Q: Why is Biddeford (aka GWI) suing the District?
A: GWI makes several claims in its Complaint but, in the District’s opinion, GWI wants to continue as the operator of ECFiber and sees this lawsuit as potential leverage.
Q: Why did the District decide it didn’t want to continue with GWI?
A: For a full description of the reasons why the District elected not to continue its relationship with GWI, please see the Counterclaims available at the link below. As a quick summary, it became apparent that GWI’s goals and direction became incompatible with the District’s values. Two completely separate negotiating teams decided GWI wanted more money than the district revenues could support and too much decision-making authority. Additionally, there were concerns that ECFiber-specific local jobs would be lost to outsourcing and artificial intelligence, and creating good local jobs has been a major objective of ECFiber’s grassroots leadership from its founding days.
Q: How will ECFiber be run when GWI is out of the picture?
A: The new operator is VISPO, a non-profit modeled on ECFiber’s original operator, ValleyNet. It will operate ECFiber much the same way ValleyNet did, staying focused on ECFiber, headquartered in South Royalton, with local employees serving local customers. VISPO is accepting employment applications now and will be posting specific openings soon. See vispocompany.com/careers to apply.
Q: What is VISPO?
A: The Vermont ISP Operating Company is a public-benefit non-profit corporation established to provide essential government services in conformance with IRS Code Section 115. This type of non-profit corporation is often used by cities or counties to run a government-owned electric utility. The District is a regional government that owns an internet service provider known by the trade name ECFiber, so this type of public-benefit non-profit corporation is a good fit for its business.
Q: What documents are available here?
A: These are the documents filed in court over the past months. While they are publicly available through the courts, it’s not very easy to access them and the federal court filings have a cost to download. Here is a list with links to the documents and context:
25-06-13 District Answer and Counterclaims: This contains the District’s response to the latest iteration of GWI’s lawsuit (as you will see below it has changed repeatedly over the past months) and needs to be read in conjunction with 25-05-14 GWI Amended Complaint adds District to Lawsuit. The District’s counter-claims portion goes into considerable detail on events leading to the current situation. A week after filing the Answer the District filed 25-06-20 Motion for Preliminary Injunction.
Prior versions of the lawsuit began with the filing of 25-02-24 – GWI Complaint v Flinn in VT Court, which was never served but instead refiled in Federal court. In the Districts’ opinion, GWI realized that its state court lawsuit against F. X. Flinn was subject to Vermont’s anti-SLAPP statute and refiled in federal court to avoid being thrown out under Vermont’s anti-SLAPP statute, which doesn’t apply at the Federal level. A SLAPP suit is a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” and it is the District’s opinion that GWI’s decision to sue the District chair as an individual and not the District sought to create division within the Governing Board and to exhaust Flinn’s willingness to continue to volunteer his time.
Here’s the Federal Court version: 25-03-26 GWI Federal Court filing v Flinn, which was followed by 25-04-07 GWI Motion for Leave to Issue Subpoenas, 25-04-22 Opposition to Subpoenas Request, and 25-04-25 Court denies Subpoenas Request by GWI.
Flinn’s attorneys moved to dismiss the case with 25-04-28 Flinn Motion to Dismiss, which also contains a lot of material going into the specifics of what the District learned during negotiations. In response to this, the amended lawsuit bringing the District into the proceedings was filed. Flinn’s attorneys responded with 25-05-28 Flinn Motion to Dismiss Amended Complaint.