First, I'll bring up the agenda. Steven, you wanted to make an amendment on the agenda. You mentioned that earlier. I'm not a member. I can't make. I suggest that you add the statutory required addressing of the open meeting on violations. Okay. Is that something that you did more than just one? You said you made an S on it. No, I don't know. Okay. You want more than just public comment time? Is that what you want? This is not a public comment time to address that. I know. That's your obligation as chair to address that and to warn it ahead of time. Do you want, okay. Steven keeps bringing up this violation. And so I would like to give him time on the agenda. And I just didn't get it in there as an agenda item. I thought we'd already addressed it. So is there a right with the board if I add after public comment discussion about violations of the public meeting law? Any opposition? Everybody okay? Wave if you're okay? Thumbs down if you're not. Don't worry we don't roll call vote if it's, everybody's quiet. Can you hear me? Am I talking loud enough? Donna, I'm foreign. I don't know if I'm coming through Kim Cheney. Speak up Kim, yes? I'm for it as you suggest. All right, so we'll add that in. Otherwise the amend, the agenda will be accepted as amended public comments. Any public comment? Yeah, I can't see or be heard. I don't have any confidence that I'm being heard. Can you hear me? I'm speaking to his speaker. You can speak to his speaker. Can I be heard? Is anybody on the screen? I don't have a screen to look at or speakers to listen to. Yes you do. Same as I do. You listen to the same thing I'm listening to see. I can't hear that anybody can hear me. They're not talking. Yes we can hear you. Okay, the open meeting violation which was filed some time ago has not been put on the agenda for some time and it requires board to address it within X amount of days which has long lapsed. And I raised it at the last meeting and it was brought, I was assured it would be looked into as to this requirement. The chair cannot act on behalf of the board and just sweep it off under the rug. So that's an issue that needs to be dealt with by the board. Secondly, the participation of the physical location. I'm getting rebuffed, dismissed. We have screens, we have speakers in these rooms here at City Health Hall which is why we chose this as the, why somebody chose this as the physical location but it's not sufficient in compliance with open meeting law to have no facility to see or hear or be heard by the public participants. So this board needs to take action to direct the chair to hold the meeting in a place where a laptop can be plugged into a screen and amplified speakers can allow anyone in the room to be heard. I shouldn't have to hug somebody during a pandemic to see who's speaking on a screen. So these are basically, this is common sense open meeting compliance and I'm not getting any cooperation so the chair needs your direction as a board. And as I met, as I said last time, Stephen we're required to have audio, we have audio. We are using this space in City Hall because it's a convenient location. We are not authorized to use their equipment and their staff can not come and be at our meeting during and add hours to their work. So we are meeting the meeting law, we have a physical location because audio, you can see what I can see. I can't see what you can see, I can see.  And there's nothing in the open meeting law that says a physical presence is audio only if everyone else has video because unless everyone's willing to identify themselves every time they speak. But they should, they should identify. It's a very good point, they should and I'll try to remind them. But again, you can put it in writing but my response then is my response now. When I read it, it says audio. And likewise, the last violation, I don't know which violation but all the ones I've gotten from you as well as record request, I responded. And I was directed to say, okay, there's been more than one, I believe but I don't have that folder with me. But the one evaluation of meeting law was about the posting of the agenda. We addressed that, we made a good faith attempt. And so my, I was advised legally to offer a cure, which we did. John Odom, the city clerk at Montpellier offered to post it, we emailed it to him and he has gotten it posted faithfully thereafter. No more confusion within the staff of who's posting it for us at city hall. So to me, it's already addressed. If it's not, then I'm asking you to put it in writing. Exactly what's not addressed and what more needs to be done to cure the problem. I think the confusion here is that chair believes that she is the board and the statute requires the board take these things up and discuss them among themselves in order to implement standing resolution. And to get an excuse, a bunch of excuses from the chair does not satisfy the legal requirement of board action. Again, I asked you last time and I asked you this time, please put it in writing. I don't need to put it in writing. I did put it in writing with the violation and the board has not taken it up. The board needs to take it up as a board. The public body needs to take up this issue. Now I actually sent the board a copy of what I responded to Stephen, but because I didn't know this was an issue tonight, I didn't email it to everyone. But I can do that and we can certainly talk about it now and we can talk about it later. I don't know if you all remember the particular email and addressing that the September 9th, even though I talked to city staff that Tuesday morning and they said they were going to be posting it, it did not get posted on Tuesday. Therefore we recognized it wasn't posted. We already went through all the motions that happened at that meeting to make sure that they were rectified. We have assured it, which is the language of the meeting law by making sure we have staff assigned. Is there anything else my board would like would like for me to do about this issue with the September 9th meeting? The agenda wasn't posted correctly. And this is Sir Dukie's dinner. The both of these things need to be discussed by the body and a resolution acted on by the body. I'm asking the body, Stephen. And I just need to borrow my screen again so I can at least be visible. So if the board feels near with the situation, a member said back in September, remembers the email about it. If the board would like more information and have this brought up at our next meeting, I will do so. It's Kim. Yes, Kim. I move that we conclude the discussion of the open meeting violations that they have been adequately dealt with by the chair. So it'll be a motion. Then I have another motion. Okay. Let me make sure the secretary. Let me make sure the secretary understands that motion. Brent, for you. Yeah, that's a record point in discussion. Is that what it is on this topic? Okay, I mean, I'm trying to think of that with, that was the same action of the board considering it and feeling like the violation has been cured. It's a term that's used in the open meeting law itself. And the league uses that term too. So maybe in your motion, you could say the violation has been addressed and cured. Which violation? That's the intent of my motion. We have heard the discussion as a part and we think any violation has been cured. Okay. September 9th violation. Is there a second to that motion? I'll second. Any further discussion by the board? All in favor? Aye. All right. Aye. Okay. Doug, I can't see you right now. I just, if we're gonna do this online, it has to be unanimous or I have to do a roll call. So Kim said aye, Brent said aye. I said aye. And Doug Coyt, are you there? No. Can't knock him out. I hear him. I almost hear him. I saw a yellow blip. We can hear me? We can hear you. Oh, that's amazing. The Zoom is not working. Okay. Did you hear the motion on the table? Yeah, but I didn't hear any of the stuff leading up to it. Okay. Stephen felt the written address that I did addressing the violation of September 9th meeting where the agenda did not get posted in a timely manner among Thayer City Hall. And I expressed to the board, remind them what was in that email, that indeed the staff didn't get it posted on time. Okay, I remember that. We now have the city clerk, John Odin, who's doing a course and is getting posted as soon as we send it to him. So that's good. All right, just so I can understand, just so I understand that notice of the meeting was not posted in the city hall as we went to believe, but it was posted in other locations. Yes, but yes. And Stephen. What happened was this one person in city hall about somebody else was doing it. And that's why we now have the sign person to do it. I understand. They're going directly to John Odin. You may see him in the CC for our agendas and meetings. I understand that. And Stephen was given a advanced notice of the agenda. On the 9th, oh yes, he got that in writing, but it wasn't posted in city hall. That's what the violation was about, the posting in city hall for September 9th. Okay, and Kim's motion was- And at the October meeting, we re-voted on everything. Yeah. That might be in question. Okay. So what we're voting on now is that indeed, the board's consideration that they feel the violation has been dealt with. And that's it. Okay. So that's a yes? Oh, yes. Okay. Thank you. Donna, I have one other issue. Well, I didn't hear anything about approving the agenda. I had two requests for items on the agenda. Yes, I did. I started out with that. And that's when I asked the board if they wanted me to add the violation. So are my requests part of the agenda? What you sent me earlier, you said you didn't want on the agenda. Can you put it under other business at this point, Kim? Well, I want them on the agenda. There were two, essentially. Okay. What are they? Well, I sent everybody a memo. They are to appoint an executive director, which is mandated by the charter. And second, to discuss the makeup of the proposed budget, the type of things that will be in it because I thought your synopsis was too general and we should have a specific discussion. When we talk about the annual meeting, I was going to bring up the budget as well as on the town meeting ballot. Okay. Just so I'm not on the agenda, I think that I asked that they be on there. I got confused because you wrote those memos and then you wrote, you didn't want them on the agenda anymore, but I'm understanding you're taking part of the stuff you wrote off that you're wanting to talk about appoint the executive director. Okay, I don't have my charter with me, so I'm not as familiar with that, but we'll certainly add it to the agenda. Okay, thank you. Okay, I'll think I'll put it down there after six and make it number seven. Okay. All right, we have the minutes of October 14th, 19th and 20th that were sent out before and were sent out with this agenda. I would entertain motions to accept October 14th, or you could put them all together. I mean, people could, you could put them all together and somebody could want to take them out. I'll move approval of the minutes. Is that all three? Yes. Okay, thank you. The second, it all stuck again. I'll second. Any discussion about the minutes? All in favor, raise your hand. Any opposed? Oh, we're so. Oh, he left, he's out. So we may have to come back. We won't have a forum without him. Oh, nope, it's the other will, it's the wrong will. Okay, so we'll have to come back to this if we don't have a forum present on the screen. Discuss annual meeting. In order to get the dates right, it's indeed the board votes for December 16th. Tonight, then I can get everything out tomorrow and put the ads in the paper and social media, et cetera. Is Thursday, December 16th, 7 p.m. We have an open annual meeting. We'll have our annual report, our three year budget, and we'll also of course, invite the public there to have interaction as well as making sure all of our members are there. Will the 16th work for people? Yes. Are you okay with the warning of that meeting? That's why I'm making it the 16th and not the nine. Okay, I didn't review the charter, but it has this complicated thing of having it posted in newspapers and the like. I just said that we get the newspapers and social media. Yes. Oh, okay. So if the 16th will work, I like a motion setting that date for our annual meeting. Point of order. Okay. I have read the charter in order to do a meeting, annual meeting on December 16th, you would have had to first publish it in the newspaper on October 12th or something like that. It's 30 days. No, it's not. It's three consecutive weeks. I could pull up the exact three. I know it's 30 days and three consecutive weeks. So the first one is 30 days and three consecutive weeks thereafter.  I've worked backwards on the calendar. And when you suggested the December 9th meeting, I went back and saw that that would have had to start on October 4th, would have had to have been the first notice. No, because it can't be beyond 40 days. So this is- No, a public hearing on the annual meeting has to be held prior. No, after. No.  No, the annual meeting happens before February 1, of an annual meeting for January 1 and the public hearing is February 1. Board members, actually again, the board is the ones who are devoting members. Thank you for your comments, Stephen, but please contain yourself. Yeah. So- I don't know if the board will waive any irregularities- I'm sorry, Kim. With the- I would move that we waive any irregularities because there are any- Okay, that's one way you can deal with it. I can read you. It says annually on or before January 1, the board shall approve or cause to be distributed an annual meeting and it goes on about a budget for two years. And then in the next paragraph, it talks about a public hearing on or before February 1 of each year to receive comments from the legislative bodies on the proposed budget. Because again, in January, we finalized the budget and we produced the article if indeed an article is gonna go in the town ballot in January. I think it's a little more complicated than that, but I'm confident that the people that need to know about this meeting will know about it. And time is moving up and I wanna make sure I wanna make sure that the board approves doing it even if there may be some minor non-conformance for the Charter on this point. The Charter gives us that authority. Yes, it does. And by all means, if you wanna make a motion of such, go right ahead. But under, okay. I'm making that motion. Okay. The Charter point of order, the Charter allows the board to amend the Charter. The Charter does not allow you to just waive and ignore the requirements of the Charter. You would have to go through a process to amend the Charter in order to do what you're proposing, Kim. But it's section 90138, which requires the public hearings to address at least one public hearing at which the issues to be voted on at the annual meeting shall be presented for public comment. And notice shall be published in one or more newspapers, at least once a week on the same day of the week for three consecutive weeks, the last publication to be no fewer than five, no more than 10 days before the public hearing. And this will do it. It's all right. We're within the guidelines here. Not even close. So... This is for reference, it's section 901-38. Steve, Doug, are you back? Oh, he's in here. He's muted right now. Can you hear? Because the annual meeting and the public hearings are separate things as proposed within this Charter. And so it's allowing the board to have their annual meeting producer report in a budget and then having a public hearing about that. So the public hearing generally happens in January. There's the sections. Sure. I heard it. 901-38? I have, yes, 38, 39. I've got it. I just interpreted it very differently than you do, Stephen. What's new? I don't want to be held hostage by Steve, who is not even a member of the board. You can take his comments under advisement, but I'd like us to move on. So, Kim, are you busy looking it up with the Charter, trying to make an opinion about this? Well, I was looking up the Charter and it does say 30 days prior to the meeting, three weeks and... That's right. And then that's what I said, 30 days. Yes, but no more than 40. And then it does talk about publishing those three times, consecutive days, all of that. And that's about both the public hearing. And the last within five days of the meeting. And yes, the last one within five days of the meeting. That's what I was scheduled tomorrow, once I have a date. All right. Well, I think it's been complied with, but I agree with you. It's time to get out of this meeting. Okay. So, I'll make the motion of December 16th. Can I have a second? I'll second it. Okay. Annual meeting, December 16th, Thursday, 7 p.m. All in favor, wave your hand or Doug, grunt, say something we're not seeing you, Doug. We're hearing you right now. Oh, I mean, I see you actually, if you see your name right now, it disappeared before. I think you left it down. Doug, is this voting avoidance? What is going on? Yeah, he's some meetings were just weren't supposed to happen. I mean, honestly. Donna may ask the question. Sure, Scott. You might guess. We have two representatives of the board, Sally, Dylan and one other. Can Joe Aldsworth and I assist, or will Schwartz and Joe Aldsworth assist in voting? Would that be beneficial or is, does the charter? No, yeah. We don't, we don't have substitution or proxy votes. Sorry, but thank you for offering. Donna would ask. Yeah. If Doug could keep his internet connection, we'd be fine. We just don't have any spare people tonight. So to lose him is difficult. Joe, yes. Thanks for being here. It might be worth asking Doug to dial in, if that's a possibility. Yes, I'll dig my phone out. That's a good idea. Technology is great when it works. And pain when it does not. Okay. All right. You want to call in or you want to give me your vote on the phone on speaker? Okay. All right. So Doug, can you hear me? Yes. Can you hear me? All right. And I believe Brent, other people can hear you. So we have a motion on the table to make the annual meeting December 16 at 7pm. We're gonna make a vote on it. I'm asking everybody to say aye. Kim, Cheney. Aye. Doug. Hoyt. Aye. Brent. Aye. Donna. Aye. All right, passes. We also want to go back to the minutes we lost you right after we got the motion to accept all three of the minutes presented, October 14th, 19th, and 20th. Yep. And so let's do a roll call vote there. Doug Hoyt. Aye. Kim, Cheney. Aye. Brent, Householder. Aye. Donna Bate. Aye. Okay. Pass. The next item is to talk about the town meeting ballot. And it's one of those things that I feel like we have to approach it with good intentions, but we also need to do it if we think we, if there's any slight possibility we want to put a ballot item on the town meeting in March, we've got to start thinking about it now. Even if we change it between now and January, we need to start the discussion. Just to stay alive, we need some administrative money. And if we want to further advance phase two of our need assessment implementation, then I put in $50,000 for operating and consultant work to advance on governance, cost allocation, and funding strategies. Oh, what's the board opinion on that? And what, you've said a lot of things. I'm talking about a ballot item. Well, I think the ballot item is very complicated. I'd like to hear from the communications committee and others as to what their intention was as far as joining CVPSA, because as far as I'm concerned, they're not ballot members of CVPSA unless and until they join. They have, in my opinion, violated the MOU that are required to pay a certain amount of money, which is not entirely their fault because a certain amount of money has never been determined. But on the other hand, that an MOU is not functioning and hasn't, really. And it's just not fair to have the two cities- Okay, I wasn't even talking yet about who we're gonna charge for. I'm talking about us wanting to move forward with the idea that we're gonna need some money to stay alive. Okay, but I can't see how we can appropriate money unless we know what it's for. Well, to start the discussion, I guess you always have to pick one leg of the table. And so I initially started thinking about the amount we would need. If indeed, we're not doing equipment this year, which had already been discussed, that we were going to advance the work done with it, with Televate to deal with funding strategies. And that funding strategy would also deal with cost allocation. And then to try to create something on the board level, when we already know the stakeholders need to be there at the table, helping us create a cost allocation. We've invited them to join the table. And I have a little report of what I've heard. I thought that perhaps Joe and Scott, Larry, others around here might have some reporting what they've heard from their communities or from Capital Far. So I think talking about what Capital Far pays or doesn't pay needs to be done further down the line, Kim. Well, that's where we have a serious difference of opinion. I don't see how we can go forward unless we know who our members are. Right now, we have two members, Larry and Montpelier. The CFMAS was under a MOU, the required payment Okay, and so I didn't send out the MOU. So what part of the MOU feel they're out of compliance with? Well, Donna, they were supposed to make a payment after they negotiated a new contract for the dispatching for Cap Fire. And they did that so they're two years out of compliance. They've had two contracts since that was agreed to. And the other problem, the broader problem is unless, well, we could come up with a budget and just put shares that everybody would pay. And I agree. That's a complicated subject. And I think Paco's made a good start on it. But that needs to be really worked out. So I... Yes, what the board has voted on in the past, Kim, when this has come up is they want, and that was very clear through Tel Aviv to work too, to get the right people at the table to work on a fair equitable cost formula that everybody can buy into and sign on to and get their groups to agree to. There's a lot of chicken and egg here. I agree with all of that. You've got to have the cost. So I don't think we can do it at this meeting. And I guess I'm somehow, you know, this discussion as far as finding capital far out of compliance, I guess I would definitely like to hear, I'm sorry, Scott, Joe, put you on the spot here. If there's a way for you to respond to that, please do. I would just like them to tell us where they stand. What's next on there? Well, that was also going to be part of the agenda.  Okay, well, I think they go together in my mind. Well, but you got it again, you've got to grab one leg of the other. And we have to have an annual meeting and within the annual meeting context, a budget, and within that budget, then if we're going to have any kind of funding needs, then we need to have that starting to talk about that on the ballot. And the only people we right now have the authorization to put on the ballot is Barry Montalier. It doesn't mean we can't ask for capital sparse participation, but we don't have authorization to pass it. I agree with that. Okay. So we will totally mess up the agenda, sorry, but I guess I would like to hear one from Joe and Scott what they would like to share from your meeting last night first, please. And then talk about maybe the MOU that exists now. I think Joe wants to go first. Oh yeah, I see that hand.  If you turn it off for now, this is- Oh, sorry. Okay, Joe, please. So I'm currently speaking as the first vice president of Capital Fire and the MOU is very specific. No authority has been seated on dispatch centers. And so according to the MOU, there is no fees allocated for Capital Fire to be members of CVPSA. And that's very specific in the MOU. And so Scott, please echo. I know we've had conversations with that, but until authority for dispatching has been seated to CVPSA, that doesn't exist and that's not an option. Now, it doesn't mean that CVPSA could not ask for some planning money. That is legitimate, but for right now, as far as I'm concerned under the MOU, that's not a possibility. Okay. Donna, if I may. And I will also say Will Schwartz is also on the line here. So he may want to speak up as well. I echo what Joe has said. And I will also say for our towns that we represent, as you well know for the cities that you represent, the budget season has almost come to a close. If there was to be funds coming from Capital Fire Mutual Aid and the towns we represented, we needed to be asking them probably months ago. I don't want to give the impression that CFNAS shouldn't contribute our portion of the benefit we're getting from the CVPSA. I don't want to give that impression. I want to say that I do not echo what Kim said. I view us as a partner in this. And it's hard as a partner to hear the word violated or to hear that we are being not equal partners in this. I would share that I think we're all in our meeting last winter and spring came together saying we wanted cooler heads and wanted to see the Tel Aviv report and then we wanted to work together. And I think that is the impression that Capital Fire has right now is that we do want to work together going forward. To answer your question, what did we discuss last night at our Capital Fire Mutual Aid meeting? Because I think that's what you all want to hear. We have discussed that we still find the importance of our radio project that we had last fall and the challenges that we are facing are still there. And we would like to move forward with that element of the Tel Aviv report. Not separate, we still support other elements as well such as the cities and trying to improve their consoles such as the medical hospital working together trying to prove their frequency. We think these are all vitally important but we also feel that the part that we brought up before we need to move forward and seek for an RFP. And we recognize and we were prepared to ask tonight of the board to help us with that preparation of RFP and to help us with the expertise and guidance that you guys have to help make sure our portion of this project moves forward in the right step. Joe and Will, would that be a fair statement? Yeah, Scott. I guess Will, welcome back. Would you like to say anything? Yeah, that's accurate, Scott. Nice job, thank you. Also, Echo, what Scott said, it's tough to look at a partnership when we're, you know, there's no violation of the MOU. If capital fire and mutual aid member towns were to contribute to CDPSA then that's really a separate issue and that's a renegotiation of something. And that hasn't occurred. And to say that that's see a capital fires fault isn't accurate, it's just not accurate. Okay, Paco. Thank you. As the drafter of the Memorand of Understanding, I wanna concur with Will and Scott's and Joe's interpretation. There was a lot of negotiation that went around coming up with an agreement to bring capital fire into the fold of Central Vermont Public Safety Authority and the Memorandum of Agreement deals with the dispatching portion of the effort. At the time, as everybody remembers, we were looking to take on dispatching. Capital West slash capital fire was a key component of the dispatching services in Montpelier. The MOU or the Memorandum of Agreement that was signed focuses on dispatching. And there were language in it and I don't have it right in front of me right now but there was language in the Memorandum of Understanding that a Memorandum of Agreement that dealt with if CBPSA was to get seating authority from the two cities to take over dispatching then there would be another discussion of costs. The bottom line here is that if capital fire was going to be charged anything, they would have to go back to their memberships and so the charging aspect was always meant to be a subsequent issue from the Memorandum of Agreement that was signed. And it really would require CBPSA to put forth a Memorandum of Understanding of the costs now associated to this new member and then capital fire would have to take that back to their membership and determine whether they would want to stay on as members. So I agree that with everything that's been said tonight on behalf of the capital fire that there's no violation of the Memorandum of Agreement that was formulated. The big question which you'll be facing is we are now a couple of three years or you are a couple of three years past that signing of the Memorandum of Agreement, dispatching is not an issue. So what now happens with any cost sharing that should be passed along to all of the members of CBPSA? That's a question in my mind. It's not whether there was any violation there wasn't. So I don't know if I moneyed the waters but I did want to speak from behalf of a capital fire. No, I read it the same way but I want to get back to Doug Hoyt who's on my phone and since he's been attending the meetings capital fire, Doug, would you like to say anything on the subject of the MOU? No, I don't have anything to add. Okay, so I don't find support for that particular approach, Kim. Well, Donna, let me just say I'm glad to hear Paco's explanation. The actual money thing does not refer to Consolidated but I can see how the agreement could be read that way. And if that's what Paco thought was intended, I'm okay with it. I really want to see if we can get a relationship where we're all on the same page at the same time. And that's my real concern because I think- Well, and which is what we've talked about is not so much focusing on the existing MOU or even public safety authority's existing charter but what could a coalition look like that would work for everybody particularly right now when we're focusing so much on equipment. It's a different story and it's huge financially. We're not talking just a little administrative money. We're talking big bucks and hence the public safety authority board in the past has supported moving on with Salavate to work with the group to do that. And what I've heard from Montpelier in particular is both the council and the public safety staff is that they really want for the staff the twin city teams of very Montpelier that meet regularly to really make major time for this issue and to talk about funding strategies and to talk about what would the coalition look like. And Stephen mentioned that I guess at your public meeting, your meeting last evening was brought up that Montpelier has agreed to be a judiciary or who assists you, is that correct? I don't want to speak out of turn. They said they wanted to speak to support us and that is one role that they may they have not made that commitment and that was a discussion between the chief of police and capital fire mutual aid or capital fire mutual aid users. So no, there's no commitment from the city council. Yeah, I got a little commitment last night while you were having your meeting I was having my city council meeting. So I did ask the city council if they would support staff time being given to working on the equipment acquisition and whether it was working with Televate and public safety authorities consultant but that the staff time working with not only Arkansas but with capital fire and they all supported that. So I think we're moving in the right direction. You're right. It's more of an offer that that's something that they would be amenable to as far as being a fiduciary agent which they've mentioned before. And I think as we move in that direction then they'll become more clear as far as having a motion if indeed it happens but first you gotta be open to the idea, right? Yeah, we discussed ideas. I just don't wanna make an impression that there's any commitment yet. Good, I wasn't at the meeting. I was just, that's sort of what I heard but I also had gotten that from the city council to wreck myself. So that's good. So within your membership, how do you think they are as far as committing time forward to working on a new coalition to work on funding for this $3.9 million equipment stuff? I don't think I speak out of turn for Joe and Will and they will speak up if they disagree with me but I believe that our communications committee which is the subcommittee of Capital Fire that really looks at communication problems throughout our mutual aid system is dedicated both in time and effort. And I will call out Joe's countless hours that he's put in over this last year to try to help move this forward as a example of us being committed to trying to keep this going forward for our communities. I hope that answers your question. Yes, we will give our time and effort to improve that. Okay, and indeed, I guess I'm a little different venue for budgets. Our cities are just now and starting to gather stuff for their budget. People will still be coming in to apply for things all the way through January for budget items. So you're saying that's not true for any town allocation? I'm saying that the fire chiefs of the fire departments and EMS services have asked all the way starting back in September for what the budget would be for fiscal year 2223. And that we have as part of those users that received dispatching from City of Montpelier have already set that budget in stone because they needed it to do their budgeting process to add on to that would be near and possible as of November 18th. We needed to ask for that earlier, if that makes sense. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, okay. Well, do you have a time of year where you do officers? Are you gonna have a turnover in officers for capital fire just for now in town meeting day? Our annual meeting is in May when we elect officers for capital town meeting. Okay. And I don't wanna speak out a term, Joe's our vice president. So he's a little bit on the higher pecking order if I would say than a treasurer or a communications committee. Okay, that just helps me, May. When I sent this agenda out, several capital fire individuals were on the distribution list and hopefully cast it even further, there was some serious cost allocation, you know, done. And again, just examples, but they're examples enough to get people's attentions and maybe a few, oh my God, what was any general reaction when people saw the $50,000 distributed with capital west or capital fire and the 3.9, were there any reactions to that? Joe, do you wanna take the first swing or do you want me to speak? So the first question of the $3.9 million, that was a shock and awe. I mean, a lot of guys, a lot of smaller departments, a lot of small communities are like, well, I can't afford that, that's over 50% of my current operating budget. There are some people that have narrowed it down that they can tell you exactly how much per call that's gonna cost them. So yeah, the shock is there. One thing that Paul has been trying, Paul Saruti's been trying to do is say, we know it's expensive. We haven't bid the project yet, but we also have to say it's an old system and it needs to be repaired. We need to figure out how to repair it. As far as the $50,000 cost allocation, that has not been discussed at all. As far as I know, Scott. No, I'm sorry, it has not been discussed. Our last meeting was two months ago. So no, it was not discussed in the Capital Fire Mutual Meeting. I mean, to me, one of the things about the 3.9 is that it's very clear that we need state and federal grants. And so I think until people realize, oh my God, that could be $19,000 in my budget, maybe it'll momentum, you know, give them more interest in coming to the table and helping us figure this out and going after federal and state in a more, you know, cohesive group application. You know, open to any suggestions you have in taking any of these numbers, we can put them through any sorts of formulas, but they're real cost are there. I think a good way of looking at it, we had a, and this is about five years old, so these are old numbers, but when we had the Motorola bid and that bid was greater than $1 million, our towns, and this was at that time, just the Capital West users, our towns realized that that would not be achievable in the budgets for the all the towns that we represented. When we were able to get a lower cost bid, and this was around 350, $360,000, and we were able to come up with a 10-year funding formula to hopefully spread that out, our towns were willing to step up and many went to their select boards to ask for a annual payment to achieve that. So I think there is interest in achieving it, but I would echo Joe, $3.5 million or $3.9 million is without other funds dedicated. And I know there's grant funds and I have to admit I'm a pessimistic fool sometimes, but grant funds are nice to have committed funds are better. And right now I don't see the committed funds out there and it's not achievable without them. Yeah, but it's always trying to move that direction of how to get them. I would agree with that. And I think we are willing to work at that. We are willing to go to our legislature. We are willing to go to our town select board into the capital in Montpelier to say, we as not just a city of Montpelier and a city of Berry, we as the central Vermont community, as everybody we represent, really wanna move this forward, we all need to. And yes, I think we as an organization would commit to helping in that drive. Well, I mean, at one point, Public Safety Authority talked about dedicating some time from Poco outreach as well as Doug Coyt outreach. So we're working with you on that. And when Leahy, which we got rejected this time, they realized they saw a huge need and they definitely wanna see local money and we wanna see state money. So I feel like if we could make a real concert effort to work together this year, we could be in line with something next year. But we have to do our due diligence town by town, brick by brick. So anything else the board would like to talk about for our guests on the 50 and the 3.9. I'll just, okay, Steve McKenzie and has him in up for a while. So I'm gonna go to him first. I'll come back to you, Jim and Joe. Welcome Steve. Thank you, I'm glad to be here. What I was trying to clarify the $19,000, the $50,000 that you're talking about, is that off of the October 11th document that was prepared by Poco? That he, the October 11th. Yeah, it's a memo to you from Don. No, it's another one. Is that this? It's a separate attachment that I did. Is that the Excel spreadsheet? Yeah, it's an Excel spreadsheet, there are three of them. And one has all CAP West communities. Right. And public safety authority members. The second one has all capital West communities without public safety members. What their costs would be. And the other one has all of that are capital FAR members and all public safety authority members. So it's three charts taking a $50,000 using the population base that we control is what capital FAR uses. Right, excuse me. So that's the corporation. I'm sorry, go ahead. Just that Poco's memo of the 11th was a draft effort on the big one, the 3.9 only. Okay, so, excuse me. So the Excel spreadsheet is a conceptual allocation of the $50,000 operating ballot item that might be on the town meeting ballot. It's just, yeah, one of the ways we could approach it. If indeed, you know, indeed capital FAR came back in or capital West, even one came back and said, we're interested in really working with public safety authority and telefaith. And we want to move this forward. And this would be having the funds to do that. And just to be clear, this, excuse me. This is the 50,000 of operating costs that you're contemplating you might need for next year. Right, when we had Poco staff, you know, we were regularly going to the ballots from Barry Montpelier for staff and working on the public safety authority. Even though we only had two members, we were constantly reaching out and including the regional needs and considerations. So as I said earlier, we only have taxing authority on our members, which is Barry Montpelier. So that is listed there, Barry Montpelier charge versus if it were shared through capital FAR. As a comparison, we have no power to do it. And if the 50,000 ballot item gets to the town meeting day ballot without capital fire or mutual aid, then it would be something, whatever the, whatever the split is between Barry City and Montpelier. And from Barry City, I think it's 26 for Montpelier's 23 or whatever. Yeah, 26, five, Barry, 23, five, Montpelier, yes, yes. Okay. And likewise, if you put the 50,000, and we'd be adding that to what we have now again to pay, I see phase two of our study being like in two parts of, but so that it would be advancing the funding strategy but also long-term cost allocation and governance. That's what we'd hope to get done with that kind of funding and work with salivate. There's those, I think those three big ones, the governance, the cost allocation and funding strategy, getting into that cycle for state and federal dollars as well as local. And the capital FAR says we'll give you 5,000 and that 50 gets reduced by that. That's Barry Montpelier, 45. Don't feign on me, Scott and Joe. Just I have a couple of hands up here. Okay. Anything else on that, Steve? No, I'm just trying to make sure that I'm getting my head wrapped around the numbers. I'm sorry, I missed the last meeting. Need to start preparing the council for a request that might come in. Well, it's not a request. I mean, it's going to be a valid item, but obviously as we're struggling with our budgeting and tax rate issues, that will impact them. No, and for sure, not only are we struggling with tax issues, but as you know, we've not recovered. I mean, Montpelier has been recovered. People think that pandemic damage is done, but that's not true. I mean, we have not recovered the income that we had that we missed out the last two years, nor got back to that level to even have a good year. Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest where we're in any different places. No, we're all tensioned, that's for sure. No. And if, I mean, that was the whole push from the Public Safety Authority Board and Payne Tellavet to do those presentations to the council and to Capitol Far was we were hoping we would see the reason to have a commitment to work with us this next year to line up to get that equipment.  Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think everybody's on the same board, same page, at least with respect to the equipment we have, and it needs to be replaced. I get, my struggle is, I've had this conversation with you and Paco and Doug, I just feel that the Berry City Council is disengaged and I need to get them engaged again, at least to the point where they could make informed decisions, knowledgeable and informed decisions about, about, you know, the Samocas Project, us, Berry City, my peer, moving ahead with the council portion of the project. So there's a big education piece here. I'm trying to gear up for that. Yes, you know, and if we have three table legs here and any one of them decide not to go forward, then it's a whole reconfiguration of reassessment. And I appreciate that. Joe has his hand up. Do you mean to leave it up, Joe? So just one comment, I know that speaking with Chief Botfeld, he is aware that, and that's why we filled the other PSA, so many of us here. I'm sorry, all of a sudden my phone is speaking. Well, Doug joins, he's in our, he's in our meeting. Can't do both, sorry, Doug. Doug, boy, if you can hear me, if you get disconnected, call back. I can't keep you on the phone in there. Okay, now, Joe, would you just start over again? I'm sorry, technical problems here. So in speaking with Skip Botfeld, who's the president of Capital Fire, he understands, that's why we, Capital Fire filled the other position so that we would become more engaged with CVPSA. I have explained to the communications committee and the membership that there has to be some skin in the game for things to go forward. I think some of the folks and the consensus on the communications committee was to engage the state legislatures earlier and try to get something moving forward. We have had conversations with Commissioner Shirling, who said that he would support, request it in the governor's budget. So I think that stuff needs to happen instead of being talked about. And so that engagement needs to move forward. Yes, yes. And I guess we were hoping that, again, in using a consultant that can be cocoa as well as Tel Aviv, is that we have somebody really focusing. We were all trying, but we all have other jobs. And so it does need somebody really just pushing it. Very focused way. And to be honest, if I may just say one thing, an out-of-state consultant is not going to help with state legislatures. No, but Paco should, huh Paco? And I agree with the Paco, but the out-of-state consultant may be not money well spent. No, I would be thinking that their role is with our own coalition so that we have somebody that's non-NATI affiliated leading the way and adding some expertise and experience on those three issues we're dealing with. Okay, Kim, Kim Cheney has his hand up. I have a question for Deputy Joe or the others. Has there been any discussion of CB, the Mutual Aid Society actually joining CBPSA as a full member? So that you would be part of the budgeting process and because I think that's going to be necessary if you're going to get grants because I think this is a project that affects everybody and it's the breakdown is mostly cost is for the towns. They should be members. And to me, that presents a lot of interesting possibilities. You could get more board members. You got a greater population and I've had some preliminary discussions with some attorneys about doing proportion voting so that if you were to become a full-blown member, you've got at least a third of the population and your board membership should include that if you're going to be part of the mandatory budgeting process. And my question is, have you thought about those kinds of arrangements? I can tell you straight up that has not been discussed at all. Yeah. I think in a better way, Joe may, I'm in agreement Joe, I don't think we have that invitation from CBPSA yet. Not that that couldn't occur and not that there isn't interest on our side, but I don't believe our partnership has evolved to that yet or that invitation for us to become full board members. When we negotiated to be a part of this, it was in the very dedicated role to communications and that would be our focus. If we would be to become greater members and large, that could be a possibility, but I don't think that invitation has been reached out and certainly something we can pursue. I think I would also add to that, that I don't know if Capital Fire Mutual Aid under its charter would allow us to have, commit the individual communities to being board members. And that, I think that's a problem. No, I'm sure I wouldn't. I think you'd have to get there. I don't think we would be able to get there. Neither Capital Fire Structure nor Public Safety Authority structure. That's why governance is one of the issues that we have on our list. Yes. All right. Going to move from this discussion. Stephen wants to make a comment. Go ahead. So I think that the $50,000 budget number is. Can anybody see me? I don't think they need to see me, but. I think the $50,000 is unrealistic as a number to be working with in light of the need for engineering, to issue an RFP for engineering, and to hire, retain the executive director, as Kim said, is required by the charter. And then there are advertising, insurance, nailing, et cetera. I believe there's even a stipend for our clerk to keep the website minutes up. So those kinds of other expenses. I think you're closer to 140,000 for the next year. It needs to be allocated. And I understand there's only 28,000 remaining. So I think that that, that's a key thing. The issue around the towns being asked to pony up. That really needs to go in it to the select boards, because the select boards are not found by the same schedule as they are. And those presentations, I understand Doug. Kim wanted to do that and Doug was assigned to that task. I have not heard of any progress. On presenting to the towns that their opportunity to. Pony up a fair share and possibly join and have a voting board members. So, but I want to caution that this idea that. We're moving ahead with a. An RFP for a system before any engineering is done. And especially allowing the vendors to do the engineering. Has a very fundamental flaw in that concept in that. The proposals. And the shortcomings. And the errors and omissions of those proposals remain totally secret until a contract is signed. That's why I think that's why I think that's why. They're exempt from public records law while a procurement is going on. So that's why that's the greatest reason to. Diverge from the tell of eight recommendation of just putting out requirements and letting the vendors do the engineering. The engineering should be completed for the system. And every detail of fiber and backhaul and diverse backhaul and generators and maintenance and microwave. So that's why I think that's why I think that's why. We need to find. In a public document before the RFP is left. So. That's a lot. Thank you. All right. Number seven.  The need for appointed an executive director. Three years. Well, the charter requires one. I understand there are lots of things we haven't done for years. And the charter requires it. So. That isn't really. That isn't really an answer, Donna. The question is. And you said it yourself. We need somebody who's paid. Can devote full time to some very complicated things that are coming up. And has the technical expertise to deal with. And that's what the charter requires. And we should follow the charter. And. Changing the subject only slightly. When I, when I talked with, when I talked with Rick Burke. About. About this. Connering what. Steve Whitaker just said. They're ready to do. A detailed study. And I just suggest you have a conference, you and Paco get together with them and see what they are. Able to do and at what cost. Because I think they're, they have the data. They're ready to go ahead and put it down. And I think you do need. You know, a kind of comprehensive list of what we're going to buy and when. Anybody that looks at this can say, yes, I can see that's the kind of equipment that's needed. And from that would come an RFP. This is just a way. To tell us Scott bag quite about. Getting the legislature to see that this is a really thought out plan. So I think before. We go down this road, we got to be clear as to what television is proposing to do. And they don't have any legal. Skill. I don't pretend to. As I've told you or suggested to you. We should get. Some legal help. So we can all have a better idea of how all this might come together. Nice. And I think an executive director. You know, I think that. With time and skills could help pull up. Stuff together. So. I think one should be appointed. Talk to Paco about it. I don't know if you do it or if there's anybody else. This is not a job for part-time people. Somebody's got to really get. Get around. Get out of it. I'm not sure we can certainly do a vote with four members. The board made a decision not to appoint executive director. To reduce our administrative fee and try to move towards the study. All of our funds to the study. And then to the follow-up study again, still trying to get all the right stakeholders at the table. And that's why we're doing this. And we're working on a funding strategy. Of cost allocation and a governance that they'll. Buy into support be part of. And so if anybody wants to entertain emotion, if you want to make a motion and see if the board support it, be my guests. Well, Otherwise. We have the board is given direction. And we have the executive director. And we have the executive director. And tell of eight. Try to formulate a group of a new coalition. And moving forward on the governance cost allocation and the funding. Donna, the last time I recall talking about. An executive director was. When we were thinking of hiring tell of eight. And when we hired tell of eight. They were going to provide. What was needed. We're past that now. We're in an action. Right. So make, make a motion if the board supports it on. I'm just saying that's not where the board has been. Well, I. That's a whole nother valid item. That's, I mean, that's fine. I'd like to see it on the agenda for. I think it would be worth having a special meeting on the six. We don't, we have a bear quorum here tonight. That's right. The ninth would be our regular meeting December nine. Well, you were talking about doing a special meeting on the six. I think it was the six. 16th was the annual meeting. On the night. We can have a regular meeting on the ninth and we can talk about this and other things. That's, that's what I would like to do. I think we need more meetings and we need more people to get involved. Okay. All right. How is everyone else to the board?  I lost Doug again. We're Doug. He's here. Oh, there he is. Oh, you're so bright lit. I always look for you as being. So hands up about December nine meeting. A thumb up or thumb down. Okay. I'm going to schedule. Moving thumb terrific. The other thing that wasn't on the agenda, I realized, and just picking up on my piece of paper is. Well deserving taco put in an invoice. It will get distributed. And it's for $675. It's billable hours for August 13th through November 18th. It's a huge amount of work. A lot of non billable hours. Thank you so much. Go ahead.  Work that I did in terms of trying to meet with people to try to. Chart a path forward. In the beginning. That led to a meeting. A small group meeting. I called it the core group. I guess to again, figure out, try to figure out where we were. Where are we? That's central Vermont public safety authority. And the. Three. Three members. Wanted to go. I documented that meeting in a memo. And I tried to do some. Cost modeling. Relative to funding the project using a bond. What we did find out was that. I did speak. I had several conversations with a Vermont bond bank. And to. To finalize any bonding. Numbers. I really have to go back to the Vermont bond bank. Because. There's insurance. I used a simple. A simple. Interest formula. And I think that the bond. Bonding is. A little more complex. With the interest. By the way, the interest that they quoted me was. 1.6%. Over 10 years. Over 10 years. Over 10 years. Over 10 years. Over 10 years. Over 10 years. Over 10 years. Over 10 years. Over 10 years. And then finally. That required a lot of work. Putting that together. And then I. For you, Donna. The. Cost allocation for. I came up with different cost models for the $50,000. Money's your, you talked about this evening. And. So that was. So that was the tally of the hours. Yes, there were non-billable hours. It's hard for me to, every phone call I take to say, I'm going to bill for that. What I have come to realize over time is that, at least for me, I always underbid things. Thank you. Anyway, yeah. So that's that. And I will say that that is a final invoice. All of my contractual work is finished at this point. So. So I had a total of $6,000. Yeah. $6,000. There was a, the main contract and one amendment. Yes. We actually offered you two, but you only actually use one. That's great. Well, you never voted on this. You never. Yeah, we did. We voted on the follow-up meeting to clean it all up. That's, that's fine. Okay. Another $1,000 maybe in the bank. All right. That's good. And so everyone, the board will get this invoice and the material with the electronic signatures that are going out by Brent, you'll be seeing those take your time and go through it. But I'll also attach this so that all of our. Stakeholders will see it too. Yes, actually, we have a calibrated invoice and we'll be. Distributing that also with the payment. Yes. And their final bill. Televates bill came under about $1,000. So that was good. And that. After we added the 2,383 for the presentations they did. And they did a lot of follow-up work from us. I must say they too. Have been very generous with giving time beyond what they billed us. So even with the presentations, their full bill was like $47,425. Still way under the 50 we thought we would get to. So that's really good. But you'll get a full detailed bill. I'll be distributing that. That's also coming. And then you'll be asked. Yes. I have a question for Paco. The bills for the board. So chronic signatures when they come, we are asking you to sign the warrants, but the bills are there to look at. So just be mindful of that. Okay, Kim, you have a question for Paco. The cities will get some benefit from assignment cash system. I don't know how to quantify it, but. They'll get some improved. Tower communications. And I think it will be helpful for their in building. Communications. So it would be helpful to me. If the cost allocation. Follow the benefits from the simulcast. The city would get some benefit from the simulcast. Not only would help them maintain their. Dispatching, but. I think for operation. So. Did you figure any of that in. You're talking about the $50,000 planning funds. Is that what you're talking about? Well, that was your bottom line. I was just thinking. How you allocate that. The. The beneficiaries. What you're trying to do, I think, is figure out the beneficiaries of the system would. Would pay for it. Yeah. Just suggested that two cities and beneficiaries as well. I think there's. I don't know that there's full agreement on that. Statement. Okay. Be that as it may. Mainly I say that because what I've heard is that the. City fire departments operate on their own system. And I would deferred any. Chief that's on this call to correct me if I'm wrong, but. Certainly Montpelier from a dispatching perspective. Has a vested interest in working with their customers and. In promoting their. Their, their, their new system. I think collectively in central Vermont. Whether there's a direct benefit, there certainly is a secondary benefit with everybody being able to communicate. But to your, to your statement, I'm just not sure that that's. Absolutely true from a cost sharing. Perspective. Okay. Well, I just think it should be. I think there are benefits. Maybe not in operations, but certainly. Neither city could run a dispatching thing without the. Simulcast. Okay. You're correct. Except that. It's my understanding that one of the fundamental principles in place today. Is that the communications infrastructure. For the cap West and cap fire departments being dispatched between Barry and Montpelier. Rest solely with the. Capital fire slash capital West. Providing that infrastructure. Okay. I'm sorry. Scott, I think has some. Has some clarification. Yeah, if I may. I would say that all fire departments, ambulance services and fast squads to include the cities of Barry and city of Montpelier will benefit from the system. The city of Barry. The city of Barry. Adding the tower and Hill Street and Montpelier. I think everybody will benefit from this. And capital West only are capital fire mutual aid only has the. Towers for capital West. The city of Barry. Currently contracted Joe. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Contract for their towers or have their own towers. So that's through the city of. The city of Barry. The city of Barry. The city of Barry. Both capital fire in the city of Barry. Is that correct Joe? So the. The city of Barry. If, if they were not to. Participate in the simulcast and remain on the current frequency with the two towers that they have. Would not see a reduction. In the. In the radio coverage. The news anymore. The city. We do see them having to tone over multiple towers. And that's one of the thing that. Plugs up the system right now. But also we're dealing with. The Canadian factor. And that is another huge issue. That both systems have an issue. Right now. So. is that if capital fire were to pull out and go on to a separate frequency and Berry City would stay on that frequency, we would receive no less coverage than we currently have right now. We do have holes, we do have problems within building communication. And that's why the RFP went out to Tel Aviv to help improve that. But the other animal in the room is the Canadian factor, that we're all having issues. And then the age, the age of the infrastructure is the Achilles' heel. Okay. And I guess I always sort of have to put the regional impact here. You know, the region's small towns depend on volunteers that unfortunately are getting older. Their poor is getting quite old, retiring. And the newer FAR fighters aren't plentiful. So I really worry about towns losing their volunteer FAR departments. And then there's Berry and Montoya out there. I mean, I think we all have to realize that we need communication regionally to be available to whoever has to serve those houses. And so maybe it's not the immediate Montoya or immediate Berry that benefits, but ultimately Berry and Montoya are gonna be called to serve places that don't have any other service. So I just again, think about that big broad region instead of towns, the house needs to be served and we all need to work together to do it. And you do such a good job. So we just need to get that equipment in there. Paco. I just wanted to loop back to Kim and say, Kim, I guess I was incorrect. It's been clarified that there is some benefits. So could I get back to what you originally were trying to say about cost sharing? It's fine by me, I love to hear you. No, no, I wanted you to clarify so that I knew what you were talking about. So you're basically saying that Montoya and Berry should be part of the any cost sharing model associated with capital fires, simulcast system? Well, just looking at your numbers, the 3.9 has the entire cost of the simulcast system falling on the town. And my question simply is, is that fair? Because Donna has pointed out there's all kinds of ways that the two cities benefit from the simulcast system. I don't know how you quantify it. The consoles of people. But I think it's a factor. Right, the trade-off there was the consoles. The cities were gonna take the consoles and as a member of Capital Far, the cities then would have their share within Capital Far for the other part. So that was the rationales too. That may be fair. I'm just raising a question. I don't know the answer to my question. Nope, it's just all discussion. Good, Joe. So I would be remiss if I did not step in for, unfortunately Chief Brett had to step away. And he's been on record as saying that the Tower and Walden or the Tower of Woodbury does not affect Berry City right now at all. Other than they can't hear us and we can't hear them. But if that Tower were to exist, that would not affect dispatching and Berry or Montpelier. And so I would be remiss if I did not put that in and Doug would definitely beat me if I did not mention that. Thank you, thank you. And I really wanna commend Steve McKenzie and Doug Brent for participating today. They're both recovering from surgery, which if you haven't had any trouble yet, you probably will in your life. So I hope they have a good recovery and I appreciate them coming to our meeting. I'd like to move on to just one other item that's still there. And it's just a little statement about our committees. It somewhat comes back to the need for staff that really I'm sort of gonna just at this point dismantle them, city chairs, many chairs have really not been able to hold meetings and deal with the noticing, the agendas, the remote. It's just been too complicated. So we more have like Doug as a liaison for outreach and Jim as a liaison for charter information and Brent for our website. And right now for Tel Aviv as a consultant, I'm gonna be the liaison person. Whatever we do or don't decide to do with the contract with Tel Aviv and COCO as quote somewhat of our staff now. And maybe as we go through this process and we get all our appointments and our at-large members, I'm also, that'll be the advertised, the openings for at-large members that we hope that we'll have enough membership to go back to committees. But it seems a misnomer to talk about them and they just haven't meant to have them in functioning. Anything else is under other business before we close? All right, thank you all so much. I really appreciate all the information you've shared and expertise and time. Have a good turkey day next week.


All right, I guess we'll go and get started. How's everybody doing? Good, yes? All right, I'm Dustin Ruhl. I'm from ECS team, or as some folks have said to me, EC Steam. It's kind of funny. This is Tom Collings. We're both senior cloud architects in our cloud practice. And we're here to talk about today the fire hose a little bit. One of the things that we've kind of noticed in our cloud foundry journey, our cloud native journey as a company, is when we interact with folks, there's a lot of people that are doing a lot of really cool things, as you've heard here, with cloud foundry. Everybody says, and they nod their heads, yeah, the fire hose. I know what that is. I know exactly what that is. But then you start to peel back the onion, and it's like, hey, wait a minute. And I went through this myself. Well, I don't really know that much about it. I know what exists. I kind of know what goes into it. So hopefully this talk kind of either reiterates what you already know, maybe a little bit different. You learn some nuggets. Or this is totally cool because you learned something that you didn't know before you started listening to us talk. All right, well, hey, you've got cloud foundry. You've got your cloud native developers. They're building apps. They're building a lot of apps, hopefully. Because as you probably noticed, this platform is very, very good at allowing you to go fast, easy, and safe.  You even got a CI CD pipeline, several of them. And your apps are going from foundation to foundation, different orgs, different spaces, lots of testing going on. So the whole point here is you've got a lot of activity. So how does that make you feel? Feel a little bit like gridlock? I mean, you've got all these new platform components. You hopefully have all these new and old apps that look a different, the kind of behave in a different way, cloud native. Maybe you heard a lot about that, maybe you haven't. And you've got a lot of users. And it's just, what do I do?  And then you start thinking, how do I know the health of my platform? How do I know the health of my apps? What if I want some statistics on some of these things? Right? How many people have asked these very same questions? Show of hands. Come on, it's interactive. It's almost lunch. We're not in a food coma yet. Right, so good. How many people have actually gotten into some detail on the fire hose? Oh, it's great. All right, so hopefully we'll be teaching a lot of people some things today. Well, you've all heard what the loggergator is. That's one big giant subsystem, if you will, of Cloud Foundry.  Okay, confused yet? Well, really what you have is a bunch of sources. And those are apps. Those are, you know, things like the Diego Brain, the UAA, the Cloud Control, a lot of different components, all the components of Cloud Foundry, and apps are considered sources. All right, well, what's next in this chain? How do my metrics and logs flow through this loggergator? Well, for every job, or VM, whether you like to talk in Bosch terms or IaaS terms, you have a Metron agent, and that's the collector of all of these sources, multiple sources on a cell, for example. Then you have another kind of collection point. Think of that across AZs, okay? You have Dopplers, all right? And then on top of that, you have Traffic Controllers. How many layers of abstraction here? Well, actually, they're all pretty cool because at the end of it, there it is. There's a fire hose. So you hear loggergator, like what is that?  They're all basically coming down, down to the end there at the fire hose, okay? Which pill you wanna take right now? For those of you that's already, done a lot with the fire hose, you wanna take the blue pill? Or do all of you wanna take the red pill? How many reds? Really? Oh, come on. How many reds? How many blues? How many people don't care? Awesome. All right, Tom, make a note, we're gonna have to make this a little bit more interesting. So the fire hose is just a big, giant multiplexer, right? You got a bunch of inputs going in there and really what happens is at those sources, it gets turned into what's called the drop-sondie protocol. Who here has heard of protocol buffers from Google? Excellent. All the drop-sondie protocol is on top of protocol buffers, binary wire format. So it's very efficient, very compressed and messages are flowing through and drop-sondie, okay? Well, you kinda hear that there's a lot of stuff in the fire hose, right? How many here think everything's in the fire hose? How many think most is in the fire hose? Oh, good. Well, that's actually true. So while it's a journey for us, it's also a journey for the teams that are building these, they're continuing to put more and more in the fire hose. So for example, right now, any of the syslog components that live, or excuse me, any of the events that go into syslog on a VM, right? Those are actually coming out of our syslog.  So if I'm going to SSH into the cloud controller and I have a failed login attempt, right? That's a security event that a lot of people wanna see. That's not gonna show up in the fire hose yet. And that's why I have the roadmap on here. How many people have actually been on the website and seen the loggerator roadmap? Yeah, we got the product manager in the back. I would hope he's seen that. Well, on there, I encourage you to go on the loggerator site, there's things that loggerator roadmap, and Jim is very good at showing what they're working on. And one of the top items that I saw they're working on or about to work on is actually getting that R-Syslog information into the fire hose, which is really cool, okay? So, how many people knew that's where, if I did cflogged my app, that's where that came from? All right, see, a lot of you guys learned something new. So you sit down, just like you're normally developing, you do cflogs, that's another source. It doesn't attach to the fire hose, at least not yet, but right now it comes off of the traffic controller. Now, the key point on looking at this traffic controller before we continue on, notice it's a web socket. We're gonna come back to that in a little bit when we talk about consuming the fire hose. Okay, so let's take a look. What is that? Oh my gosh, there's no apps in this. This is just the platform. Look at all that. That's the fire hose right there. Lot of messages. That feel a little bit like this? Thought so. Who hasn't drank from the fire hose yet? Exactly. Well, I know, and this is a little tidbit of information, you can walk out of here that's useless. I have a lot of that in my head, right? So that was what you saw right there, came from Bosch Light running on this laptop, and I have Diego on there, so it's about 19 VMs, containers inside that vagrant VM, okay? 60 seconds. Anybody wanna take a guess about how many megabytes that was in that minute? Come on, let's hear some numbers. Two, 16, 20, 200, wow. Okay, well, that may be true. I'd be a little nervous if it was 200 meg on my laptop. What's that? Ah, nice, all right. Touche, well, on my laptop, without debugging turned on, running on Bosch Light with those 19 VMs, it was actually about 10 megabytes a minute. That's nothing. Why is that important? There's so much information in there that anything that you wanna find is gonna be in there. And at some point in your maturity path through the cloud native journey, you're actually gonna find that a lot of that information is gonna become useful at some point, okay? All right, so there's a few of you here that have dealt with the fire hose. You already know the answers. How do you consume this? I've got this web socket endpoint. It's throwing a lot of information. Well, the answer is nozzles, okay? We as our inner nerd, we like to put a lot of nice metaphors around things. I happen to think this is a great metaphor, okay? So, if I'm connecting to the fire hose via nozzle, there's kind of two main kind of configuration that you need. One, you have to have a user, because it's privileged access, that has a fire hose Doppler scope, right? A lot of people when they first do it, they just hook up admin. I probably wouldn't do that. So if you're operationalizing yourself and you haven't already done this, you should create a separate user for anything that's consuming the fire hose. You also have the endpoint, the web socket endpoint that connects to the traffic controller. And it's on my Bosch light. It looks a little bit like that. I'm gonna interrupt you there.  A lot of information has come through this fire hose here. There could be some PII, PCI kind of stuff coming through here. So you wanna guard this fire hose Doppler user pretty well, because that application's gonna have access to some information that you may not want leaking out. See, leak, fire hose, nozzle. Hey, there's the metaphor. Nice. So a little nugget, that's all discoverable via the CFAPI, right? And there's the endpoint right there.  You can do some discovery, which is kinda cool. All right, so what now? I know how to connect. I got a rudimentary nozzle that I'm gonna connect. Well, remember we talked about drubsondi is the thing that's flowing across there. So what is flowing across? Really, it's envelopes containing events. Okay, that doesn't sound very exciting. They come from the traffic controller. Again, not very exciting. All right, getting a little more interesting. I got to un-martial that from that drubsondi format. How do I do that? We're not gonna go into details here, but what we're gonna demonstrate a little bit later, we encourage you to go, and what we're talking about a little bit later, we encourage you to go look at the source code. It's actually pretty straightforward. They've done a great job on that team, writing clients to allow us as a community to consume the fire hose and do something useful. Well, these are the event types. A lot of those have a lot of interesting aspects in their own context. Ones that are going to be, we're gonna look at today are log message and container metrics. Okay, and I'll get into those here in a minute. So now let's kinda talk a little bit about the life cycle of a nozzle. How do I, what do I do with these nozzles? How do they live out there? Well, kinda there's three primary ways that you can do this. One, you can create a nozzle as a Bosch deployment, right? Getting your manifest, Bosch deploy, Bosch release, create a release, upload the release, deploy it. Another cool thing you can do is you can turn it into an app, and then just CF push, and we love that.  Leading into, here's some examples, right? So the demo that we're gonna show you and the source code that you hopefully go look at after this at some point, you're gonna see that we based what we did, and I hope a lot of people do in the open source community based on what other people do. I don't wanna redo the same work that somebody's done. I'm lazy, or at least that's what everybody tells me. So a couple of very cool nozzles. I like our NOAA, that's kind of the base one, and then fire hose to syslog, and I'm gonna show you why it is one of the very reasons that it's cool. There's a lot of reasons, but it's a very cool nozzle. All right, so let's look at a message or two. So we do our CF logs, spring music, this is just a router message, I get it back at 200, tells me I'm successful, right? Well down below is me, CF nozzle, filter, log message. Now doing this, I'm gonna see all the app log messages, just so it happens on my laptop, I only had spring music running. So you can imagine how much information's coming in here. You can start to think about, if I wanna operationalize this, I have to segregate my log data and create security models around it so that only certain people can see that data for the very reason Tom pointed out, PII, PHI, hopefully not PCI, but hopefully you can protect that information. Well, let's kinda look at some of these, how are they made different? Maybe you kinda saw that, maybe you didn't, but looking in the red, you see a nice little RTR, you can kind of, all right, it's router, that's what I'm used to seeing when I'm a developer and I see if logs. Well, you get the job name, for example, in the firehose message, but you see there are a lot of things that are also very similar, right? I see the same get and the same URL and the same HTTP response, they're in both messages. So it's not magic, it's not voodoo, right? It's just a lot of information. All right, let's look at an app log message, and this is leading into one of the cool features that I love about firehose to syslog, and hopefully you will too, and maybe you guys have already experienced this pain, right? But if you notice in the log message for an app, you see that big, long good, right? Everybody see that? You kinda see the start of it right after app ID. So what do you think happens to that in, say, a blue-green deploy? Anybody wanna guess? Changes, that's right. So now if I wanna look at something a couple weeks ago, I have to remember that very long alphanumeric ID or create a meta table, right? That's all well and good, and there's very good reasons for doing that, but on an operational side, how do we solve that? Use the firehose to syslog nozzle, right? You're still gonna put that into your syslog aggregator, a splunk, a log insight, whatever, and it injects the app name into that very spot, which is very cool, all right? So how many here have experienced that pain where that change of the good? You're like, how do I go back? There's a few. Well, I encourage you to look at and implement firehose to syslog, because that will fix that for you. All right, we've done a lot of talking about how do messages flow through the log aggregator into the firehose? How do we consume the firehose? It's really easy to kind of think of a use case that, hey, I wanna look at my logs, right? Everybody wants to look at logs, but where the power of this firehose comes from, we wanted to kind of, you know, yeah, we could go down that rabbit hole and kind of be monotonic on some of that stuff, but what we really wanted to kind of open your mind to is feedback control loops. This firehose is great for feedback control loops. Anybody have any background in here in manufacturing? All right, a little bit, that's good.  The cereal's too sweet or too big or too small. Now I gotta go back to where the thing that's producing and I turn some knobs and I turn that into an improved process, right? So it comes out the other end in a more controlled way. Well, the same thing can apply here to your apps. Okay? And we've all probably heard of, you know, some of the feedback control loop systems that are out there. There's a CPU auto-scaling, right? That's feedback control for your apps. There's, what is Kevin Hoffman's nozzle that you built? Oh, the app usage nozzle. If it's been an idle app for a long time, we'll go ahead and delete it for you to keep your AI accounts down. Yep, so there's another type of feedback control loop. Well, today, we're actually gonna demonstrate memory-based auto-scaling, okay? And in this demo, there's kind of a couple of main components. One, as you see, is the memory-based auto-scaler nozzle and we deployed that as a CF app on Bosch Lite on my laptop, okay? And why I have that dash line coming out of that green plus, that's the control point, right? That's where we're gonna take some information coming out of that output. And the B is an algorithm that says I need to do something because I've exceeded some threshold and what's that something? I'm gonna scale my app. So really, I've got a container metric coming out for a dummy app, okay? I've got the average memory that I'm gonna look at for all instances and I'm gonna look for them to exceed a specific threshold for a duration. And algorithms are all tuning. What you're gonna see here is a prototype and feel free to use that as a seed to start.  I've reached some memory threshold over an average that makes me uncomfortable, right? Because you can't be perfect in everything. You don't wanna stop deploying something just because it's gonna run out of memory, right? You'd like to get that all cleaned up, but maybe it's slow enough and hard enough to find, you can still get some business value by deploying that. And we have some kind of cover and a feedback control loop that allows me to take care of that safely by scaling as I am filling up that bathtub of memory. Okay? And at this point, now we're gonna go to demo and I'm gonna turn this over to Tom and drive the demo. Sure, so like Dustin said, we've got two basic applications deployed to this space right now. The first is just a dummy application. Once it starts, it immediately starts allocating maps of maps. It just wastes a bunch of memory. The second is the nozzle that we're attaching to the fire hose. And through a few environment variables, we've set some parameters. One is the memory threshold. We set that to be 100 megabytes. So once you cross that, we're gonna start looking at possibly scaling the application. Yeah, so there they are. Memory-based autoscaler and the dummy app. So let's go ahead and start the memory-based autoscaler. And we just wanted to demonstrate by starting this that the very first thing it does is connect to the fire hose. And we just put a log message in there because it's not very interesting that, you know, hey, I'm connected, great. Let's go ahead and start that guy. So we wrote some filters in there. It's only looking for container metrics. And of those container metrics, it's using the same syslog to fire hose style code to annotate those events with app name and turn those container metrics into useful things like memory usage of the container. So it started up and you can see it connected to the fire hose. So let's go ahead and start this dummy application and go back and tail the logs over here. So there we go. We got our very first event and right now we're using one megabyte, which is well under our threshold of 100 megabytes. So the way this is coming out right now, it's about 30 seconds between events. There's probably ways to tune that to get quicker feedback. If you're doing this kind of system, 30 seconds is probably appropriate. So here we go. It's coming along, it's coming along. So this dummy app, all it is is a map of maps that just keeps allocating and allocating until it gets higher and higher and runs out. Right, so here we go. After 30 seconds it went to 124 megabytes and we've crossed our threshold of 100 megabytes. So what we wanted to account for is just spikes in memory. A lot of times dynamically working heaps can clean up their own memory. So if you get a spike, you don't wanna scale on a spike. You wanna make sure, all right, it's been above this threshold for a while. We're probably getting into a dangerous situation. Let's consider scaling this guy. So once this next event comes out, any time now, come on, there it goes. All right, so yep, we're at 221 megs. We've been over that threshold for a while, so it's time to scale. We went ahead and issued the command to scale list to two instances, and if you do a CF apps, we'll see now there are two instances of dummy running. So let's come on back. One of the things we do in terms of bookkeeping for this application is keep an average of all memory uses across instances. And so the next time this comes up, you'll see that there were two instances that were keeping track of memory for a minute and will calculate the average there. There we go. 332 and 105 megabytes for the instances. Average is 218, and we're still over the threshold, but we're also keeping track of the time that we last scaled because we want to give the applications a little bit of time to come up and handle some of the load. I mean, obviously this app is killing us, so we'd want to be scaling pretty quickly, and that's just another dial we can tune to keep things going. So that's basically how that thing works. It's a pretty simple prototype, but if you wanted, you could jump in, tune a lot more of these dials. You could do some kind of composition pattern, so you're looking at HTTP response times as well as your memory, as well as CPU to give yourself really complicated scaling algorithms. So where can I get this code? All right, there's links right there on ECS Team's GitHub. Encourage it, yes, Jim. Yeah, absolutely, and of course, I've uploaded, we've uploaded this presentation, so feel free to do that. Also, come on by to the booth this afternoon. All right, we'll talk more Firehose Madness, and hey, you can register to win an Amazon Echo or a Garmin Vivo Smart, and the drawing's at 320-day. And at this point, I want to leave it open for questions and start with Jim, go ahead. I do, let me give me a second. I can, I actually do have that up. So while he's coming up with that, one of the things you can do with these nozzles is attach little service endpoints on there, so. Let me go. Is he doing this real-time on us? Hold on, hold on, refresh. All right, you guys, hopefully you all heard that. Great, any other questions? We've got a few minutes left here, no questions. Oh, yes, in the back. A little bit, what you mean by attach as a service? You absolutely could do that because it's just a web socket endpoint that's protected by a privileged user, and so, absolutely. And yes, Jim, go ahead. Perfect, did that answer your question? There was one right here, yes. Yes, yes, we just chose because there's, you know, people have probably already seen a CPU autoscaler. We decided to do one that was memory-based, but you could absolutely grab the different container metrics, CPU being one of them, and actually doing some action on that. And then you could also do it on any other type of data, right? And the other point of the feedback control loop is to open up your mind of how can I self-tune my app? How can I make my user experience react to how users are interacting with my application? Right, there's, think of the possibilities, yes. So the question was how do you scale out the firehose? You can do that a couple of ways. You're gonna scale out the traffic controllers, and then your nozzles you can scale out and buy the subscription ID, so one of the things we kind of glossed over is you connect with a subscription ID and then as you scale those nozzles, that becomes a pool, think of like a database pool as an analogy, and then those connections to the traffic controller will use that pool and spread it across. Say again? Correct, correct, it's not partitioned. Any other questions? Yes. So just to tag on what I was just saying there, if you have the same subscription ID, then it should be load balancing those messages, excuse me, across that subscription to the number of nozzles. So I have a different subscription ID, then it's actually getting, both of them are getting the messages that they are signed up and filtering on. Right, and like in this example here, we ignored any other apps, and we ignored any other, excuse me, app of, excuse me, message types, event types, and only looked at container metrics for the dummy app. Yes. Yes, actually in our, you can use the CF API because we use it to scale. So we're in this code here, we're using a couple of different things. We're using Dr. Nick's Go CF client, and in there there's some get methods to get origin spaces based on your app ID, which is app GUID, which is what we use actually to do the scale, so absolutely. So you should have all the information just falling through the code that we have there, and it'll show you how to do that. So we do not have a nozzle for Splunk. One of the ways that you could, start using Splunk right away with this, is set up a syslog listener on Splunk. I know UDP, TCP, no, you can't do that? Yeah, you can't. No, no, I know you can do that. I'm saying he is restricted from doing that in his Splunk system. Sure, yeah, but yeah. I've personally been on projects where we sent it directly there, and it was fine. So I think that's probably a good safety thing, and maybe they're worried about dropping messages or something because most of the time it's UDP, but that's where you gotta weigh, if I have business data, and it's the most critical thing in my application that I'm doing, probably don't wanna send it through there and rely on it, because you could have some drop messages. Any other questions? Awesome, thank you guys for coming.