Well, we're still catching our breaths after a stunning set of votes at town meetings all over the ECFiber region. Every town that voted on the ECFiber item at town meeting voted in the affirmative to join together to create a fiber-optic community network. Twenty-five Vermont towns and cities are committed to creating a state-of-the-art fiber-optic network to bring television, telephone, and high-speed Internet to their towns. We're grateful for the positive town meeting discussions and votes, and for all of the hard work that the ECFiber volunteers and supporters have already contributed to this project.

What's next?

• We need to continue to collect pre-registrations for ECFiber service. As of late March we have pre-registrations from about 10% of the households in the ECFiber region, and we're hoping to collect pre-registrations from 20-25% of households by the time that we begin negotiations for funding the network. Potential funders will look for two main things: a solid business plan for ECFiber, and community support. With a large percentage of the households in the area pre-registered for service, we can demonstrate that there is widespread community support for the project, and that will also show that when we begin connecting households we'll be off to a running start with a committed group of pre-registrants ready to connect to the network.
  
  Be sure to let your neighbors and friends know about the project, so that they can pre-register. Pre-registration is easy online at www.ecfiber.net/preregister, or on that same page you can download a form to print off and mail in. If you would like some of the yellow postcard sheets to distribute to neighbors and friends, let us know.

• We are also soliciting letters of support from businesses and organizations; we use these to show interest from the business community for the project, and this is also important to potential funders. There is an example letter of support on the ECFiber website at www.ecfiber.net/support.
  
  
  
• We will soon convene an assembly of official representatives from each of the ECFiber towns, with a lead representative and an alternate. It is this body of representatives which will, through an executive committee, govern ECFiber and enter into agreements for the building and operation of the network itself. The first meeting of the ECFiber governing body will be held in early April, and this will signal an exciting new phase in the project.
  
  
  
• We're beginning the process of soliciting funding proposals for the project. There have been some questions about how the most recent Wall Street ups and downs may affect this project.  The municipal capital lease market is a specialized market, and is different from the stock market.  Our preliminary inquiries indicate that there is money available, there is a pool of interested investors, but the cost of the debt will be higher than it was a year ago, although still very much in line with what we had assumed in our financial model.  In addition, because the size of our project is now so large, it may take more time to secure the financing than we had anticipated.  Nonetheless, we are keeping to our original timetable, which means circulating our prospectus in April, after our intial organizational meeting.

We've grateful for the support and help we've received from everyone involved with our pre-registration drive, the town meeting votes, selectboard presentations, and getting the word out about this important project. There is a great deal of information about the project at www.ecfiber.net, and if there are any questions that you have or ways that you think you might be able to help with the project, please feel free to drop a line to info@ecfiber.net.

Thanks for all of your support.

The ECFiberNet Steering Committee

Tim Nulty, Jericho Center

Loredo Sola, Pomfret

Bob Merrill, Pomfret

Jim Masland, Thetford

Stan Williams, Norwich

Leslie Nulty, Jericho Center

David LaVie, Hartford