 So we are going to go on to broadband planning, meshing the plans. We've got a couple pockets of money. We've got a short term COVID related plan that's been funded. And then we have the 10 year plan. And we kind of hoped to, I think what I'd like to do is avoid what happened. I'm not sure it was last January, the January before, but they have the department come in with a plan and we're saying this isn't what we meant. I thought it might be more constructive if we said what we expected on the record so that if there is a disagreement, it's not because we have failed to say what we expect in a plan. And Clay sent us and Faith has emailed to you information on the state of the statement of work that we're anticipating. All right, I'm on page three and I can't get back. All right. So commissioner, I'm going to turn it over to you. And if you want to, you know, do this or clay, you know, usual, it's your show. Thank you very much, madam chair and good afternoon committee for the record. June Tierney commissioner department of public service. I will walk through the testimony that I prepared. Clay will be here to help and answer questions as necessary. And of course, I am delighted madam chair to hear the remarks you just made. Because this would be a very good time to verify that where the department's meeting with this plan is something that is going to be something the committee would take an interest in. We have retained CTC energy and technology of Keswick, Maryland to do the COVID-19 plan using the $500,000 appropriation under each 966. CTC energy technology completed work for the state of New Mexico, their Department of Information Technology office of broadband in June 2020. So this is work that CTC is familiar with doing. We have shared with you what is actually the scope of the work that we plan to do under the contract. And so we're hoping to get the contract back from the attorney general's office today. So this discussion is very opportune because I certainly welcome your input as I administer this contract to get a product we can all be satisfied with. The, I think it's helpful to review a little bit the constraints that we're under in doing this work. We are trying to use money and by we, I mean the state of Vermont, both the general assembly and my department. We're trying to use money that has been appropriated under the CARES Act. It is subject to the December 31st deadline for using that money. It must be specifically related to COVID-19 pandemic activities. So we don't have a free reign with what we're doing. And as soon as the law each 966 took effect on July 1st of this year, we had conversations with guide house, the consultants for the administration to understand what it was that we could do in order to make proper use of this money and not risk clawback. The runway is not very wide. It's not very wide. It's just an RFP that also for us functioned as a request for information on July 9th or thereabouts, I think in order to see what consultants would tell us. They thought they could do with. This kind of work and funding and CTC happily was one of the vendors who responded to the RFP and gave us the information we wanted and said, so do you think we can do this? And guide house was very clear about two things. One, they wanted us to document what the relationship was between language and each 966 that changed the due date for the 10 year telecom plan and then the language that appropriated the money for this plan. If you recall the 10 year telecom plan, the next version was supposed to be delivered to you on December 1st of this year and you've changed that now to June 30th of next year. And the guide house consultants were very concerned that the proximity of that change in the legislation and the money meant that the legislature was going to spend money on doing the 10 year telecom plan, which in their view is not an authorized use of the money. So we have documented that and in this testimony, I'm documenting it as well that this money is not being used to do the 10 year plan. It's being used to do the short term pandemic resiliency planning that the state needs to do. And that principally consists of a look back at the draft 2018 plan, which the legislature has not convened hearing on to finalize and which I have not adopted over or better said, which I have not adopted without your input. I do not think that would be prudent. So we have a draft plan that we're looking at. It is also helpful work in terms of the ongoing emergency broadband action plan that the department is working on. If you recall, most of what we have done with H 966 by way of programs and funding you've authorized was contained in the first part of the emergency broadband action plan that the department put out for public comment first on May 5th. So there was a second component to that plan and that had to do with preparing for the possibility of federal funding. Should it become available? That work is still ongoing. We have received a lot of excellent feedback from stakeholders in the state. And this is an opportunity with the CTC energy and technology consultants to have them look at that as well and to give the department council, which is very important from the guide house perspective because they have been quite clear that the value of having consultants like this is to be that they are advising the agency as the work is being done before December 31st of 2020. In terms of this contract where they will be advising us is their report is due to us on November 1st. That is the report that we call the draft public comment report. That is the report that we will then take around the state as we have with other plans and seek public feedback, public comment on it before we deliver to you a final plan on December 20th of this year. So that that is the role of CTC in this and I might add that the role that I've just described the look back at the CTC energy and technology that we have been working on in terms of where does that need to be beefed up to deal with something like a pandemic. What are short-term measures that the state can be doing between July and the end of this year with the CARES Act money. Those are things that are also consistent with what the consultants to the legislature, the CCG folks recommended in their June 18 memo to you about the impact of COVID-19 on the state. And I think that's a good point. Thank you. Well, as an overarching statement, what I just would like to put on the table for everyone to remember is that there's this fundamental tension we're working with here. That December 31st deadline. And the fact that we actually don't know when the pandemic is going to end. And so it's tempting to say, okay, we're still trying to do things before December 31st, but in fact, what we're dealing with is this awkward fit of having to use the CARES Act money by December 31st, 2020, but still trying to do things that are both relevant to the time period before December 31st. And the pandemic that may continue for who knows how long after December 31st. And it is my hope that this plan will inform both what we're trying to do and what we're trying to do in the future. And that in turn will prove useful in dealing with the pandemic as it continues past December 31st, but that's a tension that we are constantly having to deal with. Because as you also know, we have the 10 year telecom plan that we will be preparing. I assume with the appropriation that our, our three quarter year budget will contain for $250,000. And that plan. We're going to work that the statutory scheme contemplates all of those criteria, everything that was done in the 2018 draft plan as well as accounting for the changes that the legislature made in each 517 that was adopted in July 1 or 2019, I think. So, you know, on one hand, those two planning processes have to be kept separate. But at the same time, the pandemic is going to overlap both. So that's a tension we're working with. In the, if you look at the scope of work that we've given you from the contract, I'm not going to touch on every provision, but your question was, how does this mesh with the other planning? And I think the first answer has to be from a CARES Act perspective. They don't mesh. But it is, I think from a substantive perspective, inevitable that things that we are doing for the pandemic plan are going to prove beneficial ancillary, collateral in doing the work for the 2020 telecom plan. But I have to be clear, this is not an attempt to spend $500,000 on doing the 10 year telecom plan. That is very clearly not permitted under the CARES Act. If you look for instance at a section one of the scope of work that envisions an assessment of telecommunications infrastructure, this is very valuable because it is an opportunity for experts who've been doing this work for a very long time to look at our infrastructure and to give us an assessment of how it has performed since March of this year during the pandemic and what we can likely expect as the pandemic continues. The state of that infrastructure is probably the starting point, I would think, for our 10 year telecom plan. So that's a good example of how we're doing something with the CARES Act money and the pandemic telecom plan that is informing our understanding of our infrastructure now that necessarily is going to be sufficiently helpful or relevant or fresh to also be used in the 20 year and in the 10 year plan. What I was struck by when I looked back at the draft 2018 plan to see how we would use the $500,000 CARES Act or pandemic plan, the way I thought of it was this, if you looked at the 2018 plan just under the criteria we had at the time or if you projected the 2020 plan using all the criteria we have now, I think that that emergency response plan, portion of the plan would have continued to reflect the assumption that you're dealing with a natural disaster where there's destruction, a storm or something of that nature. That's certainly what the draft plan has that we have right now. But what the pandemic has taught us is that a natural disaster can be something other than physical destruction. And so what I would expect these consultants to help us with is looking at the state of the infrastructure to see can it stand up to something like an emergency order that requires sheltering at home so that under what I'm going to call yesterday's version of planning, the question would have been if there is a mass scale natural disaster, is the telecommunications infrastructure strong enough to where somebody can in fairly short order make a telephone call to make an office appointment with a doctor? Under the new version of planning or at least the COVID-19 planning, the question is, can this telecommunications infrastructure stand up under an order that directs everybody to stay home and to have that office visit over the phone or over a computer? That's the big, for instance, one of the potential shifts necessary in order to understand what we need to do with our telecommunications infrastructure in light of what we've learned about the pandemic in order to harden it for as long as the pandemic is with us. I hope that helps you, but that's what helps me in thinking about this future. I think one of the things we've found is that people that thought they had adequate broadband speed because they could sit down and do their emails at night and things were fine, but when you put two parents, two or three kids all having to work at the same time on that system, that's when a lot of folks found that it didn't function, that they couldn't work and their kids couldn't go to school at the same time. Yes, that's right. Or they found that they needed to do something more. Or they found that there were technological upgrades that they had to make. Whatever the case may be, that is the kind of thing that a plan should be able to identify, and a strategy can be devised to deal with that. Whether it's in the short term, which is what we're dealing with the pandemic, but these are also lessons that help us with the 10-year plan as well. I keep saying 20-year plan because in the energy world for the longest time, our plan was a 20-year plan before we went to the comprehensive energy plan. In any case, that's just an example of, it's not exactly a paradigm shift, but how to differentiate between the paradigm for the COVID-19 plan and the paradigm for the 10-year plan. I'm just checking my notes here for a moment. You see on the scope of work that we are expecting an assessment of Vermonter's attitudes or a survey of them. An example of the kind of question that I would expect we would be asking for the COVID-19 plan is, what about Wi-Fi hotspots? Are they totally useless to you? Are they useful in some measure? Do you want more? Do you want less? I know a lot of people don't like that, but it would be good to have data on that. In turn, it helps us inform other questions, some of which were raised by the CCG consultants in working with the JFO. For instance, should we be deploying Wi-Fi buses on school buses? Is that something we should be doing during the pandemic? I know in some states they are. That's the kind of thing that a survey of Vermonter's would help us draw a bead on so that we can, in turn, talk to stakeholders in the industry to see what their capacity is and their willingness is to make that kind of deployment. We're also looking to do an assessment of state-owned facilities, which I think is very timely because there are so many people are so focused right now on connectivity in the pandemic that there are synergies of thinking that have perhaps not been there before. While I'm working very hard with my staff on something like this plan, for instance, there are the CUDs out there who are all trying to crack the nut in their areas for what to do about last mile and how to accelerate that deployment so that we can deal with the pandemic, which is always front and center. There's a lot of discussion about pole harvesting, for instance, over the last couple of weeks. That's an example of what I'm talking about, where there are a lot of actors who are, you know, some of them very well established, some new, coming into the space and putting energy into trying to move quickly to do certain things. Something that came up to me last week, for instance, was I was approached by the NEK broadband outfit. This is the group where Christine Holquist has joined us and they were asking, hey, you know, could you transfer the last mile fiber that the state has in the northeast kingdom to us so that we can be using that strategically? And, you know, from my point of view, it's a very good question. It's something I've been thinking about for some time. This is a VTA asset that was vested in the department when the VTA was mothballed. And I have often asked myself, is it the best use of this asset to be in state of Vermont hands, or are there other hands it should be and to be more useful? I honestly don't know the answer to that question, but it's what I've been asking for some time. And here last week comes NEK broadband to say, hey, we could make good use of that. Well, these consultants under this plan for the COVID-19 plan, that's the kind of question that they can help us with. And that kind of consultation under the assessment of state on facilities is what we are contemplating in this contract and that, to my knowledge, is a legitimate use of CARES Act money. I'm trying to see if I have other notes here, because Madam Chair, I'm not sure what the committee's time is. I had the impression that you also have other business you need to do. So I'll try to move along here. That's okay. I think. Yeah, really the last point. Yeah, because I imagine you have questions and I really want to get to those as well. And I think I've mentioned this in our short-term section of the emergency broadband action plan. We had a variety of actions that we laid out, line extensions, connectivity initiatives, meaning build-outs of connectivity. We had the Wi-Fi hotspots and the like. Are there things, other things that we could be doing? I think I mentioned earlier Wi-Fi buses, but perhaps these consultants would know more, especially given the work they did in New Mexico. So at this time, I think I'm going to draw a line under my prepared remarks and I'm available for your questions. Okay, committee questions. Madam Chair, can you speak up a little bit? I was going to say, are there any questions? I'm sitting back too far. Okay. There's still no questions. Clay, do you have anything you want to add to this discussion? Are you very happy? I think I'm happy. Happy to be answering any questions you have, but I think June summed it up well. Thank you. Okay. I think what I'm hearing then is, yeah, this is kind of, you have to go back and look at that 2018 plan, which hasn't been approved or fixed or whatever. See what that said. See what's happened so far during the pandemic. And I think we're all kind of hoping it continues the way it is, but I think we also all know that we could end up in another shutdown. We could find out where the holes were. Then develop some a emergency solutions. I don't know that we'd see. Wifi equipped school buses as. The best, but. Some emergency ways we could roll out. Connectivity. During the next, and it could be a natural disaster. Or it could be a forest fire where the smoke is so bad that everybody gets told to stay home and don't breathe the air. So. And then, but some of the information you get will also be helpful. As you go forward with the 10 year plan is that. That is, that is correct. And I'm just, I am just emphasizing that that is entirely incidental. Right lateral. It's, it's a beneficial. Byproduct, but it is not the objective of plan. Whether or not we do another plan. We will be doing another plan. But I mean, whether or not we do it. This plan will stand on its own. So. As to no matter where we are. The next time. Correct. That. You know, the information you have will help us get that broadband out, get it out. More effectively or quickly. In. In the next instance. The other thing to keep in mind. I'm not going to say that. But the last time chair is, there was a statement in the CCG report to JFO. That I thought was instructive where they were saying. The, one of the principal benefits of the planning. Process is the process itself. The plan is the objective at the end. It's the product. stakeholders, developing the information, considering options and all that, that is what's so valuable. And I can testify that that was one of the most valuable things the department experienced with the emergency broadband action plan, and that is what I hear wherever I go now with stakeholders that I deal with regularly is, oh, yeah, we really got to talk about that and that got us thinking, whether it's VEDA or certain utilities or individuals we talked to, they all remember, oh, yeah, we came together for that and had a robust conversation. That's the planning process with aggressive outreach working. And so I think we have a chance here to do something very similar that's valuable. Andrew Brock. Thank you, Commissioner. It sounds as though you read General Eisenhower's book about planning. I have several Stephen Ambrose books about World War II. I think you know I'm a fan of that stuff. I think I've had a few conversations with Senator McDonald over the years about it too. Yes, I have. Well, that was one of the things that he always emphasized was that it's not the plan that's important, it's the planning. And I think it's absolutely correct. And so that leads in a way to some of my questions is, as we look at this particular plan that's COVID related and is under all of the constraints that guidehouse, what parts of this do you think fit logically into the statewide 10-year plan that you are looking forward to doing, one? And then second, can you put into context on a broader scale, what are the next steps and where do we go as far as planning is concerned to get to where we want to have a comprehensive statewide plan, notwithstanding what we're doing with COVID? I'm just making notes, Senator Brog. So I think where parts fit, as I was saying a moment ago, is in the what I'm going to call data development. So when we do those surveys, when we do those assessments, those are quite fresh for the COVID-19 plan. And I think that those will be readily adaptable for our planning purposes in the 10-year telecom plan. I would imagine that the scope of the surveys that we do to capture everything that the legislature wants under the statutory criteria for the 10-year plan will be wider or more robust. But I have to think that it will include what we're doing in the emergency scenario. Think of it this way. When I looked at the 2018 plan, it had, I think, a page and a half or two pages on emergency preparedness. And as I was saying a moment ago, all of it presumed that you were dealing with a natural disaster like a tropical storm Irene. I would think that the analysis that's done for this COVID-19 plan, which is a pandemic as the emergency, will definitely displace and expand that element, for instance, of the 10-year telecom plan. In the next step, Irina, Senator, I think what I have seen in trying to do the emergency broadband action plan on an accelerated basis. And what I have seen as a regulator for many years in the state is that we have many different venues in which we discuss telecommunications and what we're trying to achieve, including emergency telecommunications, commercial applications of it, educational health, whatever. I mean, just the process of trying to bring all those strands together in this COVID-19 emergency has been challenging. I think we have done well to do so. But it is my assessment that we have always been managing from behind. And I want to be clear that I don't see that as anybody's fault. Others may see it differently, but I don't. I see it as these are the circumstances that hit in February and March. This is what we have done to deal with them. But as I have surveyed other states and tried to draw on other states and what they're doing to see what works and doesn't work, what I have noticed is that almost every other state is substantially more resourced to deal with the subject, meaning connectivity in general. When I looked to Colorado, for instance, they reached out to me to see if Governor Scott wanted to support a bill that their governor was putting in for more broadband funding. This was in July. And the query came to me from the director of federal relations in the office of broadband in the connectivity division of some part of Colorado state government. And this person had a staff. So they have vastly more resources. The other thing I've noticed is that in many states, they have completely different institutions to deal with these things. And I think this is a subject that you have focused on for quite some time. They have broadband councils. They have an office of broadband. Or they have whatever, I have to look at the name of this Department of Information Technology Office of Broadband in New Mexico. Different states do it differently. What our experience has been in Vermont is there was a moment where we created the VTA. We resourced it. It was in action for a while. And then there was a decision to mothball it. And as I've said many times, I don't know what the particulars were. But that was to my knowledge, the attempt that Vermont made to recognize what I'm trying to say here today, which is that there's a broad application or a broad perspective that is needed in order to satisfactorily address the issues that we're trying to deal with infrastructure here. And I don't know whether the VTA just didn't suit or what the thinking was. But I think you asked about next steps. Where do we go? If we cannot content ourselves with what we have right now, then I think we have to think about what would a different institutional framework look like for trying to analyze this problem. What I do know is that for as long as it is in my charge, we are certainly going to do everything we can as we have been. And very respectfully, I think we have done as well as you can expect with the resources that we've had. But if there is a desire to bring together a council, for instance, in I think it's in Iowa or Minnesota, they have a council that is outside of state government that is populated by business leaders, academics, and the like, they have representation from state government on it. But those are the folks who drive policy on connectivity in their states. So that might be something for you to consider. I am giving you a clinical assessment, meaning my assessment as an expert in the area. I cannot say honestly that I am speaking right now for the governor. These are not things that I have socialized with them. But you have asked a question and I'm trying to give you a candid answer. So resources is a major issue. The other issue, of course, is in effect authority to move forward with initiatives. One of the questions, of course, is, is there sufficient coordination in state government between all of the players who were involved in broadband expansion between the utilities on the one hand, the CUDs on the other, the non-regulated carriers, and the like? I would think that that would make planning a very difficult thing to do other than on paper. Is there something structurally that ought to be done? Is, for example, the recreation of something like the the the organization that was was was the VTA, basically, along with, though, both staffing and engaged and charged leadership to actually do those things. Is that something that you think would be desirable for us to look at legislatively? Oh, I think looking at it legislatively is definitely something that I would recommend. I don't think anybody is going to make the argument that what we have to date definitely represents the very, very best we can do. I think what we have to date is what happens when you take something like the VTA and you mothball it and you put the residual elements of it into the department. I mean, I have my differences with Peter Blum. I've known him for many, many years. I've had lots of very good faith arguments with him. Sometimes he was the hearing officer and I was the attorney, but he said something that I absolutely 100 percent agree with in his testimony, not too long ago, where he was putting his finger on the tension of being a regulator and being the driving force or the actor behind trying to be the partner in doing these connectivity planning and implementation activities. This is a tension I feel all the time when I'm meeting with a Comcast or I'm meeting with a CUD or I'm meeting with one of the electric utilities, especially with the electric utilities. I've been doing so much work with them to try to get them involved because I very much, I believe with all my heart and all my mind, that we are witnessing the convergence of the energy space and the telecommunication space. And if nothing else, there's huge rate payer waste in having to pay for two systems. You can see that just with the poles and the wires. But anyway, I've been doing a lot of work with the electric utilities on the subject and I'm constantly dealing with that tension that one moment I'm their regulator for rate purposes and the next moment I'm the commissioner who's trying to get telecommunications deployed and modernized and expanded in the state. And that tension, it's a very delicate line to walk. And I think Peter was right. It may not be best to put those functions with the regulator. But that is what we got right now. So I think legislative, there's great value. That is what I saw from the Emergency Broadband Action Plan. We had a couple of hearings with you in the spring. My memory is that House Energy Technology was there as well. And in my judgment, that is some of the best legislating I have seen, where there are those kinds of conversations going on, broad attendance and broad participation as we struggle with this question. So that would be my feedback on the question. Other questions? Not seeing any. Let me ask another if I might. And that is in the short term, in terms of funding, moving towards the 10-year telecommunications plan. I know we had concerns as to whether or not there was sufficient money in the budget to do this. What are your opinions right now? And what's your assessment of what funds are available to you to move forward with the 10-year telecommunications plan? And what would be the schedule for doing that? And in the event that the funding is not sufficient, what would you ask of us now? Well, Senator, I appreciate the way you've framed that question. Because I think where we have sometimes come to grief is the difference in how we approach this. My approach is that I have to do what I can do with the resources at hand. And your approach has very much been, I'm going to go get the resources. And I'm going to give them to the department. And department, I want you to do the job that those resources can facilitate. So for instance, if $800,000 is appropriated, as I understand you and your colleagues, that is because you would like to see a telecom plan drafted and prepared under the direction of the department using consultants whose work justifiably would cost $800,000. That implies a certain scope, a certain level of expertise, a certain quality of work product, no question. If I have $800,000, I do an RFP. And I am comforted knowing that I'm going to get responses that the breadth of the range of responses I'm going to have is going to be broader if I've got $800,000, then $250,000. At the end of the day, though, what I do as the executive in an agency is I implement the law and do what I have to do with the resources I have to be perfectly clear with you. I do not have a spare dollar in my existing budget for outside consultants for this telecom work. So to the extent that I'm going to have outside consultants informing the work that the department does, it will have to be because there's a general fund appropriation. And we will do the very best we can do. In terms of timing, I am very grateful that the legislature has extended the time to June 30 of next year because that gives us more time to work with. But it is September, forgive me, is today the 22nd or 23rd? And I can tell you that our focus right now remains on the pandemic, including the planning activities that we're doing because of the $500,000 appropriation. And so it is challenging for us to also maintain a work schedule on the telecom plan. That is something that we, the tenure telecom plan. And that is something that we have to very quickly engage. So I expect that that's going to be a squeeze. And if you're asking me what would I ask for now, it would be something that I'm going to ask notwithstanding the fact that every instinct in me says not to. I have a record with this particular committee on timing for the telecom plan that has been nothing I wish to repeat. I'll put it that way. But it would not surprise me if we get to April of next year and the plan is not ready to be delivered to you on June 30th. I will be doing everything I possibly can to meet that deadline. But if I have to write to you in March and say, forgive me, we just are not able to get this done by December 30th, I would ask you now for forgiveness. Well, let me put it then in a slightly different way. And that is we've allocated presumably a certain amount of money to do this. And let's take time off the table and look at the funding that we've allocated to do this. Based on everything we know right now and the other things that your department is charged with doing, what kind of a plan are you going to deliver to us? Is there going to be an A plus plan, a B plan, a C plan, a D plan, or an F plan? Thank you, Senator. You asked that kind of question. And it reminds me of when you asked me to grade my performance in March of 2018, I think it was. I gave myself an F before landing on a B. If I had to answer that question again today, by the way, Senator, I would give myself an A and I would let you talk me down to an F. But I'll do my best to answer your question. My pride wants to say I'm going to give you an A plus plan bounded by the circumstances. And if you look at that plan and tell me that it's a B plan, I'm going to have to say to you, I can see where reasonable minds could differ. But I'm going to do my very best. A notion of what you are able to deliver in terms of doing some of the tasks that would be necessary to come up with a really top-notch, thorough plan. And given the funding in the event that you don't have those resources available to you, regardless of how long it takes you to produce the final product, that is what is really driving my question. Are we asking you to do an impossible task based on the resources that we're giving you? And that's fair. I'm going to cry uncle on this one. I don't like to admit that something is impossible because it's just not an option. But do I have to admit that for what the expectations are, the problem that you want to solve and the desperate need to address this problem effectively, $250,000 is not going to cut it. But it is what the people of Vermont are able to afford and that's what I'm going to do my very best with. There's something I have wanted to share with all of you for a very long time, just food for thought that I think is worth mentioning in the emergency broadband action plan stakeholder process. I was able to catch up with Tom Ebslin and just talk to him a little bit about what it was like to run the VTA and what he thought his greatest hits were and did he have any takeaways for us? And it's enjoyable to spend time with him because he's a man of great learning and great wisdom. And what he said was in retrospect, I wish we hadn't planned as much. I wish we had done more. I wish we had constructed more. And so that's something that stays with me a great deal. The plan needs to be done well. But honestly, Senator, I have not seen a plan in the country that is any better than anything Vermont has been able to come up with. That does not mean that a better plan is not possible. It means that it has to be resourced and $250,000 now that that probably is not resourcing such a plan. But we'll do what we can. What I've always had underlying this is it's not solely the plan, it's the strategy. And I'm not sure we voted enough time to strategy. You have been very consistent in that position, Senator. And so what I would say to you is this, perhaps the strategies that Vermont has had to date have not been as granular or as comprehensive as are needed to resolve our version of the connectivity challenge. But I do think it is something to note that in the 2018 plan, however flawed it may be, there was a strategy, a series of actions laid out and those actions became the basis for H517, which among other things fostered the increased creation of CUDs. So we do have a record of having a strategy and acting on that strategy, but I can fully accept that the strategy may not be sufficiently comprehensive or sufficiently granular. And I think that is the work that has to continue. One of the things that I notice in working in this area though is you also have to try to keep up with the rapidity with which there is change. So that we could have had a well-settled, well-articulated, clear strategy of like they had in Massachusetts. You heard that presentation a couple of weeks ago where they gave buckets of money to different towns and said, make it happen. Here's our 40%, you come up with 60%, you choose your technology solution and our towns could have chosen a cable solution. And we would be sitting here going, I wish they hadn't done that, I wish they had built fiber and we could be putting all our resources into a fiber build out, which would make a lot of sense. But you had witnesses here who are credible witnesses telling you that even fiber is not future proof, that there could be a necklace of satellites that are deployed that take the place of that fiber build. I'm not saying that you have to accept their view of reality. I'm just saying that the pace of change in this arena is such that planning has to remain nimble and fluid and strategies have to remain nimble and fluid as well. And one of the things I'm proudest of in my tenure as commissioner is that when we saw the pandemic coming, we jumped on it and we got a map out there for people, we got hotspots out there for people, we devised a broadband action plan that pleased nobody but that excited everyone. We engaged them, we came up with a series of steps to propose. You folks looked at them, you vetted them through your own experts. And we said, yes, let's spend money on that and let's do it now because this is what we can do with the CARES Act money. And we got it, we're getting it done. Some of that has already been done and more is getting done. That's the sign of planning and strategy and action and flexibility converging to serve the people of Vermont well. And that's something I think all of us can be proud of. Senator Pearson, you've had your hand up for a second. Sorry. Thank you. The challenge I have or I worry about is that, you know, the idea of a telecom plan sounds very theoretical and isn't it obvious? We just go where there's no broadband and string people up and get them connected. But we may well, if the pundits are right, see a large slug of money made available by the feds. Who knows? I'm one of those pundits. In three months, in six months, in a year, and I'll say for myself, I'm not hearing that we will say, oh, thank you for $100 million for broadband. We know exactly what to do with it. And that's where I get pretty worried about the theory matching the desire that you have and you've articulated and all of us have of actually putting connections on the ground. And shame on us. We have been talking about the obvious need for broadband everywhere. And if we're not, and we've all been stymied by the money and that's the reality for families in Vermont and for the state government. But shame on us if we're not ready when the feds do come forward with money. That's what worries me. What would you say to people and to us who if we got in April $100 million, do you think we would use that money wising? We would be ready to deploy quickly or would we risk getting outpaced by other states and therefore not getting as much money because we're not frankly ready? Hi, Senator, I really appreciate the question and the candor with which you're posing it. You and I have a different perception, I think of where we are in terms of readiness because that is exactly at the heart of the second part of the emergency broadband action plan. The department has a proposal. It's a 300 plus or minus million dollar proposal and your chosen number was $100 million. One of the things that I took away from the emergency broadband action plan and the stakeholder process was that our energy in standing up the CUDs is very high and very focused. And so already if I had to revise that plan, it would be with a different role for the CUDs. And I don't mean that I know what that role is as much as I am aware that the role needs to be different. And I think we would have very little difficulty identifying the need for a mechanism to disperse that $100 million equitably to those last mile partners so that they can stand up their systems. I don't have any anxiety about that. I've also been in constant contact with the federal delegation, trying to keep them updated on our CUD activities for instance, so that they're aware that the emergency broadband action plan, for instance, the reverse auction, that that's one option, one vision, which by the way would still require elements of it, would still require your approval, your review. So it's nothing I'm prepared to do unilaterally, but they're aware that that's only one possibility that another possibility would be to take a substantial amount of capital like the $100 million you've mentioned and to treat that as the capital seeding, if you will, for the CUDs that took EC Fiber many more years to acquire so that they can get out there and get loans and basically jump over EC Fiber's evolution. So I really don't think the question is, what would we do and are we gonna get caught short? I really think the question is, will we get such money? And sadly we have to understand that absent such money, we have to come up with other means and they all involve some amount of competition with the state's other capital needs. But I'm certainly happy to work with you to give you greater comfort on this subject. But I think when you consider how many fronts we've had to deal with, how much time you folks have spent in special session, we're in a pretty good place, if you ask me, in terms of preparedness for federal funding. We're more so than other states. And I would just say this last thing to you too, the consultants that we've hired for the COVID-19 plan, this concern that you've just articulated, that is one that they flagged for New Mexico as well when they delivered this plan that they did for them on June 20th of this year. So I think we have at our disposal a set of experts who will be good partners for us to be engaged in this kind of iterative discussion about what more should we be doing to be ready if that federal funding comes. Thank you, that's helpful. Absolutely. Other questions, committee? Okay, commissioner, I think this has probably been the most productive meeting we've ever had. And I think, I thank you for your candor. I think, you know, you identified the conflict between being a regulator and a cheerleader. And I think we found that out with the economic development people too in the TIFs that to be promoting anything and at the same time trying to be the regulator of the entities you're promoting is conflicting. And that if we expect excellence, it is our responsibility to provide the resources necessary to get it. But we all tend to live in our little bubbles or silos or whatever, and unless somebody says to us, now wait a second, you know, I've got two people and I can't do that in this amount of time or then we tend to just keep rolling on downhill. So it's very helpful to have these discussions. I think we also understand that you work for an administration that also has a budget and a point of view. But since the federal money went away, broadband has been the poor stepchild. We've kind of just run it off the connectivity fund. We haven't really put any money into it. And I think we all bear responsibility for that because I don't know where we're going to get the money. We have essentially been on a not quite a starvation diet but a maintenance diet since the last financial crash. And next year is going to be even more fun. Well, Senator, I thank you for those words, but that said, I think you need to also not be too hard on yourselves. This is a moment in which, in my opinion, a very poor public policy judgment has come to a head. It's an understandable public policy judgment that was made in 1996 at the federal level when the idea was that market forces would be the superior means by which we could modernize telecommunications in the United States. It's easy to forget what 100 years of regulation of landlines felt like and why in 1996 somebody might have said, oh, God, let's not do that with the internet too. Let's turn that over to the market. It's been a quarter century since that was done. And so a quarter century is plenty of time to have seen now without mistake what the results of that are. And it's this disparate distribution of infrastructure. And this country has known for decades. Senator McDonald, I know, has found this for history too. I think he'll agree with me when I say we've known for decades that we needed something like the rural electrification service. Peter Welch has been saying this too. Governor Scott has been saying this too. It just isn't rocket science. And it's a national disgrace that Vermont shares in because the same problem is repeating itself everywhere. So yes, in Vermont, given the resources we have, we've been on a maintenance diet and no, you can't expect to do the impossible with it. But nonetheless, I think it's important to keep in mind that the federal government hasn't been stepping up the way it should have. At least that's my view. I remember I just keep thinking of my daughter in Senegal living in a mud hut with no electricity and no running water, but she was connected. I had that experience outside of Phnom Penh where just indescribable poverty surrounded me, but they were all at a single lamppost that had a solar panel and they had 4G on their cell phones. And I told my counterparts that I was gonna go back to Chairman Volts and let him know that Cambodia was putting us to shame. And I did. Okay, Senator McDonald. Um, the commissioner has said we've come a long way and I think she's correct. I believe that the reason that we held up the VTA a couple of years ago was because the director of the VTA was focused on wireless and focused on supporting the incumbent carriers. And it wasn't, we had not yet evolved to the principle that the commissioner just articulated that we apparently have arrived at. And my concern is now that we know the direction we wanna go, which is connect broadband fiber where it exists, push fiber out where it's not yet there and don't avoid moving a cable out as a cheap alternative. Now that we've got there our concern on how to activate it depends on the next building season that we're prepared for. And I was hoped that during this session we would find a way to make ready the make ready work. And we've got two or three days here to do that. And I don't see a lot of hope for it. But that's the difference between being one more year away or being one year closer. And I would hope that there would be some cooperation and emergency effort to get that year before we adjourn this week. Thank you. Two days, guys, that's all. That's, we'll just, we'll do it. We've got two more witnesses. Thank you commissioner. I'm thinking that maybe for January I'd be interested in maybe putting together some kind of a bill that might give us some direction. It does sound like we need a separate cheerleading section, perhaps. And then a regulating section, but I'm starting to think on that and anybody in the committee that's got thoughts join in. It's, you know, usually when you're going home it's like forever when you're coming back and now it's only a couple of weeks. So we can get some things done. Okay, on my agenda, I believe next is Mr. Wittaker who is still with us. Adam Chair, do we have some decision points that we're going to be making along the way as it relates to this? Or is this more? More wrap up discussion. Chance that we're going to get anything other than the budget through this year. You know, this week is not great, but January, unless we can come up with the money to do the make ready work, which is equally a long shot since it got knocked down for COVID money, then I'm not sure, but I'm open to any suggestions anyone can come up with, okay? This is purely, I think, kind of a wrap up discussion and setting the stage for where those of us that are here next year on the agenda just that are here next year on this committee are going to be prepared to go. So just thinking and any legislation, anyone thinks we might get to get. Okay, Mr. Wittaker, and we're going to try and talk about planning and lessons learned and we're off. We have one witness after you, at least I hope Evan Carlson, yeah, his name is still here. So yeah, you are still here. There you are. Okay, so Steve, the floor is yours. Good afternoon. Thank you, Madam Chair and the committee for addressing this important issue. I want to raise a couple of concerns and then I've got a specific list of bullet points that I have provided to committee members. I wasn't able to get them out to you last night. I sent them to both Faith and the individual members email. Okay, that's great. The, I'm troubled by their continuing references to the emergency broadband action plan being pedaled as if it has any legal standing at all. There are serious issues with that plan and it was basically set aside by the Telecommunications and Connectivity Advisory Board motion to approve either the first section or any of it. Two motions at two separate meetings failed. So the fact that the commissioner continues to peddle that as if it has legal standing to our congressional delegation should be troubling. The lack of planning dates way back beyond 18. I mean, commissioner Martin failed to produce any telecom plan in 2007 or 2010 or 2013 and it wasn't till then that Senator Ash, your predecessor chair here, ordered a plan produced in 2014. So, and no one seems to have noticed that those 10 year telecommunications plans were missing. So I find that very troubling. I do want to point out the major difference to the 10 year telecom plan that we are now expecting next June is that it will have a lot of specific action steps and strategies to reach specific goals of 202C. That is the only hope we have towards getting out of this kind of quagmire or quicksand that we've been stuck in. We've been having our foot on the gas and the brakes at the same time, pretending that a free market solution. Meanwhile, we've encouraged the monopoly carriers to cherry pick leaving greater and greater expense to reach those who do not. The fact that I don't have enough broadband even here in Montpelier to participate at other than a voice level is just one small example of that. The problem with that plan having been pushed off until next June is that the incentive regulation plan is for consolidated is expiring in July and the most important statutory role for the telecommunications plan is that the Public Utility Commission has to find any proposed incentive regulation plan or contract regulation plan to be consistent with the 10 year telecommunications plan. That timing does not allow and I would ask you to consider in the budget conference, appending the language that was drafted in 92 to order the PUC to postpone review of the replacement incentive regulation plan until the 10 year plan is completed. You just heard the commissioner say that she might not get it done by June and that would be a disaster. I also must point out that it was her prior role as general counsel for the PUC that repeatedly ignored the missing telecom plans as they repeatedly approved incentive regulation plans or extensions to incentive regulation plans. So we have a regulatory failure here and a planning failure that are compounded to create this situation. This is not just a result of a pandemic. So do you have access to or can Faith share the sheet dated today with 20 bullets on it? You emailed it to Faith. I'm pretty sure she can put it up. Okay, I'd like to speak to some of those items. Okay, let me say, Faith, can you get that up? I'm working on it. She's working on it. Okay, so secondly, I wanna give you one example of the need for immediate action towards the strategy. You're not gonna be able to- Steve, you're up and live, you're 20 bullet points. Okay, even in this emergency situation, pulling VTA out of mothballs could be done just because Congress passes an extension to the deadline for spending the co-cares money. That would be sufficient cause under the existing statutory basis of the VTA dormancy legislation to allow joint fiscal committee to pull VTA out of hibernation. The effect of that would be to have the current director of telecommunications, Clay Purbis, become the interim executive director of that new agency and it would take some time for the governor to appoint a board and hire an executive director. There are immediate, and I'll give you just one example, there's a new state police barracks being put up at the old regional library. That $4.5 million was in the capital bill, if I recall correctly, to plan that. Central Vermont Public Safety Authority is voting tomorrow night on a telecommunications needs assessment to be done possibly by the same engineering firm that did the CV fiber. The street paint turnpike is wide open right now and now is the opportunity to put an underground piece of fiber to protect such a mission critical, ultimate top level public safety facility onto a sturdier footing. If a hurricane comes through, which has happened before and will happen again, much of our telecommunications cellular and aerial fiber will be torn down. Here's an opportunity while the street is already dug up to throw a piece of fiber under the street so that you would have underground fiber facilities to this new public safety facility that will have microwave ability to hit the state microwave network. And we do not have any coordinating body in state government to act on such an opportunity. It's gonna be 10 or 20 or 50 times more expensive to do it later. If it's done in the next 30 days, it costs very little. So there's one example of why you need a coordination utility. I'm gonna start at the bottom of this list, the governance council. You've heard repeatedly from me for years and you've had many opportunities to address 911. You're about to enter into a new five-year contract, $13 million. I won't go into the improprieties there, but what you should be considering for January is a governance council that in effect combines and requires integration, interagency coordination and integration between the Enhanced 911 system and its network planning, the prior role of the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, which was middle-mile fiber and wireless, Vermont Interactive Television restored as a tool of democracy and public participation. FirstNet, which is a secret initiative currently managed by the department, well, managed by AT&T with flight supervision by the Department of Public Safety. Which also manages the microwave network. Agency of Digital Services currently has no oversight to review or approve their plan. And the Access Media Organizations are working to create a statewide network, a single statewide AMO as an umbrella among the 24 different Access Media Organizations. The governance for all of these should be under the purview of a council, similar to what Commissioner Tierney just referred to. That language has been already drafted. That, in fact, one piece of that was pulled out, I believe with Senator Brock's initiative and inserted into the broadband bill last year, which constitutes the stricter 10-year telecommunications planning requirements. So the bill creating the council and the working groups that would handle these different categories of public safety, broadband, community media. But that bill has been drafted under Senator White's drafting request and could be polished and ready for introduction in January. Right now we have a real problem in that everyone's anxious to go out and collect all location data and we have no statewide standard. Due to the fact that the Vermont Center for Geographic Information, our state GIS shop was subsumed into ADS, there is no longer a advisory board, there's no longer a users group. Basically a community asset that was state, local, and regional has been disappeared into ADS. And it's too busy to think about all harvesting accuracy standards or a fiber layer knowing where our fiber is. That's a very critical problem because it means any data collected by either the high tech LiDAR solution that you heard about or the low tech solution you heard about from Nick and Connor last week, both risk being having to be redone again to meet the accuracy standard for engineering and for utility management. So you've got an immediate crisis of nobody at the statewide level overarching setting standards to prevent waste and further waste of public funds. Secondly, the statutory goals of 202C and I would encourage you to look at them. It's one page, in fact, they're even quoted. I believe they're quoted in the document that Clay Purvis and that the commissioner just referred to. The statutory goals of 202C include competitive choice, mobile wireless, best available technology, open access. Those goals are not being factored into the decisions being made for these grants. We are further entrenching monopoly practices including a new grant to Tilson for $4, $5,000 per address without an open access requirement. And as one example of that possibly enough reason for me to have wanted VTA put away Vermont telecommunications authority passed through a federal B-top grant to Sovereignet for many, many millions to build that fiber network and they forfeited the right to lease dark fiber in that network. The language of that contract which I've reviewed basically waived the state's right to lease any dark fiber within that Sovereignet network. And to me, we had a statute that said open access shared infrastructure, shared fiber and we ignored it. We allowed the VTA to sign a contract that ignored our statutory policy and goals and that's happening frequently and cannot be allowed to continue. This is the problem. It's not lack of funding. It's the lack of coordination, the lack of adherence to the law as to when you create a plan and what goals and policies you follow in creating that plan. So the emergency issues, I won't call them emergency but high priority issues are bulleted there. Application at the top, application of the 202C goals and policy to all publicly funded connectivity initiative builds. Most importantly, open access to all fiber built with any public funding, federal or state. Mobile wireless is a critical public safety issue along the highways. Many of us know a young lady here in central Vermont who spent the night in a car off the road because no one could see and there was no cell coverage and she's permanently damaged by that. We need to insist that communication, junior districts and any recipient of a connectivity initiative grant incorporate mobile wireless as a priority in their designs or they don't get the money. Mobile wireless in a neutral host manner can provide all carriers access very cost effectively and we have been ignoring it. The 202E obligations of the connectivity division requires them to catalog all the licensed spectrum and available options for its use. That would include the state colleges, it would include road departments and municipalities that own spectrum. That has never been done in the five years that the connectivity initiative has been in existence. The urgency of a statewide fiber and all inventory. You've heard much about this, I believe Maria Royal has done some research into the, what I call speech claims of proprietary nature. Am I competing with somebody in the background? I don't know, somebody isn't muted. So there's some background noise but I can't see everybody so I don't know who it is. Just talk louder. Okay, well, I've also provided some faith today. I won't ask her to switch to these, but there's three photos. One is a coil of fiber on a steel rack here in Montpelier. The other is a close-up of the fiber and it shows that the number of strands, the manufacturer, the type of fiber is all plainly visible just along that coil of fiber. There's a second one that shows first light put their label and the left of fiber hanging out in harm's way. And again, you can read the manufacturer, the footage on the roll, the number of strands and they put a sticker on it, property of first light. So they've waived any claims of proprietary. They've made no effort at all to keep this secret and I believe I would ask you again to refer to Peter Blum's research on this topic. What you're hearing is claims of trade secrets and their effort, the proprietary advantage gained by keeping that information secret is more customer ignorance is what they're gaining. It's an anti-competitive approach to competition by a customer not being made aware that there are other alternatives, some of which may have better resiliency or lower cost. And by keeping it secret, who's in the area, you've also heard consolidated say that they've gone into the communities and showed the select board and the planning commission where their fiber exists. They've waived any claims of trade secret or proprietary advantage there. So we need to insist and order and take immediate action to get fiber mapped across the state so that we can make use of that fiber to close rings for resiliency, public safety imperative, to hang small sales, just supply fixed wireless and mobile wireless coverage, and to provide closer regional access to laterals which the CODs could build quickly and inexpensively to provide fiber broadband. By not having to go as far or not having to coordinate with three different fiber owners to get to a fiber ring, this would greatly speed up this process. Charlie Larkin framed it very eloquently, may he rest in peace. He said, once you see where your fiber is, then it becomes very evident that a few places where you still need to build and we're not shadowboxing with this fictitious fear that there's a billion dollars worth of fiber that needs to be built. We may find there's only 200 million dollars worth of fiber that needs to be built and we need to enforce our state policy for shared infrastructure and open access which would allow CODs and others to hop on whatever fiber is already there. So these are fundamental problems that have not been addressed and they need to be addressed even sooner than next January. So transparency, training for the CODs. The CODs need training in how to operate within open records and public meeting law including where they've hired a secondary operator. EC fiber is the most egregious example of this and yet they're touted as the godfather of CODs and yet when I asked for their emails or records detailing their resiliency plans, they say, we have no records. ValiNet holds all the records for us. They're our operator and they're not subject to open records law, public records law. That is just fundamentally- Dave Mann, erupt you for a second and ask Faith to put back on the screen your bulleted lists so that those who don't have it in front of you themselves can see your list. I thought it was bill up. No, Faith, can you put it back up? Here it comes. Good, thank you. All right, there it is. Okay, so about the sixth bullet down is transparency training for CODs. The idea that you can hire an operating company and therefore offshore your public records obligation to an entity that is allegedly not subject to public records law is absurd, especially when we're talking about public safety of the ability to complete a 911 call. These fiber networks we're building and the cable networks are much more vulnerable to power outages blocking 911 calls. We have not addressed that in any of this money we've shoveled out and the PUC has fumbled in its ordered investigation into these matters two years ago by legislative session law. So that's an issue that won't go away and we should be incorporating it at a high level so that we're setting an example that backup power to maintain ability to call for help when you need it is a fundamental piece of all fiber design. State level engineering support again fits with the idea of strategy. The state should retain an overarching engineering. I don't know whether CTC is in that. I know Inderisle has that kind of capability but the state should provide the uniform engineering strategy and framework to all CODs so that we don't have everybody going off in different directions and they won't fit together in the future. So that could include the mobile wireless being incorporated into all fixed wireless emergency designs. I've heard little at all today about the emergency we're facing and the fact that this pandemic could extend into late next year even. So I want to caution that $500,000 I noticed no one's revealed the amount of the CTC contract but if indeed it's $500,000 what she described as getting in the way of surveys and an analysis of network congestion during the pandemic it sounds to me about like about $50,000 worth of work. So where is that money going? If not to the 10 year telecom plan. So that's just a caution that we could face a clawback here. I'm gonna, there's something I've added to the list afterwards, it's not a bullet but it's a good, I talked to Terry Lavelli. He is the single point of contact. He's the radio operator at public safety. He manages and upgrades the microwave network for the state manages all those towers. He's also the single point of contact for FirstNet but FirstNet has operated as a secret contract. We don't see it. He's not allowed to talk about what AT&T is putting the tower where and with what coverage. And yet at the same time he serves on the telecommunications and connectivity advisory board which is supposed to be advising the commissioner on telecom planning which is by statute participatory and transparent. So Terry is in this very unique position of being not allowed to wear his one hat in obligations by nature of the fact that the governor opted into this secret contract. The only leverage we have with FirstNet is to pry it out into the open and put conditions on their tower 248A permits that they will show us their propagation, prove their propagation, harden their towers, share generators, the conditions that we can put are limited but they all come down to the PUC Act 248A process because of the way that federal initiative is constructed. Those opportunities will be gone by next year. We have to be doing this stuff immediately. Again, networks built to public safety grade to support public safety radio and sell backhaul. That has to do with the state level engineering making sure that there's diverse routes and resilient ring architecture making sure that if one tree falls it doesn't sever the entire public safety dispatch for that area. We need a statewide wireless survey much different and more comprehensive than what was done by the department. The department's strategy was admittedly ad hoc but there is a need in order for us to put fixed and mobile wireless cells on these DOD properties and on these poles they can hang mid span. They're about $15,000 apiece. They could be easily installed before December 30th. We need to know where we need them and without accurate coverage mapping of where our wireless is by each carrier we cannot do that. Where we do place small cells they should all be neutral host, all carriers access in order to not have areas where only AT&T customers can live or areas where only Verizon customers can live. We could easily require 248A. You could put a line in the budget that requires the PUC to start requiring digital propagation and verified digital shape files which would be shared among the CUDs of where the coverage will be for every new 248A permit. Legislature must deal with the geolocation costs if you're gonna do mobile wireless. If you want the CUDs to allow mobile wireless service on the same small cell that they put in for fixed wireless that triggers geolocation required by the FCC that is only needed by the 911 system. So it logically should that geolocation charges should be paid by the universal service fund. And I have earlier described that the 0.4% added in two years ago in the broadband bill for the connectivity division that easily be diverted back to the 911 fund instead of being skimmed off the top to make sure that those geolocation costs are borne. In many areas, I learned this from coverage co, the geolocation costs out are more than the revenue generated by the mobile wireless. So it's impractical to either you're agreeing to have a dead zone there or you're agreeing to sponsor or subsidize that geolocation cost in favor as part of the 911 system. So we need shared fiber definitions and rules. We've got open access in the statute for many years in 202C it's never been defined. It's never been enforced. So every carrier is building another set of fiber three, four, five deep on the same set of poles because they're not being shared as another goal of shared infrastructure requires. The VTA process for middle mile fiber could and should be proceeded as soon as that organization or its successor can get up and running. But it's much simpler now if we map the Velco fiber and the distribution utilities fiber that's been built by Velco and then connected. There's very few, much fewer number of fiber segments that need to get built but until you make them transparent, you can't know that and you can't know whether we could actually accomplish fiber to the whole state with the money coming next year. This is the requirements of a plan and we are not at all well positioned despite what the commissioner said with this type of planning. Reasonable wireless test for this is one where we've probably out of fear an overreaction to 10 years ago, over technology that VTEL put up with public funds and we've now insisted on testing every address whether or not the subscriber at a cost of $200 plus per address which to me is gonna be a huge waste when you could use that some of that money the same to subsidize customer premise equipment. It costs $800 or $1,000 per address to put a wireless receiver and antenna on a building and if you were to take a more reasonable approach to wireless validation and testing and shift the saved money into customer premise equipment we would get a lot more of the low income people online. The subsidies I understand do not the current shares funding subsidies will not pay for broadband past the, okay, I'm gonna wrap up with this piece. Oh, we're gonna have to get you to wrap up shortly anyway because we've got one more witness after you and then we've got a little discussion. Yeah, and I think it's an election year don't I get equal time to what commissioner Tierney? I believe commissioner Tierney was mostly asking questions and no one is guaranteed equal time. She's not guaranteed equal time to you either. I was being facetious. So the LiDAR approach, you should be cautious that there has expressed intent to continue to use CARES money for poll data gathering just by calling it workforce development and or breaking it into smaller chunks and spending it but the problem is that the LiDAR is such a precision technology it can capture the flaws in the sidewalks the flaws in the curbs, the exact shapes and architectural features of the buildings and you have not dealt with who owns that data and whether that data is shared or to what accuracy we need to collect it to make sure it's useful to everyone. And if we don't do that we're gonna have to do it over again. VTrans is not ready to take on such a massive project we should probably postpone any statewide LiDAR collection and to use traditional methods which have been deemed and verified to be sufficiently accurate by fiber engineers but before we spend a million dollars or two or three on LiDAR we should get uniform standards set among all stakeholders to make sure that money is not wasted. I'll end again with the governance council. There's a one pager also provided to faith today and act relating to information and technology planning and governance. There's a one page synopsis of that describing which plans would be integrated and found necessarily integrated and made to mesh with each other getting back to that planning, meshing the plans. And then how this relates to the next generation VIT and hand sign one access media organizations the Kupar-Vermont Communications Board. The governor over a year ago created a new emergency communications advisory council. It has never been appointed nor has it convened its first meeting. And now is when we need it to set standards for how this fiber is going in to support resiliency in emergency community during an emergency. So you all need to intervene and take some immediate action or as soon as adjournment by the general assembly joint fiscal should meet and discuss whether to pull the VTA out and the mothballs and address. Give it a mark. I don't think they can do that Steve. Yes they can. Provided the information to senators Brock and McDonald last night I pulled it out of the statute. So I'll wrap with that. Might want to share it with me since I chair joint fiscal. I'd be happy to madam chair. I'll do that right away. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Okay. Committee any questions for Steve? Now I think you've given us an awful lot to process. I know. Everything is up on the website. So everybody can sit and look at the documents you've sent in and we can inform our discussion. It's just a lot to process. Okay. So thank you Steve. Evan Carlson. Okay. Welcome. Good afternoon everyone. So I guess before I get started I do want to be respectful of everyone's time here and get a sense of what it is that you want to hear from me since what I had received as a kind of call to it to join the discussion today was relatively vague. So give me direction before I start espousing with people. We're relatively vague. This today was just kind of a wrap up. Where do we want to go? What are we expecting? The department to produce for us. So from your perspective, where do we need to go? What would be most helpful? Sure. All right. So for the record, I'm Evan Carlson. I am a member at large of the Telecommunications and Connectivity Advisory Board as of March, 2019. I'm also the chair of the N.E.K.A. Community Broadband, C.U.D. When I joined the Telecommunication and Connectivity Board in 2019 or since then I've participated in a number of recommendations for the Connectivity Initiative Rounds and then also now to the COVID Connectivity Initiative Rounds and also participated in the feedback process for the Emergency Broadband Action Plan which certainly had overwhelming response and also participated in one of the public hearings though is very, very lightly attended. So I think it's important to note that my testimony here in appearance is from my own experience and not on behalf of the Telecommunications and Connectivity Advisory Board as a whole. So I guess I would touch on just a couple items since I know listening in on some previous Senate Finance Committee hearings that there was some back and forth regarding communication with the Department of Public Service. So as we are all aware, we're in unprecedented times and we're all doing everything we can to ensure that this funding is spent before the end of the year and to spend it in an effective way. By my count, the department is now managing no less than four additional programs that they did not have to manage in the past year and they're doing that with the same number of employees and staff to do it. They're also building these programs out and trying to establish processes so they're really going by that expression building the plane as you fly it. And so there's no surprise that there may be a sense that the department is kind of willfully denying any access to or access to some information to the board, but rather I think the department is doing everything they can to efficiently administer these programs just to ensure that it actually gets out the door or that the funding gets out the door before December. Also in H966, their legislation specifically states that the commissioner only needs to notify the CUDs of projects that they intend to fund. And I believe that this is what the commissioner and her team has done. That said, our board has a diverse set of points of view that need to be taken into account when making informed recommendations to the department. And we require some different information at times than what the commissioner and the department may think we need to make informed decisions. So in points when we are making those requests that is the reason why we are making them not to slow down the process. And I think that we totally understand that the commissioner and the department are under really tight pressures to make this work. I think that it's important to also note that the advisory board as a whole is in a bit of a unique situation. When I first came on I would say that we were relatively inactive or should I say not proactive in our approach to board business. And then since March, since the pandemic has hit the board has become much more engaged in the day-to-day processes. And I think that has inherently created some intentions between the department and the board because we are wanting more transparency and more information at a time when they are trying to do significantly more work than they're doing on a day-to-day basis. And so I think that that's an important point to respect. So I think relating to the telecom plan I think the 10-year telecom plan is absolutely something that needs to be funded and I would agree that to the commissioner's point that $250,000 is not going to be sufficient. Looking at it from the perspective of both someone representing a CUD as well as someone that is sitting on the telecommunications and connectivity advisory board there's a lot of nuance to the individual regions and the challenges that exist in each of those. And I think it is really important to ensure that there are individual plans or components of plans that are taking into account those challenges in each region versus a blanket plan for the entire state especially if you're expecting them actionable items for each region or that are going to address the true statewide goals for telecommunication. And really considering how the RPCs and CUDs play a role from the beginning of this process I think is a super important thing. And I'll stop there to let the committee ask questions because I do have a sense that there is maybe some specific questions about the connectivity advisory board. Okay, committee. Any questions at this point? Senator McDonald. The last witness get testified on a variety of issues and one that seemed to come up over and over again was the notion of sharing the resources on the polls sharing fiber and having open access. What has been your experience in achieving open access and being able to take advantage of that statute? From the perspective of a CUD. Yeah. I think that's something that we are unique and that we are early on in the process of trying to do that. There are mechanisms to be able to access some fiber and the VTA fiber specifically as well as Northern Enterprise or the North Link fiber assets. But I would say generally the other fiber assets that exist in the Northeast Kingdom are completely inaccessible because there is no policy in place to allow open access. I think that one thing that is yet to be kind of agreed upon by all CUDs but I think in the NEC we see ourselves less as an NISP and more as an organization that can own and be a clearinghouse of fiber assets to the ISP to reach the end goal of 100% connectivity. Which makes us different. We're not trying to generate buckets of revenue. We're trying to reach our goal of connectivity. And if that means we have to create many partnerships to combine the number of assets to get to that goal and we will do that. But I think open access is an excellent way to be able to potentially create that collection of assets to reach the goal but also achieve some of the things that both the commissioner and Mr. Whitaker had pointed out in getting better mobile wireless communications and also land mobile radios and all the other different communication needs that the region might have. My question was if the law says that open access is the goal are you as your CUD being denied the use of unused fiber on systems in your neighborhood or area of operation? No, but I don't believe the law says that today. The goal it doesn't say they have to do it. So I think I've got open access issues down as one of the things we're gonna need to address in January. I think that that is an absolute necessity though I would believe that the larger incumbent providers will fight to the end to keep that as a private asset. But I think if we truly believe that a competitive market is the way to ensure that our residents and our community members are getting served with quality service that is going to keep up with the times. Competition is a necessary means and open access can help us get there. Thank you. Okay, any other questions? Senator Brock. I understand that the Connectivity Advisory Board reviews things such as the connectivity initiative proposals that are in the three tranches. Is that correct? That is correct. And of the reviews that you've done so far can you tell me how they've gone? As far as the process? As far as the process and whether or not it's working as intended and the relationship between the board and the department in terms of information gathering and reporting. Yeah. So I will say that in normal circumstances in the two rounds of the connectivity initiative that I participated in before the pandemic we have been given confidential watermarked documents in order to be able to review the full proposals in advance and typically a week or more in advance of the actual meeting in which we would make a recommendation. And so that has been sufficient from a timing perspective. There is also included in that recommendation of what the department thinks should be awarded through the grants. And I would say that in at least one of the rounds that I participated in there was constructive feedback given and open dialogue across all the board members around types of projects that we thought were serving the community needs while also trying to strive towards the statutory goals. Well, in terms of the more recent reviews were you given the information you mentioned and prior reviews were given? Were you given the information in the two most recent reviews? No, we were the law stated says that we are not required to receive that. That said, we did request it and we did eventually get the information we needed. I think that at a base level the information that is provided is the exact same information that the commissioner is getting. But as I stated in my earlier comments there are individuals in the board that would like to get into the details to be able to really feel comfortable with the decisions and the recommendations that we're making. And I completely understand that. You say there are people who wanted to get into the details. Does it mean that there were questions asked that weren't answered? Well, I for one was one of the people that was asking and I will tell you that for me I'm interested in the technology that's being used and ensuring that there is a strong strategic plan in place to be able to not necessarily future proof but is this technology that we're funding is it worth the additional costs that it might take per address to ensure that it's gonna be a 10 year investment, a 20 year investment versus a two year investment. And you're not gonna get that in a high level table of potential awards. So is it correct then that as far as the board is concerned was the board satisfied with the level of information and the timeliness of it that was presented so that you were in a position to intelligently evaluate what was presented to you? In the beginning or by most recent examples? By Monday we were in a position to be able to do that. I will say that the previous meeting, the Friday meeting or Thursday meeting we did not have the information that we needed and you'll see in the record we'll reflect this that there was no vote that was had and the process was rehashed on Monday. Thank you. Yeah, there are questions. Okay, Evan, do you have anything else you think we need to hear at this point? Yeah, one other thing I think you had been asking the commissioner about what happens when the pandemic continues and talking about the wifi hotspots. One thing I will report on the ground in our CUDs the wifi hotspots have been really well received but there is a new expense that the towns that are keeping these hotspots up are incurring which is supplying the service cost to keep that hotspot running with higher usage. So I think that that is something to consider in any potential new legislation or new bill that is being worked on. I would assume that would get COVID funding. And there is current, none of the bills currently cover that. Okay, something to balance. Evan, can you just give us a sense of what the range is of that the additional money that the towns are gonna have to come up with for this? So my understanding is at least two of the towns have a new internet subscription service specifically to be able to handle the cost for the wifi hotspot to serve at the town hall. Well, it's just important to note that we gave general grants to municipalities. So they presumably could use that money to cover this. It's not like they're completely out of luck. For that matter, some of them may be doing it through their schools too, I should think, but. Okay, any other questions for Evan? All right, Evan, anything else we should know? Okay, thank you and thank you for being patient and sticking with us. It's been a longer afternoon than I think we anticipated. And committee, I don't know about you, but I could use five or 10 minutes to stand up and walk around. You can see where your, if your kids got home.