 of a random agenda that was called together by folks just thrown at us, things we need to talk about. So what I would really like to be able to do today is, first of all, limit discussions to the timeframe and the topics at hand, because there's a lot to do in a short amount of time. And then I would also like to see if we can get persons of responsibility for each of these topic items, or for as many topic items that deserve a person of responsibility to come back and talk to the board, to the committee at a later time. Pardon me, I should have had something to drink. So you want me to, I can grab you a glass of wine. No, that's all right. Any additions or changes to the agenda? I'll take that as a no. Excellent, we just gained a couple minutes. Public comments, that would be you, sir. None, okay. Gained another two minutes. Excellent. So one thing I want to do is stand corrected on a number of my comments about how meetings get called and what is public and what is not public. Some of my comments to individuals were incorrect. I stand corrected. And I just want to make sure that we're all in agreement that, here come a stand, hi Dan. Harry. You have to sit over there. I have to sit over there, whether I want to or not. That's right. And you just interrupted by me a couple. I was just saying that I stand corrected on what I've said in the past about public meetings and how they're handled and how they need to be announced. And I just want to make sure that everybody understands that all meetings of this committee and any subcommittees, or any work groups, or any such endeavors that we pursue as a group need to be, all need to be in accordance with the law. Any disagreement with that? Just one quick comment, I just want to thank Becca for taking care of putting the agenda together and getting it out to everybody. As always, so she's great. Absolutely, thank you Becca. And she sent me, by the way Becca also sent me an email. All right. Becca also sent me an email requesting that we get her the immediate, the minutes immediately, if not sooner, so that she can get them posted the way they need to be. I think she might only send that email to me. Okay, so we've gained a couple of minutes, excellent. So there's a handful of topics to go through. And as we go through them, it would be great to have some discussion. I want to limit the discussion to the topic. I want to limit the time to the times noted. And I would also like, if necessary, that somebody stand up and say, I'd like to investigate this topic and bring information back to the committee. So I put it out there. Now is there any discussion on the naming and branding for the DBA doing business as? I think that's just getting started, because with my initial push to get this on the ballot to get us a constitution, I mean, Senator McMillan said it was, I don't say off the cuff, but it seems appropriate. It seems clear. And I think, I mean, I personally like it. I think it's simple. I know there was some discussion about whether it's the most descriptive correct name for this, but I personally stand behind on that. Probably, I mean, while I'm interested in this discussion, it's probably not appropriate for me to be the person of responsibility for this, because I have those, if I had my charters, I would just keep it to myself. A stated preference? Yeah. You know, I mean, I don't have like an immediate stated preference. I don't think that it, I don't think central Vermont internet's great for a market or marketing perspective. I do have experience in branding and marketing. I'm happy to take this on and try and put together like a rudimentary brand platform and a list. I would put together a list of suggestions of names to bring back to the committee, along with rationale behind each name, basically, for further discussion. Does that make sense to people? If anybody else would prefer to do it, let me know, but. I have a point of information. If we already registered a name with the Secretary of State, Yes. Yes, central Vermont internet. Correct. It's about communications utility district, a union district, right? Correct. So this would be a good question of doing business as names. Yeah. Right. I think we're going to take a look at that. We can change the name, it's like, look at what that is. It's a $25 figure or something. EBO to change the registered version. Yeah. So I mean, I can see, I mean, as a municipality, I think that we might need to use that a little bit more. I mean, you could not pillar as a town. We're changing the name. That's true. I'm sorry. On the other hand, you know, we're more of a consortia than a actual physical town with boundaries and residents and that sort of thing, and maybe, maybe more flexible. But on the other hand, I think it's really not that they deal to just have a doing business as another entity and just have that be the front. Like, EC fiber chose a really awkward name to incorporate and to create their communications union district. Central Vermont communications union district. EC fiber isn't, I mean, it's workable, it's serviceable, but even they acknowledged their presentation that it wasn't a hold-on, you know. Well, it's Central Vermont. I don't even know if it's the same. All fiber works. Also, I mean, I will let you delve into this, but the nice about the Central Vermont Internet, of course, is that it gives us some flexibility in how it's delivered, depending on what's appropriate and densities, et cetera. So it doesn't tie us in just to fiber. And sort of logically constrains us to Central Vermont so that we don't have place to just talk to some of you or a water firm that we didn't want to have faster internet. Not the sort of town that we can reasonably reach out to and say, hey, it's not really the Central Vermont. I think the use of the word internet, though, has implications if we want to carry backhaul to a tower, backhaul to a microcell, that's not internet. And internet also has jurisdictional issues, the use of the word internet, because internet is not regulated by the state and the FCC preamps. So we want to be careful here that we don't basically acknowledge that we're stepping outside of state jurisdiction to be regulated as a telecommunications utility. So I had hoped that we would actually resolve this today rather than kick it to another committee, to another committee meeting, to another board meeting, you know, two months down the line. Have you a recommendation? I recommended CV Fiber at the first meeting just because we're building on the success of EC Fiber. And so is it Northeast Kingdom Fiber too? No, it's called Kingdom Fiber. Kingdom, what's Kingdom Fiber? Fiber seems to be the word for this communication. Fiber is. Well, Kingdom Fiber is not in the communication system. That's a for-profit owned by my folks. Right. I was talking to folks about the Northeast Kingdom. They may end up needing a communications union district to fill the gaps that Michael doesn't want to cover. Yeah, yeah. Will you say research and development approach to naming? What does that mean? So what that means is that I would review comparable organizations, not just in Vermont, but throughout the United States. I would probably pull those names apart and analyze them for their applications, things like that. Yeah, the URLs, whether or not there's availability of an acceptable URL. And basically write that up as a memo to the committee that you get a week in advance so you can review it along with a list of recommendations based on that analysis. So your sequences you're mentioning, you chew on it for a while, hand it back to this committee. I mean, again, talk about it more and then hand that back to the board. Yeah. So it'd be the September governing board meeting that it might get resolved. How's that impact anybody's timing? We're meeting before that meeting. Yeah. I just want to make sure everybody understands I fully anticipate that this district will end up carrying different kinds of carriage of leasing dark fiber, carrying telecommunications services, radio backhaul services for the public safety district. We cannot be limited to just internet. Yeah, I mean, you know, but I, sorry, but they're all packet switched networks. So AT&T is limited to telephone and telephone. That's why they, that's why there's the abbreviation. But yeah, yeah, no, I get it. Yeah. I would like, I personally support you taking this and bringing the kind of well thought through options. Does this mean a motion, is that how it works? I mean, if we just generally have consensus. Right, unless somebody's really disapproving, you know, in violation of the other ones. I mean, yes, we're here, we're on the PC5, I mean, 715, we're on there, and so forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just two. There were other ideas fielded back at the last meeting. It was written in the first week, that was the first week. Yeah, that's in the minutes. Am I, okay, so I can review the minutes, and then, I mean, is it within the, is it within sort of the acceptable email thing, the email and say, if you have a suggestion, send them to me. As long as they're, as long as they're one-on-one. One-on-one? All right. All right, so it's a one-on-one. Yeah, yeah. Fiver. And can that part of your research be availability of domain names and whatnot? Yeah, that's, yeah, that was gonna be part of it. Yeah. Yeah, availability of domain names, and you know, I might even not, you know, I'll probably crowdsource a little bit too. So, I'll bother some people that are, you know, make way more money than me on this. There's some cool doing top of the page, too. That's a good thing. Yeah, CB Vibrate Gmail was not available. Okay, great. I figured Jeremy got it. No, shall we move on? Yeah. Excellent, excellent, thank you. Yeah. So, the next discussion topic is research into finance and organizational structures. Has any particular expertise or experience in that area? I'd ask for clarification of what it means. Organizational structures means decorp, C-corp? So, yeah, I think I can give some background on this. So, the research into the financing, and this is, I think the idea here was to talk about the sequence over time of where the money is coming from. We talked about this a bit, and we see Fiverr talked about this a bit in terms of going to do the crowdfunding for the first few years, doing some initial limited build-ups, and then switching to the revenue box. This is sort of the party line that I've been towing since I've been talking to select boards and talking to the media that people go and do some initial fundraising. Then the idea is that we get more municipality. We can go and we can get these cheaper revenue bots. So, are there other financing options? Somebody mentioned last time, maybe we do a go fund me or something like this, or something like that. I think those are possibilities. I'm not sure that they make the most sense. But I think talking about that financing timeline probably makes sense here today. Now, the organizational structure, I think also ties into the potential operating partners does the district hire some employees? Is there an executive director? Or is it a board that hires somebody else and just says, here's what we want you to do now. The rain and the track will do it. I brought this along and I sent some stuff to folks that'll be posted hopefully on the... It was out last week in Islesboro, Maine, and this is the town paper for the month. That's it. Yes. Useful specificity. Wasn't it? Yes. They did their own five work now. They were less limited than we are because they actually used local tax money to get it going. But they also did a pre-subscription within the town of, you know what? Now, there are a perfect model of a small town where it has limited services right now because everybody wanted it. So they were able to basically have the town council basically say, we'll add a piece onto the tax revenue for the next two years and we'll do it. And so their monthly fee is $36 a month per subscriber. Which, you know, their density is like when people are nice. I didn't mean that if you know how many people are 10. Something like 630 or something over the winter, which is, I mean, they serve, you know, there's... This summer is over too. But he is doing the same thing right now. And so they're delivering gigabit service on fiber and they're quite, you know, everybody seems to be ridiculously happy. I mean, I was amazed to be sitting out in the middle of nowhere with these people. Dan, is this the one where they worked with the electric company as well? Yes, and they had to because they don't have the same, they have different pole attachment rules in Maine as they do in Vermont. So they had to do a lot more work with the electric utility that he was envy. I was envious of him for being able to use tax money. He was envious of us for the pole attachment. Because I said it took them a lot longer to do the negotiations on the pole attachments then. Thank you, Harry. And I was part of the town clerk in Calis about two weeks ago. And they're suffering from having DSL. And they got a quote from some of that whoever. It was going to be $100,000 to run a fiber line for the town clerk's office. And they said, I think we can probably, if they're interested in spending that kind of money, the town might, if they can get an extended subscription rate, you know, for how many years they might cut out. So I think it's probably other times. Right, so that was something that I was going to mention is, you know, I think the pre-subscriptions are probably something we're going to have to do with some family. And then we have contracting with towns and saying, if you want this, you can hire us as a contractor for it. And that way the town is buying a service rather than the town using our tax money to build it for us or something like that. And I think there's another option too. And this might be more powerful in the larger municipalities, is that the towns actually take responsibility and they build their own dark fiber, and they lease it to us. Which would then allow some version of this to all? Right, and so if the town decided to bond out, City of Montpelier decided to bond out $15 million, let's say, and build a whole bunch of dark fiber here, there, and everywhere. And they said, now we want you, or anyone for that matter, to go and make it happen, around the fiber of the premises from what's on the existing poles or in their existing conduits or whatever. So- Is there not a state agency with money to do exactly what you just described? There was. It's in moth balls. It's not been disbanded, it's not been repealed, it's in moth balls. And EC Fiber used a lot of that, of the stuff that they did build, but they were not building in metropolitan in my terms, not in city areas. They were building largely in places that they just needed something. That talks, right? So, some of us- Yeah, I have a question on this map. What is the service that's providing, am I reading this wrong? TSL, they only have TSL. They only have- They had zero coverage, that's 25 through, zero cable coverage. Okay, I was reading it backwards. Yes, we could explore. I'm thinking that, because I was just impressed with the fact that they were able to, but I think Jeremy's hybrid there, where the town could, and we could do the, shall we say, the engineering and that stuff for them. He was very clear on what they learned the hard way because they actually set up their own, they bought a used bucket truck and did their own construction. So you had a long conversation with this guy. Oh yeah. Oh, great. Oh, no, he was like, he said to us, send him any other questions we have, but I said, he gave me a whole package, which is being posted on our site, hopefully. And the, but he was saying that they have the company, and it's in the package, I don't remember, that did the engineering for them, the contract engineering, said we have to do over again, we don't have them do the construction, I could say could have actually done it at the same cost as what it did for us. We should definitely not get involved with it. So I was the one who actually suggested that we punt this or send this to this committee in my function as alternate. And largely it was before we had done that EC5 or meeting, but it was predicated, it was predicated on the concept that we should review our options as best as possible because they will, in many ways, determine technology, they'll determine finance, they'll determine our approach, right? And after hearing the EC5 where folks speak at our meeting, it was abundantly clear that they have many advantages, which we do not, right? So they have some gold towns, right, with high net worth individuals who are willing to write checks upfront to get things moving. You mean like, wait still more? Woodstock, Marquish, EC5. But what would you say is expanded to Winston? Well, yeah, yeah, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's something that we need to review with clear eyes and probably do some form of SWAT analysis around the advantages that this district has, and then formulate a approach based off of the advantages we do have and the advantages we don't have, rather than saying, oh, these guys down and south so we should do it this way, right? I just want to take that as like, rote approach. So that was sort of my suggestion, my thinking there. The other piece of it that I realized later is that in terms of the finance piece, which I think is actually probably one of the most critical pieces, especially early on, is each different approach to financing, which we'll have to mix and match, has different requirements, has different needs, right? So if we want to engage people in a philanthropic enterprise or engagement, we need to have a mission statement. We have to have an impact statement. We have to have things that help them understand why they should, out of the kindness their hearts give us money, right? And each other phase is sort of a different set of things that we need to check the boxes off and get them done, right? So by doing this SWAT analysis, by developing these sort of like finance options, then we essentially write our action, parts of our action plan as a committee and parts of the action plan as a board, I think. I think another advantage that BC Fiber had is they had some finance wizards, John Roy specifically, they have, I don't not say we don't have finance wizards, it's just they're not sell haven't it yet. Who knows how to raise and manage money at that tens of millions of dollars of level. But secondly, I'd also caution against a one size fits all approach because the, especially in the early stage, there would be a real advantage to having somebody running with plans right now and tying things together in a paid capacity to get the ball rolling. But right now it would have to be funded from philanthropic money. Whereas down the line, it might fit into a budget. Oh yeah, I think we're all in agreement that it has to be a hybrid approach to finance. But also sometimes they're gonna have like, Calis for instance, if this pilot takes off that I didn't get my chance to propose last meeting, Calis might self fund their own pilot and turn it over to the district later, you know? That's my idea, not theirs. But the idea that we different towns, we're wrestling with are we already too big? Do we need to be bigger? And how would smaller subsets of the district be more at liberty to run faster? And I think we should try to create an environment that encourages what works best and quickest. Does it have to be separate subsets as it were, but rather does it make more sense to say there are places that would have a deeper desire for something that would be done initially, which then begins to prove the concept at a lower cost. You know, that's why I didn't know whether Weitzfield or Warren could be starting, but places where you could actually get a presale. Is it demand and density? Demand, demand, density and available money. You know what, what they did here was say they had a $360, your first year. Prepaid your first year for the way you got it. Prepaid your first year. Community support internet, like a CSA, right? Just like support internet. Which seems to work very well, they were working in a different business. But we have many talents that are about that, you know, not much bigger than that. Absolutely. I guess that the question I have is, is financing is one topic. Organizational structure is the other. I mean, there's alternatives. Alternative, I mean, there's alternative organizational structure. And as the EC Firewall, and then there's the other one, we build up an organization of that. Having a discussion on what we think we may need to have, you know, is it a one person band and is it some contractors that do early else that is a, you know, a organization that does its own marketing and sales and customer support. And I don't know, you know, how do we get there, how do you make that decision, you know? Yeah. And when do you make that decision? It's important though to know what the options are because there are some things that you'll be able to do. Once you start going down a path, it can be more difficult to switch to a different structure. You probably want to stay with the structure that you've selected. So it would be good to have that well thought out and laid out. And I also think that, and I believe you mentioned this but I'm gonna restate it that the finance and organizational structure, they need to blend, they need to mesh. But I think the research into that is two separate items. I think perhaps one person can look into organizational structures, another person can look into the finance and then we blend those after we have the different bits of information. And I assume the objective of what we're trying to do as a committee is to end up with here's how we think we are perceived on each of these elements and here are the options. And we have to make a choice at some point. Right. Be cautious against locking in to your, when you suggested you're gonna end up making a decision. What if we decide we're gonna... Did I say, what did I say about the decision? Because I think what we're gonna get to here is either we're gonna have a single whatever it is on these topics that we unanimously recommend or very well could be a series of alternatives that is presented to the board. And we're not recommending one item. We're not deciding necessarily one item to give to the board. It may be... Yeah, no, I'm talking about years down the road. Let's say two years. Let's say the board votes to hire ValiNet, presuming they wanted to take on more than they have on their plate. And ValiNet agrees to do it. But two years out, they have less capacity, they raise their price, but we don't have another alternative. There's not another contractor with those skill sets and capacity. We end up locked into a monopoly where we might have... I mean, that's a problem that any organization is gonna have. I'm trying to have a bit more. So we can't look two, three years down the road and say, what if, and then be paralyzed into inaction. I mean, I think we need to be clear-headed about, well, if we put all of our eggs in one basket, that couldn't happen. So there might be something to be said for keeping all the employees under the umbrella of central Vermont into whatever it's called, rather than going with the contractor. But I think those are just the pros and cons that we have to recognize with each of those decisions. So as whoever goes and takes this as a baby, it says organizational structures, here's the three or four options. One of the bad things about relying on a contractor is that you have to change a contractor that's awfully painful and may not actually even be an option. It could be much more expensive, I'm sure. But these are just part of the decisions. Sorry to jump right in, but per your piece, we might have a very hybridized structure as well, where we are providing a pass-through for backbone internet and that is a completely different functionality than what Valley Net would furnish us and we might do something different in that instance. So what I'm hearing from you, Steven, is that you wanna make sure that we're adaptable, we're nimble, and we're able to plan, but also to take opportunities and to take challenges as they come. And grow jobs locally. I think the idea of hiring in an out-of-state firm who's gonna come in here, hit and run, is not a preferred. I'm listening for the first of volunteers. Practice. Practice. I don't have expertise in either of those areas. I won't claim expertise, but I will look into organizational structures and do some homework and rely on the expertise of others as I can find it. This meshes with the conversation, with something I think later on the agenda, of identifying possible operating partners. They're really integral because we'll have a different set of needs if we partnered with Washington Electric Co-op, for instance, because of their skill set. I understand that. I think it might, yeah, that might be... Or if we use... Hold that together a little bit. Or if we offered to pay to staff up Waittsville-Faston as an operator of CV fibers. Because Waittsville-Faston is not gonna welcome, in fact, they're gonna go to the wall and keep us out of it. This is quite a work. Can we talk about those when we get there? I think having that discussion is good, but I think... It's out of order. Even if we decide that we're not going to use that particular organizational structure where we're going to have an operating partner, I think having a list of them in our pocket with that future item is the right thing to do. But I think let's wait till we get to this. So you volunteered for the organization? Organization. Who organized? Who's doing finance? That's where I'm waiting. So, what is it that we need to identify with finance? I think it... No, go ahead, please. I think it's literally looking back at the EC fiber piece, seeing what they did, seeing if there are any additional things that we want to... Just looking around, seeing if there's anything else we wanna consider through other models or even just being creative. All the sources of funding for both the seed startup grant just at this level and then sources of funding once we reach a certain level of the six-month lapse, bond authority, et cetera. Private investment. So, identifying those options, I mean, do we not have, at least in our minds, a reasonably comprehensive set of options as to what those are? I mean, what's the question that we're trying to answer by with this? What comes to mind is I remember, I've attended years worth of EC fiber meetings and it wasn't until they had three years of audited financials that they became eligible to go to Wall Street for junk bonds. So, how are we gonna do anything during that first three years? But this is something that we've been clear about the whole time that we will have to establish clear books for those years to do that. And that's something that I've known for a while and I've brought up in the meeting several times. Right, but what funding do we use to build those three years of audited financials? I think one thing that might be helpful is to have on a one-page or two-page or five-page or whatever it is, the vehicles and something about the timing of those vehicles, the, you know, the monetary extent that the amount of funding you may be able to get from a vehicle, the timing of that, when, where that vehicle fits in the timeline of getting something off the ground and that would, a lot of that would be about the prerequisites for what does it take to. How long did the EC fiber give us first money? A couple of years. A couple of years. Well, I think some of the founders threw a quarter million in at a piece to start with. So yeah, I mean, but from, you know, from conception when they started sitting down and then they actually started actually having real money in hand, it was so many of these, that was a couple of years. And I have the slide deck and I can go back and look at the actual timeline. So we need to look at universal service fund, connectivity funds. All of this. And I have the whole list. The other question I have about the finance thing is that at one point in the matter, I guess this comes out in some of the other topics, what do we sell and when, you know, what's the implementation schedule for delivering. Here's the money. We need your money. Well, actually there's, and this one I was hearing before and have had a little experience for it, but not a financing person. The idea is if you're structured somewhere around being a nonprofit where you have a mission and a goal, you know, a set of goals and stuff, you are not necessarily tied into the same business plan type of thing where you're basically saying, there is this environment, it's crying for this, here are the reasons why it's needed. And then you go to, you know, and maybe nickel and diming stuff to some degree, but for my community fund. The, you know, the other people who are, you know, the more we can attach it to strengthening communities, you know, providing economic development then we can, you know, open up a whole bunch of areas where, now we're not allowed for local tax money, are we allowed to have money from state operating, you know, from state funding? State funding is fine. You just, you can't take money from the member towns through their taxing capacity. That's just like, here we're gonna write you a check. Now, like I said before, they can contract, you know, or there's other creative things that they can do. Right, but we need the running around money to be able to have those kinds of packages. Yeah, and if you have, you know, unrestricted funds, then yeah, I mean, if somebody says, you know, I wanna make sure you get going. And they say, I want a tax deductible, you know, here's $500 tax deduction, that's what I want. Which they can get, giving them money to us. And that's, and you know, unless they're putting encumbrances on it, then we can work with that. Yeah, we just need to snowball capital, right? So like, before we can have a business plan that is, you know, happily realistic, or, you know, have paper that it's printed on, right? We need a little walking. Oh, oh, oh, paper, oh, paper. Yeah, oh, paper. I'm walking around money. Thanks, Elliot, for the agendas that was written on it. Thank you, kid. So we just need, you know, like some nice posts, you know, like a postcard or a one-pager, you know, like these materials that we need to be able to achieve those next phases, right? So I think philanthropic funding has a lot of advantages in getting that sort of snowballing. So the 100,000 is a logical goal number to reach for, but it could be structured, that could be structured, either as a grant or as a prepayment of the first-year service. Yeah, I think we love grants. Right now it's a grant, I mean, we're not a position to promise a first-year service to anybody, especially when we don't know where we're going to start. Right. I like, it's not on the agenda, but I like David's question. What are we selling and when? Because that maybe could be added to the agenda, because that has a whole range of possibilities. We can put that for the next meeting. And I think some of that will be revealed when we hopefully finish our commission discussion the next meeting. And also, I don't mean to point at you, but whoever is going to research financing, that will also inform what are we selling when, right? Like, we need to have some, we need to have those phases and things like that so we can say, okay, you know, this is how this could be structured, you know, this is how we're going to proceed. And somebody's going to have to write a grant proposal. Yeah. Can a town pay for planning services if somebody wants to go and get ahead of the game with their own fiber plan? Sure. Is there a way that if you lock grant money, there's all kinds of things, such as our bond for the purpose. But we need a operational entity that would be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we also need to go through these certain Monday details, like the bank accounts and the end of the signatory power and, you know, how do we present the bills who signs off on the bills and these sorts of things that are, you know, very well resolved at all the towns and the cities in the area that you can do anything for. Well, we're not there yet. I mean, that's an iterative process. It's not purely linear process. We're going back. No, but there's so many offered us 100,000 right now. See, we don't have an account to put it in. Understood. I think we would get one pretty quickly. Oh, I bet there would be one in 24 hours. You would figure out a way to do that. I'm sure the SEC would be more than happy to hold it. Hold it until we're ready. But, you know, having just been through this with a non-profit, I'm running that there is a process where you actually have to recognize that you've got to have a story to tell. And the, it's all about the stories. Now, in each of our towns, by the way, you know, and this requires each of the, like the Montpelier Community Foundation, you know, which has some tax money, but it is somewhat separate, you know. So maybe each of the towns has either some philanthropic entity or person, you know, so each of the members from different towns can begin to do some scrolling within their municipality and say, well, actually, you know, Steve down the road here actually has more money than God. And, you know, he might like the prospect. And, you know, in each case, it is like identifying sources because we're not actually talking about identifying the sources. We're sort of still looking at kind of government speak of like we have to have this structure and we can't go for the tax money, et cetera, rather than say, all right, if we have 100,000 or $150,000 gold to start with, which is enough to get things off the ground, et cetera, and break it down into what's that going to be used for? You know, is it going to be used for staff or studies, et cetera? And then you have, so you have a budget. You have your narrative, you know, and the narrative is kind of there. I mean, we can squeeze that out fairly quickly. So we're getting closer to that, you know, every time we get together. Right. We're getting closer. But what I'm not hearing is the name associated with doing homework on finance. Have you heard that? That's a few more minutes. Good chair move there. Five, Jerry, did you hear that? I don't think it's me, I have even less expertise in so many things. So listen, we've got, so we've done so 555, can we just push this aside for now? No, no, no. Can we just, like what whiteboard this or put this up here and just list, let's literally list what those financing options are and just talk generally about them and then fill in the details absolutely next time. So I think we can, I think we can probably do this collaboratively in the next 10 minutes. Because I don't have this, I mean, could I just, yes, I don't have the time outside of this to do that. Understood. So let's start with just, yeah, fill in topic donations. The category is, okay, who would remind? Phil does that category. Oh, the United States, what's that? So I mean, I think it needs to be more specific than just film projects. It's like, oh, we're making fun, the High Meadows Fund is about, you know, a number of organizations in Vermont that do this. By the way, High Meadows is a subset of Vermont Community Fund, so. You still have to go back and do that for the money, yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure we fit the category of the works. So, I mean, under philanthropic donations, there's grants, there's digital giving, there's small dollar donations, there's large dollar donations, you know, there's a couple of other, and even a couple of other options in that mix, right? So, I mean, if anything said, $100,000, and we wanted to, you know, divide it evenly across the towns, which is profoundly unfair for the smaller towns, but we were talking about a little bit less than $7,000 per town. I mean, I think I could knock on doors in Berlin, and I could, you know, shake $7,000 out of the trees in not very long. I could do that in a week, I would bet. Tax-deductible, and donations up to us would be tax-deductible. Right, they are. So, and then there's, so, the donations, I don't think with the shoe leather and some time, I don't think that that's terribly difficult. Well, and I wouldn't give up the private funding either because it's a bit of a pain in the ass to set up, but if you've got your narrative and you use front porch form, a few other things you can say, do you want fire in your future? Let's find a way to tie our Montpelier access fiber into the state house. If we can feed PBS, PBS just sold our spectrum back for $53 million. We could probably tap a piece of that. What was it, PBS? Vermont Public Television Network. So, that's a huge windfall that they don't know what to do with. So, yeah, connecting with partner, especially partner nonprofits, partner municipalities that wants to see a similar mission. So, I'm thinking, so, PBS is a clear, a clear wind. Think Borchow is a clear wind. I think there's other. Borchow is also with their handout elsewhere, so. Sure, sure, but if they're on board as a partner in terms of getting this out here, and if they had better access to faster broadband, we're able to move media here and there and everywhere more quickly. I was already approached by whatever the umbrella organization that goes over, ORCA and CBTV, was that? Vermont Access Network. Yeah, they love this and want to be involved in this. Now, is there gonna be a lot of money forthcoming? Probably not, but on the other hand, getting the word out there is something that they do really well. Oh, yeah, no, no, no, that I'm completely in agreement with, you know, Winston. Is there any telecommunications company, grant money? There's connectivity fund, but there's not a whole lot in it right now. But, I mean, is it an annual grant cycle? It's an annual grant cycle, and it can be easily repurposed to, I've been trying to get the legislature to put a focus on planning grants, revolving loan fund, or planning grants for community development. I start to ECCD, and it looks like we may also be able to get their planning grants as well. Who's ECCD? The Agency for Community. Commerce and Community Development. They just be one of the most recent ones. And, yeah, those are usually developed in block grants, is that what you're talking about? Yeah, they have both, they have planning grants and block grants. Yeah, it was the planning grant I talked about, and those usually require matching funds too. So, that's not going to get us all the way there, but you can usually use in-kind contributions to or in-kind donations of time as part of the matching for some of those. Okay, so I've got foundations, individual living, large-dollar donors, smaller-dollar legacy giving, in-kind donations, protect property access, government grants, federally, USDA, FCC, state, ECCD. There may also be some... ECCD has CDBGs for a year or two out. So, do you want me to put that as a sub? Yeah, because the planning grants are different in the Community Development Block Grants. Okay, I'll put them both under there. You've got BD, DB is reversed in your... That's right. What is that, Stanfield? Community Development Block Grants. How do you tap into the Universal Fund? So, Legislative Action. Universal Fund? Universal Service. What's that managed by the department? It's managed by... Yeah, it is managed by the department, but it's strictly allocated to a legislative formula. I actually... Can I respond to that, even if it's broader than the agenda item? What we're doing here is telecom planning. And the state has been deficient at telecom planning for a very long time. And to the degree we're going to do the legislative telecom planning for them, part of that job is convincing the legislature that we can do a better job and we're more deserving of the money that is being squandered by the folks who aren't doing the telecom planning right now. So many state departments are that way. My point is that they're particularly aware and sensitive to this issue right now. Who's aware? The legislature. So, is that a lobbying effort? How does that work? Well, the Joint Tech Committee, one of my successes this year was getting the Joint Information Technology Oversight Committee created. They are yet to be appointed, but in their first couple of meetings, they're going to need to be aware of how does what we're doing fit with the statewide goals and the timeline clicking for fiber speed connections to every home in the state? So we can flow some draft language for legislation there too. And I think getting our fellow board member, John Quinn on board, and getting him in there and saying that this is a good idea too. Not that that's totally within his running for responsibility, but I think it makes sense. Do we have a whole legislative sponsor? I will absolutely write that. We don't, shall I get on with it? Yeah. And there's plenty of legislators in the county. Anthony Polina wouldn't have already talked to him about that. Mary Gopro would be... Both Mary and Martin would be willing to, yeah. I'm sorry, but on this financial thing, what else needs to be done, besides what we're taking here in minutes? Will we need somebody championing us, leading us? I don't think so. I think we've got to run that set of options by the governing board and let them decide which pursuit. I assume they're going to pursue all of them. Yeah, I think we're going to pursue all of them. I think it's a good assumption. Time, you know, like time, I mean, I think timing, you know, the idea is that we're going to have some sort of plan in place so that we can do this stuff, right? So we can have the materials and the resources necessary to implement each stage of this financing process. Which we're building towards. Right. Mission statement. Yeah. These statements. One question, if I may please, and we're running out of time on this. But there was a gentleman from the board that sent around a notice of grant money that was distributed. I believe it was federal grant money. The EC Fiber, I think got some of that money. Do you know what I'm talking about? It was one of the Gilbert's. And is that on this list? That funding opportunity, did he put it out? One of our, one of the board members. Yeah, no, but who put, who issued that? It was, I don't know if it was. I think it's, that's upcoming. I think EC Fiber got eligible for the cap to fund reverse auction. Do you know what that's under? SCC. But that deadline closed to be qualified another year. Yeah, this is another year. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of different government agencies that we should certainly be able to do. I just want to hear a little about it. Yeah. It's definitely a lot of this. Yeah, rural development is under USDA, that's why. Yeah, you might as well just put Welch and Leigh and Andrew's own names on their list. Post their pictures. I don't know. I don't know. Okay, so we're not going to have an individual champion this. We're going to have this in the notes for now. And a go a little further and perhaps in the meeting there is one retired person who has a little more time to who could follow up on, become our financing. And so you're saying somebody at the board meeting wants to own this? Yeah. That would be great. So that's an ask. Could you put that up there? Ask for the governing board if anybody wants to hold this. Yeah, we're looking for a CFO stand-in, interim CFO to get their head around. So we're spot on time for our next topic. If we're moving forward, Dan, I take that as a, let's move forward. So there's a, one of the items here is various bank services appropriate for nonprofit use. Who had this particular one in mind? And is that, how far afield is that from what we just did? It's more of the where the rubber, this stuff meets the road. This was Siobhan's suggestion. And I think knowing where our money is going to go and how we hold on to it is probably a sensible thing to have whether we need to go and have that, have that lined up just now, I'm not so sure. If we need to check the account, we don't need an investment account. Yeah. So I think we want to find a bank that is also supportive of community investment, community development. Right, right. And that there's, I mean, there's a different, so when you're in municipality, there's different restrictions on the, how you store your money type of account. So as we get audited, we will find out more and more about this, but it's not quite as simple as just being to open up, open up an account. You can't take public money and just chuck it into CD, for example. It has to be some, has to be specific insurance structures around that money. Who's got the good experience with this? I've, I don't know the details I would have to talk to our town treasurer to learn more about it. How about Barlow? He works for League of Cities and Towns. He would know the stuff. Yes, but it would be just as easy to go and walk into VCCC if that's who we decide to choose and I would hope that we choose them personally, but if we walked in there and just talked to their corporate banker, whatever, just said, can we make this work? If they say no, we'll go on stand, we'll go and talk to other banks. I'm pretty sure they will try and, my experience with them is they will try and figure out how to make it work within the law. I mean, they're not going to squeeze anything, but it's a- Who is Berlin Bank, but- Depends on what you're talking about. Depends on who you're talking about, who holds money, does this mean you account for bonds or what they're talking about, that the general fund, there's a couple different places we have it. VCCC has not been on any of our business when we put stuff out there, for example. So that's why it's sad that things- I mean, I haven't put a picture of the savings, since I haven't put a picture of any stuff. They do. I agree. I like the idea of keeping it local, and both of those are local. Yeah, sure. Let's see which one. So is this slightly premature then, as far as making a, moving any farther than what we've just done? Well, one of the things that I think that this is probably something that we should do before, sooner than later, is that there are people with itchy wallets, and as we get towards the end of the year, when people are going to start, and when you get that big flurry of all of the nonprofits trying to hit you up for funding before the end of the year, I think having a bank account, we're ready to go, nothing, we're spending a, not we're spending, you know, just not money, we're probably just a place to put the money. To catch end of the calendar year- Donations. We're all dropping donations back to the bank. So then, and I actually had a note on the top here, because I want to, before the end of the year, have a board member shake down the agenda early. No, you passed the hat. I mean, nonprofits always, you know, go to their board members first. This is the difference. This is the difference. We're representing the cities as a, you know, we're not coming as a, but I'm going to write a $25 check, or a $50 check, or whatever, but we can- Per mile of fiber, right? Sure. That's a zero, right? That's a zero, right? Yeah. But, you know, so, but we can do that. I think it made sense to have that. And I think it also, the fact that we can go out there and say that we're handling money is, I think probably it's a good solve for stuff. So we're going to talk to these two guys. I would also just say, somebody pointed, you know, I don't want to make overcomplicate things, and I don't think anybody does, but somebody did say, well, should this go to a finance committee? And I would- We don't have one. And I would, like, what's that? We don't have one yet. Well, I know we don't have one, but we should probably, you know, have one, have a treasure, treasure presides over that committee, and they should be separate. You know, one's focused on raising money, the other's focused on, you know, being compliant and spending it, right? So, I mean, that, I think it's a perfectly acceptable thing for us to come back and be like, you know, talk about it, we think the finance can, you know, we need to finance it. We need to finance it. Well, how about if that, we made that as a recommendation to the board of the next board, we need a finance committee and a treasure. Yeah. Let's do that. We know- And in the meantime, I will- Are you just agreeing on that? No. I will ask those two banks what their paperwork requirements are and what the account fees and interests would be for a municipal checking account. So, let's try, well, we're thinking about treasures and such. This is something that we'll be talking about at the board meeting too, but the treasure can't be moved with the other board. That's statue. Right. That's the way it is with the fire department, isn't it? Treasure, treasure is not a good word. Treasure, treasure was an ex-Officio member of the board, but it couldn't seem to be on the board. Couldn't be. Okay. But I think we want someone with much more finance experience than credit potentials. Right. If we have somebody with finance experience, do we want them as the treasure or do we want them as the fundraiser? So, but that's a good point. Maybe we want them as both because we may want to pay the fundraiser and we almost certainly want to pay the treasure. No, treasures are not profits, you know, as small as they are not necessarily paid, but the- And fundraisers have to be very careful because there's a point at which they have to register with the state and there's a whole bunch of paperwork that goes along with that. Why don't we pay anybody? So, hold my pockets here. So- As you're sitting next to Jeremy, he's kind of already hit you up, so. I will. You already had some. I already did. Me neither. Yeah, I just- Anyways, yeah, so anyways, because I'm imagining somebody who's like a municipal treasurer, maybe they want to do this pro bono initially, but maybe we ask them to do this as in their professional capacity, too. But I wouldn't- I don't know that you want to take somebody who's a professional and ask them to do it for free. Maybe we can find someone. I guess I'm to spoke. At this point. Okay. At this point, I think it's, everybody's working pro bono. At this point. At some point, when this gets closer to being operating and it's not six hours a month. Yeah, we're just trying to get this born at the moment. Yeah, okay. But I agree with you. At some point, the people that are doing the work will need to get paid at some point. Okay. I mean, the thing about this Isbro group, because they were repackaged with it, the town treasurer was actually- Okay, go ahead. Was also the treasurer for the internet. He did it during his business hours. Yeah. It wasn't separate. Well, because it was a town project. Right, right, right. Right, right. So in addition, building on that, there are a bunch of towns that have part-time treasurers. They might need to keep kind of personal. They come out- Yeah, commonry's got a really- Oh, shit. I know. Just as long as they bond it. Yeah. And I'm still trying to wrap my head around how in-kind services work. But in theory, they could give their services an in-kind contribution to the organization to take it as a tax deduction. So- We need to shake the bushes if you got- 20 bucks. Who are the finance wizards in the crew and who's willing to devote some time for this? Yeah. Who was in private equity? Come on, let's- Okay. Moving on. And let's- Holds is a brand of apostrophe in it. Our- Hmm? Holds, Bourbon's acutely- So we're pretty much done with the various bank services. We're going to make a recommendation to the governing board. And we're going to move forward with what we have in the notice as far as that goes. So the next one is the- And we had started talking about it on the organizational structures and that was identifying a short list of potential operating partners. There's- There's- I think that, and as I had mentioned before or without wanting to go too far field, I think that falls kind of closely with organizational- There's a lot of overlap on those Venn diagrams. I don't know if it's a totally separate effort or if it's close enough to be the same, part of the same effort. I still think that having this list is going to be useful. Oh, yes. Even if we- Even if we end up hiring our employees directly rather than having an operating partner. I think you're right. I think this is part of the due diligence. And when you think of an operating partner, this is like EC5's operating partner value net. Is that the kind of person from a company looking for our organization? Okay, yeah. So- At the risk of tiering- I'm- I'll throw out five that I can think of. Some of them, not in today's world, but in a possible future scenario, VTEL could be an operating partner. Stowe Cable. I recently talked to the operating partner, the manager there. They've been building great guns under the guidance of Tim Nolte. They have a state-of-the-art network and they could potentially hire more people and operate a bigger service area. They're right next to Elmore. Value Net, I don't think they're looking to take on new work. Weitzfield-Faston, Greg Haskins. They have a huge service area already, but they do have the trucks and tools and technicians to actually be an operating partner. What's the second word to that? Weitzfield? Weitzfield-Faston Telephone Company. Faston? Yeah. W-I-S-D-U-N. There is this town that doesn't seem to have a center that's up on the hillside above, oh, Weitzfield. It's also called Champlain Valley Telephones. And Washington Electric. Yeah, we're not Washington Electric. They're not there yet and they may never be, but they can't not be considered. So that's Washington Electric co-op. Yes. Yes, sure. I mean, one of the things I was wondering is for Washington Electric, for example, is there potentially not a benefit, a service they could use by adding all of their meters that accessible? I mean, you would think that that's something that... They're willing to help, but again... GMP would be equally interested. Yeah. Yes, I think so. GMP said they're not interested. Washington Electric has said they're not interested, but then Washington Electric has come around to say, and if our members get a discount, maybe we'll be more popular. I mean, we're talking about organizations that have systems already set up, just that wish for... Right-billing. You know, all that stuff. Trucks, bucket trucks, swinemen, poll counters. Yeah. Transfidium. Transfidium. And what do they do? They're a little cable company like Stowe. Okay. And then what about the one that's running the services and I want to say, open on the Riverside things by Bradford? Is it... Topson Telephone? Topson Telephone. Not that they want to do it, but I mean, there are other entity that's in the business. And then I don't know what Michael's future is, but is he an operating entity or not? Burnbaugh? Yeah. He is, but he's got his plate very tall. I know. I mean, is he gonna say, I don't want to grow my company. Kingdom Fiverr. Or what's Cloud Alliance? Cloud Alliance. Kingdom Fiverr, Cloud Alliance, two different organizations. Yeah, this one. They're one person. Yeah. All right. What else is RG? R-R-B, rather. R-R-B smart failure. Oh. Yeah. That's bad. That's bad. Ruben. TDS, Telecom, I don't think once, they're barely hanging on to Northfield. So you just say TBS? TBS. TBS. They're just a little Telecom operator, but they do have trucks. They're a little here. They're bigger elsewhere. So if you want to consider all the options, they are enough. That may be what you want. Yeah. I think this is Northfield. Yeah. What was that name? TTS. I think we should put as many people on this list as we possibly can. Because we might actually have some sort of patchwork. You never know. Then O-Telco. Which one's that? O-Telco. Which is the hotel? It's a, they run Shoram. They bought Shoram. Okay, so all of them are open. But they're building fiber. They're managed out of Maine. But these are companies that have experience running and building networks, but they have a marginal footprint in Vermont. But this might be what makes the difference that makes them stable. And I suppose it's for profit though. It is. As is TTS. Sure. As is TTS. We're trying to have a subcontracted arrangement with the service management. And look at the, again, I don't, yeah, I can go with, but the stuff I sent there, he had nothing but good things to say about this company out of Connecticut that they... Yeah, what? It's an AOMA. Yeah. It's an AOMA. It's not an address card. It's an, well, but they said, yeah, they came into the engineering and we were gonna do the construction. So we did, but if I had to do over again, I'd have them do the construction as well. Tilsen. Tilsen, T-I-L-S-O-M. They're out of Maine. They're running networks. They're designing and building networks. They're, they employed the guy who left VTA. The director of the VTA now works for Tilsen. Chris Campbell. So a couple other options that are maybe a little bit further out there. Less as an operating partner, more maybe as a co-location partner would be something that they can govern. They do have some IT staff that are other small and then probably more appropriately in Norwich University, my employer. Lots of IT staff that don't have bucket trucks but they have a lot of skilled people. Because what about VTC? Yeah, but I mean, that's a state entity and I don't know how easily they're gonna be able to move or how quickly they're gonna be able to move on an opportunity like that. I mean, that we might as well be, in that case, might as well partner with the state, which is possible too. Yeah. I mean, the mayor, Barry after all, is very supportive of this and as a state employee doing networking stuff. The state does not be a good partner right now. Okay, but we're making the list. Velco. Check in twice. Velco. Sure. Mm-hmm. Which does not matter to me, yeah. But they have the trunking. No, they have a top-notch team of certified security-cleared network operators running. Yeah, but you know. So here, or do we want to ask a town or city to be the operator? There's IT staff in some places and maybe one of them wants to take this on in terms of getting things running. I think it's fraud. I don't think we got anybody big enough. I mean, if we're being exhausted, if Sheriff's Communications, it just bought BT. That's what they considered. Wrong to tell, huh? It's on the road. It's not the pipe. Let me count the ways. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay. Just letting it to start was just five. Okay. And then we continued. And we persisted, all right. Nice. So identify a short list. I think we failed. We did it, we did it. No, we covered it. This is the short list. This is the short list. It's a long list. This is the list to start. That's great. Maybe it's best to move on to CVI talking points because that might take a little time. I think the intention of this was to have something like the elevator speech in your pocket. Is that what this was meant to be? It's good. Yeah, I mean, and I think this is valuable. I got a call from somebody there in Burlington or out of state or something. They called me and they said, we're thinking of moving to Northfield, you know. And we were hoping that we could get our internet service to central run internet and I was like. And they said something about this other ISP told them that they should call me. There you go. Oh, wow. You're not going to call me. Thanks. They're from Grifton, your year. You're in my voting district? Yeah. And they were looking at buying a house and they said, here's the address. And I knew from the map. I said, you got a DSL, you probably have two megtops there. And they said, so what are you going to build there? Yeah, that's in that plan. And there's some other potential partners, the Realtors Association. Yeah, that's true. But actually, I think this fits into talking points because we have opportunities to deliver services before we build stuff by leasing dark fiber and turning it up in certain areas. And this weaves into a conversation and I hope to have at the next board meeting about microsels and about public safety. But to the degree we can start leasing a dark fiber circuit and lighting something up, there's nothing that keeps us from putting service into an area using services. Do you have to pay for that? You do have to pay for that. So you have to have money to pay for it. So the other thing that I think, an elevator pitch is great for raising money, but there's also the where we are, who we are, right? And I think you just really get to the crux of it, which is right now, even people are uncertain as to what we're doing and how we're doing it. And it's okay for us just to have diagram points that are pretty much like, we are a nascent communications district that is working on building out, essentially planning a regional network that will deliver broadband to residents of Central Vermont. What's that? To Central Vermont, sure. Residences is our nonprofit-referred way of not calling people citizens, because that is... So residents with a T, I guess. That excludes, not a C.E. Okay, thank you. Anyway. So I did create the Q and A before town meeting, which I think covers some of these higher-level talking points. And so some of the talking points would include, what is CVS? Some people might think that, oh, it's just another for-profit that's coming in here to do this saying that it's intended to be a publicly-owned entity, whatever else it ends up being, according to the commission's statement. Locally-owned, locally-governed. Locally-owned, locally-governed, yeah. Or, yeah, publicly-owned. Publicly-owned. Is it not a profit? Publicly-owned. Is it not a profit? It must be not a profit. Okay. So there's three talking points right there. So it's not a profit. It's not non-profit. It's not for-profit. It is not for-profit, it's municipality. Municipality are prohibited from being. Yeah, I think in my language, I intentionally danced around how we were incorporated. Well, you could call it a super-municipality, because it's a municipality. I just call it publicly-owned. Because when you get into this super-municipality, or- Yeah, it raises- Nobody has any idea what you're doing. Yeah, we have to avoid jargon in our talking points, absolutely, so. Yeah, I mean, not for whatever. Yeah. How about the fiber-optic-based? That's something that I have in the later one. Yeah. So what is that actually, what are we actually doing? I think we're gonna lease and build and manage or arrange to manage a hybrid fiber network across the whole service area. Do you know if people were more concerned about than knowing about the individual details about whether we're buying or leasing or building or whatever taxes? That, that was part two. Part one was, are you using the existing pulse or are you using wireless? No, no, seriously. So wireless is one thing, but is this in pulse or is this when we have to dig up the roads and it's easy enough to run things along the roads and people have a clear understanding of what that looks like. It's a nice tangible instruction. The reason why we have no scenic views of Vermont anymore is because we have everything covered in wires. Well, we're gonna- As of the time- So the ledge, this far under your soil. Where we're gonna cross bridges, we're gonna have to go and conduit, so you know. So usually the way that I write talking points is I actually do start with questions. I find that to be a helpful way of creating the talking. Yeah, the question is a good way. Yeah, so like who are you, who are you, what do you do? And then thinking of some of the more frequently asked questions and pulling together. You can erase my taxes. Yeah, taxes, pull usage. It's in the folder, I mean this is something that I gave to everybody back in March. Yeah. Because the story addresses that. So what is this? Why do we need this? How much do my taxes go out? Who owns the infrastructure and takes on the debt and can this actually work? Is Vermont dense enough? How much does it cost? How fast is it? Well, CVI respect net neutrality and user privacy. Right. It seems like you've done a whole bunch of stuff on the front without talking about what it is and fell down at the bottom. You know, what are we providing? And also a lot of those, I mean, you know, how fast is it? Well, how about private speed internet? The first question was what is this? My answer was. You just said we can't use internet. About a dozen towns in central Vermont are living in a community owned internet service provider to provide up to gigabit speeds. That was my answer. But we can go to 10 gig. And we're not, we're not building actually. It's a gig. And we're not building. Why are we building? Well, because we have no money. We are building the provider. We are planning. I didn't say we're building the network. I said we were building the provider as to why we're doing why we had this question on the time meeting. Yeah, I mean, I'm just flagging that we don't wanna, we wanna as much as possible avoid confusing people by making them think that this is coming to their house tomorrow, right? We also don't wanna tell them it's $65 a month. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So can I have internet now? That's the question, right? Okay, so. I speed. Yeah. You know, I think there's some things that we can definitely, you know, like net neutrality. I think that's something people don't know what it means. Yeah, I get that confused. Half, no, half of the doors that I knocked on, I kid you not. Half the doors that I knocked on in Norfield asked. So, if you're telling me that nobody knows or nobody cares about that you are. Those were the Russian bots that they didn't comment. As you are. And no, this was one of the most frequently asked questions aside from price about when I was knocking on doors. People are in the know. This was far more common. I submitted a comment on net neutrality and I was like looking for it in the FCC. And I was like, okay, I'm in Barry City, I'm gonna look at Barry City list. It's probably like me. Look, and there's like a hundred thousand comments from Barry City, but they're not, you know, they're Russian bots. They're Russian bots. So, anyway, okay, cool. I think, yeah. How far do we wanna go with this? Because can we get what you have on the screen? Because I feel like there's a. So it's gonna be out of here. It's a real cut and paste thing that we can be doing. So it'll be to, it's in January, just scroll to 2018. Oh, it's, I'm sorry, I have mine ordered by. I have to buy it last modified. I could do it by. No, just scroll up. You must be not past it. I'm not past it. There's November. Oh, I must have uploaded that. We need folders. Yeah, back down a little bit. Let's talk on this. This. Oh, okay. So there's another one that's not sideways. It's called something very much. Is it tarstropedia? Is it called not sideways? It's PDA. Open it in PDA. Yeah, okay. How many techies does it take to open a PDA in? I'm sorry. All right. All right, what is it? What is it? Is it supposed to be folded? Is that the idea? I cut it. Okay. There's two columns. What's going on? All right. Do you want me to, do they hold it in firm? Do you need to zoom in? Just kidding, just kidding. See a patch. I think a key issue we're gonna hit real quick is how does this, what are you doing different than Comcast or Sovereign? That's a good question. Yeah, the distinction. What I think this is this problem. What is the speed of the internet and all you can do with it? Well, this'll be symmetric, presumably, which Comcast will not be. And that's, you know, at some point we're gonna have that. What does that mean for the average user? But nobody's bringing, nobody's bringing, Comcast is knocking on my door asking me if I want an upgrade of service. You don't get five. They just turned on gigabit upgrades across the whole Vermont service territory. I, I don't want to sidetrack, you know, I get nothing. They're offering and marketing a new gigabit service to upgrade you to $89 a month for the first time. They have not offered that to me. Because they don't have any wires up. Yeah. So they know where this is. Yeah. They're not bringing it to me. They're not bringing it to me. They're not bringing it to me. Yeah, that's cool. You do, you need to, they'll swap your boat up and. These are fine. Do we, yeah, these are fine. I think we outlined some potential additions. So we want to take that 17 megabit speed out of there. Just probably if you, if you read what it said, we don't know for sure, but hope to get near EC Fiber's monthly rates and explain it. I think we should leak it. EC Fiber was short-sighted to trickle 17 when they should be given everybody gigabit like VTEL is doing. Yeah. You know, we should be just start at a gigabit internet. That was a marketing technique that they chose. And we haven't decided to use that yet. So their average revenue per subscriber is $100. So the number of people actually buying this $86 packages is low. Has the board voted on that neutrality? So. We gotta do a few things. While we all are amenable to it, you know, that it would be less of like this, but it would probably be more like, you know, that's pending, you know. And then as a board, this is where you come in as a board chair and you can, you can set, you can deliver the temperature of the room with our approval, I think. Is this part of the mission statement? Neutrality? Maybe. Yeah, I think it's part of the mission, yeah. So it's coming pretty quickly, but I just wanna, I mean, like I'm just bragging as like, like, you know, I think, yeah, I don't know. Okay. I can throw in the original order. Yeah, that's very helpful, yeah. Great. And so if we just wanna, I don't know. What's the deal with open meeting laws and group editing things in like Google Docs? Is that legal? No. You're a parliamentarian. No, I'm not. I don't know. No, you can't. Not even if you have like the... Can't collaborate, can't collaboratively do something like that with a quorum that are able to do it to be part of it. Got it. Now, could you create a copy? Yeah. Create a Google Doc and share with me. Yeah. Can we do it back and forth? Absolutely. Can you do that in such a way that the rest of the board can see it? No. Okay. Great. Do we want to, I mean, it seems like you have a very robust set of talking points. I think we added a couple. Do we wanna sort of agree on an ad hoc basis that we can... I think we gotta pare them down. I think we need to get down to like 10 things that everybody can remember and pitch them regularly. Actually, it's been proven that people can't remember. Yeah, we need three. We need our top line message and then we need three supporting talking points for that. 2793. I agree with that. I just think that, you know, like rather than assign one person, this is something that people could probably just like go in and say, send a red line copy to Jeremy and we can let Jeremy call us them all together into that one sort of thing. And so I did put the original word document in there if anybody decides where you wanna go. So we can each individually send a red line copy to Jeremy. That's okay. We're not gonna get emails saying we can't do that. No, no, that's fine. I'm not the electronic. It's no, that's totally legal. Just like you can one-on-one call, celebrity members go on a call and say hey. Try to find where the line is. Yeah, okay, that should be fine. The red line. Sorry. I did not mean to do that. So that'll be my best to incorporate everybody's feedback knowing of course that there are gonna be conflicts. You're just gonna take mine. I mean, that's just the way that's gonna work. All right. So we're all sending our red line copies to Ellie as cool as any copy that's done to me. I mean, if you want me to do that, I'm fine doing it. I'm a professional writer, so. Let's see the document that we're gonna show. Okay, so. Part of P for local service providers, I think we're not right there yet. Almost. I haven't been home since Sunday. I think what he was saying was in terms of that as a gender item, we may not be there yet for this. Yeah, we can skip it is what I'm saying on this side. I would know all for that. So if we do skip that and we go to market plan, there's the document that you had provided, which maybe can get a reasonable amount of time. And we're skipping the RFP side, right? Yes, we're just taking that for the spread out. I don't like it carried away, I guess. I don't like it carried away. It should be carried away. I should be carried away. It was sort of the plan I would make in, and I was just thinking of all the different things you need to do that the organization needs to do in terms of getting to go. And I gave him the task of his market planning. I think who are we in terms of both the mission statement and the whatever we're doing business has is very important. Well, it's brand new. What is the freaking brand? What's the logo? What's the sub context? What's the sub title for who we are? You know, I don't know if you see five or it has a sub there. No. Based on your logo, no. That's true. So those are all things that I think are important to this. But in terms of the data gathering, which is my field, I just want to say that before I mean, I think it's out there for people to add to our. Subtract from? Subtract from. He has his pilot project idea. We're going to run without any basis of who we are today. We need to be more organized about where we're going and how we're getting there. And it's almost too bad that the law prevents us from working with some of the more modern collaborative tools, like project management tools, because I imagine putting this up on some sort of like document repository and like assigning this to me, I just fill in the blanks. In that vein, I suggest the last time we're going to want to keep a running list of proposed legislative changes. And that would be a logical one. They would welcome the idea of updating open meeting law to accommodate collaborative online tools. So before I spend a lot of time in this, one of the survey potential customers who live in and might come to my phone company, or my camera company, even though I'm retired, has been doing this tool out there called Survey M23, which allows you to create unlimited questions you want to ask somebody. And I'm thinking that it would be great if we put together a list of what we'd like to find out about top clients, the town, the kingdom of towns, and businesses, and whatever. And one of the easiest ways to do this, in terms of helping us identify the locational stuff, is using the E911E sites database as the primary. I have no names, so I can use that as the database of the survey information is collected on. And the kinds that I have are used in front of which forum. So here's the URL for the survey on some of the months, fiber, whatever. And we're not going to get everybody. But we're going to get a good smattering. Including, yeah, I'm interested in participating at this level of speed, service, money, financing. I'm going to put out some money up front. I'm going to give you money for that. That's the kind of concept I'm thinking that we easily do. So you have each of us. So because I have the front porch calling on my failure, I would post it there. That is the number. And doing the little mission thing. Well, what are we hoping to do? And we want your feedback. We need your feedback. And then you can fill out the survey. And it turns out with them, if you space a couple of days in between, you can do it like three times before they whack you. They're going to tell you. The question I have is, do you want anybody to do a survey with their name or not? Because it can be pretty anonymous. I think the time would be sufficient. Well, we have the E-91. It's going to an E-91 address. When they fill in this survey, the results are tagged to the E-91 address. How are you getting this? To their IP? To their IP? No, from the database you have been building from the surveys attached to the E-91 address. I don't think we, first of all, because of all the sensitivity around names and data right now, merely having them do it, because we're still a ways away from marketing. We can go back and do this again when we want to. I think we don't want to create a privacy hack. I think anonymized data is probably sufficient and detached from addresses so that we could only have generalized things like, what is their current service level? Maybe they're in distance that they are away from something. They probably won't know. What can we get the way they want to? Well, I can tell you why the E-91. If you look into the density analysis future to figure out where you're going to deploy first, knowing what this information came from is useful. OK. But it's highly competitively sensitive, because Comcast, our fair point, is going to want to hack this data set and get out there before we do. But they can't provide the same service we'll provide. So does that matter? Or they refused. Well, wait a minute. I'm a little unclear, Stephen. How are they going to hack it? They're going to ask for a copy. They're going to ask for a copy. They want a copy of our survey results. Oh, and because we are a municipality, we have to provide it. In between care. I mean, you know what I mean. Well, no, you're getting into an area that the Policy Development Committee has been charged with looking at, because EC-Fiber has run right up against the issue of our computer mapping files competitively sensitive. But fair point is using the information of where you apply to attach to a poll to run ahead of you and sign people up for DSL before you can get your fiber lit. So you're not going to stop that. Yeah. The only way to do that anyway. And I already have a poll that nobody's offering me brought back. So the information that you're talking about, the E911, that's available. These guys, the companies that have tens of millions of dollars. They could be doing this themselves. They've never done it. Or they already have done it in a certain way. And they made the business decision to not connect. I mean, they've done it. They've already made their business decision. And I will say, I mean, I was talking to an attorney and asking them about this particular piece. And they were very knowledgeable in public records. And they worked for the state for 25 years. They were confident that there are carbouts for proprietary business-related data. So I don't know. But municipalities aren't usually in the role of being individuals. Yeah. It's not up to me to make that determination. No, those exemptions are easy to find in the book. The question is, when the courts have sometimes ruled that municipalities aren't in business. But we are. We are a municipality in business. We are very different. So communications union districts and ready districts are different than towns. It was a water district. I mean, water district sends out bills to residents. So I wonder how much money are you using? Can I get that data from a water district that's a municipal thing? Yes. No, you can't. Absolutely. But water districts are not competitive. They're provided with their data. They're monopoly. They're monopoly. We are not a company. We are a competitor of all entities. This area has not been tested or interpreted in law yet. Actually, that's different in different countries. There are private entities that buy new super-law systems. And there are public ISPs in other parts of the country. Yeah. I was going to joke and say we should definitely make sure we have a big bank account, where we do it, so that when we have to go to court, we can pay a lawyer. But I was also thinking probably in terms of fundraising, we would probably pull in tons of money from throughout the United States. If we were to engage in such a battle with a Comcast, right? Yeah, that would be a problem. Fair one. That would be a problem. So there's a give and take there. I like the survey idea. And I think I like that as long as we can sort of get past the privacy issues. And I think that could also be a nice initial place for funding. And I think having, obviously, you have to collect people's names so that you can get the money from them. But getting that data, doing that analysis in a privacy-sensitive way, I think it's totally doable. And I think we should probably do it sooner than later. We almost have to warn them, though, that if this gets tested and we lose, we violated their privacy. Of course. And I mean, that's just like when I sent emails to constituents in Berlin. I have a little footer that says responses to this are subject to public records. Well, no, we could say we intend to claim and defend the competitive exemption. But if we lose, we're going to have to give up your name and address. Well, wait a minute. Does I-1-1 gives you address but not name? Right. So what if we just did something like this? What if we just said we put together a survey not tied to E9-11? We're going to do that. I mean, that's not a problem. And just say, maybe ask them to give their street name. So the other beauty of the E9-11 data, anything explain this. For every E9-11 data, ID, the building itself is a road segment that it goes with. So you can actually collect density of how many structures are out for roads at home. If that would be very- But if we can sort of get some fuzziness with protection of privacy. Yeah. Well, we just don't have to name that name. But we do know where the cable wires are. No, we don't. I don't even know where the cable is. We have a reasonably good idea of what's covered and what's not. Right, right. So it gets a little fuzzy. It doesn't get- you lose definitions. But so for example, if we look at, if I said Brookfield Road in Berlin, you're going to be able to tell me that there's a stretch of one residence. There is exactly one residence, three structures, two structures. I want three structures on Brookfield Road in Berlin that are covered by monastry. Isn't that Black Street and Black Road? Actually, what? You can't- that is not a publicly available data set. That cable line is not public. The cable- yeah, okay. So- We won't put anything in this trend. So maybe sooner than later, just so we have an idea of demand and what we're dealing with, and also to get a sense of possible donors. I think putting together- Well, yeah, I'm just having an idea. What's the demand level we can pursue at what level of service? Because where do we drop off in terms of cost as far as demand? Does survey one, two, three cost money? Sorry. Not much. Okay. But we could also use- we could also create a rule of law. Yeah, the reason I started on it is the GIS-based system. You had the information going forward. There is one. He's sent for that. How about front porch form? Have you used them for things like this? Oh, yeah. I've used them all the time. So I'm thinking front porch form would be the link over to his survey, and that would then capture the location. But that's okay with front porch form. Oh, sure. Can we kick that to the other committee to just review the privacy implications of- I think- I think the privacy implications are a much larger discussion here. I think if we just have a- as generalized of a questionnaire as we can, if so we get, you know, 80 respondents in Pealier, and they say, yeah, we're willing to pay $200 for a gigabyte of fiber, then- I don't think- I don't think the survey is that urgent. We've got other stuff to do that's more important before we get to everyone informed and- No, we're trying to find money. It's not important. We can go- these things can go parallel, right? Yeah, basically, if you have the ability to say, we want this much, you know, we've got this much potential demand, it then becomes much more interesting to investors and to funders. But if we do some education first, we'll get a better survey. Well, that would be a response, definitely. Yeah, and I think having this document- But this could even help you figure out where you need to do your educations, because if you only get three respondents from Calis, I mean, and you know that- what's that about? And it also answers the question, I mean, Steven doesn't think it was a big issue. He says, what kind of services are we offering? This is a way to find out, I will not take your thing unless you give me TV. I'll offer a TV package. That's the question I didn't get to answer, ask you C-fiber. It's how did you- how have you gotten this far without having a TV package? Well, you just saw it. They made 17% coverage in cable. I can actually answer that. I asked that question when I was down there, and they said, when people ask them, they essentially hand them a packet of information about the different offers. Over the top, sorry. Mm-hmm, yeah. So they- I thought all these guys did, too. Direct TV and Netflix and whatever, and here it is. And they say, and they still have, you know, massively high reviews about their subscribers, and their subscribers aren't- I was not hearing that their subscribers are writing about, you know, not having some specific package or anything like that. But he does that they do have pretty poor connectivity. I mean, subscribers in areas that are cable. That's what he said. He said 17%. 70%. That's pretty common. But that's pretty common. That's the same number everywhere in the country, roughly. But that creates a second-class citizen as far as breaking news, too, or live state-assed. And they're just one of those things, right? But I know that- There's a lot of education involved. A lot of education involved, and things don't necessarily stay at 17% after we've been out there and it's been worked on. Yeah, and I really think, you know, both the economy part, the economic part, but the health services, medical services, most of this kind of technologies. Things we haven't even thought of yet. There's a huge amount of news recently about the number of people, especially in younger demographics, who are cutting the cable all together. They want the internet, the television services, it's camera. And he said that it's the people who want sports. I think I need some permissive fiber. Yeah, it's better. So, I call them today because there's an RFP out on the street that I thought they'd be interested in. They have a woman who has worked on five or six municipal fiber projects. And he said he didn't be willing to patch her into a phone call to explain her experience with the communities that she's worked with, the pros and cons. I said, we'd probably be interested in that. I don't know exactly how we want to take advantage of that opportunity in terms of experience that they have had with, you know, municipal fiber. And probably as we get closer to, like, an RFP for engineering, things like that, I mean, unless there's- Well, they probably want to get on it again. Of course. This is an FBB. But yeah, so I think you're right, the best RFPs, when you understand, you know, who the players are, what they're looking for. Usually, for good RFPs, you want to be inviting the potential bidders in to help you write the RFP, because- Yeah. Anyway, that was the other thing I wanted to bring up today. Cool. I think this is awesome. This is awesome, and, you know, yeah, super helpful. We're gonna keep going back to this as we move on. Yeah. Moving on. Is there a, if you're done, is there a round table additional discussion that we need to have about something? Are there any action items on this? Sorry to- Just to- It's gonna be put in our archives. Okay. Along with the other two pieces of information. Well, that was interesting on the map, and I, I mean, in the data table, and we got this from the public service department, is that the number of, I put the number as well as the percent. And it's really interesting that the numbers are pretty round, round about the same thing. I think it was 600 customers per pound. It wasn't. It was. It was struggling. Yeah. So does that help this idea? I don't know where we're gonna go in terms of planning, employment, and prioritizing, but it was pretty interesting to see how that worked. How many customers does EC5 have? 2,000? Close to three, I think, now. It's a similar, a similar amount. This isn't, I mean, there's people, a lot of people that already have service that would join us, but the one thing that's interesting is Elmore, Orange, and what's the other purple one? Roxbury. Roxbury. Roxbury. Yeah. These are really outlying members of this district. And so I think EC5 said that they would do it again, and go to the least served communities. And we're talking about some least served communities that are pretty far out there. Right. Unfortunately, they're not in the center. And in terms of every ball of discussion on what is our sequence, is that the same model we want to use or not, or do we really need a bigger bang, you know, a bigger bang from four customers? Can you, can you, can you start in three areas and spider out from there? Does it have to be, you know, especially when you're leasing fiber that's already there, you can do all kinds of creative things. And that would argue for the urban, the Montpelier-Barry Waterbury. Berry Montpelier Waterbury would generate the most revenue, which would then sub it. Maybe it's the harder self. But that's where the planning piece has to come in, you know, how to decide what criteria we want to use. Taking BCA fiber experience and just like I said, let's say you're these guys, you're no density, low density towns, you basically will have people throwing money at you to get it. No, this is a small island. No, no, but it's not that different, you know, in population than Elmore or... Yeah, in terms of rocks. Yeah, so, yeah, cost of building a roster or Elmore going to be slightly higher in building out that island, I think. One thing that might be interesting after hearing from EC-Fiber where they talk about it, it's businesses, home businesses, would be to see where they're incorporated and then you can lay it out on top. That's a good point, yeah, my brother said. Because many people who work from home, it's not incorporated at the house. I work from home. It's a Virginia company. Yeah, so that's just the question is, do I work? Do you work now? Yeah, that's my answer. And I actually think, given the whole thing with the governor's push for trying to attract, you know, there ought to be some... Do you read the Times-Royce today? I wish... There's a great quote from me. Say it, Matt, yeah. I wish they did it. Do you have a problem with that whole article? There's a difference between employee and labor force. In the newspaper, all the governor got it right. No, so what I said was that, you know, why are we incentivizing people to move here to become remote workers for jobs that require high-speed internet when we don't have a high-speed internet? Right, that's good. No, I... Yeah, that's fine. I think a woman running for governor off of the demonstrate that's trying to get a bill, that's what she said. Yeah. I mean, it's obvious. So I think, also looking at something like Roxbury, it's, you know, joins EC-Fiber territory. There's fiber right over there. Can I raise an issue that we need to be thinking about and deal with? We're talking about markets and development. Williamstown is part of central Vermont fiber. Washington is not. Washington is also an orphan. It's not an EC fiber either. So I think we need to consider recruiting Woodbury, Washington, and Waterbury into this district. Moretown, I've talked to, there serves two-thirds of that is sort of by-wakesfield-based. So Moretown can go either way, but it wouldn't be hard to... So last I heard Moretown was gonna put joining central Vermont internet onto the November ballot. Okay. Washington... Their representative I talked to today didn't know anything about it. Okay, so maybe they changed their mind. Washington, the select board knows about it. And I expect we'll probably be voting on it before long. I've not been told that there's an agenda. I know that I did talk to two different residents there. I just want to move that forward. Woodbury. And Waterbury. I read that down. I didn't write Waterbury. No, no, I wasn't talking to the U.S. talking to, if you had made any contact with them. Waterbury's got a copcaster. I heard from somebody from Woodbury back in December. And I said, here's what you gotta do. If you accept the meeting, I will show up and they know that they're back. It's really hard. I have not reached out to Woodsfield, Warren. Yeah, I didn't know anything about it. They don't know about it, so they have the opportunity to make their move. Our next meeting would be, I think, let's see, today's the second, no, yeah, today's the second. So today's the first Thursday of the month. The next one is the 6th of September. See, Thursdays don't work for me, typically. My bookroom. Oh, wait a minute. If it's five to seven, I can do it. My bookroom's at seven thirty. We can just go to your book club. It's fun, especially. Yeah. What do you mean? Okay. The room, the room in there in my head's. Everybody asks you if you use candles, though. Okay, so if I were a part of it, that's the time it works. What did you propose? I was at the 6th of September, which is the first Thursday. And are you going to be able to be so generous to have this space available again? If it's, yeah. I'll say, if it doesn't work this small of a group, Thursday nights are open at the time of office. I would love to de-get a little bit to like five thirty only because when we get people coming at 4.30, it sort of disrupts our business. Well, I can do it upstairs, but. What about this? It's not the problem, it's really. Swim right upstairs. Yeah, I think it's fine. Yeah, it's a little bit of a surprise. Do we want to move it to 5.30 then? Shall we do that? Then I might have to leave it. Oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah, but I can't crunch. I think, I think, I think two hours is real generous guys. I love that. 5.15? 5.15? Yeah. I love this. I love it. It looks great. Sure. 5.15, 7.15. Can't make out to Cal some 15 then? No, the book looks not bad. Okay. So, there's no need for us to meet sooner than, so we're going to go. We don't have anything for board action next week and we're not going to have. We have a report. We have a report back. Okay. No action out of it. For the board, we have action for the board and we'll have more for the next for the September meeting and we can by then make a decision on a name and a bank account. For the agenda, can I send out a draft agenda and folks redline it and send it back to me and that will be the agenda? Sure. Does anybody want to put anything on the agenda right now before I go? I think we're going to report out a lot of this stuff and then the board's going to add a bunch of random things. Yeah, and we'll take it from there. More assignments. So you might talk at the general meeting about public safety might then land in this subcommittee at the next meeting. Totally. Or separate subcommittee altogether for that item because there's five of us and we're going to hand another. Think about that. And I want to thank everybody for making this from a three person committee to a six person committee. Thank you because that makes it so much more workable. That is fantastic. And thank you for taking notes. Thank you for hosting us. Thanks to the kids for being so patient. Are you kidding? Are you a work fan? We might make you voting members. Of course they're kidding. And by the way, you know Small Island but it's 600 subscribers so it fits into that same model.