 6 p.m. I see a quorum. There are 11 towns represented. I will call the December 16th, 2021 special governing board meeting of CV Fiber to order. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? Okay. Not hearing or seeing anything. Sorry, Jeremy. I have a quick one about communications committee membership. Communications committee membership. Let me add myself a note. I guess we should also finance committee membership. All right. So we'll call it committee membership and we'll do both. It's great. Anything else? Moving along. Public comment. Is there anything folks would like to comment on that are not on items that are not on the agenda? I just wanted to profusely thank you all for the news page on the website, the newsletter, whatever we're calling it. That has really brought me up to speed on the activities of the last six months. And I was able to generate a update for the Berry City Council and the mayor as a result. So thank you most sincerely for that. It's really well done. Yeah, kudos to John Walters, Chuck, and the rest of the communications committee for doing that work. That is invaluable outreach. I will definitely second that. Anything else? Financial report, Phil? Isn't there minutes approval because we have two sets of minutes to approve? Meeting minutes approval. So what are the dates for those? I didn't have those handy when I was creating these. Motion to approve the November 9th and November 16th governing board minutes as drafted. Second. Okay, moved by Jeremy, seconded by Siobhan to approve those two meeting minutes. Any questions, comments, otherwise? Okay, not seeing any objections to adopting that motion. Okay, motion passes unanimously. Okay, anything else on meeting minutes? I don't think so. Moving along to financial report. Now, Phil. Okay, thank you. The current bank balance is $1,048,646. That's up a little bit from the last, actually 10 minutes yesterday. We've received an advance on a grant of about 700 and just over 700,000. And we just the the executive committee just approved payment of invoices totaling about $110,000. Most notably in the invoices being paid are for poll inventory in three communities. And on top of that, there's some project management fees, mapping software, legal fees for some contract negotiations, accounting services. Any questions for Phil about the finances? Jeremy, I just I have an outstanding invoice. I hope you'll forward it to Phil. Okay, I thought we had taken care of that. Phil, did you get the invoice that I sent from RD? The second batch of magnetic signs. Okay, I'll send it again if necessary. Yeah, send it directly to me if you'd like. If we have the numbers, we add that to the bills that we approve. Can we take care of that? We're not talking about a lot of money. No. What's the total, RD? Like $388. Don't worry about it. I'll send it again. Okay. Thanks, RD. Sorry that got lost in the shuffle. Well, we do have the signs. I mean, we've taken possession of the signs. I think we already approved the payments. I mean, we already approved the expenditure. I just think that the check needs to get cut. Yeah, I don't see the invoice here. So if I'll send it after the meeting. Don't worry about it. Just send it to me and it's probably been approved. I'll get it in the batch that's being cut. Got it. Jeremy? Yeah, kind of not about this. So if there's more on this, get finished that and then I had a question after. Sounds like it's up to you. Financial report is where we are. Okay. Sounds good. So I am unsure of who the phone number calling in ending in 75 is. That's me, Jeremy, RD. Okay. I just wanted to double check for the minutes. Thanks, RD. All right. Anything else about finances? Great. Thanks for that, Phil. Moving along. Clerks report. Jeremy, anything else to add that you want to report on? Nope. I am keeping up with minutes and posting stuff to the website, and that's what I've been working on. I do need to get working on organizing files a little bit better, but that is something that I don't have time to do immediately, but we'll get around to it. Sounds great. Thanks for that. But before we get into the project manager's report, which I think is going to have a fair bit of meat, can we do the committee membership conversation? So, Chuck, do you want to start? Yes. I would like to move that we add Linda Gravel to the communications committee. Okay. I think I heard RD in there first. Sorry, Siobhan. All right. Move by Chuck to add Linda to the communications committee. Any further discussion? Jeremy, I see every hand up. Is this about this, or is that still up for before? That's legacy. I'm sorry. I'll take that down. Cool. Any objections to Linda joining the communications committee? All right. Motion passes unanimously, and Linda is on the communications committee. Ray? First of all, I'd like to thank Linda for having been a member of the finance committee and as a result of her dropping and now joining the communications committee. The good news is we have a spy in the communications committee. I understand that Christopher Schenke is going to join the finance committee that was part of the agreement that was worked out between Christopher and Linda. Christopher, if I have this wrong, let me know, but move that Christopher be added to the finance committee. Second. Okay. Siobhan did get it at that time, so if I write, seconded by Siobhan. Any questions or comments about adding Christopher Schenke to the finance committee? I see, Alan, you have your hand up. Is that about this, or about other committee stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you finish this bit and then get back to me? Sounds great. Okay. Any objections to appointing Christopher Schenke to the finance committee? No objections. Motion passes unanimously. Welcome to the finance committee, Christopher. Thank you for your help. Alan? Yeah. It's my understanding that Linda is on the policy committee, and I believe she wants to continue serving on the policy committee. Does anybody know if the board has approved her? She said she's never been notified or has been able to find out that she actually is a member of the policy committee. If there's nobody that can say, yes, I remember, I would move that Linda be appointed as a member to the policy committee. Second. Okay. Moved by Alan, seconded by Jeremy. I think there's not a harm in, even if it's redundant, that's fine. Any questions or concerns, comments, any objections to the motion? Okay. Motion passes unanimously. Linda is now a new member or remains a member of the policy committee, depending on reality. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Linda. Thanks, Alan. And this isn't really committee stuff, but we have someone who is not an actual governing board member. So actually, maybe I'm getting this wrong. John Walters, are you a resident of Montpelier or East Montpelier? I forget. I am a resident of East Montpelier. My mailing address is Montpelier. Okay. Maybe that's where I'm getting confused. For some reason, I thought I was going to say we need reps from Montpelier and we don't have any. Okay. Sorry. Clearing my brain. Nope, no problem at all. If I move a quarter mile, I could qualify. So you actually qualify as long as you get appointed by the city council. It doesn't really matter exactly where you live. You just have to convince them, frankly. Because we have people who do not live in Vermont who serve on the governing board, so... All right. So anything else with committee membership? Okay. Moving right along, project manager's report. How about it, Jerry? Sure enough. So pre-construction work in grants. The pre-construction work that we set out to do a few months ago, if you remember, and it was September when we sent out notice to proceed for our poll inventories for area A, those are mostly completed. Middlesex, Moortown and Worcester are completed and we have the data in hand and we actually approved payment for that work today. East Montpelier is almost complete. They have just a few polls that they're catching up on that they had missed when they went through the first time and for whatever reason, they couldn't get to the polls. So they're closing out their data this week, I believe. They'll certainly be done by the end of the year. And in Calis, our initial contractor provided information to us. We did our quality review. We found that some of that data wasn't up to our quality standard. So we had another contractor come in and is providing, is filling that data gap, if you will. That work is going on right now. So we are pretty close to finishing what we call area A, all of the poll inventory work in area A. Also importantly, the grants that pay for that, we have gotten extensions. That work was supposed to be completed 31 December. We've gotten extensions to bring that work out to June of 2022. It's not going to take until June of 2022, but they offered it. We took it. And that's similar to the high level design that's going on. The high level design was meant to be completed at the end of December. It's going to roll into January. That's okay because that grant was also extended. So that work is moving forward. We are also moving down the bullets here for the fiber purchase. We are participating in the Vicuda coordinated bulk fiber purchase. And we've purchased or are purchasing 300 miles worth of fiber that we have a staggered delivery because we don't need 300 miles day one. So we've coordinated with the other CUDs and with Vicuda to stagger that delivery. We've also staggered the size of the fiber that we're buying. Some of it's 144. Some of it's 72. Some of it's 48. David Healy has worked out most of the details on this. But we're a part of this bulk fiber purchase. You may have read John's piece on that that's I think was even in the VT digger. So that's forward. We also have the next bullet is about Northfield Rocksbury. So that information actually isn't quite so good. That was a CARES grant, one of the original CARES grants that we got. And we had until the end of the year to get folks 50 of 50 some odd residences connected in Rocksbury Northfield. And what we we ran into into some very serious make ready problems. Actually, the make ready problems we ran into are basically a foul of Vermont law. And we are we are going to make a complaint to the Public Utility Commission over this in coordination with Valley Net, who are the folks that were implementing this for us. But nonetheless, it's even though we could get another 90 day extension, because of this problem, we're not going to be able to complete that project in 90 days. So this is not a clawback because we never got the federal money. What we are doing is we're rescinding or pulling back the invoice that we had sent for payment. We were pulling that back. So it's really not a clawback. There there there is about $26,000 worth of work that has been done on this by Valley Net that we're going to figure out how to deal with that as we go down the road. Because these people still need to be served that work may or may not still be useful. We'll figure that out down the road. But we so unfortunately, we have to we have to back out of this Northfield Roxbury project. And the I was per I was asked by by Rob Fish from the the VCBB to pursue this this complaint with the Public Utilities Commission, because there's an interest statewide, if you will, to have an administrative record to document the problems that we're we're we're getting with make ready. And this is this is part of that that problem. So we're going to follow up with that. We'll we'll submit and I don't know yet. I don't know yet what the level of complaint will be. We're not going to get resolution. That's not what we're looking for. But we do want to at least make sure there's there's an administrative record of this problem. And we'll do that in the beginning of the year, because there are a lot of folks that are out of town right now. And I'll take any questions on any of this, except for right. I just want to mention that the fiber, the 300 miles of fiber is costing us over $800,000. It's not money we have to put up with now it'll be something we'll get a grant later on that will pay that. There's a whole mechanism that was established between Vicuda, the Vermont Community Foundation, Community National Bank, I think they're for letter of credit, three CUDs, et cetera, et cetera. And 144 strand of fiber is over $4,000 for a mile for one mile for grand. So it's a big deal and it'll be the first to frankly many buys that we'll have for that. Jerry, did you want to mention the area B and C polls and the statement of work change? Absolutely. I'll do that and I'll answer Jonathan's question as well. So we have 12 more towns that we have put out a request for bids. I shouldn't say an RFP. It's really not an RFP. We already went through the RFP process. A request for bids and those are due Tuesday, Wednesday timeframe. Next week they're due. Fortunately, the money is in the bank and there's a lot of interest in deploying people and keeping them in the field. So we're hoping to be able to get a good start on that. So we're looking to start the remainder of the poll inventory work for our underserved. We're looking to start that as early as the beginning of the very beginning of the year. Let me take a step back. Jonathan asked a question about Make Ready and what is Make Ready? Make Ready is a series of events and the end of that series of events is where you want to put CV fiber on the poll. The poll is ready to accept CV fibers, physical fiber on that poll. That's the end process of the Make Ready. There's a whole application process and a contractor process and a physical moving potentially of other wires to make room on that poll. But Make Ready, even though it's not the most expensive part of it, it very well could be the long poll in the tent that will delay the construction and the delivery of fiber services to the premises. So Make Ready is something that we have been talking about, for example, with our weekly meetings with WEK. It comes up every meeting. We've been talking about it for half a year. It's a really big item. We're asking a lot of the utilities, a lot of effort on the utilities to work with us. The utilities own the polls. The poll owners have a big stake in Make Ready. We've been working with them in advance to make this go as smoothly as possible. When we have our contractors on board that are going to do our design and that are going to work us through the process, that's going to make the Make Ready all the more smooth. It'll never be perfectly smooth, but when we have our design contractors on board working with the utilities and doing as much as we can in advance, we recognize Make Ready is a problem and we're doing everything we can to meet that problem. And it's not just us. The VCBB, the broadband board, everybody knows that this is an issue. David, I saw you had your hand up briefly. Did you want to weigh in at all? David, you're on mute. No, I'm all set. Okay. Any questions for Jerry about preconstruction, the Fiber Purchase, the Northfield Roxbury Project, any sort of stuff within his purview? If I may, Jeremy, I'm not sure I followed. This is R.D. I'm not sure I followed all of Jerry's explanations about the Northfield Roxbury problem without putting too much burden on volunteers. Do we have a memo that something in writing that we could, that would explain this kerfuffle and what we expect to present to the PUD? We will, R.D. We don't have that right now. I was actually on the phone today with the CEO of ValleyNet talking about exactly this issue. And there's their outside plant manager who coordinates this work just left for the holiday vacation today. Okay. So when she comes back, we're going to work together and pull this complaint together. And if you have any interest in being directly involved as a review of that or want to help us with the language, I'm very happy to share. Thank you. Okay. Thanks for that, R.D. Any other questions for Jerry? Observations? Concerns? All right. Thanks for that, Jerry. Moving on to the 2022 budget. Ray, you want to talk about that? Sure, Jeremy. Yeah, I do. After we do this, before we get to the next one, we talk about town reports for a second. I'm sorry, I didn't add that earlier. But the town reports, they're from the annual report. And we want to make sure that we're covered by that. And so we want to talk about it a little bit, okay? So we're going to talk about the 22, the 22 CD fiber 2022 budget. The process is kind of a three-step process. The first part of this was that the board approved a budget. It was sent to the towns for their feedback, if any. We held a public hearing in November. The first part was in October. And now we're at the point where we actually adopt a budget. And the recommendation is that we make any changes that we need to make at this point in time. And there are several changes. I sent an email out and identified all those changes. And hopefully you had an opportunity to look at those. The total was only in the administration section. We don't have enough information to change pre-construction, construction or operations at this time. But that will come up during the course of the year. The changes included adjusting the accounting budget to reflect the contract that was signed after we had sent out the approved budget. We adjusted dues to reflect the fact that the cooters asking us all of the CUDs to pay dues in the $11,500 range. And we also made a change to the treasurer stipend, given the statutory responsibilities and the commitment of time that's required by any individual that's in that particular position. And so that went from $2,400 to $12,000 for the year. The total was $35,000. The only other thing that was changed in the budget was the reserves. You may recall that we had income and expenses. At the bottom line, it came to $400,000 in terms of reserves. The net was like zero, right? We don't have any extra money. The money goes into reserves. And those reserves were adjusted to reflect the $35,000, which brought that to $414,290. I'm happy to answer more questions, etc. What I want to do is I'd like to put a motion in the chat room. And let's see here. The motion would be move the board adopt the CD5 or 2022 budget as recommended by the finance committee and the executive committee, by the way, and dated 16 December 2021. That's the end of the motion. It's a $15 million budget. I heard a second from Jeremy Met. Okay, move by Ray. Before we get in there, before you went on with the rest of your discussion, Brad. You wanted to be sure. That's what it was. Move by Ray, second by Jeremy. Any questions, comments? To me, there's not really any surprises here. I mean, this is something that's plowed ground. I mean, there's a couple of little adjustments as we've learned more. And I think, Ray, as you've said previously, this is likely a budget that's going to have to change next year too. This is our best guess for what we expect to be spending on a whole variety of things. And then I see Henry has a question, how much comes from grants? And so the answer is basically all. Basically, everything is covered by grants. I don't think we're borrowing any money. We've not taken any affirmative steps to take on any debt. And so we have quite a bit of grant money already approved, and we have quite a bit of grant money that we're expecting to secure next year. And probably the year after that as well. There is less than $900,000 expected from subscriptions and any installation fees that we might be collecting. But again, as mentioned, the budget under statute, we can change the budget during the course of the year itself. So as we become better informed, maybe what our requirements are or what the income is going to be, we'll make some adjustments then. Yes, indeed. All right. Well, I'm not seeing any hands or any protests. Are there any objections to adopting the budget? Oh, one moment. Jerry? Certainly not an objection. I just saw something pass by in the chat, and I wanted to make sure that everybody understands here. We are trying to optimize our grant position. We are very much dedicated to optimizing the use of grants. And then there's a hierarchy of low interest loans that follows that. So there's a lot of opportunity before we need to get to going out into the actual bond market. At the same time, what we're doing is trying to protect ourselves as we move through by ownership of assets so that when we get to the bond market, we're in a good position to be able to get whatever residual funds we might need. So I just wanted to throw that out there in response to what I just saw come across the chat. Thanks, Jerry. Anything else? Yes, Henry. Vita is pretty low priority now. We may look at that down the road as a way of filling gaps between grants and such. But yeah, it's not something that we really need at this point. But we shall see down the road. Okay. Yeah, Ray? No, I'm good. Okay. Anything else on the budget? Okay. Any objections to approving this question as presented? Okay. I don't hear any objections. So the motion passes unanimously. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Ray. Appreciate the final tweaks and the adjustments as we learned a bit more. Okay. Did you want to talk about the reports? Yeah. So I received an email from the Northfield Northfield. I'm the Northfield delegate saying that if I wanted something into the published book that goes before town meeting in March, I needed to get it in by January 10th, 14th some date. Okay. I know that I believe it's RD and Dave Healy have drafted. And what they're looking for is one page, a page and a half, not a lot, right? We sent an annual report with 10 pages. I forget how long it was. That is not the report that we should be submitting. And after we take some action tonight and hopefully to approve a contract with NRTC, we'll have some really good news to include in any such report. Okay. So I'm going to, I'm going to look at David's and RD's and model one for myself. And I'll be happy to share that with folks afterwards. But we should be looking at individually submitting these reports to our town counts towns this month in December. Don't wait till January. And Chuck has his hand up with much better information that I'm going to give you. Go for it, Chuck. Well, actually Ray, what I was going to say is, you know, we have a communications committee meeting coming on Monday. We're going to move it from the normal Thursday time slot to Monday instead. And so why don't we take this up as an item in the communications committee? Super. Sounds great. And then it will be onus once we have the final deliverables, the onus will be on the individual reps to get that to their, you know, town clerk, city clerks, etc. And make sure that it gets to the right place. David Healy said that callus required theirs by December 10th. So that's maybe they'll use a bit of what we already sent or maybe they have something or maybe you can just arm twist folks there and just say this is what we've got. If you can sneak it into the middle of the PDF before you send it to the printer. Maybe that can happen. I know Berlin is like middle of January as well. Yeah. So. Okay. Anything else about, I don't think we need to take any affirmative actions right now. I think we're going to kind of pitch it over to the wall to communications and we'll just go from there. Okie-dokie. All right. Next one is possible roll shifts within CV fiber. So this one is, this is my agenda item. And this is something I've shared with the executive committee and wanted to make sure he shared with all of you. I was, I would like to step away from the role of the chair and lower the amount of work that CV fiber that I'm essentially dedicated to CV fiber. So three or so years now I've essentially put a lot of my research and some other stuff that I should be doing for work and for family stuff on the back burner. And I would like to still be involved as, you know, as much as I can, but I would like to do a bit of a handoff at this point. And so I didn't have any sort of, you know, concrete air to the throne or something like that if we want to be overly grandiose. But having talked to Jerry quite a bit about this, he is interested in taking over as the chair. And there is a certain, there's a certain elegance to this. And I just want to kind of share with you what we're thinking and get feedback. There's no action on this item. We just want to put this out there so that everybody's clear about how we think we might want to proceed. So Jerry is the alternate for Berlin. I'm the delegate for Berlin. We are thinking of asking the Berlin select board to essentially flip those because the chair has to be a governing board member. And then to ask you all to appoint Jerry the chair at the January meeting. And then so Jerry is already on the bank account. So there's, that's convenient. He's the project manager. And so has obviously been knee-deep in this stuff for quite some time. So yeah, I think I'll just leave it there. Jerry, is there anything else that you want to add before we open it up to other folks? No, I didn't actually expect that you were going to point to this, Jeremy, but that's okay. Because you know, I've been dedicated to this since day one, right? And I would be happy to follow in your footsteps here and keep this thing moving forward. I am going before the select board on the 20th of December in Berlin to be, so I'm going to resign as project manager. And I'm asking the select board to reinstate me as the Berlin alternate. And then we'll ask them to flip-flop, if you will, and make me the delegate and Jeremy the alternate. I'm not foreseeing any problems with that. I'm on the agenda. They gave me two minutes, maybe two minutes to say no, go away. I don't know. But I don't think so. But yeah, I'm dedicated to doing this. There's no question. All right, looks like Jeremy then Siobhan. Yeah, so I guess the one thing that comes to mind is, well, thank you, Jeremy, for all that you've done. And also you, Jerry, for agreeing to take this on. The one kind of woe moment was, do we not need a project manager anymore? Because I know that you've been doing a lot of project manager stuff. And is that going to go away now that we have NRTC? Yeah, why don't you just go ahead and answer that, Jerry? Yeah, no, that is not going to go away. And this is, I'm glad you brought this up. Because I hope there, if there's a misconception out there, I'd like to get rid of it right away. But the fact that we have NRTC and that we're going to start working with Weitzfield Telecom does not mean that CV Fiber can just like say, oh, okay, now we're good. Those guys are going to do it all. In fact, it's the opposite. And but we know this because the budget that was just approved includes a executive director, for the lack of a better term, we called it executive director. It's been used in other CUDs. There needs to be somebody full time that is the interface between CV Fiber and our consultants and contractors. Remember, we're the ones that are going to be hiring the contractors for construction, for make ready, for whatever, whatever else is coming up. We're hiring the contractors and we need that interface with NRTC. And they're wonderful people, but you can't just walk away from them. We have to be in contact with them every day. This is a full time job. I cannot do that as a full time job. But I have started drafting and submitted to some folks a statement of responsibilities of trying to think what's the term I'm looking for here for an executive director. What the job description. Thank you. I've started a job description for executive director and we're starting to circulate that around. And we're going to need to do this. And it's we, the money is in the budget to have a full time person as executive director. There's $120,000 in the budget for that purpose. All right. Thanks, Jerry. I have Siobhan then back to Jeremy. Yeah, I just wanted to say that I think that we'll have, with Jerry, we'll have really good continuity because Jerry's been involved in a lot of this and was working on our initial grants was way back when and just has, I think it'll make it a smooth transition because he's been here and he's been doing all of this. And I was kind of, well, who's going to do this when I heard Jeremy was stepping aside a little bit. And so when hearing Jerry is like, yeah, I think I could do this. I'm like, yes. Yay. So I'm very pro Jerry doing this. Thanks. Thanks Siobhan. Jeremy then Chuck. Yeah, just kind of hammering the project manager thing. It seems like we've got a lot going on right now. Is it going to cause us problems, delays, whatever, to lose Jerry as project manager in the month or two that it takes us for more seeing as how our hiring has been. Oh man, you must not know my MO. Okay. You know, I'm just going to keep rolling and we're going to transition hopefully sooner rather than later. But at least from my perspective, there aren't going to be any gaps. But I appreciate the comment because you're right. It looks like there could be a space so there might be a space where nobody's getting paid, but there won't be a space where the work's not being accomplished. Well, thank you so much for agreeing to be our free project manager. Let me tell you, I gotta tell you right now, man, I'm not the only one working their butt off on a regular basis day in and day out. I'm the I'm actually the only one getting paid. So, you know, I know, I get it. I get it. I know you do, man. All right. Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks, Jerry, Chuck. Since it came up, I have absolutely no bearing as to whether it's appropriate, but is it $120,000 salary enough for an executive director of this kind of organization? And, you know, was that researched and what have you? Hey, that's a really good point. That's actually based on some of the original numbers that we had used way back when from last year. And, you know, that's also in the ballpark with some of the some of the other other other folks that we that have public information about that are that are working in this area. So it's it's kind of ballpark, but no, you're absolutely right. And the budget is kind of a crayon drawing of how we're moving forward. And if that needs to be refined, we can we can refine that if that answers your question. I hope it does. It does. Thank you. Just, you know, as as somebody who manages professionally, I have kids four years out of college making much and I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to shortchange someone. We want raw horsepower in this role. Thanks, Chuck Walker. Maybe this is to Jerry or Jeremy. What do you envision? Like if we have an executive director that's paid, is that more of a project manager role? Or is it more like what's the what I guess what's the relationship between the board and this paid executive director? I'm a little confused about exactly what that role would be. Yeah, no, that no, that's great. So the this executive director would would report directly to the executive committee, which is kind of what I've been doing as the as as the as the PM, you know, basically David David, you know, David Healy has kind of been my my my boss, if you will, is the way that we've we have set this up. But it's still the executive committee that the responsibility would be to fulfilling the executive committee's requirements. So that that person would be under the purview of the executive committee. And of course, the executive committee is under the purview of the entire governing board. So that you know, there there's a there's a hierarchy there. But there's there's we really need somebody in the trenches on a day to day basis to make sure that everything stays on track and that and that the executive committee and through them, the governing board is fully aware of what's going on because there are so many micro decisions that are going to need to be made that you you can't just send all these decisions back up to to committee. It's impossible. Right. So that that's that's that's how we're looking at going. And I'll also add that this type of structure is also occurring at other CUDs. It kind of seems to be a natural or at least a reasonable way to move forward. Maybe natural is not the right word. Thank you. Any other questions about this or Jeremy? I have one. I'm sorry. I can't find the little hand icon at the moment. I in in light of some of the the critiques that have been offered about CUDs and about CV fiber in particular, I think it's essential that the executive committee get on the stick immediately, putting out a job description and seeking an executive director as soon as possible. Having a professional professional leadership in what is at the moment, chiefly, a volunteer organization is going to be, I think, vital in projecting an image of competence and and securing public confidence in our efforts. So I think we we shouldn't lose a moment in finding an executive director. And I would say that I if if the compensation that we are offering in the in the budget is is not sufficient, come back to the board. But professional leadership, I think at this at this juncture is absolutely crucial. Agreed. Anything else? Just before having said that, thank you, Jerry. Thank you, Jeremy. You've done yeoman service great, great work. I've been so grateful for your help in helping me ascend this very steep learning curve. I just I neglected to say that at the very beginning. Thank you. You are welcome and thank you all for putting in the work that you put in. Anything else on this? I mean, like I said, we don't have really any action items right now. But anything else that we should consider as we're going forward? Okay, very well. Moving on to the NRTC Master Services Agreement and the contracts. Ray, you want to introduce this and perhaps the next item as well. Sure. So the next two items have to do with the contract negotiations. And so I'm going to put a motion in the chat room that that we will find if this is needs to be an executive session. And then the second motion will actually be the motion put us into executive session. And so here is here is the first motion and then I'll read it. Move the pursuant to one VSA section 313A1A. We find that premature public knowledge of our discussions are led into the developer operator contract and WEC contract negotiations will put CD5er at a competitive disadvantage. Second. Moved by Ray, seconded by Jeremy. Any further discussion of this? So I want to point out that this is sort of combining the two agenda items that I have here at 720, 735 into a single motion to go into executive session. We will likely not have action related to the WEC agreement. We likely will have action related to the NRTC MSA and contracts and such after we leave executive session. I just want to make sure that that's clear as we're going in. So any objections to this motion? Okay. Motion is adopted unanimously. Thanks Ray. Part two. So the second motion is that moving we enter into executive session discuss the contract reference and previous motion pursuant to one VSA section 313A3 and that we include the project manager, treasurer and all board members whose information is needed in accordance with one VSA section 313A3. So second. Okay. That was seconded by R.D. Moved by Ray, seconded by R.D. Jeremy. Did you mean alternate board members, Ray, rather than board members because? Yeah. All board members and frankly every alternate is also a board member. Okay. Well, yeah, I mean board members would be included by default. The only question has been the alternates, I think. I think can we friendly amend that, Ray, so we can have all board and alternate members. Okay. John? Yeah. Two things. One, I will be bowing out from this. Can I get Ray to give me an update on any action that is reportable for the update? And two, regarding our professionalism, I have to say we're like 31 minutes ahead of schedule on the agenda. So. Thanks, John. Yeah. So, Ray, if you could follow up with John just to loop him in. So as we're writing the next updates, that will be helpful. As always. Thank you, John. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, John. So I see your comments there, Henry. Yeah. So we can chat more about the specifics of the contract as we get into the executive session. Any objections to entering the executive session to discuss these two items and including the folks that we're including? Hearing none, motion passes unanimously and thank you very much. I'm going to ask folks who are not board members or alternates to please disconnect. Christian, we will, I think Jeremy will catch up with you in terms of meeting minutes and such. Okay. Just send me what you have up until now, Christian, and I will finish them up. Okay. Thank you so much.