 Eight out of the 16, that's 50%. That's enough for a forum, I'm going to get started. I have 601, I'll call the December 11th, 2018 governing board meeting of CB Fiber 2 Order. Any additions or changes to the agenda? Yeah, I'd like to add a thing about the unofficial motto. Another unofficial motto? No, I want to add, I guess an action item to get it put on the website. Okay. Let me put that after Christine. Oh, yeah. Rama, you do have a report back for today? Yeah, that's for sure, I want to put that out. I'll leave the Business Development Committee report back, which will be short, I think, but there'll be some other information that maybe didn't happen in the meeting we can talk about there. And there'll be some discussion with that too, I have a couple of questions for you. Yeah, okay. And I'm also going to leave, the Violent Policy Committee also did not meet. Jim did have something for me to communicate, though, that I want to get to at that item, so I think we'll leave the rest as is. Public comments, anything else that folks want to talk about there that's not already on the agenda? I have a few minor things. Sure. There's a webinar tomorrow from WISCA, WISCA. Which is some organization for building your own wireless internet service provider that's just not funding. It's such a similar organization, it's the best. Yeah, it's the best. No, but anyways, I'm going to listen in, somebody else from Cabot who I'm trying to sucker into helping us, such activities, is going to listen in. Anybody that wants to know about it, I can send them an email. Yeah, could you send me the email for that? Yeah, I'll just send it abroad. Yeah, use what I said, it's important. Does Cabot culture? Yeah, right, and I have my own little, I'm just trying to, I try to, yeah, there's a few people there that can help that are skilled at grant writing and fund howling, whatever you might want to call it. So I'm trying to keep them involved and just aware of things. So one of them is actually sitting in the corner. That's good, okay. So it's great, any case? Yeah, that's the, any other public comments? About non-genitives? Okay. Thank you. You're going to mention the, so you're going to mention the seven connectivity at some point? That was, yeah, I was going to do that about the reports back from various meetings. So I went to the Northern Vermont connectivity contest. Neither of them applied to us, but they're relevant, just the same. It was a very good gathering. It was different from the seven of Vermont which you'll characterize in a bit. Where only representatives from towns and government attended, and some providers. And it was very tightly organized. It was a half-day presentation. What is, I'm not sure what I can say that's really helpful to this group, but now that I think about it, it was a very useful event where they talked about all the lax, all the possibilities, and they put providers up against each other in a forum to discuss what they offered. They had some example, some example communities come up and talk about how they did things from Jim Craftsbury. I guess, oh, you know what was important? It was what came from Leahy's office. They're talking about improving the farm bill so that USDA or US is much more friendly to smaller and more non-telco, non-utility applicants. They're trying to put a lot of money into broadband in the farm bill. Which, in the past few years, has been kind of shrunken, and also has been out of reach of smaller organizations. We tended to have to be a telco to get access to that kind of money. So that was kind of the important thing about it. Most of the rest, you'll probably save the other one. So I'll give you that. So was there a similar appetite for driving these, maybe some more independent efforts forward? And another one is there wasn't a southern one. That was one of my takeaways from the southern one. Everybody said, the feds, everyone's behind you, but no one's got any money. Do it yourself. Awesome. I mean, there's no real money in the state. This, you know, like the Connectivity Initiative is 220,000 and that sort of thing. There is real federal money. But nobody's going to hand it to you. And it was kind of a thrilling session to get people to go out there and organize themselves and kind of apply for grants. Do the providers feel threatened at all by a local reference to the providers? Well, the only incumbent big provider there was Consolidated. They were represented by a guy from Massachusetts because their Vermont guy had a previous engagement. And I was not impressed with him. He didn't answer questions directly. He didn't seem to know enough about the different kinds of efforts that were going to be made and the different things that Consolidated could be a good player helping, you know, out of its head. But he was just saying, well, we've got this really good software. Come talk to me. I'll show you what your channel can do. It's basically like they're tech support. It was more like a sales guy than a tech support guy. But about as useful. The other thing is that the Fonville passed the Senate today, so. It'd be interesting to see it at that broadcast. Nice. The other providers that were up on the stage were small providers. I was one of the wireless or something like that. Any other public comments? All right. Great. So, does that understand we have a group photo? Are you, Lowry? I am, yeah. From middle sex, Phil couldn't make it. So I'm his alternate. Phil had a bit of an injury this weekend, so he's recovering from that moment, so. I don't look enough like him, so. No, that's all right. You are still, I mean, as an alternate, you're still technically a member of the board, so I would encourage you to join the group photo if you're feeling camera shy, then maybe not. So, all right, so that's the next item. Ellie, I see you have your camera ready to go. I don't know what the best do if you wanna be in front of the white screen or. Stand over here. Quickly, see where that chair is right there, that long chair first row there. Sorry, guys. That will teach me I need to look at the agendas. Because I would be wearing like my rainbow skirt or my sparkler skirt. And obviously I'll put the lens cap off. Can somebody just grab that chair that's there now and just slide it to the side? You have to actually, you're not angry at the people on the music side. All right. So that looks great. Why don't you all smile? There was a lot of pictures. Yeah, your eyes will be open in at least one of them. All right, that's it. Thank you. I bet he'd love to film now. Yeah. Hey, Rob, look at that. He'll film there. He left the memory card out. That's what I am doing right now. That's what I'm doing right now. Thanks for running here. I guess maybe that's the battery compartment so it's a little round things. Okay, so thanks for doing that. Thank you guys. The Treasurer's Report, I'm gonna, before you do that, I'm gonna hand you these, which you will probably be able to include in your report. Sure. You're gonna make me do public math. Public math. That's 2,600 is what I handed you. Okay. That's crazy. All right, so before I was just handed $2,900, we had in our checking account, $941.83, and in our savings account, $25. So that is a grand total of $3,841.83 in checking plus 25 in savings. So we received $491.83 that's net of fees through the Snowball Fund raising that Elliot set up for us. And before these checks, I had 350 in checks, so now we have another 2,900 in checks. So what was that? I'm sorry, what was the number on the outline? $491.83. Comment that when you do the online, maybe it's other contributions as well, but Rebecca, your emails, what shows up as like the on receipt and so forth, it looks like your personal email, so I don't know if you wanna get a treasured email or see me out for the last time. Yeah, that could be my next project. Well, and once we set up the domain, also we have proper emails after domain, that's gonna be probably where it should, where it should be. Yeah, that's what I meant by my next project. The domain's all set up. It's just on the website. I just don't have an email server. So, I just have to map one. There's only one. Do you need a server? I need, I'll have to do some searching to figure it out. So if you bring up a proposal for if there's any cost involved with the email, we have some funds actually. So if you needed to have an email service, I can tell you an email service that's quite good that I use, I use the free version of protonmail.com and the limited skinned versions of whichever domain you like. Yep. Okay. With else? No. So, we have Christine August here. Thank you very much for coming. I wanted to just read the thing that I sent to you guys that you guys sent to me. Elliot. I wanted to read the kind of the instructions necessarily, but the message that we sent to you and why we invited you here. So now I can't find it on my preparation. No, I have it here. So the invitation goes to be like introduction to what CBFibre is. We do not have the ability to access funding by any type of taxation instrument by member towns. We do have the ability to issue funds with the organization that chairs it before. We've been working on this project as a board to be positive and be able to grapple with big questions about how we should proceed to maximize our chances of being successful in our mission. Can you come and weigh in with some advice on how you would proceed if you were in our shoes? We'll probably have more questions as we go. We'd like to know if your vision for statewide fiber leads you to any suggestions for how we should proceed. So let me just start by saying that I've been studying this for 18 years and looked at all the technologies. So I want to start with two assumptions. If you agree with those assumptions, then the rest is easier. One is fiber is the only real long-term solution for Vermont to be competitive. And I'll say, for example, many people say, well, in fact, the governor even said RF. But the problem with RF is if you want more bandwidth, you have to increase frequency. If you have to increase frequency, it becomes more directional and you need more antennas and you need more expense and you need repeaters. And Vermont has this problem of hills and mountains and trees and all that. So you should go up in frequency. So when you talk about these 5G networks that they're putting in cities, they're gonna put antennas in every pole. We just don't have the density for that. When I looked at, as I've done the math several times, because this was something our board of directors asked me to continually look at. And I was continually telling my board, stay away from this until 2017 when I say, okay, now let's go for it. And the reason is because in order to make things pay, you really have to get a penetration weight rate of 12 customers per mile on a radar to get it really any of these systems to work, including fiber. The way, so is there any debate about in this room, anybody wanna ask questions about the technology before I move on to the next slide if anybody disagree with this? Usually when I talk to tech, yes. So Christine, everybody in the room knows that I disagree with you on that. Okay. I'm the fiber part. I think fiber is a superior technology, but I think that the state can't afford it to every house. Okay, good, good, I'm okay with that. I'm gonna answer your affordable question. That's fine, and so I believe that we need a hybrid solution where we use more modern ultra high speed wireless to supplement fiber. So fiber where we can get that density of, and I would dispute 12 also, six or seven a mile can work as well, but get as much density as you can with fiber and then build to the last, last model with wireless. So if I convince you on the affordability side, I mean, from a technology standpoint, forget affordability. Do you agree that fiber is the best technology solution? I'm gonna show you how we're gonna get it cheap. At the moment, the only way you can get a gig on wireless is with very high frequencies, very minuscite. Yeah, very good. But it's coming. So I see evolution in wireless. I'm not talking about models. Yeah, but you can't change physics. Can't change physics. Oh, I know that. So let me talk. All right, so I'm gonna answer your affordability question. That's why I'm here because I'm gonna tell you under your current thinking, of course it's not affordable. I agree with you, but that's why I'm gonna give you a different model that's affordable. Now, the next thing I want to make sure we agree on, or it doesn't matter if you disagree, but I just wanna hear if you disagree. Yeah, I respect disagreements is where I'm here. But I'll say that we can't grow business without connectivity. I can't imagine any business that's gonna locate that can't get connected. Anybody dispute that this is a baseline for our economic growth in Vermont? Okay, good. So let me talk about the affordability model with fiber. And this has been, and I'll send you the links. There's models where this has been done in several other parts of the country with densities, a third of that of Vermont. And it's being rolled out in 60 different rural areas in the country right now. And so I'll give you those links. I'll send you those links to you so you can read those case studies. But so here's the, and I'm gonna tell you, the reason that fiber is expensive is because we have two infrastructures. We have two organizations supporting our poles and wires. The model that I'm talking about is a European model where the electric utility owns the fiber, maintains the fiber, ensures it's lit and has the responsibility to the home, the premise. Because we already have an infrastructure called electric utility that handles the poles and wires. And it used to drive me nuts, it drove me nuts for years. When I would send bucket trucks up to Canaan, Vermont to restore three spans of wire, and then Fairpoint at the time would have to send a bucket truck up there to restore the telecom component. They're all on the same poles. Our line workers can do that and we can cut the cost in half because bucket trucks are expensive. And in 2003, I did a partnership with NorthLink where we did this. You can use all dielectric self-supporting fiber and hang it from the neutral. The neutral is your lowest line. Today what we do, we hang our telecom 40 inches away from the neutral. We do that because to enter the electric space you need to be a first class line personnel. And the technology used to be that you would also have to drop the fiber and put it in a trailer to splice it. Today we now have portable splices that go up in the air. So now we can have the electric utility maintain the fiber. Now, so if you do that, you've cut the cost of the infrastructure in half. Now, the nice thing about electric utilities is they're regulated monopolies. They can borrow and pay back over a 30 year period versus a 15 year period and with significantly lower interest rates. So now you've cut the cost by 75% of the way it's done today. So when I talked about the math, the math for fiber was 12 customers per mile. Once you do this new model, you're now down to four customers per mile. Now four customers per mile as a take rate pretty much covers the state. Now the average, now understand that we don't, in electric utilities we don't build people by where their location is. So I ran Vermont Electric Cooperative. In the Hinesburg and Huntington area, we had 40 customers per mile and we had like three customers per mile in the Northeast Kingdom. We didn't have a separate rate where you had to pay. That's the beauty of being a regulated utility. The public utility commission sets a standard rate for the entire state. So it socializes the cost of the infrastructure. And the way this pays for itself is, you, and again we have models that work in the electric utility today. They're called transmission models. Where you pay for this based on a tariff about the, in the electric world, what we do is we had, we served four municipalities which are separate electric companies. The state set a standard rate so that when you're running your power on somebody else's line, you paid X dollars per megawatt. And the same thing applies to the data rates, the way this is done. So the actual user will, so you don't pay for this out of the electric rates. You pay for this, you do a projection and this is what the public utility commission does with electric rates. You project what's the usage gonna be over a 30 year period? What's the take rate gonna be? And we're gonna set a rate, a telecom rate for that take rate. So you, the user, whether it's voice, data, or video is going to pay a standard tariff no matter where they are in the state. That pays for the infrastructure. Now if the take rate is higher, that rate'll get adjusted. If the take rate is lower, that rate'll get adjusted up. That's what the PUC does. So that's why I'm arguing that the affordability is taken care of by changing this model. Can I, when you talk about the user, are you talking about the individual home user or some sort of service provider? Okay, so thank you, the question. So just for clarification, the electric utility doesn't provide the end service. Just like your electricity, you get to your house, we don't tell you what appliances you're gonna use. In fact, in most states, you can actually choose who your electric provider is gonna be separate from your infrastructure provider. This is kind of a model that's used in other states. I'm not arguing that we should deregulate our electric utilities. But I am saying we use this model that, for example, Massachusetts, you pay a rate to the person that owns the poles and wires, but you can buy your electricity from anybody. That's what this would be. Open access fiber meeting, you could buy your services from anybody, anywhere. You could buy your services from somebody in Australia if you wanted. Because that's, you know, this creates competition in the home and the business for providers. So now you're gonna choose your provider based on price and service. And- So the user that's paying for the usage of, you know, however much bandwidth they use then is who? Who are you describing as the user? That's what I'm kind of- Oh, well, ultimately, that's, your provider is gonna have that built into their bill. Yeah, you're not gonna pay a separate bill to the infrastructure. So you, as a utility, would be billing some provider for providing that amount of service. That's right, yeah. I think there's a question in the back. Yeah, I'm not sure I see how this model comes about without it being a larger regulatory maneuver. I'm not understanding, maybe I'm missing something here, how this group can move forward with that model. So what I'm gonna do, I'm already working, I'm gonna propose legislation and it's a two-year legislative process. And what, you know, there's, I spoke to RediNet last night, you know, I plan on getting EC fibers at Gen, I don't know whether other community districts are out there, but you know, if we get fiber, if we get this successfully passed from a regulatory standpoint, it solves your problem. So the point being, I would expect a group like this to support that. And I think your job is to say why you believe you need this kind of bandwidth. You know, one of the things I ran into the campaign, which I found interesting, but I also ran into this in 18 years I was studying this. If you do a survey of people in the Northeast Kingdom, which I serve, and ask them if they need more bandwidth, they're gonna say, no, I'm perfectly happy with what I got. It's really one of those things, this is that you don't do surveys to figure out what. Oh, I'm not disagreeing with her, I'm just like, I can't think, I can't imagine that. Well, think about it, if you don't use technology today. I can make an argument, just because of the recent storm event we had and some of us are supporting Michael's thing, you know, and I work, that's what I do, I work for startups that are new Orleans right now. And when I lose connectivity, it's traumatic. But I don't need, I don't need much, I'm doing a GitHub check, you know, like doing a check-in. Like, I gotta send an email, like you don't really need that much bandwidth, but you need a lot of utility. I need a choice. So now, let me take an Instagram moment here. You're looking at the view from your own narrow business, but if you want to grow business and you want, you know, helpers here, you want to bring people that are gonna, you know, work, like, I guess I custom that, like, you know, yeah, I stream TV now and then to watch sports and stuff, but even that doesn't really draw that much. No, I'm talking about new businesses. I'm talking about business, medical records businesses, you know, any, they use a lot of bandwidth. You may not use a lot of bandwidth. You don't have to pull fire to every house to meet that need. That's probably a part of the business process. No, let me just say, the real, what we want to do, we want to build an infrastructure just like your wires. When we put the wires up, we want to build an infrastructure. You don't want to have to replace your infrastructure. Sure. Fiber is the end goal. I don't disagree with the vision and the idea that it's time to do the solution, but it's been eight years, I don't know how many 30, 40, 50 million dollars have gone down the drain. Nothing's changed in terms of the visioning, basic internet service, the underserved areas in the Northeast Kingdom. Oh yeah. And like, if you look at the capital build-up or the legislative change that's required to get from point A to point B, like I'm just using EC5 as a model, they've been at it for eight, 10 years, 18 million dollars in, and they've served, you know, 600 customers. Well, okay, I'm not. This isn't, all I'm asking is you're, I don't care, I'm focusing on, I was up in Canada today, I was down at Bennington College yesterday. I'm not, I don't care. My focus is on solving climate change. That's where I'm moving towards. But I'll be glad to introduce the legislation to make all this happen. I'll be glad to make this happen. Well, then I, but the point is, the point is if nobody wants it, then I don't care, you know? No, I don't know. No, I mean, if you get the regulatory change and you can come up with a model like that, that would be awesome because now you have the capital and you have the momentum behind it. My concern is if that doesn't succeed, where are you if you're, you know what I mean? Like, you gotta be careful. Vermont, Vermont, if we have to see, Vermont, you know, we, this is a basic need. We're all here for the same reason. Let's not fight about the highest level goal, right? The highest level goal is we've got to have broadband for Vermont to grow its economy. Right. And so, you know, if I can be successful getting all this legislation through, which I think I can, will you support me? Oh, I would, an idea, like a model like that, especially if it's been properly vetted, which will have to be through the policy process. Yeah, here would be awesome. Yeah, okay, good. That's really what I want to know. Let's make sure everybody that hasn't had a chance to talk yet, so Shavon. So who fights this? Who argues against this? Well, I think, first of all, first of all, I can tell you, Consolidated won't fight it. I know that because I talked to them before I even thought of running for office on this one. Consolidated is they're losing a ton of money on their infrastructure. That's where they lose their money. They're, that we talked about purchasing their assets at net book value. And there's not a lot of net book value with their copper infrastructure. But in their polls, you know, the polls and wires, all these assets have been surveyed. We know what their value is. They're more than happy to get rid of the infrastructure. So Consolidated isn't going to fight this. You know, I plan on sitting down with, the only thing that Green Mountain Power got mad at me was because I said, Green Mountain Power, do this because they're going to get 8.9% return on the assets. Robert Doss, this friend of mine says, don't say that. We're going to do this if it's for the public good. And I honestly believe Green Mountain Power. Some people don't like Green Mountain Power. Don't trust Green Mountain Power. I think their intention is good. And I think they will do it for public good, but they'll also get an 8.9% return. So, and I know Washington Electric Co-op and Vermont Electric Co-op are interested. So, and I know Morrisville Water and Light wants to run fiber every home and business. So I think the utilities are going to be supportive. I'm going to get them on board. The people that might fight it might be Comcast. But we can, or I've already talked to VTEL. As long as you protect their existing assets, Michelle Gite and I go way back. Michelle says, well, I got all this money invested. All right, well, if you already got fiber, then we don't need to run due fiber. We don't need to overlay. But I will send you all these case studies. And this is being done. So it's not like it's impossible. So there's a new legislation. We have another revenue source that we could potentially cover up also. Again, Robert Doss says doesn't want me to talk about the revenue side. Because they're basing in the way out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No one knows more about utilities in this room than we do. So I don't know a lot of them, but I've talked to them. I've talked to you. I've talked to WACC a lot. And my impression is they're risk-averse. They're tempted to get into communications as long as it doesn't jeopardize the members, rate payers, depending on whether it's a product or not. They like the idea of it if they're not the ones with the bucket truck dealing with the fiber. Part of your savings idea has to do with the utilities doing the fiber work. And I'm not sure you're going to get buy-in from the utilities on that score. You may. At the moment, the impression I'm getting from utilities I'm talking to is they would rather, perhaps, own infrastructure but contract out all of the fiber works separate from their own utility guys. And the other point I wanted to make was I think consolidated is into it because they want to bust unions. They want to get rid of all of those line workers. Because in all the other states that they exist, they don't own polls. But in New England, they do now. And I think they want to stick to that old business model and get rid of a whole lot of payroll. That's part of why they bought into that. Let me answer your two. Let me make a counterpoint to your two points. First of all, those line workers would be happy to go work for electric utilities. They would be happy to leave consolidated. I've talked to them. And there aren't that many line workers left in the state. So those line workers came to me and asked for jobs. Yeah, I agree. So those line workers would go work for the utilities in the IBEW, which is a stronger union. Now, my line workers opposed me on fiber as well. And now they want to do fiber. We bought them portable fiber splicers, and they loved it. Someone has to go sell the line workers why this is important. And line workers like to know new skills. They like new skills. So we'll solve that line. That's a line worker resistance problem, not a utility resistance problem. I speak to the risk averse nature of the boards. Oh, so I speak to it. Yes, so I was the CEO telling our boards not to do this. I remember. Yeah, because the last thing I want to see any of these utilities do is go into the telecom business. I'm still saying that to this day. Because if you look at, here's where you get to the problem. Here's why no utility should go in the telecom business. I'm not even saying that today. Because what happens is, think about the customer service component of this, which is really hard. You've got somebody who's sitting at their computer who says, I'm not getting any signal here. Right? That's the last thing I want my utility customer service folks to be dealing with. And of course, today you've got to go reboot your modem. With a fiber modem, you've got more stability. The good news about just like electricity, when we put smart meters in 2005, our utility as one of the leaders in the nation had smart meters, we put those things in to deal with just what you said. Because I was so annoyed when I came to the utility. We had this terrible thing where it'd be 11 o'clock at night. A customer would call because their power went out. And you'd say, would you go out and listen, put your ear on the meter and see if it's humming? And then I witness this. It's 11 o'clock and it's 10 below zero. I'm in my pajamas. You're telling me to go put my ear to the meter? Yes, go put your ear to the meter and see if it's humming. Because if we send a bucket truck out there, we have to charge you $250 for a truck roll. So nice thing about putting smart meters out is, hey, oh, your meter's running, so can you go check your fuse box? So now we do this for you. That's the same thing with the provision of if we know your modem is lit, then the problem's on your end and you need to call your service provider. But I wouldn't want to get into the telecom business. And then the other thing too is around building headends. I ran a headend for four years. I'll explain what a headend is. A headend is what provides you all your connectivity. So most, like VTEL has a head end, Burlington Telecom has a head end, and Stowe has a head end, Stowe Cable. And that's the one I took care of for four years. Just, I don't know why. So the head end has all these satellite dishes and it's the thing that brings all the television stations in so you can get your 3,000 channels or whatever. And it also brings, it's the place, essentially the mini network operation center. And those things are a nightmare. I wouldn't want a utility to be dealing with that either. Has one of these models existed in the country? Yeah, I'll send you them. They're all over the place. They made it through the Public Utility Commission and they were sanctioned. It's actually, there have been two federal cases that the telecom provider's lost on this one. And we actually have an alternate coming up from Williamstown, who actually worked in southern Virginia with one of those setups that you're talking about. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, cool. So I think, Ella, you had your hand up before. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if we can answer this today, but like, OK, great. That sounds awesome. What do we do? What is this board doing in the meantime? Because obviously, each of us represents a town. We can't go to the town and be like, we have this handle. No, no, no, no, no, I don't know. Just wait two years. There's an electric center. Oh, no, just wait seven years. Just wait seven years. Right. I think they would really struggle with that. So I think the question is, obviously, we're, I mean, we're technically municipality. We have the ability to, we do have the ability to advocate, correct? Unlike a 501C3. So we're able to go to the legislature and say, hey, we want you to do this. And we can go to our towns and say, hey, call your reps and tell them this is going to happen. So you've got already the beginnings of a grassroots situation going there. But what's the other stuff? What are the other things that we could be doing to potentially build, start building those head ends out, right? That might be something that could happen in the end room or, I don't know, speculating on a five-month system. Yeah, what would we do? Yeah. What's our goal in this? I'm going to tell you something else too that I talked to was, we don't need any more head ends in the state. I got Michelle Gite to agree. And I started the conversation with Burlington Telecoins. Why don't you take your head end component and turn that into a cooperative and make that available to all? All these resources in the state. Because you don't want to get into the head end business. That's expensive and late. You're up to late. What's that? Head ends are up to late. Well, don't tell that to Michelle Gite and Burlington Telecoins. It's the one that I'm really good at. Oh, is the head end just for TV? I thought it was also where the backbone is. The network operating center doesn't have to be a head end. No, it doesn't. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. You could have like two or three head ends in the country and connect them if you had reliable connections. But that's a secondary issue. I would say don't fight that battle. You and I are a firm agreement, by the way. I think Al, you are. So my disclaimer is I'm not a utility person. I'm not a tech person. So forgive me if this question is really dumb. Oh, I should be able to answer those questions. So I get landline and DSL service from Consolidated Communications. I get electricity from Washington Electric. You've mentioned both of those companies, entities, and entities who might be able to partner with them to provide the space and the upkeep for internet service coming in. Which one would I deal with? And who would be overseeing this system to make a decision about whether it's Washington Electric that is my internet service partner versus Consolidated Communications that's my partner? I don't see. I can see going to getting a change in the legislature to allow this to happen. But what would be the mechanics behind who would decide who does what where? So once you create this network, you, the consumer, will choose your internet service provider. You won't be talking to your utility about your telephone, your television, or your computer. That's going to be your provider. And once the network is called open access, so any provider can use it. So whoever wants to serve you will be able to serve you. But how does the wire get up in the hole? Is that something WEC is going to take? That's the WEC will take that, yes. And why not consolidate it? Because that's how we're doing it today, and that's the expensive way. Because today, the way it's done is we had to put telecom on a separate infrastructure. Because when you're in the electric space, you require first class line workers. If you're a telecom provider, you don't need first class line workers. You can drop it down below. So WEC is the default choice for who we would want to work with in areas where we could. You as the consumer would never be talking to WEC. Right. But the person who's in charge of making all this happen is going to have to make those arrangements. So WEC is going to carry Gilbert's line through Worcester. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. There is the monopoly there. GMP doesn't cover that. Yeah. So is there a way? And the magic of this, by the way, is getting them under the electric utility regulations is what that does. So is there anybody who hasn't asked a question of Christine that would like to ask one? Otherwise, Jerry, you had your hand up. Yeah, Christine, I'd like to bring you back full circle, if I can, to Jeremy's original questioning. And after hearing all that you've said and following up with Elliott, in consideration of the fact that we've been trying to do this now in earnest for eight months, and we've got $3,000, we've got a way to go, should we be thinking in our business plan to have the flexibility to take advantage of such a situation? Should it happen in 2022? Or, I mean, I'm still trying to figure out how to use this, because we've got to get fiber to people soon. And we're poised, we're trying to be poised to do it soon. And by soon, I mean it could be two years from now that somebody is actually lighting fiber. And I think we're in some ways obligated to do that. So could you come back around to talk about how this relates to us and our stage of development? Yes, and I don't think you should change your direction, because I'm the snake little salesman when I'm coming in. I'm not saying I'm the snake. You should consider this. Of course, I'm not. But the point is, I may totally fail in this endeavor, right? And you're going to know this session whether, and I think the legislators lined up to produce legislation all this. So the point is, I want the support of all the folks who are working on this to say, this is plan B, your plan A, or whatever. And you've got to work both directions. But ultimately, just like I did on the campaign trail, I said, we've got to get fiber to every home and business in Vermont. And there's a model that works. Let me show you the model, state of Vermont. Let me work this through. Whether I get elected or not is irrelevant. Phil Scott can take the credit for this. I mean, I'm happy. This isn't what I'm here for. I'm not here for personal credit. I'm here to get this done. But you should continue to move in the direction you're doing. But what I'm asking is for support to say, yeah, this is the direction we'd like to go. That may be our preferred direction. OK, so that sounds like maybe interacting with what I mentioned your suggestion. Yeah, I'm going to talk to Patty Richards. I've actually got a meeting set up now with Rebecca Town from my electric co-op. I've sent Mary Powell a note I want to meet with her. So I'm going to get the utilities on board. That's my job. So Jeremy and I are meeting with Patty and Barry Bernstein, the EC5er, and Mike on January 24th to talk about this. So good. The question I have for you related to that. I know Patty is less interested in barriers in doing this. What's the financial risk that the utility is taking and going out and do this? The idea is for them not to take a financial risk. How do you convince Patty of that? Well, because she's going to be paid for through the telecom providers. So yeah, but what if there's not enough papers? So I do think that part of what I was going to propose our probably duty is to start to essentially pilot these with utilities. And also, as a municipality that has the ability to do these bonds, take on the financial risk on behalf of the, I mean, it's a sweetheart. In that regard, it's a sweetheart deal for the utility. Oh, that's an interesting question. Yeah, you could take the risk. That's a good point. I'm a technical person. So I'm trying to put my head around, what would we be doing? So we're not going to be laying wire. We're not going to be supporting the polls or hiring anybody to do that. We'll get the companies to do that. What do we do? Are there computers that we own somewhere that are servers and then we've got tech people who do that? I don't understand what, as a provider, I don't know what providers do, I guess, if I'm trying to. Well, I'm not sure why you'd even want to do that. But if you do, the point is if you want to get into the business of being an ISP or a telephone or video provider, then yeah, you've got to build an infrastructure. But you're competing against, I'm sorry, what was your name and you're right, what's your name? Mark, right? Michael. Michael, Michael. So Michael's point is my point, because all those services are, once you get connected, you're going to need less of those providers, because, right, Michael, isn't that what you're saying? So then what is our role? You don't have a role. Your role is an engine. Take the financial risk. Christina's saying, until this passes, we have a very big role in doing what we've been doing very long. But if she can get that through, it throws everything out. You won't go where retail already is. You won't go where we've already gone, but the rest of it will be done under this tariff situation. Is that right? Yeah. And just the other thing that we sort of talked a little bit about in our subcommittee, but probably not to the larger governing board, is the role of a governing board. We're effectively the board of a company, right? But it doesn't exist. So what are we really doing? We have the ability to contract with existing companies that have all those existing infrastructures, and we take financial risk. And basically, it's like a win-win. So there's a bunch of different ways we could incorporate ourselves and our approach to delivery. The easiest one, as Christine pointed out, because we do not want to be in ISP, is to find an existing ISP that has much of that infrastructure, billing, customer service in place, and just work with them, right? And in the fee, it sometimes. So because we're taking the financial risk and we're taking on the fundraising burden and the reaching out to people, trying to get more subscribers in and all of that, with the promise that we're providing this, we're working with somebody who's going to provide you with a solid service that meets these requirements where we're not looking at your finances, where we aren't looking at the color of your skin. We don't care. And it's all a completely. So we're offering them an option outside of the corporate thing. Am I understanding some of this a little bit? I mean, I think so, absolutely. I mean, as a governing board, part of our duty and role is to basically set policy and set the tone by which an operation runs, right? We don't run the day-to-day, but we get them in the firm direction. I didn't want to lose the ability to have a say in, especially for the underserved populations, especially for the financially dependent people and all of that, because I don't want that taken away from us. Because that's what I think our prime value is. We're trying to get this out to everybody no matter what. If you live on top of a mountain and all that, you don't want to get that too. I just want to make sure that that's what we're still talking about. Let me just tell you something, too, that you just triggered something for me. One of the things that electric utilities have is an obligation to serve. That's a very core part of this. What I'm going to argue with the legislature is network connectivity is as important as electricity. And what I'm going to argue is that utilities have an obligation to serve broadband to every nook and cranny of Vermont. Because the concept being is, if we all agree, you can't run business without connectivity, or I don't even think people can exist, but I can't imagine. I've got a bonded pair, the highest level of DSL, and it was wholly inadequate for me when I was running my campaign. That's for sure. So first thing it is, bought an office in town that where I could be connected to fiber, because it was just impossible. I'll just tell you, just the other day, I'm part of this movie that's being shown in Taiwan. I get a call, look, we need this 20-second video from you. So I record the video, and I'm on bonded pair DSL. The video file is, I don't know, 50 seconds or something, and it's 300 megabytes. I have to drive to town, 20-mile round trip for me to get that video up that night, because I couldn't do it on my bonded pair DSL. So our mission statement, and I quote, we will provide central Vermont residents, businesses, and civic institutions with universal access to a reliable, secure, locally-owned, and governed communications network able to grow to meet future community needs. So focusing purely on that locally-owned part, and now with Washington Electric, with Mount Electric, it's easy to say locally-owned, but it's a different story when we start talking about remounted power. How does that locally-owned fit into this? Well, if you don't buy that green-mounted power as locally-owned, then you got to go back to your expensive model, because the only way the only way it works is the regulated, you know, I just, I've been pride of the whole financial model that says, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get, you know, the point is, the point is green-mounted power has 71% of the meters in the state. You know, they're the elephant in the room. Okay, so just in the interest of time, everybody we have about five more minutes, so if we can do a couple final questions, and if you want to start us off. Did you see the legislative, like you talked about some of the other actors that might have different viewpoints, you know, from the legislature itself, I mean the one thing that comes to mind for me is dollars that you would think they're, do you see any roadblocks, or where do you see the biggest hurdle in terms of, is it just educational, is it? I think it's educational, I think the point, you know, I was a frickin' politician, so who would believe me, right? You know, that's kind of like, I understand I wasn't in politics long enough, so I could, but there's clear evidence that this is an effective model because I can refer people to where it's being done today. You can go out and kick the tires, you can go out and visit these places if you want. One of them's right across the lake here. In fact, when you talk about, when I was starting to get my board to think about it, I actually talked to the Otsego Electric Co-op who was building a head in, and I said, hey, can I use your head in? But then Michelle Goethe goes, well, I'll cooperate my head in if you want it. So the point is, these things are out there. I just didn't have enough time to explain to Vermonters, oh, this isn't hocus pocus, you know. You know, now we've got time, but it's education of the legislature. I would bring, you know, I know this guy John Chambers. John Chambers, he was the head of the Federal Communications Committee, he left the FCC to carry this model out. So I would have him come speak to the legislature. You mentioned like electric utilities are required to provide service and so forth. Would it be mandated that all telecommunications infrastructure be controlled through the utilities, or is it just something that they'd be able to start playing in that space? I'm saying, you know, the way this works, we gotta make a requirement to serve. So it would mandate the electric utilities provide the infrastructure. There's not anybody else who's got a hold on it. Sure. First of all, I hope I didn't come across as being antagonistic. I'm just trying to poke through the holes in there to see if we can make it stronger. Yeah, well, thank you, I appreciate that. I hope I didn't appear too defensive. No, no, no. So, a couple things, a minor technical thing. We've discovered ADSS is a terrible solution for the fiber of the home, so we can talk about that later. Yep. Yes, there may be a couple of examples in the country, but I'm concerned about how Comcast and others will litigate about Title I and Title II of the Communications Act, and we're talking about regulating information services as they are currently classified by the current FCC, and as long as it's the phone company, it's a little easier to regulate because they're required to provide phone service, which is under Title II, but I'm not sure this legislation is proposing wouldn't get preempted. That's my big concern about it, and the other thing we should talk about more is open access in a small, sparsely populated state and the impact on any small providers who try to compete in open access and being unable to fight the biggies. So you have comments on either of those? Well, yeah, the first comment you made, I agree there's gonna be some fights. Peter Welch and Bernie support this, too. They're intrigued by the concept, too, so I'm working at the national level as well, and I've been working at this national level, I was the head of the chair of the strategy and technical advisory committee for the National World Electro-Cooperative Association, serves 56% of, it serves all of rural America. We're dealing with these issues. There's been two federal court cases that were won, but that preemption, I agree, that's a risk we take. That's a risk I take, a risk we take, but the point is, this is an important battle, I think, because ultimately, if we, I've been working on this for 18 years, if we can't get to this point, America continues to be a backwater, and I can get into all the political other reasons we're a backwater anyway, but. It's interesting to win this battle of 15 vibrators of litigation. But I mean, again, it's hanging wire, and I don't know, it's hanging wire, it's hanging wire and right, public right-of-way, we own it, guess what? We're hanging wire up on it, period. Yeah, that's the attitude I'm taking. But from the tariff forcing utilities to do it. Well, if they fight that, we'll already have it 50% up. That's why I'm asking you. Well, let me also tell you why you can win this battle. It's because, so my highest goal, you heard me say it, my laser focus on solving climate change. In order to solve, and I don't even, we won't even go down the sinkhole here, but in order to solve climate change, we have to have a reliable data connection to every home and business so that we can be communicating with appliances and setting price signals. So the foundation that wins in these federal courts is, IP-based metering is a necessity for the future of electric utilities. So electric utilities gotta have a connection anyway. All right. So it is a battle, I agree with you. Open access, turn to that, or no? I think we'll, maybe we'll put open access a discussion of what that, yeah, that's not something I'm concerned about. Okay. Yeah, that's not, I don't have any ores in the water on open access, I just, my ores are in the water, I'm getting fiber to every home and business. Yeah. So let's have a short discussion item about- Yeah, you guys, I think you as a board can take a position on that, you know, that's, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming, Kristina. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Siobhan, it's all you. Okay. Okay. So every person that I've mentioned our unofficial motto to, which I remind you is- Oh, I don't wanna start. Noster interre, sugo ne, which is Latin for our internet sucks not, has gotten a uproarious laughter and people enjoy it and they keep saying, is it on your website? And they wanna see it on the website because they're amused by it. And I think that if we could tuck it away somewhere on the website, that would be good. And it would be amusing and interesting, yeah. Jerry, what do you think? I have a question on that. It's been a long time since I've taken Latin. Can we have second and third party verification that that is, in fact, what that means? Yeah, because I got it from a Latin student, so. Okay, I'd like an independent verification. Yes, I can appreciate that. So kind of like when somebody wears a shirt and there's Japanese characters on it and they don't know what it actually says. Yes, please. Fair, fair. So I'm gonna be the skank at the garden party here, but we're gonna be selling bonds pretty soon. And when you sell bonds, you often run into people who have a lot of money but are skeptical of the practicality of a project and the people behind it, and they're looking for reasons to not trust those people because they wanna make sure the bonds are good investment. I am really risk averse about anything that's public. And I think even though I like the Latin statement personally myself, I think some people, when they found out what it was, they would think it's juvenile and sophomore. And what the heck is this public utility really doing? What are they capable of? That's what I'm worried about. I can't imagine Chase Mann having this in my bag. I can understand your reluctance and your feelings on that. I'm having a hard time caring about those people who would be like that. But I also understand they've got money. I'm just, I just have a hard time imagining that that's actually something that people go out of their way to look up and say, oh, look, they're just, they're having too much fun. I understand there are people like that, but I just can't see it costing us that much. Plus the goodwill, it gets us for who are amused by it. And who say, oh yeah, look, they're not seeing themselves too seriously, but I can, I would just go first. Well, I just want to echo first of all, I think it's a lovely sentiment. However, there's a danger with trying to be cute. There really is a danger. And the danger is that it backfires when somebody looks and says, that's not cute, that's stupid. As nice as we think it is, and I've run into that from personal experience, not me saying that's not cute, that's stupid, people looking at me and saying, that's not cute, that's stupid. And so it can backfire on what we think is funny. Other people don't necessarily see it as funny. So I think we should approach this with a little more caution. I mean, if you were to write that at the bottom of your emails, I would look at it every time and go, that's great, seriously. But that would be a personal statement on your part. And you wouldn't be put in the whole organization. And so I don't know. Fair enough, fair enough. I heard David had a suggestion sort of. With the t-shirt? Yeah, if you had a t-shirt with the logo that said that in the bottom and did that as a fundraiser or something like that. I mean, to some people who would be amused by it, whatever, that's fine. But I think I'm generally speaking with Alan on this, that's not trying to be too cute as much as I. I have a job where I get to wave my geek flag pretty high and do this stuff day to day. And I can make dad jokes in class. And there's not, I mean, really, I just get students rolling their eyes at me. I think, yeah, but folks who are making investments and writing checks with more than four zeros, we ought to probably keep it a bit more conservative. And sorry, I know we've all sort of said something about this. But the other question is who are we right now? Who do we want to be when we grow up, right? And the deal is right now we're a fledgling municipality going out hat and hand, right? And so I think we do need to conform to people. And I think that the dream is that we'd be this cool hip Silicon Valley-esque thing maybe, and for now that's just not Vermont. Yeah, Vermont, the Vermont version of that. I don't know what that is, you know, I'm wearing my big boots to take boots here. But, you know, so my point is, I think that there's a point in our maturity process where we get to set our tone and we get to be who we want to be. But for now, I think we need to be a town. I would wear that on a T-shirt. So any other discussion on this? This is what we added this as an addition to the agenda right beginning of the meeting. So Becca's going to be heading out. I need somebody to volunteer to continue to take minutes that we can put in the minutes for next time. Thank you very much. Thank you, Alan. I have been waiting on extra five minutes to see who's coming. Oh, I know. For giving me a hard time about leaving early, you're going to leave early. Yeah, right, right. I'm going to enable you to do that. Well, Alan's taking notes. Everyone should probably say their name and town before they talk. I actually, I think that already said. Got it, everybody? Yeah, I have everything right. Great. Thank you for taking the notes for the first hour and change. Finance committee, we have a bad problem. Could you run the meeting at this point? Motion died for lack of a second. That's why the clerk isn't a measure of the governing floor. So from the finance committee, I think the first, not the first, but the big identified need for us in our discussions at the finance committee and talking about policies and the oversight and all of that is some definition as to what our operating structure's going to be. I mean, when we sit there and we have these discussions and it's like, well, what are we going to be? Are we going to be a board that contracts out everything? Are we going to be a board that hires a business manager and we're really having more directly? You know, whatever the operating structure's going to be, it's kind of hard to move ahead with some of our discussions without having some firmer idea of where the board's intending to go to come out the other end with an operating structure. So I would love to kind of put a couple of the options out there. I know we've talked about these, but I traveled to a conference with Michael. So we can change it go, I guess it was, it was last Friday, I don't remember. Right. Whatever it was. So there is over in Newbury, Christine mentioned this, Newbury-Rendianet. They are essentially something like us. They're a rural economic development initiative district, which is almost the exact same language as the communications union district lifted over for economic development. They are doing the same sort of fundraising and teeth gnashing as we are, but what they're doing is they're trying to essentially raise money so that, was it consolidated it's doing it? For consolidated to build stuff in their town. So kind of an odd approach from my perspective. Then you have the EC fiber model, of course, which is hiring either an existing or building and having some new operator manage this. And then the model, which I think at least initially within the next year or so, probably makes the most sense to me is actually Michael's model, which I got to learn more about the Kingdom fiber model. And you please correct me if I mischaracterized this and just keep us straight. You contract for help desk through a help desk provider and you contract with someone who's gonna do your network management and you contract with people who are gonna do your billing. All of the things that are the main kind of business office things that are happening down EC fiber down in Royalton, where they have people assigned to do these things that are painful to employees and health insurance benefits and whatever don't make sense and your network is quite small. So instead, you pay, is it per subscriber? You pay a per subscriber for help desk and for billing and for these sorts of things. And that can be done rather cheaply. I mean, we can get the actual numbers. I don't think that that's really relevant right now. But my instinct is that we may transition from one model to the other. Part of my report back with the reports back from various meetings was the progress in talking to potential operators. So entities that are already out there that may be able to take on our business in a similar way as ValiNet does for EC fiber. I think there's still some unanswered questions for that and that we are probably poised imminently to give you some more, let's just say give you the governing board some more information about what seems like the best move forward. So two comments. One on that last model that you described where you contract, you do a piecemeal contracting. The one thing that you just kind of glossed over is the last thing that you need, which is a Michael. You need an executive director or somebody to functionally run all of those small subcontractors that you've hired out, right? So there is a capital expense in the fact that you have to pay somebody a salary. You have to pay them $60,000 a year to run the thing. And then the other thing I would say is we didn't have quorum so it hasn't come to this board yet but I did send around to our small committee, the business development committee, sort of a timeline to sort of hopefully make some of these decisions. And the focus of that timeline was largely to initially get together planning grant and hire somebody to pull together effectively the three, you know, our options and pull together probably an RFP for each of those options so that we can go out and actually see what people can do for us within our community, right? So the way I'm hearing it then is the model that appears to be gaining traction is one where, I mean, we're going to hire somebody to actually, somebody or some organization, we're going to hire somebody to actually do the operations and we're just gonna provide the policy oversight for the operations, yes or no? That's closer to the EC fiber model, I mean. I don't know yet. We don't even, I mean, maybe you guys have an understanding of what's out there. I just don't even know if we have somebody to do that. Well, the ready net model is very different. Yeah, that's true. So basically, when Craftsbury was thinking about doing their whatever, they had Fairpoint come up and say, what would it take to get you to do all this fiber for us, give us, you know, 50 megs or whatever. And Fairpoint came back a week later with a bid. They said, give us this amount of money and we can do it. And I think that's sort of basically what happened with ready net. So you can get kind of cast or consolidated to build something in Reddit as theirs and you pay them to do it. You pay them their construction costs. They're very thrilled because they don't have to come up with the capital and then, so that's one model. That means you don't hire anybody. You just raise money for them. I'm not in favor of that, but it's certainly a good model. And there's that utility model that we just discussed as well, right? Which is also something that is hopefully gonna come up about the reports back from various meetings where we do have that upcoming meeting and we do have some questions and where I think we need some direction from the board just in terms of how do we approach that? Because I mean, Michael has an opinion. I have my opinion. David has his opinion, but we'd like to come in with some, if not consensus, some kind of generally majority opinion so that we can go there with and say, hey, we're interested in supporting you in doing this option or this option or this option. I don't mind going with a couple of options. Right, but that's what I mean. You don't even have to have a majority. I mean, the discussion, especially with WEC, I mean, if WEC says great, we'd love to do this thing and bring it out and probably says no, it's half of the towns don't get anything from that model. But if we can start, I mean, if we started with just WEC poles built in those places and then once we got a stable financial foundation where we could go and get bonds and then build out those other places, let's do that. I mean. WEC could potentially go in those GMP areas and act kind of like a valley now. They're not running electrical stuff. They're just running the... They're not running electrical stuff. I think my mind went all out on their poles. Listen to the discussion of what fundamentally was in my schema as an outsourcing model, which is very successful in many instances. I would say that at some point in time, the board will have to also investigate getting a skill that hasn't been discussed yet. And that is outsource integration. Having had a lot of experience in dealing with multiple vendors from multiple services and multiple hard good products, all of which have to come together. If you are seen as the person that's providing all of this, then you better be damn good at integrating the deliverables from all of the companies you're using as an outsource. So I recommend the outsource model, but understand that that's a management skill that is in short supply right now. That's a really good... Well said. We need a Michael. We need a Michael. I might be available. Whoa. But that's a conflict. So... I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm not dropping, please, I'm not trying to put a leaf in the punch bowl here. It's just that as we look at developing the operating model here, which is separate and distinct from the business model, when you look at the operating model, if you're going to outsource every function or nearly every function, they all have to play together with the illusion of a cohesive entity. And that requires some considerable skill. So can I speak to that? Unlike DEC, there's like three or four contractors at most. So it's a little easier to integrate than where you're getting all kinds of parts and services from lots of disparate things to build a product and market it and manage that system. Your experience is much deeper than mine in that regard, but what I'm saying is there are in a whole lot of different contractors that have to be managed at once. Well, I'm taking this beyond the physical implementation of the infrastructure in saying that you're billing your insurance, whoever's going to handle payroll, all that other stuff has to be seen as a single cohesive entity by the users wherever they touch it. I mean, from my standpoint, yeah, there's one interesting thing after another to look at how you got all these parts to play together, but my real goal always was to look at what the customer saw and what the employee who was delivering all of this product saw. If my employee's paycheck doesn't clear and I've outsourced that and I can't go beat up the payroll manager, I've got a disgruntled employee. So I'm viewing this from the entire spectrum of what it takes to deliver business. So bringing us back to the finance committee and what I was saying, and I thank you for this and I'm going to ask it if my fellow finance committee members have any questions on this too, but I'm kind of hearing that any policies or procedures we develop are going to be really kind of myopically focused on our current reality with the understanding that as a better operating model is defined that these things are going to have to change because it does have some bearing on how we deal with things like audits and expenditures and revenues and stuff. So I'll leave it at that. So you guys know how long we approach this. I don't know if you guys have any questions or comments. I think what we've been, we've been tangling with Rhonda is not knowing really what the organization is and it's really hard to write business policies and procedures when that's the case. And it's not anybody's fault. We're just new and we're growing. But I think I've been convinced it's going to be hard for us to write effective policies until we know how we're going to be operating. And until we know how we're going to be operating, we write the policies, we're inviting the very high probability we're going to be rewriting them shortly. So I'm not quite sure how much we need to have in place right now. Well, on the other hand, we just had Becca say that she needs to get checks. Yeah. And how do we manage that? Well, and we actually did something and we came out with a workaround. I was going to come up to that. We authorized spending some money, but we'll get to that in a minute. I think that's what we ought to do for the next couple of months and see if it works. Instead of thinking we can devise the scheme by which any sort of system can work. We ought to just do our best and do the right thing and make sure we have enough checks in balance, enough checks in place now to make sure fraud doesn't occur or embezzlement. But I think we can do that. And then once we have a better sense of how we're going to evolve, it's going to be a lot easier to write it. The procedures and policies. And I still intend to have something come up to the board in January because I think we're actually following into just one or two areas that we need to make sure to get covered. So that will still become, I just want to speak to something Alan said. You're right, we don't know what we're doing yet. And it's okay. And having Christine come today is valuable. It gave us a perspective on an approach we hadn't considered. And next month, we're going to have probably Chris Campbell. I hope he's up. Okay, he's going to present something on behalf of Tilson Technology and Maine with others, engineering and construction ideas. There's another consultant that I've mentioned to Jeremy recently, Magellan Advisors, which is a national firm very big on getting monster grants from our U.S. They're going to have a different proposal they'd like to come and present. I think it's awful, we have to be patient. And we don't want to get this damn thing happening. Where's my fiber? The more of these perspectives we hear, the better equipped we'll be to make judgments. And so let's make tentative plans and then say, well, let's hear what the next idea is and be prepared to change it. Yeah, I think that's what I heard Alan saying too. Yeah, because that is elegantly so. But that's all right. You're actually not an intern, he's saying. I finally figured that out. So the other thing is, I guess to make sure we mention is that the finance committee did authorize the treasurer to spend up to $300 on, what was that, motion? Let me see if I can find that, where did I take, okay. So the motion that we made in pass was to authorize the treasurer to expend necessary funds to purchase checks and other incidentals required to meet immediate needs with a total not to exceed $300. I think that's fair. I think what I would personally like to see is with every meeting then when she does her treasurer's report for us to maybe have an item after that where we can essentially approve to sign the checks as it were, I mean, just so that we can see the checks that are going out, if that makes sense. Yes, and actually if we can hold that discussion because I think that's something that would come forth with a policy because the expenditures, well, we'll have to talk about how we're gonna expend money. We've kind of covered revenues at the moment. We've got the four positions, it's actually three people that are authorized to receive money on behalf of the municipality. So I don't know, does the board, do you want to leave it to the finance committee to approve payment of the bills or does the board want to approve payment of the bills? Or some other, I don't think I've ever worked with that. So maybe some balance between here is for us just to get a report of the end of the out. And the board would do that, so the board would see it. The board would see it and the board could just say, we've received this and have a motion that we've received this and there's a process where we get to look back over it rather than. Yeah, just review the checks that have been written as opposed to bring them here and then we'll approve you. Now you can sign them. And that would be part of the treasure report, yeah. Right. My understanding of where you're then at a place now where we can expend money or is there a certain restrictions around, like I thought there was that six month waiting period of all I concerned last year about waiting until it was up for the reading. It's not at all clear that that six month waiting period prevents us from spending money. That was something that was probably my misread. I think Jim's take on it was that we still can, we just have to realize that people who are lending us money have to be aware or be made aware that if the legality of the formation of this district is challenged and we are undone somehow, then they might not get their money back. That's all. So no, we can indeed, we can indeed spend and we'll be spending money, not a lot right at the moment, but certainly on checks. I'd also like to see like a PO box so that we can have, so that when I'm like putting in a dress down on these sorts of things, it's not my house, which is fine. I mean, I don't really care that much, but I think it would probably make more sense if it was a PO box. And how many months do we have left? Provisionary period, I don't know. I don't, or? That's not bad, that's not, that's fine. Because it was like two months ago we finally got certified, right? Something like that. But I mean, there's really, I still think we can test our formation on it, so. Yeah, I think the risk of anything like that is diminishingly small. And I don't see us, I mean, I could be wrong, I don't see us borrowing money into the next four months. I see us applying for grants, not borrowing money. Well, we may be issuing promissory notes the next four months, which is arguably taking up most of it. I'd be surprised. But we'll see. I mean, I have a hope, I hope, I like your happenings. Okay, any thoughts on the finance committee? No, other than that, we had some, we just had some discussion about, I mean, a good part of our discussion is how, well, we think it's gonna happen as far as the governance goes, as I mean, the operational structure goes. We'll just have to keep moving ahead with the understanding that, you know, it has presented here, which is that there's still a, we might go one or more different directions in the future, and we're not really quite sure which one or more of those will be at this point. So, flexibility is here. All right, moving on to the Biola Policy Committee report back, Jim Barlow, who is not here. He said nothing to report. That committee's not met since the last governing board meeting. He didn't think that they had any tasks on the agenda there need to be tasks on the agenda. We can add them at the end. But he did want to call out that, and I will communicate this to Rebecca as well, but we need to do a better job of meeting the 48-hour prior warning of our posted agenda. So, I try to have that done by Friday morning-ish, and then get that to Rebecca when I'm done with it. And then my expectation is that it goes out from there. It may be better when I get it done. I also, I run it by, I run it by filling back as sort of the executive committee, just to say, if I missed anything obvious, is there something that needs to be taken off or something that I screwed up on? Once they sanity check it, I guess I can probably just put it out there because I usually have it ready to go well in advance so that everybody has a chance to review it, and we meet that statutory guideline. So I'd like to apologize to everybody that it didn't fall within that 48-hour window as such. And that was Jim saying, by the way, you want us to put it out there. Okay, Business Development Committee report back, Jerry. Yeah, so there's a lot going on in the Business Development Committee. So first of all, we're at the end of the year, Fundraiser, and I've made a personal outreach to everybody that's on the governing board and the alternates, that's probably in the mail, just to shake the trees a little bit because this is the only money we're gonna get for now. There is, hopefully, we will be able to leverage whatever we collect among ourselves, we'll be able to leverage this with the grant you guys made it in just before the tick of midnight. Is that what I saw? Let's do it at four o'clock. It was submitted at four o'clock. But I mean, that looks like it's got a pretty good probability, so with that, and what Elliot had alluded to earlier, what we've been looking at at the Business Development Committee, and please let me know if I'm off-base at any point, is that we're moving through Grant Rider, so the first batch of money is a small amount of money that we collect ourselves and leverage off the grant that you just asked for from the state, so maybe that's 25,000 bucks or close to it, and that gets us a Grant Rider. The Grant Rider we're presuming will get us a Business Plan Development Grant, where we'll get some folks that can spend their full working day on these items. And I have a question for you, because what I wanna make sure we understand is the extent of authorization, the authorities to do what? When I read through what you had submitted to the state for the grant, you had talked about the Executive Committee, and when we're working in the Business Development Committee, it's not clear who's writing the RFQ, RFP, who's evaluating it, who's making that decision, and I certainly don't want two groups of people doing the same thing. For sure. So it's unclear to me, I was wondering if we could get that explained. Yes. How that's gonna happen. And that might be the Business Development Committee that actually works on, that works with the consultant or the proposer or whatever that happens to be, because I was flying fairly blind and I realized that, oh, my other responsibilities and Thanksgiving or whatever, I sort of said, oh, I gotta do this right now. Yeah. And with the constraints of having only six pages, you couldn't go into any more detail than was what I had there. So who's writing the RFQ? I don't know yet, but that's, I'm envisioning that happening with the Business Development Committee and maybe the Executive Committee together or a group of separate volunteers who are willing to step aside and do that. Let me follow up. I think it's logically housed within the Business Development Committee to get that going. But, so what is the, I'm still looking for the authority. I'm not used to working in this kind of environment. I don't know who's the one that gets to say, yeah, do that. So what I think what I've sort of said in the past, and this is just me saying this as the person running the meeting who maybe talks sometimes. If there's something that you see that needs doing, I would say just do it. I mean, I don't think that taking policy positions on behalf of the organization is something that would probably be a good idea. But if you want to, like Ilya did, he just went and registered the domain. He just went and set it up. We didn't approve all of the copy that went on there, but I'm kind of okay with that. So if there is an RFP or a financial model, for example, like we talked about that you want to work on, I would say let's let the Business Development Committee do that. I don't suspect that there's anybody else that's going to steal your thunder and try to be doing these things in parallel necessarily. If you'd like to be, if you'd like to- That's fine, that's fine. If you'd like us to make it formal saying that Business Development Committee's purview is now also to do, to build this RFP. Well, I think we've been working on the assumption that that is what we were heading in that direction as the Business Development Committee. It was me reading what you had said, looked like the Executive Committee was doing that when I read your proposal and that's why I bring it up. And I probably should have had it say Business Development Committee, but it was just- That's fine. I just want to make sure it were the path forward is straight. A small net, but you raise an interesting question since you're going to send out the love letters requesting money. Are we restricted in any way from accepting charitable grants from towns using town money? The reason I ask the question is because right now towns are going through the budgeting process. Obviously there can't be a line item on the budget per se, but at town meeting, we all, at least in Elmore, we vote on charitable contributions which have been requested by letter for the town. It's not a town obligation. Is that an avenue of money we could pursue? No, not yet. No, okay. No, there's always obligations paid for by your tax dollar. That is correct, but unlike most of the budgeting in the town, the town votes on each line item directly. They can say yay or nay. So the law is very specific about it. That was the clarification, because I saw it as perhaps one of the things that we could get at. With sort of like one caveat or exception, some towns have like a community development organization. What's that? Yeah, like in Cabot. Yeah, so Cabot has like a community. But it's a separate entity. It's a separate entity to the town, but it's a pot of money that could potentially find. Is that a line item in the town budget or is that a separate organization? It's a separate organization. What the law says state specifically is the towns can't support us with any monies raised by taxes or things. And I would argue that probably legally that would also apply to a pass-through. I mean, super PACs might do that, but I don't think that that's probably a wise move. If there are operating expenses that the five one C three question requires. We're not going to be easy. No, I know. Tits fall. But Bob, there is another way that a town could do this while maintaining compliance with the law. That would be if the town wants to contract with us to do something, that's possible. They can't fund us like we're through a direct appropriation, but if they wanted to hire us to do a job like any other organization that they might be putting something out to bid and we bid on it, that's something that we could conceivably do. I'll scheme on that. Okay. Is there some promotion that could be done at town meetings? Like can we ask their notice being made that we exist and we're taking donations and stuff? Please do that. Sure, whoever wants to do that documentation or write that language or physically stand up on the floor, please do that. Maybe we have the ability to receive those on the web now, thank you. We also have the ability to just collect checks. Cash is a little bit harder. You would want to make sure that you have a good paper trail and receipts just so that we don't have any sort of appearance of impropriety. Related to that, and anybody who wants this, I had to submit a written report to our select board for the town report. It's done, had to be in last week. If anybody wants a copy of what I wrote, I'll be happy to send it to you. Yes. I don't know how many towns require this, but every commission and board in town is supposed to submit an annual report. The select board just send that to all the towns or do we have to go as individuals? I sent the approved annual report that we approved two months ago. I sent that to all of the town clerks. All the town clerks have that at least. I'm gonna put it, the notice that we're accepting donations. If somebody wants to write that or can put something like that together, I'm happy to, or Becca I'm sure can do that. As it stands right now, all of the agendas go to the clerks already. So it's really no big deal at all to just send that in a package with one of the agendas that we send out everywhere too. Just to close the loop on the immediate fundraising that we're doing, one of the things that I had volunteered to do before I could stop myself, was I said I would write the thank you letter and what I do need to know is who to write those letters to. And that'd be straight through Becca. Yeah, Becca would have a list of who's actually contributed through the web and through checks. Sorry, and one other sort of point on that score, Becca and I were sort of going back and forth discussing that when we set up the online portal. And she gets the notification when something comes through. I had said, maybe we want to consider divvying that work up of sending the letter out. So if it's somebody that's within a town, the representative who is from that town signs the letter, that could be good. So really all we're looking for from you, Jerry, is to write the copy. And then people can literally just put their name on the bottom of it and sign it. That's what I think would be a better touch. Yeah, yeah, I like it. And it would obviously distribute the work in a more equitable way. Does everybody seem, would everybody be amenable to signing a letter like that to your neighbors? It does require a little bit, I mean, we're actually a little bit probably in arrears in terms of sending out these letters. You usually want to try and send them out within three days of receiving a donation. So just be aware, if you say, yeah, that sounds great. We shall do that. It means that you're gonna have a little bit of an administrative turnaround time where you have to get to the post office, right? Just so everyone knows. The volume of business that we're doing pales and comparisons of the fact that in another organization that I'm a member of, I have to send out the, the begging, I call it the begging letters, the end of the year begging letters. I personally wrote hand notes for 220 of the members of it. It's all divided nationally. And I'm sending stuff to people in Texas that I've never met. Right, right. We're not quite at that point yet. Yeah. We're going to start making connections between the donation page, the Facebook page, our webpage, and that way we can start social networking, the donation page. Yep. That's a good idea. So I have admin access in Facebook page. Backadjust, does anybody else want to slash and dip? I mean, do you do those things? Would you want that? Absolutely. You're able to connect? I mean, I just, I mean, yeah. I have an admin and I can connect things up. The other things that I'm sort of working on in the background, I've got my graphic designer working on a color palette for us, believe it or not, that's not something that I feel at all comfortable doing. So I have asked my graphic designer if she could just pull together a good color palette for us, you know, did a little research on our competitors, tried to pick colors that weren't quite our competitor colors. I think the predominant colors would be orange just because there's too many greens in this sphere space. So we're working on the color palette. The other thing that we're gonna add to the website is we're gonna add an area for warnings and for minutes to be added to the website. That will count effectively as them being posted, I believe, and I don't think they need to be emailed to anyone at that point, as long as you have an official place where it's posted and warned. You gotta go to two public places. Two public places. I'll check it on the whole Facebook too. I don't know. Anyway, I'm just saying, I'll make that repository and I will give Becca administrative access to it. She has familiarity with WordPress, so she's pretty well set in terms of posting it. The last thing that I will say is that I've added basically a day up to date on our progress piece on our little mini microsite right now. I think Jerry signed up for it and maybe one other person, but as we go MailChimp, the bulk email service, they have a free email system, so I'll probably just set that up and maybe get Becca trained up on that and others trained up on that so that we can start sending nasty emails out that way instead of CCing everyone on Gmail. Anyway, that's sort of my little update too. Moving on to reports back from various meetings, that's me. I met with Central Rwant Economic Development Corporation on December 3rd, which was last Monday, on the advice and memory of Michael, who remembered using some CVEDC Telecom Revolving Loan Funds. And it turns out that they spun that, that was USDA funds, that they spun into a more kind of general economic development Revolving Loan Fund. It's still there though, and it's available. There's $50,000 that are there that could be usable. The caveat is that they fund actual physical things. So if we're building infrastructure, we can use that money to build infrastructure. We can't use that money for planning, for planning, business, plan, development, anything like that. That's not something that we can use that for. So on the other hand, they said explicitly that they would love to help with any future USDA grants that we go after. And they can help in a number of ways because those grants are all about scoring. One of the things you get these bonus points for prior experience managing a USDA grant, which I learned there. CVEDC has done that. They get some bonus points. Apparently though, there was a rule change in the last go-around that he's not sure if it's gonna be there again, but in the interest of getting more people applying for grants, they gave a bonus 40 points to be essentially given by the local USDA office to essentially incentivize folks who haven't previously applied, which would be us. So having CVEDC work essentially as our fiscal agent applying for the grant on our behalf is possible, but may not improve our chances, it could. He suggested that I follow up with folks at USTA to find out for that, and I still have that on my to-do list. Vermont and New Hampshire are in the same reasonably small pool of world development funds for this particular grant that we're looking at. Let's see, the loan fund of that $50,000 is one point over Wall Street Prime. They have some flexibility of going interest only for a period, so we could probably be fairly manageable. He suggested that we communicate and try to link up with Central Medical Center with the hospital. You said the Revolving Loan Fund is a rate slightly below Prime? One point over Wall Street Prime. Okay, the reason I ask is I've had experience with other revolving loan funds where not only was there a very favorable interest rate, but the outstanding balance was adjusted by a certain percentage every year. One of the ones that we're currently paying off in Elmore, basically the outstanding balance has reduced 3% each year for the remainder of the loan. So not only did we get a good interest rate, but we also get a reduction in the interest total payment every year based on a reduced outstanding loan balance. Yeah, I was sort of sad to hear that that's how that they have this structured. I suspect that we could probably, we may be able to twist an arm a little bit, but he did specifically say when he talked about it that the way that they got the money from USDA, they have to be more fiscally conservative with it, so they don't have that same, some of those same features is like. I just wanted to confirm, because as I said, my experience was different and it was always nice to just see that the total outstanding balance dropped by 3% every year, and that was fixed against the outstanding, additionally did it, breaking in a new tongue here, the initial indebtedness. Right, and one of the things that there's a drinking water revolving loan fund that the town of Berlin used to build our water system here, and it had features very much like what you're describing now. Yeah, so there could be better options out there. Jenny? Yeah. You might want to, next time you meet with him, ask him what happened to the other 30,000, and did they have a right to change it from telecom to general? He did explain that in more detail. I didn't put it in my notes. There was, yeah, there was some question about how the funding was used and who was supposed to own the infrastructure after it was funded, but that would probably be an offline conversation. Yeah, he didn't like the deal I got. Something, something like that. They also said they'd be willing to write, if nothing else, write a letter of support for various grants, and I wasn't able to get in touch with him in time to write a letter of support for the grant that I applied for on Friday, but he said in the future, as part of the business community, he's totally willing to do that. So that's good news. The leader of that day, also on December 3rd, I met with Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission. They were interested in what we were doing. It is part of their regional plan also to do fiber and broadband deployment very much like what we're envisioning, and they think that one of the things that we should really strongly try to pursue is integrating broadband deployment with town plans. That has some implications on also other development funds out there as well. Towns don't generally go back to edit and modify their town plans unless they really, really have to, because it's sort of a long and painful process. One of the reasons that we would want to look at doing this would be emergency services connectivity, because that's an important portion of the town plan. And, but one of the things that they said at the Regional Planning Commission is that a lot of the town plans are going to be up for review because they have an energy plan portion in a lot of these town plans, and those that are going in there and reviewing them for energy plans like Norfield is where I'm most familiar with. While they're in there and making these edits, they can also add components of what our mission is there as well in terms of economic development and how growth and how zoning and things ought to support what we're doing here. And there's some more concrete things that they have that they would, that they're able to push our way to. There are repeating windows for revisions of town plans, one of which is within additional section, such as an energy section has to be written. Another one is a mandatory refresh rate. I don't know what the interval is, but I think it works on to about five years. What we can do is take a look at that refresh rate. And if we had some boilerplate that we could submit to the Regional Planning Commissions for use in the town plans, that would make their job easier, make the town's job easier. So if we wanted to craft something like that, we hit the refresh rate, we get it in there. I think one of the things the business committee talked about was actually writing some boilerplate for town planning grants that go to telecommunications. They can get $20,000 a year. That might be a good thing to get on the shelf. In other ways of dealing with that, where they get their plan developed that way. And they were very clear that they'd be willing to support that and be able to essentially hand these things out as we go to. Yeah, and the other thing that just occurred to me is a while back I was working on, and it was so long ago, I can't remember a single thing on it, but there were essentially policy recommendations to mayors and city councils for fiber build out. So here's how you make your town or city more palatable to ISP for build out. And so obviously, when we're engaging on those town plans, we'd want to try and revisit that. Because basically, that's how Kansas City got Google. They basically said, we'll do whatever you want. You come here, we'll rewrite our ordinances completely. And they did. And they rewrote their ordinances, and Google got like a total sweetheart deal, basically. They were able to out-compete all the existing folks. So that's how Amazon had here to stay. So anyway, just something to keep in mind. If there was a town planning grant that went to a town, would they be allowed to forward that money towards us? If it doesn't come from their taxing capacity. So let's say it's state money. And so they can also like, since we're an economic development corporation, they can also apply for those grants on our behalf. Okay, I'm sure. In my experience, if the town has a town planning grant, that money can be expended to any resource that is developing that particular portion of that grant from the town. And if there's a town that's willing to do that, I suspect that if we have the capacity in this organization, that we could help them quite a lot in writing that grant as well. That's why I'm gonna loop back. That's why I'm suggesting that if we had a couple of paragraphs, town plans don't have to be complicated. No. But a couple of boilerplate paragraphs for an associate in any one of these documents, who had it on the shelf. They love it. And as I understand it, there are other towns elsewhere, maybe not in central Vermont, there are other towns elsewhere in Vermont that do have such portions of their town plan. But that would be somebody having to go out there and find those things. So like I said before, I also went to the Southern Vermont Connectivity Summit, which was a bunch of folks in Southern Vermont around Rattleboro there, about looking at what they can do to improve their broadband down there. And that was out of their Economic Development Commission in that area. And there was a lot of interest and there were a lot of the incumbents there. Michael was there representing Kingdom Fiber. I sent you all a link with all of the slides from everybody there. There was some groups, some co-ops in municipal buildouts in Massachusetts. Michael's slides were there. The slides that I presented were there. There were some slides from- I'm actually representing Craftsbury. Or Craftsbury, I'm sorry, that's your, when you were sitting at the table, you were representing Kingdom Fiber. When you were presenting, you're, yeah, it's all very confusing. But there was, yeah, in presentations by who else was there? USDA? Did he present? Delta was there. Sanders, Sanders was there. Sanders was there. A bunch of different talents. ACCD, one of them wrote us. Yeah. He was on our board. And a bunch of great, like, the Southwestern, Vermont Regional Commission, and people like that. Yeah. So that was good. And it really, I mean, it was really interesting that they're in the same place that I was, and I think that a lot of you were, or have been together the last several years. So I essentially went up there and said, here's how you build the communications union district. And we'll see if any of that happens there. One of the wish list items that was mentioned at that meeting from ACCD was the creation of a broadband revolving loan fund. Let's go back to that again. Which would essentially, this would be an item in Governor Scott's next budget that would essentially enable communications union districts or other similar organizations essentially to have bootstrap funds for the first few years. Which is kind of like exactly what we need. I'm hoping that that is actually introduced in the budget. It will be in front of the legislature before long. So I will keep an eye on that if that hits and that's still in there, I would encourage you and beg and plead of you to talk to your reps and your senators and if possible, we'll try to set up a time to testify to whichever committee that that lands in. We can talk about that. I think it has legs, all of the legislators that I've talked to formally and informally have seemed to think that that was a good idea. But politics being what it is, it would help to have more people talking to them. The opposition may come from the incumbent providers, the bigger ones. This is true. What's the title of that again? Broadband Revolving Fund? There's no title, I was just making that up. It would essentially be a fund, not like the connectivity initiative, but this would be a low or no interest rate loan that would be available to organizations who are building out real broadband in Vermont. But there's no title yet? Not, I mean, there could be, but I'm not aware of that. So the proposal, as it stands, says we need one of these. Is that where it is right now? As far as I know. A revolving loan fund has to have these three components. It has to have customers, obviously. But it also has to have money, and that's where the legislature comes in, but it also has to have a source of money. And unless and until it shows up as an actual line item, it's going to be difficult to cover that in the current budgetary environment. So what are they doing with regard to this legislation to identify the revenue source? That is beyond my pay grade, I'm not honestly sure, but this is something that they're actively talking about and it might be moving money from one bucket to another to make this. No, I just, I'm sorry, the pessimist in me is always looking for how can this possibly fail? And I'd like to come up with some sort of way to prevent that sort of failure, if possible. I can speak to it. VEDA is the main development fund for the state. It normally gives out loans to all kinds of organizations, but it vets them very well. And the idea is that this would be added funds for VEDA to use that are higher risk. My point is as far as that added money come from, it's out of the general fund somewhere. So it'd have to be a line item, that's my point. If you're getting it in there, it's gonna be a budget. Yeah. Okay, I also spoke to the CIO at Norwich University who seemed amenable to this idea and boy am I glad I talked to him. He was the guy who actually worked in Southern Virginia building a cooperative, building open access fiber all over the place. And the stories that he had to tell about all the stuff that they did was really pretty incredible. And he said, yeah, I recently moved to Williamstown. I was like, where is town? Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, we don't have an alternate in Williamstown. It's like in Ramah, could you use the company? So I was like, would you be willing? And then, so I'm used to when I do this pitch for like people to be on board. So like, ah, no, I'm too busy. And I know he's too busy, but he's like, yeah, yeah. So we arguably do have an alternate from Williamstown who's not been participating very much. But I would like to see if not as a second alternate as somebody who can come in, Frank will be active and would be a valuable addition to the team, I think. And as somebody who has also been looking at things from a fairly high managerial IT level and who can also talk geek, I think is he would be a valuable person to have. Did he also say he's become an anchor tenant? He would be thrilled, he would be thrilled to be hooked up as I think like most of us in the room would be. We also had a meeting with Bill Powell briefly last week, last week, I don't know, I was tracking the time. Essentially just floating, some of the ideas just kind of seeing where the lay of the land is with this. And the, you know, it would be nice to, again, we talked, I mentioned this earlier, if we could be, if we could go into that WEC meeting saying how we would like to have them help us and partner with this. So, you know, if WEC were interested in, you know, buying a promissory note from us, you know, is that something that we'd be okay with? I mean, I don't think anybody would say no to that necessarily, not that they probably would, but, you know, what if WEC went and built all their own fiber and leased it to us, okay? What if WEC just said we are not interested and we just go through the problem of attaching to their polls and they're responsive to us like in a lot of polls where they're not. I mean, that would be the worst case scenario. Are there other things that we want to say? Here's how we want to interact with WEC that we can just essentially pitch and say here are things that our board thinks might be good ways forward. I was thinking of what I didn't think Christine was talking about, you know, these incumbent telecoms don't really, especially if you're talking about Consolidate, it really doesn't want their hardware out on the polls, you know, and I don't know how true that is, but I'm taking it at face value, I know, for instance, in Washington Electric Co-op area, there is not to the home, but pole to pole, there's a good amount of fiber running through that area, especially if you get to places like Williamstown, I know, you know, there's fiber up and down most of the roads in Williamstown, they just don't go to homes, you know? They go right by businesses, there are businesses right down on Route 14 that I've been talking about since EC-Fiber, I've been talking to these folks and they've been like, where is the fiber network? I need that connection in order for my business to, you know, I need it for my business purposes, so. I just, where would the possibility of us just purchasing already installed hardware for all of this, I mean, if indeed that we found that Consolidated didn't want their lines, didn't really care about them, just wanted to lease the throughput. I mean, I suspect we could go to them, I'm not sure that they would be willing to lease any part of the fiber that they've built there, it's not really part of their business model and we would be competing with them. Well, I'm thinking, A, we would buy the lines, they would lease from us, but we wouldn't necessarily be competing with them only if we went into the telecom, if we weren't providing telephone service, I mean, it's. CSL is an important business to them. They're just delivering it over copper because it's an existing plan. Right, well, here's, so in my limited knowledge of all of this, here's a possibility of a plan that we would own, we would own all the fiber lines, they could sell the fiber lines out to us under the auspices that we would be able to go out and do the maintenance for them one way or another, I take your pick, maybe we can get Wacker somebody to go out with the line trucks, I don't know. So, by discussions about Consolidate or whatever, I think if we can leave that for another time just in the interest of continuing, so no, I kind of understand where you're going, but really about how can we go to the board of WEC and say, these are possible ways forward that we can partner with you. And this is what I'm talking about, because we've already broached the concept that maybe, we would be the funding providers for them to put up the line. This would be along the same thing, there's areas where there's already fiber up on those poles. Well, there's a lot of fiber out there. Rama, I'm sure that that's a non-starter, positive. There's no way they're gonna give up their infrastructure. Well, I don't know why that until what you were saying I was talking about was something very different, and I was talking about installing new infrastructure up in the electric space that's owned and run by the utility. And I understand, but it's any dark fiber that anybody, but they'll deliver service to anyone who requests it if you're paying enough. That's right, but we don't know an answer until we ask a question. So, will you reach out to Consolidated and ask them? I could try, I mean. No, I mean, it's worthwhile. I don't have the bandwidth intended to pursue that, but I would encourage you, if you can find whoever the appropriate contact would be, our friend that was sitting next to us. Jeff Austin. Jeff Austin. Just ask him the possibility of leasing some of the dark fiber. I think we wanna stay below the radar with Jeff Austin, even if you can hear our broadcast right now. So, I would invite you to find out. I'm with Michael on this one. I'm 95% sure that this is not a way forward, not something that we can likely rely on as much as possible. Yeah, we're, like, there's a lot there. I mean, you don't know how, just because you're seeing fiber down poles, you don't know who owns it. You're gonna sovereign that first. Listen, my coin isn't to put out a full-fledged business proposal here. You were talking about going to WAC, talking about possibilities. That's a possibility that, you know, there's lines out there that possibly we could, and that's why I'm bringing it. Now, I can imagine various models to work with that, but that's irrelevant to this conversation. But let's just go back to your question. What would we want? So, one of your proposals, too, was, A, W, C, will you string up R fiber, new fiber, whatever fiber, open access fiber, you know, CV fiber, and every pole you have within your service area, so that, you know what I mean, is that, you know, because that begs the first question, A, we don't care if there's already fiber going up and down that road anyway, if we want another strand, because we have control over it, we have to pay the extrovert rent, and we have an operating partner that we trust. Or where is that? So, there's some questions about ownership and whether or not WAC can do these sorts of preferential things for us if they don't own the fiber themselves. And that's sort of, is a bit of a sticky sort of thing. The thing that we can provide, though, is we can provide the kind of the last mile, and essentially to be the ISP, but furthermore, we could also be involved with funding the planning and engineering, you know, mapping pole audits. Right. And maybe, you know, as part of this partnership, you know, they can offer discounted rates, or we can offer discounted rates on internet service to WAC customers. And I think there's a much bigger discussion here that I don't really want to get into. But I would like, you know, at least at a high level, to get a sense of what we can go to, go there and say that what we're interested in, just so we can pitch just so that I'm, you know, I'm not, or Michael's not, or whoever's not sort of going all, you know, going road. So this question of what is currently allowed for them to do what they say, I mean, if they're, I understand what you're saying is, Christine, is they're not allowed to be a telecom? WAC is not allowed to at this point? Why not? I don't know. No, she was talking about obliging them to run this equipment and make it open access. I think if an electric co-op wanted to string a whole bunch of fiber and go into the fiber leasing business, we already have examples of that in Vermont. So in either case, it would allow us to, like, say, hey, this baby coming down in the pike, here's an opportunity for you to hit the ground running when it does, and we can all get that set up. Yeah, I think so. Jerry? Two things. One, in talking with them, I think it may be beneficial to talk about a target area to say we would like to try this in, and we maybe at the moment don't have the area defined, but you know, we looked for a pilot project for lack of a better term, for one, so that we don't have to talk about something that's going to be system-wide for them, for one. And then the other is, you know, maybe there's something we can offer them, because if they had fiber connection to all of their meters, do they get something for that? Is there, you know, are we able to provide something for them to better manage their system, but they don't want to go and go through all the connectivity to do it. But if we're saying, hey, you know, we're going to drop to the house, when we drop to the house, can we provide some kind of connection for you? There are. This was the last thing that Christine said when she was talking about climate change. Yes. This is the demand response capability, so that when you have a smart water heater, you don't necessarily need to have your water heater on during the day, and if there's a peak where you would normally be, you know, spinning up a coal power plant to meet that load, they could actually hear and say, not right now. That's the load management. Right, they have time to manage it. They have time to say over heat your water heater so that it has enough heat to last you through a three hour pause in service. Or somebody. But that would be, that's all smart devices that can respond to those sorts of things. There might be a need that they're looking for. That is a strategic future need that I think all utilities are looking at. So, Jerry, they don't have SCADA in the work system. A lot of utilities do, but they don't. They need that, and this fiber could deliver the ability to have that. They also could update their mapping system of their pole infrastructure, and this would be a collateral benefit of doing it. There's a number of things that they can gain from it, and they understand that. I think your question, Jeremy, is what might we propose to them, and that there's really three possibilities that I see as obvious ones. One is they own fiber. Something like Christine was saying, or just in general, whether it's up in the electric space or on the communication space, they own the fiber and lease it to us. Another possibility is we own the fiber in the same circumstance. Now it's definitely in the communication space of the pole and in exchange for some potential financial benefits the benefit they give us, we give discounts to their members. And the third is, forget about any deals with WEC. We just install on their poles, just like any other attached to us, and we do it our way. So those are the three approaches. The third one is the least attractive in terms of partnering with them. They have access to very low cost funding, and they have 41 towns of what? How many was it? 1,300 miles. And how many people? How many was it? I didn't write that stat down. A loss. And so going back to Jerry, we don't want to take him to 41 towns. Not now. We want to figure out how to do a half town. And they'll understand that, I would think. But the idea is to look ahead, are 15 or 16 towns? Yes, maybe even a 41. We should talk about those things as possible. We do, though, have a, I think, and I could be mistaken here, but if you look at who's providing electricity to the towns and to the areas that we're looking to provide service, I think it's not your state division between Green Mountain Power and WEC. I think there's a lot more WEC, we have substantially more WEC presence if we will. There's Green Mountain in the state highway corridors. Right. In most of those towns. So there's a lot of WEC presence. WEC presence we're interested in. So I think you guys have effectively outlined some of the benefits for WEC to adopt a fiber network. I think the ultimate question for us is how we spur that adoption, how we accelerate that adoption that is already, we already recognize it's in their interest. There's a reason they haven't done it yet. Right. It's probably a combination of we don't want to be in that business, right, with that type of customer. We don't want to be like unplug your mode and let it go back into business. And we're afraid we're gonna lose money on it. So the question I think is, you know, do we have access to a financial vehicle or do we have the ability to take on risk that they would consider to be an attractive option? I would say we need a feasibility study to convince them that it's gonna be successful and then they have access to the financial vehicle. They have a lot of access to financial resources more than we do. Well, that's what I was trying to understand. That's what I was trying to understand, right? But at the same time, I mean, they might love it if we took on the initial risk, even if they have access to those lower cost financial vehicles. They did a pilot. We're gonna fund this pilot and... And then you're gonna see it works and you're gonna get excited and then you're gonna go to your big banks and go. Right, and I think that's a promising way forward. I have another meeting with RBE Technologies in East Montpelier as a potential operator that's on Friday. We'll see how they're interested, if they're interested in any of those sort of pieces that we've talked about contracting or subcontracting out. And I wanted to kind of give everybody a sense of what I'm picturing as sort of that the grant landscape and the funding landscape, in addition to our raising money through various ways. The connectivity grant actually is... The next one of applications is due January 30th. 25th, okay, it's coming up soon in any case. You have to submit a letter of intention by the 5th. January 5th. Yeah, so I suspect we will probably want to at least put a letter of intent out there and see if we can figure out some way of getting in on one of those grants. These, this is the map of the, what do they consider to be underserved areas? And I had a talk with Clay Purvis. I'm not sure if there are any red dots or red. I had a talk with Clay Purvis at DPS about the, whether this is, these reflect a reality or not. And he's like, well, this is the best that we can do. They put up all these addresses of what they think doesn't get at least four one DSL. And then they went out to all the providers and said, hey, do you serve any of these? And then whatever was left was not the case, but... Yeah, so they're relying on the report of the providers. Yeah, let me speak to that. Because some of the provider I challenged addresses they got taken off the map. In order for them to accept that, I have to sign a pledge. I had to sign sort of a contractual obligation to serve under those locations for the least four one. So, and if consolidated challenges something and takes it off the map, they're obligated to provide a four one at that location. That's just a contract. Otherwise, the state can confirm that. But if I and the subscriber don't know about this, I can't come in and say, well, I'm not getting four one. Why is my address not on this? I didn't even know that they were doing this. I found this one really interesting. These are addresses, but you know what that is. It's the Triller Park, yeah. That's the campground. Yeah, well, it's the Triller Park and then there's a campground there, too. Yeah. That one? Yeah. So these are all the nine one one locations in the state that includes camps. All this area, this is trailers and then it's a camp. These are trailers and these are trailers all through here. But I would suspect that there is DSL available there because here's DSL, here's DSL. But these are the grant requirements that we have to be a concrete plan of serving those red ones. Was it the red or was it the green in their legend? Red. That's the red. So red. And those are census tracks that aren't 100% served. You see where there's just top graphical area there? With no page. That's considered 100% served census track. Right, all the plain field. I was looking at this map and I thought the plain field doesn't even show up here as having a problem. They don't. They don't. Michael. We can serve all the plain field except for the village. It's true. So in any case, pursuing the census track. So the census track has red and green dots in it because that isn't 100% served. So the green dots are served and the red dots aren't. So I'm a green dot, I can see my green dots from here. So that means you get DSL, good job. Yeah. So the connectivity initiative is a rather small amount of money that allows us to tap it. We'll pay for building to these red dots as accurate as this data might be or not. So my immediate neighbor who is served by DSL, I can tell you that for sure because I know where the line runs. It runs along the driveway. It's marked as a red dot. My address was thankfully taken off there because I'm an active and solidating customer. What about that section of Roxbury and Northfield? So that's a funny thing too because actually EC Fiber has some Roxbury addresses that it serves where it was at. Have you sent this link around? Yep. This was a link at the connectivity page that I sent around today. I tried to download it at my home in Worcester, I just want to do the time. So I want to try to wrap this up too. Connectivity grant is one avenue but the pot is small and it might not be worth our time but I want to put it out there. The USDA grants should be coming. We should have more information about them in the next month or two. I'm on the mailing list to find out more about that. Central Monet Economic Development Committee has that revolving loan that we could tap into. And I, if you haven't read it already this was my request for $12,500 from ACCD for doing feasibility study and business plan development including a survey. Some of this stuff is we're going to have underway so we may not have to pay for as much of it so while the overall project cost is $25,000 and everybody's gonna say you can't do that for $25,000 but if we're doing a lot of the work along with this I think the cost can make sense. That's all my various meetings that I've got. Vermont Telecommunications Plan has anyone had a chance to read over that? Yeah. So it turns out that the public feedback meeting that's closest to us right now is happening right now in Montpelier if it hasn't already closed. There are more meetings for feedback on the Vermont Telecommunications Plan if you wanted to weigh in on that. It's pretty interesting and it's pretty exciting. That definitely lines up with our vision. Maybe some parts are a little bit squishy, weak-sauce is the word that I was going to use. I have one more grant option. I was looking today in the Northern Borderlands whatever economic development group that's main in the Hampshire of Vermont, Elmore is in there. You can get 50% grants if you match the other 50%. Northern borders and Elmore is in there. Okay. That's your only talent. You want to fill in the rest of the meeting? Northern Border Regional Commission next year if the front bill passed, it's going to be for the whole state. Oh. And it's going to be $20 to $30 million available between the Hampshire of Vermont. So the VRC is something we really want to take seriously. So we want about 10. Sorry. So I encourage you to look at the Vermont telecommunications plan, even if you just skim it, there is interesting stuff there. We have to formally adopt the budget and I don't know that we have a lot of time to talk about next steps going to 2019. I think we've already covered that in large part. We have a budget. Do I have my grades? You don't want to see the grades. As I understand it, the finance committee adopted this without any changes. So unless anybody wants to talk about it, I'll make the motion that we adopt the budget as presented in the amount of $305,760 even. Second. Okay, seconded by Rahmah. Any further discussion? We're not obligated to actually spend that money if we don't want to. But it's a start. We don't have it, we're not in this budget. That too. But even if we have it, we might alter our budget. We're not bound to this budget. That's true. I mean, at least in this first year, we're certainly, this is again, this is a shot of the dark. We're doing our best here. But I think what it does is it establishes kind of a basic idea and a set of priorities even if it doesn't necessarily reflect reality. There has to be much more detail in the 2020 budget. And I promise you, I'm not going to write that one myself. Promise. Hopefully we get that grant against somebody else write it, which would be fabulous. Any other discussion on this? Hearing none, all in favor? Hi. Hi. Opposed? Abstentions? Okay, motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Anything else about 2019? Good. Any back burner items? Net neutrality? We need to put that on the agenda for the next meeting. Nope. Any committee assignments and membership? Anything that we need, anybody want to join a committee or anything that committees need to be doing between now and January? One question for the business development committee. We had said last Thursday of the month. Yes. Yeah. So will we be doing that in two weeks, I guess? Okay. So could you send out maybe a duplicate agenda but send an agenda out for that ASAP this week so that we can get that on our schedules? That's going to be easier for me if I have at least a week's notice. That way I can beg out of any budget meetings. And we could, I mean, for now we could just have a standing agenda. Yeah. And then outside of the agenda could we have anything we want to add? But be stuff awarded. Yeah. No, I understand that. But like I'm just saying to reduce barriers we can just change the date and... I think that's what we've done for the past week too. It seems to work. I had notice. I had notice. You didn't notice? No, I didn't notice. Okay. Anything else on this item? Oh, I just want one plug. One of the alternates, I can't remember his name works for the food bank. He's a grant writer. Does anybody in this room know what he's talking about? Okay, I was hoping to recruit him to the business development committee. I would have to go back. I mean, I could find out my notes and look at the bids. I mean, what they did the round of introductions, I guess. He came to several meetings. I think he's the one who got us in here once when it was locked. Yes. I don't know how he did it. Oh, I'm from America. That's nice to hear. Anyway, I just want to flag it. Okay, good. All right, approval of November 13th, meeting minutes. Everybody a chance to at least see them, or at least glance at them nonchalantly. Okay, so I will move that we approve the November 13 meeting minutes as presented. Second. Who's that second? Me. Okay, that'll be it. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstentions. There'll be a couple of abstentions. There's folks that weren't here at the last meeting, but pass unanimously otherwise. Okay, round table. I don't have anything about the history tonight. Okay, I'll pass. Pass. Yes. I just still share some anxiety about time and shooting from the moon. Not that I'm against any of it or trying to be negative, but I just, I have some serious concerns that, in the end, you said something earlier about the capital. And all of this is just a capital game. Somehow or another, you got to come up with a capital to build this infrastructure, because you're doing it on somebody else's behalf tonight. And I guess I'm just a little nervous about, we'd all in on the idea, but we never come up with a capital. So, that's all I have to say. Yeah, I'm working on the bench. Okay. Happy holidays, everybody. Did somebody write a letter to Santa for money? Yeah. We'll get one in the mail. Jerry? We'll second your anxiety, but I think things are gonna happen relatively fast over the next six months. I think we'll be in a very different position, making different decisions, hopefully. I think so. Maybe just two things. One is that, with a little bit of fundraising we've done, we've raised a few thousand dollars, I think we need a few million dollars. So, somehow we need to figure out how to ramp up. And then the other thing is I just wonder whether the idea of our somehow creating organization that's going to provide this internet service to people is yesterday's strategy, and that really what we should be doing is try to convince the legislature to mandate that electrical utilities also provide internet access to people. Because they're halfway there. We're not. And I think maybe that's a further discussion that we should take offline and flesh out more detail. Don't tell me I can't do something. I'll read. This is my first time here. I just wanna commend you on a really thoughtful process. It's really impressive. I appreciate all of your work and your continued persistence even in the face of thousands versus millions. I believe we can get there. It's gonna be hard, but it is. Yeah, it really is about how can you tap that capital. How do you get there? Well, once you do that, I think, once you have the money, it's easier to get money there. Thank you very much. A journey of a million dollars begins.