The Berkshires Broadband Movement: How 19 Small Towns Built Their Own Fiber Future - Episode 668 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:12)
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell. I'm at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm having a good day and I'm here talking with Jess Auer, who is our Senior Researcher working with me closely on a lot of tribal broadband networks and other research projects. Welcome to the show, Jess.

Jessica Auer (00:38)
Thanks for having me.

Christopher Mitchell (00:39)
And then we have a special guest coming in from Western Massachusetts, David Kulp is a broadband activist in the Berkshires and ⁓ manager of one of the municipal light plants. Welcome to the show, David.

David Kulp (00:52)
Nice to be here, Chris.

Christopher Mitchell (00:53)
We are excited to talk about one of the more interesting municipal networks, kind of a regional collection of municipal networks that came about in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, about which we have a report. Jess, do you remember the report? Do you have to read it or do you actually remember the title of verbatim because it's seared into your memory?

Jessica Auer (01:13)
can remember the title, it is ⁓ Seeking the Commonwealth of Connection, How Small Town Volunteers and Public Partnerships Transformed Internet Access in Western Massachusetts.

Christopher Mitchell (01:25)
And that's about all you need to know. I mean, that's the executive summary right there. It's everything. ⁓ Jess is responsible for this report. It is a wonderful, wonderful piece. And I do want to say that for people who are tuning in here, we are recording this. This is the second interview, actually. David and Jess have just spoken with Nicole Ferraro from Light Readings, The Divide, a wonderful podcast. And we're going to be...

David Kulp (01:30)
I think we're done.

Christopher Mitchell (01:52)
touching on slightly different topics. It might overlap a little bit, but we're really aiming to sort of talk on some of the other things. So always recommend people go out and check that out. But we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the volunteer nature of some of the work, ⁓ including how people ⁓ organize to get this built. One of the challenges they faced along the way, we're gonna talk about the construction process and then how the contracts actually work between.

the local municipal light plants who own the fiber and then Western Gas and Electric, who is kind of an operational partner, I think would be a way to put it. So that's the preview. David, why don't we start, let me ask you to just start by telling us, were you involved from day one and what was day one like for you?

David Kulp (02:33)
Yeah, almost from day one, there were a few others who were the instigators of a meeting at a middle school in Western Massachusetts. I think it was in the winter ⁓ early 2010. This was after the middle mile was built out to much to all of our towns. But we were still without

any access at all, completely unserved in towns like mine. there was, you know, through word of mouth, I would say there was about 50 people who showed up at a middle school and talked about this crazy idea of actually building a fiber optic network, which at the time really seemed

outrageous to do in a rural area where there was still lots of talk about how to maybe use fixed wireless or how to somehow incentivize the incumbents to somehow serve these places that weren't profitable for them. And the thought at the time was that we were just being way too ambitious, way too expensive technology. would never be able to do it. But that's what we wanted to do. And we

We

then spent the next year figuring out how to organize and we did lots of different work that I could talk to you about, but ultimately that was the beginning of creating an organization that was called Wired West.

Christopher Mitchell (03:54)
So we'll talk more about that, but I did wanna, I wanna make sure I got this right because, and I'll come to you in a second, Jess, for your origin story regarding ⁓ this project. But I did wanna say, I always feel like it's helpful for people that are not familiar with New England to know.

you're talking about rural hill towns, but this is not like in Minnesota, we have towns and then around the town, have farms or other people living and they're kind of an unincorporated areas, the county might look after them. In the Berkshires, the towns are everything, right? There's no one that lives between towns effectively, right?

David Kulp (04:26)
That's correct.

Yeah. Massachusetts and a few other New England states are a little bit unique in our governance structures and our municipalities. Everything is in a town. And so when we talk about small towns, we're talking, there's no unincorporated county area here, but it also speaks to how we make decisions because just like in Vermont, in Massachusetts, we all have what's called annual town meeting and that's

where in a pure democracy, except for in the few cities in Western Mass.

all of the residents get together and decide our budget and all of our priorities and any other legal issues for the towns. And so we decide in a pure democracy everything from whether we're going to, know, what are the individual line items for our budget are going to be or whether we're going to build a fiber optic network in our towns.

So it is unique in that respect. We're not talking about everybody is in a small town here.

Christopher Mitchell (05:29)
So at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I often assign things to people and I'm like, hey Jess, I need you to do this 

thing. I need you to do that thing. Jess, your involvement in this project was a surprise to me in that I didn't know it was a project until I feel like it was nearly done and Ry was like, hey Chris, Jess is almost done with that case study. And I was like, what? So Jess, can you tell me what the origin story was for why you thought we should dig into this?

Jessica Auer (05:53)
⁓ Yeah, was, I mean it was more I was looking for ⁓ a new big research project to sort of take on. I like to have something to structure my days so that Chris can't just assign me whatever he wants. you know, this was a, Ry and I sort of talked about it together deciding on this. part, two things I think. This is just like such a concentration of.

these small towns who have this infrastructure, unlike, I think, really almost anywhere else in the country. And then second of all was that, I think you, Chris, is that you were really interested in this from the very beginning. You followed this for a long time. You wrote about it. We've written about it at various stages. And so this was a...

a sort of story that we'd already invested in, personally invested in, it felt good to kind of give it a big package and a big start to finish sort of thing. I would definitely say that some of the folks I talked to, Chris, were like, ⁓ yeah, I remember Chris Mitchell. Good or bad, but.

Christopher Mitchell (06:48)
He made us wait an hour when

he got caught in traffic and didn't know how to get to the restaurant in time.

So for people who aren't familiar, I'll just say that briefly, we'll the spoil the surprise is that a lot of communities came together to form a cooperative effort called Wired West. And out of that, the state of Massachusetts was kind of originally or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was originally supportive, more supportive than we had seen other states being of community networks.

and then became less supportive, which was disruptive. And then once again, became somewhat supportive of certain models. And we ended up with 19 towns building their own networks. And most of them, all of them working with Westfield Gas and Electric, thank you. I was excited to say this part, which is that I remember the early days. So David, I think...

Just captures this in the piece, but I was frustrated from the beginning about the mass broadband 123 project because one of the things that I looked into when I started this work was the Alberta supernet.

and the idea that if you had a publicly built middle mile network that just connected one location in each town, there was a theory that then someone would then take that network and expand it to all of the people and connect them. And the empirical evidence from Alberta and other places suggested that in fact what happens is is that a few people set up ISPs opportunistically and serve people that are convenient to serve and everyone else is left behind. And so I saw mass broadband say, we're gonna bring a connection to every town and I was like,

well, that's not gonna do a whole lot. then that's, think, motivated some of the folks in the region then to go to that meeting. I don't wanna, because we have limited time, I don't wanna spend too much time at the beginning, but I do wanna talk about the role of volunteers. And so...

David, I want start with you to just, if you could give us a sense of, this was a not solely volunteer led project, but I would say a volunteer driven project in a lot of ways is what it looked like from the outside.

David Kulp (08:42)
I would say almost exclusively volunteer. So there's very little non-volunteer ⁓ time that was put into this. got some planning grant money where we could hire consultants to generate some pro formas and things like that. But in of the organizational effort, it was...

Christopher Mitchell (08:44)
Okay.

David Kulp (09:02)
all volunteer and it was highly organized volunteer effort right from the beginning where we immediately set up representatives from each town and these folks of which there were more than 40 of us you know were very committed so we were on telephone calls usually once a week or

every other week and we were often driving to visit each other and organizationally I think the fact that we had a strong commitment to that an organization and not just individual towns working on their own I think really supported that volunteer effort. It made it possible for us to work together. And then the last thing in terms of volunteer effort is we're talking 40 small towns and there was a usually at least

one representative from each town. So there was a lot of volunteers and it I guess it it speaks to the the need but it and it also speaks to

how impressive it was that we could sign up or we could get those numbers from so many different towns where is in other examples, you it's hard to scare up any volunteer help. And I think it was really special here that, you know, we had, you know, upwards of a hundred representatives that were regular volunteers and participants right from the beginning.

Jessica Auer (10:23)
wanna put a little bit of a fine point on it. I didn't think to ask you when I first talked to you, David, but I talked to a few people after you and I did ask them how much time do you think you spent from the start of this? How much of your time have you committed to it? Do you have a ballpark number for that?

David Kulp (10:39)
I don't know myself, but I'm sure it's thousands of hours. Yeah. I mean, seems crazy that now in retrospect that there were so many of us that were so committed, but yeah, we really were.

Jessica Auer (10:43)
I mean, that's what I hear.

Christopher Mitchell (10:45)
Is this in for?

You know, I don't

know that it does. I I'll say like, I salute the kind of time you put into it, David, but like, this is why we have 800 electric co-ops across the country too. Like, that the generation of that time also put time into this? I despair a little bit that we haven't seen more examples of this. I do think we have places where people put in a lot of volunteer time to try to work it out, but the structures aren't there to support them. They don't maybe find that kind of mutual aid.

that you found with the other towns to work together. But I like to think that spirit is still out there.

So if we skip ahead a little bit, past the idea phase, past years of trying to get people, I think, in Boston and in other parts of the state to be supportive and recognize that this is a real process, there's a point where the state becomes supportive. And so let me ask you, Jess, because I think you kind of had a sense of the rocky road as you were starting to dig into it.

But were you surprised at the kind of turns that it seemed to take when you were talking to people about how they got to where they are?

Jessica Auer (11:55)
Yeah, well, definitely I think that just the sense that maybe the state agency as a whole couldn't make up its mind about what it wanted to see happen and how it wanted to see that happen. And we heard about, well, it sounds like in 2014 and folks, after spending all this time organizing, of pressure the state to put a little bit of money into this, to support this project a little bit.

And then there is a change in leadership at MBI, at Massachusetts Broadband Institute. skepticism that might have been there before, but maybe wasn't quite so much on the forefront, really starts to take over the way that they relate to you folks in Western Massachusetts. And what struck me is the sort of back and forth of like,

Christopher Mitchell (12:26)
the Mass Broadband Institute.

Jessica Auer (12:44)
you know what happens is they say actually we don't like the cooperative model we want you to do individual town-owned networks and then actually we don't think you should own them at all we think you should work with a private provider and you know we're willing to give them a lot of money to do that for you on your behalf aren't we so aren't we so generous sort of attitude

Christopher Mitchell (13:05)
Yes. And before you say that, David, I mean, I will say like, it always feels difficult for me to talk about MBI during this period because the Mass Broadband Institute was forward thinking in a lot of ways and in, in, in, ⁓ in more aggressive than most other States in terms of trying to resolve these issues. And yet, ⁓ at times I feel like they were really backward, in terms of that. mean, this is a time like right now we know of Vermont has like these, community communications union districts.

At this point, Vermont was trying to figure out how to shovel cash at Fairpoint as fast as possible, you know, to build more DSL. So it's not like other states had figured it out. So what do you remember of that time, David?

David Kulp (13:43)
Well, I guess it's mixed. I think you were right in some sense that they were forward thinking. On the other hand, most of what they were doing were sort of small scale pilot studies of things like wireless technology and so on. It was not very big thinking. And then when we showed up with this cooperative, it could have been a very fruitful public public

relationship there where they could have enthusiastically added their professional expertise and other resources that the state could bring to bear so that where we might be lacking in the specific details of construction, they could compliment us. to be honest, it was always a little bit of a

Friction, there was always some friction between the two organizations. Some of it was personality driven and some of it was just that, you know, these are bureaucrats who were in Eastern Mass and we were mostly a lot of retirees and other volunteers in Western Mass without that kind of experience with, you know, working with government and so on. And so there was just sort of understandably a lot of kind of friction there, but.

Nevertheless, there was a receptivity to the fact that we were a conduit or a connection to Western Mass to make some progress. And so, you know, we got various planning grants and had regular meetings and so on, and really saw ourselves as potential equal partners for a while. But then, as you said, come around 2014 or something, that sort of tone changed.

And there was, you know, maybe they're like Jess said, maybe some of that was just boiling underneath all along and we didn't know it. But it then just became very transparent that while we, you know, they were willing to talk, they really didn't see us as a real serious organization, even though the irony is that we talked about that Massachusetts is made up of all these small towns. went through enormous political efforts to

authorize these municipal light plants, created more MLPs in Massachusetts in two years, I think, than it existed in the rest of the history of MLPs, created this cooperative that was all the will of the people and backed by our governments in those towns. And yet it was never really seen as a legitimate entity that the state would work with as an equal.

And so at some point they just started to think, you know, signal that it wasn't really going to work the way that we wanted. We weren't going to own the network. We weren't going to necessarily even operate the network. And then it wasn't even going to be a cooperative at all. was, every, hear this ridiculous sort of ⁓ rationalization all the time, but you know.

Every town has a different sort of solution that's appropriate for their needs kind of thing. But really what that ends up doing is splintering a cooperative that is pulling together the population numbers and the resources across a large area and splintering it into many different small groups that make it much harder to do something bold like build a fiber optic network.

Christopher Mitchell (17:04)
Would it be correct to say the state kind of surfaced two objections? One, they thought the cooperative structure might be too rigid and not allow individual towns to do what they wanted to do. And then the other was that they just thought not enough people would want the service. That your projections for the amount of people that would take service from the new network were way too high and unrealistic.

David Kulp (17:28)
I think the latter one for sure may be the first, but I think the third one was just a sense of being, I think, risk averse that this largely volunteer cooperative representing hundreds of square miles of a third of the state could be trusted to build and operate this network. so more conservative folks thought, well,

There are incumbents that have already been doing this for years. Maybe we can get them to do it instead.

Christopher Mitchell (17:57)
I love that attitude. I love the sense of like, you know, these companies that we all hate and who we agree have not invested properly, nonetheless have a lot of experience and we should trust them. And I'm not saying that that's totally irrational, but like there's a bit of a rationality mixed in.

David Kulp (18:12)
Yeah, you know, and to jump forward just a little bit, you know, ultimately there again, yeah, there is some truth to that, you know, we ended up partnering with Westfield Gas and Electric, and it was because of their incumbent experience as a utility, and their more recent experience as a broadband fiber optic builder and provider, they became an excellent partner for us to work with. But yeah, the frustration was that we

definitely at that time saw the solution being a municipally owned Internet service. And we saw a lot of the benefits of that as a nonprofit. And I don't think that the state really saw that as like we did.

Jessica Auer (18:55)
also want to say there was this, this didn't involve Asheville, this in the record in Beckett, which is another one of the towns that built, there are minutes of a meeting in which the MBI representative was there to try to convince them that they should take this deal with a big cable provider. And he said two things. He said,

60 megabits per second is going to be perfectly fine for a family in the future. Yeah, 60. We don't need any more than that. And he said building a fiber network in Beckett would be like building a highway for two cars. So I think there might have also been a of just a thinking that you were asking for too much or you were doing too much for the folks that lived there.

Christopher Mitchell (19:18)
60.

was, this is what Christopher Ali, the professor from Penn State now calls the politics of good enough, right? It's like good enough for them, right? Like nobody, nobody that's doing planning for Boston would accept that level of capacity. But if it's in the Berkshires, who cares? Like y'all, y'all don't need that much. And, you know, we see this this attitude in a number of places, but Jess, there was there was claims made that and I've seen this in some places. I mean, I will say around that timeframe, I was looking at a

and that network would need 70 % to break even. And I felt like that was an exceptionally high amount that would be difficult to achieve in this other area, not in Massachusetts. And so that's sort of the area that Wired West needed. We now have evidence as to like what the take rate is. How are these 19 towns doing with their take rates now that we actually have facts on the ground?

Jessica Auer (20:30)
think David can answer for himself, but WG &E told me that they had 8,000 customers in the area, which was about 80 to 90 % of the potential subscribers. So we're looking much even higher than 70%.

David Kulp (20:46)
We ran numbers and we committed to the project knowing that we needed at least about 45 % take rate. And now in Asheville we're at 80%.

Christopher Mitchell (20:57)
Right, and 45 % is totally reasonable. 70 % is a challenge. But the thing that I think we should highlight, and you already said this once, David, is this is not a random issue in which you have an elected body that's making a decision and people are kind of checked out. People had voted on multiple occasions in town meetings that they wanted to move forward with this and that.

tells you something and it wasn't close, right? I mean, like when I look at these votes, many of them were unanimous and these are events that most people showed up at. You had a real sentiment of people in the course of doing this work it seemed like.

David Kulp (21:33)
No question about it. I mean, we had larger turnout for these broadband votes than almost any other town meetings that we've had in our town's history. And they were overwhelmingly supportive. And Ashfield was not unique in that respect. Even though there was a lot of skepticism at the time, lots of questions, ultimately, almost all the voters were behind it. So yeah. And I attribute that sum to our

Western Mass and Yankee culture and rural nature and so on was just this feeling that here is a problem. We don't really think that anybody's gonna come and save us. We really need to fix this ourselves, but we need a little bit of capital to make this happen. And while it didn't quite turn out the way that we wanted, ultimately that is essentially what happened. We got...

some capital from the state, some capital from the FCC, and a large amount of money from our own property taxes to make it happen. And at this point, we're in the black. We've paid off our debt in Nashville, and we're not that different than a number of other towns, so much so that we're operating in the positive territory, so much so that we could lower our rates $20 and

are now offering a gigabit service for 65 bucks a month.

Christopher Mitchell (22:52)
It's really great, which is lower than most people pay for that service anywhere in the United States. Jess, ⁓ you've been to a fair amount of Tribal Broadband Bootcamps. You've done a little bit of construction yourself. When you were digging into how construction went with these Wired West networks, is there anything different that ⁓ you saw in terms of construction than we see with a standard kind of process for a municipal investment?

Jessica Auer (23:17)
Well, I don't know. I don't know exactly what you're trying to get me to talk about. But there are a couple of things that I noted. I think all 19 of you hired Westfield Gas and Electric as the owner project manager for the construction as well. And one thing we did see is that folks were saying, having a utility with experience with poles, with attaching two poles,

saved towns a lot of money. They knew when to push back when a pole owner was saying, you need to replace this pole, or they knew what to expect. They were steeped in that and had just done it in Westfield. And that was a really valuable element of the partnership in the construction phase. But the other thing that I do want to highlight, and we have two examples.

In Plainfield, one of those towns, volunteers spent two weekends clearing trees and brush and later dug trenches for the fiber and in Washington they prepared the concrete pad for the hut and installed an underground conduit. in some of these cases, the drive to get this done and to save money and to do it, get hands on was even more pronounced than in some places. And I've done some

David Kulp (24:26)
Yeah.

Jessica Auer (24:28)
trenching and conduit and that's not easy so that says something.

David Kulp (24:32)
But in terms of construction, what Jess said is true that we, these small towns, it's maybe important for listeners to really get a grasp of how small we're talking about here. We're talking about towns with populations between 300 and 2000. And so we don't have the staff for doing procurement and we don't have somebody that can serve as the clerk of the works.

things like that, that we would need to hire those out. And although we can definitely do that, we do that in the past when we're doing other large capital projects in our towns, it was incredibly useful to have a partner through Westfield that had the experience of doing these sorts of things so that they could handle our bidding, for example, for getting our contractors that were going to.

built the outside plant, for example, and so on. that was a really, continues to be a very good public-public partnership. And the fact that we were both municipal light plants also meant that working with them was very straightforward contractually because Massachusetts makes it easy for those kinds of entities to work together.

Christopher Mitchell (25:46)
did want to go in a direction that I didn't prepare Jess for, but she's prepared for my unpreparedness. Jess, I asked you to look at a little bit of some of the towns that had joined Wired West, but then had taken the state's advice to work with a private company, like a cable company or something like that. What did you find when you dug around in those examples?

Jessica Auer (26:07)
Yeah, I talked to a couple of people in some of those towns. I'll say as a caveat that I talked to people that were really involved in the Wired West organizing. So these are people that were the most committed of anybody. they said that like, talk to anyone random on the street, they might not feel as strongly as I feel about this. So that's the caveat. But both of them said that the Internet service that they have is fine.

It's fine, it gets the job done. But their prices are going up always. They can't get a person on the phone that knows who they are and what their issue is. And they just feel genuinely that their town lost an opportunity to kind of have a stake in its own future, in its own digital future in that way. that forever, they'll be asking this outside provider who doesn't...

care about them and their small town for a favor, essentially, or asking them for their attention. And in one of these cases, in fact, the town paid for it. The town, you know, the state money went to this outside provider, and the town also had to pay this outside provider for 10 years. And the sort of disappointment of that is pretty profound for these folks, feeling like a lost opportunity for sure.

Christopher Mitchell (27:20)
David, when you think back to all the hours that you put into this, what makes you feel that it was the right decision aside from the fact that your bill went down rather than up recently?

David Kulp (27:30)
Well, I think regardless of the output outcome, whether some of these towns ended up with private providers or whatever, the fact that we spent so many volunteer hours creating the political pressure to result that resulted in change, I think I'm very proud of, you know, I'm happy with the outcome here in Ashfield with our municipally owned fiber network, but I'm also just

proud that politically as a group, we really put the pressure on so that something could actually be done for everybody. And it became, know, Governor Baker's, one of his issues that he felt like he wanted to really complete as an indication of one of the things that he accomplished during his term. And, you know, he took, you know, a victory lap around Western Massachusetts before he left.

making sure that everybody remembered that he was the one who was responsible, supposedly, for completing the last mile. And to a certain extent, he did, you know, light some fire under a number of people. like, you know, MBI was so dysfunctional, at least dealing with a lot of Western Massachusetts towns when he came into office, that he literally moved money to a different entity within the executive branch just to get money moving.

and to Western Mass again. So I do give him credit for that. So I guess I'm really proud of the volunteer work in terms of its broader impact. But I'm also proud of it because of the fact that we do, in many cases, own our own network. We can control the level of service, the level of the pricing, and we can respond to our citizens directly.

and we're keeping the money in Western Massachusetts and in our community.

Christopher Mitchell (29:14)
The last thing I want to talk about if you have another couple minutes, the last question then is, so we did want to talk briefly about the contracts and how it works. So Westfield Gas and Electric is a provide service and I gather that there's some difference between the way different towns have contracted with them.

I don't know if David, if you want to walk us through some of that and then Jess, if you want to fill in anything else related to that that you saw.

David Kulp (29:36)
Yeah, sure. So each town has a separate contract with Westfield, they have some, but basically they're very standard contracts. And the rates are based on per subscriber and how many years we've committed to work with Westfield. So, Ashfield agreed to the longest term once we renewed after a couple of years and we were happy with them. we didn't want to make a big commitment right up.

at the beginning, once we've had a good experience, we've now committed for the 10 years and we've got very low rates per subscriber. And the way that the money flows is basically all our subscribers are automatically paid. There's no actual billing. You have to set up things, so it's an automatic deduction. All that money goes into an account that's held by the town and then Westfield bills us on a monthly basis.

for the subscriber counts, any bucket truck rolls that have to have happened, and basically that's about it. And so that money then flows to them.

Jessica Auer (30:37)
And do you, my understanding is that you pay Westfield, if there's a repair or maintenance, something that has to happen, that's also like on a, it's like a separate sort of cost plus basis.

David Kulp (30:49)
That's exactly right. and they, and at this point we have such a good relationship that I've stepped out as the middleman between all of that. So customers call up their customer service line, you know, a tree has fallen on my overhead line. They roll a truck, they fix it. I get a bill. It gets paid all automatically. I'm not involved at all anymore. So, ⁓ they really do an excellent job.

Christopher Mitchell (31:14)
great is there anything else you want to close with Jess in terms of as the outsider looking in any surprises

Jessica Auer (31:21)
I don't know. I just, I'm really, I want to thank David for being on the podcast, but also for meeting with me a few months ago and everyone who talked to me about the experience. just, it's really inspiring. It's like kind of...

you know, maybe a little too sweet to say, but it's really inspiring to just see communities who are like, it's driven, and it's not even driven by an elected political leader or something. It's just like folks deciding that something can be different for them and making it so. And the thing that struck me about the volunteer work is just this sense that you say it's really amazing as you look back, but like, there was no guarantee that it was gonna work, and yet it just to continue to show up and continue to invest in your community in that way.

is really special.

David Kulp (32:02)
Yeah, I would just on the volunteer side, I would really be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that I was only a small player in this and that there were many people who played very dedicated roles and put in a lot more hours than I did. I'm not going to list all of them, but there are, you know, it was a big team effort for sure. The other thing is that I just feel really grateful that the timing worked out so well that we were

even though it felt like a really long time, because we started in 2010 and we didn't get connections until about 2020, in Ashfield, we got our first connections in, I think, June of 2020, just after the pandemic had shut everything down. And then...

in typical kind of small town fashion, we started thinking what's going to happen for schools in September. And we then went through our list of all of our residents and said, who has school children? And we prioritized the hookups just for those homes that had children so that come the end of August, all of our kids in Ashfield were connected so that they could go to school. So ⁓ it really turned out to be very fortunate that the timing worked out the way that it did.

Jessica Auer (33:13)
as you say that, strikes me like that's something that only a person who's there and local and cares could do. Much less would do, but could do.

Christopher Mitchell (33:20)
Yes. Well, I hope that it serves you well throughout this very snowy winter that's coming up. always, I feel like Google surfaces the alerts for me. I'm up here in Minnesota. I know that you all get some weather there too. and I also know that the investor owned electric lines have a habit of going down and I hope you're able to stay up when that happens.

David Kulp (33:34)
We sure do.

Christopher Mitchell (33:43)
So thank you so much, David, for coming on and thank you, Jess, for the report and sharing it with us.

David Kulp (33:47)
It's my pleasure to chat with you, Chris.