 I'd like to call the December 8th, 2020. Actually, hold on a second. Do that, start the recording. I'd like to call the December 8th, 2020 regular governing board meeting of CV Fiber to order. The recording has started. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? I can keep this within the existing comms committee line item, but I am going to make another plea about people joining the communications committee. Right, and that was actually, that was something I was supposed to have added. So yeah, let's do that within the communications committee because we were going to add, who was it that, we wanted to add RD to the communications committee. So I will make sure that I make a note of that. If there's anybody else then that decides that they want to join RD, how many folks do you have on there right now? Do you know? Five. Okay, yeah, so it'd be nice to have another couple. So question, to be on the committee, do people need to be board members or can non-board members be on committees? Non-board members can be on committees. Okay, did you ever reach out to that person in Plainfield that I pointed your way, Chuck? We chatted, we had a couple of back and forth, but it didn't end up going anywhere. At the time, but I can re-engage that person. If coming out of this meeting, we feel like we still need some more help. I mean, it's up to you. I mean, I might have a little bit more time to help with the communications committee going forward, but I haven't lately. And I do know that this person is good at writing. So if they're interested, that might be an option. Appreciate you reminding me of that as I had definitely forgotten about that person. So let's circle around back to that when we have that agenda item. Is there anything else that folks want to add to the agenda, Alan? Jeremy, are we going to be talking at all about the announcement, the public announcement to its members by WEC about their project to build out Fiber? And the second thing I wondered about, is there going to be any discussion about the maps and other comments we got about Ardolf? So let's add a discussion item about WEC and Ardolf insofar that we can talk about some of those. I'll put those before our executive session. So let's see, add WEC and Ardolf, at least the publicly discussable bits. Yeah, the annual or the monthly report that WEC put out, I thought that was amazing. I've been sharing that pretty widely. So yeah, we'll do that. That's because- Okay, thank you. For those of you that didn't know, Ardolf released the winners today. There's still things that we can't really talk about, but the public information is at least out there about who got what block or which consortium got what block. Michael, I saw you had your hand up. Yeah, I sent to all the board members Ardolf results in a file about five minutes ago, only though we can share. And in preparation for the discussion. Okay, sounds wonderful. Anything else that we should add to the agenda? Okay, so moving along, public comment, is there anything folks wanna talk about that is not on the agenda? Okay, I'm not seeing anything. I do wanna mention that- Oh, yeah, go ahead, Henry. Just a question on rural business development, letter of intent, which is due the 11th. And are we gonna, even if we don't, you know, apply for the grant, at least having the letter of intent as a backup? Yeah, I personally was expecting to talk about that in the grant funding update. But yeah, I mean, so my gut instinct is that we are going to at least put the letter of intent there just so we can sort of put the bookmark in the book, put our foot in the door or what metaphor you like so that we can eventually, should we choose to do that, that we can go that route? Thanks. Cool. One thing that I wanna mention, Evan Carlson from the Northeast Kingdom, his organization, Due North, which is a co-working space, they are applying for some funding from the Vermont Community Foundation to do a CUD accelerator, essentially to take all of the, to essentially provide a training for all, well, for a limited number of CUD members from each CUD. And the idea is to get everybody onto the same page in terms of being able to talk about the technology and the funding. So I had a conversation with RD last week, earlier this week, I don't remember exactly when it was, but he had questions and new board members, oftentimes have questions about these things. The nice thing about EC fiber and CV fiber is that we have a bit of institutional knowledge, even though we've not actually strung fiber yet, but this was a way that we would have the ability to take some folks to go and get trained up and that other folks around the state could also get trained up. So he's envisioning and actually is pretty far along in scoping out a eight or nine week, essentially one reasonably short meeting every day of the week. So every weekday for basically a full two months, covering everything from financing to technology to working with electric utilities, legislative process, essentially just to get everybody ramped up. So if you are interested in that, please shoot me a message and we can see if we can distill that down, but should he get funding, he's gonna start, he looks, he's looking to start that in January, Ken. What's the source of the expertise? He's tapping a bunch of people from all over the place, including, so Michael, he's been in contact with you. He's talked to stand on an EC fiber. He's gonna be talking to folks at Eustis. He's essentially just drawing people from all over the place to cover each of these topics. Oh yeah, yeah. So out of state ISPs, people who've done similar projects, essentially just to give everybody a really good breadth of the stuff that you gotta know when you're looking at some of the decisions that we make as a CUD. I mean, so we as a board, we kind of learned this stuff in fits and starts. And as people said, hey, what the heck is this thing? And then we went and found out, kind of stumbled through it on our own. This is a way that we'd get folks in, the Southern Vermont CUD or whatever, getting everybody on there rather quickly up to speed. So if you're interested in that, please send me an email directly. If we get lots and lots of takers, we'll have to figure out and we'll have to ask Evan how he wants to limit how many people are doing that. But I expect that there's gonna be a lot of interest. My main suggestion to him, it was a wide-ranging discussion, but my main suggestion to him was for us to, for us, for him as part of the project, find a way to distill the content of those meetings so that we could have the, and I don't remember who mentioned this term, but it was what, eternal September, what was that? Somebody mentioned that before. I remember who it was, but the idea is that because we're gonna have so much turnover forever, we're always gonna have some folks who want to know what's going on and how to get ramped up to be able to have a package and say, here is your eight-hour CUD in a box seminar go, and then any sort of detailed questions we can find the answers for. So yeah, that will be hopefully forthcoming. My impression was it was one day a week, not five days a week, but maybe it's evolved. Oh, so maybe it is one day a week and maybe I just misheard what he said. That would be quite a big commitment for people to take on now. Yeah, and as I was thinking about it, I was like, that's an incredible amount of content. That's a full college course there. So, okay. All right, any other public comments, stuff that's not on the agenda? Okay, so... I'll just add that I just joined you. My name is Phil Chakini. I'm from Berrytown. I've asked the select board to nominate me as an alternate, which I just joined now because that's where I was on another call, and their meeting doesn't start until 6.30, so I won't know until after that, but I thought this would be a fun way to spend an evening. All right, welcome, Phil. Thanks for joining us. We're always very happy to have more folks join. Josh has been shouldering that burden for quite some time, so I'm happy to know he'll have somebody in Berrytown to help with that. And then you're going to be appointed as the alternate, correct? I just wanted to double-check. I'm Jeremy and the clerk taking notes, so... Well, I put my name in, and there wasn't a lot of competition. Okay, I understand. There wasn't for me either. You're a junkie, Phil. Maybe we should see what goes on after you were appointed. So Jeremy, on the notes, what was Evan's last name? Carlson, C-A-R-L-S-O-N. Okay, thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, so moving on to the consent agenda. We have on the consent agenda the approval of November 24th minutes. We also have more bills than just the COS, the project manager in the last mile. I also included our printing bill and our... What was the other one? The logo work. So you got all of those invoices. I sent those today at about 2 p.m. And I will move that we approve the consent agenda as presented with the addition of Catamunk color and expand creative. Second. Okay. I heard Chuck first, sorry. All right. So Phil, this is a running thing where there's this race for some reason for folks to get the second. So just want to let you know that we keep it reasonably late. Okay. So moved and seconded any further discussion? All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Do I have opposed abstentions or any folks wanting a roll call vote? All right. We have unanimous consent. Thank you very much. Moving on to the finance report. I also sent you the VACC bank transactions. We've not had much going out. You can see the last round of checks that I sent out. You'll see checks 529, 535, 31. That was all the November bills that we approved. I'll be cutting the checks for the ones that you approved tonight. I'll be cutting those tomorrow. Yeah, nothing too terribly surprising there. I did get your, I did get your message Tim about invoicing the state and making sure that those go to the state. I will do that as I'm cutting them tomorrow. I'll try to do those. Do those all at once so that we get reimbursed correctly. Any questions or any other, anything else about finances that we have? Okay. Good news. Let's move on then. Communications committee talking about hosting services. Web design services and appointment of new members. So Chuck, I'll let you drive on this one. Great. So before we get to a couple of motions that we need to make, let me provide the board with a little bit of backstory and context. So last month we put out an RFP looking for a website developer on the CV fiber website. To that RFP we received four proposals. Some proposals had, you know, kind of big agency polish and, and a lot of detail and, and some were a little bit lighter on detail and, and you know, we're, we're clearly smaller agencies. The reality though is that only one proposal actually committed to standing something up by the deadline upon which we need something stood up. So we spent a lot of time in the communications committee talking about the merits of all of the different proposals and giving them all a fair shake. There were a couple we ruled out for miscellaneous reasons. One of the reasons included technology selection for the hosting of the website, selecting a fairly obscure platform or, or trying to push a proprietary platform. And we ultimately selected two finalists, even though only one of them even committed to completing the project in time and we interviewed both of them. And the interviews went pretty well. Both did seem like great candidates. However, the reality was one of them could not even start the work until after the new year. The great news is the candidate who did commit to doing the website by the end of the year. We had an absolutely wonderful interview with. She's, she's kind of an independent agency, one, one, one person shop. And she seems very approachable, very easy to work with, has, has decent design shops. And sounds like will be a really great fit for, for bringing our website to the next evolution. In addition to that, she just recently helped DV fiber, which is going to launch their website. And so what, what, our conversation with her has largely been is that for this next phase, we acknowledge we only have three weeks to get this done. So could we get pretty much to that, that level of sophistication. We're obviously not going to be to say EC fibers level of sophistication with interactive maps and routes and, you know, and stuff like that published yet at this point in time or the ability to sign up and register and, and check service levels that you're addressed, but at least to get something out there that, that has more polish provides quite a bit more information than we have today. And also presents our, our brand in, in a better way. And she felt very comfortable that she was going to be able to do that. And so, that's kind of the, the, the backstory. Any questions before we get to the motion coming out of the communications. Yes. Henry. I'm sorry. Checking. I want to mention our interview with the, the reference. Oh yeah. Henry, hold that thought. We also did reference check. And the reference was the chair of the communications committee at DV that DV fiber. And not only did he have absolutely wonderful things to say about working with her. He specified that he has worked with her in the past and would work with her again in the future, which in my book is always a great way to think about somebody's quality. So Henry fire away. I'm just curious. Will she be able to do the face to the COS system? A little bit of it. But at this point in time, we are actually still waiting for information from, I think it's actually supposed to be coups. Is that right? Michael coup systems. I think we're still waiting for information on exactly how that technical implementation can proceed. So. We're going to have to remain a little bit flexible as to what we can actually get by the end of the year on that based on how complicated it ends up being. We should be able to get at the very least things such as. Email newsletter signup form. And, and, you know, if we just got that, you know, we have one today, but it doesn't feed automatically into coups. So if we, if we got to that point, I think that would be good, but we will continue to explore the boundaries there and see if we can even get a little bit further. I guess similarly. If, if there's any way. Would she be able to do the embedding of, of. ArcGIS or any of that. I don't know how easy these APIs are. Or, you know, how technical they are. Sure. It again depends. I think we would need to do some research on ArcGIS and see exactly what their capabilities are. Now my understanding is ArcGIS is pretty sophisticated in terms of allowing you to embed content onto other websites. I don't know, David, if you want to weigh into that a little bit more, I guess my bigger question would be around licensing and how we're allowed to use it. Yep. So I may have to work on that, but it's, no, it's easy to do. And. Thanks. Any, any other questions. Okay. Hearing no other questions. I'm going to go ahead and proceed to the motion. Now I did send the language around to the board. So you could all get a preview of the language. And I'll go ahead and just read that here now into record. And thank you. Thank you. Ray for drafting it in a, in a really clear and concise way. It really is clear what we're asking for here. So whereas CV fiber desires a website that provides the public with user friendly access to information services and its governments governance. And whereas CV fiber desires a website that is secure, scalable, readily updateable and supports integration of email and third party services. And whereas CV fiber desires a website that is secure, scalable, readily updateable and supports integration of email and third party services. And whereas CV fiber published an RFP for the design and development of the website on November 19th, 2020 and received multiple proposals in response. It is moved that one CV fiber enter into a contract with code writer for the design development and technical support of a CV fiber website in accordance with the contract statement of work, such work to be completed. Other than the maintenance by 30th of December, 2020 and less extended by the parties. To CV fiber enter into such contracts as appropriate for the provision of email hosting maintenance and security services. Three CV fiber approves an amount not to exceed 7500 for the foregoing contracts, although we're actually going to amend that to 10,000 and I'll explain in a moment. So CV fiber approves an amount not to exceed 10,000 for the foregoing contracts. And for CV fiber authorizes the project manager to negotiate and the chair to execute such contracts and for the chair to approve any extensions as deemed appropriate within the authorized funding. So that is the motion. Second. Seconds. Any further discussion of this. To me, it seems pretty straightforward. Jeremy, I just note that the language is there in the chat room. Exactly as on the. On the chat and what's in the chat. Specifically number one, for example. We're talks about the website to be launched by 30 December. Yeah, launched by 30 of December. That's great. So that, that would allow us to have a maintenance portion of the contract. That would allow security updates to be applied. And if we wanted, you know, new page template down the road, something that we could get out of this developer over the course of the next one year. And, and that actually explains the difference in the price from the original motion to the motion that we have here. I won't get into specifics of what we were talking about in the there are a few different meat moving parts of the cost here. That is the initial design and development of the website to be launched by the end of the year. The secondary portion would be a maintenance contract or retainer for future work over the course of the next one year to be done in order to support its ongoing existence. So that's a good point. For future work over the course of the next one year to be done in order to support its ongoing existence. And then there's some other services such as hosting that we have to pay for separately in order to host said website. Any, any other questions, comments, discussion points. So this Microsoft versus Google thing that you and I have been talking about by email. Is this, does that included then in the $10,000 or is that it going to be a separate item? That would, that would be a separate item as it is thought of right now. It is worth noting just as an aside, I have applied for Microsoft's nonprofit program. A sales person I spoke to there said that while their website literature does not talk about municipalities and is really focused in 5013 C that they have been known to make exceptions in the past. And so he encouraged us to apply. And I did so today. Great. Yeah, so, so we were talking about essentially, you know, looking at Google as an option, looking at Microsoft as an option to, to have CV fiber dot net addresses for potentially for all board members rather than sort of the ad hoc, you know, CV fiber dot more town. At Gmail dot com that Chuck has. And I think that lends quite a bit more credibility to have our own domain name and that and also spending the money to have a hosted phone number. So if we go with Google and Google voice, I don't know what Microsoft calls their phone voice over IP product or whatever, but it would be something, something similar just so it so we're not putting, you know, my cell phone number on all of the letterhead and all of the, and everything, which, which is fine. I don't get that many calls, but I should say I don't get that many calls where I have to talk to people. So not that many people leave messages, but in addition, both of these services would include a cloud based document sharing and collaboration. And I know as an open body, we have to be a little bit careful on the collaboration aspect of it, but at the very least it would give us the sharing and the tools to be able to make edits. And the primary difference between the two, of course, being that the Microsoft suite of services comes with the desktop or thick clients. Whereas the Google suite of services is all web based. The Microsoft does have web based as well. Frankly, they're not quite as good in my humble opinion as the Google services, but you know, you can't beat those desktop applications are obviously best in class. Is this part of this portion? And if it isn't, can we vote? So, but so I wanted to make clear that we knew what we were voting on so that nobody's surprised when the next agenda item is about hosting, you know, with Microsoft or with Google. So this does not cover that then. This is specifically about the website itself. We'll keep email separate. It does include the hosting aspect of the website. So the website hosting is included in this package, but email hosting will be separate. Okay. One, one question. With that website hosting. I mean, I apologize. Who would that person be with specifically? Right now we're considering WP engine. They're a host that is specifically designed to host web WordPress websites at scale and take care of a lot of the update and security considerations. In addition to that at our scale, they're incredibly cheap at $300 a year. For up to, I think it's 25,000 visitors a month. And then the next year up above that goes to like 1200 a year. So they're incredibly economical. I've used them to run $40 million business websites in the past. And, you know, not had issues with security. There are some additional security considerations we could put into place on top. However, at this point in time, I don't think we need to quite go down that path, but for example, we could take. Cloud flares. Distributed denial of service protection layer and put that in front and their DNS hosting. For those of you, I'm happy to define any of these terms if anybody wants. But, but in the interest of time, just trust me that I don't think we need that just yet. Probably not. Yeah. We are going to start collecting. Customer data. And things like that. We got to be really careful about the GPR type of, you know, things that the recommendations that came into that. Yeah. And the good news here is that our vendor that is going to be handling the customer data and PII personally identify a little information. I don't know if I would have touched that one. Henry, you had your hand up. Oh, I just. Was. In the way or as clauses. There was no mention of the SEO. So I'm sure that is top of mind for them. So Chuck. Did you be a medical center? Try to hire you. He did not. I don't know if I would have touched that one. Henry, you had your hand up. Oh, I just. I don't know if I would have touched that one. But as clauses. There was no mention of the SEO optimization. I assume that's. That's part of the scope of work, though. She does include that as part of scope of work. That said, that happens to be my wheelhouse. So I'm going to take on some of that as well. So her, for those of you not familiar, she's been a regular manager. She's been a regular manager. So she's been a regular manager. She's been a regular manager. And I think she's been a regular manager. Manager managing growth. And SEO optimization teams at those large scale websites. So SEO is a thing I know a thing or two about. And think I can help with. And we appreciate your work and appreciate not sending invoices. Anything else on. On Chuck's motion here. All right. All in favor, please signify by saying aye. Chairman. Oh, I. Was that motion to be amended? Sorry. No, I didn't jump in here faster. So, and so as a point of order, we are, we are in the midst of voting. We can get back to that in a second. All those opposed signify by saying nay. Abstentions or folks who want to do this as a. As a general call. Okay. Motion passes unanimously. RD you had a question now that it's now that the motions passed. Was that motion to be amended? To change the sum from 7,500 to 10,000 or was that all. The tax. No, so, so that the 10,000 was included in the motion that I pasted into the chat. That is, that is the motion. Sorry. I haven't been able to find chat and go to meeting. So it's the upper right hand corner. There's the little picture of people. There's 22 people. There's a little like dialogue bubble. Click the dialogue bubble. There it is. Thank you. You're welcome. Excellent. All right. Thank you everyone for making that smooth. I do have one other motion pertaining specifically to this project that I want to put forward. And the background. I'm going to go back to that. I'm going to go back to that. And actually we, we maybe we'll just skip a motion. I guess I can just open it up for discussion because technically, I think the authority has already been delegated, but we have an incredibly tight timeline here. We have three weeks to get this done. And so there's going to be a lot of work to be done. And the key here is I don't think we're going to have a ton of room for board oversight to be able to hit our deadline. But I think we'll have a lot of time to spend. There's going to be a lot of people. With the communications committee running with this project. And, and if you want to be involved, I would encourage you to come join us as part of the communications committee, or at least as part of the project team on this project, if not joining the communications committee. On an ongoing basis, additional governance board approvals going forward on this particular initiative so that we can get into the finish line. I guess, you know, does anybody have a major strong objection to that idea? And if so, let's talk about it. No, I'm all for making it happen. Well said, Chair. Great. All right, so yeah, as far as I know, we had a motion in a previous meeting that essentially gave the communications committee the responsibility to go and do this. So I'm happy to operate under that assumption. So take the wheel. Great. Thank you, everyone. Does anyone... We're going to do appointments where there are people who are in the raise their hand. Yeah, there's still two more things under communications committee before we're done. So the first of all is, I wanted to talk about these hosting services. Does anybody have any feedback or thoughts about hosting email and such? So Chuck and I have been talking about specifically Google and Microsoft, the funding from with the CARES Act funds have to be spent on essentially the minimal duration package. And because Google, I believe has a monthly package, we would only be able to get funding for a month because that is going to get us the end of the year. If the minimum size package is a one-year package, we can do that. And it appears that the Microsoft package is in fact a annual contract. So... So Jeremy, I'm so sorry to burst this bubble a little bit. While that is what they advertise on their marketing pages, when you actually go to sign up, they do give you the opportunity for a month-by-month commitment. Okay, so we may decide to do this anyways and just absorb the price and using some of the funding that we've received from the Vermont Community Foundation. It seems like a valuable enough thing to do. Do you want to go into the economics of it really quick? If you'd like, yeah. Well, just a quick order of magnitude, like how much money we're talking about for the next year so that if we're saying, we're going to take $4,000 out of our $20,000 for the Vermont Community Foundation so that I can know, or we can all know, how much is left. Yeah. I think that would be helpful. So if we assume an account for each of the 20 delegates and maybe just like delegates and alternates share an account or something like that, plus we have three accounts for, say, Clerk, Treasurer and Project Manager, we are running between $13 to $1,600 a year for the base tiers on both products to about $3,300 a year for the higher tier. If we layer on the additional 20 for primary delegates and alternate delegates to each have their own account and email address, it essentially just doubles at that point in time. So we'd be looking at about $3,300 for the base tier and about $6,600 for the higher tier. And the primary difference of those is in the Google product, the higher tier includes meeting recording. We could switch to Google Meet, get rid of go-to meeting if we wanted to, but recording is a pretty important element to that or we could go for that lower tier and stick to go-to meeting, which I'm guessing is a lot cheaper than that price difference. The primary difference on the Microsoft side is whether you get access to the desktop apps or you have to use their web apps. And that does seem like a pretty important difference in the Microsoft ecosystem in my humble opinion. Mine do. Shavon. Does the Microsoft one come with Teams? It does. Yeah, so I'm leaning towards the Microsoft one just because the desktop apps and Teams, because we can record in Teams, can't we? Would there be a limitation on that? All I know is my experience with it, with the state has been fine, but the state's got all of these things. So I can't say that we'd have the same level. Anyway, I'm done. Let's see, Ray, Jeremy, Henry. Chuck, I didn't hear specifically that you made a recommendation. Could you articulate what that is? And then I'd like to get the floor back. I have intentionally avoided making a recommendation so as to not bias the conversation yet. I want you to bias the conversation. I want to be informed from some of the best people who know what the hell is going on. And so I want to know what your recommendation is. I mean, yes. I happen to be quite fond of the Google suite of services. I use it a lot in my work on a day-to-day basis. I find it to be quite adept at what it does. And if I never had to fire up the desktop applications, I would be quite happy. That said, the downside there is that I work in the startup world of not open meeting law-covered collaboration. And so there is a real benefit to having the desktop apps and not having to, say, compose a document on Google Docs, download it using their export feature, and then email it around. Being able to just have your document right there and email it around pretty quickly, there is some definite benefit in that. But I would probably lean towards the Google suite if this were solely my decision. OK, so as a lawyer, I'm used to having my advice ignored. And so I'm going to ignore yours. The second part was, the second part was, money is no object here, right? I mean, we're going to give back what we don't spend. And so the idea that we wouldn't have an email address for alternates, where we would really like to know who was the delegate and who was the alternate when we're having a conversation. So I think that's Pennywise and Tom Fowich. But I'd go with at least something that's going to get us to that tier, OK? And anything that's going to help us communicate and collaborate better, I'm all in favor of. So just as a point of information, money is an object here, because we can only pay for one month of this. And then we will have to absorb the cost of it for perpetuity in order to keep the stuff going. So if it's $3,300 a year, right? So that's roughly $300 that we can get the CARES Act funds to cover. And then the rest, it's going to be another $3,300 next year. But if we're saying, this is what I'm trying to find out, is of the $20,000 that we have from a community foundation, do we want to allocate $3,000-ish of it to do this? Or $6,600 if we want to go with the desktop apps. Right, which I see. I mean, if we need to give email accounts to alternates at CV Fiber as well, then yeah, this is part of the conversation. I'm hoping to at least get some wind blowing one way or the other, because we kind of need to move on this. Jeremy, you're next. Then Henry, then Siobhan. So one question that I had with regards to getting certainly accounts for alternates. I have Microsoft myself, so I'm not sure that I would specifically need the desktop app, because I already have the desktop app. I wouldn't use that. I wonder if we can do something that's a little bit more targeted, where we give out accounts to people that A would use them, because there are a lot of people that maybe show up to meetings, but don't write a whole lot and don't have their own access to the desktop apps. Just a thought, I don't know. With either provider, we would have the possibility, I believe, for no additional charge to create alias email addresses that forward to your personal address or a Gmail address or something like that. So we could certainly consider something like that. So I have Henry, then Siobhan, then John, then David. So my question is on the Google hosting. Are we talking about workplace? Is it the workplace suite that you're OK? I just went to a seminar on that, and so I am very familiar with all of the aspects of that. Looks like it's quite powerful. Yeah, and that was a prerequisite for getting a organizational license for Google Voice, which is what started this conversation in the first place. And it was for the public sector. The seminar webinar I just went to. Very good. So that could be where we land. Let's see. Siobhan, John, and David. Siobhan? I'm not sure I understood what you two just said about public I'm sorry. I didn't either. Don't go back, Siobhan. OK. I'm just saying I went to a webinar that was discussing the Google workplace, and it was particularly targeted to the public sector. But actually the whole conference, it's happening right now. It's a two-day conference. It's all for Google for the public sector. So if anyone's interested, email me. OK, so all right. So OK, I understand now. Just a couple of comments for me. There are a lot of people who object to Google, just in general, and aren't going to want to use it for that reason. The other thing is I probably won't need the desktop apps. I would like the desktop apps, but it would save us money. I could use my work computer for stuff if I had to. I would want an email, but I haven't had an active alternate ever. I don't know what happened to the one that they pointed. I mean, I suppose I could go up the hill. He just lives up the hill, but then I'd have to go up there. So so far, we'd save money on that. Can we do it piecemeal? I think Jeremy was kind of asking that. But can we do the desktop apps piecemeal as well to keep the price down? But then do we have to make a decision if we're going to buy pay for a year? We're going to pay for X licenses. Can we add a license in the middle of the year at a pro rate or something? OK, anyway, a number of questions there. And I don't know the answer to all of them. I can tell you your last questions. Yes, we can pro rate as we our needs grow or shrink or what have you, they allow you to add and remove licenses. And that's not a problem. Now, to your question around the desktop apps, if we were choose to do Google, no, because they don't have desktop apps. So that that would be off the table if we chose Google. If we went the Microsoft route there, I don't know whether you can have email only account. It's kind of an all a cart package and whether you can have some users on the lower tier that don't include the desktop apps and some users on the higher tier that do, I would have to look into that and get back to the group. OK, so I'm going to give Jeremy the last word, but we'll do John, David, and then Jeremy. Again, we're just trying to figure out a sense of whether this is something that we should go forward with. We're going to survive through the end of the year, but I don't know that we'll be able to use the CARES Act funds effectively this year. So John. So I echo Jeremy's thought that there may be a lot of people who already have the desktop apps. I do. I also have a preference for Google over Microsoft in general. So that sort of counteracts Saban's point. And I think that probably we have a lot of people in both directions in both camps. I also wanted to know, would there be an expectation that we use these email addresses? I have an email address that I use for everything, and I would prefer to continue to use that for everything. I'd be happy to let this CVFiber email address forward to mine, but then when I send something out, it's going to come from my address. It's not going to go back through CVFiber. I think that's a reasonable question. And I think that that's a kind of policy discussion that we've not yet had. Let's see. David and then Jeremy. I just want to say I own Microsoft Office 365. I pay for it every year. So I mean, I don't know how many people have it. I am definitely a Microsoft person because I find working in Google Docs and Google Sheets sucks. And Jeremy, you want to deliver the punch line? Yeah, I was just saying that forwarding to email addresses is maybe not the best thing, because you could set up a reply so that it replies from the CVFiber dot net email address. So it looks like it's just, but that's maybe tricky to do for people that don't know exactly what they're doing. So I think that if we're going to give people email addresses, they should be actual email addresses. Anyway. OK, sounds good. So I think maybe what we'll do is communications committee. If you next time you guys have a meeting, if you want to just chew on that for a bit, you can get into the weeds. And in the spirit of that, I'm going to move to appoint R.D. Eno to be a member of the communications committee. Second. Who is this? Seconded. David Healy. OK, thank you. Trying to talk about it here. Any further discussion? Any amendments by adding anybody? Any more voluntals? Yeah, does anybody else want to join the communications committee while we're in this? All right, so on that topic, I have invited a guest, Gabriel Gilman. You'll see him here. He is a more town resident and a state employee and an all around kind of shady character that I would trust immensely. Gabe, do you want to jump in and just kind of give a quick intro of yourself? Hi Chuck, thank you and my apologies for connecting a little bit late. I'm Gabe Gilman. I am a neighbor of Chuck's in more town and very interested in what you're doing and grateful to contribute in any way that I can. All right, so then Gabe, you'd be willing to serve on the communications committee and work with Chuck? Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. And that's quite an emotion. Great. And John, I saw you had your hand up briefly. Are you also interested in serving in that capacity? I am interested in the committee. I'm not sure that I have the time in the next couple of months. Perfect, though. That's exactly what I mean. So I'm sure we will continue to need folks after the next couple of months as well. So just to be 100% transparent here, part of the reason we're looking for a ramp up of people on the communications committee is that so we can have breakout groups more effectively of members of the communications committee to work on this website project. Because right now, three people is a quorum. And it's very hard to do anything. And so if we were to increase the size of this body to say seven or eight people and make four people a quorum, we'd have more effective collaboration. So John, if you did want to go ahead and join this committee for a couple of months time, get a feel for it, and then revisit in a couple of months time as to whether your participation is going to work, that is OK. One dangerous caveat there is the communications committee is going to have to have a few meetings over the course of the next few weeks, and we will need to reach quorum. And so I just want to make sure that anybody who does raise their hand right now, while you may not have to do any of the work coming up in the course of the next three weeks, that you're at least willing to show up for a couple of meetings over the course of the next couple of weeks so that we can have that quorum established. And if we're above quorum, you could probably even drop it if need be. All right, so any thoughts, John, before we take Jeremy's comment? The difficulty for me is that I am so busy that I often forget, as you may have noticed, that there's a meeting. If somebody would like to give me a call, I would be able to jump onto a meeting if you don't have quorum. Otherwise, I should probably not join. So Chuck, he could be your on-call quorum maker? Well, at this point between R.D. and Gabe, we would be at seven unless anybody is planning on stepping down and hasn't told me. So that does put our quorum at the four I was hoping for. So at this point, anybody else I think would be gravy. OK. And again, anybody who wants to be involved in the project is more than welcome to either join the committee or just reach out and get involved on an ad-off basis. Jeremy. So I had stepped down earlier. I'm not sure if I'm counted in that or not. But I could rejoin. So yeah, I'm not sure if I'm counted in that or not. But count me in it, I guess, is what I'm saying. Assuming everyone's happy with me. Jeremy, I never really recognized your stepping down. OK. Well, I guess we'll ignore that then. Well, I was wondering if I could get any emails. All right, well, let's keep going then. And I think, David, if you're amenable, we'll friendly amendment back. We'll go back and add Gabe Gilman to the appointment along with Artie Eno. It's a friendly amendment approved, yes. All right, so any further discussion about this? Wonderful. All in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed abstentions or roll call requests. Excellent. Passes unanimously. Thanks, everybody. Chuck, you've got some more bodies. Anything else from communications that you would like to do at this point? That wraps up what we have other than the fact that we have a lot of work ahead of us. And so I'll be reaching out to some people individually to pull in as needed. So don't be surprised if you hear from me. But otherwise, we'll be kind of rolling up our sleeves and trying to get this done. So thank you, everyone. All right, thanks, Chuck. So moving along, Business Development Committee, report, David? Got it. So the Business Development Committee met last week. And I forwarded a proposed resolution for tonight to adopt on moving forward with developing and putting out an RFP for contractors to do the inventory, the design, engineering, make ready, construction, and operations of a CV5 or first build. I've pasted into the chat room the resolution, which I will read. And I'm making a motion that we do this. And then somebody can second after I read it. Just a second. David, I don't see it in the chat. You may have sent it directly to somebody. If you could just make sure it's set to everyone. Oh, forgot to hit the send button, I guess. Is it there? You knew. Let me tell you, it does look like it got cut off. Yeah, I can I can paste in the rest. Just go ahead and start reading it. I'll get the rest. Whereas CV5 was formed to deliver fast, reliable internet service to the unserved, underserved, and those with unreliable service within its 20 member communities, the project. And whereas CV5 has completed the feasibility study and business plan for the project. And whereas CV5 will be funding the project with state and federal grants and loans, customer subscriptions and individual loans and presubscriptions. And whereas CVFiber has retained the services of a project manager to oversee the implementation of the project. It is moved that CVFiber approves the development of one or more RFPs by the business development committee together with the project manager. One for poll data collection and design and construction. A third for operation for each for phase one of the project. That the RFPs will be submitted to the board for review and approval at the board meeting on January 12th, 2021. For the target issuance on January 18th, 2021. And that the RFPs each provide for the possible award to one entity, a group, for phase one, or for awards to multiple entities to meet the requirements thereof. And that operations is to consist of actions typically performed by an internet service provider, such as network operations and maintenance, as well as customer operations, including but not limited to installation system maintenance and management, customer support and billing. So that's motion. Okay. Okay. Siobhan seconded it. Thank you very much. Discussion. Henry. So I'm curious how this is going to interact with the NRTC work. Is that independent of this? Or is that somehow combined with this? Or how does that work? Well, that's sort of why we're waiting till middle of January to do this. We should have some settling of that out by then. We doubt that we'll have anything settled with work by then, but we will know what NRTC outcome will be by then. Okay. So you don't know whether it's one way or the other, whether it's separate or part of the scope of the work. So the RFP will address all those issues and let the bidding entities understand some of the things they're going to have to be flexible with. Okay. Another question is you referenced the feasibility study. Has the feasibility and business plan been updated for Duxbury? Do you got anyone? I would ask him whether he's had any communication with Interow on that. I did talk to Fred. It's he's working on it in Duxbury and Waterbury. So we'll get that by the end of the year. This was an expectation for Washington. Okay. All right. That's it. All right. Thanks, Henry. Michael. Oh, I'm sorry. There was one last question, which is how is this assuming that we get the startup funding for the Vita loan then? Or how does that work with the finances in terms of us being able to fund that work in January? So putting out the RFP in January or early February, probably doesn't mean we're going to be selecting anybody. It's all March 1st at the earliest, I think. And we will have access to possibly, I mean, we can access the money from the state beginning on January 1st is what the current plan is. So we would have some money to start to not only match Vita's requirements, but also start on the inventory and design work. Excellent. Thank you. All right. Michael. Call everyone's attention to the dates that are in the motion. Approval of board meeting on January 12th for target issuance on January 18th. I support the motion, but I also want everyone to be aware, at least in my opinion, that that target may change. The target date of January 18th may change based on what we learn about what other entities are doing so that we can properly select the group. One date I can give you now, as of yesterday, the FCC announced that the prohibited communications period will end on January 29th. There will be more information coming out before that, but the full information won't be free to be talked about until the end of January. So it's possible that we may be looking at something at the beginning of February rather than the 18th. Yeah, it says target date. That's why the word target's there, and I just want everyone to be aware of that. And we can amend it on the 12th as necessary. So Siobhan, then Ken. I was just going to point out the 18th is pretty much the date it's not going to happen. That's the date we put in there for the day it's not going to happen. You have little faith. All right, Ken. Yeah, and I don't see the necessary relationship between the embargo on information from Ardolf and releasing the RFP. They still have a significant period of time to respond to the RFP, and there will be additional information that's available after the release. So I do want people because I do feel this one's going to benefit from some significant time for the responders to really learn a great deal and respond directly to it. So I'm enthusiastic about actually getting it out there, even with the recognition that some of the details won't be available for them to respond to until into the response period. I've read and Michael again. So Ken, it's likely that there's going to be some sort of a footprint that let's say we're talking about just a general thing. And that it's likely that some of the Ardolf stuff is going to have some sort of footprint within those three communities, for example. And if that's the case, it would be helpful to know that when we define phase one, we can actually define phase one more clearly for purposes of bidding. And that's why phase one isn't defined. It was originally defined in the motion that you saw the first time around. And that was taken out because of that. Plus at the same time, we didn't want to raise the expectations of particular communities or incur the ire of other communities. So that's why phase one was not defined here. And we will define phase one when we get to the point where we have a motion to put before the board and for them to approve it before it's actually released. Very pretty much said what I was going to say. Ken, the only reason to wait is that we don't want to ask someone to bid on a route that is going to change. They need to know what they're bidding on. And so if the route is possibly going to change based on the information that comes out, it would do better to get it right the first time. OK, anything else on David's motion? Everybody ready to vote? All in favor of the motion signified by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, abstentions, or roll call requests? Motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Anything else, David? I'll let Tim take care of the canvassing stuff. OK, under the project manager's report. Yeah. Cool. All right, let's do policy committee report. Alan, this is yours. So the policy committee, can everybody hear me OK? Yep, yep, yep. Thanks. So the policy committee met last, oh, no, last night. Yeah, last, yeah, Monday. And it's funny. So I don't even know what month it is, let alone the day of the week. Give me a break. And what we're trying to do is to respond to the proposal that had come before the board back in November to make some changes to the conflict of interest policy so we could cover situations where there might be a conflict of interest that a contractor or a subcontractor may have. So what we did last night was we looked at a proposal that I sent out to all of you about two and a half hours ago. And I've just sent out on the chat function the meat of what the changes would be. What we're suggesting is that we do make some changes in the form of an addition, a new additional F portion to the board, governance board, conflict of interest policy. But that in addition to those three items in the new section F, we add language to every conflict, to every RFP and to every contract going forward that speaks to the responsibility of the contractor to in an RFP tell us who the contractor is planning to have as a subcontractor should they get the contract. And then if the contractor bidding adds another subcontractor that wasn't on their initial list, they have to get approval from the CV Fiber Governing Board or I wrote it the board or the executive committee and we can talk about that later. They would have to get approval from one of those entities before the subcontractor was approved to become part of the work. The language that is what I call attendant to the policy, the language about RFPs and the language about the contract itself is actually from state contracts. David Healy was nice enough to dig up state contract for me and he found that indeed the state is already covering what I think we have been having some difficulty figuring out how we could deal with. And I came to the conclusion and the board last night, I think agreed that really this is more of a contract issue than it is a policy issue. We still think it's fine if we put some language in our conflict of interest policy, but the real defining language that's going to allow the identification of subcontractors is going to be in the language that goes either into the RFP or goes into the contract. So let me stop there and see if there are any questions about what's going on and how this is going to work. I have a minor correction in your updated language under section F3. There was a copy and paste that just mentions central Vermont internet. So if that could just be made CV fiber, that's trivial, but I'm sorry to point it out. Yeah, I noticed that the other day when I was going through. For a point of clarification, Jeremy, are we still officially in the Secretary of State's office central Vermont internet or is that changed? We are. We authorized, in our last meeting, we authorized me to go and make that change. I haven't done it yet. I'm going to do that when I finish migrating this weekend next week. Yeah, it was me that was supposed to do that, Jeremy. That was you? I thought so, seeing as I've got the account with the Secretary of State. Well, go and do that then. I haven't gotten to it. I've got finals and all sorts of stuff going on. Wait until after finals. So I'm really not convinced that there's a pressing need for that particular bit of administration right now. Well, I'm certainly glad I included central Vermont internet in this document. So we've had this discussion. You guys. Thank you, Alan. Yes, you're welcome. All right. Any other questions about these changes? Is everybody happy with these? Tom? I'm just considering how contracting and RFP work will happen down the road. And I'm wondering, should we have some sort of formalized like stage gate of a committee forms a form? Maybe it goes through the policy committee for review or anything like that, just to make sure we're not making governance rules just so we can completely ignore them down the line. So if I understand correctly, the question is, should we have some mechanism for reviewing contracts and RFPs before they go out? Boy, that's a question probably not for the policy committee, but for Jeremy, somebody else on the executive who thinks like an executive at this point. I mean, we could find ourselves in the roles of being full-time employees if we're not careful here to pay. Well, some of us are already the ones who are laughing, aren't they, but we're all looking like David. Ray, you sort of talked a bit about contracts last night when we were meeting. And it seemed to me from the way you were talking, we ought to be able to come up with standard language, sort of what the state has done. And just make sure that that's in all of our contracts and all of our RFPs. And then beyond that, for this issue, I mean, for stuff beyond this issue, I don't know how you guard against other things happening. We can definitely do that. And you might have noticed in the last motion, we actually approved that the board is going to review the RFPs to be issued for the polls, as well as the operations and design construction, for example. So you're actually going to see that. And you'll see contract language in there concerning conflict of interest. But Ray, there's no reason that we should require that kind of review for every contract, right? I don't want to get into that. We want to understand it for the ones that really are of substance and there's an important issue at stake. Well, there's some people that ought to see that. It's really kind of technical stuff. I mean, it's boiler, a lot of boilerplate stuff. But the stuff that the board should be really interested is in the recommendation from the various committees concerning the statement of work. I mean, that's the details, right? The resident has to do with the legal obligation from the parties and things like, with the format of the response. So they're all saying the same thing, the same paragraphs, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, and it meant, so I would expect that if the boards saw an RFP, they would kind of focus in on particular items and the rest of the stuff, y'all won't care that much about it. So we should really be thinking in terms of almost two different parts of the contract, the boilerplate stuff, it really is boilerplate stays there, doesn't change unless there's a reason. Part B, which is the particulars of that contract. Absolutely, the statement of work. All right, David and then R.D. Yeah, I was just gonna say that the language that I gave Alan came from attachment C of the state contracting language. And it's always an attachment to every contract and it's in every RFP that the state issues so that the bitter nose with the state's boilerplate is and you pay attention to it because they do pay attention to it. R.D. What constitutes a conflict of interest and who on the board is responsible for identifying a possible conflict of interest? Well, that is a great question that many minds in the legislature have been a lot of thought into. We tried to, in the conflict of interest policy, to answer those questions as best we could. Basically our conflict of interest policy is one that was drafted by Jim Barlow who used to be on the board. He's an attorney. He used to work for Vermont League of Cities and Towns. And I think he used the League of Cities and Towns model policy as a model for ours. So it tries to define conflict as well as anybody in the state has been able to do it. But I've got to tell you, R.D., the whole issue of what exactly constitutes a conflict of interest is often in the eye of the beholder. And this has been a difficult issue for everybody in state government. And frankly, in all municipalities and boards, public boards across the state. And I think we're all working on this, identifying conflicts of interest and doing something about it. But it's not a hard and fast science that can be applied to this point. So R.D., I would point you to Alan's email to the board at 4.35 this afternoon, which has the entirety of the policy which has a specific definition of what we call prohibited conduct. And that's going to hopefully clarify it. So I have Tom, then Ken. So first, this is a site that I was brought up with Alan earlier today of, we don't really have a location where all the policies that we've created are housed. So one can go easily look up what our governing body policies are. It might be something we want to work towards, whether it's on Google Drive or whatever. Another thought, I mean, I was basically looking to see like if we have a checklist or maybe if we already talked about other contracts going out the door today for doing web pages and so forth, just that I'm not looking to slow things up, but that before someone pushes the send button, there's a five point checklist that says, hey, did this get included? Did this get included in the airport? And whether it's boilerplate that gets thrown in there, that's fine. But just to make sure that, I mean, if I was sending that out, I would want to have some mechanism to be able to ensure that I'm not putting myself in hot water by going against port wishes. I think that seems reasonable. I don't think we have that checklist just yet, but it would be nice. Ken? Yeah, so right, the text that we're looking at here, to me does raise the question of, is this in the context of conflict of interest or is it yours at the more broader topic of malfeasance, other behaviors that would be the basis for us to not have someone work on a project. So I work for the state and I do, when that clause and attachment C comes before us, we have a checklist of items that we go through and actually conflict of interest is not one of them, that I'm aware of it maybe, but it's not one of them. So again, as we pass this, I think we need to be very clear that if this is our means of addressing conflict of interest, we should be really clear about that because say oftentimes, it puts a burden on us as board members to recognize a conflict of someone when there are these other topics of malfeasance and poor behaviors that I think is what we're also very interested in making sure subcontractors are addressing or that are meeting standards. So if I, oh, go ahead, Alan. Okay, so Ken, this did come up to some extent at our meeting last night. And I think one of the problems we have as a board is we don't have any administrative arm. I mean, we have Tim working for us right now, but we don't have the resources of the state or the legislature or even a company that might be able to do investigations or might be able to make inquiries on a significant basis. And I think generally that's what makes defining and identifying and dealing with conflicts of interest really, really difficult for a lot of public entities. We're not greatly resourced in essentially being people who can police things that maybe haven't been done correctly by somebody or they got out of line. And so we have to come up with the systems that we think are going to work the best, be effective and will catch as much of the stuff as we possibly can. And I think following the state language is the best option for us right now because we know the language has been vetted, it's been around, but we have to remember this is going to be only one small part of a contract and we can put all sorts of other protections and backstops in a contract that we want to. But in terms of how could you do better with a policy on policing conflict of interest? I think about as far as we've been able to figure out how to go. Yeah, and my perspective, looking at this as a former select board member, municipal officers kind of have to deal with this also as in a lot of cases, in many cases as unpaid volunteers as well. And they have to navigate the same conflict of interest and as a three-person select board in Elmore, they have to do this. Montpelier City Councilors have to do this. Montpelier City Councilors have staff though to manage that, but the select board members in small towns and in large towns still have to look at malfeasance, they still have to look at conflicts of interest. And yeah, and there's a bit of flying by the seat of our pants I think is maybe a glib way of putting what Alan was saying out there. So I mean, I would say if there's other things that we should be doing, I mean, I think we can certainly add to this, but is there something in here Ken that you think we ought to be taking out or doing differently? I think it's the context of the language that again, this has been raised in the terms of conflict of interest. And it, this is way more than that. And I think it's appropriate. We need to have a mechanism to assure that we have some ability to review subcontractors. Absolutely. But again, I'm not sure that it hits conflict of interest very, very squarely. If this policy was renamed so that it was a bit broader in title, would that be sensible? Yes. Okay. Do you have a name in mind? What's the current name? Policy on conflicts of interest. Her ref F is added to what? I'm sorry. Her ref F is added to what? The governing board's policy on conflict of interest. I mean, we could call it conflict of interest and ethics or some conflict of interest. Yeah. I do not have a suggestion at this point. So if maybe for right now, if we could just keep the amendments as they are, and then as we look to broaden this, or if somebody comes up with a reasonable title for this, I think that's a pretty easy change. I mean, I would be perfectly happy if we had a good turn of phrase right now to do this. Let's do that. Otherwise, I think we can approve this and then give it a better name down the road. R.D. I saw you pop your hand up for a second. Yeah, R.D. Yes. I would recommend that if there's boilerplate from the state defining conflict of interest that we appended to our policy. And Alan, I'm not sure whether I heard an answer to the question of who is to evaluate whether a contractor or a potential contractor has a conflict of interest. Who on CD5 is responsible for making that assessment? Well, essentially, if the conflict of interest becomes apparent because of information that's given in response to an RFP, it's whoever is on the board, or maybe it's the full board, is doing a review of the proposal. And R.D., this is section D of the policy. It clearly lays out how these conflicts of interest shall be disclosed and managed. I don't mean to cut you off, Alan, but this is pretty clearly stated in the policy. It pertains to the governing board, not to contractors though. Right. So yeah, so it's gonna be us and we're gonna be expecting that they're going to be reporting conflicts of interest if they have them. That's a contractual obligation from them to us. If one of us discovers that there are conflicts with a contractor or subcontractor, then it's gonna be on us to inform the contractor that they're in violation of the contract. And then there's legal remedies to proceed from there. But it's on us as the governing board. I mean, we're the shepherds of this organization and it's going to be us that are gonna be the initial folks that are gonna be doing the, not the enforcement, but calling the enforcement. Siobhan, you're muted. You're muted. I'm a dork. It is for force relying on the people responding to the RFPs to make themselves aware of the policy. They would have to read the RFP. They would see the conflict of interest information. It's gonna be there. And if I were going to enter into a contract with somebody and I saw a language like that, I would think, okay, well, if I don't disclose conflicts of interest, they could come back and haunt me because then I'm in violation of contract and I've got no recourse for collecting on the contract. I can understand that there's only so much we could do. Like if we could see a name, like if we say we had a bad contract experience with this contractor a year ago. And then RFP comes through and they're suggesting using that contractor as a sub and they have that in the list in the RFP. It's on us to remember, oh, that's the contractor that we had a really bad experience with and to have an enter into a dialogue with them and say, yeah, not this one. Can you find somebody else or something like that? So there's some given take there, but we don't have a lot of resources to go to the investigate what's going on with everybody, but we do kind of know who's on the naughty list at this point. And if those names appeared, we'd have a chance to have a thought and a discussion about it. I guess I've done. All right. Maybe last word, Tom, and I'd like to have a vote on this. Some of that information to the board is one thing, but I think the bigger thing here is protecting the board that if some other company comes along and doesn't get an award contract, but then notices a conflict of interest that they're not coming back and trying to sue for reparations or something. I mean, that's the major point of a conflict of interest clause, right? Is to try to protect us from people who are thinking that a contract is being done in an improper manner. I suppose that's fair. Okay. Unless anybody really is screaming to comment, let's take a vote. So we have an amendment to the conflict of interest policy and I will just ask the policy committee, once this is amended, just to change central Vermont internet to CV fiber and actually it occurs a couple of places earlier on in the policy as well. But all those in favor of the amendments as presented, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. So I missed this. Was there an actual motion to adopt my connection cut out for a sec there? Allen, did you? Yeah, I think what I proposed, and I meant that to be a motion, I didn't use the word motion against a move, but I proposed that we just say I'll move that we accept the proposal. That's fine. Okay. I did we have a second? I think Siobhan's seconded it because that's what you would do. Thanks, Siobhan. Thanks, Siobhan. Okay, thanks for that, Jeremy. Any opposed abstentions or requests for roll call? Okay, motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Anything else on policy committee, Allen? No, that's it. Thanks very much, everybody. Appreciate it. Thank you. Moving on, grant funding update and CARES funding options. I'm sorry, project manager report. I skipped you, Tim. Nope. All right. So we talked a little bit about the COO systems. Dave and I have been working with them and they are setting up what they call zones, which will be our roots broken down into more finite chunks. And we can start using the software, expect that they'll be done with those changes this week. And then at some point we'll have a handoff from them to integrate that within our website, which will just be a link out basically to them. Canvassing, David sent some metrics from last mile. They're well underway and we'll send weekly updates. Last week they made over 500 phone calls and having it was 143 respondents fill out a survey. And subsequently others would follow up later. They're going to hit those that they didn't reach the first time as well as continue on the 2700 plus phone numbers that they have. They're also going to start a text campaign for those that they have mobile numbers with information as far as encouraging people to fill out the surveys. They have reported that they've had very good feedback and engagement with those that they are able to reach. So it sounds promising. And as we likely guess there's many who are eager to find out what's happening and when it will reach them. And their team is likely going to start their door to door either later this week or next week of starting to hit boots on the ground with that operation as well as they will continue on the phones. I did send the trifold in the door hanger which will be used for those canvassing operations went to the printer today and pushing them to hopefully get those, pick those up this Friday and deliver those to a last mile to start with that operation. I think Chuck talked pretty much about the website. So I'll reach out to a code writer and we'll set up a kickoff call tomorrow with them. And then I'll also alert the others who were not awarded that business. And I'll continue work on the Vita application. I did send around the areas that they will look for us to address in that application process as well as helping David who's begun the ISP RFP. I'll help him continue to work on that for issuance following completion there. I believe those are the tasks that I've been up to at this juncture. Any questions for Tim? Henry then Alan. Yes, I'm just wondering about kind of coordinating with the town delegates as they're doing the canvassing. I mean, I'd be happy to contribute to that if I knew they were working on Duxbury, for example, or whatever. I did send them all your contact information. And so as they begin, they have been told to reach out and see if there's how much engagement you would like. So they do have your information, email information and I'll remind them to reach out prior to things happening. Thank you. Okay, Alan then David. So Tim, is it correct to think that if somebody hasn't been contacted by last mile, by Wednesday of next week, if they haven't been contacted over the phone, that they should expect a visit to the door and if they want to avoid somebody coming to their door, they should take the survey online because some people have more or less asked me this question. So they'll be continuing with the phone calls through the end of the year really, because they'll keep trying to go back for those they haven't reached. So that work will continue through the end of the year, but they will start some ground operations as well. I don't have a schedule of where those are starting, but they'll be obviously targeting those that they haven't reached via the phones. But the preferred method is reaching out. Yeah, what some people in Worcester have mentioned to me is they really would rather not have people coming to their door. I mean, given the pandemic and I think probably under pandemic regulations, at least through the 15th of December, there really shouldn't be contact with people in going by residents. And so I think it's fair to offer people the opportunity to take it online, which I appreciated getting that web address where people can go. And I know where people who have contacted me have gone, I hadn't done that. But I just don't want to see us get in trouble for violating pandemic restriction rules because we have people knocking on doors and they probably will be doing that. Okay, yeah, if you could take that back to last mile and see what they have to say about that, I think that's valuable. I have David and then I'm adding myself to the list after David. Yeah, just for everybody knows, they don't have phone numbers for everybody. They have phone numbers for about 65% of the addresses that we gave them. So they need to find a way of reaching these people. And if people don't answer the door, there'll be a material left on the doorknob to fill out the survey. Doing Front Porch Forum is a great way of doing it. In fact, when I put out the message on Front Porch Forum, I got a lot of people filling in the survey. So, and when they do that, when they look at that list before they make a call, because they're not calling somebody that filled out the survey. And that goes by address. Oh, sorry. Yep. Okay. Okay, so I'm up next then, Chuck. So my question for you, Tim, is about, again, about the canvassing, and this is maybe what Chuck, what you were about to say is, we had talked about the tempo of their phone calls and whether 500 was actually a reasonable number given the amount of time that they've spent on it. That's still, to me, seems like a, for the number of people they have, that seems to me too, like a small number. I mean, if I'm running a political campaign, I can personally do 500 calls in a week. No big deal. And I know Connor Casey and some of the other folks on that team have definitely personally made more calls than that in the given week themselves. So I'm just wondering if they can justify why it's so slow? I mean, if that's the raw number of calls, I'm gonna agree with Chuck and Echo what he said last week, that that seems pretty sluggish, frankly. Yeah, I can check on the actual metrics of how many people are doing it and what their volume are in a given day to get some sense of justification there, but would agree, because they had talked about up to 12 people, but I don't think they have 12 people full time, clearly making phone calls at this juncture. Yep, Chuck. So my question is actually something quite different, but thank you, Jeremy. So I'm actually changing the subject a little bit, but on the COOS systems, I think we're gonna need to have a call with them a little bit around discovery on website integration capabilities. Tim, can you drive setting that up so that I can be armed with providing our new code writer, vendor, all of the details of what the possibilities are and the exact capabilities and documentation on the integration touch points and so forth? Well, it'll be probably likely with Jessica, I'll work with your schedule. Okay, thank you. You should have the link. Okay, anything else for Tim? Okay, moving on to grant funding update and CARES funding options. Do we have anything to talk about here that's not WEC or ARTOF? We have a separate item to talk about that. Or is this, yeah, David? Well, I mean, if Congress changes, decides they're gonna act this week or next Monday, we could see an extension on the use of the money that we weren't able to spend. So, I mean, I'm super pessimistic about it, but I mean, if you're feeling motivated, call up Peter Welch and see if he could hear from another few people he hasn't already heard from. But he's on board as far as I know. Yep. All right. Moving on, discussion on our relationship and moving forward with WEC and some of the public information that came out of ARTOF this week. Who wants, so Michael or David, I mean, if you wanna be careful about what you say, if you wanna give us a summary about what we saw with the public release of information, I can talk about it briefly too. My first instinct, no, I guess I'll start. So, I was looking, so the consortium to which we belong, one fairly large number of blocks. If you haven't already read the message that Michael sent out, which I'll have to go back and look at side, did I get it? Yes, I see it. So there's the breakdown. You'll see that the lion's share of the blocks were given to, given to, were won by consolidated. And those are, that's consolidated fiber. So the company that's currently doing basically DSL in the state is now moving on in a big, big way to fiber. So, related to this discussion, Tom, it looked like you had commented that you had actually gotten a survey from consolidated because you may be in the service area for them. I don't know if you had any takeaways from what you saw in that? It seemed to me mostly, are you happy with us? And if not, why kind of survey questions? Because you suck. On my end, I don't know if your experience, I've looked at the files you shared, but on my end, they did ask a lot of questions around remote work and whether there are people working here, whether this was a business, yada, yada, yada, but I do have a business tier account with them. So maybe that's why. Yeah, I don't think I saw that. It was mostly the how things go in question and then probably more than half of the survey was stats about you, your income level and how many kids you have and whatever. Mine had no demographics information, so definitely quite a slightly different survey. Was that on paper? No, it was an email that came in and went to a website. Okay. So, Michael has a nice breakdown in that email that he sent out about the amounts and which towns, which CV fiber towns got or had blocks won by which entities. So that's pretty nice. And David, I'll let you, you were gonna say something too, but you would also put together a nice map, as I recall. Map is there, you can see we're in our, we're, you know, the full vendors and where they're located. I mean, you know, who knows what it's gonna, we haven't sorted out the implication yet. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Chuck and Siobhan. Okay, so I don't know what I'm allowed to say here or not. So let me start with a couple of questions first. Can I call out, you know, I guess you just mentioned it's solidated. So I clearly can call out specific ISPs, yes. And can I call out specific regions they were awarded? You can see it on the map. If it's on the map, if it's in the public information dump that came out yesterday, then you can talk about it. Is the link you shared of your map, the public information? Yes, that's the public information. Okay, cool. All right, so my region was awarded Starlink. What the hell does that mean? Elon Musk loves you. That means, I mean, I get that, but it's satellite. That means nobody bid on that block that was offering fiber or they were asking for such a large subsidy that somehow Starlink came in at a better score. I mean, that's, I assume that's how the math works out. And I mean, Michael, feel free to correct me, but that's, I mean, that's the way it would have to have worked out. And Michael, you're muted if you're, it looks like your lips are moving. Not the only dark. I mean, you're not the only dark. So let's take a hypothetical census block group in North Carolina and there's a consortium and there's an incumbent telephone company and there's a cable company and there's Starlink and they're all interested in winning the support in that census block group. And the auction starts at a certain level and it gets to the point where they finally have a clearing round where awards can be made. And if, at that point, there's a tie between two fiber providers that will go on to the next round but if in that round there's no fiber provider and the cable provider decides to drop out and Starlink is still standing, then they can win it. And so what conceivably Starlink's strategy was is to bid in every single block in the United States of America and gather whatever money they can get from whatever blocks nobody feels is worth bidding on because it's gonna be too expensive to build there for the subsidy that's being offered. So that's how a block could end up in the hands of a lower tiered bidder. Starlink was given the right to bid at a fairly high level just under fiber. So they could outbid some other technologies. So that also gives you some color as to how they could have ended up in certain towns. It's because the other bidders withdrew that they could win. Is that helpful? That is, thank you. Siobhan. So space exploration technologies as Starlink? Yes. Yes. Okay. All right. So I'm just looking at the map. I lost orange. Where did orange go? Near Plainfield. South of Plainfield, east of Berry. There it is, there it is. I found it, I found it. All right, so I'm looking at the light green that is consolidated. So the stuff on David's map that is light green is the area that consolidated has said we're gonna serve these people? Is that if they're reading? Pardon? That is the, I'm not looking at the map. I don't know if there's only one, but there may be a few census blocks. Within a census block group of multiple census blocks that the FCC is asking people to, companies to serve for a particular level of subsidy. Okay, okay, okay. Okay, I must stop you. I'm on Tricklebrook Road. Yeah. Reservoir Road doesn't have anything on it, but Bissen Road, the Cutler Corner Bissen Road, Brooke, Orange Brook Circle here has light green on it. And that's just a parcel of land over from mine. It's like, so they're gonna serve the people, the four people who live on Bissen Road. I'm exaggerating. I think there's 10 people that live on Bissen Road. But not the eight of us who live on Tricklebrook Road and up Reservoir Road a little bit. Is that the idea that they're only obligated to serve these green spaces? That's right. That's right. The subsidy is not for a whole town. It's for locations in a census block that are 100% not served. Okay. So there's another census block that you live in that is partially served. Partially served. And so that's the, okay. All right, I understand it. Thank you. It wasn't in the auction. Okay. So they're not obliged to serve you, but it's quite likely that if they're building nearby, that they will very likely be building more fiber than just to those 10 houses or whatever. I don't want them. Your service is awful. All right. All right. I understand. Thank you. All right. I see a Tom and Henry. What's the timeline on that? That they are obliged to serve within 10 years. 10 years. Six years. 50 years. The support last, the support is 10 years of support. And they have to show progress within two years, right, Michael? Three years. If they show progress, they have to complete 40% of the build in three years. If they complete 20% of the build in two years, they get a better deal with the FCC going forward. But the minimum obligation is to do 40% of what they won within three years. Quick question. David, is this map suitable to be shared with the public? Yep. Let me put it in. I just did. Oh, you did. Okay, thank you. So, let's see. Henry, then Alan. Yeah, I just was gonna comment that a big reason why the data is so inaccurate from the FCC census blocks is because it's based on the 2010 census. So that's gonna change in the future when since 2020 is just complete. If we ever get the 2020 data, I'm on the apportionment board and we won't be able to meet our statutory obligation to do the apportionment because we won't have the data in time. Okay. That's unbelievable. It's actually based on E911 data. Not in Duxbury. Well, it may not be accurate, but it was based on state provided E911 data. I don't think so. All right, well, why don't you guys take it offline? You can fight that one out. Alan, you're next. So I wanna make sure I understand these maps. It seems to me that some of the most important information you want is not on the maps. All those areas where nobody is going to be doing any work, it doesn't necessarily mean that nobody wanted to bid on those areas. It simply, it could mean that or it could mean that they were never identified as a census block to be served. Is that right? Can I keep answering questions? Yeah, go for it. Okay. Every census block group in Vermont was awarded. None of them were not awarded. Everyone was bid upon and were all awarded. But many, many census block groups in Vermont were not in the auction. The reason they weren't in the auction is because at least one location taints it such that it can't be considered 100% unserved. And that's based on some faulty data as Henry's pointing out. Based on provider self-reporting of what levels of service they deliver. It's based on a lot of things. So it's not ideal, but that was the ground rules. So all the census block groups that were eligible were awarded and the map accurately shows who they were awarded to. In the case of consortia, you can't know which consortia member was awarded which group. And that will come out later. So I was looking at this map trying to figure out of what strategic value is this to us in terms of trying to figure out where we want to start working first or second or third or whatever. Because if you look at the map generally, it kind of looks like you have little bits of cancer that are starting to grow from parts of the area. I mean, it's metastasized in some places to larger areas, but otherwise through the CV fiber area, it's all, it's kind of overmo- it's somewhere in most of the funds but not huge chunks of it for the most part. So it's almost as though somebody was setting up a system for blocking somebody who wanted to build a line through a town because maybe a third of the town now is gonna get served by somebody else. And so therefore the other people, the other two thirds on the other side of that block have just had the chance of there being served by an incumbent diminished and by being served by somebody like us, that's probably diminished as well because we can't pick up those customers in the first third of the mile or first mile of three miles. Am I missing something here? It does not seem like a positive thing to look at for people like us who are trying to build a area-wide system. We could say we could have the opportunity to build out first before they did. Because we now know where they're going to build? Well, we know where they're gonna build and we know where we were planning on building. I don't know, there's some little debate to go on on this one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems like an arms race to me. It seems like fuel has been put on the fire on the arms race. And that's why I think this is also when we start talking about WEC we're gonna have overlap between this discussion and that discussion. Because I think WEC is going to possibly make possible, David, what you just said, maybe we are, now we know where to start building. I mean, maybe that's what it is. All right, so if we could do a Tom, then Michael, then David, I have to step aside for a bit because I'm getting to bed time. So I'll be right back and you guys can take in that order. Tom, David, or time Michael and David. Well, I mean, it seems like both for us and for consolidated and everybody else, maybe not SpaceX, if we have to build 40% out within three years, then that's gonna very heavily lean on where you're gonna build. If you can, does it go by number of residences or land area? I mean, what's it going by? So that I mean, consolidated is probably gonna go by major metropolitan area to try to build out as much as they can within that number first. So they make sure to ensure their funding is accurate. Michael. David's laughing. He can answer this best, I'm sure. Michael, I think you're right, Tom. So Tom, you're onto something. This is where we're getting into the area where we're not allowed to speak. We can't speak about strategy. We can't speak about the bidding process that took place. We can't speak about plans. So I can speak generally to your question and that is it would behoove any company. First of all, the answer is it's about the number of locations, it's not geography. So you're correct. It would behoove any company that's one to gather as many locations early as possible. And that would be favor much more populated areas than sparse areas. So that is a clue as to what a company might do and how someone else might respond. I think I should leave it at that. Oh, can I make one more comment? Of course. Alan's very important question, which is that we've got this answer of all these dots and how does it make any sense? Think of it in an entirely different way. Don't think of it as some company trying to connect all those little tiny dots. It's more about getting a certain level of subsidy. It's about the dollars. So companies would bid in order to amass a certain amount of money so that it could subsidize a build. And that builds would certainly include areas that are not directly obligated to be served. It would be a build that serves much larger areas that make sense rather than that cancer. And I guess that's all I'll say about that for now. So far with the money. Well, it's gonna make whoever's overall build cheaper. It's not necessarily that they're only gonna build in those places, but that as they go and build a bigger project and Consolidated had announced two months ago that they had just gone after a whole bunch of new capital. So as they look at a build and they can then say, as long as we cover these addresses in our build, we can subtract whatever however many million dollars from that build. And then they sort of amortize that out over the entire project as long as they can finish that project in the FCC amount of time. Is that a reasonable way of rephrasing it, Michael? Yeah, and unfortunately we'll have to wait until January 29th to talk about those kinds of implications. There's a lot of information that we have access to that will help explain that, but that's absolutely prohibited. We can't talk about that stuff now. All right, David, then Jeremy. I'm passing. Okay, Jeremy. I mean, I guess just to speak to Alan's point, I still think that even if they are gonna do a bigger build than just a dot here and a dot here, that it's likely they are going to not build out to the fringes. Yeah, that's been my experience in Worcester. It's most of the roads, I mean, the majority of back roads, dirt roads in this town and in a dead end, you know, they come up against typically public forest land and there are no more houses, so the lines just end. And I think that's a problem in other towns as well. All right, Tom, and then I'd like to switch gears a little bit and talk about WAC if we can. Just one more clarifying question for the experts in the room. So is that 40% related just to the Vermont section? So if one of these companies has won something in a different state, they'd have to get 40%, and that state doesn't consolidate together or something. Good question. It is state by state. So if the national company wins in 12 states or 20 states, in each state, they have to hit their 40% level. Thank you. And I just want to call your attention to if you're looking at the thing I sent out. In the state, consolidated got roughly double what the NRTC consortium got, but in CD fiber, it was almost the same amount. So that's really significant. All right, so WAC, any updates on WAC? I assume you all saw their monthly newsletter that Alan sent out. I thought that was pretty cool. Anything else that, David, that we need to know about? Well, I have to say Barry Bernstein from the board checks in with us regularly and me with him. And I would say as much as I'm sort of frustrated at the pace they're moving at, they're moving forward positively. And the biggest concern right now is the financing. They can get the loan, but they have to pay back the loan. And if they have to pay property taxes on $30 million of investment, they would have to increase their electric rates by five to 10% in the first couple of years, which they're not sure the PUC would approve of that rate increase to run fiber. So they're pretty aggressively lobbying the legislature to exempt municipally-based fiber to be exempt from the property tax. Now, this is probably gonna get somewhat confident. I'm not gonna go over well with some places, but the towns that currently get this property tax, the State Education Fund, they get this property tax. Frankly, it's not getting it now. So this is sort of a new source of revenue and property tax. But if it does mean increasing the cost of fiber to the premise of broadband to unserved areas, it's like the state is hurting itself by doing one policy and not another. So we're supporting at this point, we may have to have a board resolution supporting this request by Wex to the legislature and you're getting in touch with your own representative on this. So that's one of the things that Wex doing there. There, well, I don't know if I mentioned this at the last meeting, when we were looking at the Moortown CUD COVID grant project, their operations guy went out and inspected all 64 polls on that route in one day. And he's incredibly excited about this potential for running fiber in their territory. And he wants to see that it happened. So it's just gonna take a while. Michael, do you have anything else you wanna say about Wex? No, I think you said it well. I think Wex is gonna come through. Yeah. It's just gonna be slow. All right, any other, any questions, Alan? I just wanna say maybe in conclusion, I was totally blown away when I read that piece in Wex because the energy that Barry Bernstein was portraying is just 180 degrees from where he was even just two or three years ago. I mean, I remember talking with him about this. Getting involved in telecommunications five years ago at a public meeting, I think a Wex public meeting. And they really did not wanna hear about getting involved in any kind of internet connectivity project. So to see the turnaround in a relatively short time and the total scope of things and the depth of commitment they seem to be willing to throw at this, I was impressed and I felt it was like a door that was opening up for us. Yeah, very motivating. I read it too, it was very motivating. It kind of makes me sad that I'm not a Wex member anymore. All right, anything else on, yeah, Jeremy? I was just wondering if, I seem to have missed that. Would you be able to send that Alan or put that in the chat? No, that was emailed out a couple, like a week or so ago. Yeah, it was a PDF. Jeremy, if you can't find it in your email, just send me an email and I'll send it over to you. Okay, thanks a lot, I appreciate it, sorry about that. All right, moving along then. So we have our esteemed project managers contract coming up at the end of this year and the previous funding source that we had used to pay Tim disappearing. And so we need to make some decisions about how we would like to proceed starting January 1st. So what I would like to do is go into an executive session to discuss Tim and Tim's work as a prelude to talking about how we move forward in January. And just so that I'm clear, Tim, you would be willing to stick around in the new year should we have funding to keep you on? Is that, am I understanding that correctly? Actually, no, so I'd rather say that I'd like my service to end. I think I'm gonna pursue other avenues and opportunities for my career with my ambitions and also candidly looking for benefits and such for my family. Okay, fair enough. So that simplifies the discussion somewhat. On the other hand, I would still like to, before we let you go, I would like to be able to give you sort of as they would say in the Army after action report. And if we're gonna write you a letter of recommendation or such, we should know what to put into it but I would like to hear from the board to do that. So, and then should any decisions or how we'd like to proceed come out of that executive session? I have a separately warned agenda item. We are well past our time, but I think, thanks Ardolf. But I would like to then hopefully have a brief time when we toss out any motions that we might have after the executive session and then do a quick round table and adjourn or skip round table, whatever. So with that in mind, I would like to, let me copy and paste this. So, oops, I missed it, hold on. Try this again, copy, just gonna post my citation. So I move that pursuant to one VSA section 313A3, we go into executive session to discuss the evaluation of our project manager Tim Shea as a personnel matter. Second. Okay, seconded by Siobhan. Any further discussion? Okay, all in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed representations? Okay, we are in executive session and hi Phil. I guess that means I need to leave then. That is correct. Thank you. Okay, thank you everybody. I guess I'll, assuming that I'm appointed, I'll see you all the next meeting. All right. That's right. Yeah, have a good one. Yeah, be well. We'll see. And Tim, we would ask you politely also to have a good rest of your night and we will communicate, we'll communicate anything, any of our motions or whatever from tomorrow, I guess. Sounds good. All right, thanks. Okay, I will actually be right back. So if everybody wants to take like a two minute pause, I'm going to stop the recording. What about the worker? I will boot them as soon as I stop the recording.