Fort Pierce, Two Years Later: Fiber, Smart City, and Steady Growth - Episode 677 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:12)
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in St. Paul, Minnesota, where it's warming up a little bit, although this is going to be a minute before we post it, perhaps. So perhaps we'll be cold again by then. I'm talking with someone who is much warmer than me, someone who's almost two years to the date since we spoke last. We have Jason Mittler on today from Fort Pierce, the F-

PUAnet manager Jason Mittler welcome back

Jason Mittler (00:43)
Hey, Chris. ⁓ It's good to be on here. I'm sorry to tell you that here in Florida, the weather is much different, but we did go through a cold front for us. I think we got to like down to the 20s with the wind chill, which was pretty crazy. Had to cancel schools. No, they didn't cancel schools, I think some people probably didn't show up for school or work because it's just too cold for them.

Christopher Mitchell (01:08)
Yeah, I mean, if you're not ready for it, you know, like, I know, I know what it's like every November we go through it, you know, cause you're not used to it. I am curious. I have to say like, ⁓ I want you to keep that great climate cause I love oranges. So I'll just say, you I like to start my day off with orange juice. So, it's important to me that y'all stay warm.

Jason Mittler (01:25)
Yeah, I was at the dentist today and I was talking with one of hygienists there and she was talking to a farmer and I guess the freeze on the fruit was significant this year. maybe since like 1987 or something like that. So definitely something significant. So hopefully it doesn't impact the citrus industry too much.

Christopher Mitchell (01:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, I hope not. So when we talked last, you were kind of in the earlier phases of building the network. I hope you're in the phase of sleeping through the night now. I know that these things are challenging and it can take many years to sort themselves out. So why don't you remind us what Fort Pierce is doing down there?

Jason Mittler (02:01)
Yeah, sure. Thank you again, Chris, for having me. So yeah, so.

We're in Fort Pierce, Florida here on the East Coast, basically west of the big lake in Florida. If you see the Lake of Okeechobee and go due west, run, due east, you run right into Fort Pierce. Fort Pierce is a great coastal town here and we're one of the few electric municipalities, Fort Pierce has an electric municipality, which is Fort Pierce Utilities Authority. We have five utilities, which is electric, water, wastewater, natural gas.

And then obviously FPUAnet which is our Internet service provider. And so we're really happy about what we do. We've been in the fiber business for a couple of decades, over 20 years, but really that fiber infrastructure was installed for just really our electric grid, providing connections to our substations, internal uses. In about 2006, we branded FPUAnet and really started providing service to the larger municipalities, the sheriff.

police, county, school, know, those type of entities. And it really wasn't until 2018 that our now director, utility CEO, Javier Cisneros kind of mentioned the idea of Smart City. We pitched that idea and we started to build out more fiber to connect, you know, some of our smart grid such as AMI and water wells and lift stations and gas stations and all of those components.

and really built some partnerships with our city and county to start deploying public Wi-Fi. And really, FPUAnet now is what we've branded ourselves as a smart city Internet service provider that provides smart grid solutions and smart city services over the same network that we provide to the home and business.

Christopher Mitchell (03:39)
And you are going out to every last meter, right? And where are you on that? Or am I confused?

Jason Mittler (03:46)
so, you know, we probably will not build to every meter. mean, we'd love to do that. you know, our AMI is not dependent on fiber to the meter at the moment. ⁓ you know, it's, it is. Yeah. Yeah. So we do point to multi-point technology where, know, you have like what's called a, a gatekeeper and we bring fiber to those nodes, which are throughout the city. but we have many other things that need to be connected.

Christopher Mitchell (03:56)
to do like meter reading remotely and troubleshooting and stuff like that.

Jason Mittler (04:09)
⁓ So we're on track for about passing about 13,000 parcels by 2029 for us. We're at about 3000 parcels at the moment, but as starting a new telecommunication provider that's Internet provider that provides to home and businesses, it's a little different kind of staffing up, getting tools, getting trucks, vehicles. ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (04:31)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mittler (04:32)
OSS, BSS systems, everything you could imagine that you need to run a broadband entity. You had to kind of stand up. And we've done that over the last five years because reality that's moving away from just providing dedicated Internet to a few of our key municipal partners, it's changed a lot. But we've really been able to dial in our design and deployment of fiber.

And this year we'll be doubling our parcels past. So what took us a few years to do will take us less than 12 months to do. So we're excited about that.

Christopher Mitchell (05:07)
Getting up the learning curve then.

Jason Mittler (05:08)
Yeah, yeah, so we're excited to be able to learn that and, you know, getting staff was challenging, right? Training staff and all that stuff is in place. have really good staff. It's really been amazing finding great people that is committed to the vision.

Christopher Mitchell (05:25)
Now, the branding as the smart city, what I find interesting about this is that many of the cities that get a lot of attention for municipal broadband, for retail service, they've bonded. And once they've borrowed a bunch of money, they borrow money from private investors to build it out and then they're gonna repay those private investors. So basically that starts a shot clock for them. And like from the second they sign the document, they wanna build as fast as possible. And now you don't have that.

pressure, right? Like you're able to take a more measured approach because you haven't gone that route.

Jason Mittler (05:56)
Well, that's not true. We have bonded. So we bonded money once and we're fixing to bond again for our second phase of expansion.

Christopher Mitchell (06:03)
But

right, I guess what I was meant was more that I should have been more clear is like they bond, you know, for an amount to cover the entire city all at once. They're not going for like tranches.

Jason Mittler (06:12)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, that was not, you know, in the cards at the moment. ⁓ Because we have five utilities, we have lots of other things going on too. We just finished our wastewater plant. We literally are relocating our wastewater plant off of the island where it's located right on the inter-coastal, moving it off there to, you know, inland. And that was a couple hundred million dollar projects.

You know, those things all play into the account of expansion efforts. But, you know, we're really excited that our leadership at FPUA, our board, our city commission are all in support of the broadband deployment. But yeah, we didn't do a $40 million bond to build out to all of our electric customers at the moment. You know, our goal is to build it to our entire electric territory. But with that being said,

If there are other providers that build fiber to a certain zone prior to us building that zone, I don't know if we're going to go in there and try to be the second fiber provider and compete directly with them, especially on borrowed money. I just don't think that's a wise investment being the second entrant providing same service, XGS PON, same rates.

you know, it's challenging. I do think we do a better job because we're local and the customer service. But, you know, there's other areas that we'll build first. And then once we have enough additional revenue, we may reinvest and put that into those areas. And if those competitors don't act right, meaning they don't provide good service at affordable rates, you know, we will come in, we'll build them.

Christopher Mitchell (07:49)
Yeah, that's what I, I've heard that from a number of utilities. I feel like the way I think of it is like, you're not gonna decide to build in there based on your ego, right? You're gonna decide based on like local sentiment of your rate payers.

Jason Mittler (08:00)
Yeah, we want to be wise with our money. We want to do the right thing. And so for us, ⁓ us building fiber is the right thing, we feel, because we have to connect a lot of our utility assets. And we're partnering with the city and county and putting out Wi-Fi in many of those parks and utilizing that Wi-Fi to feed police cameras and so many other different types of smart city components. We feel like we're doing the right thing. And I feel like we're having a good success at it.

⁓ It just I just don't think it's we're at the point of an approach that says listen We're gonna build everything even if you've already built it as a service provider I just don't I don't I don't think that we're trying to completely sub plant the AT&T's and Comcast of the world

Christopher Mitchell (08:38)
I want to go back to the water treatment plant for a second. And, I know you're the manager of FPUAnet, but I always like to contrast this when these things happen in, this like close period of time, because when you hear people who oppose municipal broadband under any circumstance, they'll often talk about how it's too risky and they'll talk about how it's too expensive. And you just, the numbers you just mentioned back up what I've often seen, which is for a utility mindset.

building out your entire city might cost you $40 million, which is a lot of money. And you absolutely need to be a good steward of those funds. But people should understand the water treatment plant, like in the water system, it's often like a factor of like eight or 10 X the cost when you, when it comes down to it. And so there's not to say that what you're doing is trivial, but I like to put it in context that it is a, it's an amount of money that we can trust local leaders to decide how to invest.

Jason Mittler (09:30)
Yeah, for sure. mean, know, FPUA is a multimillion dollar entity and we have capital budgets for, you know, electric and water and sewer. And so the reality is, the fiber world for us is a small piece of that, that budget, even though we are completely separate from an O and M and a capital cost, you know, even in Florida, one of the challenges is, there's legislation that was created, I think in 2005, which we were grandfathered in where it basically

restricts bonding to bond for 15 years. So when I borrow money, I'm bonding it for 15 years, which is, it can be challenging. So you have to be very cost conscious on how we build and deploy. You know, I don't want to go and overbuild a fiber network where I'm going to get half of the take rate that I'm expecting. It just doesn't make sense.

Christopher Mitchell (10:19)
Right. Yeah, you have to.

Yeah, 15 years and the difference between 15 and 20 years is not as small as people might think. It's a significant difference because those extra five years are the years where you're basically pure profit and then you're able to like make those payments a lot better.

Jason Mittler (10:32)
Yeah, well, not only

that, much of our infrastructure is good for conduit stuff, 50-year infrastructure. And so when we bonded the rest of the stuff, it's 30 years. It's like when you buy a house, who buys a 10-year mortgage, 15-year mortgage? Not many people. ⁓ It's challenging. But from our financial model and our projections, it looks like that's going to work for us because

Christopher Mitchell (10:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I wish I had the funds too, but it wasn't in the cards.

Jason Mittler (10:55)
You know, we also provide the services for internal purposes, you know, such as our fiber for our electric, our wastewater, our gas, and all those components all matched it together work, right? And we have so many dedicated customers that we had before that helps, you know, be able to provide that revenue base.

Christopher Mitchell (11:14)
What are the smart city applications that are the most exciting that you're developing that, you, and I guess there's a second question too, which is sort of like, what is the sexiest, coolest stuff? But then also I'm always curious, what are the things that you wouldn't do if you were leasing the lines, right? Like, because you own it, you have a different cost than if you had to pay AT&T in order to like do some smart city things.

Jason Mittler (11:37)
Well, one of the things that I think, I'll answer your last question first. So I don't think Smart City from a dark fiber perspective, meaning if you were dedicating that fiber for that Smart City service, it can be really challenging because that is cost, that's not cost effective. You we use dark fiber when we're trying to connect our relays to our substations. And basically what that means is if there was a fault on the transmission line, it needs to have

immediate connections, extremely reliable, extremely critical from a cybersecurity perspective. And so it needs to be segregated. you have, know, that runs an entire electric grid. So there's a reason for that separation. But deploying public Wi-Fi or cameras or a traffic light, you know, lot of that stuff can be run right inside of the network that you're deploying to the home and business by segmenting it through VLANs. And so that's what we're doing.

So when we build out our pond zones, our passive optic network to build terminals for the homes and businesses, we have accounted for the parks. We have accounted for water wells or lift stations or things that are not as critical from a control perspective if we're actually only monitoring. We put that on that network. If it's a control thing such as a relay,

We at the moment, we've kind of segmented that and says, listen, we're going to provide you a dedicated fiber that's off the network, that's completely segregated, it doesn't traverse our network or the Internet. And so we include those additional fiber ports so that whenever the need arises, if it arises, right, to say, hey, you Wi-Fi at that park, or we want to connect this water well, or this, we want to connect a parking garage, or whatever the city or the county needs.

I think that we're building that into our infrastructure just as additional fibers, which helps reduce that cost.

Christopher Mitchell (13:21)
Right, if I

tie it back to AT&T, it wouldn't necessarily be cost effective to be leasing every one of those things individually. But the fact that you can bundle it all together means that it is, you get like this, sum is more, the whole is more than the sum of the parts I feel like.

Jason Mittler (13:37)
Yeah, yeah, and so one of the things what we've done to partner with our other sister utilities is when they need a connection in the field, we're actually providing that connection for $30 a month. Well, why are we doing that? Because outside of fiber, the only other option is cell. And so that's typically the cell cost. So what we're saying is, is if you're paying Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile to connect,

via a cell card, which is not going to be as fast. It's not going to be as reliable. We can do that with Fiber when we build out the zone.

Christopher Mitchell (14:08)
And you're not trying to like figure out how to make extra money. You're just trying to avoid the cost of ⁓ the competitive service.

Jason Mittler (14:08)
Okay.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it does. It becomes a subscriber, right? It's very similar to like a residential home. They're not using a ton of data, you know, but latency is important for them, which doesn't, that's not good with a cell provider, right? The latency is not the same. As well as there's some security benefits for everything being inside of a network. doesn't necessarily need to go out to the Internet when it comes through our network. We can then directly segment that and put that onto.

you know, our IT network.

Christopher Mitchell (14:40)
So is it your job to try to figure out how the city can use this in smart ways or is that like the city's problem? Because I feel like people always assume that y'all are like in meetings constantly and like you're making decisions for the city, but in reality, those things are pretty segmented.

Jason Mittler (14:47)
Well...

Yeah, that's an interesting conversation. know, when we started this, we were trying to spearhead it and trying to create ideas for the city. And so, you know, we're not as far along as I would like to be, but we're building strong partnerships with both our city, county, sheriff and police and looking at applications. And it's really kind of transitioned and pivoted from saying, hey, we need to figure out what you need because I can't do that.

What I'm doing is I'm the infrastructure provider, right? Whether you need a fiber, whether you need some type of wireless connection via Wi-Fi, or even if there's other solutions, we are a technology company that provides these types of infrastructures to you. Let's get together and discuss what are the benefits, what are the needs that the city needs? Because I think that smart city is a great buzzword.

And I've cautioned people, and I've said this many times at presentations that I've done at various different conferences, is that we have to be careful about implementing a smart city service that turns into a liability. Meaning, you put electronics out in the field, that stuff needs to be refreshed every five to eight years at the maximum. And so what happens is you think it's great to monitor trash cans and

You got all this cool stuff, but if it doesn't add value and reduce cost, either reduce cost, add value to the community, it then just hurts your budget. So it just may not make sense to do, but each community is different. They may have so much trash that they need to know when the trash can is full that they need to pick it up immediately because they've got so many raccoons that tip it over. Now there's trash all on the street and now they have to spend two weeks picking up trash.

Maybe it's more cost effective for them to monitor that. But I can't decide that, like you were pointing out. But we want to provide the infrastructure to be able to make that connection and partner with those municipalities.

Christopher Mitchell (16:45)
So I wanna talk about the Lincoln Park Smart Neighborhood effort. One of the things that we found again is that communities are, you're torn in different directions, right? One is you have to figure out how to make use of limited budgets in the most effective way. And the other is you really wanna serve people that have been left behind. Those are often the highest cost people to serve and they also have the least ability to pay.

And I believe when we talked, Lincoln Park had the lowest subscription rate of Internet access within the county. And so you were trying to make sure that you were rolling out a service that would really benefit them. I'm curious how that's all going.

Jason Mittler (17:23)
Yeah, you know, Lincoln Park is a bigger neighborhood. There was a subsection of that neighborhood that was selected with the partners with Allegany Francis Ministries, Santa Monica County, City of Fort Pierce, and FPUA. It was two parts to it, one rolling out fiber to every parcel and then putting in public Wi-Fi in five key areas. At the same time, we obviously accounted for all of the other smart grid pieces that we needed to connect with inside that track of

of parcels. I would love to say that, listen, we've had such a great take rate in there and we have so many subscribers. That's not true. ⁓ We even offered a discounted rate, $18 off our retail rate, no contract, no equipment fees. So we really did a really great deal in that area there for them. And I wouldn't say that we've got a good take rate from that because I think it's one of the things that people

Christopher Mitchell (17:58)
It's hard, it's very hard.

Jason Mittler (18:16)
We need to be transparent, right? And what works, what doesn't work. But what has worked is the free Wi-Fi, right? That has been great, because there's no cost to it. And people can connect to it. We've had a lot of great responses. And we just actually finished a project, which I'm very proud of. It's still the Lincoln Park area, but it's within sight of one of our four peers housing authority projects, which is called the Garden Terrace Housing Project.

think it's about 350 or so homes that are inside this housing development. And it was awarded through a grant in partnership with Indian River State College. And so we were able to build out a fiber network and then deploy wireless access points. We deployed 23 wireless access points throughout that whole community. So every one of those individuals in that community now have access to free public Wi-Fi in and around their home.

Christopher Mitchell (18:46)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mittler (19:06)
I can't say that in every room of their house can they access the Wi-Fi that's exterior, but pretty confident that pretty much in various rooms or in outer rooms, porches, you can connect that Wi-Fi, is a much better approach than in the first phase of Lincoln Park, Smart City neighborhood, where it was really focused on parks. You'd have to leave your home, right? No one wants to leave your home, especially if you've got elementary kids who are doing homework.

Christopher Mitchell (19:30)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mittler (19:34)
These people are now able to do it right from their house. And so we've then also, there was a sub-grant that was awarded to the Fort Pierce Police Department and we're in the process of deploying some overt cameras, right? They're not designed to catch people, they're designed to deter crime. so these cameras will be put on the streetlight poles, but instead of them paying, again, $30 to $50 a month,

for a cell signal, which could get expensive, right? know, 17 cameras at that rate per month. What's happening is, is because there's public Wi-Fi that has been deployed throughout the whole area, they now have their own private SSID and VLAN that allows them to connect, get back to their crime center, and they're able to see those cameras. And there's no additional cost. It was covered in the grant.

So, I think that there's significant value in there. That's one of the ways that think Fort Pierce is working with our community partners to deploy Smart City services as well as benefit the community and help bridge the digital divide and create digital equity with inside some of our communities that really are challenged financially.

Christopher Mitchell (20:45)
I'm curious when you, and this comes from some of the work we've tried to do directly with communities that I can, I can appreciate how difficult it is to figure out like how to make sure you have a plan that will be appealing to people there, that you can help answer people's questions as they're developed before rumor mongering starts and things like that. Based on the partners that you listed, ⁓ I would assume it's the ministries that likely are kind of that, that conduit, the connection to people on the ground.

⁓ Is that the case? And can you just share a little bit about the communication with people to make sure that these services are well received and things like that?

Jason Mittler (21:20)
Yeah, so the Allegany Francis ministry is an amazing ministry. It's a group of nuns that sold, I believe, some hospitals. And I could be wrong, but they had a bunch of capital, and they come into various communities and invest. And so they invested a significant amount of money in Fort Pierce through various years, and this was one small subpart of that. Outside of that, we...

We do use and work with many of the churches because many of the churches love our service, right? Because many churches today with virtual church, they're streaming. And so with the cable providers that I will not name, Their services go in and out and they lose connectivity constantly. But then when they get that fiber connection that has that symmetrical connection, right? They have these great upload speeds with low latency. They're loving it. So they are excited.

Christopher Mitchell (22:07)
If I could just

interrupt for one second, because I've been involved in one of these projects and I've talked with people about them and you have to understand the way it works is that the church often has a volunteer or two that are technical people, but they're not on call. And so they want to set up something that works. And we want it to work all the time so that they can set it and forget it. Basically, they'll come back and do security updates or, or whatever, but they want a service that is solid.

not something where on Sunday morning they're scrambling to try to figure out why the signal's not working. yeah, reliability is very important.

Jason Mittler (22:39)
Yeah, that's what we found. And so they've become a big champion for us. And actually, last week we just completed our second town hall in one of the local churches to discuss not just FPUAnet, because FPUA has recently made significant changes in growth and we've created a new

department and group, Rachel Tennant, our director of public affairs and sustainability, she leads that. Not only does it, you know, got grants, they got like a hundred and something million dollars in grants for this wastewater plant, which was amazing. But we've also really taken an approach from being reactive to communicating with our community to really being proactive in all aspects of what we do as a utility. And so we have these listening sessions.

inside these churches, we're what we call a town hall, and we bring up ⁓ set groups of questions, but let them ask questions as well, and we bring up the SMEs and the experts to discuss that. So yeah, those churches have been very great and helpful getting the information out to the community.

Christopher Mitchell (23:43)
That's terrific. As we're winding down on time, let me just ask you a question I always like to ask, although I didn't prepare you for it, which is, when you look at this and the amount of time you've put into it, what makes it worth it to you for you having, what do you think about in terms of why this has been worth all the effort, time that you've put into it? I'm sure ⁓ anguish at times.

Jason Mittler (24:05)
you know, I think being able to stand up a fifth utility, and provide an essential service to our community that is really what I could say is, is helping to increase that digital equity. I think is really important. I think second alongside of that, being able to help modernize our

network and provide further reliability for our utilities, I think is very important as well. know, one of the things that I don't think people realize, and we're finding this, you know, as an Internet service provider, we have to be have networking experts. We have to have outside plant fiber experts. And many of the municipalities, they don't have that.

They don't have that kind of staff on play. They don't have networking experts. They have IT people. And IT is so vast. I'm very proud that one of our staff, Evan Sapia, he's a CCIE. Like what municipality has a CCIE? Well, we do because we're an ISP. All my network engineers, they're all going for their CCMPs. Most municipalities don't have people like that. So what we do is we offer those services.

Christopher Mitchell (24:56)
Mm hmm. So very different too. Yeah.

Jason Mittler (25:18)
to our municipal sisters and brothers and talk to the county and the city and say, hey, listen, how can we talk to you and help you from a network perspective, architecting that, those higher level roles that they may not have experience in? if the county's having a problem with their internal fiber, guess what? They don't have fiber people. So we send over one of our techs. And so that's not a place of us gaining revenue. It's value add for our community.

So I think that there was these missing pieces to the puzzle. And I think FPUAnet has been able to bring that into the community. And I'm very proud of that.

Christopher Mitchell (25:53)
Yeah, I'm reminded of a study that we had done, which was looking back at Martin County's situation, ⁓ not too far away from you, I think, more than 20 years ago now, where they were confronted with very extreme costs for continuing to use the fiber that they were paying a private company for. And I suspect that's just something we'll continue to see, which is ⁓ local governments, counties, and cities who have historically relied on the outside.

companies being hit with a little bit of sticker shock as those companies flex their market power a bit. And for them to have someone to come talk to, know, for you to be for them to get a sense of like, okay, what are our options here is really helpful. Because again, when you work for a local government in this capacity as it, you don't get a magic crystal ball, right? To answer these questions, you got to try and figure it out. And it's nice that they can ask you rather than

perhaps Claude or an AI at this point that who knows what kind of advice they would get.

Jason Mittler (26:48)
or a vendor, because you start talking, listen, vendors are great, but at the end of the day, they're there to sell you something. And ⁓ they will sell you, some of them will sell you things that you don't need. And so a lot of times we sit in as outside consultants for them to just listen or help provide perspective and say, yeah, that's true, yeah, that's just a good idea. Or listen, that's not something we should do. And so we're very...

Christopher Mitchell (26:51)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mittler (27:11)
grateful to being able to be part of that because one, they're some of our largest customers. And so we're kind of operating as a managed service provider for them as well, but not really at the moment. But we're providing some consulting. And I think that's a significant value add for the community overall.

Christopher Mitchell (27:27)
Yeah, it makes all of Florida, makes the region stronger. that's one of the other things that I think is important about developing local expertise. When one is looking at this on the spreadsheet, there are benefits of developing local expertise that don't always show up and they are important. And when you lose them, you don't always anticipate the higher costs that'll pop into that spreadsheet in the future in other areas.

Jason Mittler (27:48)
That's right. There's significant other costs that are not quantifiable to that value adds can bring into the equation if you really consider what it means to have an Internet service provider in a local capacity here and how that works from a job perspective, from utilities, from municipalities, from community services, just all that stuff.

Christopher Mitchell (28:11)
Is there anything else you want to highlight before we wrap it up?

Jason Mittler (28:13)
Yeah, you know, one of the things we just did actually Tuesday, we ended up lowering our rates significantly. So we're really excited. you know, us, we have to change our rates in a public space. It's much harder for us. And when you change your rates and you ever have to increase them, you don't want to do that. Cause it's not fun going to the FPUA board and the city commission and people would speak and say, well, I don't want my rates to go up. I'm very proud that not only did, you know, FPUAnet lower their rates to basically

Christopher Mitchell (28:16)
I forgot about this.

Jason Mittler (28:41)
I think in most cases, they're going be the lowest in the market. There are some providers that also just put out some promotions that is hard to follow because different promotions change every week, every month. You can't get them. I don't know. But at the same time, FPUA just adjusted their utility rates for inflationary purposes, but it was very low. think on average, like 1.5%.

With all the things going on in the world with a 1.5 increase, that's significant. So I just want to brag on my brothers and sisters within SideFPUA for doing a great job. And I think that just all of us working together, know, has just synergizing, providing value for our community. And I think that's what distinguishes us from other providers where it's not about bottom profits and going to our shareholders and putting out dividends to them.

Christopher Mitchell (29:04)
Mm-hmm.

Do you think you would have had the same amount of coverage of your rate decrease if you had increased your rates? Or do you think more people would have noticed?

Jason Mittler (29:36)
if we would have went and increased our rates, yeah, would definitely have been resistance, I would imagine.

Christopher Mitchell (29:42)
Yeah, there's

a symmetry there. feel like it's, you lower your rates and you might get like some local media coverage briefly. but if you raise them, then, there's like, you know, endless stories about it. think so it is, it is, it's, it's funny because I think it's a good feeling and you know that the board appreciates that. but it is frustrating that in like public opinion, like it just doesn't catch on in the same way. You don't get as much, praise as you should. feel like so, so kudos to you.

Jason Mittler (30:07)
Yeah, no, thank you.

Christopher Mitchell (30:08)
We're gonna wrap it there. Thank you so much Jason for coming on and updating us and I just I want to say one last thing which is just that I do feel like a lot of the places that build all at once they do the big bond You know and they try to build every once they get more attention I feel like these approaches of like these like phased approaches and like learning as you go along They should also get more attention much like your rate decreases should get more attention. And so

We're always trying to highlight that, so just appreciate it.

Jason Mittler (30:37)
Yeah, we've learned a lot. if anybody that's watching that if you're interested in understanding it, I've been involved in every sector. We had some consultants and vendors and I learned from them and then they ended up learning from me. So I would say that you might find out that those vendors and those consultants may not have every answer for you and most likely not the most cost effective.

So when you have restrictions in budgets, you tend to do things smarter.

Christopher Mitchell (31:04)
Yep. All right, well, thank you. And