Albemarle Broadband Authority Annual Meeting   8/26/2020

Good afternoon, Richie.

I'm good.

Thank you for asking.

We have a member of the public on board with us already.

And Bucky is joining us now, so I'm promoting him to panelists.

So we'll get started in like five or 10 minutes, probably, depending on how soon we get everybody on.

So Bucky, you're coming on as a panelist.

Good to see you too.

Bucky, good to see you.

Good afternoon, sir.

And I hope Kathy can hear us.

She probably can as a attendee.

So we'll wait for public comment to let everybody else speak.

And I'll pause recording, so when the actual meeting starts, please let me know.

There is, Chair.

So this is the virtual meeting preamble that's brought about because of COVID.

And in terms of the public, everyone on the phone and attending via Zoom from the public

is in listen-only mode.

During public comment period, please enter your comment in the chat and it will be read into the record.

Include your full name and the magisterial district in which you reside.

If you don't know your magisterial district, please provide a general location of your home or business and street address.

We will run through the chat comments first and then take comments by phone.

For those on phone, please use the star nine to indicate you'd like to make a public comment.

We will ask you to provide your full name and magisterial district or general location of your home or business, and then allow up to three minutes for your comment.

Because of the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the limitations on group gatherings imposed by the governor's executive orders, this meeting is being held by electronic communication means on the Zoom platform.

It is authorized by the counties April 15th and June 17th continuity of government ordinances.

Also this authority's resolution of April 22nd and the Virginia statute signed into law on April 24th permitting this authority to meet electronically to discuss and transact business necessary to continue its operations.

The public has real-time audio-visual access to this meeting over Zoom and real-time audio access over telephone, both as provided in the lawfully posted meeting notice.

The public is always invited to send questions, comments, and suggestions to the authority through the county's Information Technology Office.

This meeting is being recorded and will be made available on the county's website.

With that explanation, I'll ask the board members attending to identify themselves and their current location in general terms.

Trevor Henry.

And has Supervisor Price joined us?

Thank you very much, Mr. DeLoria.

Richie to his friends.

The next item here, approval of the agenda.

After Mike circulated an agenda for us to review, I asked him to insert two items in it.

And if you've gone to the public page, you would have gotten these.

Right after this point, approval of the agenda, we have brief announcements by authority members and public comment.

These are things that are sort of on our standard list, and they just had fallen by the wayside for this meeting.

And so we just ask they be inserted back in.

And if that's acceptable to you, if there are any other changes, let me know.

I will second that.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Seeing and hearing no opposition, the agenda is approved.

Which brings us to brief announcements by authority members.

Trevor, are you set?

Just to announce that the current building posture for the county buildings, it's going to remain through at least November 9th.

So we will be continuing virtual operations

Possibly.

OK.

Yes, sir.

Any other?

Well, very good.

Then moving on to the public comment.

Delighted to see the number of attendees from the general public.

Looks like we're up to nine now.

And as Richie said, if you have a comment or a question or an item to bring before the authority, if you could enter that into the chat or the Q&A.

Ah, here we go.

Mike?

Mike, you're talking, but we can't see you.

So Miles Smith has posted a comment, and I would offer up to the chair that we allow him to speak to us directly.

Well, let me read it in, and we'll see where we go from there.

Hi, I'm Miles Smith, director of Grace Episcopal Church in Keswick.

My church and I have recently become interested in learning more about how improvements in broadband happen in Albemarle County so that we may advocate for the county and especially our immediate community in Tezwik.

I personally became more aware of this matter from young families early on in the pandemic who did not have sufficient internet access at home to be able to telecommute to school and office.

So we shared our church Wi-Fi system with them, even though our broadband capacity at church is not all that great itself.

So we would like to learn more about what the Albemarle Broadband Authority does and how we may help you as well as our community.

Thank you.

Well, that's a fantastic question.

And let me take up this as an attempted answer.

Mr. Smith, the Broadband Authority has been surveying the residents of Albemarle County

We reached out to folks in the county on several different occasions asking them for input as to where we have good, bad, or otherwise kinds of internet connectivity.

Sadly, there is no one repository we can go to where we can get accurate information about what does and does not work for folks and where the various vendors sell their services and what services are actually available.

So by taking the data that we've gotten from members of the community, both formal reports with speed tests and things like that that are available through a link on our website, as well as anecdotal reports that people have just written in emails, such as when you reached out to Mike, we've been able to compile a database of, how many is it, Mike, 1,800, 1,900,

Different reports in the county of places where primarily there are deficiencies, not surpluses.

And using those, we've made maps of where the problem areas are.

It stands to reason, for example, if one or two or three or four or five people on Green Creek Road don't have good service, nobody on Green Creek Road has good service because these are the folks at the head of the road.

So we've made maps of where the problem areas are and we've shared those maps with various vendors

that service our area and ask them, would you be interested in bidding with us, either directly applying to us for funds or bidding with us to the state of Virginia for additional funding to get projects going to deliver service to those areas?

The broadband authority does not want to own broadband equipment.

We don't want to be in the business of managing our own internet service provider.

What we would like to do is facilitate

Internet service providers in getting those services out to folks.

And to date, I guess in the three years since our inception, we've had some success in doing that with, I guess, 3,600 folks through CBEC that we've helped to facilitate, another 850 or 60 folks with a project we've got currently with CenturyLink.

Prior to that, another 100 and some odd.

Anyway, the total that we've

you know folks that we've helped facilitate connections to or that connections are coming to because the projects are still underway is in the four to five thousand range and we've recently just put in last week through the good efforts of Mike Culp and the folks at CenturyLink and one or two other folks put in a proposal to connect another 2,300 people in Albemarle County with fiber connections.

None of which I think actually reaches the Keswick church area though, Mike correct me if I'm wrong but I don't remember that out of what we've got.

We're by no means done but we've been trying to bring up service to the areas that we could identify as quickly as we could get a vendor to go in with us to get that service done and we're probably still some years away from being complete in that regard because as soon as we make sure everyone's got service we're going to have the issue of

Well, I've got service, but it doesn't work regularly.

It doesn't work reliably all the time.

Or I've got service, but I can't afford it.

And yet I still have the needs for my job or for my children to be able to get access to the internet.

How can we help?

So we have a lot more work to do.

And had we only, at this stage, I'd say if we just had 50 or $60 million, we could sort it all out pretty quickly.

You might want, I just, Derek Kelly put in a comment into the comment section that said the Grace Episcopal Church on Guernsey Road is included in the 2020 Betty application.

That's great news for you then, assuming if the state of Virginia grants us this application, that would lead to an opportunity to purchase fiber services from CenturyLink with 940 megabit connection speeds, which I would like to be able to do, and I'm sure Supervisor Palmer would and Mr. Jaquith.

But we're trying to help the folks who have nearly nothing.

Good job.

Thanks, Derek.

Yeah, I have to give my thanks to Derek, too.

I really think you did an outstanding job working on the application.

So just as a public comment, great work, Derek.

I really appreciate your assistance in getting this thing out there.

And the church, you know, it's great.

I didn't know that you were providing Wi-Fi.

That's an outstanding service to the community.

and why we put the church in as what's called a community anchor because of the things that you're doing to sort of help the residents in the Keswick area.

So we really appreciate your attention and thanks for being part of our community.

I'm optimistic that we've at least begun to address the question.

Are there any other public comments or folks who want to be heard from or be answered to?

Thank you.

So I'll just walk through the list.

Allison, do you want to make any comments?

I'm assuming if there's no star nine or star six there.

Nope.

Okay.

Ann Marie Park.

Ann Marie Park.

There's a question from Ann Marie Park who says, I live on Dick Woods Road.

No.

We're looking for questions or concerns.

You're on Dick Wirtz Road, I think I know what your question and concern are, why isn't it faster and why doesn't it work better?

Is that correct?

Mike, can you provide an update there?

Okay, the best thing to do is to submit

We have a broadband report.

It's a survey that we provide to the community, have been providing for over three years now where we're collecting data and we put that data together and that's what helps us make applications to the state for funding.

So it's important to provide that information and encourage

folks in your neighborhoods to participate as well.

You can get to that report by going to www.albemarle.org slash broadband report.

So that's the county's website and you just add a slash at the end and put in broadband report.

And that allows you to fill out some basic information, but it also collects speed automatically from the location where you submitted it.

So preferably it's from the location where you're experiencing

The other thing that's available to you is a report of bad service or not having enough service and that can come directly to me.

So if there's issues with you're not getting the speeds that you were promised, just send them to me and I will do my best to connect you with the right service provider and try to get the problems resolved.

I see we have another question here from David Ludwig to all the panelists.

Mike, go ahead.

Okay, so thanks for the question, David.

We are currently in contract negotiations.

I can report that.

Until those contract negotiations are complete, and I've talked with the procurement office about the public release of information that was submitted during the RFP, they're held in confidence.

In other words, they're confidential until the

The negotiations are complete.

So asking for patience and going through the right process to make sure we're following all procurement rules.

We'll take that under advisement and let you know and help out as much as we can when the time is right.

I'm sorry, I have to append the disclaimer that I don't know state procurement practice, but certainly under federal procurement practice, RFPs that are not awarded the contract are not public, not allowed to make them public.

Yeah.

So that's that's obvious.

You know, you could you could poll all the the incumbents, all the providers that are in Albemarle County and make your request directly to them.

That's another option that you have.

So good point.

Do we actually maybe on our website, we could just list the ones that are

out there.

I don't know if that's even something we want to do because we're not trying to promote a particular business and if we leave somebody out accidentally, we get into trouble.

Yeah, that's a good possibility, but that potential that you're overlooking someone or providing preferential

I would just defer to our procurement office and our attorney that supports this meeting on guidance on that.

I think there are some restrictions around any release of

Sure, sure, bids.

But the idea about maybe posting who the service providers are in this area, let's chew on that some at another time.

That's a different question.

I'm going down the list again.

So we've got Derek.

Derek, do you have any questions or comments for everybody?

Derek Kelly, if not, I'll just keep moving.

So Elizabeth Sutton.

Elizabeth.

And if not, Greg Kane.

I know I've spoken with Greg and emailed a lot with him, but I guess he's listening in.

I'm sure he would speak up.

And Kathy Woods.

Okay, so hearing from no one, we're, oh, I couldn't find out how to get off mute while in the app.

There is no other comments other than there are close to 70 homes on Dick Woods Road included in the 2021 body application.

So that's good news too.

Okay.

Which I think moves us along to the next item on the agenda, and that is approval of the 24th, 22nd, and 14th of August

minutes, that's June 24th and July 22nd.

I apologize.

Kathy Woods has raised her hand, so allow her to talk.

Okay, good deal.

Before you do that, I wanna thank Waldo.

He filled in some information that I didn't have.

Very good.

Any other comments on the minutes?

Then I'll move to approve the minutes for the last three meetings.

Is there a second?

I hear a second.

Let's just go ahead and call the roll since everybody's on board this time.

Yes or no?

Bill?

Yes.

Trevor?

Yes.

Waldo?

Yes.

And the chair votes yes as well.

So thank you very much, Bill, for getting that done.

And Waldo and Liz for helping out.

Yes, thank you.

Let's see, what question do we have?

Have we gotten anything in yet, Mike?

They said there was no infrastructure available at this time, equipment, even if there were funds to pay for it, St. John's Road, Gordonville zip code.

CenturyLink said they applied for a grant from the state on August 18th.

So St. John's Road is the continuation of Turkey SAG 640 on the other side of 231.

And I wonder if,

Well, I guess I'll just state as a potential solution.

If your power provider there is the co-op, I'm sorry for- Central Virginia Electric Co-op.

Thank you.

If you're a customer there, I believe they're working on extended broadband out there as a part of their cash corner project.

So that would be gigabit from the co-op, which would be pretty cool.

So there might be some good news there.

Elizabeth Sutton points out that SEVAC is one side of the road, the side opposite is not.

Yeah, I'm on Turkey SAG as well, and I am on Dominion, but I don't, I think we have a muddled state of upgrades there as well, but we have some news about that related to the Vaati 2121 application.

Yeah, does that cover that at all?

Deferring to Derek,

It helps if we have an exact address, but I do believe parts of St. John Road are included.

Cool.

There might actually be options.

Right.

And in a longer term fashion, that's exactly what we're trying to do.

In the shorter term, we've made some suggestions to the county for small kinds of things like, you know, making sure there's connectivity from the library, even if the library is closed.

The schools have opened up connectivity from the school parking lots but that doesn't really help you if you need to stay home and work from there.

Can I comment just a second?

Sure, Donna.

Thank you.

I apologize for being a few minutes late.

I had the opportunity this morning to be at Mullen Mills Willow Tree where Senator Warner was there.

And he commented that he believes, of course, this is kind of betting on the come at this point, but he believes that two things are going to happen.

One is that Congress is going to go back in and he feels optimistic that it will be approved for additional funding coming out of the federal government and kind of the CARES funding

and secondly that they are going to remove the time constraint that the funds must be expended by the end of the calendar year and specifically he talked about the educational component of this

with a vision towards temporary towers being available.

One of the specific areas he talked about, and this would tie in more with the school board directly, but providing funding for temporary towers at the schools, which would at least expand to some degree,

not just in the parking lots for those who have to go to the school facility you know geographic property in order to get access but expand around a little bit further there so he seemed pretty optimistic about that of course what we also know is schools are supposed to be starting just days from now and so that funding will probably not be available at the beginning of the academic school year but he did seem to be optimistic that both additional funds will come

that they will not have to be spent by the end of the calendar year.

And the third thing, which I forgot to mention earlier, is loosening up the constraints upon the funding.

Right now, we are very limited in where we can spend the money.

And so he seemed really optimistic that there will be

three additional areas of relief.

I recognize also that is separate from the body funding, but that does look to go that way.

And then the final piece that he talked about, which I think Liz and I have each separately raised, is he is a co-sponsor of a bill that's getting a lot of

Additional Support, which would be comparable to the 1936 Rural Electrification Act to basically mandate that Wi-Fi access, broadband, I don't always get the terminology correct, will be treated just like a utility like electricity was.

But again, that's not going to be in the next few weeks.

And then the last thing he said, and I don't know how much enforcement to use that term that we have,

But he said that the maps that we utilize are not as accurate as they need to be in terms of identifying residences and businesses that don't have access.

But also that he started at Nextel, which merged with Sprint, which merged with whatever to whatever and everything.

And he said, every time one of these major mergers takes place, the companies promise that they're going to do things and they never do.

So, you know, we, and I felt like it was kind of like the loyal we, you, the federal government may be able to enforce that a little better than Albemarle County can, need to ensure that they actually come through on that.

And then he said, every time before we

that this is local government approved contracts with any of these providers that we should require them to tell us where they're going to go next to help bring the delivery of services.

But again, I go back to how do we as an individual county actually sort of, you know, enforce that?

I don't know that we have a lot of power, but I thought I would share with you the comments that he made both publicly

in front of the entire group and also in a private conversation that Supervisor Lupisto-Kirkley and I were able to have with him this morning.

So I thought I would just throw that in since we were talking about the school situation that we may be able to get some help sooner rather than later with some of the school access.

Thanks, Donna.

That was very informative.

To some of our earlier conversations from Elizabeth Sutton, there's a note that SEVEC is on one side of the road and the opposite side is not.

We have actually been talking with SEVEC about some of those situations where you may not be a SEVEC customer, but if they actually walk right past you, there may be opportunities to get you connected to their network as well.

So we'll see how that

plays out.

We've got to get the connections up before that's they've got to get their customers hooked up first.

I'd like to say to Kathy's question she just asked in the Q&A chat about the urgency of this.

So I'll mention that if we don't seem urgent, it's because we have been feeling very urgent about this in a series of meetings going back to March, where we have been very aware of this deadline.

Kathy lives right over there.

If there weren't trees and a mountain, well, we'd be all sad, but we're neighbors.

I have a rising third grader at Stony Point Elementary.

I have a pretty bad DSL.

This is a serious concern of ours that we have talked about at every single meeting.

One of the reasons why we decided to put together our own request for proposals, which is,

In negotiations right now, but our own request for proposals was not to wait for this.

This VADI is a state grant process and takes a while.

We wanted to move faster.

So we had that request for proposal from ISPs out and ready for proposals by, what was it, early summer, late spring.

Got the proposals in, that's in negotiations right now.

That's spending our own or the county's money that, God love them, they provided to us, but also some federal funding that's come in that we're all, we're trying to piece everything together.

But the point is, this is our effort to move quickly.

And I just want to remind everybody, I think I sent it around and everybody remembers this, that the county permits the temporary towers.

They can go up.

There's virtually no approval process for them while they're in a declared emergency.

Very good.

Thank you all for your interest and your questions.

And I think at this time we need to move on to our next agenda item, which is election of officers.

This being our annual meeting, we elect officers to each of the various slots that we have.

And let me start by telling you what a wonderful job the chairman is and that you should each and every one of you consider in your hearts what a great resume builder this is.

I second that.

He's been wonderful.

I can't imagine anybody doing a better job than Bucky.

Are there any other nominations?

All right.

Well, hearing none, then I'll accept your nomination.

I thank you very much.

Yeah.

Does it exist in our bylaws?

I'd like to nominate Waldo Jaquith for vice chair.

I would second that and only ask that Waldo try to be a little more animated.

Are there any other nominations for vice chair?

Hearing no other nominations, then we will take the vice chairman as approved by a claim, and it will be Waldo Jaquith for the coming year.

It takes us on to the two actual important jobs, secretary and treasurer.

I know these are hotly contested and usually there's been a lot of campaigning at this point for both of them.

Let me start with Secretary.

Bill, we thank you for your service once again and your willingness to serve in the future.

Happy to do it.

And the obvious person for that is Trevor.

Certainly the treasurer.

Thank you.

Nomination's been made and seconded.

And with the very important connections to the rest of staff, the ability to actually find out how much money we have, these are key qualifications for this job.

Are there any other nominations for treasurer?

Thank you all.

I'm happy to do that at the suggestion.

The slate is myself for chairman, Waldo for vice chairman, Bill for secretary, and Trevor for the treasurer position.

Trevor, treasurer.

I have a hard time saying that.

And so let me do a roll call.

If you are in favor of that slate, please say yes or aye or something signaling assent.

Bill Fritz?

Yes.

Trevor Henry?

Yes.

Waldo Jaquith?

Yes.

And I am in favor as well.

Bucky Walsh.

Very good.

Thank you all.

The next sort of general business thing we have for this annual meeting is to establish a schedule for our regular meetings.

I believe we've been meeting on the fourth Wednesday of the month at five o'clock.

Let me put it to you that that seems like a good time to me.

Is there a suggestion for something else?

That has us meeting on the day before Thanksgiving, and I think it's on the 23rd of December.

As we get closer to those dates, if those don't seem appealing, we can always look at moving the date.

Yeah.

All right, let's run a quick roll call then.

All those in favor of the fourth Wednesday, Bill?

Yes.

Trevor?

Yes.

Waldo?

Yes.

Donna?

Aye.

And I vote yes as well.

So we've got that set.

The next general business item is to adopt our rules and policies.

And we have an intention to amend our rules of procedure, which was attached to this agenda.

So it's been proposed that three rules be amended.

The first one talks about kind of modernizes the practice of the authority.

and as it now stands, if there's remote participation because of business travel or personal travel, although the member is participating, the member is considered to be absent and that counts towards attendance.

What has been recommended is that Rule 2C be amended to read that a member who remotely participates in a regular meeting by electronic communication is not deemed to be absent under this rule.

Now this isn't something that applies to the current COVID situation because we're operating under emergency rules.

This would be for when we move out of the emergency declaration.

So that's the first one.

It seems to me that we went over this last year, or maybe two years ago, and you said that we weren't able to do that.

because we had a couple of members.

We had one member at one point prior to Waldo who really had trouble getting to the meeting.

So I'm just slightly confused on our ability to do that.

Obviously we do.

So I'm confident that we're able to do that.

And I'm trying to remember there was one rule that we weren't able to change.

This wasn't it, but I can't recall off the top of my head which one that was.

All right.

It may have been.

I know we had a big substantive change over reasons for not being able to make the meeting.

It had to do with personal reasons and also disability.

And that did change to some extent.

But being requested to look at this, I researched it, and I feel comfortable we're able to do that.

Second rule amendment is one that that that because the secretary and the treasurer they don't have to be members there come becomes a quirk if

If this board has a member who is serving as an officer and then leaves the board, that automatically serving as secretary treasurer will not change.

And so the proposal is essentially to say, if you're serving as secretary treasurer,

You're a member of the board and your membership ends either because you leave or your term ends, then your office as secretary and or treasurer would also end.

It doesn't mean that you wouldn't be subject to being reelected as a non-member, but it at least would put that, it would give that option to the board.

It would clarify that.

So in terms of that rule 3F, the sentence would be added that the term of office of an authority member so serving, and when it says so serving, serving as an officer on the board, shall and to be deemed vacated when the member's term ends or authority membership is deemed vacated for any reason.

And that's the purpose of that, just to kind of to avoid some type of quirky situation in which your membership ends, but you continue as secretary treasurer.

Let's see, and then the third one, amending rule eight, the remote electronic participation.

Right now we have, in terms of remote electronic participation, we have a process or we have a procedure and a policy that is set up.

and it is what it is, but there's some expectation that the General Assembly will move to liberalize the remote participation in the future outside of the emergency.

It seems like there's a lot of, that the public is comfortable with it.

that more of the public can participate in the meetings.

In terms of membership it may expand the pool of people who are able to serve on the authority just by virtue of we have a very large county and I know if you live down in Scottsville to come and make the meeting at the county office building can be quite a haul.

So what this amendment says is that

We are stating the rule which essentially right now follows the Virginia Code, that we are restating the Virginia Code as a matter of convenience, that we're adopting it, but in the future, if the General Assembly changes the remote participation law,

and the scenario I'm thinking of is that they liberalize it, then our rules automatically accept the amendments in the Virginia Code so that we don't have to have a special meeting to adopt that, that we just go along with what the General Assembly says in terms of remote participation.

It wouldn't change anything that we're doing right now or when we move out of the emergency won't change our policy.

So those were the things that I had put forward as suggestions in talking to Richie.

And he was able to put some strong language around that to make it reasonable.

And I would like to move these as changes to our rules of procedure for the following year or for the following period.

Is there any other questions or concerns before we move to a vote?

Very good.

We're on the roll call here.

Bill?

Yes.

I waited because you were chewing.

Trevor?

Yes.

Waldo?

Yes.

Donna?

Aye.

And the chair votes yes as well.

Richie, thank you very much for your help with that.

Thank you all.

and I think that takes, that's it for rules and procedure, otherwise we've adopted them as with that one change, we readopt those rules and procedure.

Old business, the VODI 2020 and 2021 updates.

It pleases the board.

We are actively working on updating the frequently asked questions for BODI 2020.

Contract negotiations with the providers are ongoing, meaning CenturyLink has subcontractors who are working to make sure that they're going to do things correctly to support the fiber to the home project for the eight locations that we have in BODI 2020.

One of the things we're adding to the BODI 2020, and this is the update on BODI 2021, was the successful submittal of an application for BODI 2021 funds, which has over 2,300 living units included in it.

So CenturyLink and the broadband authority submitted an application to DHCD.

So we're just going to be very measured in the difference between BODI 2020 and BODI 2021.

So we'll have a frequently asked question for 2021 if it's funded.

So we were on a meeting or at least the Commonwealth Connect had a meeting where the body 2021 update came from DHCD and highest number of requests for funding, highest number of dollars requested from the state,

We're still sitting at 19 million.

There's a proposal in front of the General Assembly to update that to 48 million for this year's round.

So 2021 has the potential of increasing from 19 million to 48 million.

And our internal analysis, both from CenturyLink and with our own look-see at what the other 53 applications have included, we seem likely to be awarded funds.

I'm putting the optimism in there for 2021.

We will not know until at the earliest, the end of the calendar year.

So the latest on that is that by the end of the calendar year, and that potentially could move.

So we're sitting on pins and needles.

There's what's called a challenge process, which opens up in September.

So challengers, meaning other ISPs who feel like an application is

going over their current service area, meaning you're coming in and potentially taking customers away who currently have body level service.

They have the ability to challenge.

That period closes on September 23rd.

So we're watching closely.

We'll be notified if there's a challenge as soon as the challenge comes in, and then we'll have 15 days to respond.

We're anxious about that.

We're hoping that we get to September 23rd without a challenge.

Right.

So we're good.

On that particular item, you had drafted a letter and circulated it

basically encouraging support for Governor Northam's proposal to increase the dollars allocated for the VADI funds allocated to DHCD.

Let me just check.

Yeah, there we go.

Just wanted to make sure that we were all on the same page, that there wasn't something I didn't

Didn't recognize that would be an impediment to getting that done, but I think we certainly ought to throw whatever weight we can behind that idea.

Certainly the citizens of this county could benefit dramatically from that.

That's 2020 and 2021.

Again, I got a chance to skim through the 50 some odd applications that have been posted from the various counties and authorities around the state.

and I didn't see any of them that were better than ours just from how it was put together and content size and looking at the things we know that they evaluate on, I felt like we'd really, our team, Mike and Derek, had really done a great job of trying to hit spot on the points that would be of concern and make it easy to see why ours was an approvable proposal.

So kudos to the whole proposal effort

and here's hoping we get good news.

Okay, I think that's me too, a very short discussion.

I was hopeful that we'd have a longer discussion this evening, but because we're still under negotiation, we have to wait until those negotiations are finished.

And then the next big thing will be a notification, meaning we have to be

cautious as well as participatory with the school division since they're part of the process.

So the messaging that both ABA, the Board of Supervisors, and the school division provide to the community have to be practically if not the same.

So we're going to go through and build a communication plan

Probably soon, it looks like we're close to the finish line.

There were times when we thought we might not be able to finish negotiations, but it's looking better.

So it's likely time to start at least putting heads together and make sure we get a communication plan with that.

That's the first one, the bigger of the two.

The second one, which has already been approved by CRF compliance is Wi-Fi, public Wi-Fi hotspots at the Greenwood Community Center.

So that'll be a nice feature out in the western part of the county, which will allow people to drive up in a significant parking zone and be able to access the wifi from their vehicles.

But we also have the opportunity to put either tents up in the relatively big courtyard, and we also have a covered pavilion there, which will allow people to come in and socially distance and connect to the internet and do work from the community center.

So that's a positive,

and without going into a lot of details, there's five others that are underway.

The chair indicated one of them earlier on, there is some interest and there's other interest in both, I think I can say this temporary and permanent towers.

So I think we have a discussion item about the potential for one or the other.

I think I blanked on your first item before the Greenwood School.

Would you just tell me that one more time?

I apologize.

Yes, it goes back to the earlier conversation.

I think Mr. Ludwig brought it up to the board where he asked if there were if there is the ability for the county to provide the submittals.

This all

came about because of the timing and Waldo says this best, so I'll just try to be as brief as possible, but our timing was outstanding.

The process of us putting out the RFP and then working with the providers, we did an RFI process and then we did an RFP process.

and during that process, we had communication availability to all of the ISPs and had multiple virtual meetings with them to have discussions about what we were intending to do.

As we got toward the end of the RFP process, the Commonwealth provided us with the good news that CRF funds were coming our way.

It turns out that those CRF funds are likely leverageable with the contract that we're about, hopefully we're about to sign

So until we get to that point, we've got to hold some of it in confidence, but it's looking positive.

Thank you.

Very good.

Thanks, Mike.

That ends the agenda that we approved.

Are there any other things that any member of the broadband authority need to bring up?

I just was looking at the questions and I see Kathy has a question that came up shortly after my comments about Senator Warner.

I agree with her question that a year or two from now isn't really going to help us in terms of some of the additional access points and I think that goes to what Senator Warner had said about one, additional funding, two, eliminating the end of the calendar year expenditure, and three, reducing substantially if not eliminating a lot of the constraints on what the money can be spent for.

so in that respect he seemed pretty optimistic that we will be additional funds we won't have to spend it by the end of the year and we'll have more flexibility in terms of on the school property I presume you know Mr. DeLoria you might be able to answer this I presume that is something the school board would actually be making the decision on I don't know that you know we at ABA or the Board of Supervisors would but

But Kathy, I do think that Senator Warner seemed optimistic that we are going to get more relief sooner with more flexibility.

So I'll just try to answer that question as best I could.

Liz?

I have some questions if Mike knows this.

And if not, I can try to find out from other sources.

But on the state level, the General Assembly, what is the process for them making this decision?

a committee decision first.

So it goes to the technology committee or, and I ask this question because it's a question of where our letter goes to.

And also if I can tell the board of supervisors, write a letter to them and ask, we have an official letter from the board of supervisors supporting this also.

Thanks for the question, Supervisor Palmer.

I think there's a couple of recommendations that will come down.

The first thing is to understand that it's with the Finance Committee right now, so our letter should go to the heads of that committee.

and the example that Senator Boiska sent around as part of the broadband advisory council is a great starting point.

So that's what Bucky and Richie and I have started as a letter for the broadband authority.

I would recommend that the board of supervisor take that same action and maybe go direct to the heads of the finance committee and our leadership, elected leadership that serve on that committee, whether it's a senator or a delegate.

So,

I think that answers the question.

So when do you think you'll have your letter completed and would you, I'm sure you're going to share it with the broadband authority and if possible, I'd love to get that approved next Wednesday at the board meeting and it would help to see the letter that the broadband authority is writing.

Great.

Wonderful.

If you could send that out, I can ask our board to either sign on to it or write a separate letter.

I like the idea of writing a separate letter, but it would help a lot to see this one.

OK. And that would be great.

And I will say, I think I said once before that talking to my representative in the House

and the general assembly was very down actually on spending money because of COVID and the overall budget and told me don't expect to see any extra money for broadband this year.

So I think that the letters, I'm hoping he is incorrect and he's only one individual and a very large group of people but I'm just saying that I think that all the letters we can write

are of value.

Can I comment on Supervisor Palmer's question in regards to the rules amendment?

Sure.

So the clarification is that the amendment that the authority made today

was one that dealt with attendance.

And so two years ago, I think it was two years ago, or maybe just one year ago, year and a half ago, this board amended the rules to note that if a member participated by electronic means, they could do that, but that would count as an absence towards the limit.

And so in this case, the electronic participation, whether it's for a personal reason or business reason, will not count as an absence.

And I think our absences are four in a 12-month period or three in a row.

So what we did is we changed that.

and said if you have a personal reason or a business or medical reason to participate by remote participation or electronic means, you're not deemed absent and that doesn't count against you in terms of your attendance.

The limit on participating twice remotely for personal reason is under FOIA.

And that still stands.

That is in Virginia code.

But if you have medical reasons, there's no limit on the medical reason.

It's the personal, the family, the travel, that sort of thing.

So that's the distinction.

That would be, no, it's for any reason.

Okay.

For some reason, I thought before we couldn't do what you're doing today.

And so I guess that was my mistake.

We set an attendance policy in February of 2019 and the authority decided that remote participation would count as an absence and so that it would

so that it would incentivize showing up and not doing it.

I think the environment's kind of changed and technology has changed and it doesn't count as an absence.

Now the Virginia Code hasn't changed as of today and so there are limitations on the number of times you can do it in a year for personal reasons.

But in terms of

And frankly, our rule in terms of attendance, our rule in terms of attendance would have prevented anyone who had a medical disability and could only participate from home, that would have prevented them from participating as a member.

Thanks, Richie.

Hearing nothing, well, thank you for another annual

Meeting of the Broadband Authority.

Second.

Anticipating no objection.

Thank you all very much.

Mike, I'd like to give you a call.

Just about one thing.

If you have a minute in your office.

Very good.

Thanks to the folks who attended from the public.