July 17, 2017

Otis Town Hall Conference Room

Meeting called to order at 6:00 pm in the Town Hall Conference Room, is being recorded, and a quorum is present.

Present: Bill Hiller, Frank Tolopko, Laurie Flower, Larry Gould, George Mabee, and Lisa D’Orazio

Others Present: Dave Rice, Jane Reiner, Michael Ernst

Approval of Meeting Minutes: The May 15, 2017 Technology meeting minutes were unanimously approved as written.

New Website Updates: Lisa and Lyn have been working with the new Town sandbox website and both are impressed with how easy it is to use. They have both been maintaining both the current and new websites. Additional users are being trained for the end of July so we should be ready to go live for August 1.

OtisFiber.com is due to go live soon. The sign up page has the construction phases listed and users can enter their street number and street name. We still need to set the price.

Generators needed for broadband are due to be delivered this week. We also ordered UPS backups this week for the generators. We ordered four individual ones which will be installed two per rack. This installation has double sine wave technology and will make the rectifiers redundant for both racks – these are all positive things. Also by doing things this way, we spent $6000 on this set up as opposed to $8000 on the original set up and gained the redundancy we need to keep the system operational.

Otis Website Updates: The NoticeOtis website is now a moot point. The Police Dept. goes to a google webpage and should be incorporated into the new website. The draft version of the new Town of Otis website looks real good. Bobby is ready to set up training for Lyn and Lisa. Discussed who needs update capability for new website besides Lyn and Lisa.

Broadband Updates: The construction bid opening will be on Friday, July 21^st. The hut that was supposed to be placed at Town Hall will be located at the main Fire House instead. These do not require a lot of power for the huts except for the UPS backups so we do not need to install fire suppression in the huts. Phase 1 of the Make Ready work came in at $30,000. Phase 2 came in at $100,000. We just paid this bill so we do not have the completion date for Phase 2 yet. Westfield is now planning to walk through with Verizon for the make ready work for each succeeding phase.

WG&E may decide to use Otis as a dispersal location for other broadband town feeds. If so, this could reduce backhaul costs for every town involved.

Other:

Broadband Informational Meetings: Technology decided to meet one hour before the Select Board meetings to begin to answer any and all broadband questions from the community. We plan to begin these Information Meetings on August 8^th from 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm and continue every second and fourth Tuesdays at that same time.

Town Hall Server: The new server was installed today and everyone is connected to it.

MS Office: We currently do not have the correct licenses on our town computers. We need to purchase 15 licenses from Government Connection at $275.00 per license which will come out of the Technology budget. We are also considering looking at other accounting software due to the high cost of SoftRight. Bill heard from several sources to keep in mind the vendor recommendations of DOR and the town auditors before looking.

The meeting was unanimously adjourned at 6:55 pm.

Respectfully submitted,

Lisa D’Orazio, recording secretary

Town of Otis Technology Committee

List of Documents

A copy of the proposed Broadband Update notice will be filed with these meeting minutes.

A printed copy of FAQ’s from OtisFiber.com will be filed with these meeting minutes.