 We're good. Good morning, everyone. Thank you. Today is October 20th. Thursday and we are convening a Massachusetts gaming commission meeting and we're doing so virtually. So I'll take a little call. Good morning. Commissioner. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning. Commissioner Hill. Good morning. Present. Good morning. Good morning. Commissioner Skinner. Morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. And good morning. Good morning. Good morning, commissioner Maynard. Good morning, madam chair. I am here. Excellent. And we're calling today. Public meeting a number 398. So a bit of a countdown going on. We'll keep track of that. And I understand that we are going to have. attendees today. So I'm checking to see who is on. Thank you. I know that we're going to have an announcement of introduction of a new member, but before, so I just want to provide a few comments to set today's stage. Allow me. I want to start off this public meeting with the recognition of our team here at the MGC. Since the governor signed this bill into law, and even before, the team at the MGC has rolled up their sleeves and got to work on implementing this new charge, all while continuing to do their day-to-day work at an acceptable level. We've acknowledged that at our recent meetings that there is continuing work as we continue to regulate the casino game industry. Every day, they are making personal sacrifices as true public servants. On October 7th, we issued a scoping survey. And I want to get this right for applicants and ask that those intending to apply for an operating license return these surveys by this past Monday. Nearly 30 operator surveys came into the commission, and I know we will be discussing this a bit later in the meeting. This level of interest in sports wagering licenses demonstrates what I've been saying in past meetings, that the Commonwealth sports market is an exciting one. It also means that there is a great deal of work to accomplish, from reviewing the suitability of the operations and financials of these prospective operators, continuing the regulatory process necessary to stand up sports wagering. Unconfident, and I know my fellow commissioners join me in saying this, that this team will complete this work without compromise to the integrity of the process that the public has come to expect of gaming in Massachusetts. Furthermore, the MGC will complete its work upholding firmly our commitment as a commission and agency to delivering the strongest consumer protections to the benefit of the residents of the Commonwealth. Throughout the course of this process, we will continuously update the public on this work during these meetings and through other means to maintain transparency, and we will need the cooperation of all of our applicants to be able to bring the level of transparency the commission and public expect and demand. I'd also like to thank all the companies that submitted their scoping surveys by deadline. We appreciate your interest in operating in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission looks forward to learning more about each perspective, excuse me, each perspective, it's a throwing issue and I want to get it right, my apologies. Massachusetts Gaming Commission looks forward to learning more about each perspective applicant and this is the part I wanted to get right as we begin to review the applications which are due by November 21st. So I wanted to make sure that I get the application date right November 21st. So again, we look forward to to those submissions as that application date approaches. Okay, so now before we get started on the minutes, I want to turn it over to Director Lilios who has an introduction. Good morning Chair, good morning commissioners, and I actually want to make sure that Caroline has joined the meeting. I was looking, that's who I was looking for. I don't see her, could I come back because I think it's important that she be on. Yeah, that's exactly why I was stalling a little bit, Director Lilios, so I didn't see her. So we'll wait and when she joins, if she joins, we'll make sure to have that introduction. She will and thank you so much. Thank you. My apologies, we're just navigating a few last minute things. All right, not that Kara is the last minute thing at all. She's her new chief of licensure and we are very excited to bring her on board. But now I'll turn it over to Connection Health. Madam Chair, I would move that the commission approve the minutes from the March 31st, 2022 public meeting that are included in the commissioner's packet subject, tending necessary corrections for typographical errors or other non-material matters. Second. Everyone had a chance to read them. Okay, Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Commissioner Skinner. Aye. Commissioner Maynard. I abstain. Okay, and I vote yes. So forward, yes. One abstention. Thank you. Then moving on to Executive Director Wells and the sports wagering process updates, and we're excited about our first guest. Thank you. And good morning. I think we were going to do the casino update with the Assistant Director Band first. Oh, my apologies. Yeah, no, that's fine. So I'll start with Bruce and then we'll go over to Kevin. Okay. Morning, Madam Chair, commissioners. Update today will be quick. I'll start with MGM. They're nearing completion of the new coffee shop called Roasted Bean, which be completed in the near future. On October 8th, they hosted a classic car show. Every Saturday, MGM hosts a poker tournament in their poker room. PPC offers entertainment in the Revolution Lounge on Fridays and Saturdays. They've been having horse racing four days a week throughout October, and that will change to having a line racing three days a week in November with the final day, the day after Thanksgiving. Remaining in October, they still have one big promotion. It's called the Spooky Sweep Steaks, which all you have to do is insert your player's card in the machine. You don't have to play to be eligible for it. That is on October 28th. Encore now is operating their poker room daily from 10 a.m. to 4 a.m., and they're adding the nine tables, which should be in the room by the end of this month, and that will bring them up to 24 tables. I have one other announcement. This fiscal year, the gaming agents helped the Department of Revenue retrieve $3,601,569 in unpaid taxes and child support payments. That's over $3.6 million for this year. Last year, as you recall, it was $3.4 million, so it was an increase of $200,000 this year. Any questions? Questions for Bruce. I'm sorry, Madam Chair, thank you. Bruce, is that fiscal year or calendar year? Fiscal year. That's Y-22. Thank you. You want to just go over that number one more time, Bruce? I know that the public is interested in that. Yeah, so it was over $3.6 million, but the exact number was $3,601,569.28, to be exact, and those are through the jackpots where we would check to see if they owe unpaid child support or back taxes. And our team works on incorporation with DLR on that, Bruce. Great. Any questions on that issue for fishers familiar with it? No questions, Madam Chair. Just a big congratulations and great job. Thank you. This is a great job. Thank you. Thank you. Go right ahead, Director. So the next item under the sports wagering process updates, it's really just an introduction of Kevin Mullally from GLI and just an opportunity to welcome him to our team as we launch sports wagering. Introduce him to the commission and just give you an opportunity to have any questions. Kevin is the Senior Vice President of Governor Relations and General Counsel at GLI, and he is the Chief Legal Officer and responsible for all risk management policies for the company, as well as supervision of all outside attorneys and consultants. He was the Executive Director at the Missouri Gaming Commission, so he has extensive experience in gaming and regulation. And also of note, because the Massachusetts Gaming Commission has such an interest in responsible gaming, he was the Board of Directors of the National Center for Responsible Gaming from 2001 to 2015. In addition, he was also on the Board of Trustees of the International Association of Gaming Advisors. He's currently on the Board of Trustees of the International Association of Gaming Advisors. He's also chaired the National Council of Problem Gambling's responsible gaming committee from 2001 to 2019. So GLI, I'll let Kevin tell you a little bit more about GLI. But as you know, GLI is an independent testing laboratory, but they do more than just the testing and equipment. They do provide services to not only operators, vendors, but also regulators across the country. For us, this experience in assisting regulators stand up sports wagering is going to be invaluable. They're going to be assisting us with writing rules and regulations, review of internal controls, and testing platforms. So it's going to be very helpful to us as we go forward. So I just wanted to introduce Kevin, let Kevin tell you just a little bit about the company and what they can provide to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission and just give you an opportunity to say hello and also just ask you many questions that you may have. I'll turn it over to Kevin just to say hello. Thank you, Karen. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Good morning, Chair Judd Stein and commissioners. Chair, I think you weren't on yet when I was explaining this is the last day of my annual think week. So I ran a farmhouse every year. This one's on 200 acres, I think, near Marceline, Missouri, the boyhood home of Walt Disney. And just go out there by myself and try to reset and focus on strategic and other issues. So no disrespect, but I am wearing my Harvard hoodie. In other appearances, I'll have a proper business attire. I have a long history with the commission. I always enjoy working with you. It goes back to the formative days when the commission had just been appointed. We partnered with them to help stand up the original staff and some of the initial policies and procedures. We periodically checked in again on issues relating to responsible gaming, fantasy sports, and whenever you've called upon us, we've enjoyed the work. And particularly, we love working with your staff. We work with gaming regulators all over the world and you should be very proud of the special team you've attracted there. They're smart, they're engaged, they work hard, they're easy to get along with. And so we're really looking forward to and already loving this engagement. We've spent the initial time where we were already pretty familiar with your regulations, but went through another review of those to make sure that we can pose the appropriate questions of how to incorporate the technical standards, how the technical standards might need to be tailored or modified slightly to fit the needs of Massachusetts. We're also working to review the timeline the staff has prepared and offer any additional steps that we may have seen from other markets and that will be forthcoming. And then we've also begun initial work on the internal control standards. In addition, we were fortunate to have Commissioner Skinner attend G2E. She was able to do a lab tour. She's been very engaged and asked great questions. Something that we haven't done in the past that we were doing in the process of doing is adding some explanatory notes to the technical standards so that you have a complete understanding of not only what risks that the technical standards are designed to either mitigate or what technology requirements they're designed to verify, but how that will be done. And so when we get around to the point where you'll be offered those to adopt, it'll be a very informed discussion. Beyond that, we're working with staff to figure out a process. I'm a big process person. I think you work on process before you actually start writing. And so we're working on forming a steering committee so that we make sure we have clear communication with every segment of your staff and that nothing gets missed in the translation or that all involved stakeholders are getting the information in a timely manner. And so I have a great team. I won't list them all today. You'll meet them in due time. We do plan to arrange for a few days in the office with the staff and commissioners as appropriate. I think that you can do a lot remotely, but I don't think there's anything. There are some things that are best done in person. And I think we're up to nine or 10 former regulators in the company. Not all of those will be working on this project, but a good handful of them have actual government regulatory experience. And the others have extensive industry, technical or legal experience that we think is relevant and brings a lot to the project. So I'm proud to be proud of our team as you should be of yours. I think together it'll be a great collaboration and we're looking forward to it. Thank you, Kevin. Can the commissioners ask questions, Karen? Yes, absolutely. Commissioners? Kevin, you stole my thunder. I wanted the opportunity to brag to my colleagues about my tour. No questions, but just wanted to thank you and your fantastic team for the hospitality. The tour was fantastic and I'm really excited about our engagement with you and your folks. I'm happy to report the team was excited to meet you and commented on the excellent questions you asked. I said, you know, a lot of people go on a tour and they just recede only, but they said it was very interactive and they really enjoyed the time they spent with you. Yeah, I had the benefit of having our in-house experts, Nathan Saylor and Christian Tavares with me. So we made a great team. That's great. And commissioners Skinner, I've had the benefit of also that tour earlier when I was able to come in between. Other commissioners, unfortunately, Kevin, just because of the nature of our work right now in front of us, weren't able to get to G2E this year and they were disappointed in that. It was not a lack of interest in getting to the tour. So I'm really hoping that Commissioner Hill, Commissioner Maynard, I know Commissioner O'Brien, you are interested in that lab visit because you were supposed to be with me when I didn't have a family in person. So again, commissioners Skinner, I'm glad that you were able to make it, but the other commissioners are certainly interested as well. Commissioner O'Brien. Yeah, I did. It's nice to meet you, Kevin. Your ears should be burning. I mean, people talk about you around here all the time and how great you are. Commissioner Skinner just confirming that I'm very excited that you're on board with our team. We've got a huge, they've got a huge ass that we're making of them in terms of this timeline. And so I was, I was happy to hear you talk about bringing in your experience in terms of other steps from what you've learned in other jurisdictions and looking forward to hearing your input on that. So welcome to the team. It's nice to meet you virtually and hopefully on me too in person sometime soon. Thank you, Commissioner. And, you know, another side note on local connections. This is actually version two of my Harvard hoody. The first one was two years ago when I attended Malcolm Sparrow's week long seminar on strategic management of regulatory agency and risk control agencies. And that really formed the foundation for what I think about regulation and risk control and has guided me throughout my career. So I was very lucky. It came at an opportune time for me because I had been the deputy director in the Missouri Gaming Commission for the previous six years and had just been named director. And so I had enough experience to be able to ask some good questions. And Professor Sparrow is a brilliant man and I have every one of his books on risk control and grateful for the opportunity I was able to spend at Harvard. But the first version of this hoody didn't last 22 years. I'm glad you got another one. Yeah. So questions for Kevin as he begins the consultation that we're so eager to receive. Those services are going to be, as Karen said, invaluable. Commissioner Maynard. I just also wanted to take the time to express my gratitude to Kevin. And I did have the opportunity to use the greatest education tool we have today, Google, to look up your resume and background. And so it's going to be very, very useful as we go forward. So we appreciate you being here and just offering up any collaboration we can. I know that a lot of the interfacing will be with the staff, but I think I probably speak for all the commissioners when I say, you know, I'm happy to interface with you too and happy to engage with you during this process. So thank you for doing what you're doing and look forward to it. I appreciate that very much. And I do think the commissioners experience and guidance, you're there for a reason. You're all very talented and we're chosen for those reasons. And I think we will rely on that. You know, we know a lot about technology. We know a lot about risk control and policy. But what we've learned from these projects is there is no cookie cutter way to do this. There is no gold standard. I often get asked that question, well, who does it the best? We'll just do it like that. Well, they may do it very well, but they may have a very different environment and what they do may not work well for you. So and in order for us to fully understand that, we need to rely on local knowledge. So Kevin, in terms of when you come personally, certainly the commissioners will love to meet you. I know your time will be precious and you're going to want to, you know, really roll up your sleeves and get to work here. But certainly the commissioners will look forward to that interaction. And we also hope that you will be able to appear in front of other public meetings and give us the guidance publicly. But certainly meet and greets we are very, very, we're always looking forward to meet and meet and greets. So when you're on campus, you let us know, Karen. Excellent. Any other substantive questions? Okay, thanks for your time. And I have to say this whole one week of thinking. Pretty highly, highly good idea. Pretty good idea. I recommend it. No TV, no anything, just long walks and books and writing. What's the weather right now in Missouri? It's been chilly. I always say the weather will be what it needs to be for me during that week. And we've had incredible weather, but it's been in the high 40s, low 50s this week, which has been fine. It's kind of four speed and not to pay attention to what I needed to pay attention to. So it's been great. Congratulations. It's a well deserved week. Okay, thank you. And Kevin, I don't know if you're staying on, but you certainly are welcome to, but you may need to be doing some serious thinking. So I'm going to monitor it for a bit, but I'll go off camera. And I know our team will be is watching. So we've got a lot of eyes on it. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. All right. All right. So Madam Chair, the next item is the sports wadring bender regulation. They've been taken off the agenda. Karen, I didn't realize that yesterday that was a determination to move that to a future date. It's been put under review. Oh, okay. So we'll go right to the divisional updates. No problem. Thanks. Okay. So just with the divisional updates, Derek is doing the best procurement and then Katrina's out today. So really just talk a little bit about what the legal department's doing. I'll turn it over to Todd. But first I wanted to just talk a little bit about the IEB and Loretta Lillios, the director of the IEB's here. One of the first things we wanted to talk about was the scoping survey. So we did get, I believe, 29 scoping surveys in. So I'll turn it over to Loretta with what we're doing on that. And then we wanted to check in to confirm on the what the deliverables will be from the IEB at the different points in the expected process. So I want to turn it over to Loretta just the plan for the scoping right now. Thanks, Karen. And this will be very helpful because we had a bureau meeting yesterday and realized that we, the team is ready to go. The team is excited to be working on things. But we really need to confirm what the what the deliverables are. So as Karen mentioned, and as you all know, we have these scoping surveys that have been received. And by my count, in terms of that group of the untethered category threes, it's numbering in the 18. I think it's an 18 number. And I'd like to confirm what the IEB could be prepared to do and make sure that that's the deliverable that you that you want from us. So we've got these scoping surveys. We could be prepared to scope initially the entities on those scoping on those 18 plus a number of tethered that have been received. And that would be to identify first the entities that would be required to submit applications. There is the application deadline for that general application that is set at November 21st. And we would be able to look to have those BEDs for the entity qualifiers set the 21st is the accompanying deadline for those BEDs. In terms of your evaluation process, as you narrow down from the large group of the untethered to the up to seven untethered, we could at that point have the scoping for the individuals prepared it and direct a very quick turnaround for the multi jurisdictionals. That would require us to be in contact with these companies in advance, because they would, you know, likely need to be preparing those multi jurisdictionals in advance. That is a big lift, especially if there are people who have not gone through this process before, but where can be prepared to be having those ongoing conversations with them, set a short turnaround time for the multi jurisdictionals. And that would be in the event that you want something on the individuals like a criminal history check before you were to award a temporary license. At the BED level, to summarize what the IB would be prepared to do for the large group. It would be to summarize the self reported compliance litigation and license history, as well as provide a financial metric for comparative purposes for you. So it would be very helpful to me and to the team if we could get confirmation that that is in fact what you want. Karen, I'm going to turn to you first to just Lorena outline the process, which I believe you outlined for us when we were talking a couple of weeks ago about timeline. Just wonder if that's just with what you understand. Yes, it does. The initial phase where you are doing an evaluation of the untethered, you will get that information about the company. Then once we narrow it down or the commission narrows it down to up to seven, that's when we would look at the individuals that's just so we are not doing, so say there's 15 individuals doing 15 times 18, that's a lot of work that may not have to happen. As Lorena pointed out, the trick here is going to be to identify for the scoping for those companies and have a quick turnaround time for those multi-jurisdictional personal history disclosure forms because the time period where the IEB is doing that background on the individual of the untethered operators is the same time period where we are also doing that certificate of operations process. We have this 30-day-ish window for that to happen. In order for us to do that work, there has to be a quick turnaround time. My expectation is we get closer to that. We identify exactly what the commission's processes and where we can get that done. The ask is going to be that we have a quick deadline for that multi-jurisdictional form to be filled out. So we'll be in communication with those operators in advance to prepare them. One thing that we've mentioned before in public that has been done at least in New Jersey and probably in other jurisdictions as well as they will accept a multi-jurisdictional personal history disclosure form that's been submitted within the last year to another jurisdiction so they don't necessarily have to re-update it. That may save us some time and get that information to us more quickly. I'd recommend that we go ahead with that policy as well. But yes, this approach of the initial suitability on the corporate level and then once it's narrowed down, initial suitability on the individual level is what we discussed under the parameters that Loretta outlined. Just to be clear, the multi-jurisdictional forms that you're speaking about, they have to fill out the multi-jurisdictional forms for part of the application but not with respect to the system, the difference. So the suitability forms for gaming for background checks are the BEDs for the entity. So that gives you information about the company and the corporate information. So their litigation history that complies all that information that Loretta is going to compile for you. And then the individual multi-jurisdictional is for your corporate officers, members of board of directors, et cetera. So that's about their personal history, so their finances, their background. You think to disclose criminal convictions, they have to disclose all sorts of things in that form. So that's what we would rely on in that second phase. So my understanding is that the BED is absolutely due on the 21st at the same time as that general application form. If we are not necessarily going to have to scope all the applicants for the untethered operators, Loretta doesn't have to do that for the individuals right away because those forms aren't due till later. So that's where we're getting into a little bifurcation here. And Karen, if I can, I like the, I think the policy of accepting the multi-jurisdictional if it's been recently filed is, will be, will help us with our efficiency. With that said, we may need new fingerprint submissions from these individuals. You know, Heather just reminded me of that. Questions for Karen and Ra. So yeah, I, so I had voiced my hesitation in not doing any sort of open search on any sort of clearly identifiable individual qualifiers in that case. And we had talked about the fact that whether it was GLI or some other contractor might be able to pride some level of assistance in that. And I just want to know what the status that is in this process that it's been outlined. Eileen, I think we would be able to incorporate that especially given the anticipated scoping of the individuals, the way the statute's written, it's at a 10 percent in control. And I think the proposal from legal is for inside directors on this list as well. So that is a little bit narrower than we do on the gaming side. So I think we can fit that in between our existing GEU team and our contractor. Okay, and then where does that fit on that timeline? Is that before narrow to seven or are you anticipating that after we narrow to seven? After I anticipate that. So I do have to say that's that's an area that I am a little concerned about. I was hoping to get open source feedback on some of those before we narrow to seven. So that's just a concern that I raise. And another question I have is when you say short turn around time, what do you mean by short turn around time? Just so we're talking, you know, you have the BEDs do on the 21st with the application submission. And when you say short turn around, what are you envisioning for that? A week. A week. Okay. Brian's point on the first point because she did mention the open source. We used to have somebody on staff that did that. And we didn't fill that position. Would we have the information to do that open source work if we got attempt, that kind of work could probably be something that we could have if we needed additional hands, eyes, and ears have attempt in there? Or would we not have the individual scope out? That's what it is. That's what it is, Chair. You know, we can do our best to accelerate the scoping, but we need to scope to identify the individual. So the scope and survey that we did doesn't give us that. It gives us the universe and then we make the designations. And the plan that we discussed was a focus first on the entities and then the individuals. I can go back in and rework that. I don't want to open the promise. And I do think that that, you know, again, we don't know how many applications we'll ultimately get, but I do think that that may make sense from a resources point of view including for the companies themselves. I just wonder if there's some kind of a way to get to Commissioner O'Brien's concern. And then Commissioner O'Brien. Yeah, yeah, no. So when I raised it, there was a solution of some of the vendors we were bringing in via GLI or some of the others were going to be in a position to help with some of that open source. And so my question is, is there a way for them to be more involved so we get even a high brow open source review as we're trying to narrow down the seven? Yeah, and I think the actual open source review is something that we can easily do. I would need to rework my timeline on the scoping. And I just asked to report back to you even later this morning if on that, I don't want to over promise that without looking at it on the time. So Karen, the limitation on the scoping had to do with that November 21 deadline for the application and in particular the EVs. What we could do is give Lareva some breathing room because if you look at our timeline and what we're looking at, particularly for the tether, if you're evaluating, though, say in January or February, I forget what the exact date the window was, we can probably get that information to you before you make that final decision on the untethered without creating that compression for that November 21 deadline for Lareva. So that's the issue. It's the deadline for the application. Not having the individuals be part of the application allows us to have that earlier deadline. So if we can work through the schedule and figure out how to get you that information before you make the decision without extending the deadline. Right, that's my question. Is it doable? Yeah. So it'd be part of our evaluation process. It would be available then, but not before. Right, right. Right. Mr. Skinner, Krishna Garner, are you all set for right now? Yeah, I'm all set for right now. Okay. Krishna Skinner? Commissioner O'Brien asked a question. I heard Lareva's answer around the turnaround time a week, but what was the question? Along with the individuals have to submit their MJPHDs and mass supplements before or after they are designated by the licensing division. Okay. Just in my prior role, I'm very familiar with the scoping process under normal circumstances, but can you walk us through what the scoping process looks like under the expedited timeline? So we've prepared to have two teams working on this, and we would divide up the survey responses between the teams. Typically, there are internal meetings, external meetings, and then another internal meeting. We would expedite by relying on the submission with a telephone conference as needed. And in other circumstances, we've used the scoping process to really start to learn about the company, get to know about the company, establish relationships with the general counsel and executives. This would be a more streamlined process with a team made up of licensing, our new chief, our supervisor, and drawing on our financial investigations chief, our chief enforcement counsel, and myself. And will the team be communicating with potential applicants on a rolling basis, or are you conducting all of the scoping? No, we'll do it rolling. Okay. And should we be communicating specifically anything to prospective applicants around the expectation that the BED needs to be submitted for any of the entities that IEP designates? Is there something we can be doing to get on top of that? So these entities know what's expected of them as soon as possible even prior to the official scoping notification that they might get from IEP. I ask that because I'm concerned that there might not be enough time. If this even this truncated or expedited scoping process is going to take, say, two weeks, that's two weeks that these applicants are losing when it comes to the November 21 application deadline. That's a lot of time. So what active communication could we be making to these prospective applicants to sort of get started? I know Karen, we already spoke this morning about a meeting as soon as tomorrow morning. So Karen, I'll let you jump in. We lost your first words. Sorry, I turned away. Yes. So I think part of this, as you point out, is communication. And the advantage we have with these notices of intent and now scoping services, we have points of contact. So we will be not only are the applicants basically watching our meetings and hearing our conversations. We know they're very engaged, but we'll also be having that one-on-one conversation. I was hoping to schedule that as soon as possible. We have one with the category ones and their tethered operators for tomorrow. And then we'll do one with the untethered operators, basically all the category three. So they know the expectation. These companies should expect and they should know that they would need to fill out the BED. It's been discussed publicly repeatedly over many, many meetings. And most of these companies are aware of their corporate structure and it's not unfamiliar that they have to fill out these forms and what the qualifiers are going to be. It's not something new within Massachusetts. So I think it's a matter of letting them know this is the turnaround time for Karen advanced and we'll be ready to go. Yeah. Okay. That sounds good. The deadline for submission of the BED being November 21st, I wonder if we could sort of advertise that a little bit more clearly. For instance, I was on the website this morning, our sports wagering website, and it only made note of the actual license application being due on the application. Let's be really clear. Okay. I want to make sure that everybody, every applicant understands the components of the application. The prereq was the scoping, the BED. Can we go through the parts of the application? Maybe Todd, because I want to make sure it's clear it's not a separate component. If you want to go through the parts of the application. That would be helpful, Madam Chair. Yeah. Thank you so much, Commissioner Skinner. If I don't hear you, Todd. Oh, sorry. Can you hear me now? I can. I don't have that reg up. I'd have to work out for November. Karen, do you know the... I know. So the part, it's the scoping survey. We'll call it the general application form. The general application form incorporates by reference the BED and the multi-jurisdictional. The only thing we're dealing with here is that the multi-jurisdictional may have a later due date. So everything else is due on the 21st. It's part of the application and it's in the application itself. And that was my confusion. I guess I didn't know that we were deciding that it might be a later application deadline. That's all. Yes. Having a one week extension in assets, not giving them one week to do it, they would just... If they want to go ahead and do it now with the hope that they might get chosen, that would be probably really smart, right? If they haven't got one, they haven't filed one within the last year. But those are the components. The good news is the prereq, the scoping is done. Then the application, which is now our document that we developed, and then the two forms that most operators are going to be very familiar with, although they are extensive documents, but they are all part of the application. And to Commissioner Skinner's point, Mills, if there's again a point of clarification, we can say that certainly our regulation, Todd, should be like that? Yes, I believe it does. Okay. I have a question, Madam Chair. Before we post to the application, of course, Commissioner Maynard. Director Wells, is it true that every form, every component form of this application is available today on October 20, 2022? So anyone could get going on the application. Now, scoping is part of the designation, but there are certain things. For example, your CEO, your CFO, your general... These companies know who's going to have to fill out the forms generally. There may be some discussion around the edges, but they have a general idea of who's going to fill out the form based on general practice. So the follow-up question I have to that is, what you're saying is there's a baseline that's pretty much standard across the industry. There may be a situation where Loretta would go in and maybe include more people than they would anticipate potentially, but there is a standard. Correct. And those people have availability to this information may have already filled it out for other jurisdictions, as we're speaking. Correct. All right. Thank you. And the form has been up now. The application's been up since October mils. I don't know what day he first posted while we were collecting public comments. It went up that Friday after the public meeting. So that was October 14th. I believe so. All right. So does that help clarify Commissioner Skinner? It does. It does. And I'm really just making... I want to make sure that we're communicating as clearly as possible as accurately as possible so that we're not fumbling here. That's why we wanted to clarify it is part of the application. It's not separate in a part. BPD, it's not separate in a part. It is part of the application. This is really helpful to me and to my team. Director Lilios, are there other things that we could help clarify? I know we don't have it marked up for a vote, but so far I'm not hearing anything but a consensus, right, Commissioner Skinner? Yeah. Anything else that we can help clarify? No, this is great. Okay. So Karen, would you like to clarify to the applicants? Anything? Just that the BED is due the 21st and work with Loretta Lilios, the director of the IEB, with respect to individual qualifiers in the case of that. So how can they do that? Can they just reach out to Director Lilios? They can and they think they do. When she does the scoping with all of them, she's going to be meeting with them and they'll have the discussion. So they're going to have the one-on-one discussions with this. So that's why I'm not super concerned about their notice because there'll be an individual contact with the IEB. So yeah, so I just wanted to make sure that anyone who isn't as familiar with Director Lilios's office, they can reach you directly. Now that you've filed your scoping survey, that's my permission to do so. Okay, excellent. Alrighty. And then, you know, for the divisional update, the only other thing would be to, you know, for Todd to let you know what's going on there. And I know they have been in communication with GLI and that's been very helpful. And Todd, if you wanted to give the commissioners a brief update on what's been going on with regulations. Sure. Well, certainly, the development of the regulatory framework has been our primary objective at the moment. And that includes our collaboration with GLI. They're at the moment going to be focused on developing the technical standards we've talked about in the past, working on the internal control series that Kevin mentioned earlier, as well as the development of the sportsway during a specific type of regulation. So that is or will be shortly underway. As you know, from our discussion at the agenda setting meeting yesterday, there's also a series of regulations that we anticipate having prepared for your review next week. And in the coming weeks, including subject matters like suitability review, temporary licensure, investigation and licensing fees, license conditions, and matters of that sort. Of course, we've already developed the application regulations. And just to confirm what was discussed minutes ago, all of those documents are included in section 211 of the regs, the scoping, the BEDs, the multi-jurisdictional, and then of course the application form itself. So they are all part of the application process by regulation. So that that is covered. We will momentarily, later on in the meeting here, be discussing the evaluation process as well. So the framework is certainly well underway and coming into clearer focus on a weekly basis. And that is where we are right now. Excellent. Questions for Director Lillios, Director Wells, Councillor Grossman. Madam Chair, I don't have a question, but this is, I don't think it's a question anyway, but it might culminate that way. I know we're going to review the evaluation criteria regulations later in the meeting. But I think the regulations that we voted on in the past couple of weeks, 211, that talks about an extension of time to submit the application. I wonder, you know, when would be a good time to discuss what the criteria would be in granting an application for an extension of time to file? When is the right time to have that conversation? And I'm asking because, you know, if an entity isn't scoped in enough time, such that they can have all of their entities complete the BED by November 21st, what avenue do they have to submit, you know, what's that process going to look like to say, you know, we weren't formally scoped, for instance, until November 15th. So the seven days in between, whatever that turns out to be, we didn't have enough time. We don't anticipate that it will be enough time. How will we consider such a request? I believe that the regulation does something like section seven. Is it section seven? Maybe I'm wrong. Would give us some flexibility, but it's a commission decision and my mom? No, that's absolutely right. It's extraordinary circumstances, I think, right, John? Yeah, that's exactly right. I was just going to point out what you both just referenced, which is that in section 211, it's actually paragraph 10, as I'm looking at, it talks about the extension of the time for filing. And it talks about whether an application was in on time, or whether it was in past the established deadline. And that's when the extraordinary circumstances provision kicks in. Otherwise, the paragraph here talks about the commission's discretion and granting more time. So to your point, Commissioner Skinner, there are not specific criteria per se. It really just talks about discretion and the extraordinary circumstances provision that you referenced. And I guess my comment would just be, you know, to my fellow commissioners is that we should be sure to take into consideration IEB's timeline, you know, the response time in terms of communicating scoping expectations to these entities. And, you know, I have good faith that IEB will work diligently to process these scoping surveys and issue their designations, but I want to make sure that, you know, I note for the record that that may be a concern. If an entity, you know, feels that they just didn't have enough time, just given the back and forth between them and IEB, I want to be sure that we are acknowledging that that is an extraordinary circumstances, extraordinary circumstance that might warrant granting of an extension of time to file the application. Any other questions? Commissioner Skinner, you know, you've noted it for the record. It's not a matter before us that regulation is pending now. My understanding is that the regulation does allow the applicant in the event that they can't make a deadline to come to us with extraordinary circumstances should. Yeah, I don't think, I'm not suggesting we make any amendment to the application, to the regulation. I'm just simply noticing when, excuse me, I am requesting that when we are reviewing the criteria for approval that we take that into consideration the timing. Could you put that in your parking place so that we find us just to come in front of us? That would be really helpful. Right now we don't have that, and let's let's hope that it all works out and that applicants are able to make that one. But then we could revisit that. Madam Chair? No, in these times we don't know what could be an extraordinary circumstance. Commissioner Hill? Thank you, Madam Chair. And I just a little request to the legal department if I could. As you all know, I am not very good technologically when it comes to finding our some of the links to things that you have put out for us. So with that said, I know there was a Excel sheet that was put together at the beginning of this process to update us where we were with all the regulations, what was done, what was going to be done, things of that sort. And I would just respectfully request if we could see more updates within that Excel format so we know where we are and what we have done, it would be very helpful at least for this member. Katelyn, you came on? Yes, I think we can absolutely do that. We can send around an updated chart for everyone to see. Thank you. Excellent. Good idea, Commissioner Hill. Okay. Other questions for Todd, Loretta, and Cara. Okay. Director Wells? Thank you, Loretta. I hope that was helpful. Absolutely. And Kathy, I can introduce Cara. This would be the right time. This would be great. Thank you. Hi, Cara. So if anybody questioned how important the licensing division is to this whole process, the conversation we just had explains that. So I'm very happy to introduce our new licensing chief who started with the office on October 11. Caroline or Cara O'Brien joins us with a wealth of relevant experience. Most recently, she was the Executive Director for Licensing at the Office of Public Safety and Inspections. So she has a deep knowledge of licensing, which is very useful to us. She managed a team of licensing specialists. She was the business owner for a licensing management system, as she will be here. And she is well versed in the importance of the customer service aspect of this work, as well as the significance of efficiency in the work. At her prior position, she also approved continuing education programs for the licensees. And as you know, the gaming schools is something that our licensing division has a role in here as well. Cara is also an attorney and reviewing, reading, following, understanding regulations is an important part of her job and anticipating legal matters. So her experience working as a prosecutor, a researcher, and in civil litigation and civil discovery matters are important to us. She joins the supervisor, Dave McKay, and the dedicated team of Lisa, Tara, Nate, Connor, and Vivian. I'm very happy to introduce her and welcome her to the team at this exciting time. Good morning, Cara. Good morning, Madam Chair. And thank you, Loretta, for that introduction. I'm very excited to be here and excited to help move this process along. Fishers, welcome Cara, who wants to say hello first. Fishner O'Brien. So yeah, I get dibs given the name. I just want to say, as I said about Lieutenant O'Brien the other night, you know, I know there's not a lot of O'Brien floating around, but we are not related in any way, even though we have an old professor right now. So happy to have you for the name and your background. So I'll try to pop in next week when I'm in there to see you in person. Wonderful. Thank you. Mr. Skinner. Welcome, Cara. I second Commissioner O'Brien's comments, very impressive background. Excited to have you. You have a great team to work with and I know you'll be great. Thank you. Commissioner Hill. I just, I want to say welcome, but I've already welcomed you. I think three times you've met each other in person already, especially yesterday. We were, we were connipsing a little bit at the baked good table that we had all set up and your smile is as big as this agency. So I think we're going to fit in beautifully with everybody on the 12th and the 13th floor. So welcome aboard as they say. We look forward to working with you. Thank you very much. Mr. Maynard. Cara, I have also had the opportunity to meet you and also know exactly where you're coming from. I worked at the division of professional licensure when the Article 87 came over that brought over DPS and created OPSI. And although you and I never had the opportunity to work together, as soon as you got this position and it was public, multiple people called and really spoke to your professionalism and the quality of your work. So it's something that we need during this time and we are so glad to have you on board and look forward to working with you. Thank you. And interestingly enough, I also have a chance to meet Cara in person around the starter donor. So that table is well placed at the base of the steps. So Cara, again, welcome. Mike Jordan, I also received calls from former colleagues who have just been so impressed by not only your professionalism and your credentials, but by your nature, your personality and how you will work with, I know, as an incredibly talented team and invested team who are really eager to be involved in this experience portfolio. Your timing, your arrival is perfect. What I've said to so many of us, this is all new to all of us. So no one's new here. This is all new and we are very, very happy to welcome you. So good luck and on the 13th floor that the commissioner's doors are always open. Okay, thank you. Welcome and thank you Loretta for the opportunity today. Thank you. Okay. So anything else on, did you want to do any update on IT or no? No. And I'll coordinate with Katrina with something else. Okay, excellent. All right, Cara is back to work, everyone. All right. So with that item number four on our agenda is complete. We're going to turn now to community mitigation. And thank you, Joe, again, for yesterday allowing me to sort of listen in on your local and subcommittee. Commissioner Cal, thank you. Those volunteers really provide incredible contributions that allow us to make really informed decisions. So thank you. And again, to Mary and Lily, thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair and commissioners today for your consideration. We have our draft community mitigation fund guidelines. And just to by the way, a little bit of background, as you recall, you know, we develop sort of policy questions over the course of the year, and we put those into a memo to you back in September. And from the input that we got from the commission and the LCMACs and the subcommittee on community mitigation, we we took those recommendations on the on the policy questions and incorporated them into our draft guidelines that you see today. And again, before we get into it, just a few thanks here. Thanks to Commissioner Hill for he's been on many of these meetings. And he could probably recite this as well as I can because he's heard it so many times. And also, of course, Mary Thurlow and Lily Wallace, a lot of work went into this to put this package together. And also, I'd like to thank Mark van der Linden and his team, Marie Claire as well, who helped us crafting the gambling harm reduction section. So with that, I thought I would I would share the guidelines with you. And since we did have some good two by twos, I don't think I need to go through every item. I thought I would try to just hit on the high points. And of course, if the commission has any questions on anything else, please feel free to jump in. So the first big item that we want to talk about was the money that's available for calendar 2023. So in region A, we have $20 million available region B, 7 million. And we've set aside a million dollars for the category two facility down a plane plane bill. So just spending a little bit of time on this. In region A, which is on core Boston Harbor, they generate roughly $11 million per year that goes into the community mitigation fund. And in region B, the MGM facility, they generate roughly $4 million a year. So and the category two facility does not actually generate any money for the community mitigation fund, but those communities are still eligible to participate in the program. So what we have here in region A is $11 million of new money, but we did roll over $9 million from the previous year. And in region B, the $4 million in new money and rolling over $3 million from last year. So you see the split there, but the way that the split has been done historically from a policy that the commission established with input from the LCMACs was essentially that the money that's generated in region A would stay in region A and the money generated in region B would stay in region B. This last year we had in region B, we actually had quite a bit more in grants that went out to region B than went out to region A. We had about $6 million in region B and about $4.5 million in region A. So while we have been generating some surpluses over the last couple of years, region B has been spending down there as quicker than region A has. So that's why you see what might appear to be somewhat of a disparity, but that is really by design by our policy. So I thought next I would go on to our new categories. And again, we have some changes here, but these are not particularly significant. So the first new category is the projects of regional significance. And in this category, we're doing this as a pilot program for the first year, and just in region A and region B. And what this is looking at sort of larger scale regional projects that also address an impact of the casino. So we put an example in here, which I'll just sort of walk through to give you an idea. We said, for instance, if a large transportation construction project is designed to reduce congestion along a nearby stretch of highway that affects multiple communities, while also mitigating traffic-related impacts associated with the gaming establishment, that project would likely be eligible for funding. So what we're saying is we have these large projects that have a great regional benefit, but they also have a benefit to the casino or to a mitigated impact of the casino. And these are not only just transportation issues. It could also be economic development, housing, public health, or other infrastructure needs. These are things that are identified in the law that are eligible. So obviously a community would need to do a couple of things. One is they have to show that regionality of the project, that its impacts are regional, and also that it is addressing an impact of the casino, and they would have to link those things together. So we talk about the eligible communities, and these are all of the communities that are eligible for community mitigation funds in region A and B. We are also saying that state agencies can apply for these funds. For instance, MASDOT, if they had a project that was on a state highway that impacted multiple communities, they might be eligible for some of these funds. And through the development of this, we worked with the local planning agencies and MASDOT to try to identify a little bit of a universe of projects that might be out there. And those agencies are very excited about this. Some of the key considerations here, again, this is projects that are quite regional in nature, but also address a casino impact. Because of that, we felt that we can only cover really a relatively small percentage of the project cost, because again, these are more regional in nature. So we're proposing to cover up to 15% of the total project cost. And capping that at $5 million in region A and $3 million in region B. And I think this goes back to that discussion earlier about the split of the monies and how region B has been spending down their surpluses quicker. We didn't want to put too high a dollar value on this and then have region B exceed the allocation for the region by a significant amount. So we are allowing, we are giving folks two years to apply for this money. And then to get under construction, we realize that these are complex projects and probably are not ready to go today. But we do expect that projects that come in are probably already underway as far as design and things of that nature. Actually, why don't I stop at that point and see if there's any any particular questions about the new category? Okay. So we'll move on to the next new category, which is the gambling harm reduction category. And what we're proposing in here is a two-piece program. One is a small grant, we're calling a type one grant of $20,000 and a second type two grant of up to $200,000. So this first type of grant is for communities who are just starting to think about the issues of gambling harms that might be in their community. And this money would be available to a community really to help them kind of scope out a larger research study that they might look at. So this can be used to get the community engagement, vision, and planning. This will help them identify a particular topic or issue that they want to investigate further. So the hope is here is that folks will come in in this category and then we'll come up with a research project that could then fall under this type two category, maybe in a subsequent year. So for the type two, these are communities that already have a specific research topic in mind that they would like to study. So again, this was Mark and his team really helped us out in developing what we think is a really tight sort of scope that they need to submit to us to make sure that we're going to get really good projects out of this and not, you know, we want these to be quite focused. So Mark did a great job helping us out with that. We did give them some links to some of the research studies that have been done previously to get some ideas, but I do want to go just back to this paragraph here. Now there could be some communities out there that have already identified or have already done some research studies and have identified some concrete solutions to problems. And we certainly don't want to discourage people from coming in to try to address those. And what we're suggesting here is that if they really are ready to try to implement solutions that they should come into us under the specific impact category. You know, this category right now is just at a reserve for the research and for the studies. But we are also suggesting that if someone does come in under a specific impact that we would really like to have a discussion with them in advance of the submission just to make sure that, you know, everything seems to be going in the right direction on that or we could potentially give them some direction in what we'd be looking for with that. And this goes back to the last year where we, you know, received an application from the city of Boston and then ultimately got withdrawn. But it got us thinking about this and we want to make sure if someone thinks that they're really ready to go, we should probably have a conversation with them to make sure that the project is a good project. And then the last item that I just wanted to talk about, sort of large item that really affects our applicants is that we are no longer requiring that the communities submit their applications to us through combines. While we will still advertise through combines and all the information will be available, people will submit applications directly to us. This has been a problem for the last few years with a number of communities getting applications in and sometimes get the applications getting lost in the system and so on and so forth. We think that this will help mitigate that for the communities. We think this will be very well received by them. So with that, I guess I'll stop the sharing. So those are those are the key points. And I guess if you had any questions or comments, you willing to entertain those now? I want to bring the issue up. Just as a reminder, and I'm trying to remember who brought the issue up during some of the discussions we have. And I think it was you, Madam Chair. So I don't want to steal any thunder. I'll bring the issue up. I have no thunder. Steal away. There was a question about the region and the amounts of money that were in each region and did the commission want to have the ability to be able to move some of those funds into other regions if we saw fit? That is not part of our regulations, nor is it part of what's being proposed today. So we wanted to bring it up as a discussion today to see what the commission thought about the idea of giving us the ability to be able to take those figures that Joe showed us early in his presentation if we saw fit to move them from one region to another. So I want to just bring it up for discussion. I am okay with the way things have been moving forward, but I always would love the ability to be able to move something if we needed it for a bigger project in another region if we didn't have enough funds for what was being proposed. So Brad, let me just address that a little bit. So back when we initially put the policy in of how the money was split, we did have language to that effect in the guidelines which we could add back into these guidelines. I mean, that was the policy that was established, so it still really kind of exists, but it was interesting in our local community mitigation advisory committees. We raised that with them and in region A we didn't really hear any concern, but in region B the folks there I think almost unanimously said do not put that language in. We don't want it in there and I said, but this would be potentially to your benefit and they're like, we don't care. They said, we know that more likely in the long term if you use that it's going to be to give money to the east. So the language was removed, Joe? I think the language, we just didn't carry it forward from one year to another for some reason. I don't particularly know why and I did explain to them that the commission really does have this authority to do that. The intent is not to do it because we set up this policy, but in extraordinary circumstance the commission could do that and the thought was since it doesn't say it in the guidelines this year we could put it back in from a previous year. It just for whatever reason when we revamped things that I don't know the paragraph got left out. It was just interesting to hear region B's response to that. Yeah, I mean I'm not surprised when I was in the AG's office and you would go, basically you hit Worcester West, there's that concern that everything's going to be east heavy in terms of what's going to happen to money and if the monies are generated and supposed to be here we should keep it in that particular region. Wasn't there also something in there about it stays in there for x period of years and then if it's not there and there's sort of a FIFO system, right? So to your point I think you were saying well we never really get there because the theory we're kind of panning out and you never really get to that three years. So maybe there's a way to rewrite that. I felt like we were trying to address it that way without actually poaching from one region or another in a given year. Yeah, the way the policy is set up now does say that there's this is sort of three years if so if there's money that's left over from three years ago that would then become available statewide. It could go to either region or to category two and we've never reached that yet. We're only, I think we're in year three right now and the only money that's rolling over is one year old. So right now it doesn't look like well we haven't gotten there yet and there certainly is and look the commission could also do other things. The thought is let's say in region B you know last year we put out about six million dollars. If we did the same this year there'd only be a million left for a project of regional significance. So let's say we got a three million dollar project and it was a really good project. Would we want to try to transfer some money? The other options for the commission are you could essentially borrow money from the next year's allotment you know because we're we only put money into it through the end of 2022. So by the time we award these things we've generated six months worth of money that's sort of kind of sitting in the bank for next year. So there are there are other things that the commission could do short of taking money from one region and giving it to another. Like a short-term loan restoration of policy because I understand region B's concern. Interestingly enough the numbers right now prompted the question right that commissioner Hill because today it's got 20 million and region B has 7 million and if region B submits some pretty exciting applications we might want to be able to respond and the numbers might limit us. So I do I'm sorry I just was wondering if we could have some kind of a I wonder if right now we even have that flexibility now to do some kind of a lending with a restoration policy in place. I do have the language from 2020 that I could just read a piece of it if people wanted to hear what we had previously. It's pretty cut and dry and to the point I'm just trying to define it here so bear with me. Oh I just had it. Told you I'm not very good at technological. So as part of the guidelines it's the commission notes that it plans to target its funding decisions based on the regional allocation described earlier. However the commission reserves the right to make determinations that do not strictly adhere to it strictly adhere or adhere to such targets in the event the commission awards are not in such adherence the commission may make appropriate adjustments in future guidelines to bring regional allocations into more congruity with such targets. So it was there at one point it's not there here we wanted to bring it up for discussion. I always feel having language like that can only help us and again something great comes in from the west and we've been getting great applications from the west the last couple of years. This might help them but again it's up to the full board. And so I think it was this was sort of a you know region B was very loud and clear and region A was like oh that sounds fine to us you know so there really isn't unanimity in that. What we could do is we could we could draft up some language to put in the final guidelines that you could consider you know in a couple of weeks when you're voting the final guidelines and and and see how it looks and then you can either you know leave it in or or or exit out you know at at that time. I was just going to say that I really appreciate when we're all in open meeting because if you would have been an hour two by two with Commissioner Skinner and I we brought up the exact same issue with with Joe. To a T it actually sounds like I definitely agree Brad that we should respect the western region but I also would like to have some flexibility just in case there is a project that that would potentially benefit them and and have some flexibility so that's my two cents on. And if I can just add one last thing Madam Chair on this issue so process wise we gave our comments today this goes out for public review in the next two weeks so this added language is there and we hear you know a lot of negativity that would obviously help our decision in two weeks but the public will have an opportunity to let us know how they feel about this language should we put it in is that accurate. Well the the intent was to go out with the draft as the draft um you know and and get comments on the draft and can we as the commission ask that it get be included with this language so that we can get back on it. Sure we can add that in before we before we publish I think. What do you think commissioners we could vote on it I suppose um but we don't have marked up for a vote but do we have a consensus that um because I believe I've said I said to all of you that language that came from the 2020 guidelines. I think there's no Madam Chair. Do you think so Commissioner Skinner you think there is? I do. Let's check. Commissioner O'Brien what do you think? I remember Joe reading me the language I don't know that I have it in front of me though. If I think we'd want it we probably wouldn't be inclined to add it after public comment it particularly hearing you know local committees didn't love it um so probably should be included. Do you want to hear it again um Brad has a handy Commissioner Hill or you did have a hand. Let me make sure I'm still not muted. So it said the commission reserves the ability to determine a funding limit below what is detailed in these guidelines. The commission also reserves the ability to determine a funding limit above what is detailed in these guidelines. The commission notes that it plans to target its funding decisions based on the regional allocations described earlier. However, the commission reserves the right to make determinations that do not strictly adhere forward here to such targets. In the event the commission awards are not in such adherence the commission may make appropriate adjustments and future guidelines to bring regional allocations into more congruity with such targets. And Commissioner O'Brien I just forwarded you. Yeah I saw that um of course my computer's decided not to let me in right away but that's typical. Today is the day where this challenges you know. My iPad was yesterday my regular computer is today. Um you know I maybe because I've been I heard it my entire time in the Aduce Office too about sort of Western Mass wanting to be heard and know that there's monies there for them etc. I'm still in that that's why we did the the longer view of this of the three years etc. I don't mind so much the you know we might have to go under or over depending upon what projects we get. But the latter part of it I may be in the minority but I'm not inclined to actually put that back in right now but that's just that's me remembering some of the vociferous nature of of Region B wanting to make sure they were protected. Which part um do you would you like re-praying? It doesn't specifically mention the regions but the language that he just read sort of saying we reserve the right to sort of move it around depending on projects um it's the latter part of the statement. Could we use the language? No but what page is it on? Could we use the language where we um allow for some flexibility provided there's restoration um no for the goal of immediate restoration so then we would have we'd have to think about that. Can we immediately um restore it and so maybe there'd be a cap on what we could do for an overage. Or is it also are we doing it where we don't get sufficient applications in that region for the money? So it's one thing to say to Region B also you know look you haven't asked for these monies and A happens to have in this year you know these these projects one of which we could fund by moving this money over. That's different from a scenario from us saying we're going to prioritize this extra project in A and even though there's a B project we're not going to do that so you know that I think is what they want to avoid. And Commissioner the language is on page four. I'm sorry you would just ask the language is on page four about halfway down. Okay thanks. And Commissioner Hill, are you going to chime in? I think that is different. I think we weren't thinking of of the one that you're concerned about. I think we're thinking about almost short term bridge loan. I got nothing else to come out but anybody else have ideas you know just that flexibility or is it where we don't want to go? Commissioner? I think we do not have a consensus here Madam Chair on this particular issue so we probably in my my view now we would just move forward with what has been put before us and we can discuss this again as we have guidelines come before us in the future. But it is an issue that we are concerned about and recognize. I guess my question is Joe when you guys were meeting with the regional groups did you revisit this again that language? Yeah yeah because you know that had come up you know with in the two by twosie it makes sense to talk to our to our groups about it as well and get their input on on that on this particular issue because this seemed to be the only issue that kind of came up. Right and then you got the same responses historically you've gotten which says fine and because we really don't want you to do it. And look I think the reality is is that when the policy was established the commission reserved the right to move money around you know the intent was to follow the policy unless there's sort of some extraordinary circumstance that would that would necessitate doing that you know again if you had a really great project that was going to die on the vine without the money you might want to consider doing that but you know the intent was to follow the the the distribution of the money but still reserving the right to to do more than that you know if it really came down to that. Yeah I mean I'm all for the reserving the commission's right to move it I'm just trying to think if there's a way that we address region B's concerns in terms of saying this is something that would be done you know actively keeping in mind that we are priorities to try to keep the B money and B in the A&A which to Commissioner Hill's point I'm not so sure that language is here today for us to vote on to put out for public comment. Right well what we could do is if we want to we could put that language into the document for public comment and then you know we can sort of wordsmith it between now and the and the 10th uh if you know the commissioners could take a look at it and and if there's some language you think that that provides some better protection I guess if for lack of a better word we could do that and then incorporate that into the final document. Are you comfortable with that Commissioner O'Brien? To be blunt I'd rather have the language go out for public comment in advance but I can also you know we can do about what I'm fine with that too. The language of choice you mean um yeah well maybe what we could do is we do have some work ahead of us perhaps Joe if you're available you'd be able to circle back a little bit later in the meeting with some language do you how do you feel about that commissioners if we really if we want it otherwise we can do exactly what Commissioner Hill suggested just not include it and I think there's also waiver provisions you thought Chief Delaney that maybe that would also work should be come into an extraordinary circumstance of some sort where we want to be able to gain some flexibility. Yeah and I think with the waiver provision if there's um and again I think this comes down if there was money available from the next calendar year at that time I think the commission could you know move that money up as there's this wave basically the guidelines say that commission you pretty much wave anything that they want to wave in this thing and that's we've given the commission broad latitude to do that obviously we haven't done that routinely because that's not really the intent but I just think we do want to have some flexibility and I think the waiver process probably does give us enough of that you know should we run into that kind of issue and also you know look this is I guess a good problem to have yes you know if we think that they're going to be oversubscribed I think that's a that's a good problem to have but you know and obviously we won't know until we get applications in either so I'll tell you my one fear is that this year if there is something of regional significance out in that west they may see that seven million dollars and and think about all the other projects that they also want to and they say we're cap this year and they may be fine with that but you know we're just looking for the very best applications we can from both regions and you know I I hope that both regions know that we will be fair and transparent um about those allocations it's just that right now they're they're quite upside it yes they're quite upside it um and and would I be saying the same thing if it were region a versus region b probably because it's just so obvious right that's why it came up in our two by twos right um no thunder commissioner helps so the consensus that to just go out as we are right now and you know we'll deal with this next year if if it really results in a problem or so I think that all great points have been raised I would like to make a decision based on current feedback from the region as opposed to discussions you might have had joe in 2020 or individual commissioner recollection so you know if we don't include that language uh in the version that's going out for public comment what other opportunity do we have to hear from the region well we heard from region b yeah we're going to be reiterated to this in this year yeah and then as far as recount committee yesterday yeah that was yesterday yeah yesterday it should be reiterated yeah that well okay okay I missed that somehow okay yeah so they met yesterday the local advisory committee it's not yesterday and joe pointed out region a was fine region b did affect the language so okay joe I have a question did they did they see that the money disparity yep they're aware of that in region b they were saying we just want what's ours and we don't want you to be able to take it away even if it's less and the commission has the discretion to move the funding the funds around even even if that language doesn't make it into the final guidelines correct I think that probably is the case I'd probably have to sit down with Todd and go through our policies and stuff but and and make sure but I'm pretty sure that we would be able to do that if if we really needed to and no disrespect to region b I think someone said this earlier that is not you know my position here it's just I think you know to the points that have already been raised if there is a really you know stellar proposal out there you know we don't want to shut it down simply because you know of the unavailability of funds that had been allocated to a particular region right right and you know we don't we don't want to lose a good project if we have that's that's really what it comes down to and yeah and just and just to be clear I'm sorry madam chair I keep interrupting you and I don't know I was turning to you thank you just to be clear it's through the waiver process that would allow us to be able to move the money yeah if if that came before us yeah okay we would be waiting at the allocations of some so in the subway right yeah yeah the theory okay so can we actually bring we could actually bring and engage the region at that point too right so we're kind of talking about something that hasn't happened yet but if it does happen we can engage them okay that matters to me yeah we do that a lot there's a lot of engagement Jordan that's what makes it so good it is very inclusive process all right so we'll just we'll leave the language as is the travel go out for public comment and we're going to return in a couple of weeks and we'll be voting on the guidelines yep thank you Lily thank you Mary thank you Joe okay we do have the one more item for your consideration madam chair and that's the reappointment of one of our subcommittee our local community mitigation advisory committee members Rick Sullivan so his so you have a memo in your packet Rick has been he's the appointment for the regional economic development representative on the region b local community mitigation advisory committee he's been on the committee for a number of years and you know Rick has been around everywhere forever you know he was Governor Patrick's chief of staff he was the secretary of the executive office of energy and environmental affairs and he is now president and chief executive officer of the economic development council of western mass he's been our chair for the last year we voted him in as chair for another year pending this appointment so we fully highly recommend him to continue questions for John on this issue no we thank both chairs for their service we do need a vote on this do i have a motion oh thank you Mary Mary do you have any you want to chime in at all Mary or Lily i'll set okay i move that the commission reappoint Richard Sullivan as the region b regional economic development representative to the local community mitigation advisory committee for an additional one year term second thank you any questions edits all right commissioner o'brien hi mr hill hi mr skinner hi mr maynard hi i vote yes five zero thank you very much thank you it is um 11 45 if um if i could i would like a a quick break before we move into the next matter uh commissioners do you welcome that opportunity as well okay so it's 11.5 if we could return at noon and we're going to be then turning to the evaluation process and to those folks paying kb thank you for your your patience who they've been on since the beginning of the meeting thank you so much nothing like having a rabid in the backyard when your dog goes out to do his business chasing him down into the woods lovely i think we're we're all set thank you mr you know it's late we are reconvening um public meeting 398 of the denny commission and just to be safe because we're holding this virtually i'll do a roll call commissioner o'brien i am here thank you commissioner hill i'm here mr skinner i'm here thank you and commissioner maynard there you are i am here great we're all set to proceed and we're going to now turn to item number six um and i'll turn to uh council grossman thank you yes thank you madam chair good afternoon everybody so we are here to talk about section 218 to the commission's regulations again uh this section talks about essentially the application and evaluation process for the award of sports wagering licenses it's designed to chronologically set out the process to make those decisions in all categories it is also designed to offer the commission the maximum discretion and flexibility it may need so that it can ensure the best possible processes in place depending upon the circumstances it also affords prospective applicants fair notice as to how the application they will be submitting shortly will be reviewed so that they know what to expect the modifications uh that you see in the draft here before you are based upon the review and discussion performed by the commission last week as you'll see in the packet there is a red line version and a clean version the red line version was included just so you could see what changes were made if that was of interest but that is somewhat difficult to navigate so i anticipate just walking through the clean version here today if that is okay with everybody the section's design i should just note to work in conjunction with a series of regulations that will be coming before you shortly i mentioned some of them earlier they pertain specifically to those relating to suitability which is the reference to 215 that you'll see there's i believe a reference to 219 which is the draft temporary licensing regs and then of course we just talked about section 211 which talks about the form of the application itself so there are a series of cross references in this draft that you'll notice as we walk through it so with that if there are no the comments before we start i again intend to just walk through the clean version which is found at page 43 of the commission's packet if everyone has it before you we can just kind of proceed in this fashion so everybody can see everybody's faces or i'd be happy to share the document if that would be a helpful as well commissioners are you comfortable with having your own document up do i have noz okay okay looks like we're all set five excellent so let's jump right in and start at 218.01 you'll recall again that this is generally modeled after the rfa2 process but there are a an extensive series of modifications that were made to suit our present needs and one of those areas was the pre-application consultation so it's important to note here that it says that the commission or its designees may conduct a consultation meeting or information session with applicants just to provide guidance as to what's expected of them as far as submission of the application is concerned and you'll see that there's a second sentence added to this section that provides that the commission may use other methods to respond to inquiries regarding the application process such as publishing responses to questions submitted by applicants and that was the process we discussed last week so no decision necessarily needs to be made today as to how we will go about doing this but this will afford the commission the ability to engage in a series of processes to help clarify any questions that may be outstanding for the submission of the application commissioners any questions on that i'm hearing on Todd make the good point we don't have to decide on that but given that the application process is going as underway do we have a consensus that we would that we might want executive director Wells to make a proposal perhaps to us on on consultation meetings for the applicants or there's also the answer in question should we should we ask for that or maybe to be advised for next week or i'd be in favor of that chair okay i'd see Mitchell brian snorting her head okay thank you it could be both too it might actually be um both us and i see commissioner hill giving a thumbs up okay good thank you okay Todd yes i was needing to ask this preliminary question have we received comments on these draft regs i know they were published they yes that that's right um you know i i'm not aware of any comments that have come in um no so be able to there's uh oh maybe there was hi good afternoon no we haven't received any comments on this regulation yet thank you i should also just to mention uh since there's only eight of us on the screen that uh attorney macarius has joined us as well he's been a critical uh made a critical critical role in preparing uh these regulations as well thank you questions that come up um so if we can we let's move on to 218.02 the application requirements so this is the section that starts out by saying that essentially the application has to be filed before the deadline established by the commission which has been done there are a couple of important provisos here that we should walk through as well the first is that the commission may establish different deadlines for applications within the different categories and though we haven't done that at the moment you reserve the right to do that if you are so inclined and it's important just to take a look at paragraph b here in conjunction with that which says that after an application deadline for any category or group of applicants has passed the commission may establish a new application deadline for such applications this language is included in recognition of the somewhat uncertainty in the landscape at the moment particularly as it relates to perhaps the category two applications and at the moment where those proposals are still evolving and being developed it may be that the commission recognizes that the existing submission deadline is not going to work well and it may be adjusted so this gives the commission the ability to adjust the deadline even after it's passed with any particular category or for all of the categories depending upon the circumstances no i'm i'm glad that's in there because i had questions when we wrap this up the last time about you know what if we don't hand out seven untethered or what if someone either has their license revoked or they relinquish it or to your point you know there is no qualifying category two at the moment of the submission and therefore they come later and ask for something so i mean what i'm hearing is that would give us the room to set up a different timeline to do the same criterion but that different circumstance exactly right and i had asked um i think i went first to uh executive director wells and and copy Todd to ask about precisely this issue too but i was thinking more on category two particularly as we were um addressing the new racetrack application because i wasn't sure about the alignment of their deadline should you know a license for your lord so i think this covers it right well it's like a regency if there is a regency casino that will be tethered to those and so there are other scenarios where this may come up that's a good point beyond this you know 1121 deadline so um i like the the amendment here Todd for that flexibility thank you for it very much yeah thanks Todd i really like the language to Todd and Mina and i hope we could consider using utilizing it for the scenario that i described earlier whereby there is a gap in the timing between when ieb completes its spoping work and the actual deadline of currently 1121 absolutely yep no i think this again is designed to afford the commission uh flexibility to to deal with some of these circumstances as they may arise um so paragraph c and then two which we'll talk about as well uh just describe the scenario where an application may be submitted after the deadline so paragraph c says that the commission may decline to take action until essentially the suitability or preliminary suitability decisions are made and then paragraph two gets into again after the application deadlines have passed what happens if someone submits an application then or whether they submit an incomplete application and so this gives the commission some discretion to handle those matters in an appropriate fashion depending upon the facts and circumstances that may arise at the time there is just kind of one Scrivener's note i believe the reference in paragraph two at the end should be 218.031b not not just b so we can make that adjustment if there are no questions on that we can move into 218 one quick question just when we're going to the application given that we may have a separate application a separate deadline for part of the application specifically the multi-jurisdictional personal history disclosure forms may be a potentially a separate deadline do we need to put that in here anywhere or have application deadlines be plural or i don't know if there's any issue there if this is covered i just wanted to flag that uh good good question i let me see uh i mean feel free to weigh in if you have any reaction to that um karen i think the easiest way just to uh clarify this would be to say the commission may establish different deadlines for applications uh or portions there are portions around because i think right now reads as only by category right that may be helpful we need to be more precise now may not on that point i disagree um the first time i think it is um probably within your power to do that whether or not it's in the regulation but i um i think if we wanted to just make that clear that so that someone doesn't say you know so and so got in part of part of their application late i did it what does that mean um it kind of gives you the flexibility to say you know especially with the scoping piece i think you might have have that issue so um on the whole i would say let's be clearer on it but i recognize you might not need to but do we need to do anything else today given that the application is out there with the three four components we include the survey do we need to do anything to say that that deadline has been extended because i don't know Karen are you recommending that extension well here's the issue is that the applicants don't know which individuals and entities necessarily they kind of an idea but they don't have confirmation of who needs to submit so until unless and until they meet with the IEB and get that letter they don't have that um that information my recommendation is that within the letter Loretta can add the deadline it would be the 21st for the BEDs but it may be a later date i don't know what do you think Loretta yeah we you know we've already been speaking with um Karen this morning uh after the first part of the meeting that we're going to communicate with them even before the scoping to let them know exactly what is coming the forms are available can be accessible on the website we'll also send them the form so they can get going and our initial written communication to them within days uh can give the you know confirm the deadline of the 21st for the BEDs and then um we expect to scope the entire piece including the individuals at one time we've determined it's more efficient for us to do that rather than have to go back and touch it a a second time so um we may be able to give them the same deadline yeah and they're they're they've been on notice of of this since the 7th so but i'm wondering in terms of you know the the question about sort of fundamental fairness accusations that may be made if someone says well you gave them two extra days i didn't realize that's your thing is there a way to write in there that any sort of extensions or whatever would be something referencing the iv process and that upon recommendation and approval by the commission so that it's clear that you're getting these because you're in the process and not arbitrarily i mean i'm worried about right share your comment about precision of language so people know this is you know same treatment across the board it's one thing if it's something on us that causes a delay it's another to say well i just was a couple days late and they were a couple days late so no harm at all a lot of media suggestions is that regulatory or is that well first let me back up and just say that you know just in rereading this language it does say that the application has to be filed on or before any applicable deadline any applicable deadline established by the commission so i think there is some built-in flexibility there though that doesn't address what commissioner brian is just talking about how do we avoid essentially arbitrary and capricious decisions is is the point and you know we could certainly attempt to be more prescriptive for the situations we are aware of and this is certainly one of them and we could build in specific language allowing for the process just described as it pertains to the scoping if that would be helpful but you know it it you know becomes a situation where you start crafting the processes for unique situations and that's that's the only hesitation i would have otherwise you know we just need to be very careful but i think the construct is here to allow those decisions to be made i guess my question is partly drafted is it clear that any continuation of deadlines is up to the commission to decide and not something that even if the genesis was because ib had a backlog on something that it would have to come back to the five of us under these rags to make a decision on extension i think that's why i just want to be clear i think we could add in some more designee language that might be one way to address that specifically because i think no i'm not actually asking i'm actually trying to make clear that it would have to come back to the five of us yeah i think it it does come it does say the commission should you know do all this stuff so and it's and um madam chair if i could it's it's also Todd's right plus if you we haven't gotten there yet but then changed to 2804 c allowing for additional information to be submitted that contemplates that if someone's for instance didn't get their full application in and is going to be allowed to add in any information that has to be in the commission's discretion that was edited as well so so that again gets that the commission making the decision on that point well director lily knows i just heard that you've had a really productive conversation with char so that's some good news what do you how how without holding you to that do you feel like that's that's a realistic um outcome then that conversation uh what to designate both individuals and entities at the same time yeah i do well director lily else and carrot thank you that's really helpful and of course that would um this issue of you know we always there can be circumstances that arise right um director lily else but that that was a productive conversation so let's see how it plays out but it sounds as though we've got the language here that we need uh measures unless there's some further questions on it thanks great okay um so next up is 218.03 uh we're now at the bottom of page 43 top of page 44 in the packet um and you recall we discussed this uh last week and just i just wanted to kind of remind everyone of the distinction we discussed and that was between um administrative completeness i.e whether everything is actually present and then reviewing the content itself the substance of it and drawing that distinction and these regulations do as drafted recognize that distinction the administrative completeness review is more designed just to ensure that all the information and documentation that's required to be submitted has been submitted not that it's really well done or thoughtful or gives us everything we want but just that everything is there um and so that's that's what we're talking about in 218.03 so you'll see in paragraph one it says that the executive director or their designee will review the application for administrative completeness and actually then references um if you're following in paragraph one here as described in 218.032 i think um and Mina and I haven't had a chance to talk with this so we're i'm going to operate on the fly on this one i think instead of that cross reference because it doesn't doesn't really answer the question i would propose that we replace that with the language i actually just read which is to ensure that all information and documentation required to be submitted as part of the application is included and so the first sentence would read the executive director or their designee will review each sports wagering license application for administrative completeness to ensure that all information and documentation required to be submitted as part of the application is included and that i think lends some precision to what this process is designed to do and it also ensures that the particularly that the people who will be performing the review are clear as to what the level of scrutiny is supposed to be. Director Wells i bet you have a question. Yeah so in uh i'll just uh to be quite blunt this is this is the ideal process if we had a lot of time my concern is that you know in looking at the timeline uh if the team is doing administrative completeness checks you know right now we have 27 that have done the scoping survey that potentially delays when it gets to the commissioners and cuts into their time of review so there are a couple of options you could include this administrative completeness review and keep that same process which as Todd indicates has some benefits to the commissioners because they are you know they're reviewing the applicants and it would be complete. The other option would be that the applications be submitted and given to the commissioners and they are basically submitting at their own peril the commissioners would know anything that's not in the application and that could be taken into consideration with respect to particularly the untethered a comparative analysis of the applications. So there's you know there there's certain options on how we do the staff will be you know ready willing and able to do it however you would like I just want to make that aware. The other issue is that when we do the administrative completeness uh when we're doing for example right now qualifiers for new qualifiers for the casinos for the BEDs and the multi-jurisdictional forms and they'll defer to Loretta on the present practice but we generally are quite rigorous and will will licensing will go through those applications and if an applicant has not filled out the form correctly we may list all those deficiencies and send back a letter to the applicant and they have to correct it and send it back and we have the process in place where it's completed before it goes to the investigators and the advantage we have with that um is that it puts the onus on the applicant to have it done correctly and that the investigators are not spinning their wheels chasing down supplemental information from the applicants because if we wait until it's complete the clock for the investigation doesn't start ticking until the applicant has done their job. So this is a bit of a different scenario because in that circumstance if someone for example a key executive is looking to get to work it's on them to get things done right and they can't start working until it's until um they submit the information. The situation we're dealing with now when we're dealing with a competitive process you theoretically could have a situation where say there are 18 applicants for the untethered licenses. If two of them are not submitting their application materials properly and there's a delay because we're going through this back and forth because it's not complete and we're giving them a chance to complete it then uh that could potentially impact the other operators and impact the timeline. So it's um you could have a it's like a thumbs up or a thumbs down like it's just not complete you're out of the box but then you'd have the this the staff of the MGC making final determinations on on these licenses as opposed to the commission which I'm a little uncomfortable with. So there there's a lot to consider here and it's just it's a it's slightly different scenario than we're used to with the IEV. I don't know Loretta if you have any comments on the administrative completeness. Yeah I know we've spoken in the the commission's public meetings for a couple months now about that part of the process that it is an integral part of the submission process that the cases don't get transmitted over to the IEV until the licensing division has performed that review that they uh and Nikisha you'll well know uh this that they uh have been trained to do that review in a sensible way. So uh you know the example that I think I've given in the past is that if the instructions direct the applicant to write NA for not applicable in a line but the applicant writes none well they're not going to send it back you know to follow the instructions more carefully because it's clear what the applicant meant but if the applicant neglects to initial and date each page the way the instructions directly applicant to do that is something that if we ever have a problem on the information on that page it goes directly you know a hearing officer or the commission looks to whether the applicant has signed that page we've learned that the hard the hard way. So our team tries to be smart and not send things back for deficiencies unless it's a meaningful deficiency uh but it's an important part of of the process. Commissures I have some thoughts I don't really want to go first um so I hate to put Commissioner Skinner on this spot but it seems like she might be the have the best perspective on this. Oh well yeah I mean I you know at the outset I'm not in favor of penalizing an applicant by deducting points or outright rejecting the application in a scenario where they're not getting the benefit of the regular administrative completeness review process you know the issue that is potentially created here is self-induced. I respect the fact that the commission voted to adhere to a truncated timeline by which to get sports wadring up and running but I find it just I'm fundamentally opposed to holding applicants accountable for for for for for something that we decided not to put in place right we decided not to put these safeguards in place with respect to the administrative completeness review I mean I know that hasn't been decided yet but that is the discussion if we go that route again I think it's it's it's a problem that we are creating yet we are uh holding the applicants responsible and I again have a fundamental problem with that. So I do hear Commissioner Skinner you brought this quite up the last time and I do understand the idea of administrative completeness I wasn't the chief licensing officer as Commissioner Skinner was but it says my understanding the policy behind it is what Director Lillius just referenced is that what they've learned over time is that it actually really impacts the investigatory process you know our team DEU the financial team end up getting an incomplete document and it has to start although you know go backwards in time and they created some efficiencies there. I do see this process that process our licensing process that we do right now under 23k that's different from the process that we're going to be using to for a competitive process for evaluating the pool of untethered category grade and I think that's where maybe I'm just you know I can be persuaded otherwise but I see a distinction in that process and I think that's perhaps the Director of Wilds was getting at. Sorry to cut you off Madam Chair go ahead. No coming. 203 contemplates the issuance of either a positive determination of administrative completeness or negative but that's what we're discussing so. But I just wanted to go with my policy the policy thinking of administrative. Two separate issues the IEB policy perspective but then there's this determination so my point is you know an application gets issued a negative determination because they don't have the benefit of having the licensing team complete that administrative review that. I'd like to finish my thought because I might not be saying that we have that negative. Yeah no I suggested that you do and you offered me the floor so I turn I yield the phone back to you Madam Chair. Well thank you I thought that you were I thought you were done when you pointed out the language my apologies are you you're all set and no my my thought was that maybe we could come into some kind of a you know in between when I heard the language that that God offered you know one of the concerns I had is that it's all being all administratively complete because then there's a whole bunch of judgment around the answers etc you know it's not the same thing but I did run the Judicial Nominating Commission and the judicial applications were extensive and very very competitive that the applications are very extensive of significant background checks etc there there wasn't the opportunity to correct there was an opportunity to be evaluated and sometimes you know candidates did a better job on applications than other times in in each evaluator had to assess I wasn't an assessor I was the executive director that we could adopt that approach where the applications come in there might be some kind of a check for fairness commissioner scanner maybe that's what you're getting at to make sure you know did you mean to leave out something but it gets to us and and then we make a judgment college we're evaluating what they what they they did and what they left out what I also really cognizant of is down the road for suitability for our finalists we're going to be back at that point where our investigators going to want the the full sum check I don't know if that that process can be continued along you know down the road somehow if there's something that was identified as as missing but I think we would identify it during our evaluation process so I wonder if those are in between it the licensing process that is in place now it's not part of a competitive evaluation process and that's where I'm seeing the distinction yeah however as the regulation is currently written an applicant doesn't even get the opportunity to compete right to be evaluated the application doesn't even get submitted to the commission if it is not administratively complete yeah I agree with you I think I was just sort of issue is if if they if they don't have the benefit of a normal process that this agency offers in the application in the license application process for instance they get issued a negative determination you know they if they if that determination is issued before the application deadline they have the opportunity to cure I just want to make sure my point is clear I guess I just want to intercept I think that you're talking about this as if we've adopted this reg and we have why I said as currently written so I think I'm happy to you know engage in in discussion and hear from from our team as to how my concerns are you know how we can adjust the language so that my concerns are addressed and they might others may share this concern as well oh yes I understand I guess what I'm also saying is the normal process that you're I don't want to put words in your mouth commissioners kind of what I'm hearing the normal process what you're saying is the process that's applied currently or our licenses under 23k is that what you're saying when you say the normal process that's afforded yes yes and in response to Karen's concern about adhering to the normal process in this environment okay director wells I just want to make sure I understand this correctly because when I'm reading this and then maybe I'm just confused but this this reg is written Todd seems to say if there's a positive determination it goes on to the commission if there's a negative determination if the deadline hasn't passed the executive director can allow them to cure the deficiency if the deadline has passed they can request an extension so I I yeah so one thing I wanted to point out on that I'm not so sure why you would have discretion in the first scenario to me that should be stricken and it should just say the applicant you know make sure the deficiency prior to any applicable deadline and then if the deadline has passed then they come to the commission I don't see like there's any discretion on the part of the ed it's like if you have time to cure it try to cure it before the deadline the deadline's passed you have to go to the commission and ask for permission to get an extension and then what's the 205 cm r 211 1 Todd the process for asking for the extension yep that's the extraordinary extraordinary circumstances language which gets back to commissioner skinner's point of we need to talk about what that means right and so what I see just from an operations perspective from a truly practical standpoint hypothetically you know we've got what 2930 entities that have suggested they're going to apply if they all submit you know two days before the deadline or a day before the deadline this the team can't does it you know we these are hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of pages we can't do this and get back to them with these deficiencies so just from a practical perspective I'm not sure with a deadline and this process I'm not sure what we do I don't know what I'm supposed to do right I don't see it as applicable here in a competitive process I liken it again to a procurement or selection process rather than a licensing process to be engaging so are we treating two and three tethered and untethered differently well well that's actually an interesting question because you know hypothetically let's take out the the the competitive process the tether if we were just doing this on tether once if their application wasn't complete well that's on them and maybe just their launch date gets pushed back because they didn't fill their forms in time and they commissioned didn't have that ability but it's just feels different with the competitive you know our system seems to work you know the administrative completeness would probably be helpful to you you know with the category once before you give it to the commission make sure this is all in order but with a hard and fast deadline you're that's where this is complicated but the deadline being what happens the reason why it works in in our normal process is that qualifiers come up at any time and there is no deadline right that so that's why it's it's kind of apples to oranges there's you know today you maybe see news that there's a new qualifier forgot it and then they're going to they're going to apply and and then the process goes and our licensing process works so superbly and it really works for our investment in this case we have we do have deadlines in order to make it a fair standing up process for each operator we know all the the policy decisions behind that it wouldn't be ever you know we could do rolling basis but I I mean I know that Maryland is sort of facing that idea but I think that's kind of we we sort of know is sort of fundamentally unfair in this particular market Commissioner O'Brien yeah I mean this this is some of the concerns that I raised on that aggressive timeline that we sort of all hashed out a week or two ago this is some of the minutia that now is cropping up that we need to deal with and one of one of the ways to separate there are different processes that are applicable in different standards statutorily applicable to category to retail and then tethered versus untethered and so the question I have is are we do we need to be adding more specific processes into these regs and how we're going to process these applications that specify the the retail the tethered and the untethered because I don't see how this realistically works in a way that is fundamentally fair to both the applicant and quite frankly the five of us and staff to get this done under this timeline unless we do another dive into this and further delineate separating out in terms of how once they're in by the 21st how those are going to be needed out so the law does look at each category differently right the law actually contemplates one category too so maybe Mina and Todd can help on this but also talking to Loretta and well yeah you know in terms of what's what's realistically helpful both to staff us and fundamentally fair to the applicants as commissioner Skinner has pointed out and and and to further that point I mean yes chair there is one universal application date November 21st but the variable is going to be dictated by when the administrative completeness review is done by the licensing team when the scoping is completed and so you're going to have dates that are all over the place that will quite frankly determine you know how how much lead time an applicant actually has to submit their package before the November 21st deadline and it's going to dictate when their application gets submitted to the commission if that turns out to be on a rolling basis if I can jump in on the scoping piece I'm confident that that can be concentrated in you know a concentrated period of time to minimize you know the spread of time between some when some applicants learn of the designations compared to others there's been some discussion I'm not sure from from whom but about that the under the current 23k process it's qualifiers who we have to do the administrative completeness review and if that doesn't happen in time well you know the operation keeps continuing but okay okay um thank you I just want to clarify that that process applies to the qualifiers which is a small amount of the applications that we receive it applies to um vendors it implies to employees uh it implies to all three levels of of vendors so there are categories of folks who you know can't get going uh until they have that completeness that completeness review so it was really just to provide you the example of the qualifiers but of course it extends out but my point was that in this case we're standing up everyone at the same time right so it's a little bit different because the administrative completeness review process comes in depending on when when you get notice of the new a new applicant right a new employee a new vendor a new qualifying but in this case we have applicants for a competitive process and so I actually wonder if we have to have the administrative I know that this language contemplates an administrative completeness process but for the let's just look at category three on 10th and then go backwards to the ones in twos um and then in the category three tethered do we do we treat them differently because of the competitive process and can we without being arbitrary and conclusions and and I'm going to it would be an exception to Commissioner Skinner who says the normal process and I trust me Commissioner Skinner I love our normal process I'm just trying to think how we apply it in this um in the in the job that we've been asked to do which is to stand up the sports wage ring not 20 you know luckily that's stood up and running smoothly I come away so I have to say we yes madam chair we have been asked to stand up sports wage ring but we have not been asked to do that by Super Bowl or by March Madness can I can I cut in here madam we did make a decision on a timeline if that needs to be and I acknowledge that I acknowledge that if we need to make that reconsidered and we got we did it with a caveat yeah and my last amendment was based on the number of applicants we got and we've exceeded that but I wanted I want to stick to today's um item on the agenda right now to see if we can work out today's agenda item under the deadline that we adopted you know after 12 hours 13 14 hours of meetings commissioner Maynard madam chair I feel like I've listened a lot here thank you for timing in in in uh full disclosure I may sound like a revolutionary but essentially I think the scariest words in the English language is this is how it's always been done and this is how we did it right and I want to look at what can we do with the charge that we have today I I know that this is tough and I hear what Karen saying and it is and it's weighing on me too but my thought is is there a way that we can find a middle ground here right is there a way that there can be a for a lack of a better term truncated administrative completeness review where there is a check of the application itself I understand there are hundreds of documents that are attached to this application I'm not saying I don't understand that but maybe it's not as deep a look at that to get us to the competitive process right now it gets deeper as we go and I think that's been a theme of our entire discussions over the last few months is the normal process is going to take place the question is when is it taking place and to sound like a broken record here the law definitely contemplated us moving quickly I would say it contemplated us moving before Super Bowl not by Super Bowl so you know I think that we have to we have to find ways to make this process work I don't want to I don't want to you know put public safety at risk at all but I do think that we have to find a way to do this and looking backwards isn't always the best way to do it which is why I you know to your point Commissioner Maynard you know I'm going by what has been presented to us today in this set of regulations as they read today I'm not comfortable with a lot of with a lot of what's in here unless we make some concessions particularly around the timeline you know I am not okay with penalizing an applicant right for not instituting our normal process completely fine with forgoing our normal process as you say given the charge that's before us but I think we have to just work out those fine details I don't I don't want to have an applicant not make the final cut because you know they left an answer blank in their application I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you on that well if they according to the if they do not answer a question then then they get a negative determination of administrative completeness and that application will not go forward so I think this is a good time to pause Todd and Mina can we walk through the regulation as written because what you're hearing is feedback from the commissioner is that it doesn't necessarily reflect the process and and from Director Wells and perhaps Director Lillias it doesn't necessarily reflect what we're looking for based on if we let's just walk through the line by line and see you've heard us you're both talented lawyers see where maybe you can make some suggestions for us because I think we all we may come from different positions but I don't think we're I think we all are absolutely in agreement we no sacrifices of integrity no sacrifice on consumer protections understanding that's a different law understanding that we have lots of processes we can turn to for to inform with also the idea that we might have to pivot on all of this too Christian Hill you haven't weighed in before the two lawyers take over are you all set all set to move forward before we move over to the attorneys that the question that I have because I had what the thought that the commissioner skinner raised which is if we strike the section and then the question of completeness falls entirely on the commission I haven't vetted these before what does that mean can staff who's been here before you know explain to the body of five if we strike that section what does that mean in terms of our work well it's going to fall on us and so I guess I'm trying to see what's the difference in product that gets to us if the answer to fundamental fairness is we strike the process of administrative review by staff and it falls to us is that a layer that we then have to add on to our work or what happens well I think there's there's a lot that was just said and if I may I'll try to address as many of those points as I can as as concisely as I can first of all I think it's important to recognize that the draft before you was designed to cover all three or four if you will categories of licensure it uses the same principles for each one but the the language recognizes that there will be essentially separate processes for each so they need not be identical in all cases but they do have to adhere to the same general principles in the same decision making and that's why they're all set out as they are the the alternate way to do it of course would have been to just write a reg that says for category ones here's the process category twos here's the process and we certainly can do that but there seem to be enough overlap between all of them that that was not the drafting approach that was taken but the exception and we'll get to this shortly of the untethered category threes whereby we do contemplate a competitive process so there were a few additional measures and principles that had to be addressed so for starters I would just make that note the second thing is as far as administrative completeness is concerned it is not included here because we've already always done it that way it's it's there for a specific purpose and this gets commissioner brian I think to your question a little bit if you don't do it which is okay it's not required to be done in any way what what could happen and this might be an unlikely circumstance that something like this would happen given what appear to be the the quality of the applicants we may be looking at but what could happen is that the application deadline approaches an applicant has not completed some type of analysis they don't have certain data that is required so they just don't include it and if there's no administrative completeness review their application would move ahead for evaluation and the commissioners would get to looking at that and say well we don't have anything here can you get me something the whole while that particular applicant would have had an opportunity to be working on that whereas other applicants may have rushed it or moved it along quicker because they knew it had to be submitted so you could create inequities potentially in the quality of the information that comes before you if there's no gatekeeper rule I should just add and this was another point that was made this is intended to be a very high level overview of the application is there something there it's not intended to get into the substance of the quality of the work or whether you believe it or you you're persuaded by it or any of that just that there is something there that's responsive to the question but given the circumstances we are operating under this is an area that you could remove the it's I'd have to spend some time less meaner or Paul commoners has joined us as well I just wanted to make sure everyone has noticed that he is joined and he's a critical part of this drafting process as well just make sure that we recognize that it's there for a specific purpose and it's it's not just something that gets done because it's the way it's always done that's not why it's there and certainly it could be different in the call in the scope or otherwise than we do it in other capacities it certainly doesn't need to be the same as it was in the rfa2 context but it does make sense to have some gatekeeper kind of function when these applications come in though to to Karen's point it does take some amount of time to have someone go through and look just to make sure that all the materials and information have been submit so it's kind of in some ways it's a it's a policy question but there are certain legal risks that you want we would take on if we don't perform any um completeness review ma'am chef I may add to that um just to you know maybe a couple of clarifications or options that might be helpful here as well um I completely agree with everything Todd just said it it's certainly we understand that this takes some work and we spoke frequently with the IAB in preparing this you know because of that we knew that this would be a lot of that work would fall on them um the the one thing to keep in mind I think Todd alluded to this is the different processes already have some distinctions um in terms of what is going to be required in the application and when and and perhaps that is a clarification just as I think we correctly made that clarification above about the different deadlines for portions of the application perhaps making that clarification here as well might be a good part of the solution at least if not the whole solution because for instance uh where you are going to have the competitive process if you're relying or allowing reliance and again I know it's a separate issue on an attestation or certification type approach by applicants for suitability what is going to be submitted at the outset uh may be different than what then whether you need all of that all at once up front so you know what what a complete application is will look different applicant to applicant and of course for category ones in particular you have a lot of the information um are ready right so you're not you're not looking for that so that's one one potential solution to it um as Todd said I don't think there's a um there is a requirement to do this but there are some very good reasons to it to actually to put applicants on equal footing um I certainly um you know I think you heard director Lillio say you know this this the the review is not intended to be unnecessarily nitpicky I think that the you know the commission's direction is that an opportunity cure deficiencies will always happen one of the things for instance the RFA one and two process had is just instead of tying it to a deadline it tied it to 14 20 days whatever I think we've said it seven or 14 days from notice of the deficiency so you maybe have a little bit more time if you get stuff last minute I don't know if those are the right timelines given the number of applications just suggesting it as a model so there are ways to deal with that I would say though on on the whole the idea is to have an application that gives you what you need to be able to do the assessment and if you don't have that and you're chasing folks for pieces of it um wanted it has an unfairness but also make great more time while you're setting up to do other work in the review process and I think that's the concern that I that I would just have and that's probably more for staff to address but that's that's sort of one of the concerns as we're drafting uh chair I if I can add on to what Mina mentioned is that okay absolutely you know I think it's the heart of what we're talking about is you know what you need for the competitive review and what you as a body have discretion to determine what's important or not important for that competitive review and then you know on the other side is what the IEB and the licensing division is used to and trained to evaluate for purposes of suitability I would feel very uncomfortable asking staff to be reviewing the applications with discretionary decisions about what is meaningful and what's not meaningful they are trained to look for material omissions omissions that can impact what the investigation you know whether the investigation can proceed so you know I'm just uncomfortable asking them to expand feel like that would be an unfair position to put them in to try to evaluate what would be important for your competitive review so if there's you know some way you know I know you're talking about a process you know is there some other ground you know I just don't think it's with the kind of review that staff is able to do yeah madam chair if I could if I could just call did you want to weigh in or are you all set madam chair I apologize I wasn't able to join for the very beginning of this discussion but I know that you've been in the best of hands with Todd and Mina and I have nothing to add on this at the moment so thank you so much so in other context you know with my kids where I have to go online and fill out forms all the time and you get the little red asterisk that says this one's mandatory you know you can skip some of these others it's up to you and this is what I had in my head too and I was thinking about this Florida because to your point that's that's not your role to make those determinations and do we as a commission have the ability at this point to flag so much of that application to say these are mandatory we want everything but if you don't do these 10 you will be deemed deficient and you will not go past 1121 oh there's that we could do that we also first we would all have to I appreciate that that's another that would be an in between I guess one of the the questions I had for my league over this point of view you know keeping commissioner of Ryan's good idea to the side for a second let's just say that there is some kind you know when we get the applications and I and maybe it's to to be fair you know some applicant might just have failed to include certain things so that are really obvious oh you know the document isn't attached and give just no judgment whatsoever I do understand that's time alone so let's just say we don't even have any and this is not necessarily my opinion I'm just saying that scenario there's really no review of the untethered for for fullness or completeness at all if they came to us directly and whatever they submit in a process that we're really familiar with and you know all of us have had a lot of experience in big big procurements big selection processes you get the application and somebody just fails to answer something or not attach something can we assess that as part of our over evaluation or do you think that's too much risk to commissioner of Ryan's earlier point how do we address that um is that could could it work that way or is there's a reason why you don't see that working mean a ton and Paul that can't work I think some of the difficulty we're having here is that it's difficult to envision every scenario that may present itself and what exact information might be deficient or omitted so we try to create you know this prophylactic kind of process that covers it all but I critical why would we want them to advance that's my question well I mean because you know people make mistakes as you pointed out and you know someone may have forgotten to submit something so it depends what it is and maybe we would want to go back to them and say hey you forgot to submit whatever it was can you please get it in um so it it kind of depends what it is um I suppose in many respects commissioners I mean are you going to add in I was but I see director Wells um has thank you what I'm hearing is that it really sort of this comes down to what is the purpose of the administrative completeness review is it to basically knock out ones that are not complete so that the commission isn't utilizing resources in evaluating one that's not complete or is it to give applicants an opportunity to cure defects and you know I see sort of those two competing interests and within the competitive process and the non-competitive process is Kathy Madam Chair you mentioned before it's very different I mean Derek in the procurement process do you normally cure deficiencies no for grants for anything your deadlines your deadline right and that's why you set deadlines and you know if I start looking at what's proposed here especially for the competitive side not for um the ones that are basically in legislation going to get a license and we just have to make sure they have the best information everything we want to hold them accountable to but for the competitive side you've got quite a pool of operators um so if we've already extended what we initially said from 30 days to 45 days um I would highly suggest against touching any of those until the deadline has passed the commission has already said they want to take on the role of evaluating these with the exception of the piece that the IEB is going to do from the financial stability and the integrity side of it um if they didn't if they forgot to attach something it's a five million dollar feed for the license it's a $200,000 application fee I just look at it as you've got plenty of other competitors out there that put their best foot forward they didn't and we talked about this the last time around if you're looking to put everyone on equal footing with the with the truncated timeline the more times you start letting them change or update information not clarify but actually add information you're adding more risk more questions into your process so for my suggestion would be get rid of your risk by getting rid of the administrative completeness in touching any of the competitive until until you actually open up the the deadline passes and you have a chance to open up the applications and that is the commission's responsibility to do some of this review and if information is not present well then they don't get as good a score and Derek I you articulated much more succinctly but thank you that's that that's my point of view that's my recommendation but I do not have a lot of agree I'm just going based on no make sense to me but that aligns with my thinking and again I could be persuaded otherwise but it might just be because of my own experience that that that's how I'm dealing this too why wouldn't we go that route commissioner skinner are you leaning in commissioner skinner yeah I yeah I'm just trying to get my thoughts together you know I hear what's what's being said you know but I I don't I don't agree that you know an applicant's failure to to you know complete a portion of the application or question on the application indicates their inability to put their best foot forward as Todd said people make mistakes you know we in my experience I have seen applications from you know the biggest licensees right coming in but inevitably on every single application it doesn't matter how many times they've submitted the application to massachusetts doesn't matter how many times they've submitted the same application to another jurisdiction there will be some information missing whether it's you know the fingerprint packet whether it's you know the question that gets answered see attachment a what they forget to include attachment a we will see many of those types of that's my prediction omissions and obviously I you know I would not consider those to be intentional so I think we have to build in some safeguards for those applicants the stakes are just way too high to reject an application because of a simple human error so whatever process that gets decided on today I really do hope that we are taking into account those scenarios so that's really really well framed too so the derrick and commissioner skinner's thoughts is there some kind of a process that's different I know we use the term administrative completeness in this regulation and that triggered something that's fairly familiar but not necessarily the same here so we have to just is there something caring that's in between that would be helpful here yeah so for process listening to commissioner skinner's concerns I guess the only the other option would be to derrick's point you don't touch them until the deadline and they're all passed but I guess theoretically you could bake in to the commission's review that the commission can request you know when they request supplemental information it can also include completion of things in the form I don't know you know what's what's I've deferred illegal on what's the most risk in that scenario but then it's the commissioners open it up and I would assume Derek just like any other procurement you could ask for supplemental information and a procurement review but I am not an expert in this area I defer to legal if that's a problem and instead of the IEB doing a review when the commissioners do are doing their review to commissioner skinner's point that if they you as a body do not want to reject an applicant because they forgot to submit an attachment that you could allow them to supplement with that attachment and things like that and would that cure this issue yeah my my fear is that if we don't agree on what those are that there's going to be an argument of disparate treatment that someone says well you know mine was this which was pretty ministerial but you didn't let me supplement it and yet you said to them you can go ahead and supplement on whatever there was bias there so unless we said these are the ministerials or everybody was allowed to supplement you know I I'm concerned and then there's another I forget who brought this up the idea that someone squeaks it in knowing they're going to have some more time to get a better foot forward I certainly want to want to say you know you have the right to amend it or you know I would be concerned about fairness in that regard too I'm sorry I mean I think I jumped in right friend no it's all right certainly no I I think you if it's okay Madam Chair I could sort of weigh in on that piece the there's a couple of things that I'm hearing and I you know sort if you were to do a process where you don't have any completeness review and you were weighing it as part of your process which actually is what I believe I you don't understand Derek to be saying you could rely on your cooperation regulation which would be 212 if you ask for something you don't get it or if you ask for information you don't get it but as Commissioner O'Brien saying I actually within the procurement world which is one of the things we do a lot of as well that is always a concern because you get you know the equivalent of that in for instance construction bids of unbalanced bids where someone says I think it's going to be zero dollars and I'll get back to you when it's more you get the background information that was missing the decam certifications are missing that's that's one world the non prevailing way exactly and and every every single qualified under those you wouldn't be a qualified bidder if you didn't have those submitted under and you know under under construction law you'd be disqualified right away whether you didn't ask dot or decam decalification so much back to Commissioner O'Brien's early point do we like there's no room to not include this and I know there are concerns about this but but you know just to put it one of that and we we can perhaps try to clarify this language but part of the reason that this is intended to be an administrative completeness review and I in drafting resisted a temptation to call it bureaucratic review because that that has such a bad connotation is that is the intent here it is not intended in any way to be to be as as director lilio said to be asking staff to make judgment calls about what isn't isn't there it's a way to make sure that there's a complete package as you know just as a thing to weigh if you are going to take on as a commission weighing every application and what's in and not in your your now it's harder for you to separate yourself from what an applicant can consider a truly administrative review because you're also the decision maker and so there is some value to having someone take a look at the applications um even if it's a completely curse if you're going to have any review to have it be truly administrative that you have you have someone check to see that stuff is there to put it very simply because if you're not doing that your I do think there is more of a legal risk that that you have an applicant saying you know it's a commission truly asking for more information or allowing this applicant to provide more information because they missed something ministerial or because even if it was a must it was unintelligible it may wanted more time to do it etc you just there's as Todd pointed out there's just too many permutations to really account for them all um and I I guess where I'm coming to is in some ways you'd be better off either relying entirely on it's either you either did everything you're supposed to and if you didn't maybe you'll get scored different or I use score in a small s in a way that you'll get weighed differently um as Derek is suggesting or you have some kind of truly administrative bureaucratic non substantive you know non qualitative review however many adjectives you want me to add to that uh chair we we're talking really about two kind of categories of applications the competitive application that was designed specifically designed for the you know when we find ourselves in sports wagering context we're also talking about the applications that arise out of the scoping process the BEDs the multi-jurisdictionals in the massachusetts supplement and those go directly to suitability they'll be utilized by the IEB for preliminary suitability uh as well as for uh you know the full uh the full suitability uh so I think it's important to distinguish between those two uh categories you know with the first one you know something missing may go to the quality of the application uh for the for the second one uh very difficult for the IEB to engage in an investigative process uh without a an application that meets the completeness administrative completeness standards it's all one application but I understand what you're saying Loretta and that was where I said I wanted you know could we divide it out you know later to go back and um or at the same time over evaluating you getting everything that you need on those for administrative completeness um but Karen were you gonna weigh in well and I say I think it's really interesting that we spent about an hour thinking about how all the applicants won't get any of this right that's really what we've talked about that they're going to make so many mistakes that we we don't have a system to accommodate them respectfully Madam Chair it's more about fundamental fairness and equity for me than people being missed absolutely thank you and then I was and I was going to explain that I do think our applicants are going to really work hard to get it all right right um and so what I think I'm hearing is when there is an inadvertent error so when I think about what Mina's proposing is is it a cursory review Loretta how many how many touch points would the licensing department if that's the right division have to do with this particular application the whole application all the components to complete a touch of to say that it's that all the attachments are there doesn't matter how they're filled out because that's substantive that's judgment I think Mina saying strictly administrative or bureaucratic I have no problem with that problem that word how many touches for that about ministerial completeness that's a good word too thanks general application well then no the one that we for the that we the 28 or whatever that we're 29 that we're facing is that what you're talking about that had the scoping survey the application the multi jurisdiction on the DD well I don't have that number in front of me you know how many oh how many touch points overall like applicant like attachments and everything do we know yeah I mean there are well I I'd want to go back and confirm and be absolutely accurate but there are you know there are attachments depending on who the applicant is whether it's a foreign person a domestic person we've got checklists for the different categories to be you know working guides for the licensing specialists they do go through each question make sure that each question is answered and they make sure that the attachments are there I I'm just talking not even answering the questions could be could we all agree on that answering the questions is different than attachments are we also going to say not answering questions is something that we would give them a chance to complete well it's it's tough because some basic questions have to be there or fundamentally you can't proceed like this goes back to the question I had is did we you know can we flag the bare minimum saying these questions have got to be filled in attachments these attachments must be there that defines complete ministerially if you don't do that you don't advance you don't advance and that in my my world I think of that as the musts and the shoulds the musts if you don't have the musts you're out right Commissioner O'Brien you and I both know that language so we didn't do that I don't believe in the application we didn't start so I don't know to our lawyers is that advisable now to go back and and do you know stars that are required if they fail to answer it they're disqualified that is not an unusual an unusual construct does it mean that you know people can make mistakes in human nature absolutely and I get that but I'm just wondering where we are where do we where are we going in terms of I'm Brad I'm going to turn to you because we haven't heard from Mr Hill I I'm not going to lie to you madam chair I am absorbing all of this because a lot of information has been brought up in the last hour and a half and I'm trying to digest it all I was trying to think of a way to share my opinion and Derek came up and basically shared it you know very eloquently how I feel about this and how we should move forward but I as the discussion has moved forward I don't want to penalize an applicant because of maybe their size compared to the you know the bigger applicants who don't have the staff if you will to put forth something because maybe they're a startup I you know again I don't know and I would hate to be put in a position where we penalize that applicant but what I haven't heard today is how do we address that exactly I I feel you you you got to get in your applications by the time that we've set we had a huge discussion about that we debated it we voted on it and that's what we decided right or wrong that's what we decided and I feel we should continue down that road but I do want to make sure that somehow we have something in place where we don't penalize an applicant for making a mistake and let's be honest I'm new to this as a lot of us are and I'm learning how applications are put forward in in many fields and that's why we have these discussions and they're always so great and so good but I just haven't heard yet other than the idea that Commissioner O'Brien put forth with the application if you don't fill in this field you don't move forward I can't buy a ticket I can't buy a ticket to a concert without putting in all the fields and you can't move forward and then if I go for a student loan I can't move forward until I filled out a bcd and e so I guess my question would be do we have a process do we have the technology to do that is it too late because of the you know the timing that we've set for so I wish I had a silver bullet here madam chair but I don't but my biggest concern is you know not penalizing an applicant for making a mistake and not having it come before us for discussion when it could be a very good company so commissioner hill I'm in total agreement with you it's and and and dealing with also the idea of not in any way if it ends with us somehow developing a risk because we have to be fair to everyone so Nina and Paul and Todd um first off Ken is is it even realistic to clarify the must or the asterisks areas of our application you contemplated that somehow in this regulation because you've had the executive director somehow making a determination that they could disqualify which is what commissioner skinner brought up you know a good hour ago and it was an important point none of us want to see that done unfairly right because of but we also are probably all of us are familiar with those those fundamentals that are required in order to proceed and then even with the last fundamental at what point do we close it out we can't keep on hearing because it just keeps on snowball Nina Todd I I'll defer to you first I have one one or two thoughts but oh I'm sorry well I guess by my reaction is I think it's an interesting idea to kind of identify things that are absolute requirements for submission and those that are more optional but preferred I in just looking through the application though I think it will be exceedingly difficult to draw those distinctions because every line on the application just about was included because it was considered to be important and so I'm not sure you know that you could draw a distinction between um you know your advertising plan and your geo fencing you know understanding and where you how are you going to decide which ones absolutely have to be submitted so I think that that's that could be an exercise that would bear some fruit but I think it would be very difficult to do in this case and Laura you can't really do that with the two other forms either correct chair that's exactly right I mean I get it that first form that's you know discretionary the commission's evaluative process but the other forms are are the suitability forms and they've been vetted for years and we need everything in that form to perform a suitability review okay so the month should go yeah madam chair just a different way of maybe coming at this um you know assuming that the musts the musts and shoulds would be difficult to do because I think it's I agree with what was just said it's it's almost it's it's probably not wise at all for the suitability forms and for the others it might be hard and and you all worked hard on on getting good applications out there just just to throw out as a straw proposal um one of the things that was in the in the um in the gaming regulations and I you know not saying it because it was because good the pass is always perfect but this this may work in this case was as I mentioned an actual timeline to cure deficiencies as opposed to that wasn't tied to necessarily a deadline but was a set period of days if the commission based on this conversation is going towards a ministerial review of the applications where applicants will be told you missed an answer to number 23 and the attachment to 24 I'm making up numbers I'm not sure are there you get an email or you get whatever back that says that you have in the gaming context so seven days from the filing of that 14 uh in some cases you respond you don't respond that's one threshold another so that's sort of at very easy there isn't a whole live discretion to it there may not be any further chance to it then the question is if you fail to respond that gives you a lot more ability to say there was failure to cooperate failure to respond to information requested by the commission so you get both the notice of what you missed and a very short cure period or a relatively short cure period that works within your review process without having multiple deadlines floating out there it's that's certainly up to you you know that whether you do that I'm imagining it would kind of have to be kind of for the point Derek said before be very hard if you're getting folks who submit on the application deadline you know and folks you certainly don't want you don't want to encourage it to be I guess I would say you should do it after the deadline because if you don't you might have folks who put in applications to see will they think this is enough and and then hear from you as opposed to you're actually reviewing it for administrative completeness at that point and director Wells I feel here at discomfort because you're trying to figure out who's going to actually execute that that exercise of bureaucratic medium and then sorry it also just bear in mind it impacts the timeline we built in these four buckets and so to have time to do the administrative completeness review on potentially 29 of these and then also to give them time to cure the deficiencies and then to have them that those deficiencies review that adds to the timeline as well so just want to prepare you like we should be doing this review first thing we need to get a time go through I know that that doesn't minimize the work involved but I just wondering I'm wondering if because I thought about that within five days or seven days you know you could curing it but I'm wondering if there's a way to and again this doesn't necessarily address executive director Wells's concerns about the time commitment but in terms of the language of the reg if it was changed to something like you know ministerial review to make people better more comfortable with that but if you went down to 1b where it talks about upon the issuance of a negative determination of administrative completeness ed or designee will notify the applicant of either negative determination or the omission sees in the application by email do we strike so much of that that says any application shall not proceed further um provided that and then our b1 and b2 separate do they become c and d where it says you know what they're going to look at it you're going to get it you can get a yes you're moving forward you get a no we're going to tell you what was deficient if the deadline has not come and gone you can cure those deficiencies if the deadline has come and gone you need to go to the commission and ask for permission to cure the deficiency the only issue there are like uh commissioner brian is that if i if our team gets inundated yeah like they all come in the day before right disparity you know there's no way you can do them all at once right not that it necessarily solves this issue at all but of course i think it's important to bear in mind that we can do this by category so you can look at the category one applications first and start moving those through the process and then move on to the others so we don't necessarily have to look at them all at the same time that could create some disparity issues though for sure councilor goes i think that director valis if i'm understanding correctly when you talk about the timeline and your and your plan you're you're more thinking of the untethered category three because that's the that's the longest time line that's the one that you're thinking that's the most difficult to manage um i don't want to talk to you about am i right correct because that that process aside from doing all the regulations doing all the review you have the commissioners delving into those applications and doing the review and then we also had the public portion of the review um which may take a while okay a couple of ideas one um providing additional help okay so let's think about that um we you know are there some extraordinary um folks out there who would be able to come on the team in a temporary fashion and might actually join the team later um to help in this review process um second would they be distributed to the commission comprehensively with the administrative review while the curing is occurring so that we have them we start reading them and you know hey while we're reading want to say oh no this that might be missing but it's going to probably come our way through an administrative review is that putting us at risk i don't think no that's i think that is workable i don't i don't think we necessarily have to wait per se yeah so i'm working on it i'm what i said my brain's going you'd have to fit that in so the the way the timeline was set up the applications come in on the 21st and i think there was the period of time um you did do an internal review uh and then the first action by the commissioners would be the um you know the review of the category ones and potentially the category twos but still got to get more information for you on the category twos um you also have the opportunity to review the tethered even though um there's not a competitive process they still need to be licensed they still have the same go live date according to the commission's directive but they still need to go through this process so you could do some work on the um on the the untethered during that time period um but it you know it might if you if the commission was willing to sort of wait on the process to um evaluate the applicants for the tethered for the untethered but um i think kasha brian one way kasha brian you're thinking let's have a good i i i feel like i misheard um i would need her to say that again because i i i almost feel like a tethered and an untethered got turned around maybe that's quite possible no i think what you were saying karen is that all of these are coming in at the same time we're going to be working on category one category two category one and category two's tethered um category three applicants and then we have the untethered and so you're saying we could um but those would have to be checked for an administrative completeness as well if we are concerned about that those won't be competitive so we would to the whatever extent we are looking for those to be or they are or we would not be as concerned about completeness there well they don't have so for example most of the category ones they don't you know they've already been found suitable when mass lp so they don't have their um their that's new they would have to submit but they then their applications would be subject to an administrative review too or you're doing yeah yeah because it's all going to be new to you you will not be starting to see to work on on their um background checks and in any way or start doing it suitability work on those tethered category three you will be well the exception madam chair is that because there's certainty with the tethered mobile operators we're going to go ahead with the uh individual qualifier suitability because we know we're going to have to do that it doesn't have that that's what i thought yeah thank you that's what i thought so they aren't being treated differently right so i guess i'm back to that deadline day um could we review the un tethered applications pending um you know just begin reviewing them understanding that someone is looking for administrative or ministerial and ministerial commission completeness and is that sloppy and messy well it depends and this has been the conversation when we do for example the you know as maretta's mentioned you know if you do the beds they're frequently are things missing if page is not initial i just want to prepare the commission that administrative completeness process could take a while with 29 of these so um you know i recognize the you know adding more resources um could help given that we're doing suitability of the does that help us at all can it be reviewed during the process well again for example um and laura to chime in here for the purposes of the uh report that the commission is going to get from the ieb or the suitability of the applicants for the competitive process you we have the conversations more you're going to look at litigation history compliance history um where they're licensed you're going to do some financial stability review and then open source check you'd have to have that information in the bd you know like if they missed one of those you know you either say you know what you didn't even fill out the form you didn't you know indicate whether you have litigation history or compliance history we either have the model right you know that's just not complete and you're you're out or um you'd go back and have them at least fill that out because otherwise the ieb can't give the report because we're relying on self-reporting sorry would any of that information allow them to better their application or would it just be to give you the information you need to know whether they're financially suitable or whether they meet the integrity so how does that change how does that change the scoring process because you'd either say you're out yeah what you could do right because you didn't fill it out so we can't make a determination well you could have theoretically company a and company b they're they're both suitable they can both operate but one company a has you know an absolutely clean record and compliance they've been operating for 20 years and whatever jurisdiction and they have no issues company b they have you know operating the same amount of time but a number so the commission could compare relative suitability yeah and um but if they didn't provide that one of the companies did the other one you can say i can't grade them as well because i don't know about them right it's right so that that's how the applications go it's you grade it on what's in the application right right so it's the you're doing it you're you're missing information at your own peril and if you apply for a school you have to fill it out right right sometimes you make a mistake but if you miss the application deadline you don't get back in high school students are held to that standard commissioner reinerd initially about an hour and a half ago when i spoke i was kind of going the same please chime in more frequently the same um kind of the same line of as commissioner bryan but the more i've heard this and we put together uh psa on why these applicants should make sure that their applications are really really good two hour long one um the more i think that derrick's right on just spot on right um is is you know let's not do it let's not do it half that's you know loretta you said after i spoke that it would be unfair to the staff to have them go and try to grade which questions are important which ones aren't the commission well let's just you know get the application in front of us and make a decision i mean that's that's the more i'm hearing the more i'm leaning that way there it doesn't mean we have to disqualify them commissioners they can't weigh it they get master you know a vibration but things can can offset i guess the one piece i'd ask is i know that the regulation allows for us to get supplemental information um and that's where we want to be careful right not to be unfair to get one applicant who didn't you know really do a complete job and the others did but but even if we get them they would still have just a little bit of a you know a weight less but we still could ask for that information acknowledging you know what it just it just wasn't as as complete and and your in your little scoring is reflects that but i wonder i i guess i'm i'm hearing Mina and Todd and you know not heard from paul but he agrees with his colleagues that this there's this benefit to the earlier review even though we've really spent and we do have to take a break here a good deal of time wrestling with it since commissioner hill says without really seeing a solution could the commission just take it on first of what what does that just just make two greater benefits may i be heard on the suitability side if if you if you did and i'm not speaking to the risk associated with that right if you did take the applications as they came in you made your selections of up to seven based on what came in without the completeness review you would award you based on this competitive review and at some point full you know full suitability is going to happen and i don't have a full application and i would need some kind of reg to address that that is a that is a challenge point but could we ask for them to cure that during our evaluation process so that you get the complete sorry and we do need to take a lunch break i think few of us are fading director wells yeah i'm just thinking loretta the commission could condition the license on you know on the complete application so they can't put this they can't put the switch they can't launch until they have all of the materials that loretta needs for suitability so that would that would mean that they won't hold them up the others but it could hold up their own launch yeah right what do you think about that director lios you know i think we have a lot of resources in the licensing division i'm concerned that this is a lot of back and forth and you know transmitting incomplete transmitting application that hasn't gone through a completeness review it's it's a lot it's not what i originally anticipated you know they're it could have an impact on the time okay commissioners i think we need to take a lunch break um does that make sense right now we can all think about director lios's last point and the other points that were raised a and k folks is that okay if we take a break it's two o'clock commissioners just i i just so you know i have a commitment with my kids at 445 tonight so i will have to jump off if we're not done by then just as a heads up okay um richard's lunch break everybody okay with that how about leaving turn 30 then madam chair i have a 2 p.m. that i will rejoin right after just as a heads up let them know that it's a relief it's an old colleague of yours so i'll let him know oh i'm happy to join a nice thank you so much minna for all your input okay um we'll rejoin it 230 thanks everyone thanks knows kathy i'll be back in one second please go ahead without me i'll be right back sure um we're going to reconvene uh meeting the 398 of master's gaming commission we are holding this virtually so i'm going to do a roll call good afternoon commissioner ryan good afternoon i'm here good afternoon commissioner hill hello i'm here good afternoon commissioner skinner i'm here you changed your background and and good afternoon commission me i'm here great thank you so um we need to return to our discussion around the um uh reg that's presented before us at 218.0 way um and one thought i had is that maybe we should clarify is that as you know our application right now by regulation is comprised of four four parts the scoping survey uh our evaluation application which indicates all the um the um um issues that we felt were really important for our evaluation process and then there are the two standard uh suitability documents that IEB is very familiar with and take it they routinely but without it being not complicated deal with BED and the multi jurisdictional form one thing i think maybe it's really important to clarify is that i don't believe IEB has to do any administrative completeness for us on our form that's not a form they're familiar with that's not a form that they would evaluate but they are familiar with are the other two forms which actually are really pertinent in part the BED mostly for a portion of our evaluation and then of course the the forms you know jurisdictional as well as BED for the ultimate suitability review so I am wondering if we could um I'd love to start calling the question if we could think about this that um we uh segregate and I know Mina's not here but Todd is here and and perhaps Paul is here that we segregate and we don't worry about administrative completeness for our um our portion of the application and then the team and its normal process the licensing team somehow does an administrative completeness in whatever form Director Wells and Director Lilios thinks is necessary for this the work that's before us and we get our applications on deadline and start to review them and then we would go in you know reviewing for our own intake and then we would go into our evaluative process we will unless I don't know if I'm wrong but I don't think we were going to be reviewing the BED and multi-jurisdictional documents themselves so much um that's really uh something that we would rely on expertise of IEB to evaluate um so I think that we really could look at it differently and I would adopt Eric Lenin's approach and would make that recommendation around so we could get going these applications are going to be coming in on time the majority are going to get it you know right um and you know we are all empathetic about human um you know errors we could evaluate those and in with respect to our application as a commission and Director Lilios and team could could do what they normally do in the course of their administrative completeness process Director Wells what do you think Cameron before you jump in just for completeness Kathy and for the public the third um or the additional form is the Massachusetts supplement form yeah and that is it's actually so it's really five pieces we should have we were combining it thank you thank you Loretta so again to correct the record from earlier this morning it does include the Massachusetts supplement so um Karen Director Wells thoughts on that or Director Lilios well you know Karen and I were speaking at the at the break um that would be helpful to the licensing team to remove the review of that evaluative uh piece from their responsibility your correct chair that is not a form that they're familiar with you know even to this day very few if any of them have have ever seen it and we don't have a work aids on that the way we do uh with with the other pieces and the process that Derek Lennon laid out it's really I'm sure that Derek was thinking you know that that competitive don't want to put words in your mouth Derek but that that component of the um for evaluating of course the other two um it sounds as though the industry is probably more familiar with the opportunity to maybe correct when they leave out something with respect to the multi-jurisdictional and the form in the in the uh BED Karen would that work yeah I mean I'm less concerned about uh sort of the errors for the uh on the applications on behalf of the licensees I just want Loretta to get whatever she needs in order for her to do her job and so Loretta what I'm hearing you saying is that an administrative completeness for the BEDs and then ultimately the um multi-jurisdictional mess up would be helpful to you um it it would you know but I have been very uncomfortable with the idea of any operations commencing without the ability of the IEB to engage immediately in a full suitability review to try to get deficiencies cured uh after an award and operation commences is not a good position to be in so could that happen simultaneously while we're starting the review of the um evaluation process first reviewing it independently and then I think you can begin it I think again it it's it's also dependent on how many applications we actually get now I realize we're doing scoping on a lot of them but you know to be fair they haven't had to submit any any uh application fee until the application fee comes in I don't think we know for sure how many how many we have we might get far fewer than we expect so if we get far fewer it's a much more reasonable thing to do the deficiency letters um and then uh have an opportunity for them say 30 days to cure their deficiencies but I agree with Loretta that um you know having an understanding that if they have not submitted a full application and complete application they should not be allowed to operate operate but in terms of getting through from the time of submission of the application to the time when uh first heard to do the suitability is there time in there to complete whatever administrative completeness that you need to do to get everything that the Loretta and team can do for their job to get their job done and and that that time would be between November 21st right when the applications are due until mid-march is that do I have that right early March for the untethered right or potentially handing out a license to somebody before we know their suitability right am I hearing that correctly well I guess the question is are you licensing them at the time you narrow it down to seven or are you making a preliminary finding and then you don't license them later I don't feel comfortable giving a license to somebody until suitability is determined so I never I never envisioned doing it the other way I mean the narrowing down to me was never a licensing we do that though all the time so it's not getting not for operators you know not for the operators no but we need some level of suitability I guess I'm trying to figure out as written this reg does not differentiate subsections of that application and send some off to IEV it says the application is a whole so what does what do we need to change in this reg that makes it clear that IEV continues to do their administrative review and what if any is happening to the four corners of the document that we posted as the application itself and the questions that we want so um Karen you asked a question our Commissioner on Brian asked a question of you in terms of suitability maybe we should just go through what the plan was um under the so let's just talk about the untethered the other one's sort of pulled into the process untethered the applications do on uh November 21st Loretta is saying that they they would do the scoping the folks would have to submit their BEDs and multi-jurisdictionals on a before that date yeah at that point November 21st cat one cat two the commission can get all of the uh general application but the IEV would uh and the licensing division within the IEV would review the BED the mass-up and potentially hold off on the multi-jurisdictionals because of the time frame but at least for the BED do a suitability do a uh administrative completeness review and do a deficiency letter so so do we need to rewrite this reg to make it clear that they are not including in that administrative completeness review what you've called the general application right because I didn't know the lawyers can I pause for that let's not be so tied to the language in the wreck I think our lawyers our legal team is going to hear us and they're going to revise this reg to be voting on this today or are we hammering out language because to me the language in the reg matters today then if we're voting on it well we so I'm looking for the legal team to be hearing us and see if they can help us get language today and it would be ideal to move on this yes so that's why I asked that question on but I would say we need to rewrite that word rather than going through each word and us uh rewriting could we have a legal team kind of hear us and give us I just want Madam Chair with all due respect I'm looking for an answer to the question on whether or not as written it reflects what's being described procedurally in one it does not appear to be consistent with that process so that needs to be redrafted yes I agree with you yes okay yeah I think we all agree on that um and I think even from the very beginning of today's discussion we agree it needs to be rewritten so that's why I've been resisting going back to the language so but has been proposed now is a little is a difference and so if I could just make sure Executive Director Wells if you could if you could frame what you're thinking you're hearing or has worked out and then the legal team because I know how good they are maybe you can help us think about crafting and if we could get language today that would be ideal otherwise we'll move on to the other sections see what comes out at the end of the of our discussion is that um what we're discussing right now is the option of an administrative completeness review for the BED the multi-generational and the mass sub and that the plan would be when the applications are received then commission gets the general application the licensing division reviews the BED the mass sub and the multi-jurisdictional personal history disclosure form they create for each one that's submitted a deficiency letter let's assume they all have something everyone gets a deficiency letter they would have a period of time say 30 days to cure their deficiencies if they don't do that within the 30 days then they either are out or you could hold up an operator license until it's completed but loretta shouldn't be in a I understand she should not be in a position where they have to go do a suitability investigation over the next year a full suitability without a completed application I think that's fair I think all of us are nodding our heads on that absolutely I'll agree with that correct right so the issue the issue I see is is the number if all 29 are are actually going to submit we may want to have a conversation about about how long that's going to take or resources but if you know hypothetically only 10 or 11 or 12 that that might be different and then we can probably fit it in with the timeline so we may just have to take a pause and be aware that as things progress we might need to take a look at the timeline and resources can I ask another question if the applications come in early are we able to work on them in this way without any kind of compromise I'm asking the legal team in other words could this process that director wells just outline commence upon the receipt and not just the depth first of all I just wanted to be clear make sure that I was clear as to what the proposal is so essentially and then the madam chair of course I'd like to answer your question so there's really if I'm hearing this correctly there would just be an administrative completeness review for the so-called suitability applications and not the general application and that suitability administrative completeness review would be done by the division of licensing and they would release any deficiency letter that's necessary but the general applications would just come in it'd be immediately transmitted to the commissioners and then the chair's question is essentially as I understand it can the commissioners commence reviewing the applications when they come in or IDV also commenced its work well certainly the IEB could I don't think there's any issue there I don't believe there's any issue with the commission beginning to review applications as they come in obviously you shouldn't be deliberating them and I know that wasn't the question or scoring them in any way until you've had an opportunity to have all the applications before you but I'm not seeing any harm in starting to review them when they come in but I asked a question around scoping the scoping survey last week whether commissioners could be those and you raised a concern so what's the difference in the scoping survey and the applications I'm sorry commissioner I didn't hear your question so I had asked last meeting whether the commissioners could review the scoping surveys um on a rolling basis as they come as they interrupt um the our computer has gone down so we need a pause so we can we configure streaming we'll just pause our technical glitch we'll figure this out in like two minutes all right I think we appear to be re-streaming so you guys should be good okay commissioner steering we're making a point so I realized that the deadline for the scoping survey has come and gone so we have them fall um but I had expressed interest last meeting in reviewing those on a rolling basis as they came in and I'm taught I believe you advised against that but I'm hearing something completely different for purposes of the application and I'm just wondering what the what the what the difference is point um and I apologize but I don't remember exactly what I said about that what I what I would say neither I just remember it was no I think I wasn't sure that commissioners would be reviewing the scoping documents because those are really for IDPs um purposes so I did I raised that issue um and also that it was a pre-react but um I don't know if it was about rolling basis so much I can't remember that Todd yeah I think the underlying issue with all of this would be kind of any bias that we might inject into the process and protecting against that so where we are right now uh based on my understanding and I think we're all on the same page here if there is no administrative completeness review and let me be clear about that I think that's an important component of the of the general I'm talking just the general application not the uh the suitability documents if there's no administrative completeness review there I don't see harm in reviewing the applications as they come in as as long as you don't begin scoring them um or forming you know orders or any evaluating them in substance you're just looking at them to see what's there and just by way of contract can I just ask you about Todd in the procurement context they don't like you're looking at them till the deadline has come and gone so are you talking about we we can get a dump on the 21st or the 22nd are you talking about rolling and if so what's the distinction between the concern and procurement reviews before the deadline but not this well I think that that I'm not an expert in procurements but my my sense is that the concern is that uh you would uh potentially bias uh future uh applicants or by beginning your review too early and perhaps forming opinions and whatnot let's take that off the table but IEB could start its work on a rolling basis without concern well certainly the IEB could um and I yeah that's good that's that that's all we need to say we don't need to look at the modern rolling basis when they all come into us the evaluation then we'll start that process commissioners do you agree with that except that depending on how many applications we have you know it would be good to get a head start on reviewing them if we're expected to meet the timeline that's been set forth ideally um that would be great but if this comes with some risk then we'll just maybe have to work a little bit later hours or something like that um and uh but IEB that gives IEB access to them if they come in early Karen right but I'm hearing you know I mean you raised a really good point in the procurement world you wouldn't get them normally early but for IEB's work getting them early would help them out Karen do you see this that is helpful yeah and it's important just to distinguish the suitability process which is not competitive in nature there's a standard that the IEB is reviewing and ultimately the commission to determine whether suitability has been met so I really I and I would let Loretta chime in on this if I have this wrong but I don't think it really matters what order they come in or you know whether one is more suitable than the other in theory you either are suitable or you are not so Commissioner Skinner to be clear I'd love the extra time too but just Todd raising that flag makes me nervous do I have um I don't want to take that off the table for folks um I'm being conservative there uh I think Commissioner Ryan flag the issues uh do you want to explore a rolling basis more given Commissioner Skinner's fair point for our piece or should we wait for the deadline maybe asking me that question or legal everybody yeah I'd love anyone to chime in no I mean if it's legal obviously it helps my concern is you know I have from procurement experience that's frowned upon so I just want to make sure that we're not doing anything that's going to tink the process yeah I think it might be helpful um if we can maybe not make that decision today I don't think that necessarily affects the the language in the regulation as to when you would commence your review and just give us an opportunity to think about it and take a look at whether there are risks that we should identify and reasons why you would not want to do that or at least that we're all aware of what those risks are and are the commissioners on like general consensus that the general application that's we're calling that part two um subject to our review and not subject to IEV's administrative completeness process I see Commissioner Hill nodding his head Commissioner Maynard Commissioner Ryan Commissioner Skinner how do you feel yeah I mean if that's the way it's normally been it seems to me as long as the normal process is followed by IEV in the suitability realm then we're safe okay Commissioner Skinner I also nodded in agreement okay and so what would you propose I'm sorry what would you propose instead did you make sure let me make sure I understand what you're asking now chair could you repeat your question oh okay I um I was I wanted to make sure that we didn't just jump um because I think I was doing that so I apologize um that um that we're comfortable having IEV do administrative completeness with respect to the three forms the well that actually it's really the two forms the mass supplement and BED and then they'll do the multi-jurisdictional down the road a bit um but they would do their administrative completeness in that process that's what Director Wells was recommending and we would receive um the general application outside of of any administrative team led staff led BED I am in agreement I'm okay with that and okay that's proposal to postpone the answer to the question is to whether or not Commissioners review on a rolling basis versus on 11 I'm fine with that too okay okay so we're going to postpone that till we get some more legal advice because I think we'd all love the extra time um and but I do think we want to weigh that legal risk uh and and maybe there's a means to make sure that we we preserve ourselves against any kind of legal risk if there is you know what what what um practice we could employ to ensure that they understood we were not operating that we were reviewing etc etc okay so with that how are we getting closer to this 218.03 legal team oh um I think um I have a good understanding I may say I can't make these edits while we're talking but I don't know Paul if you have kind of been able to capture some of this we can try to circle up after but I think we understand the the the direction everyone would like to go so then we have a consensus commissioners on that point okay all right I'm just looking for eye contact there we go all right um so is there anything else Commissioner O'Brien on 218.03 in terms of that you would want to preserve any language there that you'd want to preserve given given what we just agreed upon it was not so much the reserving but I guess I I understand some of the language I was going to propose to strike if we're amending it to omit the general application then it makes sense to me in terms of why the ED allows the curing of deficiencies I was going to propose that we strike that but if we're only talking about the BEDs and the other suitability forms and that makes a little more sense to me and we're comfortable if they don't cure under IEP's direction with the executive director and they're just out are we comfortable after did you want to say 30 days do we need to add that director Wells you know we could also do a 14 you know defer to loretta you could do a 14 day timeline you know if they've done a decent job and we identify the deficiencies especially this is not a couple of you know it's a report or something that's that's in the the general application maybe give them 14 days um but I think the reg should allow the um licensing division to submit a deficiency letter so they would identify what the deficiency is you don't have to say whether they're in or out I would think there should be some language that if the deficiencies are not cured that the commission may either deny the application or delay or deny the ability for the applicant to operate until such time as the deficiencies are cured then it would be up to the commission what to do if because if you if you leave it up to IEP to knock somebody out then you'd have to give us the standards and that's that's going to get complicated so if we just put language in there that it's up we can report to the commission the commission can make a determination that's probably more fair commissioners which which language are you looking at specifically I so I think she was looking at 2018 if you look at 218.03 and subsection B a 1B that's where there's a negative determination made by our IEB ED so I think what she's saying is rather than having it be they they would make a determination of that that it's down right that they're out that they would report to us that they haven't been a cured deficiency within a timeline and then we would make a decision yeah so it's the IEB is not making a negative determination of suitability they would just be identifying the deficiencies in the application yeah but that's what this says I mean right so that doesn't say negative suitability it just says negative I'm sorry I'm sorry a negative determination right but you're saying that rather than having to cure anything prior to 1121 because that's not realistic you would do what a 14-day window and the rat is okay that 14 days is reasonable for them to cure okay so this the extending the deadline under extraordinary circumstances is that pertinent to this or is that a misplaced subsection too that's more for you know if that's us isn't it really yeah so that's our general application so it seems like maybe that's not it doesn't have a home there aesthetically if someone was you know trying to submit their their art their uh multi-jurisdictional needs and all that and their computer crashed and they got he was like 10 you know late at night and they couldn't get it in and the next day would we give them a pass I would suggest and they have to come to us and ask for that under extraordinary circumstances right okay legal commission is getting you know it also is 14 days in which to cure the deficiencies in the application 14 days from when is it 14 days from the deficiency letters and the deficiency letters will be issued on a rolling basis okay and they can start as soon as they that process can fire measure scanner once the applications are received so that would keep them all rolling for on the basis and if I understand the discussion after the 14 days has passed and there are still deficiencies it the the matter would be brought to the commission to then consider a request for an extension do I have that right thank you for giving us sorry but you should have language in the reg that basically gives the commission authority to deny the application give an extension or at least hold the uh the ability for the applicant to operate until such time as the deficiencies are cured because otherwise it's just going to go on and on and on maretta's going to be chasing down all this information so do you have that language legal team on those three options you've got to be courted yeah I I mean in all practicality so my support here has other obligations so they're not here anymore I can't obviously write this while we're on the meeting so this might be something we need to bring back to you at some point I understand but you understand I love how Director Wells just outlined those three options commission do you agree commissioners yeah I think I I think we understand what would like to be done I'm not sure I can whip this up no I understand that's fine okay anything further on 218.03 and all right then let's move on Todd thank you sure okay um so that brings us to 218.04 bottom of page 44 of the commissioner's packet onto the top of page 45 a couple of uh provisions in here I would just like to draw your attention to so this is the part where we talk about well we'll have to kind of modify this too because it refers to commencing the review after an application is deemed administratively complete since we're not doing that anymore we'll just say that once the application is submitted the commission will commence to review the merits of the request and that you may take any of may take any of the following actions the first is to refer any part of it to a number of individuals or entities including the executive director or the IEB or staff to assist in the evaluation that includes part B where we discussed last week the retention of professional consultants by either the commission or the executive director in certain circumstances to assist in the review and to make any appropriate recommendations as requested and then getting to paragraph C and this kind of dovetails from what we've just been discussing so this is important and worth pausing on for a moment this also allows the commission to require or permit in the commission's discretion the applicant to provide additional information and documents and I certainly heard all of the conversation before this is a an area that you may find to be useful in really understanding an applicant's plan and if you were to engage in this it's something to make sure is well documented and recorded and what I mean by that is that if there is a request for specific information that we commemorate that in writing and flag and mark any information that came in as a supplement to the application and that of course that it be applied uniformly the alternative to that of course is just to as discussed a little bit earlier and I don't want to interpret what was said too narrowly but the alternative of course is to essentially just say whatever is in the application that's it that's the application and you kind of you know have the decision made based upon whatever the applicant submitted so I think it's important to just recognize paragraph C here and make sure that this is something that the commission is interested in doing when you use the word information does that include interviews I know we'll discuss interviews later but there's a possibility that we may decide to to meet with the applicants right so they might be providing additional information that way oh yeah so that's discussed in the section that follows but this is more at least my intention here was that it's more when you're reading the application through whether it's the commissioners or a consultant or member of the staff who have been designated to perform certain parts of the review if there's some information that's not clear or if there's some supplementation that might be helpful or if an applicant comes to the commission says hey I forgot to include what have you that there be some vehicle that allows for that and that's what this is though it on its face is somewhat inconsistent with some of the comments that were made earlier so it's important to understand this the existence of this language and determine whether you want to include it or not in the first sentence when it says the commission will review the merits of the request what what is request referring to the request for a license that we could modify that to maybe it's application yeah and it should say like timely filed is because it's really got nothing to do with administratively complete right it's like any timely filed application yep yep we definitely need to modify that well application includes IEB's portion so we would still need that administrative complete language in there now yeah but then we also need the time to file the application right because you can get your IEB stuff in and miss the deadline right so however you need to word it to capture all five sections of it now I think all five have to be submitted on time yes but I was just making the point that that the therefore the five components are being reviewed for administrative completeness yep well yep so the language is relevant yeah but it's not all encompassing I guess my question is it still doesn't give a nod to the general form I agree yeah I think we'll have to do a review to kind of make sure that we reconcile this language with the discussion today that's part of the reason I don't think we can necessarily do this today on the fly I think it'll take attention yep okay so to Todd's last question 218.04 subsection C he was asking about are we comfortable retaining that language yeah because didn't we talk about even a best and final as something we might want to put out so that would be asked for right that's a slightly different area that is the best and final part I think on what he was saying that subsection C really is is about the application supplementing if we want more information maybe we need to clarify that time because I asked again the question about even doesn't include interviews so you're really saying require permit of course it's in our discretion with this additional language provide additional information and documents relating to the general form general application yeah if I may come to a bunch of caveats right I would just draw one distinction to kind of hopefully clarify Commissioner O'Brien's point what what we're talking about now is the the period after the application has come in before the Commission has begun evaluating it as part of the hearing and so there's language that we'll get to it's in 06 on page 46 at the top that talks about once you're in the evaluation process allowing for best and final offers and supplementing the application at that point and modifying the proposal and we'll have to talk about that obviously too but that's where that is so I would just kind of draw the distinction between allowing or requiring further information at the out from the outset versus once you've completed the initial review now you're evaluating it asking for best and final well I guess and my question would be a subsection C you're saying we've all had the chance to review them individually now we are sitting down together our public review process are we starting then where we're saying do we want any additional information because we see some things not complete is that what you're saying before we actually begin to review so I think paragraph C is before you begin the evaluation at a public meeting so that okay so we just sat down yeah we're all looked at that culture do we want to reserve the right in our discretion to say these you know applicant ABCD&E we'd like supplemental information and with that comes a bunch of caveats and I see Derek Lennon um charming in but do we want to reserve that for right now Derek I just if somebody could explain .04 and .06 like what is the purpose of 04 compared to 06 because I mean the chair just described sitting down and diving in but .06 kind of described sitting down and diving in so I think that was my question this is before we dove in this is actually we just sat down before we dive in before we get our feet wet we sat down together we're on the pool side we haven't gotten our feet wet so that's what I think Todd is saying because we don't have the administrative completeness process can we at that juncture ask her am I right Todd is is that fair that's exactly right so this is us doing our own administrative completeness then that's on the general form well it's more than that it's administrative it's this is more of a substance this could be a substantive supplementation it's not just you're missing a document can you please give it to me it's you know you've provided some information but we would like a little more clarity on that and I think we should let Derek jump in here I think he can kind of talk a little bit about the risk particularly as it pertains to procurements and what the distinction is here but this is just an option and again if we do use this and for what it's worth it was used as part of the rfa2 process that it has to be done very methodically and very carefully yeah so I think a good question that the Commissioner Brian you just brought up and Todd just kind of addressed as 0.04 and 0.06 had this belief that each commissioner was kind of doing their initial review and they were of a certain section and they would go back and get the clarifying information not supplemental clarifying because if you do supplemental information and you may decide to do that and everybody on the line you're changing you're changing the application right you're letting them add to it so they could go back and ask for clarifying information and you know you'd really want so what you could do here is kind of roll that into six and have each commissioner at the beginning of the public hearing say I would like a clarifying point on this piece this piece this piece and this piece and have staff go back and get it then you can start reviewing the applications holding off those sections and once you've got the clarifying information you could kind of do the holistic review of those sections and the application but what you're seeing there was the kind of dual process of one each commissioner was reviewing a separate section of the application getting the information and clarifying information so they could make a presentation to the other commissioners and then the point where they could come forward in public and give additional information if it was asked by the whole body right and we're all getting the entirety at once you're getting all of it you're getting all whether it's all 20 some odd or some smaller group that comes up with the 200 000 Derek could you give me an example what what a clarifying information request would be so so if they said something along the lines of we're providing benefits to our employees and the package is this is that to full time is that to part time is that to contractors what are you offering so that would be a clarifying it was a distinction between how many of your employees are going to be full time versus part time right that's a clarifying thing so you can get a better understanding but it's not letting them say I'm going to change this to be 10 000 employees now because I got to see what everyone else is offering once once all the applications came in so if we thank you for that so I'll just give you an example of something else to make sure I'm clear on what we're at what we can and can't ask for I would not be able to ask well I see under the community section that you said this can you add to that then that would be a no correct that that's but you could ask that during the baffle right once I understand that but during the initial evaluations where you're just evaluating the written applications you just want clarifying no new information yep thank you that would be under the procurement and that's held up pretty well but this is an application so I want to say you guys have the ability to do different things right this is an application but if you want this to you know follow a pretty well established set of criteria that would be an area that you would want to really consider with legal weighing the risks of what allowing supplemental information would do to other applicants that didn't get that same opportunity so madam chair to answer your question I would be very hesitant to use this tool if it was in the regulations however always love having that tool there if we ever needed it mm-hmm I agree and how do we feel about how it's written I think it gives us discretion right to use it can I ask clarifying question huh but not to be funny Derek but I want to make sure it's okay to ask that clarification clarifying question about just one of the 28 or one of the you know 23 or 19 whatever it is or should you ask it across the board but if it really is just you can ask one you can just ask one and you'd usually want to post that so that if other people wanted to come back and say I have the same information I'd like to provide then you would consider that right but you'd want to post it all it's just like a question in answer period the best way to do it is never to take them verbally get an email respond put it up in a public place or so that's the same thing you'd want to do if anyone else wanted to update their application at the same point which is why I'd recommend you do it in the public meeting so if someone else wants to respond and say I would like to update now some people may try to provide supplemental information and that's where you would want to say we're not going to review this because it's clearly supplemental we'll only review clarifying points overall premises now where we have to do that treat everyone the same way across all right really helpful commissioners do we have a consensus that's that subsection c is good to me keep right now as a tool that anyone opposing that okay and we understand that it's going to get reworked address the issues that we've discussed prior should we continue commissioners is it okay all right hearing no nays we'll continue time please great okay so we're on 218.05 this is an area where we talk a little bit about again some of the tools that the commission may elect to employ and it says that the commission may conduct one or more meetings to do the following to receive public feedback so we talked about that a little bit last week if if the commission is so inclined you may conduct just a general public hearing on all the applications to allow members of the public to share any feedback that they may have and that would be specific to the applications secondly you may may choose to allow each of the applicants to present their application to you at some point it could be soon after the submission of the application it could be closer to when you're prepared to evaluate the applications but again this is a tool that you may find to be useful in understanding what their proposal is and then again just one of the other tools is that you may choose to allow an applicant to respond to any questions and again this is before you commence your evaluation as a body of the applications this is one way to kind of ensure an understanding of the proposals so those are three of the options Todd can I ask you though the latter part of C as directed by the chair or the designee it says like the commission may and then when it gets to C it sort of narrows it saying as directed by the chair of the designee does that then narrow the authority so there's a communication between the chair designee or I'm a little confused about what that's yeah it was I mean we can certainly clarify that it's a good point the intent was just that at a if you're at a public meeting and you're allowing an applicant either to make a presentation or the public is there commenting on an applicant application you may allow the applicant themselves to respond and the reason why that specific language is there was just as a kind of procedural matter where the chair ordinarily presides over the public hearing it was not it's not at all designed to suggest that other commissioners can't comment or anything along those lines but we can designee thing too as it doesn't seem to make sense that you might say like okay Karen you go talk to so-and-so and get their response to you know what you're saying it's the public hearing but if we um the chair or their chair if you just allow any applicant to respond to questions or public comments the commission would have to allow that yeah so do you need the other qualifier I guess that's I don't get where it's there we could know I take your point I think we can we can remove that language I don't think that's necessary in this context whoever is the chair of that hearing um should it be public meeting and hearing to preserve our options because it does so we see public input so that would be in a hearing setting okay uh yeah so in absolutely um and then same as to two right meeting or hearing yeah oh so this must have contemplated the like the legislative stuff that where one person might be sitting over it yeah I think that then I think that's under the contract where the chair can designate somebody else to stay home yeah I think that's where their way that we sort of inherited where one presides over the reg comment yeah I think that's by statute that it can do that yeah okay well yeah no I that we can certainly make those edits um of course um okay and I think two just basically allows the commission to determine how it will receive comments whether written oral uh setting time limits uh things along those lines it's just that single two of those three lines right right and everything is struck below any questions there commissioners okay commissioner I'm assuming you're not raising your hand thank you okay um so then you get to I'm not sure if it's a new subsection or not Todd evaluation of the application might have it yeah so this is uh 06 this is uh 2018 06 and we're on the bottom of page 45 under the top of page 46 um this is once all the uh we'll call it preliminary uh matters have been performed you've had time to evaluate the application conducted any uh hearings uh or meetings or allowed presentations allowed uh questions to be answered now you're sitting down to evaluate the actual application as a body um and you'll see that this particular section is is really kind of broken down into uh two components in some ways most of it the the first three quarters if you will applies to all categories of uh application the bottom part that we'll get to applies only to um and I want to make sure I have this exactly right but the untethered category three um application so that the regulation draws a distinction between those processes the primary distinction being uh that we can certainly envision uh that the untethered category three applications will be reviewed as part of a competitive process where the others will not so that's why there are additional uh rules here that pertain solely to that okay if we take it from the top of 2018 06 though um this provides that the commission will commence the substantive evaluation of the contents of the application and again you may utilize technical assistance uh as part of that if that is something you choose to do i.e. uh you could have a consultant or staff member make parts of presentations during your evaluation um or things of that sort again just a tool um number two says that and this is I mean there's a lot of important parts but this one is particularly important um that the commission shall analyze the factors that are described below in no particular order and giving uh and not giving any particular weight or no weight to any factor so I believe that that is the direction the commission by consensus anyway set out and this is how it is reflected so each of the criteria will be independently reviewed and they be weighed however the commission chooses to do so and we're deliberating in public on all of these yes and we we do get into that a little further down but yes that is the way this is designed paragraph three gets into um oh actually it's right here in reviewing the application the commission may utilize any of the following so you may again conduct any public meetings allow any presentations and again here's the part we talked about a little earlier as part of the actual review process at this point you may request additional information allow modified proposals or applications or request best and final submissions you need not do that but this is a tool here and of course if you are to do that it needs to be done with precision and very carefully to avoid any of the concerns that have been already been raised but it is a tool that proved to be helpful in the past and we're not doing this just because that's the way it's always been done but this is a potential tool that you may elect to use depending upon the circumstances so before we keep going I just want to make sure everybody is okay with this language here any questions if we're good time okay so four says and again important that the commission shall deliberate on license applications in public in a public meeting and shall not be required to use the 101 procedures which are essentially the adjudicatory proceeding rules so this is a decision point for the commission that you would review this just at a public meeting and not as part of a 30 a adjudicatory proceeding there is no constitutional right that attaches at this point so there's no right to an adjudicatory proceeding here you could certainly elect to allow that in the case of the racing application to draw a distinction there is case law that says that those need to be conducted at an adjudicatory proceeding there is no such requirement in this particular case so there is some discretion afforded to the commission here but to be clear this language says that the application would be deliberated upon at a public meeting I can I can keep going here so we're on paragraph five now and this gets into the criteria if you will that the commission will be actually evaluating each application for what you'll see here is that it includes all of the criteria that the commission has already reviewed and approved what we did though is for your review and consideration added in some sub criteria and these are based upon the questions that are included in the application and you may find that this would be helpful in breaking down the criteria and kind of really helping you to evaluate the applications against one another in some cases or just really distill whether a particular criteria has been satisfied to your standard there's certainly no requirement that there be sub criteria but we wanted to show you what that would look like and we can certainly supplement any of these sub criteria if there are other items that emerge as being helpful as well but that's I think I could make that suggestion to go back to the application but I didn't do a side-by-side with the application I noted this in my review of the proposed break is there any commissioners did I assume that you all saw that that had you know that that's where it came from the application right here was anything missing that it looks like you generally followed the application from my memory but Jordan you were closest to the application having worked with the team on it anything that you would have added as we go no and I went over it last night too I think it pretty much captures everything that we talked about in that but yeah and I think it's good to have the right detail right so Todd nice job thank you great okay so and again just to reiterate we've already talked about this but I think it's important just to highlight that and I'm now I'm down on page 47 paragraph F that's the part that talks about suitability which again is incorporated into this process it's not a separate process suitability is one of the criteria the commission has identified what you will I think it might be on page 40 because some documents were taken out so just oh okay yeah that's fine I'm sorry I'll stop by using the page numbers I was might be going off an older no you can look at your page number like seven I just wanted to point out that you'll see in F little one that there's a reference to 205 CMR 215 that is the suitability section that we anticipate coming before you next week or in the coming meetings and that would set out the criteria and other considerations that would be applied in reviewing a suitability that's that section that directability we refer to as relative suitability correct and I'm just looking through these criteria here we just need to make sure that what you get from Loretta will give you the information for this because remember you're not getting the full suitability investigation for maybe a year so the in order to make these determinations just remember you're going to be getting their licensing history their compliance history their litigation history and some metrics with respect to their financial stability and also that open source check so just so we're clear that's the information you'll get make that determination on subsection F and and so that is all of those subsections though are in the application so the applicant has to this has to answer them themselves correct correct yeah so madam chair against my recommendation we went forward with actually putting those questions back into the application after we had actually pulled them so it looks like that actually was a really good idea oh you think that's good because I felt that about that good good thank you I can't say I actually saw it all coming to this fruition Mr. Maynard thank you all righty um and then of course it's paragraph g which is just kind of a tool the commissioner commission may use if another criteria somehow emerges um that you'd want to include as well would have that ability to do so if we move on to um subsection six so this is the part that I referenced earlier that applies just to the untethered category three licenses this was designed to reflect some of the comments and consensus that was developed in earlier meetings relative to this process so it says that in determining whether to award this type of license the untethered the commission shall and we should look at that word take into consideration the variations between the applicants as they relate to any other applicant for a licensee and how granting any particular combination of applications would maximize the overall benefits and minimize overall harms or risk of harms to the Commonwealth so that is the general standard that we are setting out for commission review of course you evaluate all the criteria but when you distill it that is essentially the high level standard you would be looking at in determining how to select the up to seven untethered category three licensees the next part gets into a little bit more about the process so part a is more kind of the standard that you're looking at part b is the process and again these are tools at your disposal and we say here that the commission may in its discretion implement competitive processes for awarding this category untethered category three license and you may as part of that either utilize scored or unscored selection systems grant or deny one or more particular applications while reserving action on other applications for future deliberation or review the applications in multiple phases or rounds and use different review methodologies in each phase or round but I would say about all of this is that decisions on some of these should be made prior to commencing the evaluation and not during the process of course so once the applications come in and you see what the universe looks like at that point we would want to discuss the process that the commission intends to use to evaluate them you want to ensure that you don't make this decision based upon the contents of certain applications so Todd they'd have the commission would have to regroup and make a determination before they look at anything correct that would be ideal that protects against any assertion that decisions were made because of the contents of a specific application or a number of applications that you may or may not find to be more appealing of one way or another could we bring that piece up then in the regulation um somehow you know where we just decided on that subsection three and whatever number it was where we said at the top of our process before we touched the you know we're still on poolside and not taking a deep dive we said we might think about supplemental information should we have this piece come in where that we have to we have to determine our little s i mean a little s scoring system is that is that does that make sense uh commissioners just in terms of process or should it somehow be flagged uh we just want to Todd if i could i i'll just jump in just on structure yeah okay i i think you wanted to stay here because it's about how you're going to determine it and and the flexibility you have to do that um that's not this i think what what Todd's getting at to correct me if i'm wrong and we all agree is that because you have some flexibility you you you can preserve it for as long as you need to but at some point before you start using that flexibility to actually determine to do a competitive process you need to decide that but that's really an internal scheduling issue for you as opposed to a message of to the external world and for the regulatory process it kind of fits within the chronology of this is when you determine when you're doing the licensing so and that's that's more of a drafting thing but i i think okay all right as long as we all have that in mind thank you okay i put a big flag before you get started all right um okay any questions commissioners i have one oh i'm sorry commissioners going to return i'm sorry yes no worries um i guess that's six a why is that only applicable to the untethered category three license review just in terms of holding um a decision until all of them have have been reviewed all of the applications have been reviewed why wouldn't we want that for the category ones and twos as well i'm sorry i want to make sure i understand your question question which you're referring to right at the top that provision is limited to the category three untethered why would you want that for the other categories as well well you well this was it's designed primarily to afford the commission a manner to draw distinctions between applications where that's not necessarily a concern when it comes to category one and two that said it it is always helpful to have a general standard you are looking at and um that is if that part is what you're referring to that might be something to include for all the um overall benefits to the commonwealth type language once the license is granted does that mean so for the category ones let's say once the license is granted does that mean that they are no i just answered my own question it doesn't mean that they're ready to operate that they're good to start operating because we still have this other piece around the internal controls and responsibility okay thank you yeah there's um in the pipeline is a draft um operation certificate section so that that's a great point to bear in mind here getting a license does not mean you're allowed to just start operating it means that you are now eligible uh to pursue an operation certificate to can to begin operating so i think my question is more important when we start to talk about the granting of an operation certificate just in terms of you know creating a level playing field making sure that everyone um can go live if you will at the same time because of that question in the next section commissioners can or i'm convinced the lawyers will show me how it works um on the temporary licensure process so um yeah so let's if we keep moving here um everyone's all set so we've moved to two eighteen oh seven oh i'm okay i was sorry let's go yeah i was going to hit paragraph seven first apologies yeah so this is the supplemental suitability determination now this uh goes um hand in hand in many ways with the temporary licensing uh regulation which you haven't seen yet uh which is set out in two nineteen and will be coming your way shortly but uh it kind of captures what we believe to be the consensus of the commission as to how to move forward uh with temp or how best to move forward with temporary licensing in light of the law um and what the process contemplates is that there be a more of a limited uh suitability review as part of the initial review um and that once that standard is satisfied and the commission makes a decision to award someone a license that it could be it would be temporary until the complete suitability review has been completed at which point the commission would convene its ordinary suitability reviews in in accordance with the regs that you'll also be looking at and then if the person or entity is awarded a positive determination of suitability they then become eligible for call it the full license um and so what this section here talks about is just that um the commission may make that supplemental suitability decision after it has already determined who to award the licenses uh to and that if the entity it does not let's call it as a achieve the positive determination of suitability that the commission shall deny the uh application and not award the license to that entity so this paragraph seven recognizes the suitability piece of the puzzle and that it will be essentially conducted in two parts here there's the first preliminary determination and then what we would likely consider to be the traditional complete suitability review um and that is reflected in this section Todd if I may just one thing that I may have caught some some folks eyes is is the eligibility to request a temporary license and what that's all about that is uh tracking the language in section six of the statute because the the applicants have to request a temporary license and have to pay the associated licensing fee before the commission can grant it so this is a little bit of a of a hyper technical ad in there but is to cover that language we don't intend to add any more time or process to that it's simply uh you you're ready to ask for a temporary license and then you can so this confusion when we talk about temporary license under section six and then the temporary licensure that um director wiles has been referring to all our time this is this is using um and Todd I don't know I don't want to jump in and this is using the section six process that's contemplated to be able to provide the temporary licensing that I believe you've been talking about in your timeline the the sort of accessibility process so it's sort of giving that meaning to that part of the statute so may I just ask a clarifying question so um under this structure for the fees it would be that the we would collect a million dollars for each of these temporary applicants so keeping our timeline in February and in March we get a million dollars but we would not collect a full five million or the additional four million until suitability is done potentially a year from now is that correct correct Paul correct me from wrong but I think that's how and that will be reflected in the 214 and 221 um sections which I believe are on deck for next week those already drafted that on deck for next week that is the model that's consistent with what the statute talks about and that's that's why that proposal is and are we specifically again this reg limiting these request for temps to know more than seven untethered well it would be whoever you select right so it's going to be limited to the people that we then select through the competitive process that's right that's right so basically you make your licensing decision um understanding that the complete suitability review has not been performed and in order to allow the commencement of operation subject to the operation certificate but let's set that aside for the moment um this would allow um the prospective licensee or presumptive licensee I should say um to request the temporary license they pay their million dollars and they can begin operating once they get their certificate of operation once the complete suitability review is done on those let's say seven untethered category threes and the category one and two uh applicants uh in the commission awards them a positive determination of suitability then they can pay the other four million dollars and they receive their full license that's what's contemplated here that is consistent with what the statute talks about um and that's why we have advanced that proposal should we make it clear the temp fires when the permanent kicks in that's that's also and this this is unfortunately the next one it's not getting the other rights yeah 19 has that and I believe it's also in 2020. I was wondering if we why we didn't have in here that as soon as the full license goes up the temp expires but he said that's in the next wave we're going to be ending. So I have this question if the temporary licensure process was was not there would we be collecting let's just pretend that the temporary licensure process was eliminated would that um would the process be that we would collect the full five million um once they can operate under our temporary licensure process um pending suitability would we be able to collect the full five million dollars you would um that would be really favorable yeah commonwealth right that would be an excellent outcome for the commonwealth to be able to collect that five million dollars if in fact the temporary licensure structure was was struck yeah so this all this does so what the what you would describe if there were no temporary licensing provisions in 23n um we would probably or by we I mean the commission award a conditional license whereby it's conditioned upon achieving a positive determination of suitability you pay your five million and go on with the process we were um as we've discussed at length very aware of the fact that there is temporary licensure language in the statute that we need to somehow recognize and incorporate and this is the way that we have proposed doing it to ensure that we're in full compliance with chapter 23 and if we say that we had awarded five and not seven um what happens with the two we just would leave that open but somebody could still be seeking a temporary licensure process down the road for that same language yeah the statute doesn't require the commission to award seven I think it says you can award up to seven which implicitly means you may award less if you don't find um any others to meet your standards um Nina commissioner uh or ma'am chair I think that the just in cases I'm not sure if what you're asking is would those you know next to let's say you set a new deadline two years from now to get the other two do you have to go back through temporary licensing and I guess there's uh one short answer is these are these regs could be amended in between um first of all and you may decide then that you don't want to do a provisional licensing process what I would think of as a more provisional or conditional process or that you do I think you would have that flexibility in the future but um so sort of for that first class really helpful thank you um okay so um let's uh if if we're comfortable with paragraph seven we can move on to 218.07 um and this talks about essentially the decisions that would be before you and they include that uh you are able to find the applicant uh suitable and eligible to request the temporary license so that's essentially awarding uh the license um you could find that they're I'm sorry you could let me draw a distinction let me back up a second I missed this nuance that I meant to point out and this again gets into um the the fact that there's a separate uh suitability reg and it references in here 215.01 paragraph two and then 215.01 paragraph one um and the distinctions between paragraph one and paragraph uh two are that paragraph one which is reflected in subsection b here is essentially the complete suitability once you've gone the applicant has gone through the full process um and a decision is made that that entity has uh met the standard. Little two which is reflected in paragraph a here is the preliminary finding of suitability that is achieved and we will of course get into when you look at that reg how an entity would go about achieving that preliminary finding of suitability but uh we say here that if the entity achieves that preliminary finding of suitability you may deem them eligible to request the temporary license so essentially you're designating them as the presumptive licensee they can then request the temporary license and move forward subject to final determination of suitability by contrast if you look at paragraph b this is a scenario where you have found the entity completely suitable there's no preliminary finding it's just a complete finding of suitability in that event you may award the license subject to conditions um and the conditions are set out in a section that again will be coming before you shortly that's section 220 and of course there are certain provisions of chapter 23 and uh to consider here too so a and b that you're looking at under 218.07 are both scenarios in which you are awarding essentially at least presumptively a license to an applicant paragraph c is the opposite that is that you may deny an application for any of the reasons set out in the regulations including section six or nine of chapter 23 and and just by way of explanation there section six talks about looking into during the investigation that an applicant has failed to establish essentially their suitability that they don't have the requisite intent integrity or they haven't been able to demonstrate responsible business practices or other reasons why would be injurious to the interest of the Commonwealth to award a license to that operator and then section nine talks about denying a license to an applicant because they have knowingly made a false statement or they have had a license revoked by any other governmental authority or they have been convicted of a felony or again have affiliates or close associates that wouldn't otherwise qualify for a license so that those are the elements that are discussed in chapter 23 and section 60 and nine and so you may certainly deny an application for any of those reasons or for any of the reasons in 205 CMR which would include that they didn't they weren't one of your top choices under a competitive process. May I ask the question and this is to Commissioner Skinner's earlier question when we being eligible to request a temporary license and then we give them that temporary license you know assuming everything lines up they can't start operating still because we are going to have a universe thanks to Paul but I see you're not I think it is going to be universal do we need to clarify that Commissioner Skinner kind of asked the same question do we need to just to say that or is it somewhere more clearly stated and I just am missing it. We could certainly and Paul and Mina feel free to jump in I we could certainly add a cross-reference in somewhere just to recognize that there is an operation certificate process that has to be satisfied prior to commencement of operations. Mina correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the regulation on license conditions which is 220 contains a requirement that every license and temporary license be issued subject to a condition that they not operate without an operation certificate. Excellent so maybe we could just cross-reference that. Yeah it actually is cross-referenced okay Madam Chair in in 07B but it can also be cross-referenced in A if that makes sense because of the temporary license so we can clarify that. Excellent thank you. Any questions on the on that process or the denial process commissioners? No questions but the conversation that the question that I asked earlier that you just referred to Chair was directed at paragraph 2. Yeah it's 2807 and not the prior paragraph I got it a little a little ahead of myself back then so just a clarification. And now I understand why Todd was confused that's my question. That's okay but are you satisfied with the cross-references now because I have the same concern. Okay excellent all right so I'll set commissioners on the the rest of that provision I see nine pets I'll start. All right then moving on to tweet I guess actually is it the 2 of 217? So this gets to I think what she's talking about which is that this says that for the untethered category 3 application review process that the commission can't make a determination until the deadline for submission of the applications has passed because in all likelihood there will need to be a competitive process so you don't want to make rolling decisions on any particular application until you've had an opportunity to review them all uniformly and ensure that they're all part of the same process. And further that there's been an opportunity for the public feedback and comments at any meetings that you may convene as we talked about previously under a subsection or section O5. Okay so O8 talks about what the process is after the commission has made its decisions and we say here in one that upon granting an application essentially the commission will write a file a decision including a statement of the reasons why specific findings of fact and of course set out any conditions of licensure that have been imposed. Two gets into those applications that have been denied says that the commission will prepare and file its decision if requested by the applicant and prepare a statement of the reasons for the denial including the specific findings of fact. So those are basically the written decisions to be prepared at certain junctures of the process depending upon what happens. In paragraph three gets into when the license is deemed to have been considered awarded and it says that it's deemed to have occurred immediately upon the majority vote by the commission to issue the license unless otherwise determined by the commission. So that's when you know the ability to apply for a temporary license would trigger obligation to pay the fee and things of that nature. Anything else meaner Paul on that? No just a real quick that unless the commission otherwise that discretion there is intentional because there may be situations with different categories where you might want to have to where you might want to wait do you want the application fee and now or do you want to wait for a later time for the license in particular for so everybody starts on the same day in addition to the operation certificate so that's a little bit more flexibility in there. And so that takes us through the entirety of the draft certainly there's some work that needs to be done here but that's that's the general process that we've proposed for your consideration. So for me and Paul I think the work that needs to be done is really pretty limited to the idea that we extracted the general application that is the commissioner's general application form with the criteria that we've established for evaluating the untethered quote unquote seven and then allowing IEB to do what they need to do in the ordinary course of their business to determine administrative completeness or otherwise with respect to the other forms that are part of the application and so that will allow us to proceed with respect to our work and they can actually proceed perhaps even earlier on a rolling basis Scott was going to look to see if if we could start to look at the applications as they come in the general application on a rolling basis without putting us at terrible risk but I think those were generally the two areas and then you just need to do some cleanup work with respect to the regs that followed that provision that we spent a good deal of time on to reflect that that sort of not a fabrication but just an extraction if that makes sense because I think Nina and Paul you missed that but we during a little food goes a long ways gentlemen and we recognize that IEB really doesn't have any familiarity with that form so it didn't make sense to have a licensing department review that for completeness that so we could extract that their responsibilities. Is that there Todd? Absolutely absolutely so we will the legal team will certainly circle up and update the draft and get it back over to you as soon as possible and I think we can anticipate putting this on the agenda for next week if that works for everyone. I think Crystal is taking notes of that now. Crystal do you have any questions? I want to put you on the spot but you'll work illegal. She may be multitasking so she'll put it on on for because we don't have an agenda-setting meeting next week. Okay commissioners how are you feeling? Any questions or comments? Commissioner Wells? Director Wells? Any questions for this team? Crystal you're all set we were just asking because Todd said that he could add the revisions that will come from today's discussion to next week's session. I heard I sorry I had to run out really quick but on my way and I heard that we were adding something and that there was no agenda-setting meeting but I can just touch base with you on exact for end Todd on what exactly we would be adding. Okay excellent language there. Thank you Crystal. Any questions from A&K for us anything that you need clarification from the commissioners on? No thank you Madam Chair just to remind everybody because it was before that conversation we'll also make the updates to the ability to have deadlines for portions of the application not just the application but that was the other one that I heard early on as a policy choice. Yeah thank you. Commissioner O'Brien are you all set? Commissioner Hill are you all set? Okay Commissioner Skinner are you all set? Thank you Commissioner Maynard. I'm good. All right so I think that brings us to our last item and thank you excellent work. It was last week's early review Todd was outstanding and it really helped us frame today's discussion. Thank you so much and Director Lillios thank you for all the expertise you provided and Director Wells. So we're looking at now just if there's any other business commissioners. I know we've got some children to worry about so Pat's already expressed his interest on Director I mean Commissioner O'Brien so. Alrighty so do I have a motion to adjourn today's meeting? So moved. Okay. Thank you everyone really appreciate everyone's attention to the details of this critical matter. Commissioner O'Brien. Hi. Commissioner Hill. Hi. Commissioner Skinner. Hi. Commissioner Maynard. Hi. Yes thank you everyone 5-0. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Have a good rest of the day.