 I'll call the meeting to order at, I've got 6, 15 p.m. September 14th, 2021. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? Yeah. Krista is asked to move her item up. She has to leave at 7 o'clock. Okay. So we'll do that. We'll do that first after the consent agenda then. And Orca is trying to get into the meeting. And they are in once and I've approved, I'll approve it again. Admitting admit failed. Yeah. Okay. It's good when one's able to admit failure. So yeah, I just keep hitting admit and it's saying admit failed. So you can hear me. I can hear you just fine. I should also probably check to make sure that we have a a quorum and so Alan also says that he doesn't have any audio, but he seems to be getting video. But you can't hear me correct. I can hear you fine, Alan. We can hear you, Alan. Okay. There's John. What did you do, John? Yeah. Nope. He downloaded the teams app. Okay. For what it's worth, I'm using the teams app and I used it earlier today with success. So I don't know if the dealings can hear me. Yep. Yes. I downloaded the teams app. I mean, I'm using the teams app as well. I'm probably signed into my UVM. I'm running for better or for worse in the edge browser just so that I could start the meeting. That was the only way that I could get connected to this. Wow. This is a good start. All right. Let's move on. So let's roll. So aside from moving Chris up, is there anything else to add to the agenda? Okay. Public comment. Is there anything folks want to talk about that are not related to items on the agenda? Okay. Moving on to the consent agenda. I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented, which includes the August 10th minutes. There you are, Chuck. This is weird. I can't. Okay. So moved by me, seconded by Jeremy Matt. Any further discussion? Yeah. One thing that I forgot to do before I sent out the draft is to add the participation grid for who was, or for what towns were present. I will add that before posting the minutes. All right. I think I should add that before posting the minutes. Okay. That sounds good. Anything else related to the minutes? Any objections to the adoption of the consent agenda? Okay. Consent agenda is adopted unanimously. Thanks for that. Looks like I screwed up the times for the financial report, but Phil, you want to take that? Okay. So my apologies. I had to reboot after you were commenting that I was up and running. Looks like I lost it again. No. We can hear you. Yeah. Keep going. Oh, you can hear me? Okay. I can't see my report. But suffice to say there are a handful of bills that the executive committee will be approving, totaling about just over $6,000. Most of those are for the project management fees. And there are some. My computer is wonky. There were some checks cut that will again be approved by the executive committee in the next meeting. Unfortunately, that's all I have without looking at my report. Got it. Okay. Any questions for Phil? Thank you. Okay. So I'm getting some feedback on either Tom or Alan. Okay. That seems to have solved, I think. Okay. So let's move on to the clerk's report. Esteemed clerk. I don't really have a time to shoot a report. I've been keeping up with posting the minutes. I'm still getting a lot of feedback from Alan, though. So. Feedback to me. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe a few different people. The only people that I hear with, the only people I see with mics are Alan and David Lawrence. But I see Alan muted. So should be fine. All right. So I see. I don't forgive any other, but I will mute just to be sure. All right. Great. All right. So I see Tom now. I see Ray now and I see Walker. Hey there. And so this is, so maybe if you don't have anything to report, Jeremy, we do have a couple of folks here that are joining us for the first time. And maybe we can take, just take a moment to have them identify themselves. If I didn't have a big network spike here. Walker, would you take a moment and introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Walker Blackwell. I live in Washington, Vermont. And I'm the alternate for Catarina in Washington. And I have a tech background and grew up in Cabot, and also had fiber to my home in Burlington. So I've been a previous beneficiary of fiber. So I'm excited to be involved. Wonderful. So welcome. If you have any questions or if you want kind of the, the rundown of how CVFiber got where it is, where we're at, if you want to kind of a catch up, send me a message directly and we'll schedule a time. We'll just, we'll chat for half an hour or an hour or something. That sounds great. Thank you. You're welcome. So we also have Brian Evans-Mongin. Brian. Hello. This is Brian Evans-Mongin. I have recently, last week, appointed by the Elmore Select Board to be the new Elmore representative, taking over for Hans DeBoer. Hans is going to continue in an alternate means for the time being. Presently, Waterbury is my hometown, but I have a summer location in Elmore on the Lake. I have dealt with numerous fiber interconnections. Presently, I, in various forms, take service from Comcast, consolidated in various capacities of DSL and fiber. My business is utility services. We're out of Waterbury, Vermont. And we work with the utilities all across the nation, including those that offer broadband services in addition to their electric services. So that's my background. Great. Well, welcome. And Brian, the same offer is on the table for you. If you would like a catch up, or if you have any questions about this, please feel free. Let me know and we'll chat. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. We also have Gavin Bodnar from CVRPC. Gavin, introduce yourself real quick. I'm Gavin Bodnar. I'm with America Vista with CVRPC. I have a background in civil engineering. Just getting up the speed on this new project. Christian told me all about, so I'm excited to learn all about it. And yeah, I'll be taking some minutes tonight, although Christian will be taking minutes as well because it's my first time taking minutes. Thanks for joining us, Gavin, and we definitely appreciate the help. And last but not least, Will Anderson, who is a staffer for Vicuda and is joining us tonight. Will, would you introduce yourself? Sure. Hello, everyone. My name is Will Anderson. I am, as of last week, the first staff member, first employee, and only employee for the CUD Association. I'm also a resident here in Montpelier, part of the CB Fiber Communications Union District. And my role here will be to try to coordinate some shared services amongst CUDs. So I'll be listening in and reaching out to Jeremy and others of you to get a read on where CB Fiber is at with receiving some of these shared services. And I'll also be working to coordinate with the community broadband board and other state officials. So I'll put my contact information in the chat and please feel free to reach out to me to talk about any and all of these issues related to the association or to liaising with the state. I'll also add that I was previously an AmeriCorps VISTA, Gavin, with the USDA, and a recent alumnus of that program. So thank you. Thank you for letting me listen in and looking forward to hearing where CB Fiber is at. Thanks very much, Will. And it's too bad it would be a conflict of interest. We have an opening for a Montpelier rep. So we'll have to keep searching. In the future, maybe I'll take you up on that. I'd very much like to. But for now, I'll stick to representing the association. Of course. Of course. Okay. So that's great. Great to have some new folks joining us. Moving on to the project managers report. Did you want to do that, Ray? Or was somebody else going to, David? I don't remember if one of you were going to present Jerry's materials since he's out. If you're speaking, David, we can't hear you. Okay, can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you now. Okay. I'm just going to read the report since I don't have it. It doesn't look like I want to share it properly. So since the last meeting, Jerry has been busy doing managing grants and filing grant reports, preparing the next grant application, hiring contractors, managing contractors. Putting, helping putting out requests for proposals and requests for bids and working with our various partnerships. I can tell you, he's a busy guy. Active Public Service Department and Vermont Community Broadband Grants. Right now, we have $160,000 that was funded on the CARES, fully obligated, and it was expended at the end of 21. It needs to be expended by the end of 21. Not exactly sure what that one is. But anyway, Northfield-Roxbury $90,000 to do the plan to connect, I think it's about 40 houses in Northfield-Roxbury. ValleyNet has told us that they've completed the poll inventory and it's submitted poll applications to WEC and they're planning construction for October-November. In Moortown, we have $150,000. The poll inventory has started. We did a write-out yesterday. I did a write-out yesterday with WEC. It was very informative. It looks like the majority of the polls we looked at yesterday looked pretty good without a lot of work and we'll probably submit applications next week. Let's see, next slide. So we've got the most recent grants. We got $190,000 for high-level design for the non-WEC portion of the district and we got $200,000 for the WEC 3CUD. Design and we had a kick-off meeting on September 3rd. We've had a second meeting with Vantage Point on Friday of last week and they're moving right along. We've asked them to see if they can speed up the schedule which is scheduled now for completion at the end of December. The Area A poll inventory, which is $225,000. The contract is Apex, Ustis and Tilson have all started. Some of you may have seen them out on the street already. I've had a few comments about the logo on the side of the vehicles, positive comments. Actually, it's a pretty good thing because people are seeing that we're there. In fact, they asked me, when do I get my fiber? And these are Calis, East Montpelier, Moortown, and Middlesex and Wooster. First week, data reporting is incomplete. Well, we got some of it, but we need to modify the fields, the data they're collecting based on the meeting we had yesterday in the field with WEC. Grant application, the pre-construction funding grant. A draft application is under development. Very detailed guidelines have been issued by the Vermont County Broadband and Jerry has pretty much filled out all the boilerplate that has to go with this application with the help of a bunch of people from the board. But we're going to apply for more pole inventory for areas B and C. Make ready for area A and detailed design and administrative tasks. And according to the broadband board, we have only left available in terms of our allocation for pre-construction funds under the current legislative session was $2.9 million. So we have more needs and we have money to get from the state. So we'll talk about that later. The request for proposals. We have an accounting proposal out there. Submittal time was extended and interviews are ongoing. There's an audit request for proposals. Submittals would do a due on Saturday, Friday, one of them soon. And operator submittals, we got five respondents. We narrowed it down to two in which we've sent out very lengthy questions last Friday and expect them to have responses to all those questions by this Friday. And make ready, we have under development request for proposals. We're trying to get Washington Elector to take on that task more than us. And I think, yep, request for bids. So yeah, one more. We've put out a request for bids for area B and C. And we received submittals from all three of our indefinite quantity contractors. And we're awaiting funding, actually. So that we have to apply for the money before we can start this next project. But we got the bids in. And they're all, in terms of pricing, all pretty comfortable. We're going to be able to make some decisions based on the quality of the work that they're currently doing. In terms of partnership. It's a very difficult question from Walker. Go ahead, Walker. I didn't hear it. No question for me. None? Okay. I am not, I'm trying to read two screens here. So I apologize for my inattentiveness. In terms of partnerships, Jerry, myself, and sometimes Jeremy have been meeting with WEC operation staff in terms of coordinating the poll data, poll applications, writeouts, make ready RFP, and high level design. These meetings have been very productive because it's at the operational level rather than the management level. And so I think there's been some good communication going back and forth between CD-Fiber and WEC. Believe that is Jerry's report. So I'm sorry I couldn't share that. But I can see that. I can see that. I'll be sent it out to everybody. David, we were able to see your screen on that. So you are still sharing your screen as a heads up. Oh, all right. All right. That is my Patrick report. All right. Thanks very much, David. Any questions for David? Okay. Question? Yeah, go for it. Where might we find the identification of the towns associated with the various areas? We've identified the area A. Brian, we can talk offline and I can explain to you more. So we've declared that to be a trade secret, so that it's not for public disclosure yet. So I'm happy to share that with you outside of this meeting. Okay. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Committee appointments. I understand that we have at least one appointment that a committee would like to recommend. I heard you start to talk, right? I didn't start to talk. Can you hear me? Oh, we can hear you now. Okay. So a couple of things. One is to recall that the WECMOU needs to move up because Chris is leaving. All right. Right, right. I'm sorry. Yeah. Secondly, at the last session or maybe the finance committee meeting that Linda had expressed an interest in joining one or more committees. And so I wanted this on the agenda and there are folks here that are new that might be interested in joining one of our committees as well. If you go to cvfiber.net, you'll see the charters for each of the committee. So you have an idea of exactly the kind of work we're doing. And perhaps we could postpone this a little bit, give people a chance to look at that and then come back to it. Sure. All right. So let's move on to the WECMOU. And, Chris, I made you a presenter if you would like to share your screen or you can proceed as you like. Hi. Thanks very much. I actually did not prepare a presentation for you. So I was going to talk about the WECMOU at a high level and then offer to answer any questions if that works. Fine. So the WECMOU is between, there's a series of MOUs. So each CUD is signing an MO, each CUD in the WEC territory, which is yourselves, EC Fiber and NEK Broadband is signing an MOU with WEC in regards to the WEC network that would be built with RUS financing. The RUS application has been submitted. There's been some initial verbal positive feedback. The MOU is fairly high level. It outlines the basic terms that we will be... I have David very large on my screen. Hi, David. With that we will be and outlines the basic terms that will be incorporated into the agreement. WEC is taking the next step in terms of establishing what the terms of the agreement are and then and then we'll work together as a group from there. So in terms of approval of this MOU it provides an opportunity to fund a fairly large portion of your project with long-term low interest rate financing. It will incur the costs of administering that financing for WEC, which could include items such as the interim financing that they'll have to get to cover costs because the RUS loan financing is reimbursed financing and as well as project management support. But overall the evaluation that's been done is that this will be significantly less expensive because of the cost of the borrowing and the length of time it's borrowed over and enable much more of the build to be built faster than might otherwise happen. They need to have an agreement in place in order to be successful in getting their financing approved by the Public Utility Commission and so the goal is to work towards a dark fiber agreement as quickly as possible. Are there any questions? Is anybody have any correct questions for Krista or any any thoughts about the MOU that David sent out? So the next step that you'll take is to is to vote to approve entering into the MOU and those that MOU has been sent around for your review. Okay in the interests of moving things forward then I'm going to move that we approve the MOU as presented. Second. Okay Chuck beat you there Jeremy. So moved by me seconded by Chuck. Any further discussion about the WEC MOU? Okay I'm not hearing any additional discussion so I'm I'll take that to be a good sign. I want to thank you Krista for all your work on this it was definitely you know there was a lot of a lot of steps getting here I know so I definitely appreciate that. They'll facilitate the contract process. Yeah let's hope so. Let's hope so. Let's hope it's all smooth from here and everybody's arm in arm. Yeah exactly. All right so are there any objections to adopting the MOU as presented? David. Nope. This is Brian. This is Brian Evans Mungin. I'm going to abstain as I've not been part of the process. Okay thanks for that Brian. Okay so I'm going to assume without objection that this is being adopted unanimously and we can move on to the next thing and we can let Krista go. Super thanks very much everybody thank you. Thanks Krista. See you later. Okay back to committee appointments. Did you want to push this to the end? Ray was that what you were imagining? No we can bring it up at any time if people or if anybody wants to raise their hand and indicate which committees they'd like to join. Okay so let's kick this to the end if folks want to spend some more time and review what's out there we can do that. Hint hint nudge nudge. So let's go on to a grants update. Jeremy you do have a raised hand from Linda. Oh okay. She just put it down never mind. I'll wait for the rest of the people. All right thanks Linda. The grants update I think we got most of that out of the way with the PM report. Is there anything else that we should be talking about related to grants? I think that's it. I mean we can do the we do the town outreach update you'll get more on money but that in terms of grant the opera money from the state of Vermont it's that was in this jury's report. Okay sounds good yeah I can't think of anything else that we would add. All right so an update on the developer operator David? So as I mentioned in the PM report we are busily reviewing the team is busily reviewing the applications that came in or the proposals that came in. They're both the pretty competent applicants and we will you know try to get the one thing that I've requested that we consider is getting a technical expert to help us review the two finalists so that we're not shooting in the dark totally from our volunteer standpoint so I've you know reached out to CTC technologies in I think they're in Maryland who helped DV Fiber go through their review process of proposals and I and what I guess I'd like to mention is that the executive committee try to wrestle with you know whether we go forward with contracting with them on a time and materials basis or not but I think we're going to need that kind of help. I think the team has done a great job of going through the the five five lengthy proposals we received and needs to say even though we tried to force them to use apples to apples comparisons we did not get apples to apples comparisons so and hopefully the questions we asked will help do that. So that's where I have in terms of a calendar what I do with my calendar I actually have a calendar try to get the the answers to questions that do on Friday of this week and the team will review the questions next week and draft interview questions or a framework for how we want to do this and hopefully work with a consultant on this and then schedule interviews hopefully in the week of the 27th so we've got a sort of a fast track and then bring it to the planning and development committee at the end of the month and then next week next month early next month bring it to the board it may stretch out longer than that where I see the biggest the time drain we may be able to pick the firm relatively quickly but negotiating a contract is probably going to take a month at least. DV Fiber told me today they're still negotiating their contract so they're agreement. So anyway it's moving along and if there's any questions I'll be happy to answer them. I actually have two one is do you have a sense of the cost of what DV Fiber paid to CTC for this work? I do not but what I've outlined is probably 12 to 20 hours at the most. Okay so what's our order of magnitude then of so I mean 12 to 20 hours at 100, 12 to 20 hours at 500, probably 200 hours an hour. Okay so we're looking at what maybe five K tops? Yep we can bring this up at the executive committee meeting on Thursday Jeremy where the executive committee has the authority to enter into these kinds of engagements. And I'll have more information by then. Okay and so my other question is did you see the announcement that NAK had chosen their their operator developer? I haven't read the press release but yes NAK Broadband has selected a team made up of any NRTC, Watesville, Champlain, Telecom and Mission Broadband and they are one of the firms that have applied to do IS. The role is Watesville, Champlain, Telecom is their ISP. NRTC is due to the engineering and construction and Mission Broadband is to manage the overall project that's out and it's similar to the one they submitted to us. Mute. All right so I'm going to it looks like Katharina is trying to reconnect and it's not letting me reconnect her. Okay any any questions for David about the developer operator update? Jeremy Madhouse. Go for it Jeremy. Do we need a motion to kick this over to the executive committee? The answer is no. Okay so we have it in our current authorized budget for the executive committee to do this? We have in the current authorized charter for the executive committee to do this whether we have yeah we have to see whether we have the money or not. The money's a separate item but we do have the money. Well I'll rephrase. There's money in the budget. The question is how much is it going to cost? Okay so so the short answer here is that the executive committee has already been approved to to tackle this and we'll be tackling this on Thursday then. Right. Cool so let's let's move on RFP RFB contracting updates. Is that yours Ray? Well I think that I think that the project manager covered a great deal of that. What I would say is that the accounting is still open and we're expecting a couple more proposals. The audit proposals are due on Friday. I was given a list of additional people for accounting and auditing and I forwarded the RFPs to them. So I would say that by the next by the board meeting in October might be in a position to make recommendations on those positions those engagements. Okay very good thanks for that Ray. Any questions for Ray about that stuff? All right moving along still town outreach update. Take that David or Ray I mean I don't really have any other updates since the last time we met. Well there's probably a couple of bits. One is that we have asked Chris to review the MOU and I can tell you that I've seen a couple of drafts of that and it has been sent over to Rob and the other town attorney for further iteration. In addition there are people board members who are interested in making presentations Linda being one of them for example in Woodbury and there may be some others and so we're going to be working with her and anybody else that wants one and I'm happy to make some draft presentation materials available to you that we can go through and so that that's those are two bits I have. All right Alan I think Alan you have an update from Worcester don't you? Yes I do can can you hear me? Yep. Okay I'm having trouble with the connection and teams. Yeah Worcester has allocated voted to allocate their select board voted to allocate $50,000 towards of the town's ARPA funds and this is money that the town now has in hand in an account so it's actually available but I think we're all still working on the MOU between an individual town and CV fiber and that's that's that's the impediment we have to actually receiving those funds at this point and I Jeremy had suggested maybe trying to trying to do our own agreement but the more that I've looked at this and talked with people about it it seems pretty clear we really should have one agreement that is something that all towns are using with CV fiber just I think for our own sanity as an organization because if we start getting into 20 different MOUs with different requirements for us in terms of I don't know reporting or whatever I think it would be a nightmare so somehow we've got to get the MOU the the draft of of a singular MOU moving so that so that we can actually begin to take in some of this money. I agree and I'm realizing now that the update that I last gave was not to the governing board but was to the finance committee so I should probably mention that the folks in the middle sex have elected to slow down and not allocate any money to CV fiber right now until there is better defined rules from the Department of Treasury and they're following the advice of CVRPC and the League of Cities and Towns so hopefully we'll have some movement either on the part of Treasury or the League or CVRPC in convincing them otherwise that we can and should move forward with this but I see Josh has a hand up and then Henry. Can you hear me? Yep. Perfect. In regards to town outreach I think in the last meeting we ran and possibly the one before that I had mentioned that I had already done I had already done a town outreach before we had anything any canned presentation made there were some things that came out of that and I know Jeremy you had reached out to me directly and I did respond back to you I didn't know if there was a there was a time or a place that you thought it would be good to discuss that so we could determine how we wanted to kind of settle those odd oddities that came out of the select board of my town. Yeah I mean from my perspective it's really there's one select board member who I think kind of misunderstands what we're doing and our relationship to to Berrytown so I was hoping that it could be maybe just you and me and the select board member and we can just talk it over and just make sure that everybody's clear. I did see your email back and I just need to we just need to set a time and reach out to the select board member to hopefully just hopefully have that sit down. I mean I can't imagine it's going to take long just to get him up to date will be valuable I think. Yeah I think it could be very valuable and maybe with a better understanding because obviously his understanding is quite skewed we we may be able to maybe make some headway with my town which would be fantastic so thank you. Thanks Josh. Henry? Yes I just wanted to mention that Dexbury is interested in having a presentation customized presentation for the select board and also I have another question which is at one point we were talking about the town's money being able to be kind of allocated for drops or expenditures from the you know from the main line to individual premises and has that gone any further as a tangible thing that the towns would get from contributing these funds? My understanding is that we're still sort of trying to better understand the parameters of how the money can be spent and that may end up being the way that is most palatable and most defensible to Treasury. I mean I don't know if anybody else has any sort of perspective on that but that's I was sort of waiting for the legal review of this to finish first. Okay so I think I've summarized where we are with that then. I see John Morris is next. So John's having some audio issues. He's sitting right next to me and he just asked if I had the meeting with Marshfield last month and the answer was the answer is yes it went really well. We talked at length I didn't really plan on being there that long but it was a really good conversation. So they seem to be willing to allocate most if not all of the ARPA funds to us. I forwarded Bobby the town clerk there the MOU that we had telling her that it was under review kind of in a similar spot as we've been talking about before where we kind of want to have that reviewed and have towns comfortable with it first and one other thing that came out of that was a discussion about Marshfield as being a place probably a really good place for a hub location. So that was another letter that went out to towns requesting if they have space for hosting network network equipment or hosting you know a little bit of a bigger space that they should get back to us and I've really only heard from I talked to this the select board chair in Middlesex and he sort of talked me through what they have available and they've got some they've got some good options available there. He just hasn't sent me the the data he was supposed to but Marshfield we did get that or David did I send you one of the other was it Marshfield I sent you? And then Deserenguel. What data did I send you for the hub location? Do you remember? Oh the hub location was Marshfield. Oh yeah it was the town office the school house. Yeah. Yeah. The only thing I want to say is I know that I prepared a slide for a Waterbury presentation. I don't know if that's gonna you know happen when but anyway that's something in there. It's in the works. Yeah that's that's coming soon. We have a meeting soon to sort out what what that's gonna look like and what when that's gonna happen. So okay anything else on town outreach? Has anybody else heard from any of the towns about hub locations because I've heard nothing. So so probably would be a good idea at some point to reach out to select boards and or clerks again and I'll probably do it electronically rather than with a letter this time and just say here's what we're here's really what we're looking for. We're in order to do our high level and detailed design we really kind of need to have some options on the table. I think the high level design may tell us how many we need. Well and so if the high level design you know identifies some logical places we can maybe just go and ask and say is this available and kind of go backwards into it rather than asking what's available and then build based on that. So anyways so for area A anyways it seems like middle sex is very willing has three different locations in three geographically separate places that any of which could be seem to me just just hearing about it could be good candidates. All right moving along from town outreach then. I don't see any hands. High level design update David. Yeah so the the consultant is vantage point solutions out of Mitchell, South Dakota. They have a team that we've transferred all the GIS data that I had to them to use to do this design and as for the three CUDs in WEC territory and then the remaining part of CV5 is non-WEC area which is quite a bit of invite is probably half of a half of the price. So they're doing them together and they're they think that probably has some sketches sometime in early mid-October of to get feedback from us before they go into a lot of detail. I'm still pushing them to to move faster. They want to know where there were access points and Carol Monroe from Valley and that gave me the complete list of all the access points that first that has so I sent them to them today. They're looking for that kind of information but I think they're they're moving they're moving ahead. I mean you know like everything like this would like it yesterday but we'll be patient. Yeah it feels like a very exciting step I mean to be able to have to be able to have a map in hand and say that this is something that we're going to actually proceed with. So just to give people an idea of right now the the three CUD WEC team has you know on the review on the participants and the high level design it's it's been Chris to shoot and Kristen Fountain from N.E.K. Broadband but since they've now hired an operator manager their consultant from Mission Broadband is now their liaison to the high level design up until this point WEC is the only entity other than I shouldn't say a valley net is always like Carol and WEC hired a fiber engineer out of New York to work part time as their consultant on this to oversee it. So we're the last organization that doesn't have somebody who's can talk the language but anyway we'll get there. So I'm actually happy that N.E.K. Broadband having having some good different perspectives on what the lot a lot of noise from your side Ray. I get noisier because you're going to talk about the budget. Oh good. I'm done. Anything you're good David. Yep thank you. Okay great. So um before we do the budget uh committee appointments. I believe somebody asked to be on the planning development committee and I've forgotten or lost the email. I see some hands up. Start with Jeremy. So I'm really really busy at this point and I'm going to need to step back from the finance committee. I'm just going to have trouble making all these meetings. Yeah okay thanks for letting us know. I just found the email is Linda Grovel who wants to join the planning development. So I'll nominate her. That's me yes. Okay so so so before you nominate her let's let's hear from from everybody. So I see Linda's next then Christopher Schenck then Tom Fisher. I am interested in the planning and development committee. I have worked in telecommunications. I'm a software developer consultant and I've been a project manager. I think I have some skills that could be valuable for planning and development. Did you also want to serve on the finance committee too Linda? Accounting was not my best subject in uh management school but if you need me there I will. So so the reason I ask is that that was the appointment that I thought was happening today but it could I could have misunderstood. All right well so so you didn't say no and you know someone who's recruited candidates and I'm sure you've recruited candidates and they don't say no then you have a chance. So all right we'll we'll we'll put you on both then. Thank you. No thank you. Yeah all right. Christopher you're up next. Hi so there's a good reason that Linda and I were both selected for the to be the primary and delegate primary delegate and alternate for Waterbury because our skills and our interests are very much aligned. I was also going to volunteer for the planning and development committee and I am also not super strong at finance so sorry to complicate things but there you have it. Well that's good Christopher we can stumble along together in finance. There we go. What are the needs for for the committees just sort of curiosity? Yeah that's that's a good question so we've we have what five committees that meet regularly so a executive committee is that's kind of separate but we've got planning and development communications policy and finance so those are really where we're looking for for folks to join and do some extra work beyond the governing board meetings. I guess my question my question really was how many people on each committee are you are you looking for? It sounds like you might need more on finance than other committees but maybe that's wrong. Well we have we have one fewer because Jeremy Matt just stepped down from it so it would be good to have that sort of topped up as I think that puts us at what six re? Six or seven yeah. Okay so and so we have we sometimes have issues of we have issues of quorum so if you have a like a three person committee anytime two people on that committee talk about business related to CV fiber it's public record and it has to be a part of a worn meeting so if we have a decent decent handful of people on committees then we have less of a chance of tripping over the open meetings law and public records and such so. I'll just add on the flip side of that though if the quorum gets too big sometimes we've had difficulty making meetings actually happen although having remote meetings has alleviated that that was particularly a problem when you know people had to drive in the middle of snowstorms in Vermont. Right so kind of the more the merrier but on the other hand I think what Chuck is saying is that if you join a committee meeting there is an expectation that you'll actually be there because that can be it can be a it can kill a meeting if there's not enough people there. Is it a two-thirds quorum? It's a simple majority so 50 50 plus one. So Tommy you had your hand up before do you still have a question or comment? No my comment was about quorum and you guys have covered it. Cool glad to hear it so David nominated Linda for the planning and development committee. I'd like to nominate Linda to the finance committee and also appoint Christopher Shank to the planning and development committee. Second. Okay any any further discussion? All right if there's no objections then they are they're appointed. Thanks everybody really appreciate putting in the extra the extra work on it. Okay now we go into the noisier part of the meeting hopefully not too too noisy the 2022 budget. I do not have my motions in front of me and such but Ray I think I can count on you you probably still have that. I still do have that and so before before moving that we go into executive session I just want to make one observation and that is in Q4 we are likely to spend a million dollars which is the biggest outlay of cash indicating that we're finally getting some traction. About three quarters of that will be for a pole inventory. About another 100k for high level design is about 250 close to 250,000 for Northfield Roxbury and Moorfield construction work and so you can see that in this last quarter we're going to spend more than we spent previous year and a half maybe. Anyway it's we're finally getting some traction on the risk. So the we'd like to go into executive session the motion is move that we enter executive session to discuss records that are confidential pursuant to one VSA section 313a6 specifically financial details that relate to our strategic planning. Second. Okay so moved by Ray seconded by Chuck. Any further discussion? Any objections to this motion? Hearing no objection. Well hold that thought though. So Ray if you can mute real quick I'm getting feedback from your side. We need to decide who is coming in with us in terms of alternates and such. We can because alternates are going to be involved in could be involved in the voting on the on the budget I think it would make sense to bring them along. I think we we will have to bid adieu to our AmeriCorps folks and our Vicuda folks and ORCA. I think that's the only folks I see on the on the roster that would be that we'd be kicking off. I see a hand up from Jeremy. Yeah I just wanted to say that I can take the minutes for the rest of the meeting Christian and it's not going to be much but. Okay so if that's okay if I can friendly amend that we include our alternates as well and if there are no objections then I will take that as passing unanimously and we are in executive session so I'm going to go ahead and say goodbye to Gavin and Will and ORCA. Thanks for joining us and Christian for that matter too. Bye-bye.