all the work to one organization. We, in June, we approached our governing board with our recommendations and our board approved our approach, which was to award the pre-construction tasks listed there to one engineering firm. And incidentally, that engineering firm was a little bit or I say here in italics that poll make ready was intentionally excluded from the RFP. We did include poll attachment license applications just since it seemed like kind of a labor grind that we didn't want to deal with at this point. And it really wasn't going to impact our going forward steps. The key here is the next bullet. We applied for $1.3 million to grant pre-construction tasks, but as many of you are aware, 315 just didn't have that kind of money available. So in discussions with Rob, we've scaled back and asked exclusively for $45,000, which was to cover the cost of the high work, high level network design. I was going to ask if you had questions at this point, but I think we're just going to go to the next one. If I can change, there we go. Okay, okay. So, this is kind of an aspirational document at this point. There's a lot that we don't know. We don't know to what degree DCBB is going to want to dictate our various steps and how that might impact our schedule. And we also, well, to some degree, I already have a good sense of where the when funds might be available to fund our next steps. And so, this is kind of a caveat at the top of that to capture that. Sometime later this month, we're going to have a network management agreement executed. That agreement will capture both maintenance and management of our network, as well as providing services over our network. And under the terms of that agreement, we own all the infrastructure that we built. And we run the show, which is our drive towards ensuring that we do have ultimate access to the municipal bond market. Next month, we're also going to receive the high-level network design. And under this, I wanted to just make a quick mention. I'm thinking about this approved part, and I'm thinking that based on my discussions, whether engineering firm, I believe, and I kind of want to kind of be careful about expressing this properly, but my sense is that that network design, we can tinker with that design for a while without having it impact the timeline. So my thought is here that if that may be well where VCBB wants to have some input on what that design looks like, and I'm thinking that depending on the pace of what VCBB does, that may not interfere with our timeline. In other words, I'm thinking we can run, and I have to validate this a little further, but I'm thinking we can run, continue to proceed, and then at the side working with VCBB to make any necessary adjustments. For example, based on what little I've heard about what you have in mind, it mostly related to perhaps augmenting your network, our network to serve a greater goal. So I'm thinking that kind of thing might be dedicated buffer tubes and some of the infrastructure, which would then be dedicated specifically to the state of Vermont requirements, rather than Addison County requirements. So I'm thinking we can do those kind of things possibly without facing any delays associated with the work we need to do. We'll be working with our network engineer to identify the build sequence, and this is kind of ties in with Jane had said. I think we're going to be trying to drive towards a higher take rate for underserved subscribers. Our big interest at this point is as rapidly as possible reach the municipal bond market, and we see that being achieved. Once we have several hundred subscribers, say two or three hundred subscribers, that might be sufficient for us to reach the municipal bond market. So we're going to use that as one criterion for selecting the build sequence, and there's of course other criteria that we need to look at, but the build sequence will kind of drive the next steps that we engage in. So once we know which town or area of our organization is going to be built first, we commission poll surveys in that area, and then we proceed after that work is done. Once the poll surveys are done in that area, we will then engage our engineering firm to begin on the detailed design construction bid documents for that area. And so one of the other realizations that we came to during the process was that I kept thinking about this as a serial process. First we have to do high level design, then we have to do poll surveys, then we have to do detailed network design, and that's too broad. What we're doing is we're breaking it down into construction zones, and as we identify each construction zone, we survey that zone and do construction bid documents for that zone, then move on to the next zone. So in that way, we can keep the process moving. Also in September, we're going to be issuing a business plan, which naturally is going to follow the details of the network management agreement. October, the big risk factor to us is long lead time materials. I'm sure all of you have heard all about that. Ships, shortages, OLTs, ONTs, fiber cable, and so we have an opportunity here to take advantage of the fact that our network manager that we're going to be executing an agreement with has facilities that are capable of taking delivery of long lead time materials that are delivered, say, at the end of the first quarter of next year or sometime in the second quarter of next year, so that when we're ready to build, we don't have the absence of materials to delay us. I just want to tell you, but I think that in terms of the place where we stand the most risk as it relates to VCBB activities is funding. As it stands right now, we have sufficient funds to pay the engineering firm to do the high-level design, and we don't have any money to do the poll surveys. And based on what I sense that X71 funds, I don't know when they're going to be available to us, but my estimation is that we will probably want to commission poll surveys sometime, say mid-September. That's four weeks out, so I'm thinking the date's going to slip. I don't think we can meet that date. I think probably poll surveys aren't going to be commissioned until October or November, depending on how long the grant process slows us down. That's it. That's all I've got. Questions? Thanks for your presentation and love your logo, by the way.  I'm sorry, I missed that. Yes, okay. Yes, we are. Thank you. See, this is Patty Richards jumping in quickly. Last same question of everybody. Do you have an RDOF position? No, we evaluated that, and there really wasn't much real estate in our region that was impacted by RDOF and seemed like even for those areas that are impacted by RDOF, they're probably going to be the last locations that are going to be accessed by RDOF winners. So we may well be able to get access to those areas before the winners, if that's a choice that we choose to make. Okay, thank you. All you got a question? Yeah, thanks so much, Steve, for the presentation. Can you give us what your ballpark is on addresses that need to be served for universal service? I was afraid you were going to ask that. No, I can't give you that. I can tell you that the miles are about 500 miles. I was scrambling to try to find the number for you thinking you were going to ask, and I do not have it. I can get it back. At a high level, I can tell you that the DPS figures are what we've been working against all along. So whatever Rob has furnished and is up on their website is what we use as our basis. And I have a follow along if I might. Am I right in understanding that you anticipate having a different entity that's your design engineering construction group in another entity that is your operating manager? No, the whole way. Yes, it's different. Excuse me. I misinterpreted two different entities. Yeah, so the design and engineering firm is they're nothing but telecom engineers.  They're not an operator. They're not a content provider. All they do is build or not build design network. And so the operations and maintenance of the infrastructure as well as providing service over our network is all falls to our upcoming network manager. And do you know who that is? I do, and I cannot share because we're days away from executing that agreement. Thank you. Questions? All right. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. How about Jeremy here, CV Fiber? And then I'll ask him to be any K unless another card wants to participate. All right. Let me share this. Hold on a second. Steve, you may have to stop your screen share. All right. Is that visible to everybody? Yes. Terrific. So thanks for having me. I'm Jeremy Hansen. I'm the chair of CV Fiber. We have 20 towns here in central Vermont, mostly Washington County, but also some adjacent counties too. We have an application from Waterbury, which will be considered this evening. So we may be 21 later today. I'm not going to read the slide to you here. I want to make a couple of mentions about what we're doing, where we are. We have some folks under contract for doing the pull inventories right now. We are waiting for the funding to tell them to get started. We didn't want to have them get started until we had the money in our bank account. And for better or for worse, mostly for worse, there have been some delays, some bureaucratic, some otherwise. Between the timing between getting the contracts done and getting the contracts in our accounts, it's a long delay. And we've had the contractor ready, contractors, I should say, ready to do this work for quite some time now. So not that fixing the finance process at the state is something that I'm going to ask you to try to solve. I just want to let you know that something that really impacts our timeline. As you're looking at putting grants together and the process for this, I would also request, and this got mentioned in the little briefing that I sent to you last week, funding should be available in large enough sums so that we're going to be able to keep our contractors going. The moment that we have to come up and take a breath and dive back down into it, that coming up and taking a breath, we may lose the contractors. We may add unnecessary delays to our process. I just want you to be cognizant of that. And then a couple of requests for things that the VCBV could help us with. And this is something that you've heard before about auditing GIS legal. And then looking at really looking at centralized bulk purchasing of fiber. So we all know, all the CUDs know that we will be using fiber. Is it possible to ahead of time go and buy a fair bit of fiber at some centralized location, that's you all, that then the CUDs could come back and purchase from you later? Just a thought. Talking about statewide design, statewide design should be supplemental to the CUD designs and maybe looking at how CUDs interconnect. Any non-CUD areas, how do those folks get involved in that network reliability. But we're already planning on interconnecting with our neighboring CUDs. We have active agreements with design with NEC and with EC fiber. So as we're doing our high level design, it's going to include NEC, CV fiber, EC fiber and Washington Electric co-op. This is a grant that we've applied for through 315. And we will be executing quite soon, as you can see in our timeline here. It's really just dependent on again funding, landing in our accounts. Looking at our costs for detail design, I just got this number in the last day or two. That cost, I'm expecting to be about $1.5 million and that includes the WEC areas. So the detail design of our network along with WEC. So like I said, I can read over the slide or I can explain the chart here. I'm hoping that it's reasonably self-explanatory but I think I'll just stop there. I have two questions. Thanks, Jeremy. Large enough grant making to allow your contractors to keep working. What does that mean? So it kind of depends at which phase that we're at. So whether we're talking about construction, pre-construction, what have you, we should have enough that we could be making actual progress, understanding the time of the bureaucratic pipeline, such that we start making some actual progress and then we can already be partway through that first process while we're securing the funding for whatever the second part is. Yeah, my apologies. I was unclear on my question. Can you give me a dollar amount? For which part? What size pre-construction grants would you recommend we be looking at? We're going to apply for $1.5 million and substantially all of that. We are not yet in a financial position where we have the cash flow to be able to absorb that and then ask for reimbursement. So that or very close to all of that. I haven't worked out the detailed timeline of what that looks like, what the detailed design looks like or how long, understanding well how long the bureaucratic process is. But as I'm seeing the bureaucratic process, it's quite long. Months between contract, between RFP and then actually applying for the grant, then getting the grant and getting the actual grant money in the bank account. It's quite long. And do you have a different amount for construction? Yeah, I mean that's going to depend. I don't have that number in front of me. I apologize. Actually, hold on. I might have it. I just need to look. It's okay. I'm just looking for a basis, like some place for us to start. I mean, hearing that and the other, I guess, is Patty. I've heard a lot of the CUDs asking about can we do the central purchasing. I would like us to find out if we can. I don't know if we can. You may all know that. It's in the legislation. Well, can we functionally do it? Good question. The cost of storing the material, unless it could be donated, challenging based on what I know of other equipment and what is charged for the state to store equipment. That's a question for us to put up on the parking lot for. So Christine, take a note. Try that technical criteria. Fibers, not fiber, right? Exactly. It can be, if it wants to be, if we want to make that requirement, but. Right. If CB fiber doesn't want to build to that standard that we just purchased, then we're stuck with a bunch of reels of fiber. And with everybody at pre-construction at different phases, how would you know how much? Different engineering companies. This is a question. Before we keep going, I just want to make sure, I'm going to fully disclose, anytime CB fiber or EC fiber speaks up, WAC is planning to build 860 miles of backbone. We are not planning to be what's called an internet service provider. We are planning to do fiber on our electric system and interconnect and help interconnect CB fiber and EC fiber. So WAC's position in this, just super transparent. That's our role in this. So Jeremy States working with WAC, that's the connection there. WAC will own the asset, and the asset will be roadside. It's not middle-mile. It is middle-mile. WAC's portion is all middle-mile. We're not doing anything for any others. Yeah. So Falco has a project. It's underway. We are already procuring our materials, and we are looking for construction much sooner than any of this, but for full disclosure, we're going to substations and solar and storage generation along these routes. It's not associated with any of this. It's a standalone project. We will partner with anyone that needs access to this middle-mile fiber, but we're not in this business. So I just want to make sure that's understood. I have a question for Jeremy. Phase one says it's going to go to 85% of the unserved and underserved addresses. What's the other 15% going to do? They will get caught up in phase two. And phase two says it's a build-up from the core, and I don't understand what that's meaning. So in the same vein as what the previous CUDs said, we have to go to the places that are going to have the highest take rates that are going to give us the firm financial foundation that we can build upon, because the grant money doesn't get us across the finish line. This is going to get us going, and we will eventually look at the bond market for filling in those gaps. So we're going to do the design for everything all at once. The high-level design and the detailed design, we will get that done, at least the high-level design. We will design the entire network, again in conjunction with WEK and NEC and ECFiber. We will build that. We'll design that all at once, and then we're going to actually go to the places where we think we're going to be the most likely to be able to serve people. But then the other 15% tend to be the folks that are quite a bit farther out, and so we will still build there. So we'll build to those places that are farther out, and we will also, incidentally, for the most part, we'll incidentally go into the places that are served. But our phase one is like, let's build a good, robust network that gets the most bang for the buck, and then finish the network later once we have the vast majority of folks connected. Thank you. Jeremy, this is Patty jumping in. Can you tell us about your ARDOF position and do your album? So we were part of an ARDOF consortium. We were not a bidder. So Kingdom Fiber Consolidated and ECFiber all won census blocks within CV Fiber Territory, and we are aware of these. I believe there's less than 1,000 premises in CV Fiber Territory that are covered by these ARDOF blocks. I don't have that number. On hand right now that I could ask David Healey, he maybe had that number or could run that report, but so no, we don't have that specifically, and we have been in discussions with Kingdom Fiber and ECFiber about how to approach those census blocks within our districts. Okay, thank you. David, this is Brian. On your slide, it looks to me in a little graphic at the bottom with area A, B, and C that you're going to break your build into lack of a better term, construction zones or areas. Is that right? Correct. Okay, so when you go back to Laura's question about grant funding, do you need the full preconstruction? Do you feel like you need the full preconstruction amount for all zones, or is preconstruction for any given zone enough to keep you going on the ground and not run into delays because of funding gaps? That's hard to say. I haven't gotten to that level of granularity, but the detailed engineering here, maybe I'll just zoom in a little bit. The detailed engineering is, we're expecting to do that essentially all at the same time. So yeah, that detailed engineering, we're going to be, because we're hiring the same firm to do the detailed engineering is doing the high level design, we're going to expect to be doing basically all of that all at once. Okay, so when you get over to construction, that makes perfect sense. I agree with that. When you get over to construction where you're going to be sequencing this stuff a little differently, what I'm trying to get to is the larger the grant requirement, the more review and consternation it's going to get, if you can break it into bite-sized pieces, that's better, but I totally get your point about not having delays on the ground due to funding gaps. So I'm trying to figure out what the right balance between, you know, if construction zones in phases that, like the construction phase, if the construction zone is the limit of a funding asks, oh my God, I can't even get it out now. You know what I'm saying? So how do we break this down in the most effective way and if our construction zone is the way to do that once you pass pre-construction? Yeah, so I think these areas, A, B, and C, this is the way that we're approaching it. So as we're building, I mean, when we're expecting that these are going to be on different timelines. So yeah, so we would be looking for construction money for area A first, followed by B, followed by C. Now whether we can get to C using all grant money, that's to be determined, obviously. So we will move on. We will hopefully be, you know, securing funding for B before we get A done. That's my point is that these are, it's important to have these staggered that we may not be able to say, okay, here are final deliverables. Here's the thing that we completed before we then go into the next step. We would need to show that we are making affirmative progress towards the things that we promised for area A. And you should be able to look at this in a pretty concrete way. I mean, we should be able to take pictures and like tell you how many people are signed up or how many people have service available. And while we are looking then at the next, at the next area. So I think that's a reasonable approach. Correct. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks. And last up, I believe Evan is presenting for Northeast Kingdoms. Can you all see my screen? Yes. Evan Carlson. Yes, sorry, introduction. Evan Carlson, AKA by band chair. We are a 50 town CUD are planning to get to 55 at some point here. I believe everyone saw this slide or was presented with this slide last week. So I'm just going to kind of leave this here while I talk through some of the activities that have taken place as well as pre construction needs. I'll try to be brief since I know we are over. So we complete our business plan in June in this really outlined for us how we are going to reach the 3,000 addresses and 2,800 miles of construction to complete the network. We have about 20,000 or 17,000 underserved. This plan also laid out a phased approach for construction. We are doing essentially four phases and are going to building across areas that include some of the state fiber assets, some of the North Link fiber assets. I'm really trying to leverage those. We are also a part of the WAC network that Patty and Jeremy touched on earlier. So we're working to move that forward. Additionally, the business plan included a very clear picture from a financial perspective on how we were going to build this network and highlighted the capacity building needs as well. The other item that we're kind of going through right now, we're finalizing a contract for construction management with Mission Broadband who will be driving some of the Concord Waterford project that was funded through CARES last year and expecting to light that up later this year. We are selecting a poll survey vendor to do the poll survey across the municipal electric areas as well as the WAC territory. We are doing a detailed design, hopefully this fall. And that's going to, did I cut out there for a second? No, no, see your final. Detailed design, we're hoping to begin this fall. And that's really going to allow us to kick off construction in spring 2022. And that is certainly where we need funding more than anything else when we talk about pre-construction funding. I would say that we also are finalizing while working through some negotiations with a couple network operators and expect to have one selected, I would say in the next month or so. And very excited to announce that. So pre-construction needs from a funding perspective, we certainly need funding for further capacity building. Being able to have a full-time executive director, we certainly have some funding for that now. But I think being able to continue that support into 2022 is going to be super important. The pre-purchasing of assets for construction in 2022, we know there's a delay in that. That was a comment that I had made in the BCVB meeting last week. But I think that that's something that would be helpful for the either the state to participate in or to be able to make sure the CUDs have the funding ASAP to be able to do that. We also need to have our funding for the design and engineering, and that's going to be a pretty substantial amount of funding for us. And I don't know, yeah, that's another some questions on what that looks like from the BCVB's perspective. So we have some thoughts there. The state, I think the funding needs from the... Sorry, I'm kind of all over the place here. The pre-purchasing of fiber, I think utilizing the state's purchasing power will certainly be helpful if that's something that can be done, ensuring that the CUDs have the assets that they need in advance will speed this process up. And if possible, being able to issue an RFP for the purchasing of those assets. Talking about the design and the role that the BCVB might have, one thing that we feel might work well would be to have the BCVB help with the procurement of backhaul and being able to get any type of pricing discounts with backhaul providers to the CUDs. And then the potential of a consultant on staff that can help identify where the interconnection points make the most sense between the districts. And specifically looking at the designs that the CUDs are producing and helping determine where higher account fiber should be considered at the kind of abutting borders of the districts. That seems like a role that the BCVB can play rather than providing a or dictating a kind of middle-mile, last-mile design for each of the CUDs. And I think this was mentioned last week, but it really potentially runs the risk of doubling the amount of work that needs to be done if the state is producing a design and then each of the operators and CUDs are refining those designs again before they actually begin construction. Obviously, we're trying to move fast, and so doubling the work doesn't seem like it's going to add much value there. The question on ARDOF, we have two groups of awardees in our region, Kingdom Fiber and Consolidated Communications. The thing that we're looking at doing is offering a lit service to those providers across our network. We expect that we will be building probably quicker than some of the providers in the areas that were awarded. That's all I have, so. Thanks, Evan. So I don't know if you heard our discussion earlier about the potential for pre-purchasing and the challenges that arise. Did you hear that discussion? You're saying for storage and for being able to actual logistics of purchasing it? Well, and also I think it was the type, right? So it's not all the same. So I think the comment was made, but we were to do something like that when you all want us to impose, like, okay, and you'll be using this type of material. Yeah, I think that there's not going to be any dispute on our end. I think when it comes to the actual fiber itself, there seems like there's going to be enough use between all the CUDs that there's going to be an opportunity to use it. I mean, we talked about fiber counts. I think if you have a variety of different fiber counts available and if the state wants to help define maybe what the kind of minimum fiber count should be for backhaul in middle mile, that to me makes sense. And there seems to be a role for the BCVB to play there. So Patty, I mean, this is, I'm really interested in us chasing this down as far as we can. And I don't have the knowledge.  Well, I think I'm compiling a list of, this might go into criteria or other areas, but that's one of them. And if the CUDs all agree, yeah, we'll take these four standards, then procurement can start. And it might be a six-month lead time, whether or not the BCVB does that or another entity does that, but getting manufacturing space secured, I think will be the important part. And then we have financial assurances that will have to go. Nobody wants to extend credit to somebody. So it's complex, but. I also did just receive an email from Chris Russia ADC fiber and says that they have an ability to potentially do that or at least want to talk about it. So if we're done with any K that might be a good transition briefly. I would just ask the CUDs to the extent that you're able to kind of be even more specific together about what you mean when you say that. I think that will help us try and accommodate it. That should go into for the CUDs are doing engaging engineering companies to do bi-level on the detailed design. They would have to be part of that construct as well. Can I ask a question? If it would it be helpful for VCUDA potentially to provide a proposal on what the kind of fiber purchasing process might look like or kind of what we would appreciate for purchasing? I think that it would very much. I think for all the CUDs we should ask that. So that's VCU. I will plan to bring that to VCUDA. That would be great Evan. Thank you. Yeah because if we can standardize we know what we're what we need to purchase and then figure out the details. I want to see you standardize. Yeah to the extent right to the extent we can. And the fact that some of the organizations have engineering or pre-engineering from the software already. I don't know what that does. So we haven't heard from PC fiber yet. Are you ready to quickly move to PC fiber? Children or chickens? Those are chickens. I was going to apologize for that up front. But yeah those are chickens and they're loud. I'm sorry. Nothing I can do about that. So do you all want me to weigh in at this point? I'm sorry. Okay so first of all I'm Chris Rakia managing director of ValiNet which is a design build operating company for EC fiber. We're actually partnering with GWI as well for the DV fiber. Is anyone from EC fiber on who was planning on doing a presentation on behalf of the CUD? I haven't seen that. So here's what I will do. I wanted to talk about the procurement piece briefly because that's where I have the most information. But let me just say that EC fiber as an entity we have over we have 6200 customers online right now and we're pretty much finishing our build of the original 22 towns. We have Hartford still to do which includes White River Junction and a bunch of pretty complicated areas. And then we have eight new towns that we're pretty much in the same boat as the other CUDs on in terms of poll collection information applying for licenses developing those. The other piece that we have which I would share with you in more detail if and when you wish the board wishes to get into it but it's kind of in the lessons learning department. Some of our original towns that we built we kind of built them to people who wanted service and didn't design the whole town at the same time. And some of those are going to need to be rebuilt frankly. Barnard comes to mind as one that really could stand that and they're probably a couple of others. So that will go into a lessons learned discussion but in terms of procurement we anticipated that we are going to have problems particularly with the art off auction around the country and all this additional attention to broadband that we're going to have problems procuring materials. We have ordered all our materials for both Hartford and most of the new towns already and we anticipate delivery this fall. But what I wanted to bring your attention to is there is a consortium of groups that are able to procure through power and tell and Calix and I'll talk about those in a second. Advanced ordering where the consortium will store the materials and guarantee a delivery when you call them. They will guarantee the delivery within a week. So that may be an option that we can explore some more. We haven't had to use them because we've had such a good direct connections with power and tell and and Calix. What I will say is I think that the ARPA funds and and Rob may know this better but I suspect there's going to be a buy American priority there and we do try and do that whenever we can but the reality is that even an American company that we buy from like Calix has manufacturing that's in China or elsewhere so I think we have to probably explore that some more. But I guess I will just stop there and say how any questions that I can be helpful with or anything that we can do as Valinette to you know help facilitate your work. I'm happy to do that. Laura. Yeah thanks Chris. So going back to the grant you're on camera. I'm sorry. Thank you. I'll stop smoking my cigar now. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you for that. Sorry boy. That's okay. It's okay. It's okay. Thank you. I don't laugh enough. So going back to the grant the grant sizes that we heard from Jerry and Mary making sure that when we're awarding grants so I know Valinette has an EC5 or have a lot of experience in this realm so when we're thinking about pre-construction and construction grant sizes do you have an opinion about the sizes of grant awards that we should be thinking about or the range? Yeah I do. I think for the poll collection and make ready the poll collection is about is probably about 700 a mile you know. I expect all these prices to go up because we're all trying to do the work at the same time but we've used poll collection at about 700 a mile and make ready and design is going to be about 10,000 a mile. Overall construction is and you didn't ask about construction but we have that that's creeping up to about 35,000 a mile. So when we think about you know when you all are coming in we have a CUD coming in for a pre-construction grant you know what should we be thinking about as the minimum that they might need in order to meet Jeremy's question from earlier you know now it's people to keep moving. Right I suggest that because of that that tension between bite-sized pieces as well as you know keeping the continuity going I guess I would suggest that that the grants have the ability to have different sections for you know high-level design poll collection applications for make ready as kind of separate line items but I do think you're in you're in the million and a half to two million dollar range probably for each of these CUDs I mean I hope you all saw the NEC that is extraordinary right the the breath of NEC and the number of miles to serve the number of residents in that vast area I you know I think from our business planning we've shown that that's going to require some construction assistance beyond the beyond the bonding capacity but the rest I think are similar enough to what we've experienced in EC fiber territory that that grants to get this going to the point where then there's some capital available such that you can be attractive to the bond market is is is kind of the way we we envision everybody kind of going I'm not sure I'm answering your question but I think the pre-construction stuff and you know getting to the point where you can start constructing fiber is probably a two million dollar venture for each of these CUDs I'm just that's a rough that is a very rough estimate so 1.5 to 2 is I think yeah with NEC we kind of estimate I just did an extrapolation from cv fibers number if you extrapolate up from the 9.8 percent to the state level we end up with 16 and a half million so I suspect with any case numbers in there it's probably to be close to about 20 million total design yeah I think that's probably that's probably about right I should say we tried to address some of these issues we're gonna I know we're running behind schedule but we do have a draft for review for the board that's still pending with guidehouse and the state for approval of a potential RFP for the remainder of the pre-construction funds that we'll talk for but I know we are running any other questions um Chris just this is Dan Nelson um yeah what was your design cost for mile please um we kind of roll it in with the with the um sorry the chickens are uh extraordinarily loud at the moment um we kind of roll it in with the make ready application stuff and we were estimating I would we were estimating about 10 000 total thank you yep quick quick question for you on your um is it bartered do you have to rebuild yes yes what was what was the flaw there well so it wasn't a flaw per se it was just the nature of how we started remember that we started um with private um private equity um and what that meant was we were constructing out to people that wanted service and kind of offering service along the way to those that um happened to be between point A and point B but the reality is the way to do this right is to design the town all at once which I'm I'm not hearing any objective you know I'm hearing everybody saying they're doing that but we did not get to because we were kind of scrapping for funds we had private equity private investors who wanted service to their own houses um we had to build kind of uh piecemeal and as a result the the overall system in the early days wasn't designed to necessarily have the right number of fibers or an organized way of getting from uh to everybody and you know we've learned that over time and we've certainly made adjustments and and have um more success now but the reality is in the beginning we didn't have the money nor the the penetration to be able to do that so some of those towns earlier um really aren't built with um the right fiber numbers or direction um to to really provide that um resilient link that we and rings that we look for so that was really it okay thank you any other questions or Chris thank you very much thanks everybody I'm going to insist that we do our break though I can make that happen but I have to make previous arrangements why don't we take a 10 on a break five isn't it 10 no more no more than 10 let's be maybe a competition for the master from the other meeting we'll be it's 10 50 now so please be back at buy 11 we're back to um we're back to meeting yeah we're back in session yeah back in session thank you okay so we've gone through the cd updates um is there any comment uh we want to have any follow-up discussion relative to the cd updates can we just confirm that people can hear us because everybody might be muted you can put up your hand if you can hear us very good okay it's coming through here so okay so that was some very meaty content very helpful any further discussion questions probably um there are a number of references to uh business models that precede pre-construction or high level design and um earlier funding that helped structure a plan part of our charge is to evaluate I think the sustainability of the proposals or the projects that are coming before us and I just don't know what to do with the random references to oh yeah we have a business plan and and how we how we address the evolutionary part of the cd's so there's two max absolutely there's two pieces of legislation so act 79 some two years ago which is what most of these guys have been operating on and it had requirements to put together a business plan yeah to do that so I think that's I don't know if that's a question no in order to to make grant agreements it seems that we have to also be evaluating the business plan so and that is something that I think this group is going to need to figure out like are we evaluating a business plan before we spend more money is that in the legislation I I'm recalling that but I could have just collapsed right over here's the way and I'm going to put this out there because wek has put forward a business plan wek has done a feasibility study so I'm somewhat operating in two worlds right now yeah and and our fiber rollout is for electric purposes intentionally it's for the benefit of internet service providers so we have a our vested interests is on the electric side to help us do some things electrically of course anyway that said we've done a feasibility study business plan that informs us and drives us to move us down the road I it could become part of a package that ultimately we file with if we were applying if we were wek is not applying but if wek we're lining up to apply for funds from this board that could be part of the story so we need to develop district criteria grant submission protocols like here's our 20 pages of fill this out and part of what what that book reporter requirement could be is that tell us if you've had a feasibility study tell its tangentials documents that you would submit as part of our grant requirement so I look at it as a body of work not necessarily that that stuff is required of everybody that makes sense everybody's most of the ones I've heard are they're going to have some sort of pro forma financial projection right it's going to have it's going to have miles it's going to have numbers it's going to have take rate it's going to have some assumptions about retail pricing and and you know unlike wek you know wek's backstop by a vibrant electric business these these CDs are not these CDs are not backstop by anything other than their their pro forma right and the reason why I'm concerned about it because several times today we've heard oh well we want to go out to the bond market and we need to establish sustainability our plan for that is to going to high take rate areas well it isn't just high take rate areas it's having a viable business so so I think you know yes yes to the checklist right but that will be part of the body of stuff that is produced to say this is why you should give us money right and it doesn't just did you do it but rather what did it say right and all the all the CDs are very far along several are holding off on finalizing until they determine with them with a with their potential partner or operator since that will influence a lot of what their overall model is but at what one other kind of another another reason why I care is because prista could you mute um another reason why I care is because we do have an affordability objective that's underlying all this I have an opinion about that I don't want to bring it up here but it helps us keep that on the checklist that should be in this body of you know grant requirement requests we're going to say if you want money from the bcdb you have to fill this out and part of that is how are you going to fulfill this portion of the low income requirements that's what that's what is in my head I think and maybe Brian oh sorry well something you said is how do we not block them and keep them going because they're on a run if there are some standardized project schedule like where are you this is what it should look like your burn rate is and you need this much capital of these milestones but we can make sure we feed that and yet not give them three million dollars today we feed them appropriately as it goes yeah I think I imagine something that looks like you're approving them for an amount but you are but the distribution of the amount will be milestone based that shows that the ball is rolling in the right direction at the right pace and that as soon as they hit a milestone that says yep they're going to make it then boom you if then you send the next distribution so that they keep the activity going and in that the draft rp review that's one of the approaches that we took was where we established a cap and then they would be applying within that cap because I've heard from many of the cds it's hard to determine it's hard to get to an operating agreement without knowing what you potentially have available to you so we can talk about the process and all of that if we want to go into the into the rp the high level or I don't think we should move on but I did cut off Laura when I added one quick question so I think I'm aware that there's one cud feasibility study that came back that it was not feasible is there only one there is all there is only there is only one there is a one feasibility study that is still pending and being reviewed then my question is is there some comparison of the feasibility studies of all the feasibility studies to go I think more to your question I don't know such a comparison exists they use the variety of different vendors some will be easier to compare compare than than others so so for a benefit of staff just to Dan's point the narratives are are great and it's nice to meet the cuds but I think we need to start benchmarking this out and have a format in which we track where people are and what they're doing the narratives we're we're not tracking anything specific yeah this goes to I've sent us an email but you know the concept of a maturity model is basically just you're taking disparate organizations and just ranking them on a you know how mature are they in the evolution to their objective right so I'm going to say this it's probably wrong that's just an example but I would say if you were to break all the CDs into like a three-tier maturity model EC5 is going to be at the top they have they have thousands of customers who pay them regular who pay their bills regularly they know how to design construct support and operate a network a retail network you know they they're basically just an expansion mode now but their core business model is proven and repeatable right and they're solid you know on the other side you've got some some CDs that are you know just starting the journey that EC5 started 10 years ago and so I think we also need to tune our grant process around where to where does each CD fit in their maturity model because some need more support than others and that and that we should be in recognition of that and the monies we award are riskier or less riskier depending upon where they are in their maturity model journey so I think we need to spend some time doing that and it's not a judgment on the CDs it's just a statement of factor where they are in their evolution and how that aligns with responsible grant administration and I was and making sure that we bring the tail end up sure remembering that these are largely community volunteer organizations so who needs more help to get to that place and that that was the approach with the age 3315 funds because it was pre-construction and capacity and various groups needed more in terms of capacity there was also a long process in terms of ensuring that they have the capacity for grant administration which is what led us to the idea of the shared discussion reviewing contracts and things like that a lot of those were put into place for those types of safeguards but I'm sure the CUDs would welcome and I think they would agree with our assessment of where where everybody is at. A couple of caveats on the feasibility studies one they were done before the ARDOF areas were established and two beware of you know saying I'm aware of the study was said was not feasible but of course there's something NAK is not feasible either without grant funding you know and so so there were different assumptions made in those feasibility studies the assumption that NAK was look you know these are feasible weeks we're serving such a such a small area but how much grant funding do we need you'll see in the NAK model you could plug in the grant funding and see what it does in the time it takes to pay off the loan so so that you know that's why we exist because the feasibility isn't there and the feasibility actually the feasibility studies probably most of them were done before even the ARPA funds were here either which is a game changer in terms of feasibility so I think it's a safe bet to say that if they were found feasible before the ARPA funds they're definitely feasible now I think yes well you did you have something not okay we think all right we are 10 minutes after 11 and 11-9 shall we jump over to pre-construction program we're just seeing this now just a it's a little bit of background on process when when 71 was signed there the Department of Public Service was given the ability to allocate up to 20 million dollars in funds via the pre-construction program we were unable to get an RFP approved there was various legal review that went through with the RFP and the state has a whole system for reviewing anything connected to ARPA funds we are still waiting for the final go ahead to even be able to release the RFP so this document that you have and that we'll put up on the screen momentarily and have a net board packet is a draft for discussion so it's not just us making changes we may have a finance and management coming back requiring various changes as well so that that's the history on that one other piece of history is H315 provided 1.6 million dollars for pre-construction and capacity that has been exhausted and you heard many of the CUDs speak about that all already almost all of those grants are fully fully executed how much was that 1.6 million you also heard mentions of delays when it comes to to federal funds and the record keeping of financing there was various steps in terms of insurance in terms of the federal DUNS number and SAM number all these all these technical things that I will be thankful when I don't have to deal with but it was really getting everyone's ducks in a row to make the process a lot smoother as additional funding goes out the doors there were some challenges with CUDs where they changed their address or changed their names or various other different things that held the process up a little bit the grant agreements also underwent a legal review by both the legal staff at the public service department which delayed those able being able to be issued but it was all done to get us in a better place to be able to move things out the door at least in terms of trying to reduce some of that type of bureaucracy and to focus more on the deliberative side of things of what should be approved what shouldn't be approved how we go about that so that's just my man called but in terms of the delay of all the delays so this so this was the first draft of this was probably written in june but let me put it up on the screen so everybody at home can see this and there's just a few things to we should focus on all right this may take a moment to find this because so can I ask a question so then as I'm starting to read through this this looks like it was worked on in advance for us that we now are having the opportunity to because initially we thought this was going to be out before the board was even created which is great so we're not starting right so it was changed to being it was changed to being where it's the board issuing it and various other items in terms of reporting in terms of everything were switched to being as if this could be used for the board and this is intended to be a rfp which is essentially setting the framework for all pre-construction grants yes which we're not going to be asked to act on today because we're just getting it right now that's that's up to the board to to decide okay and how of the cd's how many of them have already received our past pre-construction any of them except everybody has even ec5 or has pre-construction needs for their new town so everybody everybody needs uh for the initial 1.6 program uh million dollar program i believe we i don't have the exact number it was close to nine million dollars in requests well oversubscribe so it's it's been admittedly it's cd's will certainly say it's been a bit of a of a hold up but they also understand that the board needs to get stood up and needs to take an interest in this as well so it's kind of this this whole bouncing act that we keep talking about let me add two of them this pre-construction grant doesn't commit the board to anything this is really to get the money in our account so ultimately once this is approved we get it in our account we allocate it well using this rf this is the using this rfp yeah but we can i don't buy that yeah it's we had to provide a draft rfp to the administration and uh guidehouse for review to make sure that it's in compliance with all the arpa treasury guidelines uh there can be some changes after that uh but it's more of there there can be backed and forth once the initial program is approved and that gets us access to the the funds that were appropriated sorry can i ask a silly question what's guidehouse sorry guidehouse are uh one of the consultants that review all all appropriations from uh first from the current the crf funds the coronavirus relief funds and now from the american rescue plan to ensure compliance to federal it's governs all governs administration it's consultants that the administration is working for the fence exactly we're giving those no they're working for the state the state has engaged them the guidehouse has a religion with all 50 states for this or just from that i know it's they work with many different states but it's certainly not all 50 there is one of the premier companies that has been reviewing different the just to reiterate and so there they're protect us that we've checked all the boxes for the federal funds and we're not going to so yes okay so it's simple but sometimes it does take some time everything so so that's what so this is the draft that was shared with them they already have they already have it and how long they had it oh it's in very it's there's been a back and forth over whether they want to approve the 150 million dollars program by program or the entire 150 million dollar appropriation they've they've now had this version of the grant for several weeks now and i believe we we're expecting hoping for some type of approval next next week so we couldn't issue this today even if we wanted to but we can move towards if we want to make additional changes to this today and start setting over setting up the time frame we thought it was a good a good point to start the discussions at okay so i'm i'm let me make sure i follow this because this is the requirements we're going to attach to the cud is this isn't the rfp that we submitted the governors this is part of the package that we had to submit okay but we as part of that package we had to submit what we were going to be issuing when we issue our request for proposals our request for grant applications so this is the very very draft version of our request for grant applications from the cud for the pre-instruction program can i ask a question we we you submitted a package to the governor's office did you just talked about it yes what is that uh it's a it's a questionnaire for the use of any of the funds okay and we're supposed to attach any rfps that are in draft form for them to also review so they can get a better understanding of the programs it's just like this board is attached to all that stuff and we just don't know about it that's okay we can provide you copies of that we will put like a copy right think about it's like we're jumping on a train it's already moving and and unless we can see the cars we can't jump some of us will be more methodical about how we jump and others just jump and that gets to what really i've been working and then we should have a good tweet i really want to have a place where all these documents are kept if you have access to and the grant we're working on it's we're in talks to figure out the whole website and want to get stuff off there for a variety of reasons sooner than right that's right it's huge yes it's like okay if i'm a grant applicant i want to go to a website and so i tell me what to do what are all the things i have to do lay out what exactly what i have to do and then i go forth and show all the because it's a it's a left building out grants is a big work project i fully i fully agree we just have been not able to release this until we got approval but we felt that it was necessary to discuss amongst the board absolutely i'm in a public meeting so that's why i don't need don't send me applications yet based on what you see in here please this is something to poke at and poke holes at which is helpful exactly or process wise i mean will will we approve this i think they will approve right that your expectation is the executive nothing i we're not expecting approval today right yeah actually we will be looking for your okay the next question is okay what is the process to go through this are you gonna do some just walk us through or you're expecting us to make changes no we're gonna give you an overview now you take it back with you and you can send those recommended changes to me and you know we'll let you know we'll present it in the next meeting yeah we're gonna let you know yes yeah this is called track one yeah yeah this is good and you'll send it even though i've been out today i will send it in words so you can track out it this is more just to give an idea because it's a lot of things we're talking about with pre-construction and allocating funds and stuff are addressed in here so i want to make sure that we're on the right track i feel like we were close but once again this was developed before the board was even before x71 no it's what this now no not before x71 but it was developed right after x71 was passed since we were going to have access to in the interim we are expecting to have access to a certain amount of funds to get out the door to keep things moving but that access wasn't provided because of the trying to make sure that we're all on track when it comes to the use of these federal funds which is a worthy goal for everybody in the state okay so i'm just going to go through i'm going to go through some of it fast some of it is just a lot of background of what it's funded by it's funded by x71 became law june 8 all that disclaimer about the american rescue plan act that the treasury guidelines are still preliminary um it's very clear in that they are allowed to be used for broadband especially at the speed but that disclaimer has to be on there that additional guidelines come out it may impact the administration of the program question so do i have it right that the funds can only be issued to see you these yes pre-construction yes just for that step just for pre-construction construction funds are open to we can get into that we talked about but you'll see when i talk about some percentages it's based on just for c uds which is one of the other reasons why when we're talking about pre-construction it was you weren't hearing from the other providers you were hearing from the c uds uh so we set aside uh 30 000 was what was 30 million dollars was what was discussed if uh please correct me if i'm wrong Laura many times that one of the legislation was being drafted uh when it was put into the budget bill it was all lumped together as one appropriation but that is one area that this is a choice so this is a choice so this is for the entire program pre-construction pre-construction program is it enough for pre-construction because unlike construction which they can bond for they can't bond for pre-construction right that that is that is correct two million two million times nine c uds well no it's too cool no not quite but about 20 based on the numbers we had today we're looking at about 20 million total for design so then um you know then then they'll be make ready costs on top of that but we think 30 millions enough pre-construction include actual make ready costs i believe in the definition should be explicit about that we need to define it okay we need to define pre-construction more i think the prime question is an important one is does it include the make ready costs versus putting that in the construction cost yes is it the survey cost or is it the actual right get on the pole and make the room yeah that's a good question something that we should that we should start it's like i think yeah or is it up to us to define yes so um so the first so the act 71 also talks about an equitable distribution of fu