 We've rescheduled February 26, 2019 governing board meeting on CB5 or 2 order. Welcome, gentlemen. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? Yes. Yes. How meeting is coming up? It is. And many of us will pop this open. What's going on with you? If there's any official decision to take or give our own renditions of what we think is going on? Well, I hope you're on a pencil. Because there's a lot of stuff to write down. Well, it's something that's happened since our last meeting. So how do you want to communicate that? I'm not entirely sure. But we will also have another meeting in a few weeks, too. We'll probably be sure in front of you here. But I think most of the interesting stuff will be today. There's still some things outstanding there, hopefully. Is there anything that we need to add to the agenda or change, or otherwise? We're still good. Good for all the presentations of everybody. I hope. Any public comment on items that are not on the agenda? I would like to give... I have a question, Jerry. Do we include, at this place, comments we've gotten from the public? That would be fine. This is actually a really great place for that. Because I did have one person call me up the day of the story of when you said we could have internet by the end of 2020. 2019. 2019. It's in our budget. Well, I thought it was great that somebody was calling me up because it showed that he was eager for it. And he read the paper and he actually got the point where you said what you did. So people are paying attention. That was my public comment. Great. So on a related note, thank you for calling that out. I have a little... Printed copies that I made. There's a little chair's note on the upper right-hand corner. It says, anyone willing to write an article for the bridge tying our efforts to real estate? Talking about property values or anything like that or more generally what we're doing. But they're doing a real estate-themed issue during the next time round. And they will essentially give us a half page for us to write on, whatever. You want to do that? That's all good. If you could both... What's it in like? You got a little bit less than me. Okay. It's still okay? It's okay. I can turn right over there. Just write good stuff. There you go. Here's your guidelines. I used to write for you. Great. I will put you in touch with their editor. Yeah, and if you have... David, especially if you have graphics to... I also can get some quotes from real estate agents. There you go. Okay. If anybody wants to offer quotes to David and Becca that would be great. Any other public comments or any other items that are not on the agenda that anybody is like they want to weigh in on? I'm being a poster that I had sent to Elliot but I haven't heard back from him yet. But I have it and I gave it to my town clerk to put up... It's actually pull tabs. So the actual pull tabs. But I've also got QR codes on it that take you to the donation page and the .NET page. Or not the .NET page. The web presence. Sorry. Yes. The web presence. And it has a little blurb about just from our website basically what it says and what our member towns are. And I'm going to be putting that up at my office because I've been kind of talking to myself around the office. One of the women said, if you have a poster up in the lunch room I'd read that. So I made that but I didn't know how to distribute it. You can send it to me. You can broadcast it to everybody. You sent me a copy of the poster. And that might be a good thing in advance of town meeting to have that there and to do the ask for funds and such. Okay. I'll be back. Yeah. That would be good. And I want to introduce Frank Moore who is replacing Arama as the main delegate from Williamstown. Frank works at Norwich with me and I will let him give yourself a quick introduction. We'll do a round of introductions. I'm terrible with names. So I'm going to take two or three meetings. That's right. There's a video recording. You can watch all this over. When I have a busy day. Of course. I moved here a half ago from the Seattle area. And I was in Seattle four years in prior to that. I was a faculty member and chief information officer at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia which is as rural as it sounds. The town the size of Northfield was the only shopping town in eight towns. And I sat on the board of directors and chaired the Audit and Finance Committee for Mid-Atlantic Broadband which built an 800 mile fiber network in Virginia that connected every healthcare facility every K through 20 institution and 56 business parks. And then we also built fiber network from Atlanta to Ashburn, Virginia. I was doing that for seven years and it was a lot of fun. Our biggest challenge actually I shouldn't say this was not getting the money because Virginia is a tobacco state with millions and millions of dollars in tobacco settlement money which is how we financed it. But the biggest challenge was the last mile from the backbone to the house which is what I'm sure you're finding here. My biggest fear of moving to Williamstown was I have no broadband because I'm almost 2,000 feet above sea level on the side of the mountain east of Williamstown on Baptist Street and I actually did find a wireless broadband that is so-called the phenomenal. I'm Becca Strader, I'm the clerk and treasurer and I live in East Montpelier. I'm David Healy, I'm the delegate from the town of Calis. Jeremy Hanson Berlin. Shabbat for Orange. Chris Reddell, Berry City. Andrew Gilbert, Cabot. Alan Gilbert, I'm from Worcester. And Robert Schneider from Williamstown. I think we've met. Yes, we have. Jerry Diamantini is the alternate delegate from Berlin and also the chair of the business development committee. Are you going to join us? Sure. Let's make a rundown for the same field. Okay. It's a nice meeting you all. I have Stephen Nolten from Washington Electric Co-op here on my computer. So if you hear voices coming from here, that's who that is. Can you hear me, Stephen? I can see you, but I can't hear you. It's a sound like every video conferencing meeting that's just there. Never. I can see you. I don't have my camera on. I'm not... Yeah, we can hear you now, you're good. All right, so I'm going to go back where any other public comment on items that are not on the agenda? Okay. Next one, Woodbury's petition to join CV Fiber. I had the pleasure of meeting with Woodbury Select Board and talking to them about what we've been doing. They approached me after I spoke to Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission and they said, hey, this is something that would be interested in pursuing, so I met with them and they said, hey, we want in too, especially before you start building stuff and then we have to pay to join. So they were very enthusiastic, asked great questions and are interested in joining. So Wood, let's say... Good. They're the closest to the state's fiber. Is that true? It goes to hardware. So if we're ever going to interconnect with Kingdom Fiber, we'd probably need to go up that way. It's a nice little keystone spot. And they were convinced that they were never going to have any options. Even fewer than some other places, I think. At least Wooster is on Route 12, Cabin's at least on Route 2, although I hope Woodbury has Route 2 there as well. Route 14, I'm sorry. That's what I think. Anyways, is there any reason why we shouldn't? No. I'll make a motion. I'll make a motion that we accept with just participation in the CFR. Second. Move and second at any further discussion. Okay. Second. Opposed? Abstaining. Motion passes unanimously. Woodbury has actually in anticipation of this has already appointed their representative. Skip Lindsay. I don't see Skip here. He was invited and maybe showing up. He was supposed to be showing up. But he shows up and looks kind of confused. I'll ask him to sit down and we'll do the introductions again. Okay. Training reports. Yes. So we currently have $5,345 in 63 cents. All but plus 250 that I'm not going to do math in public. 25 of that and then our savings account and the rest is in checking. We've received a total of $5,386.69 in donations. And so the difference is are the online website, the website that we use for a donor that we take online donations charges a fee that I take a little slice of those donations. So that's all the expenses. Cool. The practical matter of if we get the grant $12,500 grant we have $7,500 more roughly to go. Think about how we're going to bridge that because if they say yeah, you've got the grant let's see your bank account we're going to need to move. When do you expect to find that information out? I thought that was end of February. I was supposed to be end of January. Then it was end of February. Then it was last week. I sent an email yesterday. Are they relying on any federal to put on that? No, I asked. I asked if there was any funding pulled up and they said no. They're just waiting to get their ducks in a row and to announce. So they're going to have some sort of press conference or something to announce that. Has there been any resolution of doing business name of Central Vermont internet? What's that timeline? When did that hearing happen? I'll go back to my calendar. I mean we should be hearing sometime, actually sometime pretty soon shouldn't we? It was about it was in towards the end of January. One of the reasons I ask is that if if anybody is trying to verify for say a foundation, a charitable foundation or a charitable gift foundation whether we exist if they go to the Secretary of State's website and type in Central Vermont internet they end up with company that is not us. Right, so that was a 30 day window Ramam? That happened on January 28th so we must know by tomorrow. Also Alan I just want to remember you'd ask me for that EIN right? Yeah. So that should help as well. I tried that EIN and it didn't come up with us. It's kind of blank if people there's a charitable gift trust that's trying to verify whether a gift to us is tax deductible they wouldn't be able to do it at this point. Follow up and verify that that can actually happen? Yeah. I'm surprised in the EIN I'll check with you not going to make sure I have the right numbers. I wrote it down. Any other questions or feedback or pressure slash money items? Okay, next up we have Sherri McCuller from Angelin Advisors. Shall I? Sure. Yeah, if you want to set up wherever you'd like. Unfortunately we don't have a screen. That's okay. Wait a minute. You want a table or something? Put here. Or if you can email one of us or email me or somebody your presentation I can distribute to everybody. Oh, that's good. Do you have my email address? I don't know. Okay, I'll connect. Yeah, the Wi-Fi password is over. Lowercase M-D-L-S-X-P-U-B One, two, three, four, five. It's P, not D. M-D-L-S-X. D isn't David. Yeah, like middle-sex public. Should I get on middle-sex guest? Yeah. Okay, tell me again. M-D-L-S-X-P-U-B P-U-B One, two, three, four, five. I mean, through the fucking, they're just confused. Did you encourage the money part of that? Sherri? Pardon? Did you encourage the money part of the presentation? Yeah. Well, actually, I didn't let me take that. Okay. What's your email address? Central.inferment.internet. Central.inferment.internet. Central.inferment.internet. gmail. Okay, you should have that in just a second. It's with Stu's thing out there called the line. Did you say you live from the Virginia middle-mile backbone network? Mid-Atlantic broadband, yeah. I used to be. I know their work really well. I remember when it was funded us. They've done a lot. It really helped North Carolina a lot too. We can get to Ashford now. I got it, Sherri. If you want to start, I will circulate it while you're talking. First of all, thank you for having me. I'm Sherri McCuller and I'm a senior broadband consultant with Magellan advisors. Before I get started, I just want to say that I love this photograph. Being here reminds me of my hometown where I live. We're in an area that looks almost exactly like this in the mountains of western North Carolina. It's very sparsely populated. It's very low-density. I think we have maybe seven households a mile. We have a rural electric co-op. We also have broadband thanks to a grant that we got. I helped to get that grant for our county. I know a lot about business planning for rural development projects and it's hard to do. There is way and it is profitable and it does work. It just takes patient capital and committed partnerships to do. First I want to just go over this a little bit and give you a little overview of our company and our services and our project team and talk a little bit about projects that are relevant to what you're doing here and why we're here. And then our proposed scope of work if you all retain us or your partner pertains us. Just to some additional information there are grants available now for broadband planning that you might want to look into. We're trying to save enough time for questions. I'm going to try to keep this under an hour so you guys can get some work done tonight. I know we have other people here. So first I want to talk about scope of work. This is excuse me this is to be determined. I'm sorry. But essentially we want to do the business planning the financial modeling partnership development either from grants or subsidized loans and we would like to suggest a pilot project. So Magellan advisors Magellan advisors has been in business for going on nine years. It made big splash when it hit the scene when VTOP started since then we've done over 400 projects for public and non-profit clients. We've built over 50 networks across the US and Canada. We've raised over a billion dollars for broadband funding. We connected over 1 million feet of fiber to the premise connections. We've connected over 1,000 community anchor institutions and so that number of these numbers are two years old but I have to tell you that right now we've got 175 million dollars in projects from Canada to Alaska. So we know a lot about rural broadband. We do feasibility studies broadband engineering and design business modeling and partnership development financing and grants and project management. This slide goes into detail about the exact services that we provide but which slider you want which slider you want sorry this is slide number four We can do comprehensive work in any of these areas. We do a lot of smart city projects across the US and these are mostly in bigger cities. Rancho Cucamonga, California San Francisco city planning financial planning economic modeling scenario planning sensitivity analysis break-even analysis design and engineering we have a full design engineering firm but we keep it separated from our planning business we don't do planning and design engineering we do planning and then design engineering we're interested to get forward but we don't mix the two. The government IT consulting is a big part of our business in fact that's how Magellan got started was with municipal IT consulting we are a full project management firm and we also provide operational start-up support for new ventures Next slide So these are some of the areas where we have built fiber. These are fiber the home systems for municipalities for cooperatives for clients of ours we've done work for states for regional development authorities last model networks we do high speed wireless and cellular data networks SmartGrid is a big part of our project work over the last year in states that have just passed laws that allow electric co-ops to build broadband systems now which is something new in a lot of states we do smart home automation grid security energy efficiency projects transportation is a big deal for some of our municipal clients health care telehealth telemedicine we've raised a lot of money for rural telemedicine networks and Wyoming was our latest project Public safety of course is a huge area for Magellan So for this project the CB fiber project what we're proposing to do is to start with a business plan and a financial model and then look at partnership opportunities for CB fiber because a new entity without assets or revenue stream or history of operations is going to be tough for you guys to raise the money on your own so definitely some partnership opportunities and then recommend an organizational structure for the venture identify the applicant for the funding and then go after funding loan funding from subsidized federal loans, state grants and federal grants you're a really good fit for all of those three so our team John Honker is the president and CEO of Magellan and John has a lot of experience working in Vermont Valco is one of our clients and John has personally worked on that project for one on the last three years Courtney Violetta is our chief operating officer and Courtney is the former city CIO Courtney and I are working together on a project in rural Canada we recently did the business planning and raised 68 million dollars for a remote area in northern Canada it was the largest grant award in Ontario history and the largest federal award in the country and it connects five remote fly in only communities with a fiber to the home system and an 800 kilometer fiber background so we're really proud of that project you can read all about me I used to be with an investment bank for 20 years in Charlotte, North Carolina and when I retired from the firm I moved to the mountains of western North Carolina thinking that I would do software development which I enjoy but quickly discovered that there was no broadband and in fact there was no T1 line the telephone company at the time who was GTE said well we can probably get a T1 up there where you live but it might take us about three months so I spent the next three years on the road because I had to go to my client's site to be able to communicate it was awful and finally my family and my husband is with me today because we're going to Alaska this week I got to come to a brabant we're traveling on but my family finally said look either do something about the situation so that you can stay home or we're all moving back to Charlotte because you know they never saw me and so that's how I got interested in broadband as an economic development strategy for rural areas it's really the only thing we have you know we're remote, low density don't have a lot of businesses don't have the state barely knows that we're part of the state and so we don't have flat land we have a lot of mountain land we have severe weather we have a lot of public land that doesn't belong to us and so really we don't have housing we can't house big box manufacturing companies we don't even have roads they're very good they go up through the mountains so really the only thing we have is broadband and so that's how I got into it and I've been doing this for 20 years so really I got into it for the children I found out that our local school could not teach advanced chemistry or biochemistry because there weren't enough kids to hire a teacher to make it feasible and so one of the first projects I did was raise money to connect school districts together to the two community colleges and the state university and they own their own fiber optic network and it saved them $65 million and it's still operating it's a great project so now the little kids can just share a teacher no matter where the teacher is you can read about me Dan Howick is our VP of design and construction Dan came from Danella which is one of the two best construction firms in the U.S. for utility networks Mark Lane is our inside plant engineer Mark is fantastic he managed Bristol Virginia utilities by the home network system which is one of the longest operating municipal utilities in the U.S. which ultimately got to 68% broadband adoption which is amazing and then Ashley Polling who's our project management analyst all straight and then lastly Dave Brevitz Dave is our policy and regulatory guide if we have questions about what's legal in states we put Dave on so why are we here we're here because we know what you're going through access to broadband has become the gateway to equal opportunity I argue that it's become a civil right and the reason it's a civil right is because legislators by their actions can deny it to certain classes of people if you don't have the internet you don't have equal opportunity the FCC's policy of subsidizing aging copper network has utterly failed for all communities we now have a network that is falling apart in the ground that can't get much above 25 megabits and by my last count I think the FCC had spent $19 billion on subsidizing that network through the connect America fund so pretending that 10 megabits of service is broadband and pretending that it's going to meet the rural needs of communities it's not going to solve the problem that we all have we did some research on Vermont before we came here and I have some background in Vermont because I worked with EC Fiber and with Kingdom Fiber through the VTA back in 2014 to put together a plan to participate in the rural broadband experiments auction which the rules changed after some of the provisional awards were made and that wasn't a good thing so I learned a lot about Vermont and Vermont internet service during that time and one of the things that I learned was that VTA got a $116 million broadband stimulus award to build a 14 wireless network and they did do that but I don't think a lot of people are getting 10 wireless servers unfortunately I think Vermont is cursed by that because VTA is a RUS borrower and RUS will not make or answer loans in areas where there's an existing RUS borrower so one of the things that we did was overlay a map of CB5's Serving Area with VTA's Serving Area and the good news is there are places where the two don't overlap that means there's access to RUS funding and grants in those areas it does make the business case a little harder to serve the ones where there is overlap and we actually think that the Vermont Public Service Commission did a test of all of the wireless services that were in the area and it was really amazing if you can see the yellow dots on the map and the red dots those are the sites where they tested so we think you should follow waiver requests with RUS and ask them if they will lift the restriction on additional RUS funding because VTA is not actually meaning statutory obligations so it's a long shot because at the end of the day RUS is a bank and it's going to protect its borrowers but it's still worth the try that could open up the whole area of the funding and of course state grants would not be subject to the same restrictions so CV5 is the start up where do you go from here you know I recognize a lot of the people on this the delegates on this committee and members of your board are very well versed in rural broadband engineering, business planning all of the existing networks the needs, the gaps you already know a lot of that and the jolin advisers usually starts our work with feasibility studies, surveys to measure demand, stakeholder engagement to test the reliability and cost of services that's available but recognizing that you're a start up and that access to funding right now is difficult and also recognizing that you have a body of expertise already existing here and we think that we could work with you to get the information we need and just skip those two steps and start with the business plan we think there's enough expertise here to be able to develop a business plan so you know the thing that you need more than anything else right now is a business plan you can't raise money you can't apply for funding you can't even find a partner until you have one and let's talk about partnerships we do a lot of work in rural areas we do a lot of public-private and non-profit public partnerships and as I said I've worked mostly in rural areas for my 20 year career and what we see as the fastest lowest cost way to get services out in rural areas like this is to form a partnership with a cooperative either an electric cooperative or a telephone cooperative or both in Oregon one of our projects in rural area is with a co-op that is a co-op of co-ops there's an electric co-op and there's a telephone co-op in between the two they have access to two sources of federal funding and they form a separate joint venture so it's really a great project and by the way the CA rural utility service loves cooperatives because they trust them most of them are already existing borrowers they know them they feel comfortable making loans and grants so we think that probably your best partner without doing the business plan or even look at all of the aspects but just right off the bat we think your best partner is going to be a cooperative probably going to be an electric co-op they own their own co-ops the co-op fees alone in the business plan co-op fees in the business plan for a rural community can actually bankrupt a small organization it's the single largest cost that would make great of any of the costs that you're going to see in the plan and if you can eliminate this cost the business plan looks a lot better a lot faster also you can leverage the facilities that are already in place so and also you've got access to $5.5 million dollars a year federal appropriation funding that goes not to the telecommunications program or the U.S. but to the electric program and that money is not restricted there are no restrictions on the size of the loan unlike the telecom program there are no restrictions there is no limit there's also no restriction on overbuilding existing carriers except for U.S. carriers but if you've got a charter or an AT&T you can use the money that's overbuilt and that makes a big difference in the rural business case because what happens in rural areas is the incumbent carriers essentially cherry pick the densest area leaving the unserved area out in voodoox it's really hard to serve an inspector to be served and there are not other to make the business case so we can talk more about the smart grid loan but essentially the head of the smart grid project for the electric side came from the telecommunications side John switched programs of the years ago and that is the smart grid idea they know that you're going to use the money to build broadband networks and they want it to but you don't talk about that in the funding application you talk about the benefits of the smart grid network and all of the savings that it's going to create for rural electric cars and it is going to create savings the one thing you can operate your electronics in real time remotely which can make a big difference it helps you manage your loan you can save money on peak power cost and less consumers access their own appliances remotely over the internet to serve cattle themselves but mainly as we've seen in electric cities and electric cars revenues from electric services are trading down and they have been for many years and so the broadband service is a way to diversify the revenue and increase the revenue stream and so the R.U.S. Electric program is going to diversify the network and they are going to offer broadband services and they encourage you to but politically and I'm talking about funding for the lobbyists for the industry hasn't worked this way ever to the electric program they have worked over the telecom program pretty well and so everybody is marching to the lobby she would do is accept on the electric side and so long we've got this money available I think we all need to go for it while it's still available because money in Washington is like a play in this way and it just keeps moving around with everybody in the administration and what's allowable today may not be allowable to so the other thing we like about electric co-ops and telecom co-ops is that their capital is patient the profit sector and I'm talking about future capitalists probably equity funds if they're not going to invest in the area of the cyclist they simply are not going to do it because the return on investment and the time period to free cash flow is too long most of the telecom companies will not make investments unless they've seen a return in 18 months they won't invest at all if there's not a return of 5 years and it usually takes 7 to 10 years not 10 more years 10 years will be a good thing and we'll send deep cash to the company co-ops know how to do that they all send to have several areas of better margins so now I'm going to tell you a story about why the private sector is going to do this when VTOT came out I was working in Eastern North Carolina which is really rural, really core and really hard to serve they got a pilot and so the university system applied for some VTOT ready to build a state middleman operating and I worked with them to do that and so it's my job I'm not sure how I got this job but my job was to go out to the private sector and get the fundants and get them to support the plan and invest in a match for the money so I must have defended somebody but so I went to the carrier at that time and I won't tell you your name because we got a new VA but they were the carrier for all of Eastern North Carolina and I said I think we can get $140 million in federal funding and you don't want to be the applicant because you don't want to have to deal with the compliance so you're not going to allow open access to your network I said but if you work with us then you can have some of this fiber to all of your cell sites at very low cost and you can be the contractor to help us build it and you won't be subject to any compliance obligations whatsoever you'll just be the contractor how does that sound? and the director of Carolina looked at me and said you know if somebody gave us $100 million tomorrow with no strings whatsoever attached we would not take it and no funder would be able to fill out and I said why not and they said because we can't reach our internal rate of return threshold and so you know there are national companies that don't understand that I worked for the investment bank once you have public stockholders you're a human captive and I do understand but the point is they're not doing it and so we've done a look to alternatives and that's what I've been doing for 20 years and so what I'm saying to you is that is you're tonight so I'm not going to say that but I will say that if you ask me based on what I know after 20 years of experience I would say what you need to do is form a partnership with Washington Electric Block and then Washington Electric Block should form a partnership with E.C. Bobber and with Kingdom Bobber to be able to operate the system and start it up so between the three I mean four of you it would be a plan that could work quickly it would leverage the assets that are already in place the ownership facilities the electronics the knowledge and the experience the regulatory piece with you guys and what you agreed to the table would be the aggregated demand of 16 maybe 17 communities you would be the community's piece which is going to be necessary for you to get public funding R.U.S. especially for community engagement and support as one of the ways they rank their applications and so C.B. Bobber would play a very important role that you would have to endorse the partner now we're doing other projects like this right now we're doing like Alaska and we're working in the mission of Crible of Islands which really has a problem the schools out there are paying $60,000 a month for a satellite interconnection and E-Rate is paying for 20% talk about a good business plan the incumbent carrier is making $22 million a year every year off the schools and it's killing I mean they can't even though they're paying 10% it's no filling so they want competition there are four carriers it's a really tough business model to leave me because it's a submarine cable so what we did was we said okay we're going to go talk to the four carriers there's $600 million of federal funding on the table right now for the Reconnect funding opportunity are you all American? so but you have to move fast and so the community network which is a confederation of those 16 communities that the English School of Arts is called Southwest Delusion Municipal Conference they are receiving funding they coordinate the U.S. counties and they have they carry a lot of weight so we went to the incumbent carrier and said here's our guiding principles we want to see lower cost services we want to see higher reliability we want to see faster speeds we want jobs created in the communities where people live as part of the department business as much as possible with the old companies and you know here's a list of other things you've got to be experienced your plans got to be feasible all of that and they said well what kind of community benefits are you talking about and I said well a lifeline link up discount would be nice maybe you could give free service to a technical college for a while for you know to do some adoption training and the like you must not know our business model because to charge is closest so you know basically they didn't operate maybe they sort of had those until we didn't call them that because what they realized now is that that community municipal conference has a lot of power and we are actually negotiating with the other three carriers who make the incumbent so they're thinking about forming a group to work together to submit a proposal for four carriers to determine who's going to get the backing of the municipal conference but they have a lot of power that they didn't really have kind of get the incumbent too just hearing about it and they do have money but they don't want to end the network they're not in that business they don't want to maintain it they don't want to end it so they would be very happy to have a partner I'm not going to see you guys can read it I'm going to leave plenty of time for questions and answers but you know there are different models you don't want to do if the numbers don't work out there's going to have to be a business plan that shows that it works out for everybody and if it's not to Washington let the Republicans like you or DC Fibers or Kingdoms there are other models and there are private sector models so just right on the top of our head to save you time and to save you money we're giving you our best thinking to life after the models so are there any questions about what you think I've said so far so I have a question we're always curious why people show up in the market how did you even know that you were doing this is it just because the work you've done in the state before do you know some of the players yes we do we know Belco because Belco is a current plan as we've talked to Mike we see a fellow that we've got this we know Michael here we've helped him develop this plan for his photocopied network with his question on wireless VTA brought us in we did it on the business VTA awarded it to us working with the university system at the time but because we know rural areas and one of the first questions they asked us was how do you find rural and you know we kind of laughed but they weren't kidding they wanted me to answer that question and we said well you know anything if you've got 10 households per mile that's a great business model for rural areas we've got four and so they want people to understand that and who aren't going to try to do things according to a boilerplate template that doesn't work in the model and that's why they brought us in so we met Stan and his group and they didn't need our help but Michael was transitioning from wireless to wireless and so he needed the business plan and VTA's interest was to lease some of the fiber that they had already built two carriers who were willing to build by casting networks in rural areas specifically in the south center of Vermont and so it was challenging let me just say that the design was interesting so when Michael and I first met we talked about distribution networks and I was like well wait a minute I was like I'm looking at this and I don't see a distribution network and Michael said because there isn't one and I said what? there's no one on the road we have long jobs we have long jobs it was pretty innovative Michael is amazing the research that he has done and he identified some very good costs to put in the year solutions that made the plan for the board and so that's how we came to know about this we also read about the communication union district legislation because we followed some of the policies we'll see safe last day yes is there a role for Velco in any of this? yes definitely because you know Velco should have mentioned that Velco can draw transmission fiber at the substations for what and that's a huge deal if you don't have an upstream connection like like we didn't have in Virginia and North Carolina before you guys and we started doing our work the city of Wilson, North Carolina was the first municipal fiber in the home network in the state they had a great plan they didn't think about their upstream connection and you know level three and say to those guys they're not regulated they can charge any price they want and guess what? they're two biggest customers who hated the city and their network they wanted to go away and the price for upstream connectivity went from $4 which at that time was good price to $175 connected so that upstream connection is a tremendously important piece of this this reminds me of the horror story back in Virginia in about 2007 because NBC was set up as a cooperative and the members were ISPs so it was a 501C12 and we hit a point in time where the ISPs were supposed to roll over according to the rules to the board of directors and we realized it would have brought chaos because they compete with each other for customers so we went through a whole period of a year with the IRS converting to a 501C4 and when we started up Verizon and Sprint and I will name them said we were going to be an utter failure and they refused to cooperate with us and within two years they realized they had better join we had the best way to get them to do anything was just a thread to do something yourself all of a sudden they'll start building all over the place I don't know can you answer this hopefully it would be helpful to have a sense of year and date of the model or on the Joan judge just because of the chicken and egg and we are and we don't have to really we're a little challenged operation it's just because of nature but we are what we really represent community interest and putting that all together and doing that aspect of it but we're not really an operational bot so we do need these partners but chicken and egg so do you have any insight on how that might work without getting into it so first of all there is funding out there for planning and I'll encourage you all to apply so and there's a winner that would make now I think it's $50,000 it's not a lot of money but $50,000 it's a lot of money for us it'd be better and I think there's some state legislation that's pending right now that would also make funds available for planning as well as other important changes that would be paid to the state $60,000 $60,000 that's great so Michael has he's been talking to me he's sent me a copy of the bill so they're a waste of money let's talk about time because right now the reconnected opportunity is on the table and the grant window is going to be out sometime in mid-march we know what the closing dates are we don't know what the opening dates are it's too late in the game for you guys to apply for that we don't have a business plan we don't have a partner we don't have design engineering but there are recurring programs for more years to happen in a year and usually they open up about this time in the year so right now you have the community connect grant windows telemedicine just to tell you it's open, rural economic development business grants are open and smart grid is open all the time smart grid line is open so we think that it's going to be a combination of grants and grants but before you even consider that you've got to do a business plan and I would suggest that we do it in concert with Washington they'll come along they'll shoot me in ready but I mean they can't do anything they just want to they know they can be whole and it's going to meet their needs and it's going to solve them all and so since they would be the applicant the applicant must own the assets in the bank and they must be going to operate them or to hire an operator and so since they would have to be the applicant then really it needs to be their business plan and they sort of need to and there is money and they might have some money I'm sorry it's a mundane question it's fascinating open door or closed door do you want to be locked or unlocked leave it unlocked sorry so for Tommy we thought the grant window is not going to open again until you know so there's plenty of time to do this we know this Magellan things are going to happen now we monitor the policy and legal environment we see what we're doing we're delighted about the communication union district role we're very happy about the bills through being introduced to the legislature and we know there's going to be federal funding for next year and we think the reconnect credit room is going to continue next year we don't think it's going to be just a call to go away we offered to send this to Mike earlier today and we're going to send this to you we've done an analysis of the farm yield but we're going to give it again so you can see where the plots are you'll just be up but we want to be associated with what you're doing because we think it's going to turn into something big so we're willing to provide the advice that we can until we can fund funding for a plan and we're going to try to help you fund that plan but then once it starts we want to be retained I think that what we want to have they probably want to have their own disability study even though I think you guys probably already know it's feasible I'll end they probably want to have their own disability study we probably want to bring capital analysis and inventory and all of that we're happy to do that but it makes us the cost of our engagement if we can work with you and take what we already know collectively we can go ahead and start the business plan so our process would be feasibility study market assessment we do surveys we actually do online and paper surveys we do stakeholder engagement we can go out and talk with keen anchor institutions who you would call them anchor tenants for example if 16 or 17 municipalities could agree to buy service that would be an attraction for the business plan for investors so we would do all of those things and then we would like test the adoption level we would look at the demographics what's the income level what's the age level because that's going to affect your adoption rates we factor all of those things in we look at the best way that they use the network so we're talking about 17 communities but that one we're talking about more than that because they serve 41 and so we've got to look at phasing how we can generate free cash play in the fastest how we can leverage what the partners already have what the partnership development comes after the business model then you start looking at a partnership agreement and we do partnership development all the time so we've got agreements in place that lay out who's going to do what we're all going to get out of it we have one right now for Newport, Tennessee which is an electric city in another area and has the same kind of demographic except they're a persistent poverty we did their business plan they're actually not a smart grid line from all the US which is amazing it's not a co-op and we had to get RUS to agree to let them pledge revenue instead of assets they were going to borrow $35 million and that work only cost 21 million and that was for two counties plus part of 200 counties they had a big serving area it was only 21.7 million but they went ahead and borrowed 35 because the money was very low cost are US money compared to municipal bonds where they ran the numbers the savings on the debt service was $11 million for that venture that's really good money so we do the business modeling we start talking about partnerships we work out the terms of the engagement we count with the contracting fees then, if you like we will do the application for the funding we'll be very successful at that I personally I have never had an application not funded except one and that's because the client they want to buy some of the financial presentation but everything I've ever written has been funded because, not because I'm a great writer but because we had good plans in place all of that work was done in advance so I had something to do with it so we will do the application development if the funds are reported and especially if it's a grant fund there's going to be due diligence the funders will come on site and say, okay, we've got questions because you're going to try to reduce their risk and ask for things like sensitivity in policies or break even plan or risk mitigation strategy we know how to do those so we would represent either due diligence and if you like we can retain us to do design engineering and your construction management we do not do design build we don't recommend it and our US will not allow it the engineer has to be separate from the construction company so we would govern and be the construction manager we would manage all of the procurement because we know what things should cost we would manage all of the contract administration and we would manage the compliance before the project was complete then we would conduct the final inspection and place it out with the funders so that's what we're seeking now so that all sounds fantastic it sounds very expensive the question is can we do this out of paradise and if we don't need to accept all the services we'll give you a hand in the picture and we do realize that you guys are just getting off the ground we also know that we want to be part of what's happening in the box it's going to be good so we're willing to come in and accept research from you instead of charging you more so we can do some research and community engagement and we can go straight to the business plan and the business plan will be a go no go step so what comes out of the business plan will dictate whether you go for it so we're willing to end our engagement after the business plan does not make sense for it wouldn't make sense to be part of it and we will try to keep that price low if you ask me for a range of prices in the one camera I'm going to give you more but it's to me determined we think that we could do it from between $50,000 and $88,000 but we would base it so that you would not have to pay all of the expensive price and the scope is going to dictate the price so the more you can do and you have a value to do it because we know we want this group we're going to be confident and we know you have the expertise so we would trust your information so that you're lowering the price does that answer your question? You seem to think there's something special about what you're talking about I'm kind of curious what that is Well, remember we work in all different states and so we see the bad things that happen and for example in my state municipalities can no longer build networks rural and electric co-ops can offer telecommunications service but they're not allowed to seek our US funding in February and these things change all the time but we see a change in leadership in the state politics have changed we've been monitoring the communications union district organization which is really good we like public utility districts and we think that you're going to have some loss of affinity they're going to decelerate broadband instead of decelerating broadband as we've seen in 21 states so for the remaining states that have big loss we'd like to work with employees essentially I think there's a lot of plans out there there's a Department of Agriculture business development plan that's open now the plan includes the requirements on the end of March how would working with you potentially fit into that because I think that in order to put the application together for that grant you have to be very specific about who's going to do what you almost have to have the scope of work in the grant and actually it's argument for rural businesses how are you going to support them right they want to know how many jobs and that kind of thing that is a rural business so some technical assistance for them but we are Western any time you do employment you're going to create jobs and what about the timing for getting that time is tight it's very tight you're talking about the planning grant Jerry yeah the planning grant that closes no matter what you write no matter what you write in the plan this is not successful you're going to be using it material over and over again to get that look at that once you do the business plan once you do the development piece if you go after a grant and turn it down it doesn't matter the first time you get a grant you're going to get a lot more grants the first many years the hardest you raise because but once the federal government wins many more grants they like to leverage what they've already spent so if they don't have to recreate the wheel they can just put a few more dollars into something they're going to fund now Scott County Telephone in Virginia is a good example they've got three community connect grants because our U.S. likes to leverage so the first many years going to be hard once you get it grants for chair can I stay on that same theme again about the timing and the tightness of the timing would it be possible and if we were to work with you would it be possible to work that into the application for this grant that's coming that the deadline is the end of March is that is that a feasible way to pay for this kind of work if we were to move forward you mean if we were to do that would you be able to pass for the grant proceeds or if you would retain us I wasn't thinking of retaining you to write the grant because we don't have the money if I reframe it maybe so I think what Jerry is asking is if we said that Magellan was going to be the group that we were going to engage to do the planning not have you write the grant I think we will be able to do that in collaboration with the local USDA RD office but they said that there's two approaches you either have the consultant that you're going to work with in your pocket already essentially set ready to go or you're ready to shoot out an RFP that's already essentially built that's part of that grant application that's what you're talking about right I'm not sure that Magellan really would have much to do you know maybe provide some information that would be necessary to put their information on the grant which is something I think we should probably talk about more during the USDA reports back we also monitor funding opportunities we do that all the time we read the answers to that and said one of the things that we could do would be if you informed when there are opportunities maybe on this point we're setting this two types too late to go for that but what we're going for is a planning thing to create a business plan why is it today let me just add two more things there's also an urban board and regional commission the USDA the urban board and regional commission all of them coming out the same time but all we're asking is funding to do a business model why couldn't we have done that earlier and I thought that you were asking if we could do it and it would be tough for us because of Reconnect we are starting to decline clients who are calling it's actually too late so it would be really tough for us until opportunity comes and you're going to do it that was my we would do the writing we might need some information if we decide to do it taking a completely different time we're talking you talked about a rural community in Tennessee with a new board that you said that is a poor community yes has there been do they have the broadband in place now yes has there been any examination of has this helped improve the lives of the poorer members of the community have some of them been able to say find online jobs classes and certification this is one of the things we discovered when we started doing grants research for Newport because sometimes people don't know what's going on in their own community so we actually got to read newspapers and one of the things we found out is the third worst city in the country for opioid abuse related health problems nobody hit me talking but you know and so these are addiction problems if you live out in a rural area 30 miles from town with an adage you don't have a job, you don't have money it's kind of hard to get counseling but if you've got a broadband connection you can get counseling the same thing is true for suicide prevention so yeah there's already some addiction treatment programs going on I was also thinking more specifically about jobs in my in my town of Orange I think the idea that there are jobs out there that they could get if they had a guy just had a friend in Alabama who just got hired to do tech support online she has to have a good connection but it's going to lift her out of a really bad situation now that she's got this job you know I don't think they've done research yet to know obviously it is and obviously it's going to make a huge difference but I can tell you that from my community it's made a huge difference but I will also say that sometimes the benefits to the community in terms of economic development jobs, lag, deployment of the network because there has to be a period of time for people to understand and use it to get jobs and how to improve their businesses and say some adoption programs by the communities training programs we've seen a big lag but in my community we have I could not do what I do for Magellan I would not do what I do for Magellan if I had to go to the office in Florida or Denver but we have 40 consultants across the US and we talk to each other and work online every day we use GoVeeting we use online collaboration tools it's a great thing for Magellan because we can talk to a peer expert in any area at any time and share information we also work with our clients using Basecamp which is just great we can share documents in real time so it's been great for our business it's been great for our community we have a lot of people now who work in the room and when we did our first survey we wisely left an open comment please share any concerns that you have about the existence of Magellan and the comments were unbelievable they were like I used to live in a third-world country and they had better internet than I had here and if I don't get my internet I am going to lose my job one girl said that she had failed an exam because the internet went dropped and the school didn't have a break we heard from a lot of people that they were going to lose their job if they couldn't get their internet connection so those weren't new jobs but they were job safe but there is a lag there is a lag a lag period and we need to be prepared to understand but we might be able to offset some of that with organized community effort and training and outreach that's very important and I actually talked to a co-op down in North Georgia years ago we worked together with leaders and I thought it would make a sense to spare time and I said he's in the economic development piece for the department and I was like you guys have large economic development so she put the network in which has been almost eight years I said how is this better than your ability to create businesses in the area he said we've had three in eight years but he said really the biggest impact has been on companies businesses and remote workers they haven't recruited a lot more and sometimes economic developers don't know how to recruit they're used to doing things based on state directives they're used to big box trying to bring in white elephant that doesn't work anymore and so they kind of need some help and understand how to market what they've got and we have actually been retained to do that a tribe that we raised money for came back and said we need for you to tell us what industries we should be recruiting from and exactly who we should call and so we did do that we did some business research working with the university again some of the industries were on a good fit because she had faith in their tourism they don't want to mess up their views or water for the high tech which is an enormous industry with lots of sub-sectors we were able to give them a great list with contact information and strategies for what companies we wanted to work with what happened with bank and you know said the tribe prepared tax credits a $10,000 per tribal employee tax credit to anyone hired on the tribe of lands they connect directly to Atlanta they own their own pipe to Atlanta and so they could recruit back office jobs to banks clearing houses into the area and retain local people to get tax credit bundled up with the free internet access over to the network I've gone to your website and I've just signed up for the newslet what information of news am I going to get since that's what you're getting what's been the newslet information about funding opportunities information about smart city applications which is a big deal for us press releases about our projects federal information a big deal for three dot California right now is wireless tower sighting it's a big point going on where the center of the industry is trying to restrict what cities charge for access to their polls and they're going state by state they've already been in our state they try to say you can only charge $20 actually try to set the price so that was defeated but there are all sorts of things that cities have to do now and some of the pages are looking for a poll so we have a lot of information about current policy both about projects and policy yes and funding opportunities sounds like we might be out of questions we have about seven minutes of parting comments if you have any otherwise just from a personal standpoint I'm pretty interested in the lives of all of you you guys seem to be pretty progressive people which I like if you find a way to do that we now have a lot to work with you're very innovative and we just serve the right group of people like them good one question here because you're dealing with a lot of municipalities that are like them so you deal directly with municipalities that are like them yes and public utilities and states most of our our clients are non-profits and public utilities we don't do a verizon we're creating we tried to work we got a project in Savannah a few years ago and we do we send down requests so they can tell us what they're prepared to offer for the city bills just in case they want to do it for them and AT&T AT&T called us and they said we're not going to give you any because Magellan is our competitor so we we don't do that but we do work strictly with public utilities I will say that we work with small some kind of companies but they tend to be smaller local groups like Kingdom like our cable company which is a local family business but we don't work with a giant company and we don't have a cable or telephone and you know some organizations that serve local communities actually incorporates businesses rather than non-profits for that reason and the reason is they don't have to share the confidential information because they are going to be attacked by the innocent and so you know I started up a a middle-model carrier in southwestern North Carolina with many of them unless you get it because they didn't know anything about it but they did have a business reason for doing it their core business demanded it and they were best very wealthy one was an Indian tribal casino and the network kept going down and it went down three weekends in a row while they were digging around you know an area that couldn't have a half diversity on the network so it just took down all the cell phones all the wireless, all the telephone all the internet for a four-county area went down including the casino and they wouldn't tell us how much money they lost in those three weekends but they did say that it was in eleven digits in three weekends and so they were like how much does this network going to cost in us it's seventeen million dollars and they were like well, if that fellow over there in Franklin wants to be our partner that's fine with us but if he doesn't we'll just pay for it you know but we incorporated that company as a core product entity because we started getting black and medium-sized and they could have gotten to our financial statements and tax returns or publish that to you so we worked with that company that company very good, thanks very much we appreciate it okay next up we have Chris Lynch from Matrix Design Group hi Chris that's kind of a tough act to follow my name is Chris Lynch I'm with Matrix Design Group I did bring some brochures for people so I'll leave them there cool and if you don't mind I'll stand I'm based out of Worcester Mass before I would drive up so I just want to get my legs up on the floor I'm not sure if you're familiar with Matrix Design Group we've been in business for over 22 years we got formed to design and build fiber-optic networks over the past 22 plus years we've done thousands of fiber projects and built literally thousands of miles of fiber networks included in the projects that we've done include Marcus University we've connected all of their campuses in New Jersey we built two multi-million dollar smart grids for public services we recently did a seven ring fiber backbone for the city of Boston which included a secure link to the Federal Reserve Bank included in all of that work I should back up and mention there's actually two companies they're privately owned out of East Hanover New Jersey we have Matrix Design Group which does the engineering we have Millennium Communications which does the installation and the electronics so together we can do the design and the build or as we like to say take a project from the concept over the years we've also built in New England we built the first nine towns for EC5 we've not only designed it we built it but we operated that network for the first three years of its existence so we put it in place the building and their technical support pretty much everything that went into that network and for full disclosure not only did we design and build it but we're also an investor because the way that they take for that network was basically by investors and smaller people giving donations or investment that basically paid a little bit better than CD rates we also built the town of Leverett in Massachusetts Leverett was an activity for that network they did a $3.6 million general obligation which means that the average house in Leverett was valued at $275,000 they ended up paying $209 per year for 20 years to take for the network however it was well worth it because the take rate in town was about 84% of the homeless and the people who took internet service of those people 70% of those got a voice over IP line and got rid of their line from the rival because the copper had been so bad for so many years it was just happy to be everywhere so the network is very very successful in an average price wouldn't you add in the tax increase it's about $95 per month if you have a house that's worth more than $275,000 you're paying over $100 tax increase but again it's over it actually happens to be the next town over for gamers so a lot of the people either work at the University of Massachusetts or they rent out an apartment to somebody that works there we also are in the process of building up four towns for brilliant telecom we're involved with their original build I kind of want to make that clear but their expansion is one of the reasons why people are interested in purchasing that so they use the expansion as not just a way to get new subscribers and new revenue into the business but as a way to make themselves more attractive to the investors brilliant telecom could have picked anybody they chose to do business with us we also have done a lot of work for VTA that's been done by us our three largest building customers today are Verizon AT&T which is now part of the 9th century one those are also the three largest internet providers in the country again making the business where they want to and they choose to do business with us so outside of the industry we're not really well known but inside the industry we have a good track record and we're also in the process of building the town of Petersham now now Petersham is a little bit different it's a public-private partnership they are providing us with a right-of-way on utility poles and a place to house the power of the network electronics we're paying to design, build and operate the network now the reason we're able to do that is because they fit the business model that we've learned over the years including that business model that we see fiber that in order for you to be a break-even you have to have six subscribers per mile of build now there's a difference between a subscriber and a house because one house could have multiple subscribers but you still need those six subscribers in order to just be at a big break-even so one of the biggest things for you guys going forward is you're trying to figure out the areas that you'll be able to meet that goal and those are the areas that you should start building out first and kind of build from there and I also agree with something Sherry mentioned as far as working with the municipalities one of the first things you might want to undertake is take a look at what they're currently paying for their telephone service but they might still have centrics what they're paying for their internet access and what it would cost to put in a municipal fiber rate because if you connect the municipal buildings and the schools all of a sudden I can have a fiber network that's in place that can be expanded to every house that passes and once you do that you're able to expand the network that revenue comes in part of that revenue goes for a network expansion the rest of it goes for paying for operation and we can basically self improve the network the partnership with Peterson there will be a little background on that by area they're one of the largest towns in Massachusetts but 85 to the 82.5% on the town is non-taxable because they're right on the quality reservoir so a lot of it is MDC land it's the state land and Harvard University has this school of forestry in Peterson so another good chunk of the land is made up by the carbon forest so they don't have a lot of tax money to put to this so our partnership offer was a godsend they have a density of about 11 homes per mile which gives us the ability to say we're probably going to be able to get 6 subscribers per mile and a density of 11 because not everybody's going to take the service and leverage where they might have the highest take rate in the country the 60% to the people who didn't take service I know because I literally went door to door helping people test the service the people who didn't take service were people who were elderly and they didn't want the technology they were people who were a land rich for cash poor and couldn't afford another monthly bill and then the third part was the people who just don't have fixed income couldn't quite afford the bad thing about that model is that those people who couldn't afford to take it they're still paying the leverage there's no cable companies so they're not competing against they're only good horizon and we don't mind competing against DSL because we think DSL over the long run is not going to be a workable technology I started off in business selling T-1s to businesses and when businesses go to T-1s they thought that's all I'm ever going to do one and a half megabits let me take off some of that then I'll put it to voice lines and then when people have got DSL three megabits oh this is great I'll never do anything else in my life right now the standard is 25 down and 3 up I can see that going to like 100 by 100 most of the traffic on the internet today is video and the video standards are changing so you're going from your standard definition and high definition today to 4k to 8k standards that use more than double the amount of damage you know so what might work for today is not going to work in the future and you're going to have jobs that require a lot of upload some of the jobs that people don't think about that are becoming dependent upon broadband are things like machine shops right? how can you get the CAD files to the machines in order to place the order or fix the order for the customer you can't I've seen a lot of machine shops close because they had to move to towns that had broadband we have better trinarian services today an animal has a problem with their eye they need to upload that to a specialist to get a recommendation or anything else like that anything that requires a file is an upload and that upload you're in DSL you're running into problems so you're right in doing fiber you're also facing a big uphill battle because your main problem is money building fiber is not cheap and we've worked with like I said, EC fiber and they're a model of self-employment we've worked with Leverett where they did a bond offer we've worked with Peter Sam where we're basically doing a public part of the partnership you're kind of sitting in a no-man's and you're cutting to figure out how you're going to get from point A to point B and to get from point A to point B is going to require some cash and the question becomes how do you get that now one of the things that I won't say that we do we do engineering and we do construction we don't do business plans we don't do grants and we don't do applications for rust loans or things like that the landscape has changed greatly over the past couple of years a couple of years ago there was really an EC fiber there was no rust loans there was no money that was available in the USDA unless you were a a reservation less than the specifics you weren't going to get any funds now today some of those funds are available so those are avenues that you might be able to use to get funding but again there's other competition that you'd be looking at like a retail or other folks that might be going for those same funds some of the conditions that they put on those funds are unfair like for example the Consolidate it says you know one out of every 100 homes in your town can get 10 up 10 down guess what, that's served even if that one person that they saved can get that 10 up 10 down can't get it as long as it says so on their map they're not considered a unserved census census water so the big thing going forward with you guys is trying to figure out how do you get the project off the ground we do engineering we're willing to be a sounding board for you because we run into a lot of different aspects of your projects we might have seen something that you run into before and the one example that I'll give you since I've been so pessimistic is the example of the town of Concord Massachusetts Concord Massachusetts has both Verizon files and they have Comcast yet they've started a municipal broadband that has been really successful because one of the problems that you run into trying to over build a Comcast or another cable provider is when you talk to people they'll say I can't stand them I can't wait to change but when push comes to shove and it's time for them to sign up for service cut the cord with their cable provider most people don't do it they just built or on the flip side the cable company will come back when you call to cancel so are you sure? because we'll give you a special deal and they make it really hard for you to cancel and your cake rate starts to go down as a point of interest we haven't built the network in Peterson but right now we have a taker that's 70% because people will only have DSL they want something better and going forward it's not just a right it's a public utility that unless you have that broadband available people are going to move away new families with children are going to move in the population of the town is going to get older and older and in school districts aren't going to get any cheaper to run so it's one of these things that's critical now and it's only going to get worse so you're doing the right thing by trying to address it today and as I mentioned before as far as the town of Concord they've been really successful but the one thing that they had wronged them they were in a municipal light department which means they were the electric coming up the town so they had the ability they already had every single house in town on their building system connected to the electric service all they had to do was run fiber and then connect the houses they started off by connecting the municipal buildings and the electric substations for the electric department and rolling out from there and by doing that they've been very very successful even though they're competing against horizon files and against Comcast two minutes if there's any questions Chris or two minutes to wrap up since you're on the construction side of things how difficult it is going forward going to a number of places that are going to start doing this getting employees or skill labor to do construction installation and maintenance you're starting to see a lot of colleges and journey colleges have programs in this place so you're going to start to see a lot of people joining the workforce for this particular job and this is one of those great jobs like being a welder or any trade that's transferable so you could decide that but there's a lot of jobs that are Florida or in California and you could take your experience and bring it with you if you go so those things are not going to be a problem when you're doing things with public funds one of the problems that you're running into is prevailing weightage and all the paperwork that goes along with that so it's not really our splicers we're a union shop so all of our splicers are making actually more of the prevailing weightage and what kills a project as far as like the costs associated with it it's all the paperwork that goes along with it you know so that would be one problem I think that you've run into and the other problem that you've run into it's that thought of a lot is the maintenance because the utility company is only X number of subcontractors and all the utility companies right? so their big contracts are going to be consolidated with others and if there's a big storm they're the people who are going to get served first now the way that utility poles work anyways is the electric company goes first the telephone company goes second then anybody who's attached to the poles goes third even if you're the first person on the scene you have to wait for the other two to take care of their issues so it's kind of good information thanks Chris happy to leave some cards I'd take a card and these are some extras for you okay anyone need a card? they give me a pack of a thousand is your bonus calculated on how many of the thousand I'm not on commission I could honestly tell you that I ran out I apologize I can honestly tell you that I've been in technology for over 25 years and Matrix is the best company I've ever worked with and that's just the people involved thank you business development committee report back I believe that's you Jerry I'll kick it off the first thing I want to say is Elliot was I don't know why he's not here but Elliot was going to talk about the website that he's been working on different things that he's been doing and I cannot speak for him but that was his intention for the regularly scheduled so we have Ken you're ready to talk today right? I can talk a little sure and David you'll want to talk about the survey and what you're doing so either one guys who ever wants to start I'll start so the proposal that went in under the innovation grant that piece of legislation is that has been drafted to fund specifically that grant probably won't be available to July 1st I'm getting the sense that that legislation really goes along quite well so that's part A and then part B the Northern Board of Regional Commission the letter of intent to seek funding is due in the March the actual but really is just a letter there's no format that requires a lot of detail the proposal itself is due sometime in May and so that's for up to a quarter million and I'm pretty aware of the criteria for that grant program is that a construction grant? it is an infrastructure grant that's where you have the greatest opportunity for success and you get about two years if indeed you apply or accept it at the end of the summer about August then you have two years to use the funds and then getting back to the legislation there's some planning funds available for entities like communications union districts at about I think 60,000 a pop 60,000 60,000 a pop but then the big one is the bond package through a Vita bond for millions of dollars where in terms of appropriation the proposal is to put in some loan loss so that Vita is more comfortable taking on a little bit more risk and again all this is within current draft on the bus telecommunications bill and the early reviews are very solid this is a topic that the legislature and the administration are aligned on which is great so let's go so I think I sent everyone a copy of the proposed survey to go out I do like the question of adding the one with throwing your own comment I don't have that in there right now I've gotten some great edits and corrections that I've made some of them already but I didn't hear from everybody I think I've heard from six people how many people have done the survey okay I haven't gone into the database to see the answers that's great I don't have your email address you didn't get it I may have commented on your survey I was wondering if you were thinking about businesses it all seems to be aimed towards residential users a new version would have to be done a separate set of questions for businesses I did have a meeting with the Economic Development Corporation person from Montpelier who is really interested and she said is a big interest among small businesses in Montpelier who don't have money to buy first, later the major connections in it and she was willing to actually do the survey for them in Montpelier and I haven't reached out to the other Economic Development and Barry has one I know I don't know if you must have one and I've actually heard last year from the folks in Barry that they're a business group there they would like to see Fiverr there as well for a sense of more reasons so I like the other question of surveying the municipalities to see how much they spend right now on telephone, internet, whatever but that would be a little different I did I think I'll leave that for the business development I've been trying to get the map for full development and I can't it was at one point talk of getting some input from Weck about questions they would like asked and the surveys I sent it to Bill Powell and he sent it to Carol Monroe and she actually gave me three good edits nothing really related to Weck came back so I still want to reach out again on that I do have because I haven't had time to look at it about that you're talking about the development people and a separate business thing is that, is there anything in the survey that's going to the residential areas that will cover people who have home businesses that are not necessarily hooked in on these other things like my neighbor up hill runs a trucking so I just didn't know because I know that they're dying for internet and they can't get DSL do you want to copy that survey? Bill's on vacation this week but David you sent it to me that would be great the edited version please every time somebody sent it I updated it so you may have gotten one that was already pretty good when you got the one that you can only check Worcester sorry about that guys Worcester had a lot of taters but that's sort of where I'm at and basically I don't have much else I held a community meeting in Calis last week in which eight people came to me it was in competing with the Washington Central difficult it was a boxing match I did ask if the people who came would want to go around and do host house surveys and they all said yes so I felt pretty good about that I just wanted to ask you a question in terms of your survey how are you going to get it out what are you looking for for distribution I think one of the I've been thinking of using Front Forge Form as a first go round but I think it really is going door to door as Michael is suggesting every sixth door and you actually have the people fill it in as you go to the door you should get a chance to explain what it is in the sense most people in most communities don't even know what the heck we're doing is it a public entity is it a community business what does it mean to me so then that begs the question how we recruit survey takers there's one guy that's not going to do that so I don't know how I'm engaged you are with your own community but it's been a work some of you are still working full time me, you know, I work part time can do lots of things you can see if we do end up going to a partnership you can put that out with the co-op currents true I don't know how long it is but there's but we have a link to it's on the web I haven't done a printed one of it I was saying if you went door to door it would be on a tablet see it actually Michael's broken a lot of ground here he has a tablet fill it in no pain I was wondering if there's a way to do it for a month viral version where I think about my day care and stuff where I have the list of every parent's career there's just a lot of different connections in my wife's office no, I mean, the brainstorming this would be great you just have to be careful if you're doing a survey it's not that you're bringing bias well, no, just having people fill it out a number of times with different connections we're asking them for their address if they give us the same address then we can easily duplicate that okay, anything any questions for business development folks, moving along we have a bunch of other reports back and if you want to keep sitting there that's fine, we are going to talk about WEC momentarily if you want to join us more in the circle here I'm happy to take the fifth WEC, State House and USDA reports back we've had meetings several meetings in different forms with all of these groups but various here from WEC and if you want to maybe introduce yourself and if you want to give us a snapshot of where you guys are all thinking and the decision from the board that's not all of that necessarily percolated back to everyone here I'm Barry Bernstein, president board of Washington Electric Co-op having for a number of years I'll just say that I really got more interested in this within the last 60 days really, I know you guys have been doing it for longer I have run a business out of my home and when I had dial-up which was only five years ago or something like that I actually had to tell people they couldn't send me stuff they had to send it to another address so I understand that our biggest thing is we have eight members a mile so the real question is in a fairly elderly population what numbers are going to make sense after I met with Jeremy and a few folks at the end of January our board voted to go ahead and try to find grant money to do a needs assessment feasibility study and business plan Michael won't let me say the second but we can't at this point we can't use any electric money to do anything for fiber that's a state statute although it may be changed we have a lot of requirements not to cross subsidize with electric users who really might not want the service so we've got to be fairly careful with that we've taken a look at the $30,000 grant our concern is the amount of energy to putting it all together it's not so much writing the first four or five pages it's all the documents that they require on top of it they ask for a lot of documentation and when you're in an electric co-op it's just going to be celebrating our 80th anniversary this May we have a page and if you need two or three years of each thing so Patty Richards our manager and I testified in front of the house energy committee on age 95 and I actually threw off the idea that maybe they wanted to put $75,000 in for our co-op so because they were going to get this DPS their plan is to get DPS to do a state needs assessment and other providers and I could see that being nothing but a mess Michael's been working with them and I guess they're talking about doing feasibility money now that would be a lot easier for us to go after it was available than the amount of time you got to put in to get $30,000 for the federal government Sherry points out one good point that once you start getting money from anybody it is helpful I'll be honest with you we have a board meeting tomorrow and I have to do some more talking with that board our manager is practically resistant on this because it's a big jump from us to move to the next step I think my feeling is there's no way to go but to make the move and I've given that some thought so I'll just tell you this Patty introduced herself as the manager having to be practical and I was the visionary and after what I thought about yes my visionary is having convinced our board in 2003 to build a Coventry landfill gas project which is now supplying 70% of our electricity and within the next couple of years we'll be supplying 85% of our electricity and to make our co-op 100% renewable before anybody was talking about it which was 2007 so I'm a very pragmatic person when it comes to business but I also think we're going to need to make this jump where we're actually at I can always speak for myself is that I've been pushing this I think the feasibility study if we knew the money was going to be in the state if they pass it this year I think it makes a lot of sense for us to work together I talked with Sherry earlier and she asked how I felt about it and I said I can tell you how I feel I have a nine person board but I think that we're there's no way we can work separately to be honest with you we have the polls, we own 100% of our polls what we want to look at which may be a little different to you but I think the end goal is the same we want to look at what's the benefit of us going fiber through our whole substation and all of our lines before there was a drop to the house because if we can make some sense out of that it may not be 100% if Sherry said there's nothing to show 100% economic return but we're facing we have six major storms in 2018 it's only going to up currents in the annual report that this is the worst year we've ever had I'm getting tired of it I knew my mother was the only one who ever read though so I didn't mind but I'm getting tired to keep saying the next year is the worst we've ever had but we all know what's happening with climate change so that's in a nutshell I'm pushing for us to look after the money it's very hard for us I think to push us to go after the $30,000 grant particularly for if I know there's other funds we have looked to other funds but they either have to we talk to V-Lite it has to be in line and mentioned in the conference of energy plan which fiber isn't even though you need it in order to do things there's always some little glitch so I think in the next by Thursday I'll know more of where our board is and I think it's I think people will come along I just think we need to be patient you guys have been pushing and are past your patience I'm trying to get us into a place where we're ready to move with it so I think there's good prospects you may have to move faster than us but I think it's probably wise for us to move someone in conjunction with each other that's my personal perspective what we talked about was the possibility of working with WAC and having them actually apply for that $30,000 just to bring you on the move apply for that $30,000 planning grant with us taking the proceeds from the grant that we're going to get from the state to do the planning and the business plan that we had from the thing from my innovation grant which is still wherever that is essentially handed to them to act as the match so they would have $25,000 then get $30,000 and we can't use selective money for that match right, so to take it essentially us and them arm and arm going in applying for that USDA money and then having $55,000 and be able to go and do work with somebody to go and build a business plan doing the survey and some of the other bits and pieces necessary to go and get that shovel ready stuff that we could then apply for the USDA and whatever those grants you need to basically be ready to go and then as soon as they ready to check then you're up the door doing construction and engineering and stuff the current iteration of the omnibus telecom though that Ken has mentioned earmarks two separate $50,000 grants for electric companies for planning but that's different than feasibility when you were testifying the language that is to talk about the feasibility of electric utilities using their transmission and distribution infrastructure as a telecommunications piece that was a separate is there any value in that? but separately in the grant to the DPS which is $700,000 $100,000 of it is earmarked for two feasibility studies for electric companies the first one was age 95 I think so they've combined them all they're both in there talked about it but Michael is it $50,000 or $60,000 for the feasibility study? for the electric companies it's $50,000 we're not a company we're co-ops we really work that's worth the next $10,000 the thing is my feeling is because and we have to talk about this um whereas anybody who's doing the feasibility business plan might be between $50,000 and $75,000 I don't think we can do it alone by going after one of the grants I think a combination of both of us together we serve you know we have 11,000 households in 41 towns in all of your 17 towns I believe but maybe only a few in some in Northfield I don't know how many actually in Northfield so um how we get to the main pavement and all of those but I don't know if they'd be our first target because they already have the services so the ones we're trying to get it's all of us who don't live on the 14 and 12 or whatever the numbers are 302 so I do I think you were going to try to consider whether it's for this $30,000 grant or really more advantageous for us to be able to get the $50,000 is to be able to sit down together and be able to hopefully figure out what we want out of the feasibility it gets it to all of us your end goal more than the electric co-op is 100% agreeing vibrate every household our goal is to make sure that our members are getting the services that they need and we're starting and this is how I'm on the National Electrification Board as a director from Vermont this happened all over the country with a thousand co-ops we're all in that place where we know that um our um kilowatt ourselves is flatter declining and we have a base that we've served for 80 years and we want to be current with those people going forward with our members of which I know we're going to be doing that I was wondering what are the objections to this that come up in say in your board meetings I think the biggest problem we have is I'd say there are a couple one is that we can't use any money to cross subsidize okay so that puts us in a bind right off the back in fact the way the state statute is right now which was developed in 1999 to keep us out of selling propane and being in that business oil propane is that you can't even use RUS grants or loans for non-electrics electric utility things so that's number one I think the pressing one is that we have eight members a mile we have two-thirds of our members have been on the line for 30, 40, 50 years or more most of us are older and the question is how many of those folks this is a big take rate this is a conversation with Jeremy and Michael and I gotta tell you I didn't know what any of these words meant so if I sound like an expert I'm a bullshit I'm learning really a lot faster than you guys know I'm trying to catch up the speed but you know if we have two-thirds of our members who are low income particularly in Orange County low income and older you don't think of them as wanting to get to pay EC Fiber said that they're charging $75 a month I'm paying $60 for seven what is it Michael what I get seven two or seven three yeah I don't know if I get that or not I doubt it but that's what they tell me but for $60 I get that in North American phone service so if you're going to come in if we're going to come in and say I'll charge you $75 as a guy who's just closing his business it's not that attractive but when the two other folks are up here say I think that video I want to stream is coming into me at the same speed it did today in six months or a year I'm going to be awfully disappointed when I want to watch that sporting event which is probably all I use the screening for so but that's our concern is not to get in a hole where we're having to declare bankruptcy I can understand that but younger people got moved somewhere that they can afford to move I think everybody understands that that's we're going to a push and pull now you're talking about a board that has bought into very progressive positions way before and this is just a new one that we got to face and I'm balancing everything including my own resistance to trying to get people to make that next move and it's coming you had a question first off as a member of Washington Electric Co-op I think working with this organization is a fantastic thing to do and I encourage you to by the way my real question here though you were talking about the low number of houses per mile the relative poverty rate out there and whether or not people can take but one of the other ideas that is out there is to start where they talk about a ring and you set it up with the municipalities or the municipalities et cetera and I know even in Williamstown I've talked to two different business owners who are extremely interested in this project so I mean is Washington Electric as a co-op as an organization itself are you guys focused on being able to provide service into the houses themselves or are you also interested in maybe starting on something that would develop well we heard the ring strategy laid out before you lay out a ring and then you build out I don't think we know that's why I've been pushing for us to do this feasibility and business plan I don't think we know what we want to do I think the value we bring is we own and I agree with your statement about it would be great for us all to work together I know a number of people here I think the value we bring is owning all of our own polls I think if we can bring this if we did no more than bring this to our substations all the way through our systems and not to the house that's got to lower the cost and we can borrow that money over 35 years so this is just my head thinking I've got to talk this through again tomorrow night with everybody and I don't think we know where to start because you may find that the density for instance you talk about schools I'm not even sure our school is going to be around in two years the way they're going in this state but the when you talk about going in an area there's density like with businesses along the main line that we don't serve there's also two or three carriers on that line so our best may be to take well people in Corinth would love us but we'd have to find some place we don't connect with VTEL because we want to find an area where we're going to be open to getting grant and even lower interest loans and that area who knows where that's going to be but it's not going to be it's not going to be down in the villages or wherever VTEL is now already Jeremy you know more about where they are VTEL I mean if you were going to pick a pilot project without knowing any more than we know now yeah I mean so that's something I've asked Dick to put together is to look at the USDA at that map and Clay Purvis from DPS actually had a great a great term he called them and right in the USDA meeting he was like what are you talking about like he called them contaminated census blocks those are census blocks that have already been partially funded by USDA rural development funds and they're therefore ineligible for us to apply for any funds to build there there are decent portions of our territory that are not contaminated in particular and even up around East Montpellier around your headquarters makes that a plausible place to start where we can go but we can't really ever get rural development funds to go into those other areas without a waiver and as we talked to USDA they also talked about some changing mapping rules where you may be able to actually carve out in different ways than census blocks they were going to get back to us exactly what that looked like but we had some of these possibilities well for instance somebody asked we've been in conversation with Velco if we can bring the Velco what's the word upstream the upstream connection and we can tie that to our it looks like we could tie it to five of our eight substations easier than the other three because it's a longer line but let's say we could tie it to one or two at the beginning and we could identify an area within that one or two where all of a sudden picking something we'd all have to make sense about what's the best way to go because every step we take we want them to success and we have to be very wise of doing that together and I again there's not a more natural match than our two groups there's just not we just have to try to make sure we're all in the same place at the same time so I welcome you Alan Barry you said you can't take electric money and spend it on non-electric things there is the community fund is that correct yeah but our community fund is strictly for social service you know for organizations that are working in the community and we have like 30 40 thousand dollars but that's it'd be a big opposition because we fund a lot of very basic organizations they're doing childcare and first mother birth is that like hospice? we do hospice it's one that works with newborn mothers we don't get to individual organizations you know that are doing other stuff so I would suggest it's not really a good place for us to try to do it I think there's some of us who are not necessarily donating our capital credits and I'm wondering if Nipia well because I think a lot of times I think well rates went up this year so you know my bill went up and the capital credits sort of kept it down for a brief period of time I'm not embarrassed to say I did not donate mine I think when an organization has a goal of doing one thing because it thinks it's important it's not a good idea to scatter the little bit of this of income that you can turn into a grant for one year to one organization that's going to try and work in the entire area on something that's going to be a long lasting good well let me say as a member I'll mention at the board I'm just saying that that's we've taken years to build that fund up and our whole message to people is it's going to small groups in our communities libraries and places that have a hard time so you know that's the difficulty with that I would say it would be a lot easier if Michael's work and we're testifying in front of the Senate committee tomorrow Senator Finance and I'll make the same pitch you're going to be testifying what's that I'm not going there tomorrow I wasn't aware it was happening but I've been to Senate Finance already and I personally probably know most of the people on that committee but that's just what I'm going to pitch this is a time for us to do it my board has given us the okay that we can find the money and I think that's what I've been trying to do in the last January 27th not a lot in one month we've got a few options they just aren't coming up exactly how we'd like them any other questions we'll stay in close contact I really respect what Michael and Jeremy and all of you have done obviously I've been slow to get on the boat but I'm there now and I agree with my fellow co-op member over here that it would be great if both organizations can work strongly so thanks for your thank you sir I want to report a couple things the efficacy in policy at the state house is probably not probably not deserving of a separate item in part because anything that we came up with tonight that ship is probably already sailed with a handful of us already having testified to senate finance and house energy and tech so what I'd like to do is make a brief note about the Tilson presentation that we had previously I talked to a colleague of mine in economics who's familiar with the start-up world and finance that sort of thing and sent her the presentation and kind of explained what was pitched to us and she said that that's interesting but she didn't raise any red flags for her she said it's just an interesting way of sort of shuffling the way that the financing is done and her main message and I don't have it in front of me unfortunately her main message was just to make sure that the lawyers are happy on our side with the agreement just to make sure that we're not surprised if there was a handoff, if that's a model that we decided to follow so the state house stuff we've been getting invited which is not uncommon but not super common, been getting invited and asked to present our thoughts on various things in the state house and a lot of those suggestions are being put in this omnibus bill which is taking a whole bunch of different bills that are in house energy and tech right now and those are just mashing them into one I'd like to if you don't mind I'd like to walk through it fairly quickly and I want to mention one of the things that came out of testimony from a lot of us here was that there were a lot of, these bills had set as minimum standards for state funding that minimum standards set at like four one and eight one and such and it was like well ten one ten down one up and I said really it's like so we're talking about broadband now but we're not even hitting that national standard and I advocated for, you should say it's a hundred hundred because that's what's already in statute, that's what it says that we're supposed to be doing by 2024 and in the current draft they didn't go quite that far but I managed to shove them up to 25-3 I should say we managed to shove them up to 25-3 so it's getting better so let me just, I'll just do a quick walk through of what I said to you they're looking at increasing the universal service charge by one half of one percent starting in July 1st 2019 essentially to fund some of these things that they're talking about applying money into the connectivity fund and that connectivity fund is to reach the last handful of people who don't who are unserved and so this is something I brought up to the difference between really two goals in building a broadband there's getting to that last person up at the top of the hill and then there's bringing actual 21st century speeds to Vermont which is these are two separate goals so the connectivity fund is really targeting getting to those last people it's less so it's less useful to us in my experience it can help us like with certain legs of our projects and I think that's how you've used it to Michael it's sort of like supplement designed the latest iteration is talking about 25-3 minimum connectivity that's that means no more DSL okay so anywhere that DSL would qualify them for the connectivity fund no, no, no, 4-1 is the threshold to make an eligible location under 4-1 and if it's under 4-1 they will fund you only if you deliver minimum okay so consolidated won't be able to walk in and say you're underserved let's run a cup of wire to you and consolidated has won some of these connectivity funds in the past but they won't be able to that's a good thing don't they say that their twinned wire gives you 25-3 that's what they told me I don't get it but that's what they tell me 200 feet from the terminal I don't think the connectivity board would accept yeah, consolidated can't argue that their twisted pair of copper is going to get 25-3 that's what they sold me let's just be a test show yeah 17-1 well that's oh it's twice than I had before channel bonded DSL right, supposedly each line is 8-1, 8-1 you're already going to get 16-2 but I'm channel bonded DSL too and I'm lucky on a given night if I can go home and watch Netflix right now right I always do that sorry so is the Netflix threshold going to be established? it should be Netflix is good at adjusting its speed so although I do have to say I did make cat video jokes the importance of cat videos in the committee meeting so I feel we'll get down so and yeah so what's the next bit there one time general fund transfer $700,000 this was mentioned before to DPS the fund feasibility and planning grants and pilot projects so $205,000 of that gets plowed into the connectivity initiative that's in addition to that increase of the rate on July 1st $50,000 to DPS to for doing internet access using electric utility infrastructure which we just talked about think Vermont's special innovation fund so putting more funding into the grant pool that we just applied for $45,000 to that let's see another grant pool up to $60,000 from DPS as well to support studies and projects feasibility studies again that's not necessarily tied to that's the $718,000 so the more part of the bill they're appropriating it and later they're describing how they're going to spend it right okay so that was that $700,000 and it's doing more there there's money put aside for hiring a what do they call it broadband they call them CUD specialists but it's going to be linear so specialists at DPS to essentially help new CUDs elsewhere and other folks looking at building broadband anywhere in the state having a person who's getting paid in an office to do that outreach and have those questions being asked and answered immediately to show up at select board meetings and say hey you want to do this here's how and shepherding and all that and that was I think that was really Laura's vision putting that off Laura's vision so massive massive CUDs to her there was talk about allowing towns to issue general obligation bonds to fund municipal broadband projects and I testified in favor EC Fiverr testified against and it was actually taken out Williamstown would be adamant but the great news is if Williamstown doesn't want to issue general obligation bonds they don't have to it wouldn't pass the select board first of all but it still has to go to a public vote that was my argument select board puts it out there and the people vote for it so it did survive in the sense that they're going to study it for next year there will be some people talking about it over the summer that's the place where ideas go to die do we know if UVM has been making any noises towards online consultation or online appointments so people in rural areas might have a shot at seeing a doctor if they have more time getting in because that could be like an expansion point that's not something that I've heard about I know they have medical coders that they pay rather a lot giving them access to so that they can get to the hospital network and have a fast connection and see all those documents and enter them but I was thinking more an elderly person who's homebound having a difficulty getting to the doctor that could be a selling point for getting an elderly person online they but if that doesn't exist if there's no conversation about that I'm just being involved with telemedicine telemedicine hospital to hospital or two could be and there are RUS telemedicine that someone like Sherry could help us look up to so the other thing was the bond underwriting to the state essentially ensuring bonds that we asked for we tried to that we issue I don't know if we would still have to meet eligibility requirements to have those issued or if we walk in with the state of Vermont saying we'll support this if that's something we can actually do before we have the financing kind of the three years of audited financial I don't know that it's going to go through VEDA so it's what VEDA expects that money is really just a little lost confidence as well so we would have to talk to VEDA and see what they expect but conceivably we could walk in there this year supposing that this existed yeah okay I guess it's not about it's loans that VEDA is going to Vermont that's right so VEDA would make loans because the state is going to partially okay this is really good to me that's the remote thing in the whole bill this is all getting thrown into one part that's actually going to move this year it's right now I would bet it gets voted out of committee this week is there anything anybody needs to do to help make sure when it gets to the Senate it doesn't get to the Senate okay so and Cummings is the chair of senate finance which is probably where we'll land next so it's worth talking to her I think she's generally favorable I mean I don't she doesn't see survivors she does it's good to say gum walking like one of the other things that they add is sure thank you so much not forcing but directing the rules about full attachments to be better which is I think is going to be super helpful so and make ready and there's a specific thing that says the rules adopted pursuant to the subsection shall specify that in the B here's the cool bit the make ready work is not completed within the applicable make ready completion period the attaching entity us they hire a qualified contractor to complete the make ready work and bill it back so if they don't go and do it we do it for them and we say here's how much it costs and walk away so which is quite nice and we'll hopefully prevent some of the problems that Michael's seen and he said if I were to see is that going to be fought? oh yeah and one comment this is a belt and suspenders kind of approach it's in legislation but at the same time the public service board has already submitted to the TUC a petition to change these make ready rules and independent of whether it passes in the legislation they've already petitioned the public utility commission to change things and I think that their proposal is better than the one that's in this legislation even better so the sense that I get from the folks in the state house is that fine actually even in the executive branches that people want to see this move forward so very very encouraging we're sort of like sitting here at almost exactly the right time I mean it would be great if this was already in place of course but in terms of things moving forward and us sitting here I think we should feel pretty supported by our state government it's a very very exciting in my eyes you didn't see that Indiana gave a hundred million dollars for rural broadband state of Indiana did a hundred million dollar grant who would they get that to rural communities in Indiana but anyways it's cool so but the other thing that's cool that I wanted to make sure I underscored is that the northern borders funding so northern borders with the farm bill we are now eligible to apply for those as well which is which is big anything else on this like state house state policy advocacy stuff that I'm missing Michael or David for that matter you've been there so what's on the what's on the docket percent of finance tomorrow then I don't know but Barry's going maybe he knows I can pull up there for schedule do you know I don't know I thought it was we're talking about the same thing at age 95 was but since since this bus is going to be totally different yeah and it's not there yet I don't know what the specific bill is that we're going to be talking about I will give the same pitch no matter what yeah it was it was pretty exciting Barry totally surprised us all I walked up and asked the committees like why don't you just write us a check don't give it to the public service department just you know give it to CV Fiber and Weck and we'll go tell you if this is feasible or not and they didn't they didn't say no all they did was they reduced it from 75 to 50 they put it in they said they put it in 50 for the feasibility but it was for any electric yeah the electric ones I think that meant was that for the pilots well they threw a pilot in there but one of the chunks is for the public service department to do the feasibility study and then there's this hunger and I think that that's earmarked to electric companies for pilot studies they include pilots they can call them a common pilot I don't know what they mean but I'm going to send it on so now I'll say a pilot feasibility study and get all the right words so 2.30pm schedule for S91 an act relating to electric companies and broadband internet access service I think that's the senate sibling sibling of the whatever H whatever it was that we talked about before that's already been subsumed by the way it's modeled on the Virginia that we worked on so do and I don't know if you've had a chance to read it but if you want to endorse the bill as it currently as I sent you the copy of I mean I know there's some changes in there Michael that you submitted there but do we want to endorse it and send it to them and just as a board like I said it's honest it's probably going to go through that's my instinct please correct me if you Michael I think it's going to go through if you want to sort of but I don't think it's necessary and I don't think it's necessary there's any way of a feeling why don't we give you the authority to advocate for it if it becomes necessary I already have then so thanks I have sent emails and I've said these are things that I showed up there and said you're the good ideas, you're the bad ideas send it to Fiber if you want us to build Fiber and they said 253 cables minimum standard which whatever so we could say we could support it and say 100-100 or whatever or we could just leave it as is I am comfortable with 253 I don't think it should be 100-100 I think that we should allow the whisk to catch up because the technology is still improving for wireless and there are towns that are not going to get Fiber projects for a while our towns may but as an example on that committee Mark Piglin from Lowell has been dying to get something up there and no one wants to go do Fiber there but if there's a 253 incentive for a whisk to improve in that town there is a whisk there not mine I think it's a good thing for them there is one provision in there that's an activity part of that it says has to be continuously upgradable that means that's the reason why DSL is not going to go there a bonded pair could get to 25 but it cannot get continuously upgraded to 100 but Fiber can and wireless can so I think it's fine Comcast will argue that they can too they're welcome we're just eliminating twisted pair ok I was hoping we could leapfrog but I don't think it would be fair to the other ISPs as much as I don't like Comcast I don't think it would be fair to them but why invest state funds stupid in cable because it's going to be capable of a gig so if they can do it let them if they can't they won't is it really capable of a gig not yet but that's just they haven't hit the laws of physics yet yeah twisted pair of copper has that's dead that's physics yeah is there anything in there about it being verifiably that fast or he sort of like checked on me yeah so that would be that would be an interesting thing to put in there there's not as far as I know I don't know that we have the bureaucracy to test that aside from DPS doing fun things like driving around with cell phones in the seat it's a fun job if you can get it and something that the I'm trying to remember when we were talking about it but they would I'm sure they'd love to see speed test results from all over the place and be able to say hey DSL advertises this and this is what we have to get now can we actually regulate that can we in Vermont actually regulate that not really it's federal can the attorney general file of consumer protection can they just make public information hey here's what they say here's what they do what do you think public that's not regulating but it's powerful and so yeah I don't know my data from speed test apps and stuff where you just they could provide that and something that was talked about the southern Vermont connectivity summit was in addition to doing the survey because they were crowdsourcing survey questions there as well speed test so click that link pops out another window does the speed test copy and paste results into the survey I don't know if that's something that we want to do but that would be some interesting data the problem is when you do the speed test what the weather was that day could change that and it may not be as interesting where is the server located whether or not that's all I've got for the all the state house and policy stuff is there anything anybody else wants to add we're basically on track review of back burner items did I miss anything review of back burner items committee assignments and membership is there anything that we need committees to do or look at or things that we need to add to our to our back burner that we do to our back burner that we need to put on a future agenda item oh random thought driving across the app getting to NPR talk about who way and cyber security issues and so forth do we want to put as a back burner that somewhere down the line we should write up a policy that states these are the standards on which we're going to reference as far as what equipment we can use what security it hits and not my area of expertise but I'm sure people in the room have that state of Vermont just adopted a standard it would be easy enough to adopt theirs in turn so yeah I'll put that on the next agenda we just have that as a discussion item a budget for the next fiscal year we need to start thinking about that one I mean there's still a great deal of indecision regarding our actual operating business model and all that so but I mean at a certain point we need to start working on a budget for next year soon sounds like a great thing for the finance committee well at least to give us a skeleton well like the yes I that's no problem but I need an assumption as to the business model we should be developing a budget I think without a business plan it's hard to say so I need an assumption to what to work with our we to assume that we're going to be contracting everything out are we going to should we assume we're going to be providing whatever ask us again in April we're going to contract out a study of some sort of business model probably we haven't voted to do that but it's yes you seem to be headed but beyond that that's going to inform us how to make the decisions about all the rest so would I be able then to get somebody from the business development committee maybe to show up at the next finance committee meeting to help us start thinking about the budget and how we should be looking at trying to prepare whatever needs to be prepared because I think these two really interact at this point it's going to be a real budget this time so takers for the when is your next finance meeting we've been having them lately right before this meeting before the regular board meeting so does that mean your next one is going to be when are we on the 16th, the 12th do we want to plan on it that way that's a meeting we're going to have somebody from business development there sure what was was that an agreement to have it on that day that's okay it'll be what it'll be it will be an hour it will be an hour before the meeting at 5 o'clock up at the up at the maple woods the maple woods across from the school yeah we'll take over the maple woods yeah you know why I didn't okay I'll do I can move but then make a space yeah community service you can not answer okay any other committee stuff backburner writings committee stuff that's a good call so folks who have recently been added joining the board any committees that you'd like to join I'm on one aren't I you're good there's what so we have finance business development policy interested Frank policy that's the same stuff okay so next time there's a policy to be done we'll put you on there so I'm going to move to add Frank Moore to the policy committee maple woods at 5 o'clock so it's seconded any further discussion all in favor aye abstention thank you very much Frank quarter of six coordinate with that happens okay we have approval of January 8th meeting minutes thank you for putting those together back up anything in there that needs to be changed or updated or anything I didn't see anything in there that was talking on everything this might be I'm going to come over okay January 8th meeting moved and seconded any discussion all in favor opposed abstaining those minutes are approved did those go out onto the facebook page do you know they did great I converted them because I always have trouble with that but I converted them to jpegs and that worked sounds great okay we've got round table we'll start with you Rahman no I'm just really welcome Frank when I went in front of the Williamstown sweat board when it first started I told him I wanted to be the delegate but I wanted to look for somebody who was actually qualified to sit on the board and I really think for where this organization is right now at this point in time Frank Moore brings in some very valuable experience and now you have the bandwidth to join the WEC board and push that from that side right many of you here could do that we just missed it we can't see each other alright Jerry nothing for me other than we'll have a business development meeting next I'm not sure when but I'll send an email around and we'll figure out when folks we're a little bit out of sync we were aiming for the end of the month in order to be prepared the week before or 10 days before the this meeting but that's falling out of sync now so we've got to get back to that but there's a lot of individual work that's been going on welcome Frank just believe that I'm happy that we're not talking about five and six different dollars we're going to array up Frank we had a little interchanged a policy topic which is should there be a sort of a separate track in dealing with those parts of our region that do have cable where because of density because of potential commercial customer schools there may be some opportunities there to provide some competition so I would ask to consider what that would look like not a replacement of dealing with the underserved but as a second piece of the longer term piece I hope I get a poster so I can put up a town meeting how many people here had to put a report in the town report it really is going to take a lot of work to keep everybody engaged I think ours is in the town report which is a hard graph there because Bruce was like hey so I'm expecting the next meeting which is in two weeks I'm expecting that to be rather short I don't know that there's really that much going on between now and two weeks from now so let's see I think between the presentations that we had over the past couple of months and the stuff that's going on in the legislature it really comes together a lot of good ideas starting to formulate and I think maybe we can find a real direction on that I am going to be standing up I've got the select board to say that I can get on the agenda but I'm going to stand up at town meeting and talk about us and so I'm going to be because I have a tendency to ramble you may or may not notice I'm going to have talking points and so I'm going to be making some points and I'll go ahead and send those around as well because I'm going to try and focus on what I think they're going to care about as citizens of orange rather than well it's going to be great if he's blazing the past speeds okay we're not adding a burden it's because that's going to be the first question and so I want to and I've been kind of percolating around but I don't really doubt so I'll let that out and I have to add Woodbury to the poster before I send it out good to go pass yeah I guess I like the way things are starting to kind of gel a little bit too from the DC and the legislature and some other stuff and my own perspective I guess has taken me a while to skip we just kind of got a few ourselves a lot more as the customer and what we represent in terms of our community was better than us being the operational people we need partners so it's good yeah I would agree I think the partnership and contracting for most of the work that we'll have to do is going to be the way to go it seems to be a trend that we're hearing through a lot of the presentation so it's sort of good to at least see some consistency last one thanks everybody I'm Woodbury