 I'm going to call the October 8th, 2019 Governing Board of CB Fiber meeting to order. Are there any additions to or changes to the agenda? OK, while we're on this item, I want to point out that this is a tight one, packed tight. It's super unlikely that we're going to get to this. Before we adjourn tonight, I expect that we will probably need to schedule another meeting in part because there's just so much here. And I also don't want to cramp the time that Carol's traveled up here to give us a presentation and talk about possible steps forward. And I don't want to ruin our opportunity to ask her questions while she's here. So if we go along on that one, that would be totally fine. In particular, the approving of the strategy, the draft budget, and the annual report, I think will generate a lot of discussion and might be best to do this as sort of a first reading and come back to this in a week or two because it's probably a meeting on its own. OK, public comments, anybody have anything to add about items that are not on the agenda? OK. Question? Yeah. Can we set a time now for that next meeting? We certainly could. I don't see why not. Does everybody have a good sense of their schedule? OK. Two weeks out works for me because I won't be taking kids with me, bringing kids with me rather. Tuesday the 22nd, Wednesday the 23rd, Thursday the 24th. Just going to make me get a show of hands of who would be available for Tuesday the 22nd at the same time. I don't know if it's going to be here. OK, so that seems to work. Is there anybody who knows they cannot make that date? OK, one. I can't make that whole week, so don't worry about me. OK. So I'll be on vacation. Thank you. You need an alternate, I think, Chivalry. Yeah. So when you're at the door, so you probably talk that up. That might be good. I tried. Wednesday the 23rd, anybody available, evening of the 23rd, Wednesday the 23rd? Anybody know that they're definitely not available on the 23rd? OK, so to Thursday the 24th, let's just do it this way. Anybody know that they're not available on Thursday the 24th? We're probably going to need to have another meeting this month. OK, so one. OK, so for the folks that just walked in, Tuesday the 22nd, how does that evening look for you? For what? For another meeting like this, so that we will likely, because this is a long agenda and there's some big discussions to be made, we're going to have to have another meeting this month. What are the proposed dates? The 22nd, 23rd, 24th. And right now, the one that seems to fit the best for everybody is the 22nd. I can do the 22nd. OK. I can do the 22nd. And Michael, you're good. I can do all three. OK, so I will put together an agenda based on how far we get tonight. And we will plan a meeting on the 22nd. Can I call on somebody to schedule a place? I don't think I'm going to be able to get this. Can somebody run that? I mean, I can try. So the other alternative is we could do Montpelier if somebody wants to just go and call Kellogg Hubbard and get a room. Will you do that, David? I'm not around. Not around. OK. Is Kellogg Hubbard the logical place? I think so. Yeah, they have two big rooms. What's that? Are they open this late? They'll stay open. They're open until 8. Which, as long as we don't go past 8, it should be fine. I could see about Plainfield Town Hall if you want. OK. So why don't you find out maybe as a contingency plan? I'll find out about this place. And I'll find out about Kellogg Hubbard. I'll just do that schedule October 22nd. So we'll say, yeah, hopefully just 6 to 8. I don't want it to be longer than two hours. OK. Treasurer's report, I would kind of prefer not to do either of these next two items before Becca gets here, because she's kind of essential. And our clerk and candidates are not going to be here until like 6.15, as well. Right, so let's turn this over directly to Carol. Carol Monroe, I don't know what your title is anymore. The former CEO of Valley Net, what's that? Emeritus. OK, so CEO Emeritus of Valley Net and EC-Piber, et cetera, et cetera. Fiber, wizard, extra in there, something like that. And we had talked the last time about working with Valley Net. We've been talking about this for a long time, and there were some questions about what that might look like. And so I talked to Stan, I talked to Carol, and Stan's at this EC-Fiber Governing Board meeting, but Carol was able to make it up, because you sort of detached from that part at least. And so you wanted to make sure that everybody understood what they do, what they might do with us, and the grant that they just got, which I think is pretty interesting and definitely dovetails well with what we're doing here. So if I can get this projector on. And there's copies of Carol's presentation in sort of like handouts format right behind you, next to the pizza. Pizza. There's pizza. I bought pizza. No vegan options, sorry. I'll see you. So yes, so we've been talking a lot to Jeremy and some other folks who have come since I was here last time with Irv to come up to come down to speak with EC-Fiber and Valley Net at their location a couple of times and spend conversations going back and forth, particularly around when we were all involved in trying to get the legislation passed as well. That would benefit communication union districts and benefit other groups in the state that haven't yet gotten as far as you have at this point in time. So Valley Net, I mean, our mission is really to bring future-proof connectivity to all homes, businesses, and civic institutions in the member towns for EC-Fiber and for others. And it really has pre-model, and I just want to talk about this to you all about a model that can, in fact, work financially going into the future. It's motto, light shining the world in us. I'm not going to even attempt to say the Latin there, but. Just like you're right. And originally it was set up to suggest the Upper Valley in a very narrow scope, and now that has sort of more future, much larger scope across central Vermont, as well as across central New Hampshire. It was in the United States. It had 6,000 dialogue accounts until 2006. It sold those to Sovereign Net at that time, and it took the proceeds from there and invested in EC-Fiber. And now, since 2007, we've only been working on EC-Fiber. EC-Fiber is very close to reaching all of the unserved areas, of course, for what we mean by that, of all of those that don't have cable access. And so, they've been building about 250 miles a year every year for the last five, four, 20 on five, and it's very close. I think they have one more year's worth of complete build to go. By 2021, all the unserved areas will be covered all the way to that last mile. One exception, and that's those people who are off-grid, which we do have off-grid customers, but we target them one and a half. You never know what the Eastmen's are gonna look like against somebody off-grid. And then- Can I include Montpelier? Unserved areas. Oh, thank you. Unserved areas. So the other two areas are Montpelier and which also belongs to your group and Hartford. Now, they are doing a piece in Hartford this coming year. It's called the Jericho region of Hartford. It's really the section south of Norwich, north of 89. It doesn't have any cable. Not counting white rubber junctions. So that section right in there. And that will be built out this year. The rest of Hartford has a very strong outcast presence. And so it's not that we won't build there, but the business model will be different and the commitments will be different. It won't be a build it and they will comp situation. It will be more of a, we will build fiber service areas where we have commitment from a percentage of those customers that will take service. There are lots of condos with underground construction. They have conduits in for electric telephone cable and not for another. So, there's all sorts of issues around that that make it a difficult decision, but it will be a different business model than the unstructured areas. They know that. We've been discussing that for five years and I've been working with EC Fiber and they'll continue that process. So, why do we want to help CD Fiber? Well, mostly because we know that it's worked for EC Fiber. We've had our growing pains or some decisions we made that maybe we shouldn't have during that five year or seven year process. One of those was at one point we decided to buy our own telephone switch, which we could never get up and running and be successful at. Only to find out it was much more difficult and more technically challenging than they had anticipated. And you needed to focus on one set of technologies and this was a totally different set of technologies. We would have met a whole new staff in the end they decided to outsource that function. But that was a mistake that they made and funds that they spent and maybe they wouldn't, I wouldn't suggest that you would do. Other is they did build where people invested and that kind of created a little spiderweb effect across the entire network. It made it much more difficult to build whole towns which is what we do now. And it has meant that we have overbuilt some of our first build because we didn't plan for all of the premises in the town. We only planned for where people had invested. Putting blinders on and not looking at the streets on the left and the right where there are more and more houses. So there wasn't enough fiber put up to accommodate that. So we fixed that and bought it and that Verne Stratford had built before and we had to overbuild it and it's now completely built border to border in those towns. But it's something I wouldn't suggest. I would suggest you get designed full towns at a time. So you don't have that issue. You can choose to build after you have a full design anywhere you like but you need to have a design and a plan going forward. So we did learn from all of that and of course the financing, what our cap acts is, how we build, we've maintained that 30,000 a mile for the last seven years. It's not, it hasn't changed. It could change a little bit with some of the changes that are happening here in Vermont with regards to CCI poll, the poll ownership. But for the most part, that's not changed. It continues and of course operations continues to grow, they're now up to 22 employees at EC Fiber and I think we have three openings coming up this coming year. I said it's close to completion. So in this, Valinette of course is the operations company for EC Fiber. EC Fiber has zero employees similar to yourself. And so Valinette has always planned for EC Fiber and has been very much involved in all of what EC Fiber is doing. But as we look towards that window of building less EC Fiber, and the question came about, well how can we take this lesson and get out to other groups in the state? And we find to do that at the state level with all the legislation that you've seen past this past year, we've been heavily involved in that and we'll continue to do that. But we also have partnered with a group of three for USDA grant, it's called the Rural Community Development Grant, with rural and important communities and partners from off. That's a group that works with rural communities. If you know Matt Dunn, he's the principal of this group. They have a lot of mapping strategies and mapping individuals. They have a lot of planning individuals and a number of people who know how to do surveys and various other skill sets and they help rural communities not just in Vermont, but all over the country. So between RISI and Valinette and then CTG Energy and Technologies, a group in Maryland. The principal partner there is Joanne Horvus and if you've ever read any of the materials that you see on the fiber broadband association or muninetworks.org or any of those sites, she's been a very powerful player in that world and at every single conference. She, her company does do feasibility planning, business planning and others for rural areas and all over the country. And right now they're focused a little bit on Garrett County, Maryland. So this grant has six municipal partners. Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and you go, what? I'm now into what I said, what? Pine Bluff, Arkansas, two Vermont companies and one in Maryland, we're doing Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Arkansas, but Matt's company, Rural Innovation Strategies has been working on Pine Bluff, Arkansas for a while now on various rural issues and not just broadband. And then Garrett County, Maryland, which is of course where CTG Energy has been working. And then we looked at Vermont and New Hampshire and chose two towns in Vermont, Reedsboro, because they have been heavily working on broadband as you have, but have not formed a district at this point in time. And Roxbury, because it's adjacent to EC fiber and part of the CB fiber group, so the hope was whenever we do, Roxbury could extend out to all the rest of the CB fiber and move that along. New Hampshire, it's with the North Country Council, but it's primarily for Carroll County Broadband, which is a group of towns in the Lake, just north of Lakewood-Casaki in the Conway area. And they also have been moving this along fairly quickly. They would like to do what you're doing. They'd like to do what you see fiber has done. And this would try to determine that direction. Very different in New Hampshire, by the way, because there's no funding at all at the state level, zero funding. And CTC brings also to technical assistance to the whole group. The other group in New Hampshire is Lake Centipede Region Planning Commission. And that group is just starting this process. These towns are just starting to get interested. So those are the groups that will be involved. And some of the services will include this sort of menu of things. Basically, we're meeting, we met with Reedsboro to say, okay, you've done a survey, you've done this, you have a feasibility grant in your pocket, what can we help you with? And so there are some things out here that we'll be doing for them in terms of financial impact and analysis and business planning for Reedsboro, as well as looking at the possibility of a communication union district in the southern part of the state or two. So that's something that's come up. And we have talked to Jeremy, and we'll be more involved with Roxbury. And this is just a piece of this tonight to determine what is it we can do sort of with this, with CD-Fibre and Roxbury, but in terms of items on this list that we could do for that greater model that can be done for all towns and the whole district together. That would be the reason for doing this. This grant for the USDA comes down to creating six different models that communities can use to sort of set forward, help themselves move things forward in a different way. And we know that Reedsboro is different than Roxbury, their opportunities are different. We know that Carroll County is different than the Lake Centipede region. And certainly Garrett County and Pine Bluff Arkansas are different as well. So there'll be different types of models, but that's what the USDA wants from this grant. And that's what we will provide to them at the end of that grant period. So the goal for the USDA is a broadband strategic planning guidebook with multiple models. And thankfully, CTC Energy has writers on this app. You know, everybody brings something different to the table. So we can provide all that technical data and they can write the guidebook. That would be fine. So that's kind of that grant. And then let's talk a little bit about the big grant, the big little grant here in Vermont, the broadband innovation business planning grant. And I understand that you probably in the process of trying to pull one together with the subscriber. I have a few concerns about that. One is timing. So I've already received, for an example, an RFP from another town in this, not in your district, but in the state. And so if you wait for this grant to come up and then you do an RFP for feasibility and then maybe an RFP for planning, that RFP process is a long process. You have to publish it, you have to get responses, you have to analyze it. And this grant is a short window. It's a six month grant. They're looking for feasibility studies to be done in three, business planning, then the other three. So it makes it really tight. It's something that you couldn't do, but the timing of that would be something that you have to consider. The other is, everybody's, Valinette is interested in the EC5O model, right? So could it be tweaked to include other things like perhaps a wireless type of option or some wireless in it? It could be. But if you're going from this grant for feasibility, which the feasibility has to include some business planning and financial planning because otherwise you don't know if it's feasible, you go into business planning that's based on feasibility planning and then the whole thing, going to a VEDA request for funding from the state or start-up funding, they're all tied together into a, you can't do an RFP for construction or if you don't, on somebody else's design, on somebody else's plan, on somebody else's feasibility. So it ties together. I wanted to keep that in mind because for an example, Valinette's not interested in doing a completely wireless network. I look at Michael and I say that, but you know that, right? Because that's not our forte, that's not something we have a strength for, but that's something that if somebody did a feasibility study that showed a lot of that, we wouldn't do any business planning because we don't have enough information to VEDA. And the same thing would happen on the reverse side of that. But the VEDA application tends to be based on that business plan. Now I did go back and look at the requirements for the VEDA application. It doesn't say you have to do this first. It does say you have to have a feasibility and you have to have a business plan because you have to have that anyway to apply for VEDA funds. But it doesn't say you have to get a big grant in order to do the VEDA fund. That I did check. But if you were to go with EC Fiber or Valinette, not EC Fiber, sorry, Valinette, we sort of developed this timeline so you could get a look at it. And so some of this is Stan Williams who works a lot with us in the planning piece of it and then the financial planning piece of it. He's the person who's at the, he's the private board meeting tonight doing their budget. We're there to take care of that. So basically the idea would be to come up with a business plan for Roxbury and the unserved areas of the district. Now that means identifying, and I think you've done a lot of this, those areas that are significantly served already. So the reason we, EC Fiber didn't build up Montpelier is because 90% of 95% of Montpelier has multiple carriers and they have options. So that it gets built last, those served areas get built last. So it would be based on that. We would approve it forward and follow through with the requests for Vita funding of about $4 million for you, for any other reason. But Stan was very instrumental in creating the language that went into that Vita funding. So he was very instrumental in knowing what kind of a business plan is necessary to perhaps obtain that funding. If you were going to be working with Valia, we'd go on an operations agreement from the EC Fiber and that's the way we could see. And we would assist in raising the 400,000 match that's required for the Vita grant Vita nodes. We would begin co-collection and make ready work in Roxbury because that would be the one that was the most adjacent and easiest to get to. And that design departed that other brand. And so that would be the first 50 miles and allowing you to have a first year of auditing financials at that point. 2021, we had two more towns about another 100 miles. I can tell you what we've learned from EC Fiber is you cannot build any more than 250 and 250 is a strength. And it's primarily because the utilities can't handle any more than that. And they really have a problem with that 250. So when we talk about building 20, 50 miles, we really talk about an 18-month process. It's not a year. But another 100 miles, finish that construction on the first one and light up Roxbury and then continue in 2022, like 100 miles, the next 700 customers in 2022, we keep the process going. You can see that it happens there. How far is it 100 miles, get you, are we talking? Most of these rural towns, we look at row miles and to give us row miles, except for the last six roads. Class four roads. To give us an estimate. And it's been pretty good. So in a more populated town like Stratford and Stratford, almost within both, in 10 miles of the network miles, in towns less populated like Grandville and Hancock, it's actually been less miles than row miles. Mainly because you have that Green Mountain National Forest that has roads, but no people, no premises. So it has depended, but it's been a good ballpark thing. So what we're talking about here is not doing an RFP, not getting bids, not getting other companies to tell us what their ideas are. Signing an agreement with Valley Net and just rolling forward. That's what we're talking about. Kind of, there's more to it than that. Okay. But I mean, from their perspective, from their perspective, this is kind of how to work. I think there may still be, and that's the discussion later, is that what does the RFP look like? Are we looking at getting consultants for some parts of this or whatever, but that's, I think that's still under discussion. So when, so we are working with the Southern Vermont Academy Project, is that what it's called, something along those lines, and the Regional Planning District down there, put in for a BFD grant. It will start, that process will start with feasibility for Communication Union Districts, because there are none at that point in time, and then we'll develop that feasibility for a district down there. We are named on that application, VAL-Headings, as well as Rural Center, Rural Innovation Strategies for Mapping and Capability. How would you get $8 million revenue by financing, if you wouldn't have enough revenue in 2023 going on that timeline, to go out with that kind of a finance amount? Well, I think that is exactly what Stan is talking about here, is that you would have, by that timeline, you would have 700 plus customers on the network, plus, I think these timelines are a little bit tight. Okay, that's right, I was just trying to understand that, because I know there's this whole, you gotta have revenue for a while and... Three years of auditing financials. Right. And by that third year, they need to be cash flow positive and EBITDA positive, and that's what he's, he did these things, but that's what he's talking about here. And then you take it to the municipal bond market. Right. Payback half of VEDA one year, half of VEDA the next year, that's what their, their intention is, is that you get paid back so they can re-loan it to somebody else, and, and strictly deal with the municipal bond market for the purpose of capital expansion. So your, your cash flow positive, even a positive on those customers, should be able to pay for operations, and principal and interest, things. It's a not-for-profit, there's no profit in there, but that's what that would pay for, and that would show up on your, on your audited finances. So, representing Marshfields, and I believe I can speak for Cabot too, and saying that if you begin in Roxbury, it's gonna be a while, no, is that, it's not a, when you're expanding Northwards over the years kind of situation? No, you don't, that just has not necessarily a case. You do not need to start in Roxbury, and it's gonna end up. Okay. You want to actually, to be honest with you, sort of want to start, I'm not sure with Cabot. Northeastern corner of our district. Okay, so you really want to start on the outskirts that are more unserved, and then focus on Bury, Montpelier, those areas that already have sources. We've got sources. So you surround it like an amoeba, and then take it home. It's like a dot at home. And that's true for many of these towns, as you can see, a significant cable premise just down the center of town. And so it doesn't mean you design the little town, so you know how you're gonna deal with that, but you don't necessarily have to deal with that sector as a whole. You want to know, you know, where your health locations are going to be, and that you have a design that all works together so that you don't have to worry about it. And then there's gonna be an analogous design for the whole district, because all our population centers are still right in the center of the 17 towns. So in general, we look to what we've done with BC Fire in that the district, this is sort of some structure around this, the district addresses things like general policy, they own all the assets, they issue the bonds. It's controlled by all of you, and decisions about the district doesn't have any employees, it's all volunteer municipal activity. And then in this terms, RallyNet manages all the facets of the business under contract. So business planning, financing, design, build maintenance, customer service, and so on and so forth. And I can tell you, as CEO of RallyNet at the time for EC-Fiber, I would recommend to them what areas that we build the following year. They would have a say in that, you know, it's not like we pulled it out of the hat. But generally when you follow the mission and you follow what's been done in the past, it makes sense. So, and districts make sense, districts themselves make sense because you can serve towns like Grandville, Hancock, and Rochester because you serve Stratford and Rolich, right? So there's some more densely populated areas and really least dense areas, more rural areas. None of this is really densely populated and impoverished in the long run. But that's one of the advantages of having a district. So I would present to the board my recommendations for the following year. And they would discuss it, we'd discuss it at a meeting. Sometimes it would tweak here and there and I would adjust. So sometimes that would make sense to be able to do that. And then the revenue, it's rarely the revenue bond market that prefers that the issuers have no idea. So when EC-Fiber became a district and it was gonna go out to the bond market for the first time, we talked a lot to municipal capital markets who's our bond agency. But because we thought at that time we might merge them together. Valley Net was only supporting EC-Fiber at that time and we gave one organization and the bond market, bond people said, no, don't do that. Because they like the fact that an operations company is running the network. And frankly, they like it that it's a municipality because it experience and that type of thing. But also because of the pensions. Pensions is a big deal for them in the municipal side. They didn't want to be involved in any tensions that might arise in a sense district. And so we kept it the way it was. It was a contract between the two that sort of identifies what each member does. And they, you know, it's why I like a business, not like a, it's not like I go and don't do this. And put on like it like that. So these have been our results up to this point in time. So the revenues are steady increase in our revenues closely reaching four and a half main. And even a positive, you can see it's not in the very beginning. So you get to reach that point in the year three, gradually climbing, certainly customers. And you can see the takeoff in 2015 and 2016 to a much higher curve there. But that's because we started building 250 miles at a time. So the first years we built 30 in that vicinity 25, 30 here and there. And then when we started to go to the one market we borrowed enough to do 250 miles at a stretch. And that's what's pretty good. That work miles, I think we're up to just over a thousand. Sorry, quick question. What is the EBITDA? Earnings before interest taxes. Depreciation and amortization. Okay. Depreciation and amortization, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'll always remember that. So he's just talking about the relevant paragraphs in there which is to say that the district has rallying it during the day-to-day operations and then deprecating that to them. And the detailed bill decisions. Follow the district's policies. And we make the recommendations not the nature's thing for them. And I actually have very few changes when I make the recommendation because I know what the district is expecting to see. I know what the next steps are. The investors, bankers, bond markets appreciate the separation between the municipal and the municipal governance. And we have the same relationship that Vallynette does with Lime Fiverr. So Lime is a little bit different in that they have a group of private investors who have invested, have this network built and then taken it all over throughout the town of Lime, universal access. Vallynette is the group that does their construction management, which is where we are today. And then lighting it up and how far it's supposed to go. It's right across the limit from that group. So it made them a lot of sense. You can get to it. How's that work? Carroll County in New Hampshire said, well, why can't Vallynette do that for us? And it's like, wait a minute. That's like a three and a half hour drive. You know, you come out and bring a second truck. It's a little bit hard for us. But there are other operators where that could do the Carroll County. Hey, Carol. The middle part of the slide, we could go over that for a second. So you see Fiverr's general policies to cover underserved first. But they also want to cover areas with the highest take rate first. And they aren't always the same. No, I think what he's trying to say here, this is a slide, is to avoiding the politics where generally politics says to do the highest density population. So you're, you. Yeah, that's, so I mean it's the opposite. So yeah, so underserved areas first doesn't mean we don't go through some cabled sections we do, because you can't get to the other side of town without going through a cabled section. What we're learning about that is that cabled section through the center of town that we're serving, we're picking up this whole business is on. They like our product better. They don't need a television product. So they might have had Comcast or Charter, Spectrum, and now they're coming on board with us. So we're picking up small businesses along there, our pricing strategy is better for them. So it's not without customers. But in the cabled areas, we're, we experienced today about a 17% take rate versus the underserved areas at 40 to 45% take rate. And that grows to 16, 65, and how long we've been in the town. Can I get back to that? So we, over time and more recently, more intensely started talking about where do we serve and where don't we serve first? And one thing we've been concerned about is if we're, especially in the first three years when we're getting either Vita money or somewhere and we don't have a financial record, we have to demonstrate to the lender that we'll be able to make our debt service. And the most underserved areas have lower population, typically, and we may not get enough critical mass of customers to cover debt service. So we've been discussing, well, are we gonna go for these middle towns, not the dense ones and not the underserved first? And so, but that, you see, Fiber's policy is strictly to go that way. So not underserved, so not unserved, necessarily. But underserved. But not necessarily the most underserved towns first? I mean, we didn't do Grandville, Hancock, Rochester, which are the most rural towns and the least population until after we did the more underserved, meaning all they had was DSL. Okay. So that's sort of in harmony with what we've been sort of talking about. So that's good to clarify that. But it's good to do whole towns at a time if you can. Now, having said that, we've done everything in random except the Senate, because that's highly cable. And so we, it's clearly the donor. We'll eventually, we have a plan to do that, but that's not today. So that's another issue we've been talking about if I can go on. One idea that's been bandied about is that we not necessarily do whole towns, perhaps I think I agree with you that you design for whole towns, but not necessarily build the whole towns at first and maybe build over several towns, do your 100 or 120 miles, but not necessarily concentrating on individual towns. As long as you come to whole design first. As long as the whole designs, you're comfortable with that. Okay. Because I need to pick and choose. So when there are a lot of financial expertise, we raise $40 million to date. $32 million net for DC fiber net meaning that we paid back those first investors of all those private investors, seven million plus dollars, they've all been paid back and we've got paid back out of the first two tranches of municipal bonds. And I said last time I was here, so we're not very happy about that. So we're getting about 6% on it. And there are notes and what quite is good on the bonds. Not good for us. And Stan has been doing this for over 30 years before becoming involved with DC fiber. He was involved with a cellular company, two or three cellular companies that we eventually bought by 18 to 18 years. This is Puerto Rico with all sorts of IPOs in my current mind. And we're heavily involved in the way that the leader is structured in all hospitals in this past year. He's, he has been involved in coming to them. So this is sort of the DC fiber financing but the first 2008 to 2014 nothing had any 2008 to 10 other than Valley Net sold its dial-up accounts to Sovereign Net, which is by the sum income there. That's about it. And then as people invested and we had three major investors initially that about a million dollars worth that built the first prototype and first parts of the network and the rest are all smaller investors, $2,500 and so on. That's the piece that we want, we'd like to see Vita take out, right? So that you have Vita financing through that, will you become able to go into the municipal bond market which is our bonds last year were sold out in two days. Municipal bond market? Municipal bond market. There's a, there seems to be a not very many options out there. And we're not a rated company so we have no rating at all. I guess if you were in the financial field you might call us junk bonds. So I hope you use that word but it's because we have no rating and we won't go for a rating until we're ready to have it be good rating. It's better to be unrated if you're rated that way. So the first with the wannabe customers that invested, we needed 30,000 to build. We still, the business model does still call for an average of six customers per mile. That's an average across the density. The density for BC fiber is about 14 houses per mile on an average and in the unserved areas. So that's about a 40 to 50% paper. So you can't get that in areas and beforehand I use them all as an example at the time because many of those houses, there are not six houses per mile and that's just the way it is. But then you go to that further or Stratford or something that's sort of more like 14 houses or 18 houses. So the average is out. So that's, he's just saying the Vita bridge loans are to take out those private investors to not have the private investors but to be able to use these Vita funds. They can turn over and give to another communication union district to move on. Sort of pounding on that in the South as well. Our rubber newborns, 23 to 25 year maturity, five to six percent interest rates all tax free. They actually range. So 23 to 25 year maturity is actually an average. There are some at three to five years, much lower interest rates than the ones that 23 to 25 years, which are much higher interest rates. And then we talked about refinancing for other, refinancing at some point in time. And it requires the three years of audited financials, a positive EBDA, EBita. And those bonds are issued to the district. They're not issued to the towns. There's no liability on the part of the towns for these bonds. They're strictly revenue bonds that have to do with the district. If they would have failed for some reason, they cannot go back to the towns for reports. So the obligation of the district to pay that. And these are just our costs. And you have this in your presentation. These haven't changed. This has been pretty stable for the last seven years. The way it's changing is, CCI sold their jointly owned polls to GMP. And you have to be careful what you ask for here because that's sort of a good thing because you have one owner in most cases of the polls. And CCI does, CCI is Consolidated Communications. They still own some polls. But all those joint owned polls are now owned by GMP. But what it does, if you're a poll owner, you have to have a tariff at the state that says, if I'm going to move the facilities on the poll to move the line down, up or forward, it's X number of dollars to replace the polls. Another one is a whole menu of things, tariff at the state. But if you're a third party on the poll, which they're now considered, they're supposed to pass through their actual charges, which are considerably higher than their tariff. And so that's part of the reason they did that, is so that they could reduce their costs for doing this make ready. Well, no, to increase the cost for doing the make ready. Reduce the losses in that area. And in some ways, I'll be completely frank. The tariff for CCI had not been changed in many years. I think the late 1999 in that vicinity, 2000, 2001. And so those prices were a bit out of date. They had a lot of things they wanted to resolve at the state level that was more important than those tariffs. And so they never brought it up to the DPS to change. Well, I'm sure at 250 miles a year, that became priority real quick, right? Well, it does, and natural. The other good news though about Consolidated is the new union contract allows them to hire contractors. And it's good and bad. They're laid off a lot of their own employees, which is not good, but they are hiring contractors that are non-union. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know, but they're able to hire contractors. So when you get, when they get 250 miles that they have to respond to, they can go out and hire contractors. And what we don't know is how the one-touch make-ready rules that are in the process at the DPS are going to affect all of this. Is that going to make them, does that cost go down? It's just going to make it balance out. So now they've gone up because of CCI's newest make-ready costs, and they're going to go back down. That means to be seen in the government. So just to emphasize the builds we've done, the phone company tariffs were remarkably cheaper than the electric utilities. And so now that CCI has sold a bunch of polls, it just means make-ready costs more. Make-ready costs more. That's what we're counting on right now. Whenever we do a business plan now, we're counting on it getting more until we see the effects of the new language for one-touch make-ready. There's lots of issues surrounding one-touch make-ready. I think the primary one in the telecom space is if you submit a poll application for 200 polls. So if you're building 100 miles, the most you can submit on an application is 200. And you have three polls that need to be replaced. Does that mean the whole application is complex now and therefore not eligible for one-touch make-ready? Or what happens? If they pull those three polls out and the rest is okay for one-touch make-ready, that remains. Do you want to expand what one-touch make-ready is? Sure. One-touch make-ready is where the contractor, usually the one that you would hire, would go through and raise or lower the lines on the poll to make ready for your space. And it sort of happens today because Valinette uses use-disk communications to build construction. They also do make-ready work for Comcast and Spectrum. And so they do it while they're doing our construction today. They don't, we don't have a separate, they don't come out separately to do that. And they've done it for Fairpoint when Fairpoint was on strike. So it's not like they're unfamiliar with the copper lines and the copper plant. So knowing that, you know that use-disk can do it. I think there are other companies that can do it as well. They've been doing it for those utilities all along. But as it stands right now, it's the actual owner of whatever wire is on the poll. They have to go there and they have to move it themselves. Generally speaking, yeah. Which is slow. Some companies, yeah. So it would be extremely slow if they all had to go out one right after the other. And the poll owners are responsible for those deadlines that are set up in the administrative rules or that tell you how long it should take to be your neighbor's poll. So you're supposed to consider that as part of those rules. So it makes it harder to control how long it's gonna take if you have to worry about that the Comcast is gonna move there. So sovereign it, it's gonna sovereign it, but it's gonna move there first like. But now, if we can get this one cut to make it ready to work well, it'll just become part of the construction project process. With the exception of polls that need to be replaced, polls that might have a DSL, ESLAM connected to the poll, polls that might have a Comcast box, you know. Also, equipment kind of closet, if you wanna call that attached to the poll, those polls will be considered to be Comcasts. So that's sort of an unknown going into this a lot, but it will be better than that thing. So why valignette? We've had experience doing this. It's been a proven model. We'd like to see it move throughout the state in some way. Every district will be a little bit different. Would valignette wanna be the operator for a southern district? Or is there other operators down there that may make more sense? It's the same thing about the New Hampshire story. So you're driving two hours or three hours south. It's not a customer. Just may not make sense. But we'd just like to see it move forward. And that's really, valignette is a not-for-profit in the state. I mean, it is not our goal to be the sole operator. We're not power hungry. We don't need to do that. Easy Fiber is certainly sufficient on its own and Lime Fiber is fine on its own. We don't need to do that. But we do see it as our mission to move this whole concept forward so that more people in Vermont can have the internet access to the equivalent of batteries. And that's the reason we do this. So you asked about titles earlier. So I am on the valignette board. I'm right now the secretary of the board for valignette. My responsibility right now is community outreach. That's partly why I'm here tonight. And Stan and I work on that together. Stan Williams is the chair of the board. He's also the CFO of valignette. And as we move forward through October, we're going to reverse positions here a bit. And I'm going to become the CEO of the chair of the board. He's going to do more of the CFO work on the board. I think this is going to be the clerk. But that's the intent as we move forward. But our roles are really about community outreach and moving this forward in some way. I can't tell you how many hours I give away. And I don't get paid for most of what I do and most of what I do in New Hampshire will only be paid if we can find some grants to pay it with because they have no funding for all of New Hampshire. And I don't mind doing that. I'd like to see this done. I'd like to see my town in New Hampshire have broadband. And I'd like to see all these rural towns in Vermont have broadband. And you have beautiful, I drove to Reedsboro the other day. I've never been south of nine on 100. It's beautiful. And of course, it's beautiful now because of the leads as well. But it's just gorgeous out there. But the more you go out there, the farther you get, this beautiful country, the less broadband there is available. You just need to fix that for all of you. A couple of questions. One is when we visited the office, we talked about the possibility of a series of proposals and agreements, not necessarily signing an operating agreement in advance. And what I'm hearing here is that you'd like an operations agreement. And so the next question is, well, for how long a period of time would be an acceptable investment value then for us? So I know that he had that right up front, that's right up front before you start to build. So I think the working together had to do with funding coming from a feasibility grant or funding coming from a VIG grant to pay for the feasibility and business plan. It's really more about business planning for all of you who've done a lot of the feasibility. You have all done that during surveys now to see about take rates. So that type of work, particularly in-depth business planning that would end up being tied into Vita financing would all be part of that VIG type of grant or feasibility grant. We've been doing this a long time so if that's what you wanted, then that would be there. But those would be different contracts than an operations, construction contract which really only occurs when you have funding. Right, that's what I took away at last time. We looked at phase one, phase two, phase three operations contract. If everyone decides that that's the way to go. That's right. But we could also do an RFP at that point. You could. What makes that difficult is you've done, that's what I started with, okay? So you've done business planning based on a certain concept. And you go out with an RFP to build that concept or to operate that concept. That company may not wanna do that concept. It may not be there for 10. And so I'm just cautioning on that. That's all I'm trying to say. So I think you're right. I mean I think you're seeing this the same way I am but I think there are points where we would be able to say we need to shift gears here and consider all of our options. This is certainly not a railroaded situation. It's also the same thing as if we sign a deal for operations for five years, let's say. At the four-year point, we do an RFP and everybody competes. I mean that's still an option as well. Thank you, Sabine. I'm the chair of the business development committee and we've been working out an RFP. We have a grant and we're moving along. And I think our committee is pretty interesting getting an independent view of how we ought to proceed. So this is interesting to me but not, I think, exactly where our committee is and we're pretty much finished with our RFP. We have some money. We're applying for the broadband initiative grant. So it's sort of like, this is a different model of operation than I am. I don't think this is mutually exclusive. Okay, the other thing that I know that this is independent of the RFP is could Roxbury just join EC-Fiber? EC, I can't speak for EC-Fiber but EC-Fiber is struggling with how and when they accept additional talents into their district. And so I don't know when they will make that decision. Mainly because they really want to see the rest of the uncertain areas finished first and they want a plan for the service for the heartbreak and so on, a business plan for that and that they can work with. I think at that time they will consider that but it would be always been a different time. So we only put in Roxbury because it represents a CD-Fiber town that we would use some of this funding to help you all out, do something with what you needed to do. And so we'll meet with you to decide, okay, what is it you need, just like we met with Reeds for us to say, what is it that you need for us to do? Can we go back a little bit to the not mutually exclusive that you just said? So we got a USDA grant for $25,000 and we have other match and in-kind service that we're adding to all of that and we're coming out with an RFP for a business plan and our intention is to use this money in the in-kind services to have a contractor develop a business plan for us. So the idea of it not being mutually exclusive would one possibility be that Valley Net would respond to the RFP? Is that how it's not mutually exclusive? That's not what I was envisioning. I mean, they're certainly entitled to do so but no, I'm imagining putting out the RFP for a contractor that's gonna work with Valley Net, stands already on the hook with the USDA grant to go and give us some of these services anyways and he's still willing to do that. The money that they have to do some of the feasibility in Roxbury dovetails with this just like that. So I mean, what I have on the item down under 2020 strategy so that we have an agreed forward motion on this that includes the business development committee's work that includes the surveying and moving forward is making some concrete decisions now or maybe the next meeting depending about how that can work and fitting and figuring out how that works. So it would be if we were to change course a little bit and maybe change course isn't the right word because we didn't know about this until we just sat with your count. So the concept then might be to revise the RFP potentially so that whomever the contractor is would be doing this work in concert with Valley Net. Because that would be lined up with the money that we're getting from USDA. What money, Central Vermont, CV Fibers money or Valley Net's money? CV Fibers money from the USDA grant. We have that is very targeted to a specific RFP, I mean work plan and it's not this. No, but in terms of building to doing the feasibility study and doing the business modeling, Stan is like I said, Stan from Valley Net is already on the hook to do in kind services to do that financial modeling for us and to do this work. So I mean it's already, I mean in the USDA grant there's already a partnership with Valley Net. No, there is not. Okay, so it's not a legal business partnership but Stan as, I'm sorry. It's an in kind, it was listed as an in kind. It's included as part of the in kind contribution. Right, so the dilemma is this. To me a feasibility plan should tell you what are all your options, right? So your options about just thinking about feasibility and putting my hat on, talking to a group that hadn't done anything. So what are all your options? Your options as a communication union district, I can give you five options because I know towns that have put out our piece recently that got five responses. And so they're all different options but they're all different models of what you're going to have done. So you're going to need out of that feasibility if you do a generic feasibility plan and you decide out of those three, four, five options list three, fiber to the phone, completely wireless, a hybrid network, all those options. Then, and you pick one but it's not something that Valley Net's or pay is. We can hardly do a business plan for something that's not within our failure. Look at it that way. I mean, nor would you want us to because that's not our level of expertise. We don't have that expertise. On the other hand, on a hybrid option we may be able to partner with a wireless company to do a business plan that would include both. But it would be a partner with somebody else because we don't have that wireless expertise. So it's hard when you say you're going to go out with a business plan, when you haven't even decided what it is you want, what's it look like? Unless we've already decided you want fiber to the home and then there's sort of the Valley Net model for that and then I don't know what an independent person you've come up with. So that's my, I'm guessing I'm here because I just want to sort of weigh that out. That's a difficult conundrum. It's almost like you can't go out for a business plan until you decide what it is you're going to do. Which is what I was hoping to decide in that agenda item 2020 strategy so that we can. Yeah but we can't, I mean one of my concerns all along is we as board can't decide what to do without help. Like we need somebody to do all the financial work and real feasibility work and whatever. And that's, so it's a chicken and egg issue. So all the help that we've provided over the last year or so it gives you a lot of information to work with. Yeah. If that's your goal to sort of establish a communication union district in the same way that EC fiber has done that's what Valley Net has done. That's the help that we can provide and we have been providing it to you without any issues there. But if that's not your goal that makes it more difficult to do that. So suppose we continue their process of an RFP maybe modified a little bit more. And RFP is for both a feasibility study and a business plan so that we're truncating the long period of time that takes the, we're not going to go out and do RFPs for example. And in the feasibility study phase of it we pose, we suggest that consultants propose different models and even consider doing a feasibility study of multiple models. And at the end of the feasibility study making recommendations are you saying that Valley Net, timing was a big issue in your slide. Are you saying that if we don't grab the opportunity to work with Valley Net early we'll lose it or will it still be an option if they decide, it could be Valley Net that wins the RFP but it could be another consultant. Whoever recommends let's say either a fiber to the home solution or a hybrid solution that Valley Net might be able to consider. The next half of the faith, the business plan could take all that into account. Is that how we can do both? You know, I think that if you want a complete feasibility study then I think Valley Net, we talked about this on the phone, Valley Net has to be independent of that because our feasibility study is going to tell you how to do this in the way that we know how to do it and how it works and how it's worked in the past and how it worked for you, right? So we're probably not going to try to bring in your hybrid network or even, we wouldn't even know where to begin to show you, okay you could do these areas with wireless. Well, so take that off the table, just fiber to the home. Let's say we, after the feasibility process and you're looking for a feasibility study, we're probably going to write that in such a way it's going to mimic what we've already done. Unless the problems that we had, right? The ones that we learned from, I think you don't want those. And then if that was what you wanted for after a feasibility study, then we would, we could help with the business planning. As he said, for whatever reason, we sort of thought you were on that trajectory. And so Stan offered to do some business planning in kind contribution for this grant because that's what we thought you were. But if it's a different, if you're looking for something different. We don't know yet. Well. That's what we're trying to do. I understand that. But if you're looking for something different, that's kind of hard for him to do. Right. You can't do a business plan for something that, it doesn't matter where he's supposed to be going. Jared. So I don't know if I'm getting too far ahead of myself or not. And I've been learning a lot from working with Carol and talking with Stan and the EC fiber model is what I've learned. So maybe that's all I know. But I'll tell you what, if five years from now, somebody could be pointing to the graphs and the charts that you were pointing to and was saying that was CB fiber over the past five years, I would be a static. So there's, you know, the Venn diagram of what you have done and what we want to do. There is, there's so much between the two that is similar. I don't know if I'm premature about this 2020 discussion you want to have. And I'm not exactly sure of the details. I want people to ask questions of Carol until there's no more questions for the moment. I mean, like I said, we're going to have another meeting and that's probably more of the final discussion. Yeah. And so haven't you encountered customers who want, who could only be accessed through Wi-Fi? Potential customers? No, and I'll answer that to me. Honestly, the reason why that comes up sometimes is that customers have underground construction of their utilities in the road to the house over some steep incline over a long, long. Very long stretch. The difficulty with that with the fiber to the network, fiber to the home, fiber to the premise project is if you are going to bring Wi-Fi to the street level and then supposedly try and you might have to help me with this but try and get it to the home, right from the street, from the pole on the street. That's not usually a clear path. I mean, part of the reason they have issues is because of them and it's very forested and very, it's not impossible but we've not looked at that service and it's only because they don't want to spend the funding to put in the conduit necessary from the street to the house. It's not because it can't be done, it's that that dollar amount is high. The way that we've remedied that over the last year and a half is we have been subsidizing more heavily the underground underweight installations because you present, most of them are well under $500 but then you get somebody who's got this long treacherous driveway, $1,800. Yeah, it's like $1,800 or $2,000 or $5,500 or $10,000. Are you sometimes able to pull these clamps through existing or is that able to pull the top out? Has said that the conduit on private land that belongs to the customer, belongs to the owner of the land and therefore we can pull fiber through, but here's the, so we can pull fiber through and so if it's 400 feet, that's not an issue but when you start having a lot of pull boxes in between, those belong, the actual physical box belongs to the utility. That's bizarre. And so what we do is we generally go through that conduit and then we go around the box. We go around the box. That's probably 2% of the underground. Most of it is around the 400 foot mark. You're essentially saying you manage this issue. We're managing, yeah. But there's still some people who don't want to spend anything to do. We just did a installation that was 1,100 feet and it had two fair point pull boxes and at each end of each run, they had put concrete in the conduits around the own cable. Jesus. So even though the owner owned the conduit, it was not usable. So we put in an entire new run to the house and that guy paid $6,000. So one thing that we haven't looked at because each time we have not found a good solution is fiber that can be safely and permanently be buried directly without conduit. It's very tough in these areas that were lost. It's not so tough in the Midwest. But here, if you'd like my garden, I can turn it under in the fall and I'll have rocks in the spring. All of a sudden we have new rocks, right? We have to scrub. And that happens of course under a more tundra that's been run, a non-conduit that's been run. So we kind of, we really want to do the conduit and not find a good solution for that in Vermont or New Hampshire because of the terrain. But it's not impossible. There is fiber out there that's hard to even encase in all of that sort of thing. Carol, I think I attended, I was attending a meeting in Pomfret when you presented to the select board down there a number of years ago. I used to work for that community. And I think one, yes indeed. I think so, to my point, you have a great deal of expertise in navigating the seemingly vast morass of municipal government. I think that's something that we're not really fully appreciating here and that you have negotiated and spoken to and on behalf of ValleyNet NEC Fiber to many communities. And I mean, we all act as representatives of various communities, but that is a sort of an unremarked upon service that you provide, in essence. And I think that is something that is extremely valuable personally. You spoke very clearly and seemingly were able to sway a number of public officials, including our road commissioner, as to what you were doing and how you were going about doing it. And I think that just in terms of optics, that is a service that your groups can provide that maybe we should consider very strongly before we embark it down any of these various paths. So I'll add something to that, that particular experience. We work with the towns to try and do what they want us to do if at all possible. And the landowners. So in that scenario, we must have had six different designs at a time and settled on compromising one pole on a scenic road and then did underground the rest of that road in River Bridge to Gap. And that was the compromise. We really presented a number of others that included private landowners and so on. So that's what we do with towns is we work with them to say, okay, if this isn't acceptable, then what is? And the towns generally bring in the neighborhood as you saw in Comfort. And so, you know, they're neighbors who even at the cost of not having one third of the town have fiber or willing to dig in the hills and say no poles on my way. And that would have meant that the southeastern part of Hartford would not have gotten done until we do Hartford or Woodstock. Because that's how that town was built. And this question comes up a lot that I just kind of need to ask it again. The one, you know, your ability is valiant to scale. And you kind of brought it up a little bit. Like the idea that, you know, you can start in Roxbury and then, but it doesn't mean cab it's necessarily last while good. But to get a truck to cab it is a problem right now. Like for somebody like you. And also scaling just the entire operation if you're now EC fiber, New Hampshire, CV fiber, you know, are you, are we asking too much of valley net? Well, we're expecting too much if we go all in. We're going to see them off in the busy. Rally net, we've had this discussion internally and it will become, there will be a point in time where you'll have your own structure in this territory. And it makes sense to do that. So it's bucket and install. Now where it would go. Now you might have... You can keep it at my house. And so... Insurance won't cover that. And you are in a territory that has potential. What I think you really want is universal access and probably one provider at a time. And that's suggesting I know for five years maybe you go out for a different provider. That's up to you. But it gets... When you split this territory, it's going to be difficult to build a business case for two sections. Separately from each other. Without the option of a net. Any final questions for Carol? Kind of a quick one. One of the things in one of the early slides that seemed to be glossed over a little bit was that you get the $400 million... or $4 million to be paid. Yeah, hard to definitely have all the problems. That's a $400,000 match. But then how do you go about getting that match of money because that was what, $400,000 I think you said? Which is substantial. And just curious about what sort of tactics you've used to go for that. We have raised $7 million from private investors in the past. And there are private investors that are no longer investing with us. But we look for an opportunity to invest in them. And when I talked about it's over-formed in 50 of those private investors, there were some that were not in our... not in EC private territory. I can tell you I was one of them because I was very curious before I came to work to rally net as to what was happening. And I figured this was my way to keep my fingers on the pulse of this new entity. And so I invested $2,500. I'm not sorry because I got my money back plus great interest. But there were others that invested $30,000, $40,000, and $50,000 that were not even in our territory just because they liked the model. They could see a return on their investment. It's a subordinate debt to other debt that you might have. But there are investors out there and we would work with them to do that. Thanks. Jeremy, I just had a question. I might be naive or I might be uninformed, but when Jonathan was talking, I had the impression that you sometimes at Valley Net have to deal with zoning regulations in towns. Is that the case? If there are zoning regulations that have anything to do with where the polls are or the easements on the polls. So a town can actually decide where the route of a line can be? If there is no line there today, they can assist us with what we're going to do to bridge that gap. We'll always want to be on the existing polls where it's all possible. So does that mean you're happy when a town doesn't have zoning? No, that's not at all. We don't wait on that at all. Our intent is to work with the towns and do whatever is best. Each town has different rules. Towns have a different idea of what the rules say. So some towns say that the right-of-way starts from the center of the road to X summer feet off, that's the right-of-way for the town. Other towns say that's a right-of-way over private property that the landowner owns to the center of the road and the town has a right-of-way over that private land. Very different scenarios because a town can make a decision for their right-of-way in the first scenario and the second scenario the landowner has to be involved. And there are two or three towns that think that the landowner owns to the center of the road and that the town's right-of-way is over private property. And there are other towns that absolutely not. No, not a lot. So even your interpretation of the rules here in Vermont or within the town's rules are different. But the idea is to work with the town to make it all together feasible. Yeah, we don't weigh in on what a good zoning, bad zoning will adapt to whatever happens. Well, it's not good zoning, bad zoning, it's also no zoning. Right. There's quite a lot of that out there too. The other thing that you all have to think about is that GMP is moving their facilities from the easements through Overhill, Overdale from the field, Meadow, to the roadside. And they have a plan for that over the next 10 or 15 years. But that could dictate where you build because the last thing you want to do is build through that easement and then next year have to move it to the road, which is what we're doing in Comfort right now. So, I'm not in Comfort, I'm sorry, it's Sharon. It's on 132, so they've moved all these facilities to the road. We have to move ours on top of that. And that's a cost for us to do that. So if you can avoid where they're going to do that in your town, but they have a schedule that goes out two or three years, they can tell you what their plans are for your town. So have you been involved with buildouts that rely not on electric utility poles, but on electric cooperative poles? We do. We work with Washington Electric and Chelsea, Versier, that top section of our towns into Tunbridge. We find them very helpful to work with. We have no issues with that. And we'll work with them on scheduling and so on. So they've been very good about that. And that's our experience there. In New Hampshire, I'm developing experience working somewhat with New Hampshire Electrical Co-op and in Lyme we have New Hampshire Electrical Co-op poles as well. They've been good to work with and I don't have anything that's helpful. Thank you. I'd like to see them step to the plate and run fiber. So would we. But they're not ready for it yet. That would be good. Do you have any thoughts about fiber in the electric space? Oh Lord. Yes and no. Provided you have a crew that is trained to be in the electric space. I think that's one of the criteria and that's a, they're more highly trained than those running in the communication space. And you would want them to be because it's the liability insurance is much higher if you're in the electrical space. We've worked with ADSS fiber, which is usually what they use in the electrical space. We wouldn't do it again. We did that for the first 200 years in the miles of our build. It tends to sag over time more so than fiber on a strand. It's just a different way of looking at it. But it, and we didn't run it in the electrical space. But I think that's the issue with the electrical space is maintaining it and making sure you have a crew that can be up in that space safely. And so what I'd like to see the co-ops do is run fiber in their space as if they were running it to every home but drop the connection that's going to go to the home, the fiber access point down into the palm space so that you can, and anybody, any trained technician can then do the drop to the home. So would you, would you have the build put a FAP in the communication space throughout the network where there's drops? If they could, if they would, they have to have funding to do that too. So they're looking for models too, right? And there's work being done to save them. So that has to get models financially too. So the savings of getting a wedding make ready then starts to partially get eaten up by each of these drops. They could, but they own the poles. But they have to keep them... But once they're in the communication space... So if I could, this is, I mean, I think this is a good conversation and something that needs to be modeled. But I think we probably... That's a good possibility. A network is trying to figure out what they want to do. So Becca is still five minutes out. So thank you to our treasurer and clerk folks for sticking around. She should be here in about, like I said, about five minutes. If we could maybe jump to Andy to your item, the report back, the observations about... Sure. Various things. I have some printouts. I didn't want to kill trees. People want the printouts. You can, I can throw them around. I only printed a few, or I can send out a new one. But they're just talking points. So I don't, it's not like this. It's really vital that you read these. So Jerry and I, we have a student who met with Waitsville Telecom on 9.20. There was a whole plethora of Waitsville Telecom guys, VPs there. Four or five, I don't know. And I have their names on here. Lee Cheney, Roger Nishie, Kurt Ryan, the IT director who Jeremy remembers. I didn't have his name. And the summary of that, just, you know, we kind of just had the whole general conversation about what they've done and how they got to where they are and where they are. They self-funded all their conversion to date. And the cool, one of the cool things that I took away from that is, and that's why I asked that one question there, they're pulling legacy plant as they go. I think they were like 70% done? It was over a half. So they've got over a half of their footprint converted to fiber. They're pulling the legacy plant. They had some kind of interesting... What does that mean? Copper. I know, it's really cool. I tell you, like that, I was like, yeah. So, and they, their model would, because of that, their model is a little different than us. Like, when we go to do a build or whatever we're looking to, how many people are actually going to sign up? They're looking at, we got to get people off of this old stuff. And at the end of the new world, both for value-add, but also to cut maintenance and to have a consistent network. So they, their financial perspective on things is slightly different, which was interesting. I found that part of the conversation pretty cool. They're, they're still pretty occupied with finishing conversion within their own footprint. And that's, you know, what their focus is. They're not, yeah, that's their mission. That's what they do. They were very, very supportive and open in talking to us. Very, yeah, a lot of good collaborative discussion going on. Their core network is Juniper. They use Calyx, G-Pond. This gets down on the weeds a little bit, but it was good to hear. To them, like the big thing with technology choices was really the vendor relationship and support and also the expertise they build up on their crews. So then that kind of came up in discussions about, well, gee, if we're, you know, inter-operation or partnership thing, they wouldn't be so keen on learning new technology sets or having different widgets in the stack so to speak. But that makes, you know, it makes a lot of sense. It was pretty common. On the other side, one of the bigger support issues is the consumer side is Wi-Fi. And not Wi-Fi to get to the house. It's Wi-Fi in the house. So it kind of gives you a really indication of what it is to run an ISP. And they've actually come up with kind of value-added solutions to that, too. They've also worked on how they do their build out, which is kind of relevant to us. Like the whole, some of that was relevant about, you know, even their building neighborhoods now at a time rather than kind of ad-hoc-ing or whatever and then finishing them off and then going on to the next one. They have a bigger plan, but they had some issues with kind of timing and cost and truck rolls and stuff like that that they have worked out. The more, the big part for us was kind of, they're going to help with clarifying more town. Did you have an update on that? I have an email out to the select board. It's been Radio Silence. They're like admin assistant, like forwarded on to all the select board members. I've not heard it back from anyone in Moretown. The situation there is, you know, like, they're the operator only for like 30% of Moretown. So the other 70% of Moretown is on CCI. They're on the same boat as most of us. So that, they were going to work with us to clarify that to the Moretown select board and everything so we could talk to Moretown and substantial other town to be part of Sensor for My Fiber. Because these guys ain't going to help them at least in the short term. It's not on their plan. Now that said, that did lead to a more, we started having more kind of fun creative discussions. You know, could you take, you know, since, and it's kind of like this Roxbury model, they're right there, you know, would you build out the rest of Moretown and brand it CV Fiber? And just, you know, and we run it as a, you know, as a brand so that we have customers generating revenue so we can go get revenue bonds and that kind of stuff. That brings up this whole question, do you really want to have kind of multiple operators and manage that situation and multiple networks and all those things. But it was a, it was an interesting discussion. They were actually a little more open at that level because it's easier for them to do kind of support billing integration than it is to do technical stuff. If there was one homogenous network that their tech didn't care that they were running, they wouldn't really, they wouldn't care if they'd build out, you know, some subset to somebody else. So that was an interesting part of the conversation too. That was it. So imagine separate operators but both running Calix equipment. It might, it might work. And we do both run, we, our techs often talk to each other when they're issues with Calix devices. The other thing they wanted to think about is there was one town in New Hampshire that was split TDS and CCI and I think in the end TDS decided to be a non-islet for the rest of the town. So to finish building that out the town was so angry that one half the town was going to get, TDS is running fiber to the home, was going to get fiber to the home and the other part of the town was not. I think in the end TDS decided to finish that town. Right. So I, you know, it is, it's an idea, you know, but one part about it that appealed to me is, oh, you know, you start getting, you get customers kind of on the cheap. Yeah. Like you just, hey, more time you join, hey, wait, we'll build them out and we just say, yeah, there are customers. Which is kind of, you know, but thank you. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you. So then the second, the second thing I have, and this is mostly kind of disclosure, I won't spend too much time in this, but yeah, whenever I did it, and B, there's some fun in it for everybody and I, if you wanted to print out, I kind of just went on my own and said, gee, what if I started my own whisk? Like the goal being that I can't really wait, you know, until 2024 or whatever and, you know, what would it take to build like a 20 to 50 subscriber DIY community kind of better service footprint? And I have a lot that I can share on that. But, you know, I kind of just did the, you know, the basic exercise. If I had to go borrow 10 grand and buy some equipment and cobble something together and get some neighbors to pre-subscribe 20 or 50 to 50 people and divided that over my months and operating expense and all these other things, you know, could I even do this? And I had some fun with it. By constraints that I kind of self-imposed is, you know, very limited dollars, didn't want to deal with permitting, licensing, tower builds, had to be comfortable pre-selling a neighbor or somebody that I know that I was going to do this, had to be performant better than DSL, obviously, to make it worthwhile. And temporary in scope, because I didn't view this as a replacement for CV5 or it's just, I got to have a life line to get me to, you know, from now till when I'm 80. So I did the whole, you know, I went out and the first stage was, you know, what's the physical plant that's in town? And that actually kind of came out better than you might imagine. I had to sign an NDA, I couldn't go into all the details, but there's actually a fair amount of physical plant in the capital, which is, I kind of knew that just from snooping around and looking at the soil. Yeah, well, you can see, yeah, all the toilets and all this, and there's logical spots where stuff would be. So that, you know, pretty good. It's mostly a single provider. The pricing's not great. There would be, you know, all the usual hoopla about that, but it wasn't a showstopper yet. So then I went to the next stage, all right, how do I get a footprint for 20 to 50 people that's really reasonably cost-effective, seeing if I can get a drop, you know, two or three drops, get over the hills, all that kind of rot. There's two technology choices that I've picked. One was this thing called TV White Space, which is a shared spectrum approach. Shared spectrum approaches are the idea that the FCC allows you to use stuff unlicensed kind of on a lower priority scale, and there's usually backup, a database or intelligence in the actual equipment that tells you whether or not you're allowed to use the space. I mean, that's the simplified kind of description of it. There's another one called CBRS as well. TV White Space seems to be more ready for the market. I went and talked to the big vendor. Microsoft is pushing this a lot. They have an initiative called Air Band, and they have a partnership with this vendor. I go and talk to this vendor. It was a lot of fun. The basic issue there, the technology is pretty emergent, and it was very, very difficult for me as a larger person to come up with any kind of an idea of what you could really cover without taking a fair amount of risk. It's really what the bottom line was. You have to go buy equipment, hook it up, test it, drive around on your truck, see what really works, and you're taking a lot of risk. That was my impression of it, just from talking to enough people and from what even the vendor was saying. It's a lower frequency technology, 600 megahertz, so it does bend a little bit, go through trees, supposedly a little things, but that also means it's more susceptible to noise and interference and whether or not TVs are actually out there broadcasting or where you are in the path and all these other things. It's really kind of DIY friendly. They ate a lot of licensing issues. It was just a, I was like, eh, so then I went to Ubiquiti, which Ubiquiti is awesome. I don't know if you guys are familiar. It's 2.4 or 5 gigahertz on licensed stuff. It's all on the site. They have a very, very nice tool called AirLink, which is a website that you can go and I had a lot of fun with that. Because you could just, oh, if I had to drop here and drop there and it'll show you your bandwidth, everything. It's beautiful. The issue with that became a kind of one of my first constraints was, and Carol pointed at this, Vermont is hilly and tree and it's very hard to come up with a line of site plan that doesn't involve lots of pieces of equipment in the end. And so then I was like, why don't you just start pulling fiber? And then the worst part was, it gets worse. Then I'm hanging out with my wife talking about all of this. She was actually being supportive until I mentioned SpaceX and she started asking questions. And I'm like, eh, yeah, yeah, SpaceX. I found I couldn't really defend myself to some of our questions, which is, and I don't know if you guys are familiar with the Starlink stuff that they're doing, and it's really interesting. Because it's a little worth orbit, it eliminates the latency issues or in theory it should, and because they're putting up so much equipment, it also helps with the total bandwidth. And so the promise of it, when you actually start looking at it, thinking about it a little more objectively, it's pretty high. And they do have 57 out of 60 other satellites are working from their first test launch. I kind of came away from the whole thing like, you know, I'm sitting tight, even though I've been dying, just because I didn't feel like I could take the risk, both from the kind of the complexity of part-time DIY. I still kind of want to do my little air fiber ubiquity guy from the dam up to my house, but I don't know. It's probably not worth it, but it just became a little more complicated than I wanted it to. And I also just, I really came away and I don't know how those red line guys are going to stay in business. I don't know. Because once this stuff starts happening and you can sign up for SpaceX, it's going to change things, a little bit of rural environments. It's not just SpaceX, there's two other companies. Yeah, I know. And that was something that I was going to bring up in our last meeting, but it just started going on. And, you know, with SpaceX initiative and the other as well, are we I came away thinking it just makes fiber that much more. What we're doing is I came away much more sold out, more fiber than promised. Because it's going to be superior to all those offerings anyways and then being in the half-ass phase of what I would call it, you're going to get hammered by this SpaceX. Absolutely. That's where I came away. That's kind of what I was going to bring up last time too. I agree on that. But anyways, so that was... So why is, why is fiber better? Because you're at the performance and cost, you're going to get there's no way, even think... What do you know about SpaceX performance? But it'll never reach what fiber it's at home. You just won't... the physics of it. There are actual physics limitations to your alfastic build. You both baited that on what? Well, bad assumptions. All right. No, I haven't done math, but I just assumed that because it's a shared... You know, they're going to be limited, even if they put up a lot of material, they're going to write whether they really get to that or not and when, and you know, you mean to see it on time for a lot of... Jeremy, what's next? Next is Josh. Can I speak to Andy for a second? Quickly yet? 15 years I've been doing that stuff. And I applaud you for how much you figured out in a short period of time. But I think there were a bunch of a lot of assumptions and we should get together. For example, CBRS is much more promising than TV White Space and you didn't explore that too much. You can get on something in two weeks. Wisps will be able to bridge the gap and cab it if that's what you're seeking for a longer period of time than you think these Leos are going to take over. It's going to be a while before they're around and dominating what Wisps do and they may never even though they're going to be a good product. I think there's a lot to talk about there and instead of doing a do-it-yourself 50 person thing, you hook up with the neighborhood that's already got the infrastructure and go cheaply and cooperate with Cabot that can work. We should talk about it more but I wanted to say it publicly because I think everyone should I mean that was like an indictment against wireless I know you didn't mean it that way but it actually can work way better than the way you just presented it. We'll talk about it later because I don't want to take up a lot of time. My bigger takeaway is that you just really need experience and operational expertise I guess is the way I would say more than the technology choice. I agree with you on ubiquity, it's not the right solution for Cabot. Ubiquity is a great solution for a lot of different things I've done a lot of work with Ubiquity and as long as again LimeCite is a good subject then it's a great way to go. So let's get on to what I actually need to talk about. So I've been working a lot with Kristen Zeider at the agency of commerce and community development. I'm going back and forth a lot trying to get our insurance waivers so we can get this grant moving along and she did eventually come back with me stating that we got the auto waiver which I wasn't horribly shocked that we would get the auto waiver that made complete sense to me and she says well we're kind of him and hawing on whether or not you'll get the liability waiver or not and we went back forth with you know well this is why we probably do qualify for the liability you know waiver and so and she went back and I am collateral report we got both waivers so we get the waiver for the auto and the liability now I thought it was a little bit odd and it was just because I come from a corporate environment this seems strange to me I asked alright so those waivers how does that work what kind of documentation will I have this show that we had this waiver and her response was our email exchange okay so what we need to do I will grab that email exchange and we will keep that as that is our proof of waiver legit proof of waiver is the email exchange back and forth between her and I and at this point she needs the signed agreement from us so is that all of the insurance so we don't have to buy any insurance whatsoever right now but at this point and there is a caveat to that obviously anybody that we work with needs to have their own insurance yes of course I mean it should be very obvious I just want to make sure that that's out there so Kristen is waiting for that side letter for me then so that the commissioner can sign on their side and then we're good to go and I will print off the whole combined back and forth so that we have that for our waivers and there's a waiver on workers account as well we have it on employees yes yes it was spoken about and that wasn't even a concert does that require a motion to signature or have we already addressed that I'm happy to take a motion to do that but I think we've already gone through the process of accepting the grant this is just the final bit of paperwork to actually say yes here's a picture of our bank account here's the match you can write us the check and I've got some reporting to do I put her off once because our timelines technically started in June which obviously we didn't start doing anything in June because we didn't get to spurs the funds but it gives us the ability to begin to move forward with that particular project well I do want to just add one more thing in regards to the insurance at some point we may need insurance I'm trying to work on getting those quotes back I'm kind of things have kind of gone dark with Hickop and Borden so I'm trying to wake them up again and I'm still working with Michael sent me some leads that I'm working on as well but I haven't actually got anything firm yet but I'll get back to you when I do I appreciate it any questions for Josh you need a minute to take a breath back up back to Treasurer's Report with back up thank you Treasurer's Report balance of all accounts is $7,247.85 all revenues have been by individual donation except for three cents of dividends on our savings account yes my great grandmother always used to say you can watch the pennies and nickels and the dollars will take care of themselves so for whatever that's worth our Jeremy had asked me to break out revenue and expenses we haven't had any expenses yet and our 2018 revenue was $4,134.89 our 2019 revenue was year-to-date is $3,112.96 we have gotten $45 in donation since the last meeting additional money's pledged is $500 from Cabot Community Fund I think that's what it's called yes and that is reimbursable against expenses so since we haven't had any expenses yet we haven't realized any of that money $12,500 from the Think Vermont Innovation Grant which requires a one-to-one match and is that also reimbursable or does it just require the match I have to look at that people work I think it just requires the match and then $25,000 from USDA Rural Development Rural Business Development Grant which requires a one-to-one match and I believe it's also reimbursable that is definitely reimbursable great any questions for Becca it's like the last chance that you're going to get her as treasurer do we already do elections no, looks momentarily alright let's move on to appointment of clerk and treasurer just some happy people here who have joined us who have expressed interest in in the position either combined or separately I think judging by and I have one resume but I guess I'll let each person introduce themselves and they can talk about their backgrounds let's start with Nathan Hawke oh man, that's alright no one ever gets alright in my family so I'm Nathan Hawke I am a Berlin resident my personal feelings are I'd love to tell Comcast to shove it professionally I'm an accountant primarily corporate I started my career in public accounting well probably 17 years ago or so currently work for the community college Vermont as the director of this operation so I previously worked for Vermont Hospitality Management which is New England Culinary Institute among a few other companies I have a lot of experience working with grant awarding agencies especially in the last four years the college does in the neighborhood $14 million a year in grants $38 million consolidated budget I have worked extensively with USA, we, US DOT all the state agencies we for what usually for the college is at any given time probably 16 or 17 grants since 2014 when 2CFR 200 was adopted that was really a boon for awarded agencies because it standardized the rule set the compliance bar became much more easier to navigate you weren't subjected to specific rules for each individual awarding agency so I have quite a bit of experience there I have a lot of experience in budget as you can imagine projections, revenue forecast you name it I manage an office of 7 to 10 people cool and so when I saw this I'll tell you why that's probably what I haven't covered aside from my Comcast I think projects like this can be really meaningful and they're important because the success rate of any of this development leaving it to the bigger companies has been flawed to put it gently so I think this is a great opportunity as much as my self-interest aligns there's a lot of important work that can be done and I'd love to benefit from it also great anybody have any questions for Nathan or do you have questions for us right off the bat I don't my initial inclination to listen and learn and when I do get ready to ask questions it's hopefully I can articulate them intelligently because I have spent the time to try to understand where at what some of the issues are what some of the potential work in the future is I don't have anything at the moment now candidate for both positions treasure yeah understanding what was listed was that the treasure was about three hours that was more or less what it said yeah outside of meetings our anticipation is that it's going to get more complex hopefully to put it short I'd be interested in both I'd be happy to do just the treasure that was my main interest close to the treasure position but if it was one person you could do both and Rosie tell us about yourself and I have resumes if anybody is interested I can don't worry about how to spell the last name nobody gets it right so just Rosie is fine I am I was just interested because I'm looking for an additional way is public service but public service has been sort of an ingrained an ingrained behavior in my family for as long as I remember my parents have always done one thing or another and they encourage their children to do the same and I've always been involved in some community service or another and right now I'm not so I saw the front porch forum had and said huh I'm a town clerk I can do a lot of that clerk stuff and I guess that would be the strength that I could bring to this if I'm being considered for it as far as the treasure part is concerned I've performed all the duties but not at his caliber so so that's all good I'm kind of a worker B I'm the one behind the scenes that makes sure your minutes are done make sure that your notices go up when they're supposed to make sure that you don't try to call a meeting before you're able to the whole public meeting law stuff in my past I've only been a town clerk for two years I'm sorry I live in Berlin I'm a town clerk an Eastmont player I'm one of a handful of appointed town clerks in the state right now the Charters are allowed that change in 2017 so before I was a town clerk I worked for the school district for many many years almost 10 years actually and when I first began working for the school district in one of my first positions I began taking the school board meeting minutes and sometimes they go on for hours and hours and hours and sometimes they're not and I will say that given the stress and frustration of recent school mergers I have decided that I don't want to consider being the school clerk right now which is why I said well maybe this would be a better choice it's all good it all happens but in any case previously to being a town clerk other than working in school districts I did work for the private sector for a bit in a food manufacturing company where I handled secretary of state reporting and acting as a registered agent and handling lots of intellectual properties and patents and working with that kind of paperwork so I'm familiar with a whole lot of different things and right now I'm a member of the Vermont Municipal Clerks and Treasures Association so I've at least met if not developed a rapport with many of the town clerks who would be indirectly at least involved with this endeavor and I would think that would be not a bad starting point although to be honest I'm not sure as a town clerk what our role is to be in this and our roles will be different because I'm appointed I'm not elected so therefore select boards or other entities they work differently with that cool any questions for Rosie or Rosie do you have any questions for us well I too came to I guess I got the timing right timing wrong tonight but I came to listen and find out more about where you are in the process we hear a town meeting once in a while the little board what's going on and to see whether this would be a good fit for me or not the good news is you didn't get up and leave neither did it sounds a good thing have you ever maintained a website so uploading minutes to a website I'm actually doing that right now Twin Valley Senior Center has a very immature and very primitive weekly website and I'm trying to help and it's been difficult for Rita and I to get together but yeah I've been doing this for a while you have me at yes I also do it for the other company that I work for and compared to the Senior Center's old website this one is bells and whistles Rita does the best she can with what she's got Rita does the best she can with what she's got alright so I have to say I mean it sounds like both of you fit right into the respective treasurer and clerk's roles if you're willing to take it on Becca has expressed a willingness as she's transitioning out of the position of doing both of those working with each of you and sort of handing off the keys in terms of with the treasurer the bank accounts and addresses and things like that debit cards the debit cards in your name isn't it yeah it has my name on it and we only got one but we can get so then Rama is the other sign or on the account so we should pay another one for that but so you can work with Becca to do that and then in terms of the minutes and all of the other things that we've been doing and kind of our structure and the other clerk records things cause yeah it's currently now everything's coming to your house you know even stuff that has my name on it work with Becca then on that as well that handoff so the next thing I'm about to do is point both of you to these positions not yet I just want a little bit of time to think it out I'm not a person who makes an instantaneous decisions so maybe I can have you chat with Becca and then we could maybe talk again in two weeks cause we're looking to we can have a supplementary meeting on the 22nd so it'll be two weeks from today I don't know if that's enough time for you to think about it oh yeah it's plenty of time I'm just going through my biggest concern is what's the actual physical time commitment that you're looking for right now I think for the clerk it's most of the meeting for the clerk it's just pretty much the meeting so Jeremy's been sending out the notice for the meetings and so it's really just taking the minutes and posting and we'd have to change over the cause right now I'm the registered agent and things come to my address and those kinds of things so there'd be some change over there but the clerk part yeah the clerk part was more work up front when we were all getting established and the treasurer has not been very much cause we didn't have very much money and now it's kind of flip-flop are we operating on one bank account presently? a single checking account or do we have a more complex financial stuff no we have one checking account and one savings account okay we have five dollars I just want to add maybe doing something with the google drive sorry the google drive would be good I haven't done google drive since I worked at U32 it's sort of a little tenth time but this is the sort of thing there's a lot of materials in there that can probably move to the website there's a lot of materials there that can probably get archived so I don't see any comments from the meetings on the website at all they're not on the website yet so we have a number of we have a bunch of that stuff on the facebook page I don't know what we've been doing if anything with regard to minutes from committees like business development and others should we if that's the answer that is yes then we need to make Rosie aware that that might be another meeting night so the but the committees tend to take their own minutes so for the committee meetings you would post the minutes but you wouldn't take them somebody from the committee would send them to you so and I can get with you later afterwards and figure out a time to meet, I live in East Montpelier also so I can, I know where you are I'm actually missing a family celebration oh okay I thought we were supposed to be here earlier so it's okay I'd love to talk to Becca I can let you know by the end of the week probably but I just want to be sure I know what I'm getting myself into because I don't want to make a commitment that I really can so thank you I'll see you in the email tomorrow Rosie have a great evening to your families okay so Nathan, last man standing I'm in at the stage this this company is at there isn't that much activity knowing that you anticipate that that's going to pick up and then quite honestly when that picks up to a level that it isn't maintainable on a volunteer basis I'm assuming there is recognition that it'll be addressed so yeah, I don't have a lot of concerns outside of knowing that we're all on the same page on that front I'm not super worried about the time commitment especially because too much happening on that front but I would be excited to be able to lend some expertise down the road when it comes to grant writing, compliance, grant management business policy, general injury, you name it because I really, that's where they're well from my experiences and that's definitely going to be coming into play because I'm going to, well I'll talk about this later but we've got some USD stuff coming in right now and some state grants coming in as well I just wanted to say I bring up probably every other meeting that the treasurer needs a stipend so so and to be clear we're not a company we're actually a municipal entity called the communications union district non-profit municipality cut for short I hate that though yes so I'm going to move that we appoint Nathan Hoke, our treasurer okay I'm also happy to leave you guys want to have any kind of discussion so I'm secretary for a small 501C3 land preservation force management group in the Adirondacks where I grew up and I'm very, very familiar with Robert's rules so and we would always allow that right if you want me to step out and if you have it open this is mandatory public session we could go into executive session if you feel like it but I don't think that's necessary we're not letting you step out I'd like to make a motion that if we still have a secretary that she cast one ballot for a unanimous choice for a treasurer, for Nate okay we have a motion on the floor but he's going to short circuit the voting process so no objection so I don't hear any objection and so we'll just do it all in favor okay it's unanimous congratulations thank you, I'm happy to be here looking forward to getting an eye on a little bit welcome to the club and the meetings aren't so far away not at all okay thanks for that let's run a donor software so we talked about this last time, Siobhan and it seemed like some CRM stuff that we wanted to go and buy because we were going to use it is this something that we want to go and actually spend the $39 a month for up to $2,500 and then it goes up it's a little green light Jonathan had recommended it $2,500 for donors for constituents or something like that if we get to $2,501 we can afford I'm sure we can even if they just all donated a dollar and it's I think the data is stored on a cloud not even we need to have a computer dedicated to it or anything like that we can just have logins that get into it and all that public, shared I have an idea what type of structure we're going into security is things like that as I understand it it's used by a lot of different organizations so I have not used it it's very well reviewed everything I've read about it has been pretty positive I haven't been able to find anything really negative about it I have some experience with it it's fairly flexible for smaller size nonprofits in particular I like it quick question is this specifically to replace I believe we already have a donation electronic donation well this is like managing your donor base like a CRM yeah it's for communicating with your donors or keeping track of your donations so that you can produce reports of this is how many donations we've had and these are the kinds of people who have donated it or that kind of thing it's more so we can develop a relationship with our donor base it stands for constituent relationship management CRM and it's going to be software as a service and it'll probably have some ability to leverage some usefulness for communications most do at this point where you can mail merge out like if you've got a pledge drive coming up where it's something you want to communicate to have all of your previous donors what need is this felt is it like Salesforce? it's also to help with marketing it's like Salesforce or because I know Salesforce has a funding drive or CVCRM yeah it's free until you want to customize it so this is customizable I think we're probably going to be just doing what they does have some integration with QuickBooks and all of that is that we're using QuickBooks? who owns donors I don't mean to be yeah to the backside yeah I mean to I guess finally concerned with the I always think you know we're a bunch of volunteers at a board and none of us are really in charge of donor recruitment management is that on the agenda? no I mean it's part of that though I mean because we can't just go by software and say awesome we got it that was my question does this fall under the treasurer and to be used also by the marketing committee we don't have one David talk maybe I because part of this is Carol she just brought up very specifically she's really good at raising money and like do we even need to bother as a board to do this if we have a partner like that CRM is the database of your donor passing the president right but I don't even care my argument is none of us on the board should care what the CRM that some underlying person who is responsible is raising the capital as long as they raise the capital because we're a policy entity we're not really we're a policy oversight group we're not we never handle the money directly so we don't handle we personally all have a responsibility to reach out to our communities and try to broaden the money but we're not the ones that are responsible so where's the locus but we're in two different places right now and where we're correct and where we're going to be hopefully in the future where we will have some other somebody else paid responsible for that but I think buying this for a few months so that we can manage these things might make sense but David from the survey of the 800 and whatever people have filled it in over 500 people said they wanted to do either loan gift or presubscribe so those people ought to be in the system that you can contact and they said they want to be contacted they want to know what our progress is this would prevent us from double tapping donors who we've already solicited funds for and or tracking major donor support if a core group of say 25, 50, 100 individuals have contributed the vast base of the pyramid of donations we should solicit more meaningful relationships with those donors and involve them and to some extent in the decision making process that again we're kind of a 501c3 and we're kind of a municipal government we're kind of this weird hybrid thing and that's all great and I'm not against this I just want to pin the responsibilities I don't want to buy software but if we're buying software it's a service of $35 a month the business committee meeting that we just had do you want to bring that up bring what part of it up the splitting of the two it's the next item so $39 a month I'm willing to experiment with this for the next 12 to 24 months to maintain records of our donors and also see what other value add opportunities we can use the information for and if we can't after 12 24 months now with it move on so who's going to be the designated admin for this though I volunteer so let's make it to Siobhan in our new treasurer give you something fun to do I heard the word loans mentioned do you know if this software handles loan amortization at all I don't know if it's targeted at that I doubt it covers amortization schedules for loans so that may be a need depending on what kind of volume we get in a small tool just to help manage that so if this motion ends up working out so then we would be authorizing you as the treasurer to go ahead and pull money out and make this happen it's littlegreenlight.com if you find that for whatever reason that it's unsuitable after a month or something like that we find something else I don't think it's a I'm willing to say the motion is $50 a month you two figure it out you get that in your budget go do it I heard a motion there and a second by any other discussion about this so you got a $50 a month budget if it's a little green light you have the green light if it's something else you've done the due diligence the committee has looked at what our needs are we aren't necessarily ready to just go for the trigger so really this is something that we're probably needing to get into sooner than later so even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that are going to satisfy us for the next three years come back and educate us next meeting just go and buy it it's only going to be more for me any further discussion sorry I walked away for a second there is there any discussion around who has permission to view or it's not public who our donors are and all that so do we want to restrict within our own group who can go pull names of people or send emails so right now it's just going to be them in the donor management system and we will probably delegate something like one of the business committee I don't know if the policy should probably make the policy when they come back with the report next month they can tell us what kind of reports it generates who should see it we'll also look at tiered user access because most systems these days I don't know about this one specifically but it's pretty common to run into tiered user access where you can give somebody the ability to run summary reports but never get down to the PII level so you're basically covered on that and PCI compliance quite frankly I won't even be able to see full card numbers if someone uses it that's standard these days because really if there's a way to tier out access there's no reason anyone that wants to go in and run a summary report for some reason shouldn't be able to it's just looking at summary data how many donors do I have in order? right I think that's probably good to know informational demographics and stuff like that would be useful okay anything else about this so there's still a motion on the floor okay so not hearing any further discussion all in favor of the motion of authorizing Nathan and Siobhan to spend up to $50 a month on donor software please signify by saying I I'm opposed abstentions and some motion passes unanimously with one abstention alright status of grants and applications I will be signing paperwork for the USDA tomorrow morning it is now public talk away $25,000 we'll hopefully be pulling the trigger on the state think Vermont Innovation grant funds as well soonish do they issue their own press release? we do not but so currently we are without a public information offer the post just went out today so we will be hiring one but in the meantime no we do not do our own press releases but we are happy to support a press release if you're doing one we'd like to write the press release okay so not going to do a press release it seems like something we should do what would be the I bring it up because I look at how many people don't know who we are and then survey so far we should do one I could take a stab at it who wrote the job application who wrote the job application no no the job application for Nathan I took her and you should write it it was pretty well done and I can't I'll take you somebody promises to send me a few examples I'll take it there's templates Microsoft Word that you can use yeah crib away we need templates download it I'll take it cool thank you for that and then there is the RFP for the BIG grant when is the deadline for 25th so we will be looking to apply for that as well and the business whichever section of that committee is going to be owning that process as I understand it is that correct anything else other grants applications etc that we should be paying attention to that we haven't we have a session on 22 October the deadline for this grant application is the 25th didn't we pass a motion earlier that we had to approve grant applications not necessarily see them but approve it for it to be submitted so I think it's going to work out nicely that we'll at our next meeting we will have some time to see that final version and sort of bless it as it goes out sorry I can miss the name thank you that's that new bucket of $60,000 from the state okay anything else on grants applications moving along business development committee I don't have a formal set of minutes from our meeting last week so we did meet and we did take out the issue of spreading the committee true fundraising formal name for it fund fundraising marketing marketing we had something outreach and my notes are outreach and the outreach would be business development planning and grants planning the other government grants but we also decided not to create two committees two subcommittees two subcommittees I don't know that's something that we even need the whole governing board to approve you can just go do your own things so that's not something you want us to formally do and sort of cleave you and twain we got your blessing on the idea but then we decided we'll stay together but we'll just go two subs we are anarchist of you Bravo I said Jeremy a copy of the latest survey results today just to get a sense of where we are and I've sent that out before but I'm still seeing the middle sex rules the rules the rules to second and then there's a few in between in there but it's really interesting that some surprise or orange came up way up so I mean it's still over I went door to door I went five hours on Saturday but the other two things from the survey I've had a chance to look at it but luckily to subscribe definitely would was 49% and probably would was 49% so that's 90% indicating that they do it now it's a select group of people who are filling the survey willing to invest loans 115 people said they do a loan I don't know what that means give 57% respondents and then pre-subscription 403 people said did pay in advance we need to keep on that as we wind this down I sent out the paper version to everybody I have been able to take it to 10 point type and fit it on two pieces of paper so that you can print on both sides we're going to put it in the calculus Tom Quirk's office but I don't know for everybody else I don't know how else to get it out to get people as well could you take a QR code for it and get it on the website or something because if I could there were several people who were on their way out if I could have had them scan it thank you the link is there the link to the survey is there but you want the PDF version but I want the QR code on the paper that goes to some people who were leaving their house when I got to them I could have said here's a QR code scan it and fill it out on your phone later then that would have been awesome because now I've got pieces of paper out there the rest of the meeting we've been working for three months now on this draft RFP and it's coming along pretty well we spent a bunch of time going on almost sentence by sentence and we plan to finish it in the next week or two it's the same thing with the proposal for the broadband innovation grant but it's coming along and we've got a whole time frame of when it would be out we have to give vendors who would do it and now I have been in the impression that we're a public entity we have to do RFPs and get bids on things I was a little concerned when I heard Carol today because I don't want to make decisions on things that we haven't done according to Hoyle so I was a little uneasy about all that but at the same time this is primarily to get the feasibility what's going to work best for us and we spent a lot of time in the committee talking about how do you do it and how do you get who's the best candidate community to go first off a service area within communities to go forward but we need help on that we should be getting the best advice on that we've got some good advice for us today here if they want to bid on it, that's great if they don't, I think we ought to open it up that's my opinion and I think we've been is Roxbury the right place to go? I'm not sure, I think we ought to do if we get successful at getting $4 million it's about 120 miles and is that what we want to put the money in terms of take if middle sex and Worcester are hot boy, I'm not sure but to take great, there's much greater than with Roxbury's that we're going to be but I don't want to prejudge that that's my main thing about this the take total, the take great might be higher in Roxbury these two communities forget it, they want it so one big caution I put I don't take the survey responses indicative of that because you've got bed sampling here and Roxbury and Roxbury has not seen this on Front Porch Forum yet I actually take a pretty strong issue with that because it's dependent on whether Deligate tried or not it doesn't have anything to do with the individual it doesn't tell me demand in the town I could tell you that in Worcester it was just on Front Porch Forum once, that's it nobody else walked around I still from a data perspective I agree every question you have to pay attention I don't I think it's awesome again it goes to you know we're always going to operate on imperfect information a little bit and that's fine we're going to have to make some decisions but I just want to be also not just because we've got an anomaly over here it doesn't mean over here it's bad it could mean a lot of things and I think you have to look at a lot of data and not just survey data can I ask a question when you spent five hours coming door to door what kind of response that's immaterial there were two people who refused to open the door but everybody that I spoke to was very enthusiastic about it everybody other than those two people one guy said I'm not interested in the internet and shut the door in my face and the other one wouldn't even open the door so that was it there was only two people out of five hours yeah and I went Cutler Corner Road all the way from the Berrytown line to Reservoir Road around Lad Road which is about 10 houses I was driving walking not a hiker and and Bissen Road which goes by the Reservoir so how many people well I got 13 completed surveys I've got three that are sitting people's hands and I've got an almost completed one that I have to go back because the wife has to answer the questions said 20 houses 25 houses well those are the people that she got that I got there were tons that weren't home there were lots and lots of people who weren't home I said the survey of twice thanks for pushing it and the job thing as well that's great I sent out twice the first time 35 responded in Northfield and the second time 30 people responded based on these numbers here and I'm going to do it again because not everybody is reading everything so why not if you've already sent it out once send it out again I had the chair of the select board send it out so I went out three times in Calis and so there's some nice knock-on effects too like Ray you sent that out in front porch form I got phone calls from Northfield saying can I join but they wanted to be part of the board and I said well we got treasure and cleric positions open we weren't really interested in that but one of the committees that's not going to be a board member I had people from Washington contact me to ask if they could do the survey and I was like you know sorry your name but talk to your select board yeah I can't get them I'm not going to call them because I don't really know them but I don't have any email addresses for the Washington select board so what we do is we get Rosie to call the town clerk who has more power than the bullet okay at least get it on their agenda can we get the results upon the website well there's a question there whether we want to post these or not we tell them we're going to in the survey so maybe we just take a selection of these that make sense like the highest level ones with the marketing all these people say they would go for it what's the meaning? we'll look the combination post okay here's the results and if you're interested in adding more people would really appreciate that another from portrait the link to like the current survey totals or whatever excerpted data set I will mention the one thing that I did do is I did not skip a single house on that route I went to every single house how nervous I was from the look of the outside of the house and I was surprised at some of the responses I got in those other in the scarier places so yeah okay anything else from the business development committee that we should be talking about this I just wanted to clarify so we have the RFP is about to we'll read and that's the feasibility RFP where it is now this RFP has been morphed to try to take care of the USDA grant and the potential for the broadband initiative money so we're going to change the scope of it a little bit in other words we may have more money we can do more with more money or with less money but we want to only do one RFP in one company okay and that's some spectrum of feasibility in the business plan that's all I just wanted to mentally so we discussed this in the development committee and Carol brought it up in her presentation so that $4 million somewhere between 120 and 150 miles can be built then what she added was that three years later you have to have 700 customers to be able to be at that cashflow positive position but you can't build anymore you don't have any more money so we had talked about this in the committee meeting that how do we get to where we go this is what we're targeting because we're fairly certain we're going to get enough subscribers from that 130-40 miles so because we got one shot so this is the board really in every town has to be like it's like a runoff is what we talked about which towns are going to step up and get subscribers because there's only one shot you spend the money you don't get it and you follow on money and the other part of the business meeting is I think Greg was charged with meeting with the Central Money Economic Development Corporation yes I did so I met with Jamie Stewart from Central for month economic development and because it was raised the last meeting as to whether they might have any monies to pay for board training he said no they don't and he said you can go through I think it's the league of cities and towns but he said it's a long process we're not eligible to join the league just to get some money from organizations like that to come in and do board training is there a USDA training long process for board training what's possible? there could be community foundation also depending on how they consider us I mean they have a capacity building grant that non-profit use for but I think you might be eligible for that so Michael you would mention at some point the possibility likelihood whatever of in addition to this there might be something like CAF 3 what was the I remember you telling me this but it's kind of vague in my memory I don't know if you want to tell everybody else if you haven't had this already well it's really important USDA money is big CAF 3 CAF Connect America fund and the third round of it it's not being called CAF 3 but everyone's calling it CAF 3 because it's easy to say funded 22 billion dollars are going to be spent on the United States compare that to the stimulus round in 2008-9 on broadband they spent 7 billion was it? 7? okay so this is three times the size of that and the money will be available to you have to deliver data and voice you have to be willing to be the voice carrier of last resort wherever you get the money so you're becoming an ETC that's a federal designation for that's what Consolidated is now and it's targeted at locations that have less than I believe it's 25-3 so almost everywhere is eligible and the really significant is that the FCC has funded many organizations at CAF 1 and CAF 2 and they will not favor their previous fundies we don't have that USDA problem where we can't compete with someone they've already funded so Fairpoint took the CAF 2 funds one of the few price cap carriers in the United States that did and they're getting $48 million over a period of 8 years in Vermont we can apply the FCC and over build everything Fairpoint did in central Vermont if we win as long as it's the actual locations qualifying not all locations will not a whole area can be funded this way but a substantial portion of it so this is going to take a couple years to work this through still in a notice of proposed rulemaking at the FCC and these things take years it'll probably be the end of next year so we're going to continue on our process of getting maybe Vita money and 4 million or whatever and building out something we may be able to halfway through our 3 years or towards the end of our 3 years build a whole bunch on free money we're almost free money it's a significant thing so we obviously can't budget based on us getting that but that could at least be something that we have kind of a potential light at the end of the tunnel there that might help us bridge that but I think your point is right if we don't we don't make a good choice right away and we don't get the takers and work hard to get and keep them we're going to be kind of sitting twirling our thumbs and not be cash flow positive at the end of it which might not be the end of it but it certainly will put into question whether we can move forward on the same timeline as we're envisioning certainly not with the aggressive one you know that stand put together up there one more thing to explain CAF a little more the way it's funded the way awardees get the money is it's per location per month for 8 years a certain stipend so it's anywhere from 30 to 80 dollars per month per location so the steady flow of a lot of money is it sounds like it's per location you have to sign those people up so some exciting possibilities there anything else business development folks the other is one one topic about me we've made a decision that the broadband initiative Michael cannot participate on the writing of our because he's writing his own so I'm competing my company is competing with CB fiber for one of the three spots in the first round for the bg grants so I'm going to recuse myself from discussions of that and practically speaking at board meetings if those things could be put towards the end of the agenda so I leave the room that would probably be the best way to handle it I can also step out and come back in but I mean I'm not competing with CB fiber but there might be the appearance of conflict and therefore thank you for that that makes sense so that does come into our next agenda item the 2020 strategy which is I think inextricably linked to how we're going to write that the bg grant and going forward with the VEDA so the next meeting 2020 in the review improve the RFP for the next meeting so the approved the RFP is going to be in the next meeting I just want to put out I want to mention what I have is my general 2020 strategy that we need to hammer down we need to I think decide so that we can make sure it's reflected in the RFP make sure it's reflected in the actual grant application and that nobody's surprised so if we can talk about it a little bit and then approve that and get a sense of it as an entire organization something concrete get a sense of it today and then get something concrete at our next meeting in two weeks that would be good I think and also the draft budget I have copies of that over back by the pizza eat more pizza I'm sure there's still some left if you want so with the draft budget this is me spitballing based on yes we get the the Vita money and yes we get the the VIG grant 2019 expected is me not knowing exact amounts I can probably update that with the 72, 47, 85 rather than the 7500 that I have listed I should also probably put a carry forward in terms of like current balance because 2019 that was not all 70 72, 47 you had those amounts you can send those to me some at some point but then if we look down to the 2019 budget was us looking at doing something completely different than what we're doing now so no fault there I'm actually imagining spending this year I don't know if this is realistic and this is where I'm hoping for some feedback for the next meeting external business development services including business plan consulting if we close on the RFP that might be something that we're writing a $20,000 check for the end of the year and the problem with the grant it can't get reimbursed to finish the work but we will hopefully have some start writing checks and they can start providing deliverables to us whether that's going to be $20,000 or is that going to be less I don't know any feedback would be would be lovely I added a line for insurance I thought that was going to be $2,000 it looks like it's not going to be $2,000 this year I can strike that from there it might be $2,000 next year once we start having actual things to worry about office supplies, PO box it's going to be $500 again, I'm guessing the software we talked about purchasing software, yeah it will all be in 2019 but it will be in 2020 okay, that's a good point $2 a month advertising, if we decide to pay for advertising Facebook post boosting, posting in the Times Argus which would play the only other like local news the world yeah, you can do inserts in the world that's been that's not that expensive still goes to all of my neighbors and they cover basically every county in some capacity it's artificially January 1st so in the next 2 or 3 months I can't imagine that spending any advertising money there's nothing in there right now I think it's premature but if we're we have to budget for 2020 so however much you think we're going to spend on things like that if we're going to spend on things like that throw me some ideas some grant opportunities namely those that are provided through the state require warnings of hearings and so on from our community development program being one so that we would have to run ads for that yeah survey if we're paying money for any sort of survey software if that's something that we need to do David or if there's any other as I know in the USDA grant we can do some data analytics some data management, these sorts of things do we need to pay for storage in the cloud do we need to buy some hardware so that you can have a dedicated place to store it at home on your local network or something I don't know but these are the sorts of things that you can hopefully come up with and then the big one is in 2020 are we going to spend we're going to build 50 miles or do 50 miles worth of pilot construction we're going to spend a million and a half next year I don't know the timeline and the costs well enough to know whether that's true or not well let's say we get the vehicle on which is accounted for and let's say it isn't awarded until August we're probably not going to build that year probably not going to build but on the other hand we would start the permitting we would start engineering so there'd be some make ready and this would be some engineering and so that might not be so it might not be construction you know cradle to grave for 50 miles but it might be permitting make ready engineering on 200 so tell me what it is that was me spitballing I would cut it in half I cut it in half again 500 then split the difference between the two so this is our best estimate given that we don't really have any of this thing we're kind of making this up as we go and this is for us to give to the towns soon so that the towns know that they're part of this thing that we're actually moving forward and being kind of disciplined and thoughtful about it this isn't going to be as scrutinized as closely as when we have to go and get audits done and when we have to actually be really careful about so that we don't overspend our insurance line we will get to that point before long I don't think we're there yet so this is us forecasting as best we can for 2020 so is 500,000 insane assuming everything goes well could we spend a half a million dollars on the first steps towards building out wherever we build probably probably not but maybe it's a reasonable forecast so and change the line take pilot construction out and say permitting, make ready engineering preparation for construction construction no one misreads it as construction happening here gotta have that all not with that community of people moving up there sure in terms of operational I think the number the subtol you have is good because as far as we know through grants and the donation so far it's going to top out at 110,000 so having a number like this it's good yeah there's a little bit of room there so I'm imagining we're spending most if not all of the USDA funds soon if not this year then soon thereafter and then all of the BIG grant funds after January 1st so I mean I'm hoping that we get it and if we get it then that money will be spent it will be spent but there's no forecast of any additional monies so keeping the budget around this 77,000 is good so if there's anything else in here that needs to be changed or things that are added the legal I put in there the 10,000 I was imagining I don't know that we would need a municipal attorney I don't know that that would be the case it's again I just put it in there as insurance in case that we do you know we won't need somebody to go and you know draft bond documentation or anything just yet but it's a good place to hold on soon if you're looking at this and you're like screaming out you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat you're like oh we just can't do this then just send me an email I'll try to incorporate this into our excuse me into our next meeting we have to get that to the slide boards by December 1st 15 November 15 November you have to provide some to a hearing and it could be up toward 22nd or something I had no idea what that amount would be because I wasn't sure about I know I know you don't have to pay principal I don't remember I think you have to pay yeah it's probably interest only from the outset has Vita released terms? Carol was saying that they had released information I wasn't aware of that she was sure slides mentioned it if you have loans of $4 million orders won't the recent debt service in 2020 as well as we draw it down to some of that money right and that's the other thing I'm not sure of is if it's more like a line of credit we might not get charged except for the stuff that we have I think it's a line of credit so if you draw it down a million you're going to be paying on that so if we're paying, pulling down $500,000 what's the debt service on that going to be at I don't know what the terms are right is our account with VCCU? yeah so in the past when I worked with Vita you see it like when you actually log in you see your account and then you see your Vita line of credit and you can just transfer from it just right and then it's going to automatically calc what you owe and interest and as you go back and forth right and I don't know the specific terms of what that agreement looks like in the past I've dealt with it where it's been like a five year balloon so should I budget or put it four percent or whatever happens to be of the $500,000 that we take out imagining that we take it out on January 1st which is not right or if we take it out on middle of the year middle of the year so it's not worthwhile but I'd rather estimate that we're going to pay more yeah so half a year of the interest on $500,000 that seems good so what's the ballpark though on those Vita loans does anybody know four percent sounds great it does sound great but I don't want that to sound like that well I mean I just want to put something here so that again we're doing this right around five percent that should cover us right okay so we'll do six months of five percent of the $500,000 so that's $2.25 well that was quick okay okay so I'll look more into whether Vita's posted those things if you find it before I do Michael would you send me a link if they have a white paper or something variable rates based on Vita plus appropriate risk based spread yeah loans up to five years with the amortization up to 15 hmm but does it say does tax exempt variable rates maybe as low as 4.5 percent of certain economic development criteria or met I think the last time we had one that I dealt with it was like six and a half and I didn't I'm sorry is that any Vita loan or this specific no they have rates as of last year yeah and this is probably going to be perceived as a low risk loan except that some of the high risk is being taken up by the state appropriate extra we're probably optimistic on the 500,000 anyway so the whole thing is so that's what they mean with the five year loan with the 15 year term is they're going to let you amortize over 15 but you're going to have a balloon at five years to pay off the balance they have a currency change age on their website great the other question I have is about the promissory nodes so does that mean we're sort of planning on offering promissory nodes that's a big line item there it is judging by the number of people who said they'd be willing to get loans though I think it's something I think we'd be foolish to not consider especially if that's going to be part of the 400k distinct from presubscription so are they going to be $2,500 or are they going to be 50 in those people's minds we don't know yet but in order to get that $4 million we have to have the 10% match whether that's Carol in shaking the money trees for us or whether we're hiring somebody to go out and shake the money trees for us we've got to put $400,000 in there they'll only do 90% that's what you're talking about they'll tend to all month donations they'll have yeah so I was imagining 50k we're just making stuff up I said we were going to have 225,000 promissory nodes this year but we also switched gears and decided to take a different route so good so super briefly you know what I'm not going to do this that's what I was going to do so I'm going to send that so in advance of the next meeting we can actually nail this down so we're going to put the 2020 strategy draft budget annual report on the next agenda the RFP on the next agenda as far as I know we don't have any back burner items that we need to talk about committee assignments membership call that one done anything from WEC anything from WEC well I want you a meeting that VEC put on and WEC was invited and they sent six people three from the board and three from staff and it was from a national non-profit that markets to WEC for co-ops to do feasibility studies business models for co-ops and broadband and they were very very slick and some of the people were impressed in the room and some of the people were very not impressed there was a big range of responses who else presented, I've forgotten now and I did but I'm forgetting who the there was another anyhow they are WEC is still very keen the general manager was there Patty she asked good questions so seems to be getting a little more on board we didn't have another transition meeting since the last one so I can't look around okay so we're going to do the we'll get the meeting minutes from back on we'll see what happens from there so I'm going to go, let's do a brief round table this is Nathan so this is where everybody has a chance to say something brief at the very end of the meeting there's one thing that's like in your mind we sort of just go around the table are you good? go shake the trees I'm good good nice something to say as a question so in terms of planning and I don't know the tech well enough so right it's obviously it's going to be a dumb question but is wireless feasible to consider is it going to be cable areas like downtown Montpelier or something like that is a way of like kind of shocking starting that without having to necessarily like lay fiber to all of those places it's a different business model so it's not one that group's considered I mean we've talked about it a bit but we're really we've really committed to primarily fiber to the premises as a mission but I mean that's something that we certainly have talked about so seems like a I mean at least on the face of it seems like a good opportunity great so I had something to say I wasn't going to say it but Nathan said it so I'm going to say it I think we should offer free wi-fi downtown every downtown period and we can discuss later I just want to plant the seed I'm remembering a lunch we had about five years ago right so Barry said he does offer free wi-fi downtowns paid for by the merchants have you used it it's okay better than nothing but that's also in considering that doesn't have to be paid for by this organization what's the SSID I don't remember it's like Barry community it could be CV fiber marketing, economic development leading forward and each of the municipalities that are part of this are obligated to lease us space if we ask for it it's an established so if we could stick in some routers on the city hall three or four radios downtown city hall to the back hall it's been sitting there the more important is conduit space under the streets there you go so we'll follow up with that I guess across that bridge Jerry two things three hours is too long after a ten hour day I agree and I think we're getting to the point where lots is really starting to happen and we might need to do this twice a month rather than once a month instead of trying to jam it all in and we made the decision this time to have a second one we might be better to plan for that for the next few months feelings about that if we can keep them short so less than two hours as long as it doesn't interfere with the committee commitments right because if they're the ones doing the primary grant writing and some of that other like more laborious process based work it's that time for them over general meeting time but I agree things are going to get busy it seems like you're in on the cusp of does our committee is meeting more than once a month okay so we'll try to keep these much shorter and just maybe for the foreseeable future we'll plan on twice a month and if things it turns out that the agendas are super short it doesn't make sense and don't forget too to happen I can set up a Webex and anybody who wants to if you have so we have connectivity so you can watch about that but you can also phone into any of those too and we can put so if you have a landline if you can call in with your landline that will still work and that's still possible we can still get a quorum with people who are attending remotely most likely a pizza journey much more pizza for me keep going on the team I have not forgotten about the Latin motto I have confirmed the Latin motto and I am working on a design for mugs and t-shirts that I will present to the board eventually remind us again of the Latin motto it is sugo ne it means our internet sucks not the direct literal translation yeah, well do the Romans had internet? that's from Socrates because the Greeks had internet what do the Rawls ever do for us? we have a ring of the light and the wilderness yeah I like that one the other presenter at the Vermont Electric Co-op meeting was the nascent CUD based around Linden Vermont and I am very impressed with us I just want to say are they a similar stage in their development? they did that's a pretty low bar we are doing really well whoa I had one of my town who signed up to the survey they asked about being not on an email list in order to donate and I didn't know if there was some way for us to set up the donate list so we don't have to provide emails in order to donate it's on the website so if they want to donate? they did but then they asked if I could get them off the list I was just wondering it might be easier in the future but we have to you're obligated to provide an unsubscribe to anybody that ends up subscribed these days and once they opt out you're done things have gotten much tricker are they still getting emails? no we're sending emails to anybody but I just want to make sure we're staying on the right side of this that we do have an unsubscribe where we have somewhere that you don't have to provide email in order to do a donation and that's what little green light is useful for so that we can track the people who say please don't send anything I want to give you money I never want to hear from you any famous last words? wow I don't know thank you for your patience with me learning how to be a municipal circular and I'm guessing that our paths will cross again which is why I have to quit part of me resigning now then allows me to be able to make sure you all are in the loop when stuff is available now we can leverage you with immunity thank you so I just want to thank back again as she's departing and has done an incredible amount of work over the last few years and change and I'd also like to thank Nathan coming in and picking up some of that work again this is so far very volunteer and we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel so very very excited to see that I'm going to second it I I I I I I I I I I I I