 I'd like to call the November 12th, 2019 governing board meeting of CB5 or 2 Order. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? Hearing none. Any public comment? I think it's not on the agenda that you all want to talk about. Okay. Moving along, he got the agenda. I talked to the Moortown Select Board last week, so moving on to Moortown application to join the district, they were a bit surprised that I was asking them to make a decision right then. I said, well, if you don't move right now, I'm not going to guarantee that the rest of the board is going to say yes come December. So they were a bit taken aback and a bit nervous, and I assured them that having met with Weitzfield Champlain Valley Telecom that those folks were not too nervous about the prospects of Moortown joining, and so they actually made their joining contingent on finding out whether the things that I was telling them matched the things that Weitzfield Champlain Valley Telecom made sure that those actually matched up. So I was hoping that their sort of pre-delegate Chuck Burt, who I actually met with and spoke to the Moortown Select Board back probably about the same time I was talking to a lot of your towns, and at that time Moortown did not put it on the 2018 town meeting ballot. So they have since requested admission to the district, so that would bring us up to 18. Any thoughts about that? No. No. But I'm glad that Moortown's wanted to join the district. Mm-hmm. Moortown Marrier? No. I don't think so. Up to a certain threshold. Up to a threshold. It would be 20 years before you get a bill. No. I don't know if Marrier want to make sense. Yeah. Moortown. So is there an application? Do you want us to vote on it? Yeah, I mean so I was hoping Chuck would be here and that he would be able to immediately essentially be seated. That's why I put this first. So if he wanders in I will wave him to his seat and he can introduce himself and we all can introduce ourselves again. But yeah, if you'd like to make a motion that would be cool. Do we have anything right from him, email or anything? I could follow up their select board meeting minutes, I suspect it reflects that. But given that I was there, I'm reporting back that that actually did take place at their meeting. I'll move the week except Moortown as a member of the district. Okay. Seconded. Any further discussion? All right. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Great. That's kind of how I thought it was going to go. And they were, yeah, they were a bit surprised. I was like, you really want us to make a decision right now? Select boards don't do that. Actually I want you to make a decision back in 2017. I didn't say that. So close. So hopefully somebody gets to watch this video. My orange select board was like, why are you even asking us? Yes, no. And that was all but a handful were pretty much straight on board. And I think, honestly, really the thing that happened was the number of people in the audience that said, well, hold on a second. No, why don't you say yes to this right now? And yeah, it was really, and there were people who were not there for this. They were like, I'm at the end of the line. And then somebody else says, I'm at the end of a different line. It's like, and there's no, there was no hope other than DSL. So, all right. So let's move on to the next thing. Public hearing on an adoption of the 2020 budget and annual report. Has anybody heard any feedback from the, hello, hello? So, like, walk in like 20 seconds later than your agenda item. But you are, Mortown has been, has joined the board. This is Chuck Burke from Mortown. Welcome. Welcome. Who is actually, and you're actually sort of an old timer because you were, you're among the first people to reach out to me when we were trying to organize other towns in central Vermont. So while Chuck's getting his things together, maybe we'll just do a round of introductions. We'll just go around, go around the room so you can get a sense of who's here and which towns are represented. So you know me, I'm Jeremy Hansen. I'm the chair from Berlin. I'm Josh Jarvis. I'm the delegate from Berrytown. I'm Siobhan Paracon. I'm the delegate from Orange. I'm David Healey, the delegate from Calis. I'm the manager of Berlin, hasn't it? I'm David Gilbert, the delegate from Calis. I'm Michael Burlow from Plainfields. I'm John Russell from Blankfield. We're both here from the same country. Phil Hayden, Little Six. This is Martin Lugberg. In fact, there's a couple more behind me. I'm Jeremy Aldrin from Plainfields. I'm Alan Gilbert. I'm the Aldrinette from Worcester. And Tommy Woodler. I'm the delegate from East Montpelier. You can grab a chair there. We're a little bit constrained for space because they're taking a number of the tables and quite a lot of the space. Thank you, everyone. Great. It's good to have you on board. It's a nice round number 18. Okay, so adoption of 2020 budget and annual report. Any feedback about the draft budget or annual report that went out? It went out to all of the clerks to be communicated to all of the select boards and city councils, right? Are we talking about the draft budget that was sent out on 22 October? Yes. So that was looking at that again. Now, it says revenue, four million, or loans, four million dollars. And I thought we had a discussion that we were going to put in there the amount of money that we expected that we might expand. Hmm. Don't recall that discussion. Um, the... There was nothing to be sent out, right? And I had it done long. The updated one I have in front of me, the one that I sent out to all the clerks... And it says four million. It does not say four million. No, I'm looking at the ones in October 22nd. Even though I don't have anything... That's the one before the meeting. Okay. Did you send one out to us? That's not the right one. That's the most recent one. That's the most recent one you have. I updated it with all your feedback and sent it directly to the town clerks like that day. I will send that right this second. My town has posted that on their website, so I was able to go to the website and get called. Oh, okay. Very well. But if you're asking if the major specifically asks me for feedback from the town or any public reaction on that, such as I've heard nothing from the town. Okay. It means also the date of the new report if you've made any changes to it. I don't know if I changed the date on anything. Stand by. It's on its way through the series of tubes. Virtual tubes. They could have called these a tube, but they didn't. They've been too confusing for tire makers. That's right. Bikes are big back then. All right. So we can wait until these arrive in your mailbox and we can adopt them as presented or we can also kind of park this one and come back to it later once everybody's had a chance to review it. Okay. So we're just going to sit on this for a bit. David, do you want to review that or are you willing to go into your business development committee report back? Sure. Okay. The committee had a good meeting last week. How many people have read the notes that I sent out? I haven't yet. But anyway, we typically, I mean, if you go through any activity that any of the members have been doing and so I've summarized some of that. So we learned that a person by the name Aaron Versado is in charge of the survivor for public service department. The department acknowledged the receipt of our application and hopefully we'll hear it today or tomorrow that we were successful. I mean, it would be horrible to be unsuccessful, but we'll see you later here. Fundraising. I provided Shuman with the list of all the people who, well actually all the, she got a copy of the survey results to have information on who is willing to make donations to CV Fiverr and she was going to follow up on that. You know, Fiverr, speak to it whether she's made any progress with that. She received it anyway. So I was happy to offload that task. We had a discussion about right-of-way, VTrans right-of-way and there's a bill, I guess it was part of the broadband bill that was funding for PEG that would find out ways of funding PEG with other methods other than Comcast, reimbursables and so we just had a discussion about what was going on there. We also discussed managing, I didn't include this in the, I did an analysis of how many poles there were in every town and estimated how much time it would take to inventory each pole and it was way more than I thought we could do and so the discussion was, we'll take it in chunks, very small chunks. I don't mean that, but there's one in how many poles there are there a lot. I have that on the table by town. You know, I didn't realize what vertical asset meant until you just said that. It was interesting, I was starting to find out, I didn't know what a vertical asset meant so the broadband and innovation grant talks about vertical assets. Anyway, it's been on, it's been a topic at the business development committee for a couple of times. I actually have sort of a tangential question there because in Worcester anyway, there's multiple poles for, so some of it's electric and some of it is just for the phone run. Yeah, and it'd be interesting to see, I don't know, maybe Michael knows this, did Green Mountain Power take over all of consolidated poles or just the ones that were sharing? Well, no, I'm thinking of DC. I think they took over the ones they're sharing. Okay, not their independent ones. So there's no data set that I have that the state's GIS system has of consolidated poles. And there's quite a few. Yeah, I mean, some of them are standing right next to each other. Oh, next to each other, yeah. The double poles are all supposed to be removed but they don't get removed. Well, I mean, they don't even remove the empty poles but there are very few of those. I mean, usually the phone company hasn't moved their stuff to the phone. Because they can't afford to. The phone company, they don't have enough staff. They can't afford it. The other activity that we're talking about, Greg's been pretty busy. He met with the Waysfield Champlain. Do you want to talk about that? I just met with a VP there at an event and he just said they were very interested in bidding on being an operator. That was the extent of it. And then you had another conversation with a company named Vertec. Correct. And Colchester who are into it. Vertec does back office operations for many telecommunications companies across the country. And they've been reading about the broadband grant and would look into whether there was an opportunity for them to offer to provide services to CUDs. So going moving on to the next slide, I'm going to be covered with responding to RFP questions. One of the first people who received the RFP sent a question right away about funding. We'll get that in a minute. The committee decided that we compile all the questions, draft responses, send them back to the committee for concurrence, and then put them on the website and notify the people who actually requested that they were going to bid on the proposal. We'll get that independent notice. So far I will receive two questions. They still have some time. The final version of the response to be done by the 19th. So we did a calendar, basically, the meeting to make sure we're not falling behind on anything. And we're working on that. So in the question of funding, and the committee decided at the meeting that we'll indicate that we have about $60,000. That doesn't mean that that's what we have to do. I got to read Ray today email me saying he doesn't feel like we should tell them any amount of money that just will take the best bid. But practically speaking, if they've watched any of our meetings, they know the score. And that's what I told Ray. I said, Ray, the money is there. But it's an interesting idea to let them fight over how much money is there. But I'll take any input on that. Well, two parts there. One is, it's speculative. You don't have the grade number. We are spending up to 60 RAs. And the other is that you shouldn't be answering and giving them the amount, just telling them that it's a competitive process for taking the best bid. I like the phrasing. So that was my position as well. But another thing that I realized in talking to some engineers with experience with RFPs is that a lot of RFPs are not responded to because of the fear that there's so much more needs to be done than there's one left for. And without a sense of whether they're going to be able to do it, they may not even apply. And so I suggested to the committee that we kind of compromise that we do throw out a number, but not the whole amount. Because we do want to reserve some of the money for other purposes. And we don't want to scare them away and say we're only, you know, we're only 25. But the last thing was that we would make it clear in our answer that it would be to their competitive advantage to both bid low, despite what we're saying. So that others might bid lower than the amount we're putting there. And those are the usual arguments that we're doing and not doing. We'll discover some people and encourage others. So that's how the committee reached its decision. We'll discuss it back and forth part of the year. I've mostly been on the state side of this where we're out putting out for bids, but I have very good relationship with the contractor who works for us and has been for seven years now. And putting together an RFP is a lot of investment on their part. It takes a lot of time. And they need to know how much they can expect to get back on that. It's only fair. It's not like we're not going to spend the money. It's not like we've got some secret million dollars and we're only going to spend 60. We've got 60,000 dollars and that's it. And they know that. And they know... So anybody who's going to bid a million if we tell them we've got 60,000 they're even going to ratchet down their response or they're not going to bother. And so I think it's... I don't think there's any harm to us to tell them how much we've got. And it's on them to be grown-ups about it and figure out do we want to bid or not. And if the best value came in if the quality quality bidder came in and it was 75,000 dollars as opposed to somebody kind of less quality and less certainty where they came in at 60 so are we going to go with the 60,000 or are we going to find the money for the 75? And so I don't... We'll evaluate them. Exactly we'll evaluate them. That's why you don't put a dollar figure out there. And we haven't said we would take the low bid. Yeah. And I've also bid on contract. I understand all the process that comes into doing that. We've spent a million dollars submitting some proposals that I've been involved with. And also get nothing out of it. Right. And my expertise is kind of constricted from the corporate world and every time that I repeat anything on it and granted it's always been on the tech industry side of things and so they usually know that you have fair lady pockets depending on where you're coming from but we've never put a dollar figure of any art or map or to anybody no matter what we're searching for. And they came to us and if it was a really large number and it made sense and it made sense and we were the ones that evaluated and determined whether or not that RP that came back to us was really made sense for what we were looking for. And the dollar figure you know there was always a range with our own internal budgets that we knew about it. They didn't need to know about that. You could always adjust in order to make the right decision. I would also go to the car dealership and say I have this much amount of money this is what I want. And I get what I want and the price I'm willing to pay. Right. So the RP is out the committee made the decision to respond with the dollar amount so I think we can move forward and see what comes of it. We haven't put the answers out yet. So with a strong feeling in the room we would consider not a minor decision. But because we're not in the corporate world because we are a public entity this is all arguably public record and if somebody went through the process of watching the wonderful videos that Orca produces for us or reads our meeting minutes they can connect the dots. I think we're just Do any of the municipalities say what the dollar is? Sometimes but you can usually extrapolate based on previous budgets. Sure, you can do that by looking at the budget. They remind us that we looked at it by listening to this conversation. Yeah, I mean so the cost of printing the town report in the town of Berlin for example you can just go and pull the budget from the last year or two and you can see how much we've spent in the past and you know kind of what your high water mark is. So this is not an unusual circumstance for a municipality. It doesn't strike me as being that important. Okay, let's move on. So the rest of the next item in the business community is just dividing the timetables responsibilities and those who have the chance to read this we're going to try to get this all done by the next meeting that we I don't know if it's on the calendar but we have a meeting scheduled in the month of December. So we have one the week before and then one the next week. So the committee will be making its recommendations to the full board at that meeting will be meeting. We'll be pretty busy. Proposals of due? 13. Proposals of due. I don't have enough time. Submission deadline December 3rd. December 3rd. So we'll divvied up the responsibilities for ranking criteria, point system on each one. We'll get everybody on board on that and then everybody will do their own reviews separately and bring them together at one of our meetings and we'll bring it to the full board. In the RFP we said we reserve the right to have interviews. So if we do that I think I've run that night of course. So that's where we are with that. Survey update needs the response rate is still not improved since the last time we sent it out. Very little since we last brought it to the whole board. But in the discussion that we had at our meeting Shabon took on the task of trying to get the paper survey distributed to all towns. I haven't done that. But anyways, we've gotten some help with that. That was great and I did send you the two page version and a one page blurb on what can go with it and you can modify it any way you want. Do you think it's valuable to put out a Facebook ad? I would just pay $20 or $30 to boost it and just send it to all the members. Interesting enough, I forgot who suggested was it you Andrew to putting the RFP in front porch forum? I did and I got three people inquiring. So I think being in people's face is important and I think maybe we've all sort of forgotten that. I meant for the survey to make sure we get more survey responses. I'm going to put it again in front. I did it twice and I think I'm going to just once a month put it out there and I'm presenting in CalIS I'm doing a presentation with the select board in two weeks and I'm presenting at the Washington Central Supervisory next week. So and another business we talked about WECS Power Expansion Replacement Smart Grid Grant. Now the headline in the Times August was a grant the story was about a loan so I have no idea which one it is. I think it's a grant. We're going to meet with since army our committee said let's get another liaison meeting so Greg and I have now scheduled one for next week. Barry stated that that article was totally off base very inaccurate it is their normal periodic funding for instruction for a period of years there is nothing special and new being built so we were thinking oh they're going to build a particular set of polls to a particular set of people and maybe we should coordinate with them forget that whole idea but we're going to have our liaison meeting anyhow and then we'll report on what's going on with that. Yeah and Bill Powell I think sent Greg and Mike and myself that are getting ready to do their every five year survey. Not until next year. A survey. So they asked to piggyback as much as we could so if we wanted to target anybody in particular or have any questions. That's good. And I don't know why I put this in this but Greg indicated that the Barry substations did I get that wrong? Of tall polls upgraded their substations and put in new polls between the substations. So thank you. It's available. So at the bottom of the notes that I took is the calendar that we have both the RFP as well as the business committee's meetings and I think that's all I have to report. Any questions? Okay. Zero. No I'm just saying pretty thorough. So were we planning to post meeting minutes? Different meeting minutes. Are these postable on the website? Yes. I would have said no with regard to the money for example however comments that you've just rolled over that one quite readily. We'll just we should give some thought to is any of this stuff confidential now and in the future? That's all. But those who know Jared is the ultimate delegate from Calis and he has been sort of I mean when I asked him to put up the RFP on the website and I gave him a little narrative the one with it he did it like within 15 minutes. So I don't and there is a minute section and there's not a lot of minutes in it. So yes so what I would strongly recommend those of you producing minutes if you have a instinct that something might be sensitive. Remember the minimal information that we have to have in there are what are the motions over the votes and if there's anything in there that could be construed as being sensitive just take it out you can have it in your own notes just take it out and send it to Jared but I mean we are obliged as a public entity to produce these things so we have to be careful how we tread in terms of what's what we think is sensitive and what the law thinks is sensitive. So this report pretty well documented most of the discussions and now we've spoken about them in an open public meeting that's recorded so it wouldn't harm to put these in the minutes but in the future we're more cautious as to what minutes we report to the board correct. So that's a good segue to my concern and I don't mean to be negative about this we've been at this for a while but and I reiterated this on the phone but so what you just said before it made my concern even stronger and that we've essentially created a business development committee that's essentially doing all the work of the whole committee and it's disenfranchisement the whole board? Yes but that's my but that was based on some motions telling giving us direction to do that not do everything but to do the things you're working on. No we delegated authority on a number of things to the business development committee I mean when there are final decisions that need to be made the whole board needs to sign up on then they have to come back to us but in terms of fact finding and discussion. Fact finding is one thing so I'll give you some specific examples I don't even know when the business committee involved me I don't know when you guys meet you don't even as a courtesy send an email to the rest of the board members that were having a meeting so that fundamentally I think we have from you know right from that point from a courtesy perspective it's a little weird to me so the second part I don't again I would challenge any place that we've been at this for two years we're at the most crucial part now we're in the process of money we're negotiating and we're going to assess vendors and I have no say in that question and I apologize because I'm the new guy in the room but my understanding based on open meeting law is that even a subcommittee is still subject to open meeting laws announcements meetings so now you're taking specifically to the comment you just made I mean you guys have to produce minutes it is an open meeting now you're going to like spend the minutes so when you come here I'm going to have my third that's just compounding on my concerns I'm not trying to be reverent but to me I guess I just don't understand this like from a perspective of what we're all trying to do to me this is like there's no efficient you're going to get two or three responses send them to everybody let everybody rank let's vote on it together as a board what efficiency is there and like only allowing a subgroup to do this I think that's a question for the whole board getting you all the answers I didn't even come to the meeting I didn't know where the water I had no idea when you guys were eating that so there's some easy moving forward things that we can clear off the plate right away when the business development committee has a meeting send them to the whole board send them to Jared and you need to do 48 hours before the meetings happen easy produce minutes that will happen going forward that must happen going forward the next question is a different one is who's involved in what sorts of decisions the ultimately the selection must be the entire board it must be the entire board the business development committee was as I understand it essentially pre-screening them so they're going to come with a recommendation not a decision and we should we all should as a board that stuff is possible I would just emphasize the courtesy aspect of that to understand that so when it does come it's not kind of a fair complete I would say as one of those we probably need for the whole group it's publicly available I didn't want to be like whatever but it just strikes me as you know we're finally getting to some meat and fun well wait a minute the good news is we have a dedicated agenda item for talking about scheduling through the end of the year that I think what we can do is we can make a list of all these meetings coming up and we'll make sure that Jared who's been really good about keeping the website up to date we will make that the calendar of record we'll just have him keep that up to date and when we have agendas in minutes you can have date in minutes when they come and I'm thinking the Montpelier City Council and the Norfield Select Board they do really well and Norfield is simple Montpeliers is really complicated but it's the same sort of thing I think we can do that so David under a 5B1 you will send out the proposals to all the BD committee members on December 3rd and then could we just send the proposals to everyone and then the BD can do their ranking work and then give the rationale for your recommendations and if there were interviews at night that would be something else it would just give us the extra week to go through so it's important that these proposals are not public going so when we send them out to everybody be careful they don't go to town clerks it's essentially like executive session I don't have a problem sharing with everyone are we allowed to do that via email? we can't have a discussion by email you can communicate information and transmit things like documents and records of the body but we can't have a back and forth discussion outside of award meeting it should be clear perhaps the subject lens is confidential the first thing and then it says what it is or if you're feeling at all nervous about it I think it's something to the whole group send it to me I can put it in the Google Drive with a share I want you to be members of the committee I mean of the board actually that would be we underutilize Google Drive I know as long as it's not set to allowing edits correct can you do that? information you can get back is not going to be in an editable format but if the I don't put it in a zip drive I'm going to zip them all I'm very aware in general but if there's like a ranking or a commentary or a spreadsheet or something that's not something that we can do without running a foul of open meetings and one other comment if anyone in this room thinks that we're getting into the fun stuff and wants to participate they're welcome to join the committee it's not exclusive yeah I don't know who I was referring to well we do have a new board member that just wanted in so he might have he might have some interest in doing some of the things so this is maybe not a terrible time to discuss that since I actually removed the appointment of people and assignment a task to committees so so we have our business development committee which is doing some pretty heavy lifting right now dealing with RFPs processing proposals and that sort of thing we have a policy committee which is rather asleep at the moment there's an executive committee which is sort of just created by virtue of who the officers are and I don't know that we've ever met separately finance committee which is also kind of sleepy but both finance and policy did a lot of work in the early days most certainly and so these things so this committee is doing a lot of work now but then there will be another kind of committee and then outreach fundraising subcommittee so any of those are interest to you we can certainly make it official and sign you up on that you don't have to decide right now but I would like to learn a bit more about how things are working but I'm certainly willing to help where help is needed and the other thing too I mean if we post the when the business development committee is meeting Thursday you have another meeting on convenience you're obviously free to come on down isn't there one coming up next month I have a meeting date on something that you had sent that said to review draft answers to the all right questions you can't do it by email you cannot have conversations and discussions by email so the way the way that you can get around that is by you still have to and at least one person has to show up at a place so that the public if there are members of the public that's your house and you're willing to have people show up at your house that's fine but then you need to have everybody attending synchronously which people we're not talking about meetings we're doing proposals so it will have to be there's a public meeting and they will have to go into executive session but it still has to be warned that this is something that they're doing and they have to go through the process you can't have one on one back and forth you can have one on one back and forth there was some discussions last time around the confidentiality of proposals until one is selected and so forth how would that work when they're all being discussed in a public forum so but the committee can't go into executive session the committee can go into executive session the committee can't accept it they just have to go through the right steps just so that part since they are confidential I guess just some mechanics of that you really do want to make sure so the proper way I guess is notice everybody and both public and house but as long as you can just control access then to the actual documents themselves as bank material that's toilet that's fine it's not unusual at the select board I'll get a packet of information not all of which, if I get a personnel information that doesn't go to Times Argus or wherever most of it does just to clarify, when the subcommittee goes into executive session it does or does not permit another member to present to also attend the executive session the people who are delegates to that committee can decide who they can bring into that meeting so that often we'll do that with our town administrator or town attorney or treasurer, these sorts of things that's fairly common so if non-committee members happen to be there and want to discuss this with them, if the committee decides that they don't want that person to be there then they can choose that it would be a majority vote either way no luck for you well, it's not my concern is that necessarily and I appreciate that it isn't I wouldn't be a voting member anyways my concern is that we've been at this for a long time we represent a lot of communities and this is probably the most important point we've been at and I just want to make sure it's franchised at an appropriate level and I'm not trying to be I'm on your side I appreciate that but I think just some of the let's just get some of the mechanics on better and I don't want to trust that I appreciate that, I just want to know the other part of this, it's a lot of work I understand so I apologize for not just franchising I would like to think about it on the other side somebody else part of that that's not the goal because we're all doing this I'm good thank you do you want to get an updated schedule now on the record? let's talk about that when we have our schedule through the end of the year because we have governing board meetings also coming up I just want to make sure everybody remembers when that is, we'll do them all once then if we can anything else on the business development committee? could I talk a little bit about the survey? most definitely so I have found that having paper orange is a little town, there are not a lot of us on front page whatever front page best I'm on it but not a lot of us are I got a lot of good response when I went door to door oh my god that was painful I spent 5 hours on a hot Saturday going door to door I didn't get a lot of responses but what I was thinking about that is I would have got more responses if I had a QR code that people walking out their doors can scan with their phone and answer later if I thought to leave some of the paper surveys with people because they had I did get one back in the mail that way getting as you mentioned before getting at the town clerk's office and that's the thing I want to help with I would like you all to print out paper copies paper copies with your name on them and your address your name and your address, not mine what's your address again? put them in your town clerk's office so they're actual there paper copies with the QR code on it I will provide you with a document that has that so they can, if they're in there they can scan it with their phone or they can pick it up and take it home and respond to it and let the clerks know what you're doing and ask them to encourage people as they come in because we're coming into tax season a lot of places are paying their taxes this week and that next week next week and so if we could get those into the clerk's office and I was thinking well maybe I could take a day off and drag everybody's town clerk office and I'm like no I can't afford I can't afford a day off because I just took my vacation a couple weeks ago so if I could get that level of help if I could get you all to commit to this that would be awesome and so I will get you so you have a QR code I will generate a QR code and put it on the survey so they don't even have to pick it up they can just scan it and go but for the people who want a piece of paper and want to fill it out and want to send it to you in a minute can all the guys at the American Legion use their flip phones and this QR code they just want to know they're going to be smart and a lot of people with smart phones are not going to have a QR read around and they're going to need to know how to do that and you were going to well no I didn't mean I think what you have to say is absolutely accurate and I just wanted to just make a note that because I knew that you were doing this and I remember you talking about the time that you spent going around and the same thing is for very town there are a lot of us not from the first one but there are a ton that just aren't we're not reaching just don't even go into the town prep office but there is something that our town does do all your towns do it or not we actually send out a a legit newsletter it goes like everyone in the town and I coordinate with the town manager and in this November's newsletter that's going up our entire town this survey is going to be ended up so if I could get that QR code and I could get it in just in time I don't have an added to that that would be fantastic okay because you have a chronicle that comes up that runs in two days too so I can do that I'll try to get that out tomorrow morning whether it's post office in the liquor store that's the liquor store so wherever it occurs to you that your neighbors hang out bowling alley can you not send that to all of us I will so I got a two page that Dave built I will send that out to everybody I have to add the QR code to that and get you guys a QR code a separate sheet that could go up as a QR code so when the piece of paper run out there's at least that and then y'all can do you have to add your name you have to go in a word and add your name and address to and then turn it off a bunch of copies can you get my smartphone could we have a modest size poster with a pocket on it with a bunch of surveys in it and the QR code not by tomorrow morning and the QR code on the poster saying please take one of these or scan the code here and return it it's something special for you we have sandwich boards oh yeah only a snow machine suit are you ready to hear section two there with a blind corner perfect next next that's it I'm done anything else business development committee related are we ready to go back to the public hearing on the adoption of the 2020 budget and annual report does everybody have a chance to take a peek at that the budget looks like what we talked about no surprises the report didn't have really that many changes that Edmond suggested it was just there's some language changes so I'm finding the changes okay so I will move that we adopt the 2020 budget and annual report as our official 2020 budget and annual report I'll second that seconded any further discussion all in favor aye opposed okay, thanks Jonathan I don't like it by the way everyone Jonathan is on the phone did he introduce himself yeah and so I realized I didn't ask you for an introduction when our new board member Chuck Burt joins Jonathan if you want to do the honors thank you short bio your internet connection is holding up huh I'm just saying alright are you sure I'm late in the dollar short because we already took the vote but I did have a question on my select board they were asking if we were going to start paying a treasurer or clerk is that built into the budget I believe it was then just wasn't called out I sold them I think it is it's probably under the office supplies advertising somewhere in the section that's where the sandwich was we did talk about it I don't remember my name there is nothing okay so I guess we can cross that bridge we can amend the budget you can amend the budget the reports going to the towns I mean if they do have some significant comments to make out what are we supposed to do that window just closed that window is over so we met our statutory obligations to the towns by providing it to them with a certain amount of notice they had a window by which we could respond thanks for communicating that Tom faster that's we had to get them on November 15th into the statute or something but I think they had an opportunity to provide feedback or ask questions the opportunity to give feedback and ask questions would have happened during this meeting they would have sent someone or they would have sent an email to me or to someone to communicate those concerns to him well it's feedback and we could we could go back at this point and go back and edit it and add however much you think for a clerk or a treasurer or what have you you just don't want well it didn't stop us from the rest of the stuff we didn't know we had either having it to be great I think you should sit together you want me to do that you nailed this already every clerk in the district got it and I asked them respectfully to pass it along to the select force or city councils and as I understand it many of them did I saw the clerk today and I shouldn't say anything to me about it well Kitty definitely got it I'm sure she did but there wasn't any feedback I had a request this week from my town clerk whatever I'm going to put into the sound report I'm going to give it to them but I just don't understand I don't know how many other towns have the same kind of requirement but the final request thinking to just making sure everybody should follow up with their town clerk to at least make sure it gets into the town report and stuff if you can so our alternate from various city the mayor he also asked the same of Greg and I once we have it finalized we can pass it along and as I recall we have a digestible version rather than the statutorily required version is that still willing to work on that? yes I would still love that so what we can do is Jonathan and I will work together our official report is going to be this one he and I will work together to get a maybe a shorter without without the lingo jargon rather and we'll make both of them available and we'll let the clerks or the select or whomever decide what to include if you want to include both awesome if not they can just pick so we do have the opportunity right now we can amend this budget put $10,000 in revenues $10,000 in operating expense for a possible clerk or whatever now this is and it would more clearly define something that we probably are going to do we are on that agenda item right now that there would be okay where would you put the $10,000 in revenues just additional I don't know that I would put it as a revenue I would put as a clerk and or treasurer as an operational expense well $46,000 on a positive bottom line so dropping that by $10,000 fine just more overhead we get a motion we will in a second let me just put this in here so how do you want the light item labeled the clerk clerk and treasurer operational stipends admin, operational admin, something like that board assistance board assistance administration administration administration $10,000 just round numbers okay so that was make sure my sum covers all of that and it does now okay so that brings the net income down to $336,640 all right so motion to amend the budget to add whatever we said it was $10,000 for administration under operational expenses seconded by Tom any further discussion all in favor aye opposed okay you spoke a line item different so does this require that this be re-sent to all the town clerks I'm going to redo that anyways okay and so what I will do is I will remove the word draft from all of these and they will be marked as final so the copy that we'll send soon will be this budget the annual report and then it will be easier to read annual report and when is the deadline that needs to be in I don't know that I mean the deadline is time by time when they're going to include in their time reports so I'm hearing from some folks it's December 1st I know in Berlin we could get it in January 1st so we'd still be all right December 15th so do we want to send a deadline here and just that it's done to finish that but Jonathan you and I can get that done by December 1st right okay anything else about the budget or the annual report before we nobody else has select words or city councils have any feedback just want to make sure do the annual report alright moving along the status of grants I'm I submitted the quarterly quarterly report for our USDA grant and handed off some documentation from David that showed his in kind work as we built the survey and are sort of ramping up to get the RFP out there's a kind of a handful of new kind of numerical justifications that we have to do to say this much in kind thankfully we haven't gone for any reimbursements or anything yet so that was simpler than it's going to be in the next quarter so that's that's good to go I got the paperwork into I have one more piece of paper to make that final final and then we will have a grant and we will be good to go with that and can start submitting reimbursements for that as well the broadband innovation grant I'm looking at their web page and I've been sort of like frantically refreshing it hoping that maybe by the time we got to this oh yes and they were I've been doing it they didn't do it I didn't know not kidding it said on their website says the awardees for the first round of funding under the broadband innovation grant program have been selected and will be announced on Tuesday November 12th, 2019 via official press release self-recall bigger did we get it tomorrow to the grants has it just I just want to make sure I'm just coming from the insurance side of things we have a copy already that went to Kristen because I didn't have to retake so we are good the insurance we are good absolutely everything I need to do the final like literally final documents and then that will be and we will be good to go with that so thank you for the insurance they are completely satisfied that we've met all those requirements I'm going to go see if I can find my press release link at Tigger so for the remind me the USDA what are the two think Vermont innovation grant which came from the state which came from ECCD USDA world developments this is the broadband innovation grant from DPS how much more is this one 60,000 so we are 12,5 25 that's 60 this one kind of counts what the fuck they lied it was a snow day they submitted it but it was a snow day the media guys didn't post it yet but it was a snow day we could just recess for a while and just call Clay at home he lives in Northfield right he does I'm just looking at press releases on Tigger that were posted today so I'm hopeful and yeah hopeful that we'll get that but obviously we don't know until we know anything else we should be talking about with grants that I'm missing do we have grants that we have not yet approved us to submit because we talked before before we submitted a grant over $10 whatever the number was they were going to get more approval we're not looking at any others yet the last time we did that was a couple months ago with the broadband innovation grant that David wrote almost the entire year but actually I think we approved it and then we sent it out 2-3 days later right so thankfully it has a really fast turnaround time on this it was less than a month actually very fast that's true and I think they probably already knew who was going to be applying so yeah it'll be good as soon as I hear I will do a broadcast to the whole board and I think if we can then maybe some language for a press release that did I need something for the RFP that still has suggested that we post what David did I think we will we can probably piggyback that on hopefully finding out about about this we did language for the USBA one we did that I did that one so we can write back that I'll put you on a committee so I recommend that we send one out just on the RFP that we had done just to keep us fresh in people's minds I had a few people stop me and say make that faster at least they know that I'm doing it that the CB fiber that we're doing some stuff on the RFP with a progressive thing I'll take it I'll work with you whenever we'll try something out and I think that would be doubly good news because it shows that there's concrete steps being taken and now we'll have the resources by the way we have a survey I'll put that on the bottom all of this is absolutely key once we understand that we're actually moving forward we really have concrete business to do and we're going to have a service that are really going to be able to offer them and people can really get excited for us welcome already if it is going to be posted any day or if we do get it it's worth dropping the link to the survey in the comments on their article even on their page okay oh yeah anywhere you find it I haven't tried any of them drop it in there the gold ones are caramel that's a really good idea okay anything else on grants that we should be talking about grants coming up that we need to know about start thinking about move forward with is there any reason not to call your friend and not to well we can I actually can't talk because I have Jonathan on the phone so that's I lent you my phone but I can't read it you want me to call him? if you have his number just shoot him a text if he's around any news? you're probably also Ramon is a suitably small place so that's not weird I'm only asking for CB don't tell me the bad news you've been on the rise oh yeah I have to speed and target some of the first things that I think we maybe need to tackle as a group on the accounting side of the house we're in process on the bank stuff it's 10 times longer and you think it's going to she mentioned that you were the person I should talk to about getting any information we have for documentation about the capital grant? yes and then you for the other two for the thing from the 25,000 okay perfect if you wouldn't mind sending me that along with copies of companies or anything else that way I can start familiarizing myself with that and do you have a statement of grant award for the USDA grant? I sent it to you David and Jerry I think in a zip file if you just do a search for USDA that whole thing is in there all the paperwork I've signed actually has all of the reimbursement documentation and stuff that I have to submit like the stuff that I submitted today I'm just going to start I'll try a good organization I'll start looking at those and then we'll eventually need to consider a chart that comes down and you're really moving forward with some actual documentation of that stuff that's maybe in a software it sounds like but I know that just got a lot of it in Excel yeah and it would be good if we had quick books or the equivalent thereof so that we could easily if we have a treasurer's report which we would usually have at the beginning of every meeting a treasurer's report where you could say here's our balance any checks that we need to approve or anything like that and we're good to go and then yeah and then just knowing the cycle that we can ask for reimbursements and whatever I've actually changed the changed our registration in SAM for USDA to reflect it you're the treasurer now so actually just today plugged in your email address so if you get something strange yeah I'm going to create a separate one for my personal just to keep it because the SAM database rate all those email addresses are public so third party vendors harass you constantly to update your SAM information because they can see your expiration date the worst part of it is the renewal goes from the date you complete the renewal not the date of your current expiration so you can bump it back so if there's a different email address that you'd like to use whatever they says yes what all right can you say 90 the other folks were okay can you say you Peter didn't he didn't tell me it was just like I said the CB Cardboard is wondering where the big press release is and welcome news you can share before we go home the answer is CB is getting one 60,000 that was your application yeah kudos that was your work you can shave you can shave all right there's a funny story about that well that's a wonderful way to cap off the status of grants ahead of time even anything else on grants that folks want to talk about all right very exciting so I suppose there's going to be another tranche of paperwork on its way so buckle up no problem okay contract hopefully it's a little bit simpler they usually negotiate okay well even even so better than clay responding to you saying no okay wax survey feedback so I heard from and we talked about this a bit before I just wanted to make sure everybody had a chance to hear about it where did I go so Bill Powell says member satisfaction survey in 2020 we're putting this out what he wanted to propose is a process with our SMEs our subject matter expert the consultant that we're hiring and with survey instrument design which I guess is actually going to be David less so the consultant where we marry the Washington Electric co-op survey with some CV fiber specific questions because they have survey out anyways so if there's some way that we can include something that's going to be strategically or otherwise useful to us we have that window so he says I welcome the opportunity to meet your subject matter expert as soon as possible so you've already gotten that and you've already probably communicated with him a bit anyways so I need to make a commitment to the survey entity so we can begin to fine tune the 2020 survey instrument and there's more in that email too is there anything that we need to be asking or do you have any follow-ups about that David I'm going to follow up I already followed up a little bit he wants to get together again so we'll go ahead and do that it's not clear with the relationship what they want in their survey relative to fiber but it could be smart but it could be something as simple as satisfaction level with the current internet service provider yeah that would work and maybe no because there's so many more towns 41 towns including most of them which I just saw so that would be valuable to know even though they're going to get far more data than we're even going to be interested in well it's a he was clear on it it's only a 600 person survey so it's just a sample it's a pretty reliable sample it's not by town they're not going to get data by town I mean I don't think a number that small nobody knows the statistical significance it's a co-op regional not per town but per region 41 towns before all the AT the co-op if they could give us some sense of a different statistical breakdown in our 18 towns then I think that could be yeah they might be able to do that because they're doing it by meter number or whatever I mean if I don't know if there's an issue with doing that but if they would be able to share with us who's answering what and we could follow up with them or I don't know if that compromises the way they're they're doing things what's that I doubt it but I think our survey is going to be more helpful to them I mean does the membership support their continued cooperation with us and other initiatives like that and it's not going to be that useful to us and the bigger thing down the line with WEC I think is where rural broadband is going to go and how it's going to get funded from the federal side of things there's going to be some real potential there okay anything else on the WEC survey so so we only have one question is that what I understand so far we don't have any questions we do suggest the one yeah but I'm going to be with them with the range of what he can include I mean he has our survey so I mean that is everything from how happy you are with what you've got so far really that's pretty good could you edit the survey to include more time or is that problematic oh no not a problem I just added them to the map oh good I could edit the town who's in CB5 I have a statewide fiber map on RGI online and it's editable for me I just put CB5 or any more town's name but could we add another option for that question oh yeah I'll add them to the survey is there a deadline when we're saying the survey will close because there is one more milestone my town has to go through I don't know if Jeremy told everyone about this but we have we still telecom in our town and they serve half our town quite well and they've been very, very good to our town and so the whole reason I wasn't here from the beginning is that our town, our select board opted to not join up front because of that concern now after a few years of efforts we've been able to switch that concern and get people on board with the idea but they did want to have one more check in with Wadesfield Telecom and reserve the right to pull us back out after joining it was a little bit of finagling to try to get me here tonight and start learning the process and all that but in any case I would be reluctant to share the survey out with my town by a front porch forum we'll adjust the survey and I sent you a link to the survey and some sample language you might put up front porch forum when you're ready to zoom in forward. Great, thank you. And so I'll send it out as soon as I kind of get the final full endorsement from the select board. Okay. Fundraising. I didn't answer one of the questions again. No, you said something about a statewide fiber map and my recollection is on the eastern Vermont fiber that they were using they got access to use some of the state's dark fiber. Do we have any state dark fiber in our district? No. Okay, thank you very much. This survey is it's really that the consultant is going to do our feasibility plan so having as much information in there is pretty critical. And I was going to save this for round table but while you brought this up Ray there has been introductions made between, I'm trying to think who did this, it must have been DPS introducing somebody from Velco, I don't have his name in front of me, but Velco has a lot of middle-mile fiber that we could possibly use as we needed to move from point A to point B. Okay. And they're interested in making that available to us. And WEK is just agreed I believe with Velco or not? Not quite. Not quite. To run a fiber line that doesn't currently go to Maple Corner and East Montpelier, right? Right. So was that Carrick Johnson? Yes. Yeah, he's and so I think that, yeah, that introduction got sent out to several people. I think you were on that email? No. I was, okay. I was, maybe it was like Evan up in the Kingdom or something and then some other folks down in southeastern Vermont, there were several other people on the call that were introduced and then Carrick actually called me and followed up. I just haven't talked to him yet. Anything else on WEK survey or potpourri as this agenda items turned into? Okay. Okay. Fundraising? Is there anything else that we want to talk about with fundraising? Any targets? I mean, I know you're the fundraising guru. I haven't got the software yet. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. When he's got the ISIS, the bank account, I can get the software and then I can get the data from the people who want it that we can touch. But there's got to be a lot more people than that out there that we could maybe start talking to. One of the things that Jonathan, is he still on the phone? Jonathan, are you still on the phone? I am. I'm having... So, Siobhan has a question for you. Well, I was wondering, because you had mentioned several meetings ago about fundraising going better if people have stories to share about the thing you're fundraising about. And so I've got a story that I was planning on writing up and I was wondering if I could get some stories from other members of the board on why fiber internet would make a personal improvement in your life. A story about something that really sucked and then fiber would make it better. Or something along the lines. Oh, one more story. We're trying to start or maintain our own business but they can't without high speed internet. I think we were able to collect those kinds of stories. Really, if we want to do a fundraising letter, we really need only one or two stories so that we can plan out you know, appeal of letters for different Caesars like spring, fall, etc. But I think we're to focus on, you know, gathering stories in our communities that would be the best way to go forward in my opinion. So, if you have somebody in your community who would be willing to put their name on a story, it doesn't have to be long. Short to the point is good. Get it to me. Talk to somebody. See if they're willing to put their name on it and have it become a public statement. And get it to me. And I will work with, hopefully maybe with some assistance from Jonathan. Brief assistance, not a lot. To come up with a way of restoring the stories so that we've got stories we can draw on as he said, a story bank so that we can do these in a sensible way so that we're not exhausting people with pleas. But other than that, another thing that I had been thinking about was going to businesses in my town and saying hey, we want to do this. Do you have any money? A little classier than that. But not much. I just wanted to briefly add that we should make sure that if we are gathering stories from people who have their express written permission to share their stories and use them in fundraising appeals there are templates for that sort of permission granting form everywhere. But we should definitely make sure that we have their permission to do use those stories too. Well, really aren't there probably some prime candidates for stories from some of the stronger survey respondents to contact me? I think maybe that would potentially have a good reason they'd be able to hand me out in a couple of sentences for us. Yeah, I'm sure my neighbor up the hill would have a lot to say. Is there a way to guidance on solicit stories from people to say I keep it under 500 words? I think we can always distill it. Distill it and send it back to them and say is this okay when you sign off on this? Oh, you can take the whole thing that they wrote and just use the little dot as long as they sign a release. Didn't you just say brief? People will be brief. Then I'm going to write paragraphs. Yeah, I think 500 words is I'm not going to use 500 words. Jerry's asking me to ask you if Jerry did a shakedown of the board members to contribute money. I did. It's about that time. So that annual appeal comes in December for non-profits. I expect that we'll probably have a similar shakedown at our summit board meeting. So get that checkbook warmed up and... Alright. Anything else on fundraising, anything else that you need? None. I have a question. At what time will we have stickers to give out and maybe shopping bags to give out and things like that to spread the word? I have some designs that I've put together but they kind of fell apart when we lost Elliot. I got his name. That's good. Because I was bouncing colors and fonts and stuff off of him but not doing the answers and then he disappeared. I haven't heard from him in a long time. So it fell by the way. He's not on the board anymore. I was looking at Cafe Press. I'm looking at some other possible websites to work through where we come up with a design and we put it on a variety of swag. And then you can direct people to it. I don't know whether we've got a line item to purchase a batch of things that we then hand out individually to ourselves. We have $5,000 for advertising. So we don't have that money yet. But it's in process. I've got a couple of things that are in process. We also have your service culture. If it's towards fundraising, it's useful. If it's not, it's probably just increasing demand before we can fulfill it. Emma? Yeah. Can there be time? Yeah. Yeah. Where is that? I think you could keep people going as long as you know that as long as they know that it isn't imminent, but it is going to happen and that we need their support for a long period of time. But you're right. I'm going to say everyone. So if we start telling people three to five years, how do they take it? Get back to me in three to five years. You're going to be watching Elon Musk. That's right. 120. 120. 110, actually. Right. Can you tell us some fundraising? Okay. Scheduling through the end of the year. So if we I'm going to start with what I see is the business development committee meetings that are were mentioned on sort of the spreadsheet that you had to synchronize with the stuff that's going on with RFP. I see a Thursday, November 14th. The 19th. Okay. So the 14th is going to be a coalition email of information sent to the board members. Okay. There's a meeting will be on the 19th. Okay. So we need a one-up by the 17th? Yes. Okay. So Tuesday, November 19th business development committee meeting. We have a December 2nd to also a business development committee meeting. Or is that I see topics develop review criteria scoring. That's right. A meeting is probably just a coalition of what you gather from your committee, right? Yeah. I have to figure out whether that's a meeting or not a meeting. Could be a meeting. Okay. So can we just schedule it as a tentative meeting? Because it's going to be better if we have it and cancel it. Everybody knows it's happening. Right. And I see another one for Thursday, December 12th That's 12. And we had talked about having some supplementary meetings in this body. The 26th, I suspect Right. That's I suspect that that's not going to work. Are we going to hold off until December 10th for our next regularly scheduled meetings? So 10th and the 17th have two in December and just one in November. I just have at Thanksgiving you can give thanks for the broadband innovation grant. Stretch it out. Two in December is good because December, the 10th can be regular business and the 17th can be focused on the RFPs. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense for me. Yeah. I'm not sure I'm being realistic here about the RFPs and the work that has to be done. So for example, on the 3rd of December we have the proposals to do. And then I hear the next meeting is the 12th and then the following and that's a Thursday and the following Tuesday you expect to have a recommendation to us. It would seem like you're going to have to have a meeting after the proposals to do before the 12th such that you can ask questions like, well, do we need any more information or are we going to have interviews and you might send questions back to them and get the answers back in response to shaking your head, I know. But things are going to happen between then and you're coming to us with a recommendation. The RFPs have to be self-contained. We cannot ask questions after the fact that do not also go out to all of the other people and give them an opportunity to respond to us. So the 3rd is the deadline and then we get those and he sends them out to everybody. We're going to have the criteria before then before then we'll be sending that out to everybody. Send that out to everybody. So you'll have from the 3rd till the full board meeting on the 17th to look at the RFPs and look at the criteria. We will have from the 3rd until the 12th to read the RFPs and do our ranking and then on the 12th we will meet and discuss our on that and come up with a recommendation and then for the 17th that will all come. To his point, while you can't ask new questions you can ask for them as you clarify particular sections of my experience that's quite common. Depends. If you get apples and oranges you're probably going to want to ask a few questions. Michael? So when the town of Craftsbury went through its municipal RFP process they did two, one for construction and one for provider. They reserved the right to select two finalists and then interview them and ask more questions of each. It's conceivable that we'll have some very close ties and we may need a recommendation where it's select one over another and we may have to extend our period but we didn't put it in the schedule either. Yeah, so I think we can see if there's a clear frontrunner that will make this decision easier in this conversation but let's see what we get and then we can and if the folks that are reviewing it early say, oh wow these are all over the map we're going to need to do some additional follow-up then we probably need to schedule an additional meeting. That happens. We're definitely going to have to say that. Yeah. So okay so I'm going to go back through this list of meetings that I have here. We've got November 19th Business Development Committee December 2nd Business Development Committee December 10th Governing Board December 12th Business Development Committee December 17th Governing Board It's ambitious. What's that? It's ambitious. We're having an actual development committee on the second. And I've got to do budget from now until January. Okay, anything else that we need to add to that list? Oh yeah. Meeting at Ray's house. Bring your own I know where you live. You didn't mention earlier that we're going to create a calendar to put it up. That's what I'm hoping to get from this is if we can get this to Jared. Jared, thank you so that we can get it up on the website that we'll have that easily visible and then when we have agendas for these things just as soon as the agenda is available we can send it over to Jared. I think our meeting on the 10th I can't imagine that meeting being terribly long. It's going to be maybe some initial thoughts about the applications that are in here. Maybe an update on the grant, the B.I.G. grant and probably some other basic stuff. But I don't think there's any huge decisions to be made then. That's a good follow-up question. I'll get to that in a second. Regarding meetings and notices I used to send the agendas to Rebecca and she would send them to the Town Clerks. Am I supposed to send them to the Town Clerks? Somebody needs to send them to the Town Clerks. When I send governing board agendas I send them to the Board and the Town Clerks. If you want to send them to me it's easy enough for me to do that. I can read a third group email. The way I have it set up for the board meetings is that everybody on the two line is a board member. Everybody on the CC line is a Town Clerk and interested party members of the media. That's how our friends at ORCA know when to show up. Question about the Clerk. I did send a message back to the person on Facebook who applied there who is from the very city however, in talking to Susan just at the beginning of this meeting she was under the impression that with her as the Clerk she was going to take over the responsibilities for doing all the meeting minutes and everything which I thought we were going to spread that love around until we found somebody who was willing to do that but from what you said you're willing to I can do this. Well, let's see how I do with these minutes. The only problem I'm having is that I think the tables should be closer together. People are speaking in very low voices. It's hard for me to hear. I have no hearing problem at all at my age. Thank you. But I think people really need to speak up and we need to bring the tables together. And you'd like us to have name tags, wouldn't you? Yeah, name tags. Pardon? Microphones. We need microphones. Name placards. Yes, yes. We can do that too. That's what you like. We got any minutes. Are we getting minutes from our meetings we haven't had? Um, I send that email to Becca about once every week or two. So she has several of them done. I think she's waiting until she has all of them done to send to me. And she wants them to send to me for signatures. Because we can't approve the next minutes because I don't think anybody's written them out there. Yeah, do you have the minutes from the last one? Yeah, I can send them out tonight. Yeah, I will clean up probably a few little things before I send them out. Yeah, so you could do a reply all to tonight's meeting and that should get to everybody that needs to get to or, I mean, yeah, that should probably be fine. Okay. Anything else, no scheduling through the end of the year? So approve the meeting minutes. We're going to move on from that because we don't have any to approve. All right. So we have a round table. So I don't know, does the More Town Select Board do this where everybody sort of gets like a parting shot to instill their personal wisdom on the group or otherwise say something that was on their mind that maybe came up that wasn't covered earlier. So we'll go around and we'll start off with you, Jonathan. Do you have anything you want to add? All right. Josh. No, just that. I'm very pleased with where we are and the progress that we're making and all the hard work that has been done on the grant that we have just approved. Good job. Thank you. And the committee. And the committee. I think the committee did a lot. I said no. There's one other area going on that I think may have some influence on hoping us with our system. Based on the power outages, and if those are going to dig into it, there's one story on power outages in 9-1-1. There seems to be hearings on what kind of infrastructure information needs to be maintained by the state. So we know where outages are affecting 9-1-1 calls. And so to this has been something that's been on my agenda since I started the state's GIS system in 1988 that we have a utility infrastructure database which we do not have. And it looks like there's enough impetus now because of what's been going on with 9-1-1 to have the utilities all get together and try to work on that. Which will hopefully save us money doing vertical asset inventories. Great. A good pass. Nothing. Thanks. I'm good. Clay apologizes for not getting the pressure. He says they'll try to get it out tomorrow. I told you it was Friday. He said there were seven strong applicants and they urged me to be in thought. Sorry to hear that, Michael. Did he say who the other two were? I asked him to say. I guess we'll find out tomorrow, right? Maybe. He's had a bad day. I just want to say I look forward to working with you all. It's been a long slog to get me here and get more town in and so I'm happy to be here and I will follow up with you directly because there's probably a lot of data you've accumulated around all the other towns that we're a little behind on so I want to figure out how to jump start that process and you can figure that out. I'm good. Thanks. So take away action items. One thing is to support this grant. Right? The award. Is that something you're going to work on? I'll ping it off the YouTube so it's a draft going on. I was doing some long-range thinking on the way home last time and I remember I think it was David who sent out a notice about some town out in the Rockies that had just bought their whole infrastructure and just gave it away. And I started thinking about, okay, so we're at $70, $80 and we're throwing around per month that we would maybe theoretically charge and that helps us build out the next town and so forth as we go. Once we get 2025, 2026 and we've built out the bulk of our infrastructure, where does that leave us when it comes to costs? Are we still looking to have $70, $80 a month and because that's what's going to be needed or do we start drastically reducing down to like $10, $15 just to make sure it's storm damages being taken care of and just if we want to I know we're going to have a feasibility study and we can look at all these different business plans and look at all that kind of stuff but we can start thinking about different ways we can look at that. What we need is 3 grand from every residence whether they put it in now, or they put it in over the next 5 years, they put it in over 10 years, just different ways you could look at that kind of stuff. Anyways, I just wanted to see the survey results said a lot of people were interested in prepaying. So on the other side of it we're still supposing that we finish. I think there's going to be there's going to be some expensive construction yet to be done which is I think where EC5 or they find themselves now they're looking at well what do they do about Norwich what do they do about those other towns that have cable infrastructure and how are they going to approach overbuilding it if they choose to do so. Other things that they've talked about are just as you said we just push down the cost, the monthly cost and so everybody's getting charged $40 a month or half of it or whatever and just enough to essentially keep operations and keep the wires and the poles. They're also talking about this is sort of just off the cuff what if you're a public entity and you have a bunch of extra revenue and they were talking about plowing you back into the towns so essentially writing stipend checks back to the towns I mean I don't know how that would work or what strings would be on that if any or do we start looking at different sorts of infrastructure related to communication so I think there's some I think that's a really good question and I don't know that we'll necessarily get to that answer as part of our business plan but I think the more that we can talk about it we want to go trying to find funds or just bringing more people if we can sell this as like this is where we're trying to get but here's our long-term vision and that's part of our sell packages we want to get to a state where we're doing this then that can make much bigger impact and we're just going to be another Comcast that maybe has better service than the other one and I think I'd like to keep maybe put this on the back burner and maybe come back to this next summer when we have maybe a wall in a meeting I mean our next meeting will probably be a bit quieter as well you're essentially bringing up the opposite of what that one guy came here and he's going to go get investors but he's predicated on the idea that he could sell the long tail right it's interesting but I like the blue sky of thinking so yeah I think we can probably come back to that at some point and whenever anybody's ready to talk about it or you think he needs to go on an agenda let's dedicate some time to doing that well certainly all organizations and business plans and annual reports and as working as a utility financial analyst for the public service department for 30 years I know how to come up with a cost of service so when that time comes like I'll be sure to I'll be here to help out with that thank you any other parting comments other than that just speak up advertise alright so I see the end of the round table and I move to be adjourned second in all in favor