I'm going to call the meeting's order, June 12th, 2018, since we want Internet Governing Board meeting. Let's do introductions again. We can go all the way around the table just so we remember who all of us are and there's some new faces there. So you want to start? I'm Jim Barlow, I'm the representative from Marshfield. I'm David Healy, the representative from Calis. I'm Alan Gilbert, the representative from Worcester. Bob Cline, the representative from Eastmont. Not to be outdone, Bob Burley from Elmau. Not to be outdone. Andrew Gilbert. Well, we're here bobbing. Jeremy Hanson from Berlin. I'm from the alternate but sitting in from Northfield. Robert Schneider from Williamstown. Mr. Schrader, clerk. Christopher Bell, the representative from Berry City. Michael Brunbaum, the representative from Plainfield. Excellent, we have some alternates. You want to introduce yourselves? Tom Fisher, alternate for Eastmont. It's kind of a message, alternate for Calis. Elliot Bent, alternate for Berry City. Okay, welcome all. Any additions or changes to the agenda? You're none. Public comments, we have 10 minutes for public comments about any items that are not on the agenda. And this is, board members are alternates opportunity to weigh in on anything that we don't already have. Okay. I just want to jump. Is there a public slot in the person, what I hear? So the answer is yes, but I don't have the password handy. Okay. There's an unpassword, you have to go for a message that says this is not secure, but it is. What's that for? WCSU Y5. Okay, that's the public one then. No password. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Okay, not hearing any public comments. Report back about Certificate of Organization, like I believe this was yours. Yes. So, what's required for the communications district is a certification of the vote in the towns that voted on meeting day that gets submitted to the Secretary of State's office and then they distribute the official notice to all the towns. So I don't know who received the certification of the vote. So that's a good question. I saw the votes, the official votes on various town websites and newspaper and then I contacted the select boards of all of the towns to have their representatives appointed. So I don't know that I have anything certified from those towns, except from just Jeremy. And I don't know if this follows under the same and set of rules as the town that is when there's a town vote. The town clerk provides certification of the vote to the Secretary of State. I don't know if that's applicable. And it might be, I mean, they've probably already have reported the contents of their, the results of their votes on their, not only their items that have candidates or budgets or whatever, but I would expect this as well. I don't know if that's sufficient for the Secretary of State. We can just say, hey, there were these 13 now towns that voted at town meeting in the affirmative. Here's the list. We're good to go.  Tees crossed, eyes dotted and such. So maybe the best way for us is just to write a letter and just send it to the Secretary of State. These towns did this. They should have reported this to you already and we're good to go. Okay. That's been reasonable to everybody too. Yeah, the person who is in charge of that process right now is new to it, so. What, who is that? It's Rachel Muse. Okay. Yeah, and they get all the election results. Well, that's what I was thinking too. I said, well, don't you already have that because it's part of the regular town meeting process. Yeah, they're reporting the process. So they should already have that certification of those. So, but I'll just verify that and make sure that they don't have anything we need to do. Okay, yeah, just getting that clock started is probably a pretty good idea. Well, and it looks like from the website that the clock actually starts, like the date of those votes is the date that it starts, maybe not. I remember the statute that it's from the date of the filing of the certificate of organization that that's something that this board causes to happen. So that would have to happen after the board meets and then we say we're going to file a certificate of organization as however, so we, in the last meeting, we chose the name under which to file, so we're essentially ready to pull the trigger. And I'm happy to do that, or you just want to write a letter and say this is us, we exist, and then that triggers that statutory time. Okay, yeah, it just looked like from the website it looked like for CUDs and a couple other entities it was different, but I'll verify that. Okay. Could you two just stay in touch between our big meetings so that our next big meeting is a done deal? Yeah, and that was something that we were hoping to have been resolved, and we should have been able to say as of June X that this is resolved and then our timer runs out in December and then we can start accepting money, open a bank account, and do all the more formal pieces. You're not going to come down any more. Unlikely. Okay, anything else on certificate of organization? Okay. Michael Greenbaum, Broadband Primer Presentation. Okay, so I'm a Broadband guy, but not an AD guy. Okay. I think we're set up, but maybe it's coming up. Oh, there it is. So you want to get the lights or something, or do you want to get the lights? This is Chicago. This is up to the hate. Yeah, from the likes of that. Agribus. It's there for sale. Or by the time it's working. That's good. Yeah, I think so. Okay, okay, because the past food didn't preview it. Pretty good, only one. Okay, confess who didn't download it and look at it on a bigger screen than on the Google Drive. Okay, so you couldn't read a lot of the fine print, right? Put your try. Yeah. Okay, so we only have half an hour. This was three or four hour thing before. We're going to run through it fairly quickly. Stop may have any time you want to. Let's see if I can remember how to do this. Yeah, okay. So, we're going to cover these topics and I won't read them aloud because you're going to see more of them. And those are all the sub topics and each one of those is a page. We all know what digital information is, right? It's information that's made of digits and not analog and that's the difference that you put the clock number, the watch number left there. So the clock that watches that analog one and the other one is digital. And they're binary, they, oops, here we go. They're made of on or off, one or zero. That's the binary digital building one. And bytes are eight bits and they're considered in a frame in terms of packets that create the building one. And those are some standard sizes. And you assemble the packets into languages. There's probably a couple of coders in the building here who take these languages and it's really all zeros and ones but there's translation between those zeros and ones and programming languages that create more of the building blocks. So networks, we're all familiar with what networks are. But a digital communication network is this definition. You should read it for a second. Notice there's two ways to carry the digital information once electrical signals and the other electromagnetic waves are given to them. So the electromagnetic spectrum, is everyone familiar with that? It's a bit of a complex thing. It's physics, it's the waves. Some of them are visible, it's light. Some of them are x-rays and some are radio and some are microwaves. There are all these different frequencies of waves. So some of the waves are really short and some of them are enormous. And the enormous ones have much lower frequencies because they take up much more space and it takes more time to get that big wave crew. And the smaller, smaller, smaller waves are very, very fast. And the usable spectrum for, say, wireless communication is very, in there, that's too small to read. So there's microwaves which are up in here and then there's a bunch of smaller, shorter waves in here. You're familiar with short wave radio, those are much longer waves. And radio stations have waves that are bigger than this building. But a microwave antenna, say, with a dish, is sending out waves through this big. Okay, this is a definition to read and we all pretty much have intuitive that. So, the internet is a collection of, well, let's start, well, let's think about web pages because they're the most familiar. So a web page is gonna have an address and that address is gonna be in numbers. Typically, internet protocol version four, this first group of four numbers, like that 172. And so every web page or every device on the internet, they all get assigned different IP addresses, internet protocol addresses. And for the longest time, these groups of four octets, octets, because you see the ones and zeros underneath, there's eight of them for each number. Each one represents the number above. That was more than adequate, but the internet exploded and the uses of the internet exploded and we've run out of those addresses. So, IPv6, internet protocol version six was developed and you can see, I think, yeah. Oh, this is what you need to see. So, see how many addresses there are in IPv4 and this is how many are in the new one. Generally speaking, IPv6 has not been generally very well adopted. It's in use in all the major routers and all the major providers as kind of background and it is carrying a lot of information, but largely IPv4 is still dominant and there's a market now selling unused addresses to people who need them.  So the internet isn't just the web, but we're kind of concentrating on that, yes, but. Just to test my eyes a little bit, IPv6, that's done in Hex, right? Actually, that's the address. I don't know. I think I saw Hex, but I was working down here in the mysterious corridors. Do you want me to go back to this slide? No, sorry. That's all I need to know. Okay. And the numbers are really long. They're divided up with colons instead of periods and if there's many redundant ones and so there's ways of shortening them, it's an elegant complicated system and it's gonna be really valuable when the internet of things develops in its massive scale when every household is gonna need 100 or more addresses and then we're gonna start to use the capacity of that. So the web is the predominant tool and I remember when Bob was talking about his background in digital equipment, he was talking about ARPANET and DARPANET. So that's back in 1969 when the internet was sort of invented and 20 years later, the web got more fully invented and the key language, remember we were talking about languages so hypertext transfer protocol, HTTP is the key language for the web and HTML and markup language also. So does everyone know what a domain is? So we have one? Do we have one yet? No, we don't have one yet. Domain named servers, these are crucial to the internet. These are the dictionary for the internet. Remember we were all IPv4, four numbers separated by three dots? Well, none of us can remember any of those numbers but we can remember things like Google.com. So a domain named server is a dictionary that translates between the name of a website and the actual numbers that underlie it. So if a DNS server isn't functioning and you have a perfect connection out to the internet, you will not get any web pages because the translation won't happen. And domain named servers are decentralized. They're replicated all over the world and every ISP has the ability to have its own or to subscribe to others that are larger organizations and the whole internet is very decentralized with some centralized organization. So there's little tiny networks like the Wi-Fi network in here. Here. Sorry, I'm late. Welcome. Just grab a seat and we'll see you here. You haven't missed that much. So the little Wi-Fi network in the library, that's a micronet where you could say when there's small local ones, perhaps the whole network in the school or maybe the school systems network and they get bigger and bigger.  There's huge cables that go under the sea. There's all kinds of networks that connect the whole world. And oh, I should, I'll keep going. But here's fiber optic cable. There's 72 pieces of glass in this one, 72 strands. So the ones that go under the sea are bundles of these things. And the bundles are bigger than I can reach my arm around because there's so many strands going across. Maybe pass that around. Sure. So each of those tubes, the colored tubes in there holds 12 glass strands, which are also color coded. Some of them have broken off because I've been hauling it around for a while. So I remember in our last meeting the word broadband got disparaged. This is all it means. It once meant something else, but this is what it's come to me now. So there's lots of broadband services. We're familiar with data, it's like web stuff. And voice is telephoned over the internet, voice over internet protocol. Video, you're familiar with that on YouTube and Netflix. There's security services brought over broadband. There's telemedicine, which is becoming more and more important. There's education, which has always been part of the web, but it's getting much more important with video and interconnecting schools. And then there's the internet of things which is just in its nascent right now. That's smart light bulbs and smart refrigerators and smart toasters and all kinds of silly things. But there's a real lot of potential there, especially industrially. But as consumers, we're gonna get to know them more.  Because everything's gonna be connected if we choose to buy that stuff. We don't have to, but that's where the world's headed. So how are we doing on time? Should I speed up or? I think now we're, you're good. I don't have 15 or 40, get 20 more minutes. Great, okay. So how is broadband measured? It's measured in bits per second. Remember, bits are zeros and ones. It's measured in kilobits, which is thousands of them. Megabits, which is millions of them. And gigabits, which is, is that billions? I think it's billions. Yeah. Transfer of data is measured differently. Remember, there were bits and ones and zeros, but then there were bytes, which were packets of eight bits. That's a byte. So data transfers measured in kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes, and even bigger. Peraflops, all kinds of stuff. So that's confusing when you look at a speed test because sometimes the speed test will be categorized into bytes and sometimes in bits and you'll say, oh, mine is really slow. It's this little number. But then you realize, oh, you have to multiply by times eight. It's not so bad. Or the reverse. Delay and latency are really important measurements. If you, well, let's say you're doing a stock trade. Something I've never done, but let's say you are. And you want to get it at a certain price and you send a signal and your broadband connection has a lot of latency. By the time you get there, it might have gone up $2. If you're playing a shoot-nope, shoot-em-up game. You might be killed before you've been realizing you're still shooting the other guy. So latency matters, it affects the quality of voice. That's a really important thing with voice. So if you want to do voice over internet protocol or telephony of any sort, if you have a lot of latency in your system, it's going to be poor. It's going to sound like it's underwater or you're going to talk over somebody because it didn't get back to that signal. So it's measured in milliseconds and microseconds. So jitter or packet delay variation, typically called jitter, is delay versus the average. So if it's varying all the time, that's, it's okay to have consistent delay. But if it varies all the time, that really messes up voice, for example. So jitter is a very important measurement as well. So this illustrates it. Can you all read that one? So this is showing that pretty much that was fairly steady. And so we get away with a couple of drops of packets, a little bit of latency. But if you have a lot of variation, that wouldn't be readable or curable. And you could almost add that as an additional bullet there in terms of data loss or the noise on the line. That could be another way of measuring particularly late. So signal to noise ratio. It'll be in the next presentation. Thank you, sir. So now we're going to divide it up into wire line and wire list, okay? So here are wire line delivery and media. And I'll talk about that photograph in a second. So there's twisted pair of copper. That is your regular telephone line. Two little skinny wires that are twisted together. And they're twisted together for a reason. It affects how the waves travel over them and they reject noise. And there's coaxial copper, which is what you're familiar with for cable TV or just connecting your TV to something in your house that's a heavy copper wire surrounded by a dielectric that doesn't conduct it. And then there's a sheath metal around that. And then it, actually, there should be pictures here. Or maybe they show up later. Then there's optical fiber, which is passed around. I got to the end. And so these wires can be buried or they can be on our poles or strong few buildings. And outdoors they're vulnerable to these hazards. Aerial is more ice storms in vehicles, possibly bar spiders, and buried is very vulnerable to digging accidents. So wire line runs on different kinds of protocols, which I'm not going to try to define that. Someone want to put a protocol? I don't think we need to get to that here. All right, so twisted pair of copper. Remember that's telephone? So these are telephone internet protocols. ADSL, that's asymmetrical digital signal line, I think. ADSL too is a faster one. G-Fast is emerging of multiple copper pairs to bring in more speed. These are all technologies that the telephone companies deliver broadband with. The cable companies use coaxial copper. And I do know what DOCSIS is, but I'm going to mess it up. So I'm not going to say that out loud, but DOCSIS 3 is the real fast one that the cable companies are now using. Then there's two kinds of fiber protocols. There's active ethernet, which means it's point to point. At one end you have a powered device that sends light over the fiber. And at the other end you have a powered device that perceives it. And it's a single piece of glass the whole way. And then it goes back and forth between those two points. That's active ethernet. And then there's passive optical fiber, and that's G-Pond, XGS-Pond, and so forth. These involve, think of it as point to multi-point. There's a piece of glass. It gets spliced into a splitter and now that piece of glass is divided into multiple pieces of glass. And those, there's no powered device there. It's just passive and it goes on. And then finally, each one terminates at the end user. And you can even split early. You can cascade these splits. And the limitations are that every time you split it, you are cutting down the amount of light that can pass over it. So you can't just infinitely split. But it's a much more economical way to deploy fiber. There are arguments for active ethernet, but it's more typical for the kind of thing we're talking about to go with passive. And then if you want to deliver a lot of bandwidth to a central point where you're then going to distribute it, you may need a lot more capacity than is available in the PONs, the passive optical networks. This is where, let's see, course wave division multiplies. Course wave division multiplies. Dense wave division multiplies. And a new version of PON. Each of those carry instead of one or 10 gigs. They can carry multiples of 10 gigs, 100 gigs and more. And so that is a backhaul to the locations where you then distribute it. So those are the protocols, and we're gonna get a little deeper into each of these now. That's, now I remember the pictures were here. So this is the phone lines. That's two phone lines there. So to get DSL at a house, you have to have, the phone company has to have installed it. DSL is distant dependent. It's a very important feature of it. If you are within 200, 300, 400 feet of the terminal, there's several kinds. The central office ones and the remote ones, and they're called D-thlands and things like that. If you are within a short distance, you can get pretty good speed. You can get 20 megs. But the majority of the people on a DSL line can get more like seven or three or one and a half or three quarters. And the farther away you go, the slower it gets because it's just the matter of physics. The cop, these little tiny copper wires can't carry speed that far out. And the way the phone company tries to solve that issue is to densify. They put in more and more terminals to try to boost it up again. But there are very clear limits to this technology. That G-fast one I mentioned is one way around it for a little while. It buys some time for them. But the long range, and they're doing some bonding also. But in the long range, it's a dead end technology. And all the phone companies, even though they're selling it, they know it. Even if you're close to a box, you can get more subscribers. The speed goes down. Yes and no. They sometimes call it dedicated signal line. It isn't truly. But there is a limit to how many they will put on a stretch. And cable and wireless are more susceptible to oversubscription than DSL is. But you will notice that at night, when more people are using it, it's gonna be slow. And the other thing you'll notice is that two houses next door to each other with the same distance to the terminal will have different qualities of service. And the reason, one of the reasons for that is the quality of the copper wires that it's coming across. If they're old Verizon copper wires that haven't been touched in 25, 30 years, they're corroded, there's a little water leakage. They just, so the physical plant matters a lot. And copper is a very expensive commodity. And so to put up, to rebuild with more copper and to know that it's kind of a dead end technology tells the phone company, we don't wanna do that. We don't wanna invest in that because it's not in the warm range. Therefore, the plants degrade and degrade and degrade. And so if you have four lines coming into your house you might wanna keep changing them to see which one gives you the fastest speed because it's actually that variable. So we've talked about the speeds. And I noticed the difference between downstream and upstream. That's very important. Upstream really matters. Most people don't think so because they're downloading stuff. But without the communication up to the servers that are downloading to you, it doesn't work smoothly and doesn't work as quickly. And if you wanna send an architectural drawing it's a big file and it's gonna take a long time with limited upstream. And phone lines are limited that way. And we just talked about that. So we'll talk about cable now. So that's a familiar looking cable, right? More speed. Pretty significant downstream. Pretty limited upstream. Why? Because it was designed around TV. It was designed as a delivery mechanism, not a TV. So the protocols don't allow for as much and the construction of the cable will do it. Now this DOCSIS-3 is getting around that to a certain extent. The cable providers are formidable competitors for fiber providers. So I'm not denigrating their service compared to DSL. They deliver good service. If they're in terms of customer service that's another story. But in terms of technically they can deliver pretty good service. This was an answer to Alice's question. There's shared network segments on coaxials so more customers, slower speeds. And it is capable of avoiding this enough limit to the jitter that it will work pretty well on it. So now we're gonna talk about fiber. So these speeds are dramatically greater than the previous ones. So what's carrying all that information down the glass fiber is a wave of light, multiple waves of light, millions of waves of light. And on those waves of light are digital pulses and I'm not gonna go farther than that just to say that there's information being carried on the waves of light down the glass. And the waves of light will go, imagine you're in a dark hall and you turn on a flashlight and you shine it on the wall at the opposite end and you see a beam on this thing. Now imagine you're in a castle and you shine your flashlight and you look down at the other end of the castle and you can't see the beam on that wall because it's gone so far it's gotten weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker. So that's what happens on fiber. The light, there's a budget. It's only so much light created by the laser that's injecting the digital information on the glass and as it goes farther and farther it gets dimmer and dimmer and at a certain point cuts off and just, there's not enough digital information to work. And so the fiber optic engineer is designing that. They figure out the safe margin of where to stop. They figure out how many splits were in there, how much to get diminished by splits, how much distance is involved. And the reason it diminishes, I mean, light will travel forever, right? If it's in a vacuum in outer space, it just keeps going. But we're not there, we're here and it's going on bends. It's reflecting and refracting off of the inner cladding of the cable and restriction and exclusion to the quality of the glass and so forth. And so it has a finite budget. I already told you about active ethernet and it's at a certain point to point. And pass it, those ponds. Typically they're split 16 or 32 times, sometimes 64. And it all depends on how much light you start with and how much bandwidth you start with. What you want to deliver to customers and how far you want to go. So let's say you're starting with a gigabit of speed at one end. If you divide it by 64, you may not be able to deliver all the bandwidth that everybody wants all 64 customers, especially in the long run, you all want maximum. So you might want to limit it to 32 splits and so forth. So remember we were talking about the backhaul stuff, the wave division multiplex, either coarse wave or dense wave. So coarse wave is typically four colors and dense wave can be up to 64. Those are, so you have light waves going over this little thin strand of glass. You saw how tiny those are. Each, that strand of glass can carry a light wave, but it also can carry another light wave and another one and another one, all different frequencies and they don't interfere with each other. It's known as they're different. They can travel simultaneously down that glass which exponentially increases the amount of information that can be carried on that glass. And that's why those are the backhaul protocols because they can deliver so much to each central point. So how's wireless different from wire line? Did you all get to read this cartoon? It's near and dear to my heart because I'm a wireless ISP provider, right? And everyone talks about how it's so simple. And well, I'll tell you, here's the line. It's actually more challenging than wire line is. There's a lot more, there's a lot more physics. There's a lot more, I'll give you an example. There was a French physicist named Pascal Fresnel. You may have heard of him. You may have seen a Fresnel lens, lots of concentric circles carved in a piece of plastic and you look at it and it magnifies. Anyhow, he did a lot of optical physics and he figured out that radio waves don't travel from one point to another point just directly with a single line. In fact, they travel in an ellipsoid shape. So in the midpoint between the two points, it's an enormous fat part of the football. And so he figured out that that's why radio waves, even though you can see from this point to that point, it might not get there because the lower part of the zone is getting interfered by hills and trees. And so we now, maybe wireless, pay a lot of attention to all the Fresnel zones and make sure that we have exams so the lower part of the Fresnel is getting interfered with. That's an example of one of the things that makes wireless challenging. Not that it's bad, it's just takes more figuring out. Five minutes left. What are we on? 21, we're halfway. I can make mine a little bit shorter if that implies you another five minutes. Okay, so I just told you that, you're doing that. Main wireless delivery types. So there's terrestrial fixed, that's fixed antenna, on a building, earth-based, terrestrial mobile, that's what you'd think of as cellular. Satellite fixed.  Satellite mobile, that's sat phones that the work correspondences in Afghanistan, right? And then there's a little atmosphere fixed in mobile and we're gonna see more about this. So here are our protocols for wireless. You're familiar with some of these unless so with some of the design. And I won't describe them because we're short on time. So, typical wireless ISPs use low-power, unlicensed shared spectrum. Here are some of the schemes. You're familiar with Wi-Fi, which is designed to be indoors. There's proprietary schemes that developed a way to do Wi-Fi outdoors and not have too many packets colliding in the air between points, but didn't fully solve it until the fourth generation, which were YMAX and LTE, which were truly designed for outdoor wireless and big breakthroughs. Typically because of low power, you use high-gain antennas to receive the weak signal. Wireless is worth capable. Typically, not with a cellular but with the fixed wireless. Companies don't cap how much transfer you're doing or not, so you don't have budgets or whatever, and now I can't see a million more movies now. And wireless, unlike DSL, continues to advance. We haven't reached anywhere close to the limits of physics in terms of how much information can be carried on wireless. And so there are now radios capable of greater than some typical fiber installations. Multi-gigabits going on with the wireless. Is that any shorter distances though for the faster? Some of them are and some of them aren't, yeah. And there's great ways of combining the two. The weak point in any wireless chain is the access point or base station, the radio that is disseminating. That has a finite capacity. If you exceed it, you put another one on the tower with another set of antennas. Whereas with Wireline, the weak point was just DSL, the weak point was distance with fiber. Once again, there's distance and splitting. Everything has three points. So now mobile. They use high power and it's licensed. And the reason they can use high power is they're the only ones on that particular frequency so they're not interfering with anyone else. Whereas the wireless ISPs are on shared spectrum, it's all low power so they can get along with each other without too much interference with each other. The range is a little shorter. But because of the high game broadcasting, they can use low game handsets. And they severely restrict transfer. You have to pay a lot for that transfer. That gets you to be an expensive way to get broadband. These are different. G's stand for generation, not gigabit. Second generation, third generation, fourth generation. They've gobbled up all the spectrum there is and they want more and they very agree with those sub-garras. They're just as low of a spectrum to do all the things they wanna do. So they're fighting at the FCC level to get reclassification of government spectrum and take it away from wisps and all kinds of stuff. So that's their big currency of spectrum. Satellite, that's the problem. Very high latency because you say, I wanna go to Google.com. The signal goes up to the satellite. It goes down to Texas because that's where they translate everything. Back up to the satellite. Google sends back to you. So that's 22 to 36, that's 44, 472 miles round trip. It's actually double that. So 89,000 miles of distance. It's going at the speed of light. But that's a long way to go at the speed of light. And so that represents just under a second of latency. And that's why VoIP won't work on satellite. Not well. Yeah. And because the package up there orbiting the Earth is limited by weight, it has limited capacity. Just like the radios on the tower were limited, but you can't just throw another one on the tower if it's up there. You have to launch another one and that's millions of dollars. So they limit packages to the customers. And that's how they do it. They call it fair use. If you can see the southern sky, you can see one of those satellites and you can get service. So it's the last resort. It's one way to get a form of broadband where no one else can get to you. But you may have to cut a lot of trees down or stick it way high in the tree. So we'll do the sad poems really quickly. Same thing. There are low Earth orbit ones that they're only 700 miles. They work much better. You need lots of satellites because they're not geostationary. And then this is some of the future. They seem kind of low tech and old, but they're actually kind of cool. And for the continent of Africa, it might be great for all of Nevada. It might be great for places where there's vast spaces and maybe not a lot of economic support. These kinds of solutions may be very good ones. And I've toyed with doing the blimp thing for Vermont for years, but it's not gonna happen. So an internet service provider is an organization offering communication services. And backhaul, we started to talk about fiber backhaul. It's the way to connect different sites that an ISP has. Sometimes called backbone. T1 is an old cell phone, right? That we used to think was really, really, really, really fast. It was 1.5 megabits per second. Microwave.  We think of these things as microwave antennas. Microwave is just referring to the frequency of the radio waves here, propagating from an antenna which could be square and small. Millimeter wireless links. These are the ones that Jeremy was just alluding to, their short distance ultra high speed connections. And then there's fiber links. These are all different kinds of backhaul. And they're important because everything fails sometimes. And redundancy matters. So can we cherry pick the remaining slides? Yeah, should I not talk and just flip through them? No, I just think we can continue talking. Yeah, here we go. Okay. So to run an ISP, you can't just have the delivery meeting. You have to have a lot of other stuff. And this is important to us. This is the business of running an ISP. All of these functions, without any of these functions, without any one of these functions gone and the ISP doesn't work, fails. So remember this was a presentation for Crasper. So this only shows the ISPs they could have chosen from. Some of you may know about a whisk called Great Ock Wireless or GAW. It was in the news for years. It was statewide. Pretty controversial. What's left of that whisk is a newcomer. And you all know who Betel Wireless is. They have a strange combination of cellular and fixed. It's not truly cellular in terms of phone because they don't have agreements to roam. And it's not truly a whisk because they're using mobile technology to deliver the fixed service. So they're unusual. And this was the ones that we were offering to bring to Crasper. It's like kingdom by your wings. So this shows that we can translate this for our region. So there's, that blue line is state fiber. It's already there. I've heard from the girls that it was on. So when we do our mapping, so we're gonna figure out what resources already exist. Where are the weak points and all that. The mapping's really essential. What do you mean by state fiber and dark fiber? Why don't we save that for later? It's a good question. But it, okay. So how is mobile wireless like fixed wireless? They use the same kind of stuff. When you say cellular, that really doesn't mean mobile wireless. Fixed wireless is also cellular. If there's a central thing, when there's a hub and scope system, there's a cell and another cell and another cell. So they use pretty much the same design. The mobile areas connect with the analog phone network. That's a difference. Now here's the significant difference. Handoffs. Goes from one cell to the next seamlessly. It doesn't, you don't have to reconnect to a different wifi spot, right? You're driving down the interstate. If there's enough towers, you don't lose your phone color. It keeps going. So that's handoffs. That's something fixed wireless doesn't do. It doesn't need to because you're not moving. But that's a difference. And the handsets are very proprietary. So these are the different kinds of wireless base stations. There's macro cells, which are the big ones that are on towers. And then there's small cells, various sizes. The femto cells are the ones you stick inside your house to increase your cellular range right in the house. And the micro cells are actually, I would say the pico cells are the ones that Coverage Co were using. They have, I don't know, they're big enough. They're micro cells, but they don't have two kilometers in age. So they're micro cells. Oh, and then there are boosters, which is something different. A booster just finds a signal when it amplifies it and spreads it through it. So these are the providers that could get to Craftsbury. Oh, we've come to the end, guys. And we also might want to do some kind of analysis of all the economic relationships of each of these technologies. How, what's the cost-benefit of wireless versus fiber versus everything else? And also compare the providers and think of where we're going to get in here. How long is it going to take? So then these are the things we've covered. Any questions from up from any of us yet? Any further ones? You may, there seems to be a friction in Vermont with the powers. It comes and goes, it varies by town. It depends on whether you're going through local zoning in Act 250 or whether you're going through a public service board or now it's called the Public Utility Commission process. Yeah. It depends on how you approach the community. It depends on whether you're at the big bad cooperation or whether you're local and doing something that the community wants. There certainly is friction in Vermont because Vermont doesn't want to look like New Jersey. But on the other hand, most towns want more communication. And usually it can be worked out if you're sensitive and appropriate. So we have never encountered resistance to a single town that we put up and we put up the passbook. We're a very small business. Whereas we put, there was one in Hardwick put up by Carl Winkler from Barrick. They took him three years and $150,000 in litigation to finally wear down the opposition they get in. And we put ours up a mile away from there for five months with no opposition. So it's a, maybe we were lucky in that case, I don't know. But that's the key is, it's how you present it. Did you all see the money for it? Thank you. Thanks Michael. I have to leave that computer open for a second. Oh, you want to use this one? Sure. Okay. Want to put a thumb drive on it? Yeah. Okay. If anybody hasn't signed into this yet, we probably still need to sign if you can pass that down. Let's see if you can just be right there. Okay. Okay. That's pretty good. Just set a folder, call me to see if you got it. I'll be there. Be right back. Okay. Let's see. I'll start with, I'll ask for money. All right. Thanks so much. Good. Thanks so much. Thank you, Jerry. I'll sit up and see what you're going to have. Okay. Okay. So I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to briefly go over what EC Fiber presented to me and I'm not going to do as good of a job as they would. It turns out that the reason that we meet the second Tuesday of the month is because in the statute that they wrote, they meet the second Tuesday of the month. So they're having a meeting right now and it's going to be incredibly hard for them to get to our meetings unless we have a special meeting at some other time. That said, I'm going to do my best to, to go through this. And I think Phil, where'd you go, Phil? Okay. Phil saw this presentation too and could probably weigh in a little bit but I'm just going to blast through this reasonably quickly. So there's, there's their full name and there's their mission. I have a short presentation after this too that sort of distills what I took from this and the way that I was pitching this to the various communities as I went around the central Vermont and in the last year beginning of this year. So EC Fiber essentially pioneers the communications union district model in Vermont. They are a public private partnership. It's actually their operator. The company that runs the day to day operational bits and pieces is a nonprofit that's a formerly a dial up internet service provider called ValiNet and they do all of the heavy lifting. EC Fiber itself is a board and they write checks to ValiNet to go and operate the EC Fiber internet service provider. And they are a fiber to the premises network. That is they install fiber primarily on poles the distant poles and they run fiber directly to the premises businesses and in the local residences. And there's their towns and cities. And I have another map coming up soon but to show you, we actually have bought their service territory Williamstown in Roxbury here and we had the opportunity to interconnect with them if we choose to do so and add some nice redundancy to their network and as a nice redundancy to our network once we get connected down that far. I would think so and then connect to the North too with other folks that are around. So this was a long, long process for them to get to where they are. So there's quite a lot of history here. They had a bunch of angry people in very rural areas essentially stomping their feet and saying why can't we have some? Why can't we have anything? And they, so they essentially ended up going through this whole process and they built their own essentially.  So they went and created something that was called they actually mentioned this later an intralocal contract it's a slightly different thing than the communications union district they are now that they were having trouble getting funding in that structure. So they ended up getting somebody to sponsor legislation to create this structure that we're now taking advantage of here. Intralocal compact, thank you. So once high speed internet needs more than six people per mile on the road. So that's the joke because the commercial providers wanted higher density. Higher density means profit and when you're a municipality and your job is just to provide the service you don't have to see profits necessarily. You have to pay your bills and you have to provide the service but you don't have to look at paying shareholders. So this number has actually increased since they presented this but they have about 420 miles of fiber run and I think they actually have built out to 600 and actually a little bit more than that since this is here. So they have a little more than 2000 subscribers right now and that's a take rate of about 50% that is of the people that their fiber runs by half of those houses half of those structures sign up which is pretty great take rate compared to other places around the country. And so their revenue averaged across all of their customers some of whom are taking cheaper subscription packages some of whom are taking more expensive packages they averaged to about $100 per customer per month. They have 14 full-time employees and after their fourth year of operations they have a positive EBI TDA cash flow essentially. So they have more than enough money to cover their expenses and are stocking some money away and can actually pay off some of their debt early and can actually invest in additional bills if they choose to do that. Jeremy, they've got a positive EBITDA now do you have any idea when they hit that point in terms of the start? If you don't know, don't worry about it just in doing startups before EBITDA or time to profitability or time to break even are critical marketing things to get investors. So they're four years and they hit that. Okay, so EBITDA in four years. Yes, however it's a little bit more complicated than that because they sort of meander through various structures before they got there but I think they're measuring from when they started operations not when they started shaking down slight ports. Yeah, I'm kind of jumping ahead to figure out okay when the time comes to go 10-couple we're gonna want to know that stuff. And Michael's right, if you measure from the point where they started doing something not when they started operations it's in like seven years. Yeah, that's about right because a cumulative cash flow is an excellent way to manage your business and you expect a huge bathtub. And part of that had to do with their ability to access capital. So funding limitations. This is something that they got around by creating the communications union district structure but this is not something that tax money can be used to fund.  That the funding for this network will come from the subscribers themselves and EC5 are showing that this model can work. So this strong track record this year comes from them essentially crowdfunding and they mentioned this. Yeah, crowdfunding a lot of their initial building and essentially asking people to give them recently high interest rate loans. You did that. You did. So here, this is the juicy bit. So 2008 to 2011. So ValiNet actually paid in a bit to this as well. Crowdfinancing they got about $7 million in people giving them money and giving them loans. And then they used that to do their initial build and that initial build I don't think that was cash flow positive but what it did is it showed future investors in step three there, the institutional investment showed them that they were capable of operating the internet service provider and that they were going to be able to pay the money back that they borrowed. So as I understand it, the bond bank, you can't really go up for a municipal bond, a revenue bond without two years of audited financials. So that's something that we have to keep in mind however we go about this. As a communications union district, we'll have to do essentially two years of flailing around a bit on our own and that comes into play in my vision, vision slides that are coming up here too. Fundraising history. I don't think they've gone back for more of this but I think their intent is to go back for another round once they've finished their current waves of instruction. What general state institutional is bond bank? Bond bank, yeah. Bond bank or direct to bonds given by certain banks. So crowd financing, so $7 million raised. There were some really high end loans given up or really high amount loans given up so you might have somebody who's really wanted to see this happen they said, here's $250,000 and it'd be nice if we could find people like that too because that makes things a lot easier. It's the paperwork which they talked about. The paperwork for dealing with 450 investors that you're paying them back on loan, right? It's like paying back 450 credit cards at a time. So they had an 18 month holiday and they said if they could do it again they would make that holiday longer because they just barely got started and then they had to start ramping up a whole bunch of people to take care of that paperwork. They said they spent a lot of time and a lot of time just paying people back. And so that was building the bridge to real financing. Yeah. Quick on that holiday they took on big incentive. Did they give a number of how long they thought it would be more optimal? I have that written down somewhere. I don't have that here in my pocket but I think at least, I would imagine at least two years. But I mean, for people who wanna see the project go forward and who want to earn a decent interest rate on something like this, I mean, it's a promissory note so it's unsecured so people have to have faith that this is going to actually work. But because this is a municipality we're all gonna be above board and transparent and they'll know at each step of the way what it is that we're doing and they can come to these meetings and have a say and it's rather different than a startup that doesn't have to be totally transparent. Just an observation in passing, I've participated in some general obligation that's in and about that timeframe and this interest is at a slight premium to what the G.O. Dent out of the Vermont wine bank has taught us paying. Back in high interest rate. Sure, and this is unsecured too so these folks would not be able to come back and take you to court and sue you and take over the assets that are being built with this. So this was nice but they talked about the administrative burden down at the bottom and there's more here too and I'm just gonna sort of scoot over quickly. And then what they did is rather than marketing to individuals, neighborhoods or one person here, one person there, they found that it was easier to market to entire towns saying we're gonna turn on all of Roxbury or whatever and that's easier to find people to sign up for that. So what they did is when they took out their first round of bonds, they used a good portion of that to actually pay off early that crowd financing because they got a much better rate from the bond bank and they were able to save some money there and at the same time they were able to do, what's that? Simplified admin. Absolutely, absolutely. So you take your 250 people who all put in $500 and you wipe that administrative burden off your books and then use the remaining money to build out to build out the additional network. So that's the 2,500 buy-in for their promissory notes. So that would be something like that. Since there are some of their plans and this is really hard to see. They just pulled on some grants from the state of Vermont. They were able to use dark fiber and dark fibers essentially, they have fiber optic cables running on the poles or running somewhere that's not being used. And so VTA, the Vermont Telecommunications Authority built these with the, expecting that other people would use this and you can essentially pay rent to use their fiber that's already there. We don't have any of that in Washington County that we can use. Is that because of the confidentiality factor? No. So there's no dark fiber offered by the state of Vermont. Oh no, dark fiber, but proprietary or company-owned fiber there is. For real? Yeah, so. And they won't write that. Probably not, I mean. They will. What's that? They will. So that's something that we would need to explore depending on where we put them. Two different, dark was sort of publicly dropped in sort of. So that's a slightly different term, open access. So when that's available to anybody to use, otherwise you're talking about negotiating access to those other links. So can this work elsewhere? And the, you know, I was banking as I was going and pitching this to the Select Wards and City Councils that it would, that this would work here in Central Vermont. You can duplicate their successes here. Requires a little lead in local investors, notice in the town, angry and determined communities. I know that there are several of those here in Washington County. There are grants available from the state that we're willing to pursue. Willing Service Provider and Operations Company, that's something that's a nut that we still have to crack. Dedicated volunteers. Governance, marketing, sales, patience, that's you all. This requires a lot of work. Go with Unmet Need is the highest. And this was sort of, this was Herb Tomey's pitch to us before there was a communication team in the district. These are the things he was telling us. Go with Unmet Need is the greatest. So in my vision that's where only DSL is available. So I'm looking at you Roxbury. Small businesses, especially people who are working out of their homes. Major employers who might want a bump or other municipal entities that want better service school districts, for example. WCSU, I think only East Montpelier and Berlin of the elementary schools have anything like high speed internet. I think like up in Worcester it's just the DSL line to start the whole school. This is Dan Jones. Oh, okay. Dan Jones is gonna be joining us remotely because he wanted to be in on the later on this conversation about policy but we'll get to that in a bit. Put him right in the middle. Hey, Dan, can you hear me? I'm doing great.  Okay, and then so the other thing that he was pitching was he said, offer the maximum package to libraries and other community centers at the lowest, whatever the lowest tier you can. He said that kind of engenders a lot of goodwill in the community. So they offer to libraries, they offer 700 megabit per second symmetric service for $66 a month, which the libraries and schools look at that and they say, oh yes, oh yes please. And again, getting more people to recognize this as a community service rather than as a, you know, somebody to fight with. I think this is, that's something that you were alluding to before. Working with communities and helping communities to provide those necessary services is an important step to what we're trying to do here. And so that is that one. I'm gonna go quickly go through my vision presentation here as well. So this is bits and pieces. If you've seen this presentation before, it's the one that I gave to the select boards or whatever. This is similar, but I have added a couple of other things here. So what I'm proposing is in particular fiber to the premises in the underserved areas in central Vermont. So current SEC rules call broadband 25-3, so 25-download-3-upload, and these rules are changing. Not that many people actually have that. It's mostly, in central Vermont, it's mostly concentrated in a peculiar very city, very town, and other denser places in some towns. You can get cable, like Comcast here, and in some parts of Berlin, but not everywhere. Not down by Mark in Northfield, not even me, I'm only a mile away from this building, and it's not available where I am. I would imagine that most of you also don't have the ability to get cable services.  Does anybody else have access to Comcast and you've got other board members in this room? Yeah? What's that? Charter. Yeah, Worcester does have it. It comes up through 12 and sort of goes to the village and has a few... A part of West Hill Road, like halfway up or something. I'm over the Mabel corner. I'm over the Mabel. Nice. Lucky you. Comcast covers pretty much all of Montpelier. Yeah, it does. All of Montpelier, all of very city, and all the two addresses in very town, I think. Much of middle section. Much of the charter. So, Vermont Telecommunications Plan, which is, I would say, rather aspirational in being charitable, said by the end of 2020, a majority of addresses in Vermont should have access at 100 megabits symmetric. Not gonna happen. Yes it would. Okay. It's the law, it's not an aspiration, it's the law. Okay, okay. So, the law might say that pigs ought to fly in 2024. Unless we're inventing... It depends on how well we write a plan and how quickly we write a plan. I like the way you think. Then by 2024, it says every address should have at least 100 megabits per second. So, there is, at the state level, there is a desire to make this happen properly. So, getting the state to put their money where their mouth is, I think is one of the things that's incumbent on us to push. This is some of the data that's available on access. This is Northfield. The red lines, it might be hard to see. The red lines are where there is at least 25, three. So, these are cable. In Northfield, it's trans video. Every girl says it's black though. I think we have Mark's house down towards the bottom there where it's black, that's only DSL access. If you see, and Berlin pond up in Berlin, that's near where I live, nothing there either. So, we know reasonably well where the cable is and where the cable stops. And maps for, I think all of the member towns are in the Google Drive. You can go see those. I created those using the data from the state. I think it's useful to get a geographical grip on where we might be building. So, why do this? I think you're all here because you know we have to do this. So, ISPs don't really have the motivation to build. Something that Michael alluded to earlier. It's expensive to do anything other than use the existing copper wires that are there. It requires a big investment and an uncertain payout. Having local governance, us here, local control, local accountability, local tech support is extremely attractive to everybody that I've talked to. Because we don't have to seek a profit because we can seek municipal bonding, we can potentially offer cheaper rates at lower densities than a commercial entity might be able to. We can also emphasize net neutrality and subscriber privacy concerns. I think this is a big win for economic development, however you look at it. So, I just wanna give you a sense of the map of where we are here. I created this before town meeting at Elmore was still kind of a question mark, so I circled it in green right there. And so, we passed the town meeting ballot in all those towns. We're still waiting for Barry Town to send us a rep, but that should be imminent. Cabot snuck there, there we go. Yeah, so, Cabot was added by us later on. So, Cabot was added. Orange and Moortown are interested in Moortown. I think it's gonna put it on their ballot in November to do a kind of a temperature check on their population there. The Select Board didn't want to petition to join for whatever reason. The Select Board and Orange has seen it and they're interested. I don't know where that is right now. Brookfield, Braintree and Grandville, you can see bits of those down there. Those are EC-fiber territories and those are places where we can conceivably interconnect with them either by a Williamstown or by a Roxbury. I think that's, Williamstown or Roxbury in particular are important towns because the infrastructure is essentially just gonna be right over that, right over that town boundary. Woodbury was interested. I haven't heard anything more from Woodbury. There was somebody, somebody from Woodbury said, hey, this would be cool.  If somebody wants to just float something to people they know in Woodbury, I don't really know anybody there. The Fire Chief was at the meeting I was at just before and he's very interested because this could support their radio communication. Just tell them to put in front of the Select Board and have them petition. We should also pursue Waterbury because of the population density. That could be a good funding source for them. And Waterbury, as I recall, also has a fair bit of cable infrastructure there as well, but no, but also Waterbury is important to get up to some parts of Elmore. This is something that Bob and I had a conversation about. So, Waterbury, Stowe, and then up into... More, more. More, thank you. I would very well share a fire department. Okay, so that would be fine. I've explored this proposition with several select persons as well as the town planners in Stowe and they're quite receptive. There are suppliers there, but they don't see any conflict or any reason not to proceed. Great. Yeah, so if any of you feel like reaching out to other adjoining towns where it makes sense, I would encourage you just to go and ask them if they want a presentation, if they want somebody to come speak, I can do that or I can give you a slide deck that I presented or I can give you the video recording that I recorded for Berlin. That would be fine too. I think it's... Hold on a second. This may be sort of an adjacent question, but obviously the towns don't have to be adjoining because of not being part of the CC fiber union. What would be of benefit or is there a benefit or is there any reason to speculate or think about another town or other towns that might not be abutting the current towns? Some of these towns are even more underserved than the Washington County towns that we have here and some of them are orange and Memorial County towns as well. And they might conceivably be better places to start or to do some initial building. And there's also some geographical access considerations like there might be corners of Plainfield, for example, that might be easier to reach via orange. And if we're building in orange already, it might make sense to offer those services there as well. I think it's important, and it's probably another agenda item for another meeting, that we temper our creation of expectations. What we really have to offer right now is planning services because to figure out where the infrastructure is, where the dead zones are, what problems we can solve near term and what scale of dollars we're talking about long term, it's important not to run around and recruit more towns with unrealistic expectations. Sure. So in particular, I agree with that, where it makes sense. And this is something that we can discuss and we don't, you know, if, let's say, you know, Groton says, you know, we want to come on board too. If we don't think that it makes sense, we can say no or we can say, why don't you hold off until we have more of an infrastructure to enhance it. It's a valid point. On the other hand, I think Waterbury Stowe Morristown makes eminent sense, especially when we're talking about serving Elmore, a large portion of which is really only going to be accessible via that sort of roundabout route. Okay, so this is my vision. This is sort of what I was pitching to select boards and I sort of had this a bit more concrete in my mind. Again, the decision for how we're going to do things lies with all of you. I would prefer to target communities that DSL as their only non-wireless option and that was taking the advice of ERD and DC Fiber. The minimum density for it to financially make sense. This is something that I've said over and over in the media and I've said to the select boards, six subscribers per mile for Fiber to the premises. It can work. It can work and be financially sensible. I noticed you had the bundle in the TV. I think in a way, that's almost one that we can ignore because a lot of people are starting to move away from those bundled table TV offers. And that was something that I wanted to address specifically because one of the things that people do ask, when I was off knocking on doors in Northfield to get this on the ballot there, that was something that people asked about. That was something that I talked to one on one with Jerry Diamantini's about. He said, you know, what about bundling? And I said, if you're only going to DSL subscribers, that's less of a big deal.  You say six subscribers per mile. Is that at a certain average level of subscription or? No, that's actually getting six subscribers per mile. That's not six. It doesn't matter whether they go for the base radar, they want to go for the max upload. No, I mean, so I think you have to target the roughly the same average. Some people will take more, some people will take less. But I think you see Fiverr's numbers and the numbers that I saw from the state, it ends up averaging out to about $100 per subscriber from the other state. So ultimately there's some dollar value per mile that we're really trying to hit? Yes, it's $30,000 per mile. I'm sorry, Dan, could you say that again? First subscriber was $100. So the cost, as I understand it, the cost per mile is about $30,000. And that's kind of building in the operation of bits and pieces too. So I would have to sit down with a spreadsheet again and take that $30,000 per mile divided among six subscribers per mile and then work out how that amortizes. I think it just amortizes over five years. I'm not mistaken. And you said 50% uptake, so that's 12 people on average. Right, and that's the trick. So if we have 12, but that's still pretty optimistic, I think, if you have 12 structures per mile and you get six of them to volunteer then that's fine, but that's still 50%, I think that's a bit ambitious. However, if you can look at the number of structures in your whole town and look at the number of miles of town roads that you have, that's easy enough to just ask the select board to find out and work out what percentage you would have to hit if you built out every road. I promise you, we're not gonna build out every road. It just doesn't make sense. What I've started to do is calculate a phase deployment radius based on 12 installations or 12 residences per mile. The strategy being start with the town center and assuming a 50% take rate in the town center, what is the radius that I can build out into the rural area out of the town center? And that's the point of discussion that I start to have with people. But there are a lot of factors here that there's a provision in the permits that have been issued that the state may, for its own purposes, attach to existing facilities at no cost, which would take the pole, rental, the strand. We could potentially get build costs below 10,000 a mile and a lot of miles of road are served. One string of poles serving two sections of road. So it's half the number of... So this has to be very precise, kind of accounting level facility. And that's true. So I'm talking kind of vision, like future, what this might look like. And all I'm doing is I'm taking EC5'ers numbers and literally copying them over. Is it gonna be 30,000? Is it gonna be 40,000? Is it gonna be 10? This is something that once we know the technology that we're using, we'll be able to get a better grip on that. I have two questions, but I don't wanna deeper out your presentation. If it's germane to this, I think... I can wait till the end, but I'm just not much further than that. Yeah, so I only have another two slides. So let me... Can I say something before you move on to this? I think we have to be careful in thinking one of our main strategy points is to go where the customers are. Because one of our main goals is to serve people where there aren't customers. So I think we can't be like big guys. We can't be like... And others who are only going to places where there are people, enough people to pay for the service. And I recognize the economics of this are daunting. And I think there's gonna be a real feeling that we should go where the greatest number of people don't have service. But I hope we have to be careful about how we handle that. Right, which actually I briefly touch on this in the next slide, in terms of how we move forward from here and how we decide who those communities are that are gonna be served. I know actually I have it here, so, citing. So this is more of what EC Fiber did. So we've talked about doing a feasibility study, which as I understand it is gonna be $40,000 to $60,000 to conduct it in the same way that other communities have. I don't know personally, I don't know, I don't think that that's the best option for us given the density and given the geographical sparseness of the communities here, because we might get statistically good sample size. On the other hand, we've got three respondents from Roxbury and two from Berlin and 15 from Montpelier, whatever. That doesn't necessarily tell us as much as it might, if we actually go and knock on doors and say, hey, we are thinking about building this sort of thing here. Is this something that you could get on board with and get people to, if not commit, at least register a letter of intent, or if they're interested to put down a deposit or offer, get on one of these promissory notes for $2,500 or something like that. And then once we understand what these likely neighborhoods are, then we can start thinking about, well, what makes the most sense? Is it okay if I talk about demand aggregation? Is there a word that fits into that? Sure. Yeah, if I can just go through the rest of this and then we can have sort of a larger discussion. So again, my vision is to do this, canvassing, get a sense of where we need to go, whether that's in a slightly more dense location or if there's like one road in Roxbury. Just- You're talking about Roxbury. Well, the reason I talk about Roxbury is actually if you look, if I bring up the stats, there is zero, there is zero people satisfied by the people or like offered cable, according to the stats that I have in Roxbury. So I think Roxbury is a great target because your internet service is terrible. I think we should start in Roxbury. So, but what I'm saying is if there's one road in there that's five miles longer, a series of roads in there and basically everybody's on board said, this is something we want to do, then it makes sense to start in Roxbury. Or if we find that, you know, Worcester, if you find that there's a bunch of people in a reasonably good geographically contiguous area where it makes sense to do that, then we can do that. And there are obviously other approaches to doing this. It's the same where it's right into this. Yeah. So, and then once we know where that is, where that's going to be, we can then start crowdfunding. What, you know, we can look at what the actual costs are going to be and go and crowdfund this and get people to invest in our build out of this. And then after two years of operation or more potentially, we can then look at the bond bank and do something very much like what EC Fiber did, pay back some of those early investors and then start building from there. And then the question of bundling TV and phone, I personally don't think that we ought to be in that business. And then, you know, point them to third party services like the Roku box or a Vonage Direct TV, you can get without actually having a satellite dish or whatever, you can stream it over your high speed connection there.  Yeah, so my vision is different from this one. It's not radically different, but it's different. And at some point, I'd like to go through a lot of these different suggestions and say, well, I would say it's this way rather than that way. But I don't wanna do that now. All I want to do is say that one way to figure out where in a town or which town to go to is to use either commercial demand aggregation software or create your own version of it. And I'll give you an example. There's a company in Sweden called PUSS Systems, COS Systems, and they make the software where they create a map. We just tell them which neighborhoods, which could be as big as a town, we want to separate our whole area into it. And then we find one person in each of these areas to be the captain, or you can give them any other name. And that captain then rallies the troops to sign up and they compete one community against another. Who's gonna have the highest percentage? And we set a target. We say, we're not gonna build to your community until you get 30% or 22% or 80% whatever we decide. And you can either attach to the sign up a $50 deposit or a $500 investment or a zero, just a value of commitment or this all different. We can tailor it in any way we want. But if you use the system, you get these communities to compete with each other and that's how you find out where the demand is. And then you don't spend money building somewhere where the take rates gonna be poor. You'll get there eventually, but if you want the business to survive and keep moving, you don't have to go to the low-hanging group, but you have to go to the lower-hanging group. And this is a way to do that. And there's an American company called Crowdfider that does the same thing. I think the Swedish one's a little better, but we could also create our own. I think we have some people here who are good voters and we could create our own as well. That's a really good way to gauge interest in the neighborhood of a town or a whole community or a collection of communities depending on what you choose. So what I'm envisioning our next steps to be, again, personal vision, what we're doing right now is setting up the organization policies and bylaws and such and the additional members that make sense. And then start to identify sources of seed money and these anchor institutions. And I think that three and four, and actually three, four and five sort of all tie together and especially with the software that Michael's talking about, to do that demand aggregation and to get a sense of where we're gonna start and how we're going to start. And then so maybe we are able to move quickly enough on this, I don't think 2019 is probably gonna happen, but 2019, 2020 look at what is that first small deployment look like? Five miles, 10 miles. And that location of the deployment partially dictates where the back office stuff would be. So that's something that Michael talked about too, is you can't just run the wires and hope for the best. There's support staff that are required. There's people to actually watch the computers with their blinking lights in some building somewhere. It has to, that has to happen. And I think probably initially we would hire a contractor, somebody that's had some experience doing this already, and I have a lot of really excited students that would want to do internship for zero cost. And I can offer them class credit and I can have a number of these students at any given time to do that. So, and these are things that they're happy to do and in a lot of cases they have experience managing networks and managing data centers because we have a student run data center at the university already, so they can take their experience there and duplicate the elsewhere. Kind of related to that, with EC Fiber it seemed like a key part of their success was having that kind of off the shelf ISP and ready to run operations, right? I guess that's one of the worry, you know, I don't wanna say it's, we're a board, it's very hard for us to be execution oriented. So you need that partner that's really just the execution partner, I don't know, I mean, I don't know if other people have other thoughts, you know, is that something that's like an item to 3A, 3B, or it's like, is that what you mean by anchor institution or is that? And it could be that too, so let's say Norwich University, they wanted to get on board with this and they could use some of their IT staff to support this as well. Then yes, on the other hand, you know, there's an ISP in Northfield that could conceivably be interested. I watched an electric, there's some other in these out there that have some of the infrastructure that you would want, IE, field service and that kind of stuff that, you know. But it's gonna be going and talking to those people and finding out where that is, you know, maybe somebody mentioned Goddard, for example. They're in a pre-geographically nice location, they do have some IT staff there and they do have buildings which are necessary too, obviously, to host these things. So this is a good segue to my questions. You hit on one thing and then you hit on the second thing. We have a client that, we worked on their house on the Braitree Hill extension of EC Fiber as they're putting it in, one of their complaints was it took forever to get everything going. As EC Fiber, I don't know if you know this, as they, this is question one, have they figured out sort of their staffing in terms of having enough people to do what they need? Is that one of their biggest struggles in trying to staff that, do you want anything about that? So they have had a little bit of challenge with staffing because they're not the highest paying organization as a municipality, they're not super competitive there. As far as I know, they are staffed up to where they want to be. The problem I think that they were having with the delays they were seeing was getting full access. So because the people who own the polls are like, we just, we don't have any incentive to actually follow the rule of the law and actually give them access to that. That leads into the other question about, who actually does this? I live in Roxbury. I am literally the end of the line of 18,000 feet from the last spot for my DSL, it got to the point, actually when we bought our house 13 years ago, we had better DSL service than we do now. Get to the point where banks were timing me out, trying to do, my bookkeeper was trying to do work on the bank and it was taking too long so they thought I was trying to hack in or something and I get timed out. I have been the proverbial squeaky wheel to TDS, who is a service provider there. Also serves in Orange University. I spoke to our town three years ago, trying to see if anyone wanted to, the trouble between Braintree Hill and Roxbury is seven miles I think of nowhere. There's literally like three houses to get from A to B. No one ever said anything of the interest of that. But I've often thought about something like this or where EC5 or it could basically take us over or take over TDS and I also think about this as, I've had so many conversations with TDS way beyond the typical interaction that a client would have with them. I finally, after probably four years of sending like once a month trouble tickets into them, got them to rebuild our copper line. It's funny you said no one's building copper lines. TDS is, because it's cheaper than them putting in fiber. I've asked them how much it would be for me to put fiber onto my road and just pay for it because I was so sick of it and it's $80,000. But during that rebuild, I got to talk to some people within TDS that aren't your typical customer service people which they've now farmed out. They used to be Wisconsin, great friendly people. Now it's who knows where terrible service, horrible. The people that I know, the people that work on lines, they can't stand TDS although they won't say that. They become a terrible company in terms of how they're serving our community. They're not interested in it by any means. I'm not sure TDS is inclination to wanna serve this. They buy a lot of rural telecom services around the country. That's who they serve as far as I understand. You probably know a lot more about this than I do. But basically the feedback was we're gonna build these out when we get to federal funding to build it out. And zero interest in doing anything beyond that because they are literally, it's gotta be a loss for them. I can't see how they're making any money off of the Roxbury conserving it. They probably had to do it. So I've thought about a situation like this where perhaps we take over them and other companies in terms of the management of them so that the TDS technicians no longer have to work for TDS. We just pay TDS rent for their, they have the trucks, they have the equipment, they have the same thing with whatever communities that we serve if it's a different company than TDS so that we don't have to become a telecom company or just a management company. It sounds like that's what EC-Fiber did with ValiNet. Is that more or less what they did? Yeah, yeah, with the one big caveat that ValiNet is a non-profit. Great. So I don't know how that fits into the overall vision but certainly I gotta imagine that Norris University is the biggest telecom client in this entire region. So to get them, I mean we have a fiber trunk that runs right into Roxbury, it is right there. And it's so frustrating, our school, I'm a school board member, our school has a dedicated fiber line running right into it but they're the only ones in. And because we worked it out with TDS but it's all there, they're just not gonna do it. And I would love to see maybe a way to put all that to good use. Is ValiNet interested in expanding? That's something I mentioned and they didn't laugh me out of the room. Obviously they're busy, they would need to ramp up but I don't think that's impossible. And do they do the actual physical connections to houses? They do, they do the installations. They're on the set. No, well, I mean I was wondering about that but I mean, the guys who run around, there's three guys I think that run around serve our community, our most good TDS office. I know them all, they've all been out to my house and they, you know, I can see it wearing on them every year because it gets worse and worse because they're not giving them the resources that they need. They know exactly what to do to make my service better. TDS won't give them the equipment. The one warning on all that, that the consolidators and TDSs is a very woolly world. They're very, very, they're highly, they're highly, the poorly capitalized, they're very indebted, they have a lot of legacy, union and other issues and service issues and they have really strange cultures. India, I would say just, I mean, the company I work for right now, we are actually, one of the things we're in front of do is a financial engineering deal where we take over management aspects of their business for them and just for those very reasons. Well, for companies like TDS, let's put it that way. And it's, but it's, it would be something that I would want any less to get to me fall to. I guess we'd be better. Would they like to absolve themselves of their response willing to just collect a rent check? Well, they like, it's like, you hit it. They tend to take federal grant money and do poorly with it. I'm sending around the data from the public service department January of 2018, the types of connections that are in that town and in the district. And I see the Roxbury kids. And I also put this up on the Google Drive so there's an electronic copy of that for anybody that wants to see it as well. Which, yeah, which so, you know, while your select order is initially a little bit reluctant, I think, to put this on the ballot, I think, you know, I think your time is almost certainly the one most in need of it. In need of something like what we're proposing here. Any final commentary or thoughts about the presentation I just gave? Otherwise, we'll move on to rules of procedure. Okay, CVI rules of procedure. This is, you've got, yes, I distributed them. I have a question. Yes. I think they say way, but, you know, in terms of you presenting a vision and this agreement of a vision. But it seems like that might be something that could be sent to the government. It's a committee to discuss. Okay. I think you can't form a motion or anything, but it's just something I like to discuss. Discuss and hashtag, vote on. So, sending that over to the by-law's committee to chew on that and digest that and like have competing visions presented there. Does that make sense? I would suggest it's just something to put on the agenda for a full meeting and basically contrast the different visions and opportunities so that everybody, I don't think a by-law's committee is gonna be able to convey that. So, how about this? As I'm crafting the agenda for the next meeting, should we make it like a hour and a half or two hour discussion? And we can sort of, we can talk about the different, the different models that you're imagining. I can talk about the model that I'm imagining. And you can also present, you said you had a couple of disagreements in there too. And we can essentially, I'll bring one of the big white, sticky papers and we can just put it all out there. Is that, sound like a good plan? Okay, I will say vision discussion. Yeah, I want you to disagree with mine. It's what, what happened? Sure, sure. I know that Michael's presentation is on the Google Drive was the one that you just gave on the Google Drive. I put it on there today, yes. The DC fiber one as well? DC fiber one is actually, yeah, that one's been up there for some time. I also sent it off to Orca, so they should also, they'll probably have it on, you guys link to that on your site too. Yeah. Okay, so the CBI rules procedure, this is a report back from the Bylaws and Policy Committee. This looks, this looks great. Would you just want to give us a quick overview? Yeah, that'd be great. So the Bylaws and Policy Committee is charged with developing some rules of procedure for our board meetings. We move forward with that using the Mont League of Cities and Towns model rules of procedure for municipal boards combined with material from the governing statutes for communications union districts, some material from the open meeting law and also some material that came from Robert's rules of order and what we developed on our, developed ourselves from some conversation. Just running through its purpose and authority first section borrows largely from the governing statute for communications union district. I believe that everyone got a copy of what I'm talking about, the unpaid version, okay. Do you have any copies? Just the one, I've got one. Actually, I can look at it, but try. Thanks. You want comments as you go through? Yeah, why don't you go, if you would offer me whatever suggestions you have on it as we're going through, that would be helpful. The one comment I had is on the third paragraph we added the chair, however, without such specific ground vision may speak to the governing board on, I would say the adopted policy and what, I mean, I get a little nervous when the board chair is allowed to do anything they want, but that's just a description of it. Matters of adopted policy. Is that, is everybody amenable to that? Well, I see a lot of red flags there. That means you have to have everything voted on before the board chair can ever speak about it. I don't think you want to have it. Yeah, I just said, I'm not sure it's a great idea to have the board chair only speak to adopted policy. It means the board chair can't speak unless the board has vetted and voted on an item. What does this mean then? Well, what it means generally is that you have faith in the board chair for speaking for the entire organization and reflecting what the organization has developed, worked on and stands for. You don't want to have every single board member having that authority to have the official word of what the organization is doing sort of filtered through the chair who hopefully has the balance that is reflective of where all board members think the organization should be voting. Adopted policy really puts you into Well, what is policy then? Well, that's something we talked about in our meeting because at some point we probably want to talk about things like policies versus resolutions versus positions. I mean, policy typically means in a municipal body like a school board something that a subcommittee has worked on for a number of weeks or months to develop. It's gone through an approval process that goes to a board that's formal approval there. Sometimes you have to have double level approvals before the policy can be put in place. So policy is usually thought of as a very formal procedure that has a lot of rules connected to it. So that's why I'd be worried about getting into something called adopted policy because it then implies the whole system for developing and vetting the policy. I think you have to have somebody who can speak for the organization when a reporter or when a legislator calls up and wants somebody to testify. They have to have somebody who I think will know and be the chair of the board who can be trusted to give an overview of what the organization stands for and is working on. That's a little bit different than policy though. Yeah, I think the caution there is that, and we've spoken about this, that in effect we've gotten off for better or worse with a vision being put forth that hasn't been voted on or adopted. The press has run with that including speeds and timelines and dollar figures. I can see it now including we're not gonna have television. There's all kinds of pitfalls in not having an agreed upon vision or purpose and having one person be able to convey that because it can get distorted very quickly. And before the first meeting, I had spoken to Jeremy and basically said, a lot of those things are yet to be decided. I appreciate your energy, but back off and let this committee grow its own, this governing board. And we're at that point where the rubber meets the road in that we're having to decide which of these things are already adopted by all of us as a new entity and which of these are parts of the kind of embryonic vision.  Is this a concern? Is this language work here? Should it be changed to adopted policy? Should we strike the whole thing? Just does anybody care I guess is maybe the more? I think we should stay away from the word adopted because I think when you start the word policy at least in my mind and working on school boards and all has a very broad definition under this process and that this would give the chair whoever the chair is the opportunity to speak on behalf of what the board's been discussing on behalf of what the board's doing including to be able to give a sense of the board. Sometimes that's very important too in public communications to be able to say where you sense the board is going with a particular subject. And I thoroughly agree. You elect a chair, you have to put some faith and trust in the chair to do the right thing with their job. The chair can also be removed by two thirds of both. So if the chair exceeds the chair then there is recourse to the board to deal with it. That's true. It's a nice switch. Isaac. No, I mean I agree with what you said the policy is a little bit of a kind of a not really precise word in this context because of policy change. But I think that what Steven has raised around the danger of our vision, of vision outstripping our vision is real. I don't think it should be codified in the bylaws but I think it's worth noting and just seeing where we're at at this moment we just think have to be maybe not speaking as little as possible. I recommend that our chairs speak as little as possible or now that we are a board consulting there's more opportunity to have this kind of proceed in a way that we feel like we're all on the same page. I would trust that you've heard the caution. Yeah, of course. Of course. Well, we're both saying it. No, we're not saying it. We're comedians about to hear it too. I just wondered if there might be some sense in six months or 12 months from now asking the bylaws of policy committee to a committee which hopefully is to pay attention to reflect back on this and ask them, ask us, is it working? Does it work? And what are the weak parts? We're aware of the conflicts that can't be resolved. I think I personally think that makes a lot of sense. Anybody else who has not spoken want to weigh in on this? Should I take your silence as we leave the language as presented? Okay, I will take your silence as meaning of that then. So we can continue along. Sure, in the next section of application the primary point of interest is amending the rules. It presently provides it except it's otherwise provided by a lot of these rules may be amended by two thirds both of the governing court. The notion being that we want to have some appropriate voting level here. If it's too easy to amend the rules we'll amend the rules on the fly and they don't mean anything. If it's too hard to amend the rules they'll never get changed. So two thirds was the number that typically is if you want to suspend the rules under Robert's order it requires a two thirds vote. So that was the suggested number in there, okay? Any objections to that? Organization reflects that the board is obligated to elect a chair and a vice chair. The chair shall preserve order at the meeting. That language is taken generally right from the governing statute for communications union districts. Moving along here, essentially the role of the vice chair is taken directly from statute as well. The notion of disability resignation or removal of one of those officers or with shall select successors also coming directly from statute. The rule for a quorum comes directly from our governing statute as well. The next we get into part E, discussions, motions and voting. The first section in that. Can I take a pause on the quorum? Sure. Because of this problem with subcommittees that we run into. Committees of only three right now I think all the committees have only three which means any two of them getting together is a quorum which needs to be warned in minutes. And that's a problem. It's a hassle. It is a hassle but we haven't been able to have a meeting of one of the committees yet due to that. And so I think we need to beef up the committees and deal with the issue of quorums because even an executive committee of three, you know, I see the need to get things done but the executive committee needs to be more than three as does any committee that's gonna really be able to meet effectively. I would like to go on the record as saying that I don't view the morning and taking the minutes to be a hassle or something. I just really want to go on the record. I'd like to go on the record and say that for a meeting of three people, the requirement of producing the agenda, making sure that it's been posted and I trust that it has in every community that's a member of this organization is quite a burden. I think that generally for the level of work that is being done on that committee, it was, it's quite a bit. I had to take time from my professional obligations to make sure all of that was done. I'm just a volunteer, I'm not paid staff and it's quite a bit of work and it's like characterizes it's a hassle. Okay. Yep. Can we use the internet and some automation to alleviate that burden a little bit? Can't we have a regular mailing list that goes to one repository that automatically goes to the town folks and each of the towns and it's posted soon. We need that set up. I think also just glad for a future legislative agenda that especially with these inter-municipal governing bodies, the, there's no way to enforce or make sure that something is printed and posted in a town hall. I think we should pursue a modification of law for an inter-municipal district like this to have it suffice to have it on one or two electronic locations. And so this is, and this is something not specifically about that but about some other things that because we are a municipality, we have the opportunity to change our charter essentially to modify state law according to how we are operating. So we could conceivably change our reporting requirements, our warning requirements, right? We could, we could just have the provisions of law addressing communications and have specific warning requirements that apply only to those, only to such districts without having to amend the entire open meeting law just to accommodate us. So they would still have to be approved by the legislative charter, yes. But so we could do that by a charter or we could do that by asking, asking where municipality, we can write a charter. Effectively the statute is our charter. I agree with you. Yes, could we write a charter? Let's save that for every day. Okay, so we could ask somebody to, some legislator to introduce a bill to change the CUD law. Yes, okay. I don't know if Jim Arles said it was a hatchet. Yeah. Okay. The first section, discussion, motion and voting, the first item there. Informal discussion of an agenda item may be permitted while no motion is pending. All governing board members which is previously defined to include both delegates and alternates may, present may participate in informal discussion of an agenda item. So the notion being, the notion behind that being is that we have tremendous amount of knowledge, resources, great things available to us through our alternates and we don't want to stifle that unnecessarily through our rules of procedure. So the notion being that the introductory discussion on an agenda item, that informal discussion is open to everyone who is here in the room. A motion shall only be made by a delegate or an alternate serving in the absence of a delegate. And that wording, a delegate or an alternate serving in the absence of a delegate is drawn directly from the statute as inelegant as it may be. It is in fact what the law provides. So it's only, excuse me, that language is what the law provides. This is, a motion can only be made by a delegate or an alternate serving in the absence of a delegate. So an alternate who is participating or who is present but not participating cannot make a motion. Okay? All motions shall require a second. We don't have to have a second but I think in a group this size it would be a good idea to have one. The chair may make motions. In some boards the chair is not allowed to make motions but we would allow the chair to make motions here and they vote on all questions before the board. Only delegates and alternate serving in the absence of an alternate serving in the absence of a delegate may speak on a motion. So once a motion is made, just to be clear about this, the once a motion is made, only those who are delegates or alternate serving in the absence of a delegate can speak to the motion. So that would effectively bring the discussion from room wide down to table wide. Okay? And that's the proposal. And I have. You just got thoughts. I've got thoughts. I'm going to attend a committee meeting where this was discussed. I think that especially in circumstances where a motion might be tabled and picked up again later, this similar situation will also involve executive sessions which we haven't touched on. I believe that it's important to allow both primaries and alternates to participate in discussions because of the level of expertise we have here and because of the informed, in this situation here, my primary, if anyone would need to make a single motion to muzzle me, which I would, and then I have no recourse to tap my alternate on the shoulder because he's coming in through a cell phone, right? I mean my primary. So basically I would be shut out of the discussion on a motion as important as the one we're discussing right now. So. So you disagree? What is proposed? Yes, I'm disagreeing that once a motion is made that alternates can't participate. Once the motion is made, only delegates or an alternate serving in the absence of a delegate can participate in the discussion. Oh, meaning if, I guess. If you have a vote, you're the only one.  You're disagreeing with that. Chairman, is there any formal rules around absence? Like, I mean, we talked about quorums print in the last meeting, like if three people show up and the alternate is also there, is that something to do with quorum? I'm sorry, is there any rules around absence? So, right. What qualifies as being absent? It's especially when you get to like, if there's a meeting or potentially a meeting, but this person by the delegate not being there, but the alternate being there, that suddenly makes a quorum. Yes. That should have been announced. Yes, potentially, yes. Well, I think first of all, what we were talking about earlier was the quorum requiring for a committee meeting, which is gathering the jury, the members of the committee. And yes, if you were to only, let's say we had a five-member committee, we anticipated that only, we had anticipated that only two members, no, that wouldn't, I'm sorry. Think about this. Three members were gonna be there, but that would have been a quorum anyway, so we would have warned them. We anticipated that only two, but we also have, I'm sorry, I'm verbalizing as I'm thinking, it never goes well for me when I do that. We also have committee members who are alternates. Yes. And even non-board members entirely. And non-board members entirely. They're officially appointed to that committee. To the committee. So there are no such things as alternates when it comes to committees. There are no alternates when it comes to committees. Alternates are for this board. And so, for example, Mark is sitting in for John tonight, and so if we'd only had seven other people and then Mark showed up, he would then become the eighth. We'd get to the quorum eight out of 15, and we'd be good to go then. But when we're talking about a committee meeting, we don't have to worry about that. There are no alternates to committees. Thank you. But we do need to make the committees bigger. But we do need to make the committees bigger. So, going back to the original question, should we limit the ability of alternates to participate in discussion once the motion has been made? I would suggest that on a board this size, the fewer people are going to speak, the better. Otherwise, you're never going to get through anything. And it's just too many people tied. What do we have to 18 people here? If everyone wants to say something plus an alternate, we'll be here all late trying to do anything. Your town selected you as a representative, and your alternate can pass you notes. It's just a huge board to manage. Right, exactly. I'm on the policy committee, and the intent here was to really draw a compromise to be able to be part of the discussion inclusionary and have that as broad as we possibly could. But when it came to the point that a motion being made was a moving to decision time that it becomes, it is an unmanageable size group. If we don't have some structure for doing that, then literally every alternate is then acting as a board member. And I think that changes the whole dynamic and also the intent of the law. So say, there's a delegate and there's an alternate. So we wanted to be inclusionary in one respect as far as having as much discussion as we could, but we also didn't want to draw a balance and be able to draw some focus so that things don't go on all night and get to a decision point. So again, I participated in the draft of the language. I highly recommend that you adopt this as written. So again, an interest of moving forward with this. If I could get a show of hands for how many people would like to keep the language the way it was presented. Can I just see a show of hands for who would like to keep the language? Okay. Okay, so I think that satisfies me enough that we should move forward on this. There shall be no limit to the number of times a delegate or an alternate serving in the absence of a delegate may speak to a motion. So we are going to not, essentially not, again as it calls there, not limit debate. So motions to close or limit debate will not be anything. What's the motivation there? Because again, in having served on several boards where we just need to get to it, I'm a fan of thus. It's like the Phil Busterman board. Yeah, so I'm a fan of limiting debate and I'm a fan of calling the question sometimes when it's not used as a blunt instrument. Again, having been involved with the draftiness, I think our sense was there because a couple of different things here. There's this piece of language basically saying that, yes, you can speak to an issue multiple times, but then it also is up to the chair to make some decision about running the meeting that says, Phil, you've said the same thing three times. I'm not calling on you again. Now if I've said three different things, because as we have discussions, we burn walk into different areas, then you might make a choice saying, okay, yeah, I can speak to that. So I think it's the combination of the role of the chair and the language written here that has developed the meeting decorum. But this runs contrary to what was just straw full earlier. If you're basically trying to limit debate here by saying we want to limit our debate by keeping the alternates from participating and then here we want to limit the debate once we've narrowed it down to the primaries. I think it makes it a board chair. If people are unhappy with the way the board chair is running the meeting, that's sort of the function of that, is the board chair is here to aggregate all of the knowledge in the discussion and when it gets offline, it's the board chair's job to put it back on the line and more deal with the consequences if people are unhappy with that again. So did someone take a mic with us? I'm generally opposed to calling the question.  I think there's enormous power. We have a benign, despot chairman and he has the power to steer that conversation a lot in several ways and blunt ways and therefore I don't think they should be codified and you can only get to speak twice on a topic or that there's a two-thirds vote to call a question. I think that the chair can use this discretion and if we're not happy with that, we can tell him. And why can't the chair use his discretion to call an alternates to obviously have concern with the topic in hand? I would, if I may, hold on. I'd say that the alternates are not, unless they're serving the place of delias, they're not voting on the motion. The debate around the motion has remained too voting ultimate in our nation. I think that just like we entertain public comment or we have the public maybe be able to speak during informal agenda items or we're not debating motion, that's the one, right? It's not an arbitrary one, it really is about who is gonna be voting. So could we do another straw poll? How many folks want to keep the language, the motions to close or limit debate while not being entertained? How many folks want to keep that language there? Okay, how many folks do not want to keep that language there? Okay, so I mean, I think the folks in favor of keeping it are probably gonna win this one. Maybe we come back to this. It doesn't work, we're gonna be back. Can I just say real quick here, because I think as we go along, there's not a whole lot of powers running the meeting that a board has as a board separating itself from chairman, vice chair, et cetera. And one of them, of course, is to call the questions that seems debating to move on with things. And it takes majority to do that. So I mean, it's not going to be a successful motion to call the question in less of a majority. I'll work with that number. I'll work with that number, I'm not sure. Okay, that's true, I'll argue the point. That even makes my point, I think a bit more. The fact that it would still take two thirds in order to close off the debate and go on to the vote. And this is one, and I'll tell you, I'm going, you know, I was there at the discussion. I did have a bite at the apple. I will vote for this to go through as it is. People don't want to change it. However, I do think that the board gives up a very important power that it has by giving up the ability to call the question. And it's just not a lot of control over the meeting that the board itself exercises. Well played, yeah, well played. Okay, so let's move on from here if we can. Okay, the next sentence just addresses the notion that if someone has spoken to a topic, they can't be recognized again until others have had the first opportunity to comment or until others have begun the opportunity to comment as many times as any other speaker has commented. So we try and even out the debate as it goes along. Any delegate or alternate serving in the absence of a delegate may request a roll call vote. The request must be sustained by at least one member. Alan, I think that was, maybe you could give the thinking behind request must be sustained by at least one member. Yeah, that's a standard rule in the legislature. Those of you who have been there. And I think the thinking is sometimes you can't have one person that really has a bug about something and they're going to gum up the works for the next 45 minutes by having a roll call vote. And at least make the person get a second person agreeing this is important enough to have a roll call. That seems to make sense to me. The next provision addressing roll call votes is comes directly from the open anymore. Requiring a roll call vote is required for votes that are not unanimous when we've got someone participating electronically. Each member's delegation shall be entitled to cast one vote that comes directly from our governing statute. Only delegates and those alternates serving in the absence of a delegate shall vote. Just to clarify who is authorized to vote. Any action adopted by a majority of votes cast at a meeting of the governing board which form is present shall be the action of the board except is provided in the governing statute. The provisions requiring for agendas are taken largely right from the open meeting law. I mean if there's anything in particular that needs to be explained there we can go over but otherwise I think we could just move right through it. I think that it's, look I'm sorry, meetings section G as well, largely directly right from the open meeting law sort of layman's interpretation of what the law provides. Public participation, members of the public should be afforded reasonable opportunity to express opinions about matters considered by the governing board as long as orders have been maintained according to these rules to begin a provision of the open meeting law. The next could be dealt with in different ways. At the beginning of each meeting there should be 10 minutes afforded for open public comment by majority vote and the governing board may increase the time for open public comment in its place on the agenda. So some boards will have open comment period at the beginning of their meeting. Some will have a public comment opportunity for each agenda item. Some are real nasty and make the public wait until the end of the meeting and they've got to sit there the whole night before they get an opportunity to speak. This seemed like a reasonable starting point if there was going to be any discussion. So at the beginning of the meeting 10 minutes afforded for open public comment. So Ken, Yes. Ken just increased in the time was that by both at that meeting or prior in the agenda or? At that meeting. Okay, so if something's really germane and we all think it's worth hearing more about we just say let's extend our 10 minutes. Exactly right. Can I raise an issue with that? Sometimes there's an issue on the agenda and it's important to hear what is going on before you provide your public comment to be informed your public comment and maybe there should be a provision to at the discussion with the chair reopen above a comment period later in the meeting. So this is handled fairly well and fits within this. So during any agenda item, I mean when we have the public comment period tonight one of the things I said is anybody have any comments about something that's not on the agenda so that when we get to an agenda item if there's a member of the public or an alternate or somebody that wants to speak to that in that sort of unstructured initial time before there's a formal motion that's the time for the public comment and for people to weigh in. And that's H1 is I think, okay, thanks very much Dan. Thanks. That's 825 Dan Jones meeting and we're up on the board.  What's the problem, what's the problem? But Mr. Whitaker the difference is now you get to vote. Yes. But Jim with respect to your committee work is it appropriate to make any suggestions here to further changes? I'm looking at meetings, emergency meetings and special meetings. And it occurred to me that inserting the word something to the effect of with notice to prior requesting individuals and press because there is provision under statute that press and... Any person who has requested notice of such meetings? Yes. It's in there. H1. That's special. An emergency doesn't require any prior notice. You give as much notice as you can give under the circumstances. And you don't have to give notice to the press on emergencies. Okay. That's Jeremy. Excuse me, I apparently have a stuck at fault here on the public meeting or the public comment period. It would seem to me that having one single public comment period for a fixed time at the start of the meeting forces you to batch process stuff before you've had a chance to discuss the actual item. In previous board meetings in corporate America the technique generally has been limited public comment on the topic in play at the time. And that seems to work much more effectively than having a free for all at the beginning of the meeting. So I got a stuck at fault by having everything batch processed and everybody's got to remember it from the front of the meeting. So no, I thought I addressed this before but the public participation 10 minutes at the beginning is for any items that are not on the agenda. It's exclusively non-agenda items. As long as it's clear, I'm comfortable. And then once we get to agenda items then members of the audience can go and weigh in at that point. That should be a fixed time increment. It can't be a free for all. Yeah, but 10 minutes right now. So it's up to a 10 minute free for all at the very beginning. That's fine. But the weighing in on each agenda item is going to be people called on by the chair. So it's going to be the chair's responsibility to make sure that things don't go off the rails. That would make it easier for a man of my age and an inferred intelligence to deal with. So we ought to have a provision that authorizes the chair to do that in the rules. OK. And so the chair should be giving the authority or discussion to allow the public comment on an agenda item as I'll come up with a little bit. And that could be actually a safety valve to the ultimate. It's not getting to participate in that discussion on motion. Yeah, I think that that's a critical piece. And it should be the chair's discretion. Also, part of that public comment period, particularly in a municipal situation as opposed to a corporate situation, is you never know who you're going to get in terms of trying to derail things at the beginning. And it's their responsibility as every board member's responsibility to read the agenda, read the appropriate materials, and comment on the board. The boards work for that at the beginning, because they are not a member of the board. They're more than welcome, and we welcome their comments. But it's their job to do their homework, come in and say, I think here's my feeling on this, and I'd like to have the opportunity to speak when you talk about it, if possible, and not just get random rants, and particularly with this many communities involved, that's there's a high likelihood of that. And I think you have a good point, so that's sort of a built-in suspender's approach, where during public comment, they want to say, and I want to be sure that I'm heard about item X. I think that makes sense. Can I just suggest that it shouldn't be at the chair's discretion? I mean, simply because the way we're framing this right now, and that if you're going to say that the formal public participation is for items not on the agenda, you still have to give the public and take it out of the law there. They have to be afforded the reasonable opportunity to express opinions and thought matters, considered. So if you're going to say that this 10 minutes is for items not on the agenda, then the implication is that you can't talk about the things on the agenda. So that it wouldn't, if we're going to do it, which I think, by the way, I think the way that it's being outlined with doing the agenda item, but I don't see how it could be at the chair's discretion. It would be public participation. Well, it's public participation in subject to reasonable rules by the chair. So it actually, yeah, I think that there's some discretion on part of the chair to follow by that discussion, but probably not to prohibit it all together. Yeah, I understand we have some disagreements on the details of that, but having said that, we're in agreement on that point of it for sure. So, Mr. Chairman, I'm hearing an amendment here to this about public participation, an opportunity at the outset to comment on matters not on the agenda, and then the ability to comment on items on the agenda as those items are addressed by the board. That sounds about right, and I guess I thought that H1 covered that, but it actually couldn't hurt to be more explicit. Okay, so I have a question out. I haven't been on a long course. Is it common for the public to weigh in on any matter that's coming up for vote? Yes. It is. Yes. The dictator would say no. I would move we amend H2 to add on the following. The chair shall appoint a public opportunity to comment on agenda items. And I'd just go on that just as a starting point because I know that's an artful and quick, but I think that's where I was trying to get to. Reasonable opportunity? Well, careful. I mean, you could say, I mean, it's straight out of the law to say afford and reasonable opportunity to express opinion. So could we maybe, so H1, if we change that to members of the public, shall be afforded reasonable opportunity to express opinions about matters considered by the governing board in the order of, as those agenda items are discussed? Sure, you can replace my motion. It hasn't been seconded yet, so we can do more of that. So there's actually no motion to amend right now. So, and your motion wasn't seconded. Right, that's why I'm saying it could change it in a matter. So if we can maybe continue sort of informally, we're smithing this a bit. I personally don't think we're probably gonna be ready to approve this tonight, but I think if we can give some feedback to Jim and you can just put in some of those changes, we can come back and actually do a vote for this first thing with less discussion next time. That way I don't get to vote against it. That's true. So 12-1-0 still passes when it's versus 13-0-0. Last section, order and decorum. Order and decorum should be observed by all persons present at the meeting. The notion here is that we wanna keep some elements of order and have some reasonable provisions for managing the meeting. The language that's used here is members of the governing board and members of the public that were pivoted from making personally offensive, non-dermain, or threatening remarks. Non-dermain are those that are not relevant to the discussion. So that seems reasonable. Threatening is First Amendment Supreme Court's law about finding words. And then personally offensive, reasonable people could disagree about that particular term, but I think that the notion here is that we shouldn't have to be subjected to, we shouldn't subject each other. Nor should we be subjected to offensive terms and we should keep it civil in our discussion. Does that mean add hominin or does that mean don't or you're not allowed to swear? Which kind of offensive are we talking about? In the words of Rodney Cain, can't we all get along? Yeah. Why not put both in? I mean, the issue of offensive doesn't necessarily include ad hominem and I personally think that the specific citation for not permitting ad hominem attacks in addition to offensive words is in order. So privilege from making offensive or ad hominem, offensive comma ad hominem, comma non germane, comma or threatening remarks. So if I wanna say damn, I have to give a trigger warning. So it really boils down to order being maintained and us being civil. So if you think what something you're gonna say isn't civil, don't say it. I mean. The difficulty though is that it's also a respective limitation on speech and we are the government and folks have a First Amendment right to criticize us. And in some cases to use non words when they do that. It's finding the appropriate balance to that. It was really the hard question. Samantha, do you know where the line? Samantha B. Caldivana, I'm so worried. I would be actually more comfortable taking out personally offensive altogether, leaving it as non germane and threatening and just trusting each other to be on our best behavior. Contempts? I agree. I would like to add too though. If we put together a set of board expectations that we're gonna apply against each other, because the bit about the non germane, personally offensive, et cetera, threatening remarks, that's gonna have more to do with the public. I mean, we're allowed to make rules slightly in each other's speech, right? I mean, that's how committees and boards work. The rules don't allow you to go off and say anything you want for as long as you wanna say it. So I, you know, we have this discussion. This is another one I would vote with that phrase in there. I did not personally like it. I found it personally offensive. But having said that, listen, I will vote for it because I think this is one of those things that will either work itself out or just be immaterial over time. And I think most of the times it ends up being immaterial. As written, it says it's prohibited, but there's no, it's not spelled out in terms of the sanction for that prohibition. So it can be there so that it guides people to not do those things. But ultimately it would, I guess, be the board to decide if someone is out of line whether or not they can be part of the board anymore. But it also guides the chair. Yeah, I still wonder if it's not. The remedy, if the remedy is available, if someone were to be out of line and use personally offensive speech is to remind the individual of our rules of procedure, declare a recess or table the issue, or adjourn in the meeting to a date and time certain.  It's not a sanction against the individual, not penalizing them, we're just gonna take a break. And not to mention that we all serve at the pleasure of our respective select boards and city councils and we can just say, hey, it's not working out. And ask you to be replaced or ask me to be replaced, that matter. Yeah, so bad. So if a lot of this is more germane to the public and their presence, I mean, we call off the meeting because someone shows up and it's just. That's certainly happened before. Oh, yeah. I've seen meetings being taken over by people who came there to take over a meeting from a good perspective of the public. I mean, I think in the end, these are really aspirational. Of course, first thing is these are our values, these things are important to us. We don't insult each other, we don't yell at each other. People may go ahead and do it anyhow, but I think that short of a lawsuit being filed and having to go through that, it's really just an aspiration, this is how we like it. Okay, so as I'm hearing it, we have the option to keep the language as is or to strike the personally offensive part. Again, we'll just do a quick temperature check, straw poll, how many folks want to leave the language as it is as it's presented? Okay, so how many folks want to strike the bit about personally offensive? Okay, so it's pretty dead even. Is there some compromise? Could you argue that being personally offensive is non-Germain? Yes, that's what I was thinking. You could be taken over by saying personally offensive is not very good. Therefore, obviating the need for the personally offensive could be there because that's a judgment call. Something that offends one person is not going to offend somebody else. The original word was impertinent, which is non-Germain, but it would work in a good way. And I was hearing vindictive or something like that. We didn't like that one either, so. So do we want personally offensive to impertinent, non-Germain or threatening or is impertinent like a loaded legal word? Non-Germain. It's not worth the paper, it's printed on it. Oh, thank you. It's not worth the paper. It's like that. Okay, so non-Germain or threatening? Just leave it, yep. So strike the personally offensive? Yep, yep, yep, okay. Okay. Wonderful, and Jim went over to A, B, and C already, and then we've got some signatures that we will not be signing. That's correct. Parting thoughts before we move to the next thing in our remaining two minutes. Why did the people put this face in text when we left one in two minutes at point? Yeah. Sorry? Okay, so at your leisure, do you want to shoot us back a updated copy of that, and we'll bring printed copies next time and have everybody sign, we'll be ready to go? We'll do it. Awesome. Okay. That's pretty kind of it. Oh, Edoke. Policy on conflicts of interest? Conflicts of interest policy. All right, shall we adopt the same maybe slightly higher tempo version? Oh, yeah. I think this one is a little bit shorter. It's a little bit more, I think, better understood. Could you could just give me a moment while I pull up my product version of, I'll do it shortly. I just wanted to use the electronic so that you can see the color better. While he's doing that, does anybody want to take any initial commentary out for this? It is reasonably short. I can, I mean, I can speak a little bit. I was on the committee. A lot of this comes from either statute or from model policies like the League of Cities in town. And I think one of the difficult things for a lot of people, a lot of people who serve the public is understanding what a conflict of interest is as much as anything, and then what do you do? You go about it when one is identifying it. And generally, the way that a lot of public bodies, including the legislature, handle conflict of interest is really self-identification as much as anything. The person who thinks he has a conflict of interest is expected to tell back to the group. The way this is written and the way most models are written, we don't have the power to censure or to bounce somebody out if we disagree that they have a conflict of interest because we don't have the authority. We've all been sent here by our towns. This board doesn't have the authority. I mean, the way Jim's explaining it to me, I think he's right. We don't have the authority to overturn a decision made by a member town. We can't go to town and say this isn't working out or a person acts but we can't censure the person and then ask them to leave. So that's, I think, the root of the self-identification of a conflict and self-determination, whether the conflict really does pose something that the person should be a trigger for accusing him or herself from an issue. So if this sounds a little bit weak and mealy-mouthed, that's the history behind why it sounds like that. It's pretty hard to figure out a way to judge when a conflict is truly a conflict and to take a sanction that's appropriate. And we're not the first people to discover the difficulty of doing this. It's hard. I have a general question about the whole topic. If a board member believes he or she has a conflict of interest and chooses to volunteer to accuse him or herself, does that mean they also are unable to speak to any of the issues or are they accusing themselves from the vote? So the way we've done this in the past in the town of Berlin is that person becomes a member of the public. They temporarily resign from the board and they sit in the audience. So they can talk when it would be appropriate for members of the public to talk as well. But I think in that case, if I were stepping down because I had a conflict, my alternate could presumably come up and provided that he didn't also have a conflict, could then represent Berlin. Do we do the same thing anymore? I've had this happen. I've had a conflict and in our board, I spoke and then left, not just in the audience. And it was not part of the vote, not part of the rest of the discussion I gave them. I said, my piece, and then it was up to the board