its survival first i want to thank everyone from k b especially alan madsen secondly i want to thank everyone from b tab and all of their incredible time especially david was another cool twenty million but the twenty million did not drop from heaven as i had wished so my idea had not told anyone else has to do this as sure's i think  you pronounce them are from indiana and some very nice people have sent me information on them seems to have very much the same feel as burlington and cape b t l small town south bend indiana they've been there forever and they're very excited about opening a new branch in a new field by buying burlington telecom so i'm suggesting that you advance b and sure to the next bidding session and create a way for sure as to be the financial backing that twenty thirty million dollars that we need and a large experience company with great variety  b to run burlington telecom as a local entity and the new expert for sure is in broadband for someone who burlington sentence and support wish we can each sign a long term great guarantee for ten years like i now have with bt that there is financial support for those special needs programs and the people who can't afford the full  bt can have the services and that there is special financial support for all of various programs like bt ignite that bt is never sold it has to happen if it has to happen that all the city council the mayor and all the users of burlington telecom choose where it is sold and have first rights of refusal to buy burlington telecom that if we find ourselves suffocated by the new owner we can buy back burlington telecom over time please please install guarantees that will keep bt as close to the values of keep alan madsen as your leader to help write any contracts and do your best to have the next owner of burlington telecom or in partnership with sures so we have the twenty million that didn't drop from heaven thank you very much for your time thank you others  hi my name is debt flanders i have been a group tour and travel consultant for goodspeed and bach for the past seventeen years in burlington i am a new customer of burlington telecom since your service just became available on a perch church street i'm very pleased with your rates and customer service it's wonderful contrast my experiences dealing with business comcast that charged me more and offered me much less it's a relief not to be put on hold for hours when i have a technical problem making the switch was one of the best business decisions that made this year now that burlington telecom is up for sale i fear rates will rise and service will decline if your company is sold to an outside corporation keeping this telecom business local is a guarantee against arbitrary rate increases and capricious customer service after attending several meetings with keep telecom local i was pleasantly surprised at their offer on the table they have a solid financial plan and support from ben greenfield founder of ben and jerry's and other businesses such as  market but the city chose the co op because other grocery stores had served downtown pearlington early area poorly for decades it is unlikely there would be a lively grocery store that does so much more than sell groceries city market gets thousands of dollars each month to the food shelf and other non profits the vermont brand is small and local but of high quality and very strong i would like to keep  powered by citizens and not by corporations outside corporations thank you for your time thank you anyone  them i have here one of the petitions one of the volunteers for keep burlington telecom local collected twenty four signatures of owners and managers on church street and very close to church street a lot of these small business people have bt now and are very nervous about what it will mean for their business to have bt owned by a large corporation as the former speaker spoke about her solid business plan that shows with very conservative projections that they can easily me the obligations of their loan and of running the business and what i want to share with you today is that when city market was formed they had a very conservative set of projections with their business plan very excellent business plan conservative set of projections according to their  confident that citi market would be in the black within three years of opening in fact city market was in the black in less than one year of opening that's the kind of expertise i have to send from ation from don sram who was chair of the onion river co op board and who was very instrumental in developing the business plan and who shepherded the entire thing through so i know this to be the case and so this is the kind of expertise that's behind the keep burlington telecom local cooperative business plan it's grounded it will work the private companies will get their million and a half to three million dollars from the sale which to the people of burlington that's that's enough and will be kept local it'll have the community control that is absolutely necessary in this world including to our business people here in burlington thank you gaps city council as you know we moved four proposals to the city council the city council has been working through that process over the last month the council is having a we talked about the desire to move to forward so that if we lose one of the betters during the document stage we're not starting from scratch the council  maintained that thinking through this process and has been working with the administration through the process there have been developments with the proposal since we've seen him  needs that we had i dress addressed and are becoming clear one bit of information that we staff sent to you all this week was the sure there's a development f telecom company out of the midwest went on to minnesota actually helped us in advising us when we were first faced with the issues of burlington telecom and i would i would add that really the game plan that turned bt around was part and parcel of the advice we got from h p c so i think stephen can speak to more about that deal but that was announced on friday  and the most interesting part about h b c is they have expanded from one known and now to seventeen communities twenty two communities which of course was something that the b tab it identified as an important element of that criteria terry do you want to touch base on some of the other changes to the proposals that have been discussed over the changes so it's probably premature for me to call for what has actually been changed but there will be a clarification coming in from taking on certain elements of their proposal and i am expecting now the turn of that shortly as soon as we get it i will circulate it one one change that i but certainly for for a while will we have had to ask them exactly how we were looking for clarification on that and i expect they will provide thank you steven anything the add on sales process and change go to the go to the mike and becoming the back room for small business as they've gone into wholesale they've gone into wireless really just multiple different revenue streams to try and fill the gap that they've se the is comcast or another big player in most of the markets that they're in charge of the markets their charter charter communications and dan yesterday told me that even though   but my question actually doesn't specifically relate to comcast my question relates to something that happened at the council meeting and if he'll indulge me i didn't get any answer to that question and i think it might be of everyone might have an interest in it and that is at the council meeting we were each basically given the opportunity to ask one question and since there are twelve of us that meant twelve questions of each of the four entities that's thirty six questions and that was sort of how the meeting was run i asked one question and i only got half the answer and so i appreciate being able to ask it now one of the questions that i had or one of the question that i had asked and i don't believe it pertains assures but i think it was just in general was the ongoing relationship if there will be any ongoing relationship with any of these entities with  and i believe the way that i had asked it was dormant and faucet and i think stephen you were also sitting at that table and i had asked you as well and i think terry gave an answer about  doormen and faucets association with any of the three entities going forward no matter who gets burlington telecom but i wasn't really i didn't feel as though i actually got an answer from you and was hoping that you to do to put myself in a situation where i can make a real difference so i'm not interested in a job for the sake of a job paycheck for the sake of a paycheck i'm really focused on being involved in something where i can shape it and make a meaningful difference if any of the future owners of the have an interest in talking to me about what that might look like i have very somebody says that vision has to say thank you other questions on the sales process going to shannon thank you sale and i just wonder terry if you continue to talk with these folks if that is a point of discussion now i will say it continues to be what i hear in the community certainly we hear a lot of support for part of that is because there's a belief that that's our best protection against being absorbed by comcast or some other large corporate conglomerate and i think that's a really broadly held opinion in burlington so  just wondering if if that's been part of recent discussions if not i hope it is part of future discussions you the other thing that has come up more recently is how each of the organizations would treat our data and that's not actually  increasingly aware of our data being used in ways that many of us would consider unscrupulous or certainly a violation of our privacy which is happening it seems it's happening all the time to us and it would be good to be forward thinking about that and i know perhaps from my question when i asked this question at the city council perhaps it has up to me that it's not just a matter of not selling data but really protecting it and encrypting it and that word is probably the limit of my not even be done but i just think that it should be on the radar screen that we should be paying attention to those policies and make sure that people who can speak to it better than i can are are satisfied with the level of protection we get from from we do operate as a traditional i s p so basically we are offering unfettered access to the public internet so consumers can always choose to encrypt or v p n or do anything they want with their data in that regards but we do not have specific measures for encryption specifically of different flows of data inherently that's not how the internet works today clearly that's where people are trying to move things towards a secured connections from and and for all communications so in terms of data retention the only thing that be really keeps is can see costumers of ours who want email they have certain amounts of e mail storage and that lives on our servers and that is an encrypted repository so there really isn't much data to gain access to beyond the actual streams themselves if they're intercepted so and that's just people who use b t s into the right company if you're sitting out here and contrary should it tory and get on the bt public steven just asked about customers data the manuals he dresses ok so that would typically be considered you know b s s billing services billing system so that system is isolated from from the internet and functions as an internal office estimate and we work with a vendor minute maid america and they basically they host that data for us and they have their own security connections for doing that  but again that data does not live within the control of the bt i mean we control it but it's not if you're talking about like address phone number email just standard type account stuff that level of access that is in our  you know maintaining the basic policy that that bt has is sufficient into the future i think it's really important to be key follows best practice and trends going forward so if the industry moves towards solutions or equipment that  does provide antenna encryption on all connections that we move forward with that that's inherently not how the internet operates say as far as consumer data protection we believe we take this ain't the same or similar measures that any other company would whether it's brought into electric  rising wireless or anyone who holds consumer data in terms of account information such as you know names birthdays things like that those systems are protected and are generally they do not live on the internet they're on an internal system ok thank you here who would you want to work for the three that we have out there are you had discussions with them and you know i can honestly say i have had no deliberate he had working for anyone who wasn't really focused on maintaining and improving that i do believe you can be both with every fiber of my being and i'm an old guy and most of my working life has been thank you do you think it would be appropriate for the council to hear from the beattie team and staff on their thoughts on this i think you raise that i think there's nothing th interesting to know their perspective you know so before we move into the management up there i have not been asked by the council from the beach for any additional information recommendation are our charge was to send the names forward the meeting is monday evening i would encourage be to have members to attend and share encourage others if you're available on monday to attend and would turn to our fellow councillors if you want to add anything to that or you think that's a good idea a year ago i continued to be amazed by the resilience of customers and new customers signing up with what's going on around us having said that we are starting to be impacted by what's happening around as really in a couple of ways why we've lost a couple of people in customer service and currently we change their employment and join be given we are about to imminently have a new u i and i think we've got to wait for that situation to happen before we can do that  much quieter isn't too quiet second point is we are for the first time all day business remains robust we are for the first time getting indications on two or three of the more potential developments that that we're discussing and i'm i'm willing to share more an executive session probably next month if you want to do that i don't really want to  very interested doing continuing the discussion they're not going to do so until they know who the new owner is and have a view on that and it's not surprising to me it happens in almost every situation right so you're assessment is we're seeing some softness and numbers around business clients waiting for the sale but it sounds like not as much on residential carefully at the potential implications for the full year of first quarter results ways mindful of the denny's slowdown could have a meaningful impact  he's very much if we see that we're ahead of the game do we believe we'll actually be able to find a way to possibly even accelerate the build out of the need and forecast i don't know until i see the figures whether we'll feel comfortable taking the forecast up but so far everything's good getting more and more distracting for the staff more and more distracting for the management team and ways really hard for people to focus and remain in the operation as these things go on and on and our city officials and councils struggle through this process i'm sure there's been some very interesting times and moments for you personally and i knew how holmes of what the hell are you doing from a many times when we've gotten off base and you being the subject matter expert had plenty of times when to put us back on base but allowed us to do our work when we found dormant in fossett and you came into our lives to help us we're forever grateful we wouldn't have ended up here in front of the city council next week with a decision had it been not for you so thank you and to my fellow be tab members we were not off the hook yet we until this thing has passed on we do have a role in helping management make decisions as stephen presented reviewing the financial results but thank you all for your time as i've reminded people as this gets scary towards the end and more political your time volunteering to this is very appreciated  in terms of the gratitude that i think we all have for doormen and faucet when we started this process and karen was right there in the  room with me and a few others and we were interviewing different groups that might help us navigate our nonpayment of the loan to citibank and move forward and really likely we were looking at a sale at that time had we not found the talent that you bring to the table i really don't know what would have happened because the other folks that we were talking to did not have the combination of skills that doormen in faucet brought to the city of burlington in that they were able to bring a skilled manager stephen who at the time didn't really know too much about running a telecom business but you were wise enough to find the help that you needed to do that and you have become really the best manager we could have hoped for for the business while at the same time working through the process with with citibank and now working through the process of sale very deliberately each step of the way that is not really what would have happened i don't think without without dormant and dormant in fawcet and those very specific skills and outlook that they brought on how to handle a situation that we quite honestly had did not know how to handle and i also appreciate you david  and what you brought to the table in dealing with this always matter of fact really focused on you know you we started with the blue ribbon committee and there was the charge to the committee and david had that plastered on the front of his folder and kept waving it in front of us this is what we're supposed to be doing and i do hope that we are approaching the finish line now of what's been a really tough seven years and i appreciate you being by the side of city of the city of burlington the whole you know every step of the way here thank you so much for your service you know david  when we first started this week we asked you if you would be willing to help for about maybe three months four months three or four months turned into seven years  hard to believe that it was that long ago doesn't it seems like it was a long time ago and it was when you know when joan alludes to that the meeting that we had we were upstairs in the mayor's office there were probably six or seven of us in the room we interviewed two other maybe even three but at least two other firms to to find you know to find a firm that would help us in turning around bt the others showed up in person and we were not anywhere near is impressed with them then we were with a man that we didn't actually even meet for a couple of months after who was simply a voice on the to and met with terry and with stephen and they told us their plan for how they were going to turn around bt and i think the three of us were like sounds good sounds good i wonder if they can really do this and and they did and so much more i did want to mention one thing and it's only because i just i just feel that i sort of i sort of feel compelled to and that is that  a number of people in this community who have who have said less than kind things about the work the doormen and fossett have done that have said less than kind things about terry and less and then kind things about ste and i have insinuated that somehow or other because of the way that the bluewater deal works that they have steered the council steered others in the direction towards one of the offers versus the other and maybe it's because of what of what david and joan and i have said that you'll understand that we do we we  do feel and i think we are right in feeling that we know stephen and we know terry we have worked with them very closely for a long time and it is saying what people have said really calls into question their integrity and that can't be further from the truth they haven't they have not encouraged or discouraged us from going in one direction or another the information that they've given  us i think is is fair and in the end they are very well aware of the fact that the decision about who is the new owner of burlington telecom lies in the hands of twelve city councillors i i really hope that as this process comes to a close that people will really think carefully about what they say because it's really not city neither one of them has to be here doing what they're doing stephen certainly doesn't have to be here doing what he's doing he does it because he cares about the city and he cares about burlington telecom and  i am very grateful for the work that they have done and everyone in this city should be exceptionally grateful for the work that they've done thank you thank you i bt management team you know there isn't one person who's done this there's a whole team who came from disparate backgrounds didn't really work together well to begin with in fact for teach other  somehow came together and and rarely is that group managed to achieve results beyond what anybody thought they'd be able to do including make again a public thank you to each and every one of them hanging in there and going above and beyond often in times they had no understanding of what was going to hit them particularly they'd all agree with that when it came to the sale process even though i'll never forget the words say first words i said to them when i got in the room i said you got to understand this is going to be a roller coaster like you've never be really over the last few years say thank you for your time your commitment and your wisdom and lastly i want to continue to be with this point and this fact for many this is the end of a chapter of many this is the end of a kind of awful saga for me this is the beginning of the most amazing very clearly in front of it this point in time so i'm i'm excited for the future of bt thank you all right thank you i will entertain a motion to a and we're sure wish our fellow councillors good luck