 I'd like to just say a few words to introduce the panel that we'll have for lunch here and kick off the discussion that we'll have about advocacy work that's happening both here in Vermont and then also in other states around the country, particularly here in the region. But before we get to the panel, just a couple of quick notes for you all. The first thing I'd say is that if you have not had a chance to be at either the national or state public policy panels that have taken place here the last couple of days, we'll talk a little bit about that work. We won't talk a lot about national policy because a lot of what we're trying to do is prevent bad things from happening at the national level. So if you don't know it yet, just say no to HR 3557. Say yes to the Protecting Community Television Act at the national level. And then also, if you are an ACM member, please know that we are here as a resource for you to help your advocacy work at the local, state, and federal level and that we work in partnership with our state organizations and with our members to help build their capacity to advocate on behalf of their residents. Every month, the first Thursday of the month, we have a national public policy call where we review things that are going on in Washington, D.C., but then also compare notes for states around the union. And that's actually been a huge boon to the advocacy work for individual states as people who are fighting a fight in one state compare notes with their colleagues in another state. And that's part of the resource that ACM provides, so we're happy to do that for you. Quick other couple of notes here before we start the conversation. I want to say a big round of applause and thank you to board members for the national organization who are here today. If you want to stand up and say hello to folks, a quick recognition for national board members. A special thank you to Richard Turner, our national board chair, who will be concluding his service in about two weeks' time. I want to thank you for the partnership and leadership that you provided us over the course of the last several years as a national board chair. And then a quick note for you, if you're beginning to think about 2024, I would like to invite you to come to Washington, D.C. next March. We're setting a date for a national hill date for you to be able to advocate on behalf of your communities, your operations, and also the residents that depend upon your work as community media operations. Be on the lookout for that date, but I think it will probably be the second week of March. And we welcome you to Washington, D.C. It's a great time to be. It's not stick season in Washington, D.C. then. How's that? I've learned something here in the last couple, stick season, delightful. So let's turn to the panel today, and I guess the context I want to give to you as we turn things over to the work that's been happening in Vermont and in some of other states is that the status of public policymaking at the federal level has either been bad or sclerotic. And sclerotic is bad, you know, I'm not a health, I'm not a heart surgeon. Sclerosis is bad for you. It's been frozen in many respects. It's been very much stalled out as also an entire question about the extent to which there's policy capture, regulatory capture at the federal level, which I think doesn't exist in some states. So that's provided us an opportunity in the last several years for states working in the telecom space and working on community media initiatives to really be thinking creatively about how they can serve the needs of their residents. And that's certainly the case here in Vermont. And it's been like our pleasure at ACM to partner with Vermont Access Network over the course of the last, gosh, it's been about the last, it's been actually since the franchising work that occurred with both Charter and Comcast post-2015 was really sort of like the sort of groundwork that sort of made for that partnership that we've had with ACM supporting your work for the Public Service Commission here in Vermont with those renewals that took place and some historic work that occurred as a result of that advocacy work that you did. We're happy to support that and to really be a backstop for you when crazy, stupid arguments would come up from the opposition. Since that time, you've been working on some very, very groundbreaking initiatives that are beginning to both gain some traction, but then also are gaining some attention from people around the country. So we'll be talking a little bit about that here during this discussion. So with that, I want to kind of hand things over to you Angeliki and introduce yourself to folks who don't know you and lead off the discussion. Okay, great. So I'm Angeliki Contis and I'm director of a pretty small to medium sized community media center in Richmond, Vermont, which is about a half an hour from here. And I've also been on the van board for as long as I can remember it feels like now, at least two or three terms. And yeah, first of all, we all want to welcome everybody who's trekked into Vermont or even those from Southern Vermont who have come a long way. And thank you especially to Mike from the ACM. It's so great for us during the course of the year to always be able to check in and be like, Mike, what do you think of this? What should we do about that? I mean, it's like it's invaluable, I mean, to be able to just check things that are coming through the pipeline and what we're doing and let him know about things that we're up to. And we're hoping that our discussion today and I'm very humbled to be here because I know everybody is doing amazing work in their centers around the country and we saw some of that last night in the awards ceremony. But we were hoping that our case today would be helpful for you as you navigate the elephant in the room, which is the fact that our stable source of income for a long time and for many of us, as long as we've been doing this, the cable revenue is going down and we know it's happening. And we want to be ahead of this before it's a total disaster. And I know that there have been some of those centers that have had to close because of this. So here in Vermont, we have the advantage that we're kind of small. And there's 24 of us and we all know each other and speak to each other regularly and we have a very strong organization in van. And we've decided to work on this for at least since 2015 and we'll get more into the details of that. And we want to tell you a little bit about our efforts for short-term funding as well as long-term funding because there's only so long you can ask for short-term funding and it's not a fix to the existential problem. So since 2020, we've been working with Action Circles and we have someone here who's a lobbying organization and they have helped us navigate all this stuff because we know a lot about cables and how to film shows and we don't necessarily know a lot about how to get things done in a political context. On the plus side, we also know everybody because we're conveniently located throughout the state and they all know and love us. I think I don't know anyone who doesn't love us, I think. And that's a big advantage when you're doing things like this. And we're useful, I think. So we've been working with Action Circles since 2020 and we've had success. It's allowed us to obtain 2.4 million in short-term funding and that includes ARPA funds as well as other kind of funding. And during the pandemic, we were deemed an essential service and you all know what that looks like and it's been nice to have support even in the last two days from our Secretary of State and Peter Anthony, our legislator, who's here from Barrie, Vermont and our Lieutenant Governor, so we do have a lot of support. So thank you to the Vermont system for recognizing our value. That's the first step. And we're going to start today showing you a video of Peter Blum, who was the author of the PEG study, which was commissioned by the State of Vermont, to look into our existential problem of what are we going to do now that the cable revenue is going down and what are options and how are we going to make up this revenue. And he came up with a bunch of different solutions which have eventually made their way into a bill that we're working on having introduced right now. We have senators, a senator in the Senate, obviously who's bringing that in front of Legislative Council and the same thing is happening in the House. So that's all going to happen when the legislature starts up in January. So we're going to first see this video that Peter Blum sent sort of going over. He was the author of the PEG study and he goes over what's involved with that. And then Tammy, who's on the van board with me, is going to talk a little bit about the work that the van organization has done to make all this happen. And then we're going to hear from Representative Peter Anthony about the work that the State of Vermont is generally doing to to improve and modernize the telecommunications legal framework in this state because we all know how everything is changing so rapidly and we have to keep ahead of it. So I guess we can start with the video first. Why do telecommunications rules need to be modernized and what role do you see public educational and government access in that mix? Well, you know, I had seen what was going on in what was then the telephone world. When I got to the public service board, I discovered something that I should have known about already, which was that PEG had already gotten a separate source of funding through the Cable Act. So back in the 80s, when this was all done, cable and telephone were completely different silos. The cable people wanted the cable industry came along in the 80s and they wanted to be recognized in federal law and they were, but they needed franchises. They needed the right to run their wires up and down the highways. And the quid pro quo that they had worked out was a gross receipts tax of up to 5% plus a little bit for capital. And states like Vermont and in some places, in some states, other non-state actors like cities and towns were able to negotiate about those franchises. And they were able to use the revenues from those surcharges as they chose. Vermont chose to use it all for PEG access. So there's a 5% surcharge on cable in Vermont that goes directly to PEG organizations and doesn't even pass through the state treasury. It's just a direct transfer. The technological advance has made the funding mechanism for your particular mechanism, I think, moderately obsolete. But the immediate pressing point is that your revenues have been declining and you don't have less need. You just have less revenue coming in. So we did the study. I did the study to try to look at alternative sources of revenue. And since I had experience in Vermont looking at sort of multiple different programs that were related to telecommunications in the 1990s, I tried the same thing again. I said, well, what if Vermont continues with its established policies of funding telecommunications related services with telecommunications related taxes? What kinds of taxes would be appropriate? And one of the new problems with it is, if you're going to do that, you really should try to do it in a way that's competitively neutral so that you're not picking out just one industry, say cable or internet services and saying, well, you're going to pay it all, pal. It's all on you. And we want your money and your competitor isn't going to have to pay anything. You need to try to make this all a little more balanced so that it applies ideally across all the competitive markets. And the trouble I found, Lauren Glenn, was that there are so many silo-based federal restrictions that trying to find a new source of revenue in the telecommunications space is a little bit like skiing on a slalom course. It's something I was never able to do myself. And so I know that it's very hard to do. But you have to go around all these polls and zigzag around and miss things and try to get to the bottom without crashing. And there are a lot of polls on this federal preemption slope that we looked at in the report and tried to find a way through. And what would you say are the solutions that we came up with that avoid, for example, the Internet Tax Freedom Act or some of the other federal prescriptions? Yeah. So there's about four or five major areas of preemption. There's the restrictions on the use of the Cable Act revenues, that 5% restrictions. There's the Internet Tax Freedom Act. There's the FCC decisions that have restricted the use of the Federal Universal Service Fund. And by extension, what states cannot do in the universal service area. So that's very little available. And you can't add more than 5% to Cable. You can't tax Internet access by congressional action. You can't impose a connection fee on Internet connections, at least so said the FCC at the time. And so when you get all done, there would seem to be very little left. But I realize that because there are two things that are relevant here, technological things. One is Vermont has almost everything telecom-wise up on polls. That's not the case in the Midwest, where they bury everything. But in Vermont, because of rocky soils and tradition, things are up on polls. And the second thing is that fiber optics are so much more efficient than the traditional voltage-based copper communications that it's the mechanism of choice for almost every telecom carrier. Satellite guys accept it. Even the satellite guys use terrestrial fiber for a lot of their communications to their ground stations, for example. But everybody pretty much uses some or exclusively fiber-based communications. And there still is a lot of copper up on the polls. But I thought, well, if you're looking for something that everybody uses that you want to generate tax revenue from, why not try some kind of a cable on polls charge? And I thought, well, maybe we could ask people to go out and measure the length of their cables. That seems kind of arduous and time-consuming and likely to create controversy. But I thought, well, the other thing is that polls tend to be about equally spaced apart. And they're farther apart in the country than they are on major highways. But if you attach to a poll, there's a existing regulation that applies for how the price is set for the poll attacher to pay the poll owner. So there is already data around about how many of these poll attachments there are. And I thought, well, maybe a surcharge on poll attachments might be a way to get down to the bottom of that slalom slope without crashing into any gates. And that was what we explored in the paper. So forgive us all the metaphors to skiing, but you'll hear more of that as we go through the conversation. And I'd be remiss not to mention that we have an advocacy committee in Van, which is kind of people from the board, but also Lauren Glenn Davidian from Town Meeting TV, who is otherwise known as sort of like the mother of community media in Vermont, and has really helped us a lot in terms of contacting legislators, following up immediately with legislators, and also teaching us whatever action circles is in teaching us about how to do that important work. And I forgot to mention that at the end of this conversation, we do want to hear from everybody in different states. And I know Peter Anthony was also interested in hearing how other people are tackling the challenges of substituting cable funding with other revenue. So Tammy, who I speak with on a regular basis, let's talk about how the van board started on this work, because it's been a really long process. It's not like we did it in a few months or a year. It's been going on for a long time. Do you want to kind of go to the beginning? Yes. How we decided to hire action circles to help us. My main message that I want you all to take away today is that this didn't happen overnight. And we made a decision as a sector to tackle the existential crisis that we have. Probably 10, 12 years ago. And our first step was to get some grant funding to do business planning and strategic planning, to hold some special education events with our members, to talk about the big bag future of where's our money. And that was a very uncomfortable time for us back then. But over the years, we made that decision and then we committed to it. And we worked on a number of projects from VMX to the CPG with Comcast and Charter. That was a five, six year process that Lisa from CAT TV helped us through. And Kevin. And VMX is the file sharing system. So we started educating our membership on the problem. And then we started educating our membership on the solutions. And we made a decision to make this a priority. And I think that's my main message. And we worked on a number. We also worked on a statewide contract as a cohesive group. And so we started doing this work many, many years ago. And the other important thing is to dedicate time in your leadership. Whether it's an executive director or board members to dedicate time to this advocacy work, because without the buy-in from your board, you're not going to have the time to do it. And that's really important. So I bring the advocacy work to my board and they understand the importance of it and the value of it. So they're not questioning, Tammy, why are you spending so much time doing this advocacy work? They get it. So I would say that's the first step is really getting the buy-in from your board and the staff on why it's important to do this work when there's other things to do. And then secondly, start working together and make a commitment to it. And know that it's a slow process, democracy slow, right? So that's really the takeaway I want you to get from me. But we worked on the CPG. We did the business planning and strategic planning. We started working together around the FNPR on rulemaking and the gap accounting change that happened in 2018. And we really realized that we needed some professional help and that's why we hired the lobbyists, because we're not, as Angeliki said, we don't have the history to understand how to do this work. The large organizations in the beginning pitched in to pay for this work because they understood the value of it. And then slowly we all, we added it to our membership structure, to our membership fees. So we could build up a fund to pay for this work. And we hired Action Circles in 2018. The advocacy team meets just about every Monday. So when I say commitment, that's the commitment that I'm talking about. It's a weekly adventure. And may I say that there are lobbyists and lobbyists. And for us, it was really important to pick someone that has a really good reputation, that when you say their name, people don't cringe. And as the opposite, whenever we mention Action Circles and Amy, everyone is just excited that we're working with them. And they're like, she knows what she's doing. And that helped us because we didn't. Yeah. So the next topic that we wanted to talk about was how, how do we find success in getting short term funding and getting $2.4 million that we all needed to help boost our services in our communities. And we started by doing research on our revenue and made some solid revenue projections so that we could really show the need. And we did our homework and we came prepared. And we're not coming to the legislature when it's too late with our, you know, with the pants on fire, we're saying we know and we're getting our ducks in a row. And we started then in 2018 building those relationships with legislators. And Peter can talk about how long he's known. Lauren Glenn, it's not been since 2018, but and we really started focusing on building relationships with our municipalities. And during COVID really streaming government and action on a three times a week, four times a week basis, getting identified as an essential service. And then our value really became evident and became a little easier for us to work through the legislative process. And Megan has put the the chart up there, the chart that we've been presenting to legislators in our one page ask, let's say, just kind of explaining the situation and the funding that we're going to need to make up in the next few years. And I think this was based on kind of conservative numbers with cable cord cutting. And without the crazy inflation we've had in recent years. So things are changing, but we're trying to get ahead of it. And it was based on real data, real research, real numbers. And so I think that's an important point. So I think we're on to the third piece. And then we can turn it over to Peter and yet and have a discussion. So tell us about our solution in our bill. Yes. So in 2018, we had the request of the general funds. We started meeting with legislators in 2019. We requested a study committee in the state legislature. And out of that study committee, the PEG study was formed. We got some funding for Peter to do the study. And that took about a year and a half or so. And he looked at everything from he looked at where your efficiencies, what can, you know, be done better and lots of things. It was 150 page report, which I'm happy to share with all of you if you need some reading material in the night. But what came out of that white paper were five solutions. And then out of those five, as we dug into it, we came onto the poll attachment as a viable solution for what Vermont has the authority to do. And so that was the PEG study was really the springboard for this bill, which will be introduced this session, which is a long term revenue stream for PEG, which we're really excited about. So a lot of years in the making, it'll be introduced. And then we'll see what happens. We're hopeful. We're going to keep exploring future solutions and keep working it. And we're hoping to move forward. Really want to hear from you all about what you're experiencing in your states as well. But that's really all I have to say. And I can turn it over. And we will have time for questions because we just threw a lot of information at you. I'm sure there's many different cases in different states, but to continue on to the Vermont trend. So Peter, Anthony, can you tell us a little bit about the work that your committee is doing, the Ways and Means Committee, when it comes to telecommunications law and changes to it? Delighted to do so. As Peter Bloom in the video explained, the real difficulty is that there are only a few openings that seem to be, emphasize the word seem, seem to be left to the states. Thanks to our speaker in the House and the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, a working group was established to take custody, if you will, of the proposal from the PEG and Action Circle, which is specifically just focused on this group's interest. In Vermont, and I suspect in other states, we have a wider set of needs that impact the public sphere and communications crosses into emergency services, communication, dispatch. All of those had been funded by similar types of assessments, which have historically declined, as Peter explained. So well, I know you folks are interested specifically in a future funding force solely to support PEG activities, we have a larger problem. But Peter Bloom's exercise was extremely useful, and the working group, which has been at it since our legislature adjourned back in May, took that study. Though it's focused on PEG needs, we realize that there are other ancillary and related activities that, in fact, you had an address from the Secretary of State. She, I had served on the committee that she chaired when she was in the legislature until 2022 when she was elected Secretary of State. The Secretary of State and Sarah Copeland-Hanses is extremely interested in improving the relationship and the interest of young people in public service, elections, voting, all that area. And part of that in a rural state like Vermont will be delivered through cable. We're busily building out broadband, but that's going to take five years. And so cable remains a very essential part of outreach. I'm delighted to see that you had at least one session focused on what your local board is composed of in terms of skill sets and ages, because that's a problem. And I'm a poster child for somebody who's been in and out of public service for over 40 years, and I should have retired a while ago, but I didn't. Well, I'm aging out and so are a lot of folks. But back to your central topic. What we realized with our universal service charge that funded the universal service funds, which funded Peg, is it's cumulatively, cumulatively racking up deficits. So we started with Peter's encouragement for a poll tax. We poll connection tax essentially. We also realized that streaming is essentially untouched at the moment. We also realized that the use of the right of way, again, this is a rural state, as Peter mentioned, we have polls all over the place. That's been the standard, if you will, technology of attack to get wires to people. So it's a natural attraction. However, Vermont has never assessed private companies regulated or not for profit or not have never assessed the use of the public right of way to put the polls. So while we're talking about a connection fee, interestingly enough, we've given away the roadways and the publicly owned real estate to put the polls in the ground. There's obviously politics as to why that's happened. But the point is it's a missed opportunity. So there's the poll tax that's missed as use of the right of way that's missed. There's streaming assessments that have never happened before. And as Peter said, and our committee chair has said explicitly, try to avoid being competitive, anti competitive in your assessment regime. Spread the pain. And he mentions his phrase is try to have it be competitively neutral in the sense that you don't simply hit up the low fruit and a bunch of other deliverers of telecom services get a free ride. The idea is for everyone to contribute to the public sphere. And we said, Well, what about streaming? I mean, it's, you know, here and it's expanding. And so we're exploring that. Again, as as Peter mentioned, it's a challenge to be competitively neutral. That is to say, not simply hit up the obvious and easy target for funding, but it's also difficult to wed competitive neutrality with the avoidance of the preemption issue. So that's the challenge that at least our working group is grappling with. I am optimistic that we could be aggressive without being hauled into federal court. Because frankly, I think most everybody understands that Congress has passed what it passed and then went to sleep on the issue. And so there's really room for reform of the early attempt to keep the states out of this. The problem is whether you use the medical metaphor of sclerosis or sclerotic or not. The fact is that Congress is not going to return to that. They can barely get a spending bill through. So I think the states should think about this as an opportunity to be aggressive. I just doubt that US attorneys are just waiting to sue a state. And we have looked and are very proud of the representation of the New England states, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, though they're not technically in New England safe. They have a huge rural area which is comparable to Vermont's and can teach us a few things. So those are the three states we have looked to. Because one of the rules of our ways and means tradition in a committee work is try not to be an outlier. So we look to other states. If they said they've decided to adopt a gross receipts tax, well, we'll consider that, but we're not going to be outside of the rate range that they have established. We're a small state, and in a way, we have, consequently, a small cash box, which means we don't have a lot of people breathing down our neck because we're pretty insignificant. So that's good. It allows us freedom of movement without a bunch of corporate lobbyists knocking on the door all the time. But at the same time, we want to keep that way. We want to keep out of being, if you like, in the outer reaches, if you will, of aggressiveness in this area. So that's sort of the lowdown. We are not delivering a report until January, which is when the legislature comes back into session. And as I say, poll tax, streaming, revision in the use of the property tax and clarifying the basis on which the tax is assessed. It's a complicated, it's an accountant's dreamland, but it's not easy to administer now because it's based on depreciable net value, which is complicated to say the least. We are going to switch it to a fair market value assessment, which we deal with all the time in real and personal property terms. So that's the sort of overview summary of where we are and where we hope we'll get in the early part of this next session. And I have one more question. But the fact is that when I went up with others in the organization to testify to the EUC committee of the legislature in Maine, they were the subcommittee that was going to hear this bill, which is LD 1967, an act to support municipal franchising. The problem we're having, like many of you all have, is that we can't get charter, for example, to come to the table and negotiate anymore. We have 16 towns that have tried it together in Maine, and it's just not going anywhere. And there are a lot of reasons for this. But again, part of what I wanted to share is that once you've gone through this process and you have an organization that understands that our role is, in fact, to bring these ideas to the legislators and you can find a champion, and that's really the key. We have a brilliant champion right now on the bill that we're working with, Melanie Sacks, who, by the way, was introduced to public access in the town, a little town of Freeport, Maine, where all being is, because they invited her to come and talk about what she was doing in the legislature. And she's like, this is interesting. This is great. I didn't know this. And next thing you know, five years down the road, she's a senator, and now she's really working with us to establish alliances with all the players. And when we went up to testify, we had six organizations, including the Maine Municipal Association. And that's a big deal. This is the organization in Maine that supports municipal public policy. We worked hard with them to make sure that the language we crafted fit within their purview, within what they were looking for in order to support that bill. So the sausage making happened very early. And, you know, it played out in that hearing. And six organizations came to testify in favor of the bill. And of course, the Motion Picture Association was there to speak against it. Because one of the things we're trying to grapple with is this, you know, this whole question of if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Well, people keep saying, this is cable we're dealing with. And we all know that that's really not the truth. We're dealing with digital networks. We're dealing with streaming. And everybody says, well, what does that mean? And that's a good question. So a lot of what we've done is worked with legal advisors to craft definitions of these new technologies that we're trying to understand how we're going to be part of. And one of those definitions is a video service provider. And, you know, there are other states that have gone down this path and tried this. But our AG, the Attorney General, was one of the six people that came up and spoke in support of this bill. And literally told the committee that, in fact, one of the committee members asked them, would you defend this language? Because the motion picture guy said, this is illegal. You know, we're going to fight this. You can't charge Netflix for, you know, have you can't make Netflix have a franchise in your community. And, you know, we basically say, if you're providing content and you have some form of a plant within the within the municipality, you're required to have a franchise and agreement with that community as to how you're using the right of ways. And everybody in the legislature, they know exactly what you're talking about when you say right of ways. It's something we all own. So we're talking about the community now, right? It's been interesting, again, to just sort of hear how various states are dealing with these issues of not just funding, but trying to hold the cable industry and the telecommunications industry accountable for their actions. I mean, one of the things we did was we went and got the profit margin numbers for charter and put those into our documentation for this bill and it came up in the questioning. Guy says, it looks to me here, you're telling me that this is going to be passed on, you know, they played the same game, the cable company came up. There was one cable executive who came up against the bill and said, well, this is just going to cost the cable subscribers more money, right? That's always been the way. And, you know, we certainly have heard this and we know this argument. But in this case, the legislator said, I've got some notes here that say you had a 71% profit margin over the last two years. Is that true? He said, wow, that's not really accurate. It's not all profits. Some of them we got caught. He says, that's unheard and I'm a republicans and I'm somebody who would generally support this. But he says, you guys have been really pillaging our communities and I know that we can't get anybody to return our calls. So one of the things in the bill is that if you can't get the cable company to come to the table, you can now go to the Maine's EUC committee and say, look, they're not negotiating. And suddenly it becomes a state level AG's issue and the AG office under the direction of the Governor Mills in Maine who has defended at least one other piece of legislation all the way to the first district is saying they're going to defend it. So stick around, this is going to be voted on in the full legislature in January. And Tony and myself and Nate and others who are here from Maine, Terry, we're all keeping our constituents informed and making sure they're talking to their legislative representatives. So when this thing comes up, we're going to be on it and we're going to try to get it passed. And that's the way we're fighting it in Maine and it's unique to Maine, but it's also something I think we all experience. So there you go. And I think that while all of us do not have the legal budgets of some of the cable companies that we speak with, hearing the information through the ACM and each other in situations like this is incredibly helpful because we're all trying to figure out, we're all testing different solutions. And believe me, if one of them works in one state, I'm sure it'll get adapted in others. And it's an evolving situation as they stay on the news, slowly evolving and we're all working on it together. Did you have any thoughts? I knew that this was creeping, if you will, towards coming to a head and we are watching Maine because that idea in fact has occurred to us as well. And we have to figure out language, as you pointed out, which stays away from intruding on content but nevertheless gets to the issue of using the public space. And if I may add, for those of you who don't live where their telephone poles every 250 feet, we will adopt language if we go with the pole connection fee, which has a counterpart for buried cables. In other words, we know what the spacing of poles are. So frankly, we can translate that into linear feet of underground infrastructure. So don't get fixated on the fact that you don't have telephone poles every five miles because it doesn't matter. You can write the language to be compatible with underground calculations, just as you can with a pole sticking out of the ground. That's good to know. My local representatives were asking, like, what about urban areas? There aren't so many of these ugly poles all over the place. You could do that. I'm wondering if somebody from Massachusetts or from Connecticut might be able to give us a little bit of information. We've been talking about that over the last couple of days right here in the center. I was the stand-in for Dave got here at the state advocacy update. So Massachusetts, we're talking about streaming. We've got the quote unquote streaming bill that we are currently wrestling through the joint committee for advanced technology and cybersecurity and internet. Oh, I almost got that in the right order. So the hearing that happened and the testimony that happened over this summer was a really interesting watch. And the main argument that's being brought against it is again that, oh, this cost is going to get passed on to the consumer, and it's a tax on the constituents. So it's really been encouraging to hear how other states are handling similar arguments because it is a very difficult thing to go up against. This bill has been introduced in a couple of different capacities before, and we are coming close to the end of our current two-year session. So we're trying to get it approved through this joint committee so that it can go on for review in the next committee by February, early February is the date, I can't remember the exact date right now. So that's our current major push. There's also another bill about cash flow, especially in smaller towns that function in the town meeting format, so that smaller stations can go back to the court, getting paid on a quarterly basis. But I don't have as much information on that one. But the streaming bill in particular, we're really watching how some of the other New England states are handling some of those arguments because that's going to be really helpful for us. In Connecticut, first of all, we just like to thank all the other states for the work that they've been doing because that is really helping us. We have a very unique set where a significant number of areas are cable run. We basically have an argument that if we want, well, municipalities should pay for PEG if they want it, and that's their primary argument. We had a streaming bill last session that got converted into a study bill, but the language was written by the industry. The good news is that draft of that study came out on November 1st, and we have until November 29th to get our comments, and there are, is some good news in that they looked at the attachment, pole attachment, they looked at potentially population-based measurement assessment. They also looked at, who will help me here? There's five potential funding strategies that came out of that study, but no concrete recommendations options. So that's going to get kicked back to the legislature, and we're hoping to capitalize on being in the space and promoting solutions that will protect PEG. And one of the conditions of the study was that potentially consolidating all the access centers into much larger footprints. So we have 169 towns, but we have, let's see, help me. How many access centers? Yeah, 13. Whatever that. 19. Oh my gosh, my math skills. It's too early on a Friday. Anyway, so we're kind of eager to be able to, you know, take what we've learned here and try to push towards a public-sphere-friendly solution? How about that? Yeah. You know, I mean, it's a rough road in Connecticut, but we just keep walking it. And hopefully, on a good note, like a lot of times when we've come here, we've said that there are wins in that our capital funding used to be swept perennially by the government. And we've had three or four years of consistent, since the pandemic, consistent capital funding. And that is making a big difference in the capacity of our access centers to serve, you know, their communities. And I think that that is if we can continue to protect the capital funding, then there's options to show value where maybe we didn't have that same strength. It's not as if we were withering away. So thank you. I think there's probably time for one more question. Mark, do you have a question over here? I get the close. This is awesome. I'm learning a lot today. So first, I just want to thank you for the session. I was late. I apologize for coming in late. And I did want to note that if we were to multiply, if we were to do the math on our population compared to New Hampshire, we would have about 400 reps if we were to do the math. I think it's about, what is it, two and a half times our size, the population? Just a factoid. 400 people is a lot of people, though. I'm wondering if we could, is there any conversation in looking into, and maybe this might be like way off the rails, is there is a bucket of money over there? And I'm sorry, I don't remember your name representative, but I know I see you all the time in the state house. I just like family. The cannabis excise tax is stacked up. And I think it's probably going to go back into the general fund if we don't make a decision on what to do with it. And I like the idea because of the connotation and also its relationship to what I believe to be equity, that's another conversation. And so yeah, I just would love to hear some thoughts about that, whether that had been considered or whether it's kind of a, it creates a problem because we're dealing with something that's federal and we might be fearful that that might be jeopardized. The other thing is, is the process itself. I'm wondering if there's any way that we could get information on how we could, how I personally could be engaged in this process, because I'd be curious to hear more. I'm happy to show up, testify and so forth, but I'd be curious to hear how we could kind of get out in front of it. I know Amy and company and all those folks as well. And I'll just leave it there since we're at the end and I think I can circle back around with you and if I get some breadcrumbs on how to do so. Thanks. Let me quickly respond. First off, the lead sponsor of the bill for the PEG specific proposal is Avram Pat, representative from Worcester. So I would Avram Pat, P-A-T-T, a representative from Worcester. And I would email him because that committee of which he's a member is bound to have hearings on that very bill as soon as we reconvene in January. That's the cleanest way to make sure that you're invited to give testimony. And we'll be in touch because I know we collaborated on various series here in the state and we are actually, we'll send you a link because maybe nobody has already because we're gathering from nonprofits and we're great to have the Richard Kemp Center on there. So definitely. I'm sorry. Well, all of our committee business and I think Avram's committee as well are available on Zoom on YouTube all the time. Whenever we're in session, the legislative YouTube channel is recording it for public access. He's asking about the cannabis, the cannabis excise going into the general fund. As a solution for PEG, I think. Yeah. There's a perennial argument in the legislature about dedicated funds. It's unresolved and unresolvable. There are two sides to that. If it's dedicated and the funding goes down, everybody says, oh gee, I'm sorry. It shouldn't have been dedicated because now the fund will not support the uses to which it was originally intended. That's the problem with the universal service charge. That's why PEG is here. So dedicated funding is, if you will, a choice. The legislature is conflicted internally about making. I think my primary piece of that. My primary reason for asking the question was, is more to understand, is it even viable as an option? With this particular challenge on the table, is the excise tax that's currently unallocated for cannabis, which is due to go back into the general fund, could it even be considered as an option as a possible solution to what it is that we're looking at? Of course. I don't sit on the appropriations committee, which is the area that you're asking about, which is to say, if there's some funds that are uncommitted, what do we do with them? That's an appropriations committee. I'm charged with raising money, not spending it. And just a little correction that's pointed out. So PEG is not, we are not funded through the universal service charge fund currently. We're through the cable franchise fees directly. They're both declining and that's a bigger problem. Yeah, both are part of the parcel of old things that need to change and be, you know, keep up with the times. And thank you, Mark. And we will definitely reach out. We appreciate your support. And I wish I could match the energy you had at your talk, but I tried. So before we wrap things up, I don't know if anyone had like a burning last comment. I have just one small that before you go away, I wanted to address. Yes. Liz Harkins. I run random cable aid in Massachusetts. I wear multiple hats today. But I wanted to first off say thank you so much for your for everything here. It's really, really important information that everybody should be aware of. With the kind of stemming off of the dialogue of how do we get involved? I've heard a lot of dialogue specifically in Massachusetts where a lot of people just really aren't aware of the impact that this is having on us in our future. The longevity that we want to have for us and how to accomplish that. I guess I really just wanted to take to mention that in front of least for us in Massachusetts, the best thing is through what we're doing now talking, really helping educate those around us. And through that education, I really feel that we're going to hopefully make a really positive change. I know we've seen some some great movements with mass access with help of Robert and everybody else. He also wears multiple hats. So again, I just always like to vocalize like if you know someone, if you know another community that isn't aware of this, get them on board, talk to them about what's going on. And hopefully we can really make a difference. Thank you so much. And thank you to everybody for hanging out now till the near end. We have one more surprise. And thank you for Peter Anthony for spending the time and talking about these things and we're definitely going to be continuing to be in touch. Just one small van thing, some van business, since we have lots of witnesses here. So we would like to ask our colleague for Trowbridge to come up who hates surprises, but we're going to do it anyway. I almost was as tall as Cora, but now it's over. Cora has been with Brattleboro Community TV for 18 years and has announced recently she's retiring and has served in many capacities on the van board, working on the statewide channel, formerly VMX, and has done so much. And she always has this group of great young people with her and it's happened again. But we wanted a small, and here's the ski metaphor, a small something because of your many years with van and with the Harris Hill ski jump. So thank you, Cora, and put it on and show us. Thanks, everybody. All right. It's a very small token, but we wanted your ACM colleagues to also be involved. Excellent. There we go. I really appreciate it. It's really been such a privilege to work with people who care so much about the public interest and the public good. There's a subset of people in the universe that I can always count on who are doing things for the right reasons, and that is everybody in this room. And I've learned so much from you, and I've been so impressed by the dedication and the commitment of everyone. And nobody does it for personal gain is just because it's the right swear word thing to do. So I really thank you for letting me be a part of it for all these years. And I'm sure I'll be around and bossing people around in some other format. But thanks. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Over to Rob. That sounds like it. Thank you guys for being here and letting us know. Just a reminder that the last session starts here at two o'clock.