 Okay, the recording has started. Let's call the meeting to order at 6.01. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? All right, hearing none. Is there any public comment? Hearing none. So let's move on to our meeting minutes. Jeremy, Matt sent them out. Last week was it, Jeremy? No, I just sent them out this afternoon. I did get comments from, I believe, Alan. And let me see if I got comments from anyone else. John Morris said they were fine. And I think that is it. So I guess, is there any objection to approving the minutes at this time with minor corrections by Alan? Not for me. Okay, most of them approved the July 11th, 2023 meeting minutes as drafted with minor grammatical corrections. Second. Who seconded that? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. It's Chuck. Chuck, thanks, Chuck. All right, so we have a second by Chuck. Are there any opposed to the motion? Any abstentions? Hearing none, the motion passes. Thank you very much. The treasurer's report, is that, Ray, are you gonna do that? No, I'm sorry, Beth's gonna do it on her own. Sorry, Beth's gonna do it. Okay, I am on two different meetings. So I'm trying to try to bounce between you and both of them as treasurers. There are no final reconciliations for the financials for the treasurer's report. Nothing has changed until we get that reconciliation back. And when do you expect that? That's because now the banks now close out on the 30th. Is that correct? And it takes Bonnie some time? Yes, and I do know her office is very busy, but I expect to have it by the end of the week. Okay, so then we can bring that for the executive committee at that time. Yes. Okay, Ray, is there anything you'd like to add to that then? No. Okay, so let's move on to our audit finalization. We sent out the final audit and also sent out the letter basically accepting the findings and understanding and accepting the findings of the audit. And I'm looking for, I suspect here, a motion to send out that letter to allow us to move forward and close out our audit. And I had one here and I'm not finding it. So quick question for you, Jerry. You sent the audit or you sent the letter and then you are now looking for approval to send the letter. By the first sent, do you mean that you sent it to the governing board for review and you're now looking for approval from the governing board to send it to the auditor? Is that what I'm hearing? Yes, so this closes out the audit by sending this letter, it finalizes everything and that's a very important step that we need to make in order to move forward with our, in order to move forward with our financing as well as needing to show the federal government that we've met all of their requirements. So this letter is extremely important and it was approved by the executive committee on the, I guess that would have been the 18th of July, but at that time it was felt that this should be moved to the governing board for the final approval. So they're in the 18 July minutes. Alan, go ahead, sir. Yeah, Jeremy, what we're doing is we're moving for approval of the management letter that's been developed. And that will go to the auditor who then sends it in with the audit. So we're not throwing the audit, we're really approving the management letter that goes with the audit. And the audit, by the way, is formally called the financial report for some reason, but if you look at the title page, that's what they call it, it's a little bit confusing. It has many different names and colloquially it's known as the single audit because it's a very specific type of audit if you spend more than $750,000 of federal grant funds, which we had in 2022 and we will do this all over again in 2023. So let me do the emotion, let me bring a motion. Whereas Nathan Weschler has completed the audit of CV Fiber for 2022, whereas CV Fiber is required to obtain governing board approval of the 2022 audit, it has moved that the governing board accept the 22 CV Fiber audit. Second. Seconded by Jeremy. Are there any opposed to the motion? Any abstentions? All right, hearing none, the motion. Jared, as is you unanimously. Thank you very much. This was quite an experience for many of us. Someone was trying to say something, Jerry. No, I'm sorry. Yeah, I didn't get a copy of that report, Jerry. I don't know how to vote on it because it didn't get a copy of it. Okay, so let's have David down as abstaining. And David, do we not have your email address in the governing board general email? Well, I am the alternate for Marshfield. Maybe I just went to John and not me, but I just didn't get it, so. Okay, we're going to make sure. We're going to make sure. First of all, I'll send it to you. But second, we'll make sure that you are on the distribution because as an alternate, alternate you should be. Thank you, Chuck. I see you in the chat. Okay. And just to double check, David, you are checking your CV fiber email address, correct? Yes, correct. Okay, I know it's a silly question. Just wanted to make sure. Okay, any additional discussion on this matter? Let's roll into the financial and grant support update and I'm going to ask Ray to update us all on that. So the vote was concluded then on the audit, right? Okay, just wanted to make sure. Yes, yes, no, there were no, yes. I think it was on snooze. I just wanted to make sure that that. I might have been on snooze. Financial and grant support. What I would say to you is that we're working through our ARPA funds through this year and hoping to retain some of those funds into 2024 to keep the lights on. At the same time, we recognize at this point there's going to be a gap between our grants. That is between the ARPA grants and when we may receive B grants. And the belief right now is for the state, as far as CUD is getting money, it will probably be in Q1 of 2025. So we should not expect funds in 2024. There will be a competition for B grant money that we will participate in next year. And the VCBB will make awards. That'll go back to the NTIA to make sure that everything was done in accordance with the rules. And then they'll tell the VCBB that they can start issuing money and some of the money will flow. So we may see that in the interim, we're looking at the possibility of grants and loans. We have retained NRTC to work with us on grants and possibly a loan. And we're trying to define projects for that, for those grants and loans through the ReConnect program, the ReConnect Notice of Funding Opportunity will probably be issued in September for what they call ReConnect Five. And we're hopeful that we will be in a position that shortly after that NOFO is dropped, that we will be making a submission for one or more projects that might be defined. At the same time, we're working with PFM, our municipal advisor with regard to the possibility of qualifying for some loans. And we've been actively engaged on a regular basis now with providing them information. The first part of that is for them to develop a financial model of us so that they have a story that they can tell to banks and others that might be interested in lending us money. I would love to be able to get a loan for like $10 million, but I'm not sure that we're going to have the revenue stream that would make the banks or other interested parties sit up and take notice and want to give us as much as $10 million. And so we could be looking at something in the $5 million plus or minus range. So we'll see how that goes. What I would say to you about this is that later this month, the beginning, as if there's much time in this, okay, there was three weeks, I guess. Later this month of the beginning of September, PFM will be sending out an RFI to parties that they're aware of that are typically interested in these kinds of things to see what the interest might be and if they want to continue to listen to as we develop our story with the hope that sometime in Q4, so it's like on October, November, December that we might begin to actually enter into some negotiations with a party which might give us some money in the beginning in Q1 of 2024. And so those are the things that are moving right now. I'm happy to take any questions at this point. Yeah, Ray, what is the prep work needed for ReConnect 5 to prepare us for the submittal? What's the prep work? Yeah, so every ReConnect, and this is the fifth one, right? Every ReConnect has its own requirements. And so you don't know what those requirements are until the notice of funding opportunity comes out. What we are doing is we're assuming that the requirements for the five are gonna be the same as requirements for four in the sense that all the data that's required will be the same and the application format will be the same. We may find out downstream a little bit that some of that work needs to be updated because five is different. So what we do understand about five, which is different from four, is they're reverting back to ReConnect 3 in which what they were funding was those with 25, three or less, as opposed to the most recent one, which was 100 over 20. And so what that means is there'll be fewer, what they call financial service areas, project financial service areas, PFSAs, there'll be fewer of those PFSAs that we'll be able to apply for. Those PFSAs will look nothing like our DAs that you've seen in our maps that we've designed for. It will look like a gerrymandered congressional district. Actually, David, was there more to follow up? No, I just know there's a lot of work and there's a short amount of time to respond to those. Yeah, so again, it could be done. Yes, so what we're doing is NRTC is helping us with the definition of the project. They typically have worked in the past with CTC who actually prepares the application material. It's an online application document. They can't use CTC anymore, so they'll be looking for and will come back to us with a second party for that. Jerry, do you wanna add something? Yeah, the one thing I just would like to remind the governing board is that all of these long-term financing decisions are governing board decisions. So we're doing our due diligence at the worker B level. And then as we come up through the committees, we come eventually to the governing board. So this is a slow-moving train, but it's moving. Thank you. Any additional discussion on financial and grant support? All right, hearing none, let's move over to our construction update and somebody raised their hand. David Wendt, go ahead, David. Yeah, hi. So just to clarify, Ray, are we talking about loans from banks or are we talking about issuing debt? Yeah, so actually we're looking at the whole continuum, which couldn't, and we've been most recently talking about the construction loan, bank loan, short-term loan, as opposed to a long-term 10, 20-year debt. But I think we might also be considering private placement, promissory notes, so that we're gonna be looking at all of those things. And what I would say about the private placement promissory notes is that EC-Fiber over a number of years raised $7 million in that fashion, so that it could be a market that we might want to follow up on if our other avenues are kind of closed off to us. So, and that $7 million was that they issued 600 different offerings, and there were 475 people in their district that actually took advantage of that, those offerings, and all those people were paid off. I mean, they subsequently were able to get bonds, et cetera, et cetera, and retire all of those promissory notes. Great, thanks. Thank you, Bray. Any additional discussion? Okay, not seeing any hands, so let's move on to our construction update now. Outlook, Janiel, we haven't heard from you yet today. Hello. I'm mute. Still don't hear from you. So, despite a lot of flooding, the Eustis crews are still out there working and worked through most of the storms. We lost a couple crews only, and they have, as of last week, and our numbers come out tomorrow, so we will have higher numbers tomorrow, but we have 72 miles of strand, 50 miles of fiber, and 719 addresses as of the end of last week when we got our numbers, or Wednesday of last week when we got our numbers. We have, and I think Lucas could provide an additional color to this, but we have confirmed our meat point with Velco that connects the fiber to the greater network and to Weitzfield, and we're working on the connection at the OLT site at the Kent Corners Calis substation, and we're working on pulling the power to that substation as well so that we can power up CLO 1 and 2. Lucas, do you want to add something to that? Yeah, I mean, just what I'm hoping to hear more about the power any minute, any day. I have several emails out about it at the moment, so hopefully we can have more of an update on that in the very near future, because that's the last step we need to engage Weitzfield telecom to begin their work, even though we do have a couple of smaller components still at the site needed for splicing and testing. Weitzfield can still get the ball rolling, powering up the equipment as soon as we have power, so that'll be a big step. Yeah, so we're actively constructing in four distribution areas now, and the crews are looking to complete these four construction areas, most likely by the end of the year. They're working on splicing now, so very active. Do you want to talk about friendlies and where people could be brought online, et cetera? Yeah, so we are working with friendlies in the CLO 1 and CLO 2 distribution areas, and that is a handful of testers of the network. The testers of the network are testing the technical network to make sure the fiber actually works. They're also testing the crowdfiber subscriber database, that is how folks connect using our online subscriber database that connects to a platform called crowdfiber, and they're also testing, the third thing they're testing is the billing system through Weitzfield. Weitzfield as our operator will be managing the billing, and so our friendlies will be testing the billing as well. So those three things. Excellent. Any other questions or discussion about our construction update and the outlook for where we're headed? David? David? Yeah, I just want to make sure, Brandon, the board knows that by every Friday we have updated all the locations that fiber has gone by. I mean, that's on our website, and we've made it known, but I don't know how many people actually go to it and see it. Yeah, you can actually, you can put your address in and see if fiber has passed your address, and there are dots on the map that show where the connections, or where the passings have been made, and you can also see a map on our website that shows what distribution area you're in when you put your address in. Excellent. And I see that David Lawrence has posted that in the chat, the link to that in the chat. Thank you both, David. Shall we move on to installations and drops guidelines? Since we've, now that we're constructing, we actually have to get folks connected, right? So there are two components to getting somebody connected. There's the component that is from what we call the MST, and then there is the component that actually goes to the house. And we have arrangements with Watesfield Telecom in that when we pay an installation fee to Watesfield, we pay Watesfield to do the installations, right? We are covering whatever that distance is from the MST, the longer distance is being paid for by CV fiber as a whole, and it's leaving the much smaller distance that goes to the house most of the time, leaving that much smaller distance as the responsibility of the homeowner, the subscriber. And what we're doing now is we have a $99 installation fee to the customer and a dollar a foot for anything longer than 400 feet. And to give sense of feel for how this is working out, even though this is a small sample, this is exactly the way we had anticipated it was going to work out out of 30 addresses that have already been surveyed by Watesfield's engineer, which is what's required. You need an engineer survey to determine exactly which points are which and where to measure from. So out of 30, only two have to pay more than the $99 fee. So only two are farther than 400 feet out of 30 installation inspections. One of them was only for 50 feet and the other one was for 235 feet. But also I think what's telling is that the average distance that goes to that 400 foot calculation out of 30, including the long ones is only 158 feet. So it's going to prove out that it's going to be a very small amount of people that need to pay the additional fee. So I just wanted to let folks know as an update that this is how it's working out. It's working out very well. We're very pleased that Watesfield is working with us on this and that they're keeping track of this data and sharing it with us so that we can make sure that we're doing everything appropriately as far as the customer is concerned and as far as Watesfield telecom is concerned. So this seems to be working out very well. And I'll take any questions if there are any. I just wanted to let the governing board know how this is playing out as projected. Jeremy, go ahead and I see your hand. Not a question on this, but after this discussion, if you could call me please. Yes, sir, I will. So I'll let out, I'll go to Alan then. Terry, can you give us an idea of what the area, these 30 hookups are in? Is this way back in the woods? Is it on a main road? Is it, are they close to each other? Are they far apart from each other? Do you have any information like that? David Healy, I'm going to defer to you because this is in your backyard. Yeah, I don't, I mean, they're all in CLO one. And there's, I think there's a pretty big variety. of along the road and then back in the woods. And I think out of the 30, 25% had conduit, it was a big number. Yeah, that was out of the hundred. That's amazing. That's the hundred plus number. And plus, okay. Yeah, that was a hundred. No, actually it was almost 200. And out of the, and 25% of the 200 surveyed had required conduit. So 25% you might be working with that number. Let's see if it goes up or down. And some of the conduit they're finding is available to run the fiber through, which for me was surprising. So that's good to know that that's happening as well. So when somebody has an existing conduit, how are they charged if there is a fee beyond $99? Or is it assumed that they pay everything because they're doing an underground connection? It's still a dollar a foot. They get the 400 feet. After the 400 feet. Yeah, after the 400 feet. Right. But we don't pay the conduit. We do not pay for the conduit, no. The customer pays for the conduit. Hence, and we're finding the existing conduit is, you know, sometimes it's good for us. So that's, that's, that's great. So CV, so, so weight shields. Fiber that goes in the wire is covered Allen, but the conduit itself is not. So if someone was going to install their own conduit, they would need to get the conduit that meets our specs. They would need to have it buried appropriately and they would need to install a pole cable or a pole cord in the fibers that we can pull fiber through it. Right. And then in all cases, the weight field champion comes by and does the actual pull through the conduit for the connection? Is that correct? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Weinsfield doesn't want anybody else touching the fiber. They, they, because they want it, they want full responsibility and knowledge of how that fiber is being handled. Gotcha. Thanks. Okay. So before we go off topic with Jeremy. Well, actually, I do have a, I do have a question on this topic. Go ahead, please. I'm sorry, getting confusing here. So I know that we don't pay or that we are not going to pay for the conduit, but are we going to suggest contractors or have fees, you know, like say, for example, I don't have conduit. If I wanted CV fiber to install conduit, could I say pay 10 bucks a foot and have CV fiber install that? Janiel, you want to respond to that? I think that's why your hand is up. That's why my hand is up. Yes. I put in the chat box. I must have read your mind, Jeremy. I put in the chat box the conduit specs that also has our contractors that we, we actually did vet them through our contractor MBI. We checked to make sure that they use certain equipment and have certain insurances. However, we are not, we're not saying that these are the only contractors you can use. You can certainly use anyone you like. That list is on the link that I posted in the chat. Including digging the trench yourself. Knock yourself out. Absolutely. Give me a pickaxe. Absolutely. Jeremy, then, is there another question that you have? Yeah, or more of a note. I noted there's a new person on the call, Amanda Guston, who I believe, I apologize if I mispronounced your name, but I believe this is a new delegate from Berry City. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Hi, Amanda. That's me, you passed my name correctly. And apologies that I couldn't be on earlier. I got sucked into a flood recovery phone call that took up the first 15 minutes. Very understandable, Berry got, Berry, yeah. Good luck. Well, anyways, welcome. And yeah, if you have any questions, feel free to ask and jump in. We're a friendly group of people. Siobhan, I see your hand is up. Go ahead, please. I just wanted to ask, are we getting the letters from the towns or cities when they're appointing delegates? Because if we're not, we're supposed to be getting letters from them. I know. And that's something that I need to do. I need to email all of the town clerks and redo that. And that is a clerk thing that I have that I need to follow up on. Blacker. I know I'm the worst. I nominate Siobhan Pericone on this clerk. Wait a minute. Okay, I just was double checking on that because I had heard that we were getting the letters. So I just wanted to make sure that we get all of the Ts crossed. I'm done. Thanks, Siobhan. All right, thank you, Siobhan. Can we move on to website and marketing update? And Chuck, would you like to start us off, please? Go ahead and hand it off to Geneal to start us off. Okay. Thank you, Geneal for the hot seat. Yeah, yeah. So CrowdFiber is the platform that we use to subscribe customers. So when you go onto our website and you type in your address to see if you can get service, it kicks over to the CrowdFiber website. CrowdFiber is actually a subsidiary of NRTC and they're working with Weitzfield directly. They're also working with Maple Broadband and they're working with any K Broadband. And now we're working with them as well. So what we're doing with the website is trying to iron out some of the issues with it. So we are, we're subscribing people, we're signing people up successfully, but there are some glitches still. So we're working on that. If you want a broader marketing update, we also are getting ready to hire a marketing manager or a community relations manager. And just to touch on a few other things that we're doing, we've been sending out postcards to subscribers to sign up as well as emails through MailChimp to get surveys. So those are some of the things that we're working on. So this is an item for which action is expected with regard to a developer. Does somebody want to talk about what the need is? I've got a motion prepared. I can actually talk about the need as well and either Linda or Chuck can jump in after I talk about the need, but CrowdFiber is a sensitive and unique subscription database. And there's a need for additional coding to make it ready to get subscribers. It runs slowly and there are a lot of, I want to say they're bugs. They're things that we must iron out to make a friendly user experience so that people can sign up. The information gathered on the CrowdFiber database is very important. This is all of our customer information and it gets sent to Waitsfield so that Waitsfield knows who the customers are, where to do the surveys. And so it's an extremely important piece. And CrowdFiber doesn't have the personnel support to make the changes we need that will make a comfortable user experience for our customers. So we have done some outsourcing of this. We worked with Upwork for a while to fix some of the spaghetti code. That's a term I learned, that some messy code that we had to get fixed. And now we are about ready to launch and realizing that a lot of our customers are having a hard time signing up or there are duplicate signups. And so we need to have some initial CrowdFiber support as we launch so that we can actually sign people up. Tom, I see you have your hand up. Yeah, I've gotten a report on someone having a fairly long time period between when they signed up and when they got a engineer to come out and do the survey. And I was curious, what should be an expectation on that? I myself signed up about two weeks ago and have not heard anything yet. So I just wanted to make sure time people are at numbers. So yeah, weight fields will go out and do a handful of surveys at a time so that they are going out and looking at neighbors and seeing, for instance, there might be multiple folks who sign up and you can have a connection might look a little bit different depending on how many people sign up in a particular area. So weights field is going out there to do many surveys at a time rather than getting a request for a survey and immediately going out and doing that one survey, they're collecting them. So they're doing them every couple of weeks. They are doing them in groups. So if you sign up in the early part of when they're going out there, you might not get a survey or a call for a survey for a couple of weeks. Whereas if you're toward the end of that group then you might get a call sooner. So it's not like they're calling every single person every time they sign up but they're letting some signups collect and then doing them en masse. Do we have some sort of time limit on that so that we don't end up having subscribers sitting indefinitely? So it's gonna be faster as we start launching because they're pretty serious about doing surveys now because we're getting so close to the point where we're gonna be operating or serving people. So it's generally been a couple of weeks. It's generally been a couple of weeks. We didn't put an actual time limit on it but we are encouraging them to act more quickly because we have them, they're adding up and as we send out more marketing they're adding up even more. We actually have time limits in our contract for these things but they really haven't kicked in yet because we don't have a service to offer yet. But there actually are time limits, Tom, in our contract with Watesfield and I know Ray put up his hand probably to say just that I don't have those figures in front of me to know what they are but they're pretty quick going to your comment about not wanting potential subscribers to wait too long. Ray, you wanna follow up? Well, yeah, a couple of things. One is that there is an initial phase under which the time constraint is somewhat flexible when we start kicking off stuff but then there's a regular period of time the number of days escapes me at the moment but they are incentivized to get people online because that's when they get paid and they get paid for the installation and they get paid for the, as an ISP for example for out of every fee. The other part is that they've done 200 surveys and the experience is that after you do the survey not everybody takes service. Consequently, there are a lot of surveys that they're gonna spend a lot of time doing them and getting nothing. We're not paying them anything. The customer is not paying them anything. So all of this is at risk that we're doing now. They've done 200 surveys. So that's a darn lot at risk. Only the friendlies, you know and there's a bunch of others who have committed but nonetheless it's not certain. So there's somewhat of a delay in the hesitancy there until somebody is actually not committed. And I see that Linda wants to modify my remarks. Brad, Linda. Until you commit for a particular high speed internet package they will not do a site survey. Okay, so people need to go on and make sure that they have gone through the shopping cart page of the website and actually selected their package. At that time they will get a site survey and get a true price for installation, the packages, the extras that they want. And at that time they can make a decision to go with the service or not. Tom, let's go. Let's bring it back around to you. Yeah, that doesn't seem to be the situation in this case that where it seems like the shopping cart was correctly gone through. I would just add that obviously we need to see how things roll out we're in very early stages. I understand all of that. But if it is going to be some amount of time we might want to just do a friendly email or something that says we haven't forgotten you just to make sure that they're still bought into the service. Okay, point taken there, thank you. Jeremy, your hand is up. Yeah, and I'm really tired, I apologize. And whatever it was that I wanted to say blew out of my head it had to do with one of Ray's comments. And I apologize it couldn't have been that important. I think you were going to ask Ray to make the motion that he put in the chat. Yeah, Ray, can you please make that motion? I'm going to do that for you. Whereas CV Fibers utilizing crowdfibers as a subscriber database and is getting ready to launch services. And whereas it's critical to improve crowdfibers database in order to manage subscriber intakes and provide related essential technical support as needed to launch services. And whereas time is of the essence in commencing this work is move the governing board to prove the hiring of developer or developers with experience including crowdfibers, CSS and HTML and initial budget of $10,000 and thereafter such additional budget as the executive committee shall authorize. Second. Second. Seconded by Siobhan, thank you Siobhan. Jeremy, are you on topic or? That's reasonable. Okay, Chuck, go ahead, sir. I would like to suggest a friendly amendment and that is in the second paragraph where it says improve crowdfibers database. I would like to suggest we refine that to say to improve the crowdfiber user experience because we can't really actually touch their database or their setup or anything like that. All we can do is improve the UI that the customer gets to see. And there is a technical distinction between the two if people are tracking at that level of detail. I accept the friendly amendment. Siobhan, do you accept that for your second? And just one more point and that would be this and that is that this is typically, these actions are typically done in the executive committee. They're not typically brought to the governing board because these are third party consultants that the governing board has given the authority to the executive board, executive committee to do under its charter. However, time is of the essence and that is why that sentence is in there because we wanna start working with people this week. The executive committee will meet next week and as any other additional monies might be needed, the executive committee will consider those things. And so that's the end of my input. Chuck, is that a residual or do you wanna add more? Something more? Nothing, okay. David, your hand is up. David Manix? Ray, is this part of that marketing budget that was approved in the June meeting or is this a new budget, this 10,000 and additional was needed? No, this comes out of our consulting funds. This isn't a marketing expenditure. This will be an ongoing operational expenditure like forever that we'll be doing tweaks, maintenance and tweaks to our subscriber experience. Okay, so we have a friendly amendment accepted by Ray who made the motion. Siobhan, you seconded. Are you good with that? Oh yeah, yeah, I've been saying yes, but I was muted. Ah, okay, very good. Linda, go ahead, please. Just one more comment that this position is going to be doing the go live on the crowd fiber end of it. So if you want zones, people signing up in new zones as the construction continues, we need somebody that will move the go live in crowd fiber into the status that we want. Don't ask. Very good, thank you. Any other discussion on the matter? Obviously it's very important. All right, hearing none, then let's, let's, let's, well, David, you put your hand back up. Go ahead, sir. Oh no, sorry, accidental, accidental hand raising there. Okay, so are there any opposed to the motion? Are there any abstentions? All right, hearing none, the motion passes. Thank you. This is, this is good. And as Ray said, we needed to step this up and that's why we didn't want to wait for next week's executive committee. Jeremy, go ahead, sir. Yeah, so I noticed that there's a person on the call with a phone number ending in seven one and just wanted to know if this person would like to be recognized in the minutes or if he'd rather remain anonymous. Anonymous is fine. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Jeremy. David Healy, I see your hand is up. Yes, I just wanted to mention and I think I said I don't know. The other marketing thing we did in the last two weeks is we did, you know, two workshops in Calis. We had 45 people come to them and we had a bump and subscriptions after that. So the idea of putting in more workshops in Worcester and Middlesex and Woodbury has come up. We've put the Orca video is now online and we've got it on our website. So if you have anybody who's interested in seeing that workshop without having to attend one, it's all there. The nice part about the workshop, the second workshop, the work of taped was that Watesfield was at it and did a great job of showing how the stuff gets attached to your house, what's done inside your house and they cover a lot of territory that I am not versed in doing. So it was quite useful. Thank you, David. That takes a lot of effort to pull those off. So who flashed the crowd fiber dashboard? Linda flashed the crowd fiber and the point of that we talked about it today in the operations committee meeting. The point of that is that we can see when front porch forum notices are out that there are people who come to the website and then there are some people who actually subscribe to sign up for service. And we saw this especially when David did his two event presentations last week, last week, two weeks ago, last week and we saw people subscribe. Order service. So these things are very helpful. And of course we've been sending postcards out fairly regularly and those also create a bump in terms of people coming to check to see whether their addresses are being served and some people are actually signing up. So bravo to everyone that's involved with that because it's a tremendous amount of work and but it's meaningful and it has an impact. The bumps that I showed are the first bump is from the first set of postcards that we had and the second bump I believe is from David's workshop. Thank you. Jeremy, your hand is up. I apologize if I misheard you Ray but did you say that there was an operations and planning meeting today? No, that's Thursday. There was a, we had an operations meeting today. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but not the operations. No, I just wanted to make sure that that was something. It's the Waitfield committee meeting. It's that group. Waitfield. It's Waitfield, it's not a committee. Working group. So it's working group. Thank you. Okay. Sorry for derailing but just wanted to make sure that I didn't miss anything because you know. David Healy, would you take us into the next item on the agenda? Oh yeah. So for the last whatever, the last number of months I've been the alternate delegate to Vecuda. And so Janiella is the delegate and I've been the alternate. And I would have to say that I'd like to pass on that membership to authority to another member of the board who has been attending almost every Vecuda meeting anyway. And so my motion is to nominate Ray Pelletier to be the alternate delegate from CV Fiverr to Vecuda. Second. Who was that second? Was that Chuck? Chuck, that was me. Okay, thank you. Seconded by Chuck. Any discussion here? Other than thank you David for all that time. All right. Are there any opposed to the motion? Hearing none. Any abstentions? Hearing none. The motion passes unanimously. Thank you. David and Ray, thank you. Yeah, thanks Ray. The next item is our delegate participation rule. And there was some read ahead material sent out a few days ago. And there was also some refined, revised, edited, and thank you for all that helped correct the language there that was sent out this evening by Alan. I'm gonna hand this over now to Alan so that he can walk us through this room. Go ahead, Alan, please. Okay, so let me start off with a motion that I put in the chat a few moments ago. I move that the governing board take the Delegate Participation Rule, AKA Community Representative Participation Rule, off the table, and that the proposed rule be adopted with non-substantial revision suggested during the rather long one year committee review process. Second. Seconded by Jeremy. Excellent. So let me explain what's happened with this rule because it really has been sitting out there for a year. It was at last year's August meeting that we first discussed putting in our procedures and rules. This one was to be a rule that we wanted to make sure that community representatives were attending meetings and if they weren't that we had a process by which we would tell the people who choose and nominate the delegates, which is the select board or city council that they really had to help us so their community was represented in CD5 or discussions. We had a discussion last August about the wording of the proposal at that time for the rule that was being developed and the board wanted it to be revised some more suggested a few things. And so it went back to the policy committee. The policy committee at its September meeting took that up and there were some revisions that Ray suggested, I believe. And we then passed that back on to the governing board because the theory was that the governing board was now in charge since it was taken off the table of what the next steps would be. It did go to the executive committee which in October, late September or October approved the version that we had developed at the policy committee and then it was asked to be put on the agenda for the November board meeting. November of last year, if you look back at any of our meeting minutes, you'll recognize as a very busy month because we were just about getting ready to begin to start building our network. The construction, if you remember, actually began in December. So in November, we really had our minds on a whole bunch of other things other than delegate participation rules. And it just never got on the board agenda and it didn't get on for a number of months. And finally, somebody this summer, I think it was Jerry recognized that we had this rule that was hanging out there. It is still on the table of the governing board. So what we have to do tonight is to first of all, vote to take the proposed rule off the table and then we'll consider it, I'll point out the additions, corrections, revisions that were done. They really are non-substantial. This isn't all that complicated but it's been a very long process and we all apologize that it's worked this way but I think the end result is gonna be a pretty good rule that will give us some help in making sure we have participation from more communities. Are there any questions either about the process so far or does someone wanna move to take this off the table? Can I ask you a question? It looks like the motion has encompasses both taking it off the table and adopting the rule. Is the motion then the first part gonna be move that we take it off the table? We vote on that and then we move the rule? No, the discussion, I can move that something be adopted but the discussion is part of that package. You don't need to say I move to discuss this. When you move that something be done, it's put on the table for discussion and then there's a vote made on that. So I see no need to separate them, Ray. Very good. Any additional discussion or clarifications then before we vote? And now you're voting to take it off the table and then we're gonna talk about the changes that have been made so people understand how this has happened. Okay, we had a motion and your motion now and a second by Jeremy Matt. So we're voting on that question. I'm a little confused because that seemed to be exactly Ray's question was are we voting to take it off the table? But then the motion was to take it off the table and to adopt. So if we're just voting to take it off the table, do we need to then a friendly amend this motion to be a two-part thing? Where first we take it off the table or? No, I think you're making this more difficult than it has to be. What you're voting right now is to take it off the table so that you can begin a discussion that started a year ago as I said and that the discussion is whether or not to adopt the proposed rule that is before you. So the discussion is we are into taking it off the table. So we are voting effectively, we are voting to adopt this now. So we should not discuss the changes first. No, you're effectively voting to consider the adoption of the- Okay, so Alan has made a motion. Alan has made a motion to table it. I second that motion. Okay. No, we can't because Alan already made a motion to take the deli- Take it off the table. off the table and that the proposed rule be adopted. Then we will have, if we do that, I mean it could be voted down, Jeremy. People for some reason may vote down to keep it on the table if they want to stop it. But if we want to- Okay, so we're gonna adopt and then revise. Yeah, that's right. Okay, I'm sorry, I miss that. I'm quite tired and it just didn't make sense in my life. No, no, it's perfectly fine and it's why it's always discouraged to put something on the table. No Chuck, we can't. Okay. So we have a motion, we have a second and we have a vote. Are there any opposed to the untabling? Hearing none, are there any abstentions? Hearing none, the motion passes. Thank you. Now we have something that is on the table. Okay, so I just wanna run through quickly what the revisions have been since this came out of the policy committee and then the executive committee last year. They really are non substantial. You were sent both a tracked copy. You were sent the original and then a tracked copy and then this evening I sent you a clean copy that doesn't show what the revisions are. Instead they're incorporated into the document. So I don't know which is the easiest for you to use but I wanted you to see the final version and that's why I sent something out this evening by email. But basically here are what the changes are. In rule, there is, we call this a general rule but then there are five different, I'm sorry, six different sections of it. In the first section, which began delegates are responsible in the case of their absence. There was originally community in front of delegates and community was struck because it didn't seem necessary. In the third rule, the same thing happened. Community was struck in front of delegates and added in front of the word clerk was the CV fiber clerk. And this really was necessary to distinguish if we're talking about a town's clerk or we're talking about the clerk for CV fiber. So rule number three, which originally said the clerk will notify community delegates and alternates who have not participated. It now says the CV fiber clerk will notify delegates and alternates who have not participated. The same thing happens in rule number four, CV fiber is added before a clerk to specify it's the CV fiber clerk that does the notification of the town and not the town's clerk. Same thing in number five, CV fiber is put in front of clerk so it specifies it's the CV fiber clerk and not the town clerk. And then there are three sections within section five. And instead of having them separated by commas, they're now separated by semicolons in an effort to make them more readable. Communities was originally spelled as a plural noun with an apostrophe after that. That's been changed to be appropriately and correctly the community. In other words, the one community, the town that's taking action. So the community which used to be communities apostrophe is now community apostrophe S and the representatives which used to be S apostrophe is now apostrophe S. Those are all pretty standard grammatical errors that had to be corrected. And then in the sentence, in number five, the section of this that says that CV fiber suggests the community's CV fiber representatives position has become vacant, effectively was added as a way to show that we're not saying it is vacant but it is effectively vacant because we cannot as CV fiber determine when a position appointed by the town is vacant. The town has got to do that, but we can say it is for all circumstances it really is effectively vacant. And then we have that CV fiber requests in order to make it chummy that we would like to work with the select board. We originally had and that the select board or council should consider appointing somebody instead of being so directed. Directive, we said CV fiber requests, the select board of city council. And then instead of saying should to consider a point we changed it to consider appointing a new delegate and one or more alternates. So all this is really just some twisted language that needed to be straightened out. And I think if you look at the final copy it's much smoother. And then in number six, the very last item, again, CV fiber governing was put in front of board chair so people know we're talking about the CV fiber board and not a town board itself. And CV fiber board chair, government will request a meeting with the town select board chair, dah, dah, dah, dah, or to appear at a meeting of the town select board or city council when its representatives have missed five and then or more was added consecutive CV fiber board meetings to discuss the towns or cities representatives participation in CV fiber. So there's nothing substantial in these changes that we could find. And we believe that the final copy that we presented, the clean one that I sent out and that you have is the one that should be adopted. Alan, from a process perspective, do we need a motion now to accept these or do we already have a motion? We have a motion. I made a motion that we take it off the table and that we adopt it. So we now have the discussion whether we should adopt it and now we should decide whether or not we should decide the motion to adopt it. Okay, so we're, go ahead, Jeremy. No, I'm completely confused because this was exactly my question before about voting to take it off the table and why Alan's motion said to adopt and then we voted on it to adopt it but then we discussed the changes afterwards. It seems like we've already voted on adopting it. But anyways, nevermind. Siobhan, can you clarify? I'll try. When the discussion of this was put on the table we voted to put it on the table. So we had to vote to take it back off the table but there has to be a motion in play for us to discuss it. So the motion was to continue the discussion of the motion to approve this thing that we had on the table for a year. We already had this motion on the table so the motion Alan made was to untable the existing motion that was already in discussion at the last time we talked about this. So now we need to vote on that motion to approve these suggested changes. The vote was to take it off the table. This is to vote on the motion. Does anybody have comments about it? Well, Ray has his hands up so let's see what Ray's comment is. I think my comment is this and that is that however confusing this journey has been to get to this point and tonight we were at the right spot in terms of are we gonna adopt this rule or not? And that's what we're gonna vote on. Thank you. Are we ready for the vote then? Is the discussion? I don't see any hands up to continue discussion. So let's vote, are there, oh wait, Tom Fisher has his hand. No, Jerry, what motion are we voting on? There's the motion that Alan put in the chat and the one that I seconded, we've already voted on. You vote, we voted on the motion to untable. We are now voting on the motion to approve the proposed policy. That's what the vote is. And the text of that motion is the one that Alan pasted in chat. I'm really sorry that my brain is just not working right now and I'm not getting this, I'm sorry. It's the problem is you have to think of a year ago when we had something on the table there was a motion to adopt something. That is still alive. And the thing you have to do. Okay, okay, okay. So for the minutes, is the motion from a year ago what you pasted into chat via move that the governing board adopt, blah, blah, blah? Or is it just? I frankly don't know what that motion was. I could go back and find it. But it was, it was active. If we're voting on the motion, why don't we just vote on that motion and then I can go back and paste that motion into the minutes today so that people know it was actually voted on. Is that okay with people? Hulk, your hand is up, you're being patient. Let's have you add something to this please. I think the language in the motion that Alan before that is tripping Jeremy and me and maybe some others up is and that the proposed rule be adopted. And like that's what we moved and seconded and voted on it, but we weren't actually adopting it. We were moving to untable it. And so I put a little bit of a language tweak into the chat that I think might clarify this. If, I don't know if we need to remove it or whatever, but that instead of saying that it is adopted that the proposed rule has moved re-enter discussion with the non substantial revision suggested during the committee review process. So anyway, I'm willing to go however people like I'm okay with what has been read today. And so like, I think we can just go for it and bring it forward. Okay, so let's have a vote. And those that have problems with it can either just say thumbs down or they can abstain. So now we're voting on the motion from August, correct? The one that Alan posted or that Tom posted in the chat to approve the attendance rule as drafted. With the modifications as mentioned by Alan tonight. Right, as drafted and revised. Are there any opposed to the motion? Please. Hearing none. Any abstentions? Yay. The motion best says thank you everybody for unwrapping this. These procedures can be quite burdensome, but it's important to have some kind of guidelines as we play this bumper poll game here. Yeah, so thank you very much. Putting something on the table really almost always ends up in a mess. And in the legislature, when you put something on the table, the joke is that you take it to the morgue and you never see it again. It's very kind of unusual to take something off the table in many organizations, especially state legislatures. So that's, I'm not surprised that we've gotten tangled up in this, but I think the end product is really good. And I thank everybody who worked on this. And I think we've made a significant step forward and trying to make sure that we have a full slate of delegates at our meetings. Thank you, Alan. I'm gonna move to Janiel now for our community relations manager. And to the extent that we can keep this out of executive session, I would be most pleased if we need to, we need to, but I don't wanna just jump into executive session. So Janiel, would you start us off? Sure, I'll give an overview of why we need this position and what we've done so far to get here. So this position is community relations manager. This person will be a full-time employee of CV Fiber and will be responsible for making a marketing plan and executing that marketing plan, working closely with our partners and committees and the board. And I will be the direct supervisor of this position. So this person will be implementing our marketing in so far as we are launching and need to provide consistent messaging to our subscribers and to align with our partners. So what we did is we created a hiring group and that hiring group reviewed resumes. I did the initial scan of the resumes to make sure they were local and qualified and then the hiring group reviewed those. We came down to four that we wanted to interview. We telephoned screened six, I telephoned screened six. We, as a group, did Zoom interviews or Teams interviews of four of those candidates. We came up with two top ones, one very top one and then one secondary. And we brought that to the communications committee. The communications committee reviewed the resumes, agreed with the hiring group's top recommendation and put that as an approval at communications committee. Then it went to executive committee. Executive committee reviewed the hiring groups recommendation to the communications committee that approved it and yes, we're in a public entity. And so then the process is lengthy. But I'm going through this to let you know all of the steps that we have taken to get here. So executive committee last week approved the recommendation of hiring this candidate, which was the top recommendation of hiring group and then communications committee. Now it comes from executive committee to the governing board for hiring because at CV Fiber, the governing board is the hiring entity. And I believe Chuck Burt has a motion that we might be interested in. Yes. Would it be appropriate to put forward the motion now or do people want more information? And the motion, we can always discuss once the motion is out there, Chuck. Okay, whereas CV Fiber is in need of a full-time community relations manager to develop and implement marketing plan communication strategies with the public including potential subscribers and whereas CV Fiber published a job description community relations manager to Indeed and LinkedIn and on the CV Fiber website and whereas several applications were received and vetted and qualified local candidates were reviewed by a hiring group put together by the executive director and whereas candidates were telephone screen and four candidates were ultimately interviewed by the hiring group and two candidates were chosen as primary and secondary and whereas the communications committee and executive committee both passed motions to approve the hiring group's top choice candidate subject to governing board approval, it is moved that the governing board approve the hiring group's choice of community relations manager candidate and approves that the executive director move forward with the issuance of an offer letter and subject to reference and background checks and agreement on terms of employment that CV Fiber enter into an employer relationship with this candidate. Second. Seconded by Linda emphatically. Is there any additional discussion? Jeremy. You mute it. You're on Jeremy. Just noticed that I just wanted to point out that a question I'd asked during the executive committee was whether this was a unanimous recommendation from the hiring committee and it is a unanimous recommendation was my understanding. Yes. Thank you. As well as by the communications committee and the executive committee which are the committees that are appropriately making the recommendation to the board as opposed to the hiring group. It's the committees that are making those recommendations. Drew, but the reason that I made that that I asked my question was because people had the most direct contact and knowledge of all the applicants. Understood. Point taken. Thank you. Any additional discussion? All right, hearing none there. Are there any opposed to the motion? Hearing none. Abstentions. The motion passes unanimously. Thank you. I know this is a big relief for our folks. Janiel, when is she starting? August 28th. Not soon enough. Not soon enough. All right. All right. I'll subject to successful negotiations and all the rest of that. Legal language. But knock on wood. So. Good, thank you. We have run through our agenda and it's 7.15. Unless there's any objections, I'm getting ready to adjourn the meeting. No objections. I'm going back to my campground. Bye. Bye, Siobhan. Bye, Siobhan. I'm sorry, everyone. Thanks for your patience with my misunderstanding. Jerry and Linda, can you hang on for two minutes after, please? I can, but I'm going to turn off the recording. At this time. Good. So I'm turning off the recording now or I'm trying to meeting adjourned at 7.16.