 Recording has started. It is 6.02 p.m. I am calling the regular meeting of the CV fiber board to order. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? And hold on a second. I need to move this to a different screen. That do? Yeah, that'll do. Okay. All right. There's that. I'm not seeing. I need people's hands. That's what I need to see. Allen, did I need to add you to the agenda? No. Okay. Is there any public comment? Do you need a motion to approve the agenda, Siobhan? No, I do not need a motion to approve the agenda. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. Not seeing any public comment. I'm going to move on to the meeting minutes approval. Jeremy, do you have a motion for me? You have a motion to approve the March 14, 2020, three meeting minutes as drafted. I will move to accept the minutes as drafted. That's R.D. I'd like to make a correction if I could. Second. Okay. Just a moment. We have a motion made by Jeremy, seconded by I believe that was Chuck. Tom. Tom. Sorry, Tom. And Michael has a change. Go ahead, Michael. It just wasn't noted that I was absent at the last meeting. Okay. I will. So for the meeting minutes, I don't know. How did that get in there? I will change that. I have not been saying specifically who is absent in the meeting minutes. Yeah. I just noticed there were a couple people mentioned in these minutes. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good catch. I need to remove that because that is not accurate. There are a lot more people than just you who didn't attend. That's something that I do for committees. But you know, because a lot of times it's much, much closer to quorum. But I do a different thing for the governing board. I have that attendance for the town representation sheet. And I will talk to Sybil, our minute taker, and let her know that we don't do absent for this. So I apologize for the confusion. Alan, your hand is up. Go ahead. Yeah, Jeremy, you did get those two small corrections that I sent you right. I believe I did and then sent out a revised version. Okay. The most important of them was the was the was the date of the meeting had to be corrected. And as long as you did that, then you probably did the other the other small thing that was in there. Yep. Okay. The version that I have is March 14th. Okay. Great. Thanks. There's a number back and forth on this one. And I'll try to check a little bit more closely and make sure that they're better before I send them out to the board. I apologize. I'm really, really busy right now. And yeah. Okay. Is there any more discussion about the motion to approve the minutes as amended and suggested for change? R.D., go ahead. I just want to request that you record my vote as abstained since I was not present at the meeting. Okay. So are there any objections to approving the motion? And I don't hear any objections. We have one abstention of R.D. Does anybody else wish to abstain from voting on these minutes? I guess I probably should also. I was also absent. Okay. Michael will also abstain. And otherwise, the motion passes with the majority. Thank you. Operations manager introduction. That's Lucas. Hi, Lucas. Everybody. This is Lucas. He's our new operations manager. He started this week last week. He started last week, didn't you? Why don't you go ahead and talk a little bit, Lucas, because I'm boring. Go ahead. Hi, my name is Lucas Stubbs. I live in Williamstown. I've been in telecom since 2009, last 10 years with level three slash century length slash lumen. That's a technician and an outside plant engineer. And lucky enough to jump on with you guys and looking forward to, you know, hopefully getting this, you know, it's a great thing going and, you know, getting everybody up and, you know, up and online. And I'm certainly going to be one of those, I hope so. Definitely looking forward to that. Okay. Yeah, Lucas has only been here for a week. He's already hit the ground running. We're meeting at the warehouse tomorrow with with Eustace and NRTC and warehouse management. And we have on the books a meeting with weights field. And Lucas has already been instrumental in helping us pinpoint some of the big challenges that we have and maybe some solutions that we could implement. So welcome, Lucas. It's really wonderful to have you here. Thank you very much. Good to be here. Yes. Okay. All right. So we will move on to the Treasurer's report. Laurie Beth or Ray? Okay, Ray sent you the various reports that we had. We had gone over and discussed some of the things on them at a prior meeting and then a private meeting he and I had. Because we were there was confusion as to where the rent and where have went and utilities and those are under been listed at the pre construction and want to keep it there or not. But that's one of the things we discussed. So Laurie Beth, how about if I go through the balance sheet? So in the highlights of the balance sheet and if there's some questions, you'll be more equipped to answer those than than I am. I'm not an accountant. But at the end of at the end of March, we had seven and a half million dollars in the bank account. And and for the I think almost the first time, we're reflecting current assets of $2.8 million, for example. So total current assets of 11.2 fixed assets of 2.8. So total assets of $14 million. And this is important when we are interested in finding debt, for example, for additional construction work. Let's see. Profit loss. Gross profit, this had to do with grant money coming in. I recognize this $90,000 here for town opera from Northfield, for example. Licensing fees and dues. Janiel, what was the licensing fees and dues that came up with this? Do you recall? $36,000? Yeah, so we do. We do owe some licensing fees because we got some licenses last year and those are on an annual basis. So that's going to be different than make ready. Yeah. Total administration 64,000. But of course, this is before adding a couple more employees. So that number is going to go up. Here's our pre construction for March design services. 32,000 make ready services 66 materials $376,000. So you can see that a lot of money was spent this particular month. The next thing is expenses by vendor. So Kalex is provide the electronics for our OLTs on the optical line terminals, those cabinets that from which the internet will be distributed throughout the district. So that's $246,000 for one set of electronics. That's probably the largest we see here. Power Intel supply company $107,000. We buying materials from them. Mission Broadband is handling our pole licensing applications and things like that. What else? Ray, RDS got his hand up. I'm sorry, I don't mean to. What sort of licensing? What licenses are we paying for? Attachment fees. No, before. The didn't we sign that contract for the cybersecurity? Is that licensing? Oh, there's that too. Yes, that that could be part of it too. Yes, it's a security contract for know before as well. Oh, yeah, there could be other licensing as well. Okay, what is no before? That's security training software. Okay, package. Okay, got it. Thank you. Any any of the questions on these on these figures? If not, thank you. All right, so the next item on the agenda is budget allocation insurance. This is just a notification about the insurance. We're there's going to be an increase in the insurance. We obviously have more materials than we've had in the past. We have more employees than we had in the past. And so our insurance costs are going up. The executive committee takes care of approving these kinds of budget line items. So this is just a notice that we're going from something like 35 to 70,000 something something something along those lines. And that doesn't require board approval. So that's just letting us know. Thank you for letting us know. Okay, so then audit update. Yeah, so I can take this when with the auditor on Friday, met Westler, and she said that the audit was going great. We had given them some information on inventory and specifically the inventory value for each piece of equipment or materials we have in stock. And they just wanted to go through some basic questions about how we do business. And her impression was that our audit was going well and should be should be done this month. So the audit update is that we've complied by supplying all of the required requested information from Westler as well as from Bonnie Batchelder's office. And they're in the process of reviewing it and going through and completing the audit. Anybody have any questions about that construction grant update? The great news was we we we did receive an approval from the Vermont Community Broadband Board yesterday on $1.9 million of grant allocation funds to keep us afloat, keep the lights on purchase some materials as we went through in that spreadsheet, we've put out some significant funds for long lead, long lead time items. So those items, administrative costs will will be funded through the additional 1.9 that was received approved yesterday. Henry has a question. Go ahead, Henry. Oh, did you take your hand out? I was trying to figure out how to clap my hands. Clap acknowledged, yes. Anybody have any other questions or comments? Okay, great. Go ahead. No, I was just going to say that Alan heard that because Alan's in the woods. And so if you're in the woods, you can hear the clap something. Something was on the tree. Just tree falls down. Run Alan, run the tree's falling. So just a bear. This was the the last bit of our ARPA funding. Sorry, I'm trying to get the minutes and I got a little behind it on. Oh, that was a grant. Yeah, that was a grant for BCBB. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And construction update. So actually, I'm going to ask Lucas to give the construction update. I'll fill the gaps in here if if you want me to Lucas. But you want to you want to take a stab at the construction update? Sure. I don't think we got an updated mileage today. Did we from NRTC? Not today. No. No, last we heard we're at about what 10 miles of fiber built and 14 miles of strand. That was let me let me see what numbers they gave me last lap. So we're working now on trying to get a real time update for our for our construction as it goes. But they say they said yeah, I think 10 is probably pretty close by now. I think on Friday, they had 9.4. So I think that's probably about right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we're meeting with USIS tomorrow at the warehouse and hoping to get a good game playing with them to speed things up a little bit. You know, I know we want to be at about three miles a week right now once you know, roads clear out in the mud season dries up a little bit more. So we're going to ask them. I'm sorry, Dave, would I say a week? Yeah. Oh, yes. So hopefully we will be able to get on the same page with USIS tomorrow. They're sending one of their vice presidents over. So that'll be a good conversation to have. You know, one of our holdups has been the callous OLT, which we have an onsite meeting Friday morning with hopefully all parties involved so we can get a game playing by the end of that meeting. I was lost in electric and Velco and NRTC and myself. So, you know, hopefully by the end of this week, we have a lot clearer picture turning up callous. And, you know, getting a better understanding about what we can expect going forward from USIS and, you know, getting everything in the air and ready to turn up. I know we also have the RFPs that we're hoping to have by the end of the week, right? Which will light up these cabinets. So we're hoping to have multiple, you know, multiple bids in on those and have options. But, you know, a lot of these really remote places could be interesting to see who's available and who can help us out. So I guess a lot going on by end of the week. Thanks. Anybody have any questions or anything to add to that? So do we have an estimate of when the OLT might be ready to light? Well, that's going to be tough because we need to get the information in the drawings into the agency of natural resources first and then there's a 14 day comment or review period after that. So if we get all of the drawings done by next week, we're looking at the end of the month for the approval of the ANR of the drawings. Just just being realistic here, you know, I mean, we're going to we're going to have to get our permit probably by the end of the month, the beginning of May, if we're being realistic about it. John Walters asked in chat that he has almost 15 miles of fiber in the pending front porch forward post. Is that wrong? Yes. So so as of last week, there could be some informal updates, but but the formal updates from NRTC that come out on Friday, we haven't received anything more than that. So I would say I would say it's closer to 10 formally, even though they put some in the air, we don't have it officially approved through from NRTC besides what we got last week. But maybe by the end of this week, right? Yeah. Well, yeah, and they've been averaging about three miles a week. And as as Luca said, we're aiming to get three miles a day. So once they get more troops on the ground, we should be looking at an increase. It's been a little slow go because the mud season and they've been trying to get lighter trucks out there to to hang. Okay. And Tom Fisher has a hand up. Go ahead, Tom. Thinking back to plans almost a year ago now, we were talking about how Washington Electric Co-op had an area in Calis that we were going to, the real line was going to get sent to early before the rest of our build. Is that included in our 15 or 10 miles or whatever we're counting? Or has that work been done? I'm not sure if that's even part of this picture anymore or not. Yeah. So I'm not sure what that is that I'm not sure that they were going to hang early fiber. That's that wasn't part of the plan. Maybe we're thinking about delivering and storing fiber at WEC because we certainly were doing that. It was it was to run from the East Montpelier downtown up to the Washington Electric Transfer Station or something in Calis. Yeah, and nothing like that was ever done. The only scope of work that has been released for any fiber hanging is that one to use this for the Calis DA. So there has not been any additional fiber hung in East Montpelier. Tom, I think David Healy might be able to give you a clearer explanation of that particular bit you're talking about. And of course, David's in Ireland. So he's not much help. But in terms of how dare we take a vacation. That's on the record. David Healy not much help. Do we have any more comments or questions? Okay, next up is website update. Is that you Linda? Or Janiel? We're Joe, that's Chuck. Chuck. I don't want to hear from Chuck. Do you want to start or do you want me to just go right into it? Well, I mean, I can accuse you up. We're working on two things on the website. We're working on the subscription interface with crowd fiber so that people can sign up and we're working on the front end to put up the subscriptions and also some additional offerings that we have on the WordPress. So we're working with code writer on that for WordPress and we're working with crowd fiber on the integration part for the subscribers and Chuck, you can provide better context. Yeah, sure. So there are a couple of elements to this. The first element as Janiel indicated is the actual experience through which somebody can truly subscribe and indicate that they want to buy one of our packages and that is managed in crowd fiber. That interface is getting closer. We have a little bit of content we need to finalize, particularly on the commercial side of things. We have a couple of known bugs we need to work out and most importantly, while it looks pretty good and works pretty well on desktop size browsers, it does not yet look good on mobile browsers. So we have a bit more to go there on the mobile browser front. We are at this point, unfortunately, well over the original 80 hours we originally specced, but we are still under the $5,000 budget that we got approval for. But we are inching our way closer to that budget. So it won't be long before we likely come into that budget cap and either need to re-evaluate and come back for more money or figure out how to pivot at that point in time. The other work that is in flight is on the sort of public marketing site, if you will, the site that will be available to the public even if you're not already going through a subscription process. And that is from a design perspective, much closer. We still have a couple of sets of the content and how we talk about our packages that need to go through an approval process for the communications committee and executive committee before we will be ready to release them. But that should be happening very, very soon. Linda, looks like you want to add something. We are looking for testers to help us out. If you would like to join our testing team, we would appreciate it very much. We probably need six or so people on this testing team. And we would like to start testing probably at the end of the week. Bonus points. Sorry, I just want to know what kind of a time commitment is the testing thing? We will probably ask you to go through the process of registering three times. Okay. However, and that will probably take like 10, 15 minutes to go through the process and log your findings. That said, we would also love to encourage those of you who might have multiple kinds of devices in your household, and if you can volunteer a little more time to go through it on multiple devices, because we need to test iPads, we need to test mobile phones of different formats, Android, iPhone. We need to test Windows computers. We need to test Mac computers. We need to test Chrome versus Safari versus Firefox. All of this testing needs to happen. And so when you volunteer, if you can indicate whether you have multiple kinds of devices in your household and the time to do more than just one round of testing, we would greatly appreciate it. You can email Linda and myself with those details. And I just want to say a huge shout out to Linda for coordinating this testing. It's a ton of work. I unfortunately changed jobs a week and a half ago and my world has become a lot more busy than it was prior to that. And so she has really picked up any sort of slack. And I would like to shout out for Chuck because he's the one doing the code merge to get us to production. So I'd like to shout out to both of you for all the hard work you're doing. Thank you. Thank you very much. Do we have any more comments or questions about the website? I've been sitting in a lot of these calls with Chuck and Linda and I can say it is a tremendous amount of work. Every every issue is a rabbit hole and fixing the crowd fiber spaghetti code has been just insanity. So every every little thing that needs to be tweaked is a rabbit hole. It's amazing. Yep. Anything else? I'm going to move on. All right. I'm moving on marketing update. I don't even know who that is now. So I'll take it. Okay. So we are we are working toward a direct mailing campaign with Crawford. They've put together a few different images for postcard mailing to go out at phased in a phased way so that we have one when fibrous coming one when you can sign up and then one when it's here. And we also are hiring a community relations manager who is going to be liaison between Crawford Communications Committee and public interface crowd fiber weights field. So we also have a marketing campaign that was developed by Crawford. We're looking at what to do and then the first the next quarter and then the following quarter for each piece we decided to break out the direct mailing campaign because it's something we want to get done now but we're also looking at some events for the summer and getting some booths and doing events at launch and things like that. So we will be putting together a a statement of work based on the proposal when we hire a community relations manager. Linda wants to add something. We would like a list of events that are going on this summer in your towns things like farmer's markets and things like that. So if you would please send us a list for your town of different community events that go on or places where people congregate like the post office or the hardware store or maybe there's only one store in town they all congregate at. Anyway those kind of information will help us to decide where we can put up events when we start going live. So please send us an email. You can send it to Janiel or me and we're going to start collecting those events mostly summer events. Thank you. OK. I'm going to recognize myself here. I just wanted to add that I did talk to the people at the rainbow center that I work with and they're very excited about the possibility and the people who are running the pride event in Barry are very excited about the possibility to see if I were just even setting up a table there. And so I'll send you the information about that. Is anybody else. I think Barry is the one we've already signed up for the festival. Oh no. This is a different festival. Yes. Yeah. No. This is pride. The Pride Festival. Yeah. My failure at Barry Heritage Festival. Do we sign up for that heritage. OK. Yeah. That that yeah that's through the very partnership that pride is a citizens group that is doing that rather than the businesses group. And then there's my failure pride but I can get you in contact with them as well. So I'll get I'll get those out to you. Is there anybody else got anything else to say Ray you look like you want to talk. No I don't. OK. OK. So the next thing on the agenda is committee chairs and officer election notice which I think means we're not doing that in this meeting but we're doing it in the next meeting. Yeah. So the next this is an important notice actually the next meeting is when the board will vote on a chair and the vice chair and the officers etc. OK. And the other thing that's important here is that they're also going to approve the committee chairs. You may recall there's a two step process for the committee chairs. The committees themselves elect a chair and then the then the board approves the election and the of that of that chair. OK. So what that means for the executive committee folks chairs is that between now and the next board meeting in May that you'll need to hold a meeting in which you held an election for the chair. It does not include the vice chair. So that's not something the company for the board questions comments. That means you better be good Ray. For a whole month Linda. I don't know if I can handle it. OK. Chuck has his hand up. I'll just put it out there that anybody who wants to chair the communications committee is more than welcome to come. Really Chuck handing the baton. We will not let him step down. Are you kidding me. I wouldn't let me step down last year. I tried. Right. The next thing is credit card authority. So this this is not a this. This is just a notice as well. This is not an action item. The executive committee has authority with regard to the credit card business. But we are going to be getting credit cards. It's hard to believe that we haven't had credit cards to now for folks. In the beginning the chair in the executive director will have a credit card. The executive committee will approve subsequent other folks that might need them which might include for example operations manager and the community relations manager. But the executive committee will be taking action on those things. So any questions or comments on that. OK. So the next two items are possible executive session. The community relations manager. I'm assuming we will go in and go ahead. Yeah. So there were two separate statutory rationales for executive session for these next two items. One is a personnel matter. The other is strategies. OK. And so what will happen is we'll go into executive session for the community relations manager come out and hopefully take some action. And then we'll go back into executive session and go through the funding materials. And so that's just the way we'll have to run that. OK. Yeah. That I was actually going to ask that question. Do we need to have two separate sessions. Yeah. So Ray do you have a motion for the first session. It just so happens I do. That's amazing. I'll put it in the chat room. It's like you're psychic. Yeah. Moved that we had our executive session to consider the employment and valuation of a public officer employee in accordance with one VSA section 313 alpha of three and that all delegates alternates the executive director are invited as they have information that is needed regarding the employment of a community relations manager in accordance with one VSA section 313 Bravo. So now I wanted to be we have alternates and delegates and the executive director. No other staff and I'm not aware of any other folk who ought to be in attendance. And if you think that you should be then let me know that would that also includes John Walters as the vice chair of the planning district committee. R.D. The motion has been made by Ray seconded by Jeremy. Go ahead. R.D. My only question is is would Lucas's presence be welcome at the second executive session. Yes. I'm already told that I'm already told that and I will text him when we come out so we can come back. Thank you. That's why you were checking to see if his phone was on at the beginning. Nice. Nice. I'm telling you Ray is psychic. He's just very psychic. No it's this. Magic ball. OK. So I have a motion for us to go to executive session. Is there any more discussion. I'm not seeing any discussion. Do I have any objections to this motion. I am not seeing any objections. Do I have any abstentions. Do I need abstentions. Pickle the stain. Yeah. The motion carries. We are going to be going into executive session with people who are supposed to leave. Go away now please. And I'm going to stop the recording. It is 6 thirty six PM when I am stopping the recording.