CVFiber hires telecom veteran as executive director

April 1, 2022  |  By Waterbury Roundabout 

Jennille Smith has been hired as the first executive director of CVFiber. Courtesy photo

MONTPELIER — CVFiber announced that it has hired Jennille Smith as its first executive director and full-time employee. 

A lawyer who grew up in Starksboro, Smith has experience in building communications infrastructure in rural areas, a key part of the organization’s mission which aims to begin construction this year on  a 1,200-mile, $50-million network serving its member communities.

Waterbury is one of the 21 Central Vermont municipalities in the CVFiber service area. 

The CVFiber Governing Board was unanimous in choosing Smith from what CVFiber chair Jerry Diamantides called an “impressive list” of candidates for the position. Smith starts on April 11.  

Smith is a practicing Vermont lawyer who said she has spent much of her career “building infrastructure in rural and urban areas, primarily telecommunications.” 

She has firsthand experience living in rural Vermont having grown up “off-grid in a two-room house that my family built in Starksboro,” she said.  

Smith attended law school in California and spent 13 years working on infrastructure there before moving back to Vermont to be closer to her family. Since 2018, Smith has worked on FirstNet, the federal initiative to build cell towers in underserved communities. FirstNet was a response to the September 11 terror attacks, which showed the need for universal emergency communication.   

“Tragedy has a way of revealing things to us,” she said. “As the 9/11 attacks showed the need for robust communications infrastructure, the COVID pandemic revealed that connecting with the world is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.” 

Waterbury delegate to CVFiber Linda Gravell said Smith’s experience with rural infrastructure is critical. “She is a skilled communicator with the experience needed to lead CVFiber during the construction and upcoming operations of our network,” Gravell said.   

The organization is adding Smith as it shifts from its focus thus far as an all-volunteer planning operation to constructing and ultimately operating a high-speed broadband network. 

In the announcement of her hire, Smith said she plans to start by getting to know all of  the communities served by CVFiber. At the same time, preparations for construction will be under way with a need, Smith said, to be “communicating with our vendors and construction teams, identifying challenges and priorities, making sure materials arrive and plans are implemented.”  

Formed in March 2018, CVFiber is a nonprofit municipality and one of nine communications union districts in Vermont tasked with building community-governed nonprofit broadband networks to ultimately reach every address in the state. 

Each community belonging to the district has appointed a delegate and an alternate who are involved in the planning process to create this new broadband service network. In addition to Gravell, Waterbury’s alternate delegate is Christopher Shenk. The Waterbury Select Board at its March 21 meeting discussed the CVFiber plans that call for a $3 million investment in new broadband infrastructure to reach under- and non-served addresses. Gravell outlined a proposal that would appropriate some of the federal American Rescue Plan Act funds to the project with a goal of receiving matching funds from a state grant. 

The board raised many questions and asked to schedule the topic for an upcoming meeting this spring. 

More information is online at cvfiber.net.