Sep 11 Delegate Meeting

WiredWest delegates met to discuss a recommendation for WiredWest governance. The intention of the meeting was for delegates to vote to support a governance option to take to town Select Boards for approval and ultimately implement.

Date: September 11, 2010, 9 am – 12 noon

Location: JFK Middle School, 100 Bridge Rd. Northampton

Report from the Meeting

Delegates from 32 western Massachusetts towns met to review and select a governance model. David Greenberg, WiredWest Chair, welcomed the delegates who introduced themselves to the room. David then turned the meeting over to Tim Newman, WiredWest Governance Committee Chair, who introduced Brian Domina, staff lawyer at the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, Andrew Cohill of Design Nine, and municipal broadband attorney David Shaw. Brian, Andrew and David are consulting with WiredWest on numerous aspects of its creation, network design, funding, etc.

David Shaw outlined three criteria required for a successful governance model: that the model be grounded in Massachusetts law, have political support, and have the ability to raise funding. He noted that we clearly have political support from our region as indicated by the turnout of delegates from our Western Massachusetts towns.

Tim Newman described the Steering Committee’s recommended governance model, a municipal co-operative of member towns, and an alternate model requiring special legislation by the Massachusetts legislature to form an inter-municipal agency. These models and many others had been reviewed by consultants, the governance committee, and steering committee, which ultimately resulted in the recommendation of the municipal co-op; the special legislation option ranked a much less favorable second. Documents describing details of governance options had been circulated to delegates over the previous two weeks for review.

After much discussion the delegates voted almost unanimously to support the municipal cooperative model, which will be described below. The Steering Committee pledged to provide the delegates with the support they will need to shepherd their towns through the steps necessary to join the WiredWest municipal cooperative.

A municipal cooperative is authorized under Massachusetts General Law (MGL), Chapter 164 which was originally written over a hundred years ago to allow towns or a cooperative of towns to build or acquire a power generating plant, the technology of the day in high demand by citizens and in short supply by private industry. The legislation has been amended since to include other technologies such as distributing over-the-air TV and “telecommunications services”.

Towns must first create a ‘lighting plant’ through two separate 2/3 votes taken 2 to 13 months apart at annual or special town meetings. This lighting plant is considered a town department that is managed by the select board or a Municipal Light Board of 3-5 elected officials. Two or more lighting plants can form a co-operative by filing Articles of Organization with the Secretary of the Commonwealth at which point they establish bylaws defining how other town lighting plants can join, how members can leave, how votes are taken, etc.

Our intent is that towns wishing to be part of WiredWest would first create a ‘lighting plant’ department through these two votes and after several ‘early adopters’ have done this they would form the Municipal Co-operative known as WiredWest Communications. The co-operative would be run by a Board of Directors consisting of representatives from its member towns, who would appoint an executive team that would perform the day-to-day functions necessary to manage WiredWest.

Each town’s lighting plant would be required to do very little other than the most basic administration of any town department and hence the costs of running the lighting plant would be minimal. The WiredWest co-operative would serve as the major entity that would design, build and run the network with bonding authority and the ability to take on debt.

In the coming week or so I (David Kulp) will be distributing by email and posting to the website additional documents including a revised FAQ and an enumeration of open questions (and hopefully some answers) based on our discussions on Saturday. I will also post a rough timeline. As delegates, two important steps are ahead of us: creating co-op bylaws and campaigning in each town to create the lighting plant department.