 The recording is started. Let's call the meeting to order at 6.02. We have a quorum. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? Hearing none. Is there any public comment? Again, hearing none. Janiel, let me pass this over to you so that we can start the meeting with you introducing Olivia, please. Good evening. There you are. There it is. So we have, at CV Fiber, hired our third full-time employee. Olivia Contica is here as our community relations manager, and we are so happy to have Olivia here with us. I will let Olivia talk a bit about herself, her background, and what she hopes to see with CV Fiber. Thanks, Olivia. Thanks, Janiel. Good evening, everyone. My name is Olivia Contica. I live in Berry, Berlin, somewhere on that border. I am originally from New York, so I am a transplant. I moved here about three years ago. In terms of my background, I have a bachelor's in polypsi, and I actually went to law school. I am a lawyer by trade. However, I transitioned over into the world of legal marketing and business development where I worked with a firm who had approximately 80 attorneys. I did professional services for quite some time, and then I transitioned over into working in the world of startups, working with early-stage technology companies all through Fortune 50. I have pretty much seen both sides of the world in terms of marketing and business development, but I am very, very excited to be here. I am really passionate about doing local community work, and I want to be a resource not only for this board, but also moving forward a resource to our communities, which is our first and foremost priority. My virtual door is always open. Feel free to email, call at any time. I will open to any feedback, suggestions, brainstorms. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Olivia. We are so happy to have you. We are indeed pleased you are here. Thank you, Olivia. Thank you very much. Shall we then move on with the regular business of this meeting? I am going to consider Olivia being here an extraordinary business. Let us move on with the regular business. Jeremy, can we talk about the prior meeting minutes, please? Yes. I sent those out, but only about an hour and a half ago or so ago. I think they are in okay shape for approval, but I do not know that people have had enough of a chance to review. I guess Alan is shaking his head. Why do not we delay this until next meeting? Sorry, I was on a bike ride. I am sorry, I did not get it done sooner. Things have been crazy in Jeremy's world lately, so I apologize. I promise to read it quickly later tonight. All right, then let us move on. I am not sure that we have a treasurer's report today, but Ray, do we? I know we do not have a treasurer with us. Yes, I am surprised that she is not here. She had sent an email saying that she was not going to be able to make it. Oh, I did not see that. I think she said she was going to be later, like 6.30 maybe. I do know that today, just today and this afternoon, I think it was that we received from Bonnie, the reconciled financials, and so we will send them out to the board so that you will have them, and I had no further information for you. No, okay, understood. This is a little problematic with the timing. I guess if our second Tuesdays move back a little bit farther in the month, then those months will have reconciled numbers before the meeting, but when we are short on our number of days for second Tuesday, we will not have it. It is a little bit of a problem, but I think we will have to live with it for now anyway. Okay. Janiel, let me pass this over to you. If I am correct, Lucas is not able to be with us tonight, but if you would please, the next few parts of the meeting, construction through the marketing, if you have run through that, please. Absolutely. I actually like to put the highlight first because I do not want to bury it. The highlight is that we actually are operational, and by that I mean we have six friendly subscribers up and running on the CV Fiber Internet Service. I think we should acknowledge that. We do not want to bury that. That is a huge deal. That is in CLO 1. Is any of them on tonight? No, no. At the meeting? No, I do not believe there are any at the meeting. Janiel, there is a question from Siobhan. Siobhan. I was just wondering, are they happy so far? Have we heard anything? They are happy so far. Actually, Olivia is going to give a marketing update after I talk, and she is going to be delivering the great news. I am sure she can speak to the wonderful things that we have actually heard in terms of that, yes. We are actively working on signing up more subscribers. Those are our first six friendlies. So, we will be signing up general population as soon as we finish testing the network. So, the status we are at now is we are continuing to test the network that involves testing the network itself to make sure the fibers work, and also the payment system, and also the sign up system. So, it is a comprehensive layered system of friendlies that we are testing, and then we will be able to sign up the general subscribers. So, that is where we are with operations. I sort of took it almost in reverse order, but I needed to get that out first. Construction-wise, we are doing great with crews actually. On today's call, we learned we have four aerial crews, one underground crew, and now two splicing crews. Splicing is what has to be done at the end of the construction process. We got about 70 miles of each strand and fiber, so the fiber is catching up to the strand, and we have now 993 passings. That is addresses that we have passed. Possible subscribers. Construction is 192 sign ups for packages as of today. Thank you, David. Yes, 192 sign ups for packages as of today. That is a pretty darn good take rate. I mean, without just not even being technically in service for the general population, we have 192 out of 993. Now, I am not sure if that is exactly the ratio, but those numbers are excellent for where we are at. Materials and warehousing, we have ordered most of 400 miles. We have ordered all of the 400-mile bill of materials that we thought we needed, but every once in a while something new will be needed that we did not realize we needed in the field, and we will need to get it. Some of those are consumables or additional items that just didn't make it onto the bill of materials, which is normal because sometimes you will be able to use an existing piece in the field. Sometimes you can't. There are things that we learn in the field as we go. For the most part, we have the materials we need for 400 miles that should get us through all of next construction season, as well as this construction season, minus the small items, consumables that we will need to purchase. Warehousing is going well. Last month, we had actually, I guess it was back in July, there were some significant floods, but there's been a lot of rain. We have so far been able to escape any damage to the warehouse or materials, so we've been very lucky on that. Our warehouse managers are securing our outdoor storage facility as well, so that our fiber is going to be well protected over the winter. From an operational materials instruction standpoint, things are looking very positive. I do see that Jeremy, you have your hand up. Yeah. I guess my question is we have 400 miles of materials give or take. Do we have funds to have those materials installed, or are we going to have to stop construction for that first? So we do have, we have the funds to continue all of the distribution areas that we have started constructing that we have issued to our construction workers. They tell us that we have about nine weeks of construction left, and then, of course, there's additional work that needs to be done with testing, with splicing. So we're looking to be busy throughout the rest of the year. As far as installing the next distribution areas, that is, Jerry, did you want to speak to that? No, actually, I just want to get to the point for Jeremy's question. We do not have sufficient funds to construct 400 miles. What we have found is that the funds that we have are getting us through 200-some-odd miles, and that'll be a big part of the discussion of the budget and in the second part of our meeting. So everything that Janil has said is absolutely correct, but to cut to the chase on it, no, we don't have sufficient funds to construct all 400 miles. Things were not as they seemed a year ago. Thank you for being very direct, Jerry. Yes, we have seen incredible inflation and markup of costs beyond what we anticipated. They are unprecedented, so we're attacking that as we can. Any other questions? Okay, so that's what I really wanted to share for construction, materials, warehousing, operations, but I know that we have much more exciting stuff that does bleed into the operations scope in marketing. Thanks, Janil. I wanted to start with a couple of testimonials that we've received from our friendlies in CL01. I know sometimes it's difficult taking a step back and seeing all the nitty gritty construction details that are going on, but I want to emphasize in this group that we are really impacting the lives of our customers to date. So I'll start with one testimonial, and this is from one of our friendlies in CL01. The fiber is great. I'm so happy to be finally hooked up. It's all I had hoped for, a far, far cry from the old days of dial-up than satellite internet. Most recently, high-speed internet through a competitor, another ISP, which I have now canceled, from another friendly. I have been so impressed with all the various guys. They haven't been all professional, informed, and able. It's been a pleasure doing business with them. So we've, in general, have been receiving really positive feedback. If there are any ways that we can fine-tune the friendly process, we have been on top of that as well. I would say that in the past couple of weeks we really have solidified the friendly process in terms of having an inventational letter, making sure that we are in constant communication to iron out any kinks throughout the process, and so far to date we've been really successful with CL01. Now, moving forward for CL02, we do have those letters sent out. They were sent out early this morning, and we'll be scheduling those calls, and we'll be moving on to the friendly selection for RSO1 and RSO2. So all in, we are taking our feedback from a friendlies series at this point because we want to make sure that we are continuously improving and integrating based on what we're hearing in the market. Now, as far as what we're hearing, there are areas in terms of our messaging that requires a bit more clarity. As you know, there's a lot of technical nuances in what goes on behind the scenes, and so we are updating our website. So you'll see some homepage updates giving a bit more information, transparency and clarity to our audience as well. So people who are sending us inquiries trying to figure out where they are in the process, everything will be very clear-cut on the homepage, and it is our responsibility to make sure that we establish those trust relationships. So that's one improvement that we will be making to date on the site. Secondly, in terms of the website as well, we're integrating with Smart Hub. So we will be able to take payments, which is a really exciting update for us. Chuck. I want to start by just reiterating the first point that you made for the board. The point Jerry likes to make regularly of, we are graduating from being a governing volunteer-driven body to being a real live business with real live customers, and most of the people who visit our website never visit our governance pages. They don't particularly care about them. For compliance reasons, we have to have them, so we can't get rid of them, but they don't need to be showcased front and center, and what we need is to streamline the conversion subscription funnel of people getting to subscribe. And so Olivia is making great strides on that front, and I thank you, Olivia. Now, to play devil's advocate, Olivia, what's Smart Hub? Smart Hub is actually a piece of technology that is used across the country. So I want to say that it is a well-established piece of technology, a payment system that is used for transactions. Some folks may even be familiar with it here in the Vermont area, paying their own electric bills. So it might not even be something new for some of our customers as they come on board. We are essentially using Smart Hub as a way to securely take payments in a dashboard that is user-friendly and a way for folks to possibly update their plans moving forward. That's something that we've been talking about in the works by the end of the year, but also people can update their credit card information, they can pay by phone. So essentially making the payment flow as frictionless as possible because we would hate for payment to be a friction area. Jeremy? Yeah, I know that WEK uses it and you can report outages and stuff like that. Are there going to be other ways of detecting when we have an outage, or will people be able to also report outages on the app? Yeah, that's an excellent question. I can certainly dig deeper for that. Right now it's just establishing the transactions, which I think is number one for us to receive payments securely. As we become a more mature organization, which is the term that I'd like to use, I'd like to have our touch points with our customers increase so that people are well-informed every step of their journey with us. Jeremy, Watesfield will know when there's an outage. There's no question. I mean, they'll notice the light has stopped. Right? Yeah, so I see Allen and RD and then Olivia, you may not be done, so we'll go back to you, but let's take Allen and RD right now. Here it is. Sorry, I don't want to belabor the outage thing, but WEK's, the problem with reporting online is with WEK's smart meter system. There was a great promise. I don't know if you remember this back in the teens when they got, I don't know, 50 million bucks or whatever it was to install the system and they thought they would be able to use it for online outage reporting. And I don't quite understand what's missing from their system, but it has not worked. And one of the reasons they originally were interested in working with us on fiber was they realized that's really the kind of connection they need in order for their, in order to begin to use some of the aspects of online reporting. So that's sitting in WEK's hands and they've got to figure that out. I've had great luck with the hub in paying my bills to WEK. I've had absolutely no problem. Works great. You can do auto pay if you want. It's very easy to change if you want to pay by check or by bank or by credit card. I mean, it's so much nicer than having to fill out a piece of paper and send it in by mail all the time. So I'm really glad we're using that. I think it'll work great. Although, honestly, for having reporting, that's probably a terrible idea because if the internet is out, they can't use the app. Well, understood. Thank you. That was going to be my point, Jeremy. Oh, okay. Sorry to jump in. I drove to Montpelier today to find out what the heck was going on. Okay, let's give it back to Olivia because I'm not sure that she was finished. Go ahead, Olivia, please. I just have two other items, two categories of items I should say. First and foremost, events. We will indeed be at the Berry Hardage Festival, September 22nd and 23rd. So this event was originally scheduled for, I believe, July. It was rescheduled due to the weather. So we will be there. We have a team of volunteers that have already proactively reached out to me. But if you are interested in being part of the VIP club, please let me know. Please reach out. I do have time slots and two hour increments. So we're really excited for this. Again, it's a brand awareness piece because we don't know quite yet when we'll be in the area. So we really want to start associating our name with the community. So this is really more of an informational 101 presence for us. And I think it'll be a great opportunity. Hardy? Okay. Jerry, two things. First of all, Olivia, there is an event in Cabot that you might wish to have a presence at. Our cheese festival on September 30th. That's the beginning of Fall foliage day in the Northeast Kingdom. And we are right, of course, Cabot is right on the edge between CB fiber and Northeast Kingdom, not to mention Kingdom fiber. So brand awareness would be a very good thing in Cabot. The second thing I wanted to say, Jeremy said it, there's got to be a hotline for reporting averages. If your internet goes out, there's no way to report it online. So a simple hotline is, you know, probably what we should have. That's me. Very good, RD point taken. Janiel, go ahead, please. And just to speak to that RD, we do have our customer service and tech support numbers on our website. So we do have that ability for folks who want to call in. It's essentially our hotline. Yeah. And the second event, which I don't have a date quite yet. However, we have done the majority of prep work behind the scenes. We've been working with Mr. David Healy as well. We are planning a ribbon cutting event in CL01 at the Calistown Hall sometime in October. We are putting together a list for contacts for those who should be invited to the event. Again, this is more of a celebratory awareness piece for us, not necessarily lead generation for people to get signed up, but we really want to get a group together of media contacts, partners, congressional delegates as well. All of you folks as well will receive an invite from us. We want to take the time to celebrate now that we will be officially in CL01. Now, we are waiting on final approval for the Calistown Hall to be greenlit. We want this to be an opportunity for people to actually go and sign in and use our internet while they attend. So we're just waiting to hear back. And as soon as we get the green light that Calistown Hall will be ready to go, we will be sending that out, that invite out at least two weeks in advance. So you'll have that for the month of October. And the last piece in terms of engagement strategy, we are working on a creative campaign. Now that we are actually going to be live, some of you folks may remember that we did have a postcard series that went out in the town of Calist for CL01. We are updating and refining some of that messaging, refreshing the brand to make it a little bit cleaner and consistent. But we also want to make the brand a bit more memorable and human as well. So we are working on those behind the scenes. And again, we're looking to place the CB fiber brand and CL01 in high traffic locations with potentially marketing at satellite hubs, so commercial businesses that are offering free Wi-Fi for people on the go. And we think it's actually a mutual value to add not only for CB fiber, but also for our business customers as well. So we are working on that as we expand. Well, that's fantastic. Thank you, Olivia. Any questions for Olivia, comments? Olivia, anything you want to follow up with before we move on? No, just that everybody should expect an invite for the ribbon cutting ceremony. We will send that out in advance. And if you are interested in Barry Herd, trustable, I'd be happy to send over additional information. Thank you. Thank you. Alan, I'm going to pass this over to you now to give us a brief on the policy update. Again, this will be similar to what you did for the Executive Committee. Please, just a brief on where you're at. We're not voting on anything tonight. Just let us know what you're up to, please. This is the personnel policy, Jerry, you mean? The policy that you've been working on, I've been calling it the HR policy. But if personnel policy is more accurate, then please, as such. Yeah, that's actually what it's been titled. So that's why I'm stuck with that in my mind. But you're right, it is HR. Basically, what's happened is legal counsel looked at our policy. If you remember, once we passed this back in July, we knew we were going to have to have it gone over by legal counsel. And we have ended up with a document that's not 13 pages, but is more like 34 pages. And the number of sections that have been added is about a dozen. So in addition to some changes to what we had already had in the policy, there's a lot of new material in the revised policy that legal counsel has presented us with. So the policy committee dedicated its September regular meeting to reviewing the policy, the new personnel policy. We then had a special meeting on Monday to continue our review. And we're going to have another one next week to continue what's still left of what we haven't done before. It's a lot of stuff. And we hope to get a piece of it before the executive committee when it has its meeting on, is it the 19th, I think next week on the 19th? But we won't present anything to the board, the full board, until we have everything together with the executive committee. I think the only way to do it is to do a piecemeal. So that committee can really take a whack at what we've done. But I think for the board, we really have to have the whole thing together at one time. So it's going to be another, I don't know if we'll have it for October, it might be November, but we're moving as fast as we can. And it's just a lot of work. The committee's been great. I really appreciate the people who have been working on it. John and Sean and Linda and I and Ray, Ray was, Ray's not on the committee anymore, but he's, he's done policy work for us in the past. And we really appreciate everybody's effort. Siobhan, I see that your hand is up, please. I just wanted to add that this is, we're working as a committee. And so our committee meetings are available to people to come in and, and sit in and participate. So any board members who have an interest in this or are concerned about where we might be going with it or something like that are invited to attend. We encourage you to attend and remind you that we do have HR professional attorneys on this as well. So I just, I don't know that we, I mean, we do need to go through it bit by bit, but you might want to make sure you take a look at it before we get to the executive committee because we're already shredding it in the policy committee. And I would like our discussion and the executive committee to be as pertinent and on point as we can make it without going, wafting off if I, because we have a tendency to do that. That's why I'm bringing it up because we have a tendency to do that. So anyway, just get ahead. I'm done. Thank you, Siobhan. Got it. Alan, is there anything else you want to add here? Not unless people have questions. No, I think that's plenty. Are there questions for Alan? Okay. Hearing none. Let's move on then to our 2024 budget discussion. When we did this last week for the executive committee, my preamble took everything out of what, out of Ray's preamble. So I'm going to give Ray an opportunity this time to talk about something other than the numbers. Feel free. Feel free. Go ahead. You can tee it up. But let me just give a 50,000 foot perspective here. And that is that we have run into a funding gap that we knew we were going to run into. Well, we saw it coming. We didn't know originally we thought we were going to have a continuous flow of funds and we started acting based on the idea that we would have a continuous flow of funds. Then we found out that we wouldn't and now we know we won't. So there are two things that are going on with this budget. One is to be accurate as possible, which is still pretty difficult because we don't have all that much history behind us, but we're trying to forecast 2024 the best we can. And that's on the one hand. And then on the other hand, we're trying to figure out what construction and what level of installations can we maintain through 2024, given that there will not be or likely will not be any grant funding in 2024. So this is the predicament that we're in. And I will stop there. And if we need to go into executive session, I believe we will, Ray, I'll hand it over to you and then we get to the point where we need to stop recording. Please let us know. Okay, I'll start with this. And that is that the process is that in October, the board will approve a budget. That budget will be sent to the towns, the 20 towns, and for them to review and provide feedback if they want to. In November, the board will hold a public hearing on the budget. In December, the board will actually adopt the 2024 budget. The budget's going to change between the time you approve the budget and the time we adopt the budget, because we're going to have a lot more information hopefully by that time. So there will be some changes made to it. The budget is directional and aspirational. It's directional in the sense of something we just talked about. And that is for the last five years, we've been an incubator for a startup company for the CV fiber community network. And that community network is operational. And so we have to change in our governance and in our operation and in our website. There are so many things that we have to change and we have to work out a lot of details in terms of protocols, communications and oversight and what the committees are going to do and not do. The business, they do the operational stuff. The board, it does the governance stuff, policy, budgets, purchases, large purchases. There'll be a number of things that we're still responsible for as a board, but the business has to operate as a business. And they have to be given the kind of flexibility that's necessary. And also the kind of resources that are necessary. And so it's directional in that sense. And it's also aspirational in the sense that we have to make some assumptions with regard to what we can possibly get done in 2024. So in that sense, we're making a bet that we can do one more thing in 2024. And between now and December when we approve a budget, we'll be pretty far along in the knowledge about whether or not we're going to get a funding stream to actually do that. And so we're going to talk about that. Now, many of you have already seen a great deal of this. And it's not short. What we're going to go through is actually foundational for the decision and the approval that we're going to do in October. Knowing you should know that the finance committee has been working on this. The executive committee is overviewing it. The executive committee will be making a recommendation to the governing board with regard to approving a budget. So there's a lot of detail in the background. There's a lot of people that are working on it. So without any further ado, Jerry, unless you have something else you think in a preamble, I'm going to move that we go into executive session. I'll just ask to the group, are there any questions before we go into executive session? Because we need that in order to do the details. Jeremy, you're on mute, Jeremy. I apologize. So we're going to be going into executive session, and then we're going to be coming out of to do additional business. Is that correct? The only additional business I believe will be to adjourn. Oh, perfect. Okay. I didn't realize that the agenda was so short. That's perfect. So I don't know everybody who's on the call because we're going to invite into the call staff, delegates, alternates in the treasurer, but she's not here. If there's, if you are not a delegate, alternate or staff, if you might raise your hand and there's a reason for you to be invited, let us know else that's not going to happen. So here is the motion move. We enter an executive session, discuss records that are confidential pursuant to one VSA section 313 alpha six, specifically budgets, strategic plans and funding that relate to our strategic planning and inviting to executive session all staff, delegates, alternates in the treasurer in accordance with one VSA section 313 Bravo. Second. Second. Seconded by Jeremy. Are there, are there any opposed to the motion? Any abstentions? Hearing none, the motion passes unanimously.