Coordinator Report April 21, 2016 This week the Gas Pipeline project proponent announced the matter "suspended". When this state of being is taken by a political candidate it means, usually, end of the line. The Article 97 constitutional question which is, does Federal eminent domain trump our Commonwealth land protection actions may get answered due to a lateral to their existing pipeline which they want to go through state forest. Broadband Committee will report on their wireless plan recommendation. They are supporting the borrowing request at ATM. I did a little digging into the customer radio ownership question found documentation clearly stating that the radio belongs to the customer and the one year warranty is between the end user and the manufacturer. It besides being lunacy for the town to "buy back" customer radios, wouldn't be legal except at market price. Current market price is about $15 / radio. In your packet are some excerpt from minutes and my bi-weekly report which show that our MOA with resellers was done transparently. Nick has indicated he will amend a borrowing authorization with once again "good faith effort of the enterprise fund to repay" language. It does not help our efforts to get a loan. I have added the following advisory language after the warrant article which I believe meets both his need that this intent be plain and the town's need that the lender doesn't say this authorization is conditional and we will not therefore lend. "(Advisory note: This vote is taken with the understanding that while the Broadband Enterprise Fund will budget for and make debt service payments, this is debt authorized with the knowledge that this is an obligation of the Town and its full faith and credit is hereby pledged.)" The Recorder newspaper reports that MBI is taking steps to do a wireless internet study of all the unserved towns. I have shared our upgrade plan, our desire to seek funding for both the first and subsequent phases, and provided the following description to MBI: " I am sending you a copy of the wireless plan we had Fred at Interisle Consulting do for us. Your funding helped us get started on an LTE trial and we hired Fred to evaluate the matter. His advice is we do not proceed with the leased LTE network core and implement lower cost technology as part of our upgrade plan. In the history of our organic effort we haven't done much planning, just put stuff up that was the best available to meet our challenge and discover if it works. For our next move, we are doing the opposite. Fred used a waterfall approach evaluating and modeling relatively cheap commoditized MiMo gear starting with 5 GHz down to TVWS. We gave him access to our network and based on actual results with our current technology he was able to fine tune the model with respect to vegetation impact. I note that MBI data on homes actual location was used as our effort wasn't locating the radio at the actual site location but centering in at the property lot address. That was helpful. Warwick is taking a $240k borrowing proposal to town meeting on May 2 that will replace all of our electronics except our routers, POE switches, and 3.65 MHz WiMax gear. This will include 50' masts at our ten repeater sites. We are going to stick with, until we can get grant support, our Cambium WiMAX since it delivers 10/2 and holds down our license claim to 3.65 MHz When your grants become available we hope to get funding for this effort which will already be accomplished, and we hope as well to implement LTE, but a stripped down version that won't support mobility, but is fine for fixed. I am excited that you are looking at wireless and we are available in any capacity to assist the planning. We don't want to wait so are taking a plunge. We remain aligned with WW and hope they can see their way to hybrid design. Finally, here is a link to a recent story in a telecom news site I subscribe to that talk of $20B for rural broadband and sets 10/1 throughput as the goal, "except in densely populated areas". http://www.telecompaper.com/news/fcc-puts-usd-20-bln-into-rural- broadband-deployment--1136011 Our friends at WiredWest are undoubtedly perturbed by the change of direction by MBI. They had a charge to bring a "futureproof" rural internet solution forward. I fear future disruptive wireless technology almost as much as the high price tag of fiber. I remain convinced that WW can be of use. I think they will be of more use if they can see their way to studying wireless and equally importantly, abandon being the network owner. I understand well that nonprofits and governments are "owned" by their mission. They sure don't have stockholders profiting in proportion to their ownership. A new not for profit owning an asset doesn't play in Peoria. The 2015 Town Report is shaping up and I'll try to have a copy for each board member in time for the meeting. I'd like to have a joint meeting with Finance Committee regarding the FY17 Annual Town Meeting Budget and Articles but Fin Com are not available on next Tuesday which is their regular time. Do you want to try for Thursday the 28th? I seek a surplus property declaration of the old PA from WCS. We had it replaced and I'll try and sell the five or so daughter boards, the backplane and the old amp. The funds will go to our general fund. The school now has working PA and the vendor has reconfigured the Voicemail and programed on touch buttons. Rich Field coordinated this project which has been a long time coming. Most recently the PD requested the system be fixed for safety and lock down reasons. The accountant has been in more than usual catching up on accounting. I'll have general and other fund expenditure reports YTD for you review. I am seeking to have our insurance lines quoted to see if we can get any better premium pricing. Monday May 2 is Town Meeting Day. Our legal counsel has three of his town's meeting that night. I hope to be able to have the ability to contact him by phone should that become necessary. With respect to the sole article by petition, he has characterized it as "doing nothing" that is not already state and federally guaranteed protections, and called it a "pulpit piece". If this passes or does not pass, it means nothing. In addition I believe that we are protected against enactment of laws retroactively so the AG will toss this. Counsel says Selectboard don't have to put this on the Warrant, however he recommends not riling "them" up and simply make the point that this is meaningless at the TM.