 So it is a 601 on January 12th. I'm going to call the January 12th, 2021 regular governing board meeting of CV Fiber to order. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda? All right. Yeah, I have a little bit of Clark stuff to report on. Okay. So let's put you after last mile, if that's okay. Clark report and I have one thing to add to the consent agenda. And that is the payment of bills. There's also a bill from our clerk. So we have another clerk item to change there. So that's really the only thing. Anything else? Okay. Moving along, public comment. Does anybody have anything? Oh, I'm sorry, Tom, I see you. Sorry, coming in just in the nick of time. I wanted to add that potential motion about policy somewhere after the RFP discussion. Okay. Yep. I did make a note of that earlier and yeah, we will bring that up. Anything else? Okay. So public comment. Does anybody have any comments on things that are not on the agenda that they would like to talk about? Okay. Hearing none. Moving along, consent agenda. I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented. Second. Seconded by Siobhan. Any further discussion? Hearing no further discussion. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed abstentions or a roll call request? Okay. Motion passes unanimously. Thanks everybody. Finance report. So I sent you a copy of the bank statement. Going to open that up right now. So we still have some money left in the bank. I believe we still have some expenses that are covered under the CARES Act funds. You can see some of the checks that have gone out. I also wanted to mention that I have not yet deposited the second CARES Act check. I have it. Just depends on when I'm gonna be able to get to the bank. Any questions? Okay. Moving right along then. I apologize for the next two items. I neglected to update the times and kind of ship things around, but our next item is canvassing presentation by last mile. So Nick, should I give you presenter rights? Why don't you give it to Connor? I think he's gonna start out and share the presentation, I believe. Did everyone get the PDF we sent around? David, did you share that with folks? I did not. My bad. You're just gonna have to talk us foamers through how to share our screen then. There it is. No way, I never, you're ready. All right. All right, Connor, can everybody hear me okay? Yeah, Connor. Oh, okay. You sound good. Excellent, thank you. So we're just gonna kick things off here and I want to introduce myself. I'm Connor Casey, live right here in Montpelier, Vermont and inside the CV5 area. And with me are Nick Cherek and David Babaclain. In addition, we have a couple of our phone bankers just on hand who can chime in if they'd like at any point in this presentation. Teddy and Ted, Teddy is actually a city counselor and very city there. So he's well familiar with the area and a lot of our canvassers and lit droppers are from central Vermont here. So they had quite a connection to the materials that they were doing here. But I'm gonna throw it over to Dave to say a few words and then we'll get into the numbers a bit. Dave, you're on mute. Yep, I got it. I'm Dave Babaclain. I am living in Waitsfield right now. Just moved from Newbury and we saw the problems with broadband access. You know, we've been saying it for decades and during the pandemic, it really got laid there. And so we are excited to help close the gap with some of the pieces that are missing in this process, which you are all working so hard to provide. And in December, we began a survey of approximately 4,300 households in CV fiber territory, trying to find out, as you know, people's internet needs for streaming their knowledge of emergency broadband. And also as an ancillary benefit raise awareness about CV fiber and the coming services along the routes in your area. With coronavirus and the pandemic, it was a little bit different than it might have otherwise been where we would have really started going person to person. And we prioritize matching, using state-of-the-art technology, phone numbers to the addresses that were provided to us by David. And we called through all of our matches at least once. And I think I believe we have now almost finished twice. And we've supplemented that outreach with digital outreach, which you've all helped with and door-to-door literature drops. And we have now seen over 1,000 surveys be completed and we're very excited to have helped with this project. Connor, over to you. All right, and just digging into the numbers a little bit. All three of us actually have a background in political campaigns. So when we were sort of asked to pivot from the door-to-door canvassing, this was something we were a bit familiar with. And what we did was took the data, the addresses given to us by David and matched that up with some software that a lot of campaigns use using public records data to actually get cell phones and landlines for just under 3,000 folks in the district here. We put on eight phone bankers, all of whom have Vermont roots. A lot of them are just coming off political campaigns. We've had a lot from the world of VPIRD. So every one of them had a bit of experience doing this work and just a couple of things they found out right off the bat was, certainly these were a lot friendlier phone calls than they were used to. And we can let them get into that at the end a little bit, but very, very, very high contact rate compared to what we're used to seeing. And I spoke to some colleagues who are running campaigns now. If you're getting 10%, you're doing pretty well. And I think by the time the dust has settled, we'll be looking at 25% here, which we think is pretty good. So the calls made first and second round, 3,479. We're just ramping up a bit of work. And on the second round, and this is folks who maybe we left a voicemail for before, but wanna check in on again, we've probably got about 200 phone calls left on that. I think Ted has been working on that a bit today. Yeah. Oh yes, hello. Hey. Sorry, somebody jumped in with a question. The surveys we actually completed over the phone and how it worked was, I'll show you, we would have a script that we would use, but actually read over the phone and we would go online and use the CVFiber website survey. 451, 58 people said they completed later. Next number looks a little scary because you're thinking a lot of people hung up. Actually out of the 113 who refused, a good, good percentage of those had already taken the survey that through front porch form are another means there. So they were very friendly, grateful for the call, but they didn't wanna go through it again. And then we left a ton of voicemails just for folks directing them either to the survey website link or to call a central phone number that we have and Nick would answer those. We'll go into the lit dropping a little bit later, but we're looking at about 600 doors so far, mostly supplemental to try to fill in the areas where we didn't feel we were performing as much as we would like to, but Nick will talk about that. Yeah, as far as the methodology, this is what the screen would look like. We had a script under here. So everybody was using the same script. They were trained not to read it like a telemarketer because if I just say, hello, my name is Connor Casey, I'm calling from CVFiber. I think people would hang up. Friendly, conversational, you knew a little bit about the people you were calling. You would know Sharon here was 59 years old and female. And then we also had information about what Sharon's address was. So we could plug that in. And again, the whole thing was trying to make it so, you know, it's conversational. It's not a telemarketer and we really found people weren't like hanging up or anything. So we were really happy with the way the phone bank went. Now, as we're dispatching people to the doors, we have a companion program. What we use is the voter activation network. Again, that's a political software. That has a mobile technology component to it called Minivan. So Minivan uses GPS technology and it would actually direct the person dropping literature door-to-door to make it easy enough. And then they could just check off the houses where the literature has been dropped there. And again, this was non-contact. Nick will go into that a little bit. But we were able to target that and cut some maps to follow along with the potential routes there. So that ensured for a pretty high success rate. And we're still on doors the next couple of days here. We're still working on that. All right, and over to you, Nick. Cool. So we began working doing some door-to-door outreach midway through the month. And this whole sort of project, it's a four-week thing you're looking at. We got moving very quickly and we're fortunate to be able to work with some really great canvassers. Because of this being a unique moment, no matter how you cut it, we tried a couple of different things to see how they worked. One piece that we had some skepticism with is going around doing no contact canvassing and dropping door hanger literature. We didn't know what kind of response rate we would get from people. I think it's indicative about how excited people are about CV5 or that we actually saw a pretty decent response rate. I spent a lot of time out in Roxbury myself and I'd go home and look at the results the next day and the roads that I'd been on. And we would see five, six, half dozen, dozen people coming down the next day. What'd you say, Jeremy? That wasn't me, that was somebody else that had piped up that wasn't muted. So go ahead, Nick. All right, well, I had a good time in Roxbury. I don't wanna present the illusion that we're able to hit every single door in the district. We spent the real initial time calling people, but I'll dive into the numbers we got and then I'm happy to take any. Any questions or feedback or concerns? This is a little bit fine print, David. Maybe we can circulate this afterwards. This is at the start of the week. This is a breakdown of how we did community by community. Our goal internally was to get into the high two digit response rate. You can see some of the communities, the column in the right, we did much better than that. Some of it, there's a little work left to be done and there's still results coming in. But that's why we looked at Roxbury, spent some time canvassing there. We're out canvassing in Duxbury right now. I'm doing a turf and orange tomorrow, but we're trying to get enough responses from each community for it to be significant and useful to you. And we did that initially pushing hard on the phones and that's where we focused our lid dropping effort thus far, where we see there's gaps. Our team can personally vouch for 526 surveys that we personally filled out with folks we talked with directly either on the ground or over the phone. And we've matched those to the initial list of 4,000 or so that was provided with us. There's a total of 852 households that we identified though that have responded to the survey within CV5 for territory. That delta of about 326 households. Some of them are very close to the roots that you're looking at and we can dig a little deeper into that moving forward. Some of them are further afield but it's valuable community data that we collected that I think will be useful planning and for other purposes moving forward. About 86 of the surveys were from completely outside of your territory. And I think that shows the enthusiasm for the work you're doing and the general excitement for broadband in Vermont. We think those came in through front porch form or word of mouth or other digital spreading around. And then on top of that, we also collected about 910 new emails which are CV fibers now for future outreach and about 2000 plus phone numbers. And then also collected valuable data on a whole host of folks who are interested in presubscribing and other pieces of the project. So that's the work we've done thus far over the month. It's been a really exciting project for us. It's an issue that I've worked on off and on for about 10 years now. And I've spent a lot of time knocking on doors for various issues and talking to people on the phone. And this one is the most enthusiastic response I've gotten. People were genuinely happy to see me. And let's try not to make contact and scoot back out to my car. You know, I got a couple of people hollering out get CV fiber out of where we want. We want fiber right away. I want to reiterate that the fact that someone got a door hanger, took the time to fill out the survey, got a voicemail from one of us, took the time to call me back. You don't see that in other issue campaigns I've worked on. And so that's worth highlighting again. Great, thanks Nick and Connor. Time check. If anybody had any questions for the phone bankers, I think we might have a couple of them on the line here. So feel free. I like the semantic dodal stuff from the people that did the phone bank that we ought to hear about. Good and bad. I mean, you guys probably had the whole range of responses. So I'd like to hear some of them. Well, they slanted towards the good, but don't take my word for it. Teddy, do you want to talk a little bit about your experience talking to folks? Yeah, sure, definitely. Really good response rates, generally speaking. I've done a lot of phone banking work and even though people don't necessarily want to talk to you for a long time, everyone was super receptive when they found out. I was calling for CV fiber and a lot of folks were very excited about the idea of getting fiber to them. I talked to one woman actually whose husband runs a small business but their wifi is too unreliable at their house. So he actually has to drive into town and use the library's wifi, which the library's closed but the wifi is working. So he's driving into town, working in his car for a couple of hours, driving back to charge his laptop and that wouldn't be necessary with CV fiber systems. So they were very excited to hear about that. And folks were also just very, I've heard a lot of stories about a lot of promises that have been made in the past to folks, especially in like Calis and Marshfield area, that they were just like, yes, absolutely. I'll sign up, but when can I sign up? Ready to go. So had a very good response, right? And a lot of really good conversations. Yeah. Thanks. And is Ted on as well? Yep, I'm here. Oh, great. Did you want to weigh in, Ted? I see you now. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, all of that's definitely true. Definitely an overwhelmingly positive response more so than almost any other phone banking I've done. I would say, anybody that picked up the phone, and I told them what I was calling for, CV fiber, about 70% of people filled out the survey and were very enthusiastic just from my experience. One thing I did want to mention was there's a question on the survey that how would you be to sign up for CV fiber at $60 a month? And like I said, everybody really did want to have the service, but almost 60 to 70% of people that I spoke to mentioned that they would like it bundled with a landline. And I'm sure we all know how spotty the cell coverage is in rural Vermont. And they mentioned that that might be a make or break. So I made a notation of that. And that was due for a couple of reasons. Like I said, the cell coverage also costs, you know, a lot of people have, they're signed up with consolidated or Verizon and it's cost efficient for them to have that bundle of the landline. And then actually a couple of people mentioned that they didn't want their kids to have cell phones. So that they still wanted to have a landline to be able to contact their kids. And then the other side of that was less so, but a good chunk of people did say that they would be willing to get rid of their landline and just move exclusively to wifi calling because the bandwidth would actually allow it if they had CV fiber. So I would say, you know, it was a significant amount of people mentioned this phone bundling and then less significant but a good chunk of people mentioned that they would be willing to get rid of their landline and move exclusively to wifi calling. That is very good information. Ray. Yeah, so one of the things that we have been concerned about is how visible we are in the community. And I guess the question is, how often did you have to explain what CV fiber was? I would say most of the time, but if I got somebody on the phone, I would say maybe a quarter of the time they had heard of us. And I would say most of them heard of CV fiber through front porch forum. I actually, David Healy, I've heard your name mentioned quite a bit. So you're doing a great job, I guess, getting the word out. And yeah, it wasn't an insignificant amount of people that had already heard of CV fiber. Ray, that is a number we can pull for you too. We did ask that question this survey, not in the presentation, but I can follow up with more specifics. Anecdotically, I actually was very surprised that people knew right why I was there and what it was about. And what was interesting too was the couple of conversations I had from across the driveway. People were like willing to go out. They're like, what do we have to do next? Let's fill out the survey, but do we need to talk to our neighbors? So I think there is, these people are on the list we're gonna be providing. There's some enthusiasm for people to do some evangelizing and try to bring in other members of the community because they sort of get it, right? If there's a critical mass of people on the road, it's gonna make more sense from a business standpoint. So I really see the work we did is there's some really strong leads here that you or us or others will have a chance to double down on. And when you're able to anchor some of these routes, there's people excited to help find other preachers and subscribers, which I think makes a great deal of difference to what you're trying to do. And it also sounds like it reinforces our continuing use of front porch forum as a mechanism to get the word on. Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that people are responding to a survey that's left on their door or left on their answering machine it shows enthusiasm for the product, but also some recognition. I'm a big believer in repetitive touches when you're trying to reach people. And there's a point where they're never here to view and there's a point where you see them completely you bet with us. And I think we're sort of at that tipping point with some of these communities. Well, certainly one touch is not a campaign. No. All right, any other questions for the last mile folks? Siobhan? Mute, unmute, there it is. I'm really interested in knowing what the response has been from the orange folks because a lot of the people that I've spoken to like some were very excited but a lot of them were like wary, verging on suspicious. And I was wondering if you had much of a sense of that from the few that you've spoken to already? I don't and Ted or Teddy if you've had a specific conversation I am actually gonna planning on being out over the next two days in orange on the door is wrapping up some turf there. So I'd be happy to reconnect later in the week. I don't have a specific orange story yet that I can think of. But not a negative one. Yeah, I can say it was mostly positive. To my recollection, there were actually a few folks from orange that didn't have internet, didn't want internet. So that's, and I guess you'll find that across from over months, not so abnormal. Well, orange is an older community. There are some younger folks moving in, but we're an aging community. And I'm hoping getting internet in we'll get some more younger people coming in. Absolutely. Any other questions? Henry? Yeah, I missed the first couple of minutes because I was finishing up some analysis of the preliminary results from the survey. So I don't know how what stage we are in this process. Are we, you know, still going strong with continuing with the towns and canvassing? Because from my results, which I email to all the delegates so you can check your email, I could also put it on the screen. There's, you know, a couple of towns that didn't get anything that there was a broad difference in the response rates compared to the eligible premises. And I just was wondering if that was addressed before I came on. I'll try to address it really quick, Henry. And I'm happy to connect with you directly. And we also have a slide deck that we can send around. Our goal was to get into the high two digits, at least with each community. And we shared a breakdown. There were some communities we hit it. There's some communities where results are still coming in. And there's some communities where there's a slight gap. Duxbury happens to be one of the ones that we prioritized. Wrapping up, we've had folks out on doors in Duxbury yesterday today, and we will have over the next two days. So everybody gets a pamphlet. We saw some survey results come in last night. It looks like from Duxbury, I think part of that was your work, Henry, probably sharing on a front porch forum. Dave was also out there knocking on doors. Other communities, we saw much, much higher response rates than we were expecting, 50, 60, 70%. So there was a difference. What we've tried to do is shift our efforts. So we're looking at a statistically significant sample from each community. We had a list of around 4,000 folks we started with. We were able to match those with 3,000 people who we had phoned out of for. We've been calling them throughout across the whole territory, so not town by town. And then the follow-up door-to-door work, which is extra challenging during COVID, but has been proving somewhat fruitful, has been more targeted. So that's my very quick recap of where we're at so far. And there's some hard numbers we can send over as well. We did hit 65 doors in Duxbury today, so that is one of the ones we're wrapping up. That's good. Yeah, keep me posted on that. So I'm just wondering, I mean, in terms of the distribution, I don't know if I can share this table with you guys. No, David, go ahead. Henry, later on the agenda is survey results. Very good. All right, thank you very much. All right, anything else for the last mile, folks? I just want to say thank you. Thanks very much for the pleasure of working on this process. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Definitely appreciate your work. All right, let's move on to the next agenda item. Clerk report, Jeremy, you had something for us. Yeah, so the name of the organization has officially been changed to CV Fiber with both the Secretary of State's office and with the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration, that's Visara. The one little hiccup is regarding our CV Fiber DBA. We had to cancel that because Vermont statutes prohibit registering a DBA with the same name as the organization itself, which isn't really a big deal. We do still have our central Vermont Internet CUV DBA and that is now registered with CV Fiber as the owning organization. The other thing that I looked into was registering our logo. And according to the person I was speaking with at the Secretary of State's office, they require that trademarks be exclusively used to identify goods rather than services, service marks are for services, trademarks are for goods. They also said that service marks are not registrable at the state level. So therefore, unless we produce a good that our logo can be associated with, we can't register it at the state level. And I guess my question is do we want to, do we either or will we be producing a good that the state would recognize as such? Or should we abandon registration of the logo that we had said we would do in a previous meeting? Well, I think I can take that. I think I'd probably speak for most folks. Aside from Chuck's suggestion that we market raise CV fiber mugs. I think no, we're not ever going to produce anything. That's not really what we're built for. If my camera worked, I'd show you the one that I have, but if we wanted to go for a service mark at the national level, I suppose we could. I'm not sure that the juice is worth the squeeze on that one, but I'd be happy to hear from folks otherwise, if there's a compelling reason, Chuck. We've got bigger fish to fry, let's stay focused. Okay, anything else, Jeremy, on clerk reports? Nope, just that canceling the DBA cost 20 bucks. And that's in the invoice that I sent over to Jeremy Hansen. And the receipt for that is included with my invoice. So, and everybody should have a copy of that by this point. Any questions for Jeremy or anything else about the naming or trademark, service marks, et cetera? Okay, moving along, reassembling the finance committee. So I had a chance to talk to Jerry Diamantidis as he was spearheading the conversations with folks to do audits and getting somebody to do our books. Jerry, do you wanna spearhead the thinking here behind the reassembling the finance committee? Sure, and it I guess in part, it also goes with the next item on the agenda. So as far as the finance committee has the treasurer that we have currently hasn't been able for personal reasons to fulfill the role. And also the finance committee, some of the folks that are on the finance committee have really been pulled away because of COVID and haven't been able to work on a regular basis on the finance committee. So on the one hand, I'm putting my name in the hat to be treasurer if the board so desires that. And then I think we need to reassemble the finance committee so that we can develop a charter for the finance committee and move forward with the fundraising and the grant writing that needs to be done ASAP. And these things have kind of by default fall into the business development committee, which is gonna come up later with a discussion about their charter perhaps and the committee's report. But what I'm seeing is that we really need to pull some of the activity that's been laid on the business development committee, especially with regard to the grant writing, bring that over to the finance committee and with the money that we now have coming in and going out and certainly there will be a lot more in a very short amount of time, we need to keep really tight track of that. So as I said, these two items on the agenda are kind of aligned. So I've talked to bookkeepers and I've talked to auditors. We've identified a bookkeeper that we would like to work with. She's already made contact with Jeremy and I believe that Jeremy is personally comfortable with her. It seems from the emails that I've seen going back and forth. I've talked to auditors that have tried to talk me out of having an audit and even stating to us that the veto loan, even though it says it requires an audit, we're in a position where that may not necessarily be the case because we're such novices, so young at this. We don't have that much of a track record that really needs to be audited but that's not gonna last very long. So that may change in the very near future. But I think what we really would like to see, what I would like to see is the finance committee come up to the level of activity that the business development committee has had and that we can work together between the finance committee and the business development committee to have our budgets aligned, our strategic plans aligned, our annual forecasted expenditures and receipts aligned so that we can be able to respectfully handle all the money that is gonna be coming through our coffers shortly. That's my bit there, but I'm happy to take questions. If that's all. Yes, I think that the punchline here is that we need to reform this committee. I mean, there's folks that the last time we did the appointments, we appointed folks who are no longer even part of CV Fiber. So I am interested in serving on this. Jerry, as our future treasurer, hopefully will be. Be nice if we had three more people that would be willing to be a part of kind of monitoring the finances and sort of the money side of things. I see Ray's hand up. Anybody else willing, interested? I see Siobhan. I need one more. And Jeremy, thank you very much. We could certainly, if there's still another person who I can't see hands up for, whatever, please shout out or note it in the chat. We can obviously add people later if we'd like to. But that way we don't run into the problem of having a two-person quorum. Chuck, are you volunteering or are you? No, I have a question slash comments. Okay, so first the comment, since we are indexing with a higher than average number of members of the public here, I would like to call out that committees can sometimes have members of the public as well. You don't have to be a delegate or alternate to serve. And then my question is, would Jerry have to step down to be treasurer? He would indeed, yes. He would not be able to be the alternate for Berlin anymore. Okay. Any other questions or thoughts about this, Ray? So it sounds like there's multiple actions here. One is that we want to retain the bookkeeper. I think there's a lot of positive energy here and that people are happy with that. And so we need to, is a vote required for that? Second, since Jerry has now resigned as the alternate from Berlin, we need to vote perhaps for appointing him as treasurer and I'm all in favor of doing that. And then the third thing is to send the folks who volunteer I guess to go out and come up with their charter and come back to the, come back to the board. Right. And so if you take a look at the agenda, for example, that's, I have all of those items as agenda items. So I'd like to take them one by one if we could. So for right now though, what I'd like to do is constitute the finance committee so that we have the committee and that we can take some time, meet with each other and do exactly as you said, Ray. So unless anybody has any objections, I would move that we're going to appoint Jerry Diamantidis, Jeremy Hansen, Ray Pelletier, Siobhan Parakone and Jeremy Matt as members of the CV Fiber Finance Committee. Second. Okay. Honest. Honest. Point of order. And that would be that the treasurer is, might be an ex-officio member, but they're not a member we're saying. Yes. They're an ex-officio member according to the rules. So sure, but we're constituting our own finance committee right now. And I would expect the treasurer to have a vote in this committee. I don't think we're prohibited by statute from offering people who are not on the governing board votes on the committee. That's correct. The point is that it'd be the finance committee that's overseeing and overseeing the work of the treasurer. Okay. I mean, I'm fine with the motion as it is right now. I think if the finance committee wants to figure out how people want to vote, whether they want to let the treasurer vote or not, I think we can sort that out later. Okay. So it's been moved and seconded any further discussion. Okay. All in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, abstentions or requests for roll call. Motion passes unanimously. Moving to the next agenda item. We have an appointment of the treasurer and bookkeeper. I would like to move to appoint Jerry Diamantidis as CV fiber treasurer and therefore rescinding his appointment as a governing board alternate. Second. Okay. I think that was Chuck's second. I heard that right. That's what I heard too. Okay. Any further discussion? Okay. Please signify approval by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed, abstentions or roll call requests. All right. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much, Jerry. You are now our new treasurer. Hopefully we will be able to hold on to you. We'll try. I'll let the select board know tomorrow about the change in circumstances here. Appreciate it very much. Thanks, Jerry. So the next step would be to appoint Shannon Blaise and I'm going to write this in the, I'm going to write her name down for spelling B-L-A-I-S. And Jerry, would you like to explain the kind of the circumstances? We have not signed a contract yet. We do not have an agreement yet. She has explained what she's going to do and not going to do and rates and whatnot. Jerry, would you give us a refresher? Yeah, sure. She is a bookkeeper. She's not a CPA. She doesn't do audits and she doesn't do taxes. Okay. But what she does do is she is a bookkeeper who has worked with nonprofits in the past and she charges $50 an hour. She's expecting to do just a few hours a month with us. It's not a heavy lift for her. She uses QuickBooks. She does not use QuickBooks online. She says that that subscription really isn't worth it. Once you buy QuickBooks and you have it, it's just a matter of sending files around. It's easy to manage. And I can see how that would work. So my plan is to have her fulfill those bookkeeping functions under my oversight and have her be the day to day. Of course it's not day to day, but to have her be the regular conduit for keeping the books with me, looking over her shoulder, if you will. And I see the treasurer's role as maintaining contact and oversight with the bookkeeper and with the treasurer not being the bookkeeper, allowing the treasurer to do more of the planning and budgeting and forecasting of money coming and going so that we can look forward and not be looking straight down at our feet as we're walking along. So I think it's a very good idea to get her on and she doesn't require a contract the long term. It's kind of month to month. We'll get used to each other and we'll work together. And if it doesn't work, we can find someone else. That's certainly not a problem. So any thoughts or questions about hiring, contracting with Shen and Blaze to do bookkeeping for us? Right, is that a finger up? I can't really tell. Yeah, it is a finger up. So my question has to do with my expectation is that anybody walking into this job is going to have a ramp up and gathering information and filling the books, right? And so we're going to see some initial expenses and that's fine, that's expected. Now, the other bit is however, we're not having a contract is that we own the data. And even though it's her books, her quick books or whatever, I want to make sure that we get the data. And that's one of the reasons why you'd have a contract for example, as two pages that it might be. Very good, Ray. I agree with you. My intention is to have a probably a weekly data share with her and make it a standard like every Friday afternoon or every Monday morning, whatever it is that we're uploaded so that we're fully at the same place with whatever her quick books is. But I'm more than happy as we develop this and move forward to take others' expertise. Frank, would you mute yourself please? Okay, I just muted Frank. If Frank, if you want to talk again, put a message in the chat and I will unmute you. I guess the other bit was confidentiality. We would anticipate, you know, we would only make information public that we want to make public and that she would refrain from doing anything without authorization from the treasurer or from the board or the finance community. Yeah, so I agree with you, Ray. I don't think that the contract needs to be complicated but I do think that there are some elements for protecting our interests, including confidentiality and such. It doesn't have to be like any sort of binding contract where she must perform for a year or anything like that but I'm on board with you. However we decide to move forward, we will have some clarity about what it is that she's doing for us and what our expectations of her are. I'll take that on and send a draft out. Okay, thanks, Chair. Michael, actually, I saw RD stand up. First RD then Michael. Thank you. We should have a corresponding copy of QuickBooks so that if anything goes amiss with our bookkeeper, we have a copy of the books. And it's also my experience that was useful for the bookkeeper to have a dedicated laptop to work on. Once again, in case anything goes amiss, that laptop is available to us. Third, any firm that we might contract with for auditing services should meet with our treasurer and our bookkeeper. My experience has been that different auditors, different CPAs make a different use of QuickBooks and QuickBooks features. And it was, my last experience was rather tedious, having to change my book practices to conform with those of the auditor. So those are three points that I'd like to make with respect to making sure that these files, these QuickBook files are redundant. That seems fair. I don't know that, I mean, personally, I'm not sure that we need to go so far just to have a dedicated laptop for this. I would prefer that we not invest CV fiber funds in something like that just yet, but I think there is some wisdom. If we can read these files using the online or other version of QuickBooks on our own, I think that is a wise step. So maybe Jerry and I or the rest of the finance committee can talk about what that looks like and what's the prudent next step then to making sure that we have that redundancy and that we don't lose anything. That would be catastrophic. I was just admonishing my students earlier this morning about the importance of redundancy and backups. Well, Jeremy, I've been working from home for since AOL dial-up days. It's gotta be pushing 25 years. And I have three different hard drives with information on them. And I'm crazy enough about this kind of stuff that sometimes when I leave the house, I bring one with me, you know? So yeah, I fully get that RD. I think that's really important. We can't lose anything. I concur. And of course, we also have the Google Drive now where we're gonna be uploading things for everybody to see. So yeah, that's the music to my ears, Jerry. One follow-up point is that we may need to, our bookkeeper may need to rebuild our financial history into quick books. Yes, sir, that's expected. We may need to account for our financial history from day one, whenever that was. I hope we do. That's almost certainly true. And yeah, thankfully though, you can still count on, I mean, I think we've gone through maybe one checkbook in our whole existence. So we're talking about 25, 30 outbound checks. And I can probably count on two hands the number of inbound checks that we've had. So aside from a small donations on the online platform, so it should be pretty straightforward, I'm hoping. I got Michael and then Chuck. So it was perfect. R.D., Jerry and Jeremy all went where I was about to go. So I'll just give it a slight variation on that. Quick books, the desktop version of QuickBooks is superior to QuickBooks Online, but QuickBooks Online is very valuable for an organization like us because of the way we can share with it. Jerry wouldn't have to have his weekly Monday morning or Friday afternoon visit if there's a QuickBooks Online account that he can just glance at. So I agree with all the points that just got made. That's, I won't reiterate them because you covered them, but that is the point. We need some access for other people and redundancy and ability to carry the data away if something goes wrong. And I guess I agree with Jeremy. I don't think we need the laptop yet, but everything else that was stated, I think it makes sense. Thanks, Michael. Chuck. I was just gonna make a comparable plug for QuickBooks Online solving those use cases perfectly. So we should consider it. All right. I hear marching orders for the finance committee. Anything else before we, so let's see, secretary clerk person, did we already make a motion to appoint the bookkeeper? I feel no. Okay. So I'm gonna move discussion. Great. I move that we appoint Shannon Blaise to be the bookkeeper for CV Fiber at a rate not to exceed $50 an hour. Okay. Seconded by Siobhan. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed abstentions or roll call requests. Motion passes unanimously. We have a treasurer and a bookkeeper. Thanks everybody. Moving along, central Vermont Regional Planning Commission support and the PM search. David, do you wanna take this? Sure. So we were hoping to come to the meeting time. The business development committee was working on a PM development. And at the same time, trying to reach out to the Regional Planning Commission to see what functions they could help us with. And I don't know how many people in the board were over. This came to my mind only because when I go to the CUDA meetings, it seems to me there's a lot of regional planning for people on those meetings supporting the CUDs. So what I did last week was I reached out to Bonnie. I forgot the last name at the moment. Manager. And I also reached out to the three RPCs who were supporting other CUDs and got their contracts. And so I sent Bonnie a list of things support areas that I saw the other groups were doing. And the administrative support type things and these are all subject to our approval and not approvals. Take minutes at all board meetings and committees. We already have somebody that does that, but some RPCs do that. Post materials on website, agendas, minutes, policies, RPCs. Some RPCs do that for CUDs. Maintain all the documents, papers and policies. And then do responsible for communication with board members, agendas, minutes and meeting materials. That was one. They're also available to be treasure if we wanted them to be treasure. They are very adept at doing grant writing and for both grants and loans and said they're willing to support us in those activities. And then in terms of contracting support, RFP drafting, negotiations, drafting and management they're more than capable of doing that because they do a lot of it in-house already. And then in technical assistance, doing research, planning, policies, governance structure are all areas that a topic that they could consider. So I sent that list to her Friday of last week. I only, I called it today because I hadn't heard from her and she said she was trying to get some more information before she replied to us, but she said she'd have a proposal to us for the services they could offer and some estimates over to a cost. And so from that standpoint, I mean, the business development committee will have to reconsider this when we meet again and we'll bring it back to the board. But I just want to give an update. It was a pretty positive involvement for my perspective because it's sort of more organized and in one place but I'll leave questions for that right now whether it's worth continuing to pursue or not. Good idea, bad idea. I think a lot of people on the business development committee thought it was a good idea. Henry. Yeah, just one question. I wasn't sure from that description you gave whether project management was included in their capabilities. If you were talking about another thing to be developed. I mean, project management has got two things. There's administrative assistance and there's project management. And until we have a real project anyway, and we're working on that. I mean, Siobhan and Ray have been working on that. I've got to call out to Carol Monroe to see what kind of definition we need for that kind of a position to oversee our piece of that kind of work. So I'll be coming back to the board, business development and the board. So what you're saying is that we need someone else for the network project management because they don't provide those services. Which makes sense. I mean, they could, but it's certainly not something they, we can pursue it, but I don't know. But yeah, so I think because the Regional Planning Commission will offer some of these administrative services, these were some of the things that we were asking, you know, our previous project manager to do. When I think what we're talking about here is let's get the administrative stuff if the Regional Planning Commission is willing and able to do it, there's going to be some nice continuity and some built in capability there already. The Regional Planning Commission is not going to go away. Their mission lines up pretty nicely with our mission. They know what we're about, we know what they're about. And then when we get a project manager, that project manager can focus on the project. The other thing that they have multiple staff that can do different functions. So we're not paying top dollar for something that's a more of a clerical function and then we're paying a higher price for that. So the proposal she's going to give us this week will have the billing rates for their staff, which are basically at her cost, billing rate is their wage plus their overhead plus expenses, which they don't have. So don't have any money. So we'll get that to the committee soon and hopefully come back to the board. All right, any other? Oh, Michael. Just information question. How do CB fiber towns and Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission towns overlap? Which towns are not covered? Which towns do they have that we don't have? Does it matter at all? It may not, but I'm just curious about it. The only town that they don't have is Elmore. They have Washington and Orange and they have all the way to actually, the only towns that they have that we don't have are the Watesfield Valley, the Warren Valley, based in Warren and Watesfield. So it's a pretty convenient overlap. I remember, so this organic growth of our district, I remember being in their office and looking at their map and I was like, it looks pretty much the same as our map. The other thing is an advantage for me, I mean, not that I'm gonna be here forever, but all the GIS data that I've developed for us, they can handle, they have a two-person GIS shot. Any other questions or comments, Siobhan? So I need, I've gotten feedback from people on the, because I had thought the previous announcement that we had sent out for the PM search was good, but apparently it's not. So I've gotten some feedback from people about repairing it. And what I don't know is how this impacts that because I'm not clear on what is an administrative function versus a project manager function. And so I'm hoping that, I'm pretty sure Ray is happy to work with me on that. I've gotten feedback from Ken, I haven't finished yet. I've gotten feedback from a lot of people to look at, but I was kind of holding off because I wasn't sure if the Regional Planning Commission was gonna be handling project management stuff or if we were still gonna be hiring a project manager. And it sounds like we are still going to be hiring a project manager, just hopefully with a more narrow focus on what they're doing so we can pay them for fewer hours is the goal. Is that, am I understanding that right? I mean, that's my understanding. I don't need it when it's necessary. Yeah, until. Yeah, because there isn't exactly a project right now. I mean, we're on the cusp of it, but when there is a project, then yeah, we want the project manager to run that, but. Okay, thanks. So I think when David gets back the proposal from Regional Planning, we should be able to essentially take any of those items that were in the job description that we're gonna be willing to hand off to Regional Planning and strike those from the ad. Okay, any other thoughts or questions about support from Regional Planning or the ongoing process of searching for our next project manager? Okay, survey results. Do you have anything you want to share your screen? Anybody? So I asked, I gave a copy of the complete survey file to Henry and Henry, I guess tonight finished doing some analysis of it. And he said he could do a quick overview of some of the results. Is that okay, Henry? Sure, yeah. You want to share a screen? Yeah, I just made you presenter. Thank you. Can you see this? Yep. Okay. So this is the list of CV Fiber Towns, the data from Vermont Public Service Department broadband status numbers for each of those towns, survey responses by each of these towns, and then a percentage over here. There's two towns, Elmore, and these towns didn't have any theory results, Elmore and Barry City. I don't know if we're trying to get Barry City or not. And these towns also showed up, which are an NCV Fiber territory, all the way to St. Jay. So that's kind of a quick look. Now, my results were as of December 30th, so they're not as up to date. But we see that in these first five towns here, Worcester, Plainfield, Calis, Middlesex, Cabot, and Roxbury, they're all close to 10%. And then the rest of these are very small percentages. So I don't... I would like to drop a quick clarification, Henry, if you don't mind. Yeah, yes, because I don't know what the scope was for the canvassing, so that was gonna be... The canvassing was not town-wide. There were a limited number of addresses in each town provided to the canvassing teams. And so it's important to know that. So for example, in Moortown, I think the canvassers were provided with 58 addresses, if I recall. So the fact that we got 57 means we got nearly 100% of the canvassed, or at least a rate of near 100%. But that said, there could have been people who were not part of that address who still also responded to the survey because I also did a couple of front porch forums. So I can't tell you what the overlap of that 57 is with the actual addresses that will provide to the canvassers. So I just wanted to clarify that because if you're looking at these response rates and they look low, it may be that the number of addresses supplied to canvassers in a particular region was also low. So who provided the addresses to the canvassers? We did. Okay. And where did that list come from? If it must have been some subset of the eligible premises or? No, it was all the premises are in 500 feet of the road center line of the route that they get. Oh, okay, okay, okay. I just selected all the premises. And then a summary table, I don't know how much time we were spending this tonight, but the table we prepared with every route tells you how many fall into which category of service in terms of no service, four to one, under 25, that kind of thing. So Henry, do you have any aggregate summary information by question? No, I haven't gotten that far yet. Oh, well, I did. I did some of this. Okay. Have you heard of a CV5 or 65% of people said yes. 35% said no. Do you have internet service? 94% said yes. 6% said no. Has it met your needs? 16% said yes. 38% said no. 42% said not always. Do you have internet phone service, VOIP? 26% said yes. 73% said no. How many, what was the average number of persons using, students were using online per household was 1.8. So that was pretty high. Number of class hours learning, about five hours average was the number I could, was really had to pull it out of the data that I had. How many members of your household work remotely? Three quarters of the people who responded to this question said yes, about 1.9 people work from home. Estimated number of hours working from home, I didn't get to finish that one. How many members you also use the internet for entertainment? 100%. How many hours a day? 6.4. How many people are working and how many people are doing entertainment? But anyway, that was with everybody in the household. So it's easy to get that number. Are you aware of various broadband programs for subsidies for low income households? Only 22% of our survey respondents knew that there were even programs to subsidize broadband. So that was one of the things that the Department of Public Service was interested in. Are you aware of this? Got that. If CB5 were brought competitively priced broadband services, this is approximately $60 and up a month. 48% said they definitely would subscribe. 30% they said they would probably subscribe. 12% said maybe and the rest, 8% said probably not or not. Would you be willing to invest in helping finance the construction and operation of the network for the first 24 months? 15% said loan, 11% said gift, 42% said presubscription and 19% said volunteer. So that's a lot of volunteers out there that we haven't tapped into. And may we contact you? 81% of the respondents said yes we could. So we have those emails now. And in terms of all the questions we wanna do follow up at some point, I think this survey has a lot of data we can mine to get ourselves going. Anyway, so that's, as of January 1st, I guess is the data that I had. Henry asked the other question of do we want people to continue to fill in the survey? And my question, my suggestion is yes. There's no harm because I have the survey with the way the survey is compiled the data is automatically entered into the result into the record. So we can actually parse out who was done before January 1st and who was done after January 1st. So I'd suggest running another, if you've already done Front Porch Forum in the last two or three weeks, maybe wait another week. If you haven't done it in a while put something in Front Porch Forum. I have to tell you, I get people even with putting it in Front Porch Forum and I'm pretty consistent with this. I'm not getting a lot of feedback. And so it'd be interesting to see what other people are doing on that regard. And I think I'll leave the survey section done for now because I know the time is tight. All right, Jeremy, then Henry. So a quick question. Are there leftover triples and door hangers from the literature drops? Because what I'm wondering is if it might be worth saying like, hey, Plainfield Hardware, can I leave a dozen of these at the counter or something like that? I know a few of the business owners in town who might be willing to do that. I'll get the literature started around. Yeah, Les Mile has it all. Have them give it back to us and distribute it to everybody. And if you think that's a good idea, maybe we should get some more of the triples printed up. So we have some left, just to confirm that. Nick's still here. I'm still here. But how many do you have left? More than a couple of dozen. Okay, all right. We have quite a few, but a bunch left to start it with. Super. And off to the hardware store. Great. Thanks for that, Nick. So hold on a second though, but Jeremy, you also had another question which I thought you were asking. Did the addresses that we asked last mile to survey, did they include the updated routes in Washington and Duxbury? I'll take it. I think so. There was a robust selection of addresses in Duxbury. Fewer than... Duxbury had every address in town because I didn't have a route at the time. And then Washington, I did not have a route. Okay. So we kind of took a bigger bite of those towns then. Okay. So I have Henry and then, and I see there's a question from Alan in the chat that we'll get to. Henry? Yeah, I'm just curious, when you were talking about leaving them at the hardware store, similarly finding out who did reply and me going around door to door to the people that didn't reply. So a similar kind of, because I think we've saturated next door in front porch forum and it's really time to get delegate boots on the ground. So just being, so... I agree. So Alan Gilbert had a question in the chat. I will verbalize this. Is it fair to describe the purpose of the survey as gauging interests of people living along the routes in Ryle suggested as initial build out whether they would subscribe to a fiber service? I think the purpose has been a bit confusing. David or Chuck, you wanna weigh in? I mean, I think that's an accurate description. Yeah, I don't know what part, Alan, I'd like to know what part is confusing. I thought we, I thought the survey was another general survey of all 20 towns to try to figure out where there was the most interest. No, my original goal was the, we have these six routes, let's find out how many people on the routes are really interested in participating and subscribing. So that's why the addresses were limited to those routes that I gave last mile. Now, people can disagree with that, but that's where the original intent was. So that makes the collection of information from surveys people took on their own initiative online. That muddies the water a bit, is that correct? Well, we have, I mean, we can match addresses. We can match the addresses from the routes to the addresses that are not on the routes that are in the survey. So yeah, no, I think we can sort it out and find out who's in the route and who's not in the route that took the survey. I guess I'm just trying to figure out exactly what this tells us. That's all, I'm a little bit clear. I think I'm getting a clearer picture, but it's been a bit confusing at least for me. Basically who, you know, I was mostly interested in who do we have enough people to subscribe on a road? And I don't know if we have enough information to do that or not. And, you know, it's getting towards the hour. I mean, the, what's the name? Interiles feasibility study, pick these routes because of the density, the lack of cable service and the paucity of service to begin with. So that's how the six routes were originally chosen, not, and now we have eight routes. And so, you know, whether this is going to be useful information or not, then we have the COOS stuff that's trying to figure out and digest, which I know Chuck will talk about in a little bit, but that's where I'm at with the survey. So if I could just have one follow up question, I'm trying to figure out what the high number, response number for Worcester really means. And I'm not quite sure I understand what it is, what the meaning is. Well, when you see the numbers broken out for Worcester, you'll know what they answered to the question. I mean, there's, you know, the 10 questions, you know, were they going to subscribe or not? Yes or no? You know, it's. Well, I think I can take a crack at this too. So as we're filing, you know, our loan request with Vita, and as we're going into the project, you know, we have the numbers of the cash flow that we had Fred whip up for us last year, but there were assumptions about take rates in there. And if we say, we're going to build the black route, well, what does that mean? Do we have any concrete data that actually tells us what the probability that we're going to get 40 or 50 or 60% and if there's, you know, 60% of people are saying, yes, we definitely will take it all along this specific route. David can pull that out for that particular route. And then we can include that conclusion and that the fact that we went that extra step to say these people, we're really confident that we're going to hit 40% and that's our assumption rather than just guessing. And if there's, you know, for people who say, you know, that's $60 a month, we have a price point, we have some sense of the price elasticity, you know, the tolerance for a higher price or a lower price, we don't necessarily know that, but we at least know that single price point. So this is, I think, this is a quiver or this is an arrow in our quiver as we're going towards getting the funds to actually build out the project. I don't know if that helps at all, Alan. Well, I haven't seen the survey results. So I don't know if 100% of the people in Worcester who responded to the survey said, yes, we will take, we will subscribe to fiber optic service from CV fiber. It could be 100% said, no, we don't, we don't want it. So I'll send you the spreadsheet for Worcester. Okay, that would be helpful, that really would. Thank you. I'll send it to everybody. I'll send it every town to everybody. Okay. Sounds good, thanks for that. What I'll do with that, I'll send the survey results and I'll send the list of addresses that we were supposed to get results from. So you have a comparison and if you want to contact your neighbor, you'll know who didn't fill it in that you like. See, I think they had to fill it in. Yeah, thank you. All right. All right, so I've got Jeremy, then Ray, then Henry posted a question in chat. So let's start with Jeremy. So I guess my question is, if this is to gauge interest along routes and to select the next route, why are we paying COOS and what are we getting from COOS that we aren't getting from the survey? Chuck, do you want to take that? Okay. All right, right now the answer to that question is nothing. That said, Okay. COOS will allow us potentially to provide a little more structure to things like subscription pre-sales. So, if you can imagine, we're the next step along this endeavor. We've actually selected where we're going to build first. We can start to contact those people along that first build out route and say we are estimating, we are going to be at your address with service by say June 2021, just to throw an incredibly aggressive date out there. And so what COOS would allow us to do is actually get them to pick like a service plan offering to see what the service plan offerings are and to pre-subscribe and ultimately actually purchase. So COOS does handle the actual subscription management is my understanding and allows us to manage that piece of it. That said, we're still at the very early phases of trying to set COOS up and it is a bit of a struggle. It's not the easiest software ever to figure out and I've probably read the manual three times over at this point. And so, you know, whether COOS is going to ultimately work out for us, I can't answer at this point in time. We've run into roadblocks that have been incredibly frustrating along the way that have made at least me and I think David as well kind of scratch our heads and say is this really the tool we want to be using regardless of whether it is solving a problem for us right now or not. And I can't really answer that question just yet. It may still prove to provide value but we preempted it by sending the survey out. We limited ourselves from getting some of the value out of it that it does try to offer and it is worth noting that we were getting a lot more robust data as a result of it because their survey capabilities doesn't allow you to add much in the way of custom questions. So, you know, our data set is actually going to be far more robust as a result of having done it ourselves than leveraging COOS. So I want to follow up on that a little bit, Chuck. And Michael, I'm going to add you to the queue here. So I had already offered this to David, Chuck. If there's a matter of mangling data or writing a script, like an import script or something like that, I mean, I'm sure you're capable of doing that as well, but I mean, I'm also happy to do that. So if there's something coming out of the VAN software and it needs to be massaged in such a way that so that it can be easily or more easily imported into COOS, if that's at all straightforward, I'm happy to take that on. So I'll just put that out there. Let's see. I appreciate that, Jeremy. Can you say that again, Jeremy? I said that, at least if you're using Python for that sort of thing, I'm pretty decent and would be happy to help get something up and running. And what were you saying, Chuck? I was just saying thank you. Cool. All right, Ray, Henry and Michael. I think the most actionable bits of information here of value have to be the people who have identified themselves as willing to provide a loan, people who are willing to give us money and the people who are willing to pre-subscribe. I think some of the other bits of information is probably not of a high enough percentage for us to use to great value. We might be able to extrapolate some of that in arguments for our grants and loans with regard to some take rates, but I think that's a bit of a stretch given the low percentage, even though they were happy with 25% and they're probably right with those kind of numbers. But the best bits are the mining of the data of the people who are willing to give us money. Thanks, Ray. And in the interest of time, I'd like to wrap this up after Henry and Michael so that we can get onto the RFP and some of the other stuff. But Henry, you wanna ask your question that you posted in chat and then Michael? Yeah, I'm just curious. How is the contract written? When is the last mile met all their contractual obligations? What are the criteria for completing the contract? The contract expired on December 31st. So they're still working under the contract. So we didn't do any amendment or anything like that. And I have not looked at the last page of the contract to see what the final deliverable was. But that would still have to come in. Or how did they have to make a certain number of get a certain number of responses or anything like that? I don't know. I mean, yeah, because the contract's done, I was wondering what kind of obligation they had to do. Yeah, I don't know. Tim did all the contract negotiations. So I need to go back and look at that since I guess I'm the last one standing on this one. So I'll get back to the whole board on that. As I recall, there was like a number of contacts that was expected and they fell a bit behind in part because we didn't want them to do the door knocking. So yeah, as far as I can tell, the date has gone by but they still have, I mean, they're not done in Duxbury yet. They're not done in Washington yet or wherever they said they were going tomorrow. So I think, yeah, I think they're still on the hook for a bit but that would be good to look at the contract, I think. All right, Michael. Comments on the overlap of the two roles. So surveys tend to be best used for grant and loan applications for documenting demand in that sense to make bankers happy and grant awardors happy. And demand aggregation typically is used to get commitments and to actually market and get people signed up. And what we did here though was we overlap them a little more because we only surveyed residents on routes that we've already identified. So there is overlap between the two here and that's why COOS is looking a little less useful because we usurped some of its role by restricting who we surveyed. So those are my comments but I still think both roles are important. I'll leave it to Chuck and committee to decide if COOS is still valuable or not but generally demand aggregation is a very useful way to get people to commit and to rally their neighbors to commit once we're really building and really trying to get signups. All right, thanks. Thanks for that, Michael. Let's move on to the poll inventory RFP. David, you wanna take this one too? Yes, the committee has been, I think we've gone through by three drafts of this poll inventory RFP. Thank you, Ray. Ray is taking a major role in getting the whole package together. We've had some good input from a number of members on the committee. And so we think it's pretty in enough shape that we'll bring into the board for recommendation to it's a go and we'll issue it not in the next week or two but with the modifications we have to hone in on the date that it should be issued and the date that we want responses to come back. I'm of the opinion not to specify a route in this RFP but to say that we're going to need somebody to do 120 miles of poll inventory to be specified. And by the time we pick a contractor we'll probably know where we're gonna be but Ray and I have gone back and forth in this a couple of times. And I'm gonna let Ray chime in on this one since I'm gonna let it sort of be his, he does such a good job in getting it together and honchoing it. So I think it's pretty good to this. One is the RFP itself, we know they were happy with it. And so an approval of the RFP, the second bit is approval of the issue of the RFP. The third bit is actually what it's phase one. What's the definition of phase one? What are people bidding on? And as you read the RFP itself directly to purposes. One is to bid on phase one for getting that work done. And we might actually retain one or more contractors to do the work to do that. And it's also to identify other posts put under contract that we can do the subsequent phases but by just issuing a request for bids without going through the entire process of an RFP. So our request for bids and work order. I think that we had some really good technical input with regard to the statement of work. And I think that's looking really good. So the important bit here now is what is phase one? And I think I just heard David say it's going to be 120 miles and go bid on that or it's going to be blue and yellow and of course the other part within the RFP itself is that we don't actually identify what phase one is in the contract. People who are interested in knowing what phase one is they have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and then they get access to the actual definition of the phase. On the other hand, we could just say do 100 miles. And what they will probably do is they will do like people have suggested they'll determine that that means it's going to be a pole every 185 feet or this 27 poles per mile. And they're going to tell us that $21 a pole here's what it's going to cost you. That's not an unusual kind of response that they've kind of given us give you an average of what the cost per pole is. I didn't think we wanted to go with that pick it away so I thought we were going to perhaps identify with a little more specificity but I think that's a business development pretty role in the sense of coming up with a recommendation for the phase one. And so I think we still have that come back to you with but the RFP itself is in good shape as David said depending upon when we get the data together for phase one will depend upon when it's issued and when we expect proposals back. My view of the world is that we expect proposals back within let's say a period of four weeks from the time we issue it. And so if we were issuing this thing, let's say one February, we'd be looking at one March to get proposals back somewhere around there. And then doing a contract award a week or so later do the negotiation, sign the contract and work actually getting underway around 15 March. That would be the timeline that I would see this thing playing out. So I guess what I think we're looking for would be one, you feel like the RFP is in decent shape. Secondly, do you want us the business development to come back to you with a phase one definition? David, do you have anything else you wanna add? No, that's it. I think for sure we'll come back to the board with a definition in terms of issuing the RFP. And I think we have some time to define the, further define the route. Okay, so you're looking for a motion to essentially execute the RFP and start collecting responses, does that sound right? No, I think the motion to approve the RFP subject to the approval of the phase one definition. The issuance would be subject to the approval of the phase one definition. I disagree, the motion's on the floor, I'll let the motion go. No, no, no, I didn't move, I didn't move. That's why I was asking. I wanna make sure that we're on the same page. I think we should be RFP with 120 miles and that we'll have the route defined sometime in February. Because I don't wanna delay, I mean, this kind of work is pretty routine. It's not like they need to know where in central Vermont they're gonna be. But to get responses as quickly as it can, if we wait, I would like to have the pull inventory done by the middle of April if possible. So that if we go out to bid for the engineering design and make ready all that can happen this summer. I mean, the longer we delay on some of these things, the tougher it's gonna be to get services installed. So to the extent that we're gonna, we're not ready to give you a route, do with the hundred, we know 64 miles. The rest of the other 60 miles we haven't agreed to or had a recommendation on. So the committee can come back to the board with that later. In the meantime, I'm a bigger advocate of getting the RFP out. All right, so I'm gonna move that we approve the pull inventory RFP with simply with 120 miles specified without the route specified. Seconded. Okay, and who was that? Tom, was that you that seconded it? I didn't see. Okay, seconded by Tom Fisher. Any further discussion? Michael. I agree with the motion, I'm gonna vote for it. If I were a bidder on this contract, I would certainly wanna know what percentage of polls are easement through the woods, through the fields and what percentage around the road. And choosing the routes is going to be important for them to check out before they bid. Otherwise they will bid higher to cover their butts that there might be a high proportion of easement polls. But if we think we before the bidding process ends can identify the routes for them, I agree with the strategy of getting the sprawling now. Ken? Yeah, my question is similar, but can we seek the response from the bidders based on number of polls on on-road right-of-ways versus another part of their bid being number of polls that go through easements, fields and woods. So maybe they can respond without knowing all the specific perfect route. Is that possible to allow that to be a response? My guess is we'll get a response that actually visit that way. They'll give you a number for a poll in a right-of-way and a poll that they gotta go on the pucker brush on a per-pole basis. And they may not give you a final price. I think that's reasonable though. And I can actually, we're using the GIS, I can tell how many, I've been working on polls on the right-of-way for another project I'm working on. So I can give you a pretty good estimate. Okay. Any other thoughts or questions on the poll inventory RFP? Do any of you think that we need to change the RFP to specifically ask for, specifically ask for that breakdown that Ken's suggesting? I think it might be a good idea to put it out there explicitly so that it just sort of catches the questions before they come in. Yep. I'll accept that a minute. I'll make, yeah. All right. Well, I mean, that's something you can probably just do easily enough on your own. I don't think that's a super huge lift. I think we'll get no rich that way too. That sounds great. Any other thoughts on the poll inventory RFP? Okay. Hearing no further commentary, please signify your approval by saying aye. Those opposed? Abstentions or requests for roll call? Okay. Motion passes unanimously. There you are. Thank you for putting that all together Ray. That was, there's a lot there and it's, it's deep. So it followed up to all that and Ray, Ray did a great job. Greg, Kelly was actually quite instrumental in some of the things that were added to it. In fact, he added more detail than we were really thinking of. But Greg was really thinking down the line what we need to know later that I said, huh, this is pretty good stuff that I hadn't thought about at all. So there's some great input on that kind of thing. When you build this database, it's a database we're gonna be learning with for a long time. Very good. So yeah, kudos to Greg then too for, for fleshing that out. And Michael, thank you, Michael. And Michael. Thanks, Michael. So on this same topic, Tom Fisher had some commentary and some good ideas taking all of that hard work that you all worked on. But I'm gonna turn it over to Tom and he can explain his thoughts about this. Thanks. So I guess, I don't know how many of you managed to get a chance to review the RP. Hopefully you did it since you just voted on it. But in there, there's some language that was borrowed for almost any contract having to deal with state grants and other state entities. And it deals with things like whistleblower protections and fair employment practices, American with Disability Act adherence assurance that businesses are in good standing, child support, no gifts allowed to walk to the state or in this case, maybe just to be fiber assurance against a debarment, lots of other things. And so in looking through those, I'm thinking, those are things that as a entity, perhaps we should consider having policies about those as well. It's nice that in this case, we can state, because this might be under Vermont contracts, there's already some, some verbiage that can go into that. But as we do other contracts with outside entities, it would probably behoove us to have that more codified. So with that in mind, I was thinking to put forward the following motion and I will post it into the chat and then read it out loud. So I move that the policy committee be tasked with reviewing the Vermont state required language from the poll inventory RFP, along with our past board approved policies and use these in conjunction to create a living CV fiber policies document that can be referenced as an attachment for future contracts and or by board members as an organization wide policy guide. Drafts of this document should be provided to each delegate and alternate via email. Any desired changes be submitted directly back to the policy midi for consideration and integration. And a final draft should be and be submitted to the full board for acceptance at a future board meeting sometime in quarter one of 2021. I will second that just to get the discussion going. Policy committee folks, what do you think? Does that seem reasonable? He's specifying a timeline for you. I am speaking as somebody who knows a fair amount about policies, I know very little about contracts. And I think there's a difference between the two. I think Tom is kind of asking for specifics that usually flow from what a broad policy is. So for example, if there's language about not discriminating against various people working under the contract, that's really just a non-discrimination statement that I think we might already have in our bylaws, but I'm not sure. So I think you want somebody who knows a lot about contracts. I mean, raise the guy I think who knows more about contracts than anybody else. And I would suggest that he would be the person who can probably best speak to whether this is something that's doable, a good idea, and we have the wherewithal to pull it together. So since I was invited to speak here, Tom's only answer is yes. I'd be happy to take this into consideration as a member of the policy committee and see if we can assign something into a policy that we could consider. I'm not looking for a ton of work or something. I'm just, I mean, a lot of it could be copy and paste at this point and developed over time. I'm thinking, I think I used the word a living document in the motion, thinking that we can develop this over time, hopefully 10, 20 years from now when we're all enjoying high speed internet, we'll still be thinking of new policies that might want to be added, but just having it as a document that, I mean, we have a constitution written down for a reason now, and that it made sense to me that as we're now getting to the point of actually writing up contracts, as we're bringing on new members that maybe we should be able to, you know, point to some of the things we believe in and say, look, this is important to us and we're not gonna do business with somebody who doesn't have this. I think one of the difficult things is going to be the stuff that actually doesn't have to be written because we have to remember we're a public entity. So we are bound by all the, all the responsibilities that are given to any public entity, such as non-discrimination. So I don't know the level of detail and specificity you have to get to in a contract for general values. I mean, usually a contract is about the specifics of what you're asking somebody, some work you're asking somebody to perform. I think for the general specifics of the expectations we have for how a company is going to operate, such as non-discrimination, that's probably already covered by state law. But I mean, Ray, tell me if I'm off base here, but I think there's a line between the very specific stuff we want to have in our contracts versus general principles that all public agencies in the state are bound to, bound to follow. Yeah, so certainly there are state statutes and regulations, things that we can point to. And I frankly borrowed that language from another contract, another CUD contract that was issued because they were told that they should include it as part of their requirements because all the state contracts included in their requirements. And I think you're getting this up to you and broadening that, Tom. I'm willing to address and look at those things and learn from them to see if we can't come up with policies and principles that we think are appropriate for our contract. So, Alan, you're not wrong. And Tom, I think is of a right mind and heart. And I'd like to pursue that a little bit. So could I maybe frame this slightly differently? I wonder if we could just collect these pieces that Tom has identified as being valuable. And rather than maybe calling them a policy or anything like that, we can have the governing board boilerplate collection. Right? These are pieces that we're going to use in future contracts and pieces that we're going to use when stating what our expectations are but so that we don't have to replow the same ground over and over. We can say this is something that we've all agreed to. We can bring it to the policy committee or the governing board and we can say this is all things. These are all things that we expect are going to be in future contracts. We can sort of pick and choose from that. Does that seem amenable? Tom, I mean, I know that's not exactly what you're asking for. A lot of it could be. I think there's some things like, for example, if Interisle wants to give me a $500 and a trip to Hawaii, that seems like it shouldn't be accepted. And that's not something that the state's going to just, you know, bump into our normal work. It's something we kind of have to call out. And I think even with any new policies aside, all the past policies we've already created, they should be codified and presented so that, you know, I mean, I think they already are. It's just kind of compiling so that they're available for everybody to understand and use for us moving forward. Like how many dollars does a contract have to be before we put it out to RFP and all the various other policies we've created. Okay. I think I saw RDS hand up and then Jeremy. RDS, go ahead. Just a quick informational question. How are we, how are we chartered? We are a municipality. We are a communications union district under there's a specific Vermont statute that describes all of the powers that we are. We are delegated by the state. Very much like any other municipality, but with some other specific differences. So are we chartered by the state? Yes. Okay. Do we, and do we have a written chart? I'm sorry with this. Normally the legislature would charter us. Do we have a written charter? If we were a corporation, we'd have articles of incorporation. So do we have a charter? Yes. And it is a, we have articles of organization that include the, the statutory steps that we took to come into existence pursuant to the pursuant to this, the statute. The word charter means something very specific under Vermont municipal law. We do not have a charter per se. A municipal charter under for a Vermont town. So Cabot goes and changes its charter and it changes the way that state law behaves just for Cabot. That doesn't need to be changed. That does need to be approved by the legislature and by the select board in that case. So we don't have a charter per se, but we have articles of incorporation under 30 VSA chapter 82 there as Ray post just posted into the chat. Right. So much, much of the policy boilerplate that Tom is referring to might already be in our charter. Okay. Not, not, not in the charter. There is no charter. I just want to be clear about this. So it will be as part of our statutory obligations as a municipality. Perhaps. Yes, that's true. But Tom's right. The example of inner aisle writing him a $500 check and saying, you should really vote for us. That would be a conflict of interest policy that is not, that would be a conflict of interest policy. But there isn't a currently a statute requiring. You know, disclosures of. A select board member somewhere. Making the right sort of decision. Yes, I know. Okay. Thank you. That clears that up. All right. Okay. If I could just say, I think Tom is more focused really on what I would think of as procedures. Then policies. I mean, generally a policy is something that, that you create that is going to govern the way you operate. And that's kind of already been created for us because we're a public entity. So I think what we have to figure out of the procedures that we are going to be able to say and follow when we go about during doing our business. And Tom, Tom has. Tom has suggested, and it's probably not a bad way to address it. He suggested addressing us through having boilerplate contract language that more or less tells contractors when you work for us here are the procedures. Here are the things we expect you to follow into and to do. I think Tom kind of a little bit of a change in language, but that we're really talking more about a procedure. Yeah, maybe. And as I, you know, as we discuss it more, I realized that maybe there's two different things. I don't know if we need to have the board member rules of, you know, being a board member, what you can take for gifts and stuff be necessarily part of our contract language. Those could be two separate things. And I can see, you know, I guess more to my point is being able to, you know, have the handbook have something that we can, you know, reference when we're as we're making our decisions as a board. And then also having something that we can hand to our partners and to anybody else we're working with that kind of says, this is how we expect you to act. Okay. So before I call on the next two people here in the interest of time, I think these are going to be the last two folks and it sounds like we are sort of meandering around, but don't really have any sort of consensus. This might be the sort of thing that we come back with or that Tom, you and Alan or you and Ray kind of think about on your own perhaps, but not sure. We'll see what the board says when it comes to a vote. I have Jeremy Matt, then Tim Sullivan. I was kind of going to say what or suggest what Tom already said, but it sounds like two different issues. One is boilerplate contract and the other is sort of a guiding principles or sort of rules of the road for how, you know, we as a board should behave morally, if you will. Okay, Tim. If we're going down this road, it's a, it's a good idea. Thanks Tom. I just joined the a board in my Rhode Island town for the zoning board. And one of the, one of these things along with, you know, doing things by the books correctly. And I had to get sworn in over the, over the web camera, over the phone based on however you want to do it. But I would think we would all need to be kind of sworn to this in a verbal fashion as well and attest to it and repeat, repeat the language and agree to it so that we're holding ourselves accountable as well. You know, I really do think a lot of this stuff is covered by basic laws like bribery laws and. Prohibitions against graft. I, I think we, I think we're trying too hard to invent something that I believe already exists as a, as a school board member, you know, the, the outfit you take when you're sworn in is very, very general. I can't remember what it is, but I think there's an expectation that you will follow all laws. And those laws include non-discrimination, not taking gifts and even number of things. I, I'm not a lawyer myself. So I couldn't be, I'm not able to point to specific statutes, but we're not the first people who have encountered the issues that Tom is bringing up. So I, I, I think there must be a way to deal with proper behavior other than our thinking we have to invent a whole scheme that will guide our behavior. I think a lot of our behavior is already beating, being guided by laws that we might not recognize are out there. I think they really are. Okay. I'm going to give the last word to, to you, Tom, if you have any, any thoughts about this, I'm still happy to put it to a vote. I just don't know if you've, if you've had any change of heart or anything. Yeah, I think there are policies that we've created that are not under law. There's no law about how large our content, or not that I'm aware of any law that dictates how large our contracts need to be before we put them out to RFP. I don't know if there's a set limit created on what counts as a gift and what doesn't. I work for a company that has a very large contract for the state of Vermont. And I'm pretty sure that Vermont doesn't dictate what those kind of gifts, but we do have an internal policy that says, you know, this is what's allowed and this is what is not. And whether that's in line with what the state has for its own employees, I have no idea, but. Yeah. I guess I'm still in the opinion that it, that the very least codifying the laws that we already are not the laws to codifying the policies we already have into a place that we can all read them is a sensical thing to do. And also that, you know, we just be prepared for future contracts with boilerplate so that we're not having to reinvent the wheel every time we go around. I'm happy to amend the motion to kind of spell that out or bring it up at the next board meeting. But I think it would take a little work to give you that up. But yeah, I'm still the opinion that there should be something there. Okay. Would you be willing to, to, to retract your motion and bring this back next time around? And we can take another crack at it. Sure. Okay. Thanks, Tom. And if that's amenable to everybody rather than voting on this, I mean, it's, it's a breach of Robert's rules, but I'm going to assume that everybody's looking at the block blinking down there at them and thinking that this is maybe a good move, Jeremy. Yeah, I think actually what you've done is, is to ask Tom to agree to have the motion table for the moment so he can do more work on it. And I, that's well within Robert's rules. So I don't think we're going off the rails on this one at all. Okay. All right. Thanks for that, Tom. I think we, I think we will, we will come to a, we will come to a conclusion. Hopefully a conclusion that everybody is satisfied with. Next up, we have communications committee report Chuck. Great. So the biggest thing we have to report since we all last met as a group is that we have a new website live. It's not perfect yet. It has some rough edges here and there, but it is a vast improvement over the last website that we had. So I encourage you all to go check it out at CB fiber.net. Feel free to ping me if you find any typos or, or any problems, or if you have any suggestions for improvements, a couple of ongoing activities that are still going in terms of continuing to enhance this, because if you all recall, we actually hired our web developer with a retainer in order to continue to leverage her services over the course of this year. And in doing so, we are currently adding a few enhancements to the website actively. We are going to enhance a section that will house our RFPs so that we will have a history of RFPs. People will be able to view open RFPs. People will be able to link to the RFPs and, and get that information in a publicly accessible way. We are also creating a dedicated committee section that's going to call out for each committee. What is the charter of that committee? What is the purview and scope of that committee's purpose and role? And who are the members of that committee? And then finally we are working on figuring out how to make minutes and agendas much more easy to manage because they are not easy to manage there. And as a result, we have about a three month deficit of minutes and agendas that have not been posted. And so we're working on streamlining that process, also making them easier to consume so they don't show up like blog posts. They're in a nice easy table where you can go and, and kind of get them quickly and easily. So there is definitely a lot of evolution to come on the website, but I would encourage you to go, I'll go check it out because again, I think it's a vast improvement over what we did have. All right. Any questions for Chuck communications committee stuff? I do have, I do have one other item, but I just want to pause there on the website. Okay. Okay. Not, not seeing anybody asking any questions or adding commentary. I go ahead, Tim. You are on mute Tim. All right. Slow Chromebook. I'm on here. Okay. Thank you. I know, I know where.net CV fiber.net. Did we look, look and reach to see if we could also own the.org. We own both the.org and the.com. I have not instituted redirects to the.net yet sits on the to do list. So that will, that will get into place soon enough. Okay. Thanks. Anything else about the website folks. Looks beautiful. Love the, love the graphics. Great. So the only other item I just want to point out is the communications committee is going to be working on another update soon enough to be distributed to various communities. We did not get one together as we had. We actually had a hearty debate about what an update at the end of the year might have included because mostly what we had to share was kind of that bad news. And the cares extension was still up in the air. So we didn't have anything concrete. We could share there yet. But we did have a lot of information about that. That said, I do think towards the end of this month, we will have an update that has some meat that's worth sharing. So look for that. We'll be, we'll be working on that. And bringing that to the broader board soon enough. Thanks Chuck. So now any questions for. For Chuck. Alrighty. Moving along. The last thing I just want to say is thank you to everyone who contributed the website was an incredible 11th hour. So thank you to all of you who contributed and pitched in. So, so thank you for everyone who did so. Right. Business Development Committee report. David. Yeah. So I'll talk a lot tonight about business development activities, but in line with what Chuck mentioned, we are developing a charter that goes, it will be onto the website and also proposing a name change and a committee composition that we'll be bringing back to the full board at the next meeting. We're going to, what I sent out today was just, that's what I'm, you know, we're going to be working on. We're going to be working on that. We're going to be starting as a draft. And trying to shift some of their responsibilities to other committees. And we'll see how that goes. We also said that we probably always have one member from the business. Future planning and development committee. To be on the other committees in the, in the organization. The other news for business development is, is a meeting next week. With EC fiber. Now. Valley net. Kingdom fiber and WEC. We're going to be working on that. We're going to be working on that. A few days later to get. Board approval to go to the public utilities commission. To borrow money to do fiber. So that meeting's coming up. And the other. There's one other thing that business development is doing, but it's slipping my brain right now. I don't think I have it. Yeah. I'll have to let it go. I'll have to let you know. I hope you guys don't mind me sending you emails. Nope. So. Yeah. No, the, oh, yeah. And maybe I did mention this. The fiber line going from East Cal, East Montelia to Maple corner substation. We'll be a reusable fiber line. It's going to be six miles long. Going through a good chunk of Calis. So looking forward to being able to not have to pay for that fiber. Alrighty. Any questions for David or business development. Committee stuff. Any volunteers. Always taking more volunteers. That's for sure. Okay. Let's see. Round table. Let's start with Ray. That's. Josh. I'm all set. I appreciate it. All right. Chuck. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone. All right. Jeremy. I second what Chuck said. Okay. David. I forgot the most important thing. Money. So Rob fish. From the department. I think I sent this out. I quoted 750,000 that they got a million dollars from Northern. Northern border regional commission to be dished out to CUDs for construction and management. And then they got a million dollars. And then they got a million dollars from CUDs. And then they got a million dollars from CUDs. And then they got that to the one and a half million dollars that they have now. They have not drafted the. Application. RFP yet. But. Whether all eight CUDs are going to be able to use this money this year. There's a one and a half million was authorized for this fiscal year, which ends on July 1st. So that was the one thing I forgot. And then I wanted to bring up. I wanted to bring up. I wanted to bring up what we made last year for CUD for doing five into the premise. For Northfield Roxbury and more town. That, that final version, whatever we're going to have to do to just modify the more town thing. Rob has not told me what we need to do to do that, but they're pretty happy with what we proposed earlier. So we'll see how that goes. I knew I'd forgotten two things. I'm glad you remembered it. Jeremy. A real quick question. Is that specific to the Vita match? Funding. Yes. The, the, the. Two and a half million dollars now is considered to be used for the Vita match. Yep. Good question. Let's see. Larry. I'm all set. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Larry. Jerry. Just that the treasure in the finance committee will be working with the business development committee to get those. Grant applications out. On time. So that we're first in line or as close to it as possible. Sounds great. Alan. I actually had a question. Are we still under the cone of silence that's imposed by Ardolf? Or are we now allowed to talk about things that. Appear to be happening on our streets with certain kinds of trucks with huge cables behind them. Trying to figure out what. Whether or not the Ardolf work is actually starting to. To happen around our area. So that's a good question. And Michael, your next in line. So I think you can probably. Answer that at least partially. I was going to finally pass her once. I guess. The communications rule ends. January 29th at 6pm. A lot of the information is already out and therefore can be discussed because the FCC released it. But not everything. Any construction you see right now. Is probably unrelated to Ardolf. Although. Some companies, I suppose, could it be anticipating. What they're going to do later and getting a jump. But I really doubt that that's probably. Other. Funded construction. I can, I think that I told the business development committee. Meeting. Three weeks ago. What our consortium one. I can repeat that again tonight, Jeremy. I don't know if I ever said it directly to the board. I seem to remember it coming in an email. I mean, like with what? With what went to whom. Does. But I don't know. I'm on more distribution lists than. Than everybody here probably, but. Would anybody else like to see what. That information or hear the information from Michael. I've seen it. This is Jerry. It's been, it's been sent around. I don't know if David sent it or Michael sent it, or both of them sent it. But. Can you say that again, Alan? I think it was. I just think it was just to the committee, Jerry. If I remember, right. And both of you are on that committee. That's why you. That could be Michael. Okay. Yeah. If you want to share what the whole group that would be. What's happening. Whether or not to say it again quickly. They're. We see fiber one. I think it was just to the committee, Jerry. If I remember right. And both of you are on that committee. That's why you both saw it, I believe. That could be Michael. Okay. Yeah. If you want to share what the whole group that would. What's happening. Whether or not to say it again quickly. They're. We see fiber one. Quite a few towns, a census block groups. In CV fiber territory. I believe there were there two or three. Census block groups that they won. In the southern part of our district. Kingdom fiber in our consortium also won a considerable number. Most of it is in the north, but in the north. In the north. In the north. In the north. CD fiber itself did not bid. Wek did not bid. Vermont electric co-op did not bid. So those are all the members of our bidding consortium. The five towns. The kingdom fiber. One. We're playing fields. Half of callous habit. Trying to remember. Is that all of them, David? I think so. There were five. Five towns. And AC fiber, I think was. I forget now. Was it Williamstown and. Washington. I think that's it. And a piece of Berry town. That's right. So details about that can come out at the end of the month. So at this point, we can't talk about what we see on a map that consolidated one. Is that correct? No, we can. We can talk about. We can talk about which census bar groups consolidated one, because that's public information as well. What we can't talk about is. Is implications. We can't talk about post auction market structure. We can't talk about bidding. And bidding strategies. Those are the things that are still prohibited. But we can't talk about who. Can we, can we speculate about the impact of certain blocks that were won by. By for profit companies, how that might impact. The work that we've been working on. You're free to speculate all you want. I don't dare. Because that. I get it. I'll give you a call. I'll give you a call at six 15 on January the 29th. And several other. Okay. As long as it's not a quorum folks. All right. Anything else, Michael, that you wanted to add aside from answering that. No, I still pass. Okay. All right, Tom. Yeah. So I know I brought up a, you know, a nest to stir. And I recognize having, you know, been through this since the beginning that there's been a lot of that through the years. And part of my effort here is to make sure we don't keep going through those discussions over and over again. It's just codified. We point to it. Say there it is. And we move on. And I hope I'm not, you know, I really don't want to drag down our meetings with, with more of that kind of talk. And that's why the motion was worded as it all goes to the policy committee and they do the work there. So. Hopefully, you know, not too many more of those. I will bring it up again next time, but yeah, that's it. Thanks, Tom. Rd. Rd is good to go. Ken. Yes. All right. Catherine. I pass. Thank you. Henry. Everyone's doing so much great work. And it's, it's really amazing to see. And Michael, if you could send out that more detail breakdown to the group. I'd appreciate it. I only saw it. As NRTC and this seems to break open the egg inside of that. Thank you. Thanks, Henry. Tim. Sorry, I was late and I joined about seven o'clock. So I won't, I won't steal too much time, but I would be looking forward to the information David would send out for each town with the survey results. And I'll catch up with looking at the minutes of the meeting after for what I missed. All right. Sounds good. Thanks everybody. I'm sure we'll be talking again soon. We don't have a scheduled date for another governing board meeting, but if I had to, if I had to guess, we may be meeting again on the 26th. I will try to give you as much notice. If we think that's necessary. But. Alrighty. Have a good rest of your night and talk to you later. Good night.