ABBA Regular Meeting   4/16/2026

So I welcome everyone to the Albemarle broadband authority meeting, April 16th, our regular meeting.

We have a quorum of all the members present.

Everybody's got a copy of the agenda, I trust.

Anyone have any changes they'd like to see in the agenda?

Bill?

They are January, and it's not the June something.

Oh, yeah.

I'll have the person who prepared the minutes, the agenda, flog after the meeting.

I hope that'll satisfy your honor.

Okay.

Then moving on, any announcements from authority members?

None here.

On the other side of the table, public comment.

So that was just going to not be reported anymore?

Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda?

So moved.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Hearing none, consent agenda is approved.

Approval of the January meeting minutes.

Bill, you had some minor corrections.

Anything major come back to you?

No, just that one.

Do you want to move their approval?

I'm further approved.

Exciting.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Hearing none, they are approved.

So, full business.

As soon as we can.

As we all know, Body 21 construction was completed about two years ago now.

The six month report, of which there's a six month and a ten month post closeout report, was delayed due to IT issues on behalf of Brightspeed.

DHCD was made aware and has extended the due date to the end of the month.

I checked in with Brightspeed today and have not heard back.

Body 22.

So a number of updates.

Not all of them encouraging.

We did see a shift of all of the remaining project areas to spring 2026.

That is ending June-ish.

We, from a conversation with Dennis Reese at Firefly, Keene, Appalachian Power Keene project area is now connecting.

So that is new.

The other important update is that the two substations that we were waiting on, so we'd already had the Keene one, the Earlysville and the Stony Point one are in place.

And so now that they're continuing the construction work of bringing fiber to the locations.

Earlysville, both of them are at their respective fire departments.

I had a chance, like I said, to talk to Dennis Reese earlier today.

He is confident in their ability to complete this by the end of the fiscal year, which has been the number that I've been talking about for a while to give us as much buffer, but also to recognize that there's urgency related to the fact that this is ARPA money.

June 30th, yes.

and I asked what is the thing that could cause you any sort of delay that could cause you to have to stretch this into the next fiscal year and what would be the scope and the cause he said was permits.

VDOT has a lot on its plate and I had a chance to chat with a VDOT representative today to see if there's anything that we can do and bluntly they said

Anytime we can expedite things on request, if it's a pressing matter, then we do our best to move things to the top of the list.

So I recommend, if I can be so bold, that Abba consider putting together a short letter.

requesting VDOT to expedite all Firefly related permits in Albemarle County to ensure that these projects continue apace and are able to finish on time.

Yeah, but that is the pressing issue is that if things continue for too long then we are going to be putting these funds at risk and we don't want to do that.

The other concern is rail crossings and there was actually good news associated with the rail crossings as it related I believe to the Ragged Mountain.

Dennis Reese is on if we want to ask him some questions and any clarification but I believe it was the Ragged Mountain.

There was one neighborhood in the Ragged Mountain area

That has a rail crossing at its entrance and they had been waiting for a very long time They'd actually released the rest of the area and waiting a very long time to get permission to do that rail crossing Those we had less control over

And I believe that there might have been some legal action that may have stymied the impact of that particular legislation.

So permits are the major barrier that could delay this past our end of fiscal year date.

Aside from that, they have hundreds of people out every day all across Albemarle County putting fiber in the ground.

Even our own Lauren Bohdan has crews in her neighborhood right now putting stuff in the ground.

And so work is continuing.

I know.

Those permits are waiting, I'm sure.

Briefly, as we discussed last meeting, I initially reached out to Kerry Sheppard, but I heard back from Matt.

I am on a quarterly meeting with Terry and Charlie Nelson, who's the district engineer that happens to be Monday.

So I can just flag for them to expect a letter from the authority asking for an accelerated review.

That would be great.

Let's agree.

We can ask Dennis Reese from Firefly.

He would know best if there are any remaining rail crossings.

The biggest one that was a barrier was literally an entire neighborhood on the other side of a rail crossing and they were still waiting.

Yeah, I'm promoting him right now, so here we go.

Okay, yeah, I can hear you now, can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

OK.

Sorry I wasn't able to be there in person.

OK. Yeah, there you go.

So yeah, we had a town hall covered in Ragged Mountain this afternoon.

But yes, so for the railroad crossings, we recently

Got seven of those.

And that did release that neighborhood of Sherwood Farms.

They're off 29 Monacan Trail that we were delayed by that crossing.

And we've already got a bunch of connections in there.

So those folks were all desperate for a good service.

So we're happy to be in there.

We've got a couple other crossings

In the works, I think we have six remaining in the county, and I think we have three of those scheduled for later this month, the 27th, 28th, and 29th is what I was told today.

So we still have a few left, and we're working as hard as we can to get those crossings pushed across the finish line.

But we have to go through

The process with each of the different railroads every time.

So most of these are well, or most of the construction's completed.

And so the Batesville area, we do have, we were missing one, the feeder fiber, the rest of it's already pretty much built.

So that feeder fiber I'm being told will be completed possibly next week.

And then we can start the splicing and start connecting homes there.

Pretty Creek, most of that's built and I'm being told that hut will be online probably early next week, which means we'll start connecting there in a couple weeks after that and Pretty Creek feeds both, look, feeds some locations in Albemarle and some in Greene.

so several of these are well on their way to be we could start making connections in and a couple of these we are still waiting on some VDOT permits as Jason already discussed and most of these areas like I said are

Okay, they're done.

They're done.

We're waiting on the final splicing information from them for Earlysville, but we

We're still waiting on some permits there from VDOT.

Hi, just a little more color.

You mentioned that there's a lot to be done about it.

We've got

I don't know how many total crews on the project.

We had 25 pretty consistently, and more recently I heard we were up to 28.

A crew can do about a mile a week.

We still have a good 200 miles of underground place.

If everything works perfectly, all that fiber could go in and get there, and we hope to have that by June 30th.

We will not have everybody connected now, but we hope to have all the fiber plays, all the sleds lit, and have started connections.

We'll be running connections through the rest of the week.

If we don't hit June 30th, we're going to be as close after it as we can.

We're not stopping.

We're gonna ask DHCD already to give us a little bit of an extension

not because of here, Campbell County, we have areas we won't start construction for that part of the same project.

They came in real late.

They were just awarded to us.

We got a contract last summer.

But we're not shifting our timeline here any.

We're pushing to get everything done as close to June 30th as possible.

In fact, we have a meeting, an all-hands meeting next Tuesday with all of the contractors to talk about optimizing the time we have and how we can make sure that all the handoffs go smoothly for permits, railroad permits, VDOT permits, easements, those types of things to get as much in place and as many people as possible by the 30th and then lay out how we're going to get this wrapped up after that.

So it is a big lift.

We're working on it.

We're going to get close.

What, another 3,000, 4,000 passings to get done here?

It is.

There is still some lift,

As Dennis pointed out, some of those, we do have areas where we've been frustrated because it paid the fiverr in place, but not gotten the final connection so we can start actually connecting people.

And we've got a place where the fiverr has been in place for months and months.

And it's really frustrating when you're paying debt service on that fiverr.

So we are, we're working, those areas, we'll be able to start connections pretty quickly as soon as we get a couple of final areas up at Freddie Creek, because Dennis was talking about around Batesville, west of the Crow today, got a ton of fiber in the ground that we've been waiting for a final connection to.

We should be getting those in the next week or two.

So we'll start seeing progress in some of the areas of the county

sooner.

Sugar Hollow, we've got about 70% of the fiber in, so we've got to finish up some up there, but we haven't started connecting folks yet.

They are starting to splice in that area soon.

We'll let people all line up there.

What does that mean, a final connection?

Okay.

No upstream connection.

So that fiber, we built the new transmission line through that section, through our midway substation,

We delayed the fiber a little bit because it needed to be on the new line, not the old line.

We didn't want to build it and move it.

So we just finished the transmission line.

We finished that fiber and as it gets to the finished line, there was the swampy area and earlier this year we couldn't get in there, but it's clearly dry.

So that's, it's a 244 count fiber that brings that main vaccine to hit.

So that's just getting the light to it.

It's good to know the drought's good for something.

Look at the price.

It's got to be one dollar.

So we're about 150 gigs of peak usage right now.

We've got capacity for 600.

And we've got equipment that we can continue adding and expanding.

We've got all but two of our hunts have dual feeds.

So any single one will take a hunt down.

the two that do not mark in Albemarle, and we have plans for adding a second beat into those next year.

So we are, we're continuing to monitor reliability and manage that.

We did add a third internet source to Atlanta, previously went to Ashburn and down to Richmond.

Down we have three paths out of our ring of rings.

So we're

Really pretty good shape in terms of managing the traffic on a bigger scale.

That's exactly the best.

Thank you.

You have a peak on the NFL Thursday nights.

That's how you find out where your peak is.

It's strange because some of the games don't have that much usage.

I can tell you, for those of us using the internet 30 years ago, we were definitely not watching NFL games at all.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, we were mostly posting on message boards and playing games.

Yeah, not that much for sure.

Starting on a letter, I feel like we probably should do a paper vote on that to authorize the Chair's assignment.

I can make a motion.

Please do.

All those in favor say aye.

I just offer one brief amendment.

In addition to the Valley 22 locations, we also have Albemarle ARPA locations that are tied into this, and so I would just recommend including both.

They are concurrently being built, often on the same permits, so it likely would tie those locations in, but just to be thorough, it feels wise to just add Albemarle ARPA as a

Really a purview, but it doesn't hurt us, you know, to say, and these guys too.

So, you know, that's my thought.

Agreeable?

That's amended.

That's amended.

All right, then.

That's a little bit.

Great.

It's still good.

It shows you the demand is out there.

We know that.

It's not being served by satellite options and the very slow growth of wireless.

Y'all's foresight to make sure we get into this project and get it done as quickly as possible is to be commended because folks just, I can't imagine right now myself

not having internet lines.

A lot more broadband service.

It happens sometimes.

And it's disabling.

We're going to get there.

Closing in.

All right.

Well, thank you all very much.

The only other thing I wanted to mention related to Body 22

We had previously talked about the impact of easements and failure to obtain.

Firefly has been very dutiful in trying to obtain easements wherever they possibly can, especially to avoid impacting other residents who want the service but cannot be reached due to easement issues.

Dennis did send me some figures for the areas that have already been completed.

37 locations denied easements impacting 22 residents that wanted the service.

At a certain point, those will get turned back over to DHCD.

That way, DHCD knows that they're there.

Yeah, I wish there was something we could do to make folks be a little more charitable, but their land, their choice.

So we have filed as far as filing to become a public utility in Virginia.

Theoretically, we have

the right to use M&W.

That has not been used by a select that didn't have any company there.

I didn't know y'all.

Yeah.

And the county may be able to, it goes back to

Well, there's going to be challenges in the public.

Is there a public benefit by doing this?

The best thing you can do is encourage the supervisor to make sure that every subdivided property comes with utility rights.

The same way that years ago we made it a requirement in the state that you have ingress and egress.

You used to be able to sell a piece of property to the landlord.

and they you can't do that but you can lock it away from utilities and every subdivided piece of property should have a utility pad.

The BAA report, going to try to keep it fairly short.

Just jumping ahead to the BEAT update, I received an email from Comcast.

They have no update.

From the time that the state receives its NIST National Institute for Standards and Technology approval, the state has six months to complete the contract process.

I believe we are three months in, so

They got three months left.

I don't know if this is going to be like, you know, in RFP land where all of the proposals come on the very last possible minute.

But if that's what it's going to be, then we're likely a few more months away from seeing a contract.

As I previously stated, the authority made its request that our 350 or so remaining locations get

So that way they do not have to wait until 2030 to get connected.

That remains our concern and priority and Comcast is aware.

Hopefully that is something that is going to be reflected in the contract once it is released.

But Comcast is unable to discuss the details of the contract until the contract process has been completed.

Any questions on that one?

The office has been participating in web accessibility issues with the county website, updating all of our pages and working with public services accessibility to bring our website to compliance.

I can personally vouch for our pages being at 96% compliance at both WCAG

2.1a and double a.

And so we are on top of it and we are participating with PSA to try to help other departments get their websites up to snuff.

The ABBA page was only recently assigned to me, so I can now work on that page.

It is a very light page, so not one that is likely to pose a whole lot of challenges.

The other note there, we are working to create a transition plan as I will be rolling out of this position probably in the July timeframe.

It has been a great joy to work with ABBA and to work with the county to shepherd these grants along and to build some really exciting digital inclusion work.

I think that there is a lot more opportunity both in the county and statewide.

And so I'm gonna be looking for ways that I can

Sheppard things along at a broader scale.

So that's the plan.

Most likely, as long as Gary and Dennis hit their timelines,

There's not going to be a whole lot of business for the authority after July, so we are planning a large get-together, in fact a multi-site get-together is the plan, so that way we can have a live stream connecting multiple locations to celebrate universal broadband access.

Almarv County being on the doorstep of universal broadband access.

Well, it's such a long way we've come, the notion that we have a multi-site, you know, linked up presentation when eight years ago we had broadband meetings on Zoom and we were worried that nobody has access to the internet to get on Zoom because that's what we were hearing live, so yeah.

I think we should take you from Jason and start working with our supervisors here to figure out how do we know when it's time for us to go away, and how do we plan for that?

This is all we've wanted all along.

Let's plan it out to the lessons.

That might be something to discuss, perhaps, nationally.

I would certainly suggest having a conversation with council, grants, myself and the chair as an initial pass to determine what our existing obligations.

Again, there's reporting obligations, but those could be handled by OGA.

I believe independent of the office or the authority and then it's a matter of understanding what are the remaining obligations as associated with Body 22 since the county is not a grantee but rather a party to the grant.

If you take another peek at your financial update, we're about $400,000 away from having completed our financial obligation to the grant.

I'm quite certain that by the end of the fiscal year, they're going to have $400,000 worth of bills for us.

Good, good.

Congratulations.

I have a lot of interest in Bullet 3, but I can handle that through the executive.

I just want to point out I'm also a member of the NACo Telecommunications and Technology Committee and yesterday we had an update about the web accessibility and someone from, I can't remember where it was from,

noted that in the locality he was in and talking to other people, their sites had been brought up to speed.

They were compliant and they noticed a 1400% increase in downloads of information and targeted appearing to be people targeting trying to find

I can tell you the county, I'm sorry, human services as a whole, because I don't have insight into the whole county, but the human services as a whole is at 86%.

The industry standard is 87.

So we're just

just under it.

And a number of the issues can be resolved by some site-wide review.

For instance, and this is a little off topic, but there are a lot of guidelines around whether contrast is appropriate.

That is something that Granicus can just determine.

Are the menus appropriate?

Well, if every website that has one of the mega menus on the side

has 243 errors associated with that menu that just need review to demonstrate that white

whatever color blue that is, is an appropriate contrast, then you can just set it aside.

And so most likely, I hope by the end of the month, we'll have crested the industry standard.

But also, what I appreciate about PSA's work is the expectation and the intention to keep up with this.

So that way, when we revisit this in six months, we haven't slipped.

We have actually managed to maintain and keep these up to date.

One of the tasks that I've given myself as we reach the end of my time here is to update our pages to reflect a very public facing page and then a more internal digital navigator focused page.

I speak at a conference about web accessibility every year.

We normally have about 50 people.

We had 480 people yesterday.

Any other business?

I hate to keep you so long.

but if there's no other business then I think we should adjourn.

All in favor say aye.

We stand adjourned.