 for internet slash CV fiber governing board and reading of the November 13th, 2018 to order. Any additions to or changes to the agenda? Hearing none, any public comment? Anything that's not on the agenda that anybody wants to speak to? Great. Next thing is the hearing and feedback. Some hearing about feedback regarding the draft 2019 budget. So this would be a chance for individual representatives, alternates, or representatives from the towns themselves to weigh in and share their thoughts on the budget. And we as the board get to decide what to do with that. Anybody get a chance to talk to their select board, city council, do the elected representatives, and hear anything one way or the other? I met with my select board last night. And we talked about a lot of things, but I forgot to mention the budget. But they were happy for me to not talk more. So they had a lot of business. I did speak with a town manager for Berrytown. And they discussed the budget, understanding that it was a preliminary draft. He didn't really have any additional comments for it this time. OK. I heard nothing. I sent stuff to the select board members. No response back from them whatsoever. And Williamstown silence is a happy essence. There's a, I'm going to pass these extra copies of the agenda down. You can just keep them on the end there with Dan or the member. Yeah, and I gave it to the Berlin select board. And they said, looks great. And then said, off you go. So I'm going to assume that it's good, that it's good, too. Do any of you have any bits of feedback? I know the finance committee, it's probably part of your report back, Rahmah. Yeah, no, we talked about it briefly at the meeting. And the only email feedback I got was one comment that said, you know, this was just meant to cross tease dot eyes and just take what we got and run with it. So I mean, what we had maybe five minutes discussion about, the budget. And then we just voted to pass it back the way that it got presented into us. So there was no changes. It's the exact same budget that you passed around as the revised budget after the last governing board meeting. So it's not on the agenda tonight aside from the hearing here, sort of that information portion. But I think for our next meeting, we will put it on the December budget so that we can pass it in advance of the end of the year. So if anybody has any other thoughts about what should go in it, what should not go in it. And maybe we'll have some more discussions about that later on as we dive into some of the committee report backs. The only point I would make is that it has to be approved at the next meeting. Yeah, let's see it. Or else we have to have another meeting before, what, the 15th of the next month. Yeah, that's not the matter. Can I ask you if anybody has thought about having a meeting for the public? Because I've been thinking about this. Select board, as soon as they remember, we can't tax people. They don't care. Yeah, that's good. Our town puts out a newsletter every so often. I believe it's quarterly to the members of the town. And in that, there actually is snippets that I sent to Jeremy, which is like a really compressed version of what he had as an introduction to central Vermont Fiverr. So that way we're keeping at least our town folks up to date on what's going on with it. Have you got any feedback? Has anybody come to? That latest addition to the newsletter hasn't gone out yet. I believe it's due to go out at the end of this month. I'll be curious to know if you hear anything back. So is that something that you all want to do is reach out to your communities and solicit feedback in advance of the next meeting? Well, that's what I was thinking. I mean, I know what my select board would have said, had I been able to go there. Because when they first talked about this, they did mention, well, this is OK because you can't raise taxes. You know, it's like the past. On the other hand, when I'm meeting informally with people in town, I get questioned, where's the Fiverr? What's been done? So yeah, it makes me a little bit nervous that I don't want us to think that because nobody says anything about our budget being bad or off, that people are not expecting something to happen. Well, I guess I would leave it up to everybody here to reach out to your individual communities. And if there's some way, you know, front porch forum post and take snippets of the report that we have and just say, here's where we're at. You know, if you have any feedback and if they want to pass that through you, you can bring that here. Or if they want to physically come here in December, that'd be great. I mean, it would be great to have some public meetings or public feedback, rather. Do you have a specific text that you think we should be putting out there? Or should I just talk like me? I mean, it would be from you. It would be soliciting this mission as yourself. Obviously, feel free to crib, flash, copy any materials that we've put together from the draft report from the budget from anything that we've had out there. And then your own interpretation of things. OK. So hold on. Hold on. Michael, listen. So I deal with this issue a lot. There's the conflict between giving encouragement to the community and soliciting excitement and interest from the community and the holding back of the information because they'll burn out on their excitement too soon. You want to peak at the right time, just like in sports. And so one thought I had was the business development committees talking about surveying and beginning that process. And I think we're still evolving what it is we're about to do, whether it's going to be a pilot in a particular town or something bigger. And so it's almost a little premature to be saying a lot in the community. I mean, there's nothing to matter with answering questions. But to have a big meeting would be premature, in my opinion. But in terms of what we're doing, sort of part of the annual report and the budget and the process, soliciting public feedback, I think, is appropriate in that case. Sure. And whether we're going to get everybody riled up in a particular one town or another and say, this is definitely coming now, that yeah, that would be. I think that would be inappropriate. But I think if we can ask people to get involved here, I mean, there might be, you know, alternates or representatives that might come out of that and want to participate or even better without committees. They don't have to be on this board to be on committees. That's important. But what I'm mostly concerned with is the natural question that will come from anybody in the community is, when's it coming to me? And the answer is, we don't know. But the advice we're still talking about are lots of versions of how to do it. It's a similar subject, but I wonder if we want to prepare something for the town reports. You know, certainly, if that short one-pager type thing, that's different than what we handed out as our status reports. I think that would be good. In fact, the Uppbury City asked for that. And I said, you can take what we've presented, the draft. I said, you can take that. And unless we revise it, that would be, I think that would be suitable. I mean, there's nothing that's changed or too different in there, but if we wanted to, yeah, if we wanted to condense it down to a page or something, I think that would be easy enough to do. That's essentially what I did. Right. Because I took the draft, I condensed it down. That's what's going on in our town reports. So at our business development meeting early in the week or last week we talked about that report to the town being some capacity for expanding the awareness of what is going on here so that as we go out later to help develop resources within the town, there's more awareness of it. So, but you used the report as sort of a dull doing. I thought we were going to, one was going to be prepared that was sort of going to be. So I think there's a difference between the annual report to include in the town's reports and the sort of one pager that we envisioned at the business development meeting, which is a bit more forward looking, a bit more concrete and more survey-ish. I mean, obviously correct me if I'm misspeaking, but that was my recollection. You know, one thing we want to remember that somebody said something that maybe think of this, most of us are no longer going to have school meetings as part of our town meetings starting this year. I mean, we won't be meeting for a school meeting anymore. It's just going to be a town meeting. We're not going to be electing school directors if you're being forced into merger, that's the reality. So there's going to be, town meetings going to be kind of weird, at least in my town. You know, it's usually a full day and there's a lunch and da, da, da, da. So I don't know if that's an opportunity for people to maybe be willing to have other things to talk about especially in an effort that is kind of interesting that we're trying to work together as 15 towns or whatever we are now. And schools have been focused on the merger fights now for two or three years and they've gotten pretty lively in this part of the state. So maybe people will be sort of interested in an effort to try and pull together people from a great number of communities on a common endeavor. Sure, and I've taken the opportunity in the other business, the meetings, to sort of put things on the floor in the form of a resolution or in the form of this, especially provoking a discussion and that might be, that might not be a bad way to go about it too. What do you think about it? Anything else on this? Treasurer's report. Oh, yeah. That's good. That's good. So we have a checking account and a savings account. Vermont State Employees Credit Union. Rama and I opened that, I don't know, a few weeks ago. Three, four weeks. Something like that. Yeah, about three, I guess. And the current balance of our checking account is $200 and our savings account has a balance of $25. So, and then we have also had expenses of $20 to register CV Fiverr, and that was also, that was donated. I don't think so, unless there are any questions. The only question I have is on treasure reimbursements. I'll say, has that subject been broached at all yet? You, because... Currently though, yeah, those stand as donations. Okay. And that's fine. I'll let you handle them, I'll just go on to them. Yeah, so I think if we end up with accounts payable, that's something that the board should put on and sign off on. So if you wanted to get one back at some point, if somebody says, here's $100 for this, then I think we will need to authorize that as a check. So, just so everybody understands what I was asking about is that Rebecca, Becca, rather, I'm sorry, actually put up $125 of her own personal money to open these accounts. So when I talked about the reimbursement, that's what I was referring to. Is the organization currently accepting donations? It is. And that will actually come up in a later agenda. Don't worry. Okay. Okay. Lock it up. All right, anything else for the treasurer? Okay. Contesting the CBI trade name, we'll hand this off to you, Roba, and it's probably, you were the one who got that ball rolling and I will step in as necessary. All right, well, what I did was I contacted on my own initiative without any, you know, just had nothing to do with the board itself. On my own, I contacted the Secretary of State's office and I basically, and I don't have the email in front of me, so I'm not, I don't have a clue, there's a transcript for you, but. It's in the packet. Is it? It's on page, it's certainly on page five of the packet to follow along and see the exchange between Marama and Secretary of State's office and me and some of the folks there as well. Let's see, all right, so starting at page five, yeah. Okay, no, that doesn't have my first email actual, the one I initially contacted with them, basically one on two things, one, because this is about the trade name's central Vermont internet, and Mr. Whitaker, of course, had, it's two pages later. It's on page seven. Yeah, I have the whole email chain there. Okay, yeah, so if you go to page seven, you see the email, that's what I started with the contact them, and two things that I thought should have been pointed out was one that the DBA is applied for by Mr. Whitaker was done, I believe, in bad faith. That was my, that's my interpretation of it. And the biggest one, and I think the most important one is that the, them, the Secretary of State's office, I honestly believe, erred in giving out central Vermont internet as a doing business as name. And the short version is that name had to be on the warnings for the public vote, meaning that name had to be out there in the public. We were required to put that name out in the public 30 to 40 days prior to the public vote. There was a public vote where the municipality by the name central Vermont internet was created. And then the following day, the trade name was registered by Mr. Whitaker. So the essence of my argument was quite simply that, you know, they're not supposed to, and it's of state and statute, that they're not supposed to give out a trade name if it could cause confusion to the general public. The essence of my argument is, but of course it causes confusion for the general public. Legislature by the statute wanted us to have the name central Vermont internet because that's what we picked. Nobody else was using it at the time. And so now for somebody to have that as a trade name for them to have, to be able to use that trade name, especially in the central Vermont area would cause immediate confusion in the public as to, you know, are we talking about a municipality or a private business or what? So that's the long and the short of it. And then I guess you were contacted and, well, yeah, I was in the loop for the whole conversation which was good. And I think what Chris Winters from the Secretary of State's office said is that he said, respectfully, Rama's complaint is interesting and brings up and it sort of provoked an interesting conversation within their office, but they said that if you really want to contest this name it has to come from the board. It's not something that can come from just an individual who is, although, you know, associated, affiliated with the board is not carrying the weight of the board's binding with it. So I'm going to read a little bit of what he wrote. I'm going to leave out the citations to statute, but he wrote, if you wish to proceed it would be under 11 VSA 1636. This is the only way we can terminate a business name under the circumstances you described. That's what Rama was talking about. We have no other authority to determine or take into account bad intentions previous use by others or judge whether the public is likely to be confused. We can only look at a name similarity with the respect to new names that may be confused with existing names. Needed a citation. And he talks about his process. He said he would send a notice to you, so either Rama or Rama for board, and to Mr. Whitaker that you have challenged his use of the name. I would convene a fairly informal administrative hearing at which I would take evidence, testimony, and documents for Mr. Whitaker on whether he is using the name as evidenced by a substantive act or acts consistent with that intent. You would have an opportunity to appear and present the board's side of this as well. Is that how you would like to proceed? If so, please also provide me with some assurance that you are acting on behalf of the board and with their consent and I will get the notice. So, he said, here you go. Like, tell me to make it happen. I move that we authorize continuation of the discussion with Rama and the Secretary of State's office and our name that you have a letter provided therein to the Secretary's office. Second. Okay, we have a motion in a second. Any discussion? Yeah, why me? You started? You started. You started it. Yeah, so nobody knows more about it than you now. No, I'm fine, I just want to know why specifically me. So you're explicitly being given the authority to chase this down. And I will be, and I will provide any. You copied in, so that you're aware of what's going on with it all. Okay, so I would suggest, Rama, that you consult with an attorney, possibly Jim. Just to make sure that you're not making the arguments that don't fall under their statute. You're probably not going to veer back into the place of his bad intentions. No, no. But there may be some other traps that would prevent you from prevailing. So make sure you follow the statute. And as long as we don't talk about Act 250, I think we'll be fine on that. The old meeting walk. Well, there we go, we don't have disagreements on interpretation, but so I would just say then my argument that I would make is quite simply what's at page eight of the meeting packet. And that therefore part, you know, that the trade name Central Vermont Internet was inappropriately issued to any other entity or individual as use in our region of that name will reasonably be expected to lead a reasonable person to conclude that the business is a type of entity, that it is not. And that's from 11VSA. So if there's any suggestions that you can give me from there as far as guidance, what to walk away from, what to push buttons on, and I would be more than happy to include that. But that would be the essence of my argument. So let's, the three of us loop this together. Okay. And then make sure that the Secretary of State's office gets that language and so. So I'll send it around to you guys before I do any contact with the Secretary of State. There's also a suggestion from Mr. Winters about current use of the name by Mr. Whitaker. If it has not been used yet, that's cogent. So if you want to make sure you add that, that sort of give me that person provided. Anything he provided in his emails, you should take as hints of what he's looking for. Did Chris or anybody else make mention of what recourse the losing party would have after the decision is issued? I think the suggestion would be that it would be, you'd have to file a suit. He didn't say there was another level of administrative appeal. I didn't get that impression. It might be worth asking. Yeah, I think he did say that the next step. I think he says it quite somewhere in there bluntly. I remember that. Yeah, because it sounds like from the note that Chris means he can make the decision and I wouldn't be surprised that the Secretary himself might be at second level of appeal that somebody could go to. Okay, so here it is on the email from Chris Winters on page six, towards the bottom, page six. If you wish to proceed, it'd be under 11 VSA, dot, dot. This is the only way we can terminate a business name under the circumstances described. We have no other authority to determine, take into account bad intentions previous use by others, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, wait a minute. If the, do I scroll too far? Section C, a person agreed by a final decision by the Secretary under this section. Thank you, yes. May appeal to the Superior Court of Washington County which shall consider the matter to know about. So this is the Administrative Procedures Act, is that what that citation is to? Comes right out of the statute for registration of trade names. But it sounds like it's really coming, the procedure is coming from the Administrative Procedures Act. That's what's usually done. You go to the court after the initial decision. Okay. I'm just trying to figure out when people are really going to lawyer up and how much we should be thinking about that. How long is that 250? We got a lot of time. That's right. Ken, he never goes away. Okay, so there's a motion and a second on the table. Any further discussion about contesting the CBI trade name and the motion was to essentially empower Ramah to pursue his complaint with the power of the board? Our complaint. It's no longer my complaint. So to adopt Ramah's complaint as ours, like a kitten, like I can't take the kitten this weekend. So you don't have to take it. Okay, any other commentary? Thoughts? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Motion passes unanimously. It occurs to me that we have some folks here who may be joining us soon and it would probably be a good idea to do a round of introductions. So, Ken, you wanna start us off and we'll just do a circle around. My name's Ken Jones, I'm from Montpelier. I applied to be the alternate for the city of Montpelier. My day job is I work with the agency of commerce and community development and the strengthening of telecommunication systems in the state of Vermont is one of my tasks. Great. I'm Jared Thompson from Calis. I reached out to my neighbor, David. I'm interested in learning more about CBI. He's just done the board meeting and my network engineer in East Montpelier. Welcome. What's up, Ken? We wanna make sure Ken knows who everybody is. You know who I am? I'm Ken Jones, I'm a delegate from Montpelier. Andrew Giller, delegate from Calis. And I'm Alan Gilbert, a delegate from Worcester. And I'm only bent on the alternate for Berry City. I'm Scott Massage, the alternate for Calis. We're on the Schneider, a delegate from Williamstown. Chabon Perico, a delegate from Orange. Becca Strader, clerk and treasurer. Jeremy Henson, delegate from Berlin. Phil Hayett, middle sex. Jim Barlow, delegate from Marshfield. Michael Bernbaum, delegate from Plainfield. Joshua Jarvis, delegate from Berrytown. Bob Klein, delegate from East Montpelier. Tom Fisher, alternate for East Montpelier. And our esteemed worker, Cameraman. Welcome, Cameraman Jerome Luton. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, finance committee report back. This is still you, Ronald. Well, the biggest thing is just the budget that came out of there, so I'll go through and if anybody can always see this, you guys are, the treasurer has anything to add please jump in. What am I looking at here? These are the finance committee. So we did get some update, but we're going to get more update on the fund raising stuff, so I don't want to get into that. We did get a little bit of discussion from Chabon about that. We did the drop budget, which we held the hearing, the public hearing on just a bit ago. It was, of course, approved as it was presented to us. Chabon is going to be working on a set of policies and procedures, I took first stab at it, and she's going to take second stab at it, and there's still some, and I'm going to use the, Alan, I just want you to, excuse me, I'm going to use the term policies and procedures here, and I'm not being facetious when I turn to Alan, and I'd say that to him, because there's still some discussion as to what we mean by those words. So I'm using them basically to describe the way of defining broad requirements and then more specific steps that are required to accomplish those. Some of these policies and procedures, we may not end up needing at the committee or the board level, they may end up in a different, depending on how we set up our organization, and who is actually going to be running things, for instance, will determine a lot of, as far as really where some of those policies and procedures go. The policies, I think whatever bylaws or policies are probably going to be there regardless, but procedures would be different. But anyway, those are still intended to come back in front of the board because at last meeting the board said go ahead and develop them, implement them if we need to, but they need to come back to the board for approval. So we are in the process of developing them, and I'm hoping that we'll have something of substance for you at January's or by January. Yeah, I think I was leaving December out of that and maybe ready by December. The financial institution, Becca already spoke to that. We do have a bank account, a savings account. The treasurer does have a debit card. The treasurer and the chair of the finance committee, which is me at the moment, I'm not the treasurer, Becca's the treasurer, I'm the chair of the finance committee right now, are the check signers, and I did double check while we were setting it up, and it's good that we did that the way we did it, because if you replace me as chair of the finance committee, it's more or less just a matter of notifying the credit union and letting them know that the name has to change, because we've already approved the position to do that. So it's interchangeable, which is good. ZIP books, we are using ZIP books now? Well, okay, I'll say Becca is using ZIP books for right now, and I guess if you want more explanation of ZIP books and how she's using it, you can ask the treasurer. Audits and compliance. So this is good, the scheduling, now at the last meeting, Alan had handed out a listing of dates, deadlines, that's there in statutory deadlines that are required to meet. I have a different presentation, so a little more visual because that's something I need when I look at these sort of things, but part of what we're going to have to work through because our charge at the finance committee is also has to do with compliance, and the compliance has these series of reports that are mandated that are not just the budget, but there's also the finance report, there's also post reports to make sure that there's an end of the year kind of reconciliation report where we have to explain if we moved money among funds, et cetera. A lot of this is actually going to depend on how we structure our operations. I'll just use an example, because it's easy for me, having just been very experienced with school boards. You have the superintendent, you have the school board. The school board sets the policy, the superintendent runs the show, the business manager takes care of all the business end of things. I suspect that's kind of where we'll end up going, whether it's by just contracting it all, stop lock, stock and barrel out, or hiring a business manager. I don't know, that's just I'm just saying, I suspect. But how we view these deadlines and what our oversight of the compliance really depends a lot on that structure. The more directly that we're involved as a governing board, the more detailed we need to be as far as our oversight goes. If we're hiring, if we've hired a business manager, or we've hired another company entirely to run operations for us, oversight changes. It becomes much more general in a lot of circumstances. So then the oversight of the deadlines, et cetera. So things change. We kind of, at some point, need to really get some guidance as far as what we should be thinking about for, I don't know, an operating structure or this. That's really all that we had coming out of this meeting. So we're going to keep plugging. My assumption, I'm gonna keep plugging ahead under the assumption that everything's open, including the possibility that we might run day-to-day operations straight from the board. Not that I'm gonna advise that, but I'm not, if we operate under that assumption, we've covered every other base along the way because then we can just start pulling stuff out and say, well, we don't need to do that, we don't need to do that, we don't need to do that, which is a lot easier than to try to define a system and then put more things in. I'd much rather pull out. That's it, unless, Bob, Siobhan, Becca? So a general question kinda came up in the earlier discussion about when we, you know, presentation to the towns just to throw that in, I had the same reaction that Tom Clerk was like, oh yeah, I remember those things and presented them to the select board when I briefed them. So they're all like, you can't tax it, right? No, okay, great. But the philanthropic donations and we can, I don't need to resolve right here, but it's just something to think about. It dawned on me thinking, I'm actually promissory notes, dawned on me thinking about that and fundraising that we can't really issue notes without, there's a chicken and egg problem there, big one. And like, you know, there's some sort of guideline we're gonna have to establish as to how much debt do we take on versus what our real revenue projections are and who we have. So I just, it's just something to think about. Like, you know, I don't not say we need to change a thing or whatever, but I think ultimately that's gonna be one of the rules we have is like, wow, we really don't wanna be issuing more debt because we'll never pay it. Anyways, that's just my general comment on the budget. You know, like, I don't have any issues with it. Specifically, it's just, it's gonna be interesting. So I have some good news and bad news in a future agenda item when we talk about the preferred development around pilot projects or whatever. When we talk about that, I mean, from what I've seen in the promissory notes, the language that we got from EC Fiber, a lot of those explicit risks are built right into the promissory note. It's written there saying, this could all go south and here's how. It's all laid out super clearly so that people who are taking, you know, who are issuing these monies to us that they know what they're getting into. So the amount of debt, you know, we're a public body and have a responsibility to the public, of course. I don't suspect we'll be in a position where we're gonna take on too much debt or we're not likely to be able to pay it back. So I mean, we're gonna take on debt primarily for, you know, capital. Right, real built. Right, and once that's built, if we do something silly like find ourselves not able to sell service to it, then yeah, that could be scary. But I don't think we're gonna be in the position where we're just going to issue so many promissory notes. So much debt. EC Fiber had a little bit more of a start capital. And I guess that's maybe what I'm really thinking is we don't wanna sell short, just give us money, please, without any ties to start that's all. And they would have probably preferred to start with a whole lot more debt right from the get-go because they could have built their network better. And that's part of my report back there is gonna go about that. So anything else, any other questions for the finance committee for Rama? Anything that you think that they need to be? Yeah, I just had a quick question. It's just from my own personal understanding. The policies and procedures that you're ironing out, are those strictly for the operations of the finance sector or are they gonna encompass the entire entity? No, these are strictly to do with those areas that fall inside of the finance committee's charge. Okay, thank you. While we're on the topic of those promissory notes, it did observe that EC Fiber has a LLC. If we're gonna LLC. Yeah, those promissory notes are issued by an LLC not by the district itself, so. Interesting. Yeah, I just thought that was an interesting corporation maneuver. Yeah. It sounds like a legal one. Montana. Yeah, we'll have to look at that. I mean, and that might be required just by the way the bond market expects you to do things like a wholly owned subsidiary, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's good to know. Just a little flag. Yeah, I would expect whoever we bring on as counsel to help us stop. He's gonna let us know if it's required. Anything else for Rama for the finance committee? Okay, the bylaw and policy committee report back, Jim, that's you. Sure. So while back the bylaw and policy committee was tasked with developing a policy on handling data and business information that the entity might acquire from third parties that could perhaps be confidential. How would we go about acquiring that data? How would we go about managing that data or that information internally? And how would we go about responding to a third party if that data was requested from us? So with that task at hand, we worked to develop the draft policy which was included in your packets or subsequent 32. I guess I'll just hit the highlights on it. Maybe there can be some discussion on it. So the policy that we've developed applies to data and business information that the organization might acquire from third parties on a confidential basis which could potentially be exempt from public inspection and copying under the Public Records Act. I think it's fair to assume that we are a public agency under the Public Records Act and therefore would be or are subject to its requirements, meaning that any written or recorded information regardless of physical form or characteristics produced or acquired by our organization in the course of our business is potentially subject to disclosure in response to a request unless it is subject to one or more exemptions. So in the course of acquiring this information from third parties, we wanna be able to establish guidelines for acquiring it and to manage that data and information to prevent unauthorized disclosure. Why? Because if we disclose this confidential information without the authority of the group that's providing it to us, well, they're probably gonna get unhappy with us and not wanna do business with us anymore. We could be cause them to incur financial loss or other difficulties down the road. So we need to have a plan in place as to how we will respond to such requests. So the policy sets out that we will, when we acquire confidential data and business information from third parties, we will provide the same care to avoid unauthorized disclosure or use as central Vermont internet will provide to its own confidential and proprietary information. We'll protect your information with the same level of care that we'll provide to our own. We will maintain it in a secure location as best we can. And only our officers, governing board members and agents who have been approved to receive such data shall be authorized to use it, meaning that we will not disseminate this freely amongst other folks outside of our organization or even potentially within our organization only on a need to know basis. We will only use this information under our policy in furtherance of our organization's own interest and not for our own individual private or personal gain. So this is stuff we're acquiring for the entity, for the entity's benefit, not for use by ourselves or for our own individual purposes. We will not under this policy disclose data and business information that we acquire on a voluntary basis for a third party for which a reasonable claim of exemption can be made under the Public Records Act. So we will not freely give it off if it is likely subject to an exemption. And if there is a request made to our organization for such information, we will promptly notify the third party of the request or demand so that the third party may seek an appropriate protective order or otherwise defend any right it may have to maintain the confidentiality of the data or business information under applicable law. So the request comes to us and we say to the folks that provided it to us, hey, we've got this request. If you wanna do something about this, let us know and step up and look out for your own interest. One of the other key parts of this is that the statute under which we operate states that our clerk has exclusive charge in custody of our records. And therefore it seemed appropriate that our clerk be the point person for making requests, sort of the conduit for making requests for this and for potentially executing any confidentiality agreement that the provider may wish us to sign for this. So the notion being that we would have a central point of contact rather than being 13 or 15 individuals out there making requests, we will all funnel this through one central point being the clerk. And since the clerk is the custodian of the records, the clerk essentially will make sure that this information is managed appropriately. So in a nutshell, that is the provisions of this proposed policy. Any questions? Is this, yes. It's to cover only third party information or is customer information included in this or is that going to be a separate? I think that will be a separate policy. And from a practical perspective, we're about to start asking people for money, prior donations, does that fall under this umbrella? Names, addresses, donation amounts. I would say that I cannot, off the top of my head, think of an exemption that would apply to the name, address, or donation amount of an individual that's provided donation to the entity. So I don't think that there would be the opportunity to exert such an exemption if the request for that information was made. If you make a donation to your town, it's not going to be exempt from public disclosure unless you make it anonymously. But what? One thing that I think we want to make clear and I want to make sure I have this right. What we're talking about now is not information that we ourselves have produced in any way or gathered. We're talking about information we've gotten from third parties. So your question's a good one, Elliot, but I can't imagine Washington electorate has a list of people who have contributed to, well, actually they do because they, we're sometimes asked to give our member rebates to whatever philanthropic fund they have. So I mean, technically, I guess they have names. But that would be treated the same way that any other information we would get from them would be treated. Somebody wants to see the names, we'd say you've got to go ask Washington electorate co-op about that because we signed an agreement that we won't give out the names until consulting with them so they can assert their privilege if they think they have one to not hand over the information. The direct donations to municipality would be public, which makes sense. Well, that's a whole nother question. It is, that is, your statement is correct, but it probably doesn't directly apply to this policy and how this would work out. So in practice, somebody says we want the Washington electorate poll data that you have, and we say to them, we have to go ask Washington electorate, we go to Washington electorate and say, this person asked for this, can we give it to them? Who then responds? The clerk to this, I mean, the person is, well, okay, we'll have to ask Washington electorate. And Washington electorate, does the Washington electorate say to the clerk, yes, they can have it, no, they can't have it, and then we have to respond to them and say, Washington electorate says we can't give it to you or does Washington respond directly to the asker? Under this policy, Washington electorate would have the opportunity to do what it needed to do or wanted to do to protect that information. We would have to respond as being the custodian or potential holder of the record, but they could also step up and assert whatever rights that they have or opportunities that they have to protect that information as well. Could I make a suggestion that I think might make this more clear? If we can say that any of this data remains the property of the third party in question and that we are only dealing with it on a transitory basis for the purposes of our own business. We'd like to do that through a confidentiality agreement that spells that out on a case-by-case basis because that may be the case for some, but others may simply decide to give it over to us without. Right. So, but in particular, for like the WEC data, I think we could say we're using this on a transitory basis, this remains yours, we are not taking this. We're not acquiring it. We are not going to acquire it. It stays on your servers and we are going to make arrangements so that it is yours and not ours. So that we could generate reports or derive information from it that could be useful then, which that material in turn could be then conceivably requested as a public record. The thing that we generate from their material. Yes. Again, this policy would not apply to the thing that we generate. Right. Mm-hmm. The question about the servers that live on it is that we don't have servers. Is the email attachment considered secure enough if we're trying to maintain security of this data once we do have it or handling it or whatever? Oh, you're asking me a technical question, are you asking me? Are we involving that in the policy that we're going to have some policy around someone who's in charge of the security of the data? There was a specific language head put in there that said appropriate controls. Mm-hmm. Because within the parlance of Infosec and everything else, yeah, we're just not a place where we can establish any of that yet, but obviously it goes hand in hand. You wouldn't want to take the data if you didn't have some mechanism to keep it reasonably secure. And we're just going to have to work on that as we go and involve that. I mean, someday do we have like an information security officer who knows? And so, and sorry to get additional clarity, but this policy only applies to third-party data, so we are not carving out business practices or proprietary information for the board as an entity. So as we made a decision to go to, you know, this is just an example, we made a decision to go to Calis in this room. It goes on Orca, our competitors are able to see that. They're potentially able to build out to a place that isn't built out yet, currently. Yeah, short of the statute changing to allow us to protect that data. So I had two questions and both, both the previous two questions lead into my first one is should this language directly reference NDAs in any way or is it just to assume that that's exclusive? It does, does state that the clerk shall be authorized to execute an agreement with a third party to the protection of the confidentiality of data or business information provided that no such agreement shall conflict with the provision of this policy. So we're not gonna enter into any NDA that conflicts with this, with our policy. That's good. So my second question is in reference to the limitations of the legislation creating the CUDs. After you and your committee have worked on this, are you reasonably comfortable now that we have enough protections for third party data and other future type things like Elliot was suggesting or do you think that we should pursue some amendments to the legislation to strengthen our abilities? I'm gonna pass on the answer. Okay. I think I'd like to weigh in on that. I think it would probably be best to pursue the belt and suspenders approach and at least look at the legislative options for protecting some of the competitive materials that we might provide and be able to specifically find this board specifically find that this data is we're going to declare this as a competitive trade secret of some sort. It's not something that a regular town could do because towns don't compete like that. But if we are engaging in a competitive activity, we should be able to declare specific data related to that endeavor as being exempt from public disclosure. It's not in the statute now, but I think we could make a strong case for that to the legislature. I don't think it has to be in the statute actually because that's covered by exemption in the Public Records Act. I mean, there are lots of municipalities that don't give out information sometimes on the basis of trade secret. A utility that's Burlington Electric, for example, is that a municipality, Burlington Electric? It's not. It is the instrumentality of the municipality. I don't know that it has its own charter, its own existence outside of Burlington. So I'm almost positive. I remember cases where BED would not give out specific information based on the trade secrets of exemption. So I think one of the things we have to keep in mind is we can't make up our own rules on what we can give out and what we can't because we're a public entity and we have to abide by statute and what's in statute. And what we're gonna find, I think, is not that we're gonna find, we don't have to invent exemptions because there are so damn many exemptions in the state public right now. Anybody who wants to dive into this can spend the next couple of weekends just going through the 200 and probably over 300 exemptions to the public records law. A good many of them be able to trade secrets. I mean, I talked to the general council, former general council of DFR. She'd been general council for 30 years. She said there's absolutely an exception for criteria. Absolutely. So maybe what we need to do across T's and Dot Isles when we run into that situation, we need to have a finding where we declare such data to be proprietary or a trade secret or- Oh, when you get a request, you're supposed to cite a specific statute that gives you the right not to hand to turn over the record. But I think it would be better as a public entity to say our customer data or whatever, whatever we say, that we are explicitly stating we hereafter consider this chunk of data to be proprietary. That way, when somebody requests it, we can say we found this stuff to be proprietary back in this state and pursuant to this part of the statute, we're going to, we're going to call for that card out. Yeah, no, I think you're right. Thinking ahead about this stuff is a good idea. If David had taken the information we got from Bill Powell and put it on one of his maps, would that be covered? The map? The product? The product would not under this. The product might be subject to a separate exemption for proprietary business information, trade secrets. I was just going to ask if the committee is going to draft a confidentiality agreement or if I should do that or if you would have to do that. I think at some point one will be drafted. Okay. Okay. Hopefully before we get any information. Maybe we should, maybe we might think about it a little bit before, but let's, first of all, I think typically the provider of the information is going to want you to sign there. Okay. Okay. So I think that we'll see, once we get a little further down that path, we'll see if we need one and probably at that point, if we do need one, we'll have someone else's model to work on. Yeah, this isn't a question so much as a statement and I don't, I'm going to get the statement in somewhere, but we're starting to give the clerk some responsibilities which could put her out there legally. And I really think we need to start thinking of it as an organization, how we can indemnify, you know, how we can start making sure that if they're, I don't want to see Becca personally hauled into court if she's defending the board here, you know. So I just, I don't know where or when we start dealing with that, but that's something that needs to come at a certain point. How does that work for town clerks? They get bonded through the town, through the town, through their insurance, right? That's the way I'm used to seeing it done. And our board has, you know, I'm on another board, we have board insurance. But there's also a limited or qualified community for public officials. Basically, and you can't be, if you're a member of the select board, you can't be sued in your individual capacity. If you are, what effectively has to happen is that the municipality steps up and defends for you. Okay, and I haven't researched at all how that might apply to this board. I mean, I think I've seen cases where those people are listed as defendants and the judge just says, yeah, just clears them off and then the municipality for arching organization stays. This is, this may be too far afield, but one other piece that sort of segues, I think, buttresses against this business development. So probably would want to have some sort of language to let potential donors know that their personally identifying information will be available to the public, probably. I don't want to scare donors away, but I also don't like, probably be just their name. Okay, just their name? Not their email? They shouldn't, well, yeah. Well, we need a customer database. You know, we need a donor database. We can't just like take their money and be like, so, yeah. You certainly don't want to ask for their socials and you certainly wouldn't use their bank account numbers. So are these donor information considered proprietary business data? I mean, I can't conceive of it being legally allowed to be, right? I mean, as a public entity, if you're taking money from anybody, you need to be able to indicate it. We're not a superpower. Your name, address, and your phone number are publicly available in the information. Okay, yeah. Yeah. You're not protected. Anyway, I just want to flag, I don't know if this is the germane moment to be talking about it. Anything else about a bylaw policy committee? Questions or suggestions for Jim or other folks on that committee? Were you looking for this to be accepted tonight? We can, if there's no proposals to amend it. Do you want a clean copy? Yeah. So I'll make the motion that we accept the policy on, so before I say this, should I be saying CV-Fiber or Central Vermont Internet or does it matter? So I move then and we accept the policy as presented for our CV-Fiber, Central Vermont Internet and Governing Board policy on data and business information, acquisition and retention. Second. Okay, any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Passes unanimously. Thanks for your work on that, Jim. Can you just pass the resolution? Let's recognize the other members of the committee as well. Thanks to everybody on the committee for. Yes. Thank you. So just a point of information, have we now adopted that or have we had a first reading and it goes to a second reading? Don't know that we've done that in the past. You can definitely change our policies. Know that we had a, did we have it gone? We have a policy on adoption of policies. No, I'm not going to write a policy on adoption of policies. So I'm going to go with it was just adopted and if somebody wants to, if somebody wants to, does this sound good to act like the house or something like that? I'm just saying. We can always move to Amanda in the future. This is true. So yeah, so this is going around, don't sign for your town, please. If you're voted against it or abstain, don't sign for your town. Can I ask a technical question on this too? Does it matter if we call them bylaws or policies? Yes. The only reason I'm asking is because the enabling statute strictly refers to our ability as a governing board to create bylaws. So I don't know if that's a distinction without a difference with a difference who cares a difference, what? I mean what I know is that usually a nonprofit has to file their bylaws with the secretary of state's office. And then the way you operate you do through policies and then a next level down is procedures. So I thought it was kind of odd in the statute actually the way they just tossed out that word without really defining what they expected. Typically bylaws are organizational documents set up in your structure and voting and things along those lines. All of those things are set out in the statute by which we operate so effectively in my mind those are our bylaws and the things that we adopt to guide our future decision-making and actions are our policies. I'm fine. How are we doing this procedure? And if we had a charter, I think that would be a way to extend our bylaws according to state law anyways. Okay, so just a logistical question, a tactical question. So we're signing this. What are we doing in terms of setting up, is there gonna be a separate Google folder that has constrained permissions? Is that the, just? Okay. Good start. I would expect so. I just wanna like have like a logical next step. I believe to be honest to part of what I think we thought it was, let's be a little careful about what we asked for to start. Like, you know, have a reason for it. So we're not, you know, not burdening ourselves with something we're not ready to manage, but not to say that we can't ask for it, but just let's be thoughtful. Business Development Committee report back in request. So, Jerry Demetides is not here today. Let me see if I can go back to my minutes from the Business Development Committee. Feel free, folks who are there to fill in the address. So we had a kind of wide-ranging discussion, possibly incorporating a 501C3 in order to pursue different sorts of grants. How much that would cost. Coming after a fiscal agent. Jerry was gonna write a paragraph for the government board about this idea that that's sort of got lost in translation. I expect we'll come back to that probably at the next meeting. Probably my fault for sending out minutes just within a five-day period. All right, and so we had a talk about fundraising and here's where, here's where the shake-down happens. I'm gonna sign this. Shake-down with the board. The state monitor. Sure. Thank you, just so we don't forget. So in order to get us started like a lot of non-profits do is we're going to expect the board to be at 100% donor rate, right? So we're gonna ask for each of you to contribute $250 and to raise an additional 500 from your bestest friends, relatives, enemies, select board members and such. Is this up for debate? And well, you gotta finish the, he wanted to like have the pin drop, but it should be emphasized that this is, there's no mechanism for enforcement here. There's no sort of, you know, nobody's gonna be watching, nobody's gonna be keeping tabs on what people do or don't do, basically. And it's a suggested amount, suggested approach. So you come to the potluck and it's $20 suggested donation. So we're making the suggested donation to $250. If that's, there's a better number for you. I have a better turn of phrase. Sure. I would like to change it to one of these two. Board members are expected to make an annual financial contribution that would be considered generous for them. Or board members will give annually at a level that is meaningful to them. Because we are not precluding people who are fairly impoverished in our small communities for being board members by setting a dollar amount. That's a great point. And I think that the Business Development Committee would probably accept that. I think we were just picking a number out that seems reasonable. I certainly agree with the intent. I certainly agree with that. But I'm very concerned about representation on this board. For sure. And I think we need to be able to be open to people who do not have the resources. $250 is a lot. I'm wondering. You know, I think we also have to be careful what a public entity can suggest or require a member to do. We're different than a private entity. And I don't know if there's any law on this at all. But it would be really odd if to serve in a school board you were expected to make a donation. So yeah, it's certainly not an expectation. It's a, we are hoping for everybody to participate in this way. And maybe the way that the framing would be that that is something that the Business Development Committee agreed to bring to the larger board. But it's not something that we would expect the larger board to codify or vote on. Like we voted that as a recommendation to the board. It's not something that you could adopt. So a twist of the arm and not a procedure or a policy. You did it. By the way, Alan, I would like to say that as a school board member, when you do your budget, you are making a contribution to the school board. So people would argue with that. It's not voluntary, but it's just part of the whole like, how do we unveil just a donation capital campaign anyways? Because then it makes it all a little softer. It's like, here, we're going to do this. And I have no problem a person at some level giving in or beating on some people in town. But it's easier to do that when it's kind of seen as there's like a capital campaign going on, even if it's wherever. But at least there's like one or two. There's a website to go to, or there's one talking point, or whatever, because then it makes it a lot easier. So I don't know. I didn't know where. This is a little bit cartinetic, I understand. We just want to get something in the conference and ball roll in which I have a problem. Yeah, I think the instinct was that if we have the board starting, it's a little bit easier to sell going to John Doe X in Cabot, or the Cabot Economic Development Group, and saying, hey, we're getting started. Can you come on board with us? And here's where we are. I think you'll see what it adds to that, Elliot, that we've been. So I do have a question about that. If I'm asking my neighbor for $500, he says that's great, as long as it's tax deductible. I'm going to say, yep, we are a public nonprofit. In fact, we're a municipality. He'll say, what's your tax ID number from the IRS? We have an EIN. Yeah, that's going to be on. So I am working on the receipt, but it's going to be like you get from charities. It'll say no goods or services. And it'll have our EIN on it. OK. But it's not a 501c3. Not that it's a 501c3, but that it is a municipality. And that usually doesn't get it. The donation is tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law. That's what we know. So you're tax advisor. We are not attorneys or helpers. That's what we have on us. I'm assuming we're going to have that. Yeah, there is a part of the tax code. It's like Section 107 or something like that, which municipalities and nonprofit organizations that can receive charitable donations fall under. I don't remember. It's 10 something. Yes. But those donations have to be made for a public purpose. I can't give it to you, select board member, for your good deeds as a select board member. Of course. So we, yes. Unless you call it a bribe. So bribe. Are we soliciting a central remote or not a central remote fiber, which is the? I think CV Fiber is what we've all seen. CV Fiber is the word of it. Although if we got to check for central remote internet, I suspect we could. So the other, I think the other. Or does Steve Whitaker give it? I think the other piece of this is that we need some props and materials to do this. So I got a preliminary website up. Go to CVFiber.net. There is an age. Really? Yes. I think we're going to scratch this one. All the computers come up a little later. It's on a temporary server, so at some point, we'll have to find some funds to move it and or do it because it's not very, you know, I don't know. Not my day job. That's it? Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, no. Really? I brought my camera here tonight so we can take a group photo to put on the website and to put on materials as well. And I will be taking that language. And probably you guys will have lots of comments on it. We'll take that language along with Jeremy's FAQ and be working on just a one-pager leave behind as well. Now that we have a checking account, I can also get on an online portal up with your, you know, sort of with the authorized agents' approval and blessing. So we can do that. I did hear back on a related note with the website. Did you hear back from John from Roxbury, who's not here because of all the snow and whatnot at another meeting he had tonight? He did talk to his friend who was offering or is possibly offering free web hosting. And that person said, it sounded like they were at least interested, but that their schedule was basically packed full until earlier next year, at which point that he said he'd circle back around and be willing to probably come back to us. Still a little bit of work in progress. So, you know. How did you? Take a quick slide. Oh, I see what you're talking about. Oh, I see what you're talking about. It's WordPress. It's a quick WordPress. So one quick comment. When we formed Cloud Alliance 15, 16 years ago, it was a community thing. A town of Plainfields formed it. And the first people to contribute money were called Plainfield pioneers. So if we can do a little alliteration about central fiber in some way for the early donors, who they're saying, well, what's this for? This is for the early organization. It's not building anything yet, but you're a pioneer. Or something like that that might be an approach. The fiber strands. The warp and the weft of the fiber on our lives. I'm starting to get, and this is probably more me in how I interpret things, but I'm starting to get kind of, I'm getting confused. Should we be waiting now? Because I hear suggestions about, you know, waiting for some sort of an organized outreach, having some form of, you know, moniker for whoever puts up or having some sort of organized goal. Or are we waiting until something organized gets passed out to us and says, this is the material to use, go out and get money? Or are we being asked potentially to walk out of here or find somebody on the street and ask them for money? I think all of those. So I think the business development committee is we're working on materials. And those will be forthcoming soon, but some of those materials, we're not going to be totally clear about what that should contain until we can answer some of the questions about the preferred development route and some of the stuff that we got from David Healy. I think that will help. And I'd also just say, you know, I mean, you know, the idea, this is sort of a quick and dirty fundraising strategy, right? And the idea is that we're drawing concentric circles out from ourselves, essentially, right? So we start with ourselves, then we go to people who know us and trust us and maybe don't need a piece of paper, maybe don't need to go to an internet website, do diligence, and then the next circle out, I think are those folks we might have connections with but need to have that sort of tangible asset to figure out what's going on, right? So I think we just get started with those two initial circles and then we get going on that external circle, as we can. So yeah, if there's somebody really fired up in your community that's interested in seeing this succeed and they're willing to help us in the beginning parts of what we're building here, so that we can do things like maybe get a post office box, get office supplies, and then some of these other sorts of things so that we don't have to rely on our intrepid treasure to fund all of it. If we have somebody who wants to give items instead of money, are we open to that? Like office supplies. I would say so, yeah. Yeah, the tax letter becomes a little trickier in my very limited experience with any kind. Any kind of donation. But it's, you can still do it. You can still do it. Most of the people I know don't do any tax things. They just, they don't have any cash, so they'll give you some toilet paper or something. I think we're good with toilet paper. Yeah. Yeah. See the answer to this is, here's your twos. Yeah, unless we want to put five or three to roll all of those, but. Okay, and yeah, so there was that. We talked about grant funding, a couple of different angles looking at talking to the legislature when the budget is being drafted, talking to the governor's office, is there a way for funding to be procured for communications union districts in particular, or public development, USDA, I expect to have a meeting with the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission in December. There's probably not going to be lots of funds coming from them that they may have in kind services that they can provide. ACCD or future alternate from up here is a, could be our lifeline over there and they may have planning grants and other things that we can look at from there. There's this other stuff that we talked about. And yeah, we talked about putting together a fundraising plan for calendar year 2019. Something that we didn't talk about that I want to call out is that there is a draft RFP from the connectivity fund for the state of Vermont. They actually have a list of all the addresses which the state has decided is underserved. And I went through and I pulled all of our member towns and I found, what did I find? That's going to be updated in a couple weeks. It will, as different organizations challenge whether they're involved. The challenges have already gone in and they're kind of fine. Yeah, I found that from EC5 or so. As of right now, it's 719 that are allegedly underserved but that number will probably come down a bit. I was very happy to see my own address where I just moved is on that list. So quite a lot in Worcester, quite a lot in Middlesex, Elmore. So underserved means they don't have DSL. They have dial up or satellite. No, four down one up is what's less than four down one up is considered underserved in the state. Okay, so if they claim that we get more than that that we are underserved. Right, so, I mean, ostensibly I have DSL at my location. I do get better than four one, not much and not most of the time. Yeah, same. But again, it's up to the providers to say, hey, we're good on these. And the idea is that service providers that will go to these locations and cover them will get some money to do so, to bring them above four ones which is a pretty darn low bar. So those names you thought are just within our district or this? I just have it in Excel spreadsheet. I just took what I got from the state. I just chose our 16 municipalities. There's none in Montpelier, for example. No one. I wasn't too much, but in terms of the discussion we've had about where to start a pilot, is there anything that's leaking out from that list? I mean, pretty much what we expected, where we expected, there's really no surprises. And I think Michael's right. Once these numbers, once this gets scrubbed and the addresses are challenged, it'll be interesting to go back and see what's actually marked as underserved. So we'll see, but I mean, the addresses I see, for example, in Berlin are fairly far afield, out at the end of rural dirt roads. Like, yeah. So I'm thinking like. Class three or fourth? There's a friend of mine in Worcester. Let's see. West Hill Road, there's a bunch on West Hill Road. Minister Brook. Oh yeah, that's the. I said we got a trifecta in Hamford Hills on that. Hold on. I mean, they all come together. There are two, three addresses on Hamford Hill. Yeah. That's the trifecta in Worcester, right? There are a lot of people who I think have money who would like to get high speed internet. Holtz Road, Elmore Road, Eagle Ledge. Yep. So, I mean, those are. Is that the list that you've posted on Google Docs that we can see? I got it from the Connectivity Initiative site. I mean, I can put it out there, but it's really just a, I just really got it from the state and just filtered it. But yeah, I can put it out there. If you want to do that, I can read, I'll probably all like to see this. There's, there's a map as well. Oh, they did a map? Oh, sure. I didn't see that. That's a lot easier to use. I just got this yesterday, so. Oh, okay. Okay, so I'll put the Excel of the underserved, let's just say the finger quote underserved. I'll put that up. I'll get the link to the map to you. I just forwarded you an email about the Think Vermont Innovation Grant Program. It's designed to fund projects in areas that have been identified as crucial to the growth of the Vermont small businesses. The areas include, these areas include those that number three, enable or support broadband telecommunication access. Nick Grimley from your office? Yes. He receives those. It says, okay, is that some, it says the appropriation for this program is $150,000 and that's across the whole program. That's great. So, if you go after, go after a little bit. A little bit, 10. It's the juice worth the squeeze. Yeah. If somebody's gonna write this grant, we can approve them, force them to do that. Takers? What I'll do is I'll provide what the guidelines are that they're still being developed. Okay. What's the deadline? December 7th. December 7th. You better get going. So. Take that. Submissions are accepted and so the funding has been allocated or December 7th, whichever comes first. So it could even be soon in December 7th. If somebody's willing to sit down and just plow through this, over three hours or four hours, I don't think I could devote more than that that I could sit down with somebody. I'll help. And do that. Okay, okay. I think my one piece of advice would be to make sure that we get those requirements because we might find that we're just not ready to be afraid. So, because of the short timeline, if we can just make that sort of like a tactical decision and what are we asking? So what are we, what would we be asking for? For what? For doing our initial planning? Okay. So I'm gonna make a motion that we authorize myself and Siobhan to apply for a grant to the Think Vermont Innovation Grants. Second. Okay. Second by Dan Jones. Any other commentary thoughts? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstentions. Motion passes unanimously. Great. More stuff to do. Thanks guys. And that's my list. Thanks for that, Jim. Thanks to your wife. Yeah. Ignore the sort of interpersonal family dialogue that goes through that. I skipped over it. And thanks for the map, Michael. Okay. Anything else in business to help me community that I missed? I sort of blew through that pretty quickly. I think the last thing is make it on here. Survey. I think you go to the separate item. I made it as a separate item so that we could, I have to do the overview and then we could dive into actually asking questions. And we are actually on time. Okay. Preferred development route and pilot projects. This was something that David Healy put together. I think that's who it is. This is in the packet. He also put together a little grid for what he imagined the community engagement, the communications plan was. This is just his idea of sort of an Excel sort of thing with blue-ish on the page, on the page 10 of the packet. Sort of like blue-ish highlighting where we need to be doing different things in different months. And it is his, trying to wrap his brain around what we need to do to get sort of getting stuff done. And I think what the, kind of the main takeaway, the way that he described it was that these are crazy tight goals, crazy tight deadlines of things that we need to be doing. So whether we're gonna, can you get to them or not is a big question, but create a public website and all these things. But he also brought to the business development committee sort of a set of scenarios that we should probably try to nail down at this level, kind of at the strategic level, before we can even decide what we're gonna do at the smaller level. And this is something that he has actually, he dove into in an incredible amount of detail. I don't know that he shared it with everybody, but he has some basically, it's like a three or four page list of all the things that we need to do. Which is really rigging scary. But he's right, but there are some bigger decisions and I like what he did here, is he tried to consolidate all the bigger decisions and the biggest decisions into this one right here so that we can talk about it, balance pros and cons and see if there's one of these that makes the most sense for us. So page 11 of the packet. And just the other thing that we just sort of discussed in the committee was that there needs to be sort of a disclaimer attached to this discussion, which is that we are very much in preliminary stages. Obviously there's a lot of money and technical expertise that need to, and other things that need to go into making this real. But he was really encountering problems trying to construct a survey without having at least some sort of straw straw man or whatever to build it against, right? So the idea is we just gotta get going. Let's take our best guess based off of sort of some general assumptions and then we're gonna build out on to that. But it's not committing in perpetuity here, right? And the idea is what do we do now knowing that we will likely have to change, change approaches later on as we go. So he suggested that the governing board should decide what the preferred development route initially for CB fiber should be. And so he wrote the four possible choices are and I actually added two more after that. So that should really say the six possible choices are. And I'm gonna read these without the pros and cons and then we can sort of look at these and evaluate these and talk a bit more before we decide if we decide. First one is focus initial development efforts in areas with the highest potential residential customer density regardless of how few towns may be included. B, focus initial development efforts on establishment of a corridor that includes multiple towns in an attempt to include as many towns as early as feasible. C, focus initial development on a single town to get a high penetration rate in that town. D, focus initial development in areas with a high density of potential business subscribers to build a high revenue base. These are ones that I added afterwards. E, focus initial development in areas where the need is greatest and only DSL is available. F, focus on locations where it is possible to use or extend existing infrastructure. So these are not necessarily mutually exclusive. These are fairly overlapping here. Can I just say something, Jeremy? Please. Jerry, David and I did a subcommittee meeting of that meeting and the two you added were in our discussions and somehow got dropped. So there you are. Oh good, good. I'm glad I added them by Vensel Powers. I'm wondering if there, maybe there's a meta strategy which is if we're going to be successful in going to bonding, we need to have a proven track record. And so on those strategies, we should do the one that works the best in terms of finding subscribers and serve cost benefit to us. Can I ask how much permission plays into a decision when it comes to bonds? Well, I mean, there's a general idea of serving everybody, right? But I've got a feeling that if we, we have to be careful about that and that we probably can't do that right away. So it might be, mission might be important to who we think our customers are and we want them to be but might not be so important when we're thinking about bonds and promise. Right, I mean, this is after all business. I mean, it's a mission driven business, but still. So I had a meeting with ValiNet yesterday talking to them about essentially drilling more into the weeds about where we are and asking them some questions and asking them about the feasibility of them being an operator for us. One of the things that they suggested is that while the conventional wisdom is that it does, it will require three years of financials to go after bonds, they said, because this is a reasonably proven structure here that they've done it, that it's, it may be more possible that it might move us to actually go and see whether that's actually a really requirement or not. Which I thought, and that was coming from their CFO. He said that might not be as hard as we thought. I have a whole bunch of other stuff to bring back from ValiNet too, but I'm gonna let. I also wanna, I don't want us to do the same things that the private companies are doing. I don't want us to look at density as the prime mover on this, because that's how we are where we are right now. It's just repeating the same mistakes that, whatever the name of that, corporation is now that used to be Fairpoint. Consolidation. Consolidation. Yeah. Stupid name. Whoops, that's on the record. So I'm less inclined towards the, well, we're gonna have a high density of subscribers here. I think if we go somewhere that's underserved, we're gonna get a density. They've got 3,000 subscribers with EC5 right now. That's on their website, 3,000. And there are how many years into this? 10. Is it 10? Depends on how you measure it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I believe that initially, yes, we might have some fumbling around, but I think we should really allow our mission to drive this because I'm very concerned about the population that is constantly overlooked in here and the people who are living in these small communities who just don't have a lot of density. And I think we need to represent them. So one of the things that I don't wanna say may render this whole thing moot, but the advice that I got from ValleyNet, and I say that specifically, I'm not talking about EC5 or I'm talking about ValleyNet, which is the operating company. They said ValleyNet chose the deployment strategy. EC5 or said... Good. Here's the capital. ValleyNet said, okay. Now how did, since EC5 or didn't have three years of financials, how did they manage to buy? They did have about three years of financials because they crowdfunded for the first seven years. They had some healthy initial dollars. Okay. And ValleyNet itself was one of the initial donors that got them going and then they had another several million dollars of crowdfunding with these promissory notes to get them to the point where they could get to that three years and they could then go to the bond market. As soon as they went to the bond market, they took that bond revenue and they paid off their initial investors. Most of them in the first round. Did ValleyNet handle the financial work for them once they came in? Anything that was operational? I mean, they contracted out for some of the legal bits and pieces we have. Most of that stuff was... And ValleyNet basically answered these questions that you guys put together and we're going here. Yeah, for the most part. And there were some limits of what they could do and some practicality. Like there were people who were contributing, who were sort of saying, I'm donating so that you can hook me up. And so when they built out Barnard, I think is where they started. That was where, you know, they built a network in a non-ideal sort of way. Pull the five rich men please. Yeah, so it doesn't mean that we can't do things differently but I want to tell you what I heard from them. So some of the else I heard from them is that I pitched a small pilot project in Northfield to Roxbury because they have cables really close. I said, maybe you can extend your network there. And they didn't come out and say it but the strong suggestion was for a small pilot project like that, the amount of work that they would have to do internally to make that feasible for them. Just not, it's not something that they would, they'd be willing to do. They said, want to turn on a town? Let's go. So one question I had is any thoughts or one of our 16 of best prototypical, is Worcester just a good all-around kinda, it's got some of a little of everything and it's a good proving ground. Cause there is some argument to that strategy, you just pick a town and go for it and you'll learn a lot and at least you've covered a town and, but then what's the criteria if you've been picking a town? Right, well, so it has a lot to do with the operator, I think, and looking at East, that Valley and at EC Fiber in particular, they already have customers in Roxbury, I found out. They do, because their fiber runs in order to serve people in Brookfield, their fiber darts briefly over the border of Roxbury and cuts back into Brookfield and they serve people over there. But yeah, there's people on Steel Hill Road in Roxbury that are currently, right now, EC Fiber customers. So it's easier if they run from where they are into someplace they aren't? I, otherwise, you're gonna have to pay for a backhaul to connect the two networks. So it might make sense to say, let's fundraise to build Roxbury or whatever. Something else that they suggested, which, and I don't mean to sideline this whole discussion, but because this is new and fresh, I think this is relevant to the question. They said, go talk to the organizations that could be operators now and figure out what are their plans? What are they gonna do? How would they do these things? And they specifically said, and people can cringe if they like, but they said, go talk to TDS. They have infrastructure there. They do have people on staff who build fiber to the home. Talk to them and say, where are you building? You wanna build it for us? You wanna operate it for us? I don't know how I feel about that. Actually, I kind of know how I feel about it, but I don't wanna say it. So that was one of the things that they said, and they said, the other thing to do is build more fiber, have more strands than you need because you'll appreciate it two, three years down the road. Wow, there's so much. Carol suggested, Carol from ValleyNet, EC Fiber suggested for fundraising, she said, ask WEK to invest in a bunch of promissory notes and partner with them to put it on all of their polls and figure out some way of operating it from there. That way, you're not talking about taxpayer money and they're investing, they're getting a percentage and because they're a non-profit, that 7.5% that you're giving them because they're not being taxed on it ends up looking more like an 11% return to anybody else. That's the numbers that I'm getting. If you want to be from the CFO. So Bill Powell was, so Tom and Bob and I all went to the select board meeting to talk about, in East Montpelier to talk about the annual report and budget and Bill Powell from Washington Electric was there and he was interested in hearing more about what we're doing and being involved so. It sounds like there's already been some discussion inside of Blackboard with us. Yeah. Maybe there's a little or something that they wanted to talk to us about but they hadn't yet gotten to the point that they could come forward with that. Well, one of their board members is on the select board with me and she and I have had some discussion and she indicated that yes, they have had internal discussions. They're very interested in this project. They have some small community-based grants that, you know, not a lot of money but she was encouraging me to have us apply for one of those just in, you know. You know, Vermont State employees credit unions and another one, I realized just the other day they have a small community credit. That'd be like $500 to $1,000 kind of thing. Are we in there? They have. The SEC? Are we getting this together? Yeah, we're in there actually. They, it depends on how you want to talk about these promissory notes in the beginning but they actually might be very interested in providing some of the funding you need depending on the structure in which it's done within. You know, if there is a potential of a co-op function within this they can actually invest directly rather than loaning money. So it's worthwhile exploring that. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's ways to make it palatable, one way or the other. As a, what you were saying about how you let the operator figure out how they're gonna do this makes sense to me. It's like, and this is the analogy I came up with is probably not gonna be appreciated but I'm a developer and what I want the user to tell me is what are you trying to accomplish? I'll figure out how to give you that. You tell me what you're trying to accomplish. And so that's kind of what that sounds like to me is that that's what they're saying is. So it seems like we wanna find an operator and maybe we should be focusing on finding an operator that we can work with. Right, and one of the things they called us was they said you don't want a 24 person board like you see Fiverr has, or a 16 person board like we have making these sorts of operational decisions because we have long discussions. Boy do we. But that brings us back to these. These aren't questions just for the operator. These are what we're gonna guide the operator with. Right, right. Whether we wanna do a whole town or a corridor that's dense and can be successful financially so it will impress the bond market. Those questions really matter now. So what gates is right now? Excuse me? What gates is right now? I can look at all six of those. We don't have enough information to make that decision and we don't know, as a board especially, I'd be very skeptical. So what gates is right now outside of fundraising in finding an operating partner? What specific answer do you need that would stop us from accomplishing either of those two goals? There's more than those two. Well, those are the two most important things we can do to start. Get money and find an operating partner. Right, so all of these are inextricably linked. Do we have, I mean, I guess this is more of a philosophical discussion than anything? Or is there anything in here that leaves out at you and says no, we shouldn't do this or yes, we must do this? I think, you know, Siobhan came out of the gate saying that we probably shouldn't focus on density and that's the advice that I'm getting from Valley Net and some fiber is that they're saying focus on the underserved. Yeah, I think Siobhan is, I totally agree with her. I think the mission of this organization is the strongest selling point we have and whether it will actually result in the most cash raised and the most quickly, I don't know. But I think the strength of the mission is something that will be appealing to, I think, a lot of people who are willing to support us by giving us money and getting connected. Unlike most corporations who are, you know, responsible to their shareholders, we're responsible to the towns we represent. They would leave us at the drop of a hat if somebody gave them a better deal. Oh yeah. And so, I mean, yeah, I think that that's an important thing that obviously I'm glad you brought it up, Siobhan, because that should be in the forefront of our primary responsibility, obviously, is to. So I'd like to twist the concept of density a little bit. We should go for density, but the density is the subscriber density, not the population density, not the business density. So if there's a very underserved town, we may get 40 or 50% take rate in that town and we'll have density, which will drive a business, which will impress the bond market. But if we go to a town, sorry, Montpelier, they're very well-served. And it's gonna be a lot harder to get that kind of business case from that. And so the two ideas actually come together. If you go to a town that's underserved, you're gonna get, unless it's very sparsely populated as well, then you're gonna get a business case. And so while we're having this conversation, please look at page 13 of the packet. That's more data that David pulled together in terms of density and how many miles of roads have certain densities by town broken down by town. Thank you. Rami, you had a question before. Well, it's actually not a question so much as it's a combination of things. One is I do think that if you sat down and took a look at what I had drafted up for policies and procedures, it would mirror what's being presented here in the sense that I think it would lead us to the question of what should we be doing first, getting somebody to actually do the operations for us or try to develop these plans, you know? So I agree that I think we really need to focus on getting an operator and however we feel we wanna do that, whether we want to directly hire a business manager, whether we wanna contract out with something like Valley Nut or whatever. I think that we really need to do that, but going back to this list as a list of principles that we would, as a board, that would be our place to put on anybody that we hired to operate our system for us. I'll go back to what I said at a meeting or a couple of meetings ago that, you know, to me the first thing is to get the organization up running and stable. And that means in the very beginning, I am going to be very agnostic as to how we get it financially stable for the very beginning. I'm willing to overlook some things in order to get an organization that can function. In the long run, yeah, I mean, you know, underserved, but there's also people that need to be better served. And, you know, Williamstown's full of underserved, people that need to be better served and people that have really great service right now but might like to go with a municipal organization because that's what they'd like to support. But so I'm willing to accept pretty much anything that anybody puts out there that can generate revenue to get the organization funded. I kinda like the concept you put out there that, you know, if you look at the possible customer base, forget about density of population but density of possible customer base. Frankly, I don't care. I'll let somebody that knows the business better than me sit there and tell me where the most money is gonna come from and I'll say yes. Because that's what I, from my perspective, that's where I think is most important philosophically at this point. Once we're on solid ground, and I would say once, if we can get something, anything set up after this first year, I think we'll be on solid ground. And then we can be more particular about how we move forward. I think at the end of the day, as people have pointed out, this is sort of a chicken, it's not really a chicken and egg situation. Basically we need money and we need a provider, right? And we're trying to approach the money piece. We're trying to tackle the money piece because this is a partnership between us and the provider, right? What do we bring to the table to provide? What do we bring? Capital, basically. That's about it, right? We bring marching orders too. We bring marching orders. That's the third piece. And we have to concentrate on what it is we want them to do for us before we choose them, even. But we do have the, we also have the potential to leverage, you know, there's some potential for some regulatory leverage to, at some point, downline where we might be able to get a carve out for ourselves in some capacity or another, right? Let's set that aside for now. But my point is that it sounds to me like what we really need is we need somebody to develop in partnership potentially with one of these providers, develop some sort of, you know, request for proposal so that we have a target for raising money. You know, like if we're talking about raising money, these people are gonna do this for free. We need to establish sort of what they need to tell us what our target community is, right? Tell us what the most ideal community for them to go into right now is. So I would propose that we either by committee or by individual, you know, reach out to somebody, develop a proposal, get some proposals from people, develop an idea of what our target is for money. Does that sound? Yeah, so I mean, I think I have a pretty good idea of what next steps with ValleyNet would be. I think for them, it would be really only feasible to have to talk about full town builds in towns that are contiguous to their network. So what you're really talking about, Williamstown, Northfield, Roxbury. So it might make sense to talk to a few different providers and see what works best in their business interest, right, because there might be some that are aligned in other places in our service area. Yeah, I would think like even the first slide might be actually in the Berlin area at this point. So it might provide a remind one approach. Interesting. Well, I know they also, they built a line between the schools in Williamstown and Northfield. So can I ask, are we talking about approaching possible providers or are we talking about finding a consultant who would help us approach possible? Right. Because I mean, I actually think one of the people who we all know is out of work right now is a person who is pushing statewide fiber. And she wanted to have it done by utilities they didn't require to put string wires on their poles. And I think it would be fun to talk to Christine Hoplis. She could probably raise her own salary with grant rating. Well, that might be. That's actually, that's a terrific idea. I mean, I sort of bounced into the back of my mind. I have had conversations with her about communications union districts in general before the election, but. So, I mean, I have this fantasy that Phil Scott's gonna offer her the position of state to build out the internet position now, but I don't think he would do that. But should we go and try to grab her and have her build this? Yes. Well, I mean, I would defer to experts in the room on this particular topic as to who we choose. Maybe even have a committee that's looking for a consultant. I think it'd be great to have her come and talk to us and then we can think about her ideas. But the idea of actually doing it. I'm not saying we just like pick her out of, you know, pick her out of the air just because Alan mentioned it, but in terms of that sort of person who's going to go and own the process of finding the operator, any other thoughts? Or unappealing. Somebody who's got both the mental bandwidth and the time and the vision to. Or the experience. The experience to want to, you know, kick the ball would be great. Talk to her quickly before she finds another job. Could we call her an executive director, which might help her in her other endeavors? We can call the position of a lot of different things, I think. But I think. So that was, are there other likely people that would fit this thing in the profile? I mean, I think, I don't know. She's an electricity executive, right? She does electricity. I mean, there's a difference between electricity and the internet. But the co-op. I don't know. I'm just wondering if there's like a person who would know more than somebody. I think the co-op background is really important because I mean, she was able to sketch out a plan how you could finance actually doing something like this and it was based on her experience. So could we agree in principle that this is the sort of, this is our logical next step is to find somebody who is going to be getting, drawing a salary in some form or another who is going to be also possibly raising money and doing this sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that everybody's on board here. So what do you see our next step to be then, Michael? I don't think we're looking for a savior to lead us. I think we want to tell someone what we want them to do. And Christine might be that person or other good people might be that person, but it's more important that we set, in my opinion, what our objectives are before we ride someone else's horse. That's my first impression, but I could be swayed. Haven't we set our objectives though? I mean, don't we have- And these questions right here are really crucial questions of how do we want to focus on the community? We don't have the ability to answer things like density ourselves, but philosophically speaking, I think we're generally to consensus that underserved is the way to go. Kill me if I'm misspeaking. No, but I think it's more than that. Like you said, a lot of these are overlapping, right? So if you were to grab the underserved with the dense population, throw in what was after, so there's already some locations where there's the existing infrastructure that may already exist, where maybe an Easter or a straight shot or whatnot that we could follow along. If we could find that unicorn, if you will, of all these things together, then that would be a clear path for us to follow. Yeah, just throw up the term that what I'm hearing is you might want to invite Christine to give a pitch because that allows this body to take on what she's saying partly to inform whatever your next steps are, but she may have something that's like 90% of the way there which then would allow this body to add some more flesh to it and follow up. But it may be no, I think that her approach may be something that the board, after listening, says, you know, I heard that couple things were good, but no, but I take it as an offer to make a pitch, give her the parameters, the history of this discussion, make a pitch. To what end, to function as a telecommunications consultant to the board to develop a business plan, or pitch is up to, to me it's up to her. She would frame, it's her pitch. This is what I would provide to this body. And so, so maybe what we need is an RFP, a request for a pitch, or those. No, so we can hear it. Well, but we ask, but we ask. Can you tell me this request for advice, as opposed to a pitch on her behalf? I'm not a request for advice. I think we should write it in saying this. Have her come and advise us what she thinks would be good for you. We've been working on this for eight months. We're at this point where we think we've gotten to a new level where we're really grappling with some of the base issues we have to decide. And we don't want to make any mistakes. We try more to mitigate the number of mistakes we're going to make. So could you just meet with us and hear what we have to say. And you ask us questions, we're asking you questions. I actually need to be a little bit more of a carrot there. But let's open it up to everybody. Let's not just say because we, you know, this former combinatorial candidate because the name is recognized and easily memorable that we should necessarily say that she's going to be the one. There might be, there's probably other folks out there that could do similar, give similar. Of all the people who could be asked to re-pick her brain and she's the only person who really laid out a vision for how you could build that internet in the state. Now, whether it could work or not, we don't know. But I think it's just a logical thing that we would invite somebody like her to just say, well, here's what I've been thinking. And this is where I think you, as a communications union district, could use the structure to do X, Y, and Z that's on your agenda. I support that suggestion. But limit it that way. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yeah. And promptly, I think if Phil Scott hasn't already made that offer, it'll come off, Lee Soonman. No, he'd be nuts. He's not going to spend that money. And I wonder how far we want to go in terms of attaching some numbers to this. It's one thing to find thousands of customers. And if it costs a million dollars to serve them, and they'll give us that million dollars back in five years. It's great. If it takes 25 years to get that million dollars back, it doesn't work. And so rather than just approach this philosophically and find somebody who's got some great ideas and a similar philosophy and all that, I think we might need to go further. Yeah, I think you're right. But I think that follows. Did the company, I can't remember the cooperative, did it have competitors? Was it in a competitive marketplace? Which one? Do you see? Yeah, no. OK, so much of her advice will not be totally germane to what we're doing, correct? My point is that I'm all for asking anybody we can for advice as much advice as possible. When it comes to, I mean, we're about to go through a lot of pain, raising money, and we are going to be entrusted by the people that give us money to make good decisions, make transparent decisions, and make decisions that take into account many factors and are rigorous. So I just want to be very clear that that's the expectation. And so when we're talking about potentially hiring a consultant, first of all, we don't have money. So that's an issue. But once we do have money, I think we have to be very, very rigorous in our approach. And I don't know if that's a policy already, that we have a requirement for RFPs and things like that. But I definitely should be. So, Allen, could you again repeat the way that you framed it, that Michael liked the way that you did? I'm sorry. Or, Michael, if you can paraphrase what Allen said, just so that we can all get rapper brains around what we're doing after. And I'll tell you if you're right or wrong. OK, good. Allen and I move that. No, don't start a motion yet. No, just describe it again. OK, so we would like to extend an invitation to Christine Halkus on the basis of the fact that she put a lot of energy into thinking about a telecommunications plan for the state. And we would like to ask her to detail that plan as it would apply to our 615 towns and offer us any advice that she might have that we might consider. And that's it. And then afterwards, if we've fallen in love, we can take another step. But that would be a really good start. Who's willing to do that outreach? I can call our campaign manager. Does anybody know her at all? I mean, I met her once. I know her a little bit, but. I have like four or five meetings with her campaign manager. If you give me your contact information, I'll call. I'm not ashamed to ask people in public. OK, so there's a difference between asking her advice on what others should do and what she would do. And I come from a planning background. And one of the great failings of planning is you get all these great ideas of what other people can do. And it is so hard to translate that into action. So that's why I like asking her, what would you do? And again, we're not promising her that she gets to do it. But it is a different question. And it's one that I think moves us faster. I'll just throw that as an observation. I'm comfortable with that, too. And we could ask her both questions. But we're not offering a job. We're not saying there's a job here. If you were in our shoes, what would you do? Yeah. Because she's picked this already as an issue that is priority for her. So who is it that's comfortable with the questions that are going to be asked, and they're willing to reach out to her? Is that Rama and Elliot? Yeah, I'll text Cam. Now, other people we could invite who aren't available but could give advice, like Carol Monroe and Stan Williams have given you advice, we could invite the people in charge of Burlington Telecom. We could invite people in charge of cable companies. All kinds of different telecommunications companies with experience competing for customers might have a perspective that's different from what Christine has. Right. And one of my personal things to do, I'm just going to do it. You can tell me not to if you like. But as I was going to contact TBS, Carol suggested I see what are they doing? What are they planning? Do they want to partner for some part of a project? I got this from time in the mail just the other day. Well, it says for $29.95 for three years, I could add TBS internet and security line phone bundle. Speeds up to $50 MPPS. You're never going to get $50,000. No, I don't understand. We don't want to talk to TBS. So not until we pull that strand to your house are you going to get $50,000, sorry. And the other thought I have about inviting people is invite people from outside of our area to get good, clean advice that isn't tainted by conflicts of interest and competitive thoughts. So I'll just put out an open invitation. Those people exist. Consider it an assignment to each of you. Talk to them and tell me, hey, they can come to the next meeting. Just tell me that and they'll go on the agenda. I think this sort of waiting for motions and orders for people that slows us down. If you, somebody wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, you're like, this person has to come. Then just calmly go compose an email and hit send in the morning. And I was consulting for eight years. We weren't stupid. When somebody said, can you come by and give us 30 minutes of advice, we'd say, absolutely. We're not going to tell you exactly what to do, but we'll come by and we'll tell you what we would do. Sure. So I mean, we can get plenty of free advice. The person you do is you get a video recording in this meeting, right? Are there any other specific suggestions for people that we ought to be reaching out to? Watesfield Champlain, maybe? Watesfield Telecom? Yeah, they would certainly be, well, they're contiguous. Contiguous. Abutting us, anyways. Yeah? I don't know anybody over there to you. Would you? OK. Anybody else? I think I'm also going to reach out to TransVideo. They're almost exclusively cable, but I'm not 100% sure if they're willing to go do other stuff. But I think, yeah, if I said we're going to start a capital campaign so that you can build up the rest of Northfield, I'm probably going to do this. Not sure that they would say no to that, but OK. Stone cable, also good. I have a lot of fiber. And again, contiguous to Elmore, anyways, or Worcester. Contiguous to Worcester. What about them? Quick. Yeah, they are also in my pipeline of people that I'm going to talk to. And Carol actually said specifically, she said if you're going to a meeting with them to talk about this, if you get a sit-down meeting, she said she's coming up. Oh, great. So I had later. Yeah, public meeting. Sorry. Everyone else, sorry. So how does everybody feel with that sort of vague marching orders right now? Is that OK to get us through till December? Sounds good. The only question I know with vague marching orders is our goal to have somebody acting as I'm just going to use it. I don't want to use the phrase executive director, but an operations manager, is that our goal to come up with an operations manager of some sort, whether an organization or an individual, within a time period here? Or is it budget? I'm not sure that we can avoid doing that. I mean, if we're going to do any sort of real planning that's going to require real work, there's got to be some real people behind it. Yeah. I mean, and so I certainly appreciate everything that everybody here does, but I don't know that anybody at the table has the bandwidth to take on it, arguably a full-time job. No, I agree. I just want us to get past the vague, let's talk to people, that at a certain point, even if we can't be perfect about our choice, we have to make a choice. And we have to move on and start doing stuff. Yeah. I think just in my head, I was envisioning like some sort of phased approach where we get money to get a consultant to help us make a plan, right? And then we take that plan and we develop an RFP based on that plan. Then the plan is used to hire somebody. Yeah, exactly. That's how I would envision it. OK. It's really important to get, it's not sufficient to get someone to get started. It's really important to get someone really good, because I won't name organizations, but certain organizations really languish because they had the wrong people for years. And we don't want that to happen to us. For sure. OK. With all of your approval, I would like to remove the remote telecommunications plan discussion. If you have the remote telecommunications plan in your packet, I'm sure you read all 100 changes of it. I've read most of it, sadly. I'm not sure that there's anything tonight that we're going to get out of it. I think that last agenda item is probably the rural meat and potatoes today. So let's bump that off to our next meeting if we want to continue talking about it. Review of back burner items, committee assignments, and membership. I think we have some assignments still pending for some of the committees. Is there anything else that needs to be put out formally under the assignments? What was back burner items not the bottom of the agenda? Yeah. We had a discussion at our bylaw policy meeting about the fact that Mr. Whitaker might still be a member of the bylaw policy committee because of the fact that he was appointed. So did you notice that committee assignments and membership at the end there? Yes. So I'm going to make a move that we rescind Steven Whitaker's appointments to any and all committees related to central of my internet CP fiber. Second. OK. Any further discussion? I'm sorry. Who is the second one? I don't know. OK. Any further discussion? Yeah. Um, he's a really difficult person. But he's also, he can be constructive some of the time. And he can contribute. And I'm going to abstain or vote no to banning him from participating as a public member of the committee. I don't think we're banning him from participating as a member of the public. I think we're. No, you said as a member of the committee. I think we're rescinding his committee membership. Yeah. As a voting member. It's difficult because, I mean, I don't know. He's not the only person who's got good ideas. He's not the only person out there who can help us. Oh, that's for sure. I'm also very torn. I'm not at all. I am not at all torn on this. I have other better ways, more constructive ways of using my time. OK. And listen, I agree. When I met Mr. Whitaker there, one of the things that struck me was the fact that he did have a vision. He knew where he wanted to go. And I have a lot of respect for that. He's obviously intelligent and well-informed. But I just, there's ways for him to be able to have that input and for us to welcome it without having him as a formal part of the process if he still chooses. Any other discussion? All in favor? All right. Opposed? Abstentions? I'll abstain. You stand. Call us abstains. OK. So three abstentions. Motion passes unanimously, otherwise. OK. So back burner items, I'll read each other's tones. Oh, Jim, this one. Oh, yeah. The final on policy committee currently only has four members. And it might be helpful to have a fifth, simply to make sure we don't, at least to make sure we don't have deadlocking. So it's a little tough issue. Sure. 50 discussion. It's a joke, so we'll have to run over there. I promised not to show it. And we don't have, these don't have to be board members again, so if there's somebody else floating around out there who's maybe not yet a board member. So Jim, maybe you're asking people to think about who might be a good fifth member. In the next meeting, we can talk about some nominees. Well stated, Ellen. Perfect. OK, anything else of committee assignments, back burner items, outreach to other communities, net neutrality? Love the telecommunications plan on again next month. Cal's pilot discussion, public safety committee. Do any of these need to be removed or added to the next agenda or put them on a committee? I think the Cal's pilot discussion could go away, because we're talking about the other stuff and whether we're going to be doing a pilot at all as part of the operations and getting this person who might inform us and getting the company that comes in. I think continually stirring this on the back burner is going to be so much dispelling. It could still happen. It just doesn't have to be a specific distraction. People are less consensus. I have one piece that is sort of peripherally relative to the net neutrality thing that concerns our ORCA and every other cable access, government access program. There is a motion movement within the FCC. They're closing comments tomorrow about removing the subsidies. The cable companies have to provide for the access operations. I've asked Rebecca, and she already did send around a letter that I got with a link within it that has an article that has the comment link. And I would urge everybody to send some kind of a comment to the FCC through that link about the idiocy of removing this valuable service, which we at least in Vermont and other places I know use extensively and it would be a shame to lose. Do you remember about when you sent that so we can easily find it for you? So Rebecca sent it, and she sent it during the meeting. So it's in your inbox now. OK. Is it? I don't tell her. Sorry, I don't look. You have a couple of emails from me. The FCC is considering and closing comments tomorrow. So it has to happen within the next day. Comments on this motion article to remove the requirements, the cable companies, or actually insulate cable companies from having to provide support for access operations. And we probably don't have time to draft a board. No, we couldn't do more than we needed to do that. If you've never made an FCC comment before, it would be advisable to just go to that docket. Is the docket listed? Yes, it is. And read some of the previous comments from others to see the kind of legal format that the FCC likes to receive. And then it'll be more acceptable to them. Anything that needs to go on the back burner that we need to continue to have not on the agenda, but sort of simmering? The outreach to other towns. Do we need to keep that there for right now? Or do we want to just kind of drop that so we can start focusing on what we have? I think we should. I mean, if other towns want to join, great. But that outreach from them to us, I think. I don't think we should be right now. You listen to the discussions tonight. There's a lot of operational stuff. We are potentially getting ready to see start happening. I agree. I agree, too. That's fine. OK. Does net neutrality stay on the back burner? That's the last remaining thing on the back burner, then? Yeah. Yeah. OK. Or they just leave something. Yes, that last one. That's the whole thing. OK, done with that. Approval of the October 9th meeting minutes. Everybody should have that in their packet, too. And ongoing kudos to back up for putting these together. Going well above and beyond the requirements for most minutes like you'd see in other public bodies. I move we accept the minutes for the October 9th meeting. Second. Moving seconded. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstaining? OK. Motion passes unanimously. Thanks, everybody. Roundtable. Let's start fast. There was one thing I forgot to say when we were in a discussion about in the packet, there was a table that David had created for us with potential revenues for different towns based on road miles and population. And we were talking about the different kinds of density. He used the same take crate for every town. That's not how it works. We're not going to get 40% of Montpelier, and we might get more than 40% in Rocksburg. And so when any of us looks at a table like that and starts to think about how much money we can make in a town based on, we have to take that into account. Are we just figuring out who our operator is and maybe we'll probably have something to say. Actually, our trucks have to go from this place to that place, and that's going to change the cost. Cost of building in Montpelier is going to be twice as much. Let's all put our chips in, make our donations, get some skin in the game, get the organization some capital to keep going, and make a commitment to get this thing rolling. Whatever it is that you can make, let's do it. I just wanted to make a comment that I think we made a lot of progress tonight. And we never was it contentious. It was a lot of good discussion and disagreement. But that teased out ideas from us. And I think I'm glad we're finally rolling in that direction. Great. Thanks to everybody for continuing to show up and look like we're going to hit our time here. If anybody would like to join me for the meeting with the Central Mountain Regional Plan Commission, or with WAC, whenever that happens, or with either of the other ISPs that I'm planning on communicating with, let me know. And I will try to hook you into this as well. That's all I got. I'm excited to be doing this. Not just taking minutes, but not that that's not important. And I was just going to say real quickly, one of the reasons that I chose ZIPbooks for our accounting is that it has a lot of analysis functionality so that we can ask a question and do interesting things. I have requested an alternate for orange. The select board's going to see if they can think of anybody. We're just going to draw a little bit. That's it. I'm happy. I think David and I are both happy with the way things are moving along. We tend to be pretty impatient. And this is taking a long time. But I think tonight we definitely saw some movement toward result. I mean, it's kind of a log jam with all this many people trying to do everything. And we've got to break that at some point. I think the best thing that Jeremy said in our committee meetings was he was just like, you know what? Everyone's just going to be happy if you just go out and do some stuff. It's OK. Just make a website. Who cares? Let's split up. Don't wordsmith. And I think that that's sort of the time being the watchword. There's an online database of every single municipal fiber network in the entire country. If you have an extra 15 minutes, you could call them. See if they had a good consultant. They liked their consultant. They liked their approach. What worked? What didn't? That's totally something that you could do in 15 minutes. So I think what Jim had to say, we should pony up. I was embarrassed that we're back to have to put $125 in our own money on the line. So I hope we can relieve you with that very shortly. I've gotten really interested in rural issues, partly through the discussions that we've been having and also through school consolidation issues I've gotten involved in because I'm now on the Worcester School Board. And I think rural America is coming to the fore as one of the forgotten and really desperate parts of this country. And there are going to be a lot of opportunities to do some really good things. That's why I'm happy that we're beginning to get in here and get moving. I'm good. Let's go. Is there any parting words for her comments? Ken, you want to go ahead and say something? Sure, I'll just build up what Alan said. In that this recent election also identified a schism between the rural and urban America. Vermont is unique. We are largely rural. We're also progressive. And I actually think the telecommunications piece is a way to weave those threads that Vermont has a unique positive to. We have strong connections to urban communities. They are an economic engine for us. And yet we're rural. And I think it's the telecommunications that might really help our rural aspects flourish in ways that I think the rest of the country doesn't quite get. Thanks very much. I move to be adjourned.