 So, at 6.03 we have a quorum so we can call the meeting to order. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? I just want to add one thing I'd like to note that we have Jason Neely here as a guest. He is one of the NRTC engineers that has been working with us at least twice a week in person, face-to-face, if you will, electronically, if not more. And he's here tonight and we will be calling on him to talk about our construction scheduling later on in the process. And one other thing I'd like to do, one thing I want to bring out and I really want to just say thank you for the cooperative effort that I've been seeing as we've been working through all of the multiple things that we've been working through here. The spirit of cooperation is just phenomenal and I just wanted to put that out there before we even get started and just give the thank you to all involved because we wouldn't be able to move forward otherwise and I very much appreciate it and notice it. So thank you for that. Is there any public comment? Hearing none, let's move on to the meeting minutes. Jeremy, please. Yeah, just a sec. So motion to approve the July 12, 2022 board meeting minutes as drafted. Second. Motion seconded by Siobhan. Is there any opposition? Any abstention? It's unanimous then. Motion's moved. Thank you. Is our treasurer here? We'd like to have the treasurer's report next. How about if I do the treasurer's report? Why don't you do the treasurer's report, Ray, as chair of the finance committee? Thank you. So on the third report we have on the screen here, hopefully you're seeing expenses and through July there were $432,000 worth of expenses that were paid. So far in August we've paid another $12,500 some odd dollars. Our bank account at the end of July was $3.9 million. The balance through this today is under that $3.9 million. We have some outstanding invoices totaling around $170,000, which will be taken up by the executive committee Thursday night. Questions? Comments? Excellent. Thank you, Ray. Let's move on to the executive director's report. Janiel, if you could just give an update on just pick five of the 50 things, the top five, okay? Oh, three pallets being delivered to our new warehouse on Friday. We have someone accepting those pallets of materials and goodies into our new warehouse. We have an RFP out for marketing. We're interviewing all those firms between Thursday and Tuesday of this week. It's marketing and public engagement. So we're well on our way to doing that. We have construction RFP that's out and we're getting ready to award construction to start as early as October. We have a lot of make ready going on right now. We've been trimming trees and the WEC territory. WEC has been doing that for us and doing pole make ready. Gosh, there's a lot of stuff. We've got the 400 miles of materials ordered and we also have more fiber coming at the end of this month that will be delivered to the WEC territory. So we also, I visited the new spaces today and we have gravel being put down on a new Rawland lot yard in Montpelier picked up the keys. So yeah, we're boots on the ground really getting into operational mode. Any questions for Janiel? Questions are moving forward and moving forward very quickly. This is Henry Janiel. You're doing an amazing job and I'm sure that's only the top of the iceberg and so I'm so glad you're here. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. I also wanted to congratulate David Healy. We are doing incredible with town reachouts in general. We've had a lot of towns commit funds. David Healy was successful in getting $200,000 from Calis last night, which will be matched by VCBB for another $200,000, which means that we now have to borrow or pass on in subscription rates $400,000 less. That is huge. So congratulations and thank you, David, and thank you to everybody who's been doing this amazing reach out to the towns. We're just so lucky to have this commitment from these towns. Thank you. Can I ask what Calis' total payout was? What their total was? David, you're muted. They had $479,000. This is typical of some of the towns that haven't done anything yet. They're sitting on the money and I told them about the September 15 deadline. They went out of their process to make this decision, so I was pretty happy to say the least. Excellent. R.D., I see your hand is up, but you also appear to be on the phone. I'm sorry. Can you hold for a moment? Yes. No. Now you're on mute. You're on mute and you're frozen. There you go. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, never mind my freezing. Never mind frozen. Do we have MOUs for the towns that have committed funds? Yes. Yes. The answer is every one of the towns who have even shown an interest in committing funds have received MOUs. All right. Are there other questions? David, you have a question, but you're on mute, sir. Blackboard meeting last night. The town has already had the agreement reviewed by a lawyer, and they said they made some changes. They have not seen what they've added to it, but they also promised to send the commitment letter by tomorrow. Fantastic. Excellent. Thank you. Are there other ... Ray, go ahead, please. Monday on the Northfield Select Board has asked me to join the meeting tonight. This is the second meeting, and they're feeling the September 15th deadline. I don't know what we're going to get, if anything, but there's one or more members of the Select Board that are very interested in this. It's not universal. Understood. Other comments, questions for Janiel and the Executive Director's report? Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Janiel. The next item is a budget adjustment, and that is a Jerry Fatfinger mistake. I actually, when I was reading what had passed before, and I saw the budget line item that we approved, I think, two months ago now, for materials and materials management, and in between those two, it said warehouse, and I gleaned over it, didn't see it, was corrected by others. Thank you. I should always be corrected by others. There really is no budget adjustment that needs to be done, because we've already allocated sufficient funds for this budget year to carry our warehousing, which we got a pretty good deal, by the way. So with that, I'd like to move over to Alan, who unfortunately has to do this by phone. Alan, I hope this will be all right for you, but there are some policy recommendations that we'd like to discuss. Right. I think the connection will be okay. I'm working on a battery phone, so we'll see if this works long enough for me to explain the stuff. You sound good. We've got two different documents to consider tonight. One is adoption of a net neutrality policy. The other is adoption of a board delegate attendance rule. Let's start with a net neutrality policy one first. I sent around a short note when I sent out the documents explaining that this is the first of several policies that the policy committee feels should be in place as we approach construction of the network. The policy that we drafted on net neutrality is based on the Vermont net neutrality law, which was passed in 2017, and it was passed in response to the dropping by the FCC of the net neutrality rules that had been put in place during the Obama years, but then when a new commissioner of the FCC came in, the FCC turned in its attitude about net neutrality and the rules got, they weren't exactly eliminated. There were some rule changes made that just made them inoperable. So what the state of Vermont did was to adopt the standards, there were basically three of them that were in the FCC rules and put them in a statute, and I sent that a copy of that around this afternoon because a couple of people had wanted to see the specific language of it. And basically what the state did was they said, okay, here are the standards that we feel Vermont should be following if it wants to be considered net neutral, net neutrality, and it added two more standards as well. So when you look at the policy, the first three things that come up, to that end, CV fiber pledges that it will not and block lawful content, impair to grade lawful internet traffic, and number three, engage in paid prioritization. These were the core FCC regs, the state of Vermont just picked them up and made that the starting point for their particular statute. And then the four and five were things that the state itself came up with and added to the first three standards. So there are basically five different standards that a provider has to meet in order to be able to apply and receive what's called net neutrality certification. The state will certify that the provider is abiding by the state's net neutrality statute, and I think it's the best way for us to come up with a policy that gives us something immediately in return and that we are considered certified when we make application that we are net neutral. So I'll stop talking and see if anybody else in the policy committee wanted to say anything or if we wanted to have a discussion about this generally. Anybody else in the policy committee want to talk to you? Jeremy, Matt has his hand up. I guess I need to call on people for you, Alan, since you can't see. Yeah, sorry about that. Jeremy, please go ahead. R.D. did have his hand up before me. I don't know. R.D.'s hand has been up since before. It is up, Jerry. It is up for this topic. Oh, OK. It didn't go down from the last one, so I'm sorry. I have two devices to manage, if I may. Can you give Alan, can you give an example of reasonable network management? Which part of the policy you're looking at, R.D.? OK. I'm looking at the definition, definition five, reasonable network management. In number one, I cannot give a definition of that and I'm looking at the statute to see if there's any other detail and all it says is blocking lawful content, application services or non-harmful devices subject to reasonable network management. So I think what reasonable network management, what this implies, is that something that has to be done and it blocks lawful content but not out of the desire to do so on a permanent basis but because there is something wrong with the network, it has to be fixed and therefore some content might be unavailable while a repair is made. That's what I'm assuming it is. OK. I think another thing that might fall into that would be something like during very high use times, if we're short on bandwidth, something like YouTube might get throttled to the point where you can't watch a high death video or something along those lines. But that would be something like there are too many people on the network all at once trying to get too much data and that would need to be kind of spread out. So you know, but I think that's what that, the intent of that statement is at any rate. OK. Is there any case law that would help us understand or provide illustrations of reasonable network management? No? OK. OK. That's actually a good question generally because one of the things I did was I started looking at some studies and some reports that have been done about what exactly has been the reality of how net neutrality has worked or hasn't worked and what have the problems been. And the reports that I read basically said there is not enough data or information that's come in generally to come to any conclusions about what kind of a situation we're really in with net neutrality or the lack of net neutrality. And I think that's only been extended since the Biden administration has talked about reinstating the net neutrality rules, but that hasn't happened so far. So as far as I can tell, there hasn't really been much change in what's been happening since the rules were suspended essentially during the Trump administration. And it's very hard to know exactly what the impact has been, if any. Jeremy, you want to take your turn here? Yeah, I just said that it allows us to apply for the net neutrality certification. I think it's a no brainer to do for it. I mean, it's kind of part of statute and I think it should be something to kind of rubber stamp. And then Ray, I just wanted to add on top, another example, R.D. might be somebody who sets up a server farm to serve, say, a game or some other thing that ends up being very popular and receiving a great deal of internet traffic and that having an impact on the broader network itself and us needing to make a decision about that particular instance and saying, OK, well, you have to pay the higher tier business thing or something like that because it's having a significant impact and that's not the tier of service you're paying for that kind of thing. You got it. OK, Ray, you had your hand up. Yeah, so just briefly, and that is that you can expect that the law is going to be defined reasonable as the best practice and that best practice will evolve over time and that you have to keep up with that best practice so that it's not going to go to the lowest common denominator as to what is reasonable. It'll go to what is technically in practice at the time and that will that will improve over time. You know, we're going to have 100 gig backbone, right? And so our standards are probably a little bit different from somebody with a 10 gig backbone, but somebody with a 100 gig backbone has the ability to do more right and with more traffic than with others. So that would be my input on that. David Lawrence has his hand up and Ray, you just took yours down. OK, David. Yeah, all I was going to say was that situation with somebody running a server from their home is typically prohibited by the end user consumer agreements and that would be the difference between the business here and all. So, you know, I think that's going to be there's a really well established standard for the way that ISPs handle this. That's a good point. Thank you. So, Alan, let me ask you a question. Are we going to do this by two separate votes, one for each policy? I believe that's appropriate. Yeah, I think we should do that. I can make a motion now to adopt the draft of the net neutrality, the CV fiber net neutrality policy. Second, is that something you could paste in chat? It's pretty straightforward. I move to to approve the draft. CV fiber net neutrality policy. Second. OK. Oh, OK, so that's how the game is played. Interesting. All right. And Alan does not have the ability to do chat at the moment because he's doing everything off of his cell phone. Yeah. OK. Is there any more? I'm sorry. No, I'm fine. I'm fine. Any more discussion on this point? All right, let's vote on the motion. Are there any opposed to the motion seeing none opposed? Any abstention? I don't hear any abstention. The motion passes unanimously. Excellent, excellent work. Thank you, everybody. This is this is extremely important. Alan, would you please continue? Yeah, the next the next document is a what's what is labeled the Board Delegated Tendents Rule. I'll have Ray and or I don't know if Chris Schenck is on the caller on the Zoom call now, but they're the ones Chris and Ray were the ones who who thought of some language that could use the use to address the problem we've been having with delegates or alternates not showing up at meetings very often, some actually not coming for long periods of time. And originally, I think they had thought this could be a policy. And what I suggested to do was to make it into a rule in our rules of procedure CV fiber rules of procedure, because that's really where we have all the all the all the rules about how we operate as an organization, delegate responsibilities and so forth and so on. And they agreed to that and I helped come up with some language that took what they had done and turned it into a rule that has, as you can see an opening paragraph explaining why this is important and how CV fiber is negatively impacted by it and feels we have to take some action. And then there are five different steps that can be taken when absences become habitual. And Ray, do you want to take over from there? Do you want to explain anything about your thinking or generally in the idea of progressive notification or anything else? I'd be happy to. Thanks, Alan. Jeremy has hand up though. So if he's got a question we could address now. Sure. Sure. Or I mean, it's more of a suggestion. I emailed Alan, but then just thought of this recently. So I don't know if you want to talk about it a little bit more and then I can make my suggestion. Or if you want to... Let me go through some stuff here. And then we can do that. First of all, I'm going to start by thanking Jeremy Matt for the actual questions that we see over here. And you may have noticed that this information, the attendance information is in our minutes, in our board minutes. So you can see who's there and who isn't there. But this reflects the last year's worth of attendance by delegates and alternates and how much they are participating. The important part of the delegate and alternate is that they bring to the board meeting information about their particular community. And secondly, all of us have a wealth of experiences that help us inform our decision making, right? And so we miss that. And tonight we just made a quorum, right? We just made a quorum again. So here's an example of anything you see in the red here is below 50% attendance. And there's one more here that I want to show you. And you can see that Williamstown and Woodbury have had zero attendance over the last 14 years. There is low. Williamstown and Woodbury and Roxbury all have high, unserved and underserved people. And not having them there and not having them participating is disappearing, I think, for them and for us. One second there. Go ahead. Great. Jeremy, could you go on mute please until you're speaking? Thank you. Okay, go ahead, Ray, sorry. So I wanted you to see the kind of dramatic attendance or lack of attendance by some. This is the language for Section K that Alan was just talking about. And there's five steps here. The first one has to do with the clerk. All of these, except for the last one, are clerk performances, clerk duties, because this is a ministerial kind of thing. This isn't the mayor of CV Fiber talking to the mayor or the chair of some whatever. We don't get to that until the last step. So the first few steps are, first of all, because the boards are not all getting the information about what we're doing, the first step is that all the boards and councils, city councils, get the minutes. So they'll be sent the minutes, which also means the board itself, all the delegates and alternates, including those who aren't in attendance, will get the minutes. So people are getting noticed, at least they're getting the information right about what we're doing. The second one is that delegates who have missed two meetings in a row, the clerk will notify them you've missed two meetings, you haven't been present, and that just point out this rule, because the next one is that when it's the three consecutive meetings, then we notify the select board that your delegates have missed three consecutive meetings, your alternates or whatever. If that still doesn't do it, on the fourth consecutive meeting, the clerk lets the select board and the city council know that the position has been vacated. I mean, constructively, it's been vacated. The person isn't showing up for whatever reason. And this isn't, by the way, to point the figure on anyone, a particular person or anything, or embarrass them. If someone hasn't been there for three or four meetings in a row, they ought to resign, right? They should at least go to the board and resign. The fifth step is that the CB Fibre Chair will request a meeting with the select board or the chair of the select board or the mayor, et cetera, et cetera, and talk about their participation with CB Fibre. Now, we don't have the ability to kick anybody out, okay? People vote to get in and we can't just kick them out. But we do lose the value of their participation if they're not participating. And so that's the language here and Jeremy and Tom have their heads up. So before we go any further about this, this is kind of apropos, I just did a count and I only count 10 people because Seth O'Brien is an alternate from Cabot and RD is the member from Cabot. So we may not actually have a quorum. It kind of rests on who is calling in by phone. I know that one is RD and one is Allen. There are two other people by phone or either of you delegates or alternates. Yeah, this is Dan Susan calling from 2128 on the alternate for Barrie Town. Okay, sounds good, okay. Phew, sorry, it gave me a little bit of a hard time. I don't have a pro of the top. I know, it's, yeah, so I mean, all right. So anyway, I think that this is a great idea. It adds a little bit more workload to me as clerk, but I think that is fine. The suggestion that I had was in addition to having the clerk kind of reach out to the towns to get after towns where neither the alternate nor the delegate has shown up because that's really what I'm tracking. I'm not tracking whether the alternate showed up or whether the delegate showed up. I'm just tracking was Cabot represented yes or no? Was Plainfield represented yes or no? I think a thing that would be, that I think we should add is that the delegates and the alternates from each town will kind of keep tabs on each other. And if the alternate isn't showing up, like for example, the Plainfield alternate has not shown up. This is gonna be the third meeting. I reached out and didn't hear back from him. So I think if I don't hear back, then I'm gonna go to Plainfield and say, hey, I haven't heard from this guy. We need to get a new alternate. And I think that that sort of a procedure should be in there as well, that if the alternate or the delegate noticed that the other person hasn't shown up for a couple of meetings, they reach out and go through sort of the same process, but sort of internal within the town. And that falls on the delegates and the alternates. Let me ask you this, Jeremy, and let me see if I can get this on my screen here. And some reason it's not behaving like this. It's because I've done this and now I need to get this up here. And that is, so here, you notice that the change is a change in paragraph two. The clerk will notify delegates and alternates who have missed two meetings in a row. If you just said we'll notify delegates. You think that- So that's getting into a fair bit of extra work for the clerk then to track not just whether Cabot was represented, but sort of further whether the alternate was there, whether the delegate was there, right? I'm thinking it's sort of like another, a second layer of checking where me as Plainfield Delegate would make sure that the Plainfield alternate is also active and vice versa. Yeah, so the reason I don't think that's the same is that what you said is that whether or not they participated in the meeting, it didn't matter whether it was the delegate or the alternate. Right? For the attendance, it doesn't matter whether it's alternate or delegate, it's just whether that particular town was represented. Can you suggest language? And now you're putting me on the spot. So something- Go on pause and think about something and we'll listen to what Tom has to say, okay? Fair enough. Language. Tom? That was the same, similar point to what I was going to point out, the language there around delegate versus alternate changing. And I think probably best if we revisit this on a future meeting, if we spend some time, I'm just like you're making sure we get this right. But we can have discussion now, I think to help feed into that. And I would say like, there was never an expectation that a delegate must attend every meeting or must attend the majority of meetings. It was that there was representation. And I think we've had delegates in the past who said, look, I'm gonna be gone for four months. Should I drop out or should I just stay on and let the alternate take over for a while? And we've all been kind of okay, well, yeah, let the alternate take over. As long as we can get business done, that's the important thing. I do think it would be nice if we could promote to alternates to attend. Because right now, I mean, if an alternate hasn't attended for a year and then shows up and is expected to make an informed decision on something, that's just doing us all a disservice. So I would in favor of this overall, but I think we should maybe table it to the next discussion or next meeting and maybe clean up some of the language here. But I do like the idea of enforcing a little bit of attendance so that we can get business done. Thanks, Tom, before we get to Linda, Jeremy, sorry, I got to ask you again, could you please go on mute when you're not speaking? Because it's disrupting. Thank you very much. Okay, Linda, your turn. Every town has a CVFiber.net email which should make this whole process a little easier for you, Jeremy. Like Waterbury at CVFiber.net where you could both delegate and alternate receives that email. So it's not a matter of contacting them. That's not the difficulty. And the other point is that I suspect that a lot of the people that aren't showing up are also not checking their emails. It's more the sort of the nuts and bolts of having to go through each of the minutes and say, okay, the alternate from Cabot showed up, but the delegate from Cabot didn't. So I need to parse out whether, so that's what my suggestion is that for the clerk, it's just town by town is more like the clerk will notify the town that they are not being represented and that they need to find representation, that sort of a thing. And then within the town, I don't have a great way to phrase it. I wasn't able to come up with anything as my brain is fried, it's been a very long day. But something along the lines of, alternates and delegates for each town will roughly monitor each other's attendance. And if either is inactive, the other member will go to the board or go to their select board and request a new alternate or delegate be appointed. Jeremy, I think what I was suggesting was exactly what you were saying, Jeremy, is that by using the town, you're not contacting the delegate and alternate directly, you're contacting the two of them through the town at, no, why do you say no? No, because that just pops up. If they are not active, it is popping up, it's gonna just go to their CV Fiber email address. If they're not checking their CV Fiber email address, it doesn't matter if I email, Jerry Diamantidis at cvfiber.net or if I email Berlin at cvfiber.net. Right, they both go to the same place. It's just a matter of, I don't want to get into having to track. Personal email is what you're saying. As a clerk, you have to look up their personal email No, it's nothing to do with the difficulty of contacting them. It's the being counting of having to keep track of for Cabot did the alternate show up, for Cabot did the delegate show up and kind of to, I forget who made the point, but to the point that we should be expected to show up for most, but it's more, you know, is the town being represented? I think that's the biggest point for this one. That's what I would like to see too. Can we allow R.D. to enter the conversation? Cabot's been the whipping boy here. I'm sorry, my apologies R.D. It's all right, it's okay. Cabot doesn't get a lot of notice. Oscar Wilde said that, you know, as long as they're talking about you, it's okay. The problem is getting a quorum. I've had the same experience on solid waste districts. They have a difficulty getting a quorum, but the towns that participate are happy with whatever is going down, unless it affects them specifically. I'm not sure that we need to do more than keep select boards copied with our minutes, town clerks copied with our minutes, delegates copied with our minutes. If we experience a significant problem with quorums, at that point, the clerk can make or the chair, the board, can make overtures to the towns whose representation is largely inactive. It's not an impediment to CD fiber's business to have some towns chronically unrepresented. Their unrepresentation and their failure to address their unrepresentation, in my view signifies a sense to what CD fiber is doing. I'm not sure that we need to complexify our rules of procedure to lay an extra onus on the clerk to track these, I say this without disparagement, these delinquencies, they don't necessarily affect the ability of CD fiber to do business, as long as we can get a quorum for each of our meetings. Okay, so I see that Tom wants to re-enter the discussion, please. Tom? I think therein lies the rub, R.D. I mean, we nearly didn't have quorum at this meeting and we need to address that somehow. This is not the first time that we've nearly or even missed having quorum, and we need to make sure that this doesn't keep happening. I guess, so my question at this point would be, I'm not thinking we'll come back to this in the future, but looking down at like steps four and five there, what does that mean procedurally? If we have officially said, okay, we consider this seat vacated, are we legally allowed to continue with only nine people as a quorum or something? Like, is there, are we still stuck until essentially somebody's select board gets another person who does show up to a meeting? I believe we're still stuck because there's an official number of towns and we're stuck with that. I'd like to let Siobhan into the conversation. She hasn't had an answer of input yet. I, where I'm running into concern and I know that Linda has shared this in the past is the towns that are not being represented don't know what's going on. It's not just that they aren't having a voice on the board but the citizens don't know what's going on. Elmore is, well, no, Woodbury, Woodbury I think is the example that Linda has where she's spoken to people from Woodbury who had no idea what's going on with CV5 but they just kind of assume things are toolin' along. They don't get any reports back, they're not getting any information and so Woodbury hasn't been asked for funding for ARPA funds, I think. Well, I think they got an indirect ask from Jerry but that doesn't have the same direct touch as a member going to the select board and saying something and I think that that it's not just us hitting quorum but it's also the people of the town having their voices heard and getting reports back and hearing back on what's going on. I think that that matters in the long run. I guess I'm done. Thanks, thanks, Siobhan. So Jeremy and R.D., you both have your hands up are those residual or is this additional? Because, additional. Additional, okay, Jeremy, go first and then R.D. Ray, I was wondering if I could share my screen to show some of the attendance stuff that I think kind of highlights this. If you notice in the last year, the last time that we had more than three quarters of towns represented was August of last year. Since then we have missed a meeting and that's partly my fault because I wasn't there either but there was one meeting where we did not achieve quorum and we had to quickly call another meeting. There are also these two meetings here where we won more than quorum. This one I haven't put in yet but is going to be 11 out of 21. We need to get this figured out. Point taken, R.D., go ahead, sir. Okay, am I being heard? Yes, please. Good, the ensuring that the people of the town are represented is the responsibility of select boards and city councils. That's not our responsibility. We offer every opportunity for representation and I think that's the responsibility of municipal governments. Perhaps we ought to have another look at our charter and see if we can redefine quorum in such a way that makes it easier for us to do business. I had to face the same problem with a solid waste district to which Cabot belong and the solid waste district was having difficulty getting a quorum together and the problem originates in the charter itself. But I think we're undertaking too much responsibility when we make ourselves responsible for seeing to it that the individual towns are proper, the residents of individual towns are properly represented. That's my point. Well, let me ask a question here. Are there sufficient changes to the policy that the recommendation here that isn't even a motion yet? Is there a sufficient change to make a motion out of this or should, is this something that we're going to table and either bring back in two pieces and do an A and a B because I think we're very close to the A about getting a quorum and then there's B about chasing individual delegates. We do need to move forward because we spent a lot of time on this and maybe folks should attend policy committee meetings and refine it there if that's what needs to happen. I see a number of hands up and I see a number of folks that aren't on mute that aren't talking. So let me go to Tom Fisher, Jeremy and RD and see if we can close this out, please. One thing from consideration of as we move this forward in the policy committee is do we want to also address quorum issues at committees or is that an issue that needs to be addressed? I guess I'll leave that to the chairs of the committees to decide if they think we need to go that far. It purposely wasn't in this item. This was meant to be a very specific item. Jeremy, were you next on that list or is your hand down now? My hand is down now. Okay. RD, why don't you close out this discussion, sir? I would suggest we table this discussion and kick the question back to the policy committee. Alan, you started this? Yeah, I started it. I dropped off, by the way, because I had one phone go out and I had to find another one, so I might drop that again. But is there a motion that's on the floor now? No, sir. Was there a motion to adopt the policy or the rule, rather? The motion for the net neutrality passed and what we're talking about now for the delegate attendance never got to a motion. There have been some challenges made. And now it sounds like RD has made a motion to table. Discussion, is that correct? It was a request. Perhaps it is a motion. It was a suggestion. I don't think we need a motion to table since there's no motion on the table. There's no motion before us. Okay, well, I'll make a motion then. I'll move that we adopt the rule as presented just so we can keep going on this. I second. Okay, Linda seconds. Okay, so... And then the other thing we can do, if we wanna settle this tonight, I could call the question and we could take a vote on this and move forward that way. We can't call the question, right? What's that? We can't call questions. Wasn't that one of the policies? Can't call the vote. Can we do that? And I don't have my stuff in front of me because I have no power. It's just really awful. We do have other business on the agenda and we've spent, I don't know, maybe almost half an hour here. Yeah. Yeah, I thought we can't cut off discussion, but we can call the question. We can call the question. I'm sorry, I didn't hear that already. We can call the question, under Robert's rules, we can call the question, but... Yeah, and I think... Yeah, but I... But I would prefer to offer a motion to table. I think we have a motion already between Alan and myself. Alan's the chair of the policy, I'm the vice chair. There is a motion, and I would move to table the question. I believe that's in order. Yeah, you can do that if you want, and that would mean that we don't discuss this anymore tonight. It's not just any, we're essentially cutting off... But we can bring it up again at the future meeting. I think we will bring it up again. Cut off the table at a future meeting. Right. Jeremy, Matt's seconded RD's request to table. Do we need to take a vote on that request to table? Yes. All right, then let's take a vote on that request to table. I'm gonna... Any opposed to the request to table? Jerry, can I just say why? Can I say why before we do that just to... Sure, Jeremy, go ahead. I think that this is a really good idea. I think it's necessary, but I think that it needs more, needs some refining. Understood. So, so I heard, let's take a vote then because I heard an opposition. Jeremy, help me keep count here because it's very difficult to know who counts as a delegate and who doesn't count as a delegate. Okay, votes to table. Hold on just a sec. I need to get some notes down here. Do you want me to do the roll call because I have the attendance in front of me? That would be excellent, please do the roll call. Okay. Would you state the motion, Jerry? I mean, the motion before the board is to table the motion to adopt the policy. That is correct, sir. Thank you. All right, so, sorry, bear with me real quick here. So, Alan Gilbert. No. This is the motion to table. Right, no. So, and you voted no. Okay, correct. David Healy. Yes. David Lawrence. Sorry, I was muted, no. David Lawrence, Jerry Diamantidis. Yes, table. RD. Yes. Ray Pelletier. Well, I'm opposed to solid ways to RD but I'm gonna support the motion to table. Siobhan Paracon. Is that an aye? I am so tired of this policy already. I'm gonna say no. I'm ready. Henry Almastati. Jerry, Matt, I'm gonna vote yes. Linda Gravel. No. You'll notice all the policy people that are on the committee are saying no because we've been through this already three meetings. Well, we have one, two, three, four, no's and one, two, three, four, five, six, eyes. So the eyes have it. I haven't been asked. This table. Oh, right, I'm sorry. Tom. Yes. I'm sorry about that. Yes. And then actually also Dan Sousa also needs to... Yes. But okay, so the motion to table still passes. Somebody's yeses better show up at the policy committee. That's all I can say. Yes, indeed, Linda. Okay, that's what we need to do. This is the place to thumbs up or thumbs down not really the place to develop these. So if you want to put into development please show up at the policy meeting with your suggestions. They can be by email. That would be fine. I just noticed that the people who aren't here didn't vote. Point taken Ray. Thank you. Okay. Geneal, I would like to move on with some update on the communication committee RFPs. Jeremy, you have your hand up. Are we moving forward, sir? No, we're not moving forward. Oh, okay. Thank you. Community communications committee RFPs. Thank you, Geneal, please. We had four very promising responses to our bid for public engagement and marketing. We have those interviews scheduled with the four firms this week and next. We will be reviewing the responses that we receive from those interviews. And our goal is to have a kickoff meeting with our chosen vendor by the 25th of this month. One of the most important things that we're asking our vendors for is how they will integrate with crowdfiber in integrating into our website so that we can get subscribers. Excellent, Geneal, thank you. And this is a very time-consuming activity here for Geneal. Are there any questions for Geneal on how this is moving forward? Okay, thank you. So let's move on to executive committee charter recommendation. I don't know if I have this wording quite right. I'm not sure if I'm handing this over to Ray or if I'm handing this over to Alan. It might be easier to hand it over to Ray because he's got the visual. Well, Ray, will you take this? Yeah, please. So, what I can tell you is that there's an awful lot going on in all the work. You just heard Geneal. You just said that just the tip of the iceberg with regard to what is going on. And what we're looking for is the board adopts policies. The board adopts policies. The executive committee executes those policies. And in so doing, they have to set up guidelines to follow, to implement those policies. And what this motion is about is about establishing what those guidelines are. So that the guidelines describe a set of actions that fulfill policy. And so the motion is that the board approves a change to the executive committee charter to take such actions as appropriate to oversee, manage, and direct the day-to-day operations of CV fiber, including but not limited to the adoption of guidelines to govern CV fiber activities. Any such guidelines shall be distributed to the board when established. So the board will become aware of what the executive committee is doing when it adopts these guidelines. I'm happy to answer any questions for you. What I would tell you is among those, see if I have that here. I sent out by mail the implementation guideline changes. For example, that if the charter changes approved, the executive committee will make these changes. Otherwise, we would be spending our board time going through and explaining what each of these changes are and why we're making these particular changes. And so I put it to you that the executive committee might be in the best position in order to go through all of these kinds of things. So that's the motion. I second. We have a second by RD. Is there additional discussion on this? Motion? It's hard for me to see. I see Tom Fisher. Go ahead, Tom. Sorry, finding the mute button. Ray, I was wondering if you could give an example of where this fits between just doing regular daily business and a whole policy change. Like a hard example. I saw you showed one up there on the screen real quick, but what are- Can I give one? I have one off the top of my head that happened just today. Go for it. We have a new warehouse. Janiel went and got keys made. How many keys and who gets them? Do we want to bring that to the board? That's the day-to-day kind of decisions that we're talking about. So we have guidelines on okay, who's responsible for holding keys for the warehouse as opposed to having this mixed up with policy considerations. And so what the board did however was, first it approved us doing a warehouse lease. It approved the budget line items for a warehouse. And so it improved the things and now what we're doing is we're implementing those things. We're going to put a fence around the yard to make secure for the reels of fiber that we're getting, for example. We're going to set up this warehouse. It's going to have power. It's going to have internet. And we're going to hire some people in order to receive the goods on Friday. And those are just implementing the big decisions that the board has made. I think this makes total sense. I'm wondering if there's a, is there a level that you'd say, ah, that's actually more of a policy decision or area. Where would you find that line? You know, I think maybe kind of gray, but what I would say to you is this, that we will, the executive committee will publish the guidelines to the board. If the board upon reviewing that thinks that we've gone into a policy area, they can bring it up in the next board meeting and we can review it. We can answer the questions. And if we've gone over the line, then we'll fix it. We'll fix it. I like that. Thanks. So we have a motion. We have a second. Is there additional discussion? Let's take a vote then, please. Any opposed to this motion? Any abstention? I hear no, no abstentions, no opposition. The motion, motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much, everybody. This is, this really unt, we had our shoelaces tied together until we had this. Thank you very much. I think that all of the delegates who show up to the meetings should get a copy of the keys. No. No, I do not want a copy of the keys. Okay, so we have two items coming up here that are very important. We, for construction scheduling, we have Jason Neely. I hope he's still here. We have Jason that we're gonna ask to talk for a few minutes about how our construction scheduling moves forward. We also have some financial planning information that is extremely sensitive. And I would also add that our construction scheduling in order to describe it appropriately is extremely sensitive. So we have two items here that we are going to move into executive session over. So I just wanna point that out to folks. And when we move into executive session, I believe we are going to want to ask that Jason Neely, of course, be a part of our executive session, be out of the necessity of the information that he has to share. I don't know who, I think everybody else on the line is either a delegate or an employee and doesn't need, John Walters helps us with our PR if he's still on here. I have a hard time telling who's on and who's not. So is there a motion out there that we move into executive session? Do we have that already? R.D. has his hand up though first. So moved. I so moved. Well, it's in the chat room, Jerry. And so move that we have an executive session discuss records that confidential pursuant to one VSA section 313 alpha six, specifically construction scheduling and financial plans that relate to our strategic planning. And that staff, John Walters, Jason Neely and any delegate or alternates who's required one for our quorum. And also our members of the board to stay on. We will wind up in accordance with one VSA section 313 Bravo. Of course, we're gonna stop recording. What I would add to that, there'll be a motion that comes out of this with regard to financial planning. There's nothing expected for construction scheduling. So if you're a part of a quorum, they'll go anywhere. Please. Okay. R.D. will send solid waste. All of those folks who doesn't. Okay. So now that we've had that motion, we do require a second at this time. R.D. second. Thank you. Okay. Can't second before the motion R.D. Sorry. So now. I thought he made the motion. All right. We don't need to take a vote on this. We can now just move into executive session. Is that correct? No. No, it's a motion. We need to vote on it. Oh, we do need to vote on my apologies. Any opposed to going into executive session on these issues? Any abstentions on this? No opposition, no abstentions. So it's unanimous. We're going into executive session at 7.08. I am going to stop the recording. I will let you know when that recording has stopped and we will be in executive session. Christian, I will finish the minutes from there and send the notes off to you. So thank you so much. And I will send the video. The recording has stopped. We are now in executive session. Thank you.