 Good morning, everyone. I'm Tim Briglin. I'm the chair of the House Energy and Technology Committee and welcome to our hearing on the morning of Thursday, January 14th. We've, if we were in the state house today, we would be packed into our tiny energy and technology committee room today we've got the very spacious zoom room that we're in. So I can see representative Yantachka stretching out there. We've got a, we've got a very busy. We've got a very busy morning this morning and I really appreciate the folks from across the state who are joining us this morning to testify. Our focus this morning is going to be on communication union districts and we also have some folks from the Department of Public Service who have joined us to to help us through this topic as well. Just to give a little kind of background and how we're going to schedule ourselves this morning. Jeff Fish is joining us from the Department of Public Service, and he's going to give us an introduction and some background on CUDs. We've got I think a representative from each CUD across the state we're going to hear from each of those representatives, including two former representatives I believe who are here joining us today. We have some background on the evolution of those CUDs in the last year, and the outlook in the coming, let's say 12 months. And then we're going to conclude our hearing at the end of the morning with some, some background from Vecuda, the Vermont CUD Association, and some of the things that from a policy perspective, whether in the state house or work with the community, we can be doing to support and accelerate the work of CUDs around the around the state. I do want to give folks a heads up that I plan on taking, you know, call it a 1015 minute break when we get to roughly the, I don't know 1015 1030 mark, just to give people a time to stretch. If there's a point in time that seems like an obvious break point probably in the middle of some of our CUD presentation, I'm just going to call a time out and we'll take a break for 10 or 15 minutes at that point. And something we haven't done yet in any of our hearings so far, and I've been remiss in doing that and because we have such a large group this morning. I have a few minutes to do that which is just briefly I'd like to give every member of our committee a chance to introduce themselves. You know what basically just a little bit about what towns you represent what part of the state and also maybe how long you've served on this committee or in the legislature generally. So, let's just take a couple minutes to do that again my name is Tim Briglin. I live in Fetford, and I represent for Upper Valley towns I've served in the legislature since 2015 and have been the chair of this committee this is my second term doing that. I've been a enthusiastic customer of EC fiber. So, and I want to pass it to Laura, and then Heidi, and then we'll go from there. So Laura. Good morning everyone and thank you so much for taking time to join us today. I represent words bro dover reads bro Stanford Searsburg, and a little bit of whiting him in southern Vermont. And I've been on this committee for four years. And very interested in this issue. Big champion of our local volunteers out in the CU D world and really, really happy to be able to hear from you all today. Heidi, Heidi, if you're speaking you're muted I think. Okay, why don't we go to representative hockey. Hi, I'm Sally hockey. I this is my first term in the legislature. I represent the Rutland Bennington district that includes the towns of Middletown Springs where I live. Also wells, Paul it Rupert and most of tin myth. Great. Welcome Sally. Seth. Find my mute button here. Chase Colchester. I'm a network engineer and this is my second term here. Great. Good morning, everyone. I'm having had I represented one of the two representatives for the memorial Washington district, which is Morristown and Elmore and well county and Woodbury and Worcester and Washington County. I live in Worcester. And this is my second term on this committee and I served one previous term before that. Great. Representative Rogers Lucy are you there. Good morning. Thank you all for joining I'm Lucy Rogers I live in Waterville and I also represent Cambridge and Memorial County. This is my second term in the legislature but my first term on this committee I'm coming over from health care committee. Thanks. Great. Representative Sims Catherine. Hi folks Catherine Sims, I am here in Craftsbury and I represent Albany Barton Craftsbury Greensboro Bluffer Sheffield me lock and sorry about my printer. This is my first term in legislature and therefore this is my first committee and I'm a proud member of our representative for my town of craft spray on the NPA CD board. Thank you. Mike representative and touch it. Yeah, hi Mike. I live in Charlotte represents a lot part of Heinsberg. I've been on the committee for census inception. And I've served the five terms already 10 years and I'm into my sixth term so I've been in the energy part of the committee and but also on the broadband and it. Great. Thanks Mike. Heidi representative Sherman. Are you there. I love that I'm finally fixed I get my mute. In any case, I'm Heidi Sherman I represent to represent so and this is my eighth term. And I've been on this. This is my second term on this committee. So, and I appreciate all of you guys being here today and as we move forward on on this important effort. So thanks. And sorry, my apologies. No, no problem, Heidi. Thank you. Great. Thank you committee members and as we turn to our testimony now in the energy and technology committee, I see that I didn't plug my iPad and last night so I have both an energy and a technology problem. So you're probably going to have a different view on me as I move my iPad to the plug in the next few minutes. Let's start out with our, our witnesses from the Department of Public Service. And I see we also have Commissioner Tierney here. Commissioner I don't know if you want to introduce Rob or we want to go right to Rob but I'll leave it to the department as to how you'd like to present from here. I'm going to take exactly one minute to introduce Rob, not because he's not worthy of deeper introduction but because I want to be respectful of your time. There has been a great deal of progress in the state on the place and function of communications union districts as a means of addressing the gaps in the market having to do with last mile broadband in the state. I have to say that but for Rob we would not be where we are today. The volunteers who have been indispensable to the progress we've made have had a real partner in him. He has worked very closely with me and all that he has done and he has wildly exceeded expectations in terms of what we were hoping to get out of this position. Frankly, I think we've hired three people into one position in Rob. He has a wonderful gift for communication. He's a very incisive and real time strategic thinker as well. So, with no further ado, I give you Rob was going to give you a great overview of what's been done to date. I've been led to that because of the clarity of his work, it has facilitated second generation insights into where CDs need to go next. And so that's really public policy and personnel management working hand in hand to great effect for the people of Vermont. So Rob, take it away. I'm Rob Fishner for the warm welcome and thank you committee for making time for this important issue today for the record. I'm Rob fish I met most of you before but there's still a few I haven't I'm the rural broadband technical assistant specialist for the Department of Public Service. So I'm going to share my screen right now and go through a short presentation. See if I can. Okay, I believe everybody is seeing the presentation now please let me know if you're not I'm seeing my email instead. Still working on all this technology. So thank you thank you again in the presentation this morning I'm going to go through what a CD is why they were created a brief history, and then go into some of the resources the department has provided and then the needs and challenges. So thank you for all the discussions in terms of what each CD is doing to the wonderful volunteers that are representing the CDs on the call today. So as going way back, the communications union districts are formed under Title 30 from 2015. These districts are similar to other types of municipal districts like solid waste districts, natural resource conservation districts just to give you a frame of reference. So why create a communications union district. This is a way to aggregate demand, and they can make a project more attractive to other providers, more negotiating power, and it's a way for the entire region to benefit, as opposed to individual towns being being picked off it's a way to work together, reduce risk and make this happen. So both the CDs the first CD, although it wasn't created as a CD is EC fiber which was founded in 20 2008 by 2011 they secured 1 million and insider financing and then built a pilot project 2015 7 million and then in 2016 be they became the first communication union district. I want to take remember that time frame because what we're trying to do is compress that timeline and make a lot happen in a very short period of time for all these other districts. The next district was CV fiber that was created in 2018 at town meeting. Then summer of 2020. Actually, I apologize I may have skipped a slide here. Okay, well, let's ignore the text on the slide I apologize. In town meeting of 2020 just before COVID hit Southern Vermont so Bennington County, Deerfield Valley's Wyndham County and the Northeast Kingdom all created communication union districts. And as the summer went on districts were created in Addison County, LaMoyle County, Rutland's Otter Creek, and in Northwest. We now have nine districts that are 160 member towns there's another 58 towns and study areas that's the, the lighter color areas that you see on this map. And this is 160 board reps and another 160. And these are all volunteers. So here we have 320 people around the state that are taking time out of their busy crazy days during a pandemic to work on connectivity issues. I just want to let that sink in for a few moments of, of what these groups have accomplished in about a year. So the current challenge is it adapting the AC fiber model to current realities and doing it in a 10th of the time if not less. So backing up a little bit on the Department of Public Service as I said on the rural broadband technical assistance specialist, some of the dedicated staff that's assisting communities with broadband visioning I'm providing connections to other resources, and outreach, being an ear to listen to what's going on in all the districts and try to work through various issues and strategize, and also some fundraising assistance I'll get to that later. In terms of the department we also provide some broadband mapping. Most of you are aware of the inadequacies of mapping at the federal level that the FCC does. I'm very proud to say the department has gone way beyond that I'm not sure if anyone's going to disagree with that. It's the broadband innovation grant. This was created to provide funding for feasibility and business planning studies. Most of the CUDs have taken advantage of this at this point, where they've at least gone through the feasibility section of the grant and are working on the business plan. I'm going to briefly touch on some of the funding that came from the CARES Act. There was the COVID response connected community resilience program. This ended up being $2.3 million for planning and infrastructure. The CUDs were able to accomplish a lot with this funding, but there are some challenges. The CARES Act, the Treasury Guidelines for the CARES Act, made it difficult to do some of the projects that would have been the most strategic. We'll talk a little bit more about that later, but I also want to say that the CUDs were extremely frugal as well. There is money left over in this fund. We have also used CARES Act funds for Wi-Fi hotspots. 190 hotspots are now installed around the state and the CUDs assisted with identifying locations and just making it happen and building those connections in their communities. One of the biggest things that I think came out of this came out of the pandemic, it feels very safe. Yes, there is money left over in those programs. We're waiting to see what happens with that. Well, let's be clear. There was money in those programs that was not spent. That money is now the subject of discussion about whether it should be reverted for other purposes or whether it should remain with the department to complete the purposes for which it was originally appropriated. That is a legislative issue about a sunset provision that has to be worked out as well. So the money appropriated last spring has not been fully expended and the department is actively advocating for that money to continue with the department so that it can be spent for the purposes for which was allocated. Thank you. Thank you for the clarification, Commissioner. This year we will be launching a CUD infrastructure program in the supplemental budget last fall. There was $1.5 million that were made available to grants to the CUDs to assist in covering the cash contribution required for financing, specifically with the Vita broadband expansion loan. We also learned about two weeks ago now that the Northern Borders Regional Commission has awarded the department $1 million grant to assist with the CUDs in building infrastructure. This is broken down in $750,000 is going to be added to that 1.5. We are also looking forward to funding a broadband project developer that's going to work be able to be available to work with the CUDs on financing, being able to assist with public private partnerships and really financing is one area where we need a lot more expertise than I can bring to the table. So I'm incredibly excited about this position or contract or however it ends up being structured. We've also been working with the Community Foundation to leverage additional support for the CUDs. Some of those funds are going to be used for a CUD broadband accelerator program that's going to be due north out in Lindenville that's going to help bring each of the board members that are joining these CUDs up to speed on some of the issues in terms of telecom, some of the history. And just as a way to try to accelerate the institutional knowledge of each CUD. We've also provided some support for the association of all the CUDs that you'll be hearing from them later, some general operating support, and they're also working to provide additional training and technical assistance and small rural library digital enhancement grants to libraries around the state. So in terms of the challenges the CUDs are facing right now. The big one that I'm seeing right now is the need for a hybrid model. You'll hear from some of the CUDs of how the FCC ARDOF auction has impacted their districts. In many places it's created a patchwork of census blocks where you have where you have one winner in one block and another winner and another one and it's going to create the need for some coordination and possibly public private partnerships. So if they have a situation where districts will have multiple ISPs where they may own some but not all of the infrastructure and integrating that into what we're calling the EC fiber model that is a that is a challenge and that is a work in progress. Capacity is a big issue project management support has been key. We've experienced the CUDs that have been working very closely with the regional planning commission or been able to have a project manager, or have a strong executive committee that can dedicate hours or days each week to make this happen is essential for moving things forward we can only expect so much from volunteers, especially as things start to get more technical as we move towards construction. So the issue of pre construction costs, these are the soft costs that need to be incurred before you're going to be building infrastructure and having revenue. So this goes right into the access to capital and materials. I'm sure you'll hear more about the Vita broadband expansion program from what we've learned from what we've learned from Vita. In some cases these projects are going to require the CUD to come up with up to 50% of the cost of a project from other sources, whether this is grants or unsecured loans. So I'm pretty confident the CUDs are going to be asking for some or suggesting some changes to that program. We mentioned the distribution of stimulus funds. There's issues with workforce and the shortages of fiber that we're going to be dealing with. We need to incentivize incentivizing collaboration. This is both between the CUDs between the CUDs and utilities and public private partnerships, potentially with some of the incumbents. The final issue I want to touch on is just the issue of that we're a public entity in a competitive landscape. So this is proving challenging in terms of protecting business, business sensitive information, leveling the playing field and there's also a capacity issue of just complying with records requests. Like most of these groups are created about wanting transparency about wanting having some oversight over over the build out a broadband in their area, but there's, we have to find a balance there. So that is my presentation I welcome questions and I'm sure there'll be questions throughout everything else that's happening today. Thank you Rob. I do see one hand up and maybe some other questions will come up here, but representative the untouched guy wanted to call on you. The RDOF funding is over a five year period. Does this give a window to CUDs to get in there first and enroll customers before the RDOF build out takes place. I think that's going to be for each CUD to decide and for the state to decide of how we want to allocate scarce resources. These districts, the census blocks that were one are going to be built out over a period of years there's other areas that might not be built out, unless they're state funding so this is going to be a bouncing act and I don't know if the, I don't know if the commissioner has anything to add on how the department's thinking on that. Great. Thank you, Rob. If there aren't any more immediate questions for Rob. Rob, I'm hopeful that you can stick with us to hear, although I know you're quite familiar with it, what the CUDs have to share with us this morning. You're welcome to unshare your screen if you will. No, yeah, no worries. And, and I think we'll go in there. Yeah, thank you. I think we'll go into the portion of our discussion where we'll hear from from about each of our CUD representatives who are here and then as we get to the last portion of our discussion later this morning. I'm sure that some of your input from the department's perspective would would really be helpful as part of that portion of our hearing this morning. So, FX Flynn I'm going to go to you first and what I think I'll do is simply call on different CUD representatives as they're listed on our itinerary. And if there's any reason, you know, any of the folks would like to, you know, move your move your position, certainly let me know, but for lack of a better methodology, I'm going to start with you. And I know that you are the I believe you're the chair of the CUDA, the Vermont CUDA Association and but also here representing EC fiber. So welcome FX thanks for thanks for joining us this morning. Can't hear you FX if you're, if you're muted or not. Thank you. Thank you. My apologies. I appreciate the opportunity to appear here and I'm going to be speaking mostly to EC fiber. And the, I just want to say that my full name is Francis Xavier Flynn and I go by my initials FX. And I have been chair of the EC fiber governing board since last May I have been a member of the governing board representing the town of Hartford since 2012. And I really appreciate Rob's presentation. And I just want to say that, you know, as far as the EC fiber goes. It really did take us quite a long time to get achieve lift off. And then we were still struggling doing private placement of $2,500 instruments to raise enough money to be building out, but we were showing in our audited financials every year, starting in 2013 that we were going to earn us. And even then, I apologize for that feedback. The, the important thing is, as Rob said that you need to find ways to compress the EC fiber time schedule. And the situation we have right now is that we have 31 member towns, we're nearing completion of our build out in 21 of our original 23 towns, the towns of Hartford and Woodstock have a strong presence with a cable company. So we have, we have not focused on building there we've wanted to make sure that we covered places that had either nothing or only DSL. And this year where we will begin construction in some of the cabled areas of Hartford, but we will also be building in a number of our new towns. And by the time we're all done sometime in late 2023 or early 2024, we should pass 31,000 Vermont homes and businesses on about 2000 miles of network and we will have about $60 million of municipal bonds out there. So, what, what is the EC fiber model. We used to talk about $30,000 a mile six customers per mile well costs are going up. So it's more in the 33 perhaps even the $35,000 range. It'll be interesting for to see what those numbers look like once we've completed the design of the new towns have ordered the materials and have contracted for the installation, but generally speaking, we're now operating on the notion that we're spending that $33,000 broken up as I've presented here on on the slide, you can use these components as a good rule of thumb for what a statewide cost might be on a per cut basis, either including or excluding the study areas. I've done a number of spreadsheets for that, and I can make those available to the committee. At the, at the end of the day, with that average of five to six customers per mile and an average of about $100 a month. You know, ranging in EC fibers case from $72 a month to 150. You have enough revenue to operate the business and to repay the municipal bonds. So what are we delivering we are delivering world class broadband. It's fiber optic infrastructure it's it's future proof the the network we're building has a 50 year lifetime it it it's, it's not going to need to be replaced as soon as we have finished paying off the bonds and in many ways people really don't know how long it will last because we haven't even had 50 years of of fiber optic cable experience. It's symmetrical service, so that the upload and the download are the same. Right now our top offering is 800 over 800 megabits per second. We can ultimately foresee the network being able to offer 5000 or five gigs up and down. Everybody in Hong Kong has that. That's what the world that's what world class broadband is all about. We can have it in Vermont. So neighborhood slow down, you know, the way we design our network that it just doesn't happen in the real world and when it does it doesn't affect hundreds of people it affects a couple of dozen but it never happens. And so this means that people can use a Wi Fi calling at home, so that if they don't have a good cell signal, no problem that they have they have they can use their cell phones, turn on the Wi Fi calling. No issue, you can have four people in the house on zoom meetings. Meanwhile you can have four other people in the house streaming different movies, or, you know, or gaming. So all the contention issue goes away. And that's what world class broadband is. What are our challenges right now. Well, we need to finish what we wanted to finish in in 2020 we that got impacted by the pandemic and in many ways. And I'm thinking right now that by the, by the end of winter. We will have closed the books on the 2020 build and we and all of the unserved areas are of our original 23 towns will be up and running. We're in the middle of transitioning from our original phone system to a higher capacity one that's been a real sore point for us, and it'll be a huge burden and relief to get beyond that. When we build in Hartford, we're going to be building our first 10 gigabit network. In Hartford's a pretty complicated situation. There are a lot there, you know, Comcast is there. First light has fiber running around for businesses. CCI has very a very dense network a lot of tell a lot of the utility polls have a significant number of attachments. So the make ready is going to take longer it's going to be more expensive. This is the first time we have seriously engaged in direct competition in a, in an area where there's, there is already a density of service so this is going to be a very interesting lesson. And it's important because world class broadband throughout the state of the Vermont implies that you will have fiber optic network at this in the same places that you have cable networks, which are not world class broadband. So we need to finish the design and begin construction in all our parts of our eight new towns. And we, we definitely have a need to work on our customer service. We've recognized that we've, we've grown to a point where that's become an issue. We also are working with equal access to broadband which is a new nonprofit devoting devoted to subsidizing house households that are in need. I would say that in terms of what we are looking for from the state broadband subsidies like I just mentioned we're going to be gaining some expertise in this area. We strongly support efforts to get unfettered funds into the bank accounts of CUDs they need to, they need to get moving they need to have people working on this daily. I wish that we could wave a magic wand and enable Vita to make initial $2 million alone simply because the cuts exist and are likely to be able to get to the municipal bond market by within five or six years. I don't think anything will attract more young working people to Vermont than ubiquitous world class broadband. And I, I just don't think that the for profit traditional providers will ever commit to deploying world class broadband the way EC fiber has. My takeaways for the state leadership is that EC fibers been able to do it almost entirely on borrowed money that the CUDs ultimately should be able to cover via customer revenues every dollar that is made available to them that any no strings funds that get provided simply shorten to debt free status and at that point the ability to lower monthly charges that this effort is not about serving 60,000 addresses on the last mile it's about bringing world class broadband to the state as a whole. You do need to pay attention to the risk that incumbents are going to use art off to cherry pick the village centers and render the six customer per mile goal. Unachievable. And that, again, the CUDs need help to do in the next four years what it took EC fiber, eight years to accomplish. And we're laying the infrastructure for a world that's coming faster than we expected. And I appreciate this opportunity to make this presentation. Thank you. Thank you effects that was that was very helpful, and I am going to take the chairs prerogative to ask a question I don't want to open a can of worms but since you and EC fiber have been around the longest and have gone through kind of the, the most long-term development process in the last decade. A question I have for you, and I suspect other CDs may be working on in the coming years. How did you prioritize which towns to go to first when you have a catchment area in your CD, CD that is, you know, whatever it does in 20 towns. How did you go first, presumably, how did EC fiber prioritize we're going to these five towns first, then you know, what was that thinking process. In the very early days it, it, it was literally which group of neighbors had invested $30,000 to build a mile in their neighborhood. And I think that we strung together enough locations like that in places like Barnard and Chelsea, and, and Royalton to demonstrate that we could be a going concern. And, and frankly we're, we're paying something of a penalty cost for that right now because some of that initial build was done in a way that is interfering with us. We were getting newly built areas lit. Now, once we were able to access the municipal bond market. We were able to take a town by town approach and initially we were looking at where people had signed up as an indication that we would be more, you know, more certain of getting customers. And finally, we, you know, never even considered going into the town of Hartford, or going into most of Woodstock because Comcast was already there and we felt that we could save that until we had gotten to the, until we had gotten through all of the unserved areas in terms of prioritizing the eight new towns. We know that there are four of them that we can just get going on and the other, the other four three of them may have. They may have other entities that are either going to be building a fiber optic network or who will, who will build it for us to operate. We haven't gotten that quite sorted out yet. And, but it sounds like generally you prioritized financial viability of your model within towns as the as the first towns that you, you worked through essentially to build a financial foundation under your business model. Well, we need to make sure that where we build we're going to have customers. Yeah, we because yeah I, but it was a little more. I have to say that over the eight years that was a shifting goal I mean first we were building where people would invest with us, or in us. Yeah, it was difficult. And then, after that we were, we were doing it more on the basis that we knew what our final network work would look like, and we were confident that we would get the take rate. So, so the decision became more technological and less economic representative Sebelia, did you have a question. Thank you effects thanks for being here this morning and not to go into too much detail but you know I noted in answering the chair's question around prioritizing you first started with the towns where folks had where there had been funds raised and, and we know that the next step for the CUDs is really going to be funding the implementation so you just take a few moments and I'm interested from to hear from any of the other CUDs as they testify today. If they have anything to add in this regard, but can you just talk just high level about some of the fundraising efforts that took place in EC fibers beginning. Yes, before we were able to access the municipal bond market. We, we, we did private placements of promissory notes, and it's a rather tricky bit of financial business from a legal perspective. And John Roy, the treasurer of EC fiber, pioneered this method and he's briefed the new CUDs on how that's done we have a whole section in our Vicuda shared folder that explains how to do that. But I would say that our advice to new CUDs would be to design and build your network from a technological point of view of of what will work because the economics of it are really pretty good and six customers per mile should generally be achievable, even in competitive situations. Okay, thank you. That's, that's great. Appreciate it. I appreciate the question Laura that is this is a topic that we are going to dig into deeply in the next couple of weeks and thank you FX for for sharing kind of the overview and actually looking at your slides there are a few things that, as I said, I think we're going to dig into pretty deeply in the coming weeks and probably the rest of this morning. Sorry, just a follow up and and I'm not sure that this is for FX or the rest of the CUDs but something that I am interested in recognizing acknowledging we have we are working with unbelievable volunteers largely from around the state. Besides the fact that we are, you know, that you all are volunteers, you know what other tools might make that type of private fundraising, easier to do, or for us to support, if anything, because it's my belief that folks in rural Vermont that there are a number of folks in rural Vermont who, you know, are ready to pitch in here to some sort of organized effort to get this built so just thinking about what what we might do to support that and not thinking about that. I'd like to be clear as a as like where we're going. I'd like to bookmark that question and as something that we come back to after we've gone through all the CUDs and, and kind of get to our concluding discussion because I think it is central to some of the things we've got to be supporting here. So, from FX, I'm going to go to Steve and Steve, I don't want to, I don't want to butcher your last name so I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself and your last name I can see on my screen but you're next. Fair enough. My name is Steve Huffacre. I'm the chair of Maple Broadband and speaking of avoiding butchering names. My last name was Addison County Community Communication Union District and we decided that that was a mouthful and when you abbreviate it down to CUD it sounds like it has something to do with a cow's digestive system so we elected to adopt a little simpler name which is Maple Broadband. In our discussions yesterday about how we were going to present our challenges to you. I ended up being our organization ended up being at the beginning of this list because we are the youngest we've been operating for about 14 weeks. Prior to that at the beginning of that 14 week period. We were able to accumulate a total of 16 member towns that are all in Addison County. We do have 17th town writing that's going to be coming on board shortly so that's very, very encouraging. We started as many of the other COD's I imagine through broadband innovation grant, which kicked off a feasibility study which recently got was completed and concluded that we, it's feasible for us to do what we want to do. And we are now working on a business plan, which is going to move as quickly as we move as we attempt to figure out how we want to configure our operation to meet our objectives. Our initial funds and the first injection came from that broadband innovation grant. Second injection came to the unfortunate need associated with the CARES Act and the COVID-19 pandemic. And the funds that we received as we're administered by the Department of Public Service helped us both stand up our organization as well as helped us serve as an arm of the Department of Public Service to support some of the initial needs of the community to cope with COVID-19 issues. And so, for example, some of them, as Rob had said, Wi-Fi hotspots, we were deploying some signage to help people understand where the hotspots are located. We've helped us. So, we've done a number of undertakings in order to address the COVID-19 pandemic as well as billing out our operation. We took advantage of the Addison County Regional Planning Commission to serve in a back office function. In particular, they were the ones that were writing checks to entities that we had engaged through the CARES Act grant. We've done some mailings. One of the challenges had been that since we are our focus is to address this unserved and underserved, we recognize that there's members of the community who may not have access to internet. So instead of posting information on front porch forum and posting websites, some of our initial outreach has been via the snail mail, sending things out via the mail to inform the community about some of the tools that we have deployed to help the community cope with COVID-19. We're composed of an executive committee and a full board. Our executive committee is composed of five volunteers, plus two ex officio individuals, a clerk and a treasurer. And our full board is composed of one delegate representing each member town. Our current activities. We're our biggest focus in terms of our day to day activities in terms of our executive committee is we are actively rather in a frenzied fashion, attempting to interview valid potential operating partners. We've had started an interview and we're going to be like next week we're going to be in the thick of about three or four of them. And so we have, we hope to have under our belt, a good understanding of what's available out there in that marketplace and also to help us understand how we would might want to structure our activities going forward. Steve, I'm sorry I just want to interrupt you real quickly when you said operating partners. Are you talking about an ISP or an incumbent carrier that you would partner with. That's an umbrella term and I'm glad to ask that question Tim. The, the, our needs are the same I imagine that all the CUDs are which is that we need, we need, we need organizations that can both design and build out infrastructure and maintain the infrastructure so they're there. It's the full suite of services that are going to be needed to to fulfill our needs are focused so I use the term operating partners advisedly within the context of your question it's really our volunteers aren't going to be pulling cable we're going to be getting others to do that and it's those kinds of activities that we need to engage others to accomplish so our work is kind of far ranging some of it like one of our interviews is going to be with one of the incumbent carriers in region, others are organizations that may have provided support to other CUDs in their activities as well so there's lots of kind of a far range. We might find that the end state will be several entities that we have engaged in structured our relationships with them to accommodate what our challenges are challenges. Well, estimated cost to build out our member towns is somewhere between $24 and $30 million and that's very high level and I'll credit FX with giving us some rules of thumb to help us figure out how to calculate that. That's kind of our long term need we're we're our attempt on our from an internal perspective is grant writing we're looking to do. We've got several volunteers on staff that are working on grant writing. That's going to be key and we're also reaching out to the community seeking donations contributions to our efforts. Well, I think our thought had been that the Vita might help us because if we can contribute a moderate share of funds to Vita with that leverages into larger larger magnitudes of funds to a level where we can actually do something with it. If we have $100,000 in the bank it really honestly doesn't get us to even starting on what we need to do. It's estimated that it was going to take us eight years to complete our build out of Addison County. Out of respect to to FX's comment, nothing would please me more to compress on their history. I think it certainly would be a big challenge but certainly achievable. If we have the wherewithal to compress that schedule. We don't have enough funds in the bank we really can't do anything so it's at this point pretty much all we're doing is attempting to raise funds. We don't have enough money to do any pre construction activities. My estimate for what we could what we need to do anything more than fundraising is between $500,000 and a million dollars. That would be enough for us to start commencing polls surveys and possibly some high levels of engineering design so that would be real progress but as it stands right now. We're certainly keeping ourselves very busy preparing for spending money but truly we really don't have the money to spend right now so that's our biggest challenge. That's pretty much it from my own. Thank you. That was that was a great overview. We're going to go a little bit. I think south from where you guys are now and go to bill more and bill. I think you're on. There you are. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Can everyone hear me. Okay. Well, thank you for taking the time to allow us to testify. I'm going to go right into our report. So, thanks to the legislation passed in response to the coven 19 pandemic and the associated strains of Vermont's inadequate internet infrastructure, the select boards of the towns of Brandon, which I am a municipal officer and I'm working with the Audit Creek Communication Union District. And within organizational meeting on July 31, the OCCD was officially formed. In the ensuing five months our organization has worked to fulfill our mission to expand affordable broadband access to the residents of the Audit Creek Communication Junior District. So thus far, since our formation in July of 2020, we've created a board and executive committee and have added 11 member towns, Benson, Castleton, Chittenden, Fairhaven, Hubbardton, Pittsburgh, Pultney, Rutland Town, Sudbury, West Haven and West Rutland. If you notice too, it seems to follow that same sort of snow line along the Route 4 corridor. And I'm not sure what we're breaking over they've got meetings with people south of Route 4. We've worked with the Rutland Regional Planning Commission to receive and record our feasibility study that was funded by a 2020 broadband innovations grant. We applied for them and awarded three grants, two Vermont Community Foundation grants and some CARES Act funding. We coordinated the identification of multiple hot spots needs through the Rutland region and shepherded the award of 11 others. We've met or spoken with the town managers and our boards of more than 13 municipalities. We've coordinated the contracts for retention of legal services as well as website development services. We've coordinated the proposal and application for the funds for the development of an outreach clearinghouse and case management tool for the coordinated identification of internet connectivity needs and outreach to the public and dissemination of state, federal and local resources to support this need. We created a marketing campaign that launched at the end of December, 2020 which included mailers as well as posting in the front porch forum, other outreach has already resulted in the presubscription of 115 OCCUD area households. The lion share of the administrative administrative work has performed in partnership with the Rutland Regional Planning Commission by way of their super planner, Amanda O'Connor who's been working day and night with us. Department of Public Service through the person of the fabulous Rob Fish has been an excellent partner in helping us to access federal, state and private funding opportunities. Verona Community Foundation has provided funding that will allow us to continue operations into this new year, but there's much more that we will need. The task of providing 100 of 100 service to all the households that are anticipated CUD member towns. That's 26, Rutland County and one Addison County community is daunting, especially to a group of volunteers appointed by our select boards who are nearly all neophytes when it comes to telecommunications industry. There's a steep learning curve for many of our members. We could snap our fingers and receive the funding that we would need to provide fiber to the home. You need to allocate based on today's estimates approximately $38.2 million. That will include the engineering poll studies, make ready work and equipment to install the approximately 1,153 miles of fiber that will be needed to meet our community's broadband needs. This number is independent of operational costs. As we go forward, our next 12 months we'll see us navigating the waters of the Missile Bond Market, the RFP process around engineering, potential contractors and providers, fundraising, more member recruitment, implementing strategies outlined in our feasibility study and much in the way of administrative work. We will need to hire someone to manage this project. The person that the CUD can direct to provide project management and administrative support to the executive committees would help us to continue our future work. Also, we need help in developing relationships with existing providers. Our CUD is most certainly interested in efficiencies that can be realized by partnering with organizations who have the existing infrastructure and expertise that can help expedite the process. Situation is dire. We have many in our area who need this connectivity and reach out often asking for updates of potential resources. We, the members of the Autocreat Communication District are committed to continuing our work in expeditious yet prudential, prudent and fiscally responsible manner to connect our underserved residents with the high-speed internet access through the fiber that they deserve, the world-class fiber as FXO eloquently puts it. And that is the summation of, and I'll field any questions you guys might have about what we're doing down here. Great, thank you, Bill. It sounds like you're doing a ton and thanks for your service. We are actually gonna move Sharon for guard up right now on the schedule. Sharon, if you are there, it's great to see your face again. So I have a pretty short update in part because it was at the meeting two nights ago that we learned the person who would normally have been providing this couldn't make it. And I appear to be frozen. Can anybody, can everybody hear me? Okay. I can hear you fine. Yep, yep. Okay, great. My download is only three and my upload is less than one. So the Northwest Vermont Communications Union District formed in August. They're primarily volunteers with some administrative support from the Regional Planning Commission. They currently represent 12 municipalities with 28,394 residents across Northwest Vermont. There's significant need for high-speed broadband in our region. 47% of premises in the district do not have broadband as defined by 25 megabytes per second download and three for upload. Just 1% of premises in the district have access to broadband that meets the state's goal of 100 up and 100 down. The mission of the Northwest CUD is to leverage partnerships and procure funding to connect Northwestern Vermont via open access fiber to ensure opportunity for all homes and businesses in our region. And this objective aligns with the statewide goal of achieving the 100 up and down service for all residents in business. Since its formation in August, representatives have spent a lot of time working on projects to provide internet access to all premises in the district. They've organized the deployment of wifi hotspots to the district to provide immediate access to broadband, actively engaged in planning efforts with the goal of developing an economically feasible plan to deploy high-speed fiber to the premise broadband to residents in business projects, working with the Regional Planning Commission to complete a feasibility study and business plan for Northwest Vermont. Deploying a survey to better understand the need and demand for broadband in the region. In fact, the postcards just arrived to some of the towns this week. It's been some of the challenges have obviously been initially the ambiguity of the CARES Act money and the deadline, but also just trying to do this during a pandemic. We have had some conversations with Northeast Kingdom and Lamoille regarding sharing resources and staff. Lamoille's a little closer to our timeline. We chose not to align with the Vermont CUD Association due to the timeline disparities. They're so far ahead and that things like the poll survey data would be obsolete by the time we were ready to make use of that information. What we need moving forward is additional grant funding for further planning efforts to meet the state's goal of connectivity by 2024 and additional funding for paid support positions such as a project manager. And I know I'm echoing what you've already heard, which is not surprising. We need technical director, data analyst, project manager. We need professional help for people who are not volunteers. And that's it for me. I've only attended to me. I've only been part of it this month. Thanks for joining us and thanks for serving on this board. It's great to see you again, Sharon. Thanks for hitting it the last minute and stepping into the breach here. Everybody else seemed intimidated and I was excited to see some old friends. Great, well, it's good to see you. Thank you. The next person we're gonna turn to is Jane Campbell, I believe who is on the governing board at LaMoyle. So, there you are, Jane. Welcome, good to see you again. Thank you. Thank you very much. I am gonna share my screen. This one here, go bigger. Yep, we can see it. And maybe you can get rid of your ribbon just, yeah, perfect, perfect. Yeah, okay. So LaMoyle Fibernet, we started in July 2020. We represent the peak towns in LaMoyle County, Belvedere, Cambridge, Eden, Hyde Park, Johnson, Morristown, Waterville, and most recently, Stowe. The total population that we serve is 23,000 and we've got about 600 road miles altogether. I can't tell you every time somebody hears that we're working on this, we get a slew of emails saying, when can I get it, when can I get it? This is an area, a region where people either have no broadband at all or it's sparse and just looking at the access, there are tremendous inequities. Even households and businesses that have the speeds that are considered, quote, adequate struggle if there are two or more people in the house using the internet. You've probably all heard this before and it's just been really shown the pandemic has really shown how urgent the need is. I think that one of our greatest assets is our board. There is such energy and passion and participation and engagement. We've only been around six months but we've done all the startup stuff of financial policies, getting insurance, et cetera. We completed the feasibility study that did show that our CUD is financially feasible. We've conducted the poll study in our first priority areas, certain routes in Cambridge, Waterville, Belvedere, Eden and Johnson. We partnered in the second round of CARES Act funds. We were able to partner with two area libraries, Stowe and Morrisville and extend the public wifi there and also the two school districts to bring internet access to students who didn't have other options for remote learning. As Sharon and others pointed out, the first round of CARES Act funding was difficult to access because of what it wouldn't cover and because of the tight timing and deadlines. So we're looking forward to the extension on those deadlines. Our business plan should be done in a few weeks and when we're asked to name our greatest priority needs, as FX mentioned before with the Ardoff subsidies, we have three to four other organizations eager to expand in our region and they have these federal subsidies that we don't have access to and so the context we're working in, we're already at a disadvantage and then you add on to that our emphasis on serving all addresses within a few years, not 10 to 15 to 20 years, not just picking off the ones that generate revenue. So with this context, the state funding is really critical. Whether it's loans or grants, we need funding for you, you've heard this from everybody else, the administration, the design, the engineering and the construction and also, I know Rob is working on this as fast as he can, wonderful Rob Fish. We do need clarity as soon as possible on whether and how much of this CARES Act funding that's still around will be available to CUDs. We anticipated that you would say, okay, you need money, how much money? So if in 2021 we built one fifth of our 600 road miles, it would cost about 4 million. I think the PowerPoint I sent you used the figure of 31,000 per mile, but I think FX's revised 33,000 per mile is probably more realistic given that there is going to be so much competition for the same consultants, the same construction companies, et cetera. I think that's it for us. I do wanna thank you for the time you're giving to this issue. It really is critical and I'm happy to answer your questions if you have any. Great, thank you, Jane and thanks for joining us again. It's good to see you. I think we're gonna go with one more witness prior to taking a break just to give folks a heads up in the control room. And Tim Skoggins is with us from Catamount Fiber. Tim, you've been here before. I don't see you on my screen immediately, but hopefully you're there someplace. There you are, Tim. Welcome. Can you hear me? Yep, we can hear you. Okay. Yeah, Catamount Fiber is our trade name. We're still mostly going by Southern Vermont CUD. At some point, we'll put out a branding campaign to just switch over. So all we've done so far really is snag a website with the Catamount Fiber. But we are, like all of the rest except for two, one of the newer CUDs we formed at town meeting in 2020. We're up to 13 towns. And we are at the feasibility study stage. The first thing we did was get a Act 79 BIG grant and start on a feasibility study. We had a first look at that end of the last year and it said, we are not feasible. We can't follow the EC fiber model and become self-sustaining with the situation on the ground. And that situation, I should mention we are largely Bennington County is that 85% of Bennington County is covered with cable, which is of course, is a good thing for the people who have cable, but the 15% who don't have it are still out of luck. And so that sent us back to the drawing board, but we were prepared for this. We have been thinking all along that it might make more sense for us to collaborate, merge, work together with Wyndham County and the Deerfield Valley CUD and in our original ask to the department for our BIG grant, we said we would want to look at a secondary question, would it make more sense for us to work as a two-county CUD? And so that's where we are now. We're looking at a two-county CUD with a feasibility study. We have been in talks with Deerfield Valley, really from the beginning, we've all thought it might make more sense at some point for us to merge slash work together we have a working group of representatives from the two counties that meet regularly talking about how that collaboration might pan out. In terms of the feasibility study, we've had an official, not an official, first look at that, the thing we're struggling with right now is how do we model in the feasibility study the results of the ARDOF reverse auction? Because large chunks of Bennington and Wyndham County that were going to be our customers have been essentially purchased by Consolidated and SpaceX and we're trying to figure out how we proceed forward from there and so in working with our consultants we've come up with some rules, some modeling parameters for looking at that and that's still being evaluated. The first indication is that in a two-county mode we might be able to do that, that we can put together a feasible business model that works from an initial raised or otherwise acquired funding to a model that can sustain itself in the EC-Fiber way. So that's kind of where we are as far as challenges, what everybody else has said, capacity expertise and startup funding are challenges for all of us. Great, thank you, Tim. A quick question I do have for you that I haven't heard other CUDs mentioned yet but I've heard through the grapevine has been somewhat of a governance challenge is navigating some of the public disclosure requirements that are required of municipalities, which CUDs are, but also as you operate in a, what essentially is a competitive environment, you are looking to prospectively enter a marketplace with other internet service providers who are not required to publish their business plans to lay out precisely what customers they're gonna pursue or what roads they may be going down next. To what extent has that been a challenge for Catamount? Is that something you could speak to briefly? It was a challenge for a period of time. We got bombarded with information requests and yeah, quite frankly, that was something of a gut punch for us. A handful of volunteers who think we're doing the right thing, getting bombarded with record requests. I was trying to enjoy a family weekend when a bunch of them came in and ended up sitting in a hotel working on my computer while my family was out running around trying to figure out, am I really gonna get sued? What should I release? What do I have to release? Yeah, but it's part of the whole challenge of doing this with volunteers. What we're trying to do is on the level of effort and expertise of running a maybe not so small business. And if you're doing that, there's responsibilities and things that have to be done right. And it's a challenge to do those things with an all volunteer army. Yep, great, well, thank you for that.