 I'm just going to get started if that is okay with you. Hold on a second. All right, and so welcome. I just wanna talk a little bit about tonight's presentation. I'm Jeremy Hansen. I'm the chair of CV Fiber. I have everybody muted right now, and I would request if you could turn your cameras off. We will have a chance to talk more at the end. I will unmute folks at the very end. But for right now, especially if you have any sort of immediate questions about the thing that I'm talking about, if you need quicker answers, I have board members that are in attendance tonight, and they will be happy to answer some of those questions. Otherwise, I can take these when I'm all finished. And I'm gonna try to get through the whole presentation because a lot of your questions should hopefully be answered as we go on through the slides. So I am recording this right now, and I will have this out and available to the whole community. I will have it out on the website, cvfiber.net. I would say in the next couple of days. So let's just get right to it. So this is kind of a quick, so yeah, there's sort of a comment. It doesn't look like there's a recording going. That's true. I'm recording this on my side. I'm recording it locally here just because I'll have a better quality of recording than I will if I try to do this over the network. So this is an overview of the presentation that we're doing tonight. So we have quite a bit of stuff to get through, but I think we'll definitely have time to get to some questions before the end. I'm not gonna go over this, we're gonna go over these as we plow through momentarily. Okay, so cvfiber. cvfiber is this special sort of thing called the communications union district. So this is kind of like a water or a sewer district. And this is a, we're a nonprofit, we're a municipality. So we're not like a 501c3, we're much more like a town or a school district, like I said. So let's see. So we started in 2018, well we started a little bit before that, but we were created officially in 2018 after a bunch of towns voted at town meeting. We are the communications union district structure. And what we can and can't do, what we're empowered to do is listed in title 30 of the Vermont statutes annotated chapter 82. You can look at it if you like, if you're an attorney and you'd like to see how we're doing what we're doing, you can feel free to do that. Right now we have 20 member communities. I'll show you a map and a list a little bit later. And we're one of nine Vermont CUDs that are in existence right now. And if it's gonna let me advance my slide, here we go. So our mission is we're committed to providing essential Vermont residences, businesses and civic institutions with universal access to a reliable, secure, locally owned, locally governed communications network able to grow to meet future community needs. And practically speaking, we're gonna talk about what that means in just a second, but our first priority is we're looking to make service available to 80% of folks who are unserved and underserved by 2023. So turning this to around fairly quickly, 95% of the unserved and underserved folks by 2024. And we're defining underserved here as essentially folks who don't have at least a cable connection. So 25 megabits per second down, three megabits per second up to the internet. We're also making some assumptions that we can do this based on the funding that we already have, the funding that we're likely to get and that we can get our materials and we can get labor reasonably quickly. And we'll be talking about this timeline in just a moment. So our communities, so these 20 towns and cities are the members of CB5 right now. There are other towns that border us that are members of other CUDs to our north and to our south. But for right now, these are the 20 towns that we are committed to serving. Our district network, this is what we're looking to do strategically. So big picture at the end goal. Fiber to 26,000 homes and businesses. And we're looking at a cost of $50 million. And this is gonna mean something just above 1,200 miles of fiber. And for the most part, we're looking to string this fiber on existing utility poles. So if you see a utility pole and there's a phone line on it or something like that, that's the sort of place that we're likely to be running the fiber past your house and then pulling individual strands of fiber to individual subscribers along the way. So this is fiber to the premises. A bit of history, like I mentioned, we were formed in 2018. We did a bunch of organizational work and some lead up to what we delivered in 2020 last year. We finished feasibility studies. We did a business plan and we know what our financial model looks like to make this work even without the grant money that we're getting right now. So the grant money that we're getting right now makes things a lot easier, makes things a lot cheaper for everybody. We did a survey of the district. We heard from a lot of you about the current service that you have, whether you'd be willing to support CV fiber and we'll talk about what that, the breakdown of those survey results are a little bit later. And then this year, as you can see, things are moving extremely quickly. So we had the pandemic and we saw that the need for actual, real 21st century internet connectivity was something that everybody really, really wanted and everybody really, really needed. So in February, we put out an RFP, a request for proposals for folks that would go out and look at all of the polls that are out there. We need to have a sense of the polls that are out there so that we can build the network. We then have some contracts in hand and folks are ready to go do that work as soon as we have the grant money in our bank account. We have high level design requests for proposals. So once we know where the polls are and we know where all the residences are, so we have all that information. Once we have the information, we can get a sense of where we're going to lay out the network in reasonably broad strokes. We hired a project manager. We're gonna start launching those poll inventories shortly, like in the next few weeks. The high level design work will start not long after that and not long after that. July, maybe into August, we are, actually no, we just issued the RFP for the network developer operator. We're going to hire someone to actually operate the network for us. This is not something where we are going to have a, we're going to spin up a whole organization and hire employees and do these things. We are going to contract with folks to do various parts of this. And then the actual high level design process will begin in August. And then there's more to the timeline that comes up in a couple of slides. Okay, so this project is big. The overall project that we're looking for, that we're looking at doing is really big. So we're taking a kind of a smaller bite of this first. The first bite that we're gonna take, we'll talk about that in a second, but district wide, we're looking at these various steps, poll, data design, make ready, construction, connections and so on. So the punchline is roughly per mile with absolutely positively everything. We're looking at about $40,000 per mile for a total cost for the entire district. Again, the entire picture, the whole district of about $45 million. And this is completely, this is still back of the napkin right now. We will get a better sense of our actual design, make ready, construction costs as we get to those steps. So this and this estimate as we note here could be low, the cost of materials, the cost of, we can expect those to go up. But right now this is the estimate that we're working from. I'm not gonna go through this line by line, but this can give you a sense of how we expect the costs to break down per city, per town. And I'm happy to provide this presentation later along with the recording of the video if you wanted to evaluate this a bit more closely. But again, this is the kind of the back of the napkin estimates that we're working from right now. And this will firm up like I said in the next few months. So here's the other half of the district. So if you have any questions about these numbers or if you want me to go back to these later, please put that in the chat. I'm happy to go back and review any of this. We can talk more about what these mean in just a bit. Okay, so now this is getting to more concretely what is it that we're doing right now? So in terms of the construction schedule. So again, we're gonna have the same little disclaimer at the bottom that this is really subject to funding. This is subject to us being able to get the fiber, the resources that we need in a reasonable amount of time and that we have contractors available. So far, we haven't run into that with contractors. We'll see how that goes when we get to the construction phase. So our phase one is we're really looking at the underserved folks. So in the 20 towns and cities, we're gonna look at focusing on really those folks that only have DSL. That's really what we're looking at. So if you have cable, we're probably not going to be looking at serving you just yet, eventually. So that's the build out from the core. That's this phase two, but initially we're really covering 80% of unserved and underserved folks by 2023. And we're gonna start that. We'll do the work as the engineering this year. We could start construction in 2021, likely that we're gonna start turning folks on and getting folks connected at the beginning of 2022. Once we have done that, once we've finished getting to the underserved folks in our towns, we're then looking to build out from that core and essentially give everybody connectivity at some point. So that construction, 2024 or 2025, this is probably gonna be hitting still more underserved, probably trying to get to more like 100% to 95% of underserved and actually starting then to build in to folks who may have some cable options. Okay, so here's the punchline. This is what a lot of people have been asking about for quite some time now. Area A, this is where we are starting. This is where we will be doing some work imminently. So these are the five communities that we've identified. 1,600 underserved folks in this first area. So give or take 150 miles of fiber along utility poles to do this. So we have more town, middle sex, Worcester, Callis and East Montpelier. This is not getting everyone in more town, Middlesex, Worcester, Callis and East Montpelier. Again, this is getting to the folks who are underserved. These are the folks who have only DSL for the most part right now. So still part of phase one. Again, the underserved folks, we're looking at area B. This is another, several more communities after that that we're looking for. And that reaches another 1,800 underserved addresses. This is another 160 miles. So this is sort of us building upon the foundation that we've started with area A. So it's gonna be A then B then C as this part of phase one. As you can see, we're sort of taking it, this is like a reasonably big chunk of miles that we're taking in sequence. So while we're doing work on area A, we're gonna start some of the initial work on area B. And then as you'll see with a, we have a kind of timeline. You'll see how we're gonna sort of stack up that timeline and do one, then the other, then the other. And then so once we're through areas A through C, we should have a really large portion of the underserved folks taken care of by the end of 2023 then. This is the kind of the big picture of how we look at the things that we have to do to get to this final spot here. This is where we have a technician arriving at your place connecting you and then your computer turns on and it's connected to the internet with extremely fast speeds. So this service part, this thing at the end here has a lot of stuff that leads up to it. And the place where we are right now is we are ready to pull the trigger on pole inventory. So this is taking pictures of the poles, getting a sense of what, you know, are they in good shape? What sort of things are already hanging on the poles? How tall are they? And this is something that we're doing throughout the district, but really focused on, we will be imminently built fiber. So once we have that pole inventory done, the second phase then is the network design. That network design then looks at, you know, how we actually do the routing. Where are we going to connect the fiber along which poles? Because we don't necessarily have to run it along every single pole to serve the underserved folks in the district, but this gives us a sense of how much fiber we might need to buy and gives us kind of a bigger picture budget as we go into some of the next steps. So we have redundancies here. So we'll tend to build in loops so that if any part of the network breaks down, we can still route around any of that damage that might happen. The third phase then is make ready. And this involves moving things around on the utility pole. So the existing things that are hanging on the pole will be moved down. And then we'll attach the fiber above where those existing connections are. Once that happens, I'm sorry, once the make ready happens, then we'll actually do the construction. That's when the fiber actually goes in. And there's some network equipment that goes in up on the poles and there's some network equipment that has to be installed back at, essentially kind of back in an office somewhere where we will be able to manage those devices to then pass the internet connection to the individual houses at this fifth step. And that's where we actually connect folks at the end of it all. So pole inventories where we are right now, network design, pole inventories imminent, network design is really close behind that. We're gonna be doing these two things very soon in the next month or two. And then the make ready and construction will follow shortly there after later this year. So network contingent schedule by area. So this is looking at, we're looking at kind of the big picture across serving area A, B and C. And this is when we're going to do different, these different steps. So pole inventory, high level design detailed engineering for these unserved areas, A, B and C. We're looking at having all of this done by the end of this year. We have the funding for a good portion of this. So this doesn't look like an unreasonable goal at all. Once we start doing construction, we're looking to be doing a bit of make ready in 2021 maybe even just depending on timing, maybe a bit of construction in 2021 also, but with service then for area A into 2022. So if you look at just area A, just this row, you can kind of get a sense of our timing when things are going to happen. Area B, we're looking at a little bit later than area A, but still probably getting service in area B in 2022. And area C, if you look at just this row, probably not starting construction until later next year with service then following probably in 2023. So then construction phase two, this is us getting at some of the remaining underserved folks in area A and so on. So then continuing some make ready work, I'm not going to go through this all line by line, but so this second part of area A then will be construction and service in 2025. Area B is 2024. So we're, this is us again, this is us kind of figuring out the sequence of how we're going to get these various areas done while still essentially keeping the eye on the prize. And that's getting everybody that has a, that only has DSL and making sure that they all have service by the end of 2023 into 2024. Okay. So this is us again, the sort of back of the napkin. We've, I think it's a pretty good estimate, but our back of the napkin estimate for how much we're going to spend on what per year. So 2021 through 2025, most of the work, the pre-engineering and the design work is going to get done this year. Once we've done all of that, we're going to move into the subsequent years and actually do going to spend a fair bit of money on the construction then and actually hooking people up. So again, the make ready is the thing where we're essentially moving, making room on the poles for our fiber. The construction is the fiber itself. And then the service is the actual pulling individual fibers to, from the poles to the individual houses. And so I do see some questions coming in the chat and we will get back to those questions at the end. All right, so, but this is our, this is just kind of another way of slicing the budget that we had talked about previously. Okay, so far, the grants we've received and there's actually been a little bit more than this, but really the punchline is the feasibility and business studies that we got, that we finished last year, but 85,000, costs for a project manager doing outreach, doing the survey, some of our legal costs as we're drafting contracts and such, 160,000. The pole inventory, which will be done imminently about 255,000. So this like, this WEC three CUD high level design. So part of the high level design we're actually doing in conjunction with and in partnership with Washington Electric Co-op because a lot of the underserved folks in our district are also served by Washington Electric Co-op. So we are working very closely with them. We're also working with the other CUDs that border us that also have WEC subscribers. So it's WEC, CV Fiber, EC Fiber and any K-Broadband. We're all working together on a joint high level design. These are all grants that we've already received. We're just essentially waiting for the funding to land in bank accounts and for us to start paying the contractors. And then the CV Fiber high level design, that's gonna cover those areas that aren't specifically WEC poles, where we have Green Mountain Power and some other utilities in our district. The 190,000 will then catch us up to all of that as well. Okay, I'm not gonna read all of this, but I do wanna mention that we have some opportunities to work with member towns. So our 20 member towns, the state gets some of this federal ARPA money. And the state has already allocated a fair bit of this, 150 million, like it says in 2021, that's going to go through construction and some of the initial work that we're doing. So we're competing for this grant money and we'll be applying for some of this shortly. And then there are federal ARPA grant funds that go to towns. So towns can spend this money on a variety of things and the Vermont League of Cities and Towns has done a really good job of keeping towns up to date about what they can spend this on, what's eligible for this. And so one of the things that towns can spend this on is broadband deployment. And because we're also in municipality it's actually possible for towns to essentially transfer some of these federal ARPA funds to us to supplement the cost of what we're doing and essentially drive down the cost for everybody. Because we don't have, there's no such thing as profit or municipality. There's no such thing as profit. We're really looking at what's gonna be the way that we can do this and be the best stewards of public funding and to bring folks the best service for the lowest cost. And then over time, we'll talk about this in a slide or two. The lower, the more grant money that we can get essentially the less that we have to borrow, the less that we have to bond for later on. So here are the, here's the breakdown of the towns in our district and how much money each of the towns are. And I don't think that this is 100% concrete yet. I think this is a pretty good estimate or pretty good measure of what each town is getting in terms of the ARPA local money and then which portion they're gonna get of the county money also. I'm not gonna get into the details of how the federal government decided to break this down, but this is kind of what it looks like now. So this fourth column here, the total money, this is what each town or cities should expect to get overall and then broken down by when they get this. So we're already in discussions with towns too about how the towns might help us with our project using some of these funds. And I'm happy to personally meet with the each towns delegate and the town select board of the city council to talk about how we can partner in this to get our network built better and more cheaply. Okay, so back in 2020, we did a survey. And so we actually hired a company to do a survey to supplement some surveying that we did on our own. And then we got results from 1,236 premises in the district. And that was a, and the turnout, especially in sometimes was really, really good. And we really appreciate the folks that took the time to answer those questions because it gave us a really good sense of where people were most likely to sign up. And we are going to be taking folks up on those offers of the 82% of folks that said that they would pre-subscribe, which is very exciting for us. That suggests a lot of support. And that makes it easier for us to make the decisions then about where to build. Because again, because we're not looking for profit, we're just looking, how can we have a solid financial foundation over time? And how can we make sure that we are going to be providing great customer service and great speeds, great responsiveness and low costs to everybody? Knowing who wants to pre-subscribe is really important for us to, as we kind of put the puzzle together is we're assembling this network. So a little interesting call out here, 86% said that they would definitely subscribe. And of those, those are from folks that said that their current ISP didn't meet their needs. So I'm definitely one of them. The thing that keeps me going is knowing that we will eventually all have fiber and we'll be able to have a reliable, fast connection to the network, which still really motivates me even after several years of doing this. And even with, even folks, I thought this was great. Even folks at ISPs that they thought met their needs, they still said, 80% still said that they would definitely subscribe. So that's motivating for me. And I know it's motivating to a lot of our board members and a lot of your neighbors who serve on the CV Febber Board, which you'll see their names in just a little bit. So this is going back to something that I said before and that these subscription rates really are only gonna depend on our costs. So our overall construction costs, looking about $50 million. So included then with the costs of what these subscription rates are gonna be month to month, we have to include the cost of operating the network, maintaining the network. If a fiber breaks, it has to be, we have to fix it. We have to have somebody go out there and do that repair. Invariably hardware needs to be upgraded, software needs to be upgraded, somebody will be doing that. And that's a cost that we're going to bear and that we will have somebody doing for us. And then there's that third cost finance. The interest on loans and bonds that we may take out to do this work beyond the grant money that we're gonna get. So the punchline down there, that red part underlying grant money equals lower subscription rates is really, really key. So EC Febber, so EC Febber is a CUD communications union district that's been running for quite a long time just to the south of us. So we actually are towns, but they're towns and they offer a $72 rate, that's their lowest rate, $72 a month for basic 25 megabits per second, both up and down. And that's comparable to something like a cable connection, cable internet connection. And from what they've told us, they said just the debt service, dealing with the interest on the bonds that they've taken out to build their network, which is the way we were originally thinking that we had to do this. Their debt service was going to be, it was $33, almost half of that monthly rate was paying interest. So when we talk about get thing, X number of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, that's money that's going straight to us having a more secure financial footing, but also lower rates because we're not paying whatever percent interest on those bonds and loans. So we are also in a situation where because we're a municipal entity and because communications union districts, the way that they're written in statute, we can't take property tax dollars. It's not legal for a town. So if some town said, we really wanna make sure you succeed, we're going to increase property taxes to help fund you. No, I say no, we can't do that. We can, the towns can allocate some of this grant money that's coming down. That's possible. The towns can connect and be a subscriber and get internet service from us, that they can do, but they can't fund us through tax dollars. Property tax dollars cannot go to CV fiber, full stop. All right, so if you have to convince, one of the things that folks have been looking at and economists have been looking at for a long time is, what's the actual benefit then of building broadband? I mean, I like to have broadband at home. A lot of the things that I do as a computer science professor is I use the internet and I deal with big files and I will do live streams like this a lot. But there are other things that make it a really good economic driver for communities. And so we've, not that we need like other reasons to suggest that the things that we're doing are important, but research shows that job creation, retention, unemployment goes down. We have more people in the south and we have less problems with the digital divide and better educational opportunities. All right, this is our mission statement. This is something that we came to an agreement about what we were doing back in 2018. So we are dedicated to providing central remote residences, residents, businesses and civic institutions with universal access to a reliable, secure, locally owned, locally governed communications network able to grow to meet future community needs. And I went through that reasonably fast, but we're getting towards the end of the presentation now. Here are your governing board delegates. Every town, every city sends one delegate to CV fiber. And so we have regular meetings. We run them just like select board meetings. We have our minutes. We have all of our agendas and things posted CV fiber.net. If you see your town in here, the person that's listed there is your delegate and that's somebody that you can rely on as your advocate in your town's advocate on our board. So if you have specific questions, I'm happy to take those questions, but you can also direct them to your delegate who could just be your neighbor for months, a small place. So we get to know everybody around here. So info at CV fiber.net is a reasonable place. If you have a question after the fact, or like I said, you've probably seen these folks post in front porch forum, reach out to them directly. If they don't have the answer, they can certainly find it for you and we can definitely get your questions answered. That's all I have for you right now. I'm gonna back up actually because I saw some questions about maps. I'm just going to go to here and I'm gonna go back to the questions that were posted into the chat. And so I see some of these were answered already. So I will just read the questions in the chat for those of you on the phone and I will read some of the answers that my esteemed board members are answering. So one question is what area is Plainfield in? So Chuck was able to answer this and what he said was, we only have announced the areas that are in the Townsend area A. We haven't, because part of this is going to depend on the high level design and some decisions later down the road are really not ready to commit to what areas B and C are just yet. But know that areas B and C honestly are not gonna follow too far behind. Area A, we're gonna be working on this imminently. B and C, like I said, it's gonna be pretty quickly. We'll be able to announce hopefully quite soon. What roads are included in area A? So I can't say what roads definitively. So that was Deb's question. My answer to that is, if you only have DSL and you're in one of these five towns you're probably on the list. So let's see, next question. If there are new homes being built in the existing providers such as Consolidated have stated they don't have enough bandwidth to supply new homes with any internet access, would they be added to the plan? So yeah, if you're only getting Consolidated DSL and you're on a road where you can see where you can see a utility pole, then yeah, we will almost certainly be going there. Miss the maps for areas, would they be shown again, whereas Cabot, Cabot would be, the underserved folks in Cabot would be in areas B or C. I've considered underground placement to eliminate utility rental fees and make it more resilient to storms, et cetera. We have considered that the cost is quite a lot more. It's hard. Doing underground construction for utility stuff is expensive in Vermont just because we have, there's a lot of ledge. So in some places we may be doing that, but for the most part, our best option is still putting things on poles. See, my landline and power come in to my relatively new house through an underground conduit. Is it reasonable to expect that the fiber can also be connected the same way? The answer is yes. If there's space in the, if your landline goes through a conduit and the conduit's big enough, we may be able to share. It's gonna be a case by case basis and it's gonna depend on the scenario. That's something that when you come to sign up, that's something that we're gonna have to have somebody you're gonna have to have a tech look at to figure out what the best option is for that. So I got a private chat message here. Let's see. Well, underserved homes located on a private road without utility poles be served underground utility lines. So the answer is probably eventually. We're really focusing on poles right now and it really depends on how far you are away from the utility network. So we can get there. We were probably only going to commit to covering the cost of a certain stretch, a certain amount of distance from the utility poles before we're gonna ask folks to help with those costs. So it's gonna depend. I would need to know the address and get a sense of that when we're getting to the point of our detailed design, we'd be able to give you a better answer after that. How can residents confirm if their home is in the service area and whether they're considered underserved? So do you have cable? If the answer is yes, we are not considering you underserved. If you don't have cable, we are considering you underserved and we are focusing on you over the next two or three years. We purchased a lovely area of, lovely parcel of raw land in an area and internet access is a major factor in deciding when we will build. How do we find out if the area road is currently serviced by DSL? If it has a phone line, if it has phone service, if you see below the power lines on the pole, if you see another line down below, you probably have phone service. That's going to be almost everywhere. Let's see, while cleaning the utility poles to make room for fiber, would you have a second team installing the new fiber lines in tandem or you do plan to do the make ready for all the poles and for instance, for, before we can do any construction, we have to have, there's several steps involved. So when the make ready is done in an area, we can stagger some of that. So that is a good question. We can stagger some of that, but for the most part, we're going to have a lot of the make ready done before construction begins. Because sometimes the are replacing entire poles and we don't want to be in a situation where we don't want to be in a ready work pole. I don't want to be in a book because they're waiting for a pole to be in a construction crew book and be replaced. So a lot of the can't do their work to make ready work is going to be done before any construction. Okay, and so David Healy posted something at 731 in the chat. We prepared a web map application that's probably more information than you need, but there's a data layer, broadband speed by location. This is a really wonderful and wickedly to me, really wickedly interesting map. It says the application still needs a little bit of work, but it contains existing cable and fiber in every site's broadband speed. And he gives a link in the chat. And I will repost that link in the chat if you want to look back at that. I just put it there. Okay, so thanks Cody from Berry Area Development Corporation. Home value increases by 20% once a home has access to fiber. Well, there's probably going to have to be some reassessments at some point once we're done then, because we can expect a lot of folks to have access to fiber before long. Okay, so would Consolidated have the ability to connect to the newly added CBFiber lines? If so, would this cause bottlenecking? So Consolidated has their own network infrastructure. This, what we're looking at building is separate from Consolidateds. And Consolidated, I don't think that they're looking to lease space on our fiber from us. That's not something that I'm aware of them wanting to do. Let's see, so I think I answered the question about underserved homes located on a private road. Race as our grant money requires a focus on underserved. And that's true. So really a lot of the federal and the state money requires us to look at, requires us to focus on folks who don't have reasonably good connectivity. Oops, and it looks like I did not send that link out to everybody. Hold on one second, I'm gonna send that. Come on computer, we can do it. Everyone, there we go. Wonderful. So there's a question from Chris. What is the purpose of the make ready? Why move the equipment? It's the way that you do things. So the folks who have been on the poles the longest will have the closest access. It will be closest to the ground. That's the way that you attach stuff. Everything gets moved down and the newest tenant on the poles get put at the top. That's just the, sadly, it's just the way we do things. It'd be nice if we could just attach things to below everybody else, but that's not the way that we do things, not the way that we do things, unfortunately. Okay, so what I'm going to do, if I'm gonna unmute everybody and if folks have any other questions, please feel free to put it in the chat or if I have board members that would like to unmute and say anything, I would be happy to hear from you. I'm gonna turn off my screen sharing and we'll switch back to cameras so I can see folks if they choose to unmute and return to video. Board members, anything you'd like to add? We finished with a little bit of extra time, so I'm definitely happy to answer any additional questions. I see Chuck with his hand up, Jeremy. Oh, okay, he's very small given the number of people that are here. So yeah, go ahead, Chuck. Thanks, Ray. Thanks, Jeremy. I'd just like to point out to everyone that this is a colossal effort and it required a lot of hard work to get us to this point and there's a lot more hard work to come. And so if you have any interest in contributing in any way, if you can volunteer or if there are any ways you wanna consider financially contributing, we certainly would take you up on that. In particular, volunteers are very welcome because there's a lot of effort put into making all of this possible. And to that end, I would like to thank my fellow delegates and board members for all the hard work they put in. You all have done a tremendous amount, so thank you very, very much. Thanks, Chuck. Yeah, we definitely echoed that. This is a lot of, there's a lot of heavy lifting and there's a lot of people working to have this come together. A lot of volunteer hours going in that I should point out. There's a question in the chat. Oh, sorry, no, that's just Ray. Thank you. Thank you, Ray. Thanks very much, guys, for doing this. I have to thank Dr. Duxford. Looking forward to getting him up to speed up the process. Happy to help. David Healy. Yes, we're putting out monthly newsletters which has pretty much the current information that's going on at that moment. So if you're not a subscriber to the newsletter, typically post it in front porch form but you also have a mailing list if you go to CVFiber.net, you can sign up for our newsletter. Thanks for that, David. Anything else, any other questions? Is there a way to be able to contact our local representative? Is the contact information on the website? I believe it's on the website, Chuck, it's not. The contact information is not directly on the website but if you use the contact form on the website, we'll put you in touch. Great, thank you, Chuck. Anybody else? Jeremy, you can post the slides in the video someplace. Yep, I'll take this recording and I will send it, I'll post it somewhere and we'll get it up with the slides in the next couple of days. I'm technically on vacation right now so my network connection is not super fast but yes, I will definitely do that. It's actually faster than it usually is at home. Yeah, that's true. Well, I would definitely love to thank you guys for pulling this all together with a three in one make connection at the very end of the DSL line. Two of us trying to work from home, just knowing that there's a chance of fiber coming at some point in the future has made us very happy, so thank you very much. Glad to hear it, Chris. Which town are you in, Chris? We are in Moortown. Moortown, excellent. Hey, Jeremy. Hi. Yeah. Could you talk about something that you said in that the GovTech article that quoted you? You said that you had originally expected to have to restrict CD fiber to six connections per mile. Are you feeling that that's not gonna happen now? Um, the different, it's just the difference in philosophy. I mean, because we have grant money available now, we can sort of, we can look at slightly sparser areas and we can go a lot faster. I mean, the initial, our initial plans were to kind of go super slow and only build in those areas that had, you know, a little bit more density and then eventually build out to the left. So, I think we can sort of look at areas quite a bit with COVID and with the money we have been able to break. And that we will still end up, I mean, just the demographics of the district end up with the same about, yeah, I mean, not that we're not going to be careful, but we have a bit more flexibility in terms of where we can build first and how fast we can build now. And I should point out that this is a, this is bearing an interesting situation in that the more subscribers that we get, the cheaper it is for everybody because we essentially, you know, distribute the costs of this public infrastructure across more people. So it's not like, you know, we have three apples and six people and everybody gets half an apple, you know. Jeremy, do you want to talk about the new Vermont Community Broadband Board? Sure. So the Vermont Community Broadband Board is taking over the responsibility for funding and essentially shepherding the various CUDs around the state and making sort of like keeping us accountable, but also giving us resources to achieve our missions. And so the legislature stood up this five person body with an executive director to essentially take over some of the responsibility that was with the public service department to manage these grants and to help get us to across the finish line. And that board will be, excuse me, it will be meeting for the first time in a couple of weeks, I believe. So I saw another question in the chat. Who are the companies that are providing the actual service? So we are expecting when we finish building this, you will be writing a check or giving your payment at the end of the month to CV Fiber and we will have, we'll be contracting with a provider behind the scenes to provide that service. So yeah, we don't, like David said in the chat, we don't know exactly who that's going to be. We're in the process of deciding that. But we expect that it will be a public asset. That's something that we will own and that we will be billing folks or folks will be billed using our name. So yeah, Becky and Bob, Acheson. So communications union district is a special municipality that was created by the Vermont legislature some years ago that, and we are a dedicated single purpose municipality and we're tasked with essentially providing internet service and in this case Fiber to all of our member communities. Any other questions? Oh Jeremy, good job, it's 50 minutes. 50 minutes, I like it. Alrighty, well I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go get some dinner and I hope everybody has a wonderful night and thanks for attending. And if you have any other questions, like we've mentioned before, please feel free to send us a message either at info at CVFiber.net or through the form on the website CVFiber.net or reach out to your local delegates.