 First thing we'll take up is agenda change requests and vote to approve the agenda. I have one addition that I'd like to add is the COVID attestation. In our emails received a notice to fill out a COVID attestation, this group. I don't know if we have to or not, but we'll add this to the agenda for discussion. The other thing that we'd like to talk about is where to insert Vicuda, Will is here to present from Vicuda today, and we talked about last meeting having him do a presentation. I would propose we move it in just before the break somewhere between 9.40 and 10.40 if that's amenable. And what I'd like to do is the COVID attestation just after the minutes COVID here. The other change to the agenda is approval of the minutes from 8.26. Holly has reviewed those, but sent those pretty late last night around 11 p.m. And I haven't had a chance to review them, assuming nobody else has. So we will take these off the agenda today for approval and just look at the September 9th meeting minutes. All right, are there any other changes to the agenda, Laura? Just a question about executive session items and whether or not those can be either to the front or the back just for the folks that are on with us virtually. If they can be, I'd prefer that we do that. And then happy to do that. Move those after public input unless we have time for public input. Does that make sense? If we can move those after public input? Yes, unless we have time before, if we're like we've completed all our business, then we'll take them up. Yeah. Because we may go through. I'd like to hold the public input at noon or earlier if we have the capability to do so. So if we have some dead time in between public input, then we'll take up the executive session. But yes, that's what I'm thinking. So for anybody that's on the phone, public input will be at noon or slightly before if we get through all the business. So just stay tuned on the video or however you're participating virtually. I have a 12-15-hour stop. Okay, I do too, I have to leave. Okay, we'll get through this really quickly. The other item, Patty, is I just want to make sure that we talk briefly about where we are at with staff. Okay, so support for this team here is really important to understand where we're at. And I don't know where you'd like to put that. Let's put that right after further. Okay. Thank you. Two, three. Okay, any other discussion on the agenda changes? Motion to approve. Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion carries. All right, first item on the agenda is approval for the minutes from September 9th, 2021. Any discussion? So we're going to not take up the 826 minutes because Holly just did an edit of those and sent those at 11 o'clock last night. I just haven't had time to review. I was sleeping. So if there's no discussion changes, I'll take a motion to approve the September 9th, 2021 minutes. So I have that one feedback point to this matter. Yeah, I said no. Yeah, yeah, but make it formally and I'll make it a reflective discussion. I'm just trying to make the point that our vocabulary matters. And we got to get out of talking about multiple sources of baseline because. You need because we've all agreed there's going to be one. So where are you on the agenda? I want to make sure it's changed. In a minute, in a minute, sorry. It's to page two. And you want to, you want the paginated to like that. Yeah. Yeah, so my feedback was. Yeah, it's right here. And I don't know how we. Yeah, so when you make the motion to the minutes, make the motion with these amendments, and then you can approve them with the amendments and make it a correction. Does it work to do them? Is it actually translatable? Yeah, well, if the minutes are captured in the discussion and I frankly don't recall it, I'm reacting to what I saw on the page. If the minutes are accurate of discussion, then let's leave it. My point is simply going forward. It's not going to help us to have multiple references to multiple baselines. When we've agreed we're going to have one baseline. So I want to tighten up that vocabulary. And I don't know if that needs to be reflected in these minutes and not last. I have a problem with how we're doing minutes because they are not reflecting consensus that's reached. Now we're stopping short of actually voting on some sort of decision, but there's consensus reach. And I did I saw the summit August 26 minutes as well. And then we talk more generally and I think it's because we're asking somebody to both participate in the meeting and take the minutes. And, you know, I listened to the whole four hours and trying to. My only point is I think this is such an important point that we might want to amend the minutes, like literally amend the minutes. Yeah, I don't care about that. Yeah, I should say, you know, one thing to do and then it's common with boards is, you know, don't hesitate to make motions. Motions really do lock things in. So, you know, you make a formal motion that becomes very clear. For, you know, you talk about when you come to consensus, you can close that consensus. Let's not go down a rabbit hole. Exactly. Exactly. I think my point is clear, right? So let's do this. If we can leave, I'm finally leaving the nine, nine minutes as they are, as long as the nine, 16 minutes reflect the sentiment that referencing PSD data, VCBB data and CUD data, we're going to work hard to just reference PSD as the baseline data because that's the source of truth. We've all agreed we're going to work off of. And again, if somebody doesn't agree with that point, I think we've, I think we've all agreed to that point and we're past that. Yeah, I'm not sure I agree. So let's, let's finish the discussion. Well, it's like the board members agree. I know, but I'm just saying there may be, I want to provide you, I want to, I need some clarity on that because what we've been asked, what we plan on doing is updating what we, we're going to be providing metrics, measurable metrics on a weekly basis. That's not going to come from the department. No, I'm just like, where, where are those metrics going to be derived from what data source is that, are those metrics going to be derived from? It's the PSD. Yeah, we can't, we can't, they only update their database annually. So we're going to have to constantly be updating our own database. Yeah, but the baseline, you draw a line in the sand, you say, we start from here. Yeah. And that baseline data is from the PSD data set. That's right. It really changed. That's all, that's all it says. You are going to update that data going forward. And that's relative to the baseline set back here. So as you, as we make progress on things, database is updated and you measure the difference between here and here. That's what we have changed again. Let me, let me be clear, I want to be clear before. They're not going to a separate database, right? They're going into the PSD baseline, right? So no, we're not. So are we going to, are we talking? This is a problem. We have talked about this on 826, 9299. And, and apparently I didn't understand the conversation. Are you imagining that to maintain a separate GIS database from what the PSD baseline is? Can I, let me attempt this. Sure. So the PSD data is the baseline data updated yearly. As new projects are built, we are going to be tracking those. But the official broadband availability data is going to remain the public service department data. We need to track it as it goes for reporting purposes as things get built with each project. Right. So where will you be tracking those changes? In our own database. Yeah, the project, the projects that are approved and built will be in, will be in a different database so we can have disclosure on what's happening in between those reporting periods. And when we say database, are we talking about a GIS data set? We were talking about GIS data set and a map. So that, so rather than having to wait till October of each year, you have an idea of what's been built and funded with public dollars during that previous year. It'll all be. Great. Yeah. So is there any reason those changes can't be simply performed by the VCBB GIS resource in the PSD GIS data set so that it's all in one place? Well, it's going to be using the same data set. I think the department, I don't think the department's going to go for it. I think they wanted to keep doing their yearly updates since we're not going to have data that shows every single project happening in the state. We're only going to have data showing the public funded projects. So yeah, that's that was going to be my question. So what are you feeling like? I do not think it needs. Well, I don't understand why they wouldn't. It's merely a layer. Yes, yes. And to create this somewhere else, I just don't understand why they wouldn't. And the statute requires the agencies of the state to cooperate with us. Well, we're going to be using the 911 data. And maybe that is the solution that we have a separate data. We have a separate layer showing what's been built in the last year. And then it is all aligned afterwards. I think that's what I'm saying. And I know Clay is on the call and Corey might be. I'm confident they would have some feedback on our logistical questions. So can I make a suggestion rather than ruin our agenda with this discussion point? Can we take this on in a sub school meeting and nail it because this is going to take a little bit of time. This is not a simple discussion of the fact that we've gotten this far and we're not on the same page concerns me. I move that we adopt the minutes with the addendum of the Brian Otley September 15th email as an appendix. I'll second that. I haven't called the vote yet. And I actually have a comment. Sure. Hold on. So the proposal is to take Brian's email as an appendix to the minutes. I'm not sure that makes sense to me. This one that says feedback on the minutes from the last meeting. Can we begin numbering pages number two? The first full paragraph page two regarding baseline data. The way this is written it talks about PSD data, VCB data and CD data. This is not accurate. There is PSD data and that is the data with all the grade will be used, etc, etc. Yeah, I got it. I just I'm not I think this is a future item to discuss. I'm not sure it makes sense to correct the minutes because I think we did talk about we did go back and forth. At the September 9th meeting. I don't I think it's an item for us to discuss. We can get all on the same page. I think that what we talked about at the last meeting we it sounds like Christine had one interpretation. Brian had another. I'm not certain that the minutes are incorrect based on this discussion that just happened. So rather than addendum to the states, we didn't talk about it. I think that we did talk about what's in the minutes. But I think we do need to put this on for a future agenda item to clarify. Thank you. I'm going to draw my second line. I would have drawn one. OK, I still have my comments. OK, go ahead. So, you know, if we have if we are maintaining a data pool, a data set and the department is maintaining a data set, the department is going to be changing theirs right just to be clear with private builds from private providers and we would be changing their points. Yeah, and and we would be changing with CUD and that does not make sense. I mean, I think that layer aspect is going to be at one place. I think so. Yeah, yes. I think so. Yeah, but we also that we're going to have this discussion online. Yeah, but let's have this discussion as a separate agenda item. Maybe can we look at the data so we can get a better handle on that and pull up the data. So they pull up the data. The new data I believe is going to be released in October. And just I know we have we have Corey and Clay participating. They might be able to provide. Yeah, I just I don't want to get into this right now as an agenda item, but we're going to put it on for a future meeting to discuss in more detail. So then the folks at the DPS can be ready to talk about it. And it may help to put the data up so we can actually see what we're talking about. But we'll definitely future agenda. I don't have it listed as first item for future agendas. OK, with that, do we have a motion to approve the minutes as written? OK, well, as a favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? And it's our past. First, next item on our agenda is the addition of the COVID attestation. We received an email, at least I received an email asking for us to all sign something. I tried to click on the links, nothing happened. So I would like to just tee this up as a discussion item to see put it on Christine, your list to see. Do we have to fill that out? You do not have to fill that out. The reason you got that is because that was distributed to a state email system and you're an exception. OK. Thank you. That's easy. No, the next item on the agenda is a staffing update. I'll turn that over to Christine. We are the the jobs are being posted next week. It's that the state systems are a little complex. So Carol had to do a lot of work. If you if you if you post a different job position than ones in the existing database, it takes about a month to get approved. So Carol had to spend some time trying to figure out how to fit jobs we're looking for into existing classifications. So Carol Carol is the human resource support from the Public Service Department. So if you look at Timeline, we're there's a requirement for the administrative assistant to be posted for 14 days before you can hire. So we have probably a month before we get our administrative system. The others we can start hiring as soon as we can start interviewing as soon as it gets posted. So those postings will go up next week. So I'm chair of this. I have concerns about the workload that is on these folks, the expectation, our needs of these folks to see these needs. And so, you know, I'm looking for some alternative strategies. You know, are there things that I noted there was some discussion about work groups outside and we had reserved a day for doing work. I think it was the 28th or something. I would really like to hear from you all, you know, ways that we could, you know, I can give a few more hours, you know, on that day or, you know, how can we offload some work to make sure that we're doing the detail that is necessary and also, you know, continuing to move the ball forward and not cooking you guys. You know, so I don't know how to deal with it. I don't know how to deal with it, but I'm really concerned about this, actually. Christine, do you have an update from just your perspective right now with you and Rob, how it's going? We're we've been scrambling for search. Sure, you know, I keep coaching Bob, but Rob, because he has family. So I know it's been stressful for you, Rob. I think the fact that we're moving the meetings to every two weeks will help a lot because we spend a lot of time, you know, our eyes, you know, with the two of us. Yeah, we're scrambling, but I do appreciate your suggestion and we could use some help and I'll work with Rob to cover for the list. And then also the state systems are much more cumbersome than I've ever dreamed of, you know, this morning. I finally got this, you know, for, for example, getting a GIS resource. You have to go through the agency of digital services and they have this very complex statement of work RFP that I just ran into a roadblock that I just found out this morning. I didn't need to fill it out. So I've got help on that now, but it just takes the systems are a lot more complicated than in the private sector. In terms of working groups of things, I would take some. Take a little bit of the pressure off of us and help move things along faster as we are starting to receive pre-construction grant applications. I would love to have a board member involved in the scoring both for both for best practice and accountability and also just for someone else to take an eye on that since we're we're doing so much at the moment. That would be one suggestion. Another suggestion would be is we may be able to I think I mentioned this the previous meeting once goes back to actually minute taking. There's a service that'll do the minute taken that'll do a video and provide all those things that would take some administrative burden off of us. And I believe it's this is the state. So who knows? It could be within the micro-purchasing threshold. And I don't know if we'd have to go through ADS, but that would be something I would love for. I was very recently like for a month. Are we able to make a motion to to authorize that or now? So I'm with you, but if it's going to take a month to get a month's service. No, no, I think that's Robin. All right, let's get right away. Friendly motion to pursue it and explore if it makes sense. So what are we talking about? Like, because what? As soon as you said that will pop in my head, it's getting just get a court stand out that like the PEC. Is this who could just transcribe the meeting? I think that that would given that it would be a state position. It's that's a whole other can of worms to try to do. For the thing, since since I have been on the ECPY board and they do use that service you're talking about, the thing that makes that work is somebody sits down and goes through it, though. I mean, yeah, because they're they're transcribing something they they're just it's just all words. So there's still workload. So it's like a motion. Yes. OK, so I move that we authorize to have to move to explore. And if possible, move forward with securing in it, taking service, transcription in general, admin support and in general admin support. I'm second to all those in favor. All right, I post. Thank you. So going back to the working group side of things, is there we can talk offline or someone could volunteer right now? Is there anybody who's willing to willing and able to help with doing the basic scoring of the applications? The board itself will have to vote to approve the applications, but someone that's going in a bit a bit deeper and a bit earlier. How much time do you think that would chew up? How many have been so far? We're we've only had one so far. I expect another possibly up to three by next Tuesday. How long does it take you to get it through one score? So just based on the one. I haven't scored it yet. I haven't scored it yet. Before you answer that, I want to throw in another. Yeah, when we're asking for, we've asked for a lot of information. And I want to make sure that we read it and absorb it. Exactly. I encourage I encourage you all to read the applications, regardless of whether you're doing the working group or not. But should it be the same eye that is scoring all of them? As opposed to right. And if that's the case, then I think I would not because my husband is a member of us. Yeah, and before you before you make it to this one, because I really want to kind of look at you and you and Brian for specific help on on developing the design guidelines. We had the meeting yesterday, I looked at you on that. But certainly I'm looking for some expertise in helping with those design guidelines. I'll go through and score. I can be a scorer. I mean, I have big questions about the scoring. But it's just out of like, really, does this work? But yeah, it's on. So Holly, so they were consistent. Yeah, and Holly, I would encourage you to take it as a board role assignment versus going into the weeds of evaluating this. I just make any comments outside this room. It changes or addresses process. OK, is that way you're you're you're following what is the matrix and the rules of what already been set up? Yes. So rather than go in and say, oh, let's change that or yes. You got it. OK. Happy to have you take that. I know I think editoritis. Thank my husband. Haven't had another set of eyes on this. And we'll talk more about this when we get to the scoring question. But yeah, maybe after the after I do the I'll put on the. The design workshop yesterday, you'll understand more about what my request is. Yeah, Christine, you're also going to do the scoring, too. Well, this is a different engineering. I'm sorry, that's the right and the best. Yeah, and I would ask that we remember with design that it is not a statewide fiber design that we are obligated to do, but, you know, we are not obligated to require to do that. Yeah, but we are trying to make it in an connected system. Yes, which we have now with all of our different telecommunications providers. So I think best practices. Yes, yes, yes, thank you, thank you. Is there anything else on staffing? This goes during nothing. We are going to move to next agenda item, which is our talk discussion with Clay Purvis and Corey Chase. Turn it over to you to team up. Sure, actually, I'll I'll just turn right over to Clay and Corey. Great, thank you for having us. My name is Clay Purvis. I'm the director for telecommunications and connectivity with the Department of Public Service and with me is Corey Chase. You all asked Corey to give a little update or presentation on RDOF. We have prepared a small presentation, and I'm hoping that we can keep this somewhat informal and just have a nice discussion about RDOF. And hopefully we can answer any questions you have with that. I'll turn it over to Corey. Hello, everyone. So I think I can present. I'm not sure. Is that working? Can you see the presentation? Yes, yes. So I'll I'll try to be brief and we can talk if you have questions. So the RDOF is the Rural Digital Opportunities Fund. It's a program of the FCC. So I think it's important to start with a little bit of history about what the FCC has done with Universal Service. So per context, this this map shows the incumbent local exchange carrier territories. These are not town boundaries. These are wire center boundaries. All of the the way the telephone companies built their networks, all locations in a wire center boundary are served by a single central office. And these these wire centers are operated by different companies. But there's two main distinctions. You have the the RBAC, the Regional Bell Operating Company, which in Vermont, the legacy RBAC is consolidated to CCI. They have approximately 84 percent of the locations in the state. And then you have the RLEX, the Rural Local Exchange Carriers, and they have approximately 16 percent of the locations in the state. So in this map, Light Green is the consolidated territory and Blue is the various RLEC territories. So the RLECs include. Your screen isn't showing right now. I'm not sure. I'm not sure why, because I'm seeing it on my screen here, but it's not showing in Giga. It was. And it was like some I clicked something that said exit spotlight. I thought that was taking my video out of the. Well, I'll pick you out of spotlight, actually, you already did, but Corey is spotlighted and should should be able to share his screen right now. And I can see it on my end. So you can. Yeah, that's strange. Maybe it is something on our side in the room, which is. There it is. I don't know. So this for the for a few minutes, could you mute your your microphone? Certainly. Not not your microphone, the the the Giga microphone. Does that OK? Come back on mute and let me know if you if you stop seeing the screen. And I'll be brief and then we can come back for questions. So I was I was I was saying that the territory in Vermont. The most of the territory is the the regional Bell operating company legacy territory, which is consolidated and the blue shows the the the rural local exchange carriers. That includes VTEL, Weitzfield, Franklin, Shoram and TDS. So brief history of the Federal Universal Service Fund. The Federal Federal Universal Service Fund was created to ensure that they're that the telephone companies could provide telephone service to everyone with the understanding that it's more expensive to provide service in rural areas than in urban areas. And so they were given money that the federal federal the FCC provided a system to give funds to the the incumbent telephone companies to support service in rural areas. There are different approaches for the Arbok, the regional Bell operating company in Vermont consolidated and the Arlex. And it's that's beyond the scope of with this discussion, but it's important to note that there are different approaches that the FCC is employed to to provide that support. A significant change happened with the transformation order and the Connect America Fund. So the Connect America Fund had two phases. The first phase was to give to kind of shift the way that they had been doing funding to support only voice service and change to supporting voice and broadband. That, as an aside, was a very complicated thing to do because the federal language supporting the idea of using universal service fund where it was directed for telecommunication service and the idea of using money for telecommunications services to support broadband was a little bit complicated because broadband, as you know, is not a telecommunication service or many claim that it's an information service. And that is a different category of service at any rate. The Connect America Fund provided eight million dollars a year to consolidate it over six years and they were required to deploy service, they were required to continue to offer universal voice service to all their locations and they were required to deploy. I'm getting a lot of feedback. They were required to deploy for DSL service to a specific quantity of locations. The new phase that we're talking about now of Federal Universal Service Fund is the next iteration after the Connect America Fund, this new phase of federal funds, the federal approach is the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, ARDOF. So ARDOF phase one was for one set of areas, essentially completely unserved areas. And ARDOF phase two will be coming eventually to serve other parts of the consolidated territory. So going back to what I mentioned before, CAF phase one was part of the transformation order about eight years ago. This was the territory that the FCC was worried about. And to identify this territory, the FCC took the entirety of consolidated territory. So I'm going to flip back for a second to show you that again. So all of this green territory is consolidated. From all of this green territory, they selected the areas that are in the blue here for their Connect America Fund program. The Connect America Fund program, they used a very complicated cost model that figured out what it would probably cost companies to deploy service. And they picked a window and said if it was above a certain cost, then it was needed support. But if it was too expensive, they didn't want to include that either. So through the mechanisms of this cost model, they determined that they would give consolidated support for 29 or 28,399 locations. The difficulty is that there were actually 45,000 locations in these blue territories. So consolidated met its requirements and it provided DSL service to the required 28,399 locations. So for the ARDOF, the next phase, it's important to note that what the ARDOF did is it said, the FCC for the ARDOF had said, we are going to select census blocks. These blue marks here in the Connect America Fund are similar, they're census blocks, but they're clipped to the ARDOF territory. So it's not the entirety of a census block. So that gets complicated. And it also said that we're only going to fund those census blocks where no provider said that they've got availability of 25,3 service. And then from those unserved census blocks, again, we're only going to select those census blocks where we think the cost is within the perfect cost window. The perfect cost window, not to, more than we expect the companies could deploy and earn back their investment, but lower than the maximum cost we think that it's too exorbitant for the program to support. Then they did a reverse auction and they said, we're going to select, getting a lot of feedback from someone here, we're going to provide, we're going to select the company that offers service to these census blocks at the lowest cost. And then the FCC requires deployment to these areas, to all locations in these census blocks within six years. So this is the four of Vermont. There were five bidders and the five winning bidders and they are scheduled to receive a total of three million dollars a year, each year over the next 10 years. And they're required to serve areas that the FCC thinks have 19,330 locations. It's important to note that EC Fiber and Kingdom Fiber are both members of the NRTC Consortium. So in actuality, the number of the FCC model that estimated the quantity of locations in these territories wasn't, it isn't super accurate because it's based on household census, census household information, but it's also not completely incorrect. So the good news, I guess, is that there is a greater quantity that they are expected to serve, that are actually there, which suggests that the FCC's approach of holding them to require service to all locations in the territories is a reasonable approach. By that, I mean that the companies should expect to serve every location within their census blocks. This map is on our website and it's available on our website in a moving map, an interactive map in addition to this PDF map. It's hard to see all the individual census blocks on a PDF, but this shows you the extent of the territory. So much of the Northeast Kingdom is covered in the two different companies, Kingdom Fiber and Consolidated. Consolidated, you see, has service in places all around the state. EC Fiber has some, quite a number of territories. SpaceX was awarded locations in very strange, hodgepodge things. Most of their, the places that SpaceX was awarded are tiny little segments, many of which actually don't have any buildings in them. It's an interesting dynamic, the way that the FCC, the way that they did there, it's an art, what the FCC might call a data artifact. It's a result of clipping census blocks. If you assume a census block has 100 households and then you clip a segment of it, you don't really know for sure if the clipped segment has a building in it. And that ended up with, many of the census blocks have that, many of the SpaceX census blocks have that problem. Corey, if I could just interject there. It's worth noting that the Rosenwurzel commission is looking into some of the census blocks that were awarded through RDOF. It was her opinion that some of these awards were made in haste and that they include areas that are not deserving of USF support. So the blocks might change or the information might change in the coming weeks and months. Yes, yeah, I agree. And that would be good, especially for census for SpaceX. So for deployment, the RDOF requires, this is important to note that the RDOF, the FCC RDOF requires the companies to offer both voice service and broadband service independently a separate standalone thing. So if you live in an RDOF census block, the company is required to offer standalone telephone service by itself, just telephone service. And it's also required to offer standalone just broadband service if you want it, or of course a bundle. And then for deployment, they've got this rolling schedule. So it's required 100% deployment within six years, but also 40% after the end of the third calendar year after funding and 20% again after each year after that. And then for compliance, the FCC requires that the bidders submit a letter of credit. And the purpose of this letter of credit is to allow recovery of past support disbursements from a company that might may eventually default. And the company, the FCC also includes a non-compliance framework that calls for greater reporting and a withholding of support if the company fails, if the grant recipient fails to comply. So that covers my presentation. And if you have questions, I can answer some quick questions. Thanks, Corey. I have a question. So with the compliance, how are who is certifying that those addresses are served, are the companies, is it self-certification? So I want to just make one thing clear here. This is the FCC telecommunications programs generally and FCC programs are very complicated. And we at the department have a lot of experience in telecommunications issues, and we try to follow these issues. But we're also very busy doing lots of other things. And so I don't know the arcane of this as things are changing quickly in this complicated field. But in general, what I would say is that the companies are required to report to the FCC, that they have complied with the requirement, and the FCC will follow up with them if they think that that's unreasonable. So the answer to your question is this is self-reporting. The company itself needs to report to the FCC that yes, we have complied with the requirement. And usually that is through a process of providing a list of addresses. So for instance, and the way that the FCC does this is it's actually outsourced the implementation of these grant programs to a company, quasi-company called the USAC, the Universal Service Administration Corporation. So the companies, FCC, like say for instance, EC-Fiber, EC-Fiber will be required to provide a list of addresses that it has provided service to. It misprovides that list of addresses to USAC through its hub portal. And then if it provides the correct number of addresses, then USAC will report to the FCC. Yes, the company has complied with its obligations. Just to be clear, when we say reporting addresses served, it's addresses passed, right? It's not addresses to which there's been connection to the network. So all of this discussion is about the availability of service, not any discussion about the adoption of service? So then yes, right. Corey, can you go over the Ardolf timeline? And the reason I asked this question is that Ardolf has certain time markers that folks that participated in one in the auction that they have to meet. And we also have timeline markers. And I'm just curious to the overlap. Did you hear the question? Yes. Yes. So the Ardolf deployment obligations are such that this... Are you seeing my screen? Yes. So it says we will require support recipients to commercially offer voice and broadband service to 40% of the calculated number of locations in the state by the end of the third full calendar year following funding authorization. Thank you. That's helpful. And that timing that says reflected in your chart. I believe so. Corey, can you talk briefly about what happens if Ardolf went into faults, if they can't fulfill their commitment, or if they if they're sold, if they go out of business, like what are the contingencies? They choose not to, I guess it's the... Rob, if they go out of business, there's nothing the FCC can do. So, I think the important thing here is, are you still seeing my screen? Yes. So the FCC requires part of the part of the process. The FCC requires a letter of credit to allow recovery of disbursement. Pass disbursement. Pass disbursements. Well, what happens to those locations? So if the company... I'm not quite sure I follow your question, Rob. Can you try your question again? Something that it would be sold. I guess there's a presumption that it would be sold. I guess what I'm saying is, if a company has a commitment to build them and then they no longer can meet that commitment, are those addresses served by someone else? Are they thrown back into the next phase of ARDAF? What happens to that support that was pledged to those locations? So I think there are many different questions that you've posed in one there. I think that if a company... First of all, if a company has a grant from the FCC, that's not something that anybody showed or would take likely. And the FCC does a very deep due diligence process in its long form evaluation and it requires this letter of credit. And it's got... There's an assumption that the company is going to provide the service to these locations. And it's not something that anybody takes lightly. So let me ask this question. So in the past, Rob, there have been federal awards for service delivery to a number of addresses that have not happened. And so if that were to happen in this case, if a company was awarded funds to provide service to addresses and they didn't take the funding and didn't provide the service, what would... Are there any repercussions for that company? Are you asking about repercussions, Laura? Are you asking about what happens to the addresses? Well, that's what we're concerned about is how to think about the art off addresses. That's really what we're concerned about. Like, should we say check, those are done or what, we got to keep an eye on those. And which is certainly where I am. I don't think... Well, I think it's always good to keep an eye on this program and be sure that the promises that were made are being kept. I think a kind of more salient question is that what point do you decide to provide state subsidy to the same locations? Because certainly you don't want to double fund an area that already has a federal solution in place. With that said, I will remark that when we were completing the telecommunications plan, earlier this summer, we did have art off winners who advocated for the state providing additional subsidy to the art off winning areas, which to us, I think raises an alarm as to whether the promise is made or realistic. I think it was our position in writing the telecom plan that if there's a funded federal solution in place for these areas that we may not want to make that the primary focus of state funding, there is a second phase to art off, Laura. So it was my understanding when the art off order came out that addresses that were not covered in phase one would also be, that were supposed to be covered in phase one, but ultimately not covered would be covered in phase two. New addresses, like additional addresses? There are two phases to art off. So this phase is just for census blocks that are considered completely unserved or not contaminated. And then phase two, after they complete the DODC proceeding to figure out a better way to do mapping, they will move to phase two, which will be the contaminated census blocks. I believe I'm not 100% certain, but I do believe that addresses that for whatever reason were not covered in phase one will be re-bid in phase two. Cory, maybe you know differently, I don't know. I believe that that is the intent that if for whatever reason there is a problem with the deployment or compliance with phase one, that the FCC that the money is available and the money is committed for those census blocks and they would pursue trying to get the company to continue to deploy it. And if the company just balked and said that we're bankrupt, then those census blocks and those funding would be available. And as Clay suggested, I just believe that they would be enrolled into the next auction, the phase two auction. So the addresses are set. And so phase two, we just looked at the address gets served. If not, we're going to re-bid the same address. Phase two, not new addresses. No, phase two will be, Laura, you might be aware of this, but the FCC is in the process of changing the way that it does broadband availability data gathering. Everybody is frustrated with the way that the FCC collects broadband data. And they're in the process of changing that mechanism and they don't want to do the art off phase two to go after the very messy problem of partially served census blocks until they get the data fixed. And so their process right now is to fix the data collection process to get their data at the same sort of discussion that you folks are having about getting a baseline. They want to get the data right. And then they're going to proceed to the auction for the unserved locations in those partially served census blocks. So I have a different question. Are you okay? I would just say that that begs the question of, how will the CUDs planning areas be treated in that with FCC? Well, I think the question is to what degree this art off is an overlay for our work, right? And so what are the questions I have? And I apologize. I don't know if this goes to Claire Corey. Hi guys. What is the level of funding that's part of this program? And is it, does it set out in a per mile and dollars per mile or dollars per address format? Corey, I think an initial stab at that. So this is, it was a bid process, Holly. It was a, the FCC made these census blocks available and called for bids for the lowest bidder to provide service. So this is what the bids showed. Companies bid on these locations. And here's the amount of support. This is annual support over 10 years. So it's $30 million for approximately 20,000 locations. Yeah, I mean, you actually have the David Healy's email addresses that specifically for CB Flagler. Nationwide, it worked out to about 15% of the total cost per address. You don't know if that wasn't Vermont? Well, we're about 10% off coupon is what we told it. And you also know that I've read just an article just the other day that many of the, there's a lot of defaulting going on right now because, you know, either the applicants were overzealous or what I'm hearing from the applicant that I spoke to in Vermont is, well, they expected to get more money. So somewhere in between there. So they bid, how can they expect to get more money? I don't know what the, yeah. Hope springs eternal, doesn't it? Do I have this right? They did my block, they didn't bid for a number of locations unless they did the math to try to translate blocks into location, right? They were bidding on blocks. They were bidding on census block groups and the census, no, the bidding was unblocked, right? The bidding was unblocked, the awards were on groups, but the bidding was unblocked and the model spit out the quantity of locations in the census blocks. Yeah, thank you. Keep guessing. Just for that, just for the recording or the conversation, Dan and I have both done the math and that equals up to $168.30 per location. That's every year, that's over. That's for a year. Okay, big deal, $16.80 to be. Okay, but keep in mind, Holly, I think your question's very good. The level of support needed depends, I think, on the company and for consolidated communications, this is a support mechanism that it and its predecessors have relied on for over 30 years now or more. This is an amount of support that they have come accustomed to. They have used previous awards under CAF to further push out their fiber. So for instance, consolidated has fiber to their remote terminals. They are much closer to that last mile than perhaps some other bidders were. So I mean, it's really a matter of what the solution is that's being funded. With that said, there is a national concern I think Christine just highlighted. There is an organization out there called Eric as mostly, I think, made up of telephone companies who believe that they were substantially under bid or they were outbid by companies who are very much low balling it. So it's not a perfect situation, but both the R box and there's a separate program that we haven't talked about for rural Lex. They also get high cost support. This is a totally different issue, but this is an amount of money that they've been relying on for many, many years and have kind of built it into their cost models. Thank you. Corey, can I ask, I think I know this to be true, please confirm for me, the mapping you've done already based on the R and O results you've got, you've captured the data to the degree it can be accurate in the PSD data, right? That's, you guys have that layer and you know, census blocks and at least the locations presumed to be in those census blocks by the awardee and we have at least have our best pass at that data already. So to be, this could easily turn into a different discussion, but so this was opposed as a discussion about Ardolf. So we have the information about the Ardolf territory and the information about the quantity of locations in those territories and that's published on our website. Broadband deployment data that we have published in the past and that we are working on updating now is only information from the service providers saying where they have service. So we've asked the companies to say where they offer service today and that's what is in the broadband deployment data and that's what we are updating right now and we'll update soon. The Ardolf has nothing to do with that and in the past when the department has done programs we have considered for instance where broadband deployment is available and then we considered things like ongoing things in process like the Ardolf or connectivity initiative state grants or other grants that we are aware of or CUD programs or programs that people are contemplating and then we subtracted those locations on a location basis to make areas eligible. So to answer your question, Brian, we are working on updating the broadband deployment data that will be static information about what is present today with no analysis given to other projects in process. It would be our experience that you would probably retain an expert and do that calculation yourself to consider which locations you might want to add or subtract from your eligibility requirements. Yeah, thanks. Is it fair to expect Corey and you know, this was built as an Ardolf conversation but it was built as an Ardolf conversation because we needed to understand the data. So they are closely related. So is it reasonable to expect that as you're building layers of programs that are impacting locations that you would accept the layer from the VCBB of locations funded or planned? So the statute directs us to work with service providers and we talk to service providers and ask them to tell us where they have service available. So for instance, EC Fiber provides information about where they have service available. We would expect if a COD becomes active and starts providing service, we would ask them for service. We would ask them for information about where they have service and we would include that in our broadband statistics. I don't think that we would ask companies about where they are going to have service. And I don't think that we would ask the VCBB. I think, Holly, that would be a separate, that would be a separate data set or separate map. I was just thinking it could be an overlay or I think we thought it might be an overlay. I think it definitely could be an overlay but I would expect that that would be something that you would do. Corey, when we do our broadband availability solicitation, do we ask them where you'll have service in the next six months or is it the six months prior? I think it said as of 1231, 20. 20, okay. I thought in the past we had done it kind of forward looking but I can see reasons why we wouldn't continue to do that. So the new data set that's coming out October-ish will not include anything that's been built in 2021. In some cases it does. I mean, I've been working very diligently with all the providers to try to get their data as accurate as possible. But the biggest data sets come from the cable companies and they're a product of their annual analysis which comes at the end of the year. So for instance, we know Consolidated has built a lot of fiber this year. Is that that's not gonna be included in the maps or is it, I guess I'm trying to get whether it varies from company to company. Or- It varies from company to company. Okay, so it's not a 1231, 2019, 2020 cutoff. It's a very, I must say that it's a painstaking difficult process because you have two choices. You can be rigorous and say, this is the way that you must send us all data and make it up to them to send you data and then you could easily incorporate that. But you'll get very limited compliance. Basically, everybody will ignore you because this is a voluntary process. The alternative is to be super flexible and take things written on the back of a napkin and try to make sense of it and get better data but that takes a lot of work. And so we're trying to do the best we can. You all are doing great and I think we all recognize that we have the best data in the country. It still is some of it from the back of a napkin but it's really good data and we appreciate all that work. Keep in mind, you asked about Consolidated and certainly we do publish a map of 100, 100 but for your charge, my understanding is that the addresses that the VCBB and the CUDs are focused on with public funding at least to start are those that don't have 25, 3 and Consolidated's fiber builds are an overbuild of cable video service by and large. So we don't expect that CCI's fiber construction is actually going to advance the 25, 3 bucket that far, if at all, it will advance the 100, 100 bucket but we don't see it as a bill that's going to get unserved and underserved people fiber service this year. Right, it's more of if they're building out to RDOF addresses that they may. Right, when they start RDOF, when that starts then I think you'll see CCI fiber making an impact on unserved locations. One thing that I did wanna mention that Clay that you reminded me talking about CCI fiber as you're contemplating the idea of whether you want to provide grant funding to locations that are subject to RDOF grants. A couple of things that you might wanna think about are that if a company is going to over, if you're gonna give a grant fund to a company that's going to overbuild an RDOF territory that really leaves one of two options. The new entity either is going to partner with that RDOF recipient, right? They're going to partner with them somehow, which means giving the RDOF recipient more money to do something that it has already agreed to do in a public process. So that's one option. The other option is you're going to compete with that the company that you're supporting is going to compete with that company. So that means that that will be essentially undermining the business model of both entities because the new entity that you're giving a grant funding to is going to have a competitor that has public subsidy and the company that the FCC is giving money to has a public subsidy that's gonna be competing against your company. Those are really the only two options that you have if you're gonna give money to a company that is already a grant recipient. Another thing that you might want to consider, I don't have an opinion on this, but you might want to consider whether ARPA funding can be used to build something that's already subject to a grant. I don't know, I have an answer on that. Yeah, I'll just chime in. The folks that bid in RDOF were bidding in a timeframe when fiber costs were a lot lower. So their business model needs to have additional pancake grants to make it work. So even though they're getting potential grant dollars from RDOF or not getting, they aren't getting grant dollars from RDOF, the business case has changed so dramatically because the cost of equipment is through the roof. So I think they do need to pancake a layer on in order to make RDOF come to fruition. That's one good reason. Another good reason for collaboration with an RDOF recipient is that you then have a local view on how that deployment is happening and the support of that community union district in ensuring the delivery. And I just think that that's worth paying something more for anyway, personally. I absolutely think it's something that we're gonna need to figure out, but I think the question is whether or not these funds, the ARPA funds are eligible to be used there. That's a good question. RDOF? Yeah, right. Can we pancake and layer up? Which does not mean, I mean, so if the answer is no, then I mean, I think when we're putting together models, because we're clear that ARPA dollars are probably not gonna do 100% of all the areas that we're looking at, where's the municipal funding is probably where those addresses would be funded from or whatever additional funds. In which event are you gonna apply the incidental rule about crossing through that territory? Overlay or overbuild. And who makes that determination? Is it this committee or commission the outsourced arbiter of how ARPA funds get spent? Or how do we? So the state has been relying very heavily on guide, like a guide. That's what I'm trying to think of, yeah. And I'm sure that that's where a finance and management or others would, but I think that's a question that we should ask. I have a question. Right away. Right away, because it really defines. Well, I mean, it's just. A lot of how we allocate funding. Well, I think it more allocates how the CUDs think about when we're, yes, when we're putting together the financing, because it's probably not all our ARPA funds, you know, what addresses are being funded with which funds? So let's put that on the parking lot list, clearly. Yeah, legal. What is it? It's legal. What I have is our, can ARPA funding be used to? Let's just start off locations. We need a legal opinion on that. The threat we need a little bit more. One other challenge. One other decision we're gonna have to make is are we gonna fund building by another provider to an address that was won by a different company in Ardaugh if they're not working together? So it's a different question of if it's a block that's won by a CUD or won by a provider that's the operator in that area versus where it's a different operator and they're not working with the CUD. There's so many layers to this. This is one step to that question. I have to say, and I'm loving that you know these things, Laura, but there's these references to and there's other funds that are being applied in the scenario. So at some point it'd be great if we talked about what the, and they will get our dashboard for the CUDs and we'll understand what kind of funding they have outside of ARPA or ARPA funding because I'm just unclear when you say, you know there's other money out there. Well, so how much is coming from where? Act 79, we set up the CUDs said plan how to get to every address in the territory. Act 71, we set up this board to support the CUDs to get out there, including and especially thinking about how are you gonna finance that plan? Right. And so that's the work that, you know how are you gonna finance it? We were fortunate enough to also have a whole slug of federal money come in. Okay, so even if you're talking about the 2020, 2021 talking about the like, you know hopefully $250 million that we have to, you know allocate out. I was talking about this next year. Everything that we are doing even if that money was not there was still gonna happen, right? So the CUDs still have to figure out how to finance. They're pulling in different buckets of funds. They're pulling in different funds. So in addition to the funds that we're gonna be allocating, I mean that you've got NBRC, RUS, you've got, you know some private funding. You've got all different types of funding and the potential for and the likelihood of bonding at some point down the road, right? And so what we're doing, well not what we're doing but the funds that we have now help kind of really lower the cost for affordability and also to get to that bonding, you know the business makes the business case a lot better. So that's what I mean. We're seeding, we're seeding. Yeah. Yes. So there's a lot of other pieces of funding. I mean that one of the NBRC person, my understanding hopefully is that that is a person that's helping kind of put together the financial stack, right? When you're looking at putting together, building a project, my economic development haven, right? So if you're expanding a business or relocating a business, you're bringing together a whole bunch of different sources of funding for that project, are we on the same page? Yeah, okay. If I could just add just one last parting thought, sounds like we're probably coming to the end of your need for us, but we talked about ARDOF today. The rural local exchange carriers also get high cost support for their territories through a separate program. So you have a similar problem. It's different, but it's similar one that you may wanna also think about as you proceed with projects inside the ARLEC territories. And that we're certainly less knowledgeable on that might be a good discussion to have with the individual telephone companies. All right, I know less about that world, so I can't actually follow that conversation. What do you guys? Yeah, I mean, we're talking about the small providers, you know, the examples. I'll give you an example. Shoreham, Telephone, Topsoom, Brantlin, the TDS companies. The companies, you go back to Corey's first slide that make up about 16% of the geographic territory on that green and blue map. Will that presentation be posted to our meeting? We'll send it to you, yeah. Thank you. Okay, anything else on ARDOF? Corey and Clay, thank you both very much. Thank you, it was our pleasure. Good luck. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. I had some short notice, you did a great job. Okay, next item on our agenda. Are there any of the follow-up discussion or questions relative to that conversation? There is one statement that sticks in my head. I think we have to acknowledge it and at some point decide what we're going to do with it. Corey said, these are companies that have already been paid to do something. And historically, both CCI and the ILACs have been getting high-cost support from the Universal Service Fund and it hasn't made it either practical or they just haven't supplied the service we're looking for them to supply. So I stop processing a little bit when I hear they have promised to do this anyway. Well, I think funding through programs like ours helps ensure that that level of service is done. So it's not like we're giving them an abundance of riches we're helping control or guide how this happens through providing additional funding through this program. When they are working with a CUD. When they are working with a CUD. On a universal service plan. Or are in that special category of telcos that are also allowed to apply for construction funding independently? Right, yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. I just think we need to have a visibility on what they've been awarded, what the gap is and how we can help that gap, folks. But I agree with that. I don't want to, the goal is to get everybody connected. The art is how we do that in each given opportunity. And so I don't want to reliving out but I want transparency and visibility about what we're doing and not doing as it relates to those layers of funding that are available. So as part of our request for submissions we can bake that in in terms of their what grants and commitments are included already in their business plan. What commitments do they already have? Well, which ones exist that they are not accessing and why, right? And someone maybe- Well, we have to keep a roster, I guess, right? The checklist. I think that's right. Yeah. Somebody may deliberately not go for grant money. I don't know why they would, but maybe they are. And that's fine, I just want to know why. Because that goes into our decision. There could be some barrier. Yeah, it could be some risk tolerance thing, some administrative overhead thing. It could be a bunch of things. But if someone's not accessing funding that is known to be available, that's fine. Just explain it. Can we list out the available grants that we're aware of and say, which, you know, have them check off Northern borders, BC, what is, there's PLI. I don't know. But like list them all out and explain, have them check which ones they've applied for if they haven't applied why. Because I think there's one that we looked at at WEC and we got to the end of it and were like, we can't apply because we don't meet the criteria. We're not a, as a cooperative, we're not a municipal, we didn't meet the criteria. We got thrown out for that singular reason. Is that a step in the pre-construction phase or is that a construction phase step? I don't know the answer to that, but it should be somewhere in the process. Well, in the pre-construction phase, it was only open to CEDs and they were asked about previous funding they've received. I was also in the capacity survey that's the start of the maturity mile model that was sent out as well. But that's, it's just really a little bit different, you know, like here's the list of what you could apply for or our programs that are out there. How many have you applied for? It's possible they may not have known about a particular one and you said, oh, I didn't know about that. We're kind of helping educate in the process, yeah. And this is one of the roles that we do see for the broadband project developer as well. Cause there are, there's a lot of different funding opportunities out there. It all depends on how you thread the needle and making it fit. There's a lot of funding for libraries and for schools and connecting on-serve students. And it's challenging for, to keep track of them, even for Christine and I, nevermind the individual CUDs. And that is something that we see this position playing an important part of to make sure that we're leveraging as much funding as possible from as many sources. Most of those school programs that you mentioned are not part of building a fiber network. Yeah. So then the little thing that's sort of sticking with me that next then is we need that checklist of the funding sources. And we need to understand how we're gonna see the RDOF sites and where that fits into the CUD plan. Like, do we need to overtly inquire? Like, will your locations, let's go back to the data layer. Will your locations, will your universal service plan include or not RDOF locations? And ask them to be specific about that, right? Yeah, I just think we need to take the macro step back and every CUD's got a number of locations. Some of those today are served 100 by 100. Some of those are 25-3. Some of those are below 25-3 and that's fine. That's the baseline. I'd love to understand how, again, our target is below 25-3. Okay, that's our primary goal. If in the serving that goal, we can bump somebody from 25-3 to 100 by 100, that's great. But the primary goal is the below 25-3 sites. And I happen to have a particular Jones about the four one and under sites because those are just sites that are just, they're useless, right? You might as well be in the desert. Thank you. I appreciate it. And if you really focus on those, you're gonna get a bunch of 25-3 sites along the way because that's just the way the maps work out. Not 100%, but I wanna know the demographics of your territory and how your plan addresses the demographics of your territory. Just like you said, Oli, and it's the data. That's exactly right. And if you are considering the site served at 25-3 because of ARDOF, we just need to know that so that we have, because we'd wanna know, are you dependent on ARDOF in making your plan? I guess that's a question looking back at the legislation. So does the Universal Service Plan have to cover all locations or only all locations without a plan? I think that's a fundamental question for this group. And that's where we're gonna get into some, that's where we get into some judgment because if a plan has a group of sites that it's relying solely on ARDOF for, and the ARDOF timeframe is 2027, and there are a bunch of 4-1 sites. And if we can do something to accelerate that to 2024 or 2023, we should consider that. 100%, I mean, I, so CUDs are a territory, right? So they're not necessarily just, I mean, so understanding what your ARDOF is, all of the providers, you know, what's in your territory. But 100%, I think the CUDs have to be planning for, and hopefully are working with or trying to work with the providers, the winners of the ARDOF. And in the CUD area, if the winner of those ARDOF addresses is not willing to work with the CUD, that's something we should understand, right? That feels very risky for those addresses to me, right? And so they have to think about it. And actually it's a risk factor for both the CUD and whoever the recipient was, right? I mean, like. Well, it's riskiest for the people that live at that address, right? So if you have an entity who, you know, you're in, so they're in the CUD. I'm tracking with you. I'm just thinking of upstream, everybody's business plan has a weakness in it because of if they're not working together. And so that winner, the best case for that winner is to be working with the CUD. So if they're not working the CUD, because potentially you're getting it further subsidy or assistance in getting that covered. So does this, so this is the kind of pronouncement that I think we sort of, this is important information. Where do we catalog it? And how do we ensure that it gets posted? Yeah, so leave to me. Dan, I just had a little quick aside. This is part of, should be part of the criteria against which we're scoring applications is the cooperation of these concepts into the plan and showing that, you know, we're thoughtful about all these different things. And I think it's an offshoot of the policy or guideline or what we call it last time, we're doing this guideline that we're doing those, we have to give the applicants a roadmap for how we're going to evaluate their applications. That's what those are. And then when the applications come in, we're going to use that those guidelines to score. And that's, and that is really mindful compunction about, and you can come on policies and call guidelines. I'm just saying, where are the rules of the road here? Yeah. But it also gets built back into the baseline data and how we're using it. So, and we did hear Corey say that they're not interested in incorporating a layer of what we're doing, that that's a forward-looking planning process layer. And so they'll pick it up when it becomes active. So we should. That sounds like something that's going to be negotiating it a little bit further, probably. So later in the agenda today, we are looking at the timeline for construction grants and how I imagine that we would do it is we would set a goal for when we want the RFP released and then work backwards to determine what decisions we need to make, what policies we need to make to achieve that timeline. And I think a lot of this fits into that discussion as well. Because it's not just our office. And it was Corey or Clay mentioned that a lot of like Shoram telephone or some of the other small companies are also getting support and they have requirements to do something by a certain date. How do we accelerate that? How do we make sure that it meets 100 by 100? What do we do if a cut has a operating agreement for those same areas with a different operator? There's all so much, so much sausage to be made. Well, I would take that all one step further. You know, if I'm a volunteer sitting on a CD and I can say, oh, I see that my district has an ARDOP awardee. How do I, I mean, have you ever tried to call SpaceX? How am I to be supported in a conversation with that awardee? Well, in the case of SpaceX, I know those were not considered addresses with a plan since they weren't going to meet the 100 by 100 threshold. But I still get the point and that is something that we can certainly assist with. So that's really what I was thinking. It's maybe, and I throw this out as an idea. I don't know if you're interested, but maybe it would be great for this board to invite the ARDOP awardees in and ask, and just suggest to them that working together with the CUD would help us leverage additional funding if that's our position. I think we'd better find out if we can. So if we technically can. Yeah, that question that's on the board. Absolutely, there's an order to this, but rather than just say the CUDs, when are you dealing with CCI, for example? And I don't know, maybe that's a really easy thing to do, but maybe if that's our preference, maybe we ought to inform or encourage the ARDOP awardees by inviting them to participate in a conversation like that. One of the big barriers in my mind could be that in order to be an ARDOP awardee, you have to be a telecom provider of the last resort in ETC. And that's a whole level of obligation to telephone service that I am sure most CUDs are not fixated on. So how does that get sorted out? I don't even know. I don't know about that actually. Well, I'm, some will and some don't, but I'm just saying, you know, now we're talking, you know, FCC obligations and different kinds of certifications. And it's a whole level of business level of engagement that they have to be aware of and that comes with ARDOP support. So this is the kind of conversation that we could have if we invited ARDOP awardees to participate in. And we invited ARDOP awardees in to talk about whether or not, you know, and express whether or not they would talk about whether they would participate in something else, but we could at least talk about how we would like to encourage them to collaborate with or engage with CUDs. I think that's reasonable. I think we're not prepared to have those conversations. Not yet. I think once we get our ducks in a row, then I think we could have a constructive conversation and all the awardees not making SpaceX are companies that operate in Vermont and we know who those people, who those organizations are. So I think it's a high likelihood we'd have productive conversations. And just let's not fix it on SpaceX. Corey said SpaceX won a bunch of empty census blocks where there's no locations, right? And even at their maximum, I think it was like 2,000 locations or at least modeled that way. So they're not to ignore those locations, but they're a small player in this, you know, I doubt we're gonna get a lot of baseline of them, but they don't represent the lion's share of the problem. So I'll be right here. I also want to note that all of the, I believe all of the CUDs are talking with the R-Doc winners in their block outside of SpaceX. Many have NDAs with solidated, for instance, obviously the folks up in the NEC are talking with Kingdom Fiber. So those discussions are happening, whether, I guess the board needs to decide our exact role in that of how hard are we pushing? Are we leaving for them to make decisions? What do we do when there's disagreements? Like, how does this all work? And I would like to hear from you. That's their wrinkles to iron out. I don't want to get into the business. Great, great. How are they coordinating with R-Doc? Great. We shouldn't be trying to solve it. Exactly. No mandates coming from us. That's what I was trying to get at. Surrogates, sure, but no mandates. This is really complicated, unbundled, because you have R-Doc recipients. The wire centers don't match up with the census blocks. And all of this overlaying, which where mapping will come in to be quite powerful, I think, because you'll have splits in these and for the recipient or for the applications to talk about how does this complement or overlay into these districts, because they could be very complementary with the government. And to the points made earlier, have them speak to that. I don't think we can force them to go get this information, but certainly if they've done the research and they've put their heart into the cooperative efforts, that scores high. In many cases, with the census block, it's one side of the road is an R-Doc census block, the other side isn't, where you have to go through a census block that's R-Doc to get to other unserved areas that the FCC decided weren't qualified this time around. So it's, I don't know if there's a real solution. I don't know of a level in which to look like a real one. In fact, you're complimenting that census block. R-Doc reached this territory, but you're filling here with some of the CUD work and they're cooperating over there, which is R-Doc. They will build that R-Doc territory, perhaps. And together it achieves the goal that we're seeking to get. I'm going to just say out loud, and I appreciate what you're saying that it's gotta be a design nightmare, actually. I don't agree with my colleagues who have said that we aren't going to give a mandate or it's their wrinkle to smooth out. I think we should be encouraging collaboration and that the legislation speaks to that. And so I'm not saying that we won't give money, or shouldn't give money to CUDs that don't have an R-Doc partner. But I think to the extent that we can help set encouragement or guidance for collaborating with R-Doc partners, we've got to answer that R-Doc question. And we've got to figure out how we get, this is in the name of getting service to individual locations, we've got to try to leverage all opportunities. And so how the deal gets worked out isn't our effort, but rather making sure we can clear the way, like if it's getting rid of this R-Doc versus R-Doc funding question. And maybe having an opportunity for, even if we're just looking at the CUDs and if they're all talking to the R-Doc recipients, then maybe we're just good with that check that box, but we really need to know that that's happening and that the R-Doc recipients know that we expect it to happen. But we can't do anything about it. But what if we can put it in our scoring criteria and weigh things heavier or lighter based on that? Absolutely. We don't want to penalize the CUD that is not in collaboration with an R-Doc winner because the R-Doc winner will not collaborate. And that's why we need to have the conversation with the R-Doc people. I think it's a binary, in coordination is better than not in coordination. I'm saying I want transparency because there's going to be a subjective element to this thing about how we award. There's just got to be. And in that circumstance where a CUD is making good faith efforts, but there's nobody to collaborate with because of the R-Doc recipients just not open to it, we're not going to ding them. We just want to know that and know why. Because we don't want to let that opportunity pass unverified or un... For example, in Dave Healy's memo to Christine, it is not clear that one of the winners is financially capable of meeting the obligations. There's a red flag. I don't want to mandate that they work with somebody that's not financially viable. However, in support of Brian's point, the folks that are on this call are not necessarily R-Doc awardees. And so how do they know we're even having this conversation? I just think it's a good thing for us to make sure that we've reached out to R-Doc awardees and let them know that we want to understand where they're at, that we encourage their participation with CUDs, that we want to understand how these funds intersect and how the delivery of service will happen. So that's, I just want to make sure that we get the word out there. Okay, let's try to keep moving this along. Any other discussion on this topic right now? Yeah, I would actually like Madam Chair, we could get some clarity from the department about the mapping. And I would like our staff to, so I don't know if we're there yet or not, but I think we need to start settling down back to our previous conversation. Like we're actually not going to be creating two different databases. And so there's going to be another layer to the state's telecom data and how we cooperate with the department to get that done, I think is something I think we need to start hashing out, not if, not if, but how? We basically got told no. Well, I don't know that we did. I don't know that we did, but it's a process. It doesn't make it perfect. Yeah, let me back up. Like we have the interactive broadband map. There's nothing when we have our GIS contract done, there's nothing that says we can't create another layer using the same E911 addresses that can be overlaid onto that map. We can add any layers we want to public data. So as a, so I don't think we want to, I don't think it's Vermont's best interests or CUD's best interests or a private provider's best interests or taxpayers' best interests for there to be two sets of data that exists separately, somewhere that are tracking different build outs of, of addresses that we're tracking private and as CUD comes in here and we're tracking. So just, I think that conversation needs to, how we are working with the department on that. You know, how we're going to sort through that. And I think we still have the elements of what we're going to map, but how are we going to collaborate with? Yeah, I thought we had just said at the beginning with that early discussion that this is, this will be a topic of a subsequent meeting and we'll take this on the phone. The data, but the how with the DPS. Oh, I knew it all together. It's a great, excellent. But it's conversation, I think it's started. Yeah, no, I will have a conversation for you. I'll talk to Julie. Okay, moving along. Next item on the agenda is grant scoring criteria. So first, I guess I want to ask like, how you all want to do this? It can be as simple as saying that we can be, we can go through the scorecard. We can say that you trust the staff to do this. We can go through what it says in the RFP for how we're scoring it, which aligns with the scorecard. That's the feedback I want before I start launching in and going through all the different questions we're asking and the points associated. If you're going to marry the scoring to the RFP, physically, how would you do that right now? I would say that I use the RFP to inform the scoring. So does that seem to be- I went through the questions. That's what I did. Don't you think we should just walk through the scorecard and get through that? If you're open to that, we can certainly do that. That works for me. Okay. So in the board packet, there was a PDF of it. I'm going to pull up the actual, I use SurveyMonkey to make this better. So let me hold that up. And we'll go through that in a second, yeah. You know, I'll just say, because we don't have our task guidelines officially established, it's hard to look at these scoring guidelines and make sure they incorporate some of those decisions that we've been making. So this is the grant scorecard. And for the people at home, this is more for internal use. So there's not all that much explanation. For those of you that have applied for funding, you'll see these questions aligned very closely with the RFP and the other survey we sent out. How I imagined it is that this calculates a score, the applications will be recommended for funding if they're over a certain score. The board will still take other feedback and look at individual line items and everything, but this is kind of the baseline. It's to, for evaluating the grant applications as well as evaluating as part of the risk assessment stuff. There's a few questions in here that were taken from the State of Vermont's risk assessment survey. So first, it's very basic contact information, amount requested. Top question here, universal service confirmation. I have a question. Is it all on-grid addresses or is it all locations as defined in the act? What are we trying, what is the universal service that we're trying to get the CUDs to address? All under-served addresses in their territory. That's not all on-grid addresses. So this is- All on-grid, that's in the application it does specify on-grid. On-grid being the electrical grid. Yes. That's what the universal is. Isn't it under-served and under-served addresses? Yeah. It doesn't say that. Yeah, as I said, this is internal and the RFP itself does have- Oh, this is internal? This is internal. This is for when you and I and Christine and others go take our first pass through the applications to check the boxes of things that we ask them for in the RFP itself. In the RFP itself, it defines what we want in terms of a universal service commitment and that was based on the feedback from the board in terms of the exact definition taken from the legislation on-grid addresses that are under-served or unserved. So less than 25. No, it's under-served applications. Okay. So that's what I was saying in terms of there's not much explanation here because this is- In terms of- For us, yes. So that's the first thing. 50 points, it's gonna be- We can't really approve any application unless that's what they are saying that they are committed to doing. Then we take some time- Quick, quick, quick. How do you- What are the 50-10? How do the points get derived out of the position? That's where I'm looking for feedback. Okay, so this is your first point. What's the total number of points that you can possibly achieve here? The way SurveyMonkey works, it makes it a little bit challenging because if you have different options, like there's some grants that we're gonna get that are just applying for capacity. Some are applying for pre-construction. So if I don't award the- If they haven't applied and I don't award the points, it's a different point total. So that's why I have the 250-210. I've tried many times to add it up, go for it. I mean, otherwise you can't discern whether or not 50 is a material. Well, it kind of- This first one is really a go-no-go. So I'll be- Yeah. You know, I'm- It's 275. You get credit for it. Thank you. Waitress. Yeah. 275. Wow. 275, I don't know for sure if that's what Survey Monkey said because of how they- It's strange how they calculate it, but I plan on doing it by manually, like that as opposed to Survey Monkey. So the question on this first one is, if they don't have a universal service fund, we don't go any further, right? Right. But why didn't that just- Yeah. It's binary. Go-no-go. Well, it's just if they don't get these 50 points, there's no way it's gonna be approved, period. Well- It's a competition you can apply, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things that'll be listed as- And you have to allot points to it for the system to work. Yes. You should state that. Yeah, but as that this is- Future goal? 275 points, and that way you're never making it. That's what I was trying to do with 50. And as I said, this is internal. This is for us. And the application, it does, like it's one of the requirements they need to state they have a universal service fund. So- Oh, God. Oh. Just that discussion alone, it sounds like we're letting the tool drive. Yeah. Yes, instead of us driving the tool. We don't even need to put the question in here for our- I like the vehicle for the discussion. Well, more is what it comes up as an- when you press the submit button, it comes up as an incorrect answer. And that would be, okay, no go. The other way to do it is to start, everyone starts with whatever the total was, 250. Everyone starts with 250. So basically, you answer question three, yes, you get 250 points, then all subsequent questions deduct points. So that if you went to the question strongly, it's zero points deducted. And you maintain your 250 through that question, or if yours less than ideal, you deduct a couple of points and now your 250 is a 245 and you work your way down that way. What I'm saying? Yes, the tool does not support that. The tool does not support that. That's the challenge. At least the version we have access to. So that's why it was more of like, you're trying to, the way this was scored is you're trying to gain points and I said set of how many points you had to get to approve. So it's still doing the same thing. And as I said, this is a guide for when we come back to what the applications to the board. So we continue the conversation on the mirror of each of these and make news and not pull ourselves up on the tool. Yeah, like do we really need to, and I'm wondering, do we need to focus more on the question or the points? I mean, well, I just, so 50 is 18% of 275. I just like, it's just a mind-blowing thing. It's just a yes or no gate. Yeah, it's like, no, it's like, you need a score. I don't know why I didn't know. Yeah, I would just stop at that. Don't even point points to it. It's like, if it's no, it kicks it out of the board. Part of the challenge is that no one is gonna say that they don't have it because all the CUDs do have it and they're the only eligible applicants. So it's just a check. It's just a check box for being able to score this and being able to say how we made the application. It's a reminder that they have to do this. Yes. It's just a reminder that it's part of getting this. It's more of an accountability for us. Right. I mean, they know, but it's what the law says. It's like a certification, right? Yeah, exactly. We're just certifying that. We checked that off, that that was in the application. I mean, that's the best way to put it. Making a certification not to score. Yeah, this certification is there. It's not. Okay. Because the other thing is, that we can't confirm it because how would you prove it? That they have a universal service plan? They've been asked to include the language that's in their mission statement or what the plan or anything in the RFP. Yeah. Yeah, but in my mind, okay, so I know that like we don't want to go here, but in my mind, the way you would confirm it is when we get to the point of being clear about our data, we'd say, okay, we have a business plan that addresses the right number of locations that reflects our baseline data allocation for that CUD. This also goes through another question of that capacity is something that we're going to be funding in this. In some cases, we're going to be funding updating business plans or finishing business plans. I understand. Having a business plan is not required for the pre-construction. It's required for the construction. Okay. So that's, that's- I know, but you can make an exception to every statement, but the fact of the matter is is that it's what a universal service plan is. And so whether they have it today or plan to have it tomorrow, it's a way of saying, yeah, we've confirmed because we agree this is the number. We, the CUD and the BCVB agree that this is the number to be served in the universal service plan. Given the timeframe they have and we have, is it in the state of the date? Is it fair to ask that question at this moment or not? I don't think we can answer. Yeah, so- So we're, I'm just saying we're doing the best we can right now. Yeah, it's the right question. I'd love if they could answer that question and we could verify it, but the state of our data doesn't allow either party to do that. They can answer that question. The question, they have to, right? I mean, they're planning for something, right? I mean- No, no, not this question. The, how many locations are in your tip? Like, I'd love to, enough for us to know. How many locations in your territory? How many are 100 by 100? How many are 25, three or more? How many are less than 25, three? How many are less than 25, three? Now that's a universal service plan committee. I would love that. Well, if we have the 2019 data. Yeah, we have the 2019 data and that's the base data for everyone. Like we've asked them to include that on the application. Yeah, but you have to have them say what they're using. Not that we have it. Okay, I'm actually gonna, let's see if this switch is here. I'm gonna quickly go back to what we've asked for because this might answer a bunch of those questions. Okay, so this is the RFP. Let me get back to where we're going through here. And you'll see that I, when we drafted this, I wanted them to be able to create an application that we would view it, we'd understand it, that we could send it to somebody that doesn't know anything about CUDs. They would understand what this is about, what the group is about, what the history is about. So the first, so let me go back here. So, this is great, this is great. So it's right there. Then we go into current capacity. This aligns very much with the whole scoring thing. Our board members, visors, current contractors, like what are they doing? How are they managing money? Other sources of funding? We want them to list all grants they were awarded in the previous two years. Source, date, amount, and brief sum. Whoa, let's just stick to this, though, not through the hall. Yeah, I think what he's trying to do is show you that this is part of the part. And here's the universal service. And so I'm cool that if I've answered those questions, you could say yes. Yes, okay. That's where I'm at here with this, so. I think it's a zero pointer myself, but yeah, I wouldn't say yes or no. We can certainly make it a yes or no or a zero pointer. This is just to help guide us. So when we come back in a discussion, and that is also the challenge with us. The way we structure it is a certain amount available to each CUD. So they're competing with us saying yes or no as to whether their plan is reasonable, strategic, and whether they meet the conditions of the law. They're not competing against each other necessarily in the case of this grant program. That'll be different, most likely for construction. So I wanted to know if they have an operating agreement or other partnerships. Visibility study, we want the link, business plan. We want the link or status update. And we also have a little note encouraging them to request additional funding, because as I can't remember who sent it out, but we've all noticed in Act 71, how they define business plan is different than how the business plan was defined in the broadband innovation grant. And we want all these groups to be ready to apply for construction funding potentially by December. So that's something that's highly encouraged for the CUDs. I was gonna note that I sent that out. I excerpted from the innovation grants and sent it to you by email. So it's in your partner email because the definition of feasibility grant and business plan are different than they are in CUD one. And that was already been shared to the CUDs and we're looking into other ways to potentially fund any updates and see if they can do it themselves versus hiring somebody or put that word out there to try to find out more information. But that's just something to note in there. Rob, from your perspective, is this then pretty much just mimic the sequence of this pretty much? It's mimicking it for the most part. There's a few other questions in there that were from the survey that we sent out. Those are mostly the risk assessment. Like, have you been audited? Did they have findings? What's your accounting system? So it's asking more yes or no for some things that we're asking them to explain that we... So can I ask under this human capacity thing? Because I'm not gonna be allowed to ask these questions of you when I'm sitting there scoring. I'm going to ask them now. So do we really care what the number of committees... I mean, would this penalize people unnecessarily? Like the number of committees that doesn't talk about effectiveness or workload or anything. And how many board members volunteer outside of the monthly meeting? Is that something that could be validly reported? I just... I do think it's an example of maturity because I'm not gonna mention the CUD names, but the active CUDs are doing a lot more work with committees. There was... And on the other extreme, there's not much going on at all. So I do think... So this is the way that we're trying to figure out how strong they are. We're trying to separate it from what we know about the CUDs. We're trying to have something that's more of... We're trying to assign a number to it. This goes back to the whole maturity discussion. And it's not perfect. There's some questions like that we have in here like we asked how many employees? Well, a more advanced CUD that wants to access the bond market, there's an advantage to not having employees. So what do we do in terms of that question? Like there's things that... There is some variability and there is some subjectivity that's gonna go into all these things. Like that's why this isn't the end all. My assumption is if the applicants follow the directions and answer all the questions, that they're gonna score really well on this. And then it is up for us to figure out between them to make a more subjective call. I think where you're at. Can I ask, I would... I wanna volunteer to join Holly and review the first few. Great. That's sort of for one of the pre-schooling because that's gonna make me more invested in the content and familiar that's just gonna help me. So... I think it's very helpful. I think it's very helpful just to understand the... To understand each of these CUDs. Like that's the challenge I have is I have so much information up here from working with them that a lot of time... It's like a blind check for us. Yes. Wait, Christine, you had a comment? Yeah, I just wanted from a process standpoint whether you may wanna just delegate this exercise to this subcommittee because it's gonna take you a long time to get through this. Yeah, we're not gonna make it through this. We're not gonna make it through this. Yeah, we... There's no way. That's a good suggestion, Laura. I'm processing that because that's where I was going. Like I have to leave at 12.15. But I think we should have some sense of how we're gonna score before the scoring happens. I mean, we should have some consensus. Yeah, I'm suggesting that a subcommittee review the score. And so the consequence of that is... Can we come back to this at the next meeting and say our homework is to go review this? Because as Laura said, I can't read this. We didn't get the packet until this morning. I can't read this and give feedback. I can't read this. This is the challenge. In the RFP, we said that the staff would make a recommendation to the board within seven days and then the board would make a decision on the applications. Like this was in the... This is all based on the RFP that has been out there in terms of the scoring. It's our RFP. You're held responsible to the board. The board can give us a get out of jail free card for this first round of one application. Well, there'll be many more, but it's also a matter if we change in the RFP we have to go through a process of amending the RFP. So are we changing the RFP? Or are we waiting the criteria? We're just changing the timeframe given the... Yeah, we're waiting the criterion of seven days response. But we're not contractually bound to the applicant to respond in seven days. I'm trying to help. We're not going to change the RFP, but we're addressing the criterion, the waiting of the responses. Right, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. We should find out. Yes, how will we get the feedback in seven days? Because our next meeting right now is in schedule to October. That's right. And I am also concerned about that. So I'm also concerned about that. The consequence of doing this, which is something I support, puts us into October and that is a problem for me. Like the other option... Feels like we're twerking the CUDs around. Like the other option is to, we fill this out. We don't even have scores to it, but it's used as a reference guide for the board when making decisions. So it kind of is yes. I want you to score. I want to... Some of us have time to dive in and do more detailed. There's no way I can review things on a really granular basis, which can't. You really can't do it. I want you to score. I want to score for each one. And I'll see you go side by side. Exactly. Let's go to be scored. I guess going back to the side by side, in some ways we aren't doing side by side, since they're not competing against each other. No, but if you give a score, it gives you a relative sense of this. I don't want to be greater in the weight than the value of each other. Madam Chair, I would like to suggest that we update that we've held for our work. Which is what? October 23rd, 2018. It's been still two weeks. Right away, the 27th of September. What we can do is give feedback electronically to the group. I think we can respond to this and say... We could schedule an emergency meeting early next week. That's just for an hour to approve the scoring. I think we have to get 48 hours notice, just to approve the scoring that we're associating with this. Now it allows things to move forward and score them. Then we can get it, we can review them as a work group and come back potentially on the 28th to approve these applications. Yeah, I'm gonna time out here because I work blood-wise. Even if we scheduled a meeting, I don't have time to look at this and digest. It's like it's the reality factor. So that's not my problem though, frankly. I know, but it's reality. Well... Well, what if it's delegated to the committee? Exactly. If there's a subcommittee, I'm happy to do that. To have us all meet and try to make... Let's do that. So, are you comfortable with that? I'm totally comfortable. Okay, so we have a subcommittee. And so... That's my point, use the subcommittee to make... It's going to make a... That's going to put something forward to the board prior to... Well, that's up to you. I would delegate this action and you guys make sense of it and make a recommendation go. Make a recommendation or go ahead and... Go ahead. Go. You put that trust in our fellow board members. So to me, it's a two-step process. I need to review this and give feedback on it. You will do the same. We need to align that feedback, Rob. And then so the three of us or the four of us need to come up with a new version of this based on that feedback. Or ideally, it's perfect. And our feedback says, great, nothing's changed. And it's aligning with the RFP that has already been issued. It's not saying, you know, it's not trying to recreate... Basically, I want to sit down at the RFP and just sign by sign and go through it. If we don't like what we sent out on the RFP too bad. That's not agenda, that's us. All aligns, scoring, go round. And Rob and I will commit the time. Fine. Yes, yes. Right, I make a motion that we set up a subcommittee to review the grant scoring matrix submitted in our agenda and that subcommittee is comprised of Holly and Brian. I'm happy to work on that subcommittee but I am not happy to score. I don't want to score. Well, it doesn't make a lot. It's not helpful to vote. It's for the subcommittee. It can't be more than two people. That's right. That's a good one. Okay, so we'll, perfect. We'll work with you. So I made a motion. Is there a second? All right, Dan has seconded that motion. Although, any more discussion? Just time frame to have this done. Yeah, really. We need to know what the next week is going to be. You need to have it done. Can you meet tomorrow to go over this? I need to have time to review it. Staff continues to forget that we actually have to have time to review things. So I need a long time with the RFP and this to side by side to develop my comments and feedback. Then I'm thinking that each of you, at least Holly does. Then I think we get together and we either email that feedback together to get it going or then we just hash through it on a phone call. And then the outcome of that, try to time bound it. So we say, yep, we're going to have this done by Tuesday, maybe we don't know what's feasible. And then we're good. Let me get to score. And, you know, it probably would make a lot of sense because I think you can talk me off ledges, Brian, and maybe I can ask questions that you'll be successful in responding to that we don't have to bring to staff. Let's try to get our consolidated response. Is that all right? Yep. And by Tuesday, by Tuesday. So the committee will issue a response to the whole board by Tuesday the 21st. Or do you want us to talk to, I mean, this is just a question, it's not a suggestion. Or do you want us to talk to Robin Christine about our comments and then give a report to the board? Yeah, so you guys have some internal work you're going to do, but on the 21st, we're going to report out to the board. So that means that we need to do our analysis on Friday and Saturday, talk to the staff on Monday, and then have a report out on Tuesday. Yes. Is that doable? I think I said, okay. I'm just kind of aware of where the work is inappropriately cadding office on the board. And I just, I'm starting to say, you know, like, yes, we need to respond to these CEDs, but we also need to be able to be realistic and be able to get our work done. To be fair, the RFP has been out there and available, and this was printed out in the board packet sent you, sent yesterday, when we're meeting every week, it is a challenge. But we're talking about this. That was in the board packet. So let me just propose, is there a problem with having these two evaluate this by Tuesday, and then having the response to the board by Thursday? So I'm more concerned about the timeline to the CUDs. So that's, for me, that's the place that we work from, and then build as much time and space for everybody that's doing the work. So what's the goal for the CUDs? What did they tell them? The CUD application. The first application came in on Tuesday. From? Is that necessarily relevant? Why not? Tuesday to date. Public information. 14th? It came in from Maple CUD, expecting applications from several others early next week. Yeah, but Tuesday, Maple CUD, Tuesday being Tuesday of this week. So under the rules of the RFP, we would be owing them a response to their application by Tuesday. Well, it's a staff recommendation to the board, and then the board decides at the next meeting. This is helpful. So we have to have a response to the first staff. Staff has to make a recommendation. Another 21st Tuesday. Yeah, yes. That was a bad rule. Is it working days or is it days? I mean, it was working days. We can say working days. Yeah, that'd be great. Specified to where the staff can do that. And then, is there a time? For you. Yeah, exactly. We can't, I don't think we should do, I've always understood business to be a working day. And the following week, is there a day as a board that we can meet? For a short meeting to go only addressing applications. So we could. Move that going forward. We also do need the grant agreement as, as well as the next step after that. And I know you were going to say. Well, I think, I think the recommendation was that this subcommittee would make those decisions. No, the subcommittee is just going to review this matrix. Oh, okay. Well, if the subcommittee is going to review the matrix. And then make a recommendation that our response is part of actually part of the staff's recommendation to the board. Well, why don't I do this too? I will share, I will share with the, with the board. The first step, the first application that came in, there's some information that is confidential. Be clear. It's a, and that may help you with going through the scoring to see how it all aligns. So you'll have the, you'll have the first response. And you'll have the, and you'll have the scoring system. Will you send those three things up to the subcommittee? Yes. I don't, I don't know if I can put my hands on the original, the RFP, the scoring guide and the first response. Yes. We'll treat that as confidential. Yes. Parts of it will be, but all applications are confidential until they're accepted anyway. But yeah. And here's an open meeting lot question. Since we're a subcommittee of this board, do we have to warn meetings of that? It's not a subcommittee. It's a working group of, working group. Let's call it. Yeah. We're not a core. We're not a core. Yeah. Right. I just want to make sure that we're like, so when we clear with our process, seven days, seven days, seven days, seven days, seven days, seven days, seven days, seven days, seven days, seven days, seven days. And we're not, we're not a core, we're not a core. In our process. Seven days. Staff has to make a recommendation to the board about this first application was received on Tuesday. So that's the 21st. So they're making a recommendation to us. We are not scheduled to meet until October. I accept the 7th day? The 2nd. Our next meeting. September 28th. Excuse me. That's right. It's seven business days. So our next meeting is in October, 28, now we had originally said it was going to be more future. No, I think we just need to not need on the 20. Well, you made the recommendation, so you're up. That's true. As long as we have quorum. So my, just for folks, just to set the expectation for CUD World. So we're seven business days. And we are meeting then and in our next meeting are likely making funding decisions or can make funding decisions at our next meeting. On the 28th, that's one funding decision. There will be others that come in. It won't have the seven days for review. It won't have the impact of the subcommittee. Well, I just want to be realistic that by the 28th, you'll have the recommendations that you received on the 21st or in the 23rd. So when will, when are you expecting other applications to come in? Early next week, if not today or tomorrow. And so if we have grant applications, pre-construction grant applications that come in on the 21st, right, they would be out of the 27 day time frame. And so then they would, that decision would be moved into the October meeting. That's seven days to review from. So if an application came in tomorrow, we have to have a review back by the following recommendation to the board. And it says the board addresses it at their next board meeting. So those would be on the 28th. Yeah, you could make recommendations on the 28th. And it could be addressed on the 28th. I'm just worried about how we're going to handle this. That's your 7th and 8th, that's all. Yeah, the point is you're making it. There's a cutoff date. It's not. So if things come in next Monday, they aren't going to get reviewed. No, they will. They will, because the seven days ends up being the following Tuesday, which is before a Thursday board meeting. I know that this committee, this subcommittee, has to review them. They'll have had seven days. They'll have had seven days to review them and make a recommendation to the board. But the CUD will not receive feedback until after the board meeting? CUD, depending on what the recommendations are, like we could request that the CUD attend the board meeting to answer any questions. If there are questions that need to be answered in executive session, that's something that could also happen. And if we don't have enough information based on the application, we don't have to recommend it for funding. That's true. There's a negotiation process. We need a calendar. We need two requests. And we always have in the minutes the date and time location of the next board meeting. So it's always there. And then the second thing is, all of these dates of meetings and submissions. I like it when it's on the agenda, too. Yeah, better. Whatever. That works great. Either one. And then tracking all of these dates of incoming applications, review period, recommendation of the board timeframe. Well, when it comes in, actually, to the committee, I think it would be great if the staff could maybe put on there what the relevant timelines are. Yeah. Yeah. Let me check and make sure it wasn't even. Let me make sure this was Tuesday, not Monday, that it was that it came in. So we're going to put the timeline on there. Each one should have its own timeline. Well, it isn't going to help it if it was on Monday, Brad. So it isn't going to happen faster. Did you hear me? Yeah. It isn't going to happen faster if it arrived Monday. OK. All right. So I think we'll get there. What the timeline of the application? And so there's a possibility that if someone got in an application tomorrow, it would be included in this group's and the board's review on the 28th. OK. On the 28th, then, if we're making decisions, are we bound by the in-person rule for voting? No. No. We can do it all remote. We can have a remote. I've never heard of that. Sorry. It's my legislative. OK. So Rob, this matrix that you sent out, it's in this packet. Are you asking for feedback from the board? Are you making your recommendation? We adopt this. I was making a recommendation you adopted. It's what I was suggesting. There was one item I had a question on that I didn't know, but we should just not include it in the pointing schedule. Other than that, this aligns exactly with what was in the RFP. Are you? So I'm just saying, Patty, I'm just saying matrix. Are you talking about this question? Yes. So we have voluntarily, we have some volunteers, Brian and Holly, that want to go through this. It's not a requirement. It's not a requirement. So you could very well leave this up to staff. And then you do have subjective ability to when you review the actual grant applications. This is something that provides you with additional feedback from staff on each proposal, our view of the proposal. You will have access to all materials. And you could vote to ignore any recommendation the staff makes. That is what the board is empowered to do. It's a question of whether the board wants to get, and this is where I started the conversation, whether we wanted to get into the weeds, or whether you wanted the trust that the scoring was going to be fair and give you enough information to move forward. We're not just going to tell you this application scored this number. We're going to give you a printout of the questions that they answered. So in some ways, you could judge for yourself how you want to relate to different scoring. It's very clear in the RFP of the criteria we are using to add the applications. This was supposed to be a tool to make, to add some numbers to concepts and questions that we asked, and to make it an easier roadmap for you to make your final review of the applications. So that is another option. I'm just very conscious of the fact we can't slow this ship down. We shouldn't slow the ship down. I get the need and desire to perfect things, because I type A personally, I want to do that myself. But I would defer to staff personally and let you run with it, especially being board roll, staff roll. Just want to finish. It might not be perfect. That might not be the absolute end all. Not criticizing your work, Rob. I'm just saying there's a certain amount of trust as board members we put in staff. And rather than hold things up, I would recommend we defer to staff in the event. Board members want to review this, give feedback quickly back to Rob. Do so rather than set up a very difficult timeline process here. My understanding is you have to within seven days make a recommendation to the board and in our next regular scheduled board meeting, which is the 28th, we will take up any RFPs that have come in in that timeline and that have a score. We will take that up on the 28th. Comment by the 72. Yeah, comment on that. Yeah, so we had several hands that came up. Holly will start, then Brian, then Laura. As long as I'm not asked if I approve this, I could do that. As long as we agree that if we use it and find that we need to adjust it, we can. I mean, that's, I think that's the caveat because you are also putting reliance on doling out millions of dollars on this framework. And if we find that it's not reliable in terms of some level of objectivity, in terms of some level of mechanics, then we owe it to this group and the public to fix it. I'm just looking for a quick clarification. So the pre-construction phase of this and the pre-construction funding that's available, am I correct in that? You had done the math early and shown us, Rob, about the breakdown of those funds to each CUD based on their demographics, right? Yes, based on their uncertain addresses without a plan, we can address that later. Exactly. But you had that initial breakdown and you showed not only the percentages, but the dollars. Correct. I mean, that is the construct for the pre-construction awards and what the application process is doing is they're giving us certain information so that we can become very comfortable with authorizing that level of awards and that distribution based on that methodology, correct? Correct. Great. Thank you. Just for our next board meeting with these proposals, with anything that the staff is bringing forward for us to consider, I wanna just say out loud, we cannot receive it the day before. I feel we have to have at least, it has to be at least two days. Well, we agree. I don't even think two days is enough to prepare the class but I will commit to, I mean, to two days. Well, as staff, what we can do is as the applications come in, even before they are scored, we can share them with you. So if you have time and you wanna start reading them, if you wanna go that in depth with each application, you have the ability to do so. The scoring, we will get done as soon as possible. I got it, it's my plan, like if we were going with, going with this, my plan was to try to score the first application tomorrow to go through it and that is kind of just, it's providing you with a guide for your review and I will get that as soon as possible but I will send over the application, all the materials as soon as it arrives in our mailbox. I want to be able to approve an application if it's appropriate at our next meeting. So it has, I have to have it at least. So there's a cutoff, if the application comes in within 48 hours, essentially that's gonna have to be moved into the next multiple. You couldn't do it anyway, right? I mean, well, I mean, you could, I guess you could, I guess you could, yeah, you could make it. I think it's fair to say and to say to the CUDs if we don't get an application that's, if there's not at least seven days before the next board meeting, it's very likely it's gonna get punted to the following board meeting. I think that's, I think that's a fair expectation for everybody. So then everybody has access to that application for at least seven days. Is that? Say that again, clearly. Less words, very succinct. Okay. If an application comes in only seven days before a board meeting, it's not gonna be addressed at the next board meeting. You may have a staff recommendation, but it's not necessarily gonna be addressed at the board meeting. So really any application, like to talk to CUD world, any application that doesn't arrive before next Thursday is not gonna be reviewed and approved or denied or whatever on the meeting that we're talking about having on the 28th. And is, so the staff instance, it can be scored and there can be a recommendation made, but until the board votes through a motion on that application, it's not in effect. Is that correct? Correct. The board has the final sign on us. Thank you. Right. So if the board needed to punt, the board needed to punt. Yeah. If the board had other questions, we encourage you, since you'll have the application for seven days, like you are, there's nothing that stops us from reaching back out the application that I have a question on this. As in, I don't think so. So I'm here to further, I'm here to further, you say that we will have them for seven days, which is different, which is additional information. I'm saying that you will have the, if I'm sending over the application, the minute it comes in, and we're not gonna, we're not committing to approving or rejecting any application on the 28th. Anything that doesn't come in by next Thursday is not gonna. What is next Thursday? 23, I don't know. That's seven days from the next board meeting. Business days, let's see, but we, no, 28th is the next board meeting. Right. So you got a, it's not next Thursday. One more time. It's tomorrow. Five, six, seven is the 17th. And by the way, it just having the application in hand, it's enough. You need the score. So Rob is saying he's gonna send that to us. We also would need the recommendation, right, from the staff, which could not come the day before. I mean, that would. That's right. No. It's still one, that's two days. No. And it's, I'll make it a priority to review all the applications. 48 hours plus. All right. Timelines are all screwed up here. I am not following this. Yeah. I was thinking the meeting was Thursday, the 30th. I thought the, I thought, I thought the two weeks from today was the 28th, but I apparently cannot add. Okay. I have a calendar here. We have a meeting on the 28th in the afternoon. Would it be fair that we get material on the 23rd? And then that's the cutoff. Whatever's in our packet on the 23rd is what we will consider. If it's not in the packet, it's not on the table. And for it to be in your packet on the 23rd or five, it would have, it would, it doesn't, the step doesn't have seven days to review anything that isn't already in hand. Yeah. Up to seven days. We don't need to take seven days. If we can do it faster and get it to you, that's up to us. You're now speaking for yourself, your working group though. Just want to make clear. Now you have a working group that you're pulling through the not all. Yeah. If we want, we could just do staff, we could just do the staff, the staff scoring since you have the final say for this round, but for the construction grants, we want to do it a little bit of a different way. I think we just changed the rules. I think what we're hearing is, well, we, where we were going, and I know the timeline complicated it, but is that the four, the four of us we're going to make and make these decisions and recommendations. I thought we just punted on the idea of a subcommittee that was going to review the criteria and the score. We did talk to delegating to staff to do that. Oh, optionality wise, if you would like to. Yeah, I talked about the review. Right. Which, what's your idea? Yeah, no, I was saying, I was saying seven days. If anything's not arriving on the 21st, it can't be addressed on the 28th. If we manage to, and it just leaves it up to us to score things. And it's five days. I am just reminding you, if it arrives on the 21st, it's five days before the, before working days. Yeah, we're kind of wanting to just keep it working. We're trying to do seven. That's what I'm saying. Are we doing a subcommittee for scoring or are we just having staff score at this time around? I'm not comfortable with that. Okay, my preference is staff does the work. If Brian and Holly, you voluntarily want to participate and dig into the weeds, we want to set you up to do that, but I don't want to hold up the process. You can score it on your own if you would like. We will provide what our score is. You will have the application in full for you to do your own. Oh yeah. Read it within seven days of a board meeting. Is there sufficient time for the working group to coordinate those elements that you wanted to coordinate? I look what they spoke about. So the only thing I'm thinking of right now, so I'm going to take the scoring thing and give feedback on it regardless. And I'm going to try to do that in the next two days. Thank you. Right? And I'm going to coordinate with Holly on that so that we give you guys one set of feedback. And if that's a tight timeframe, we just got to deal with it. It's better than next week, which in which, you know. So that's that. And that'll be done. Then as applications come in to be scored, I think like I want to see those applications and I will look at the scoring thing myself as I look through them, just to remind me of criteria and checkpoints. I know staff is going to score those and that'll be part of the recommendation to the board. And then we'll have a discussion about each one of those applications. And I'll use my notes from my own scoring thing to inform my contributions into that discussion. And that's it. And as long as we're receiving those packages five days in advance of the meeting, that should be okay. So I think I heard Rob, do you think it's the right thing to do that as soon as you get one of those applications, just forward it right out to the board? Yes. Because then you have as much time as possible to be able to look at it and to do your own type of review and to come prepared. I just asked one favor on each application to Laura's earlier point, could you just say we received it on this date? And because we received it on this date, here are the subsequent dates we need to meet to be conformed on this application. What we promised. What we promised. Sure. That would be great. Sure, I can do this. All we promised so far is the board, it's a staff recommendation within seven days and then to consider it at the next board meeting. So just put those dates on it. So you're just gonna, what's the staff recommendation we know and when's the next board meeting where we need to discuss it? With a caveat that nobody can come in after the 23rd for the 28th. So on Thursday before our meeting, if we have Tuesday meetings set up, we have to have the material in the agenda on the 23rd. And I wanna make a hard line on that 23rd by noon. The packet needs to hit us on the 23rd at noon. So we have time to review. Understood. And we all recognize the challenge because we've been trying to do meetings every week. Understood. Getting materials as when there's someone, there's two of us and there's so much else going on that's even, that's outside of what is happening here every week. Madam Chair, just being super cognizant of the time and noting that Dan and I both, I have to leave at 12.15. So certainly the board could continue. I think he's so warm, right? So what do we need to talk about? I'm just asking you Madam Chair to kind of help. I'm looking at the executive session items. Do these have to be taken up today? We have two board members, we would still have a point. I don't think we need to take up the, with the one executive session, I mean, that number is my agenda. Well, we just did an item that was posted for 11.20. So I don't think the confidential discussion on civil action needs to be done today. The partnership proposal can be very quick. And we can do that in 10 minutes. Right. And then what about the results of the design workshop? We don't need to take that up either. Cause I, You could talk to Dan about it directly. Exactly. Yeah, in fact, I would suggest we split. I'm happy to strike that because I think I would love to talk to Dan before. The proposed decision-making timeline that was working backwards. No, this is the decision-making timeline is for the construction grants and what the board needs to decide before we can issue an RFP for the construction grants. Can you put a proposal together? I'm going to get my type A in the add-on. Okay, thank you. Thank you. So Lily McClure, I want staff to give a recommendation. Yes. And not say, you know, I'm not criticizing you Rob. If you ask for feedback, we're going to give it because that's what we're, so don't ask for that. Say, this is what we are following. This is staff's recommendation. We are, have heartburn on it. We want to pull it off and we will. But I want you guys to take more of a leadership role in driving the ship because we can't do this by committee and get stuff done. Yep, we got it. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm in support of you guys. I'm not dissing you in any way. Oh, I hear you. And we appreciate that, Claire. But I just, I want to give you the keys to the car and I want you to get in the car and drive. Yep, we got it. Okay. Yeah, that's where you're going. Exactly. Give you a list here and there. Take a room to tell you. We can handle the hard knocks. Bye guys. I would say quickly, quickly. Exactly. Don't, don't, don't, you don't recommend you. It is 1130. I would like to have 10 minutes for Will because we promised to have him speak today. And then we'll take up the executive session item. All right. After that. Okay. All right. Conscious also noon public comment. Yes, I'm conscious of the time and don't have, don't have too many things to discuss, but I do think it's important that the CUDs have some kind of voice during each of these meetings. First on the behalf of all the CUDs, I'd like to thank all of you for the great work you're doing. Rob and Christine know that you're, you know, working very hard on all these issues. And, you know, although the CUD's top priority is having the full information and full timeline on what each grant will look like and when we know that it takes time and really appreciate the work that we're doing. And this past conversation was very, was very helpful in that regard so that we have a much clearer idea of when we'll be getting feedback on these upcoming pre-construction grant applications. So a couple of quick things. We still have a priority and this was kind of just discussed. We're going to the notice. The CUD would like to have notice on proposes and policies as well. And I thought that, you know, the five to seven days notice for board members on the packet is something that would be useful for us as well. So we continue to stress that we'd like to have some kind of procedure for that so that I, so that we can develop an adequate consensus and response to proposed policies. My thinking in that regard is that for each meeting I can prepare a more formal version of this report that I'm doing now. I can do so in writing. I can do so in presentation. I can do so with both. And would like the advice of the board on how I can best provide information for you about where the CUDs are at. Because I want to know how you'd like to receive this information and provide it accordingly. I don't want to be talking about something that's, you know, completely irrelevant. And as long as I know how you'd like to get the message of the CUDs across, that's how I'd like to do it. So moving on to a couple of specific issues. With regard to the ARDOF, I'm hearing from a lot of CUDs that they are somewhat confused about how they're going to deal with this patchwork of ARDOF sites that are distributed throughout their territory. The number one priority is to build out at 100, 100 throughout the entire service area. And many CUDs would like to do that by building expediently through ARDOF territories. So we're very, very interested in the issue of whether ARPA funding can be used for ARDOF and for the construction grants, what that would look like for what kind of requirements for partnerships would be in place and how CUDs will be able to build two sites that have ARDOF bids already. Because frankly, these sites are not falling within 100, 100 service a lot of the time. CUDs are looking to build through those. I don't know if that's universal, but I've heard from many CUDs this is a priority to know about. At our Vekuta meeting on Monday, we authorized, and I know the BCBB staff is very, very busy, but we did authorize BCBB staff to start exploring bulk purchasing for material. And this is something that is a priority for the CUDs. I know that this may take some time as well. And while we're seeing what kind of offer can be generated through the centralized means to BCBB, all CUDs are also exploring their own purchasing options right now. So we're not dead set on a centralized purchasing, but should that be the best avenue, we'd be happy to work with the BCBB to make that arrangement. We've also bandied the idea around bulk purchasing through Vekuta. However, since Vekuta funding at this point would largely be coming through the BCBB, we've kind of put that idea on the back burner for now, since it would be adding a middle man to the process. So that's something that we'd like to continue to work with the BCBB on. On the issue of affordability, the CUDs very much appreciated this grocery's presentation last time. All CUDs are completely committed to the issue of affordability. There's some divergence still on what that looks like in terms of planning and policy for affordability. But again, we're looking forward to see what kind of requirements are put forward by the board and working with you on those. Also on the Vekuta front, shared services is something that CUDs are starting to express a lot more interest in. I'm starting to explore. We're starting to explore financial controls. CUDs do want to maintain a large degree of autonomy over their bookkeeping. However, there is as strong as our expressed for some more professional support to be given, especially in light of audits that may be upcoming. So this is something that within the month we're going to be proposing to the CUDs to have some kind of united service that can at least support the bookkeeping keeping efforts already in place. So in the interest of time, I'll conclude there, but if anyone has any questions about where the CUDs are at or anything that I can be looking into to help support your mission for the CUDs, please. Laura. First, I want to, is it okay? Thank you. Thank you. That was terrific. And it would be great if we can to receive. I would love to receive an update, whatever the CUDs in addition to what we may ask of them, but whatever the CUDs want us to know by CUD at every meeting. I would, in writing, maybe in advance of the meeting, are there things that you want us to know? Sure. And then with the bulk purchasing and any other shared services, I want to make sure that between BQDA and the VCBB that we have a relationship that is, how can we best serve? If you find that you need, that there's a number of CUDs that are looking for a certain type of service or that said you are coming to us to see how we might be able first, you know. Of course. To. Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, BQDA is looking at these shared services and when we do try to acquire them, we'll be going through the board. So, I'm going to try to keep you very abreast of what we're doing here since we'll also be applying for funding tonight to make this happen. Oh, and with regard to the first part of your comment, I am thinking that if I do have some kind of system to provide a regular report for each meeting, it would be coming in in advance, depending on how much notice I have on, you know, what's going to be considered at the meeting. And it would also have specific remarks from specific CUDs indicating which CUD is taking, which view, you know, depending on the circumstances. Of course, I'm always trying to build consensus and present a united front as I have today, but there may be cases when individual CUDs, you just have to be approached whether for geographic issues or financial or women. So one piece of information that I just remembered is on a call earlier this week with folks in Maryland, they are using ARPA funds to supplement ARDOC addresses to get them built out sooner. So that leads me to believe. So in Maryland, part of the funding that they're using, they're using ARPA funds to give ARDOC winners additional funds to make the build out happen faster. That makes me believe that that answers questions, but we want to confirm it. We're going to confirm where it's validated. I wanted to share that to try to reduce the heat. Well, we're good enough for a minute, right? Yeah, whatever you heard, whatever you heard. So I'm going to kick you out of here. So I'm going to back what up. I actually want to say that that is why I heard, but it needs to be checked. So I'm going to add ARDOC. So actually, you know, but I think an important point. So when we ask the question to finance and management, that we have the program from Maryland, that they're doing it in hand when we ask a question. So it's happening in Maryland here. Good advice. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to ask Marilyn if they got it. Yes. We had a conversation with the White House broadband person and a few other states and didn't get this. They weren't able to speak up. We're going to do it again. But that was one of the states that was on that. And that's where that happened. So we can look into that. So we do. We definitely need confirmation on this from a legal perspective here in Vermont. But the CUDs are moving ahead with this assumption that ARDOF sites are going to be incorporated into the network. It was most expedient. Sorry, Laura, did you have a comment? Oh, just a thumbs up. OK, great. That being said, there is a concern. And I know that this is part of the process right now. I'm not going to try to rush it. But there is a concern about how those sites and other sites that are considered based on the data that are clearly not will be incorporated into the amount of premises that a CUD applies for. So we're very anxious to see how that data will be incorporated in light of ARDOF, in light of locations that may be considered served at the CUDs, no to the otherwise. Incorporated how? Let's go back to Laura. Incorporated into the premises in the application for construction. I think this goes to the actual formula, how we're going to distribute construction funds. And I would certainly welcome Bakuda coming to us with an idea that they suggest. Right, yeah. So we have to figure it out in terms of other. And actually, I put that out there to the world of other eligible providers. How do you suggest it? Give us feedback. And we will be coming with this, because many CUDs are concerned that the number of premises they'll be able to apply for successfully is much lower than what the electricity have deserved. So this will be going into that conversation. I just want to make it clear that this is top priority. This does, though, go to our baseline data discussion. Exactly. And is critical. And so while we've already booked our meeting for the 28th, and it's busy, I would hope that we would set aside a meeting to get this done, this baseline discussion. And we want to see you the input into that baseline discussion, because, we can't waste cycle time arguing over data. We will to some degree, but it can't be the most wasted cycle. So we really want your input up front so that we can try to land something that everyone is willing to accept. Yeah, that's great. And I can try to put together a report for CUD perspective specifically on this issue. I don't know how conducive it'll be. Hopefully very. But I can talk to all the CUDs about data issue specifically and see where we stand and what we want these baselines to be. I'd also like their input in what role do they want to play as the verifiers on the ground in their territory when there are gaps identified between the baseline data and what people are observing on the ground, because there's going to be that. That is a big question. Yeah, and do they want it? I would love for them to play the role of being like, we can reconcile gaps in the data because we know the reality on the ground, and we can bring that back to whatever the baseline data is telling us. And it's not going to change the baseline. It's just going to be a reported variable. It's a bit of a separate issue down the road, but I can incorporate guidance in my conversations. So for our group, and for Will's benefit, our meeting after the 28th is October, what? 4th. I have the 20th. As anticipated, this meeting will. Oh, sorry. Is it the only Monday? I think we switched to Monday's every week. The 28th has not been sent out. I will get that sent out since it was originally. You don't have a 4th either. Is that sent out? That was sent out. So starting on the 4th, are we on day afternoons every other week going forward? Yeah, let's go ahead. So one other thing that came up earlier in the meeting is just hearing how CUDs are coordinating or not coordinating or attempting to coordinate with RDOF partners. Yes, I meant to address this. This is something that I don't have the full picture on yet. It's something I'm going to have to talk to the CUDs about, because I'm not going to represent them when I don't know. I know that CUDs are evaluating where the RDOF partners are. I don't know exactly where each of them are at in terms of actually making conversation with them and figuring out what's going to happen. So I will evaluate that and see what I can report back to the board. In the interest of time, or any other questions? Last comment, we'll just go forward. Having your presence here is going to be great and helpful. It would be really helpful to me when you're giving us information if you can be very specific about when you are speaking on behalf of all the CUDs and you have consensus versus when you are speaking on behalf of some CUDs or some feedback that is not necessarily consensus-based, just making that distinction will help everything. Yes. And I do note that you did try to do that today. Yeah, I'm great. I'm consistently trying to do that. And hopefully as the CUDs learn more about what I'm doing here, and I'll be able to get more consistent feedback. But also, I'll continue to, when I'm making reports, I may be able to even say which CUDs are voicing which we use with permission. So I'll continue to try and work on that and improve that. Really, it's true. That'd be great. Thank you. Some things can be unique. Some things cannot. Like, there's going to be how we count. It's going to be, you know, so to the extent that they can come forward with consensus thinking. Good. All right, any other comments, questions? Thank you very much. Thank you very much for giving me the time. All right, I'd like to take the time to move to executive session. And we'll take up the one item in executive session. We have motion to go into executive session. So long. Second. All those in favor, aye. Any opposed? Something I need to take off into the room. And we will, for everybody online, we will be stopping the, we will be stopping the video and the audio at this time. We'll wait outside. Yeah. Well, I think I may just come back on virtually for public comments. Well, public comment is at noon. So we will be back on, what we don't use for executive session, maybe we use for a very brief break. Yes. So we'll be back on at noon. So we were just turning off the video and audio now. On video. OK. We are out of executive session at 1202. No action was taken in executive session. We will now turn it over to public comment. Any, but there's no one left in the room here. Is there anybody online that would like to speak? We're keeping it to three minutes and then if the board has additional questions. FX has a question. Unmute yourself, FX. OK. Yeah, thank you very much. Good work this morning. I just thought I would comment quickly on the issue of the mapping and all that. Would it be OK if I shared something? Sure, I think you have the ability if you don't, I. Yeah. See if you have the ability first and then I might have to change your status. But yeah, see if you have it first. It doesn't work. Let me know and I'll press a button to see if it works. I'm pausing this three minutes. So I'll be looking for the technical. OK, yes. Yeah, I'm not. Oh, wait a second. Yep, here it is. OK, terrific. OK, that should be coming up. Come on. Same as spreadsheet. No, same as spreadsheet, spreadsheet video. OK, good. OK, excellent. So this all is some work that I did in support of the equal access to broadband work. I basically took layers from the state map. I created a layer where I more carefully defined what I thought the cable services areas were. And I took also the layer for the phone companies because I needed to know by each site address what the state bought the service level was, who the CUD was, what the status would be if they were in EC fiber territory, who the phone company would be, who the cable company would be, and whether or not there was a fiber company. And some of the things that I can do with this now is I can see in terms of the lit customers in EC fiber towns, how many the state thinks get 10-1, how many the state thinks get 100-100, how many get 25-3. I can also look at situations where we've overbuilt charter in a few places, and I can split that out and see these things. So this is all very easy to do with the availability of the state data. And I think that, let's see. You have 20 seconds, FX. Yeah, I'm done. You're just letting us know. Do you have a concluding point? FX. So this is exactly what we're envisioning as a board to help us drive decision-making. So this is great site that you guys have this data. Any chance we could get you to do this on behalf of the whole state? OK. The frozen are just really quiet. I'm not sure. Are you there, Ethan? I'm not sure what happened there or how much of what I said you heard. I just was basically. We volunteered you to do this for the entire state. Pardon me? We volunteered for you to do this for the entire state. I've already done it. Do you have the Odyssey Fiber Territory? Yes. Yes. So the GIS administrator we hire would do something similar to this. Are you willing to share this table, FX? I don't know. I'd have to talk to the chairman of the board of Equal Access to Broadband. I think she would consider it. She's very reasonable. Yeah, but I can go through how I did this with whoever you hire for the GIS. It's pretty straightforward. The one thing that I had to do was make my own layer for the cable companies because the information didn't exactly match up with my perception of what those boundaries were. And I wanted to be a little more careful about it. OK, thank you. Did you add in the electric distribution utility for each of those? Because some of those have make ready tariffs that by its location can help add further funding to these build projects. Oh, yeah, yeah, because we've got those territories as well. That would just be another layer. And then you would do the join and have another column. That'd be perfect. All right, so if we have more time, we can come back to you, FX. So I want to be considerate of everybody in the public comment section. Thank you very much. That's fine. A few pivot tables. OK, any other questions or not questions? Comments or questions? Public comment. Anybody else want to speak? I don't see any other hands. Doing such a good job at everybody. She's more in the way. More exhausted. No other no other comments. We have a few more minutes. You want to go back to FX. Does anybody else have questions? Is there anything else on our agenda we need to do? Like what about the design workshop comments? Or you're going to take that offline. And when are we going to address this proposed decision making timeline? Is that going to be? It's the staff is going to develop a more detailed proposal for the construction. So for the construction side that will assign topics for different board meetings that where we need decisions for. She's saying we're going to get it for the October 4th. I would say the October 4th meeting at the latest. If I get it done sooner, I will send it out as soon as. I will send out as soon as I can. You're getting a gender cramp is my point. So we need to have our baseline discussion on October 4th. We probably need our second slide that the construction criteria and there'll be grant applications and the grant applications flowing through a lot of it. But I'm trying to get you and trying to be encouraged calibration. It's challenging when there's a tight time frame for everything with the timeline that was in the previous packets set a goal of trying to have the RFP out for construction in early December. So that we're on track for construction next year. Yeah, we have to meet that. So that's why I want to prioritize that. My priorities are basically the grant applications and then figuring out with you all what needs to be a board decision versus what can be delegated to staff. Is there any jeopardy on the December timeline? It really depends on how deep of a dive we want to take in. I encourage everybody to look at Act 71 and specific things that you want to address as a board that we need to have policies rather than ask questions. I think is the key because we could structure it that we ask the applicants to address A, B, C, and D is one way to do it and we evaluate their answers at that time. In the last five meetings, we have made, I'm just going to call them policy statements, we have made policy statements. And I attempted to gather those up, but we need to go back and revisit those. So you can either look at the minutes, you can take the task guideline challenge that the board put out, or we can set aside a meeting after we go through the baseline discussion to do a policy or guideline review. That would happen by mid-October, still have been plenty of time for the development of the RFP. Right, because the guidelines should show up heavily in the RFP. Just to give a preview, as I briefly went through this last night, we have to define how funding is going to be allocated. That's why I tossed it back to Bakuda to give us a proposal, give us a starting point to work with. We have to define industry-accepted engineering standards. Is it a standard, or do we pose that question? Is it a single standard? These are the things we just need to get more certainty for applicants defining incidental overbuilding. I know we did address that. We need to make sure that we get it nailed. Yeah, we have to make sure we have to... And the affordability question and how it comes to bear on the business plan and the project design. Exactly. Exactly, and there's like include public broadband assets that can be shared by multiple service providers that can support a variety of purposes. These are all priorities, not enumerated. And what is resilience like? Defining resiliency, defining redundancy. So these are things where we... Yeah, and then there's the whole question of how the other providers that are other eligible entities applying, like this isn't just only for CUDs, how do they play ball? How do we evaluate whether it conflicts with the business plan of a CUD? How do we evaluate it if it's not in a CUD territory? There's quite a lot of items that I think any and all applicants would like some direction on. And as a staff person would like some direction on. Well, why don't you make a list? Rob? This is Roger Nishi and you just hit on, maybe it's because you saw my face, you just hit on my questions and comments as how are you gonna treat other eligible providers which also includes small communications carriers which are the RLX and also internet service providers working in conjunction with a CUD. So we're interested in the steps there and what you're gonna expect from us and how we get incorporated into the whole process. Thank you. Christa has her hand up. Oh, Christa. Christa. Hi, thanks. I just wanted to synthesize and pose the question again. I think that Holly's point is important in the sense that there are a lot of things that are discussed and it would be helpful for the board to be able to synthesize those so that they don't sort of have to be revisited and rediscussed and there's a lot going on. So those people have a lot in their heads and there's time between meetings, et cetera, et cetera. At the same time, just reiterating our desire to have a process that's clear and identifying what the proposal is providing room for feedback, getting that feedback and then deciding on it. So I think to the degree, I think what I'm hearing is that you're looking at trying to find a process to identify how to do that. And we certainly support that process and the ability to provide input. Thank you. Thank you. All right, any other public comments? Hearing none. We'll move on to the next meeting. Let's say I'm scheduled and then we remove the meeting, should I have to see? Yeah, I was gonna. Talking about next meeting. On the clock, on the clock. Here, September 28th at one. I have Giga as a question mark. I will find out right now if Giga is available. Well, we can also do that. Oh, there's good news, I can make that. Yay! All right, I'll take a motion to adjourn. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any adjourned? Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're not a freaking wild guy. I'm very excited about that.