 Call the meeting to order and encourage everybody to bring, if you have your PDF or you have a paper version of the agenda, you know, bring that up, because what I'm going to do is try to follow this agenda timing-wise, so let's call the meeting to order, it's a 10-01. As part of the public process, we're going to actually have a vote on the agenda, so I'm going to ask for a motion for a request to approve the agenda as provided in today's packet and a vote of the members. So, let's take a vote. Do I have a motion to approve the agenda? So, I'm going to turn the recording on. And I will take notes, so let's say, who moved the agenda? I'll probably move to approve the agenda, and we started at 10-01. Okay. Okay, all the board members in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? And who seconded, I'm sorry, was it? We didn't have a second for a motion to approve an agenda. And now that we are in session, what I'm going to ask is that anybody that is not a board member or that is not in the giga room to please turn your camera off and mute, not turn your camera off, but so that you go, if you shrink the, what's the button, basically close the camera and mute so that the board members can conduct the board business. We will have a 15-minute public comment section at the end of the meeting. We have a hard stop at 11.30, and this is an introductory meeting of our board for the Vermont Community Broadband Board, and we do not expect to get through every inch and detail of all the stuff that we have to get done today. This is a kickoff meeting, and we will basically set the table and set the stage for future meetings, and excited to see all the public participants. But I just want to let folks know that we will open the meeting up at the end of the meeting for 15 minutes for any public comment. All right, so let's move to the second agenda item. So roll call. So we'll take a roll call of all board members who are present. We have Dan Nelson. We have Brian Ottley. We have Holly Grushner. We have Laura Sabilia and myself, Patty Richards. For ground rules, as I said, I'm going to start the meeting on time. For each meeting that we have, we will plan to start very close to being on time. So I encourage board members to sign on five minutes, 10 minutes in advance if you're meeting by Zoom, just to make sure the technology is working. And obviously, if you're planning to meet in person, give yourself plenty of parking time in Mopiliar so that you get to the giga room. And Christine, will all meetings be held in the giga room? Yes. So parking is limited in Mopiliar, so just encourage everybody if you're meeting in person just to plan accordingly. And then we are going to skip to the third agenda item, which is board member introductions. What I'd like to do is have each of the members of the board just give a few minutes about your background, who you are. And we have slotted three minutes per person. This is not meant to be full listing of your resume, so to speak, but just a real high-level sense of who you are and a little bit about yourself. And that way people that are not aware of everyone's backgrounds, we just have an opportunity to share. I will start this. I'm Patty Richards. I'm currently the general manager of Washington Electric Coal. I will not be the general manager in a few months, about five months planning to depart in January. I have been in the electric space for a little over 30 years and have built power plants and power plant additions and have been part of the public service for the state of Vermont through my tenure and working in the electric world. And I'm excited to join the broadband board here in helping to deploy this critical infrastructure. At Washington Electric Coal, we serve electrically some of the most rural areas in the state, 41 towns in the central, north central part of the state. And many of our consumers, 75%, are either unserved or underserved for broadband and high-speed internet. So this whole project is, you know, this whole project meaning broadband deployment is near and dear to my heart in the sense of getting this critical infrastructure to the rural communities that desperately need it. To me, broadband is like electricity in that it's an essential service, not a nicety. It's not something that you can opt not to have today. You need it for obviously during the pandemic that really exposed the critical nature of having access to internet and high-speed internet in terms of health care, being able to work and just being able to exist in our modern society. So that's a few minutes about my background and I will turn it over to, I'm just going to read off my list of board members. How about Dan Nelson next? Sure. My name is Dan Nelson. I'm the Vice President of Technology for Vermont Electric Power Company that includes the IT division and telecommunications. We encompass both IT and OT in our network. We have an extensive fiber optic network, which I have more than 20 years experience planning, constructing and operating. We also have a statewide radio system covering about 97% of the state, dedicated solely for utility purposes and emergency services in that regard. The bulk of my experience has been in network planning, instruction and operation of that infrastructure. And during the pandemic, I would say that I have two teenage boys and during the pandemic, it became very clear to me the divide that occurs when we have with appropriate broadband services are able to access their schoolwork and have nots who just don't have anything available to them. So there's a very clear drive for moving this forward. For gravity, I guess that's all I'll have. Great. Thanks, Dan. Okay, Brian. Brian Otley. I've got a background in technology. I've worked for software companies and I was spent 13 years with Green Mountain Power, most recently as their COO. I've worked with a lot of the broadband providers in the state, so I have a good working background of those issues and those challenges. Good working relationship with Dan and Velco, as Dan and Velco provide a valuable service in terms of fiber connectivity. On the utility side, I echo Dan's comments, the pandemic laid bare the gap. We've got to close the gap. The gap has been talked about for 20 years and it's time to put it to bed. Well said. Excellent. Let's move to Holly. Good morning, everyone, and particularly to Dan and Brian, whom I have not met before. Hello. Holly Groeschner. I have about 30 years in the telecom space as an attorney. And at the beginning of my career, I was the young associate who when someone walked through the door with a cell phone license said, I don't know what it is, but I want to work on it. So I've permitted about 90 of the communications towers in Vermont, went on to be the general counsel for something called Crown Castle International, where I helped acquire and integrate into operations $4 billion worth of wireless network infrastructure, went on to work at the VTA of which you've heard. And that was a great experience in understanding the tension between public purpose and private contracts. And I look forward to working with my colleagues on the board and trying to find a good balance for how we make this really effective. I also had a little job as the CEO of Vermont PBS, the television station, where we sold one of its assets, $56 million worth of spectrum. And it was handy to understand media and the telecom space coming into this discussion of broadband. That project allowed me, pardon me, to initiate a little merger between VP of Vermont PBS. And that was an excellent experience from a board management and governance standpoint. So I've spent the last year exploring the challenges of low income families in getting this very, what everybody agrees, is a very essential service broadband. And I was particularly driven to get involved when I came home from my job in Burlington to work in greater metropolitan Cookville, Vermont, I'm sure you've all been there. It's part of the town of Corinth. And I was on the phone with my local school principal as she tried desperately to bring people into access to the broadband service that was available, such as it is at Topson Telephone. So I come to you as a DSL survivor, a person in a very rural area, and I really look forward to actually bridging this gap. Thank you. Thank you, Holly. And I know exactly where Cookville is. We held a community meeting there a couple of years ago, and that was quite a feat to navigate to get there. Like one of those, you can't get there from here and you're on a road that you're not sure that really was a road. It was a farm path. And okay, last but not least, Laura. Good morning. I'm so excited that we are all meeting. Laura Sabilia, I'm a resident of Dover, Vermont. I am a legislator from the Wyndham Bennington District, which covers the towns of rural Wardsboro, Dover, Reedsboro, Whitingham, Stamford, Searsburg and Somerset. In the off session, I am the director of regional strategies for the RDC in Wyndham County, and I work closely with the RDC and RPC in Bennington County as well. I am the vice chair of the House Energy and Technology Committee and spent a lot of time working with our chair, Tim Brighlin, and the committee on Act 79 of 2019, which resulted in all of these wonderful CUDs, many of whom I see here today working so hard, and Act 71 of this year, which created this board. And I am really pleased to be able to work with you all on this next piece. Thank you, Lauren. It's very valuable to have you on this board to help us potentially if we have any interpretation issues or what was the intent of the legislature here. So that would be helping very big guidance for us as we move along. There's always questions that come up during as you get into the weeds of things in terms of interpreting acts and what the legislature had in mind. So thank you very much for serving and being on this board, and thank you to all the board members for serving. We all have the same goal. We all have the same mission to deploy this critical infrastructure. We're excited to get going. With Christine's hard work, and she's going to be the boots on the ground to run this, and as board members, and I would like to set the state a little bit in terms of how we function, board members and general board members govern and staff through the day-to-day operation. They're the boots on the ground and deploy. As we get set up in terms of our mission and our goals and objectives, we will talk more about this. Today's kickoff meeting, we're not going to venture into the weeds on that. But in general, the way I see a board is to give guidance and direction, and the staff under Christine's leadership as executive director is to get the job done. That doesn't mean we're not involved, but we're involved in a different way than a staff person would be involved. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Christine to introduce the staff side of the Vermont Community Broadband Group. Well, with the staff side, it'll be a real simple introduction. We have Rob Fish and Rob, I'll just say some good things about Rob. Rob has been incredible help to the CUDs, and the CUDs, we all think Rob walks on water. So I'll turn that over to you with those words, but why don't you give an introduction and give a little bit about your background. Thank you, Christine. And I'm excited to be with the board. I'm excited to work with Christine and all of you. My background, I'm coming from the rural broadband. I've been working with the CUDs for the past year and a half through the pandemic, helping to build these groups and reaching out to Vermonters from all walks of life to form these boards. There's over 300 people who are board members or alternates right now. So I'm excited to continue working with them to work with Christine and to move from creating these CUDs to building broadband universally across the state. Excellent. Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Rob. And I'm happy to be here to help Rob, because I know he's been putting in lots of hours, and hopefully you can spend a few less hours working in more time with your family. So anyway, I'm Christine Holk, so I'll give you a little bit about my background. I started my career designing power systems for second largest computer company at the time, Digital Computer Corporation. And at about age 30, I became manufacturing manager for the startup of these power systems and quickly adopted the Toyota manufacturing process in 1989. And as an early pioneer of that process, I left digital a few years later and went out and did business process redesign for small and large companies, including companies like Honda and Miller Brewing, as well as local companies. But I had an opportunity, you know, I was hired by Vermont Electric while they were in bankruptcy to help them with their business process redesign in 1998. Ultimately, had an opportunity to become their opportunity and operations manager in 2000. Of course, I didn't know the utility business and I was thrilled to learn something new. So jumped in and 2005 became the CEO. We were very active in implementing the smart grid. We rolled out smart meters in 2005. But all that time, starting in 2003, the board kept asking me about getting broadband to Rover Monters. So evaluated technologies, ran lots of business models. And then of course, you know, really enjoyed that job and that career and the co-op world. But in 2018 out of an act of passion for passion for our democracy, and maybe and maybe was a symptom of aging as well, but it decided to leave and made the made the the strange decision to run for governor became the democratic candidate. Of course, you know, I have tremendous respect for Phil Scott. So it was a great campaign. But afterwards, I went up to Canada to chase a porous silicon battery with a gentleman named Don DeSacca, who built the first lithium battery factory. Unfortunately, this porous silicon battery, we were not able to upscale it for utility grid purposes. So I went to take care of my mom for a few months in Syracuse, got a call from the CUDs and said, yeah, love to help doing that. And ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised when the governor called and asked me to do this for the state. So I really have I really think this is so important. You forgive my bias, but I think it's, you know, human kind of has done great things, we're capable of doing great things. The electrification of rural America was you might be one of humankind's greatest works. And I think we're about to embark on that equally great work here. So thank you for the opportunity to work with all of you. Perfect. Thanks, Christine. And Christine, as part of Act 71, there is provisions for staffing. Can you comment at all? Is it too soon to comment about staffing plans at the department in terms of your group to staff up? No, it is not too early. In fact, we've given Rob and I have done a lot of work on this. We do, you know, think that there's there are some areas of support that the CUDs need. And I'll quickly tick those off. First of all, you know, and I would hope we get to this very quickly and in our first deep dive meeting. And I'll just kind of give you some foreshadowing of what we're thinking about. Obviously, we would we want to provide legal support. So we need we need that that resource. We need we want to provide grant administration and finance support. GIS support is important from our standpoint. What I missed, Rob. Legal support. Legal. Yeah. So we've put together a strop proposed, which will bring to the first deep dive board meeting. Yes, engineering. Thanks. Okay, great. And I'll just echo again what I stated in the beginning is that this meeting is really a kickoff meeting. We're not intending to get into the weeds on anything at this point. We're required to have a gathering of the board within the within the structure of the Act 71. And we are meeting that meeting by whole or meeting that requirement of the statute by holding this meeting. So this is really a kickoff cursory meeting. And I just will a couple of things I'll state in that pieces and the things are in the works on Christine's and that obviously this is a public meeting and we have well over 30. It looks like 34 35 people from the public attending right now. And I anticipate that as we get going, there'll be more and more interest from the public to attend. So anything that we put in writing by email is subject to public disclosure. So we have to I want everyone to have the mindset of transparency. Obviously, these meetings are going to be taped and recorded. Whether we're doing them by Microsoft Teams or some other venue, everything will be recorded. But our emails will migrate over to Vermont.gov email system. For now, we will all use our current emails that were that we've provided to communicate. But anything that we put together relative to the Vermont Community Broadband Board is subject to public disclosure. So just make sure to remind people of that. Christine, do you have an update as terms of when we would have emails available to us from the state? Yeah, that will happen within two weeks. Other ground rules that I'll just remind folks of is in the event we are talking about anything that or any type of business association that you may have a conflict of interest with or have some sort of like at Washington Electric Co-op, I will be very transparent and disclose if there's a CUD that I'm working with currently in my role in my hat at Washington Electric Co-op. And I want to make sure that we have that in mind as we move ahead is to disclose so that we can vet to figure out if anybody needs to recuse themselves from a discussion or if just a disclosure is necessary. So I'll just put that reminder out to everybody that that's going to be really critical important. We don't know who everybody is dealing with on an individual basis. And I, you know, I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm employed at Washington Electric Co-op. And we are looking at broadband and I want to be super critical that we are squeaky clean as we move forward. So I just want to put the plug out for full disclosure. Christine, I mean Patty, that standard is applicable to staff as well. Yes, absolutely. Okay. I know we're moving fairly rapidly through, but I'm just trying to be very diligent about time. In the event we are ahead of schedule, we'll leave more room for public comment. But as I've said, I'm planning for public comment at the end of this meeting for 15 minutes at least. And we will take that set when we've gone through our agenda, we will open that up. Okay, so we have done board introductions, staff introductions. So let's move to the officer's seat of vice president, vice chair. We are required to nominate and vote on a vice chair position. Is there anybody that's interested? I'm going to do this on a voluntary basis first, and then we'll nominate you. And Christine, I don't know if you've had any dialogue with anybody at this point. And I have not had any dialogue with anybody at this point. I just thought Dan Nelson would be an excellent vice chair. Okay, so nominated. And I would nominate Laura Sebelia. All right, we have two. Now we're going to have a debate. This is going to be great. Dan and Laura, are you interested? I am honored. Thank you, Holly. But I would like to decline. And I think Dan would have my choice. Thank you, Brian. That was very gracious. And Dan, I can see that you definitely want this. Dying for this opportunity. And I am honored. Okay. And you would be willing to serve then? As vice chair, sure. I think that's a great idea. Excellent. I will try my best not to miss meetings, Dan. I promise. Thank you. Okay. Can we have a nomination or a motion from the floor? I'd like to second it. I'd like to second it. Dan, glad to know you now. All right. And I put the motion forward. So I'm the motion. Holly seconded. Let's have a vote of the board. All in favor say aye. Aye. All right. Any opposed? Dan, you're officially the vice chair. Thank you. And we are required to have a vice chair. We are not required to have other officer seats, but in the event that we need them, we can take that up. At a later date. So just for now, we've concluded the requirements of X-71 in terms of filling that vice chair position in officer seats. Okay. Next agenda item, I'm going to turn it over to Christine to do a update from her seat as the executive director. Okay. Great. Thanks. And this is all captured in the packet that I sent you. But I spent the first two weeks meeting with as many telecom providers as I can, large and small, as many CUDs as possible. And I plan on wrapping up those meetings in the next week. And really to get to hear from those telecom providers and the CUDs where they are and what their perspective is and what, how we can help from the VCBB. Also met with some individual towns. So, you know, if I, if I, I'll start by saying what, what I've learned from those meetings is there's, I'm going to, and I like to talk about the value-added activities of the CUDs and the value-added activities of the Roth Community Broadband Board. And what I propose is that the value-added activities of the, of the CUDs is really to get, to get the network design, get the network built, work with their communities and really and develop the appropriate partnerships in order to accomplish the goals that have been identified in Act 71. Our job at the VCBB, our value-added becomes in creating a smooth, a grant administration process as possible, developing, you know, standard reporting and standard forms for those, and we'll take on the necessary bureaucratic work in order to respond to those. We'll, we'll provide the financial support and financial resources. It's not clear to me, we haven't had the detailed discussions yet of how much of that finance work we could take on. We could take on, I, I guess I would, I think for most, to be most productive and most efficient on accomplishing those goals, I think, you know, we, we should provide the maximum amount of financial support as possible up to the point of accounting and, and budget management as well, working with those CUDs. Legal, same thing, you know, the legal issues that the CUDs are facing are generally the same. So we, we ought to be able to come up with pretty standard templates for those legal issues. And as, as far as engineering and GIS services, I, I see us providing a statewide, looking at working with the existing fiber providers such as Velco and First Light and others to build a ring, engineer the ring around the state, engineer where those CUDs and those towns and those telecom providers connect to that ring. And also try to bring, and already have said, had some confidential discussions with other outside providers in, you know, large providers from outside our area in the, in the New England region to bring additional data to Vermont. So with the goal of driving down the cost of both data rates. So our engineering focused on the Vermont level and the region level and looking at redundancy and resiliency and working with the CUDs and the telecom providers to make those proper connections and, and to review their engineering plans to ensure their engineering brings resilience and redundancy as well as consistent with the Vermont telecommunications plan. In that vein, you, you will see that we've, we've started to make quite a comprehensive list of attributes that we recommend that we review the grants against. That list has grown quite a bit. I've shared that with as many, as many groups as possible, including the CUDs as well as this state agencies like the DPS and welcome the administration's input on that. Welcome everybody's input onto those, those attributes. And ultimately, that'll get to one of our keyboard discussions that, that doesn't necessarily need to happen in the next, next week or so, but early on, we, you know, we'll, we'll try to reduce the number of attributes that we look at in deciding that, but ultimately we're going to have to wait those attributes and we'll be very public about how we're going to be issuing those grants. We've already been very public about it in terms of what the attributes will be in weight, weight against, as well as the requirements and that's defined in the board packet as well. So that, so we've done a lot of work around identifying those attributes because, you know, we're dealing with lots of money here and we want to be as public and try to be as, you know, as fair as possible in making those decisions. So, you know, as we talk, we talk about then talking about reporting and how do we, you know, how, how do we ensure that we're responsibly by using these taxpayer funds? The next level of thing that we all should work on together is really the, the key performance indicators that show us our progress, you know, measuring the appropriate things and reporting those appropriate things and being very sensitive and careful to what those measures are because sometimes measures have unintended consequences. But some of those measures, for example, might be percent of underserved addresses connected, total cost per address, past cost per mile, cost per megabit per second combined, upload and download, take rate, low income area, service access, and some of the early KPIs. These KPIs will evolve over time. But early on, we want to, you know, look at the addresses that are covered by high level design, addresses that are covered by detailed design on time connection rates, for example. And then there's, there'll be confirmation KPIs, which one time and ongoing at actual address performance. And those will be really based on what the FCC has already done a lot of work on, but initial connection speed, initial latency, and then on a speed and latency over time. I should probably pause before I keep going because I realize I'm going very fast here. So I'm going to pause, I think I'll pause and take some questions at this point because then I'll move into what I propose for, what we're looking at for a proposed grant process. So we talked about, you know, the KPIs, the key attributes. What questions does the board have? Pat. Patty, you're muted. Patty, you're muted. Thank you. Sorry about that. Why don't we do the suit this way? Raise your hand on the video. Does anybody who has a question, Laura? Go ahead. Yeah. Christine, I'm trying to follow along with you here. And I did read this all this morning. Did you get to the reporting to the administration part yet? I skipped over that, but it is an appropriate question to ask right now. Okay, great. So I'm just interested in, I noted the weekly nature of that. And so I'm just interested in what the expectation is for reporting at a weekly level. If you have a sense of that or if that's something that has been, you know, specifically requested that would be reported weekly. Yeah, that's interesting. And I'm glad you're asking that question, Laura, because I'm not sure I fully understand the legislation versus the administration request. And first of all, I should start by saying my plan is to issue a weekly report to the board and to the public anyway, because things can change so quickly. So there's no problem with doing a weekly report. I think that's important. What we need to figure out is the administration is looking for, you know, they're looking for input from us to say one of those, and it ties to the KPIs, which I'm happy with KPIs. Do I love KPIs? So the idea is, you know, how can the administration tie this into all of their overall goals and strategies and what kind of measures for success. This report will go up through June and into the administration. And again, that brings the question around. I'm not sure since you were part of the process of putting this legislation together, I'm not sure how much that firewall should exist between the DPS and the Vermont Community Broadband Board. If that is an issue, we should probably put it on the agenda for a later board meeting. I'm not sure that it is an issue. I will tell you the nature of my question is really wanting to understand. So, you know, if we're looking for reporting on address level, data weekly, that feels different than kind of a summary of, you know, what's been happening around the state, and neither necessarily being, you know, correct or incorrect, but just, you know, a different level of detail and work. And so, how can we best help you with this? Yeah, well, I think that's ultimately what Rob and I will do is we'll kind of put together a set of recommended KPIs and then bring that to the board. And then, of course, the board value, you know, you've got some, we have some tremendous experiences, the board is to say, you know, are these appropriate? What other should we be looking at? Are we looking at too many? The danger sometimes is looking at too many. I like to say there's three to five good key performance indicators and everything should waterfall from that. There's also some indicators that are required by the ARPA funding. At the federal level. So I think that is what is being integrated into what the reporting request on a weekly basis is that's coming down from the administration. That's helpful, Rob. Thanks. So I'm not sure I understand the firewall discussion, but I think we ought to have it when we have our longer meeting, just to be fully informed as a board. I also think that there's a conversation to be had. Christine, I support you in the idea that too many indicators just means that the data gets very dense. And we really need to have some simple rules of thumb that we can communicate not only to the administration, but to the public. And so in order to do that, I'm wondering how comfortable you feel about our baseline. One of the things that we're trying to report here is have we made progress? And in order to do that, we have to have some agreement about what our baseline is. So have there been thoughts about that? Yes, I have the thoughts about that. The state has a broadband status by E911 address. My belief that's greater than 80% accurate. There are certain pockets and certain pockets and certain towns that are covered by certain providers where the data is much less accurate. But overall, I think it's a relatively accurate index. In Act 71, it states that the department has the responsibility for updating that data base on an annual basis. It may not be the perfect benchmark, but it's the benchmark we have. Rob and I continue to work from that database and we continue to have the discussion. Rob has done some comparison data to see what our confidence level can be in making decisions based on that database. And we'll be prepared to talk about that. The data set will be updated for the 2020 data towards the end of this year is when the processing is expected from the information I've been able to glean for new data in addition to the 2019 data that we're currently working off of. And that's the 2019 data, but also all the projects that were funded via the 2020 productivity initiative, the line extension programs, cut supplemental grants, taking into account locations that are included in ARDOF. So we have a lot of data that we're working to crunch. Christine and Rob, would it make sense to add to the next agenda, next meeting that we have is kind of a presentation on the baseline issue. So we have the Magellan report that did a really nice widespread look at the state of Vermont. And again, I acknowledge that that's a couple of years old now. And Rob has access to data in terms of the database that the DPS has. Maybe just do, I think it would be a really good thing to add this to our first deep dive meeting where we're starting from. Visuals and maps and gearing it to high level, not into the glory weeds numbers stuff, but just high level big picture where we're starting from. What are the areas? How many numbers in the state do we have there underserved? Like I know in Washington Electric Co-op Service Territory, 75% of our membership is underserved by internet access. It'd be nice to know that for the entire state. So I propose we tag this for a deeper picture presentation for the first board meeting to go over this. Yep. Happy to bludge. Excellent. Brian. And the presumption is, is that I think it's the DPS that maintains that data. Yes. That that will be the baseline, the source of baseline going forward, right? We're not going to get into the competing baseline sources, right? That is the source of data. That remains with the department. That's the telecom plan and everything. Perfect. Good point. Very good point, Brian. All right. Any other questions, comments? Christine, did you have more that you wanted to Tia? Yeah, I took a pause there. Now I'll get into, we'll call that a mid-presentation break. We're working on the proposed grant process. And I was very impressed working with the administration, namely Doug Farnham, a pretty skilled person in terms of looking at these. And I say that because Doug's trying to reconcile the federal ARPA requirements versus the Act 71 legislation requirements and how do we set up a standard reporting? But that said, the plan is that this $150 million that's allotted, we're in the process right now doing what's called an RFP to get $30 million for pre-construction, which will include design engineering as well as supporting the staffs at the CUDs. It's my view that we need to get to detailed design engineering as quickly as possible. A few of the CUDs have not yet done high-level design, so we're going to push that as quickly as possible. That'll come out of the pre-construction budget, and that'll be one allotment. The other allotment, the remaining $120 million or so, and I would forgive me if I may not have these numbers entirely right, but will be available in one grant. And from there, we will, you know, what I suggest as a process is that we issue the RFPs to the CUDs and include the required state and federal questions. The grant applications will be reviewed by staff. I'll sign off on those and bring those to the board for approval. Once the board approves of those grant, we'll do a grant agreement with those CUDs and towns and possibly telecom providers, I should add. And then, of course, we'll establish, we'll have established by that point the ongoing grant management reporting required by the CUDs, towns, and telecom providers who are recipients of these funds. So that's any questions on that before I change the subject. Christine, do you have a time target? You're looking at the $30 million for pre-construction and $120 million for, you know, basically it's broadband deployment at that point. Yes. In fact, Rob and I, we would have liked that pre-construction funding yesterday, so we've been somewhat aggressive working that process. And so that's, and the reason for that is because I would like to see all the detailed designs completed by the end of the year from the CUDs. And that's also a tall order as well. But we really don't know what we've got until we get those detailed designs done. And then, you know, we can move into construction. But the designs are really, and are really the ground truth thing, a some level of ground truth thing. Again, you don't really get true ground truth that you do to make ready. But certainly, you know, you look at high level designs, the high level designs are really a rough view. We get a much more detailed view at the detailed design, but you really don't know final till you get make ready. And of course, the make-ready process could be as long as 105 days, according to 3.700. So that if we want to get these things built as quickly as possible, we really have to move to design as quickly as possible. Did that answer your question? No. So I think it answered in general, but I think we should, we need to work on, again, we're hitting the ground early here running. But that's something we will need to nail down with more specificity, especially the 120 million, like what we're targeting. And I'm just, I'm not suggesting that this is a date, but by March of 2022, I don't know what the timing is, but we need to be, I think for the CUDs and anybody who interested in these funds, we'll need to work on that timing to be a little bit more specific. The reason why I say no is just I'm unclear whether there is a grant process that sets objectives and pulls out deliverables from legislation that for the 30 million that is being contemplated to start before, you know, before board approval. I mean, I think it's very important that we ensure that we're all on the same page with regard to core objectives. And I can understand why design, you'd want to move as fast as you can to get to design, but design is the cornerstone, right? So you've talked a lot, Christine, about redundancy and the kind of integrated, I'll call it an integrated network that might be beneficial to the state. That's the whole subject area of discussion that requires some design coordination, right? So I'm just saying that I as a board member know what some of the basic premises are that you're putting into that design phase. So I naturally expected that discussion. Okay, okay, great. I just, you know, I feel for the CUDs, I know that they want to get moving. So I guess I'll turn my concern back over to our chair and say, so what are we meaning again? Brian. So on the design thing, so in my experience on this, if you give the detail design, if you give two telecom engineers the same problem, you get two different designs. So my question is going to be how are we, and then I have seen designs developed with good intent that are then, when they go to the stage of being transferred to the entity that's going to actually do the build, they want to then redo the design and recheck it or modify it or whatever. So every single modification handoff transfer is what is in my mind wasted dollars and wasted time. So I think we need to spend time talking about when these detailed designs are funded and then performed. Like there has to be a connection back to whether it's the CUD or a different telecom who's going to do the build that they are going to accept either in its entirety or a large percentage of it. So we're not spending dollars several times to get the same outcome. Thank you for bringing that up because here's the tension. And you should know I came into this job. My bias was doing a centralized state design of a fiber network. But the reality is as we get into this, we have to balance and again, I think this is an excellent in-depth quarter discussion that we should have because there's definitely tensions on both sides. And I think Brian has described accurately one of the risks we run by, you know, we run this risk that a number of the CUDs are really far along and we'll be stopping those CUDs dead in their tracks. And some that won't be a problem at all. And I guess, Rob, maybe you can, I'd love to hear your thoughts about this. Sure. Give a little bit of an overview. But several CUDs have chosen or are closing in on closing who their operator is going to be. So this is who the professional company that has built these networks before is going to be building out in their area. There's a concern about stopping the process now or redoing stuff that has been done before. But I think there is general agreement that we do need some type of high level design, some type of engineering to ensure redundancy, to ensure resiliency, to ensure these networks are connected. I don't know if that provides a little bit of comfort and a little bit of background on what the tension is. Yeah. And with that said, I do think this is a very important discussion that we should have early on. So in the bill, there is a clause in the bill that gives us the ability to do a high level design. It's not a requirement to do a high level design. Right. I just want to make sure that as we take those steps, there's value to it because there's having a high level design may have optical value or political value, but does it have construction value? And I'm confident we can manage the optics in the political because it's been going on for 20 years. I'm much more interested in if we're spending dollars on design, does it have construction value? And then will the entity that's either going to do the bill, will sponsor the bill, will they accept that design or a large part of it? So we're not then seeing competing designs come out later and request for funding on those. Yeah. Let me add an exclamation point to what Brian just said. When we looked at, we built a really good model at N.E.K. in terms of serving the 47 towns and which represents 25% of the other, 23% of the unserved addresses in the state. And our cost of design was $6.2 million. So if you extrapolate to that state, we're talking literally probably close to $30 million investment in design. So it is a very important item that we all come to agreement on. So certainly we're not going to do anything until we meet as a board and come up with a policy on this. I should also say that the groups that haven't embarked on high level design are doing so in collaboration with a potential operator. Others are doing it in terms of giving them the knowledge they need to negotiate with potential operators. This is really helpful. This is great discussion. And I've added a potential agenda item as listed as core objectives of the VCBB of engineering and preconstruction work. So all this detail, we should lay out what is the design. I'm going to call it script. And I've got this written up, Christine, so I can send this to design script. We want to assume all the networks are connected. How is that going to be listed in these core objectives? How we integrate all the CUDs together and how we're not holding somebody up who's already way ahead of the game. And they're ready to deploy and already have their design work all done. So we can list this as for the next deep dive meeting that we have identifying these core objectives. Because that gives us as board members things to evaluate proposals against when we deploy funds to make sure we're hitting our objectives. Thank you. So yeah, and I think I think this is the top priority to focus on right now. Because there's so much tension out there. Really, that tension goes all the way down to the Vermonter who's underserved and unserved. We'll get so many calls from people to say, when am I going to get connected? So this is a really important discussion. Thank you. I agree. And we want to do it right the first time. Yes, accountability is key here. We want to make sure this works. Yes. All right, so the other part of this, which really gets the last part of my presentation, really is to the grant selection criteria, which will, you know, some of these things we talk about will be added or modified to that criteria. But we have a large list of grant, proposed grant criteria, as well as draft grant conditions. I'm not going to take you through that list here because it's pretty extensive. But I'd like you all to read it, study it well, think about some conditions or criteria we might have missed, look for redundancy, and ultimately think about how we weight those. Now, the conditions aren't going to be weighted, those are requirements. But the grant criteria will weight and use a decision matrix. And that, you know, using that decision matrix will be a way we can communicate fairly what the, how those decisions were made in terms of issuing those grant funds. And just as possible by this is we're talking about the construction funds. The actual building of projects, not the pre-construction side of things. So it's important to make sure we're separating those two programs. Thank you. Thank you, Rob. And I should also say that another, you know, in my, in my meetings with the, I just want to highlight that there's a tension between the CUD, I mean, this is probably self-evident, but there's a tension between the CUDs and attention between the private providers. In many cases, the private providers were given opportunities to respond to the RFPs, and they chose not to respond. On the other hand, I must confess, you know, as one provider said yesterday, hey, I got the 74-page RFP, you know, it was ridiculous, all the details in there. I said, yeah, I wrote that. So the point being, I understand that that was a difficult RFP to respond to. And I know that other CUDs may have copied that. And so, but so what I'm encouraging the telecom providers, the local telecom providers to reach back out to their, to their CUDs and talk about how we can work with them. Because I, you know, I don't think our intent is to put the local providers out of business. I think our intent is to see how we can help. So, and naturally, what you hear from the local telecom providers is, hey, if you gave us this money, we would have done it ourselves. You know, so, so that tension exists. And there's some, like anything else, there are various levels of performance with local providers. Some I wouldn't want to use either. Others, you know, we want to support. So I don't know, you know, we have to figure out how to deal with that tension and help what our policies are and how we do grant selection. And then the other part of that is there are some towns and the Act 71 allows for this. There are some towns that are, that are really moving further ahead and have already started to develop some plans with local local providers. And there's pretty well thought out plans. However, you know, the design considerations have not been discussed. So that's the end of my presentation. Any other thoughts, concerns or feedback? Any comments from the board? Questions? Okay, as I said, I've written down several items that are at some point will be agenda items for either next meeting or soon to be held meeting. We have, we have a lot to accomplish the next months and this may be good timing to bleed into the agenda for next meeting and when to re-meet. And what I'd like to do is just tee up some things I've written down and then open it up to folks in terms of agenda items. I have listed in addition to kind of that high level overview of where we're starting from in terms of that baseline, doing a report to get a lay of the land for the whole state, a proposal to at least look at the ARPA funding KPIs and start looking at those because I think those are going to be important to hold feet to the fire here. It's not only that we need to be public and fair, but we also need to be accountable and those KPIs will help us to become accountable and be accountable. Firewall discussion I have listed as an agenda item and the core objectives of the DCBB for engineering and preconstruction and that list that I rattled off. I've also have grant selection policies as agenda items that I don't think that we'd be able to accomplish all of this in the next meeting. These are things that we're going to have to tee up in the next handful of meetings. I apologize, but can you repeat again what your first bullet first item was? ARPA funding KPIs. Yeah, okay. The first bullet was the baseline where we're starting. Okay, great. Christine, I will send you this list. Great. Thank you. Anybody else have other things to add? Go ahead. From a staff perspective and from what I've been hearing from the CUDs, getting additional preconstruction funding out the door is a priority. So I ask if the board wants to review the RFP process and the RFP before it is issued, but that should, I recommend that being a priority and happening really soon because we are expecting to go ahead from the administration and guide house really soon. Okay, so let's definitely tee that one up for the next agenda. Next meeting. I think the baseline and that RFP process probably are the two critical things that our next meeting will pile on as much as we can. Okay, so can we now pick a meeting to come in a standing meeting date? I'm going to propose we meet every two weeks, at least for temporarily until we get kind of grounded and then we can pull back from that if need be, but I think there's so much to be done here that we should be planning to meet every two weeks. I think two hours is probably too short because of how much we have to do, so I would suggest we plan for three to four hours. That sounds overwhelming, but to the extent that staff can support us and do this, that's what I'm proposing that we block up four-hour meeting chunks and push through this. Laura? That sounds great. I would just throw up for consideration. I would like to attend in person whenever possible. It will be easiest for me to do so. It's a two-hour travel for me that if it's early or late so that I, you know, perhaps have half a workday at my regular job. Agreed. It won't be a deal breaker and of course I'm assuming we can participate virtually if need be. Yes, I would like to make this accessible. All the meetings that we have, I'd like to make accessible virtually to the extent that we can attend that's preferred, but absolutely understand that many of us are traveling and we may be away having to attend meetings from other states, so absolutely virtually. I'd like that suggestion of either a morning block or an afternoon block. One thing in terms of feedback with pre-construction, like this decision point is something that is holding things up. If this, if Christine is amendable and the board is amendable, potentially we could also meet the middle of next week and then go two weeks from there. We are going to be running into some vacation issues. Sorry, I am finally going away for the first time in the pandemic the next week, so I love you all, but... That's good. It's important to get some away time. I completely understand that. Yeah, I spent a little next week for me. I heard Rob say, I thought I heard Rob say he's away next week, but then encouraged us to meet next week. I'm a little confused. I'm not that evil. I'm here next week, except for Friday and then I'm down the following week. So I will be available next week. Potentially next Wednesday would allow us to still do the 48 hours. Notice that we must provide if we are going to be meeting. So that is Wednesday the 11th. Could we make it Thursday the 12th, as when I just not available for the two hours in the middle of the morning. I'm worried I can make this block. I would put a dent in the block. Could it be Thursday? The 11th and 12th are terrible for me. I'm going to be out of town on work and traveling and it's going to be brutal. 10th? 10th is great for me. I could do the 10th as well. Is that amenable? Does the 10th work? Okay. Yeah, Patty, maybe just send me the proposed agenda items and we'll put it together and get a notice out. Do folks prefer morning of the 10th or the afternoon? Morning would be way easier for me personally. I'll support that. Okay, let's do morning. And that gives us enough time for notice? Yes, we'll get that notice out today. It's a 9am start time work for folks. It gives time to somewhat travel. It's a little early, but for those of us that are traveling over an hour. 9 is fine for me. I would also meet earlier. I would meet I second Laura's sentiment. Earlier is fine also. I would be earlier than I was actually doing this meeting around the state over time, since there'll be members of the public that would love to attend in person that are not in Montpelier that wouldn't want to drive three hours as a future thing to consider. I would like us to talk about the value of that, Rob. I understand the desire, but I think we should talk about that. Having run an organization where the caravan of meetings became an all-consumptive thing. I could make earlier on Tuesday if people want to start at 8. Okay, I'm going to propose 8.30 because it is over an hour for me traveling, so I'm going to be a little selfish and propose 8.30 to make sure I get there on time. Should I bring in lunch? I think that's a good idea to have something to snack on. And conclude with a lunch. That'll be our reward or treat. Is there coffee there? There will be coffee. All right, so we have the morning of August 10th, starting time at 8.30. An agenda. I will send that to you, Christine, but we did verbally run through that. All right, I see that we still have 30 people. We've reached the public comments section, so what I'm going to do is turn this, what I'd like to do is turn this open for public comment. Because there are so many people, I'd like folks to limit their comments to three minutes. That is kind of a protocol for public meetings. And Christine, can you coordinate this and tee people up from your end? Yes, we have Chris Recky. So what I will tell you is please raise your hand. Maybe Rob, you can manage this in order. Chris Recky rose his hand immediately. So we'll take it in order. So go ahead. I guess what we can do is we have a crew here as well. We can alternate. But we'll start with Chris since Chris has. Before we start, I'm going to apologize to my colleagues and to the public. I'm in California with a deadline to vacate the premises I'm in, so I will be just hopping off here very briefly. And I'll look to the recording to catch up with all of you and see you on the 10th. Thank you. Thanks, Holly. So am I up, Christine? Yes, you're up. Three minutes. Cool. This will be really quick because I recognize there are a ton of people. I just wanted to say thank you all for being willing to serve. You're a stellar group that includes the staff with Christine, Rob, and all the folks there. I do think you guys are in the right place at the right time. This is critically necessary. I should have said I'm managing director for ValiNet for those that don't know what I'm doing. And I just wanted to also say that I'm very excited about you all committing to this. Every two weeks is great, and it's really important. In terms of the design and the comments I heard today, the high level design as well as detailed design. ValiNet is the design build operator for EC Fiber and now working with a few other CUDs. I just wanted to offer to you all that if it would be helpful for like a 10 minute presentation on our lessons learned over the past 10 years, I would be happy to do that at any point that's helpful for you. We definitely made some mistakes that we've learned from early on, and I'd like to help the other CUDs avoid those and thoughts about how to make this a resilient ring. There was some talk about that earlier to make sure that we're all, even though we may have different operators and different systems and in some respects different designs, there should be some standard stuff that we can agree on that will make these CUDs kind of integrated and make Vermont more resilient as we go forward. So I'm happy to do that at any point that's useful for you if that is. Otherwise, I just wanted to thank you and and congratulate the appointments because you really are a stellar group and I know you'll do great work. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Do we have anybody in the room and then Evan is next? Anybody in the room for three minutes? Okay, I saw Evan. He's on Starlink, so he'll be back. Yes, give me some grace here because I certainly have some latency that may be popping up. So first, very excited to see you all together to meet and congratulate you. I'm an intelligible Evan. Yeah, there's a- I think you mute yourself and then turn your speakers off to make the problem seem worse. Evan, you're getting audio feedback through your speaker coupled with a microphone somewhere. Do we want to, Evan, why don't we mute you to myself and it's coming somewhere else. Someone else has their microphone muted. Oh yeah, everybody else please mute your phones, mute your audio so somebody may be echoing. Okay, try again, Evan. Okay. There we go. Yep. So first of all, thank you all for your willingness to volunteer. It's important work. So really quick, one thing that has come up in discussions amongst CUDs and certainly in N.E.K. is thinking about how we are going to build in the next year and the material shortage is something that is coming up frequently. There has been some ideas around the idea of having the state potentially purchase some percentage of fiber that the CUDs can then access or potentially purchase. But being able to buy in volume and in bulk as a means to be able to kind of get in front of that material shortage if we're looking at our first major construction happening in the next 12 to 16 months. And if we're having to have to wait to purchase that, we might be pushing back our own construction timeline. But if the state has that ability to look at what all the CUDs need over the next 12 to 18 months, then there might be some discounts available and certainly accessibility to those assets. So just something for potential future meetings to discuss, but wanted to put that out there. Thank you, Evan. In a minute and 10 seconds, thank you for that as well. Anybody in this room? Sure. Please say your name as well. So Jonathan Baker from D.N.E.K. So I know this has been brought up by several parties before. I just wanted to bring it up again. So our region is vast and rural and fairly poor socioeconomically. So there's been some talk about affordability. And I know it makes a lot of people nervous because it's going to hurt the business case. And it makes it hard to sustain, especially when you're running real close to the margins. But it's something that needs to be addressed in one way or another in the N.E.K. Or this whole thing is kind of pointless up there because if you've got access to fire, that doesn't mean you can afford it, right? If it's $120 a month, you know, I mean, what are you going to do? So and I know that can go one or two ways, but there's some of these or these kind of things. But I just wanted to make sure that that's actually something that's going to be addressed and not sort of swept under the rug. Thank you. Next up, it looks like we have Irv. Irv, are you ready to give comment? Okay, anybody else online that wants to give comment at this point? Or Irv, if you hear us. Okay, actually, it looks like Sean Cow, Sean. You're up. Hello, everyone. I'm Sean Cow, I'm the chairman of the Northwest VUD. I just wanted to bring up to the attention of the board. Christine and Rob and I discussed this in some length this morning as well, but the kind of statewide need to develop some form of workforce development from the lower levels of installers and linemen all the way to executives. Having a pipeline of qualified individuals to do this work, we're all going to kind of face that shortage and any work that the board can do to help facilitate the legislature to continue to work with the technical centers or VTC or any of those groups to help develop programs to have a skilled workforce of installers and engineers would be fantastic for all of us. Well, thank you, Sean. And which CUD are you a part of? Northwest. Thank you. Okay, back to the room here. Chris behind you. Oh, very briefly, Chris Gamble, I'm with Tulsa and also we're doing some consulting work with Vermont Electric Cooperative to see how they can help support broadband deployment in the very rural part of the state. And just to that point, very briefly, you know, I think there's a great opportunity to build on some of the support that Vermont's electric utilities have already provided to broadband deployment to both further the goals of the state, make those dollars that are coming into the state go further, and also, you know, get a smarter, more resilient electric grid as a result of that. So just encourage efforts to include the, you know, the consultation with the electric utilities are our experience so far is that there's a lot of good role there and willing to offer. Thank you, Chris. And I believe, I believe Irv came back again. Yep. If you're ready, Irv, if not, we will go to Jane. Okay, Jane, you're up. Thank you, Jane. Well, I'm chair of Oil Fiber Net. I'm getting an echo and you're getting it to my apologies. I want to thank you all for serving and I want to thank Rob, Representative Pabilia, and many others who brought us to this point. I echo what many others have said and just want to add one thing. And that is, as you're thinking about the space to support the CUDs, let's keep in mind what VCU did to do better and what the VCBB can do better in terms of collaboration, et cetera. I just want to see duplication of effort there. That's it. And thank you very much. Thank you, Jane. Okay, in the room. Anybody else? Irv's still not available. Irv's having some trouble if we're going back and forth. So if there's, I think you're up. Madam Chair, is it possible to relax the three minutes now that you have a sense of, or no, you've got 10 minutes left. First off, I'd like to say that maybe we should consider referring to this as essential infrastructure rather than critical so as not to confuse it with the Velco and Department of Homeland Security's definition of critical infrastructure. That's a semantics thing that the workforce training somebody brought up is authorized for some of this 150 million to be allocated to. And a number of folks have recognized that that's going to be one of the big bottlenecks in addition to potentially materials. Getting that on first priority to work with Vermont Tech or other institutions to develop training programs, possibly even a national training center that could bring folks to Vermont to be trained. And if we're lucky enough to poach them for in-state builds, we'll reimburse their sending utility for their training costs. But we need to get both linemen, wireless tower infrastructure, cross train line persons for fiber and electric to staff up. I believe our best shot at getting this done. The statutory goal is every E911 address having fiber speeds by the end of 2024. I beg that you look at that closely and not just kick it out seven years and not only look at the addresses that are unserved by cable today. If we're going to strictly adhere to the statutory goal, we need to have a plan that's going to reach the cable-served addresses as well with fiber. The statutory goal also requires competition. And these are some critical path factors that are going to determine how we go about this. We do not want to just patch together a bunch of disparate designs from CUDs and build a Frankenstein that is not as resilient and interoperable and utility grade and public safety grade as we need in Vermont. We have one shot at this amount of money. It looks like 100 million per state from the builder debating today in Congress. 100 million remaining for next year's ARPA, 150 million already authorized, 18 million spent, and there's 37.5 million in Northern borders regional commission for infrastructure. So without a amount of money, we need to think about doing that statewide design in order to you're trying to cut me off. No, I'm trying to tell you that it's three minutes now. I'll take another 30 seconds. I can't compress what I have. I've got 30 years experience working on telecom plans. We have a failed telecom plan. This body needs to adhere to the goals of 202C, which necessitate mobile wireless coverage, competition, open access be integrated into all your plan approvals. There is a section in the bill for the statewide design to contract for a comprehensive statewide fiber optic engineering design to identify strategies to maximize fiber optic build out efficiency and ensure resiliency and interoperability of all existing fiber optic networks built with public or rate fair funds. And that needs to be one of your highest priorities because that would need to be completed by year end. Thank you, Steven. I encourage you to submit more in writing. I know you have a lot more to say and to be able to save it up. And just to the record, it's Steve, can you just announce your full name and who you are with, who you're working on behalf? Steve Whitaker, I'm an independent citizen. Thank you. I think Jane still has her hand up. I think Jane didn't put her. Jane, I think you are all set. Irv, are you back? I'm just trying to figure out how to unmute his microphone. I may be able to do that for him if I can find him on here. If not, Irv, if you can also try to call in as well. But let me, I'm actually not seeing him. I'm going to see if I can unmute him directly. It's not even, it's not giving me the option to mute him. So try changing Irv to an attendee to see if that helps. If not, Irv, you're going to have to figure it out. Figure out on your screen. Or maybe type it in the chat. Maybe type your comment in the chat and we can read it aloud. Maybe what we have him do is just write his comments down and submit them after the fact. Okay. He says something, he's talking about detailed design. It's hard to type in three minutes what you want to say in chat function. Okay. Is there anyone else in the chat that would like to offer comment? Okay. So here's what Irv has to say about detailed design. Beware of imposing the same level of detail across the entire state and all the CUDs. Thanks, Irv. Turn it back to you, Patty, for next steps and I guess closing the meeting. Okay. I want to thank everybody that attended today, both on the board, staff, and the public. We're looking forward to kicking this off and doing deep dive and really getting in, you know, getting going with the deployment of funds here and really look forward to a collaborative process and full transparency. And excited that our first meeting went so well. I think we got a lot done today and it's very efficient. Any comments, closing comments from any board members? Christine? No, no final comments are very satisfying. Look, you're saying it's a great meeting. Good job. Good job, Patty. Good job, board. Thank you. Yes. Very much. Rob, do you have any other further comments? I would just say we will work on the agenda and post it to all the appropriate places later this afternoon to ensure proper notice. Excellent. Thank you very much. And with that, I'll take a motion to adjourn. Excellent. All those in favor say aye. All right. We are adjourned. Thank you all and we will see you next week on the 10th at 8.30. Thank you. Great.