All right, so I've started the recording. It's six o'clock. I'd like to call the February 9th, 2021 regular governing board meeting of CV Fiber to order. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? So Henry, you had one to add doing a report on some of the survey results, I believe you're gonna talk about that. Yes. Okay, so I'd like to do that after the planning and development committee's report. All right, and David, you have something to add? Well, it could be part of my report, but it's an action item, a resolution to hire CV Central Vermont Region Planning Commission. Okay, so let's add that after the planning and development committee's report before Henry's report, so CVRPC hiring, okay. And then I'd like to give a quick clerk update, if that's okay, I forgot to tell you about that. All right, so clerk update we'll do after the treasurer's report. So we actually have stuff added. That's not usual. Anything else that we should be adding? Alan. Is there gonna be any discussion about art off auction sales tonight? I'm starting to feel like a lot of us don't really understand what's going on and would like to have some background just so we have some knowledge if people ask us questions. Sure, I was thinking that sort of thing would be under kind of the open-ended discussion in the 21 timeline, the legislature and the grants because I know Michael did a bit of reporting back to the legislature today and Michael, if you're amenable, if you could give us a quick rundown of anything that's fit to dish, would that be okay? Sure. Thank you. David's maps are terrific, but there's a hell of a lot of information in my design. Yeah. That's why they're terrific. So I would add, I'd like to give Jeremy Matt some extra compensation for all the research to do all the minutes. I don't know whether that fits into the agenda. So we could make a motion or put it on the agenda for next time to add a bonus or some additional stipend or something like that for tracking down those documents. I would not be against that. Shall I put it on the next agenda? I mean, that's not, I appreciate it, but it's not necessary. I mean, I'm doing this because I believe in it, so. Sure. I guess. Okay. And Alan, something else for the agenda? Well, if I could just say, in Jeremy's situation, if he does end up having to listen to archetypes and draw up new minutes for us, and increasingly it's looking like that's a possibility, that I think he should be compensated for in some extra way. It doesn't have to be an increase in his salary generally, but he definitely should be compensated maybe a piecemeal basis if he has to start listening to archetypes that go on for three and four hours and then write the minutes in that. I thought you were gonna say maybe a pizza. I thought you were gonna say maybe a pizza. I thought you were gonna say maybe a pizza. I thought you were gonna say maybe a pizza. All right, all right, so we'll put, I'm gonna put that on the agenda for next time and maybe we can put together some sort of concrete proposal for what that looks like. But yeah, I think that all seems reasonable. Okay, any other changes or additions to the agenda? Okay, seeing none. Moving on to public comment. Does anybody have comments on any items that are not on the agenda that they would like to share? Okay. I have a question, Jeremy. Michael first, and then Chuck. I'm just, I've always been confused about public comment. Is that, is this the moment when the public non-delegates get to speak? So the answer is yes with an asterisk. So this is a unstructured time to talk about any item that is not warned on the agenda. All of the agenda items, all of the agenda items are supposed to also be available for public comment should somebody be attending and want to weigh in on it. They're not going to be able to dominate the conversation that should be our job. But yeah, this is the kind of the unstructured, get the stuff off your chest or hey, why aren't we talking about this? This isn't on your agenda. That's this sort of wildcard bucket. Thank you. Sure. And Chuck. Just wanted to call attention to the fact that Starlink has just dropped in Moortown and I know at least a few of my neighbors have gone ahead and pulled the trigger on it. So I will be reporting back to the board about what it's like and how it goes. All right. And I think somebody sent out a link that was shared by I don't remember Tom Epsilon who lives in Stowe, I think. So yeah, somebody shared that and his feedback about that. I thought that was pretty informative. Jeremy, have something about this and then Siobhan. My dad signed up this morning in Southern Vermont. Okay. Siobhan. I got an email offering to pre-subscribe for $99 to put myself at the top of the list which I thought was an interesting, I don't know, ploy is the right word. But yeah, so I don't know. It'll be interesting to me to see if they can keep up with demand and if they can continue delivering on the bandwidth promises as they get tens and then hundreds and then thousands of people signed up for this if it will actually work out. But we shall see. The equipment's $500. So it's not a cheap sign up. Nope. Yeah, and this is Josh. Just to add a little bit to that. Right now, they're not laser linked and matched right now over the general public which will be receiving the service. That's something that's gonna be coming later. So just so everyone is aware that that's how it's working now. Their goal is to have a laser meshed system, but right now it's really not. It's not that there's parts of it that are but it's not anywhere where we are, so. Okay. Sounds good. Anything else on Starlink or anything else? So I'd like to welcome back Phil Hayek who was recovering after a while. I see your smiling face there again. Phil, welcome back. Thank you. Appreciate it. Glad to be back. Nice to see you again, Phil. You missed so much. I know. I read all the minutes. That's good. All right. Anything else under public comment before we move on? Well, at least somebody read the minutes. There you go. Exactly. I thought it was the least I could do. Okay. Moving on. Consent agenda. I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented, which includes approving the January 26 minutes. Second. Okay. Seconded by Siobhan. Any further discussion? Okay. All in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed abstentions or requests for roll call? Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Thanks, everybody. Okay. This next item I added in part to restate something that we have in our governing board rules or procedure and because of some concerns about how board and committee meetings were taking place and not having a, not necessarily having an environment that's sympathetic to equity and fairness and flow of discussion. So I wanna start with, in our rules for procedure, section E has a covers discussions, discussion, motions and voting. In particular, I really just wanna read number four.  And the part I wanna highlight is this, and it's quote, if a member has already spoken on a topic, he or she may not be recognized again until others have been first given the opportunity to comment or until others have been given the opportunity to comment as many times as any other speaker has commented. Okay. This is important. And we have a limited amount of time to do a lot of work and an incredible, an incredible amount of work happens in the committees. And I wanna point something out that those committees can't do their work if the folks on those committees don't do the work ahead of time. Okay. So I don't mean to have this to make this sound like I'm chastising anyone or anything. It's just that there's been, there have been a couple of instances where this maybe could have gone better, things could have gone better. So I just want to restate my and hopefully by extension our commitment to having these discussions in ways that are fair, equitable and open and just that flow smoothly and that we can get things done. That's all that was my soapbox moment. I'm happy to answer any questions folks might have or address any concerns. Otherwise I'm just gonna plow on through. Cool. Chuck. So lots of parts there. Is the concern that some people, and I admit I could very well be one of those people because I tend to do it, are dominating more of the conversations than they should and not giving others the opportunity to speak. Or is this more related to how the work is actually getting done in committees? Cause it sounded like a little bit of both and it's not clear to me exactly what the feedback here is that we're supposed to take away. It is both, you're right, it is both. And so part of it is that the discussions when meetings are happening are sometimes dominated by one or a handful of voices. But however, the flip side of that is that some of the work that folks on committees are expected to do is to review the material and to try to get their mind wrapped around the materials or provide authors feedback and to do these things before we go into a duly warned meeting and then have to spend time with, in our case right now, we've got 21 people altogether. So we don't have to rehash things that could be one-on-one conversations. So again, this is a, it's an equity thing, but it's also about smooth and open discussions and people kind of delivering on the sort of implicit promise of serving on a committee. Any anything else on this? Moving on to a discussion of policies, rules and regulations. Alan, I believe this one's yours. You're muted. Sorry about that. I got going on my review here. This is just a short reminder more or less of the memo I sent out, memo, the email I sent out on, I think it was the beginning of February the first about the policy work I've been trying to do to fulfill the desire of the board to see what policies we have on file and all that kind of stuff. And what I did was I sent you out a description of the work I've done and then there were also two zip files that contained the first one contained policies that I have evidence through the minutes I've been able to accumulate. I have evidence of policies that have been adopted. And then the second file was policies that had been developed by committees and in most cases were brought before the board and I can't tell what finally happened at the board concerning the policies. And part of the problem is the one that Jeremy knows about Jeremy Matt is that we have a bunch of minutes that are missing. We have what is Jeremy about four or five in 2019 of the governing board minutes and those were listed in my email. And then we also have minutes of committees that are missing. What this means is I can't complete the assignment until I have the minutes to tell me what happened to some of the policies that were rolling through the board process, the board approval process. So this is sort of an illustration of why keeping good minutes and making them available to people is really important. We get stuck on something like this and it's not a good place to be. So any help we can give Jeremy in hunting down any of these minutes is also a help for me and I'll be able to finish the work you asked me to do. Thanks for that, Alan. Jeremy, did you wanna say something? I mean, I was gonna cover some of that in the clerk's report. So maybe wait for that. I was just raising my hand saying that there were five. I see maybe it wasn't very helpful. I think I found one of them and I forwarded on to Jeremy. I would bet that if I look on my, I have a couple of USB drives that may have some of these stragglers and on other PCs, but because this was multiple PCs ago, but yeah, not the clerk at the time. So I did not have all that material. Let's see, Tom. Going through and trying to help Jeremy find those. I did notice a few places where Rebecca had mentioned providing hard copies in actually onsite when we all met. And I know most people probably didn't hold on to those, but if anybody happens to have been, somebody who squirrels that kind of stuff away, it might be another place where we could find ones that aren't digitally available. So I kept all my printed copies of agendas that have some of my handwritten notes, but yeah, I don't think I have any printed minutes. Yeah, Alan. You know, I just thought of a question that I hadn't asked myself. Orca has recorded all the governing board meetings. Is that correct? I believe so. Nobody has used Orca for any committee meetings. Is that correct? There's I think two, there's like two committee recordings on there. One from the Business Development Committee back when it was called that, and then one from the Finance Committee. If you could send me, I was gonna say we had them there once. If you could send me the day to the finance one, that might help me, Jeremy. So I know I could get back to you. It's August 27th, 2018. Is that up on the Google Drive? I'll link to it is not, but it is in the meeting minutes summary. What I can do is I can paste the link to the Orca repository in chat. And it's pretty easy to just go to like the fifth page, which I think is where the Finance Committee one is. Okay. Sorry to take up time to do some business here. No, that's what we're here for. Anything else about policies, rules, regulations? Allen or anybody else? Okay. Moving along. Thanks. Clerk's update, Jeremy, it's all you. Okay. So kind of stealing a little bit of my thunder, but I've been doing a lot of work trying to get those minutes in order. And mostly focusing on the governing board, like Allen had said, there are five that are missing. Of those, there are four, which where there are Orca recordings, there's one that we don't have minutes and we do not have an Orca recording. That one is September 10th, 2019, or 2010 rather. So if anyone has that one, that would be a fantastic one to get. I've been in contact with Becca. She says that she has found the thumb drive that she was using when she was clerk and will hopefully be able to get me files. That was a few days ago and I still haven't gotten anything from her knock on wood. The other issue is that a lot of the PDFs that we have, the minutes have been approved, but all I have are the draft copies that were sent around in watermarked PDFs. And some of them are quite rough. Some of them, the approval says that they were quote, approved with uncirculated edits and that the edits were discussed in the meetings, but there was no mention in those minutes of what the edits were. So I mean, I could go back to the Orca recordings and figure out where that, you know, so anyways, there's a lot left to do there. Also working on the planning and development, committee minutes, there's some missing there. We have most of them. I think Chuck has given me all the communication committee ones at this point. There's the executive finance and policy committees that I have a few for for each of those. I don't really have a sense of what I might be missing there because I don't know how many meetings there were, but for now I'm focusing on governing board planning and development and communications. So that's pretty much my update. Okay, any questions for Jeremy? Okay, thank you for that. Oops, I leapfrogged past Jerry. Jerry, Treasurer's report. I seem to have, sorry if I'm saying anything, I can't hear anyone. Can you hear me now or? Yep, I can hear you. Can you hear me, Jeremy? Yep, I can hear you, Jerry. I can now. My network just completely quit working for a little bit. So, okay, I'm sorry, I think we're back. See, that never happens to me. All right. I've sent out this report to everyone, so everybody should have seen it. This is not the standard report that I would like to present on a regular basis. My intention is to be able to show over time, projected expenses, projected revenues, where we are month to month in meeting our projections, that kind of a format, which is far more typical, including where we are in bank accounts, but I dropped into this thing, and the first thing I had to do was get 10.99s out, which we did, and I also signed the 10.96, that also goes with that. So, I'll just talk really quickly about what I've been doing and what I'm in the middle of doing. So, we reconciled fiscal year 2020, which for us is also the calendar year. I'm in the process of setting up the tracking and the standard reporting for the next fiscal year, so it won't just be an Excel spreadsheet, like in the same way that I'm showing it now. I'm working with the bookkeeper to set up QuickBooks. We'll see where that goes. I think the QuickBooks will be fine. I'm not 100% sure we're gonna need a bookkeeper. We certainly needed her, or I needed her. I needed somebody to lean on for these 10.99s, but we're gonna start with her. She's fine, it's not a problem with her. It's just a question of, is she adding value? So far, yes. There's a determination of tax status, and do we have a CPA on board, on the board? I don't see anybody saying yes. So we filed as a government entity, a 170C1, and when I looked up our tax ID number to see if we show up as a tax-exempt organization, we do not show up. And in my reading of the tax code, it looks like we might need to actually ask for a determination, you get a determination letter that says yes indeed, you are a tax-exempt entity, which is something you just keep on file, I guess. Anyhow, I'm working through that now. It's not a problem, it's just not finished. And then the other thing that I'm working on is the Vita application. I actually haven't gotten responses yet from Eon Young Denny. I left a voicemail and an email with her. I will pursue her until we talk, I promise that. And we'll make sure that we're lined up for the Vita application and we'll get a sense of at what point are we actually ripe for sending in that application to make sure that we provide them with everything they expect. So that we don't half-step that. Folks have seen this before, I presume, so I don't know if it's necessary to walk through it, but on the summary for 2020, I was able to track down all of our deposits for the calendar year and identified where each of those came from. Similarly, with our payments, all of our checks, I was able to follow through with all of our checks and create the 1099s. You can see the little table that I put together there. There's, these are not the actual 1099 numbers. And I say that because the one difference is that Jeremy Matt, there was $100 worth there that was a reimbursement and not a 1099 type payment, if you will. So this is just my jumping in and trying to understand where we are financially. So this is not the way I would expect to present on a month to month as we go through the year. But since I jumped in at the very end of the year, this was kind of where I landed. And then just looking at 2021, it's been pretty quiet so far for 2021 with the exception of a PSD grant that we deposited for $70,000. The deposit, the check was actually dated on the 28th of December, but it took us a while to get an appointment at the bank because I wanted to actually hand that to somebody at the bank. I wasn't gonna do my first time at the bank putting it into the tube and hoping it went through. So I wanted to hand it over. And Jeremy and I both, you know, I signed all the papers and we got everything there taken care of. So our balances as of yesterday, we have two accounts which we are required to have a minimum of two accounts. The one is called a capital account and the other one I forget what the title of that is our, the savings account is, as you see, there's 25 bucks in there. And the checking account right now, we have $84,000. I also wanna talk just a little bit about projected revenues coming up. That's the last page on the report that I did. Just because I think it's, you know, we've had a lot of numbers flying around and we're in different status, different points in some of these revenue streams. So I just wanted to have something that I could show here. And if this needs correcting, please send me an email or put a chat or somehow get in touch with me to make sure that these are corrected. But we are waiting for the legislation to extend the CARES grant. That would be, I believe $240,000. And, but that money is spoken for because of the CARES grant that has to be spent for specific purposes. So when we look at the reporting for this from the treasurer's perspective, that's gonna be a separate stove pipe. We're gonna, you know, that money will be isolated for those purposes and all of the revenues and expenditures related to that are gonna stay in their stove pipe and we'll keep that accounting separable. Then we have the PSD grant, the $40,000 that we are awaiting the OK to present the application. My understanding is that's going to happen within the next month or so, probably most likely in this first quarter. We have the VEDA loan that everybody knows about. We're working on the application. It seems that may might be the appropriate time, at least for VEDA to be ready to accept the application, where we're gonna be at that time being able to adequately fill out the application, that's yet to be determined. But we definitely wanna be ready for that. There's the NBRC grant, Northern Borders Regional Commission, I think, that needs to be revised because we were ahead of our skis the last time, I guess. But we are probably far more ready for it this time and that timing on that as far as I know is the application in May with an award in August and we should be well poised for that. And then there's a question of fundraising and there's, I think we're missing an opportunity by not being extremely aggressive here and I'm not a fundraising person. I don't know if we should consider hiring a fundraising person who really does this for a living but it just seems to me that this is something that organizations, philanthropic organizations that are looking to make a difference, here's an opportunity for them to make a difference and we not only need the money but we can put that money to use in very short order so that we can actually show action and some kind of social return if you will for a philanthropic effort. And I think we really should be reaching out and we just can't put it on the same people that are doing everything else. There just isn't enough hours in the day which is why I think we may wanna consider hiring somebody to do this kind of effort. I'm just putting that out there, I'm not making a motion. Haven't mentioned it to the finance committee yet. It's just, it's part of my report. This is what I'm thinking about. I'm happy to take any questions and also anytime, right? Send me an email, give me a call, absolutely anytime. Thanks for that, Jerry, Jeremy. So if you find yourself in need of a CPA, I know a guy who's sort of a friend-ish who I might be able to lean on to help us out, lives in Montefiore and he's a super nice guy. I can ask, so. Well, that's great. I've been talking with one particular firm that the last time I spoke to the gentleman, I said, you know, you've already given me like 40 minutes of free time here. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. But it would be great if we could get somebody that would be willing to do this pro bono or would it, you know, at least be willing to do it, you know, on the books, but, you know, keep it a virtually pro bono, that would be wonderful. If it's quality work, of course, because we can't sacrifice that. Yeah, it's Jeff Boddergill in Montefiore. I don't know if I can hear it familiar with him, but. I know the name. Yeah, they told us that they were so busy they didn't have time, but if he's a friend of a friend. He's a good friend of mine, and he's mostly retired. Yeah, he's a rack of all buddy of mine. So maybe if David didn't, I'd both lean on him. Please do, gentlemen. We don't need much. We just need advice more than anything. Okay. All right, Tom. Yeah. So I took a utilities rate making course last week for three days, Michigan State University led. And Jerry, I'd like to, whenever you have your next financial committee meeting, I'd love to join in and give you a little debrief on what I saw, but my big takeaway was, we might want to start considering a professional, at least in a part-time capacity. And maybe, you know, with an eye towards building out to a full-time work or part of a contract or something. Because of those questions, like, there were questions in there that I just have no idea on. Which of the various federal rules relate to us as far as what kind of account books we need to keep? There's at least three different types. What count as inclusions or exclusionary parts of our rate making base? There were all kinds of things like that that it's not anywhere clear to me on those kind of questions and where we'd find the answers. And we should probably have a professional who looks at that kind of stuff and starts to look, not only at, you know, just keeping the books, which I think we're doing fine with that right now, but as we start trying to figure out, you know, the next five years of development and depreciation of assets and lease rates and all of that, how do we build out our different revenue rates at different classes of sign-up and how does that relate to any, you know, bonds we're submitting or all the rest of that. There's a whole lot there to untangle and make sure we're staying on the right side of regulation. Yeah. I can actually address that, Tom. EC, Fiber and Stan Williams together are supposedly, if I'm remembering this correctly, offering grants to CUDs throughout the state of Vermont to offer Stan's financial services so that he can answer those questions and get the books in order, you know, having a long history in a lot of different financial environments, but most recently doing exactly what we're talking about. So, and as a municipality, municipalities are not burdened by most of the same regulations and bookkeeping requirements, but that's the sort of thing that once we really get into the weeds and you have capital expenditures, whatever, I mean, I would hand that off to somebody like Stan, but at least initially, it sounds like he's willing to do that for nothing. So we need to get him to visit the finance committee and have a presentation and maybe have Tom also there so that we can kind of compare notes on that. Exactly. Exactly. Jeremy? I seem to recall that for one of our grants that Stan offered to give us advice for, as a matching contribution. I don't know if we ever took advantage of that, but that might be something that we could take advantage of at some point. Yes, we did take advantage of a little bit of that. That was for the USDA Rural Business Development Grant. And yes, that was a way that we were able to unlock some additional funding with his help. I saw your hand up again. Does that require any sort of motion or just an invite? Yeah, he'll just come. I mean, we could make a motion if I think if folks want to make it formal, but I think it's really more of a question of let's get him scheduled and he'll show up. So then again, if EC Fiber Valley Net has actually made a process by which we have to apply for Stan's time through a grant-making process, maybe we have to do that now? I don't know. When I have financial questions about this, I just send him an email or a text and then he responds. He's not super responsive, not compared to a lot of folks, but when I get answers back, they're always really informative. Ray, did you have your hand up? Yeah, I did. Unless you think it's inappropriate, like to move that we accept the Treasurer's Written Report and post it online. Okay. So there was a motion. Is there a second for that motion? Second. Okay, seconded by Siobhan Allen. Jared, I had a question. On page five under the PSD Construction Grant, it's listed here in writing as a $400,000 grant, but when you just described it verbally to us, you said it was 40,000, which is correct? Can I really say 40,000? Thank you, Alan. It should be 400 as written. Okay. Okay. That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure. I just wanted to make absolutely sure. The other thing I wanted to mention the issue you brought up about tax exempt status, we went through a little bit of this. Becca Schrader and I did, we did a test run of making a charitable contribution from a donor advised fund at Schwab and in order to get approved by Schwab as a tax exempt organization, they had to do some work. And it seems to me there was some paperwork involved that maybe Becca still has copies of. So if you're in contact with her at all, you might just ask her if she remembers anything about that. I will do that, Alan. Thank you. Sure. Okay. So the motion on the table is to approve the Treasurer's Report as presented and to share it online. Is there anything on here that should not be shared online? Do we not want to share check numbers? Is that bad form? Any thoughts or is that okay?  I don't see what information someone can get from that as long as there's not account numbers. Right. I don't see those there. I just, again, just paranoid, over paranoid dude here. Alan, you have your hand up? Yeah. What would be the purpose of putting this online? I mean, isn't it kind of unusual for a nonprofit to put their financials, their monthly financials online? I mean, usually an audit or a budget you would possibly do or the government form, I'd forget what it is where you report manager salaries and stuff like that, but it seems to me a monthly financial statement is not something that most people would put online. Select boards sometimes do.  The journalists pull. I mean, we would have Times-Argus pull a copy of that or look at the list of checks every meeting. I mean, whether we put it online or not, I mean, still technically a public record, but I would... Right. As long as we're not revealing anything sensitive, I'm indifferent. I guess I'm getting really worried about the competition that I think we're walking into because of what's been happening with different possibilities springing up in the last three months. And I'm getting more worried that there's a lot of information about us out there now that could be used against us. And I totally agree. This is public information, but I don't think it's all that common, especially for a nonprofit that's involved in an enterprise that's basically competing with for-profit companies. I don't think it would be uncommon for this knock to be up on the website but maybe I'm wrong. So could I make a suggestion then? So maybe we can just include the page two and page three of which are the 2020 revenues and payments, which would normally be part of an annual report reckoning anyways. Yeah, that might be a good idea. Yeah, I don't think we could do future projections because that's proprietary information. So I'll accept that as a friendly amendment. And I expect that Jerry's gonna get to, like he said, the March, April, May or something, a standard treasurer's report. And certainly once we get that kind of ironed out, we kind of figure out what is standard and what belongs up there and doesn't belong in there, perhaps in that standard report. So I'll accept that as a friendly amendment, Mr. Vaughan will accept it as well. Okay. Yes. So any other thoughts about this motion? Okay, everybody's ready to go. Which pages were that real quick? It was two and three. Two and three. So please signify your approval by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed abstentions or roll call requests? Aye. Okay. Motion passes unanimously. Anything else for the treasurer? Yeah. Thanks an awful lot for doing an outstanding job gathering all this information. It's incredible. It has been incredibly time consuming. I know you and I have spoken offline several times and keep it up. Thanks. Tom. I just again want to bring up the need to get an audit and see where we're at on that. I also was wondering after that remaking course of different types of audits that are sometimes required and curious if we have a clear sense of what is required and do we want to reach out maybe to Rob Fish and get clarification on it. It's something like in some cases it's actually the PSD or the PUC's right to do an audit as opposed to you required to do an audit on yourselves and then report it. Does anybody hear anything further about that or is willing to follow up? Can I respond to that? Go for it. Yeah, Tom, that is actually one of my questions for the folks at VITA where they talk about financial statements. And I thought at one point they were asking for an audit and now I'm only finding that they're asking for financial statements. I want to be very clear on what it is that they're looking for. I had also been speaking with Fred Duclesi and Sullivan and Powers. He's the gentleman that's been giving me some of his free time if you will. And he's been saying we really should push to not have to do an audit at this time that we're just too early in the process to really be auditable because an audit requires certain actions that have to be taken even if there's no information and we'd be spending a fair amount of money on something that would have very little information in it. So yes, my intention is to find out from VITA because that seems to be the pressing issue about the level of financial information they have. Does that get to it Tom? Well, I wasn't sure if there was also something in the statute that created CUDs as entities, if there was a thing in there about needing to get an audit annually. There is, yes. And so would we want to follow up on with government officials on what that need actually is and can we get a waiver on that? I will do that. That would also be a Stan question. He would also be able to tell you how they threaded that needle. I mean, they were operational before they were a CUD so it's a little bit more complicated slash straightforward for them as they would have been probably doing this sort of thing already. Alan? I was on the incubator session last night, the Vaikuta one and this issue actually came up audits.  So I don't know if that can also mean financial statements but I think we want to be beginning to assemble a record, a financial record so that if we do eventually go out to bond markets we have the papers lined up perhaps going back as far as three years. It's never too early to get a start on something like that. That's a good thing to know, Alan. I expect that we'll be seeing the recording from last night before long from Evan. And so Henry put a question in the chat. Can you pick and choose which ones you attend? The answer is yes. There was a sign up sheet that went out month or so ago, I want to say. And we can, so each CUD just for capacity issues could only send three people. There's still plenty of spaces available in the remaining training sessions. So if you can go back, find that spreadsheet put your name down and then as those training sessions get scheduled then I or David or somebody sends the connection information to whomever at CV Fiber signed up for it. Thank you. Okay, you're welcome. Okay, anything else for the treasurer? Excellent. So yeah, I'd like to echo race sentiment Jerry Bravo and getting this all rolling essentially one month. The 1099 stuff. Yeah, not on my radar for sure. I'm glad it was on your radar. Communications Committee reports. Jeremy, hold on. I already said in chat that his connection is really unstable, but he had a comment with respect to fundraising says the general public is unaccustomed to thinking of utilities as philanthropic enterprises. Apparently I can't read this evening either. But I just wanted to throw that in there because he had put that in there. Sure. And I think, yeah, it will certainly be up to us to do the right thing to make sure everybody knows that we are not, you know, we're not the average ISP and that we can, you know, and where our job is rather different than shareholder profits. Okay. Communications Committee report. Chuck, you've got something for us to do. I've got something for us to do. Okay, so just a couple of quick updates before we get to the meat of that. The first is the Communications Committee is working on another update. I believe David completed a first draft today and is sending it over for some others of us to review and provide feedback and provide some editorial commentary for him. And so the rest of the board can expect to see another community update from the Communications Committee within hopefully a few days here. So once we have that, we will of course share and distribute with everyone. The other update is we continue to make improvements to the website. So a couple of changes that have been made since we launched the website at the end of December. We have broken out pages for individual committees and one of the big purposes there is to really better organize minutes and agendas. This broader initiative that a lot of people are putting time and energy into, we are also trying to make sure that the website is up to date and has all of the various minutes and agendas and whatever posted there. In addition to that, we had our developer develop a new feature that allows the websites posting of minutes and agendas to be much simpler so that Jeremy can be trained on how to do it directly and it won't take more than a couple minutes of his time each time it needs to be done. And so, yeah, Jeremy, look at that. Actually there should be an email in your inbox for me to set up a time to go through that training. Last but not least on the website updates, I just wanted to point out that while he's not here, Tim Sullivan has agreed to sort of work together with me to route all requests that come in from the broader board and help prioritize them and kind of be the points of contact for our developer going forward. And that way she's not getting requests from a bunch of different people. We have actually set up a Trello board where we will plug in the requests for her and that's what she'll work off with a prioritized list of the various details of the things that we were going to ask from her on an ongoing basis. A couple other things that have landed since that December timeframe, we landed an RFP page where we can manage a list of the currently active RFPs, what their status is and actually link out to those RFPs so that we have them available. And then finally we did the rename on the planning and development committee, no longer being known as business development committee. So that is all set. Any questions on the kind of the in progress update or website updates before we move on to the charter? Henry, I see you have your hand up. I'm just curious, what are you doing for the backend on all these different activities or committees or minutes and yeah. Yep, so the backend is hosted on a WordPress site hosted by a company that specializes in hosting WordPress sites called WP Engine. They're a very big WordPress hosting provider. They're in fact exclusively a WordPress hosting provider but they bring a lot of extra bells and whistles over other people who just give you shared servers with WordPress installed on it. They have their own custom CDN and cache layer and things like that that really help make WordPress the performance and a really stable environment with lots of automated backups and security layers and things of that nature. Does that answer your question? No. No. What is the backend database data source? Sure, so typically WordPress can use one of a number of different relational databases, Postgres, MySQL. In this particular. I don't know, WP Engine doesn't disclose their infrastructure. Okay, well, I mean, MySQL. It's probably MySQL, yeah, if I had to guess. It could be MariaDB, which is a for MySQL. I just like clarification on that and the ability to access that data or download that data, et cetera. You know, portability of the data and persistence of the data and independent access of the data when necessary. We have all of that, yes. You can set up credentials to connect to the database directly using a SQL client. They do daily snapshots on an automated basis, which you can download the SQL dump to your local file if you want to. They also do ad hoc backups anytime you want. So for example, before running a major update on the software, you can go in and do a quick backup right then and there and then run your updates. And then if something goes wrong, you can roll back and so forth. Yeah, that is really a DR aspect is really important, but the ability for the financial committee to be able to access all the minutes of the meetings, for example, once we're up and running, that's more important that the ability to access the data independent of the website is what I'm thinking about. Yeah, so we can pull some snapshots of the files or whatever, I'll let you and Chuck work this out offline. You can talk about it. Yeah, that's great, well done.  Changed my mind. Okay, wonderful. Anything else about communications committee, Chuck, before we go on to your motion? That's all the general updates. So now on to the motion. So like other committees, we have decided, well, we've taken the PDC's lead in deciding to formulate the charter of exactly what the communications committee is supposed to do as the authority to do is expected to do and so forth. And to that end, we drafted a charter and approved it in our last meeting. And the charter is pulled actually largely from the motion I originally made to create the communications committee. There is a little bit of nuance and difference from that, but it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who remembers that original motion. And in fact, it really just does a better job of setting up the expectations of what the communications committee should be delivering to the board. To that end, I sent around two copies today. The first copy is the copy that was officially approved by the communications committee. And I will now go ahead and make a motion. I so move that the board ratify the motion presented by the communications committee to represent the charter of the communications committee's role, responsibilities and authority for going forward. Second. Seconded by Siobhan. And then John Morris added some updates to this as well. So that will be a second amendment, but before, or an amendment to your first motion, but before we do that, Jeremy, you had a question or a comment? I just wanted to make sure that this was for the charter as, just for the minutes, just so it's the charter as approved by the communications committee. And then we're gonna amend after. That is correct. The communications committee approved a particular charter. And so it's my responsibility to bring the charter as approved by the committee to the board. That said, if we as a broader board want to change this charter right now, it is our opportunity to do so. I for one think what John Morris put forward only added clarity and made the document read in a better way, but I will seed my time and let everybody else discuss that point if John wants to make his motion. So real quick though, I didn't hear a second. Sorry if I missed that. Siobhan had it. Okay, I'm sorry, Siobhan. And so I will actually move just to keep this going. I move that we incorporate John Morris's edits to the communications committee charter. Second. Second. Okay, David beat you. David Healy seconded that one. Any, so right now the motion that we're entertaining is now the amendment. So to change the original charter that was presented by the communications committee to change it to what with the amendments that John Morris provided to Chuck. Any comments on those changes, right? So I think I heard Chuck actually give a full throw of the endorsement for the changes. And so if Chuck is fine with it, I'm fine with it. I have a question with regard to one part and it has to do with the email address. But I can hold that off until we get to the final discussion on the final version that we're adopting. Okay. Any other comments on the amendment? Okay. On favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed abstentions roll call requests. Motion passes unanimously. Okay. The charter is amended. Ray, you had a question about the mailing list email. Yeah, so the mailing list on here is cv5-communications.googlegroups.com and you may recall that we set up an email account for the RFPs at cv5-rfpcv5.net. I'm just wondering whether we should move to the cv5.net as our email structure and get away from the Google group stuff. I'm open to whatever you want to do, but it seems like perhaps we should go in that direction. Chuck, sorry. Or Chuck. Jeremy, okay? Yep, okay. So the cv, the RFP email address we set up was just an email forward. It wasn't an actual email address. It wasn't really a true mailing list in the sense that this is a mailing list. Sorry, there's a whole lot of background and I'm not sure whose it is, but if you're not talking, can you please mute because it's making it really hard for me to take the minutes. Sorry to cut in, Chuck. Hopefully it's better now. Let us certainly know if not. Yeah, so it's a forwarder. So the short term is we could very easily set up a communications committee or something else at cv5-rfpcv5.net that just routes to this Google group's email address. Now I've not tested that. I can't guarantee 100% it'll work. Google could do something funky if you try to do forwarders like that, but it would probably work. That said, that does speak to a bigger issue we should probably address soon, which is we should probably buy email posting. We started to talk about this in December, but it does kind of keep coming up. Jerry was recently asking about an email address for him as well. And it is something that would really help professionalize the board. And I do think it's something that we may want to revisit. So Jerry Hansen, if you'd be willing, perhaps we should put this on a subsequent meeting date's agenda. Okay. I will put that on the next meeting agenda to talk about buying some, so email and what else? Yeah, Phil? Yeah, having just gone through this for the select board. As a municipality, we really need to have archiving and legal discovery. So, you know, I think we wanna make sure we're meeting those requirements with whatever we do. It is not particularly cheap. And considering the number of people that we have on the board, we're gonna have to invest some money in that. But I think that we do need to be compliant with archiving and discovery holds. So, as long as we're gonna talk about email, let's talk about that too. Okay, thanks, Phil. All right, I will add that to our next meeting agenda. Okay, so we have an amended charter in front of us. Anything else, any feedback on this amended charter? Okay, not hearing anything. I assume you're ready to vote. The motion is to approve this charter as amended. Please signify your approval by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed abstentions or roll call requests. Motion passes unanimously. You have a new charter, Mr. Chair. Thank you, everyone. That's it for the communications meeting. All right, thanks very much. Planning and Development Committee's reports. David. Okay, from our last meeting, we covered a number of topics and one of which we'll be coming up after I finish my report on the CVPC support. But we had a discussion on AmeriCorps opportunity and decided to postpone that one for a while. We had a longer discussion on a construction schedule that would outline what it would take to do everything we think we need to do in the next few years. We're gonna revisit that again next week in more detail. And that was mostly an updating of things. So we spent a lot of time on the CVRPC proposal that we're gonna take up next in terms of what we want them to do for us. And so to that end, I can talk about the committee made it approved to provide to you for approval a sort of a resolution on what we want them to do and how to do it. And I sent it out about a week ago. I am hoping that everybody has read it because I do not wanna read the entire thing. But we have agreed at least recommending that we hire the RPC to take care of a lot of meeting support stuff which Jeremy Matt is in agreement with. And so in terms of what we're talking about in terms of minutes, it'll really be the RPC that would take care over that. Records maintenance that take care of a lot of the administrative documents and papers in the part of CV FIRA. The do organizational support in terms of anything we really want them to take care of in terms of mailing. And I have some thoughts on that for later. Grant writing, they're willing to help us on grant writing and in general just support our stuff and getting things out in time. And then other project services. If you saw the original proposal from them, they talked about what they thought it would take in the course of a year for the basic functions of about $15,000. And then anything very, specifically that was beyond the average due diligence, taking care of records and things like that, it'd be on a time and materials basis. So I would like to make a motion that we hire the regional planning commission to take on the functions as described in the resolution. Second? Second. I didn't hear who got the first one in there. Who is that? Was that you Tom? Tom Fisher. I thought that was you. Okay. So moved by David, seconded by Tom. Any further discussion on engaging the RPC in this way? Yeah, this is Jerry. I'm trying to type something, but I can't type and think at the same time. Call on me when you're ready, Jeremy, please. It's all you. Okay, thanks, thanks. My question was, and I don't exactly remember this from our committee meeting. For example, for the folks that are doing clerk related functions, would they be reporting to Jeremy? Would Jeremy Matt be managing them to make sure that everything is being done the way we expect it? And then for the other functions, would it be the planning committee that would probably be managing them and overseeing, making sure that somebody's gotta be accountable for their time sheets and all of that kind of thing. And I envision one way of doing it on my head, but I'm not exactly sure that that's what other folks are thinking. David, do you have a comment on that? Sure. All the administrative stuff that the clerk would normally take would be the overseer of the work that they did for them. Records management, meeting support, things like that. And then I believe most of the other things that probably happened through the planning committee, but not necessarily. I see them potentially taking on some assistance work for us to do fundraising in terms of mailings. Those are the kinds of things I think they're much more equipped than we are to do. We may want to hire somebody else to do that, but certainly there are various committee functions that specifically that they could probably take on as special functions. But in terms of the last question you made of how does it get reported? We didn't take an action on that. I assume since we've been planning and development committee initiated this activity, we would review the invoices monthly and report to the full board along with Jeremy about whether they did what they said they were gonna do for the amount of work they're doing. I mean, the amount that billing us. Jeremy, do you have any thoughts on that? Well, we need to develop a process for that, but it wouldn't be the handling of invoices. We haven't had that kind of thing. So far it's been kind of ad hoc. So we can develop a process for that that probably doesn't need to go through the board now, but I think that's handleable. Yeah, I mean, I'm fine with over, oh, sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry if I raised my hand. I'm fine with overseeing those tasks. I mean, in terms of reviewing invoices, obviously I would review what work they did on clerk related tasks and then give a recommendation they did what they said they were gonna do and it seems like a reasonable amount of time, et cetera, et cetera. Probably paying them would be treasurer. I don't know who, you know, Jeremy. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Yeah, so that seems reasonable. So planning committee in conjunction with the clerk will oversee them. The board, the overall board would then approve the checks going out and the treasurer would then issue those checks. Speaking of which, Jerry, we should also put on the next agenda some approval to buy you some postage and envelopes and whatnot. Yeah, that's fine. There's actually a, I believe I could be mistaken, but I think there's a stipend that goes with the treasurer that we could use for that. Oh, perfect, there you go. All right, anything else on planning and development committee questions for David or Jeremy, I see your hand up. Sorry, just real quick, Jerry. It's the treasurer's thing was, you know, the stipend plus reasonable expenses.  Okay, Henry. Yeah, I just want to say, I think this is a great step forward and look forward to having them on board and, you know, joining some of the other cuts that have taken advantage of their regional planning commissions. Yes, indeed. Anything else for David, planning committee questions, et cetera. Okay, Jeremy. Sorry, not really sure exactly if this should go in here or not, but if we have the CVRPC do the government board in particular minutes, but also the minutes in general, I would be fine with remaining clerk but having the board remove the clerk stipend. I don't know how much work overseeing is going to be, but minutes are the largest portion of the work that I've been doing at this point. And I just wanted to throw that out there. I'll leave it up to you, but I would be fine with the board using that money towards paying the CVRPC to do minutes instead. Okay, so let's put another item on the agenda for that. And I think for right now, you can, if you feel like you're doing a lot of work, then write us the invoice. If you don't, then don't write us the invoice. Okay. So clerk stipend, et cetera. Okay, okay, let's move on. Henry, did you need a screen sharing capability with this? Oh, okay. Thanks David, I was about to say. What, what else? We need a vote. Yes. We need a vote. Oh, okay. We need a vote. Okay. Everybody ready to vote? Everybody but me apparently. I'm ready just to move on. All right. Signify your approval by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed abstentions or roll calls? Okay. Motion passes. Okay. We are good to go with the CVRPC. I expect then we can hear back about status with them from either planning development or from the clerk. I'll let you, I'll let you duke it out. And I'm going to make Henry the presenter because he's going to show us some stuff. Can you see anything? It's good to meet. Oh, you do? Okay. Yep. Mine is all, it's got everyone's picture in it. So, can I just, can I ask you a question? Can I ask you a question before you get started, Henry? I just want to be sure that we're not going to see any, any raw, any raw results or talk about any of our, our current plans in this? Yeah, though, this is just data. Our routes. I don't have, so let me distinguish where David and I depart. David is the GIS person. I am not a GIS expert. I do maps, but I don't have things like routes or anything like that. Okay. But however, I'm not sure what you're saying about proprietary information because there's been a lot of things going back and forth. I'm showing you the results of several things, results of the survey, results of the FCC and the connectivity initiative awards. And that's all I'm going to show you. I don't have any plans in here, I only have data. Cool. Just check it. Okay. So everyone could see this. Yes. Okay. Yep. All right. I'm just going to start out by looking at some of the awards that have been granted and how they've impacted our territory. And then I'll move into the survey. So what we see here is on this side, the total FCC and connectivity initiative awards that have been given in our district in terms of count and percentage. And these are weighted by percentage. So you see that 72%, 73% or 456 awards including FCC and connectivity initiative have gone to Washington and therefore on to Orange and Calis, et cetera. And then this is the inverse of that. So where we, the ones that weren't given awards, where are those most, and then so Barrie, Town, Northfield, Roxbury, Moortown, Duxbury, these, the darker red ones are the ones that have a high percentage like Roxbury at 95% still need to be, still have eligible locations but have a minimal amount of funding for that. So then, sorry, hopefully someone will get that. So now we'll take a closer look at just the FCC. And we're going to look at the FCC cut awards and so this is looking at the FCC cut awards. This is looking at the FCC commercial awards. So green is good, red is bad. And we see that Washington got, this is just FCC now not including connectivity initiative. FCC, Swamp Hill or Calis, Cabot got the most cut awards. And at the commercial awards went to, Woodbury, Orange, Berlin and Calis as well. Calis is kind of a hotspot. So that gives me an idea of FCC. Henry, I have a question for you. Sure. I don't understand what you're calling an FCC. So you do award it. I don't think you have it right but I made misunderstanding. Could you explain how you arrived at that? Yes. The shapefile that had the FCC information on it broke it out into who was awarded and then I grouped Kingdom, Fiber, EC Fiber and whoever else was a cut into one group and then VTEL consolidated and Starlink into another group and that's how I came up with these graphs, maps. Could I just comment on that? Sure, please. So you're aware of the Kingdom Fiber is an ISP and not a CUD and VTEL won no awards. So I'm just wondering. I can go into the details. I have them actually here then we can look at them but that we don't need that. I just wanted to make sure that the movie wasn't confusing to all of us. Yeah, no, I'd love to go over this with you or anyone else because I made some judgments I wanna make sure they're correct but basically what I thought was a CUD like Kingdom Fiber and some of the other EC Fiber, I think those were the two main ones and then Kingdom Fiber was a private company. Okay, sorry, that's one. So we only looked at CUD one and that's EC Fiber. So we can probably clarify this rather than calling this a CUD ISP award we can call this a consortium award, members of the consortium. That's actually, that's the way I've broken out is that anyone who was in the consortium was put in this bucket and anyone who was not in the consortium was put in this bucket. Great, thank you. So Jeremy's suggestion is perfect. Just change the header and we're okay. Excellent, okay, thank you. And our thesis NRTC. Yeah, if I can write. So on this map here, we're looking at the count by town of David's root premises. So these are the counts. So 249 premises or 573 premises in Calis were on the route that David provided. See, David provides all the little lines with all the routes go, I don't do that. I just provide it at the town level, okay? So that's the difference. And then over here, these are the Vermont eligible counts from the public service department. And you can see here that Barry town has a high number, you know, Northfield. These are all the counts. These counts are just to give you a solid background. Then we look at the survey responses in relation to those counts, if my computer would respond. That's the number of premises or households, yeah. So when you look here, you're looking at the survey divided by the routes versus the survey divided by the eligible premises. And we see that in terms of routes, because more town was on the route map, you know, the survey had 100% of the number of premises on the route where other ones that didn't have any routes planned on them, you know, didn't qualify. And then over here, when we look at the survey in terms of the eligible, Vermont eligible of premises, we see that Worcester had 25% of the survey responses in Worcester was the amount of the eligible addresses. So that was not very well stated. I'll try it again. Calis of the eligible residences or premises in Calis, 15% of those eligible premises responded to the survey. 24% of the survey respondents were also on the route that was in Calis. We get with this, this is the basis for the survey. So yes, underserved. Yes, that's from the broadband shape file that came from the public service department. All right, so now we're gonna get into data where we start going in that direction. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna look at is work from home, number of residents. So this is from our survey. So we see, you know, Calis, Marshfield and Middlesex had a large, this is by number of residents. So they had the largest number of residents that work from home. And then over here, we look at the number of students and we see a similar kind of pattern. And I think this is based on the fact that there's more eligible locations in these towns and therefore they have a higher number. And so just to look, the second number here is the total hours that they work from home. So in Calis, 138 residents work from home seven hours a day. So, you know, this is major stuff, 7.7, 7.2, 13. You know, there's a lot of high numbers here. And in terms of school children, it's around two, three hours a day that they worked, four hours in war town. Okay, so that's a basis for our need. We're gonna get into the good stuff now, the economic stuff. So can I just be a timekeeper real quick? You got about three more minutes before we need to move on to something else. I mean, so. Yeah, I just have these, these are the four that I really wanna cover. And then this is just to show you what else is available. So I think, you know, I tried to plan this correctly. So I'm not gonna, so in terms of, will you subscribe to CV fiber? This is the percentages that definitely would, this is the process percentages that probably would. So at the bottom line, 51%, definitely would and 30% would probably do it. And only 7% would not, but wait, it gets better. Okay, come on. Okay, so now this is nested. So does the internet meet your goals? No, yes, not always yes. And on side of that, have you heard of CV fiber? No, yes. So your internet needs are not met and you've heard of CV fiber. Look at these numbers. This is incredible, 86% on average would definitely subscribe. And you can pick which one of these you wanna look at, but 87%, 86% would definitely subscribe if the internet didn't meet their needs and they heard of CV fiber. Okay, so can we pause for a second, Henry? There's, there have been a couple of questions about the wisdom of sharing this level of detail in our data. And so I asked this at the beginning about the roots and no, you're not showing the exact roots, but data strongly suggestive of it. And so I just, I wanted to have us take a pause and consider the wisdom of this altogether. As Tom, Tom said something in the chat that I was sort of thinking I just didn't wanna kind of go twice and say it. So, any, just, so before we continue, does anybody else have any thoughts about whether we should continue with this or if this should be something that is strictly internal? Starting to look internal to Jerry. Okay. Yeah, I'm still internal. Okay, so I would say if we go any farther talking about this, we should probably be going into executive session. And I certainly don't want to make this any suggestion of the, about the work that you've put into this, Henry. I just think that this is probably not going any further into this is probably not a great idea for public consumption. Yeah, that's fine. The only other one I was gonna show is. No, hold on, hold on. I'm not gonna show it. The only other one I was gonna show is the same exact breakdown for investment, which is also incredibly high when you look at this nested situation. And it really leans us in the direction of the fact that communicating the presence of CV fiber makes a huge difference in terms of whether they would subscribe in any town. And the same thing with gifting, but I won't show you those. Okay. The only other thing I wanna show, which it shouldn't be a problem, is that in the data that's been collected for each town, you pick your town here, and then it gives you a report in your town. And the only other thing is that you pick your town over here and it gives you the mailing addresses and everything else over there. Okay, so it would be, I think if we're gonna discuss this in any more depth that would be good if you could give us some snapshots of these in an email with an explanation, we can look over it, I think. Though the last thing I'd like to say is that I've found a way, the cheapo way is that I can post wherever you want the reader and the file. The problem is if the group is open, then you're gonna have similar problems. But basically I can email the link to the reader and the file and you can install the reader and open up the file on your personal computer and get access to all this and download any of this information you want. Or for $70 a month, we could have our own private, $840 a year, we could have our own private website and you could go there and it would be password protected or whatever and we could do it that way. Okay, so if I could make the suggestion that anybody who would like to see this data from Henry, just send him an email and Henry, if you could send that information about how to do the install, I think that might be helpful and it looks like Chuck has a comment or question. Yeah, I just wanna point out that in our shared folder, we do have a folder called proprietary and restricted materials where we can post things that are not yet for public consumption. Obviously eventually everything will become public but for things that we're working through, that is our kind of working space for things. And so that's where, for example, our business plans and feasibility studies and things of that nature live. So... Which one? Yeah, in our Google Drive, it's called proprietary and restricted materials. Is it in the governing board one or the business one or which one? No, it's in our drive folder. We have a shared drive folder for board members. Okay, I'm aware of the governing board one and the business one but I didn't know of a more general one. But okay, yeah, if you could put that in the chat, then that would be good. Okay. And that's basically it. There's a lot more but that's good for now. Okay. Thanks, Henry. Let's see. Discussion about the 2021 timeline of our legislature and grants. So the 2021 timeline, I know our planning and development committee, you guys are working on that and you'll have some more to report on that coming on the pike. The Vermont legislature, as I get stuff from Rob Fish, I've been kind of passing it along to the board and hopefully you've had a chance to watch some of this. So today there was some additional testimony in house energy and technology. Michael was there. Junterne and Clay Purvis were there a bit after him and there continues to be quite a lot of discussion in the legislature about some plans to reconstitute something that looks a lot like the Vermont Telecommunications Authority that's again specifically tasked with broadband, something called tentatively the Vermont Community Broadband Association. So I think there's some interesting stuff there. And it's all moving quite quickly, I would say. So let's see, grants. Is there anything that folks wanna talk about that have to do with grants upcoming stuff before I ask Michael to speak a little bit about Ardolf? Okay. I think Michael, it's your chance if you wanna tell us a little bit more about Ardolf than we may have been able to hear before. I'm happy to, but it might be best if I answer questions because I'm not really sure what it is that I should offer. I've given the basic information the last meeting or two which I can repeat, but maybe that wasn't enough and there's some questions. So I'd rather respond to questions, I think. Okay. Does anybody have any specific questions for Michael about Ardolf or things like that? I do. I have a question for Michael. Go for it. Let's just use Consolidated as an example and I won't have exact figures, but just conceptually if you'll bear with me. So the bid was very low. And if Consolidated won where they're only getting let's say $800 a premise or $800 a mile, I forget exactly what it was, but these were pretty low numbers. Are they, because they won that bid, are they actually required now to do that or do they have an opportunity to back out at some point in time and say, you know what, this isn't making financial sense for us. We never took the money, we're backing out. Okay. That's a good question. First of all, the amount of money is, well, it depends on which data you're looking at, but the way the FCC posted it, there was a certain number of locations in a census block group that had to be served. And there were a whole, there were a group of census blocks within that census block group in which those locations exist. And the amount of money that they provided in the data was the total amount of support that was offered to serve those locations in those blocks within the census block group. Some data showed it as one year support and other data showed it as 10 year support. So that can be confusing. And without seeing the data, I can't tell you which it is. In answer to your main question, can they back out? They can. It would cost them an enormous amount of money to do that. They would have to give up everything and they would have to pay penalties. So they'd have to pay at least 15% of the total award amount or $3,000 per census block group. And that's at the discretion of the FCC. And they generally, the FCC looks poorly on companies that back out unless there's a real easily justified reason such as, oh, we only won three blocks in the whole bloody state and they're 100 miles apart and it just doesn't make sense. We want to back out. And then the FCC will look kindly on that kind of withdrawal. But any of the larger wins in Vermont would not fit into that category at all. Okay, so I see hands up from Ken and Alan and Ray. But before we do that, Jerry, did your question get answered? Yes, I believe so. Thank you, Michael. That was great. Okay, let's start with Ken. Yeah, my question is, and I don't know if you can answer it, but the consolidated won some blocks.  And the reason I ask is to understand competition because I've heard from some folks that wherever consolidated didn't win, they have no interest in doing rural build out. And I think it's very important for us to know if indeed consolidated is on track to do build outs in rural areas that might be areas that we would be serving, that would be very informative. So is there any way from the bidding that the information you have that you're aware did consolidated bid on some blocks that they did not win? So there's probably three answers to that question. All are useful. The last question, yes, we can tell where they bid. We know directly because we could tell by the bidding patterns and the results. But you can also go to the FCC results page, which is not called results. If you're interested, I can find the link and send it to you where you can actually track every bid and every round by every bidder. It's very, very tedious. But if it's something you're very, very interested in it might be worth doing. It actually is very important to us as winners in some cases. But in the case, I'll give you an example which is safe to talk about. We won 10% support in certain blocks, block groups. 10% of the FCC's high-cost model. The only reason we won 10% is because it was a tie in every round until the last round when the other bidder withdrew. And that other bidder in every case for us was consolidated. So the answer to your question is, yes, we can figure out where they bid and where they bailed. In terms of predicting what their strategy is, we can speculate and it's, and I can, but I won't do that in a public forum. And I forget what the other question was embedded in your big question, but I think it might be. Maybe I had other questions, but that definitely your response answers my, and that consolidated is looking at rural areas beyond the ones that they won. And so for us in the kind of the long-term. That was the question. And I think this is safe to say. Consolidated has a strategy that's been somewhat spelled out by their new equity partner search-like capital that invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the company that they want to recapture market share from all of those phone lines they've lost over the last 10 or 15 years to Comcast and cell carriers. And that their intention is to recapture market share in the places where they lost market share that would be the populated areas. So that's safe to say, and they've pretty much publicly testified to that in House Synergy and Technology Committee. They intend to build in Brattleboro and Montpelier immediately. They are currently building in Montpelier right now. And when I say Montpelier, that's the Montpelier exchange which is 223, 224, 229, covering about five towns or parts of and most of five towns. And they're out there building right now and use this as laying hanging cable for them for overlashing down their lines. So we know they're going there and several of those towns, kingdom five or one, and yet they're building there. So that indirectly answers your question as well. Thank you. Yeah, and my map sort of shows some of that as well. Cool, so I see I've Allen, then Ray, then David. So Michael, when I looked at the maps for all of our towns, it kind of looks like Swiss cheese. It kind of looks like the auction allowed towns to be picked off sometimes in logical ways, but certainly in the case of my town, completely illogical ways, where consolidated went for census blocks that in one case contained seven addresses at the towards the end of a three mile long dirt road. And then at the other end of that dirt road, they bought another block. They were successful in another block. It looked like Northeast Kingdom fiber got a lot of blocks in towns that are part of CV fiber, such as Cabot and then also Walden, which is not part of us. And then on top of all this, there's been strong testimony in the House Energy and Tech Committee from WEC about their plans to within two to three years build fiber throughout their entire network. I'm thinking, what the heck is going on? This is like being in the middle of a shooting range and you have no idea where the shots are coming from and whether you're gonna survive and even if you survive, what you're gonna be left with. Oh, and then of course, on top of this is Starlink where there are now several people in Worcester who have not only expressed an interest but have gotten a dish or have dishes on order and they're starting to hook up. And I'm just really beginning to get worried that we're gonna be picked the pieces. And when we try to get our revenues, our monthly revenues to what they have to be to justify either the expense we incur by building fiber or the lease costs that WEC will charge us when we use their fiber, I'm just worried we're getting to a tipping point that's kind of scary. Okay, I'm not gonna speak to your ear. That's for you to negotiate. I'm gonna just try to answer some of the factual questions there. The Swiss cheese you're talking about is very real. That's true from town to town, but also it sounds like you might be misunderstanding what we were bidding on. We were bidding on census block groups and in the case of the town of Worcester, the census block group in question is the entire town of Worcester. So consolidated bid on the town of Worcester and within that census block group, there were individual blocks that were eligible according to the FCC that there were 100% unserved and they didn't have one address in there that was served and therefore it was eligible for phase one of our job. So there were a bunch of these little blocks in Worcester, very far apart with seven here and 40 there and 12 there and they bid on the entire thing and they only are obligated to go to those individual census blocks to fulfill their obligation but that's not really how it works. The way it really works is you're getting a subsidy well, it will start with a microcosm. You're getting a subsidy to go to Worcester. You'll go to lots of places in Worcester but on the path of going to those lots of places you'll cover the ones you're required to go to and subsidy lowers the overall cost to go there and that's how they look at it but they really don't even look at it that way. Even the FCC will get it that way. You look at the aggregate of the whole state so in the whole state they won 19 points something million dollars of support and that's a subsidy to do whatever it is they're planning to do anyway but included in that is the obligation to go to the at least those little census blocks in each group that they won because they've taken on the obligation. That's the same as us. We have to go to every one of those but we're seeing it as a subsidy for a larger build. So as a consumer I'm looking at it from the other end of the lens obviously and it just sounds like a lot of towns have been set up for failure especially because doesn't the winner have six up to six years to actually provide the service there's certain percentages that have to be added every year but the longest it can go out in six years. Yep, that's right. And can the winning bids be sold? Could NK Fiber sell some of its bids to others and that gets you out of the obligation? My company Kingdom Fiber, not NK. Yeah, so Kingdom Fiber. No, we're not allowed to sell or trade spot groups with other winners. Okay. There is an out of rules possibility of that through special petition to the FCC long after the fact of everything being settled and everything awarded. It can conceivably be done but it's not in the rule structure at all. So it's safer to assume that everybody who won a census block group will build to that census block group probably cover much if not all of that census block group even though they're only funded to go to certain blocks within the block group. I think for a lot of people we've been able to get a lot of interest going about CV Fiber, I think that's true in most of our towns and people are really excited about having a publicly owned locally operated net neutrality reasonable costs entity serving them. And I'm just worried it's getting harder and harder for us to keep saying that we're about to start building fiber throughout our territory. I think we are though. Even though it may be harder for you to say I think we're getting close. We're pretty close. Well, who's we? What do you mean by we? CV Fiber. CV Fiber. CV Fiber. CV Fiber is getting close. Yep. Well then if we build what about, what is WEC going to do? Will they put up their own fiber on the same poles? We're talking with WEC. We're going to coordinate with WEC. We're not going to double build. Oh, okay. That's great. That's really good. I think WEC is the secret ingredient here. And I'm surprised that there hasn't been, there haven't been other people going after making deals with WEC, frankly. But that's good news. I think WEC is what can pull us through this. Thank you. I appreciate that. Sure. Okay. I've got Ray and then David. Michael, I've got a couple of assertions that I'd like to make and I want you to push back on it. Okay. Or agree with it. One is that our doffs are competitors with CUD. Sorry, can you hear that? One is that our doffs are competitors with CUD. The winners are competitors with CUDs. Is that what you're saying? Our doffs are competitors with CUDs. Are you asking, is that a question? Yeah, that's an assertion. I'd like you to push back or agree with it. It all depends on whether the winners of our doff support make deals with CUDs. They're certainly not competitors. If they're filling the CUD's mission, they're not necessarily competitors if the CUD is compatible with that. Until such negotiations take place, it's hard to say. Yeah, the third part gets to that negotiation part. But the second part is that the our doff, what they're building to in agreement with the feds, et cetera, with their money is basically a beach head for extensions out further into the communities. No, it's all gonna get built at once.  So if it makes no sense to build to seven locations in the corner of Worcester, all right? It makes no sense whatsoever. If you're obligated to go to those seven locations, you're gonna build something more than that, right? Yes. How much more is up to the winner? And that's the risk the CUD might fear that it might not be ubiquitous. It depends on who your partner is. If the CUD has a good partner, you're gonna get full coverage. I think you're agreeing with me with regard to, it's a beach head for that entity, that for-profit entity to expand beyond the our doff, the win. And I think you kind of implied that when you said that consolidated won $19 million and they're gonna use that to build out their network. And let me get my question because I think you've agreed with both of those. My question is this, under what circumstances, under what circumstances would an our doff winner partner with the CUD? Funds of circumstances. For example, why? I mean, under what circumstances? So we are, we're gonna do over a period of five or six years, about some period of time, we're gonna build stuff up. Let me answer it. Where? Today, one of the things I said in my testimony at the committee meeting was that on average, our company won 42% of the FCC's high-cost model support. That's 42% of what they calculated would cost to serve those little isolated blocks here and there. It did not include the cost to connect those blocks. We have to come up with the difference. And to do that, we need more money than what they're giving us, a lot more money. It probably is equivalent to 20 to 25% subsidy because to connect all those little blocks, we have to build middle mile in between them or distribution to other locations in between them. In other words, bigger networks. And that's the only way we or consolidated or UC fiber or, well, charter was barely a winner in our state, but most winners will behave in that fashion. They're gonna build larger networks based on that subsidy helping them. And they're gonna seek further subsidies because it's not, at least this auction turned out to be, in many people's minds, a failure because the levels of support were very low, were one. So all the winners are gonna be looking for additional funding to cover what they have with their obligations. Yeah, yeah, funding. And let's not talk about your company. We can talk about Solidarity or something else and that is... Let's talk about UC fibers in the same boat, okay? Same boat. And that is, we all applaud the idea that we're gonna accelerate the delivery of the internet to all of this as quick as we can, right? Having said that, who will, out of these arrangements who will provide, who will own the subscribers? Who will give them the money? I mean, how do you see that, those kind of things playing out or is it different in every case? I can't speak for other providers and I can't even speak for us yet because we haven't reached agreements with anybody yet. And, but that sort of came, we didn't talk about RDOF per se in the meeting but we were talking about how CUDs and private providers are going to reach agreements and there are lots of permutations of how that can happen. That can be the student you could own. Go ahead, Jimmy. Can I jump in here? So I posted a link to your testimony, the PDF Michael and I also posted a link to the YouTube testimony. So if you watch the first hour of that YouTube video, I strongly recommend that you do. A lot of the questions that Michael is answering, specifically your questions Ray about how this looks in terms about how the P3s, the public-private partnerships could look, Visa V CUDs, watch that. And because Michael said these things a couple hours ago. Yeah, but we weren't specifically talking about RDOF. I think we're kind of straying away from factual questions of how RDOF works. I understand Ray's important concern to get these answers. And I can, we can take it off line Ray and be happy to continue with you. I would prefer you guys take this off line.  I still want to hear from David who has some questions about this. And then we're looking to wrap it up unless we have maybe one more short question after that. Go ahead David. I like Tom Fisher's comment. I'm gonna pass on my question. They had nothing to do with RDOF. Okay, I'm sorry, I didn't see your hand up. Siobhan, do you have a RDOF question? I'm muted, huh? There you go. I just, it was the winners can enter into agreements with organizations like CUDs, right? But I think you already answered that question. Yeah, so yeah. So they might want to lay the wire, but they don't want to provide the service or drop to the houses exactly or something. I don't know the technical stuff. The winners are obligated to provide service. Okay. And the FCC doesn't care how they do it. Right, so if they enter into agreement with another organization that's providing the service while they're doing the infrastructure, for example, that might be one. No, no, no. They have to provide the service. The winners have to provide the service. The winners don't have to build the network necessarily. Okay. They have to provide the service. Okay. All right, thanks. That was it. Thanks. So for example, WEC could build a whole bunch of fiber even into these census blocks and one of the winners could conceivably lease or get a IRU from the people who own the fiber to provide service to those residences. And please tell me if I'm wrong, Michael. No, that's perfect. Okay. All right. So fiber can be in the same boat in that way. If CD fiber moves a route and it happens to go into art off territory and much of it is could, then the winner could lease from CD fiber to serve that area. All right. All right, Alan, we'll give you the last word and then we're gonna head over to round table. Just one quick question, Michael. Does that mean that if I am in an art off census block that was bid on successfully by consolidated, that is who will provide me service in the end, no matter if the lines are built by WEC, no matter if the CUD is involved in, I don't know, selling Kool-Aid out by the pole, whatever. Am I gonna be, am I assured now to be a consolidated customer? No, you're assured that they will be obligated to be in a position to serve you, but that doesn't mean you have to take them as your provider because you may have another choice. But on the other hand, it may be that they're the only ones who build in Worcester. Unless, let's say hypothetically, your CUD does. And in that case, there might be two providers. It's hard to predict that because the CUD does not have a public plan and we don't know where the CUD is gonna build and so forth, but. Well, but now wait a minute. The CUD is working with WEC, which is gonna build fiber throughout its entire network. So presumably it is going to come up everywhere. Presumably, but the consolidated wins certainly certainly beckons in bi-weekly discussions with CV fiber, EC fiber and kingdom fiber. Right. They're not in discussions with CCI. I don't know how that, that certainly has complicated things that consolidated and EC fiber and kingdom fiber all won significant sections of this CUD and others. It is not a simple puzzle to solve yet. So it will. If I can put a fork in this, so suppose for a second that you have a consolidated one residence, but just one, okay? And CV fiber within partnership with WEC, let's say, builds fiber there first, okay? So CCI has the opportunity to do really two things. They can lease the space on CV fiber slash WEC, whomever's fiber to offer service to that location or over build with their own or find somebody else who's going to over build. But they will be there. How they're gonna be there. They have to go there with one caveat. The FCC tolerates up to a 5% non-service rate. So if they won 100,000 locations, they only have to go to 95,000 of them. So they could stay Worcester and we're skipping Worcester. They can do that. And they have six years to do that, right? Yes. This is like a cancer invented by government, you know? It's unbelievable. Hey, we're a governmental entity too, Alan. Yeah, we're a good one though. Yeah. All right. These are the same rules that the previous FCC thing called CAF2 were under. In that case, there was no auction because Fairpoint got all of it. Fairpoint built in 95% of their locations and they left the last 5%. And they also leave 5% of their support on the table if they do that, but that's what they did. All right. So I'm gonna kickstart round table by giving Tom the first thing to say. So the... The service bed they need to provide, according to Ardolf rules, is 25... I think we lost your number right there to come. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay. So now they're obligated to deliver 25-3. No, that's not correct. All the bidders had to offer at least 25-3, but each of them had in advance to clear which category they were bidding in and they were competing against like providers. The other providers had handicaps in their bidding. And so they would lose if it was a fiber provider against a wireless provider. And there were only those two. After one round, the fiber provider wins. So in this case, in Vermont, there were no... Let me think about this. There were some winners that were not fiber and those were Starlink, everywhere SpaceX one. That was non-fiber level. That meant they didn't have a fiber competitor in that block. That's why they won it. And I don't remember, but I think Charter may have bid in the 100 down 20 up category and the one like four tiny blocks. Okay. But everyone else is doing fine. Good to know. That's a thousand. It's not even 100, it's gigabit tier. My other thought was if they've won 25% of the costs to build out where they want to build out in the state and they go out for loans and they are now looking at needing to be able to serve those locations, they're now in a situation, I'm thinking particularly of Consolidated where if they are being underbid in those locations and they're not bringing in revenue to match the loans that they are now trying to pay off and balance their books that's gonna put them in a sticky situation. And so I'm wondering as I ponder here for the rest of the night after we get off this call what their thoughts are gonna be on that topic in that are they gonna have strategies knowing the market that they're walking into and knowing it pretty well, how are they likely to respond to a situation where they are in forcing themselves to take out loans to build out fiber and potentially not be able to return that revenue if there are competitors in the same space that have lower rates. I'll stop there. I don't have this. Jeremy, do you want me to keep answering or? Why don't you guys take it off line? I think that's a much longer discussion trying to guess how people are going to manage the revenues and manage the federal funding that they've gotten. I mean, they're on the hook contractually to do this. So whatever. I have a one sentence answer that can be expanded offline. The one sentence answer is they are not going after loans. They sold most of the two sentences, sorry. They sold most of their equity to a company called Specialized Capital and got hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for that. They're building with that cash. They're not borrowing. So they sold their soul for rock and roll. Let's go on to Jeremy Matz. But searchlight is gonna want a return on investment as soon as possible. So it's kind of like a loan. Anyway, that's all that I had. Thanks everyone for all your work and have a good evening. You too, Jeremy. Thanks, Ken. I'm gonna pass. Thank you for the discussion though. All right, Michael. No, I'm fine, thank you. Okay, Alan muted. So the goal that my wife and I had was to see universal health care coverage in Vermont before we died. And she actually spent a lot of her life working on that project. And I kind of supported that through some of my work. And we've given up on that one. We figured we're not gonna see that. So my second goal has been to get high speed internet at our house before we die. So please, we gotta make this happen. I don't wanna die without it. Okay, Alan. We're gonna do it. Jerry, what do you think? I think we're gonna do it, but that's all I have to add at this point. Thanks, Jerry. Chuck. I also purchased Starlink. So I just wanna point out that when it comes time to put down an advanced subscription for CV Fiber, we still have my money. I want Fiber and, you know, satellite might be great and all, but I want Fiber. So yeah, let's get it done. Thanks, Chuck. I think that was the same sentiment we heard from Tom Ebslin as well. So glad to hear it. David. Yeah, I just wanna say that in writing up the newsletter piece for the communications group, I've also written up a longer piece. I'm summarizing all the survey data into a narrative format that I'll share later. Okay. Thanks, David. Ray? I'm exhausted. Henry. I just have a question from Michael, which is, is it likely that CCI will partner with entities like CV Fiber to meet their RDOF obligations or is their funding deep enough that they don't need to worry about that? Neither. All right, I'm gonna answer it. I think they will partner with some CUDs, not because of the funding reasons, but to get to the customers, but not necessarily CV Fiber. David, did you wanna piggyback on? I was gonna say, I mean, they've already met with DV Fiber down in Southern Vermont and DV Fiber's listened to their pitch, signed an NDA and put out, I think we sent out the RRP where they're just going out open to see who could be their best partner. So we'll see in the next two months, we'll see what happens down there with whether consolidated bites or doesn't. And is there any hope with the new administration to expect that the FCC, USDA, or other federal funding sources are gonna open up a whole new arena? More broadband funding, you mean? Yes. Yeah, it's possible. I mean, I don't know that there's anything imminent, but anybody else has any finger on the pulse there, but... Okay, I'll make it. The Lay's representative has language that was the foundation of the discussions last year for the coronavirus relief fund was pulled at the last minute, but that supposedly that language is still very near the next vehicle to go, an infrastructure bill. So Senator Lay, he's very interested wouldn't necessarily go through USDA or FCC. W-A. Yeah, hopefully, let's hope for block grants to states. That's what I'd like to see. All right, Josh? Yeah, I just wanted to say that I'm gonna be working on some of that insurance stuff that we've talked about a little bit. Update our current number and also talk about what we may need in order to have actual things to insure. So I will be working on that. I haven't gotten to it in a long time, and shouldn't be busy at work, so I apologize about that. Okay, thanks for that, Josh and Siobhan. I'm gonna give you the last word of the night. What do you got? I am like, Chuck, I want a wire to my house. I might do a stop gap to get Starlink because my internet is such crap that it might be worth it to invest in just to get me speeds but when fiber becomes available, I'll be getting fiber. So I'm motivated. Thank you for all your work, everybody. All right, we will leave it right there and we are adjourned at 8.15 p.m. Sorry, we went over time, folks, but we will see each other again soon, maybe in two weeks.


We needed it, and boy did we get it. Record rainfall and snow ushered signs of drought out of most of California, but now we're facing the trickle-down effects of this much water, and that's why the Governor's Office of Emergency Services activated its State Operations Center. A lot of places in the state that are suffering from the ravages of Mother Nature and we're preparing for her next round. Kelly Houston is one of the deputy directors leading the state's effort. He says Cal OES and its partners are juggling multiple issues at once, from the storms that hit California in December and January to those on their way in now. We're doing recovery for those that have already been hit by storms. They're working on the immediate issues with sandbagging, making sure the spillway up in Oroville is being short up, and then looking at what do they need to do for any of the storms in the next couple of days. FEMA has brought in incident management teams and is a key partner in the response and recovery efforts, including assistance needed after the president made emergency and disaster declarations in many parts of the state. We have enough food, water, and supplies for 25,000 people for five days that's already prepositioned, ready to go, and that's not including what the Red Cross and other agencies have provided. Supplies also include cots, blankets, and other health and safety items. Again, all prepositioned and ready for distribution if needed. While we're still responding, we also are working on recovery and looking at the infrastructure that had been lost in communities throughout Northern California and Central California. We're monitoring levees in the Central Valley, roads and highways in Northern California, and some bridges. We're working very closely with Caltrans and to go in and start to do reconstruction on the roads that have been damaged at the highways. In the meantime, there are other mudslides that have occurred. We have this weather coming in. We're concerned about more mudslides. It's a complicated response system working 24-7, and several long-term recovery efforts involving many government and non-government agencies, working to repair the damaging effects of a busy winter season in California. For more information about California's response and what you can do to prepare, visit calloes.ca.gov. For Cal OES News in-depth, I'm Sean Boyd.