 community on community mitigation. So I've been advised that, you know, because this is a joint meeting, you know, we posted this as a public meeting of the committees, and we essentially need to have a quorum of one of the committees in order for us to proceed as a public meeting. And right now I'm looking and I'm not sure that we're there yet. So the other option that we can do is we can just do this as an informational meeting where we just essentially present the information to you folks. We just can't really get into any depth on policy matters and things that we can't really do any deliberations. And frankly, that wasn't the intent of this meeting in the first place. So I've just checked off the folks that I see here. You have a few folks on the phone. If you hit star six on your phones, you should be able to unmute. And I'm just wondering if you could let me, the folks who are calling and if you could just let me know who you are. I'll just kind of call off the phone numbers. Okay, I see someone unmuted there that's ending in one, two, seven, seven. That's Michael Pease from Chigabee. Michael Pease, thank you. I see five, six, eight, five. Ellen Tatashnik, Springfield. Thank you, Ellen. So I see a four, one, three with area code with eight, one, four, three at the end. Yes, if you can image, I would stand there from then, Jim Springfield. Oh, great. Yeah, how are you? And then we have a nine, seven, eight area code with a six, five, zero, zero at the end. Okay, well, regardless of that, looking at what we have right now, it does not appear that we have a core room of any of our committees yet. So why don't we just carry this on as, just as an informational meeting? Because I think we have a nice agenda, I think, for you folks today. But first, before we get started, I'd like to introduce Chair Kathy Judd-Stein. She would like to just give a few opening remarks. Kathy? Good morning, Joe. Thank you, everyone. I just wanted to say good morning and to thank all of you for joining. I know during this pandemic, it's a challenge to meet virtually. And the Game Commission has been very fortunate to be able to conduct our business pretty seamlessly. To have three committees joined today, not accomplish a core room is not surprising. What is wonderful but not surprising is that so many of you are participating today. It's a testament to your commitment to public service and to the welfare and the economic well-being of your communities and regions. So thank you. I want to thank Chair Caravello for Region A and all of your Likmak Committee members. And I want to thank Chair Darkwa for your work and your committee members for Region B. I want to thank the subcommittee for your work. And I want to, a great work of the review team. All of you know the extensive work that goes into the review of these community mitigation grants. We're about two-thirds through the process right now of our review. I think probably it's fair to say we voted on a third of them. This year we were able to do it in sort of per category. And Joe has really a lot of organization. It has to do with all the thorough work of the review team. And as I mentioned, it stems from your initial work, particularly that of the local committee. So thank you. I'm just looking at my notes. I know that today you're going to hear from our CFAO, Derek Lennon, and learn a little bit about a regulation that we recently enacted, giving some flexibility for our team. And then you're also going to hear from Professor Christopher Bruce. I think all of you will really enjoy the thoroughness of Professor Bruce's work and how it impacts your communities. And perhaps you've already had a chance to read the reports, but it'll be really nice for you to hear directly from the professor. And then finally, I guess I just want to point out that this has been a long year. And the work of the Community Mitigation Fund review process, all of which you contribute to, is critical for the mitigation of the impact of the casinos. And this year has been a special year. And so more than ever, this work is meaningful. We're all looking forward to what comes next. Casinos seem to be doing quite well in terms of ramping up business out of this long year. And that should bode well for the economic driver that they are for our regions. And it will also, of course, make your work next year even that much more important. So thank you. And I hope that you enjoyed today's meeting. We've been able to hear from the professor. And I know that you'll enjoy it. Thanks so much. And thank you for allowing me to say hello. Thanks, Kathy. Appreciate those words. And I guess with that, we'll jump right into the meeting agenda. So just for starters, back in the fall, when we all met to go over the guidelines and develop that whole process, all of the committees agreed that we wanted to have a spring meeting to get an update on where things stand and how we're doing and all of that. And so that is what this meeting is for. We decided to do this as a joint meeting primarily because we're not really dealing with substantial policy issues here. Particularly, this is more of an update and an informational meeting. So we looked at that as doing it as a joint meeting made some sense. We have Christopher Bruce here. And we thought in the interest of saving him from doing three of these presentations that we could have the single presentation for the three groups. And I think that's this notion of joint meetings, I think is good for this type of meeting where it's more informational. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Derek Lenin, who's our CFO. He's going to talk a little bit about, as you recall, in the fall, we talked about using some of the community mitigation funds for staff and for expenses and things of that nature. And Derek is going to give you a little update on what we did for this past year. We did transfer some monies over and then what we plan to do for the future. Derek? Thank you, Joe. Thank you for having me here. And once again, thank you for all the work in the fall where you actually allowed us to put this proposal in front of the commission to use some administrative money for the oversight of this grant program. I think it's very beneficial. I think it'll help the program in the long run. And with that, I'd just like to kick right into it in a public meeting on December 27th. We went in front of the commission and there was a lot of work done by our legal team, Joe and Finance coming together to try and figure out, take the recommendations you made and then turn it into a regulation. And what came out of that was 205-CMR-153 and the area that is really applicable to this discussion is 205-CMR-153 paragraph five. And that allows the commission to expend funds for the administration of the program. And specifically, it allows us to spend not more than 10% of the funds and the precise amount needs to be set annually by the commission at a public meeting as part of its regular budgetary process. So in February, I came forward to do our second budget update where we revise spending estimates or increase or decrease assessments. And I made a request of the commission to allow us to spend $337,000 of payroll, travel, fringe, supplies, and IT costs from the Community Mitigation Fund this year on administration of this program. The payroll is about $153,500 and that is approximately shifting two positions over. It's 75% of two FT's and 50% of Joe, recognizing that you can't go from doing all work on the state, on the gaming regulatory side to 100% on the CMF side without being able to kind of have a transition period. So we did shift portions of salaries over for this year. We put a little bit of in-state travel in. Whether that gets expended or not, we don't know, but we thought that Joe and the team may be able to get out to some sites and visit them this year. I think that the deliberation process on the Community Mitigation Grant funding has not allowed that to happen as much as Joe would have liked to, but that's something we'll probably be carrying forward into next year. So you may not see that $2,500 spent. The fringe and indirect associated with the salaries is just 37.99% of payroll is the fringe and 10% is the indirect that get charged off. We did put about 5,000 in supplies. The majority of that is the commissioners still like to have books. So the printing of these Community Mitigation Fund applications and getting them out to them, mailing them out to them so that they can review them for the commission meeting is the majority of where that money goes towards. And I don't think we spent the full 5,000. I'll have a better reconciliation of it after the close of the fiscal year. And then we have 100,000 that was set aside to develop a database for the Community Mitigation Fund. Now we looked at two options for this, and Joe can probably walk you through this a little more. We were looking at an annual license fee of probably 40,000 to 50,000 or develop it one time and then just maintain it on a lot less than the 40,000 to 50,000 that an annual license fee would have been for a database we were looking at. We think that this is a more responsible process to develop it in-house and then just maintain it versus paying for continual licensing fees of a database that did a lot more than we needed. So we're paying for a lot of pieces that we probably wouldn't be utilizing. So that's a total of 337,000 for this year. Next year that number, please don't share this because the commission hasn't seen our, so I can't go into detail on it, the commission hasn't seen the budget for next year, but that number is dropping down to around 280,000 because once again we're cutting out some of the database costs, but we're also increasing for travel and some of the costs that historically we haven't been incurring this year. When I send that out, I'll give a copy of the budget to Joe so that he can send that to you as well right before the public meeting so you'll have access to it prior to the same time the commissioners do. But the commissioners haven't seen our budget recommendation yet this year, which is for 2022, which is why I can't share them with you yet. So that is pretty much the presentation. I mean, as you can see, Joe, what was the total amount of grant funds that you gave out in 2019? For the 2020, the 2020 was about six and a half million, I think was the number. Yeah, so we're well below the 10%. It is specific to items. It's not just throwing a round number out there of 5%, 4%, and the commission did have to actually vote on this in February to allow us to do this. So I think we took the recommendations that you had asked for, put them into the regulation, which went through a public process and then actually put it into usage through our budgetary process. But that being said, if there are further ways you'd like enhancements or oversight of this, we do understand that each dollar we spent on an spend on administration takes away from grants. We are more than open to hearing recommendations and ways of bettering the process. So I know you can't talk about it now, but in the future at meetings, if you have stuff you want to send to us, if you have stuff you want to send directly to me, to Joe, I'm more than open to hearing it. We go through the same process with the licensees. We take the spending of each dollar very seriously. Thanks, Derek. And just to follow up on a couple of those things, I think the exciting thing for us is having some funds available for the development of a database for the Community Mitigation Fund. There are some really great things that we can do with that. As this program gets larger, the tracking of all of these grants becomes more and more challenging. And I think we should say that that 100,000 that we put in there is kind of a placeholder number. We're working right now with getting a developer on board to do that. And we need to work with them to develop a scope and a budget and so on. But we felt 100,000 was probably a good number just to have. Is that placeholder? So with that, I'll open it up. If anybody has any questions for Derek at this point. Again, we don't really want to get into sort of policy discussions. But if there's any general questions on the budget, be happy to answer those at this point. Okay. Not hearing any. Now, I just got word from Tanya. Apparently her account here is limited to the number of participants. And it's apparently is a maximum of 25. I didn't realize that there was a limit on these accounts at that low. So I guess I would ask if any gaming commission staff who can jump off of this call would do that. It'll open up some space for some other folks. And I apologize for that. That's okay. We tried making me a co-host because I have a large one. I'm not sure. Did that work, Tanya? I just, I made you, I just clicked a button that says make you co-host. But did that go through? Yeah, it looks like it's still at 25. I can jump off. I'm sure there's a few other people that can jump off. Do you know how many invites went out? Sorry? Do you know how many invitations went out if we drop a few people with that and take care of it? Well, probably, well, we had 20 or so committee members who would reply that they would attend. And we sent out, we always send out some stuff to the, to our licensees and all to attend as well. It looks like we've dropped below the 25 number now at this point. Okay. I've gotten messages or calls from four other people trying to get in. So I think if you would get back with them, I think, I see Kate, Kate is on here. I think Kate, if you can drop off, that would be, that would be good. Not that I want you to all leave the meeting. Yeah. No, I can drop off as well. I think you and Tony need to be on that. Okay. Enrique, usually I can drop off. No, but before you do, just in case we're able to get with your account as a co-host, the larger amount, let's make sure that that's not an option that we close yet. Okay. What if I just make you the host, Karen? Yeah. I'm just not sure because the invite didn't come through me. I'm, you know, just not an IT expert. So I don't know. Right. Well, it looks like right now we've got 19 people on. So we got space for six more. So Tonya, maybe if you can reach out to those folks and just let them know that they, that they should be able to get on at this point. Sure. And again, anybody who, who can, it's not a committee member who can drop off, that would be appreciated. Again, apologies. Yes, I'm sorry. First time I've run into this, into this issue. Me too. All right, Karen, I just made you host. So I don't know, I don't know if that did anything. Okay. Well, I'll stay on for a little bit. Looks like we're only at 19 people right now. So hopefully other people will be able to get on. Yeah. Okay. So, so yeah, please, please reach out to those folks because I have an appointment. So I'm going to say goodbye. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Christopher Bruce, who's our prime analyst who helps us out in evaluating all of the crime related statistics with the casinos. Christopher. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. And it's great to see new people. I usually present to the same group every single time. So I recognize a couple of faces, obviously. But and for those of you who have seen me before, I don't think you're going to learn anything particularly new in this presentation. But to everybody else, it's good to be able to speak to you for what I think is the first time for many of you. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. Because this, I think is the first, I know this is the first time I'm presenting to this committee, whether some of the specific people have seen me before, I don't know. But because this is the first time I'm presenting to this committee, I thought I'd give just sort of a broad overview of my work and findings rather than focus on a particular study, such as the most recent encore or MGM study. So just a little bit of background. I spend most of my career working for police departments in Massachusetts as a crime analyst, which is a position that a lot of people have never heard of. But it's like sort of a statistician, data analyst, criminologist, mapper, researcher who works within the police agency who's embedded in the police agency, and who focuses on questions that are important to the department, such as how should they allocate resources and what are merging patterns and trends are we seeing in crime and disorder, traffic collisions, other public safety issues, where are the hot spots, you know, what's up, what's down, what do we need to focus on, those sorts of things. And so you can see how that would translate well to this type of work when a new facility is coming to a community. It often happened when I was a crime analyst, it was usually a coals or Walmart or something like that, but we often needed to know what had changed in response to that new facility. I did that for 17 years. I spent 10 years doing training and consulting in the area of crime analysis at data driven policing. I was president of the International Association of Crime Analysts for six years, and the Massachusetts Association of Crime Analysts for four years. And more recently, I've taken a position teaching criminal justice at Huston University in Bangor, Maine, but I've retained this contract, of course, and I really enjoy working on this project. So this all started back in 2014, just before Plain Ridge Park opened. And I was recommended for the job, I'm pretty sure I think it was by Chief Kyle Higney of the Adalboro Police Department, who was one of the surrounding communities that was going to be impacted by or perhaps impacted by Plain Ridge Park. And when the opportunity first came up, I started doing some research into what research had already been done in the area of casinos and crime. And I found out, and this was already known to some of the commissioners before they contracted me, most of the previous research that had been done on the casino impacts on crime, which was mixed by the way, some of them showed that the casinos did have an impact, and others showed that they didn't. But all of it had really been done on summary statistics on and we have a complex mechanism of crime reporting in the United States. But basically, every police agency calculates its numbers and sends them to the state once a month, and then the state puts them together and once a year sends them to the FBI. And the FBI publishes a massive report called Crime in the United States for the entire country that really only focuses on seven crimes, murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft and auto theft. Our citizen is in there too, but it doesn't get reported consistently by most agencies. And those seven crimes are what we call the Crime Index. And they basically make up, every time you see a news report about what's up or what's down for the year, it's usually based on those FBI statistics. They're released typically in the fall for the year that ended, you know, up to like nine to 10 months ago in December. So it takes them a while to compile everything and put it together. And these summary statistics were our basis of really knowing how we're doing, even though they exclude a lot of crimes, fraud, kidnapping, all types of credit card fraud, forgery, identity theft, drugs, prostitution, all of that is not reported in those statistics. Now, I don't want to get too much into it. The whole system is being replaced by one that does collect more data, and we've benefited from that. But those statistics haven't been widely available just yet. So that level of statistical reporting doesn't really give us the opportunity to ask very many complex questions about the relationships to casinos and crime. For instance, with the burglary statistics, you can't even separate out whether they're residential burglaries or commercial burglaries or the robbery statistics, whether they're commercial robberies or individual robberies. And so that's going to really limit our ability to understand the impacts of casinos on crime. So as we got into this study, we had a number of priorities, but we wanted to do a much more detailed and complex analysis of those changes. So not just those seven part one crimes, but all crimes, because of some minor crime that doesn't get reported all that often increases because of the casino. Well, it's important to know that. And not just crimes, we also wanted to look at other calls for service that police receive every day that don't necessarily, they're not criminal, they don't make their way to crime reports, things like noise complaints or youth disorder or traffic and parking complaints, things like that. And yet they still make up a bulk of what police do every day. And also traffic collisions, which are another major public safety issue. How did those change in response to in the casinos? We also wanted to consider that maybe the overall volume wouldn't change, but patterns would change. There might be changes in locations. Crime might be drawn to the casino from some other place that doesn't actually change the overall volume of crime. If there was a relationship to the casino, we wanted to be able to identify specifically what that relationship was. Is it because the offender was here to use the casino or the victim was or some other relationship? And so we wanted to be able to flag those casinos related incidents. And then finally, I wanted to be able to give the local police departments some quick analysis, not waiting till the next fall, but some quick analysis of specific patterns and problems that we saw developing after the casinos opened. So originally we thought we might be doing these analyses every month or so to be on top of the latest trends. It turned out that wasn't necessary, but we've still been doing them every three to six months to try to keep current on what's changing. Now one of the disadvantages of doing that is that I generally don't have control data from other communities that aren't part of the study to compare to the casino communities because it takes a year to year and a half for that data to get published. And I'm trying to analyze it on a much more timely basis. But anyway, we'll talk about some of the limitations later on. And I'll try to bring up, let me see here. You can never remember how to bring up the comments or the messaging when the presentation is going. I was going to say I was going to try to bring it up just to keep an eye on in case anybody had any questions while it was going on, but speak up if you do, I guess, because I can't find that option here. Okay, so the areas that we've studied starting in 2015, obviously the Plainville region, and these communities here that have the streets are the ones that are participating in that project. So six communities there. And then in the Springfield area, we have 11 communities. So that's been a beast to analyze every time that I have to do a report. And in the Everett area, it's gotten a little bit complex because we have, I guess, nine communities, but a couple of them, Cambridge declined to participate in the study almost immediately and hasn't indicated that they might come back. Maldon is participating, but they just couldn't participate in the last report because for COVID reasons, there weren't people on site who could do the data extraction for me. Medford expressed some initial willingness and then just never has never gotten back to me about actually supplying the data, which is unfortunate because they're right next door to Everett. And if anybody was going to see an impact, they might. And I feel like it's a big hole there. Saugus was not originally part of the study, but they came aboard for the last report, and they'll be participating from now on. So it's gotten a bit more complicated there. And so in each of these areas, what I've done in order to get a deeper quality of data is extract data directly from their police records management and computer aided dispatch systems. Every agency's got two basic databases, one for every call for service that they go to that indicates who went and what time and when they arrived and all that kind of thing. And then there's a separate database for anything that's a crime for the full crime report that includes the victims and witnesses and properties stolen and vehicles involved and things like that. And the data sets are similar, but not the same. And so I wanted both data sets so I could look at both criminal and non-criminal matters. And so I established a connection for those of you technologically oriented, it's called an ODBC connection directly to those databases and was able to extract not only crime and calls for service for the period after the casino is open, but for about five to seven years beforehand. So I could establish a baseline figure for what normally did that community experience month to month, year to year and so forth. Is there a question? And then I had to merge all of this, of course, into a single database for each region, which was a little bit difficult because they have different records management vendors, different companies making the software that they use with slightly different standards. Fortunately, Massachusetts subscribes to a standard called Nibers, the national incident-based reporting system that establishes a uniformity in the way the things are coded in crime reports at least. So I was able to make use of that and I didn't have to do a lot of translation in the way different agencies recorded things. Calls for service was different. That was a lot more work because everybody's got their own coding system for those things. But in any event, I merged it all with a lot of work into a single set of databases for which I could then, we did a series of baseline reports indicating what the normal volume of crime and calls for service and crashes were in each community. And then we compared what changed after the casino is open. And the one part that didn't really work was trying to get the agencies to flag specifically when they knew when incident was casino related. Now, a lot of the time, you're not going to know because you don't know who the suspect is. You don't know who the offender is. So you can't rely on a flag like that to be comprehensive about what which crimes are related to the casino. But it would have still been nice additional evidence to have. If we had, for instance, seen an increase in burglaries and we knew that a decent percentage of arrested burglars had some sort of casino connection, then that would suggest that maybe the overall increase was related to the casino. That didn't happen. But that was the idea. But really only Everett and I think Adalboro put together a flagging system that has been has been comprehensive. And then I wanted to work more closely with the other projects to integrate my work with theirs. And that so far hasn't really happened yet. But there's still time for that. Okay, so just as an example, this is a typical police records management system architecture. You can see all the different data that we're pulling from it. So not just, you know, it's not just numbers. That's the nice thing about this project. We're not just getting they had 20 robberies last month. I'm getting line by line incident level information about every robbery, what time it happened, what date it happened, what was stolen, what we know about the victims, what we know about the offenders, no personal identifying information, but a lot of data fields so that when something does go up, we've got a lot of data to analyze to help explain why it might have gone up. And this is an example of sort of the baseline report that I would have done for Plain Ridge Park, looking at the four years or the five years rather prior to the casino opening. Now, in all of these baseline reports, my goal was to establish for whatever period I was going to study after the casino opened, whether it was three months or six months or a year, my goal was to establish an expected value. So how many burglaries would this community normally have had if Plain Ridge Park or Encore or MGM had not opened? How many traffic collisions would this this community have had if they hadn't opened? Obviously, I can't know that for sure, but I can take the past data and see what type of trajectory they were on, and then use various statistical methods to estimate what the normal value should have been. Now, this is an example of trends in the Encore region before the casino opened in or before and I guess slightly afterwards. And you can see crime was going down, violent crime and both violent crime and property crime were going down fairly significantly over the seven-year period prior to the casino opening. And this was true of Springfield as well. Springfield had had some very significant decreases in crime in the seven years prior to the casino opening. And so I can't, you know, sometimes in Plain Ridge, for instance, I started off by just using an average standard deviation to create a window of where I expected the value to be in the post casino period. So this is an example of crimes that just aren't trending anywhere from year to year. And so we simply use the mean and the standard deviation in order to create an expected window for the post casino period. But when crime is going down over the previous period, using the mean and the standard deviation just, I mean, it's not statistically wrong, but it obviously is ignoring the trend. And so it's projecting basically where crime has been, not where it's going. And so I had to use a different method in those cases where the trend was exhibited using the regression analysis, if you're familiar with the technique to create the predictive window for crimes that had been experiencing a trend. Either way, the point is in these upper and lower boundaries to create what I call a predictive window. Where should the value, where should it have been for the period post casino? And so my reports are full of data charts like this that basically show, all right, for this crime, we would have expected somewhere between 181 and 251 incidents in the post casino period. We had 204, that's well within that range. And so there doesn't seem to be an impact, at least on the overall volume of that particular crime. Steps from vehicles, on the other hand, there are about 120 above the top of the window. And so those have clearly increased. That doesn't mean it's a casino relationship yet, but at least it's something that I need to analyze more thoroughly and to see exactly what is going on. And this is important to emphasize for any time period, for any police agency, if you calculated these statistics, you would see some that were high just because of other societal factors or because of random fluctuations in the data. So once I started seeing things that were high, then I needed to, all right, let's take a look and see if we can establish whether the casino had anything to do with it. So the first question I ask is, is there a logical relationship between the crime and a casino? There are some crimes that, you know, if, if robberies increased in the immediate area, well, you could hypothesize a pretty good connection between a casino and robberies. You can't really create the same connection between, say, casinos and juvenile assaults at the local schools. And so the logical relationship is what I went for first. Spatial relationship is also important. Are they happening in a way that's spatially sensible given the casino's location? And that doesn't necessarily mean immediately around it, but it could be on travel routes to or from the casino or something like that. Do the offenders and victims, their demographic characteristics match casino patterns? So if we're getting a lot of new people from out of town using the casino are in this crime, are we suddenly seeing more offenders and victims coming from out of town? If so, that would be some evidence. I look for corroborative increases across multiple agencies. One community that's having an increase isn't quite as compelling as several that are having the same increase. And I look for corroborative increases across multiple crimes. So if identity theft is going up alone, well, that's not quite as compelling as identity theft, credit card fraud, and other types of fraud and forgery are increasing in the same area. And then of course, we look for specific evidence. Do we know for sure that certain offenders are, we're here to use the casino or certain victims were. And finally, comparison to control areas, what's happening elsewhere in the Commonwealth during the same period. Again, that's been hard to do in a timeframe that's equal to what I'm doing the analyses on because there's a lag in that data. But sometime later, I can go back and ask that question. And that that's really been very helpful actually, because identity theft is one of the crimes that has seems to have skyrocketed in all of the casino communities. And you could, you know, make a pretty strong hypothesis comparing that to the casino, relating it to a casino. But it turns out that identity theft has been going up everywhere. And, and so it's probably not related to the casinos. So generally speaking, what have I found in all of this with the three casinos that we've studied so far. This casinos themselves, in all of the communities have generally gone to the top of the list of the top locations for reported crime. Now that doesn't mean there's anything uniquely dangerous about the casinos. It's just, there's a lot of people that come and use them. And anytime that you've got a facility that has a lot of people, you're going to have a lot of crime reports from those, whether it's a shopping mall or a movie theater or casino. Obviously, the fact that you've got those, those tickets that are constantly going in and coming out of the machines, make an attractive theft target, even though it's, it's insane to try to steal anything in a casino, given all the monitoring they do. People do it a lot. And so that makes up a large portion of the numbers that we get there. But there are other things that happen there. Of course, they serve alcohol. So people get intoxicated and into fights. And yet they get disorderly and occasionally vandalize equipment and things like that. And for all of these reasons, we were seeing a lot of numbers at the casinos themselves. In the surrounding area, the changes that we've seen have mostly been evidenced in traffic patterns. So more crashes in the immediate area and on traveler routes coming to and from, again, that's purely a volume thing. More traffic in the area means more crashes. And also, and here's an example of Springfield, looking at the different street segments, the average number of crashes prior to the casino versus how those, how it had changed in the year after the casino. And you can see right around MGM here, there's a bunch of streets that have had, you know, between four and 10 or 15 more crashes, but also through Agawam and West Springfield, we had some key places heading towards the casino that had some more crashes and they increased the overall volume for those agencies. We've seen some evidence of drunk driving related to the casinos. The casinos show up in lists of the last, the place that the drunk driver had his last drink, in adjudication data that I've obtained from the ABCC, there has been an increase in drunk driving arrests and there's been an increase in accidents caused by drunk driving in Everett and Springfield, at least, not so much in the Plain Ridge Park area. So I'm working currently on a drunk driving report that looks at all of the evidence for all three of the areas and we'll try to reach some conclusions about that. In the immediate, and when I say, by the way, mostly evidenced in traffic, it's not just traffic accidents, but also things like traffic and parking complaints, you know, people complaining about blocked driveways or erratic drivers or other types of driving behavior. And again, that is a volume issue that as when volume increases, more complaints come through. In the immediate blocks around MGM, we've seen some increases and decreases that are fully analyzed in the reports and it's important to know that there's been decreases too. MGM is unique among the three casinos in that it is truly a sort of a neighborhood casino. You walk right up to it from the surrounding downtown area. You could walk to the others, but it's not going to be part of anybody's normal pattern to do so. They're kind of away from the areas that people would normally visit and you're almost certainly going to drive to them. But going to this casino is largely a matter of being part of the overall downtown area with its other shopping and restaurants and so forth. And this is an area that has had historically a fairly high crime rate. And so building the casino there has the opportunity by increasing the amount of legitimate traffic to the area and improving the area economically to actually reduce crime as well as serving as perhaps an attractor for crime. So you've got those two different forces sort of working together. And given that, the fact that crime hasn't really increased in the area for the most part, is remarkable given the total number of people that have come there to use the casino. But we have seen some localized increases. So for instance, there's a CVS right across the street and I can't say that it increased because it didn't exist before the casino. It was only open I think in the fall of 2019, but it's had a lot of activity since it did open. I don't know that it's all casino related, but I don't think the store would have been built if the casino hadn't been built. I think the store was built to take advantage of the extra traffic because of the casino. So that's one of the ways that crime can increase if certain businesses wouldn't have existed if the casino wasn't there. There's also this a pride gas station across the street that's open 24 hours and they've seen a big increase in activity since the casino, a big increase. We're talking about a couple of dozen incidents over a couple of years. So statistically it's big, but it's not huge in terms of raw volume, but they've seen a significant number of new incidents since the casino opened. We have seen some increases in theft burglary and fraud in Springfield in particular, but they've all they've been in short durations and fairly limited geographies. They haven't been consistent throughout the post casino period and I haven't found any real smoking gun to tie a casino patron to any of the incidents. So it's possible that it's had an increase in these incidents. This is an example of thefts from vehicles parked at residences. So typically at nighttime somebody breaks into a car in a driveway and steals whatever is inside and you can see this is comparing 2018 to 2019. I know the map is hard to tell, which is higher, but 2019 is slightly higher in this case in the post casino period and you can see the pattern sort of spilling south and east from the casino stretching into Long Meadow and East Long Meadow, both of which I think just Long Meadow had an increase in those incidents as well as Springfield in these neighborhoods. Whether that's for sure related, I don't know, these patterns have been going on for a long time. They did intensify after the casino opened, but only for a while and then it kind of went away and that's what we've seen in a lot of other crimes too. And a short term pattern that seemed to maybe have a relationship, it was spatially related, it was logically related, but it didn't last. And finally, generally except for the unless if you exclude the casino itself, the impact of the casino and overall crime statistics for the cities and towns has been barely perceptible really. If you include the casino, then yeah, they've been up, the host communities have been up anywhere between two and say 10%. Plainville had the biggest increase because they had very little else going on really before Plain Ridge Park was built. But of course, these agencies all got extra police officers ahead of the casinos being built to anticipate that increase. And so far, the balance between the extra resources and the extra crime has been roughly about equal. And I suppose that gets into your work a little bit because I get to say ahead of this project, I really expected, I expected more to change, to be honest. I expected more patterns in classical acquisitional crimes like burglary and theft and robbery to show up in the surrounding areas. And they really didn't. And when they didn't, I expected maybe a little bit of pushback from the surrounding agencies because there's money on the line. And so I expected, I mean, they had an interest in being able to claim that they had an increase in activity. And yet almost all of them have, even though we've given them opportunity after opportunity, we've invited them to, every time we do a report, we invite the local chiefs to a meeting to discuss it and to give them an opportunity to raise any objections and to bring up any issues that maybe isn't evident in the data and the statistics, but we don't hear anything from them. They typically agree. Things have been quiet. We haven't really seen any changes. And so it's been a very harmonious process when I didn't always expect it to be. Now, the final thing I'll say is that I think that a metaphor that I use is doing these measurements for activity is like trying to measure the volume of water in a pond. You know, you put a ruler in there and there's going to be ripples across the surface and occasional little waves that increase and decrease the actual volume. So you've got to kind of account for that. But you can basically get a sense of what the average depth of that pond is. But let's say, you know, you go to measure at the next year and just as you put the ruler in, somebody tosses a huge boulder in the pond and creates this huge slosh of water that goes across your measuring stick. And now you've got to try to figure out to what extent, you know, what I've just measured, a real measurement and to what extent it was caused by this boulder that somebody threw in the pond. And the analog to the boulder for us is, of course, COVID. Because for the last year and a half, mostly just a year, I suppose at this point, COVID has been wreaking havoc on crime statistics and crash statistics all over the United States. When you've got, you know, schools closed, businesses closed, people working from home, hardly anybody, there's no major events, people, bars have been closed. It has caused, for the most part, huge decreases in crime all across the US. There have been places that have seen an increase in domestic violence because I guess more people are together in close quarters and get annoyed with each other. But for the most part, it's been decreases everywhere. Traffic collisions in particular down like 50%. Now, for actual miles driven, actually fatalities are up during the period, but the raw number is down. So the casinos obviously were closed for a period and then allowed to reopen. And reopened was limited capacity for a while. But this is all during a period in which any effect the casinos might be having on crime has been absolutely overwhelmed by other societal factors. And so it remains sort of an open question, how going forward to, if I were to use the same methods I've used in the past, how do I figure out the casino's contribution to any new crime patterns when these crime pattern numbers are being so enormously affected by this other societal factor that we can't really control. And I've been collecting different opinions about how to do that, how to tweak my models, how to change my analysis. And I really, I just need to see the data basically from the agencies and test different possibilities before I can know for sure exactly how best to analyze things going forward. But it is creating a huge problem, not just for me, but for anybody who does this type of work. Anybody who's trying to do program evaluation right now across the country is tearing their hair out because of what COVID is doing to the expected values. And I hope that gave you a decent overview of my work and findings. I'd love to have any questions from anybody. Any questions from anyone for Christopher? I guess I was very thorough. Well, thank you so much for doing this for us. I think it's really great for people to understand what we're doing here and so on. And the interesting thing is we do have requests from some of the police departments and others for mitigation funds. And they do reference your studies on occasions. We do have increased calls for service and some increases in traffic accidents and other things of that nature. And we have been able to provide some funds for these communities, which is great. But one of the real challenges for the community mitigation fund is making that nexus to the casino. And having these studies is really valuable for the communities to say, all right, we do have an increase in calls for service and this and that. And is there a way that we can get some of the mitigation funds to help us try to address these things? So that's been really helpful. They've largely done those requests independently of me. And I might not even be aware of some of them. I know that they might have referenced my work. If they contacted me and said, we'd like to help analyzing this particular issue in more detail in order to make this request, I would give it to them. But so far, they really haven't done that. So I'm surprised we haven't seen more of those requests, but maybe you've seen a lot more than I'm even aware of. Yeah, there's been a few here and there. It's mostly the host communities who are looking for more equipment and things like that for the police department. And of course, the host communities can certainly make the argument about increased calls for service and things of that nature, just due to the actual presence of the casino itself. So yeah, it's the surrounding communities that have a little bit harder, a bit more of a challenge to make that next. Sure. Well, my contact information is there if anybody wants to write offline and ask any follow up questions. And I'm always, if you've got any ideas for things that you'd like to see in the reports that maybe aren't there or alternate ways to look at the data, I mean, I'm always open for suggestions or things like that. So feel free to write to me. And I think I guess I've probably left that up there long enough. So I'll turn the... Hey, this is Ron Hogan from the city of Malden. Can I just ask a quick question and thank you for that data? Chris, is that deck available someplace that we can grab it and share? I certainly think it's very helpful information to sort of take out of the take out of the air some of the misconceptions that might be out there. Is that available on Yes. Should we put it in your packet? Oh, okay. I mean like an electronic version. On the Gaming Commission website, somewhere under reports are every reports that I've written. But if you have trouble finding it, you can just write to me and I'll be glad to just send it to you. All right, thank you. Tony, you have a copy of that deck, right? Yes. But I'll find the digital copy and forward the link to everyone. Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you. Anyone else other questions, comments? All right. Well, none appearing. So again, thanks Christopher. We do appreciate your time. Sure. And thanks for the very informative report. Sure. I'll see you next time. Thank you. So the next thing on our agenda is I'm just going to give you a quick update of the status of the Community Mitigation Fund, where we are now. So as you recall, we finished our work back. I think it was in November where we finalized our guidelines and went out for our solicitation for projects. And those came back into us on February 1. Now, if you recall, we had a target spending amount for 2021 of $12.5 million. Now, of course, the casinos were closed for four months last year. So the casinos only actually generated $8 million in Community Mitigation Funds in calendar year 2020. But we did have rollover funds that had not been used for previous years. So that increased the capacity up to $12.5 million. And as of right now, as of the month of March, the casinos are back. I mean, their revenues have returned to pre-COVID levels. So rocking on all kinds of wood that I can find, if things hold true and everything remains open and so on, we sort of got through this pinch point in the funds in a pretty healthy fashion. So that's great. Now, with that said, we got 28 applications in on February 1. But the ask was only for $5.6 million between them. We have $12.5 million available. So that is troubling in some way. So last year in 2020, we had about $11.5 million to give out. And the ask was like $13 million. Some of the projects were, we did not approve. In the end, we only put out, I think it was $6.5, $6.9 million in 2020. And part of that was due to COVID and other things, and us being a little bit conservative on the expenditure of funds. But with that said, $5.6 million is down. Now, what are the reasons for that? Is it part of COVID? Probably. You know, everybody's been stretched pretty thin in communities working from home and other things, and maybe not sort of a priority to apply for funds. Other communities seeing that they don't really have projects that can meet the definitions and the guidelines for accessing funds, you know, these have to be done in response to an impact from the casino. And if the communities aren't seeing impacts, is that something that's causing these numbers to go down? And one of the things that we've talked about internally a little bit and is saying that should we think about, and maybe not necessarily do it yet, but think about trying to expand the eligibility for community mitigation funds. For instance, you know, can communities try to access funds more to take advantage of the presence of the casino rather than from an impact from the casino? You know, we have done some plans that people have done for, you know, marketing and outreach and things of that nature, but they still have to demonstrate sort of a negative impact of the casino that they're trying to mitigate. But this whole notion of you have this sort of captive audience of, you know, tens of thousands of people a day who are coming to the casinos, and if the communities, the host community, the surrounding communities were better able to, you know, attract those people to come to their communities, maybe that's a way we could expand eligibility. Now, with that said, look, maybe next year, things bounce right back, and we get, you know, lots of applications. But it's something I think we need to think about, and that's, you know, again, not for today, but I think in the fall, when we reconvene all of our groups, I think this is maybe one of the policy questions we want to start thinking about. And so if everybody can, you know, think about that a little bit on what it is, you know, we'd like to see the community mitigation fund be able to do. Now, with all that said, it would take a legislative fix to do this. It's right in the law that says that this money can really only be used to offset costs associated with the casino. So anyway, that's just food for thought. But with that said, we got 11 specific impact grants, and 10 of those were around in the public safety realm. Again, sort of a lot of police and fire departments looking for equipment and things of that nature. We had some folks looking for some training, which was great. We wanted to focus a little bit on that. We got six transportation planning grants for transportation construction grants, two workforce grants, and five of the community planning grants. If you remember in years past, we had this category called non-transportation planning that we changed this year to community planning grants. So we are right now in the midst of reviewing all of these and bringing them to the commission and voting on them. And as Kathy said at the beginning of the meeting, we changed our processes a little bit. In the past, we used to do these couple of marathon sessions with the commission and typically in the end of June to go through every single application and vote on all of them. And this year, frankly, since money was not of a particular issue, it's not like we had to cut projects because we didn't have enough funding. We are not recommending funding every project because some of them simply do not appear to meet the eligibility requirements. That's really the only reason for not doing these projects is they don't meet particular eligibility requirements. So what we decided to do this year is that as we reviewed these applications, we would bring them to the commission as we completed our reviews. So for instance, we did the back in April, we did our workforce grants. We got those all done early. So we said, let's get those in. Let's get those done. Let's get them out of the way. And then in the meetings, the last meeting in April and the first meeting in May, we looked at the specific impact grants and some of the transportation planning grants. And then, so as of today, the commission has seen 20 of the 28 applications that voted on 14 of them. And then the eight remaining will be reviewed. Hopefully all of them will be reviewed at the May 20th meeting. And the final votes will be taken then. So that actually puts us about a month ahead of where we were a year ago, which is pretty great. And I've said this before, you know, this process, I think helps make things a little bit more efficient. But from, for me personally, and for Mary and for Tanya, when we would have to deal with this giant slug of things at the end of June, and then get all the contracts out and all the grants out all at once, we wound up with this sort of May, June, July was this huge surge of work. And not that we didn't have plenty of stuff to do the rest of the year. This sort of spreads it out for us. So from a purely selfish standpoint, this has really helped out our processes. But I think the other piece of it is, is that communities are hearing sooner. The grants will get out sooner. You know, it will hopefully give people more time to get their projects going and, you know, knowing earlier is I think it's probably better than knowing later. So that's where we are right now. And like I said, hopefully at this next meeting, we will have finished all of our boats and then we can get all of our paper work out and so on to the communities. But yeah, so I think, and then of course, next steps going forward from that is we will start reconvening our local community mitigation advisory committees and the subcommittee in September, as we typically do. And I think we usually try to get three meetings with each group, sort of the first one to just generally discuss what the policy issues are that we want to address this year. And then the middle meeting, we really get into the meat of those policy discussions. And then at the final meeting, bring back the final guidelines for a final review. So we certainly intend to do that as well this year. And I think with that, that was all that I had. Enrique, did you want to add anything before we adjourn? Well, no, thank you, or actually I will. But that's a good summary, Joe. The one thing I would add to the policy question, if you will, that you teed up that you say is food for thought is that there's other ways, but we'll make sure to come back to you with a clear articulation of what those ways are. There's other ways in which we could look at the guidelines to try to increase eligibility and spending out of the community mitigation fund. Not just by virtue of a legislative fix, but as you may recall, there's limits into some of what we are willing to pay in certain categories. There was this year a limit of one request per category per community that we could look at again to increase funding requests. And there's the percentage of large projects that we're willing to pay for is something that we could also look at. But of course, all of that is key policy questions that we would bring to you to get that feedback as we look at modifying those guidelines. Yeah. And Enrique, I think another example of that is on the workforce grants. We somewhat arbitrarily established a cap on those of 400,000 for the east, 400,000 for the west. And there's no particular rhyme or reason to that number other than it seemed like at least early on when we were capped without having a new source of funds, maybe those groups who are coming to us, maybe the number's a million. Maybe it's two million. I don't know what the right number is. It really all depends upon what these groups advise and what the commission decides to adopt for guidelines and how important that piece is compared to these other categories. Because workforce is very different than transportation, both valuable but not interchangeable. Those are some of the things that we can tinker around the edges within the existing law to increase the amount of money that's requested and ultimately spent out of the Yeah, but we'll make sure to tee that up well to bring it before these kinds of groups so that we can highlight the exact place in the guideline that we might want to look at the history of the requests as Joe is articulating that there can be a meaningful discussion. Okay, well does anybody have any questions before we adjourn for comments or anything? No? Okay, well thanks everyone. I guess technically we never opened the meeting. So I guess technically we don't have to adjourn the meeting. And again, before I go, I just want to apologize again for the technical difficulties. I thought we had this was the first time an attendance limit has ever popped up on me. So we'll make sure that for the future that we certainly address that and maybe Tanya you can so this was recorded so maybe you can send out the link to the folks who may have missed it if they wanted to just thumb through it and see what we talked about. Yes, definitely. I'll send that along with the digital copies of Professor Bruce's reports. Excellent, excellent. Okay, well again, thank you everyone and we look forward to seeing you all again in the fall. Thanks Joe. Thank you. Thank you Joe. Thank you.