All righty. Good morning, everybody. Glad to see you all here. As always, I first want to thank our sponsors. Care first CareFirst, Arizona, Karen Ziegler is consulting services, Valley Telecom, Group G and Triad Wireless, we appreciate your continued support for the, for the task force. So a couple of things that I want to touch this morning. Get to the agenda. So again, just a reminder, if you haven't already that please do include in our emails all the time, a place for you to fill up, fill out our excuse me, our farm so that you can be included, and also to be able to see other people who are participating. Second thing is that we don't have anybody new I don't think on the call this morning. And then just a reminder that we will do kibitzing with colleagues after this meeting. If anybody wants to stay online for those of you who think thank you all know that Kevin seemed online. kibitzing is just a informal continuation of the meeting, we turn off the recording. And people can just chat ask questions, share information, or whatever. So if there's people who are interested, we will do that. Next thing is I want to make sure I wish all of you all safe and awesome holidays. Thank you for your continued participation with the task force been a long haul. And of course lots has changed from the days we first started and x's height exciting to see all the stuff that's that's going on in the state today. And of course, we will hear again, an update from the Broadband office about all the stuff that's going on. And while we're talking about the Broadband office, and we'll hear from them in just a little bit, but I really want to thank those folks. For all the work they're doing. I know it's been a long haul and got a long way to go yet. And so really appreciate all the work you've done. And then moving on. First of all I see before I forget Jim, I see you Jim basket, my senior online, and I saw your notice he want to tell people about this certification you received.
Well, jeez, I wasn't expecting that. Surprise. Yeah. So yeah, so Arizona State decided, as you know, part of their charter is Dysport Broadband in the unserved part of Arizona and and with the BEAD coming up the ASU has created a certification course for for Broadband, and Digital Equity. And the first course they held the first certification program started in the fall, it was a six week process. You earn five certifications, and then you get the the overall Digital Equity inclusion cert. And so I went through the course it was it was awesome. It is mostly self paced. And you get to hear from via video from experts mostly on the public policy side all across the country. And then there's an opportunity at the end of every two week period. To Yep, to provide an essay on various topics that you've that you learned about. The best part about that is there were some folks from Canada from the East Coast. We had some folks from California, most of them were tribal city county officials who are just getting into this BEAD game. But to read everybody else's and kind of share in and do kibitzing at the end of the course with who's doing what who's seeing what, who's got what resources and funding opportunity opportunities was pretty cool. So that wrapped up in November and we were the first class to get certified. So
it was pretty cool. Oh, and Aaron, I think you predicted that also, did you not?
I did yes I was in the first cohort. Yeah, I second everything Jim just said it was a fantastic course. And you know, it's great to have such amazing things coming out of our local institutions, of course, but I agree that the, you know, the nation wide perspective, and the folks that you got to hear from was really wonderful.
Oh, give me one second here. I wanted to look for something. Okay.
All righty. So moving on. Janet major is not on. I don't know if she's going to make it today. If not, she had an announcement she wanted to make today, but I'll see if she shows up. If not, I'll do that for her. And then moving on, let's just jump into our updates. Perla I think you're on, please. Hi, Steve.
Good morning, everybody. This is Perla from the Arizona Commerce Authority. I am the Broadband Program Manager. And to give an update last week, Maggie given gave information to the working groups about the state Broadband office statewide in personnel reach toward this will be we're splitting up the state in four quadrants. And we're what we're going to do is visit quarterly, every county, every all 15 counties, as well as tribes to engage and interact with them in regards to what's going on with their communities receive direct inputs and look into the unique challenges that they have. We also have coming up Aaron's Digital Equity plan that's going to be posted for public comment in January. And I think those are the two big updates we have so far. Each quarter of going back to the engagement plan, the each quarter is has split up the cat the state into four quadrants, and we'll be visiting in quarter one the Northeast region in the northern region and quarter to the eastern region, as well as the southeast region in quarter three, the southwest region and central region, as well as quarter for the western region, making sure that we hit all 22 drives as well as all 15 counties.
Is that all?
Yeah, those are the two big updates. Oh, and internet for all is happening in January 23. And the 24th. invitations and save the date should be coming out shortly this week. I believe our marketing team is working on that as well. And that's those are the top big three. Yeah. Awesome.
Well, again, you guys are really busy. And thank you for all your hard work. So I know that you're kind of the lead in providing or updates. But I was just I would just like to just take two minutes for Vanessa and Candace, just so people can meet the other folks who are who are online here. Vanessa, if you just want to say hello, and just remind people about you know what you're doing.
Um, good morning, everybody. And thanks, Steve. Um, so I am Vanessa Figueroa, and I'm the Broadband Grants Manager. And my job will be to ensure that the grant management process goes smoothly. So from the pre Award, which will be the once the RFP they know the notice of opportunity of funding drops to the closeout of the grant. So I'm sure I will be interacting with a lot of people. Not so much. Maybe right now, but eventually you'll get to know me and I'm always here to answer questions.
Great. Thank you, Vanessa. And Candace, I know you're online.
Candace, are you there? Okay, well moving on. So Erin, do you want to just say hello.
Hi. I'm Erin. I am the Digital Equity program manager now with ACA. And as Perla mentioned, you know, my big focus is the Digital Equity plan that is going to be posted for public comment very shortly. Similar to the BEAD stuff that has a public comment period, and then we're integrating all of that feedback that we receive before we send it back to NTIA and so I welcome any conversations that folks want to have about the D the D plan and that process. Thank you
Thanks, Aaron. And Karen, do you want to say hello?
Hello, everyone. Yeah, so as you can see, the Broadband office has wiped the team that they are building, which is fantastic. And I am on contract with ACA just support them in all of their Broadband efforts. Right.
Thank you, Karen. Did I miss anybody? Steve,
this is Candace. Er, yes, sorry, my connection went out. So last week, on December 11th, we had a southern Arizona tribal Broadband roundtable. This was to talk about the initial proposal, what that was going to look like, we also had Nicole, you might provide an overview of the, the requirements, and the ones especially that pertain to working with tribal nations. And then we also had Erin Lorandos, talk about the Digital Equity plan, sort of the overview of that plan and what the objectives and goals would be. So we were able to brief the tribes in that regard. We've been busy also just kind of working and coordinating our efforts with Perla. And the larger the larger plan to to conduct the outreach, you know, next year in that first quarter, the way that it's broken up, and I don't know if Perla went into detail, but we will be spending a lot of time in northern Arizona. And of course, we have one of the largest tribes here in the country that take up land lands on here in the state of Arizona, in New Mexico and in Utah. And that's the Navajo Nation. And we're actually planning it's in our it is in our plan anyway to do specific outreach to the different agencies that are in Navajo Nation. So in other words, we'll spend a lot more time concentrating in that region especially but we'll also hit the tribes that are in northern Arizona, including Hopi, while a PI have a su pi, and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe. So we've got a pretty nice roadmap for what's just right around the corner in 2024. Of course, we also have tribal Legislative Day, the tribal nations and legislation day that happens at the at the state house. And that's on December 10. And then on December 11, there's the first annual tribal gaming Conference, which is going to provide an opportunity for tribal leaders who have already traveled down for tribal Legislative Day, to kind of stick around one more day. And we're going to be able to provide an overview, not just about the Broadband program, but more or less about what ACA offers, in terms of its programs, and resources and information. So we're already geared up for January. But I think our team collectively just wants to close out strong and make sure that, you know, we've covered all of the we checked all the boxes that we need to check to get through and celebrate with our families and enjoy that time before we roll up the sleeves and get to work in January 2024.
Thank you again, just for that quick update. Sure that I miss anybody? I don't think so. So again, thank you all for the hard work that you guys have been doing. really greatly appreciate it. I don't believe Nicole was online this morning. Is there any update? I don't know who's here from the State Library this morning to take a look here. But you guys had two other positions that were opened at ACA, the senior Broadband Program Manager in the community engagement outreach specialist. I know you guys were doing some interviews, what's the status with those
same holidays got a little bit in the way of the interview process. So we'll, we'll have updates after the holidays on on those positions probably but we're still in the interview process.
Okay, not accepting applications anymore. Have you?
Um, I'm honestly not sure about that HR kind of manages that part of it if the if the link is still available on zip recruiter than we are, but um, I I'm not I can't speak to that.
Yeah. Telling people about that position or not.
Yeah, I mean, I can only speak to the one that the interview process that I was involved in, and there were a few applicants. So I think it's kind of always a rolling basis because of, you know, you never know who was going to apply kind of a thing. But um, yeah, I'm not sure if it's still up or not. Sorry.
I can't I can speak a little bit on it. We do have a program manager up still.
It's it says expired, but it looks like it's still accepting applications. But like, no, Garin said something at all, but they try that we can definitely make sure of, but we're still in the interview process, like she says, and we'll be able to provide insights once, once the holidays pass, as you know, everybody's busy with the holidays.
Okay, thank you. Appreciate that, actually, that I mentioned earlier, that we are not meeting next week, of course. And so our next meeting is going to be on January the fourth. And one of the things that I've tried to get survey out about looking at the date, and time that we're meeting, we have a number of people we haven't seen in a while because of meeting time just doesn't work for them. So we'll have to take a look at that. Again, as you know, it's always difficult to find a time that is convenient for everybody. You guys are all busy, busy, busy, busy. But we'll look into that after the first of the year. And just a reminder, although the the input deadline has passed, but just a reminder that we did do a special study session on Volume Two of the initial proposal for for BEAD, and it is available for for viewing previewing, if you are interested in doing that. And I do include that link in the email that I send out. And again, I'll remind you that when I send out my email, that I do have links to a lot of events and meetings and things coming up. As well as the recap of our previous meetings and so forth. So it just remind you to, to try to review that, if you want to know what's what's going on. So next thing is and of course be talking with Aaron and the Broadband office that we want to do, like we did with the BEAD proposal is to do a special study session on the Digital Equity plan. And so we'll look at how it work, how that's going to take place and let you know what's happening with that. I also would like to do a special panel discussion on the role of Broadband providers in Digital Equity and inclusion. There's a lot of providers who were doing great stuff, some who were not doing anything in the Digital Equity space, other than providing just the connectivity. And so we want to have a discussion about what how should Broadband providers be engaged in in Digital Equity. And of course, that certainly fits in with the Digital Equity plan. So
can I say something about that really quick. When you plan that, or when you start putting that together, I think it's really important to start looking at or talking to them about low cost options that they're going to have available. In terms of the ISPs just because of we still don't know about ACP, and if it goes away, the shift really needs to be still getting people connected, but finding low cost options for them to do that. And so yeah, I know, Cox has something, but to you know, bring them all together and talk about, you know, what, if anything they're going to do in that space would be great. Sure.
Okay, thank you, Elena. And when I started looking at that, that was certainly actually trying to do and in the planning of that I'm not sure exactly how that's going to work. And again, I think that's part of a conversation with the with the Broadband office and so forth. So we'll be up to date about that. So moving on, and I looked like I didn't update this page. But let's get into our digital access presentation this morning. And I want to introduce or or actually I'll let him introduce himself as dark when it gets dark. Do I pronounce your last name correctly when injure?
It is actually whining or it's like wining and dining.
Okay. I kind of thought that's what it I don't know why I wasn't sure about that. But anyway, I wanted to introduce doc who is the Director of External Relations with aloe communications. And Doc did a presentation to us probably a year or year ago, a year or two ago. And they have been very busy here in Arizona in recent times. And so we're glad to welcome doc back to kind of give us an update on all the great work that they're doing here in Arizona. So with that, Doc, I'm going to turn it over to you. Did you want to share a presentation or anything?
Like do I have a PowerPoint pulled up on my computer? Can I share my stuff?
I'm going to stop sharing and it's all yours. Right?
So here we go share screen, right here. Okay. So can everybody see that?
Yes. All right.
So I'm gonna go through a few slides here real quick and leave some time for questions. Aloe Arizona is a wholly owned subsidiary of aloe fiber is the parent company. And let me give you a quick background on who allo fiber is Allah fiber is a competitive fiber to the premise provider. We build ubiquitous city wide fiber networks. So when we enter a market, we don't just build the businesses or do E Rate to schools or whatever we actually build to every location in the city, every residence, every business, every government institution, everything within a city. We were founded in 2003. So it's our 20th anniversary. And our founder is still our current CEO gentleman by the name of Brad Moline. We are owned privately. Now net, if you're familiar with nellen. Net, I apologize. It is the largest processor of student loans in the United States. They process about two thirds of the student loans in the United States about three quarters of a trillion dollars under management. They own 45% of aloe SDC Capital Partners owns 48%. They specialize in technology projects, network networks, data centers, that type of thing. We currently pass more than 1 million population and obviously are, are growing on a very quick basis. As we'll talk about real quickly, we have our four core values, just want to mention them real quick. We don't for example, we don't do on honest, we don't do introductory pricing. If you're a customer for five, five days or five years, you pay the same price. So we don't do the you know 5999 And then jumps to 129 99. As you go forward, exceptional value, we provide in our basic rate, the router and so our routers are Wi Fi six compatible routers provided by calyx, they support over 500 devices now was about 250 devices. So each individual router, and then we provide our own tech support 24/7 with our own employees, we don't do call centers we don't offshore. So two o'clock in the morning, if you have an internet issue, you call you get one of our employees in one of our communities that we serve. And we serve right now about 40 communities across three states. Local, we have people in every market. We have our own locators, we have our own drop technicians, our own installers all of our own employees, we don't contract for for any of that. And so right now, for example, we have 86 employees in Yuma permanent employees. We have over 100 employees right now in Mojave County. So we do everything locally, including doing all of our own locates, when when we get requests to locate plant, we had 172,000 requests for locates this year. And we had one at fault locate. So in that that person is no longer with the company, but he wasn't fired for that. But he left. So a pretty exceptional platform there we have a net promoter score of over 70 which people are familiar with the Net Promoter Score, the average ISP in the United States is at 16. So 70 is a very nice I'm happy to explain that if anybody wants to have met Net Promoter Score disfigured and then we understand that we're not hassle free during construction. We are anything by hassle free. You know, we always talk about the telephone company in a community, sad about 125 years to build their network. Cable companies for that about 60 to 70 years depending on the location, we come into a community and in in 18 months to three years, build an entirely new utility with all new fiber in the community. So it is somewhat invasive during the process, but we try to make it as hassle free as possible. We are about 1500 50 employees. When I first came to Arizona did my first deck in May of 2021. We are 450 employees in 13 communities. Now we are 15 150 employees and growing 225 plus of those are here in the state of Arizona. As we continue to expand our markets, we have about approaching 160,000 customers, we got about 700 a week. And we have built communities, we tend to concentrate on tier two and tier three communities. We build a smallest 1500 and as large as 290,000. In population that would be Lincoln, Nebraska. And just some of the awards that we've received. We've received a lot of awards. Those are some of the highlights over the last year or so. Here's a map that indicates you can see we started on the Nebraska, Colorado border here in a place called Imperial Nebraska and then built the panhandle of Nebraska in 2015, no net bought aloe. And that was when you started seeing the expansion in eastern Nebraska. The expansion in the front range of Colorado started around 2019. And now our first markets construction began in May of 2022 in Lake Havasu City, and we now have live customers in Lake Havasu City, Kingman, and Yuma. And we have construction underway in San Luis, I was in front of the Somerton City Council on Tuesday night and we will begin construction their first quarter will begin skin construction in Sierra Vista in in January. The products we offer, as I mentioned, the Wi Fi six wireless routers included that's our tech support, people can actually look at what's happening with your router from our NOC and can reset it if necessary from there. Since we own all the routers, we don't charge for service calls. So it's our equipment, we can fix it so it's not the $89 $100 roll truck roll or whatever our basic internet products for residential are 500 meg all these are symmetrical speeds both download and upload. Since it's fiber, we offer 500 meg a gig and two point gig download and upload both. And then our product is scalable to 10 gig as the routers and the software becomes available. Like I said, this slide is a little outdated because the new router, the Wi Fi six router from calyx now has been upgraded through software to be able to connect 500 devices individually on each router. We're also linear television provider. That's actually how we get our right away access in the communities. We have the video service license agreement with each of the communities that we operate with using wireless set top boxes and offering local stations. And then we're also a telephone provider and we actually use the traditional publicly switched telephone network the PSTN rather than being a VoIP provider. So we are a traditional telephone provider interconnecting on a TDM basis with with all of the long distance I exceed telephone providers, business, same type of thing, but we provide up to 100 gig and more for our business connections. We also acquired a company now out of Kansas City. So we now do in house firewalls, cybersecurity, managed business systems, hosted PBX our largest customers 35,000 stations. So we haven't handled some very large business customers as well as business TV for MD use and hotels that type of thing. This is a It's just a chart that shows where we rank and we're number one in the Midwest.
Open signal for download speed, upload speed, consistency, were five nines, as well as the Broadband video experience rank. This shows you Oops, excuse me, this shows you how we match up against companies like Google Fiber, metro net, companies like that. We're actually a partner now Google Fiber. We're building part of Omaha on behalf of Google Fiber. So we're developing a partnership relationship with Google Fiber. Elena mentioned the affordable connectivity program. This picture the handsome follically challenged individual there is our CEO, shaking hands with Vice President Harris at the White House, we were one of the companies invited to the White House for the ACP celebration. Our program is we provide at no cost 100 Get 100 Make symmetrical product, or the $30 can be applied to any of our other products. And interestingly, about two thirds of our 5000 households actually apply the credit to a higher speed as opposed to taking the free 100 Make symmetrical product. As I mentioned, the current markets also is going to mention the Yuma County middle mile project for people not familiar with this, really a forward looking project. The Arizona the ACA Broadband office has been involved in this in two ways. One previous office director sat on the Yuma County Broadband Committee that worked for several years to try to bring Broadband to rural Yuma County. It's 140 mile project throughout rural Yuma County, allo won the RFP, to design oversee construction, and then we have a 40 year contract to operate that network. And it will be built not only to rural communities, for example, Somerton would not have been able to be last mile fiber built in San Luis, without this network, bringing fiber to these rural communities. And also the ACA Broadband office, awarded Allah grant to help in the construction of San Luis San Luis is an extremely expensive community to construct, because it's all front fed with very narrow easements under the sidewalks. So it is the most expensive construction that there is. And the grant from the Broadband office is helping with the construction in Yuma. So this, there's already other projects, there's tower grants that have been provided to provide bandwidth for precision agriculture in Yuma county. And so this is a really exciting project. It also is going to be extremely helpful in the BEAD process in bringing Broadband to the rural areas of Yuma County, having this Broadband network that will be throughout the county. So we're very excited to be involved with this project. Phase one, which is about the first 80 miles of the project is substantially completed now. And the fiber will be completely installed. Light tested. And and spliced by Valentine's Day, so the Phase One will be completely done and ready for use. By mid February. As we look at expansion markets, our board has prime has already given preliminary approval for about a dozen more markets in Arizona. And so what we're doing now is doing the final candidate design on those markets to make sure that and then we'll issue an RFP on those markets to make sure that those markets are in line with what our finance teams have estimated what the market is going to be but they will be two more unique regions. In addition to the region, we'd like to build regions. So we build a regional anchor community and then we build the areas around that anchor community. And we tend to concentrate on tier two and tier three markets under 200,000 population but we have built over that when it when it is been necessary. Just wanted to talk real quick about a case study and this I think is the last slide I have been in when none that bought out in Lincoln, Nebraska, the idea was to build fiber to the brown in a city of about just under 300,000 people. Lincoln had done something visionary. It's starting in 1978, the roads director, the city of Lincoln required conduit to be put in every time they did a street project. And it was seven way conduit never had any idea what it was going to be used for. And unfortunately, the gentleman died in 2012 before he got to see what it was used for. But there's 300 miles of conduit already under the streets in Lincoln, where we just had to pull fiber, you know, without having to bore. So it was a tremendous lift, we installed 8 million linear feet of fiber and Lincoln, about a three year project currently have 70,000 customers on fiber there. Lincoln before the construction was the 28th fastest city in the state of Nebraska, for fiber for Internet, and as our CEO likes to say I'll spot you Omaha but give me 27 827 other cities in Nebraska, and national speed testing company. Last quarter, showed the 100 largest cities in the United States that Lincoln had the fourth fastest download, second lowest latency, third lowest upload, but overall it was the fastest internet in the United States in the 100 largest cities. So that's going from 28th in Nebraska to number one in the country is is what a fiber network can do. So here's my contact information. Our general manager for Arizona actually lives in Flagstaff used to be a regional vice president for a cable company that serves a national cable company. We hired him away and is now our general manager running the state out of Flagstaff. With that I am going to stop sharing and either address questions or I can hang around during the kibitzing time and and answer questions or but allo our CEO has told everybody from investors we just completed by the way, a securitization process that just raised an additional $700 million for expansion. And we were valued at about $1.6 billion during that analysis. So we have acquired additional private capital for expansion. We hope to participate heavily in the in the BEAD program in all three of our states. But our CEO has made it known that he believes Arizona ultimately will be larger than our other two states combined. When the investment is complete, and the construction is complete, probably three to five years from now.
Okay, Steve?
So, so DACA was you just answered a question that I was going to ask you about, which is that you guys are largely privately funded, if I'm not mistaken. That
is correct. We are privately funded through a lot of it now, going forward, the previous funding was provided by Nell net, and by SDC, which is a capital investment firm out of New York. And so they had provided or arranged the previous capital, some of it equity, some of it debt. But the securitization then has raised significant capital going forward. And our CEO is constantly working with the various investment houses for for new issues of bonds. We were actually rated for companies that want to invest in green companies, we actually received that rating on an investment basis as a green company because of our construction practices, as well as fiber being a green technology. So we qualify for those green bonds as well. We have done Steve about a dozen out of the 40 markets, and with the new markets have been announcing over 50 markets. About a dozen of those we have done public private partnerships with the communities. And so we've been pretty creative about on how we do these with in, in the case of Lincoln, for example, with all the conduit they have, Lincoln grows to put it in Arizona perspective. Lincoln grows about Benson or a Bisbee a year it grows about 5000 residents a year. So as we expand our network and Lincoln every year, we actually expand the city of Lincoln's conduit system on their behalf as well. So in Fort Morgan, Colorado, they on the backbone network, we we own the drops the electronics in Breckenridge, which is incredibly expensive to build it at 9600 feet on the mountain. They own the entire system. We designed it, build it and operate it. So we've done everything from private capital to we have done about a dozen private, public private partnerships as well.
Thanks, doc. Any questions or comments for doc?
Oh, I'll throw in a pitch Steve, this is Jim. I've had the pleasure of knowing doc for a while. If you get a chance to spend time with him. It's a true pleasure. But also, we should all embrace. Their presence in Arizona and their CEOs interest here is in no small part due to Doc's influence. So great work doc. In we really do appreciate having you here.
Thank you. Appreciate those comments.
And, Mitch, I think I saw you online here. And if I am hopefully not mistaken, that you are with Google Fiber. Is that correct? Are you still here, Mitch? Oh, yes, he's gone. Okay. Well, Doc, thank you very much. It really awesome what you guys are doing here.
All right. Thank you, Steve. And like I said, I'll hang around for convincing in case people have any other questions.
Sounds good. Sounds great. Okay. Excuse me, I'm gonna have a little allergy attack here. Okay. So moving on. I don't think I saw anybody from the State Library here this morning. Must be that holiday season that's interrupting everything. But excuse me. Oh, pardon me. You're taking an allergy pill here. So a couple of quick things. Sorry, the Janet is not here this morning. I actually had a champ who actually ran into Janet at a event last night. And she shared with me and some of you may already know that Jana is going to be retiring very shortly. She has been a awesome partner. amazing resource for Arizona. And we're going to miss her. I think she's planning to do some consulting and still be involved with with telemedicine to some degree, but she's going to spend some time with her grandchildren. So, so just for any for those of you who may not have known that was happening, we will miss her. But she has just been an awesome trooper. And hopefully we'll continue to be involved with her. I would have preferred that she made this announcement rather than me. But she said she was going to try to do that this morning. So anyway, I don't think we have anybody from the State Library or the Department of Education today. So any other announced Kelly, I see that you're online. And of course Ma was not here. She's also on annual leave today. Do you have anything more about the pole attachment? proposals that are floating around?
More than Steve No, not really. The it was pretty well covered in the Shelby press release. The FCC issued a further notice further rulemaking basically kick the can down the road on selling more contentious issues. So pretty much what was proposed by the the FCC is what got voted through. It's a step in the right direction. It's a small step. A lot more work needs to be done. Unite and me and a lot of other people agree that one of the big problems is the exception to the shot clock for pull requests over three 3000 polls, the FCC did not handle that in this at all that got bundled into the notice of future further notice of proposed rulemaking. Hopefully I'll deal with that. But until they do, there's really once you get above 3000 poles, there's no incentive for anybody to do anything in a timely, timely manner. So all in all, if anybody has any further questions, I would, there's really not that much out there. I can sit I'll send you the Shelby press release, you circulated that pretty much summarized Shelby's position, which was, you know, good, good start. Hopefully, we'll finish up next year.
Great, thank you. For that update. Kelly. And Kirk Busch. I see that you're here. And maybe here. I see you're on mute. Do you want to say anything about your recent event?
Sorry about that. I was muted. And, and my couple things going on. Steve, I'm sorry. What was that? I heard my name. Oh,
yeah. Didn't you just have an event recently?
An event? Oh, yeah. The data center, the data center and AI cloud infrastructure summit a good year? We did. It was awesome. Mark Goldstein was there and just made it awesome. And, and we're gonna be doing some posting on it. But if you search that hashtag, hashtag, AZ DC 23. And LinkedIn, you can get kind of a feel for what happened. But yeah, it was awesome. Okay. And si Tech Institute was there and you raise money for the stem kids? And everything's good. Thanks. Over sorry about multitasking. Not a problem.
I know. You always do that. Okay. Anybody else have anything that they want to share? Looks like we're going to end our meeting early today. Anything people want to talk about? If not, I guess we are done for today. Mark. Good to see you last night, Mark. Hey, wait. It's good to see you last night. Great conversation.
Likewise, Steve, here, just just a couple of two things. I think it's you and other members of this committee is doing an awesome job. And I'm grateful and thankful to be part of it. And I want just to wish everyone a very, very safe and happy holidays, and a very happy new year. So look forward to seeing see all and 2024 and working with you guys. Great.
Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it. And, John, I know you're been here for a while. Do you have anything new that you want to talk about?
Well, one of the things that we had a nice K 12. Summit in Arizona. This is for the National Initiative for cybersecurity education. And it was a great meeting. We had high school folks from all over the state there. And you know, everyone's excited about having better connectivity. That's going to make a huge difference for education around the state. And we're hoping to get better connectivity. We did have somebody from Denae up there from the Navajo Nation. But we'd like to see greater participation and having higher bandwidth, of course, is going to make that more and more possible. Happy holidays to everybody.
Thanks, John. Anybody else? Well, again, I just want to thank you all for participating this past year and look forward. And we'd like to get hear from you if you have any thoughts about and we don't have to do it now. But if you want to send me a note, give me a call, send smoke signals, whatever works for you about what you'd like to see next year, what can we do different? What can we do better? To make this more useful? Again, so much has changed, and so much is happening that it for me, it's a question of okay, what's next for us? And, and how do we best help people? So with that, I don't anything else this morning? Anybody mentioned
something i All these years since the taskforce started in March 2020. I've kept like I mentioned to you in the past a spreadsheet of all the presentations that have been given to the task force since March 2020. And if it's something you want to distribute, you know, it's sort of a database of all the presentations that have been given. I can send that to you sometimes. So
yeah, I didn't know you were still doing that. Henry. Yes, please send it to me that that have the playback links in it to
know it doesn't have to But Steve, if you what it has is the date of the right the meeting in the presentation that you know who is the person under a brief description of what was and who the presenter was, and then if you go to that date you can on Steve's website, you can look up the actual presentation. Right, Steve, you have all those. So, yeah. Great.
Cool. Thanks, Henry. Yeah, it sounded to me. I'll figure out how to best take advantage of that. That's awesome. Okay, so Well, while we're talking about that, excuse me. What? So, as you know, I try to do a summary of the meetings. I have the wisdom of the presenters, after every meeting, and the recordings and everything. Is that work useful for you? Is there a better way to do this? How are you getting the information you need to be able to do follow ups?
I take that as a yes. As we're good. We did not Eric, I see your online I forgot. I should have asked you. Do you have anything new to add from CPE? I'll see.
What else the Yeah, just gonna go ahead and give a quick updates of what we have going on here. Just give me a second. So yeah, we're partnering with Thiago here. And we're going to try to bring ACP applications and other resources out there to the community in busy in Douglas. So we're looking to start that here. After the holidays, we already got some meetings in place looking for some locations. And then we also going to be meeting up here with the New Mexico Public Library here in Santa Fe, since they're also part of our ACP grant re going out there and try to bring some new enrollments to that. The only thing is that there is the updates with the ACP grant. So now it seems to be month to month before it seems like the funds might be running out. Near April. Now they're letting us know that you know, plan from month to month. We don't know how far the grants gonna go anymore in regards to enrolling new people for the grant. And then CPLC ourselves. We're going to be closed from that week, this upcoming week. So if you guys try to contact any of us, probably won't be hearing from us until the new year. And then lastly, we're going to be going out here to some of our like our low cost apartments like government assistant apartments that we have. And we're going to be doing some tabling and outreach and enrollments for for the community as well.
Thank you, Eric CPLC has one of the most amazing organizations has been a great partner with us. We greatly appreciate all the work that they do here in Arizona, not just for technology and Broadband but economic development and education and just so many things. So they're just amazing organization. So anything else I'm going to stop recording now
