good evening everyone it is 5 30 and i'll call our work session to order the city clerk will note that all council members are present and our work sessions are very informal and we go directly to our agenda but i need to continue to let everyone know that as we are still in this global pandemic crisis our meeting is conducted both in person and online all of our city council members and staff are in the council chambers and practicing social distance as you can see members of the public may attend in person if they like otherwise the public can watch this meeting online at burnsville mn.gov meetings or comcast channel 16 or 859. the public can also still participate through zoom by joining us at zoom dot us slash join or call 651 372-8299 and more information is available on our meetings web page and in the council agenda packet please note there is an audio delay if you are watching us on tv or online so if you speak please mute your video broadcast first if some meetings attendees experience audio issues we ask you to leave the meeting and then log back in this usually resolves the issue okay so we'll move on to the first item on the agenda and the first item on the agenda this evening is the minnesota valley transportation authority presentation and we welcome our i think miss faulconer you're going to introduce mr winder thank you madam mayor we have had this on your agenda for quite some time and the timing wasn't right and tonight's meeting is all about transportation so it seemed fitting that the chief executive officer of the mbta luther winder is here this evening to give you an update of what's happening there there also are a couple mvta staffers in the zoom meeting should some particular questions come up i just want you to know that as well as a matter of protocol and with that also council member keeley is the council pointed liaison to the mvta board and i am the alternative to him with that i'll turn it over to luther to give his presentation and thank you for being here yeah thank you and welcome thank you so much mayor council members um little gender first thing i want to talk about it's been a very challenging i think year for us all um first thing i'm going to give an update ken and kobit 19 house affected our transit and what we've done at mvta to mitigate that and also keep our customers safe our focus has been health and safety we have taken our cues from the cdc the cdc puts as well as in conjunction with the fta provides standards and recommendations for bus cleaning as well as sanitizing disinfecting procedures what we've done as an agency we've we have not only met those which is cleaning daily but we've actually superseded them that we do continue to clean after every particular trip as well as we've also looked obviously to promote from the cdc recommendations social discipline on our buses as well as we've implemented the governor's executive order for um wearing face coverings um i do want to say one of the interesting things that we have continued to see and the great thing about transit is that um there's always different promotions things we find out in our industry so what we're rolling out in the next couple weeks is what's called it's a it's actually an online competition we're going to be asking our customers to take pictures on the bus on our buses with their face coverings and um hashtag and send it into our twitter and our facebook page we're going to pick winners out weekly and provide them with bus pass it's a way to positively promote to customers who actually do utilizing those face coverings and in a non-computational positive way so we're looking forward to starting that campaign on very very shortly as far as coverage 19 as i've talked about before we continue to limit capacity on our buses we do change air filters on our buses daily we've removed all paper products that schedules all papers bring before buses we have installed bus barriers um it's been that's been a new um it's actually been a new accomplishment we've done in the past in the past few weeks so all of our vehicles on the road now do have a plastic grass plexiglas barricade that protects the operator as well as the public when they when they're boarding a light and paying their fare we've also did something um in our in three of our two of our um stations which is burnsville transit station excuse me at 12 garage where our administrative employees are we've actually installed hvac filters outside of our outside of our current hvac system it's a uva it's a uva light filtration system it's supposed to obviously continue to actually clean and sanitize the air for us not only the individuals who transverse from burns but transit station but also employees who come from the burnsville bus garage as well as or you can bus garage for our employees as well with that being said it's not all it's not all um you know covert relating we're going to circle back we've talked about ridership and alcohol has affected us but there actually were actually been some positives as well as system review and reinvestment um in this particular service area first is first myself it's interesting and it's kind of changed a little bit but um i'm served on a national tcrp panel which is transit cooperative research program i'm almost selected on the panel with about six other um ceos from small to medium-sized agencies from around the country and we've been looking at innovative practices for planning midsize for planning for small midsize transit agencies we're developing a report right now to start off meeting in the national institutes of health and national institute of science and technology in dc now we do zoom meetings but one of the things we've looked one of the things we've been continuing to look at is just different we start out looking at just ways from first and last mile as well as how we can obviously continue to um look at power power partnerships across across the nation looking at best practices we see from other transit agencies in order to obviously to engage and increase ridership recently the last few meetings were really focused on kovit because that's actually affected ridership but some of the reporter will be out in next next two months but some of the things we've adopted we've looked at will actually help us and our service area continue to kind of win back customers looking at some of the service models on the some other trains we've done across across the country and i will say mndot actually submitted some info good information a good case study that we'll be utilizing in that in us in this report too in the next the next couple months next couple months so i'll forward that over when that's um for a review or come back and talk to that when that report is finished as far as burnsville service update in particular covet 19 in beginning obviously led to a number of route suspensions in late march but in june and september service changes are reinduced many routes back to regular weekday service with others coming back to on a limited schedule currently right now we're operating 55 of our base schedule pre-coping um we're actually in october when we do an expansion of our connect service to rosemont and apple valve we'll be at 59 of our base server platform our pre-coven um our current service as you see our 442 still runs that's our burnsville apple valley on on the weekends we serve a four-four service that goes to mall of america cern's berkeley transit station r460 to minneapolis is operating um just recently back in september we put our um our 465 which is one of obviously going to unm and we've seen um and first day of service was actually yesterday um we've seen about i think 60 students that rode the bus they go back to unm so they're we're seeing hoping to continue to see that to increase as well as our um 480 service out of egan you serve burns with transit station but it still serves saint paul and a route 495 of course which goes from brunswick translation mall of america as well as serves marshall road and some of the vince's in shakopee and empire lake overall ridership just like i think what the metro transit had the same we were all we were having a banner urine in january we had record ridership in january and then um in february we were holding we were holding consistent we're going to have a banner year and then you know the our market followed a little bit what we've continued to see is we're about we're down about 55 percent total ridership um this time the same snapshot of july of last year um it's a good it's one thing to understand that local suburban ridership local suburban continues to be extremely strong across the region we're at right 50 to 50 percent of um 50 about 50 ridership for our local for our local um superman local our express is at 10 percent of what it was because obviously individuals aren't traversing downtown but other bright spotters are actually our express suburban service which is our 495 that's 70 so understanding that across the board suburban local continues to be one of the strongest performing route route categories um alongside brt in the region because individuals may not be going may not be traversing down to minneapolis or saint paul but they're still traversing obviously throughout the suburbs to and from to and from um to work shopping things of that nature and our express suburban as you know as those those individuals are going to our manufacturing hubs as well as our work works that we see in the suburban market they're not traditionally 8 to 4 30 work from home individuals either and what we see nationally is there's probably going to be a reorganization moving forward that suburban transit ridership has not fallen as much as we've seen urban because those individuals there's because though there's not been the economic pressure for those still work from home as you've seen in some of your larger urban cities so that's one of that's one of the trends and i actually came on also on the dakota county um chamber of commerce study as well to one observation they needed as well and what we do see not only the region but in our service but in our service area suburban local continues to be relatively strong comparable comparably mbta connect so that's our app based service that we started um that we started last year that serves um savage in western burnsville the top burnsville destinations for that service and that's not familiar with that that's our on-demand service similar to uber and lyft where customers download an app on their phone and request a ride just as they would do uber and lyft within the service geographical service area that you see on the map there um they can pay on the app or we also give the option for individuals to pay on the bus um our top destinations for that are very proud of this is our burnsville transit station walmart as well as retail areas surrounding burnsville center and nicolette avenue one of the great things where we designed this was to be a feeder service to our traditional fixed route not necessarily to supplement our fixed route so it's continued to be where one of our top destinations at burnsville transit where individuals come to the train station and then catch local fixed route services to traverse the region to get to where they would get to where they need to get to where you need to go excuse me um we do have a planned expansion for apple valley and rosemont in the fall of 2020. orange line connector that's a service of a few years out so mbta was awarded funding through um through association 2018 that's going to be weekday local service to connect orange line phase one terminus with anticipated redevelopment and burns mill and high density residential areas it's gonna have 30 minute on frequency all day the project costs about 3.4 million and it's estimated start date is when you spring 22. what we're going to be rolling out in spring of late of 2021 is a working group obviously with the city of burnsville to continue to refine on what that service is going to look like and where it's going to operate where it's going to operate too you can kind of see on the map right now it's kind of a it's a rough draft of what we have obviously hardware cities um we'll be at fairview ridges burnsville center that's where we're talking about for anticipated redevelopment where it shares around burnsville center as well as for high density residential areas there's some density happening around greenhaven drive apartments it's looking to serve that particular area as as those things come online in the future but there'll be a work group working closely with the city as we design as a design that service to connect into the orange line moving along one of the things we were doing prior to covert but covert really necessitated the view is we're doing a system-wide study so we're about to go out on in the next next few weeks with our rfp release it's going to be a comprehensive review of mbta transit service we'll examine unmet needs and opportunities the study will address factors influencing use of public transit parking capacity schedules route design amenities marketing land use cover 19 etc the timeline for that study will be will be um like i said fall of 2020 the study kickoff will be late 2020 um early 2021 and the study completion we're looking for summer of 2021. one of the things that we'll be rolling out really soon that i'm aaron who's uh who is the planning manager from vta we'll be sending out we'll be setting up a work group with all the planners of all the cities that we have in our service area as a prerequisite to start talking about just various service what we're looking at doing service changes as well as getting understanding of just what's happening obviously in everyone over everywhere in particular cities we're going to start off zoom zoom calls and we'll use that to feed into um that'll be the prerequisites as we feed into our system-wide study as we move forward so that'll be coming out that invitation will be coming out really soon and we're kind of excited kind of a good way obviously continue that communication that dialogue as we build where we're going to go to next on the 21st in 2021 hopefully 2021 a little better in 2020 but that's our hope that's news that we have today i think is our bbg modernization grant i do want to thank the mayor as well as council member keeley for their support on the support we have via support letters we have been applying for this particular grant for the bus facilities we have grant from the fda for the past four years there's been multiple years that no no trans agency in the state of minnesota had received any funding our full legislative delegation has been very supportive obviously of of of pushing back and getting information to try not only for this but for the build grant to try to get some funds obviously to us to any entity in the state of minnesota representative craig has been very instrumental representative emmer and saint cloud i mean trusted the list goes on representing senator klobuchar's office senator smith every every representative name has been his written support letter or followed up with us concerning this funding this past um a few weeks ago we were notified that we did receive 2.8 million dollars on through the federal grant to to modernize busfield burnsville bus garage now this for understanding you want to understand burnsville west garage started off in a 19 as a 1970s roofing as a roofing tile plant it was never designed as a bus garage overall it's also the lowest ranked um bus garage in the region it's not even it's not even really acceptable this is our phase one part of the project in order to put this in the state of good repair it would take about eight million dollars we submitted this request we also have requests and resuscitation we looked at as how much we could match because we may had we may have had to um do the match ourselves without support from the council the council will be helping us provide us with the mattress which is great um for this particular grant here um so this will be our first phase and we'll come back and do a presentation myself or samantha on exactly what we're doing at the just at the bus for burns garage um in 2018 like i said we went last in the last in the region among on facilities um it's our phase one estimated eight million and we just want to continue to thank all of our local mayor thank you because we'll be coming back again in the future obviously i'm commissioner keeley councilmember keeley thank you so much again for your um for your support letters and your advocation for this for this particular project minnesota obviously directly benefits obviously on the workers who work in the city of burnsville are there any questions so on your study that you're going to be doing are you going to also evaluate the shifts in jobs and the shifts in industry due to innovation and automation so that you can truly understand what the ridership is going to be because right now you're doing well with 55 percent of precobit but you know is that sustainable as you continue to move forward yes one of the things um we've started we have a program right now called coco where we do have a lot of information we reach out currently cogo is our business our business on program that we have a lot of consultation and communication with local business in our service area talking about their work shifts um what they see their stuff moving in the future we definitely be looking at what we see the workspace and the landscape looking at in the future when it comes to just commuting in general in our in our particular service area pre-covet pre and after covetal um so that would definitely be part of your part of study yeah what are you hearing with regard to on on your national um organization that you belong to with regard to transit that's a great question um one of the things we're seeing obviously express service across the board brt service even some light rail service those those services are designed obviously to take large groups of masses to downtown um suburban same thing with suburban commuter service what we're seeing is opportunity us there's going to start and we're seeing that now of that reverse commute where you have where you have companies that are looking to relocate outside of the urban core to the suburbs but there still necessitates the ability to pull those individuals from the core to the suburbs and that's actually been exasperated by covid in a positive way so what we continue to see on our route 45 at 70 percent of you know pre-kobe levels what that's what nationally what we're seeing this region's a little unique too because of some other factors that have to play into that but definitely covered we're seeing the market grow for suburban for suburban for suburban transit and i imagine that you will then also adjust your routes rather than all of them expressed downtown you're going to have to fan out on the 494 corridor exactly exactly okay so i was on the board of mvta when we bought the burnsville garage so i know what it is like and i know all the needs because when we built the egan because i was on the board when built egan burnsville really needed a lot of work so and it so i'm glad to see that we have the the money to upgrade it so that it can be at least be in good standards um within the metro right so thank you i would say everyone wants to we have been um really working hard we've been taking the opportunity from kova to work on our facilities because obviously we have lower ridership um customers aren't using our facilities as much but from the commuter standpoint so we've done a really good job from a cosmetic standpoint of gemstones like medic cosmetic um repainting and some plants outside of burnsville bus garage it's completely different now drive by it looks inside not too much but outside we've done it we tried to do uh we tried to you know do a good job and now we're doing that with all of our stations so that as our ridership does come back it's stuff we have a refreshed refreshed outlook for them because we're we want to make sure they understand that we want them back and we're going to make sure they see not only what we've seen before not only the safety aspect of it but the cleanest of our service of our service moving forward okay anybody have questions here councilmember gustafson council member keeley as you're going through these changes you're talking about our southern areas getting busier while our downtowns are obviously slowing down because most people aren't working down there anymore do you envision bringing in more circular lines throughout the two counties here where we're serving between the cities to move people for jobs and shopping and all that and i'm pre co but i've always think i've always personally found me and aaron talk about this frequently a need for looking at some circulator service and that was one of the and that was one of the impetus of why we wanted to do a transit study we've talked about this transit study now um for the past two or three years it's always been a funding issue it's never been so i definitely see now even with the culver precipice need for that in the future but even prior to that we think there definitely is need for more suburban and suburban obviously travel okay councilmember keeley thank you madam mayor can i take this off while i talk yeah it's easier i can breathe um thank you i just want to compliment um our executive director uh luther does an outstanding job and has ever since he took this uh position a few years back um he gets a lot of uh support and accolades from the board members and has definitely been a very strong confident leader through this entire covid challenge that as as he noted were currently 10 of of express i think at one point it was four percent uh at the bottom so uh my compliments to all the work that you do um it's a pleasure to serve on that board uh with you and the other board members and we have a lot of things to talk about these days uh kova being probably first and foremost but there are other uh challenges that we have as an opt-out organization depending on met council for our funding and so we're uh we're having some some good conversations hopefully productive conversations to to help that get along and and make sure that we can position ourselves as a transit organization to meet the needs of tomorrow's riders which uh it's pretty clear by the numbers uh as luther alluded to uh local service is still holding very strongly and will only get better as we come out of the uh the covet impact to our economy and we may find that that express in the downtown uh doesn't get back to those levels for a very long time but i'm really excited about our innovation with the mvta connect the on-demand service basically the uber bus as i'll call it and i'm excited about the expansion of that and i think that's quite frankly where the majority of our growth is really going to happen because in in the future with less express riders and more people needing to go from point a to point b you really can't establish a grid of routes that's going to meet everyone's needs and so you know on demand point-to-point service is really the ideal solution so anyway thank you very much i appreciate the the presentation and uh and definitely appreciate working with you luther councilmember i i was very happy to hear you outline the selfie contest that you're going to be doing i think any time that government can engage residents and encourage them through you know like voluntary mutually beneficial ways such as that that's really great to see i like carrots not a fan of sticks so um very happy to see that and happy to see that you know that you're making it fun and that kind of thing so my appreciation to you for that luther i'm looking at the on-demand and the connect service so you did well in the winter months and then covet hit and so it's down but i see july you're you're trending up again so and are you saying that burnsville is the highest use those are top destinations um burnsville has the impetus of the service in the beginning was that we didn't necessarily have great local service and savages a little hard to serve south brownsville does have good has to have some good local service and understanding that in savage the bulk of individuals were coming were coming to the burnsville walmart because there wasn't necessarily any type of walmart or large retail on large retail like that in the city in the city of savage um so that burnsville transit station and walmart definitely are the top two or some of the top locations now whether those individuals are coming out of burnsville or whether they're coming to savage i don't have i can't drill i didn't drill down i can drill down but now i don't have that on my slide here yeah not necessary and this is your beta test so if it gets successful as you move along then you'll expand out uh to the other ones of our within our authority the other cities yes okay we started we they gave us um we worked with a really great company and they we looked at three different they provided three different service models three different areas we could look at the first one we seen the most need when savage in the western burnsville side um apple valley and rosemont found rosemont where our last were our last ones they actually had a little tail they thought actually in shakopee due to all the all the um all the obviously the the manufacturing that was happening there as well um but we started obviously um with western that was number one now we're going over to um rosemont and happy about that because it gets us back to serving dctc mm-hmm and that's been our corridor my you know my commitment is to continue to grow and work on that corridor and that's our only community college in our service area and i believe that we should serve we should serve it well that's always been a challenge because there has always been a need to have service to the technical college but there wasn't enough ridership because the subsidy was so high to even have one bus with three or four people on it and so it wasn't cost effective and it wouldn't pencil out when i was on the board so this will help hopefully if if um you know we continue and it becomes a very successful service so that'll help with some of those design demands but you don't have to have a whole business yeah so i think council member keeley might have talked to you about one of our residents who does you know they don't have um a smartphone so they couldn't get the app so i'm sure you've heard from others so is there a way that this can be done on a laptop or a computer is is that some technology that you're working on now so some of our residents who don't have a smartphone can access this service definitely can be done on a computer um so it can definitely a computer or a smartphone the only thing we did not roll out for this particular service is we don't take phone reservations for it and that was but what do you think both electronic both electronic medias mean its work and we did have a conversation and that was a cost-effective component to it um every time you have to have an operator you normally have to obviously um our current flex drought service um even though we didn't get that many reservations we still don't have to book that and do the input there this takes this automated takes the automation out and that's where you get that true efficiency and the cost savings from um but we do but one good thing about this particular services too is that you can flag the bus down as well um so that was something that um so if you did see the bus and you didn't put a reservation you did have the ability i was to plug it down and explain that the way it sits either at brunswick transit station or sometimes it's at savage savage some station as well um they're on their hub so we didn't i can't say we were on 100 agreement um i think i think the individual may have also had some challenges with um using the computer as well but there is the computer option okay good councilmember workman thank you this was a very informative um i just and this isn't intended to be a political question by any means but it sounded like you had to pull teeth to get 2.8 million um to get a bus garage that needed a lot of help for the fta and i just saw the other day that metro transit got almost a billion dollars grant for the southwest light rail so how obviously it's a smaller organization but it's a different funding is it two different funding i guess my bigger question was is how are is it a competition with them or is it symbiotic or is it apples and oranges really yeah that's a quick question when it comes to the boston facilities grants it is a competition from any of any entity that applies for it so what ends up happening is i think um and i have with numbers there were um almost 500 million dollars was awarded um in that in this last go around but it's about 2.5 billion dollars of actual requests because so many transits in the state is in a state of good repair um there has been so we have and met the council did do a match for us for our applications so we could receive some funding um i do think as we move forward from a regional perspective and how we say may utilize um our funds that we procure buses with i know the council's had some um as measuretrans was able to do some extend the life of the buses and use that funding to build haywood too expand haywood too that option wasn't necessarily available to mvta we couldn't you know we couldn't extend the life of boston and take that funding and and and obviously repair branchville bus garage had been available we probably would have been a lot further along and not been in this competition for the last four to five years but for the most part we're just partners unless we both compete for the same funding through the fda side okay thank you okay any other questions really thank you so much for coming in really appreciate it and i think it this is good because uh our residents are watching and we have a lot of bus riders and so yeah so thank you so much we really appreciate it when we can put this on tv and uh they can go back and stream it and when they ask questions we can always direct them to hear your report no problem thank you so much yeah okay we'll move on to our next item the next item is the dakota broadband board update and this is an update and tom venables our i.t director is presenting excuse me why put some juice on metamer council members thank you for having me tonight to discuss a continuation of dbb discussions um as a follow-up to our june 9th work session and i am solo tonight uh executive director kara koch is on a family vacation this week so she was unable to attend so if there are any questions that i cannot answer that are more specific to her realm i'll defer those to her and do some follow-up with you as your background indicated following that the june 9th work session the council direction from the june 9th was to provide some additional overview information and feedback about the internet service provider presentations that occurred over the past three months to the dvb board you wanted to learn some more information about what they had to say and about the services and we'll go over that a little bit tonight and i'll dive in just a little bit the presentation links to all their presentations were in the background and we'll discuss um a continuation of the iru agreement changes and what's occurred since the june 9th meeting and then uh the dbb systems plan update and what's occurred with that you had asked for all three of those items as it relates to the internet service provider presentations that started on the june 10th dbb meeting we went through five service providers since june 10th and two other organizations and i'll briefly talk about each of those the service providers were a variety of providers in dakota county currently that provide a different level of services and have some different um different involvement in partnerships and and activities throughout the county do all of them have infrastructure as well as content or are they all content-based in terms of the service providers um infrastructure and most of them are providing content services today in the economy the other two organizations are bodies that either represent the service providers or help in the policy and the procedural process as it relates to broadband and that's where i'll start tonight our first one that uh presented in june 10th was the minnesota office of broadband development which is also part of the deed office at the state that organization actually in their back in their presentation they provided a timeline of where they've come from and i highlighted in this slide essentially when the office of broadband development was created in 2013 by law and they've existed since 2013 to represent the state's policy and help along the state in their process as it relates to broadband governance and the broadband task force that the previous governors and the current governor have appointed as it relates to the minnesota office of broadband development their role and responsibilities really are in these bulleted lists as a and they don't produce a service or a product per se they just provide um support and information to organizations like cities municipalities that are interested in receiving broadband funding broadband grants also that need help to solicit broadband activities or projects and need some resources so they really do play that role to promote and improve broadband infrastructure development they also do provide updated mapping data and that's one of the things that they did provide at their presentation is some detailed mapping as it relates to broadband service throughout the state of minnesota they also support the concept of dig wants right away permitting policy related issues that cities may turn to them for guidance and support on or other organizations may i'm not going to go through every single one of these but they did provide a comprehensive listing of those types of activities and items that each of these bullet points represent most of each the providers i'll just back up a little bit also did talk about their response or involvement in covid19 and some of the feedback as it relates to covet 19 and broadband and what the impact has been on broadband services um as it relates to the minnesota office of broadband development they indicated that there is definitely covet 19 highlighted the need for good broadband they specifically talked about the upload speed speeds increasing increasingly being important as they categorized it they said download speeds are the consumption upload speeds are for production and so overall what they indicated is service providers did ramp up and they did were able to bring out and upgrade and address the upload speed needs during the covet activities especially early on as it started out in march and april as work from home really ramped up next charter presented in the same meeting excuse me at the following dbb meeting in july charter was one of the first service providers to present they talked about their overall coverage in dakota county as you can see they represent apple valley lakeville and rosemont and farmington or their territories in those areas they talked about some of the demographics of what they provide currently in this area they've got about 305 miles of fiber 1260 miles of coax cable they pass 60 000 homes doesn't necessarily mean they serve 60 000 homes but they do pass by 60 000 homes that are potential customers and then they have um their fibers all lit uh they typically are utilizing fiber lit fiber services but they they use a combination of fiber and coaxial cable leveraging the coaxial cable that's been in the ground for many years and then they have local employees that live within dakota county their typical minimum speeds that they provide that they reported to the dbb are 200 megabits down 10 megabits up up to 940 megabits download speeds to 35 megabits which they considered their gigabit connection so if you hear them saying they provide gigabit service it's related to that 940 megabit down and 35 up typically that's a residential service that they're offering they do have business class services too that are separate and do offer different levels of service it's really interesting i'm looking at this map and they're in burnsville and i've never heard a charter in burnsville i didn't ask specifically what that presence in burnsville was but based on the the the objects there it looks like they must have fiber coming through burnsville to connect to another service provider somewhere yeah but we could follow up and find out specifically what they have in burnsville yeah because if they have fiber in burnsville and they're if they're using it as i or c net that most likely they are providing a connection or getting a connection from other another service provider that's maybe in burnsville yeah and delivering service through their organization and their footprint um they do provide mobile wireless services so they are a mobile wireless company um their enterprise services as i mentioned um before offers up to um 10 gigabit symmetrical service um over fiber typically um and they are also involved in public-private partnerships which they they did discuss and they got into specifically they've had some partnerships with dakota county and they leveraged dakota county fiber and funding to to deliver in unserved underserved areas south in southern rural dakota county they also received a border to border grant through the minnesota office of broadband that that was able to allow them to build out their fiber network to an underserved area of dakota county um that involved the state of minnesota dakota county and um charter they also discussed coveted their covet 19 response very similar to what the minnesota office of broadband also indicated they ramped up during the early periods they were able to accommodate that ramp up and they continue to accommodate the services that are being demanded of their subscribers at that same meeting in july velocity telephone and also known as gigabit minnesota presented velocity telephone is a telephone service provider uh they are also a voice and video and data provider they built out they tend to build out fiber now to residential areas and they also build out fiber ii multi-dwelling units and they focused on what they do within dakota county obviously um they're what they consider a 100 fiber-based network so when they build out or they utilize fiber from others they're utilizing fiber optic cable specifically so they partner with those who have fiber in the ground already they do that's been part of their business model early on and they also formed that company called gigabit minnesota to start building out their own fiber where they could too so they do both so they ride on the infrastructure that's already in the ground they do okay velocity you may have heard in the past because they're a customer of the access egan network and so they do purchase fiber infrastructure from the city of vegan they've also approached burn the city of burnsville in the past and have shown some interest in leveraging city city fiber they discussed their goals as a company they want to provide gigabits internet for all users that they serve they want to provide fiber throughout dakota county wherever they're serving their customers they want to also develop low cost rollouts and what they mean by that is where they can partner with others to leverage other infrastructure they're going to take advantage of that where they can and they want to expand every new development area they call it greenfield development areas and really that's their focus right now that's what gigabit minnesota is doing a lot of activity in the rosemont farmington area where there's a lot of new development right now so they're building out fiber to the premise in many areas they're also the group that has owns the fiber to the premise to homes in the evermore development in rosemont i was just going to say because they came out and evermore was the first development back in the early 90s late 90s early 2000s early 2000s services today so they're a cable television provider to the evermore development group um and they're providing video and voice services to our data services there too and they want to continue to do that model where they can and where it makes sense that their most popular internet package is very similar to the charter package that i mentioned earlier it is 250 down 20 up it is fiber based their entry cost to do that is 40 a month for for the customer so a reasonable rate they serve many types of customers and as i indicated earlier they're really focused on multi-tenant dwellings currently where they can expand quickly and gain a lot of customer base um elizabeth can i ask a quick question oh yes can you uh can you explain to the listening audience what the down and up means when you talk about those speeds okay sure and most internet providers provide two two types of um speeds when they provide you internet service there's a download speed so when you're consuming items from the internet and downloading items watching netflix or watching other streaming services that's typically a download service an upload service is when you are sending files or data to other locations or other third parties so that would be the upload speed or the second number that i mentioned and typically that is an an item that's needed during work from home type of activities so that you can upload information or access information quickly to that location you're trying to get to from your home and so in general most of the internet service providers today deliver a higher speed download higher download speed excuse me and a lower upload speed it allows them to manage their bandwidth a little bit easier because there's not as much demand on the upload side although that's changing obviously as a result of covet and work from home activities dakota county is their home turf as it relates to velocity so they really focus on activity in dakota county um they've been a business partner with dakota county also they currently do leverage dakota county fiber assets today not city fiber assets but the the county's fiber assets with the goals of continuing to work together on other projects in the future as they develop as they push out into other areas of the uh the county so their business model is is somewhat open in terms of what they want to do and they leverage a lot of other third-party infrastructure to accomplish what they want to do um and the last presentation at that july 8th meeting was also from a similar type of organization to velocity it's high wealth of broadband communications hbc as they they go by typically they actually were born out of the winona area of minnesota many years ago in the in the 90s as a telephone service but they built out a internet service and started rolling out fiber optic infrastructure in that area to the the local community the hospitals the educational institutions and then built upon that to become more of a private service provider their mission as it's listed here is to enhance and enrich lives of those they serve they've continued to expand into the dakota county area recently but as you can see with the map there they're in the southern southeast portion of minnesota for the most part but they have a fairly extensive reach out to the west now going out past i believe it's gaylord area even further past that redwood falls area and they continue to expand they are also a triple play server a service provider so they provide voice video and data services they do provide wireless broadband services too so fixed wireless so fixed wireless is typically site-to-site type of wireless service where that becomes very popular is in rural areas where maybe a farmer of the middle of nowhere just needs internet service and it's tough to get infrastructure out to that location they may put up a site-to-site wireless connector or connection to get to that location so they do a combination of things so that makes them somewhat unique in terms of a service provider they've been in the business for over 23 years in the in this area they do want to provide residential and business services and they continue to expand and they do provide fiber to the premise fiber to the home type of services and as you can see there it is their wireless broadband also they can deliver at different speeds of 25 50 and 100 megabits so pretty substantial service as it relates to fixed wireless council member augustus um can you explain how wireless works what's needed for wireless to work yeah so fixed wireless broadband typically needs a backhaul service in order to get from point a to point b point a might be the wireless antenna on the farmer's home point b is the wireless receiver that's connecting to the service provider which is in this case hbc in order to get that signal they capture back to their main network they generally connect that wireless receiver to fiber optic cable so in most cases fiber is a complementary service to any wireless service provider and when we talk about wireless cellular communications like 4g or 5g services all most of those towers that you see in within the communities specifically within burnsville all have fiber back hauls to them through some fiber backhaul performance you have to come back down and go into that fiber to get out yep and in at least a couple cases we as a city are providing fiber backhaul services to service providers that are our water tower sites to provide to their tenants who are wireless cellular service customers so it it's a partnership it's a cohesive type of arrangement um hbc also discussed what their involvement is in the community um they also did talk about their partnerships with dakota county they currently also lease fiber from dakota county in the areas of rural dakota county to get into the northern areas of dakota county so they've got some partnerships with the county in place today and they continue to expect that kind of growth going forward as they want to continue to expand their reach into the southern areas of minnesota our following um meeting in august um on the august 12 meeting we had comcast and the minnesota cable communications association uh present um very similar conversations uh comcast over went through their overview of their demographics as a company as it relates to minnesota but they also talked about their national presence too in dakota county specifically they had some statistics or information related to the homes past as as charter did they pass 108 330 homes they have 164 employees in dakota county they connect up to 5681 business customers in dakota county currently and they provide a gig service um and they call it a gig gig service very similar to charter in the sense that it's a can be a gigabit download speeds but it's a lower speed upload um so very similar in that regard and then they also focused on their xfinity services so xfinity is their services that deliver voice video and data applications and services to the home homes and businesses but in addition to that they're also branding um their mobile wireless service as xfinity they provide wi-fi service now too in many areas they also do home security now and branded as xfinity service so if you're an xfinity customer you can have home alarm service through comcast and then remote voice command services too with those fancy new remotes that they have they talked about their local and state impact overall they pay in 129 million in state taxes fees and permits overall annually this is from 2019 and 1.2 billion in tech and infrastructure since 2011 so that's their investment in the in minnesota and then they also paid in 2.8 million in franchise fees in in 2019 in dakota county and the franchise fees are the fees that they collect from the customers on behalf of the local franchises and then they also talked about their covet 19 response again very consistent with what you've already heard and what we were told from the other providers that they were able to ramp up very quickly during that early part of the covid activity they were able to respond to it with no problems and they continue to be able to respond to that during the ongoing activities with kovid they are as a company trying to become a one-stop shop so that you as a customer if you're a business customer or residential customer can buy a lot of services from them and just work through them and not worry about getting your phone from somebody else your your video from somebody else your data and then all those other services i talked about it with xfinity they also are considered at least they indicated they're the largest converged ip network nationwide that can scale up to 100 gigabit service so that's a lot of words but it it they have got a large presence throughout the country fiber optic connectivity through multiple states and so they deliver services throughout the country and not just in minnesota and their network capacity does according to comcast doubles every 18 to 24 months so their ability to deliver faster bigger broadband service through their existing network can doubles every 18 to 24 months and i didn't indicate it earlier but the map i have on the on the screen shows the comcast territories currently in dakota county obviously burnsville eagan um west saint paul south st paul mendota heights um and hastings and i cannot read i might be missing somebody um i think i got everybody in there but that is their current footprint in dakota county as far as the services they don't currently offer or provide services outside of those territories and then also at that august 12 meeting we had anna boroff who is i believe in the audience today and she can probably speak to any questions you may have better than i can regarding her presentation she very similar talked about who her organization represents they represent all the cable companies within minnesota or at least these cable companies listed here in minnesota who provide core technologies as it relates to data voice and video they serve currently 900 thousand minnesota households in total uh they are they have four thousand minnesota employees there's about twenty thousand miles of cable in minnesota alone and they provide about thirty six thousand jobs in minnesota as an association and then there's they deliver about 5.4 billion in economic impact they also she also discussed the impact covett had during the time um and i did provide some information that she was able to provide in the presentation uh as it relates to downward downstream growth or down um load growth during covid so they saw a 9.9 download growth since march 1st and they saw a 25.7 upstream growth so again that relates to our download speeds upload speeds discussion earlier so definitely consistent with what we've been hearing for the other providers [Music] she went through and provided an overview of the community involvement each of the companies her association represents have with each of their communities and also talked about how dakota county is ranked as it relates to broadband availability it's number seven in minnesota and then she provided some additional statistics related to how how much is served in minnesota based on the state's goal of 25 those numbers are so the state has a broadband goal by 2022 of having service providers deliver 25 meg download and three meg upload at a minimum so in order to be considered a broadband service provider you would have to meet those minimums that's the state's goal right now and according to um anna the these company companies in the association are meeting 98.31 of that served today and then as it relates to the state's 2026 goal of 100 meg download speeds and 20 meg uploads they're already meeting 56 of that today so and then there's additional goals downstream um in later years that the state has set um we did not talk about that so in general um very consistent conversations with the service providers and the organizations so far at this point with that i'll i'll pause if you do have any questions for anna okay any questions for anna and welcome anna it's good to see you hi you did a good job okay thank you okay great i have a question for tom sure councilman thank you um was there a reason why centurylink or frontier didn't present as part of this just has having a presence in burnsville and providing these services as well as far as i understand um anna excuse me cara reached out to them but did not receive a response from them to present okay okay and then the last presentation that we had at our most recent dbb meeting was from arvig arvig you may not have heard that name in the past but they're a growing company also in minnesota and they are a minnesota company they've worked with us as a city in the past and they continue to work with others in dakota county they deliver fiber infrastructure they deliver dark and lit services they construct fiber they are also a triple play service provider in some communities so they provide voice video and data services in some of the communities they serve today they are also a residential and business service provider so they're involved in quite a few other activities outside of the normal service provider activities that we may have discussed from some of the other service providers they um they do provide locating services for fiber so when you do a go for one call they're one of those companies that'll go out and locate the the infrastructure the utilities they also provide um public-private partnerships so and we've worked with them in the past and some of our activities the county dakota county is currently working with them and has worked with them in the past um they also deliver services to their own employees they have 900 employees in minnesota and then they also own very several many diverse companies so as they've grown out their own company they've realized the need to either partner with other companies or build or create their own companies and what i mean by that they have a list i think of at least seven different companies that they've created that they utilize as they deliver services in the different communities one of those being a engineering service or company that provides engineering services for civil engineering services for designing fiber build-outs locate service that i mentioned already they also have a media company they deliver media services and communication similar to like an ae2s they are also a company that delivers uh specific multi-dwelling unit services so very similar to velocity gigabit minnesota um they are also present in 14 different data centers throughout minnesota so that provides them a very large reach into the rest of the state as you can see by their fiber map there it's a little blurry but it does indicate where all their fiber infrastructure currently is throughout the state with a fairly large concentration in the metropolitan area and then during their um discussion they did have one question for the dbb is how can we work together to continue to expand our services and our infrastructure throughout the county and they as they indicated they are they as part of their business model is to leverage third party fiber infrastructure they also build their own fiber infrastructure where needed but they also realize that if there's fiber available that they can leverage they're open to doing that very good that was the end of the the provider presentations that we heard from are there any other follow-up questions regarding that no it was this is very good because i was really interested in understanding all of the different companies and how they're working within dakota county and i'm pleased to hear that a lot of them are looking to collaborate to work with the cities and the county with the infrastructure that some of us already have in the ground and i remember arabic when they came through they were you know they would use owl fiber irvig has approached us in the past in some of the routes that we have in the in the city where they've um inquired at least into some of the fiber and in at least two occasions they've decided not to use city infrastructure was that when we went with frontier to do content for them to do the content because we always have said we'll build the infrastructure but we're not getting into the content business because that's not our wheelhouse no the um the examples that i can recall uh regarding our vig were when they pulled permits to bring in their own fiber in in burnsville we identified that burns already had fiber in within those routes that they were interested in and at that point it was a little bit late in their process they had already done all their engineering and design work and were ready to start rolling with their own fiber build out so we would just have been slow slowing them down in order to sit down with them and come to some agreement so they decided to not pursue that city fiber at that time councilmember keeley thank you madam mayor um i thought the executive director would be here tonight so are you comfortable fielding some questions i'll try and if i need to i will defer to her and follow up with you well and we have council member gustafson who is our liaison also and i'm sure he'll chime in as well i want to i want to back up because we've had multiple discussions about the dbb and and i think we've made clear a lot of our opinions and perspectives and we still don't have a separate iru for an inet or c net until we see that uh i'm not gonna support going forward with it in fact i suggested that maybe we should consider pulling out of it but set that aside can you articulate what's the end goal for the dbb what is the go what are they what is that entity trying to achieve specifically the dbb essentially was formed to help manage the city's assets that our members to leverage the the assets that the cities either own currently or that they're going to build out for future projects and help collectively manage that and and leverage benefits by scale and by group and then leverage those assets that are unused for other third-party uses that could benefit the communities as it relates to economic development or other activities that otherwise would promote broadband services within the communities that was the original intent of the dbv as it was started out back in 2013 2014 time frame as it came out of that it really was born out of that hip initiative high impact partnerships and the the the intent at that time by the um the cities was to start leveraging that capacity that was available on a lot of the fiber that existing cities owned and many of us like in our case we had implemented fiber as part of a water utility project in 2009 it did what it was intended to do it connected our facilities we leveraged it but we also had excess fiber capacity then that could be leveraged for other uses and third parties and the city at that time decided to pursue that activity during that time frame too though and as other cities did similar activities we all experienced very similar things we were all doing the same thing but collectively separately using our own resources to do those things and similar to what the dcc model was is collectively combining resources to help standardize and bring forward very similar initiatives county-wide and then try to collectively manage and and market that if possible now i didn't dive deep and i didn't get into a lot of details but that's essentially at a high level what the dbb was born out of with the intent to save time and resources and money going forward to build out institutional network uses for our own operations and make sure that that becomes efficient and effective and affordable but then again leverage any excess capacity in that to help third parties use it but not become a service provider but provide infrastructure for service providers to deliver other services to the communities well i hear the the over writing message was efficiency i mean touched on economic development but ultimately most of what you just said and i remember those discussions back then that led up to the 2012 2013 like they started in 2010 or 11 um or maybe even earlier but obviously things were quite different in the marketplace back then but but i hear you say efficiency i mean let's we're all doing this let's do this collectively and save money kind of like the dcc model um how much is the city taxpayers saving by being a member on an annual basis by being a member of the dbb on some specific items i can provide you some savings as a whole we didn't add any staff in order to continue on with our fiber activity projects and so that our our cost joining the dvd initially increased our our expenses but with the hope that as we start leveraging offsetting revenue gained by any kind of third party activities using those assets that that would defer or defray the expenses that have increased to give you one specific example the city prior to being a dbb member had our own fiber locate costs that we had to pay pay out to a contractor to do our go for one locates for our fiber infrastructure on an annual basis that that cost the city at that time approximately five thousand dollars a year when we joined the dbb our current costs just for locates have gone down to about thirty six thousand that's our expenditure now for locate costs we were able to do that as a collective because we could negotiate a contract that was much larger as an organization that's one specific item i can cite we also had incidental costs that we would have to collect as it relates to engineering fees so when we have a fiber project we hire an engineering firm to design the fiber extension and the fiber activity and each project has an associated cost with it today instead of having a cost per project we pay into the dbb and that covers all of our engineering costs for projects that we're currently engaged in are future projects that we're involved in um and then we also have uh costs associated with uh covering our insurance on the activity with our our fiber so as a whole our our overall cost may have gone up initially with the intent that um any third-party revenue coming in could offset that because it relates to the revenue we currently have from leases that we're already existing using our fiber assets the city has about twenty five thousand dollars annually in revenue that we bring in to offset our expenses from our assets that we're already leasing out prior to the dbv even being in place um maybe i should uh i may ask uh city manager melanie lee what is based on your budgeting numbers the annual savings to the city of burnsville by being a part of the dbb currently today um council member mayor and council member i think tom captured some of the the key components um the staff costs of not having somebody to manage the fiber is a cost that we don't realize so that's a savings i i haven't done the analysis but i would say it's the range of what do you say tom 10 15 000 from that perspective at least that much the other thing that it provides us is the incidental unpredictable costs that come up in general annually breaks and fixes so when a backhoe cuts the fiber those are typically things that aren't necessarily budgeted for and the dbb covers the expense of moving on those activities and taking that on for us without any staff time and involvement whereas in the past staff would have to be involved in in dealing with those activities now we can just hand off those activities the other type of incidental savings in terms of time is examples of when there are third parties interested in city assets those fiber assets where we can just pass that off to the dbv staff to take that on and more a more recent one is mvta they've got an interest in leveraging some city fiber assets to provide another internet path to their bus garage here in burnsville i took a call and i was able then to pass them along to the dbb and the dbb is handling it all from there and providing them the engineering services on our behalf and and managing that process and that piece of it for us so that's time that then i'm not having to spend on that that i can then serve into other activities here at the organization so some of that is soft cost savings some of it's not as tangible savings that we can identify in a a budget but it definitely those incidental type of savings are realized through the dbv and we've had quite a few of those in the last couple of years oh thank you it's um sorry when we look at what are we getting we're getting some efficiency of 10 or 15 000 plus some of those incidental things that you can't really predict miscellaneous costs and in exchange for that savings uh which is i mean it's it's savings it just isn't very substantial i don't know what how it compares to our dcc savings um but um so i look at there's the benefit side uh there's some conveniences that you could put in there what's the cost to us what in other words what's the intangible costs and the hard costs i know that i saw the memo that we're going to save maybe 900 a year because other cities are adding fiber so our cost lessened a little bit it's over a hundred thousand for for next year but what else are we giving up in other words what else are we paying right we're giving up control we're signing a 20-year contract or requested to sign a 20-year contract we're still accepting liability right um we give up significant amount of control of turning the fiber over to the dbb so when when you when you start looking at that iru and the sort of in my opinion the heavy weight that we're in cost of all of those factors and intangibles for a savings of 10 or 15 000 a year it's kind of a lopsided scale it might have some great conveniences but i don't see the payback i don't see the roi on giving up all of that for a measly ten to twelve thousand dollars a year savings that's we're giving up a lot i mean it's i put a lot of value put it that way personally i'm not speaking on behalf of anybody else here but i put a lot of value on giving up control of that asset giving up a certain amount of voting control giving up in a contract situation having the kind of requirements that that contract that ru is demanding it's a lot of cost in other words i just look at it is this a fair deal for burnsville and it does not seem like it's anywhere near a fair a fair deal from my perspective and i don't know if any one of us if this was our own business would we for a savings of that much a year give up all of those factors and controls so i think that's maybe something we have to ask ourselves um so the the the other thing i just wanted to to ask you you're in the tech industry right so you follow this stuff i i do because i'm a tech junkie from a long time ago and i just love technology so i follow it very closely back in 2010 2011 when we started these discussions what was the broadband speed availability generally speaking in the city of burnsville as it relates to city operations we were providing our own broadband speeds we were doing gigabit services back in 2009 2011. today we're doing 10 gigabit services between our facilities right using our own dark fiber infrastructure in terms of the community right the marketplace the marketplace a much different landscape obviously there was much less quality service in in in services available as it relates to the broadband speeds they have today if i recall 10 years ago what those were they may have been 20 megabit service maybe 10 megabits um it varied widely yes and depending on where what service provider dsl was a very popular service back then and dsl typically served about five to seven megabits and and so it's a very different landscape definitely but also the applications and uses of broadband have changed drastically and the types of application demands in the streaming services and the online services that are demanded have a stream have changed quite a bit work from home wasn't even really a concept back in 2010 2009 only for self-employed who could dictate only for techies who were working at home with their dial-up motors yeah exactly 56k was still prevalent back then so so you did a great job articulating what was back then and and that was really the genesis and the discussion that we were having as a city in considering what we ultimately did and chose to do back then very very delicately and very thoughtfully and very carefully and not without a lot of consternation to sell at a wholesale level some dark fiber of our excess dark fiber that was well before you know fast forward the marketplace for just as you pointed out and primary primarily the soho market versus the business market drove the speeds to what they are today and the businesses ended up just sort of going along for ride and getting the biggest benefit out of it it was the businesses and homes back then i mean who who loved 56k dial up or who loved you know three mag i mean that that was kind of big ten years ago if you could get three meg download that was huge we're talking smaller numbers right so the whole world has changed from the spirit of why the dbb was even created and discussed as part of that hip thing from 10 years ago and uh and so one of my comments about this whole dbb debate has been this seems like a solution that's surfacing about seven to ten years late for what it's thinking about doing or what we might want to think about it doing from a competitive standpoint getting into the private sector business bringing competition and upping the speeds because the private sector has responded phenomenally because of the video download demands to the point where i haven't heard anybody say i'm disappointed with the speeds i have i mean i'm sure there's somebody in burnsville saying a gig is not fast enough i need better than that right or maybe they need a gig download and they need maybe um you know 100 meg upload right because they're that their business nature is such like that but not very often certainly the eagans example the eagan i'll call it the eagan experiment that cost them a few million bucks they went into this on their own and they found that there was there was no market demand for for that kind of thing because the private sector had fulfilled that market need so they learned a powerful and expensive lesson as well so i i'm still going back saying why are we in this why is the dbb existing today because for burnsville we've already the problem has gone away but for rural parts of dakota county this problem is very present and uh and and obvious in a lot of parts of the rural you know areas of dakota county and so in any kind of discussion where we might say would we or be asked would we be interested in making our fiber loop available if it were going to help under or unserved areas certainly if it can i don't know how it can and why we need to loop all the way to us and back out there but but maybe there's a solution there but for burnsville there's the solution it's like a solution in search of a problem we the problem left us five plus years ago and so i i i still question why we're spending so much time spending so much money for a fifteen ten or fifteen thousand dollar savings on something which that iru has so many things that are too costly in my mind for us and just how can we help the dbb focus their attention on the under and unserved areas because that's really where all the attention should be just like it was 10 years ago in burnsville and 10 years ago 10 years ago we did have some underserved areas and some underserved needs we had businesses that were speaking out wasn't there we weren't getting 25 50 a month it was sporadic but it existed right those are the vocal people saying i just can't get the speed i need to drive my bit you know to support my business needs and those those calls have all just disappeared and so how do we how do we help the dbb help the unserved areas and stop focusing and spending so much time trying to find a solution to burnsville's air you know because we don't have that issue anymore and so that's kind of where i'm coming from is maybe there is a place for the dvd but certainly there's no need for an iru in my eyes for a cnet here but i do want to support the inet and i think we all said we want to support that because i think our publicly owned infrastructure fiber should be made available to help our publicly owned partners like the school district and the mdta and other entities like that thank you councilmember gustafson a lot to respond to the benefit we're getting as far as the operations go it did go down a little bit this year and of course we're just getting started and the more fiber is added to the network the the more our costs are going to go down in this and it won't be just a few thousand dollars it's going to be many many dollars one of the things we keep talking about the cnet as if we're competing and i hear that all the time and all we're doing is trying to leverage assets the taxpayers have already paid for and they're sitting dormant in the ground and allowing people like like arvig and velocity and all them to come in and we already know the market wants to come and do this and allow them to least lease that from us and take it from there it cost us nothing for them to light those those fibers they cost us nothing for them to go to the door what we get out of it is is a lease charge that we'll get for for them using the fiber and that's going to again leverage our costs down as far as handling our inet and the whole structure we put in place throughout the county and i do believe this is economic development as well i think it will help drive businesses to dakota county which is very important to us when you look at egan he can yeah they made some mistakes you know what they did they lit up their fiber and they put nodes everywhere and it cost them a forks and that was one of those build it and they will come that's not what the dbb is doing all we're doing is looking at assets that we already have and are paid for in the ground and and allowing companies to come in private companies that want to come in and service the areas that's all we're doing and so i don't understand why there's this resistance to letting the market come in and do its thing like they always do you know i just heard you saying i heard it earlier today nobody in town is asking for higher speed well if that's the case these companies will do their due diligence and they'll do their marketing and if there's nobody if there's nobody that wants it they're not going to lease it from us but i don't understand why we would not want to have a revenue source that can help us offset the cost of the fiber throughout the county it just doesn't make sense not to do that especially in these times when revenue is so important to us in our city okay council member workman thank you i just i have a point of clarification um i understand that it might not cost money to theoretically flip a switch to turn on a line of fiber but there's still an ongoing budget for the dbb um continually that's not zero dollars so there is costs attributed with this that we're going to be participating in um and to your point dan g if people aren't seeking it i'm not trying to start a debate here but if if people aren't seeking it out the c net and we're going to continue to pay these dues and watch these budget numbers increase year over year over year then it at some point does start costing money with no return on that investment and so that's where my problem comes into this is if we're going to continue to contribute and nobody's asking for this then it seems like we're just throwing money at something that's not materializing and that's i think where my point of contention or confusion is coming in um and i don't know if you want to respond to that you certainly don't have to but um whenever you're ready i that's that would be my main question right now the the the broadband dakota broadband is about managing the system throughout dakota county it's about leveraging all of our cities together so we have a company that's out there that's managing the system they're taking they're fixing the system when it needs to be taken care of they're locating the system it all happens together as a county which leverages our costs so the more people that get on board the less it's going to cost each city as they as they do things the cnet or is or the dark fiber in my mind is almost like a bonus we've already paid for it it's in the ground it's not like it's not like we're going to take 100 fibers out and just keep the seven fibers we use it's in the ground and if someone wants to pay to light that fiber and deliver whatever they want to be whether it's content to to the home or a business or maybe it's a business that's got three different businesses that wants to hook fiber to for for their purposes why would we not why would we not already use that because we've already paid for it it cost us no more and we're going to continue to lay fiber out here because we have to get the whole system together i mean that's just going to happen in burnsville here we have very little fiber left delay i mean we're getting pretty close to done as far as layers so we're not going to be and we don't pay for fiber that other people put in if west st paul wants to put in fiber they pay for that that's how it works we don't pay for any of that they just can't they add that fiber to the network which helps leverage our cost for our fiber here when we're doing the locates and doing the repairs and then the management can i ask one quick follow-up question sure and then i'll go to achille so i understand that the cost to install has already been established paid for and we've walked from that so it's in the ground that's been paid for like anything else the more you use it the more service that it's going to require the more upgrading it's going to be needing you know the the costs i don't think are just stagnant the more that you use it it doesn't just continue to just stay stable um so i mean it i don't know that you can project that just because it's buried in the ground that costs won't go up that they would go down just because people are using it and i'm not a fiber scientist by any means but i would imagine it's like anything else where the more use involved the more likely it is to break and need to be repaired which comes with added costs now you're saying that the more companies that would sign on through the cnet would reduce those overall costs because then you're starting to turn a revenue that would in theory then reduce our buy-in cost because then it becomes more reliant on the sale of the fiber rather than the contribution that each city is putting into the dbv yeah that's just a piece of it the other piece is the miles that the other cities are putting in in dakota county which helps offset the overall cost of the operation of the fiber throughout dakota county but it also expands our liabilities and the need for those future repairs that tomorrow insurance for insurance is about i don't know anything about insurance you should look it up i mean and tom can give you a lot of the technical reasons why that happens i just i don't i don't want to i don't think you can sit here and say without without with any certainty that the more we sell the less the cost will be because i think the broader that this gets the the bigger the exposure is to those vulnerabilities in the system and maintenance and so on and so forth i think tom can answer that question do you want to take that before i go to keeley and and cara members as i've presented over the years one of the things or terms i've used is this is 50-year infrastructure and typically that means that the the fiber itself does not um impede in terms of performance it's the equipment that's hooked up to it on each end and the dbb today provides the maintenance on the fiber infrastructure only today not the equipment that's hooked up to it so the performance of the fiber is going to remain the same over time even as more customers and more entities utilize that fiber so the maintenance of that fiber doesn't necessarily increase because it's in the same conduit it's in the same shape so you have to take care of it no matter how many customers or how many fibers are in that conduit but the bandwidth opportunities continue to increase because that's where the equipment is necessary if you want to increase your speeds you change the equipment that connects to the fiber and that's where your cost may increase if you want to continue to increase your speeds but that's up to the customers and that would be the customer premise equipment so the maintenance of the fiber itself as it relates to budgetary costs as other members in the dbb add route miles and that's what we call it route miles of fiber the calculation used to determine the budget for each member depends on how many route miles they have and because if our route miles are continually similar and don't increase very much because we don't have very many large projects remaining as other organizations or members increase their projects and continue to build out their fiber their route miles will increase and therefore the the budgetary impact will actually allow us to see a decrease in our budgets and we're actually seeing that for the first time in 2021 it's all only a 900 decrease in the proposed budget for the dbb but it's because of the increase in rep miles by the other members that we're seeing an actual decrease so if that trend continues we'll continue to see a decrease in our maintenance through the dbb it's only a 900 difference in the next year but we should continue to see that okay can't remember keely uh a couple questions um what is the additional cost if all of the cities were to sign on for the cnet is it just you flip a switch or what are the what are the capital costs on top of what we've already invested to be able to actually set up a cnet as part of the original systems plan that was referenced in the original joint powers agreement signed in 2018 it identified cnet gap projects to finish up at that time what was proposed as a cnet network there were gaps identified within different communities and i believe there was six total as of today there's five of six that have been completed and the sixth one is in process to be completed to actually finish that original systems plan to address the cnet gaps so that's using dollars that were already committed by the members and the membership burnsville already addressed that in the first year of our membership so we don't have any cnet gap projects to complete the the cda the though also provided seed money capital purchase money of 300 and the number escapes me over three hundred thousand dollars for the initial c net um startup as as i'll call it that's contingent on updating the systems plan though that the dbb is currently in the process of of moving forward on and the idea behind that there is some capital dollars set aside by the cda to be utilized for the membership to create the final design of the cnet and so there is no further capital commitment from the existing members today because of the cda money that's available until that systems plan is updated and that's part of the the the presentation tonight and i can talk to about that a little bit about where we're at on the the systems update plan okay uh cara can i one last question sorry i had a second one who's gonna um even if we did this as an inet who actually is going to be the the person who would be responsible for repairs and do we have any senses to the like the response time for outages or issues you know what's the service commitment by i guess it would be the dbv so that would be up to the dbb to develop those contractors slas the service level agreements with the potential customers that would leverage the cnet infrastructure to develop the service level agreements that they would expect for maintenance similar to what the city of burnsville did in the past with our individual agreements with each of the providers that we have agreements with they were concerned about similar things maintenance windows when are you going to maintain the fiber if it's broken how long will it take you to fix that fiber those items have all been discussed and will all be part of agreements that the dbb would develop and work with the future customers on we have similar type of agreements in place with the the fiber maintenance company called mp next level they do our our fiber locates but they also do our break fix activities and within that agreement that the db be signed on behalf of the membership they have to meet certain certain minimums and certain requirements to make sure that our fiber is uh respond any problems with the fiber are responded to in a very aggressive time frame well that and we'd all have that concern i mean if we if we were to move forward with just tonight or niner c net in both cases especially with the inet for sure the school district mbta i mean we'd all just as we do we would highly depend on it so timely response to outages would be critical because we we'd be affecting our transit provider we'd be affecting the school district and our own ability to communicate right so that's a appreciative piece of and the first responders yeah i mean everybody that's tapping into it uh you know we'd want to have a very very significant service level delivery contract to make sure that they're addressed very very quickly part of that is that's very important there's also another thing that's very important it's the design of the network and the design of the institutional network and the the cnet if the the cnet moves forward and again because you're when we talk about inet and cnet we're really talking about the same infrastructure it's in the same condo it's in the same routes for the most part that's going to be designed in a way that makes it resilient and redundant meaning in most cases the ability to reroute traffic where there is a break can occur if it's designed correctly in our case in our institutional network today at burnsville we have that ability we have dual internet connections we have the ability to reroute traffic most of our staff facilities like city hall have multiple paths of fiber coming in and out of it and so we do take those kind of things into consideration and again that part of that concept and that discussion occurs in the systems plan and how that design is going to end up to accommodate those types of concerns from any potential customer or user of the inet or the cnet potentially can i just tag on to something you said quick and then i you you noted i i apologize you noted it's a good discussion though i think it's well worth having and thank you for being on the hot seat without the executive director here to to field these questions so we're putting you on the spot and i certainly understand it but i know you're close to this so you've done great thank you um the the debate about um whether we can have an inet agreement using this this pipe of fiber and not a cnet agreement i are you on the same pipe fire describing your your perspective your perspective what's the difference between the fiber itself and then the contracts and policies that govern the traffic the data traffic on it the difference between those two the fiber obviously is just infrastructure it's a material that needs to be maintained but it also has to be maintained in a way that relates to a contract that's in place either for customer use or our own organizational use and so in general contracts can identify where there needs to be standards in place in the build out of fiber infrastructure they can address any concerns about service level issues and maintenance maintenance windows as we've indicated or agreements that third parties may have with their own customers that we have to meet and so in most cases those two pieces are married together in many in many ways and again i can only turn back to what we've done over the last 10 years with our fiber in many cases we tried to standardize as much as possible to make sure our our infrastructure was carrier class and i use quotes because we did ask for that design concept back when we brought it forward in 2009 so that it could be considered and then tied to agreements that any carrier or any customer potentially using that infrastructure would feel that we can live up to to meet their requirements and that's really where the the fiber infrastructure and then the agreements really can be tied together so that we can show one relates to the other it really is ongoing discussion that we have at the dbb as we do this it's an educational process for many of the dbv members we've been ahead of the game in terms of where we're at and our experiences and the concerns that are being talked about tonight are things that have been brought up and are continuing to be discussed as it relates to the iru the dbb has recognized that lakeville burnsville and dakota county have some issues with the iru language as it relates to cnet and as it relates to liability they want to continue that conversation nothing has been taken action on at this time they realize it may take some further discussion and that's what they're willing to continue to do to address any ongoing concerns they are looking for additional input they want to continue feedback with their next meeting they also want to continue that as the study the systems plan update proceeds with the anticipation when the the update is completed and brought back to the dbb for further discussion they're going to wrap in the iru conversation they're going to wrap in the cnet conversation they're going to have input from stakeholders the stakeholders being not only the membership but stakeholders identified as part of the systems plan update which would mean the businesses the residents the schools healthcare and potentially other partners mvta and others that are leveraging those assets today or maybe leveraging those assets in the future so um we will continue to have this conversation about the contracts and the service level agreements and what impact that has also been something that some of the service providers have raised concern about guaranteed levels of service the quality of the infrastructure but that's also one of the benefits of what the dbb is providing they're trying to standardize the quality and the the way that the dbb infrastructure is being built out now we're again ahead of the game because we've already done a lot of build out but they're also trying to use us as an example to continue to build up for other members in the way that burnsville has done it over the last several years and then we'll continue to do it as we build out to other smaller projects that we're going to continue to do um and i'm sorry i may not have answered your question right you did you did open a door okay because i think you've heard the majority of this console is asking for a separate ru for the inet and the cnet and it sounds like that still could happen pending the study and some further discussion yes that definitely um i can go through a couple items on my next the slide that's up right now just to talk about that to some degree um so some iru language um so can i go to uh kara she has a question before you get to the iru discussion no he can go through this slide and then i'll ask my question that's fine okay um some recent iru language changes were proposed and brought forward in the august dbb meeting um the dbb board as a whole felt that there was further discussion that was needed it did not answer all the concerns and questions that have been raised in the in the past several months it mostly related to the the the change in language in the iru and the jpa to create and codify member and a member approval process um for use of assets for cnet projects so basically giving the member each individual member the ability to say yes or no to any use of city assets or member assets for cnet related projects but it didn't go far enough in terms of what some of the the three entities were asking and so the board recognized that and and want to continue the conversation um they also felt that it's necessary to um define what the c net is that's still a a conversation that's going on as we're having similar kind of conversations and what does that end up looking like and being and that's really what the systems plan update is hopefully going to address so that some concept of cnet can be understood and what that end goal is going to be um and and with the idea that it's also going to continue to address the local control and the liability concerns that have been raised as part of that the board requested a full inventory of non-dbb member uses of fiber and all that means is who's using our fiber today that is not a member so we're going to provide a list of who that is and burnsville as dakota county is and anybody that is currently leasing their fiber or have some kind of arrangement with third parties to use their fiber assets and create a final inventory of who that is that's using our fiber infrastructure today we know individually but we're going to provide it to the the dbb so they have a collective list of who's being who's using infrastructure and then the board also requested again as i mentioned earlier additional iru input language for further discussion in october and subsequent meetings with that i'll pause for your questions if you have any counselors kara so i i am happy to hear um that you're looking again at further iru language changes because i [Music] i implore the dbb to separate out the cnet and the inet into separate irus i i really strongly suggest that um so that maybe we can get past our impasse so that makes me happy that perhaps they're open to that because what started to really raise alarm bells for me was the language was separate they were not separate irus the language was separate um burnsville other communities the county raised questions about it and instead of addressing that and separating it out instead they took the language and mushed it together further so they did exactly the opposite of what they asked and when you're entering into a partnership um with a group where you're gonna you're going to work together on something that's that's not the way to go on that that's not the way to build trust and to say come on trust me this is going to be a great experience we're going to work really well together so i i am happy to see that as far as doing the inet i can absolutely understand the cost savings and and why we would want to go into that and also leasing our fiber to other types of governmental agencies like i get that as well but i am very cautious on the idea of us doing engaging in the cnet um with the group because number one i do think we're getting into a level of competition that i'm not i don't think is a proper role for us to get to um but also the last six months has really brought home to me that our government can do a level of control and shut things down in ways that we never contemplated would happen in our country in our state and in our city and then we would have private business on assets that we own and we could turn them off or we could be ordered to turn them off and although people will say oh that's so outlandish can anyone right now really say that that is just out of the realm of possibility because i don't think it is at that point so i also have a concern about that but that's a business evaluation to decide if a business would ever want to take that chance if i were a business there's no way there's no way i would walk into that at all and i also think that we whether we're part of the cnet or not um and frankly whether we're part of the dbb or not we can still work with our partners and contract with them and that type of thing that does not preclude us from if a company would want to use our fiber in another other city's fiber and another in the counties fiber and that type of thing and they're in the dbb we can still do those agreements there's nothing that says if you don't do the cnet or if you aren't even part of the dbb you're just locked out forever and it's like the berlin well went up and and nothing can get past so it's this is not all or nothing on any of this but i am really hopeful and pleased with your presentation that they are realizing the the depth of caution that we are having and that we really do have issues with the iru language and so i am i am happy to hear that um because it has not appeared up until this point there was much interest in addressing that so appreciate that thank you okay tom council member uh schultz also as it relates to the cnet conversation um just another point of clarity that the dbv is also pursuing um addressing the definition of what the cnet is and who a cnet user is obviously today the language in the jpa defines anybody not a member is a cnet user and that then defines the mbta the school districts and everybody else has a cnet so there's also been some recognition of that and needing to address that and and have conversation about that too yes and i heard that too and i was very appreciative of that as well thank you yeah and it's good that the the dbb board continues to work on all of this and you're they're going to amend the jpa i'm sure as this goes on as well when you look at the agreements for the irus that could very well be an outcome of the conversations that are continuing so and i have just two more slides absolutely please [Laughter] the systems plan as i've mentioned earlier um is being updated the dbb recently approved moving forward and soliciting a consultant to help update the system's plan with the intent to focus on um obviously updating the the one from 2018 that's in place reviewing broadband and dakota county getting stakeholder input as i mentioned earlier opportunities for institutional network expansion and as that relates not only to the physical expansion of the institutional network the opportunities to share services over the institutional network and how the the consultant can help us maybe steer in a direction maybe in terms of opportunities for projects that we could interconnect and and do together because of the institutional network an inventory of the unused dark fiber assets so you've heard me mention we've got excess capacity what is that excess capacity and what's that what does that mean and then economic development opportunities and community value that might be identified in the systems update um and then operating models and structure and pricing models that may be considered in terms of as it relates to any kind of contractual agreements that we may move forward with with third parties especially as we talk about being a wholesale provider and not a service provider of infrastructure opportunities for obviously collaboration and then outreach and communication strategy how do we do proactive marketing of those assets and outreach the solicitation for the consultant is expected to go out after uh finalizing um the language or the bid um specifications um at the october after the october dvb meeting um and then with the idea that a report from the consultant would hopefully come back in early 2021 um so that they could act upon that to make some decisions and continue that conversation in in during that time period too about iru and cnet definitions that we've talked about okay tom and council member dan g well i didn't no no i'm just talking to the two of you i know okay is that as as you're as you're going through the systems plan and for me it's looking at the infrastructure and economic development opportunities and community value i am looking at the center village because it's a mixed use that's going to need infrastructure when we're going to move into it and so it's not just the roads that we're going to be looking at and the underpass and all the other things but this communications highway that would add to our route miles yes if we decided to bring in infrastructure or fiber and then i'm also needing to take a look at that whole county road 42 corridor so if you can add that into the list when you're looking at economic development opportunities because that's the value to the city if we're going to look to the future and the infrastructure that we have to build in that area this is the communication infrastructure that we need to make sure that is part of that plan 42 would probably be a county project though yeah but it's still going to have yeah absolutely but that's that partnership yeah no no no i get that part of it but yeah let's put it on the county's bill well we're going to be working on that we're going to be working on that road anyway right so i just wanted to make sure that um that that's recognized and on the forefront i will be sure to bring that up and identify that okay good thank you uh i have one last slide please sorry well you know where we are we're not wanting to to to miss any of this stuff and that's why i wrote you a note about our needs in burnsville and what's going to be the value for us as we move forward but i wanted to make sure that that's articulated also we are in the process right now of of sitting down for planning out future years with the dbb to identify future potential projects and we can add those to the list and that that comes as an annual part of our budget process with them so i definitely will do that burnsville does have a couple of active projects right now that i just wanted to make you aware of of course we do couple institutional network projects that we're moving forward on we are expanding um in our al magnate park area to the north side of the park to provide some security services and other infrastructure services for lighting control and other activities in that in the that portion of the park we're also expanding in uh uh nicolette commons park as part of the the project going forward right now in the water feature and in the near future fire station number one the new fire station um we'll be connecting to our existing fiber assets that are within a quarter mile um and there's actually two routes one on 42 and one on connie wood five so we'll have a redundant path into that brand new fire station okay yeah yeah and then um i we already talked about the proposed dbv budget amount we're expecting to go down uh by it's going to be adopted at the october meeting but our expected uh budget is going down by about 900 and then uh the dbb did unveil a brand new website that is now available for the public and anybody interested at dbbmn.gov and that contains meeting minutes board meeting information the jpa the bylaws and any budget budget um in any past and previous activities since 2018 since the the inception of the dbb and i promise that is it that's all i have are there any questions we prolonged this not you tom yeah yeah that was our fault but but it was great to have that kind of discussion but thank you and so i'm glad that you'll you know i mentioned it so when you're doing the the systems work that you don't forget of all the things just like we're doing now but are we also adding um more um route miles or wi-fi into our parks as we extend our fiber into our parks we will be adding a small amount of route miles uh miles is probably a too large a term okay eight feet yards yeah so but because we'll have wi-fi and then it'll just drop down someplace right yeah yeah and as i mentioned earlier the the initial intent for that obviously is uh facility um asset management security um and then we always add the amenity of wi-fi in the in those areas too as we're doing that and we're expanding into those parts each year yeah so it'd be interesting to understand with all of the distance learning and all of the also uh work from home how's that affecting the use because i know that i've had some calls from people saying that i can't get service and i say well then who's your service provider and they'll say it's conscious we'll call cop and i believe that the city the executive director's intent is to ask the consultant to do some surveying of the stakeholders so we'll get some additional information back yeah that raises a good question though if that were to continue to happen then i mean are we fielding those calls if internet's not fast enough does that become something that we're obligated to respond to at that point well i had two i don't know if our staff that had received any i ask who their provider is if it's frontier or comcast that's who you call so we we don't manage it's not a i guess i would hope that that would be a conversation piece as this cnet conversation evolves that if the increased usage takes place are we going to be the ones that have to respond to those phone calls if my internet's not working or my internet's not fast enough because it's our fiber we're not the service provider so the service provider would be the one responding to those activities but at the end if the the cause of that would be infrastructure that would have to be dealt with just like any other infrastructure problems that would occur generally over the years as it relates to service provider complaints or calls that we've taken i fielded we generally take the calls on behalf of the service providers and then we contact the service providers and work with them through resolution for the residents or businesses that are calling and having those concerns we generally don't have the we can't resolve the issue because it's not our service but we put them in touch with the right people typically that's a role that we've generally played so next time my satellite goes out i can call you and you'll call directv for me i may not have much clout but i might find a person that could resolve your issue good enough you don't have cable i won't get into that okay with that thank you so much tom really appreciate uh your presentation thank you okay so thank you tom madame thank you that's fine i was just gonna say we did track network capacity during covid and i can send you that website but that's cable networks oh you had you had crashes we can't hear you anna can you come up to mike yeah come up to a mic so that we can hear you i was just going to say that anna borah from the cable association we did track our network capacity during covid just because of everyone working from home and distance learning and all of those things and i can send you i mean burnsville's networks from a cable perspective performed fabulously now that won't help you on the satellite internet side but i can send you the website where you they're still tracking it so and network capacity just to make sure that we future-proof our networks and that we have the capacity always available that's all thank you anna okay the next item is