In order to explain what has occurred in the months since I last wrote a post about our village, I’d like to go back just far enough to remind everyone that in July of 2022 I took over as editor for the website alvonebraska.com. This website has always been owned by a company by the name of WireBuilt but at that time, Cathina Schueth (one of our current Board members) decided to step down and asked if I would be interested in taking over. In the spirit of community information being freely available, I agreed, and the webmaster for the WireBuilt site got me logged in and completed a tour.

From there I became more familiar with the site and structure, wrote what news came through and began to share more public information, including videos of Board meetings that my husband and I have been recording. I provided all of this free of charge and did my best to learn unfamiliar systems in order to do so. During the time I have been editor for that site, as I still am, never have I been able to post anything that did not gain approval from the WebMaster before it was made public. This was the case for Cathina as well.

Reporting and editing about what was going on here with the Board, it would appear that it made them a big kind of mad. On November 5, 2022, as my husband and I were playing outside with our children, Chairmen Chris Julif drove by and stopped in front of our yard, yelling something about handing the over website. I disregarded him. However, my husband approached Fletcher in order to better hear him. The Chair proceeded to demand that the website be handed over, stating that we were using it illegally. He used language that I hoped my young children wouldn’t have to hear. He said that if we did not hand over this piece of property, we would be taken to court over it and that “these people had more money than we do.” A report was filed with the sheriff, as I generally do not engage with terrorists, and we continued on with our day.

Two days later, on November 7, 2022, an Emergency Meeting was called to order for the Board of Trustees. There would have been a video recording of this meeting—however, there was no public notice of the meeting. According to Nebraska state statue, an Emergency meeting is defined as “any event or occasional combination of circumstances which calls for immediate action or remedy; pressing necessity; exigency; a sudden or unexpected happening; an unforeseen occurrence or condition”—and as noted on the Attorney General’s website, the Attorney General has previously stated that “an item of an emergency nature is one that requires immediate resolution by the public body, and one which has arisen in circumstances impossible to anticipate at a time sufficient to place on the agenda of a regular, called, or special meeting of the body.”

It would seem strange since Cathina had taken over the website over a year prior, and I personally had been editing for four months at the time, that any of this was of an emergency nature. More information on the Emergency Meetings state statute can be found by clicking here. Also please note, these Emergency Meeting Minutes do not indicate where the public notice was published or posted, as they typically are at the beginning of the Meetings and at the top of the Minutes. You can review that document by clicking here, and the Agenda for that meeting is available here.

It was during this meeting that the Board, consisting of Chairmen Chris Julifs, Larry Langer, Roger Paul, and Devon Sullivan, discussed the ownership of the domain to which our clerk, Raider Rhotenacher, states that he believes it is a breach of contract to let anyone by the Board control the website. Board members then continued through further debate over ownership of the domain and continued by calling Cathina, my husband, and myself thieves for “taking” control of this website.

The fact of the matter is, the website in question was never owned by the village directly, and while the service continued to be provided at no charge to our community, previous Board members had terminated the contract entirely in July of 2019 through a documented email request. Services rendered as per the contract had not been paid since that time. According to the minutes from this Emergency meeting, Board members discussed that the clerk had a planned phone call with an attorney the following day—however, the minutes state only that a lawsuit for breach of contract with WireBuilt was voted on as ‘Yes’ by each Board member. There was no discussion to hire any attorney specifically, and no public record of such a vote exists.

We got through the election, and it was later in that week that a community member informed me that one of the videos we had worked so hard to provide to our community was linked by a website, alvotruthgroup.com. While I cannot ascertain who owns that website—frankly, as I never bothered to look it up, I can certainly take a wild guess. Now, having read the minutes from this Emergency Meeting, it is clear that our Board members do not understand contractual law or how intellectual property works. To learn that our hard work was being
used for malicious purposes was, to me, rather jarring. As a result, I took down the YouTube site that provided these videos to our community as I thought of what to do next.

In mid-November, I began to receive emails from our clerk, demanding that I turn the website, the domain, the login and password over to him. I let WireBuilt handle it—that domain is and has always been their property, and I understand how ownership of these types of
intellectual property works. It seems that a couple of letters were exchanged between the attorney for WireBuilt and what seems to be a clerk-hired attorney—and that was the end of the entire matter.

In December, our newly elected Board member, Cathina Schueth, was sworn it. It was during that meeting that the Board voted on paying for an invoice in the amount of $420 to attorney Dave Chetaboris. Keep in mind, there was no vote on record to officially hire an attorney during this previous Emergency Meeting that appears to not have been held lawfully.

From my understanding, WireBuilt’s attorney and Mr. Chetaboris exchanged a couple of letters amongst themselves and the matter was settled. WireBuilt has always owned the domain itself—therefore they are the determining factor in who is editor. As the village of Alvo sent a documented request to terminate the official use of the website and stopped paying the agreed-upon monthly fee in July, 2019, WireBuilt is free to do what they wish with their property.

Just before the holidays, the idea occurred to me that that I should buy a domain intended to be used as a community resource, so I started doing some research and purchased the domain www.villageofalvo.com. In researching how to set up the site in a manner that I hope is easily accessible for everyone, I’ve been hard at work.

You see, every single Agenda and Minutes have been requested through documented Open Records Requests, and that battle hasn’t been easy either as the clerk’s reaponse rate is “at will” against OMA statute. Most of that, as of the date of this letter, is still up in the air but I am making everything available to the community as it becomes available.

Now the videos…. The short and skinny is that the videos are recorded by my husband at the Board meetings. Another community member donated the GoPro used to record. We are fully within our legal right to be doing this. However, any content created is copyright of the
individual who owns the content. When that mysterious Alvo Truth Group embedded our video directly into their website without permission or even credit, they were infringing on our copyrighted content.

The only way to prevent this from occurring was to put them behind a paywall on a site that has zero contention on ownership. The public records that are shared with you here are still that, public and free, and I encourage everyone to read what is written in them.

However, what is written in those minutes is rarely the full story and is often skewed. I am encouraging everyone to see the full picture and to see the evidence for yourselves.

That being said, moving forward, I plan to keep announcements as regular as they come. This blog/newsletter will be breaking down what is going on, and while I will express my own opinion, you will certainly have your own—that’s welcomed. We all moved here to raise our families as part of a community and it’s time we start making it one.