By Darren Marcy

The chair of the governing board of ECFiber said Monday it is ready to take over operations of the telecommunications district.

East Central Vermont Telecommunications District, which does business as ECFiber, formed the Vermont ISP Operating Company, or VISPO, as a nonprofit to take over its operations from Great Works Internet at the end of its current contract, which ends December 31.

“[VISPO] is ready to go, it will be business as usual January 1,” board chair F.X. Flinn said this week. “We’re ready to take over now. We’re sufficiently staffed and prepared to operate the business now.”

A judge, however, decided that Great Works Internet can continue to operate ECFiber until the end of the year.

In August, ECFiber asked the courts for an injunction allowing it to take over operation now, citing a Federal Communications Commission filing August 14 that GWI had undergone a series of upheavals including the takeover of operations by Mac Mountain, an investment firm that held controlling shares of GWI.

The Mac Mountain takeover came after, according to the FCC filings, GWI fired a majority of highly skilled senior employees, quit paying vendors, and announced internally a plan to cease operations in Vermont. The filing claims GWI also set forth a plan to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, willfully withheld critical financial information from its chief administrative officer, moved and then canceled board meetings, and then was unreachable for several days as this all unfolded.

According to the FCC filing, the “erratic and ill-advised moves” violated the company’s fiduciary duties and “threatened the future [of the company] to continue providing service to customers … in rural Vermont.”

According to the FCC filing, Mac Mountain assumed control to stabilize the company.

“To halt these actions and prevent the bankruptcy filing, [Mac Mountain] had no choice but to … take control of [GWI] … on August 12, 2025.” The critical employees were rehired, payments re-established with critical vendors, and new management established, the filing read.

Flinn said that when the ECFiber board saw this information, they decided to file the injunction to immediately take over operations.

“GWI came apart at the seams on August 8th, terminating employees, stating the intention to cease operations in Vermont and to declare bankruptcy,” Flinn said. “[The] contract, in our opinion, required GWI to inform us of its difficulties and to collaborate with the District in resolving them.”

On September 3, the district filed for an emergency motion to enforce and modify the court’s preliminary injunction.

But District Judge Mary Kay Lanthier ruled in favor of GWI to continue to operate until the end of the year.

Meanwhile, two mediation sessions, required by the contract between the companies have gone nowhere, Flinn said, adding that mediation sessions are confidential, but “we weren’t the ones who said mediation is over.”

In a new turn of events, Great Works Internet filed September 12 for an expedited hearing and preliminary injunction against two former GWI employees, East Central Vermont Telecommunications District, and VISPO.

The court filings allege Corey Klinck and Andrew Oberholzer are violating a non-compete restriction in their contracts after choosing to work for VISPO.

“ECFiber and VISPO are actively raiding GWI’s workforce and will continue to do so unless this Court intervenes and orders injunctive relief,” the court filing said.

The court document said that on August 21, personnel from ECFiber and VISPO took advantage of court-ordered access to offices where GWI employees work, and visited with GWI employee Delta Tetreault to convince her to go to work for VISPO, Tetreault gave her resignation notice the same day and now works for VISPO, according to court papers.

The court filing said Klinck and Oberholzer were also recruited, and said that Flinn has testified in court that “four or five VISPO employees were poached from GWI, and approximately a dozen GWI employees have agreed to leave GWI to work for VISPO at some point in the future.”

The court filings said that almost all of the employees have similar non-compete clauses in their contracts.

Originally published October 2, 2025 in the Herald.

Published in The Vermont Standard on September 4, 2025

Great Works Internet, or GWI, has been disputing a coalition of Vermont towns’ plan for transitioning their fiber network to a new nonprofit operator started by coalition board members, arguing in court that it isn’t obligated by its current contract to help the nonprofit. There’s bad blood between GWI and the coalition, which for months have been locked in legal battles around the plan to ditch GWI.

District Judge Mary Kay Lanthier sided against the company Monday, saying GWI had to grant access to ECFiber communications plants and data.

Author:Jake Neenan
Original: Broadband Breakfast

Federal Court Sides with ECFiber against GWI

Rutland, August 11: U.S. District Court Judge Mary Kay Lanthier ordered GWI to cease efforts to frustrate ECFiber’s transition to a new operator and to follow the Governing Board’s Transition Policy. In her Order Granting East Central Vermont Telecommunications District’s Motion for Preliminary Injunction, the judge found the Transition Policy to have been properly adopted under the terms of the Operating Agreement between the District and GWI, and that GWI’s failure to participate in a transition process was likely to create irreparable harm to ECFiber customers without injunctive relief.

In a 12-point order, GWI was commanded to follow key aspects of the Transition Policy, such as maintaining current ECFiber-owned billing and network management systems (GWI had been planning to convert these to GWI-owned systems despite the District’s objections), and providing access to systems by District-designated personnel. The District was commanded to continue to make all payments owed to GWI and to assume all costs related to the transition, such as training new operating personnel.

“Members of the Governing Board, particularly those on the Executive Committee, breathed a huge sigh of relief on getting this news,” said District Chair F. X. Flinn, “We believe the new owner of GWI simply didn’t understand ECFiber, the depths of commitment found in its grass-roots history, the desire to keep it as local as possible, its status as more of a utility than a business, and its dependence on the tax-free status of its municipal revenue bonds. Each of these attributes were threatened by the model GWI insisted we switch to as part of a contract to replace the one set to expire at the end of this year.”

ECFiber began in 2008 when 23 towns in east-central Vermont voted to enter into an interlocal agreement to create a business that would bring fiber-optic based internet service to the towns, 20 of which had no cable broadband provider. The East Central Vermont Fiber Network quickly shortened to ECFiber, which today is the doing-business-as name of the East Central Vermont Telecommunications District.

The grassroots organizers included members of the ValleyNet board. ValleyNet provided dial-up access in the Upper Valley region of VT/NH and was the only non-profit internet service provider in the United States. By 2010, ValleyNet was out of the dial-up business and the ECFiber effort was its only work. In 2011, the first customers went online in Barnard, and by 2014 about $7.5 million had been borrowed from local individuals and used to build 200 miles of network serving almost 1,000 customers.

In 2015, ECFiber organizers drafted the CUD law and presented it to the legislature, which passed it, and on January 1, 2016, the newly minted East Central Vermont Telecommunications District replaced the interlocal contract. Now its own unique government, ECFiber was able to issue municipal revenue bonds. This sped construction, and all original investors were paid back by 2017.

The success of ECFiber led the Vermont state government to adopt the CUD model as the state’s strategy for solving the rural internet crisis in 2019. By the end of 2020, eight other CUDs had formed. The pandemic was in full flower. The demands pressing in on ECFiber led to a decision by ValleyNet’s key managers, who were seeking to retire, to bring in GWI. During 2022, the District, ValleyNet, and GWI worked to smoothly transition from ValleyNet to GWI without altering the Operating Agreement established in 2016 and set to expire at the end of 2025.

It was during this time that ValleyNet’s Finance Director, Cliff Rankin, hired prior to GWIs involvement, uncovered John van Vught’s embezzlement (many news reports have mistakenly conflated GWIs arrival with the discovery, but in fact, the timing was coincidental, and the record must be corrected). ValleyNet was eventually able to recover some of the embezzled funds and has taken possession of property which together will make both ECFiber and LymeFiber whole. The amount involved was never material to ECFiber’s finances on an annual basis.

In mid-2023, about six months into GWIs operation of ECFiber, Biddeford Internet Corp. – which does business as Great Works Internet aka GWI – received an investment from Mac Mountain, owned by Alex Rozek of Woodstock, who served as an alternate delegate on the District Governing Board 2018-19. GWI asserted this did not constitute a change of control because there was no ownership change, but GWI’s CEO and owner, Fletcher Kittridge, stepped aside and Kerem Durdag became CEO. (Last month, the District learned that Mac Mountain filed its plan to  exercise its warrants, and soon, or already, owns 2/3rds of GWI and has 100% of its voting stock.)

Within the ECFiber business, there was no meaningful change: all the employees of ValleyNet, including top manager Tom Cecere, continued to serve as ECFiber staff but were now employees of GWI Vermont, LLC.

In late 2024, GWI presented its preferred terms for a new contract with the District. These boiled down to more than $2 million more annually in fees, with the District governing board giving up any real say in business strategy, pricing, or policy. The District then learned via a whistleblower that GWI was initiating changes in business operations, such as using staff to perform work for other CUDs, that in the District’s opinion, could only occur with the prior approval of the District, such as happened when ValleyNet wanted to use staff to perform work for LymeFiber. Moreover, GWI had laid off many of its Maine-based employees. When told both verbally and in writing to not implement these changes without District approval, GWI resisted and sued Flinn on the pretext that the whistleblower was his puppet and their plans trade secrets.

In response, the District sought to engage GWI in planning a transition for ECFiber back to having a non-profit operator, the Vermont ISP Operating Company, aka VISPO, which was created as a public benefit corporation under Section 115 of the IRS code for companies providing essential government services. This is used by cities who own their own electric company and is a particularly good fit for ECFiber, which seeks to be more a regional utility responsive to its citizenry than a business generating profits for its ownership.

GWI refused, so the District exercised its powers under the operating agreement to establish a policy on transition. Upon its adoption of the Transition Policy, GWI added the District itself to the suit against its Chair. The District answered and countersued, requesting the injunction. This is what was upheld by the ruling on Monday.

For additional information contact:

F. X. Flinn
Chair, Governing Board (Town of Hartford Delegate)
East Central Vermont Telecommunications District (dba ECFiber)
e: chair@ecfiber.net | m:802-369-0069

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“By banding together on a community basis and using a form of self-government, the Communication Union District, to manage it, we were able to raise the money to do it. We can operate the business, we can pay the employees well, we can pay off the money we’ve been borrowing,” says ECFiber Board Chair, F.X. Flinn

“If we in rural Vermont were going to depend on the big telecommunication companies to wire our homes and get us internet, we’d be waiting until our grandchildren had grandchildren,” said VT Senator Peter Welch, a Norwich resident. “It wasn’t going to happen. We are now on the threshold of having high-speed internet that goes to every home, barn and business in the state,” Welch declared.

A special thank you to all those in attendance and who helped orchestrate the event including but not limited to: F. X. Flinn, Sharon Trautwein, Vermont CUD Association, Vermont Community Broadband Board, Representative Laura Sibilia, David Zuckerman.

Additional Coverage

• WFFF/My Champlain Valley
• Valley News 
• WCAX3
• YOUTUBE Video of WCAX story 
• WPTZ/WNNE
• VermontBiz
• VTDigger

ECFiber announced today it has placed $9 million of new municipal revenue bonds at an average interest rate of 4.48% and average maturity of 21 years. This brings ECFiber’s total bond commitments to $63.3 million with about 70% of its network constructed. Last week, the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) approved the municipally-owned broadband provider’s $2.8 million grant application for pre-construction expenses. With over 6,700 customers in 23 towns, ECFiber continues to show the way forward as Vermont’s first communications union district (CUD).

The $11.8 million in new funds will accelerate work in original member towns, while speeding design work in newly joined towns. Most of the $9 million from bonds will be spent on construction in the towns of Norwich, Woodstock, and Hartford’s villages of Wilder, White River Junction, and Quechee during 2022. The $2.8 million grant will fund preparation of detailed network designs for 8 new towns which joined ECFiber in 2020: Topsham, Newbury, Washington, Corinth, Bradford, West Fairlee, Fairlee and Windsor, plus some bordering areas where the utility poles carry services starting from within district towns.

ECFiber is a Vermont municipality akin to a water district, and consists of 31 member towns. Officially known as the East Central Vermont Telecommunications District, it has no taxing powers and has, since its transition to a CUD in 2016, been funded mainly by municipal bonds backed by customer payments for service. “We are the model for how to make world-class broadband available to every home and business on the grid in rural Vermont, infrastructure that is essential to social and economic well-being,” said board chair F. X. Flinn. “Investors have shown their appreciation for the work we are doing by paying a premium for our existing debt and competing for our new debt. That said, we will continue to pursue the new grant funding aggressively as we go all out to complete the network.”

Stan Williams, CFO of ValleyNet, Inc., and the principal architect of the idea which became ECFiber, led the bonding effort. He said, “We appreciate the work of our investment banking team at MCM, led by Jim Anderson, and remain convinced that the combination of Vermont Community Broadband Fund grants plus municipal revenue bonds means that every on-grid location in Vermont will have fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband available within the foreseeable future now that the CUDs are starting to get funding.” ValleyNet is the design, build, and operations partner of the district. A not-for-profit internet service provider, it spun out of Dartmouth College in the early 1990s to provide dial-up internet access in the Upper Valley region straddling Vermont and New Hampshire.

ECFiber is one of a very few municipalities to construct a broadband network almost entirely from network revenues rather than tax revenues, grants, or some other form of a public guarantee. It is the financial model for many rural broadband projects throughout the U.S.

For additional information please visit ECFiber.net

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