 I've got six o'clock and I see a quorum, so I'm going to call the April 14th, 2020 governing board meeting for CV Fiber to order. Before we go into the agenda, I just want to make sure that everybody has kind of a grasp of how to interact with this. If you're an attendee, I'm actually going to make Phil a panelist because he came in under the public. Make Chuck that him as well. Make them panelists so they can have the same privileges that everybody else does. If you're an attendee, you can use the questions panel and send questions by text and you can just say, I'd like to say something about this and I can then turn on your mic access. You can ask the question and when you're done, I'll mute you again and then we can go on to the folks who are on the board talking. But I just ask if you could, if you would please mute yourself if you're not talking on a particular item. It just makes things easier, less noisy. That's my experience. The other thing that we're going to do differently tonight is because we're attending remotely and everybody's attending remotely. I'm going to do a roll call by town. So if we have something to vote on, I'm just going to start and go alphabetically through and say, Barry City, I'll hear an IRNA, Barry Town, IRNA, and so on and so on. And hopefully that's not too awkward. If it becomes awkward, maybe we can work something else out. But I think it should work reasonably well. Jeremy, won't you have to unmute everyone in order to accomplish that? Everybody has the ability to unmute themselves right now. I cannot see anything. I can hear you very loud, but I can't see you. Okay. You can't see me. So go up to, there's a control panel. You should see something. Okay. There's a place to turn on webcams so that you should see. It's a whole different panel. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Okay. I see Chuck coming on now. And so, yeah. And so what I'll do is, and if we miss somebody the first pass around, we'll just, we'll catch up with them. And if ever, if somebody's silent, we'll just, hopefully, I don't think there's anything contentious tonight anyway. So hopefully we'll be able to move through this pretty smoothly. Okay. So just make sure that you all know how to mute and unmute yourself right now. So it looks like about half of you are self-muted. That's good. I think most everybody has a headset or something that's going to reduce the echo and the noise. So if you have barking dogs, screaming children, etc., etc., you know the drill. Okay. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? Okay. Hearing none, I need to add one about just a brief discussion about Duxbury. We'll do that after, maybe after the clerk appointment or, I don't think it'll take very long, but we'll do that. Okay. So public comment. Is there anybody who would like to comment on anything that is not on the agenda? Extra long pause for people to unmute and fiddle with tech. Okay. Hearing none, I think we can be willing to entertain public comment if anybody does have any later on just because they couldn't get their self-unmuted or whatever. Treasurer's report. So I will put my name next to this one again because sadly today, Nathan resigned. So we have another appointment to make and that's the treasurer. Why don't you all think about which of you are going to be that? And I'm going to do the treasurer's report because I looked at the bank accounts earlier today. We have a $16,374.41 in checking. That's after the think-for-month grant was deposited last week or the week before. And that's also after paying for our insurance and paying the attorneys. There's $25.05 in the savings account and there remains $2,637.92 in the snowball fundraising account. And that reflects an increase since last month of $113.30 across two donations. Any treasure-ish questions that I can hopefully answer? Did that also pay for the P.O. box? The P.O. box is not as far as I know been ordered or paid for. Anything? Jerry. Jeremy, this is Jerry. Hey, Jerry. How are you? I have a question about how we're going to pay inter-isle. I'm not sure if $16,000 covers what they're expecting. I don't know for sure. Okay. So we have the ability to, as I understand it, and I worked this out with Fred, I thought, is that his first deliverable, he was going to provide a half deliverable. And that would have led us, so who's ever got the background noise, would you please self-mute? He was going to give us a half deliverable partway to the feasibility study. So he's going to send us a bill and we were going to pay that. And then what we could then do is request a reimbursement from USDA. We still have funds from USDA that can be used for this. And then once the feasibility study is done, then we can request reimbursement from our broadband innovation grant. So that was the plan. That's what I had agreed to and what's in the updated contract with Fred. Sounds like it worked. Yeah. I'm just hoping that he's not expecting to get the whole kitten caboodle in a big single check because it's just not going to happen. No, no, he's not. The last time we spoke, it sounded very similar to what you just described and we're expecting that preliminary deliverable from him as you'll hear later on. We're expecting that in a few days, perhaps a little longer and then we'll move on with that. So I just wanted it to check in with the treasurer to see how that's going to work out. Thank you. Just think of the power, Jerry. You could wield that treasurely power too, if you like. So I will be sending, I have to send that tomorrow, the deadlines tomorrow, because we have not had any expenses that fell under the project that we described to USDA. We have not had any reimbursements from USDA. The attorney fees are administrative and the insurance fees or the cost of the insurance are also administrative. I do not believe that was part of what we packaged as part of that grant. So we are drawing it down as far as some of the in-kind work that I've accounted for, for example, from you and we're nearing the end of that. So as soon as we get Fred to tell us his hours and his costs and whatever, I can then go back and say, here's what we spent. Here was the cost and write us a check then and there's a not super fast turnaround time, but I assured Fred that the turnaround time was going to be within the 30 days that he was expecting to get paid from data invoice. Okay, so I didn't know he could submit something we could have submitted. Anything else? Yeah, so but the thing is, in order to submit to USDA, we have to pay it. So if he's got something partial that's under hopefully under $15,000. Yeah, a partial invoice like now and I can write him a check right now. And once that happens, then I can get it, I can start the reimbursement process through USDA. It's just that the quarterly reports are going to be, are still going to be reports, but I think I can request one reimbursement per month. I believe that's the deal. So yeah, we're ready to go and get reimbursed for that whenever. I would just need to look at the details. Anything else on funds or finances or anything? Okay. One thing that I have on my plate to do because I'm another authorized user of Snowball is to finally figure out how to get the $26.37.92 over into checking. We have a deposit account set there, but there's some, I'm not the administrator of that account. I am an authorized user, but I don't know that I have the ability to do the actual deposit. So that will be a hurdle. I will work with Nathan to get through hopefully in the next week or two. Okay, hear me. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Okay. Sorry, I tried to jump in there once before, and I think I had my system on mute on. So Michael and I were wondering about tax forms for donors for the 2019 calendar year. Neither of us had received any documentation about our donations. And we reached out to Nathan a few times and gotten radio silence. So I'm hoping with this transition, we can address that matter as well, too, please. Sure. Yeah. So if you could, if you could do me a favor, it'd be easier for me to track down the checks or the donation. If you can tell me when you said that, and then I will, I'll track that down and I can generate that paperwork. I mean, my audio. Sounds good. Okay. So I'll use that on my list of things to do. 2019 donation receipts. Well, we're listening to the worst of the video. Yeah, if you're working on getting video set up, sounds like Alan, there is a, there's another panel that you'll want to add. There's another panel you'll want to add that sort of, it may be collapsed that will be, that will give you the option to show everybody's webcam and to set up your own webcam if you so choose. Okay. I don't need the webcam. As long as I have the audio, I should be fine. It says what cases are already currently being used? Oh, okay. So I guess, I guess with this, we get a limited number of, that's odd. I've done this with a lot more before. So you get to see my lovely basement. I should be. Please, I kind of do less than this. Oh, there's Ray. Well, if there's anybody that wants to be on the webcam and can't currently, looks like there's a couple of people that have webcams that are just set as inactive. So. That's fine. That's okay. Okay. Well, we need to change that just a little bit here. How I can Alrighty. All right. So let's move on to clerk appointment. And I think if we can, we get this parade of volunteers, we can maybe appoint a treasurer as well. So any, any takers or nominations for the clerk? I mean, given that Chuck's been taking good notes and we are now recording this, it's going to be easy enough to go back and look at this. Notes don't have to be detailed. The clerk is really more of a statutory responsibility at this point. All of the mail, the accounts, everything's going to my address. So I don't intend to change that until we get a PO box. So what it's worth. I did have a community member from Barry, I believe reach out to me with interest in volunteering her time and energy toward the initiative. I reached back out to her asking, you know, Hey, we've got two openings right now, this will be three. And I haven't heard back from her just yet. So I don't know if either of the possibilities for engagement that I threw out her way are going to interest her. One was the clerk. The other was we are still looking for another person on communications committee as well. And so those are the ones I mentioned to her. But I can reach back out to her. That was just a few days ago. So, you know, I think if I hit her up again in a couple of days, we might be able to see if she's still interested. If we want to wait to try to move on that from community members, obviously, you know, I think we might need to do something temporary in the meantime. Yeah, that's that's my my sense to if we can just get somebody so that we have that covered. And if we have a replacement, then that will be I think that's going to be best. Did you mention to her that there is a stipend? I did not because we didn't quite have clarity on what the amount was out of that. And I couldn't find it in the notes. I actually tried to include that information. But I need I need to find out exactly what the information is on that what the amount is before I start offering it up, I think. Yeah, so we had an amount authorized in the budget for for that. And I think we'd be willing to cover mileage and sort of a reasonable, you know, per month stipend provided that everything was actually getting done. I mean, I don't know exactly what that is, but it's going to be on the same on the same scale as like a select board stipend. So 100 bucks a month, maybe. I mean, we again, I can cover mileage. I don't think that's that's a problem. But it might be just something just to sweeten the pot. So that I mean, ultimately, we're all still going to be volunteers. Nobody is a paid employee really yet, aside from, you know, inter-isle is the consultant. But, you know, if they're willing to help, that's really what we're looking for. And we can just sort of give them a nod that that position might require slightly more effort than sort of showing up to these monthly meetings and saying I or nay. Do you want to confirm those amounts and get back to me? Or can I run with those amounts? Are you quite certain of them? I'm not certain. I mean, I think we authorized $5,000 for the year. I've just one of the things that we had to go ahead. Sorry, yes, we did authorize $5,000 for the year. But that was on the assumption that there would be like a monthly thing that we paid and whoever was getting it was, as you say, doing the work. So yeah. I don't know. I don't know how to explain. One of the things that that was for me and Susan to take back or to bring back to the board at some point was what does that monthly stipend look like? And shortly thereafter, she got busy with other things and was not able to continue. So that was it was moot at that point. I'm I mean, unless I'm hearing anybody say otherwise, I think $100 a month would not be out of line. Plus, you know, reasonable mileage, you know, just like to and from meetings or picking stuff up at the PO box, etc. And looks like Ray posted the job description that we'd previously posted. And honestly, a lot of those responsibilities, you know, those are statutory responsibilities. But given the sort of hot potato that these positions have been lately, you know, I've just been I've just been doing this stuff. So so so arguably, yeah, the clerk is the custodian for files, records and documents. And if you're not seeing what seeing what I'm seeing, it's in it's in the chat. I don't know if you can see that that chat window that might have been sent to organizers only. Oh, if you watch the the latest description, it's up on the website, I just sent a link to organizers and panelists. And I believe you're all set up as analysts at this point. So you should see. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Ray only sent that to the organizers that that an organizers only gets to me. So, okay. So why don't we leave this sit kick the can down the road a little bit more. I mean, can we just slap that we're putting a stipend $100 a month for the work plus mileage, documented mileage or something like that detailed mileage, because I just, I think we might actually get somebody at this point in time, whereas before we might not have gotten anybody. But if we put some money on there, people, you know, even if it's just a little bit of money, that's going to pay groceries for somebody. Yeah. Yeah, agreed. All right. I will update the the both the website posting with the stipend information, as well as reach back out to this, this woman who who did contact us and her name is escaping me right now and let her know that that's that's an option as well. Okay. And Ray posted, he wants to change the job description to offer up to $250 a month plus expenses. So, point counterpoint any thoughts one way or the other. I mean, so just I mean, looking at the, I mean, looking at what we actually have in the bank account, you know, it's not always going to look like that. I mean, so we should be back reasonably stable once we get, you know, once we get the project paid off and start getting rolling. But it is a bit scarce right now. I mean, yeah. Can you hear me? Okay. So, take a look at the job. Can you just identify yourself since you're not on the camera? Yeah, this is Ray Northfield. Take a look at the term in the services that you want. And so trim that down, make that the job description offer up to 250 bucks plus expenses and move on. You've decided you don't want as much as this will trim it down to what you need. And then and I'm figuring 250 is probably about half of what we had before in terms of level of work and the money. And so I'm fine with the idea here. You trim it to 250, go negotiate something, come back with somebody and we're good to go. Okay. Other other thoughts about that? John Russell is saying in the chat that 250 is a better number. Just kind of curious. I mean, how many hours a month do we expect this to take? Well, you know, hopefully this person is 20 hours a month, something like that with all that she was doing. Yeah, I didn't know. Yeah, well, she was doing both clerk and treasurer. Oh, yeah, that's right. So I don't know, but I mean, that's fine. I mean, you know, what we really need is an organizer, right? So right, but this is, I honestly don't, I don't really want to, I mean, I'll put on the agenda for next time if you really want to, but I don't really want to get in this discussion again about hiring somebody. We just need to have our clerk appointed and then move on from there. Whether that's 100 or 250, I guess that's what I'm looking for. And so as I, yeah, as I understand it, go ahead. Do we need to make a motion? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I guess, yeah, I would, but I would like to have a bit of, I would like to have some discussion, I mean. So I would make a motion that we keep everything the way it was except say $250 plus expenses per month. Okay, so let me see if I can restate that you broke up at the end there, John. So I think John's motion was to keep the job description the same as it is, but to advertise for $250 a month plus expenses. That's all right. Yes. Okay. Is there a second on that? Second. Second. Okay. Seconded first by Chuck Bravo. His connection speeds faster. Yeah, probably. I highly doubt that. I just do this a lot. Any further discussion? Does that seem reasonable to everybody? More or less. Michael, can you hear me? Yeah, more or less. More or less. Sorry, it's not good enough. If we're looking for a clerk and a treasurer and we were in the past spending 500 months, where is that right? We weren't spending any a month. We talked about it. We talked about it. I think we should figure out what we need to pay for both of those and divide it in half for each position and offer and ask if anyone wants to do both together. That's fine. But the idea that we're paying $1250 to $15 an hour sounds like we're it's a virtually a salaried position. And if we're thinking of it as a stipend, I think it's a little high. I just think we need to decide are we offering to pay someone roughly by the hour? Or are we offering a stipend to encourage them to volunteer and cover, you know, help them get groceries and pay their expenses? I can go either way, but I think we should be clear about what we're doing because in what I heard you say at the first term is we were talking about a stipend and to encourage the volunteerism. So $250 per clerk and $250 per treasurer per month seems higher than what you were describing. Okay, that's my comment. And then one thought is if we get someone good, then we don't need to keep going through this. And we get job done. And that's important because I've been looking at the list of things that we need to do that David's been putting together. And it's pretty impressive. I know I don't have a whole lot of extra time to devote to it. So my thought would be to just get someone good and pay them maybe more than we need to a little bit, but just pay someone to get it done. So that's sort of my two cents anyway. Okay, so I just did some math. So what I did is I divided 5,000, which is what we have in the budget by two or no, not so I did first. I can do this. Yes, divided by 12 is four six 17. Yeah, so it's 200 a month for each position. But I think the treasurer job does a little bit more than the clerk. So I was thinking 150 for the clerk and am I doing this right? Wait, minus 150. We do need to leave a little room for reinforcement. Yeah, so say 150 for the clerk and 254 or 225 for the treasurer as stipends. I like calling it a stipend. Just calling it out. If we do 150 for the clerk and 200 for the treasurer, that leaves us $800 of wiggle room for reimbursed expenses over the course of the year. So 150. Sounds good to me. Okay, we have a motion to amend the motion to put amounts of 150 for the clerk and 200 for the treasurer plus within reason reimbursed expenses for travel and so forth. And if somebody takes both positions, they are eligible to receive both stipends. Seconded. Who was that second? Okay, seconded by David Healy. All right, any further discussion about the motion to amend? And I want to answer a question that came up earlier that this may be relevant. Andy asked if the clerk can be on the board. The clerk can be on the board. The treasurer cannot. So if any of you decided you wanted that big juicy $200 a month, then I'd have to ask you to step down. Just saying. Alrighty, any further discussion on the motion? Okay, so we're going to do this in town order. If your town is here, then pipe up. Otherwise, if it's not, whatever. If you're not here, I'm not going to hear you. So your name from Berry City. Berry town. Okay. Okay. Berlin. Yay. Cabot. Calis. Sorry to interject. Are you jotting this down? I am. Yep. East Montpelier. Okay. Elmore. Marshfield. Middle sex. Yes. Montpelier. Yes. More town. Yes. Northfield. Yes. Orange. Aye. Clean field. Yes. Roxbury. Williamstown. Yes. Woodbury. Worcester. Yay. Okay. So I'm going to do that if that helps. And I think what I'm going to do next time, because I think we had consensus on that, is that we'll just, I'm going to ask if there's consensus. And if someone says no, we will simply, I'll go ahead and take the roll call. I don't really want to have to do that another time. Frankly, it was a good idea, but yeah, here we go. Okay. So the motion as amended is to set the stipend for the clerk to $150 a month and the treasurer to $200 a month plus reasonable expenses with the job descriptions as previously posted. Does that sound correct to everybody? Yes. Okay. Great. Any further discussion on the motion as amended? Okay. So I'm going to assume a consensus unless I hear someone say that they would like a roll call. Okay. Let it be known that I did not hear any dissension. So we will say that that motion has passed. Okay. Anything else on the clerk's appointment? Do any of you want to do this temporarily or should we just sit on this for a bit? So what exactly does it entail? So if you pop over into the chat, actually, here I'm going to, I'm going to repaste what Ray pasted in that only I saw. So I'm going to put this over there. Okay. I saw it. Okay. Yeah. I post that to everybody now. So yeah, it's really a statutory responsibility. Think of what your town clerk does and this would be the district clerk. So it would have similar responsibilities as a district clerk. I'm sorry. Similar responsibilities as a town clerk. But right now there's really not that much to do. What we've asked the clerk to do in the past is essentially do some of the administrative office type work and to actually produce the minutes. So that's, that's what's required at the moment. All right. So I'm going to, I'm going to give you a uncomfortable pause of about 10 seconds. And if anybody's volunteering, you let me know. Otherwise, we're going to move on. I'll take it. All right. So that sounds like if someone else comes or if we find someone that really wants it, I don't have a ton of free time, but I can take it for now. Okay. So I would respectfully request, once we appoint you to document any mileage, not that you're driving a lot. My brakes were frozen to the rogers when I tried to drive last. Nice. So, and for the monthly stipend, you can just send me something that looks invoice-ish. And then I can, I'll send you a check. All right. So I heard that as a motion from Jeremy Matt to appoint himself as the clerk for CB Fiber. And I will second that. I don't know if I can do that though, because Michael's on the line. Oh, that's true. So I'll move that. How about that? Okay, I was going to do it, but that's fine. Perfect. Okay. So I will take Michael's race to the motion as a second, unless there are objections. Move by me, seconded by Michael Bernbaum. Any further discussion? Okay. I'm going to assume consensus unless I hear someone asking for a roll call. And the motion passes. Thank you very much, Jeremy. Appreciate your time with all the other stuff you have going on, too. Thank you, Jeremy. So are we going to advertise these positions or are we just going to sit on it the way we've been sitting on it? It's John. Jeremy, do you want us to still advertise the clerk position? Why don't I see how it goes? And then if it gets to be really onerous, then maybe yes. But for now, when do we see how it goes? Okay. And to call out we will still need to advertise the treasurer position unless Jeremy is willing to step down from the governing board. Do we have a text for that to put up our front porch for him yet? Or did that just happen today? That happened today. We had an advertisement that went out that we sent out a bunch of emails about I don't have it in front of me. I'm sure somebody could dig that up in short order and we can get that back out there again. Yeah, because I can put it on the leaning standpoint for him. Okay. If whoever might have a copy of that last post could forward it to me, I'd be happy to get that up on the website, polish it up if it needs it and distribute it back out to board members for me posting on front porch for him. All right. Yeah, working on that. Appreciate it, Chuck. All right. Okay. Anything else on appointment of the clerk or treasurer? Okay. So let's move on to, I want to talk about Duxbury if we could. I was contacted by someone in Duxbury and then actually a second person that that person brought in. Then they are interested in talking about joining. And I was kind of straightforward and blunt with them about what that means and why they're sort of they're kind of late. But I have a meeting with the with the interested residents and the Duxbury Select Board on Monday, May 11th. And I told them that we were in the middle of the broadband innovation grant. One of the one of their planning planning commission people asked like, well, what about this grant? Could we get that? I said, well, we already have it. And Duxbury is not really part of our process right now. And then they asked, you know, could Duxbury apply on their own? And I said, there's nothing preventing them from doing so. But in any event, I am going to be talking to their select board if there's something that you think I should take to them. Or if David as oops, there went my camera, David, if there's something that Fred tells us that's there's a value to that's not going to work. If there's a value to adding Duxbury to our map, if that's somehow valuable, dumb chords. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I'm not going to file over the place. Okay, look at chat. Yeah. So, okay, looking at the chat. Okay, so thank you, Siobhan, just post. And just and for the for the sake of transparency, open meetings or whatever would folks when you're when you're chatting, would you please actually send it to I'm going to repost this to the entire audience? Is any sort of stored communications like that need to be made public? Because we do have we have orca here, and we also we can't do that. As panelists, we can only post to organizers or panelists or both. So, okay, we may need to amend the process to say we can't use chat if if need be. However, if the organizer, if the video you record will include it, then we might be covered. Yeah, I'm not sure that it does. But so if it's short, you know, people are like posting questions, I will just vocalize them. And if they're not, I will copy and paste copy and paste them out so that everybody can see it. I'm hoping that it gets captured in the in the orca in the orca version, if not the version that go to webinars collecting right now as well. One thought is maybe screenshotting. You know, just before before we close the before we close the window, just take a screenshot of the of the chat window as backup. Okay, yeah. Yeah, so I actually and now that I think about it actually doesn't show up on the video. But I do get like a chat log a text file. So I can just grab that whole text file and just just put it out along with our minutes. I think that would probably be the cleanest way to do that. Sounds good. Okay. Okay, anything else on Duxbury? We'll circle back around our next meeting. I mean, I will I will have had the meeting with I will have had the meeting with them by the time of our next meeting. So just a little bit of information on current access in Duxbury. Duxbury is largely consolidated communications. However, there is one road across from the high school that consolidated communications had a major breakage or something, and they actually wired that whole road with fiber. So there's like one road in Duxbury that has fiber from consolidated, which I didn't even know was a possibility. But most of the other people there I believe are on consolidated standard DSL offering. I also think that Duxbury has some Comcast going up the the Camelos Humphrode. So I think there is Thanks, Michael. Okay, let's move on to a business development committee and consultant updates. That's you, David. Jair is going to do the consultant update. Right, Jair? Okay. Yeah, I can do that now. I think we're having we're having pretty good success with the consultant in Toreil. We've been meeting with them on a bi-weekly basis now very regularly. We're expecting a first draft from them this week. And that's going to come to the business development committee. We're going to take a look at that. And then what we're what we anticipate doing is having an interim board meeting where Toreil can present to the board. We don't want to wait another month being that we're going to get a draft this week and anticipate that within approximately two weeks, Toreil can present to the board. So we're going to want to ask for a board meeting so that Toreil can make their presentation without having to delay the schedule. What we've seen from them so far, if I can if I can speak for myself perhaps that David let me know if I'm off mark here is pretty promising. We're looking at multiple alternatives for a phase one deployment, which is something that we were very interested in. We didn't want them to immediately focus on one area. So we have multiple areas. The construction costs appear to be coming in at under $2 million. And the number of households I think I have here something along the lines of 800 potential customers at a $2 million cost. Those will be refined when we see they're deliverable of course. But what we're seeing looks pretty doable. And personally, I like the way they've approached it. They've been very open to our comments. They're very open to looking at flexible technologies and not a lot of mostly fiber. I mean, that's what we're all interested in. So it's not that there's a lot of wireless, but they've been looking at multiple approaches to implementing fiber. So I'm personally pleased with what they're doing so far, but I very much I'm looking forward to seeing their report, which we anticipate as a draft sometime this week. And I'll leave that now to the team. This is David, I think Jerry covered it pretty well. And I'm pretty pleased with their progress as well. And happy with what they're doing. In terms of other business development committee activity from the last meeting, I think I'll save it for the NBRC grant stimulus funding, and I'll do an item on the agenda, because it's related to that, which our discussion was related to finding an ISP or somebody to team with on one of the grants. So I'll wait till we get to that item to describe what action I'd like to propose to the board. I don't know if this is a good time to bring this up, but I'm kind of tossing it out there because it's, I think it's pertinent during our regular every week ADS check-in call, which is very exciting and a lot of fun. And I love being part of ADS, which is the Agency of Digital Services for those of you who don't know. John Quinn and Sean Naylor, the deputy secretary, talked about that at the state level, they're talking about trying to get broadband out to the underserved communities and what the state can do to help with that at that level. So this whole pandemic thing has really, they're mostly concerned about schooling the children and how many kids in our area do not have good access. So they're talking about it and I don't know what form that's going to take, but there are discussions going on and I don't know where exactly. I think it might be at the cabinet level, but I'm not entirely sure and I didn't think it was good for me to ask because John knows who I am. So anyway, I just wanted to toss that out there that there may be another pool out there at some point that's more local to us that we might be able to grab on to. Anyway, I'm done. I'll let Michael Bermond give us the update on the work meeting we had yesterday where we learned a little bit more about that, Siobhan. So before I talk about the meeting, I'll speak directly to what Siobhan's talking about. That is definitely a reality. There is a movement from the administration to devote some of the huge amount of funds they got from the federal stimulus bills. They haven't promised anything and the way they're organizing it right now is twofold. One, the commissioner of public service, June Tierney, has sent out an appeal to all electric utilities and all telecommunications companies and a couple of ISPs. They're not all on the list to do everything they can to get internet out as fast as they can to finish projects they had started to accelerate them to start new projects and to particularly focus on school children. And they offer zero dollars, but instead they say, keep track of your expenses and we will do our best to find a way to reimburse you to the extent that we can from FEMA and other funds we get from the feds. So that is a laudable goal and an awkward way to appeal to businesses. And so some of the businesses are responding and in fact I'm responding in cooperation with another WISP project in the Northeast Kingdom. And I'm sure others, VTEL has responded and made an unusual offer, kind of an odd offer. And then let's see, Microsoft through RTO Wireless and Vermont Consult Contractor, I guess, are also contributing hotspots throughout the state for the purposes of getting to students and their staff and their parents. So there's a whole bunch of little initiatives going on. Some of them are donations, some of them are speculative and some of them are coerced. And I think give it another several weeks and I think things will get a little more structure, a little more appropriate funding sources and that sort of thing. So now we can segue over to the WEC meeting. And before we get fully into the WEC meeting, I was talking with Barry Bernstein, the President of the Board, who is suddenly excited by this possibility of that, this federal money coming through the administration. And he is approaching, I won't name names, but he's approaching a number of very high government officials in the administration to see if some CD fiber projects that Intel is presented to the WEC board yesterday might be funded directly rather than going through this process of going to D and asking to borrow money and build it to see if they could be directly funded fully. Now whether that can happen is unknown, but it's an exciting possibility. It could, we could still go for beta money and still get that kind of money and build, you know, $8 million worth of stuff early, which could be really cool. So anyhow, more to come. He's loaded the idea with certain big officials and they haven't said yes or no. But we can sort of join in with him and say, yeah, we're going to be shovel ready, we're willing to do this. So that's possible. So now the context of the WEC meeting. The Business Development Committee and Greg and I, who are the liaisons with WEC and Intrarial together wanted to get a little more clarity from WEC as to what they might be able to do for us. And we wanted to tell them what we thought we might be able to do for them. And so we organized a more formal meeting than we've had in the past. We had an agenda. We sent a letter out that laid out kind of the case for the mutual assistance. And then we had a fruitful pretty long meeting yesterday with the highlight, I think probably was Fred from Intrarial showing maps and getting them excited about what could happen using WEC polls. And the not unexpected disappointment was that WEC said, you know, we really want this to happen. We really support you. But we can't commit to spending a ton of money or being your bitter in an FCC auction or doing a bunch of things that involve hanging us out to dry on a couple million dollars or more. And so they're not ready until we can convince them better of how good the business cases would be. So there is still the very real possibility that WEC will cooperate with us, but they're not in a hurry to sign on the deadline without knowing that they're not taking risks. And unfortunately, we're under a tier timeline than they are. And so we may have to, if for example, if we want to bid in the RDOF reverse auction, we may have to find another bidding partner because they may not be ready to do it. If we decide not to bid, then it doesn't matter. They want to help, but they're not ready to risk co-op members money until they know there's a solid chance to get it back. David, did you just raise your hand? Did you want to say something? You're still on mute, David. You're muted. They basically also said they really wanted to finish their feasibility study, which they just got the money from the public service department. I believe they were putting out their RFP for that study today. So they're about three to four months in limbo here until they get that kind of information. So they weren't ruling at all, but they weren't being very cautious. Let's put it that way. We also set up, there's going to be a meeting between Dan Grossman from Interisle and Dan Weston from WEC to work out a bunch of technical liaison details. So it was definitely a very positive meeting and the disappointing part was not unexpected. We were just hoping to push them along. Oh, one other thing. This is really significant. It's the first meeting that a general manager of WEC said, we really want this to happen. And I think that was a significant change. So I guess that's enough. Is there anything else important to mention, David? Yeah, I didn't read your speech. The fact we left out Velco. Velco participated pretty freely in this meeting. Michael, did you invite them or did WEC invite them? I did. I asked for permission from WEC and WEC said by all means. And so two vice presidents from Velco, Karik Johnson and Dan Nelson attended. And Dan was his normal quiet self and Karik was his normal dominant self. So they had a lot of towards the end of the meeting. A lot of talking about the money the governor's got, the discretionary money the governor may have to play with and talking about working with congressional delegations to get more money and big picture stuff like that was completely on board with allowing us to use their plan to connect our different areas. I forgot to say that Washington Electric has definitely said that we have carte blanche to set up cabinets and nodes at their substations just outside the fence line. So that was a really good thing to hear too. And if I could just pop in real quick and mention a couple of things Ray said in the chat and he says, does April 28th work for an interim board meeting? I assume I expect that is like meeting with Interisle. And then also a question where for the 800 clients and I expect that that was about the hypothetical possible build out location. I don't know if that's what you're talking about Ray. I can answer that question. So no particular area has been selected Ray or anybody else. But for the purposes of figuring out the feasibility they picked one area to look at just to see what it would cost to do that area even though they have five areas that they're looking at. And so that 800 locations is probably applies to all five of them. But they're only costing out one of them for the purposes of showing feasibility. And Ray's asking how many miles for the two million? David do you know? Give me a second. I'll look that up. This is Jerry. I believe I have that information. Jerry this is David. The map they showed yesterday was different than the one they showed us the two weeks before the week before they extended it. So yeah I don't know if you know how many miles they had on your. Yes I have it here. They looked at 800 potential customers on 65 miles of fiber. The construction cost for that was well over a million. Of course it was. Yeah I think yesterday they said 1.7. Yeah everything pretty much came between somewhere around 1.6 and 1.8 when they looked at the I have information on four different areas. But now this the information I'm presenting right now is two weeks old and we're going to get an update when we when we get a document this week. So but that's ballpark. You can get a sense of where we're at. So the other thing I want to point out is that the the legislature is also keenly interested. So not only the executive branch but both house and house and senate committees are both you know eagerly talking about this and trying to figure out how they can support these efforts to get you know internet out fairly quickly when possible at the at the state level. What one of the so we talked about a lot of stuff in house energy and tech. One of the things that I asked for specifically that I thought would be within reach of a smaller financial amount I said you know of course you know fund us you know you know give us some money and we'll and we'll build these things that will definitely happen. But I said you know probably even more so for the for the new CUDs that just came online. I said we need some kind of admin help. So we need help with bookkeeping and we need help doing kind of the clerk and the treasurer sort of stuff. And they didn't run screaming from that. So I'm I'm I'm thinking that that's going to be a a possible thing that we that we may see or if you have a favorite state rep or a state senator and they're asking you about broadband that might be a Vermont sized ask. But didn't you also mention grant writing? Yes. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. That was among the the admin stuff was also help specific help you know writing these grants. You know these grants are out there but they're increasingly difficult to apply for and then also difficult to just just to manage just to do the do the reporting and keep on top of all that because if one of us volunteers drops the ball you know if I drop the ball and reporting to USDA then you know our USDA funding is in is in jeopardy then which is a bad situation. So can I make another comment? Of course. So for the last last last few board meetings we we've come up with and screwed it around the discussion of the need for an executive director at some point. That could dovetail into the ask of the legislature. It could fund any CUD that requests you know if they could fund 50-60 thousand dollars a year for a CUD to hire someone to do this work that might might be doable or they may want to hire just one or two to do the whole state. I don't know but anyhow I when you were testifying that's what I was thinking. Could that turn into a position? Yeah and and in the chat Ray is agreeing to. He's saying all CUD should have an executive director to project manage this and to support the board and he's saying that this would be a lot like town managers, town town administrators in towns. So we would be the equivalent of the select board the elected slash appointed officials steering the ship and they would be the actual one doing the the day to day. David? This is David. I know Andy's on the phone and I and I don't know if Andy wasn't listening to the House committee meeting on Friday but I think your memo did a lot good. Yeah thank you. I was a bit of a rant but it was it was meant to be so but yeah and I that was the hearing's great if people haven't watched it and Ray thanks for sending off the link to the YouTube it's very very good. Senate findings had a committee meeting today in which wasn't on the topic but the last 20 minutes of the YouTube video are all about broadband and mostly about net neutrality. Okay anything else business development committee? David or Jerry? By the way do we get to the application piece? Okay all right moving on communications committee update to Chuck. Yeah so since we last met we have drafted and posted a great set of FAQs to the website. I would encourage people to go go take a look and we also have a printable version that you can distribute if you feel the need to hand people paper copies although hopefully there's no whole lot of that going on right now and I just want to say thank you to both David and Michael who put in a huge amount of work in bringing those FAQs together. It was a monumental effort. We had many versions and edits flying back and forth and I think where we ended up is pretty good. The next item is the survey. So the survey results we now have seven out of 18 towns with their results posted to the website so consider this a call to the other 11 towns and I hate to admit that more town is one of those towns. Consider this a call to all the other towns to finish those reports with David so that we can get them up on the website. We do have some language drafted and ready to go for people who want to share that out with their communities and so if you're looking for that language see myself for Ray we can get you that language so that you can share it out. It is worth noting that you know this is a this is a pretty good touch point to bring awareness back out into the communities and and make sure they're thinking about us and remember who we are and closing the loop on on the fact that they filled out those surveys and the survey results are are really really interesting so the the article is on the website you can go to the news section it is presently the most recent post in the news section and it has the summary data for all the towns as well as all of the towns who have completed their individual reports it has those linked out as well at this point. Yes David. You also have a set so that if you want to get on the email list and you've been getting some takes of takers on that. I'm sorry I didn't quite understand your question. People can be something can sign up on the website to get notified of things oh yes yeah so yeah so on the website uh we added well um a couple a couple of places where people address to get the first place that is we add a new how to contribute page which does have some placeholder information at this point in time the fact that you know we're considering loans and those are going to be coming Jeremy we need to connect on still the legal structure of those loans and what progress you've made but before I get to that we also added a the ability that when somebody like mouse is out of the website it pops a dialogue asking them to sign up a pretty classic traditional what's called exit interstitial marketing tactic and in that it allows people to indicate whether they are more interested in receiving service or are also interested in potentially receiving loans it is worth noting that that's been live for about a couple weeks of time at this point in time and we've gotten a pretty good response rate on that I'm just pulling up the the number right now because I haven't looked at it in a couple of days sorry real quick you said receiving loans well uh participating in loans okay yes yes my mistake thank you for that clarification um and so yeah we've received uh 23 sign ups on that email list to date over the course of the last couple weeks so that you know there's definitely some interest out there and people are going to the website to look for more information and I think a number of those were probably driven from um Ray's post in Northfield about the survey results but there are some other people just signing up there as well um so that's that's an update on that piece of it uh Jeremy do you uh good segue there do you uh do you have an update on the loan information side of things it's our next agenda item actually that's uh Phil's that's right yep yep that's right great uh okay so then the uh the next item I wanted to call out is there is an email list you probably all saw that I added you to for convenience purposes should help make managing the list of when you want to address the whole board simpler uh Jeremy we can make a comparable list for the interested parties if you would like if that would make your life easier as well and it does give people the ability to you know opt out on their own if if they so choose and want to do so um the one thing I just want to call out is the email list does include everybody so we just have to be very careful about replying all to that email list and so you know if you have something you want to discuss about something that someone sends out make sure to reply to just them and not to the to the entire list please okay uh next item um from communications um we discussed in the last committee meeting that uh for a number of us staying on top of the volumes of emails for cv fiber was getting challenging in our personal email accounts um and so we wanted to propose to the board a convention that board members can use for creating their own gmail email addresses specifically for cv fiber materials I also want to acknowledge that having a separate email address for some people may mean it never gets checked I for one am constantly in about six different gmail accounts anyway so adding one more is not a big deal in my life and it keeps things nice and clean and make sure I've got good separation there but the convention we proposed and adopted in the communications committee if you want to create your own gmail account for cv fiber purposes by the way this this uh is really valuable so I want to encourage people to do it and the reason is if we ever get into a point where discovery is required because some sort of legal uh issue comes up having all of your communications about cv fiber in a separate account is a very valuable thing in terms of separating your cv fiber life and and all your personal emails that you know people might have to dig through at that point in time um and so the uh the convention we came up with I will read it to you but I will also share it in the chat for reference uh people who are primary delegates would be cv fiber dot town so for example I'm cv fiber dot more town at gmail dot com where alternates would be cv fiber dot town dot alt uh so for example the alternate more town uh would become cv fiber dot more town dot alt um one other benefit just to call it out is that it also means if you transition out of the role as a delegate you can pass the account credentials on to whoever comes into the role and it does provide a little bit of continuity on that purpose so I already created a gmail account under my name for this purpose that didn't exist before I use it strictly for cv fiber it's shavon pericone at gmail dot com should I make a new one to conform with this standard or can I continue to use the one I've got and then when somebody replaces me they get that account I I just I want to that's a good question um on the committee we we did not we did not state that we wanted to make this a mandate we just thought it was a good idea um also uh uh Jeremy I don't know why it added an http colon slash slash after the app sign on the first one of those conventions uh I don't know if we can fix that or if that's something that go to meeting is is screwing up um but I can I can share it around with the group after the meeting as well um but uh you know I would like to point out that there are benefits to conforming to the standard which is if you want to contact the town delegate you you can guess what their email is really easily um and so you know that that is a good benefit of of standardizing but I personally am of the opinion that I didn't want to mandate it um and and at the board we did not sorry at the committee we did not discuss mandating it so unless we hear a motion to mandate it I'm I'm not going to do that yeah I'll go ahead and make a new one there've also been a couple email accounts that were created um I don't know if they still exist I never actually logged into them there were several accounts like at cvfiber.net so um I don't know if we want to go and and set those up I mean if there's a cost you know hosting it with google is probably not that big of a deal and and I don't know if we qualify for free stuff or if they do that anymore they used to I've looked into that um they only support uh 5013c style nonprofits they do not support other legal entities um and so we we don't count uh and they also specifically do not cover government entities which is closer or is what we are essentially so we do not qualify for that I actually chatted with their sales reps at length about it as well what we would call we can qualify for their cheapest tier of service which if I recall correctly is $10 per user per month so with a board this size adds up pretty darn quickly um so the other option is we could go out and look at cheaper email hosting providers there are other options out there that that are more cost effective at our current size you don't get nearly as many of the bells and whistles that you get with the google suite of services um um such as document collaboration and all that sort of stuff because I'm using it for the document collaboration on the communications committee as well um and there is some value in that I wonder if one of the member towns would be willing to um to host us to host another domain with their current infrastructure um so I'm thinking like one of the bigger bigger places so Montpelier um Barry City um not being terribly familiar with with their setup that might be an option Berlin is not really um the way that setup is not really suitable to add many more email addresses I think we've got six there and it's it's scaled exactly for what it's doing right now so this is Ken I will send a note to Bill Frazier asking if that's a possibility for my view awesome thank you this is this is john aren't we going to have our own IP address cv fiber um as soon as we that's that's exactly what we're talking about we're talking about the costs associated uh with having our own at cv fiber um the the google hosting for email addresses is ten dollars per user per month so that's not what I'm asking that's not what I'm asking I'm saying that once we start uh signing people up we're going to have cv fiber.com or something along that line right and then well so we don't have that infrastructure yet I know but we will so do we want to tell yourself no we we will what we we will I'm just no why not not why no so we we don't necessarily want to or need to host our own web or email infrastructure more and more even ISPs are off um essentially contracting that stuff out so in order to run our own website or or um mail server you're going to have to have somebody administering that and that's another person we might not have I mean I've done that in the past I can do that but unless you know unless cv fiber is going to pay me to do that that's not something I'm really interested in doing at my advanced stage okay because in the middle of the night to bring things back online because they've gone down are not much fun no I'm unwilling I'm unwilling to use Gmail at at all or FaceTime or any of those other invasive structures so Proton mail Proton mail offers you know this the same sort of structure and we could probably we could probably look at look at that as an option too there are less um less awful hosts out there that aren't Microsoft that aren't Google so I think we have I think we're probably on the same page with this I would prefer not to deal with Gmail or whatever but yeah that's that's something that let's we don't need to worry about um over over committing to Montpelier that they're going to host us there and then we migrate out if we need to at a later point I I don't really think that's going to uh slow us down at all anything else on communications committee Chuck sorry just bringing up my notes uh that that is it so just as a follow-up I will send around that convention for anyone who does want to adopt it again we're using it for a lot of document collaboration as well so there there is you know some value in doing it John totally hear your concerns and so you know if you want to keep it on your current hosting provider and managing it that way that that seems reasonable okay I'm currently paying on Sobernet I'm paying three dollars a month for their email service so maybe we can host it there too I mean I'm sure they would be willing to host another domain but um let's move on to Phil update on promissory note high risk investment offering okay please grab my notes here um I had a a good conversation from Paul Giuliani and I'm sure as you know Jeremy Paul did um the legal work for uh EC fiber and continues to um do legal work for them um he you know he really felt stronger than because of the work that was done there's a really good solid foundation of stuff that we can draw on that we won't necessarily have to pay for because they did and it's there we don't have to reinvent the real um the the document that you had sent me was somewhat different than um we're working right now that was um that was for a bond issue first of all so it needed to be quite a bit more complex than what we'll need for a promissory note but the other thing that he pointed out to me is that at at the time that was done um CUDs did not exist so they had to create other kinds of entities to be able to get some legal standing to be able to go out and go after after bonds so and of course he he deals with all the bond bank stuff so he's kind of the guy as far as knowing where um where this is going so um he said it's um it's essential to have the feasibility study and I told him where we were in that process and he said assuming assuming the feasibility study gives us a path forward uh the next thing that is going to be important which we also will be hoping to do is the business plan and at that point he felt it would be really really important for us to hire a financial advisor um and again not not the kind that we might deal with on an individual basis for you know planning for retirement or college funds but somebody who understands corporate kinds of structures short-term high-risk borrowing bond issues those kinds of things he said that that's going to be the person who essentially is going to structure uh this first kind of offering Paul will you know will draw the the note itself but he said it's he feels it's really important to have that financial advisor uh dealing with uh with the actual financial uh issues he said there's some there's some uh language that we really are going to have to to make sure that we have what he called blue sky language which basically very very clearly um lays out the risk to the individual uh investor uh but also details what we've done some interpretation around the findings of the feasibility study summarizing the business plan which in his sense was kind of putting some icing on this that says look we know this is high risk but this is what we've done this is what these things tell us we feel that there's a very high rate of success and you know uh although there is no collateral other than you know what we might get done uh here are the things that we know so um he again he suggested picking Stan uh Stan Williams spring as much as possible around these things and uh he you know he spoke very highly of all the work that he did there so he said for right now he thought we really um there's really not much to do as far as moving forward on um on the promissory notes until we see what the feasibility study tells us and then what we think our timing is going to be as far as the business plan but that probably while the work is being done on the business plan maybe at the interim report kind of stage would be the time for us to start meeting with an advisor hopefully having picked somebody you know before that time and start structuring the promissory note he said there's some you know some decisions that we need to make obviously about the amounts that we're going to sell each of these notes in um and the interest rate um and you know do we uh do we give a higher uh rate to somebody who might invest a lot more money than the person who might want to invest 500 or a thousand dollars or you know what the um the basement is kind of going to be on on that I um I thought pretty good after the conversation with paul um I think you know he's got a really good grasp of what we're trying to do he was excited about doing it he felt very excited about having worked with uh with ec fiber we had a little discussion about our you know the current situation with COVID-19 and where um where things may go and then when in fact we talked about some of those things as far as funding um trying to build on the need to get better networks for education and that that might in fact um you know provide some other opportunities for funding um and then we went off into the weeds a little bit in terms of philosophical discussions about how um business may in fact be forever changed because of something like this and again though what does that mean uh how people are going to do business probably means they're going to need to connection so I said I think that we can you know um take some advantage of a bad situation and uh and build on it but uh that's uh that's where we stand with that and you know when I see stuff come in next week from the from Interile um we can you know I can share that with Paul and we can you know start moving forward a little more questions comments so Phil my work schedule task spreadsheet if you could put in a whole set of tasks on this task insert some rows okay this is this is something we've talked about previously so I'll just answer this he's asking won't two million dollars in veto two million dollar veto loan require two hundred thousand dollars in matching funds the answer is yes and when might that be timeline so we'd obviously want the loan before we start spending any money on construction engineering or whatever so we're looking at you know this summer I would recommend you just look at David's timeline which I mean most of that is in there but yeah so fund fundraising for that 10% match is part of what we're talking about we're also looking at the next item the NBRC grants as a possible venue for getting that matching funds for the for the veto money so um anything else on promissory notes high-risk investment offerings Paul Giuliani's meeting with Phil okay let's move on to the grant stimulus funding in Ardolf David do you want to pick up or you left off I'll start um so I've been working I did submit a letter of intent on the NRBC grant with Michael's advice we we maxed out the number on the letter of intent looked to are going to see I think was a million dollars but it's unlikely we'll be able to pull that one off but we figured we'd just let them know how serious we were um I've learned today that the deadline is no longer May 15th but it's June 1st um there's a lot of people it's not as simple as last year I mean they've got paper paperwork up the wazoo to submit now um uh and so the we haven't come up with a proposal of what we put in to do I talked about you know using the money for the engineering for the rollout of the different service areas but the committee has not said that's what we should do well the board has not said what that should do when I grant and then I don't know where I heard this whether it's yesterday uh at the WEC meeting whether the idea of putting all the CUDs together to put in a unified grant application to NRBC or it wasn't clear with purpose when I heard this so I'm not sure if Jeremy were you at that meeting when that came up I agree with that I think I think uh Kara did it right yeah but I'm not exactly sure whether Whitney was talking about is even eligible for for the Northern Boylands grant but any of it so we're going to move ahead with that unless I hear otherwise from the board I'll be back with you with the proposal when we have you know the paperwork and all the details done but that was the update on the NRBC one uh the second one in terms of stimulus funding you know you need the paper as well as I do I I assume in the first go around the CARES money I mean the state of Vermont's getting $1.2 billion um unclear what they're going to spend that on or what they can use it for uh we know they're going to have to fill in some shortfalls in government whether it's state government or local government but there may be more money in there that they may want to allocate to broadband purposes we don't know yet um Ken Jones may know a little more of it and Ken if you want to say something you can't I don't know if you do know yeah the the use of the 1.2 billion is to provide government services um in this fiscal year that are in part related to COVID and in part underfunded because of COVID in other words lost revenues um but so this overlaps with the possibility of providing service both for telehealth and um long distance education which are topics that COVID has sparked and so a logical path is to use or for CV fiber to propose expansion to address the long long range education long distance education and telehealth issues in our underserved areas and that so that would fit and there's also there is also additional we're not just CARES but it's one of the federal assistance acts for education specifically um yeah so the other thing is yesterday's meeting with WEK um Kerrick Johnson from Delco was saying you know um Congressman Welsh is on there's a bipartisan committee on broadband that Welsh is working on that we should keep in close contact with him in terms of making sure that our needs are taken care of and whatever they do and then he was more than saying since middle sex is in our territory to really pay attention to Pat Leahy on the appropriations committee so somewhere on our list of things to do is to communicate with the two congressional offices to figure out that we're on the list to you know make sure they know what we need yeah there is a number being floated around for telecommunications infrastructure investment of 85 billion which would translate to 170 million in Vermont so that's in the the discussion about what the next assistance package would be from congress this is jerry i have a question do we have anybody with direct access to the staffers for Welsh Leahy or Sanders direct access that you can pick up the phone and call them i have somebody in Lee's office but not in a low level i do jerry who's who's i do is that michael it's michael yeah well this is this is critical this kind of relationship could be more important than anything else we're doing they've got to know we're out here they've got to know we're about ready to spend money and we we have to have this conversation and we should coordinate it so that it's not all of us just calling us constituents we we need to do this in an organized way and we need to really press we need to be our own lobbying constituency here because a lot of people are standing in line and a lot of people are making a lot of noise for this money and if we're silent and polite we're unheard sorry my new yorker coming out but this is how it works i just quickly say i've been to capitol hill i drink four times to visit their offices and speak with their communications staffers as well as the representatives and senators so i can share that contact with you or anyone else who should represent us or i can try to represent us myself would you be willing to do a warm intro would you repeat that please uh i said would you be willing to do a warm intro sure i'd be happy to reach out to them and try to press on this uh this topic you'll intro me would you explain that for me a warm intro and more slowly please yeah warm intro just uh an introduction right so that i'm not coming in cold as someone they've never heard of uh by michael making the introduction to me it'll be more receptive to any message i i try to push out toward them what we need to do is have um some kind of board direction as to what the communications will be i agree so we'll plan it out a bit so and uh frank has something yeah um you know filth suitsman don't you acknowledge i do filth suitsman is joined to patrick latin's hip and he brings in millions a year from the feds you may want to reach out to filth suitsman ct in novice okay i'll put that on my list of things to do i do want to throw in my perspective here because i think the path is going to be a very large illusion i think we lost it so it's not um we lost you right after the pad is give me a high sign does anybody see me does anybody does anybody hear me i mean i hear you the way i understand this will work is there will be a large federal pot and the federal pot will be distributed directly to the states and this will not be like an FCC where individual entities around the like cud's would appeal for the federal pot but rather it'll go to the state and so i just think we need to make sure that the state understands the role of the cud's and this discussion's happening because there's another path which has been the what do we call those grants the the grants that take place every year where the Comcasts and Consolidated's um are the primary recipients um connectivity you know it's certainly worthwhile to remind our congressional delegation that vermont is on the verge of having a significant amount of community broadband um and that that we should do that but in terms i don't think it's necessary to have it be structured in such a way that we become primary recipients i think that that discussion is going to be at the state level do you think the state can do you think the state's interest is in concern and solidary communication that's where our work is i know where my interest is so yeah so i this is i think this is a good segue to something that i wanted to bring up um at the legislature there's folks there that are also connected to our federal delegation and that are also you know if you watch the video you know they're interested in actually you know advocating for what we're talking about with the FCC and um advocating on our behalf so i i think you know i think our state officials would prefer to work with groups like ours than the larger incumbents because um you know we're sort of walking in ec fiber's footprints and if we can be as successful as ec fiber then that's a then that's a win in a number of different ways um in terms of getting those getting our projects in front of the state so that should the federal funds come down central vermont regional planning commission is collecting a list of these shovel ready projects dates amounts all that and they already have ours they have ours through the next five projects i just gave them a sort of here's the shovel ready project we're ready to do within the next year with the same numbers that we used for the application to the the nbrc grant and then i essentially sort of just kind of cookie cutter replace that for the other four similar areas that were previously identified by fred so that's that's out there we are in a big list of municipal and municipal projects that could be ready to go should that the funding come um and i wanted to um before we get to ardof or if we are i don't know if we're still talking more about ardof um there is uh there was a concern and i posted something um i posted something to all of you about a podcast and if you don't have time to listen to the podcast it's it's it's kind of good but there's also a transcript at the same same site they're talking about uh star link elan musk you know convincing the FCC that uh star link is going to be gigabit capable so which will allow them to compete at on the same level as fiber to the premises like we are and they could conceivably come down and say we want to do gigabit for every address in the united states and walk away with the whole bank um so that's something that we should just be aware of i think um and then if we are going to look at ardof or if we're going to look for somebody an alternate that's not wek because it doesn't sound like they're moving forward i think we need to strongly consider valley net i think we need to approach them and uh think about asking them if they're willing to apply for ardof funds to help us get that david that was my topic my motion was to give the business development committee permission to solicit isp's who might be interested in working with us including valley net but also i strongly agree this is ken i want to make that a normal motion i was making a motion that the business development committee had authority to solicit writing up a basically request for interest and and send it out to you so far i think if you looked at my schedule i have about five or six listed there um there may be more but i think we should i mean i'm i'm inclined to the valley net myself but i you know who knows who else i mean whether you know wage bill telecom or like telco from main which has some presence in vermont might be interested in working with us the question is is really whether they they're going to go on their own or whether they want to team with cd5 or on this um i mean that's my biggest concern michael what do you think um well i think greg and i worked up a list of uh i don't know i forget the number but it was more than a dozen isp's in the area and a couple outside of the area that we should consider talking with it's on it's on your work schedule worksheet yeah i'm looking for a motion from the board to authorize us to go ahead and do that to a move okay and who moved that john john moved that okay and seconded okay by i can okay and frank you want to add something something to this so rate anything else on this yeah rate posted uh keeping local informant i mean telco is a main company but they have a presence in vermont so i don't know whether that's local enough or not my feeling is to see who okay any other discussion on this okay any other discussion on uh david's request to have uh the business development committee seek um co-applicants we'll call them i just want to add i think uh fred and interisle will probably have some advice to impart on this as well okay so can i read that back real quick just to make sure that i've got it noted down correctly or sure yeah okay so uh the business development committee should be uh given the authority to pursue co-applicant isps for the purpose of pursuing rdof funding is that okay yep okay thank you for that and uh i'm going to assume we have consensus unless anyone would like to do a roll call hearing no dissent um the motion has passed thank you very much anything else on uh any we want to talk about with uh rdof or funding or grants stimulus etc i don't have anything okay thanks david i have a couple little facts about rdof that it looks like um the first stage of application called the short form may be delayed which is to our advantage because it was coming up too fast uh maybe july instead of june for example um and um i kind of in the testimony yesterday about rdof there was a little bit of confusion about um census block groups and and and whether a successful bidder in rdof has to serve every every location in in the census block group and the answer is yes every single location in the census block group whether it's identified as um underserved or not you get you get money for the ones that are underserved but you have to serve all of them even if they're not on the same roads even if they're on the other side of a mountain that's it but we knew that well there was some confusion i'm not hearing about okay uh anything else michael no okay uh let's move on cv fiber 2020 timeline and stepping up so i'm gonna let david present his timeline but this is my um um bully pulpit that i'm gonna say i'm gonna echo what david said is that so if you haven't been actively working on one of these items that that are in david's timeline and david if you want to you can actually share your screen if you wanted to put your timeline up you could do that um i can yeah with as a presenter i can give you if you want access for that i'll i'll give you access you're thinking might be muted it's now in my screen so i don't know if you guys can see it do i have to take yeah here i'll jeremy has to ask presenters first yeah there you go anyways so what while david's setting this up i'm going to ask uh firmly but politely um if there's if you haven't been participating or if you haven't um participated in any of these so far i would strongly recommend pick a few of them and not just pick one but i would say pick a few of these because we we need help these are not um individually these are not heavy lifts but we will need people to actually own and drive forward some of these things and that could just be you know a bit of bit of research um it could be some phone calls it could be um you know doing a little bit of writing but we really really really need everybody absolutely positively everybody on the call right now to show up and be a part of getting this done because if we don't we're gonna have a real hard time hitting our timeline or hitting our destination so if you if it kind of like scroll down to the bottom david slowly so everybody can just get a sense of the amount of individual items that need to be managed before we get to something like actually doing engineering or build out or turning a customer on um these are yeah these but these are all necessary check boxes that we have to check so i would encourage you david sent out that link i would encourage you just go and visit that and sign yourself up or put um you'll put a little note on there or if you want send send me a message or send david a message and we'll you know maybe find a suitable item for you um one of the is trying to get this into a google calendar so the people who sign up for a particular thing actually know when a particular task is expected to be done and i need to do this for myself because i already missed one and so it's a long list and you know phil's list is not even in there in terms of getting uh you know notes of uh promissory notes so it's a lot of work um and i'm really looking for you know we all got a row in this getting this going i think fundraising is going to be a big one and you know i don't have a lot of detail in fundraising but i know that you know everybody can do its part it'll work but without a calendar like this i was having trouble just trying to keep track of what i was trying to do and move things forward now i you know i have an advantage over a lot of you because of you know mostly retired and so i spend a lot of time on cv fiber um i really wanted to succeed so i need your help on this so that's my pitch and if you if you lost the link i can resend it to you it's all google sheet would yeah would you send that again david just just send it anyways i will yeah let me see this this filter on ken jones's list right yeah this came from this is ken's initial uh um take that we had to do the only thing that's not in here finding a manager getting a man getting money for a man yeah anyway so that's that's my night the schedule i think you know the the committees have been you know the the the michaels and the chucks and the kens and a lot of rays and jerry the jerry we're really pulling a lot of weight to get this happening and so i know mostly you don't have time to listen to legislative committees but i have to say and listening this week to both the senate and to the house they don't have a lot of faith in the administration i can tell you that much um doing doing good by kens or by local government so it's sort of an interesting dichot you know sort of i don't know you know that was the legislature who got the bill passed last year wasn't certainly the administration didn't fight it but they certainly didn't propose it so i think we're going to continue to see a little bit of that as the year goes on and next year goes on it's not clear what the legislature is going to be able to do this year at all anyway so that's my sort of pitch i can stop showing now it's okay sure now i'll change you back to me which is nothing i'm going to i'm going to post the the draft meeting minutes here for a second um i'm just take just your text stuff chuck i'm just going to put that i'm going to post that to the um the handouts section uh stand by it does not like a text file really i can slap it into google doc pretty quick if you want sure that would be that'd be great if you could do that and just if you have just post posted in the uh as a view only and then i'll i'll post it to the uh the whole audience i mean this is saying i've got a bow out this has been a great meeting this is a great way to do the meetings all right well maybe we will continue doing this uh we'll just need to get better audio once we get back to a physical location all right whenever we are i'll see you on campus all right see you frank so while chuck's doing that real quick jeremy is there a do you have a list of who attends as like an attendance sheet um we yeah we can go back through the minutes i mean i i don't have like a i had a spreadsheet for like for our first year about who who attended but is that something that needs to be in the minutes it is it is in all the minutes i just don't have it in an easily easily like analyzed broken down excel form no okay that that's fine but what i'm talking about is like for this i'm going to need to get you minutes right so um do i need to write down all the people that are on the call right now or do you i jotted it down and can send it over to you okay that'd be helpful thanks jeremy this is jerry dm and teedies you may need to add me because i think i show up as call a number seven or something like that so i i i gave you i gave you panelists panelists i saw when you logged in i had your he had your name and i gave you the reason that we can all hear you is that i switched your rights so you're all you're all good thank you jeremy yes i'd like to invite philips attention to this the implementation schedule and item number eight it says prepare a veto loan application do you see it in front of you uh i don't have that up on my screen right now i i can bring it out i would just note that um it says raise 10 percent match starting 27 june and ending to august 26th and this gets back to my point earlier that is that you were talking about when to do something we have to reverse engineer back from these dates you get that documentation ready for this campaign that has to start and order and be completed by that period of time which is a guesstimate at this point but until we get further refinement on this we we should aim for this target yeah and some of the fundraising stuff there's a kind of checkboxes too i i know that chuck is working on furiously in terms of of outreach so yeah it's uh you know i i think that what david puts together here was you know his best estimates of when we have to get these things done and yeah maybe they're maybe they're not 100 realistic with some of the other things that have to fall into place first but i think we're gonna try to hit these as well as we can yeah and don't be bashful about changing the dates yeah i actually started i i had to change one or two that made more sense yeah we can always go back and revert if we need to if if we had that Jeremy we went to the ministry meeting your inbox to share all right can you repeat ray yeah so during what i was saying was that uh you already changed some dates if we if this were in a gantt chart and you had changed those dates other things might have shifted because it's in a spreadsheet it's not going to automatically do that and so we're going to need to get this into a into a tool in which we can see the the correlation among all of these parts and all the defendants so yeah yeah so so this is the uh you know the heavy project management approach or the late project management approach i mean i'm i'm happy to roll with whatever everybody chooses but if we're going to go and populate a microsoft project project or if we're going to you know go build gantt charts and this sort of thing we can do that but somebody needs to own putting that together and i think what david's got here is in terms of a handful of lightweight tasks that need some some later than others that need to be done um i'm honestly i'm more of the opinion that we we know that these things need to be done let's do these things and so yes of course there are knock-ons and there's a way in the spreadsheet that you could have you know one thing must follow another so we can make sure that the you know the end date of one thing becomes the start date of the next thing and have equalities that way too um we just haven't set all that up yet but but i think rather than spending too much time worrying about the the meta i think we just need to just start start going yeah jeremy that kind of of proactive management is really hard to get out of volunteers you gotta pay somebody to to do that we're and and we're on the cusp of that we're really pushing what volunteers can do effectively racing in the chat let's hire an executive director as a project manager yeah again cart horse you know we've you know chicken egg however whatever we could we need money to have an executive director but we need an executive director to get money of course so right now we know what we have to do we have some of these tasks that we have to do let's just do the tasks so again if there's something in there that you see that you can participate on or help get done i mean some of these are short like tally results which is assigned to looks like communications committee if you want to be a part of that yeah put your name cc comma you know john doe or whatever these are all yeah so do do your best to engage how you can i'm i'm i i i don't think i'm out of line here saying that we're not going to have an executive director we're not going to have an executive director before we start getting some actual real money in front of us yes and if they so and raise saying if executive director is something the legislature can do yes we'll continue to talk to the legislature but the legislature as quickly as they want to move right now it's very unlikely that they're going to procure any funds before um you know before summer i mean and that would be the most optimistic and that's they get a bunch of federal dollars dropped in their lap and they say okay here you go executive director make it happen then well who's executive director then we have to hire somebody we have to go through that process so i mean i'm just saying that we've got all of these things to do for the next three four months um executive director i just i just don't think it's a feasible um i i don't think it's a feasible part of the plan that's going to get us across the finish line by next year um if we manage to get that along the line and we can start shifting some of the responsibility to them i think everybody i think especially david it's just gonna it's gonna you know can take a big take a deep breath i just don't think that we're there right now and anybody please please correct me if i'm coloring outside of the lines i agree with you german okay thanks michael um so we have the march meeting minutes is there anything uh in there i know you're just seeing this now we could we don't have to approve these now do you want to uh do you want to hold off and wait until next meeting or are you ready to approve these now just throw them now okay that sounds like john making a motion to approve the minutes as presented any seconds second okay seconded by shavon thank you um any uh any changes or updates aside from uh even simple corrections or for what it's worth i just finished uh adding the formatting so it is it is now formatted it was plain text when i pasted it in there so uh you might want to give it just a one more look through if you looked at it when i first shared the link it's like another minute and see if anybody finds anything does it matter to anyone that it's not on the cv fiber letterhead at this point and can we retroactively add that if we approve it yes that's easy enough thank you german and there's uh yeah so i just there is a motion i just wanted to make sure everybody had a chance to review it and there's a couple of spelling issues that i can i can go back and correct once we put it on letterhead and post it out there um names and things like that okay so unless anybody has any feedback i'm going to assume that we have consensus to approve the minutes as presented thank you for all your work chuck really do appreciate that so unless somebody wants a roll call okay and the motion passes by consensus thank you very much uh let's move on to round table let me um i'm just going to go through the attendees in alphabetical order so that you're not so surprised um so we'll start with uh alan gilbert alan anything for round table okay he needs internet all right so yeah yeah he's still he's still muted but if if he wants to say something later we'll catch him i'll keep my eye on it uh andy gilbert uh i'm good just thank you everybody and let's keep going all right thanks andy chuck i'm all set thank you everyone david um i i want to make sure people keep in mind as we go forward looking for anchor tenants and talking to your school boards and keeping everybody in loop post things in front porch forum let them know there's a frequently asked question frequently asked questions now on the website if anybody wants to know what we're up to what we're doing um and it was sort of generated because of i've been trying to get a little writer locally to do a story on this and he said well shit i don't know anything about you guys and how you're working so that's what jeff that was the genesis of the faqs anyway so that's my pitch for the round table all right thanks david uh jeremy um thanks for all your work david and everyone else but mostly david yeah definitely all right jerry nothing to add after that thank you uh john russell yes it was a pretty good meeting though this has been a good meeting i think we've done well for sure thanks john jonathan williams i saw you unmute but i can't hear you okay he remuted if he you can send me a send a message in the chat if you like oh he said his audio isn't working apologies okay um josh jarvis i just like to reiterate thanks for david everybody else for all the work that they've done clearly uh based on the spreadsheet um i have a few of those myself so i know what it's like to give something like that but we're all definitely like like jeremy's that we're gonna have to definitely follow us from here really put in some some time to get some of these things done um so i'll probably be reaching out here shortly just to see where i might fit in on some of these things um so that i can just participate as much as i possibly can with the time that i have a lot of so thank you all right nothing tonight thank you thanks ken michael russian chuck what was that phrase exit exigencies or something like that the warm intro you said something about some kind of oh oh oh okay uh yeah so it's called an exit interstitial interstitial is an experience on the website that interrupts the flow and um so when basically when you mouse out of the website like you're gonna go to close the tab or something like that then the pop-up comes up that says enter your email address and if we were a big company we'd be ab testing that against you know something that uh does it different ways to see what our users respond to most but um that's a lot harder thank you i have no comment i just wanted to learn that thanks michael phil hi pass i'm good thanks rey you're up next yeah so i'd like to add my thanks to uh all the folks dave phil chuck jeremy for all the work they're doing and also put in a plug for folks to finish their community reports so that we can get that notice up on front porch forum so we can stay in front of the community so that we go to hit them up for subscriptions and for loans and grants and stuff they'll know that we're continuing to move forward sounds good here here thanks right shavon oh there i am there i am so i'm i'm going through the survey results to try and get this into little green light for finally and one of the comments that i got i want to read it to you your company is going to have to do more than give out a survey to get my money prove you're serious about investing in service improve that you can make it happen so i feel like challenge accepted so that that's my comment that's let's do this all right let's do this all right uh thanks shavon tom hi i'd like to echo some of the sentiments of thanks um so yeah rey thanks for putting out that link to the committee hearing from the house i managed to catch that and the jeremy you had a really strong presentation there on the forum so thank you i noticed in that conversation around broadband how references around broadband definitions still have 25 down and three up as as you know the standard but particularly having that nominal level myself and in this crisis when everybody in and their dog is getting on the internet at the same time how much that really just doesn't cut it i mean doing my testing some of the midday week work week i was at like eight and a quarter of a make so i'm just hoping that some of the information that comes to light through this is like how that number just doesn't really make sense for us living out here in the sticks and i'm hoping that they don't keep using that reference over and over because it's just nonsensical yeah that's it hasn't that great meeting all right thanks tom hi andy we finally finally get your video from up there in cabot all right i'll give uh allen gilbert if you want to have one last chance or if your audio oh your passing slow connection here okay fair enough um so i i want to ask uh two things um first of all if i could get any feedback from all of you about how this worked if you can send me any uh any emails if you think this worked if this would be better if something else happened uh if it was all just a conference call just on the phone or something i i i don't know whatever you think is going to make this work better you let me know um second of all um we should have done this earlier but i would like to make a motion that we will hold a special meeting on um april 28th which is uh two weeks from now at the same time at 6 p.m on with the same format second and chuck seconded that all right any uh any further discussion on holding a special meeting in two weeks just just one point jeremy i one point on that are you are you doing that for the interisle a document that's what i that's what i thought uh that was okay no just just checking because we uh haven't confirmed that date uh with interisle as a date that they're available so we can we can we can certainly put that on the on the on the calendar and tell them that this is our date but we have not confirmed that date with them okay if we need to move it we'll we'll figure something out then i would also throw in that it would be good to get whatever documents need to be reviewed a few days ahead of time um before that as well yeah absolutely that's the intention okay and i have a question from um one of our attendees um not on the board he's asking will the meeting on april 28th be open to the public members this this meeting was uh yes that's um any of our meetings committee meetings or board meetings must be open to the public given that we are a public uh municipality so um you can send uh if you want a notice uh or a any sort of uh agenda in advance for that uh you can either look at the facebook page you can look at cvfiber.net or if you send me a message um central.vermont.internet.gmail.com and i will send i will put you on our distribution list for any time we have agendas and such going out so thank you for that question tim so um any other comments about april 28th so you didn't oh i'm sorry yeah so it was it was moved in seconded i'm just trying to see if there's any other discussion all right so if there's no other discussion um i'm going to assume that we have consensus unless i hear a request for a roll call hearing none i'm assuming that we have consensus and the motion passes we'll be meeting again on april 28th in two weeks and uh this concludes the meeting tonight we only went 11 minutes over not too bad for a first uh a first crack at a at a different format so have a wonderful night everybody and uh we'll see you in two weeks thanks everybody thank you rams thank you everyone thank you