ABBA Regular Meeting   1/28/2026

Welcome to the 21st annual, no, welcome to the alcohol broadband authority meeting, first one of the year.

Thank you all very much for being here present in the room and thanks to our two intrepid members who are present on the meeting.

I think our first order of business

We have a quorum here in the room and we need to decide if we want to permit these two folks to participate in the meeting.

I suggest that we do and we'd like to move same.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Excellent.

Both of you have been promoted to being in the meeting.

I understand that you're participating virtually due to personal matters, which you are required to give us some specificity about, but not so much that would be embarrassing.

Things like, I couldn't get there, sound very appropriate to me.

I'm calling from my home in the Scottsville district.

I am unavailable because I could not get my car out of the driveway, or rather my husband's car out of the driveway.

I certainly can't get my car out either.

I hope so.

It's going to be cold tomorrow, though.

Well, thank you both.

Let me ensure that you can hear what we are saying.

I'm clear.

Mike, you good?

That was a thumbs up from him.

Ah, okay.

We don't actually have video on you in the room, so audible responses will help us.

Sorry about that.

Yes, I can hear y'all just fine.

All right, so we're good to go.

We've got a quorum.

We've got all the members present.

Let me take this moment to welcome our new member, Supervisor Fred Missel.

Happy to be here.

In case you didn't know, this is the voice of Bucky Walsh.

OK. Bill Fritz?

Who's Bill?

I don't know Bill Fritz.

Let's try to keep it that way.

The man with no name.

Okay, everyone should have a copy of the agenda, either provided to them electronically or in paper.

There are copies there.

Yeah, copies here in the room if you want.

The agenda lists the June and September minutes for approval.

They were previously approved.

Ah, very good.

Update accordingly.

And Mr.

Chair, I did want to mention Chandler Vaughn is on to update us on some DHCD activities.

Anyone object if we just do that next?

Let's amend the agenda accordingly and hearing no objections to doing so.

Chandler, give me one second.

Okay, I believe we're on.

Jason?

Yep, you're good.

Great.

Thank you all for the flexibility.

I appreciate you moving me up in the agenda.

Glad to bring updates on what the future of Audi is and also touch base on other things we have going on in the office, most importantly the BEED program.

First things first, we really appreciate it as the office being invited to your recognition event last month and celebrating the work that's gone on in the county to date.

You guys are widely known in the state, across the nation, as a leader in broadband access expansion and also thinking about the digital divide more broadly, so thank you for your continued work on that.

That was well-deserved recognition last month.

We appreciate the ability to celebrate with you all.

Looking ahead, we've still got work ahead of us across the state as well as in Albemarle County and some places through what's called the BEAD program.

I'm sure Jason has you all up to speed.

The BEAD program is the latest round of federal funding to expand broadband access.

to unserved locations across the state.

These are homes and businesses and community anchor institutions that have not been picked up in previous body projects across the state.

The result in Albemarle County was predominantly with Comcast.

Yeah, I don't have a map to share up on the screen now.

We're working on developing a public-facing map now that's more user-friendly.

but you know there's some subdivisions and neighborhoods up and down you know 29 north the north of Charlottesville on each side of 29 where there are some locations that had long driveways that were not able to access Comcast service with no additional fee.

Comcast applied for those locations under the BEED program so that you can expect a lot of infill from Comcast over the next couple of years in Albemarle County.

The same thing goes for some locations along the Fluvanna County border and the southeastern portion of the county.

I think you all are tuned in to the broadband expansion work.

I think one interesting thing of note that you all should be aware of is Comcast submitted a proposal to serve these locations for free.

They did not request funding to reach these locations.

Naturally, we selected their proposal to reach these homes and businesses.

They did not request any funding to reach in Albemarle County.

That tells me it's a lot of infill on their existing networks.

That also tells me that perhaps Comcast has some capital plans to invest in broadband expansion across the county.

Again, you guys are already ahead of the game with partnerships with Firefly, for example, but I would expect to see some Comcast construction, not only to the bead locations, but also some infill here and there over the next few years.

We are finalizing an exact build-out timeline with Comcast over the next couple of months.

As we get into signing contracts with these bead companies, we'll certainly keep everybody posted there, including the residents.

What you all will see rolled out in the next couple of months as well is a resident constituent-facing tool that will provide more information than we ever have on broadband build-outs.

Residents will be able to go in, click on their location, determine what Internet service provider is going to provide their service, and see the specific stage of construction that their address is at.

So whether that's engineering and design, whether that's in the initial permitting phase, whether it's in construction, splicing, or service is activated and they can subscribe and they're directed over to the Comcast website.

So you'll see those things launched in the next couple of months.

The next thing we're anxiously awaiting in the broadband office, and it should be on the radar, and I know it's on Jason's radar at the county level as well, you know, we are expecting pretty sizable guidance from the federal government when it comes to how the states and how states across the country can invest our remaining BEED dollars.

Virginia was allocated almost 1.5 billion in funding under the BEED program.

We ran a

Pretty cost-efficient process, which resulted in about $545 million of that in awards.

That's back in the napkin math here.

We've got over $800 million remaining in unallocated funding under the BEAD program.

The Trump administration published an executive order back in December that said we would have guidance on how we can use non-deployment funding in early March.

So everybody should circle March 11th on their calendars.

We certainly do at the broadband office.

March 11th is the deadline for the agency at the federal level to publish how states can invest those surplus B dollars that we have left over.

March 11th is a date we're all looking forward to.

I don't have any tea leaves about what we can use those funds for.

There's a lot of statutory uses that was outlined in the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act.

We'll see which ones of those trickle through in the final guidance from Trump administration and certainly keep all of our partners updated on that front with what the eligible uses are.

Last thing is forward-looking as well.

This is what's on the screen here, the future of VADI.

There are a couple of legislative proposals we've seen bounce around this General Assembly session.

I won't touch on those because the governor has not indicated her position on those amendments yet, so I won't speak to the amendments that's ongoing in the state budget to the VADI program.

Just for informational purposes, a lot of the attempted amendments this cycle try to open up the VADI program to be able to fund things like infrastructure relocations.

When the state highways expand, the fiber companies usually get the bill, and now the VADI program is trying to be expanded to fund the relocation expense that the broadband provider would previously have to pay for.

There's also some attempts to expand the VADI program to invest in escalating project costs like pole attachments.

So, you know,

Governor hasn't taken a position on those.

We don't have a position on those at the broadband office, but we'll certainly relay as we go along.

The current vision for the VODI program, however, and this is where the county involvement comes back in, it's no secret that there will be new homes built.

There will be homes that slip through the cracks, even in the best broadband availability mapping process.

We're not talking hundreds in each county across the state,

We're talking points on the map here and there, new homes being built, homes that have slipped through the cracks of broadband mapping efforts in the past that will need some sort of funding to deploy broadband access to their locations.

In the past, we've been able to do that through what's called the LECAP program, Line Extension Customer Assistance Program.

We are planning to remake VADI in the image of that line extension program with some work to streamline it.

So, Lee Cap had a funding cap for eligibility, or had an income cap for eligibility.

The VADI program and the next iteration of it would be able to deploy broadband access to a location no matter the household income.

We would also be able to do it in batches, not one home at a time, a county,

Albemarle for example could bring us a list of 25 or 50 or 75 however many homes, submit that application to us that then we would then consider our rolling basis, consider it against other applications and then proceed forward with funding as long as it scored high enough and was competitive.

So we're penciling through that guidance now and thinking through all the different components of how to structure that application process on a rolling basis with

you know comparing applicants from county to county and you know selecting the ones that were scoring highly enough to move forward but more guidance there is coming just I think from a county perspective what needs to be put into place now I would recommend that if you all are hearing from any constituents in the field

that may have been missed by a VADI or BEAD program and aren't just waiting on construction to reach them.

They've been really missed by the program.

Construction is not planned to be on its way.

Be keeping track of those addresses because that's something that you would submit in a VADI application in this next iteration of VADI.

So that concludes the remarks there.

There's a lot to unpack there.

Does anybody have any questions for Mr. Vaughn?

Oh, thanks for the update.

Yeah, thank you very much for the update.

I was really excited about the consumer lookup tool.

It will.

You know, our position here is that if somebody has to wait until the end of the line, meaning wait until the end of the BEED program, they ought to be the best informed about the build-out.

Well, thank you very much for the briefing.

We'll look forward to seeing what happens on 3.11.

I look forward to seeing how the rest of this unwinds and the new VADI program gets launched.

Thank you.

So back to our regularly scheduled program.

Brief announcements by authority members.

Anyone have any announcements?

None here.

No announcements.

OK.

Then here's an opportunity for public comment.

We do.

We've got a few people on the call.

No raised hands.

OK.

Then we'll march forward.

There have, and I did want to take it in to point it out.

So if you take a look at the financial report, we did two things.

One is we updated the most recent numbers for Body 22.

So we've made lots of progress in paying Firefly for their hard work.

through TJPDC.

The other thing that we did is that with Body 21 closed out, we've reintroduced the ABBA fund, which I'm not going to remember the budget code, but the remaining Body 21 dollars, about $87,000, have been shifted back into the ABBA fund.

As pertains to our mission for parties and

Anyone on the call?

OK. Any objections to the consent agenda?

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

And we'll mark that down as approved.

Next item is the approval of the October meeting minutes.

Would you like to move their approval?

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Hearing none.

Those are approved.

Thank you very much, sir.

Old business.

I would love to make that promise.

Unfortunately, as we'll discuss, there are two more things.

So final financial review.

was completed in December.

We passed.

We received our letter.

I believe Trevor Walsh received a copy.

That will obviously go into the records.

Next, we have six months and ten

in March and September respectively.

These are the take rate counts, so not a heavy lift.

We will keep in touch with Bright Speed's management and leadership to make sure that they get us the data that we need in time and we will report those.

At the end of that 10-month, we will receive our final

And I do want to emphasize that this project,

At times challenging, we did make 1,435 connections.

And our understanding is that the take rate has been strong.

If you just had a match, I would have remembered.

Yes, so I'm going to

Let's move quickly through these slides.

They provide a couple of caveats.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

However, I do want to offer for the authorities inquisition.

Gary Wood has agreed to provide us an update.

So I'll leave the details to him, but I did want to just run through these slides really quickly.

We are and have been for some time on the increasingly long tail of this project.

This is the time when the heat starts to turn up on people's interest and desire.

Our office is fielding phone calls and emails.

We're sending them all to the Firefly team to get updates and to provide updates as best we can.

This isn't

This isn't a project in one part of Albemarle County.

This is 15 ongoing projects in Albemarle County as well as in

14, Gary, 14 other counties in Virginia that are going to ultimately serve over 70,000 households.

So it's a big project.

There is a very strong focus on Albemarle County in order to meet the deadlines that we see set, which for all of the remaining project areas is first connections in the winter.

So before March 19th.

So March is going to be a really exciting time for us.

That's the lay of the land in terms of that.

I did want to, we've been tracking this chart for a while now.

And so you guys have seen variations on this and it looks very static.

And I wanted to just caveat that when we look at this information, we're looking at based on what we have been billed for and they're billing us effectively

Two whole quarters behind.

So the progress as of December 2025 is from when they sent us a bill in January that represented

their data that they had processed in December, which are invoices that they received as of August.

So when we look at this, this is where they were about five months ago.

There has been a lot more progress since then.

Gary can share a little bit more about that.

But as we've been tracking this,

I did just want to note that we've been providing you guys this data as it's been shared with us by TJPDC but this is stale data and so if it is in the in the desire of the authority we'll stop sharing this particular chart just because I don't know that it's providing a whole lot of value in the long run it can provide us a good track as of how this project went

Some information is better than none.

It's stale.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to now start labeling it not from when I receive it, but from what it represents.

That's far better.

Yes.

And then this is the Dominion one.

The big reason that I wanted to bring this one up, this is also, as you can tell, a little stale.

The big reason I wanted to bring this up is that Dominion has completed its construction phase.

The primary activity right now is

Dennis over the last few weeks.

Dominion has had some additional work that they've had to do to correct some things or to modify some things to make sure that it hits exactly what was needed.

But as of September, they were already at 60% of splicing complete.

So my understanding is if they're not done, they're close.

And that shifts everything over to the Firefly team, which again, they've been

who have been out in the field.

They've got a renewed focus on Albemarle County.

And so with that, Chair, if I may, I'd like to introduce Gary Wood to share some updates and some remarks.

I'd be delighted.

Gary, you can do it from there or you can come up.

Come on, join us at the table.

Throw your questions to me.

I didn't bring a lot of visual aids.

but I can't talk something about where we are.

We're a little beyond where we'd like to be at Monacan.

I mean, the original project's deadline was last August.

We knew that was aggressive and we still are working very hard and made a lot of progress that you haven't always seen because we have a lot of fiber in the ground, in the air.

It's not spliced and connected.

That's very frustrating as the CEO who writes the checks for the interest payments we make every month on that paper.

So we're pushing people along to get the last stages completed.

Let me tell you the way I think about the project and then we can go into any specific areas.

We think about it in terms of our utility policy.

We'll start with Rappahannock to the north.

They have the smallest footprint of the utility partners in Albemarle, but they have actually run the smoothest because they're another electric co-op.

Our design looks just like it did on Central Virginia.

It's very predictable.

We did complete kind of the northwestern piece of Albemarle early on, the Credit Creek area.

All of the fiber is in the air.

We have a hut in place.

We have had some challenges getting Route 29 crossings in a couple of places that are required to bring the light into that hut.

So we have completed those.

I understand we have a little bit of final work right around the hut.

We should have light to the hut soon.

As soon as we do that, we're ready to splice.

A little footprint, you can see a lot of the different circuits there go here and there.

So we'll be splicing in there.

We'll get connections started by March.

It'll probably run to mid-year.

Now, APCO to the south.

We did very well with APCO in terms of coordination, except early in the project, we told them

They worked most of the time with four or five crews.

We were still ahead of the game.

Our code was running further behind a lot of counties, but they did complete their work and we have completed all of our construction in King.

All of the fibers in place, except for one small piece of underground that ties into an adjacent service area and is a final life.

We have the hut in place, the electronics are in,

The fiber is into the hut.

We've got that one little piece of underground.

This week will be hard to put that in.

Otherwise it would have gone in.

But there are a couple of reasons why you can't do that in the snow.

Not the least of which is they can't do 811 markings.

It won't spray on the snow.

And because it doesn't last.

Therefore it's snow to go away and get that piece.

But with that,

We're really within a week of when we get the snow out, we'll get that underground in, we'll get light into the hut, then we'll start splicing the main lines out of Keene and within a month after it, we'll be putting in final connections.

It's a large service area that'll also run through the summer.

The Dominion,

This area is the most complex because of the handoff we have when they build the middle model.

We have to build into it and out of it.

We have to coordinate with them.

And both Dominion and Firefly have found some challenges, particularly in Albemarle, with getting privates.

So it's not unusual for us to have an original design that we agreed to,

Dominion, have them start construction, and they're not able to complete their construction as designed because they can't get all of these things to either place the fiber or to give us access to poles.

When they give us an access point on a pole, we go underground, we have to get our easement to get from that pole back over to the State Highway.

So... Gary, on that challenge,

Special is a nice way to put it.

Yeah, well, there are folks for different reasons and we've worked through a lot.

We've worked a lot.

We may still end up with a handful of folks we just can't reach and we've talked to just some about that but

Usually, it starts with a concern about something.

Sometimes it's, well, it was a Dominion poll.

I don't like Dominion.

I don't want to do anything to get them any money, and you're going to lease it from them, so I don't want to, we start talking about what helps the neighbors, and usually we can get through things.

Sometimes it's that they looked at our easement, and it says we can remove shrubs.

That's only if you plant an azalea over top of that fiber, and 10 years from that it fails, you've got to get to the fiber, so we ask you not to plant, but if you do plant, you may have to plant.

Sometimes we get past that.

Most of the time we can, show them where we're going to build.

Some folks just see it as an opportunity for some revenue.

They assume we're going to make money off this.

dollars a month for service if not a lot of extra.

So we work through it, but it's a number of things.

There are more people paying attention in Albemarle, and I can't quite put my finger on why, but certainly they're more aware and interested with everything that goes on

So we've gone back and forth with Dominion.

This is the largest footprint for the Dominion Middle Mile in a county in our service area.

And I think one of the largest in the state.

They have a lot to build.

So they have worked through many of those issues, but when they work through them and they move some of their design around,

We have to go back and redesign.

Yeah.

We have a very unique design in our system.

If you're familiar with cable television, they have what's called a distributed split, which means they come to a cabinet

The signals split 30 ways all equally and they take off and go to the different homes.

Because we're in a rural area with a much lower density, to make it more cost effective, we have a distributed tap, which means every time we come down, we calculate just how much light we need to pull off at that point.

And then we go to the next point.

So our taps have different dB levels of light coming off and it's to optimize the fiber so we can use the same fiber several times and not have to run larger fiber to do more splicing and longer drops.

That adds a complication that then if you move the place where we get the tap, the light level is different.

So we have to redesign everything.

So more than you can know, but that's added the complication.

We have made good progress.

Dominion is, if they have not finished splicing on a

I think one or two areas they're doing a little bit more splicing.

They are still passing back the final matrix of connections in a couple of areas.

And that's from the last time that they gave us information, we get back to them, they hand back an assignment of the fibers that they'll be handing off, from there we're ready to go splice.

We have fiber in the ground in a number of areas, out in Rockfish Gap, we've had it since

Midyear, I have a brother who lives out there and signed up for service every week.

And they send me pictures and say, hey, if I was going to the Gram, when are we getting this?

It'd be so interesting.

So we should be splicing in that area.

We've just released that for splicing.

We have released, let's see, I've got a couple of these areas up here.

Louisa Road, which is on the east side.

Actually, that's in design.

I take it back.

That's not ready for splicing.

Rockfish Gap, we've got splicing.

Gordon'sville Road, further to the north.

We actually have completed our splicing.

That was a small area.

We're starting to do service jobs there.

Batesville area, we're waiting for one final place.

There's actually two past

We've got all the fiber in, we should be ready to then start splicing there.

I mentioned Kean already that we're in.

And the very western part that's adjacent to Route 250 going up to Afton, so from Crozet pretty much west, there's kind of two areas and all of that, we're either in final splicing or we'll be starting

all the fibers already.

We are putting fiber in the Cartes Mountain area.

That's a really large area south of town.

And that will probably take us six weeks to be at a point we can start splicing.

And we will be in there.

We released Sugar Hollow, another large area.

They're placing fiber up there.

What does release mean?

That's when we have given the contractor the final drawings for them to put the fiber in the ground.

So that's releasing for construction.

Then we release for splicing after we've got the final splicing.

So Sugar Hollow has been released for construction?

For construction.

And they're building the fiber now.

Midway, we have a good bit of fiber in.

What we call Midway is not what some people in the county may think of as Midway, because it's fed from our Midway, Central Virginia Electric Midway substation, but it's actually much further north up and around Crozet, actually on both sides.

It's a pretty good-sized area.

But if you get west of Crozet and we say, this is Midway,

and on the map you don't have to know this if you put in your address on the map it tells you where you are.

So we're making progress in a lot of areas we have fiber already in.

The last places we will be will be Stony Point and Earlysville because

Changes we had to make.

When we started into those areas with our Dominion Middle Mile design, looking at what we need to do and looking at what we wanted to make sure we could be able to serve long term, we were right at the very edge of our long distance optics.

So we made the decision that we would be better now

put a cabinet in place, be more local, be able to serve folks a lot better and give us a lot more options and a healthier network down the road.

As speeds increase, sometimes distances contract.

And we didn't want to be in a position where we'd say, you folks can't get the newest speed because you were right at the edge of what we could do.

So that's been the trade-off up there.

We have permits into the county.

or Stony Point, that site has been designed in the sense of county permit, we'll put some data in there and start clearing it and building it.

Earlysville, we're gonna run in parallel and build that as well.

The folks in both those areas at the fire departments have been great to work with, mostly located some of the huts.

And we will also start construction in Stony Point, particularly we've,

fiber construction there very soon, Earlysville won't be too far behind.

But those, and that includes for Earlysville, that's the Windrift area, as well as the Free Union Earlysville Waverly area.

They'll both be served out of the Earlysville plot.

Stony Point has the Stony Point, Easton area.

and Earlysville, is that Vance Mills?

Yes, Vance Mills, the north side of Vance Mills is right behind.

Okay.

But the Dominion piece that they kind of come together up there, the Dominion piece will come out first.

Okay.

Yeah.

So we anticipate that we're going to be able to get there by

still by March, but that's gonna be really, really tight in the Stony Point and Earlyville areas.

If anything slides, it'll be those areas that we just may not get to by mid-March with the first connections.

If we don't, we'll be there in April and, well, like this, maybe early May.

We'll lose two weeks to this.

But we are making good progress.

We have a lot of folks up here, contractors, a lot of places where we're interrupting traffic because we're putting in fiber-densides roads.

We do have about 30, just under 3,500 active accounts in Albemarle today.

I take separate from the CVEC account?

That includes CVEC.

I just asked for a total number and that's the number I got while I was driving up here.

So I didn't check to see but I'm pretty sure that includes CVEC.

Ultimately we're going to be in front of about 11,200 roughly accounts.

I think probably a little

around half of that we probably have service available to today.

We still have a backlog of some places to connect.

Generally on our system, we've seen initial take rates of about 60% and in areas where we have had service available a while, like the Central Virginia Midway area, we're at 75 or 80%.

Midway is actually one of the highest take rates in the whole network.

It may be 80, over 80%.

So we're working to get everybody on as fast as we can.

The newest areas will have the benefit.

We haven't announced yet when we'll start providing two and a half gig service, but all of the new huts are designed so that we have that available maybe later this year.

That's okay.

That's right.

So we do appreciate all the support the county gives us, county staff.

It's been great to work with, first with Mike and with Jason.

And

We hope to get people online as fast as we can.

The other thing is our subscribers continue to value the service.

Another thing I'm not supposed to announce until the public announcement comes out, but they said it would be at the end of this month, so it should be the next couple of days.

They're going to announce the five highest American Consumer Satisfaction Index scores nationally

for ISPs, and there'll be one familiar name in that.

Congratulations to Comcast.

Very well, very well.

That's great.

I did not see a comment.

That's it, there will be an Albemarle County provider in it.

No, please don't go, there you go.

And with that, I'm wrapping around, kind of touched on a lot of different areas, but I'll be glad to answer any specific questions you have.

But there are areas we're already in, like Ragged Mountain.

We've had fiber up and spliced for a while, but we've been waiting on two railroad crossings that have large segments, some pretty good sized subdivisions.

One just outside of town, that little park and ride area on 29, just south of 64.

Just the other side of the railroad tracks, a little subdivision back there with about 60 or 80 homes.

And we've had that fiber in and been waiting to cross that track.

We've had a permit for six months, but they haven't been able to schedule it because they don't have enough flags to train.

So we do have that scheduled.

Those are the types of things that throw off the schedule sometimes and it's hard

provide all the detail to everybody about exactly where the things are.

So they'll look and say, well, you say connected now and there's service here, but nobody in my neighborhood has.

And that's true, but there's usually that one segment of road crossing, an uneaseable way to do it.

I appreciate it.

The chairman of our Central Virginia Electric Board was the last board member to be connected when we built the CBEC system.

And that took us four years and he was connected actually just after four years.

He was in the backlog when we were wrapping up.

That wasn't intentional, that just happened.

Good leadership.

and I will be glad to keep you up to date and let you know as we get these areas.

Every week right now across the system we're getting about 500 to 600 more homes with service available.

We're connecting about 2 to 250 with service

I'd say I don't, obviously nobody loves delays.

That's a given.

So it's frustrating to see the one or so season delay.

I do appreciate

Not just an explanation, but we just heard a very detailed, largely from memory explanation, of exactly the problems in each place, and that's the level of detail that, just speaking for myself, makes me feel better about there's a delay and it's not just because, oh well, because it's delayed, or because I think we heard several times with past rounds of Fadi, like, we didn't anticipate that it would snow in the winter.

Okay.

and it's 2023 or whatever at this point.

I think we figured out that it snows in the winter.

But instead you're saying, well, it's just snow.

We can't, also we can't spray marks on the ground.

Well, heck, I didn't realize that.

That seems like a really important problem.

And therefore we think we'll be about two weeks late.

Well, okay.

No, that makes sense.

Can't love the delays.

Do appreciate though an explanation in which I get it.

I can propose in a single thing you should be doing differently here.

There's a reason why I don't run, see that.

Well, thanks.

And we have a really good team with the contractors, the key construction partners, our utility partners, and the Firefly folks.

And the one thing I can assure everyone is there are a whole lot of folks who care a lot about getting this finished.

And we pay attention to it every day.

And it's what we're doing.

That's what Firefly, we're still establishing that business.

We're a startup that is trying to get started.

and we intend to finish out our major construction.

We're not expanding into a lot of other areas.

We're gonna be here for a long, long, long time.

It's not for sale.

It will not be because of the way it's intertied to all the utilities.

And we intend to serve just like Central Virginia and be in the rural areas.

And while I appreciate that Vadie is looking at some things in case new homes are built and need service,

We're gonna connect new homes.

We're not gonna go to body type.

That's where service drop is.

We don't ask for it on the central Virginia side.

Once we're here, we're gonna start right about the shutters open.

And we'll look for opportunities to expand beyond that where it's economical, where it makes sense financially.

Well, it's exciting to see the amount of critical mass you're going to have in this space when this project's done.

It's very different from just a CBC, CBEC only space.

So you're a real regional contender.

Yes.

Well, thanks again.

We'll end up with about 9,000 miles of fiber.

We've got 4,500 miles of electric line CBC.

We'll be in front of about 130,000 volts.

CBC, we're in front of about 40,000.

They're all connected.

We have 100% take rate.

Thanks for going over there with me.

Do you have any other questions?

Just let Jason know.

Dennis was planning to be here, but I'm back up to Dennis.

He's feeling a little under the weather, but we work really well with the county.

He's joined virtually, I see.

Okay, that's good.

He'll correct me on whatever I said wrong.

Three updates.

A little office update as part of some restructuring within the county.

Our office is being combined effectively with previously the Office of Equity and Inclusion to form the Office of Public Services Accessibility, the primary role

is taking over ADA compliance and ADA coordination and that is the big, big task.

We actually kicked off that task today.

Jesse Brookings, formerly of OY, will still be in charge of that office and our team is joining them in the accessibility realm for the foreseeable future.

It's going to take a little while for us to figure out what the path forward is going to be but what we've kind of laid out is there's going to be opportunities for our team which is kind of knee deep already in digital accessibility to help build that piece out for the county.

I can also tell you one of the first tasks that the county is going to be dealing with is our web

Digital ADA compliance, which is going to be a heavy test with a tight timeline.

So any questions and all that, you can still find me where you always find me.

Our plan for websites

Digital ADA stuff happens is that a lot of the data that's on our website is currently under the government side.

We're just going to move it to the community side and make it more just informational and community facing.

So that way people, for instance, that want to access this new tool so that way they can click and find out where they are.

That'll just live in a public facing page under the community side.

Just in case it's useful, I spoke at the National Association of Counties Conference this past summer, serving on a panel with my co-panelists, had built a really great free tool to be able to make PDFs accessible for websites.

I will have Jeffrey reach out to you.

So, anything else on that one?

I did right before the meeting get an update from Comcast and the update was they did not have any updates for us at this time.

That did not come without a lot of efforts by them to just

and make sure that everybody's aware.

And they wanted me to emphasize that Albemarle County is a really, really important piece of this project for them.

And so they are eager to get started as soon as they can.

But one of the barriers is, and maybe you can help with this too, they need to get through missed review before they can publicly discuss.

That's the National Institute of Science and Technology.

They need to get through missed review before they can actually publicly disclose their plans.

And so they are currently in that.

A little bit, though.

Yeah.

So, that's the only meat update that I have.

Chandler did a great job of covering where the whole program is overall, including the $800 million, which, Chandler's still on the line, and I'd just like to point out that two years ago, I told him we'd have $800 million left over, and

You doubted me, so I'm putting that in the ground.

Digital inclusion planning.

We're still working on our regional digital inclusion plan and ahead of finalizing any of the implementation sections.

We do plan to reach out to the governor's team to get any guidance on what their plans are.

Obviously, new administration with an affordability focus.

Digital affordability is a huge part of this.

We want to make sure that before we publish a plan that it does align with expectations for what is going to happen over the next few years.

So that is still pending.

Questions for Jason?

All right, new business.

We don't have anything on the agenda.

Anybody having new business they want to bring up?

As long as I'm talking about it, other matters that you wanted to discuss or vote on?

Seeing a lot of head shaking, not happening in the new matters, other matters.

So that just brings me to number 10, which is adjourn.

I vote we adjourn.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Thanks very much, everybody.

It's good to see you all.