 recording this, it sure is, will be recording this meeting for the purposes of preparing the minutes. So no roll call at this point, is that right Grace? You can take a formal roll call and we'll then just acknowledge that we do not have a quorum so we won't be able to vote on the minutes. Okay, so with that, I will take a roll call for today's meeting and then we can move on with our business. So, gaming commissioning chair Judd Stein. Here. Senator Feinbould. Here on his behalf, I don't know if that counts. Yeah, okay. Senator Feinbould, representative Ferrante, representative Vaughn, Mr. Ortiz. Here. Commissioner Colton Harris. Mr. Piccnelli. Here. Mr. McNeil. Here. Ms. Sprague. Here. And I, Dean Serpa, am present. All right, so Grace, she'll make the proper notification, notice of that. I guess I should start this meeting first though, recognizing a new member of our committee who was unable to attend our May meeting. We've all seen her on the screen, Caitlyn Sprague. I've had the pleasure of working with Caitlyn in the past. Hello, Caitlyn. She is one of my favorite get things done people. So I'm confident she will bring valuable experience to our committee. Looking forward to working with you, Caitlyn. Do you, Caitlyn, have anything that you want to say to introduce yourself to the committee? Yeah, absolutely. I'm so happy to be here. I'm excited to meet the rest of you that I don't know already and I'm so excited for this work. I actually, while I was in law school, I co-founded a gaming law association and was lucky enough to be working in the Massachusetts State House when we passed the 2011 gaming law. So I've always been super interested in this policy work and I'm really excited to be here with you all today. Great, that's something I didn't know, Caitlyn. So now another thing I didn't know. While looking forward to it, certainly keep your ideas coming, any information that you need as a new member and we'll make sure to get it to you. Okay, so now I'm going to turn it over to the gaming commission chair, Judd Stein, for her update. And I know she's got a lot of information coming our way. So Kathy, go right ahead. Good afternoon, everyone. And it was nice being able to just chat a little bit before our meeting formally opened. I want to thank you, Dean Chair Serpa. And on behalf of my fellow commissioner at the MGC, we thank each of you, committee members and the chair for your time and most of all for your help in supporting our work and policy development. Just briefly on what you're going to hear, I think you're in for a treat today. You'll hear about the work of our newly formed sports wagering division. Crystal Bolsheman, I understand will be presenting. Her colleague Andrew Steppen is here. So many of you may remember that Crystal last served as my chief administrative officer and special project manager to the commission. And she was promoted to her current position of sports wagering business manager as we launched legalized sports wagering and she has taken off. I know that Andrew works closely with Crystal and he will agree that she's been instrumental in advising the commission on various requests from operators who are working hard to stay in compliance with our regulatory framework. Crystal's diligent and effective in building both internal and external relationships that further our mission, excuse me, mission. And I'm so excited. This is big news to announce that she has just been selected by the emerging leaders of gaming and global gaming business to be a member of the emerging leaders gaming 40 under 40 class of 2024. So we applaud you and I'm very proud of Crystal and her progress and development professional department at the MGC. You'll also hear today from the leader of our HR and DEI division to elevate our commitment to diversity and inclusion matters. We hired a chief people and diversity officer year in half a though. Chief David Maltru has brought significant experience and I dare say gravitas to our HR program and intentionality to our efforts at advancing diversity, particularly hiring and spending goals. He has recently expanded his division to include Vanessa while some die and who will present today as well. And Vanessa, hello, your background is beautiful. You look beautiful. She brings extensive experience to her role as senior DEI program manager. Finally, he's not here right now. He's in a meeting but you'll hear from chief of our community affairs division Joe Delaney will update you on his and his team's work on the community mitigation grant program. He's looking at some policy changes that will actually be exploring again tomorrow at our next commission meeting. And I'm pleased that committee member Paul Pinnelli is gonna give some highlights from Springfield. I just got the chance to see Paul and he'll be highlighting the plans underway at Springfield to further the revitalization and activation of the downtown area near MGM Springfield. I asked chief Delaney for an accounting of the grants that the commission has awarded to the city of Springfield since the funds inception. And Grace, I think it's been since 2017 but the commission has awarded in 25 separate grants to offset the impacts of the casino location to Springfield, 8,081,478 dollars and 68 cents. So we are very proud of the gaming commission's commitment and I see my colleague commissioner Maynard present and thank you, commissioner Maynard and I were out in Springfield and we are very proud of our commitment to the Springfield area. Other quick updates, PPC opened its new sports book and that's the sports book at Plain Ridge Park. I just had a nice tour with Andrew there. I encourage all to visit our properties and particularly this new sports book which is heavy in Boston sports themes and there'll be a lot of familiar attractions there for you to visit. Yesterday, the commission held a three hour virtual round table discussion on our data privacy regulation with representation from all online sports wagering licensees, the attorney general's office, our technology consultants from GLI and a responsible gaming expert. With the collaboration of the attorney general's office I would say significant contributions from that office. We have adopted a regulation addressing customer data sharing and usage and the operators asked us to revisit that regulation even though they'd already submitted extensive comments because they really did want to discuss both policy and implementation questions and it was a very extensive discussion and I think all of us left feeling it was very worthwhile. That round table, although virtual has worked out to be a really helpful mechanism for getting expertise and insights from stakeholders wherever they come from. Of note, we said goodbye to two of our team leaders, our executive director, Karen Wells departed after 10 years of leadership service at the MGC and those years were outstanding or contributions so significant. We are retaining an executive search firm for a nationwide search and have appointed a screening committee in which commissioner Maynard is a member and which complies fully with the open meeting law expectations. Our general counsel Todd Grossman was selected to be the interim executive director. Our director of the investigations to the enforcement bureau, Loretta Lillios, many of you, Rada, retired from state service after nearly 10 years of service at the MGC law enforcement career before that. And the MGC is in the process for selecting a new IEB director we'll be looking at that process tomorrow as well. Our chief enforcement counsel, Heather Hall has stepped into Loretta's shoes, she would say difficult to do but she has taken off and is doing very well as our interim director. And our horse racing season at Plain Ridge Park continues. The weather is cooperating so far this fall nicely and our racing license application which is an annual process is due October 1st for both new and renewed licenses and the commission must act on those applications by November 15th. And finally, this month is responsible gaming education month and our RG division continues to be a thought leader in this nation and around the world. We are super proud of our program and particularly of our game sense advisors who are available on all three casino floors online and by phone to help all betting patrons in Massachusetts make informed and healthy choices to keep gaming and gambling fun. So with that, Dean Serpa. Chair Serpa, thank you and I'll turn it over to you. Oh, thank you, Kathy. That was a nice update. As usual, you've got a lot going on at the commission and I'll try to keep it all straight but lots of moving parts. I enjoy learning about it every day. I guess before we sort of move on a minute does anybody have questions for Kathy just on that information she just delivered? Okay. So we'll move on to minutes but I think we won't move on to minutes, right Grace? We don't have a quorum for this meeting. So the minutes for this meeting will be just done for the future. For our last most recent May meeting they'll stay in draft form and then for the two prior meetings to that we also don't have a quorum for approval. Is that right? That is correct. All minutes will remain in draft form. All right. So like Grace said, all minutes will remain in draft form. So I guess in that situation we should move forward with our business. The first item on the agenda is the sports wagering presentation. Committee members will probably remember that in our May meeting we heard from the sports wagering division about the initial online of sports wagering and the launch. And but as you know, the work for promulgating this new industry is ongoing for sure. And Kathleen and I thought it would be beneficial to hear again from sports wagering with an update. So Crystal, I know you're gonna do the presentation and Andrew also, is that right? That's correct. I'll kick it off and then Andrew will close out for us. Being correct and Andrew, I am so sorry. I thought this was Crystal's show today but Andrew is doing double duty at the gaming commission. As I mentioned, I saw him at Plain Ridge Park Casino where he is in that, forgive me, I want you to give your title, Andrew, when you introduce yourself. But he is primary gaming agent representative at PPC and now is stepping into a big position at the sports wagering operator, Nancy. Doing two hats, so thank you. Sorry. I'm doing a great job. We asked. Let me go over here and come over here. Go right ahead. Yeah, great. Just give me one moment to start the presentation. And we'll get there. Everyone can see that? Yeah, great. All right, so as Chair Serpa had said, we had come before the G-PAC in May to provide some of the milestones between the August 1st date passed in the legislature and then the 310, the March 10th online wagering launch. So we had a bit of a 45 day snapshot. So today we're gonna give you more updates on the almost six months now since the category three launch that March date. And as stated, Andrew is gonna join me toward the letter piece of this as we have had a little bit of a shift since the last update. And we are now welcoming Andrew as interim operations manager. Do you wanna do a little introduction, Andrew? Sure. My name is Andrew Stephan. I am the interim sports wagering operations manager. I am also the casino regulatory manager for our investigations and enforcement bureau working out of our office down in Plainville. And he's doing a fabulous job. Really excited to still have a team member. And Andrew has a lot of experience which Sturl had and it's been really helpful so far. So we're learning a lot from each other I think. So just to kick this off, we have here just a reminder for you of the licensees as they stand for sports wagering. We've had no new licensees since a come on board since that May date, but Fanatics actually launched. They had received their operation certificate but they are now operational. So you have Encore, Boston Harbor, MGM Springfield, Plain Ridge Park Casino in the retail set. You have all of the rest in the category three which include the tethered and untethered options. So you have Winbet and Caesars at MGM Barstool which will be switching over soon. That's part of my next update. And Fanatics as tethered operators and then we have DraftKings, Vandal and Better in our untethered categories. And at some point in 2024, we intend to be seeing Valley Bet and Betway come on board. Just to give you a little idea of how the market share has looked in this last six months. This is a inclusive of from March 10th until just the other day, September 13th. This comes from our partner GeoComply. We can log in and see this data at any time. So, exactly what you expect. I think this hasn't changed a lot from the last presentation but DraftKings, Vandal and Bet MGM holding a significant percentage and then the rest of them leading in that last quarter of the pie. Some quick updates for you. A couple of these Chair Dredstein already went through but we have seen a bit of an uptick in our wagering activity since the NFL season came back. We just in, just since NFL launched, we have seen 9.2 million geolocation transactions. And just for clarity, that doesn't mean that's how many wagers have been placed. A geolocation transaction can be anything from creating your first account and we have to verify the geolocation to placing a wager in which again, we have to make sure before that wager is placed here in the state and of note, it can include any passes or fails. So if someone failed for one reason and then attempted again, that would create two transactions. So not all of those transactions are wagers but we have also seen almost 60,000 new accounts created between that week of September 3rd to the 10th when NFL came back online. As far as regulations, just as Chair Dredstein just said, we have been reviewing the data privacy regulation and we held a really significant round table this week. That is still being reviewed. Some that have come online, relevant to marketing in the last couple of weeks include the promotional offers, offers referring a friend is no longer allowed in Massachusetts and they had a waiver through August 1st to wrap up any existing promotions related to that and those have been completed and they're in play, the regulations imply. And then as of September 28th, we'll see the branding related to on all signage with the logos, there must be a disclaimer of 21 plus and that will, the waiver for that will end on September 28th. So we'll be reviewing a lot of that in the next couple of weeks. A few others coming up soon, you'll see that we're starting to review the temporary license process as well as the renewal process in the regulations. So comment period is up and there will be public hearings on those in the next couple of weeks. And then as I had hinted, another update is that the Barstool brand under our PSI is the actual holder of our operation certificate but Barstool is the brand you're familiar with that will be replaced by ESPN bet in the next couple of months as well. We recently received the first, it's really the second quarter of reporting but the first quarter one was only about a week long. So at the commission meetings on August 17th, August 24th and September 7th, we reviewed all of the quarterly reports coming in from each operator. For the most part, they covered revenues and taxes in that period, some really detailed information about the workforce and supplier diversity, responsible gaming metrics, including how the usage of their tools, what the numbers have looked like for VSE and cool off periods and any of the timing metrics that they have within their apps. The compliance review, the lottery relationships that they have and the communications they've had with the lottery in the last few months and then any community outreach that the brands and the applications and the operators as a whole have been pursuing and or achieving in the last few months. You can find these online just like you could always get the quarterly reports from our retail licensees or for the casinos. There are pages created now for each operator and all reports will continue to be posted to the website. Of course you can inquire if you want them directly but you can always find those. Jobs highlight on that aspect was that we saw over 150 Massachusetts jobs through this reporting, which is really interesting because most of them are not in Massachusetts. A little over 75 of those were at the retail sports books which is to be expected, but over 75 were also at our online operators. So that was interesting. And we did look at the VSE enrollments as they were reported by the operators and we saw that each operator had between zero and 200. So that's this slide for you. You can see, some of these are much bigger applications and others are much smaller, but they are certainly looking at their VSE enrollments. Of course, some people may have enrolled in several different applications. So this is not, you can't cumulate these totals and get an individual number. I could come in and say, I want a VSE from Fandle but I also want a VSE from WinBet. So they do have that option, but they're keeping track of not only VSE but all of the metrics that required to report to us monthly on the usage of every tool in their responsible gaming tool set. So we see the cool-off period, the difference in people opting in for time amounts, wagering amounts, all of those metrics. And now I'm gonna hand that over to Andrew and I can keep pumping through the slides for you, Andrew, if you just let me know when you're ready. Yeah, sure, I've got some animations, but I'll let you know just to click your mouse. So thanks, Crystal. Before going into some of our recent event catalog updates, I'd first like to review some sports wagering revenue numbers with you specifically focusing on a tax collected for the Commonwealth. The first slide here to show the breakdown of the numbers from our most recent month of August, 2023, splitting our retail and online licensees. You can see the retail numbers at the top. And as a reminder, our retail licensees are taxed at 15% of sports wagering revenue while our online operators are taxed at 20%. And the number I'd like to draw to your attention, Crystal, you just clicked your mouse, is the total tax collected for the last month, for August, just over $4.5 million was collected in taxes from all of our operators, sports wagering operators. The next slide. This table is a fun breakdown. This further splits all of our 11 operators, the three retail again up at the top and the eight online or mobile operators showing a month over month breakdown for the previous three months since June, 2023. If you can focus on the numbers, you can see a slight trend downwards in the tax collected over the past three months. And I'll go over that and some factors to include momentarily. But first, let me draw your attention again to some numbers and Crystal touched on this. And if you could just click your mouse again, there are two leaders in total handle and total tax collected month over month. Those are Draft, Kings and Fiendle. They attribute to 77% of all wagers placed in the last month between all of our operators. And then one more time on this one, Crystal. This is just a post from senior betting analyst, Bill Sparrows highlighting some of those numbers. He's focusing more on the handle here, the total amount wagered by the betters in Massachusetts. And you can actually see those numbers just to the left of that post, nearly $315 million was wagered between all operators in Massachusetts and just in August alone. Similarly, he also pointed out the leaders, Draft, Kings and Fiendle, leaving the way in total handle while that MGM does lead that a second group of operators. And if you couldn't tell from the previous slide, most of the sports wagering activity is coming from our online operators. They carry a total 96% in total handle and 98% in total tax collected. And this is going all the way back to that very first sports wager at the end of January. And I mentioned I get back to that regression and after this part shows the taxes collected the first three months, since mobile operators went live on that March 10th date, March through May, compared to the three previous months, June through August. March through May brought in over $33 million in taxes while the summer months of June through August brought in just under $17 million in taxes. Still with just over a total of $50 million collected in the six months combined. And then lastly, you can see that year to date number which includes the month of February and that loan date in January. Again, all prior to our mobile operators go live. Now, this drop off can be attributed to many factors. Most notably are the sports and options available to the betters. In March, we saw not just the launch of our mobile operators but also the first March madness tournament available to be wagered on. April sees a multitude of items the beginning of the baseball seasons while basketball and hockey are starting to wind down. There's even the NFL draft at the end of the month. So all four major sports have action to be wagered on. In May, MLB teams are starting to work through their early stages of the season. The basketball and hockey leagues are working through the post season as well as several other soccer leagues and some soccer tournaments finishing up. With so much to offer in those spring months, the summer months contrast so greatly just due to the limited number of options available for sports wagering. At our next presentation, we do hope to see this trend back upwards with the inclusion of many more offerings. Crystal, excellent. This line graph is just showing you the same thing. It's just with the taxes collected just represented in a different fashion. You can see the slight recent trend downwards. However, as I mentioned, we do hope to see this increase during the NFL and college football seasons as well as the NBA and NHL season starting back up along with the baseball playoffs beginning as well, all happening this fall. One more slide for revenue. I always find this breakdown to be very helpful. Just shows how the taxes are collected and how they're distributed amongst the commonwealth. When this is the first time or only time I'll mention the category two licensees, which you see the very top, they be treated just like the retail tax at 15%. Currently, we do not have any category two licensees. Moving on to event catalog updates pursuant to the regulation 24703 petition for a sporting event or a wager category, the commission will consider any petition requests from the operators and may grant, deny, and limit or restrict the request. On August 24th, 2023, the commission unanimously voted to include a new sport, pickleball, as an improved event to be wagered on. Currently only PPA tour, the professional pickleball association sanctioned events may be wagered on in Massachusetts. And I believe only one operator, the operator who submitted the petition has submitted house rules to include wagering for the new sport at this time. Pickleball became the first sport to be added to the event catalog since March of 2023. Around the same time our online operators went live. And I mentioned pickleball, the most recently approved sport to be added. However, other sports had been requested and presented to the commission in May, just days after our last GPAC meeting or presentation, five sports were presented. However, they were not approved at that time. And coincidentally enough, one of the sports highlight returns tomorrow to be presented again before the commissioners. And that concludes the sports wagering division portion of the presentation. Crystal and I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have for us. Thank you. I'm looking forward to when they put the Belmont Recreation Pickleball on, because then you guys, I'll be right, I'll be on the board, right? This is Paul Picnilly. Can I just jump in with questions? Go ahead, Paul. I'm just kind of curious, the recent announcement of Pickleball PPA and Major League Pickleball, merging, has that been addressed with the commission? Only, so only events that are part of the PPA tour, part of that, the PPA tour sanctioned events are to be wagered on. So if they are, is it MLP, or Major League Pickleball or Major League Pickleball? Yeah. They're not part of the sanctioned PPA tour events. I do not believe they're able to be wagered on. But I was aware of that merger as of last week. Yeah, okay. And if I think I may address just to Crystal, if I'm not, or anyone, I guess, everybody's referring to the sports wagering as revenue. Do we have any stats on participants? I know Crystal mentioned that there were 60,000 of them in the month of September. Do we have anything that's overall since the inception number of online? We technically do, though that information is, while we don't collect it because it's within their app, they don't report, they can report how many users are using their tools and we have an idea of that. Are you meaning unique users? Or just, it's easier, the answer to this in a way is it's easier to track the amount of wagers because you could have all five apps. So technically one individual could have all five apps. So I think last time this was one of the questions because we brought forth how many unique user or users there were based on GeoComply, but that doesn't actually tell you and we were breaking it out by the city, if you recall. And everybody was concerned about that because the numbers were so elevated, but you could have two phones and each phone might have a different login. You could have one person has all seven apps on their phone. So it's hard to tell how many individuals are using the apps, but we can tell how many users are within the app, if that makes sense. Yeah, I guess so. And with these online incentives, it stands the reason that there'd be an individual having multiple apps, right? So they can get sent in from each one of the companies. Right, so when we've been asked about users, it's hard to tell because we can tell you users in the state, you know, the IDs, but we don't necessarily know whether that's one individual seven times or seven individuals one time. So that can be a little bit challenging and it's part of the market share, a confidentiality component, why they don't report exactly how many users they have. But we can tell in some ways, like I said, the use of tools and whatnot, which is really important to say the, you know, responsible gaming research and some of our diversity metrics and that, they are providing some of that. So we're getting a little bit of an idea and we do get from Geocomply the user ID number, but again, it's not exactly how many individuals are using these apps. Okay, great, thank you. I was wondering, I mean, I guess it's, we don't have a lot of year over year data, obviously, so I guess we'll get more vision into this in the future, but Crystal was the 60,000 new accounts. So of course that could be across all the apps, but was that a surprising number or what was in line or a disappointing number or do you have no vision on that? Because those are sort of new customers, right? I'd say it was an informational metric, but I don't know that it was surprising. They are users, right? So, but it could be, say you had a BetMGM app last year and you decided to get better or fanatics because they just launched, because now they've got a great NFL promotion or you only had one of the apps and now you wanna go to another one because of the type of wager you can make. So again, it's a great metric to see that volume has increased, but we don't necessarily know how many people are new to the apps or new to the sports wagering or were they just in retail before and now they're trying and out because we've seen some of that movement as well. People getting a little more comfortable because now they've used the kiosks and they have familiarity and they're like, okay, I'll try it on my own, you know? So I wouldn't say it was nowhere near what we saw when we launched, right? Those were much bigger numbers, but it's definitely a good indicator of what the revenues and taxation is gonna look like because as people are making more movement in the NFL season. I don't know if Andrew you have anything to add to that, but... Perfectly stated, Chris. So Andrew, thank you. That was a great presentation. Any update on the two remaining retail working for sports books? The category twos? Yeah, Rainham and Suffolk Downs. No update as of yet, no. And then I didn't have enough time to look this up, but Bellies, I know there was a prohibition in Rhode Island's law against them opening a casino in Massachusetts. I don't know if there's an exemption to them doing a sports book as well, but I don't know if either you had any insight on that. I might pass that one to the chair. Yeah, I can, you know, Jamie, that's interesting. We didn't hear of that prohibition, but certainly Bellies and Crystal was there every step of the way. That did apply for the CAT3 temporary license and it was awarded. They just haven't launched operationally and they've given us the most recent update we've learned through our sports waiting division is early 24, so presumably they're not in violation of Rhode Island law. Yes, I hadn't heard anything about that. I mean, I was trying to like go back to, seems like a long time ago, right, chair? On anything we would have heard prior to their application period, but as the chair said, they've had the opportunity to launch all this time. They just would have to come forward with like, you know, their final house rules and everything to get their operation certificate, but they're just not ready to launch. They've chosen to delay at this point. So that's why we anticipate both will be on board in 2024. So they're ready to go. They're just, when their operations are ready, they will move forward. Crystal, to address both chair Serpa and committee member pick Nellie's question. Do you think that director Ban could highlight the map that he's in front of? You might want to explain it and how we can access it because it doesn't give specific numbers, but it does describe activity. The one behind me? Yes. Actually, this is just a still photograph of it. This is the geo comply map for the state of Massachusetts behind me. And actually, if you ever visit our reception area, you'll see it live. This map shows every wager live time being made in the state of Massachusetts. The white dots are every Apple product making wagers live time. The green dots are Android products making bets live time. The blue ones are a Mac or a regular PC making a wager and the red dots are rejected wagers. So most of the times you see those outside the boundaries here and if it's a red space, that is usually a reservation, but on it, it's kind of an interesting and mesmerizing map. You get your map, March Madness, and this is nothing but flags coming down at you all the time. And it's a 24 seven live map of every wager being made in the state. But if you visit our office, you'll see it in the lobby. It's kind of a neat thing and this is geo comply and it's how, you know, whether it's a legal wager or illegal wager. And that's where we get that user data that provides us with the trends and should number, yeah. Yeah, and of course it's a compliance around geopensing to ensure that a bet is placed within commonwealth boundaries. As you see, you can make wagers from your boat up to three miles offshore. That's a really cool map Bruce. Yeah, it is, especially to see it live, you find yourself standing there staring at it. Okay, so do we have any other questions for Crystal and Andrew? Well, not seeing any. Thank you both for that. It's a lot of information, a lot of numbers, right? It's really gonna be interesting to see it play out over the first 12 months and then the next 12 months. At least for me, that's the way I look at it. Yeah, I think that's a good question. At least for me, that's the way I look at it. Chair, sir, but could I just add one thing? And maybe I missed it. Andrew, did you give the, if you remember, I'll hand the amount of taxes collected since launch? I think it... Yeah, so the total year to date of since that January 31st launch date was just over 50 million, 50 million, 376,000 that change. Yeah, 50.3 million. So there's commission, I mean, they're giving us thumbs up 50.3 million yet. So that's I think an important number. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Okay, with nothing else, I think we'll move on if that's okay with everyone, right? Good, all right. So next on the agenda is about some of the internal work that's being done at the commission, right? It's a presentation on diversity initiatives at the commission. Kathy went over it a little bit and the individuals who will be hearing from in her opening. So I guess I will turn it directly over to David and Bonisoa. I'm not sure who's going first, but take it away. Absolutely. Thank you, Chair Serpa, Madam Chair, committee members and commissioners present. I came on board approximately a year and a half ago. My background as the chief people and diversity officer, my background is about 30 years, private sector and positions of progressive responsibility and working for the Commonwealth, seven years as the assistant secretary for employee services for the executive office of labor workforce development. What I'd like to do is to introduce my colleague, Bonisoa, Bonisoa, Sunday, please. Bonisoa, could you be on mute? I was talking and it says I was muted. Thank you. Okay, great. So I am, Bonisoa Sunday, I am the DI senior program manager and I've been with the agency for four months. Previous to that, I've worked in the same field at my previous company. So what we'd like to start with our agenda. So Bonisoa, you go to the agenda and then I'll pick it up from there. Right, I just want to make sure you guys can see my screen. Let me pull it back up again. Hold on. Yeah, we were able to see it. Okay, great. All right. It looks perfect. Thank you. So this is the agenda. We're going to kind of get a little bit into the history of DEI at MGC. We're going to talk about the core values, our MGC diversity action plan. We're going to meet a little bit of our team internally. Well, of course you guys want to hear about those stats going on here. So we're going to talk about those stats. A little bit about some of the initiatives and outreach that we have and we'll leave it open for questions at the end. Okay, Madam Chair created the MGC equity and inclusion group. Going on three years now in the purpose of this group, I won't go through it all, but purpose of the group, it's committed to racial equity and justice diversity and inclusion. And the critical nature here, it expects the same of its employees, licensees and our stakeholders. The key paragraph here is in our society applies their systems, policies and practices that continue to yield inequitable outcomes. As a result of these systems, communities of color disproportionately negatively affected and or afforded benefits opportunities to lesser degree. Although the MGC remains committed to safeguarding all protected classes from discrimination, recent national events have underscored the urgency for us all as an agency to take action on racial equity. We recognize that it's addressing systematic issues. Everyone who's part of the system has an opportunity, responsibility to examine how these systems work and to dismantle barriers and abstracting racial equality. We embrace anti-racism as a guiding crystal, anti-racism in contrast to an absence of racism, calls for proactiveness on the topic of racial equity and neutrality and is insufficient, preserves the status quo and is equivalent to an application of moral obligation. As such, the MGC adopts these principles and pledges to follow a proactive approach of continuous engagement towards developing, ensuring an environment of equity and justice. Next slide, please. Our core values, encouragement of open exchange of ideas and participation of our employees. We want to create an environment where groups and individuals can freely express their ideas and thoughts. Commitment to transparent gaming licensing processes to make sure as we go through our communities and we're dealing with the licensees, employees, that it is a transparent process as we proceed and critically strict adherence to ethical standards and licensing and regulation. We embrace diversity in a workforce as well as the internal supplier base. Our core values, which exist and we continue to develop is critical to building a foundation of equity inclusion and to make sure that all folks are treated equally. Next slide, please. So I'll jump on here. So when the equity and inclusion team got together, they just didn't make that mission statement, but they actually proposed action plans and that's part of the reason why Chief Rodrigo was hired and that was part of the reason why he expanded his team to hire me because it's a lot of work. DEI is a lot of work and what people don't realize it is just not about diversity, equity, inclusion. People tend to just focus on the diversity portion of the piece and they focus on gender diversity and racial diversity, but equity and inclusion in all three of those encompass everything that we do. And so we have these action plans or goals that's sent around the cultural transformation internally. We want to foster an inclusive agency culture. We are building that in the process now. And part of that is we're delivering training. We have delivered training in the past, but again, in order for this to become part of people's everyday existence, it has to be trained over and over again. That's how we learn. The more things are more familiar to you, the more you're gonna walk the walk and talk the talk. We need to have transparent communication and reporting on anti-racism efforts as well. And we are going to establish a culture club for sharing those experience and resources. That's forthcoming. I'm really excited about that. With regards to regulatory review, we need to integrate an anti-racist perspective into regulatory reviews. And we're gonna look at this every three years. We're ensuring that regulations don't disproportionately harm or hinder communities of color. We are also looking at in the hands customer service, reviewing our policy and procedures to unfair fairness, accessibility, and economic opportunities for people of color. And within that, especially internally, we have to look at our diverse hiring and retention. We have to improve internal hiring and retention practice to boost diversity. And we'll talk about that a little bit of how we are fair with regards to that when we talk about some of our stats. So we need to focus on our job descriptions. Now, people think when you're talking about looking at job descriptions to make it inclusive means that you're lowering standards. You're not lowering standards. You're making sure that the language is inclusive so that we can get gender diverse people to apply for the positions that when they're worded seem to be male oriented. There's also in regards to getting diverse talent as well. So we have to look at that. And part of that is that we have to do the outreach. We have to do mentoring. We have to let people know that we welcome diversity. If people don't feel welcome, they're not gonna wanna apply. And we also have to do that with our procurement enhancement and continue to broaden our policies to increase spending with minority-owned businesses. Since I've been here, I think that we've been doing a good job. And people can also speak to that to see if they feel the same. We have a team. So we have, so Madam Chair created the equity inclusion team. And from that, we needed a core team too, right? And this is our core team. It falls on the HR umbrella, although we want everyone within the agency to be DEI champions, but we have a core team to look for people to refer to when they have those questions. So we have Chief Mojuru, who is our head. And then on that team, we have Anne Mezzering. She does our data analytics. Triptibanda is our human resource manager. We have Dean Ventola. He is our HRBP. He primarily focuses on the recruitment efforts and Natasha Mardu, who really supports Tripti with regards to HR issues. And then we, I told you, we'll talk about a few of our stats. So how are we doing? Well, our agency now is 31% diverse. This is huge. And we're seeing more diversity as we continue to go on. 48% of that are women. Now we've had some challenges over the years of women, especially after the pandemic. We've seen a decline in women, but we have been on an upward trend and our numbers are recovering from that as well. And we have had $3.6 million in diversity spend in the year 2022. With regards to our diversity outreach, and this is just for 2023. Right now we're looking towards working towards an internship. We are working with one of our community partners, the Boston Chamber of Commerce with their pay setters program. They're actually doing DEI training on procurement. They're doing an unconscious bias with regards to procurement next week in which they asked us to participate with. We were just recently on a career fair, recruit military where we had over 20 veterans visit our table. And from that, we also received 58 veterans who looked at open positions that we have here at the agency. And actually we had one applied and this was just four days ago. So that we claimed that as a win as well. And in October, we're gonna also be a part of the career fair at the Black Expo. And that kind of concludes it. I know it was short and sweet. Does anyone have any questions? Do you wanna take down your slide if you're able to? Please, thanks. So are there any questions we could field? We appreciate you listening and hopefully you may have some questions we may be able to answer. I'll just interject. I am super proud of this accomplishment. I see my fellow commissioner who can actually speak because it's only two of us on this public meeting who are very careful about open meeting law. But the progress that has been made, this group was convened in June of 2020. And we did effectively come up with five action items as Vinny Swann mentioned. And the commission started in June, convened in June and by September, the statement of purpose was put together and the five commissioners unanimously supported these efforts. If they were all here, there's a little bit of a few of us who are held over. You know, we would be really proud of these statistics. So great work. Thank you. Sirpa, could I chime in? You're on mute. Oh, sorry, Victor, now you're muted. Thank you. Oh, can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay, sorry about that guys. It's the technical difficulties I apologize. Let me just say that I first want to thank and really appreciate Chair Cathy Judge Stein for her leadership in this space. It's refreshing. I thank you for this work. I know that you and I have had multiple conversations about DEI in the past. And I appreciate not only the efforts but your openness and willingness to have space for those conversations. And then obviously the steps that have been taken at the mass gaming commission. I also want to reiterate that folks know that diversity, equity, inclusion is central to the work of the Department of Public Health. It's part of our work that we lead with in the context of our responsibility and mitigation harms associated with gambling. And I can't stress enough of the importance of DEI specifically in this space when we understand that the data tells us that people of color are disproportionately impacted by gambling and it's in a position that I have continued to take our two. One is that when we look at our work and our responsibility that we have, we cannot reach the goal that has been put forward by this legislation or the legislation to mitigate harms associated with gambling unless we centralize equity. And that to me is really important. And the other point is that this is particularly important in this space because the field of gambling has historically been disconnected from the community experience of gambling and people of color. So this takes on a different level of meaning. But once again, I just want to say, Kathy, thank you so much for your leadership in this space. It's refreshing and I'm just grateful to see it materialized from three years ago when you were conceptualizing it and seeing it happening at the gaming commission. So congratulations to you and the team. And obviously, if anything of the Department of Public Health can be any support and this ongoing effort because it's all of our responsibility, we're always open for that. So thank you guys. Great presentation. Thank you. All right, yep. Thank you, Victor for your comments and Nia on behalf of this committee, David Bonisa, thank you very much for your activity, for your hard work. And I know there's no doubt, like Victor said, Kathy, Chair Juddstein's leadership, I'm sure helped you navigate it at the agency. And we appreciate that hard work. Thank you. Yes, sir, absolutely. And I would very much like to point that out that working in organizations, large organizations, a private corporate, I've worked in organizations where it was more of a task. Here it's successful because it's driven from the very top. And that's how this works. That's how it will always work. So we certainly appreciate Madam Chair for her support and making this happen. And we thank you for your time. Okay, thank you. Thanks everyone. And I think that we should really think about Chair Serpa bringing time on the agenda for Victor's presentations or outstanding work that Department of Public Health is doing in this space and Victor's leadership. So Grace, that's a good note for a future agenda item. And I see Victor's willingness to participate. That'll be great. All right, yep. That's a terrific idea. Thanks, Chair Serpa. I just took over your agenda setting process. My apologies. No, that's fine. Good idea. So if there's no other questions, I'll move on to Community Mitigation Fund. I think, so let's see, that's the next agenda item, but Joe, I think what I'd like to do, so I think we're gonna have some commentary, maybe a case study of sort that member Pignale was gonna bring up to us. And I know he has a hard stop. So, Joe, if it's okay with you, maybe we let Paul do a case study of how one of these projects can be successful and then we'll get the update from you. Is that okay? Absolutely, whatever your pleasure. Thank you, Chair Serpa, for allowing me to speak. I guess out of order, I did mention to him prior to the start of the meeting that I had a hard 330 because of the agenda item was scheduled to end at 330. I just wanted to make sure that I had the opportunity to speak. So thank you again. And as Commissioner Judge Stein was mentioning, $8 million has been committed to Region B or the Springfield area since the inception of the Community Mitigation Funds which have been sent out. So the latest item that was approved was $1.5 million to the city of Springfield for the improvement of traffic loan and system economic development in and around MGM Springfield in the Mass Mutual area, which is very important for our city. I would tell you it's probably the number one goal from the mayor's office. I do know it's the number one goal from the city council office. And just in general, I think it's the number one goal the citizens in general of Springfield to have redevelopment that is outside of the 14 acres that MGM Springfield occupies. Commissioner Judge Stein was in Springfield last week along with myself who attended a presentation on behalf of the city that identified a company called McCaffrey Inc. And its president, Ed Woodbury was presenting the fact that he is the preferred developer of two major pieces of property across the street from MGM. It's also directly across the street from the Mass Mutual Center and also is across the street from what is a major redevelopment of housing in downtown Springfield. It's called 31 Elm Street. And if I can just step back and if I can just look City Hall, there's a piece of art that's right behind me. I'm in my conference room and I chose to sit here because I wanted you to get an identification but the artwork that's in my background here is of City Hall and of the First Church in Springfield. The $1.5 million in part is spent directly across the street from this area, which is only maybe 300 feet from the front door of MGM Springfield. First Church in Springfield was first built in 1645. There's been a couple of churches built on the site. The current building was built in 1819 and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. It's one of the most iconic structures in downtown Springfield. And we're so pleased that the city is spending an additional $8 million renovating the park that's right outside of the city. And renovating the park that's right outside this church directly across the street from City Hall, directly across the street from Thurdown Elm Street, which is a $60 million housing project that will have 72 market rate housing in downtown Springfield. And again, this is all within about 300 feet from MGM Springfield. Finally, after five years of MGM opening, they just celebrated their fifth anniversary. A major development is being constructed in and around MGM Springfield and the entire city is applauding all of that. And thanks to the Mass Gaming Commission for providing this additional $1.5 million. And again, I think the economic development outside MGM Springfield is paramount in everybody's mind that this is exactly what we want to see. And if I go back in time, the Mass Legislature put together the proposals for all these operators to respond to one of the goals and objective is how can casinos work in conjunction with the cities and towns outside the actual property level? And this is exactly what the casino legislation was written for. And I couldn't be prouder to know that the Mass Gaming Commission has approved these additional funds and it's doing exactly what it was intended to do. So on behalf of MGM, they thank you for your support, the financial commitment for these additional funds. And I'm happy to address anybody's questions that they have regarding this. Any questions for Paul? I know that spot well, Paul. I've been there many, many times for many different types of events. It's really the heartbeat location of the city, right? So if there's a place to make better, that's the one and I can only imagine the impact it'll have on people using that space. It's the number four member. Absolutely, Mr. Chair, no question. It's the place to go if you want to be with people in a large setting in the downtown area, outdoors anyhow. Any, so great, great news, Paul. And I'm glad, you know, the commission was able to approve that. Mr. Maynard was there too. Oh yeah, Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to say to Paul, Chair Judd Stein and myself are picking out units on the Elm Street project. We just thought it was fantastic. And I mean, really echoing what Chair Serpa just said, I mean, you can see it, you know, some of the places the mitigation funds go further than others and you can just see it in the projects and walking around there with the chair and my fellow commissioners, fantastic work that we're doing with this money and really making those dollars go far and we love it, we love the project. Yeah, it's echoed by everyone in the city of Springfield. There's no question, everybody's mind, this is where we need to start the redevelopment outside the 14 acres of MGM Springfield. Great. And Dean, you'll appreciate that, Chair Serpa, my apologies. You would appreciate the fact that the RFP process selecting the construction company was done in a very transparent, full national search way, but really under a pretty short timeline, Paul, if I recall correctly. Yeah, I'm not so sure I can recall, but it was, again, short, but maybe four or five months. That's what I think, exactly. So really good government processes at work. I think one correction, and I'm gonna turn to Chief Delaney, I had mentioned the eight point, whatever, figure a million dollar figure. I think that was only for grants to Springfield proper, Paul. So I think there's a bigger number for Region B, which would include areas and communities, surrounding communities that are affected by the casino. And I don't know, Joe, if you want to share that bigger number for Region B, if you have it, you may not have it, or it may be embedded in your memory. I don't know. I don't have it at my fingertips, but that eight million is just for Springfield proper. West Springfield has received quite a lot of monies from us as have many of the other surrounding communities. So I couldn't tell you off the top of my head with the total list, but it's significantly greater than the eight million that just went to Springfield. But the eight million, yeah. Very much. All right, well, thank you, Paul. Certainly if there was a four or five month procurement process completed, somebody was managing it well, because that's an extraordinary timeline for any project like that. So listen, we've stepped a little bit on Joe's time. So let me introduce him in the meeting, in our last meeting in May, the membership wanted to make sure we got a picture, a complete picture of the 2023 Community Mitigation Fund grants. So to do that, we invited Joe Delaney, Chief of Community Affairs at the commission to give us detail at this meeting on the entire program. We just heard one snippet from Paul. So let's do that. We'll turn it over to Joe and hear about the entirety of this year's program, 10.2 million. And I'm sure many successful stories like we just heard. Go ahead, Joe. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So in your packets today, you've got the press release that we did on the 2023 fund, which that outlines all of the particular grants and gives you some information on them. And I'm not gonna dwell on all of those. But as the chair said, 10.2 million went out this year. That was down a little bit from 2022, which was at about 10.6 million. A couple of reasons for that. We had a lot of communities that were having real difficulty keeping staff members. We actually had a few different communities submit grant applications, but withdraw them because they didn't believe it, they'd be able to administer them due to staff shortages. In fact, and one of those, in fact, was the city of Boston. They lost like three or four people in their grant department and said, well, we're gonna have to kind of pull back a little bit. So anyway, so our numbers were down just a little bit previously, but since the beginning of time, almost 48 million dollars has gone out in this program, which is great. And we have our usual list of categories in which we give out these grants, which are primarily community planning. We do a lot of those helping communities, do planning, things like marketing plans and things of that nature. A lot of public safety, where we provide some money for things like overtime for late night police patrols, things like that. A lot of equipment. We have our transportation planning category and our transportation construction category, which is the funds that Paul was talking about, transportation construction funds that we provided for Springfield. And then the other main category is our workforce development, where we funded grants in one grant in region A, one grant in region B at half a million dollars each year. So, and for each region, I should say. And so those are the kinds of things that we've been doing for the last several years. But I wanted to focus on here was we introduced two new types of grants for 2023. The first one was the gambling harm reduction grant. And part of this was, this extends a little bit on the research that Mark Vanderlinden and his team do. But what we wanted to do is try to get money right to the communities, to try to help them identify populations that might be at risk for problem gambling and to do some studies that might help evaluate alternatives to reduce those harms. And while the first year wasn't as successful as we had hoped it would be, a couple of projects came out of that that were really great. And I wanted to just highlight one. And this was in the city of Boston for the Powell Arts Center. The Powell Arts Center is in the Asian community and provides different kinds of programming for the Asian community in Boston. And they came into us for a grant that came directly from a study that had been done previously by Mark Vanderlinden's group, which was the Asian Care Study. And one of the things that the Asian Care Study said was that folks in the Asian community need some alternatives, some alternative things to do rather than going to the casino. Going to the casino is very convenient. It's very, you know, people at the casino speak the language and so on. And the idea here was they are doing some additional programming that will give people in the Asian community and Boston alternatives to go into the casino, which, and this is again, a recommendation that came directly out of a study that we did earlier. So the idea with this gambling harm reduction category where this one is actually an implementation project, what we're looking to do as well is get money to communities to start studying these things and developing those kinds of solutions. And the other one that we did give a grant or was for the city of Springfield. And that was to look at the impact of gambling on youth. So we're looking at folks between 18 and 24. So some of those folks are even, you know, are underage to go to the casino. But, you know, the idea is that these folks are being targeted by commercials and other things and are being exposed to this. And the city wanted to find out what kind of an impact that is having on the youth of the city. So a small grant was given to the city for that. And our hope is that that might blossom into a larger study and that would identify some, you know, potential alternatives to try to reduce that potential for gambling harm. So even though the first year of this program was relatively small, we're really excited that the communities will kind of grab on to this and really try to look at this issue going forward. And then the other category that we added was what we are calling projects of regional significance. Again, it was brand new for this year. We had a couple of applications. And the one that we awarded was to the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission. And this was to improve the capacity of small businesses in the Pioneer Valley. So this category needs to look at a project that is regionally significant but also addresses a casino-related impact. As always, all of our funds have to go towards mitigating impacts of the casino. We can't just use these funds for sort of general purposes. So the impact that's associated here with the casino is, you know, MGM has had some difficulty in meeting their goals for minority women veteran businesses. They've been trying, but you know, if I'd have fallen short. And the idea that Pioneer Valley Planning Commission had was, hey, if we can work with some of these small businesses, minority women veteran businesses and try to build their capacity to help them bid on projects, on bigger projects, on bigger, you know, supplies and things of that nature that would help MGM meet their goals but it would also help the entire Pioneer Valley region by making these firms more competitive and being able to better compete against other firms and hopefully lift up those small businesses, small minority women veteran businesses particularly to meet one of the particular goals that the commission has. So those are the two that I wanted to focus on and I'd be happy to answer any questions. I said, I'm not gonna go through the whole list. There's quite a long list of projects and a lot of good things that people are doing but I'd be happy to answer any questions on that. And if there are none, I wanted to give you a little flavor of what we're gonna be doing for next year. Questions for Joe? I was wondering Joe on the workforce development grants, you know, because I'm relatively new, is the, like the mass hire grant, is that something that happens on an annual basis or is that a one-time grant? No, that's, we put that out every year. It is competitive, but we do require a consortium to come in. So groups tend to work together. So typically we only receive the one application per region. So in the East, we have mass hire and a West, we have Holyoke Community College partnered with Springfield Technical Community College and the city of Springfield. So they do all sorts of different things, English speakers of other languages, GED kinds of things. We have culinary, we have a whole host of training programs. Joe, I think, and Chair Sturpo, I think Jamie's work has been the beneficiary of mass hires, am I right on that, Jamie? Correct, yeah, I'm a great partner. Well, yeah, anytime, you know, anytime there can be more funding for job training, it's gonna help in the bigger picture, right? Especially with the job market right now. And that's one of the things, one of the questions actually for next year that we have for the commission coming up is whether or not we want to try to expand the amount of money that we're putting towards training. Right. Anything else for Joe or Joe, do you want to give us a picture of what's upcoming? Yeah, I just wanted to give you a little idea of what we have coming up for next year. So one of the most difficult things that our communities have is making that nexus between what they wanted, between the impact of the casino and the projects that they wanna do. And what we've found is that even through our own research and through other research, that kind of drawing that bright line between an impact of the casino and a project is often very difficult. So what our proposal this year is two things. One is we are looking at all of our own research, but we're also looking at research from many other jurisdictions across the country and even across the world to, and we're looking at all of the research that's out there to try to identify what are the recognized impacts of the casinos. And in doing that, in the past, what we said to our communities was, well, tell us what the impact is and then kind of quantify that impact and then tell us how you gotta fix it. And we realized that that while that sounds simple, it's not nearly as simple as it sounds. So our thought was that if the commission itself can say, these are the impacts that we recognize are likely to be caused by the casino. And again, you can't always make that saying, this is absolutely caused by the casino or not. That we recognize those and now the community doesn't have to work quite so hard to try to identify the impact and try to quantify it. We've already said it's an impact. And then in doing that, what we are also proposing is to change this program from just a kind of a competitive grant program into more of a block grant program for the communities. So for what we're working on now is developing a formula that we would use to say that for each community, we would set a set amount of money for each community. And at the end of November, beginning of December, we would send a letter out to the community saying, you are eligible for X number of dollars. What you need to do is write a work plan that complies with our guidelines to tell us how you're gonna use that money. And so instead of it being a kind of some more of a crapshoot for the communities, they know that there's a set amount of money set aside for them. Now, maybe they're not able to use all of it and that's okay too. But what we wanna do, what we heard from many of our communities, especially our smaller communities, is that they don't, and even from some of our larger communities this year is that they don't have the staff to be writing grant applications and doing these things when they don't have any guarantee that they're going to get the grant. So the thought here is that we will tell the communities how much they can get. They submit an application and once we concur that all of their projects meet our guidelines, the grant would be then given to them rather than this other process. And this is set up kind of like the Federal Community Development Block Grant Program. And all of our communities are very excited about this. Having some certainty on how much money might be coming to you is far more desirable than putting in an application knowing that you may or may not get it. So everybody seems excited about it. We've talked to the regional planning agencies. They like it. We've gotten really nothing but good feedback on this so far. And so we're moving ahead with this program and with hopes to implement it for 2024. In fact, we go to the commission tomorrow with a whole bunch of policy questions and a draft of our formula for distributing the funds. And we've been meeting with our local community mitigation advisory committees. And in fact, before I joined this meeting, I was meeting with the GPAC subcommittee on community mitigation to get input on all of these things. So I think it's really an exciting approach, I think to take for this program. As I said, communities have had quite a lot of difficulty in getting funds from this program because you have to make that next to the casino and making that easier and then giving them a set amount of money. We just think it will get the money to the communities in a far more effective manner and hopefully be a little bit more transformative for those communities. Well, it makes a lot of sense, right? You're taking away the main disincentive for putting in an application, right? Which is that you don't know if you're gonna get it. So you take that away, they still have to build a compelling argument for you to for the board to approve, right? But it makes the process a lot more circular. You know, the grants there give me a compelling reason. It's approved at yours. So that makes sense. Good move. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions for Joe? Oh, really quickly. I have a quick question, if I may, just so that I understand it. So is the new vision is to be able to provide the community mitigation funds to the community? And if so, who would be the administers? Are we thinking about the cities? I mean, can you just explain that? Who would be with the recipients of those dollars to manage it, if it's in a block grant format? Yeah, so we have a set number of communities that are eligible to participate in the community mitigation fund, which are essentially the host communities and the surrounding communities. They're the ones that are designated to submit. So all of those communities would get some money as part of the block grant. And they would be administered by the individual city or town themselves, yeah. Got it. Thank you, Joe. And the other piece of it that I didn't mention, but I probably should have that, those things like the workforce grants and we have some money that goes to like the DA's offices and a few other sort of regional entities that are eligible. We will be pulling some money, we'll be setting aside some money so that those will continue, if those won't go away, they'll be administered a little bit differently. But the lion's share of the money goes out to the cities and towns and they are the ones that have had more difficulties. So the block grant is just for the cities and towns. We'll have some set aside funds for those other entities that get money from us as well. Thank you, Joe. Okay. Anything else for Joe? That makes sense. Well, we'll look forward to hearing about how that process worked out, I guess a year from now, right? Yeah, much more to come. Okay. So that was our main business for the meeting, but I guess I'll check with our committee members, Jamie or Victor or even Caitlin, if you have any other updates that you wanna share with the group about what you've been working on, the gaming in your communities or any other topic really. This is your time if you have something. I'm good, thank you, Chair. Okay, Victor, I'll set. Yes, I don't have any major updates at this time. Thank you. Caitlin? I'll set for today, thank you. All right, no problem. Okay, so moving, I guess we'll talk about our next G-PAC meeting then. That would be the last thing we need to do today. It's what, September 20th? So I guess I would suggest that we meet again at the beginning of the new year, right? Unless there's a pressing subject that comes up, I think that makes sense. Do people have any other ideas about when it would make sense or does that work for everybody? All right, so Chair Juddstein and I and Grace will get together and come up with a proposed date for that and you'll get your notification. Is there any recommendations from the group here? Anybody here about information that they know they wanna make sure is covered in our next meeting? All right, that's okay too. So Kathy and I and others will make sure that we come up with the most germane information for that meeting and we'll put it together. Any other questions or comments from people today? Just to thank you for letting me crash the meeting and take my late lunch because I hadn't been able to eat today so I appreciate it and found it very informative. Yeah, thank you for attending, Commissioner. All right, not hearing any other business. I would ask if there's a motion to adjourn. Make a motion. Do I really even need to ask that, Grace? But I don't know. Is there a second? I second. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? All right, we have adjourned. Well, thank you very much, everybody. Appreciate all the information from the staff and I'm looking forward to working with everyone and learning more moving forward. Thank you. Thank you Chair, good to see everybody. Thanks.