 So, today's the 17th of November, 2020. This is a meeting of the Local Community Mitigation Fund, Region B. I'm calling the meeting to order. Tanya will now take attendance. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Okay. Peter Gagliardi. Hi, I'm here. Hello. Jennifer Bonfiglio. Here. Michael Pease. Here. Mary McNally. Ellen Schmitt. Here. Karmena Fernandez. Judy Theocles. Samuel Darkwa. Here. Lori Tanner. Here. Allison Ebner. Here. Richard Sullivan. And Ellen Potashnik. I think I saw Ellen earlier. Yeah, I think we got a silent here. Okay. Okay. Given the unprecedented circumstances resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic, Governor Charles Baker issued an order to provide limited relief from certain provisions of the open meeting law to protect the health and safety of individuals interested in attending public meetings. In keeping with the guidance provided, the commission will conduct a public meeting utilizing remote collaboration technology. Any votes will be taken by a roll call. This meeting is being recorded. And back to you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Do I have a motion to approve the minutes from the October 13th meeting? Move. Second. What? Sweet. All right. Back to you, Tanya. Peter Gagliardi. Should I be voting on this, having not been a member at that time? No, you should probably abstain on that. Okay. I'll abstain. Thank you. I also missed most of the meeting. So I'll abstain too. Okay. Jennifer Bunfeglio. Yes. Michael Pease. I don't know if you were there. I have to abstain. You have to abstain also. Okay. Mary McNally. Bellamy Schmidt. Yes. Carmina Fernandez. Judy Theakles. Samuel Darkwa. Yes. Lori Tanner-Upstainz. Allison Ebner. Yes. Richard Sullivan. Ellen Patashnik. Yes. Okay. So that's one, two, three, four, five. Five in favor of approving the minutes and three abstinences. Thank you. So at this point, we can start referencing the file that Tanya had sent over. We'll begin discussing the 2021 Community Mitigation Fund guidelines. Okay. Thanks, Sam. So actually just before we get started on that, I'd just like to welcome Peter Galgarity and Mike Pease as our new members for the Local Community Mitigation Advisory Committees. Peter is a representative from Springfield and Mike is our representative from Chickapee. So I would like to thank you for your service to this commission and welcome you. And would you guys like to spend a little bit and introduce yourself to the group? Why don't we start with Peter? Sure, I'd be happy to. Up until June 30th, I was the president and CEO of Wayfinders, a regional nonprofit housing agency that's based here in Springfield. And I'm now doing some work as a senior advisor to our new CEO and my current position there is part-time and I'm also working on a history of the organization that goes back to 1973. So that's been an interesting path. I've been in this position for, I was in the president and CEO position for 29 and a half years. So I spent a lot of time in Springfield and I can look out my apartment window here straight into MGM. So I got my eye on them too. Great, thank you. Mike? Yeah, thanks. I work within the city of Chickapee. I'm the mayor's chief of staff here. We started his administration in January and kind of walked into everything that's going on around us. So it's been quite a eventful eight months so far. Before that I worked as a compliance associate at Boya Financial out of Windsor, Connecticut. Great, thanks, Mike. And just again, just before we get into the guidelines, I just wanted to give you a quick update on what's going on in the casino world as you probably all have heard. The governor has new rules for the casinos. So they are now operating at a reduced number of hours. And so we've got, so MGM is now operating from 10 a.m. to 9.30 p.m. with some reduced hours for restaurants and other things. And in fact, I think the tap bar, the tap sports bar is closed, not for good, but for the duration of this reduction in hours. Plain Ridge Park Casino is running from 7 in the morning till 9.30 p.m. And Encore is running from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. And I do see that we have Jose Delgado here from MGM. Did you wanna add anything in, Jose, on what's happening with MGM? Yeah, thanks, Joe, and thank you to the committee. Not much more other than what Joe said, obviously we're dealing like everybody else with the effects of the pandemic and spike that's happening, not just in Massachusetts across the country. So as Joe mentioned, we have, as a result, we've had to cut our hours into that time place. And so that obviously has changed our business model and obviously, probably folks have read that that's also had an impact on our employees. And so, we're gonna continue to work with, obviously the gaming commission and the state and hope that we can get this done around so we can kind of get back to whatever the new normal is. But currently, that's what we're dealing with, like everyone else. Okay, thanks, Jose. Okay, so getting into the guidelines, I'm gonna share just an email that I got. So we opened up the guidelines for public comment and the public comment closed on November 9th. And we did receive one set of written comments where I thought I'd just go through that here. These came in from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and primarily dealt with the workforce development grants that we give out and some of the points here. So on item one here, it says, the Community Mitigation Fund Language reflects the needs of small businesses and entrepreneurs in addition to workforce development. We propose a new grant category to support regional business development separately from workforce development if possible. So under our community grants that we do, that type of work is eligible under those grants. And in fact, we've given out a number of grants to deal with, to communities to work with their local small businesses to try to develop relationships with the casinos or build capacity for some of those groups to hopefully participate as suppliers and so on to the casino. So that's really already an eligible activity, although it's not sort of specifically spelled out in there, but that is something that many of the groups have availed themselves. How many of the communities have used that to help create those connections. And this second one, this is interesting. I think, Peter, when we had our little introductory call, you actually brought this item up yourself saying that the high unemployment from all hospitality and retail industries now includes a group of the casino itself. Say the unemployed, hospitality and retail workers need upskilling to break into new careers or to be able to move up the career ladder in the casino now or when re-employed. These unemployed workers are not able to buy services or goods from the casino or the area small businesses. So in this case, that actually makes kind of a compelling argument that if a workforce group wanted to try to identify actually laid off casino workers to help them retrain or to do something temporarily that that it's probably an eligible use and probably it is an eligible use under our current guidelines. Of course, whoever the applicant was would need to make a sort of a concerted effort to make that connection to the casino and make that argument. But we would certainly listen to an argument of that nature. We decided not to change the guidelines really sort of to include that, although we did add in just brief segment that talked about unemployed casino workers in the guidelines but essentially that would be eligible as long as that nexus to the casino can be made. And item number three talks about including ESOL training and adult basic education programs as part of the workforce development grants. That is already something that pretty much every grant that we have given has had an adult basic education component to it. So we feel that we really already have that well covered in our current guidelines and grants. And item four here talks about digital literacy training. So that's something that most of our grants have had a component of that in it. And again, while we didn't spell it out specifically in the guidelines, I think actually when I think the program that we did at Springfield Technical Community College a couple of years ago, part of that included getting folks Chromebooks and for the classes and teaching them some digital literacy and working on developing resumes and things of that nature. Already something we include. We did add a couple of words just indicating digital literacy is certainly eligible in the guidelines. And then item number five talks about wraparound supports for families, particularly on food and housing insecurity. When we discussed this item, it really felt this kind of went a little bit beyond what our scope of work is as issuing grants. We can issue grants to government entities. We can't really give grants to families and individuals on things like that. We can only give grants to the government entities. So it was sort of our feeling of this was a little bit beyond the scope of what we're able to do, not that it wouldn't be great to do that. So essentially the guidelines that were given out to you folks at the last meeting haven't really changed. Obviously we cleaned up a little bit of stuff here and there but and added a few words here and there but essentially what you see is what we're going out with. And those go in front of the commission on Thursday to be voted and assuming a positive vote of the commission, we will then start our solicitation for projects for the next round. So that will start. We'll be posting this on Monday. So it's actually a couple of weeks earlier than we usually have gotten this done. Usually we were in early December when we started our solicitation. So being able to go out before the end of November is good. We'll be able to, you know, folks will have a couple more weeks to work on their grant applications. So that's really finishes the discussion on the guidelines. Does anybody have any particular questions? Yes. Yes, Bellamy. I know it's too late to change the guidelines for this year because they're in draft but I think that that email makes a compelling case that the guidelines really should be slightly modified to clarify some of these points that are understood but not explicit. Doesn't take a lot of words to do that but in a couple of places you could say business development or workforce development or you could add ESOL. Just a few extra words would help to clarify what's available and forced all questions like the one that was presented to you. Right. Yeah, we did make a couple of minor tweaks in the guidelines. We did add the digital literacy section. And we did make a couple of very minor tweaks but it's not, obviously we didn't add a whole new category. The first question was talking about adding a whole new category of grants while that's covered under another category. We probably should clarify that a little bit more. Thanks. Okay, anyone else? Any other questions? Okay, well none appearing. So Sam, I'll turn it back to you. Yeah, so from then on we're gonna move on to talking about the MGC research agenda and responsible gaming. Okay, we have Mark van der Linden here and then is Teresa gonna be here as well, Mark? Actually, we're splitting meetings today. So I'll take on the whole discussion about the research agenda and the game sense program. Great. So first, hi everybody. It's nice to see all of you. My name's Mark van der Linden, the Director of Research and Responsible Gaming with the Gaming Commission, which oversees exactly what we're talking about here today, which is the MGC research agenda, as well as some of the responsible gaming initiatives that we have at each of the three casinos in Massachusetts, including MGM Springfield. I'm going to share my screen. I'm gonna try to do that. I was having some trouble with that yesterday. Okay, can you see my screen? Yes. Okay, fantastic. All right, you can still see it. Yes, yes. All right, so Massachusetts is in a unique position. You know, there's a lot of states, I think how many states have state-regulated casino gambling? I think it's somewhere in the, it's over 40 or right around 40 states. Not a single one of them has a research mandate, at least not to the extent of what Massachusetts does. And I think, you know, it was the legislature and when they passed the expanded gaming act in 2011, it recognized sort of the expansiveness of the casino industry across the United States, but the complete lack of research that really talks about what are the impacts, both good and bad of casino gambling. And especially sort of that really valuable, neutral research that really gets at the heart of the issue. And so they built into the expanded gaming act, section 71, which really lays out for the gaming commission exactly what we need to measure. It covers it in kind of some big bucket areas here. So in order to understand the social and economic effects that have expanded gaming and use the findings to inform evidence-based policy and regulation, it includes this very large bucket looking at the neuroscience, psychology, sociology, epidemiology, etiology of gambling. It also included such areas as looking at public safety impacts. And I think that's about it. So the idea, and I wanna go back to this idea that using the findings to inform evidence-based policy and regulation, which I think, you know, that is what you are charged with doing through the work that you're doing on this committee is hopefully looking at impacts, looking at the evidence and what those impacts are and making decisions about how to respond. To the extent that you can use the findings from the research agenda, to the extent that you can use me to help you with that, I'm more than happy to do that. A lot of times it's just I can direct you to the right study or the right chapter of the right study. We also have a responsible gaming framework. And this is another body sort of document that the gaming commission developed that really helps guide both the research agenda as well as our overall strategy as it relates to responsible gaming. This too also really highlights the idea that we wanna use research to inform best practice models for responsible gaming strategies. And you'll see that part of the research agenda, while it also covers the areas above, it also really does a really good job of evaluating responsible gaming programs that we have. And again, then this last piece of it is creating and translate knowledge to support evidence-informed decision-making. That is a key point here that you'll see. You'll see it in many different ways through the gaming commission, but certainly through the section 71, the framework. We have another document that really highlights the need of this, which is a strategic plan for the research agenda. When I said that it was really important that we move towards a have a neutral body that carries out this research. So back in 2013, the MGC initiated a contract with UMass Ampar School of Health and Health Sciences. They submitted a proposal to the commission. It was a competitive procurement. There were a few other proposals as well, but their proposal included a partnership with the UMass Donahue Institute and several independent researchers that focus on the area of gambling studies around the country and even into Canada in order to form the social and economic impacts of gambling in Massachusetts. What this group does is they take that large overarching approach of looking at the overall social and economic impacts of gaming in Massachusetts. And their methodological principles probably oversimplifying it in this slide, but it's relatively simple. Identify how much money is involved, where it's coming from and where it's going. Assess the impact for years before and years after the introduction of gambling venues and comprehensively assess the potential economic and social impacts and utilize multiple sources for triangulation. A couple pieces here that's of note is that casinos are still a relatively new industry in Massachusetts, but this project started in 2013. So between 2013 and really for about the first three or four years, it was all about building a baseline so that we could then compare what was Springfield like before the introduction of casinos during the construction phase of casinos and what are the impacts afterwards compared to those two time frames beforehand. So yeah, so that ends up being an important piece of this. The other piece of it is the idea of triangulation. There's many different data sources that the research team draws upon and to the extent possible, they want to try to understand what causation is. And so if you see real estate impacts, if you look at real estate prices, commercial real estate prices in Springfield before the casino and after the casino, how do you know that it was really caused to go up or to go down by the introduction of MG and Casino Springfield? And so to the extent possible, they'll use multiple sources of data in order to triangulate that so that there's a stronger sense of what is causation and what may just happen to be coincidence. So when I talked about building a baseline over the course of three or four years, they built a baseline looking at Massachusetts as a stated whole, but then they also did a targeted approach to this, looking at the specific host and surrounding communities where casinos were set to be located. The baseline indicators covered, as I said before, both health as well as economic and fiscal, five dimension, 14 total indicators for social six dimensions and 15 indicators. And just to dive down a little bit further in that, here are the five dimensions that are being examined through the social and health research. I won't go and list each of the indicators here, but you can see that it's organized in a way that really tries to comprehensively understand some of the social and health impacts. So for example, suicide is a great example that one research would indicate that problem gambling is closely associated with suicides. And so would you, while we look at the prevalence and incidents of problem gambling in the state, you also wanna pay attention to what the other impacts are that span from that. So you'd wanna understand whether or not you would see suicides increase in the state. We also take a look at the social and economic or fiscal and here are the dimensions and indicators that we're taking a look at there. And so just again, using just one example without diving into too much detail, you wanna understand both business starts and as well as businesses that are struggling perhaps as a result of the introduction of the casino in downtown Springfield. So you wanna take a look at that but you also then wanna understand perhaps bankruptcy and how that's impacted, whether that goes up or goes down as a result. You wanna understand rents and perhaps that begins then to inform whether rents go up or rents go down. One would assume that rents would go up in close proximity to a casino as it begins to, as that rises so to many other sectors. But you don't wanna just assume these things. You wanna really understand it. You want research to back up what some of these assumptions are. So you as a community mitigation committee can begin making some of the decisions about that. So here are, again, I'm not gonna go into any great detail but this I thought was a great example of how this is accumulation of a lot of research. And I don't know if any of you made it to the Sigma Research Stand last month but it covered a lot of ground. Not all of it, but it covered several key areas including taking a deep look at the impact of MGM Springfield in the first year to 18 months of operation. It also included a look at the social side of this. So the UMass team field at a large targeted population survey to Springfield in the surrounding areas looking at such things as problem gambling prevalence, gambling attitudes, gambling participation within the community. A great, one of the central concerns when MGM Springfield opened or for that matter any of the casinos opened in Massachusetts was will you see an increase in the prevalence rate of problem gambling? One would assume that you would both just common sense would say that you open up a casino, more people are gambling which increases the likelihood that you would see people developing gambling related problems. And in fact, this is supported by research in this area done in other jurisdictions around the country not to kind of get to the end of the story but it was interesting that we did not for our researchers did not find an increase in the prevalence rate of problem gambling in Springfield in the surrounding areas when they did this targeted follow up population survey one year after MGM Springfield opened. They do make some assumptions or they do make some conclusions about why that that possibly is again, without going into great detail all the report and the slides are posted through these links below. And that wasn't the extent of the research that's been done in Springfield there's also been a look at a baseline as well as a follow up look at real estate impacts. We've done a baseline one year and we're working on two year follow up in terms of looking at how has MGM Springfield affected crimes, calls for service and collisions in and around the Springfield area that's an incredible study that does not draw upon our team at UMass but draws upon a crime analyst that we've been working with for a number of years as well as the cooperation of each of the local police departments in Springfield and all of the surrounding communities. There was a host community profile building with again that important baseline. And then interesting, but you might not assume that we pay close attention to how does MGM Springfield affect the state's lottery built into the expanded gaming act there's also a mandate that we try to protect the lottery to the extent possible. And that's largely because the lottery is a major source of local aid to towns and cities throughout the Commonwealth. And that's an important source of revenue for them. If you want to do a deeper dive on any of the research here is a link to the research webpage basically it's at massgaming.com you go under about there's a research agenda page we just actually recently redid this page that I'm hopeful that folks will find it much easier to navigate around and get to the specific area of interest that they have. But again, please use me as a resource that if you have any questions whatsoever or looking for a specific study have a specific area of interest. Let me direct you to it. Or if you have a question that falls outside of kind of our research agenda. I'm pretty familiar with the extent of the gaming research that's been done in the US or at least I can try to find you a resource that you can draw upon. Another interesting initiative that we've launched just over the past summer is mode the Massachusetts Open Data Exchange. We over the past seven plus years have accumulated a mountain of data. It's really good quality data that helps us paint the picture of impacts of gambling in Massachusetts. We've paid our research teams to analyze that data and report on that data. And those also are really helpful to better understand or bring clarity to this. But it's not the only way and only analyses that can be done. So our goal in mode is to make sure that data is available for other researchers that they can also use that for their own research purposes. But then it's also turned around and the Commonwealth can benefit from those additional analyses as well. So it's an exciting project where you hope to see some benefits from soon from the researchers that have requested specific data sets. Again, this is also available on the research page of the MGC website. Next I wanted to talk a little bit about game sense and in order to do that I need to close out my slideshow and switch over to a different screen. Hold on just one second, bear with me. All right, can you see the game sense? Yeah. Great, let me go back to the beginning. So we recently released the game sense impact report. Game sense is a program that basically the gaming commission recognizes that you know, we introduced casinos in 2011. First casino opened up in 2014-15 in order as an economic stimulus to bring jobs, to bring revenue to the Commonwealth and to towns. But we don't do that at any cost that we need to pay attention to the harm that gambling can potentially bring as well. I've always said that you can't realize the full economic benefits of expanded gaming. Springfield can never truly realize the great potential of casinos opening up when you have persons within the city or the surrounding area that are being harmed by it because those harms begin to erode any of the economic or potential of expanded gaming in Massachusetts. The gaming commission, and I believe the legislature also really supported and endorsed this concept as well. And so they made a requirement throughout actually expanded gaming act that really pays attention to mitigating potential harm. Included in that was a requirement that there was onsite space set aside separate from the casino. The casino I had to provide it for a responsible gaming program to be identified and fulfilled by the gaming commission. We adopted and developed this program called GameSense. What is GameSense? GameSense to me is really a prevention program. We wanna recognize there will be people that are harmed by gambling, but to the extent that we can prevent that harm from the first place, everybody knows that the term ounce of prevention or the true benefit, the amount that you can save down the road if you put prevention up front. So GameSense is an innovative responsible gaming program that encourages players to adopt and maintain positive behaviors and attitudes that reduce gambling related harm. Now, I don't know how many of you, if you've all been to MGM Springfield, but one of the first things that you see when you enter the gaming floor out of the elevators is the GameSense Information Center. That information center is staffed, well, when the casino is 24-7, it's staffed 16 hours a day, seven days a week by trained GameSense advisors. And it's not just a matter of sharing brochures, it's not just giving them information, it's really engaging with patrons too that challenge some of their beliefs about gambling, provide them with information and tools that hopefully when they do enter the casino for, when they sit down at a slot between their table game, their eyes are wide open, they know exactly what they're getting into and how to keep it fun, how to keep it as a form of entertainment as opposed to going down a path where it's creating harm. We have a number of different tools that help us accomplish that. Our GameSense advisors are certainly the very front line and they're to greet the patrons. Our GameSense team also does extensive casino employee training. So recognizing that it's not just something that needs to sit at the GameSense Information Center, it's working to create a culture within MGM Springfield that supports and promotes responsible gaming. So they do extensive training with all employees at the casino and they do an even more extensive training for select staff and executive staff at the casino. Coming to Casino Near You already at Plain Ridge Park Casino and soon to MGM Springfield is a program called Play My Way. It's a slot-based program that allows players to set a budget from the slot machine and it provides reminders for them as they approach the budget that they agree to. It's a pre-commitment strategy. You say you want to spend $100 when you sit down at the slot machine. It supports your decision to do that as you get closer to that budget. It provides reminders for players who are enrolled at 50%, 75%, 100%. And if you do go over your budget, it doesn't cut you off but it'll continue to provide you with reminder notifications pushed out to the machine that you're sitting at. And when I said that there are persons that will experience gambling related harm, that is true and we need to do what we can to create a safety net. We have a relationship with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and some of the local health departments to assure that a safety net is there. Within our span of control at the casinos, we have the voluntary self-exclusion program where basically somebody who says, I have a problem. I'm not able to control my gambling. I need help. The voluntary self-exclusion program can move in and help provide that type of external control. Basically saying we'll prohibit you from entering the gaming floor at the casinos. If by chance you do enter the gaming floor, you're cut off from the potential of winning any type of jackpot. So it takes away that winning incentive which is primary. Also cuts them off from rewards points or enrolling into the player card. No promotions or marketing material is sent to them. Also a program, both gamesense play my way and the voluntary self-exclusion program, as I said before, we evaluate these extensively and have had some actually really pretty promising results up front. We'll continue to evaluate them, recognizing that this is an ever-changing terrain and our strategies and tactics will need to change along with that. Anyway, I just gave you a really fast overview of what we're doing in the area of research, what we're doing in the area of responsible gaming. More than happy to answer any questions that you may have. Okay, Mark, it's Joe. On the research agenda piece, I know you've done some studies already in Springfield and not to put you too much on the spot, but are there any sort of key things that you've seen, a few things maybe that are surprising or sort of important findings that have happened so far? You know, yeah. I mean, to some degree, it's the lack of findings that have most surprised me, Joe, that MGM came out with a big plan to open up a casino in Springfield, an outward-facing casino. And it's not that there haven't been challenges, but if you take a look at the public safety impacts, we've chased down a lot of different angles on this to try to identify whether there are types of crimes that would be associated with the introduction of with the opening of MGM Springfield. And there's been very little in terms of public safety impacts that we've been able to see. And this is, we're looking at both the data, but we're also, our public safety study draws upon the testimonial of crime analysts from each of the police departments in Springfield and the surrounding areas where they're available or sergeants or police chiefs. And so it's been really, really striking to me that that hasn't necessarily been the case. And same with the prevalence rate of problem gambling. There are groups that are at greater risk of developing a gambling problem, but in terms of the general population within Springfield in the surrounding areas, some of those impacts have not, we haven't been able to see where there's a spike in any of these specific areas. It doesn't necessarily mean, it doesn't mean that we need to stop looking at this. One year out from opening, you typically begin to see some changes and some shifting in the landscape, but it's not necessarily the case. Maybe it takes longer, maybe some of the impacts will good and bad really take a while for us to begin to see. Perhaps the way in which we're measuring it, it isn't quite getting at that sort of the ground level. So for example, we have a study in Springfield looking at gambling behavior and problem gambling among the Latinx population in Springfield. And I think that that will be really telling to get a better understanding if we're looking at the general population of Springfield, we're not necessarily seeing a significant impact in terms of gambling related harm, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's not happening within specific populations or communities. And so we wanna take a closer look at some of that. Great, thanks. And just, there's been some interesting, some really positive and heartening economic impacts. I think that MGM came in and with really high hopes. And there has been a fair amount of economic benefit to the city, so. Just a question. When you say a fair amount of economic impact, are you able to quantify that? Do you know what amount of dollars or whatever metric is being used to kind of say that? Yeah, so without going into great detail, because I would require me to kind of remember everything in the report, I would encourage you to take a look at the operational, first year operational report of MGM. And it goes into much greater detail of the direct and indirect economic impact of the casino and in the community. So a few slides back, there was a link to the slide deck as well as the actual presentation. So you might wanna take a look. Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah, yeah. And Samuel, if you have any questions after you do take a look at that, hopefully I can answer them or I can certainly connect you with our research team. They're overly enthusiastic about a lot of this. Does anyone else have any questions for Mark or? Yeah, I'd like to just hop in before I became a member of this committee in my, when I was wearing the hat at Wayfinders, I was part of a group that came together to discuss changes in the residential real estate market that we were perceiving in the region. And then looking for what caused that, what's the likelihood for the future. And really for those people who might develop housing and there's a sense that we have not an adequate supply of housing, which tends to drive up prices. You need to know where the housing is going to want to be, who your customer is going to be and so forth. And so there is a regional study underway that's handed Hampshire and Franklin counties, but of course that encompasses Springfield and the surrounding towns that are part of your direct purview in terms of MGM. And coincidentally, we engage Donahue Institute to do the research. I think I heard of this actually, Peter. You may have, because I talked to Bruce Stevens about it when we were just starting, because he was interested in those questions as well. Right. So at any rate, there's certainly ample opportunity and desire to share whatever we mutually learn because you're focused and we're looking at a little bit broader picture because certainly people can commute from any place in those three counties very easily. And we're curious now, with COVID, all of a sudden upon us, it's changed and now, okay, what's the dynamic where the couple of thousand people losing their jobs? And that's the other side. You've never quite got to 3,000 so it wasn't that many lost jobs. But when you count that other fallout, the other businesses that lost business, it could get to be a considerable number and it could reverse the market trend that we were watching. Because of the low interest rates, people are still buying houses. I haven't heard yet a rents going down but sooner or later, something will happen. And how that fits, how one affects the other. I'm not sure. I think it was a healthy fix before, although it was creating some dislocations of people who can't pay a raised rent. When you're in a weak market, the rent isn't high enough or the sale price isn't high enough on the house to want to build another one. There's a real lack of new units coming on, taking advantage of an opportunity. And anyways, the group is continuing to look into that. There's wide support. It's quite a broad group of people on the advisory committee that was put together for it. We certainly would like you to take a look at it when we get it done. Yeah, I would love to take a look at that. And I think that's some of the triangulation that perhaps we could use in order to begin to look at what true impacts are of the casino. So that would be great. Excellent, excellent. If I can just say, you know, Zay's on the line, but you know, the cooperation of MGM in order to provide the data for the research, but as well as, you know, their cooperation and in a lot of cases, leadership and kind of rolling out some of the responsible gaming initiatives and creating that culture is really, really important. So a shout out to MGM and Jose. Thanks for appreciating that, Mark. I actually wanted to, if I can add one thing and I heard this and I know I read it on the Mass Live a lot of times. There's this one piece where it says that MGM never hit 3,000 jobs. I just wanna clarify that for folks. Wow, it's not important right now in the grand scheme of things, but the property did open with just over 3,000 jobs and through that time, the research that Mark's team and the UMass Sigma 30 folks actually pointed out was to start off at 3,000. Obviously that tapered over time, but I just wanted to make sure I corrected that. And also some of the impacts that you guys will read that the study put out is essentially, you know, $900 million worth of economic development in the area. I think that equated not only to the jobs that the property had directly, but also indirectly, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, it was somewhere five to 6,000 jobs across the state that the opening of the property impacted in the state of Massachusetts. And one of the big pieces for the study was to capture the recapturing of dollars that was going over the border to the state of Connecticut and other states that have gaming and what the research found was that 40% of the dollars that were coming in were actually recaptured dollars, either Massachusetts residents that were going out of state or out of state folks coming in. And so those were the findings that I thought was pretty important in terms of the economic piece of the study. So yeah, you know, it doesn't just take a look at the, it does take a look at the sheer number of jobs but up the direct employment, but it also takes a look at kind of the ripple effect of those jobs, as well as the ripple effect of the, you know, what's it, $900 million investment. And what is the ripple effect of that and how many people does that ultimately end up affecting? So they use some really interesting economic modeling that gives us a picture that you wouldn't necessarily get by looking at a couple of the top line numbers from that are put out there. So please let me know if you have any questions as you dive into the research or as you're thinking about your own work, we're happy to be a resource. Thank you. I guess from there, is there anything else that needs to be discussed before we move on to our next steps? Joe? Okay, so today's meeting essentially concludes this committee's activities for this fall. So the next steps are the guidelines will be voted by the commissioners on Thursday. On day we start our solicitation. We are doing, I think we may have mentioned this at some of the earlier meetings. We're gonna do a series of workshops for folks. So what we're gonna do is when the guidelines go final, we're gonna send a letter out to all of those communities that still have some reserve funds left and let them know that that was the new guideline that they're gonna have until the end of 2021 to get that money programmed. And then what we're gonna do, we haven't set the date quite yet, but around the middle of December, probably December 15th or thereabouts, we're gonna have a meeting with all of those communities. And we'll of course, we'll meet with them individually if they wanna do that as well. But to try to give them some good ideas what other communities have used the money for, what are some of the things that are eligible, we'd really love the communities to spend this money. You know, we had the example of last year, Foxboro, Rentham and Plainville all got together and said, hey, you know, Rentham says, we got these great shopping outlets and Foxboro says, hey, we got Patriot Place and Gillette Stadium and Plainville says, we've got the casino here. Why don't we work together and try to come up with a little tourism plan to try to take advantage of all of our joint assets that we have around here. And that worked out really great. So we wanna highlight to the communities maybe some things like that. I think especially we have more communities out in Region B that have not used their money and some of these are those smaller communities who may not really have an idea of what to do with it, but maybe if several communities could pool their money, they could do a much larger study, a much more effective study, something of that nature. So that's step one. And then we're gonna do two workshops, probably the first full week in January. We're gonna do one for the workforce development folks. We're gonna get everybody who's applied to us in the past and some other people together to talk about, you know, trying to think outside the box a little bit and seeing if there's some other opportunities and workforce that we can do. And, you know, we're gonna certainly invite the casinos to that we'd love to have the HR folks and so on, that, you know, Mary Kate from over at MGM and some of the folks from Longcore and Plain Ridge to say, hey, what are the needs in the facilities? So we think that'll be great. And then a third workshop is gonna be for sort of the general grants that we get every year the specific impact grants on the transportation planning and construction grants, things of that nature. Those are all relatively similar in nature. And the idea there is again, to get people to be thinking about this stuff. And also, you know, it is our hope that doing these workshops and giving some sort of best practices, things of that nature will hopefully result in maybe some more better and complete applications. I'll just leave it at that. We've had some difficulty with, you know, getting good applications in, you know. So, you know, we want to grant this money to the communities, but we need to find real impacts and we need to, you know, have good applications that support those. So this outreach we're hopeful will do that. And so then the application deadline is January 31st. Which actually is a Sunday, but that's okay because everything is done online. You know, so, you know, it's not like we need to get paper applications into us. So there's that. And, you know, yesterday we had our region A meeting and, you know, it's been our intention over the past a few years to try to make these local community mitigation advisory committees a little more regular rather than just sort of this, you know, little sprint that we do in the fall. And region A suggested that we set up a meeting in, say, April and I think that sounds like a good idea. So we can set up a meeting for both of the regions. Sometime in April, we'll take a look at a bunch of dates and see where we are. And, you know, the thought there is, I think we're going to have a public safety report for on core, but I think that still might be of interest to region B as well. We will have gotten our applications in. We'll be in the middle of reviewing those applications so we can give you an update on what we have coming in and we may try to, you know, get some of our folks to give you an idea like we did today on the research agenda. You know, we also do horse racing and maybe that might be something that's of interest to the group. And just to understand what we do in that realm, just to give you a little bit of a flavor of what some of the things are that we're working on in the commission other than just community mitigation. So those are our next steps over the next couple of months. And I think with that, Sam, I'll turn it back to you. Yeah, before we move on, does anyone have any questions for Joe on anything he just said? Sam, I had a question. What about the lottery and the on track betting or the sports betting? Don't forget the sports betting. Yeah, if you could add that as an update in April, that might be good too. Yeah, I mean, there's been some pressure, I guess, that's been exerted by the groups to try to move that forward, you know, with the legislature. And, you know, we had a bill that was out there that would have made the gaming commission the regulator for sports betting that didn't go anywhere in this past legislative session. And I think the push is on to try to do something again. And Jose, maybe you have, do you have any flavor on what's happening with sports betting from your side? Yeah, there's, I mean, obviously, there's been a lot of discussion over the past year to two years. Most recently, the House had included some language in their economic development bill. And the Senate was more leaning towards the budget, which they just put out a budget proposals, both the House and the Senate, the Senate included sports, what they didn't initially include sports betting in the budget, but there were some amendments added. So the hope is that either through the budget or through the economic development committee, that there are some of the conference committees kind of go over it. I know that both the House and the governor have essentially, you know, as part of, you know, what they see for next year, but still to be seen, you know, whether or not that gets done this year or next. So there are a number of, essentially there's a number of pieces on the table. At the moment. So looking forward to see what comes of that. Obviously for our industry, we'd like to see it because it could definitely help in current times for us. Thanks, Jose. Yeah, so there's, you know, as of the last bills that were in, like I said, the gaming commission would be the authority that would manage sports betting. And honestly, the commission itself is sort of agnostic on that. If it's given to us, we will regulate it. If not, you know, we won't. So anyway, but we are certainly prepared to do that. You know, there was, back last summer, there was a lot of talk that something was gonna happen or last spring, something was gonna happen very quickly and that sort of weathered on the vine. But certainly, yeah, we'll be happy to give you an update, you know, in April. That's a great idea. Yeah, thank you. And with that, do we have any other matters to discuss? It doesn't appear so. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Great. So with that, I believe we are all done today. Tanya's just gonna take the vote with that. Peter, Greg, we already? Yes. Jennifer Bonfiglio. Yes. Michael Peace. Yes. Mary McNally. Kermina Fernandez. Judith Theocles. Samuel Darkwell. Yes. Laurie Tanner. Yeah. Allison Ebner. Richard Sullivan. Ellen Patashnik. Yes. All right, so one, two, three, four, five, six in favor of adjourning. Thank you, Tanya. Great job. Great job chairing, Sam. Great job. An excellent first effort. Yeah. Thank you. Much appreciated. So having no further topics of discussion, we're gonna adjourn today's meeting. Thank you, everyone, and have a good rest of your day. Thanks, everyone. We'll be in touch. Not long now. Bye-bye.