 Okay we have 10 now so it's a 605 and I'm going to call the January 26th 2021 special governing board meeting of CV Fiber to order. Let's start the recording. Okay are there any additions or changes to the agenda? Okay hearing none. Public comment is there anything folks would like to talk about that it is not currently on the agenda? Just one thing I want to put out there Jeremy this is Jerry I've got a seven o'clock hard stop and I'd like to have a treasurer's report type thing on the next agenda. On the on the next our next meeting agenda? On our next meeting agenda not sure what I'll have but I'll let you know what I got. Okay yeah so we're actually obliged to have those reports at every regular meeting anyways so I will I will definitely include that. Tom thank you. I just a reminder that we had my motion from the last meeting was tabled to the next one and we just have to decide if we're going to continue to table it or address it. Okay so we can add an item this was for the poll audit RFP was that? No it was around policy documentation. Okay so let me add a so let's put that let's put that before our discussion of the 2021 timeline so put that there. Great any anything else any other changes to the agenda or other public comment that we need to address? Moving on I don't see Jeremy Matt for note-taking purposes but I can always go back and review the video at ORCA or the audio recording that I'm making right now do that later. I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented so that just includes the approval of the January 12th minutes that Jeremy sent to all of us. Second. Okay seconded by Siobhan any further discussion? Okay all in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed abstentions or roll call requests? I'll abstain I couldn't find it. Okay okay motion passes with one abstention and that was Tom Fisher abstaining. So moving along this is Development Committee's report I'm I don't know where where David is give me a moment and I will I'm going to send him a message quick maybe while while I'm waiting to hear back from David Rake would would you be you feel capable of reporting back for the Business Development Committee? No I'd rather David did that thanks. Okay let me just shoot him a message stand by okay so we'll see if he gets back to me in time all right so let's let's skip that one for right now we'll come back to it later if we can the project manager position announcement approval. Siobhan I think you were you're still spearheading this is that right you and Ray? Well it went through the Business Development Committee as approved and was sent out and I guess we need to know I guess emotion would be appropriate has everybody had a chance to read it should we worry about whether everybody's had a chance to read it I I'm not sure what the procedure is here. Well everybody I mean you sent out several several edits over time so if if anybody had something to say about it I expect I think it did get forwarded to the whole board right? Yes the full board got it a couple days ago. Okay um what do you think? It was on the it was on the agenda to be warned I mean it was warned on the agenda so I just don't want to short shrift the discussion if there is any that's all. Okay well I mean again you but you've had several days where people could have weighed in I mean certainly the Business Development Committee has had a chance to talk about this yeah is there any is there any work that you feel that still needs to be done to this? No I think it is ready for prime time um so I will I am I move that we approve the project manager position announcement that was approved by the Business Development Committee to be sent to the Communications Committee to make it pretty and put it up on the website and we also have to decide that's my motion. Okay seconded. Okay that was so moved by Siobhan seconded by Tom Fisher. Any further discussion? I'll just really quick want to add here that we need to decide where we're going to put this up and if we're going to authorize funds to advertise it like we did last time and I'm done Henry you had your hand up Henry? Yeah go for it. Yeah I think just to put this in context that we are also in discussion with CVRPC about them doing the administrative side of that and I guess it's the conclusion then that there is no overlap between these two roles that we're not going to be having this CVRPC doing project management and therefore these are independent activities they says yes so okay well yeah it was also looking at the prices that the Planning Commission has for their project managers hours it's higher than what we were quoted last time for consultants so not a lot but a little like six bucks or so. Yeah as I recall the way that the way that I heard this described I forgot who said this is that yeah we had this was designed with the idea of just like you said Henry sort of segregating these two these two responses not two responsibilities but segregating the responsibilities so that we would have the project manager project managing and if we needed additional help elsewhere we would go get it yeah that way we'd have somebody laser focused. And David did go through and remove the list of tasks that we had in the ad that he felt were an overlap were an administrative thing that we were going to have the RPC do so that that has already been passed through a filter there. Okay cool okay so it's been moved and seconded the I think let's approve it and then we'll talk about authorizing funds and where we want to put it. Does anybody have any further discussion about the the ad the job description itself? Okay I expected everybody's ready for the vote then so all those in favor please signify by saying aye. Any opposed abstentions or roll call requests? Okay so motion passes unanimously thanks everybody. Where should we put it? How much do we want to spend to advertise it and such? I think we have a bit of the CARES Act funds still available for for this item we certainly did not spend all of the kind of the advertising money from the previous round actually no I don't think it was CARES Act maybe it was a different different bucket but we had a specifically we had a a pile of funds for hiring a project manager the process of hiring so that included last time we spent it on attorney's fees we spent it on LinkedIn I don't think we put it anywhere else my suggestion is that we'd not use LinkedIn very very low signal to noise ratio it was not it was not effective so we could do indeed if folks think that that would be better we could advertise it in the newspapers I mean people still pick up dead trees periodically right that's still a thing or look at websites or look at websites sure so we can yeah could post it on craig's list maybe that's kind of a joke right yeah how about uh vt digger um how about um front porch forum uh our facebook page um do we have any website our website of course uh send out a press release see who picks that up if anybody it could be local news that does pick that up okay so seven days dude the seven days still do yeah seven days still does yes they do all right so putting it on digger or seven days is going to cost digger can also will also accept press releases but we have to pay for them you can't just drop a press release and they put it on the site anymore um that's cheaper to do an ad or cheaper to do a press release well so it on vt digger it depends on how you want it to appear if you want it to have one of these sort of um banner ads that's floating around at the bottom like join our team as project manager um i don't think vt digger has a job section though per se i think it might make more sense just to do a paid press release there rather than a banner ad i just don't know that you're going to get enough vt digger viewers readers that are also looking to be project managers but maybe i'm maybe i'm completely off i i am leaning towards what you're saying that makes sounds reasonable to me but i i don't have any counter argument to offer right though i i can't imagine that this is going to cost any more than like 2,500 bucks why don't we just approve a motion to spend up to 2,500 dollars for advertising and whatever we don't spend goes back into our treasury okay so let me before we say an um what was that a motion ray before i okay so ray has a motion to get it rolling second seconded by shivan um yeah so i'm i'm gonna go back and look at our grant accounting and i want to see where that uh what that amount is just so recruit and hire project manager uh actually from the carers act money we are over that we still have some money in the outreach and communications bucket but that's not really that's not really appropriate for this legal fees you know if we were vetting a contract or something we could probably argue that as well so um we would just be taking this out of uh this kind of the unrestricted funds that we got from the Vermont Community Foundation or the donations that we have um how do y'all feel about a cap at 2,500 dollars i think that's probably a lot but it's rather a too high cap than a too low cap right i mean it's not like you're gonna go oh i'm gonna spend all of that you know you'll you'll spend what's necessary and then you don't have to come back to us if it's and so so there's some clarification here too who um who is putting this out i mean who's going to take responsibility for listing the ads i mean uh this is development committee communications committee or me communications okay since they're not here i think it's appropriate okay and then then they can coordinate with uh coordinate with jerry jerry are you on the communications committee per chance i am not but coordinating with me is pretty easy yeah okay so i'll have them um i've chuck coordinate with jerry okay any further discussion on this 2,500 to put this out um where it needs to go uh henry um i i don't know if vermont business magazine has uh classified but i i'd check into that one too that's a that's a good spot um my comment about front porch forum is advertising to everybody on front porch forum statewide is going to be extremely expensive oh i thought he just meant posting our in our communities our delegate posts yeah okay so yeah if we'll i mean that doesn't require any sort of authorization yeah knock yourselves out um but like paid um yeah paid facebook ads so if we like put a post or we post a job on facebook that's easy enough to pay a little bit and boost it now i mean this is communications committee territory so maybe to not bother getting to the weeds at this point but do we want to do we want to target people mostly in vermont are we going to expect the person to be physically in vermont actually the ad the ads as the job description says work remotely okay yeah so i i'm happy to entertain somebody who's not in vermont they're just gonna have to go to orange get through an interview okay tom i think i heard us mention posting it on the website and then i don't think we have a place on the website to put it at the moment another thing i know re's been working on we will we will by time okay yeah so i think um marjorie's making pretty steady progress essentially whenever there's something that needs to get done there it it happens so i'm feeling uh feeling the silence so i assume that everybody's ready for the motion um or ready for the vote rather so we're voting on a cap of twenty five hundred dollars for the communications committee to uh to spend on publishing the job ad for the cv fiber project manager all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye opposed abstentions or roll calls motion passes unanimously thanks everybody uh let's see back to the agenda um i'm gonna assume also ray the change of the name of the charter for the business development committee is going to be okay yeah well chuck's not here too and this is partially partially my fault for um warning this as late as i did i should have had this out on on friday but i'm a slacker slacker yep okay whole family of slackers as you know so the uh yeah so the name and charter the business development committee i guess we'll sit on this or till so i mean i i don't do we have it i believe david david sent it out okay let's let me just go make sure let me see this is so i'm a name change and charter pulmonary r uh rfp okay cv fiber development just for the discussion okay so but the i mean the business development committee which is now the planning and development committee um you you guys all approved this charter as it's presented now right yes as a committee yes and and um and it needs to be adopted by the board as the charter it does define the limits of its role and its responsibilities to report to the board etc and so you know if you agree with that then i think we're good to go just vote it vote it up but um if you want to take some more time to look at it i see on january 24th that david sent it to uh the board and hopefully you have it in front of you yep i do have it in front of me so i mean does anybody have any objections or thoughts or should we just roll this out i mean we're not handing them you know infinite power or anything here are you able to share it on your screen journey uh i can try if my bandwidth will will work hold on one second really need to give you something more than two cans in a string yeah i can i can tether to my phone which is a little bit better at the beginning of the month but once i burn through that data in about three days then then they start throttling me all right so i'm going to do this share my screen should just share the all right how's that can you make it bigger is it i mean zoom it you have controls on the right hand side plus and minus a lot bigger oh nice thank you ray yeah so um we have the so this is the planning background development committee so we're changing the the business development committee and the pdc's responsibilities rolling through your master plan for board review and adoption so i assume that will be coming out at some point in the next you know month or two or three to help us annual strategic activity plan um so no later than july 1st to help preparation of the budget that's awesome maintain a master schedule of annual activities and assignments maintain a public dashboard showing status ongoing development contract work conduct planning and related is as approved by the board recommend network development priorities manage surveys topographic records pull out related to planning contracting construction as well as mapping and related support activities drafted and recommend statements of work for rfps review development related proposals make recommendations work with local state and federal agencies as necessary such as tpa's public utilities commission and if they create it the new community broadband association yes development and proposed development proposed agreements and we'll use go ahead ray that was a broadband development authority wasn't anyway it was um it was cba cba which is yeah to replace yeah so vermont got to replace the the vta yeah yeah essentially the outlet all that that language was based on the vermont telecommunications authority which is still technically floating out there but not doing much all right um to propose agreements and we use the partner organizations oversee the project manager participate with other cb fiber communities with at least one pdc member uh okay so the pdc member with a member on the other cb fiber committees reporting back to the board monthly been doing that anyways um then with these folks as the members anything in here leap out at you that needs to be added or removed or otherwise i would like to underscore that line under membership and it says membership may include delegates alternates and community members appointed by the board all of them appointed by the board but in particularly the fact that we're going to be open to community members who are interested and want to be appointed it would you know give us a little more bandwidth perhaps if we can get some active people involved in our committees for sure and there's certainly been some um some desire for that i've heard from people who want to make sure that we succeed and we're you know willing to help out and doing things like this so yeah this is this is great okay so it was moved and seconded any other commentary about this okay i'm hearing silence which tells me it's time to vote so to uh accept this change in the charter of the business development committee and changing it to the planning and development committee with all of the uh all of the elements in this charter um please signify your approval by saying aye aye opposed abstentions or roll call requests all right motion passes thanks everybody i'm going to oops i'm going to stop sharing thanks so that's great uh tom i see your hand up uh i think this is awesome and i think um i don't want to push work on anybody but it'll be awesome if the other committees over time manage to develop their own things like this everybody understands what the rules are each group's doing especially to bring on new people yes that's a terrific idea because then you can kind of hand them like here's the charter here's what we're responsible for and you can kind of get on with you know get on with the work okay there's all all on top of the one for the finance committee aren't you jerry yeah there'll be one for the finance committee coming out there's already as soon as we add up all the numbers in the columns we've got to do that first well there's short columns now so uh shivan you wanted to add i was just saying the finance committee does have a charter yep it was it was adopted a couple years ago yep back in 2018 do we know where that lives can can that float to the top so that we can see it somehow i sent it out a couple would have no idea where oh i didn't have your phone your ad your email address jerry so i don't think i sent it to you here okay i'll send you my email address here i'll just forward or jeremy can forward it that works too easy peasy all right easy perfect thank you it is on its way to you henry um this one comment i think that this is a good thing for the business development committee but i think we're going to have to consider who's going to pick up the things that we're not going to be doing and i don't know if selection of the project manager is within that charter or not but i mean there are other things as well so that i think that's a follow on action well we can always always task additional things to committees to ad hoc that aren't necessarily part of the charter so that's the other other duties as assigned that always gets thrown in at the end of uh job descriptions so yeah not certainly not off the hook for that and this one did say that uh oversee the project manager henry okay right all right so i think we're done with that one uh tom you want to circle back around to the policy discussion yeah um so i think the policy i don't have it in front of me what i wrote but um i was thinking the end of that last discussion um it probably needs to be reared in any ways um so i think i would put this forward as an amendment to my um motion and i'm copying to paste here just a second um making it much simpler there we go moving with the policy committee consolidates and provides to the board in writing all active policies that have been approved by the board in whatever format they decide best in addition the policy committee will update the above policy documentation periodically and a frequency they think warranted but not less than annually so i think uh jeremy you seconded the motion so i will yeah i will second this again and so this is a we can consider this like a strike all replacement motion unless anybody objects any discussion about this this is kind of a pivot from what where you were before but i think this is this makes sense i agree but the reason for the pivot i think was around um the other major component i mentioned before was having documentation um for contract purposes and i think that's already being covered in other ways um and doesn't really need to be called out separately it was more just being able to provide for everybody what our policies are um so we can also have to date on them cool any any other thoughts on tom's motion i think the only thing i would add to this and not add to the motion is that uh publisher policies online yes that would be a great idea shavon i heard an intake of breath what's on your mind oh i was just thinking about um ages ago i wrote a community support policy that we never actually pursued further because the policy committee kind of we weren't able to meet and uh i'd like to make sure that that was part of this but since i'm on the policy committee i'll be helping do this consolidation so i'll be able to put it forward so all right and our our standing uh or acting policy committee chair is is on the call with us so alan do you have any thoughts about this one way or the other i have been going through three and a half years of minutes and notes to find all the policies it's kind of interesting exploration so sounds like tom's going to get his wish after all um and then i don't think it's going to be a long list tom by the way there there have been a lot of ideas like the most recent the one that shavon just mentioned but nothing came of them so i'm trying to list those as well but the actual number of policies i don't think is vast thanks alan i think i mentioned on the previous time i'm willing to jump in with any help i don't mean to make work for the people i've got i've got all the minutes i think and and and notes and i was on the policy committee so i have notes of those meetings as well so i'm just going through all that and trying to pull it together sounds like indiana gilbert's on top of it i'm on top of this right thank you yay all right wonderful any other thoughts or comments questions all right so so tom's motion that the policy committee consolidates and provides to the board and writing all active policies etc please signify your approval by saying aye aye opposed abstentions or requests for roll call okay motion passes unanimously thanks everybody moving along to the discussion about the 2021 timeline from our legislature and grants so ray i would like to refer to the email that you sent very recently about the 2021 timeline because you're talking about assuming cv fiber had the money i don't know who you sent that to because you bcc'd folks but i saw it and it looks it's pretty pretty interesting but i mean it's you're at least thinking about what the rest of the year actually the rest of the next three years looks like which is good yeah so um i developed that and i sent it i copied you and i sent it to the business development committee they have a call on thursday with the idea of getting some feedback and and kind of looking forward to this but um i you know i i think if we had four million dollars for example uh sometimes some over the next 18 months we could actually deliver 120 miles of uh fiber to the pole um and with service beginning sometime that summer may june or something of 22 as well these things take uh as i looked at the and i gathered this information from our feasibility study our business plan dv fibers business plan that which was written by valley net the materials that valley net presented the legislative hearing on the 19th and and brought all our stuff together and um uh in in and created this kind of a calendar phase one phase two phase three which takes us out through 2023 and with some ideas of what the costs might be to something like this um it's fuzzy on the lines that i have dates in there like march april 21 which suggests a certain degree of certainty that's like that might happen in march april but you know frankly it could be a little bit here this way a little bit that way um but i think the overall timeline it's similar to the information that carol and stan from valley net were handy were saying to the legislators in other words it's like a 18 month process uh to do something like this um so and and and i thought it would be helpful to get my mind around that for a variety of reasons one of which is uh you know just budgeting purposes or applying for grants and for loans um another is to figure out what it is we expect the project manager to do um so there's a lot of a lot of things that motivated me to it but i've had trouble since the day i started here trying to come to grips with what is it we're trying to do one of the things i discovered by the way and in rereading that feasibility plan is that there are six color coded routes in there right and um there's they call them service routes and it added up to 366 miles in the district itself is like 1200 miles according to the agency of transportation it's these are the 366 miles of the most underserved and they defined in fred fred defined underserved as being uh places without cable so if you had cable you were on these routes okay and so putting we're talking about putting fiber out to these particular places and it expected to service anyone within 600 feet of a pole and he had some numbers with regard to how many people that might be and take rates and all this kind of stuff uh of course um the idea here is that eventually we're going to get revenue streams they're going to help us move to the next phase the next phase but after we do these first three phases in each phase by the way was two uh was two routes like blue and yellow or green and purple or whatever okay um but after we get through with those we still have the other um 700 miles and you have to remember too that the the feasibility study didn't include Duxbury in Washington uh and it doesn't include the aardolph impact um and there's several other things that doesn't include right so uh but I think in its in its broad parameters I think the timeline like 18 months is is um is kind of the horizon we can we can look to is you're actually doing something if we get four million dollars um it is not a financing plan it's not a contracting plan it's a lot of things that it isn't that that we still have to do so one of the things we have in the works for example is the poles inventory plan right every project starts with a poles inventory plan you have to do that okay and then you do make ready and then you do design and then you do construction and so every one of them has these elements in it some of those contracts can be uh brought together into like one contract but not all of them for example um and ValiNet in its dv fiber uh he's a business plan as well as in its uh testimony the legislature said one of the things you need to do early on is hire an operator because before you do your design you need to have an operator that's comfortable with the the hardware and systems that are going to be involved with making that thing work and so ValiNet doesn't like to work with this particular hardware and software and they don't do fixed wireless for example um so if you're interested them or somebody else you need to get them on board early and so it seems to me that after this RFP that we're doing for poles we need to be doing an RFP for an operator okay and so we get somebody to start looking at people and talking to them early because real soon now at some point in time we know we're going to get money we know we're going to get money and the other thing that is not considered so much but i'm hearing in the background for the discussions we've been having and i've been kind of cynical about WEX involvement okay but the importance about having WEX involved and having them do the fiber and them own the fiber we then don't own the debt and as a financing model that's very important that we don't have this debt on our balance sheets it's a lot easier to have it as an operating expense and so it would be an important thing if WEX could get its act together that they would agree to do the fiber and we lease the fiber for that so there's a lot of things that need to fall in place to be explored but i think that if we could at least kind of agree on what it is we want to accomplish you know in really more concrete terms than what we've been doing then i think that we can start actually doing that so so i put all this stuff together and send it to the business development committee for the discussion on thursday i didn't send it broadly to the board but i did send it to you jeremy because i wanted you to see you know what we were thinking about and and hopefully it'll be helpful when it comes out of the business development committee comes back to the board i'm sure they'll be chopping on it for a long time yeah and that was really great timing i mean i was glad to see that you did that at least you know making sure everybody is you know it's beginning to converge on the actual timing of what the next year or two years or three years are going to look like um a couple of observations that i want to make about what what you just said is this um the the way that we defined underserved and the way fred defined underserved actually gets uh that gets redefined in the the newest house energy and technology bill that they're working on so they define it as 100 symmetric which means anything that's not cable or fiber is underserved which that was that's exactly you know tim briglin loris ability lining up with us and agreeing that if we are going to build this future proof it has to be it has to be this yep the other thing is they're requiring with all of the funding sources that were mentioned in this bill all of them all of them required cud involvement whether the grant went straight to a cud or it had to be part of a cud public private partnership something like that um but they really really put a lot of stock in the efforts that we're doing here and the other cud's are doing throughout the state so that was um interesting i'm sure there will be lobbying against that before it hits the uh you know whatever final version but uh i thought that was uh that was great and one of the things loris ability was talking about today is um the fact that all of these efforts to change the landscape of broadband in vermont are being done by 200 volunteers across all the cud's nobody's getting paid for this except for you know consultant x and consultant y you know and even the the state is not really paying that much i mean we're they're they're paying the grants and whatever but when you look at the scope of the projects that we're that we're talking about here over the next 10 years it's it's pretty big um so they recognize that we're volunteers and we need help so they are talking about really um investing in that um and getting getting wek to move will hopefully be um helped also by this bill there is a property tax exemption for fiber infrastructure that the utilities could take advantage of uh furthermore the property tax exemption could also be um added by incumbent providers who partner with a cud to guarantee universal coverage so if consolidated comes around and wants to partner with us and say we want to build out every address in town x then they could conceivably get a property tax exemption there too um i don't know how the league of cities and towns or the individual towns are going to um uh react to that probably not uh super excited but it's out there um so i have a couple a couple other things uh i see your hand up ray a couple other things i wanted to address before i turn it back to you um the 18 month turn around on the you know 100 and 50 180 miles uh is rather a lot more aggressive than fred's cash flow model which had that happening over oh i think it was happening over three years he had it broken out by like miles per quarter he actually had like plans for like this is the actual capital cost per quarter one of the beginning of construction then quarter two and quarter three sort of ramps up to a certain a certain tempo let's say um where we could do a certain amount of a certain number of miles per quarter once the uh the project was was rolling um and so 18 months could could be possible provided that we get all the ducks in a row and we have a contractor that can actually um string the fiber that fast but i would just caution everybody to um make sure you know just to kind of cross the t's dot the i's and maybe i don't know if we want to circle back around with fred and ask him more about his his take on timing i think michael bernbaum would also be a good person or valley net would be a good place is just to go to for uh kind of sanity checking the numbers um the governor's budget that was uh revealed today i think i passed it on to everybody uh there's 1.5 million earmarked for a statewide poll um poll data harvesting study so the idea is that there would be one kind of statewide effort to go and do this i think we will probably start our poll audit before the budget actually would come into effect so this would be a budget that would start this summer uh so if we're going to get a poll you know poll audit going before then we we can't really wait so otherwise we'd have to wait for the money to be available for it to be dispersed to whichever organization the department of public service or this new community broadband association um agency whatever and uh i'm not sure that we would see any funds and be able to execute any poll audit before the end of the year i mean so it's good that they're putting it in there but i'm not sure that we're the we're completely the target audience we could maybe go the next time around you know when we look at the rest of our project but i think this first time around we will not be able to avail ourselves of that so i have a couple other things on this budget item but ray you did have your hand up jerry has his hand up too yeah um i guess a couple things one is that um you were talking about 1.2 million for a poll audit um we have for for our thousand miles in our district we have we're going to have 35,000 polls that $20 a poll at $700,000 or more so that money is not going to go very far even when they parse it out for a small project the the estimate for that 18 month that phase one which consisted of two two colored sections in the feasibility study is four million dollars so if we can get four million dollars to cover that then that's what we're looking that's what we need the stand estimated the total cost for the state people were talking about 300 million dollars his estimate is 600 million dollars because he was defining under serve as being anybody that doesn't have cable because they're not going to get 100 over on 100 right symmetrical finally one of the legislators asked carol are there any cud's that are ready now to do and it was stage three which was poll audit and do those other things and anybody ready now and she said cv fiver there were a couple of others but she said cv fiver so they are going to be ready they're all going to be poised and waiting for us to ask for the dough yep and i i have a um i owe them i owe valiant a meeting specifically to talk about the the northfield project the little one with the cares act funds but also to talk more about when we get to the point about the the operator rfp that you were talking about earlier ray they had some they just had some questions they just wanted to know where we were in the process so i just i'm just gonna keep them up to speed on that um the cares act funds have not actually formally been extended yet that will go through i don't think anybody's expecting that that's going to be anything other than a you know checking a checkbox um but until then we're sort of sitting and waiting um we're also waiting on the department of public service to release the matching funds for the vita loan once they will release that then we can apply for it for the 400 000 and then we could be ready to go and pull the trigger and go after that four million dollars of vita money so we would have we would have that funding that ray was talking about before um and yeah and we should be hearing um we get all the the quiet period of the art off stuff i think that's over this this friday so we'll have some more a little bit more information or we can talk a little bit more freely about it after that um i think that was basically everything that i had to report back on this item does anybody else have anything that they'd like to add about this year or the vermont legislature or grants yet jerry yeah yeah this is jerry i'd like to get in there because i think there's something that's critically important here and it's an it's an undercurrent that um whenever i'm scoping and reading and seeing what folks are saying it's always there but it's in the background and that is the lack of contractors to do the work and i think it's critically important that we don't wait for anything so that when something becomes available we already have the paperwork the background work the planning is already done now we have an advantage because we started early and we're three years into this and you know folks just just can't take we we moved we've moved a long distance it may not feel like that some days but we've moved a long distance and went through a lot of uh growing process and and it's hard to compress that so you know we have a position that we can leverage and and i apologize for talking about it in competitive terms but i believe we have to because there are only so many folks out there that lay fiber there's only so many folks that can be operators that are going to take on new systems and and we need to be as ready as we possibly can so that when that dollar hits it's obligated we we can't sit there and have money and not be ready to spend it really ready to spend it i mean with a contractor that we've already vetted and that we've you know we've already awarded on the condition that the money comes through we have to be that far along so that when the money hits spend otherwise we're going to lose out we won't be able to do it we'll have the money and we won't have the contractors i think that's wise right so i just add that we've already identified six contractors to target for our polls id iq contract so that we'll have identified people in advance and start we'll qualify them then we'll do our request for bids and work orders and so we can churn that out quickly when you see this calendar that i put together you'll see that all of the polls uh inventory work is done in 2021 for example because after that it's make ready we've already identified through uh green mountain power has been required as is wet that who hasn't done it at least green mountain power has provided the public utilities commission with a list of those contractors which they have approved to do make ready work on their polls and so we know at least three of those and several of those couple of those also do the contractor work on the other end and we picked up some other names for contractors as well so we're starting to get identified people to whom we can send these RFPs we just need to now kind of crank them out good news indeed and i see alan had a comment in the chat he says this is why wek is so important they'll be able to string fiber they've got the trucks the buckets and the workers so that will certainly be uh uh we're talking military time we'll say this is a force multiplier right because that's not that's not a workforce that's necessarily going to be available to any other entity other than partners with wek which is i think which is an exciting exciting opportunity so looking at those art off blocks you know where we're uh where the consortium you know won the rights to to serve those places and to get those subsidies you know the partnership with wek i think is going to be um super valuable all right so all the military metaphors coming out in the chat now wonderful um anything else folks want to talk about with this item oh i was going to talk about olives but then you said with this item so never mind okay um so um before we go to round table and kind of wind things down the business development committee i'm sorry the the pdc the planning and development committee they have a meeting on thursday and will likely have some additional stuff for us to uh consider slash approve or whatever and we still have a committee report from them since david's not here if um if they want to have another meeting next week how would you feel about that a short meeting to do just business development committee approvals or should we just wait until the next regularly scheduled meeting which is february 9th does anybody have any any objection or thoughts i'm just i just kind of want to plan ahead a little bit tom um i don't know if three weeks in a row of meetings make sense so i would say if we were going to do next week then i wouldn't do the week after um but i guess i would be in favor leaving until the ninth or whatever the next ones okay well so our last governing board meeting was two weeks ago oh so i i see three weeks in a row this week next week and the following week that that makes sense all right so let's let's unless they have end up with a sort of burning desire to get something approved or we need to move fast on something let's yeah let's just wait until the ninth then any uh i don't see anybody yeah that makes sense to me i i don't really remind me if i'm wrong but i don't think there's anything that burning that hasn't already come up i mean that we're going to need board approval for right no i didn't i can't see anything in my head um at this point in time um yeah alan just posted in chat the uh impacts of art off on our planning because that's going to have to be incorporated into whatever our initial plans are um um and so it's uh that's going to take some time we want to make sure david and michael are here for that the ninth makes sense see i i don't know that we're going to be able to turn around an art off plan by next tuesday that is a good point tom i saw your your hand up again just yeah curiosity later art off discussion be an executive session meeting uh maybe yeah i mean if we're going to be discussing um sensitive you know build strategy then yeah oh and i should also mention the house energy and technology bill also reiterates the fact that c u d's can have trade secrets and that once a project is done then we can then we can release it as a public record but once we're when we have competitive information before we're building something that we are we're entitled to uh hold on to those as trade secrets now if that makes sense for the um planning and development committee to do executive sessions as well right yeah if there's any sort of concrete um any sort of concrete uh numbers or um roots addresses getting down to that level yeah they would certainly want to use executive session and do the uh use the trade secrets exemption okay anything else all righty uh so let's let's wrap this up uh let's go to round table we'll go from the i'm gonna go from the bottom of my screen uh jerry nothing for me thank you okay henry um yeah i just want to let everyone know that i i emailed you a link with the results of the last mile survey and um you take a look at it i don't know if any one has any feedback on it um but um you know i'd be happy to walk through that there's some really interesting results in there you know like of the people that had bad broadband and knew of cb fiber 80 percent more than 80 percent were definitely interested in subscribing things like that there's some really powerful stuff in there for making a case um for the business plan cool top riffing on that the 19th meeting valley net really um made a strong point about going after the presubscription planning as soon as you can and really getting that underway so um seems like a next follow-up step is in place now so the uh anybody know if the communications committee is is pursuing a next step for presubscriptions because that would seem to be something that we have the data um and we are you know going to be imminently within the next 12 months building so we ought to know who those people are and get them i don't say on the hook but essentially get them you know kind of as partners as we're building this out does anybody know right hi i think there's a couple parts here one is that i think we're we're getting out over our skis a little bit with regard to this secondly i think that it's an item for the finance committee to be thinking about what the subscription rates might be in my humble opinion okay but just to but just to echo what tom was saying about valley net is that if we have this information we should at least be looping people in and maybe we do a follow-up survey maybe but we need to engage these folks and make sure that they know that we will be we will be offering that we need to have some facility for accepting that maybe like a like a contractor can they put down a hundred dollar deposit then we then even if it's not the rate that that gets them two months of service or three months of service or we whatever uh tim i had emailed back the group after the survey results came out just i had some questions about should we be engaging of these people should we be going after the presubscribers i assume everybody got it i just didn't hear anything back from anybody so i didn't know if it fell on deaf ears or got forgotten about no i i think um we i seem to remember us talking about this and we were going to be a bit cautious and we were going to leave this with the communications committee so that it would sort of be a unified communications front so that when we were going to go and ask folks for donations when we were going to ask folks for presubscriptions and these sorts of things that we um essentially didn't duplicate efforts and to make sure that we are all kind of pushing it in the same direction at the same time right and if i'm if i've misunderstood that anybody else please please call me out on it but uh yeah i would love to see the communications committee take um you know take the next step whatever that looks like and maybe that's not presubscriptions maybe that's reaching out and doing a specific ask for for gifts or you know putting together the paperwork for how we manage you know promissory notes or loans if that's something that we're going to pursue we we asked people and there was a fair number of people that were willing to do that so i think um getting the ball rolling on one of these or all of them i think is is valuable yeah part of what i emailed also was um just reaching out to people that had questions in the comment sections of the survey um addressing those in our own town specifically i i feel would be a good minor pr move on our delegates as well so i i went ahead and tried to answer some of those people in my town okay yeah and i i have a a tab that um you can by town list all the people name address phone number email all that um i didn't post that on on that link that you have there because it's uh proprietary but i can give that to what you know each town all prepped for you okay so and so yeah if that um if any of that stuff is is proprietary henry yeah don't don't don't post it to public um forums chats etc right so the way it is right now that link is only known by uh the people that i sent it to it is on Tableau public and it doesn't have any uh personal information so um it's not ideal but um you know you can take a look and see if there's anything in there that you think is is um should should not be that should be more confidential than it is is it possible for you to password protect that i would feel much much better if that was password protected or some way that we can not with not with Tableau public don't you have a google drive and spreadsheet software and stuff up there uh that we do have the link in control i can export it um it's not as interactive um but um yeah i'll take a look at that how much does a does a proper license for Tableau cost Henry do you have a order of magnitude about a thousand bucks but um the the issue there is that you need a server for it um or you you know you give the you know the the file to be viewed on by a licensed user i see okay well um yeah if you could if you could export that i think to a google drive that might be it might be better and if you can keep it i don't know if it's possible for you to keep um make a copy a link for yourself that's private but i think having a link floating out there that has um our survey data is probably not um just it makes me feel a little a little uncomfortable that's all but i am i'm more paranoid than the average bear so please anyone else if you're if i mean if you guys take a look and see what you think um i'd be happy i'll i'll take it down and it'll revert back to the form that it had you know where it's just a bunch of sheets where right now it's a story and it kind of walks you through the whole survey um but um it would it would lose a lot of its interactiveness if we took it off the tableau public okay take a take a look at it and then we'll take it off and then i'll export all the sheets and put it on a google drive okay all right thanks for that henry uh see rd no okay alan nothing yeah i um i don't know if other people have me tonight what's that i don't know if i can you hear me okay yep i can hear you rd has a little bit of a of a delay so it's uh it's a bit uh challenging sometimes to sync stuff up right i'll wait i think you're good alan go ahead i have received uh inquiries from people about starlink which probably i think some of you know has now made available at least to their beta testers um the opportunity to by addition get connected to them they've put up some new satellites so they're operating a further little bit further south than they were before but it's it's really sort of interesting that this is the one provider that is going to be able to say that they are can offer high speed internet to everybody once they have their system up and running and it's curious to me when i listen to the testimony in the state house that this hasn't been mentioned by anybody and i i it i'm very curious to see which art off blocks they won and how that's going to work and what the reception of them in this area is going to be uh but that that that that was my interesting tidbit of the weekend i i've had a couple of inquiries from people about this so the the art off blocks that they won those are all those are public um so you should be able to hear i think i got david's um map here i think that oops i gotta send it to everybody um i yeah so they they got a couple of couple of locations in cv fiber territory but kind of scattered um i i think it's it's so weird to me because they already are offering the service to everybody well not everybody to all locations eventually anybody who wants it's going to be able to sign up with them you know they're trying to do around a beta testing with with people who had signed up before but they they don't have to build any more wires or poles or any of that stuff you know they have the infrastructure in place just about now where they're going to be able to serve people so i i don't quite understand how art off fits into their thinking um and if if that makes things easier or more difficult for us but at at this point they they are truly our main competitor because everybody in this area can probably within the next six months if they buy a dish can be getting served by starlink if they want um so i i think that's true um and i i think art off was just a way for them to get some extra capital because i mean because they can say we can serve this and we can serve it right now and then they can go and take all of the subsidies as they you know as the federal government opens that spigot so it's just a way to make the overall project cheaper so i don't think they care where those census blocks are and i think they they bid at a certain level for every census block i mean this is my guess um and they won some of them because they can serve basically any of them um does it change our calculus probably i mean it would be good to know what their their rates are and i think i saw i think i saw an email that had their rates um my instinct is because the satellite is uh these links are a shared medium unless they put a lot more satellites up there if they get you know a couple hundred or a thousand subscribers um it's still shared bandwidth and so i think the more people that get on it the worse it's going to be for everybody i don't i don't know what sort of performance modeling they've done that's my that's my instinct i see tim you have something to add yeah i follow this very closely um there is actually a northfield resident that got the beta sign up um i've been on the list for a while but uh i was chatting with somebody who who had it but i follow all the feedback from all the users that use starlink quite intensely and it's uh five hundred dollars for the beta test pricing to buy the dish 99 dollars a month they're getting anywhere from 50 to 150 megabits up and down uh speed and um there i wouldn't underestimate their technology for one second because they keep on launching more satellites and more and more ground stations are showing up they're doing uh communication from satellite to satellite using lasers um the technology is going to be as fast as fiber optics once it gets up on the satellites do you know what they're getting for a ping what was that question do you know what they're getting for a ping yeah the pink the pings are relatively uh good numbers as well i i think i recall between 13 and 19 uh milliseconds for pings everybody has different experiences obviously too though uh huh so shivan just posted in the chat i think she was echoing an email from tom so it's like third hand at this point um said 50 megabits to 150 megabits per second and latency from 20 to 40 milliseconds in most locations so i think it's uh your mileage might vary i guess we'll we'll have to see so it's i don't know that's completely clear i would say that even if i were to put plonk the money down on this to use it i would consider it a stop gap until i could get fiber to my house um because i i i've had satellites several times and never been happy with it maybe this is better maybe it won't suck i am i remain unconvinced yeah this is worlds different than uh hues net or any other satellite yes it's it's completely different but the satellites are much closer first of all these are low orbit i'd still feel happier with the line to my house yeah me too all right uh anything else alan no i'm fine thanks thanks alan lauri yeah hi there i i think just to piggyback on on alan's point um i think uh anything that we can do to um kind of keep our communities abreast of of our progress is important because if people don't regularly hear about the fact that that there is really good progress um they are gonna shift to other opportunities like starlink um because no news just makes people assume that there's no progress um so that would be something i would encourage just you know because like you said if there's really um gonna be some um wires on the ground in in 12 months i think that'll give people a lot of encouragement to to to either wait or um you know i can plan for it um and i the other thing i just wanted to say is that uh i believe that um the regular delegate from middle sex phil will be jumping back in in february um i'll be confirming that with him and if that's the case then uh i will be less um present but it's been a pleasure following along well thanks very much for filling in for phil while he's uh recovering lauri we do appreciate it absolutely uh tom i'm good thanks everybody thanks tom shavon oh no i'm good thanks ray uh yeah a couple things one is that uh monday uh one february the rfp4 polls inventory will be launched responses to do back one march uh they'll go to the pdc committee for the review and recommendations to the board this is a rfp to identify about four different contractors to do poll inventory work for us and once we get them under a master service agreement we will then issue a request for bids for phase one whatever phase one is going to be right so my estimate by the way since we're looking at budgeting numbers my estimate for polls work for phase one is about 80 000 so we're not talking about a huge amount of money to get us launched and make ready will cost us a lot more than that but at least for now uh we're talking about 80 about 80 grand certainly less than 100 that's it well thanks ray tim uh i'm good no i'm okay thanks tim john nothing else here all right thanks john josh um i'm all set thank you very much all right i'm also set uh just want to thanks everybody for for joining tonight and appreciating the momentum going forward so um i'm going to declare the meeting adjourned at 7 19 p.m and we'll talk to you all soon see you good night good night