 Yeah, okay. Good to go. Thanks, Dave. Okay. Good morning. This is the convening of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. We are holding this meeting virtually, so do our roll call. Good morning, Commissioner Bryan. Good morning, I'm here. Good morning, Commissioner Hill. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning. Commissioner Skinner. Good morning. And good morning, Commissioner Maynard. Good morning. Right, we'll get started. Today is September 7th, and they're coming to go on the hot one again. And it's public meeting number 476. I'll turn right to Commissioner Maynard, who have some minutes for us. Thank you, Madam Chair. I actually have two second minutes, but I would like to move on together. There are no objections. Madam Chair, I move that the commission approve the minutes from the February 8, 2023 and February 9, 2023 public meetings that are included in the commissioner's packet, subject to any necessary corrections with agricultural errors or other non-material matters. Second. Commissioner Maynard, I have one correction, I think, on page, I think I've got it as page 16 of our packet, page 13 of the minutes. And the minutes were excellent, so comprehensive. At the very bottom, last paragraph, first sentence, I think the word not is missing because this is Chair Juddstein inquired whether it would be beneficial to have signage that children could accompany those over the age of 21 on the gaming floor. And I'm quite confident I said could not accompany. And then Daniel Miller goes on to say they do have signage, but if we could add the word not after could on the first sentence. I see that, Madam Chair, and that I can be taken care of. And we were at MGM Springfield yesterday and the signage was very clear, so I just wanted to note that in particular. So thank you. That's like a legal first year test. Don't forget the the knots, right. That's the only edit I have. Does anybody else have an edit or correction for both right. Okay, Commissioner O'Brien. I Commissioner Hill. I Mr. Skinner. I are Maynard. I and I vote yes and I like I just am noticing Commissioner Hill. I'm sure. And I suspect that that will be particularly relevant when we get to our next item. Before we just start turning to internal executive director Grossman. I did want to make note. At our last. I think it might not might I think it was our last public meeting August 25. We nominated appointed Heather. I'm going to call for she's sorry. IEB chief enforcement council to be our interim director of our IEB as well, doing both roles. As a follow up, at the same time, we were awesome. I'm going to call the but I wanted to ask and I see Dave Maltry your right on. So that's really helpful. If we could memorialize her appointment. In writing, of course, we have it in our streamed and the appointment, which would have been I think we want to confirm August 25th, and I see that Heather is here. And then if we could plan grace in for our next public meeting to anticipate an executive session to discuss her compensation, which could of course be retroactive. I know that Chief Maldrew, Chief Lennon are working on a memorandum to help us on that decision making. Okay. Absolutely. Thank you so much. And I decided to start with this because Heather has some business ahead, and I didn't want her to think that we were forgetting about her compensation. So, thank you everybody. Okay, so we'll mark that up even during our agenda setting, but I didn't want to forget. All right, so now we can turn to item number three, our administrative update. Good morning, Tom. Well, good morning, Madam Chair, good morning commissioners and to all members of our team and everyone who's joining us here today. We do have a couple of items to present to you here this morning. Good morning members of our team. First, Director Mark van der Linden will talk about responsible gaming education month. And then we'll turn to Dr. Alex Lightbound, who will offer an update relative to the live racing schedule at Plain Ridge Park, and the use of the delegation that the commission has authorized, which we'll talk about later again in this meeting. Now, if I may, I'd love to turn it over to Mark to talk about responsible gaming education month. Great. Thank you very much. Good morning, Madam Chair. Good morning commissioners. We are in responsible gaming education month. 25 years ago, the American Gaming Commission, American Gaming Association, again, dedicating a specific week to increase awareness about problem gambling within the industry and patrons to the casinos as well as promote responsible gaming. Last year, this initiative expanded to be a month long and provide an opportunity to promote gambling literacy, consumer protection, elevate employee training and work with partners to advance an understanding of responsible gaming. Since the commission has been around, the commission has recognized the importance of responsible gaming and recognized this month as responsible gaming education month. One of the ways that responsible gaming is promoted is through strategies to increase positive play. And before I define what I mean by positive play, what I mean by responsible gaming is the provision of gambling services designed to encourage players to maintain their gambling at a healthy level and minimize harm. The onus there is on us as the gaming commission and on the industry as the provider of gambling services. Positive play, on the other hand, is defined as knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of players about gambling so that it remains a recreational activity and creates a minimal risk of experiencing gambling related harm. The focus of positive play is obviously on the player. So, a critical component of the MGC's research agenda is dedicated to advancing an understanding of reducing how to reduce harm through safer gambling strategies, practices and policies. In 2020, there was a research study that was conducted to the extent of positive play among 1512 Massachusetts players. We did a follow up study in 2022 with almost 2000 players. These studies explored specific areas where positive play could be further supported and identify the extent of positive play among different player groups. The positive play study used what's called the positive play scale to measure gambling beliefs and behaviors consistent with positive play. And just real quick, I want to show you what a little bit more about the positive play scale. You can see here that it has two sub scales, a belief sub scale and a behavior sub scale. And then broken down into honesty and control, the extent to which a player is honest with themselves and others about their gambling behavior and feel and control of their gambling behavior. Gambling literacy is the extent to which a player has the accurate understanding about the nature of gambling personal responsibility. Then there's the behavior sub scale with two components, personal responsibility and pre-commitment. Personal responsibility, the extent to which a player believes they should take ownership of their gambling behavior and pre-commitment, the extent to which a player considers how much time and or money they spend gambling. Key findings from this study included that most players in Massachusetts exhibited positive play traits. Most players scored high in personal responsibility and honesty and control to a lesser extent in pre-commitment. Most players scored medium or low in gambling literacy, and that was the lowest sub-scale of the four. Importantly, the study also found that playing responsibly and holding responsible gaming beliefs about gambling does not appear to be pre-satisfactory with gambling. The study suggests that responsible gaming promotion initiatives have not been any type of deterrent and in fact may have added value to the overall player experience. Pre-commitment was also linked with satisfaction, which kind of makes sense, right? If you set the amount that you want to spend and you're willing to lose that amount, when you leave, you're less likely to have experiences of anxiety or regret about gambling losses. One of the implications of this study was that we should focus our attention on encouraging players to use pre-commitment tools to determine ahead of time how much money they will spend before they begin gambling. Hence, our theme for this responsible gaming education month in Massachusetts. The theme for this month is play it smart from the start. This was, we've worked closely with our GameSense team to come up with this theme specific for Massachusetts. The GameSense team then goes out and develops a strategy for each of the casino properties. The focus is on play management tools, both at casinos, as well as on sports way during apps. With an increase in a special focus on those sports way during apps. The GameSense team has provided special incentives for GameSense advisors who are able to increase or achieve a certain number of enrollments into the play my way system. There's both front of house and back of house programming to promote positive play, positive play tools such as play my way and other play management tools. Let's see, back of the house and table training is at each property at least one time per week and at different shifts. There's specific front of the house activities that have been coordinated with each of the properties. Special thanks, PPC has donated swag and gift cards to this effort and a special call out to PPC for helping remodel the games, the back office of the GameSense information center. It looks fantastic, so thank you very much North and Wesa for that. MGM has donated restaurant and gift cards and Encore Boston Harbor use this as a recruit of the involvement of our GameSense team for their Feed the Funnel event, which was a goal to pack 450,000 meals for people in need across the greater Boston area. I love this month. I think it's a great opportunity to elevate the importance of responsible gaming. My one key takeaway from this commissioners really is that responsible gaming adds to and elevates the experience. It's good for the patron, it's good for the sustainability of this industry and the state and overall just a good effort and period for the commission to be focusing. Thank you for the time to talk a little bit about this. Thank you, Mark. Well done. And so commissioners, there are no questions or comments from Mark, Madam Chair, did you want to jump in? I was just going to see if anybody has any questions or comments from Director Vandal Linden. Commissioner Hill, thank you for wearing your GameSense shirt. Yes, thank you. Mark, that was really interesting and I bet all of us would love to have that slide. Sure. Thanks. Well, Madam Chair and commissioners, we'll keep the momentum going, turn it right over to Dr. Leip. Alex, if you want to jump in. Good morning, everyone. Yesterday I used my delegation of authority from 2013 to approve the move of the races for today at Plain Ridge to tomorrow due to the excessive heat. CBO tool had approached me yesterday and in consultation with the harness horseman's association. We decided the best option was to move it to tomorrow instead of just moving it to a later post time today. And we were able to find enough staff that could make the switch to tomorrow, both on our end on on Plain Ridge's end. And I'd like to thank the horseman Plain Ridge and their staff and our staff for being so flexible. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Leip on questions. I think only the comment that thank you for prioritizing the health of the, of the horse athletes, the animal athletes and then of course, all the folks who are so part of that, that team. Is it going to be cooler tomorrow Alex. It's interesting. The Boston forecast isn't much better, but the forecast for further out, you know, Westboards Plain Ridge is better. Good. Yeah. Questions commissioners. Okay. We're going to be turning to a new delegation so that will be applicable shortly. Thank you. Tom. Yes, thank you. Certainly be hearing lots more from Dr. like that later on, but that's all for me for right now. If there are no questions or what have you madam chair, we can turn it back over to you. Okay, I'll set when we're turning to item number four on the agenda investigations and enforcement bureau interim director by E. B. Heather Hall. Good morning, Heather. Good morning chair and commissioners. The IEB is here to discuss Plain Ridge Park casinos request to amend its floor plan. And the request to amend its gaming beverage license. IEB gaming agents division chief. Burke Kane and casino regulatory manager and interim sports way during operations manager and or seven are going to be presenting these this morning. They will present on the decision with respect to the floor plan. And with respect to that particular matter, we are not seeking a vote from the commission today on that one. We are however seeking a vote from the commission on the next matter and licensing division chief Cara O'Brien will present will be presenting on that, which is the request to amend the gaming beverage license. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Burke and Andrew. Thank you, Heather and good morning chair morning commissioners. Let me start with a brief backdrop PPC submitted a request to amend their approved casino floor plan. This entailed expanding the casino floor square footage and transforming the flutes restaurant into the sports book at Plain Ridge. As you know, PPC has been operating in temporary sports book while this official space was being constructed. An approved floor plan may be amended on request by the gaming licensee and inspection approval by the IEB. This will bring us to our presentation and Andrew our casino regulatory manager PPC will highlight the changes in this amendment to the casino floor space he and I will then answer be available to answer any questions you may have. Andrew. Thanks, Burke. Good morning, Madam chair commissioners. If you don't mind I like to share my screen this morning I have a few bullet points as we go through this as well as a visual aid of the amended area. Can you see the. We do our point. I'll set. This may be helpful as you walk through this. Today, as Burke mentioned, we are presenting the Plain Ridge Park casino floor amendment by which PPC will be expanding their gaming floor by an additional 6425 square feet. This additional gaming space was previously occupied by Flutey sports pub and will now include a full service sports bar or sports book bar and restaurant to be known as the sports book at Plain Ridge. The additional gaming space for the sports book will include 14 sports wagering kiosks and a full cage with four bedding windows, including 180 a window. Also the restaurant will provide for a total of 187 seats for bar and restaurant service. And as a result of this amended area, the total gaming space will increase from 43,800 square feet to 50,225 square feet. With the conclusion of the IBS inspection this past week, we have verified PPC has satisfied all items required by 205 CMR 13807 section 3A subsections one through five, which conform to the approved amendment. Additionally, we have verified the entirety of the new gaming space, including CCTV surveillance cameras, cage functionality, sports wagering kiosk placement, and several other security measures that have been put in place by PPC. Lastly, PPC has provided all necessary documentation and related materials, including providing a copy of the floor plan, which is now filed with the Bureau. So upon our final inspection, the IB has approved PPC's request for an additional 6425 square feet of gaming space for the use of a sports book and restaurant. We'd be happy to answer any questions you may have regarding this amendment. Do you, are there any questions for the, do we need the slide still, Commissioner Hill, would that be helpful for you? I don't think we need it. Okay, if we could bring it down to be great. Thanks, Commissioner. So just very quickly, Andrew, where they have the sports book area now and where you take your bets now, what will become of that area? I believe I've heard that's going to be a promotion zone. They are leaving six kiosks on the gaming floor, four still by Revolution Bar and then two up near the valet where they currently are stationed. And then the other 14 will be in the permanent sports book bring them still to their total of 20 kiosks. But that counter may still be there for promotion zone notes to be determined. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. I would just note we also have some folks from Cambridge Park Casino as well here today in case there are any questions from the commissioners for them in the north this year. And I think perhaps some other folks as well. Okay. Any questions for Andrew? All right. And as Heather noted, IEB is able to make this decision so no action needed by us. All right, but you do need us, Chief O'Brien, how are you? I'm well, Madam Chair. Thank you. So this morning, good morning, Madam Chair and commissioners. This morning, Plain Ridge Park Casino has requested an amendment of its gaming beverage license for two reasons. One is to replace the area that was Floody Sports Sports Hub with the sports book at Plain Ridge as well as to change their licensed area manager. The memo for this application appears on page 33 of your packet. The Division of Licensing has completed our review of the application, which includes the description of the licensed area floor plan and confirming that the prospective licensed area manager is properly credentialed. Additionally, Chief Kane and Casino Regulatory Manager Andrew Steffen have conducted the associated walkthrough inspection. The Division recommends that the application is complete and recommends its approval. I'm happy to take any questions that the commission has. Questions for Kara? Well, the good news is the reason why we don't have any questions is because you have prepared us so well. And excellent work, Andrew and Kara and team with, of course, Heather's leadership. So with respect, and I guess we know that North is here. We're not putting him on the spot, but I know that we wish them luck as they open the sports book with in the event that we approve this particular license request. So I have a motion. Any comments beforehand? Commissioner Hill. Madam Chair, I move that the commission approved Plain Ridge Park Casino's request to amend its gaming beverage license to include the sports book at Plain Ridge as a licensed area as included in the commissioners packet and discussed here today. Second. Thank you, commissioner. Okay. Excellent work. So thank you. Hi, Michelle Hill. Hi. Mr. Skinner. Hi, Michelle Maynard. Yes, five, zero. Thank you. Good luck. And thank you Andrew. We're going to see you in a little bit. I'll be back. With your two hats. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you Kara. Number five, and this is turning to our sports wagering division and director band. Good morning. Good morning, Madam chair commissioners. Today we have the the quarterly reports for fanatics bet fair and wind bet and crystal between we handling that crystal. Good morning chair and commissioners. How are you? Hi, how are you? Good. I'm sorry. I just want to take a quick scope through but I do believe Mike Levine is on to get you ready for the first presentation. We see him. I am crystal. Thank you very much. Hi, how are you? Let me know if you have any shoes, but you should just be able to share and get going. Good morning, Mr. Levine. Good morning, Madam chair. Let's see. Let's see if you can all see my scoring. Apologies. No. No apologies needed. Remove this. Second. Sorry, crystal. I am having an issue sharing my screen at the moment. We can do it. I was going to say it happens. You just want to guide me as to when you need to change it. It's just going to take me a minute to grab. Sorry about that. Someone on our team could also drive it if that's easier crystal. I don't mind. I just have to pull it up. I have it in the wrong format for this because I'm looking in the packet. So I'm just going to grab my files. Okay, so here we go. Sorry about the delay here commission. We're not worried at all. Okay. I have it in this. Making sure it's the most recent version. I can resend it to you. I got it. It's the nine one, right? Correct. I. Yes. Yeah. That's correct. Perfect. All right. Here it is. It's weird. It's not showing it. It's because it's in a PD. Maybe this is the problem you were having. It's like not showing it as my screen. Let me try something different. Sorry. Did everybody see how busy crystal's calendar is? Just, just doing nothing. A moment for you all to feel sorry for me. It was fully one item. It's lovely one, one public meeting. I think I just have to quickly convert this into a PDF because it's not thinking it's my screen. I don't have a screen. I don't have a screen. I don't have a screen. I don't have a screen. That doesn't take long. I have that fancy software. Okay. Are we. Sharing. No. The question is. Can I. Okay. All right. Cool. We go. I'll do my best. All right. Great. I appreciate that. I really do crystal. I apologize, but I had the same issue. But I thank you all for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Regardless. Good morning, Madam chair. Commissioners O'Brien Hill Skinner and mannered and MTC staff. My name is Mike Lavine senior regulatory council for FNAG spending and gaming. It's a privilege to be before you all today to present our Q2 2023 results as they relate to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. With me today. Are my colleagues, Stephanie all house. we can move on. Thank you. One more slide. One more. Perfect. Thank you so much. So commissioners, this is our revenue for Q2 2023. Fanatics betting and gaming, which I'll refer to throughout as FBG, recently launched in the Commonwealth on May 25th, 2023. In Q2 of 2023, when we launched, we did so behind a beta gate, meaning only certain customers could use our application. And that was so we could receive meaningful feedback from real customers before we pulled that beta gate and made it available to the general public, which we did so on August 9th, 2023. So that's what this sports revenue reflects. The sports wagering revenue in Massachusetts was $266,547.51, and the sports wagering taxes remitted to the Commonwealth was $52,675.61. These numbers reflect those previously submitted to the M.G.C. and detailed in the revenue reports available on the M.G.C. website. Any questions there, commissioners? Great. With that said, I'm going to pass it off to our human resources director, Stephanie L. Apps. Hi, good morning, everybody, madam chair and commissioners. I'm Stephanie. I am the HR director of people operations. So I will take you through my slides. First, I'll walk you through the decks that are here. So in Q2 out of total account of around just under 605.89, we broke it into executive manager and non manager levels. So as you can see, at the executive level, we had a 30 percent minority and 25 percent more women at the manager level, 37 percent of which are minority and 32 percent who identify as women, one percent veteran and then three percent Massachusetts residents. And then in the non manager level, we had 51 percent in minority, 23 percent women, one percent veteran and then four percent of that population, Massachusetts residents. So you'll see in the bottom black there that the overall averages for minority would be around the 46 percent, 26 percent of which are women, one percent or four who are veterans and 19 totaling Massachusetts residents. And then in the second box below, we do have a little bit more of a breakdown for Massachusetts residents specifically. So out of our 19, we have eight who are both at the manager and entry level role who are identified as minority and or women. Next slide. Oh, perfect. Thank you. And so Fanatics has six global impact pillars that guide how we deliver, measure and communicate our ESG commitments. One of these core pillars is our all star team, culture and talent. This represents how we grow and retain a diverse representative and inclusive team. And we strive to create opportunities for our teams to innovate, engage and learn. Fanatics as a whole has an inclusion, diversity and equity and advocacy framework, a.k.a. idea in which all business units, including FBG, participate in. Idea helps shape our approach to culture and talent, and we aim for our employee population to reflect the communities we serve and for everyone to feel empowered to bring their full authentic selves to work each day. In 2021, Fanatics formalized six Fanatics Alliance Networks, a.k.a. fans in an effort to cultivate an environment for idea with an emphasis on learning and development. So fans focuses on enhancing our workplace communities, as well as supporting diverse recruitment initiatives. In May of 2022, we added six fan, which is our veterans fan. This has a focus on supporting those employees who have served in the armed forces, along with their family members. So as a whole, fans includes Family First, Global Black Alliance, Multicultural Pride, Women's Initiative Network and Veterans. With those six fans, we have 20 percent of our global workforce participated participating in the fan networks. Fanatics has continued recruitment efforts and strategies with a focus on attracting a diverse range of candidates. These include participating in recruiting events such as historic at historically black colleges and universities, engaging with diverse own professional development orgs, focused on placing diverse talent in the sports industry, developing our global recruitment team to expand consideration of diverse backgrounds and experiences to reach new audiences, introducing new skills based interviewing during the interview process, levering both external and internal training for the recruitment teams to create and improve diversity, inclusion, talent, acquisition strategies and efforts, and then participating in networks such as higher our heroes, which through hiring events and job boards connects us and provides services to service members, some fellowship program opportunities. And then locally at FBG, we've expanded upon that and more recently have placed an emphasis on sourcing candidates who are affiliated with different associations such as lesbians in tech and women in tech. We have utilized search platforms such as Power to Fly and minorities in sports. And within our local interview panels, we also ensure diversity in each interview panel for our current FBG team members to new potential candidates. FBG had hiring goals in the beginning of this year, where we specifically wanted to increase our racially, ethnically or gender diverse numbers from 51.1 to 55 percent is our goal. And in Q2, we currently sit at 52.6. And then lastly, Fanatic sets a big emphasis on training and a goal of ours was really just to increase training around idea related courses. And in 2022, we had over 7,500 idea related courses completed by our employees. With that, I will pass it off to Mike. Great, thanks, Steph. Commissioners, did you have any questions on any of the HR topics before I proceed? Questions, commissioners. OK. OK. Great. Great job, Steph. Thanks so much. Here we come. Thank you. Well, commissioners. Yeah, thank you. Well, commissioners, as I detailed previously, the FBG brand is one of the newest entrants to the industry in the Commonwealth. FBG was established in September of 2021. And in July of 2022, we created the vendor management office, which manages our supplier spend. Although we're still in the beginning stages of our procurement, the efforts we are committed to cultural diversity and increasing opportunities for small businesses, women and minority owned businesses and veteran owned businesses. In just 12 months, we've seen our Q2 2022 minority women, disadvantaged and veteran owned business enterprises spend increase from point one six percent of total spend to one point nine percent in Q2 2023. This is reflected here on the slide presented before you. You're the next slide's crystal. Thank you so much. So here are our goals and initiatives as we presented before, before the Commission during our licensing hearing and what we have established post. So our our goal here at FBG has always been three percent diverse spend by 2025. How we are going to achieve that, how we are achieving that and how we will surpass that goal are detailed below. So the first three bullet points are what are already in effect as of today and the last two bullet points we are in the process of establishing come 2024. So the first one is to ensure that all competitive bids include at least two vendors classified as minority women, disadvantaged and veteran owned business enterprises. We've updated our RFB templates to require suppliers to provide their organization's commitment to DEI. And we've established that DEI baseline, which for us is that three percent of diverse spend by 2023, which allows us to manage key performance in indicators which will allow us to improve this metric. So come 2024, we will introduce supplier databases like Tealbook or supplier IO, which are enterprise software companies that connect buyers and suppliers and provides the data needed to make procurement decisions, one being DEI. In addition to introducing DEI language into our vendor contract templates to ensure that vendors adhere to our policies and goals. Any questions on our vendors here at FBG, commissioners? Commissioners, any questions? I just have a question, Madam Chair, thank you. Good morning, Mike. It's refreshing to see that some of this much of the data that you're presenting here today on workforce and diversity are identical to what was presented during the application process, if I recall, the diversity portion of the application required some supplementation and it is again, refreshing to see exactly what was supplemented then is reflected in this data. Just relative to the ultimate goal is that still to increase diverse spend into 21 million by 2027. I don't want to put you on the spot and I recognize I realize that you might not have what was submitted back in January, but at some point during future quarterly reports, if you or Stephanie could come prepared to speak to that and just kind of outline what your progress will be towards that goal, you talk about an increase for 2020 or by 2025 of 3%, which according to what you submitted in January represents about 2.5 million dollars. And so that's a big jump from 2.5 million dollars to 21 million dollars in just two years. So I want to just kind of gauge reality, excuse me, a little bit in terms of what your expectations are for reaching that goal. I appreciate that, Commissioner Skinner. And our next commission meeting, we will come prepared with those figures. I will say that we have very ambitious plans over here at FBG and as of today, we are only live in four states under the FBG brand with a handful of additional states launching before the end of the year. So we do anticipate seeing an increase in vendor spend and such vendor spend falling within one of the MWD VBE categories. So we are hopeful that we will meet that goal by 2027. Thank you. So with that said, I will pass it off to Anthony DeAngelo, our head of responsible gaming. Thanks, Mike. Good morning, Madam Chair. Good morning, commissioners and employees of the MGC. I'm Anthony DeAngelo. I'm Fanatics's or Fanatics betting gaming's head of responsible gaming and I'll take you through some of the RG metrics for Q2. On the slide in front of you, you'll see our underage report metrics. You'll notice a lot of zeros like Mike had alluded to earlier. Our product wasn't live until May 25th, and in that we were in beta. So in April, we have obviously no data. May, we had about a week's worth of data where we had no underage reports. And then in June, we saw it not. With this, it's important to note that a customer cannot get through the application or the registration cycle onto our platform unless they provide a birthday, a valid birthday over 21. Now, obviously, there's other ways that customers could get around that by using a proxy or by using their parents or something like that. And if we are made aware of that, those will show up on these metrics as well, but we have had none of those instances at Q2. Go to the next slide, please. We have some VSC metrics. So same deal with the first two months, fairly none. But in June, we did see two of our accounts had signed up for the Massachusetts VSE after creating accounts. Those suspended, they were subsequently suspended and all communications for those customers had stopped. And then within Q2, our total active users in NAS was around 3,500, just shy of that being in beta. And you'll see the breakdowns of the tools below. Totaling 138 tool usages, about 4% of our population, we saw 0.3 were using time limits, 1.6% deposit limits, 1.2 overall spend limits, 0.7 single-wager limits, and then 0.1 cooldown periods or timeouts. These numbers are reflective of not a lot of promotion of these tools and awareness prior to us launching publicly, obviously being in beta, all contact, all knowledge and awareness was either spread through our app within our responsible gaming page or from our customer service, our trained customer service or customer operations team. We did conduct research in Q2 on trying to remove the stigma around tool usage because that is a fairly big problem in the online sports trading industry. Customers, the overall summary of that research was that customers felt tools, our tools are very important, but they're not necessarily for them. So while we're talking about responsible gaming education month and strategies, just a call back to Director Vandalin's point earlier, part of our strategy, which should be coming out sometime in September later this month, will include trying to remove that stigma with plans in place. Let's get to the next slide, please. Stay on that slide per second. Mark, if we go back to that, I know this is an important piece of research, so the percentage of users is low and we anticipate, unfortunately, sort of seeing the hearing data along that line, but I think it's really interesting, Anthony, that you're saying that tools are not cool, right? And so there's a little bit of some marketing work that can be done around that. I liken it to, I'm a pretty advanced skier, and at one point when we started wearing our helmets, it was, you know, I'm older, it was uncool. And now it's like only unless you're really inexperienced, would you ever think about skiing without a helmet? And the same with cycling, right? And so I'm hearing that there's a possibility here to say you really wanna be at that level of entertainment that Mark referenced that with responsible gaming as a heightened experience as opposed to lessen your experience, folks need to understand these are cool tools and they should use them. So I really appreciate you're saying that because I don't think I thought about that in that light, Anthony, so thank you. Of course, Andrew, thank you. Now, industry leaders I'm sure will help us in that effort, just like, you know, even in football, right? In concussion, survey, everyone is thinking about health and well-being, so thank you so much. Of course. I have a question, my name's James. Yes, Commissioner Mayer. I was just looking to see, Anthony, do you know what the durations were for the timeouts? You know, six days, six weeks. I can get you the average number of days for the timeouts. There are anywhere between three and three and 65 days at all of those numbers in front of me, but for those 400, I'm happy to share that for you. That should probably be interesting to know. Thank you. Yeah, I think the average I've seen, most I've seen have been around like six weeks. I haven't seen too many full year timeouts, but I'll definitely get you that data. Thank you. Sure. Full tools. All right, Commissioner, do you have any other? Okay. So this slide is kind of like our extracurriculars, I guess public schools are back in New York, so it's a little fitting for me to use that terminology. So within the state of Mass, some of the things that we're doing outside of what's required, we have a very good relationship, I believe, with the Massachusetts Council on Gaming and Health. Prior to our launch, we did meet with the chief executives of the council to discuss what we feel is a topic within the industry that doesn't get enough love, and that is threats of harm within customer escalations. We have a unique opportunity in Massachusetts where we're provided a customer operations platform on the grounds, which is not the case in many other states. So we feel like we have to leverage, or we should leverage Game Sense as best as we can and the resources within the state. So the output of that conversation was talking about just procedures on how we would handle threats within the Commonwealth, resources available in the states or in the state and all that, which was a great meeting. With that and kind of the tea into Game Sense, prior to our launch as well, we hosted a training with the Game Sense advisors, myself and I forget the gentleman's name, but one of the folks on our trading team offered a sports book one-on-one kind of class and then RG one-on-one for the Game Sense advisors to advise customers within the Commonwealth on sports trading as a whole and the risks associated with certain products and wager types, as well as customers who have questions on FBG's app specifically where they can find resources, what tools might benefit them, where they could self-exclude if they have to or if they feel they need to. And we had that prior to launch. And then we are looking to stand up or in the process of standing up a quarterly check-in with the Game Sense advisors. We're kind of nailing down a date right now, but essentially the idea of that conversation quarterly is for our customer operations teams and the Game Sense advisors who are on the ground. So almost share notes, right? Let's identify trends within the Commonwealth. Let's identify things we wanna make sure that our team is trained on. We also like the Game Sense advisors to get trained on things we're seeing. So as best as we can be proactive in the sense within the resources that Massachusetts provides us, we're definitely trying to be. And then lastly, just from the NCPG, we sent three folks who were plighted members of the NCPG that was one of our main goals. Before we even took a bet, we were plighted members of the NCPG and we sent three of our members, myself and two senior leaders on the operations team. So they could hear it from folks on the treatment side, from folks who work in these important organizations throughout the country and get some insights. So any questions on that, commissioners? Commissioners, all set. Excellent work. Thank you, manager. Thank you, Anthony. Really good work you're doing over there on the responsible game-building side of business. Commissioners, the last couple of slides have to deal with the lottery and our charitable efforts here at Fanatics. We'll talk about the lottery first. We've had multiple discussions with the executive director, Bracken and his team at the Mass Lottery. We're working on establishing a partnership through various projects in the near future. We've had some very, very meaningful discussions and we're hopeful in the next few quarters we'll be able to present you with more definitive work. Any questions on the lottery? Okay, great. Well, to close out our presentation, I'm honored to detail the charitable work here at Fanatics as a whole. First off, I'll talk about the impact that we just recently had in Massachusetts, in Q2, and then what Fanatics Holdings, which is our ultimate parent company, has done in the charitable space. So I'll talk about Massachusetts first. So on June 27th, 2023, Fanatics hosted Merch Madness in Massachusetts, which was held at Socios Fieldhouse at Gillette Stadium. Merch Madness is one of our holding companies preeminent charitable events of the year. It's part of Fanatics annual Global Volunteer Day in which our company pauses operations, allowing employees to volunteer and give back in their local communities. The event in Massachusetts was held for invited guests from the Local Boys and Girls Club and joining Fanatics in addition to Fanatics executives were Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Patriots veterans, the entire Patriots rookie class, Boston Celtics players and various other members of the community. The attendees took part in football drills and were gifted with merchandise items, including jerseys, hats, jackets, hoodies, and t-shirts. On the slide reflects the amount of units of merchandise that were donated, which was over 6,500, with an estimated original retail value of over $325,000. If you want to see more pictures of the event, you can find it on the Fanatics website in addition to the Patriots website. It was a great event and well attended. Questions for Mr. Levine, commissioners. Mr. Hill, any questions on that one? No questions, but I would love to have been there. Yeah, no kidding, huh? We'll send you an invite. And then we'll close it out with the chair to work at Fanatics Holdings Inc., which is our parent company engages in. So I'm gonna call out two of the areas which are very near and dear to our chairman's heart. First is the Reform Alliance. The Reform Alliance is a nonprofit dedicated to probation, parole, and sentencing reform in the United States and was founded, as I alluded to by our chairman, Mr. Michael Rubin, in addition to Patriots owner Robert Kraft and various other influential individuals here in the United States. In addition to that, the Fanatics brand created the All In Challenge with a couple of other brands within the sports industry, which is a chance to win a once in a lifetime fan experience. So whether that's attending the Super Bowl, meeting your favorite athlete, playing your favorite golf course with Tiger Woods, it's the ability for someone to win that type of experience with all of the proceeds going to alleviate food insecurity. With the All In Challenge, we've raised over $59 million. So with that said, commissioners, that's the end of our presentation. It was a privilege presenting in front of you. If you have any questions, we'd be happy to answer them now. Commissioners. I have one question. Can you just elaborate a little bit on your partnership with Make-A-Wish, if you could? Is that, is that a financial donation or do you have folks that actually make a wish with something with Fanatics? Yeah, so I don't have specifics, but similar to the All In Challenge, the Fanatics global brand has many connections with athletes, teams, and sports venues, which allow us to grant individuals within the Make-A-Wish Foundation with experiences of a lifetime. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am, Chair. Good slide. Anything else, Commissioner O'Brien, Commissioner Skinner, Commissioner Maynard? I don't have a question, Madam Chair, but just a comment, excellent report overall, very pleased with it. And I think that it's representative of real leadership in this space. So much appreciated, thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Skinner. We greatly appreciate it. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you, Madam Chair and commissioners. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. I'll turn to Manager Bushman again. Thank you so much. If you haven't had to navigate a screen in a while, it's a challenge. You did a good job. Okay, so moving to our next report, I've seen Corey Fox is on. Corey, if you want to take the lead for Fanzel. Oh, I think we can't hear you. There is a little arrow next to your mute button, and you just may have to select a different microphone. Can you hear me now? Yeah, I have the right correct microphone. Good morning. Thank you, Crystal. Good morning, Madam Chairwoman, fellow commissioners. We are pleased to be here to present to you. I'll go ahead and share my screen for our presentation, though that may be the most challenging part today. Let's see how we do in one second. I think we have Hida and Jill in the one screen. Hi, good morning. Try one more time. I can see it on my screen, just in case you need to know that. Perfect, I was just about to ask that question. Is it full screen now for you? You know, it was heavy in that direction and then it shifted. I don't know how you describe it there. That's closer. Hold on one second. Not sure what format that is. There we go. There we go, okay. So good morning. I'm Corey Fox, Vice President for Product and New Market Compliance. Nice to see everybody again. I have with me Kida Young, our Senior Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. And Jill Watkins, our new Senior Director of Responsible Gaming Strategy and Operations. We're going to run through our revenue and then we'll spend a few minutes on diversity equity and inclusion, some compliance and responsible gaming matters, our charitable impact within the community, as well as our conversations with the lottery. So here you see our, essentially our tax return from the first several months of operation in the Commonwealth. The variation goes along with the sports schedule, obviously the slowest months coming over the summer. We're excited today is obviously the NFL kickoff. We're excited to introduce ourselves to even more Massachusetts residents, those who have been waiting for the start of football season to place their wagers. So we're excited for today and for the next several weeks when we'll have a good opportunity to acquire more users and have them select their favorite sports wagering app. With that, I will hand it over to Hida Young to talk to you about our efforts in DENI. Good morning. I'm so pleased to be here again. I think when I first came before the commission, I had been at Fandall for just a couple of months. And I'm proud to say that this month I'm celebrating my one year as head of diversity equity and inclusion at Fandall. And I'm still excited about my job, this company and mainly the work that we're doing in the DENI space. As I shared in January, I was hired to develop a framework and strategy around DENI. The company's commitment is real and intentional and is investing in our DENI efforts. I'm proud to share today that I've recently just hired a DENI program manager to assist me in the implementation of our strategy. So our strategy involves attracting, hiring, retaining and developing our diverse workforce. We're proud to report that a lot of work has been done, but we recognize that we're on a long runway and we are just at the beginning. So what I'd like to highlight for you today, some of our DENI efforts and initiatives. In the attracting and hiring space, our team is working very closely with our talent acquisition team to establish a process around diversifying in the pool of applicants that are considered for open roles. It's really Fandle's aim to bring around positive change to increase the racial, ethnic and gender diversity representation, particularly at the leadership levels throughout Fandle. We believe you cannot hire who you do not see. So our efforts are now intentional in bringing forth those candidates with different backgrounds, experiences, races and gender classifications in an effort to diversify the workforce. Our outreach has expanded and where we also seek talent, in particular, diverse talent. We are taking efforts to be more visible and partnering with organizations that help us build a diverse pipeline. For example, we're partnering with the United Negro College Fund to provide emergency aid to college students. And this summer, we're proud to say that we had a UNCF scholar from an HBCU, join us in our summer program, which exposed her to a new career opportunity. We have expanded our recruiting efforts to include diverse recruiting, networking events in an effort to attract more talent, diverse talent in their retaining and developing area. Knowing that addressing representation is not enough. Fandle recognizes that representation must be underpinned in other aspects of the diversity strategy that focus on equity and inclusion. Fandle continues to make great strides in the equity and inclusion space. For example, this year, we curated and established a women's leadership development program with two components, one for senior leaders and one for emerging leaders. While a lot of our efforts initially focused on our female employee population, our efforts have expanded beyond gender. And we are now proud to announce that we're partnering with the McKinsey Company in their Black Leadership Academy. Approximately 40 Black employees, Fandle employees, will be a part of their leadership development program and we're hoping to expand the partnership next year to participate in the Asian Leadership Academy. In addition, we recognize the lack of representation in technology in the technology space. Fandle hosted this year our first inaugural Black Technology Summit, which we called Bet on Black. With respect to our community and culture, we believe and support and invest in our resource and interest groups. That's something that we take very seriously. We have four official established employee resource groups, Win for our female employees, Bold for our Black employees, Speak for our Asian and Pacific Islander employees, and Outfield for our LGBTQIA plus employees. Due to the success and the investment in these ERGs, we have now three very strong interest groups, which are on the path to becoming ERGs, which focus on the veterans military community, the Latino community, and the neurodiversity disability community. Our ERGs and interest groups serve as a critical pillar of Fandle to support and amplify our diverse communities. In addition to all of that work, we are also investing in DNI training and education that brings DNI to the forefront and assist us in this journey. I'd like to move to the next page, our workforce. So when we look, oh, I'm sorry, do we have any questions? Any questions, commissioners? I have a quick one. First off, like the four interest groups, Keto, I got veterans, Latino, disability community, what was the fourth one? It's, I'm sorry. Oh, you know, I did, it is four actually, and I didn't talk about it. We have an interest group in our UK location called FAME. What we heard from that population is a lot of our efforts, they thought were focusing on our US population. So they started their own group and it's called FAME UK. That's our fourth interest group. And I think it's interesting that you say that they're evolving into ERGs. So what's your standard? How do you get into the big club? So when we talk about formal ERGs, those are organizations or groups that have executive sponsorship, budget, and like a actual charter and framework around them. And they are now in the process of establishing all of that. And then in January of this year, they will be official ERGs. But right now we wanted them to understand what was necessary to become an ERG and get the support of the organization. And so now they're actually partnering and working with our current ERGs to understand what is actually required and what we'd like to see from an ERG in this community. Right, thank you. Anything else? Okay, I'll move on to our workforce numbers. So what we'd like to show in this slide is where we are where we break out from our minority population and our gender population. So right now you can see with our minority population, we are roughly about 35, 36% with our women population, we're at 29% for the Massachusetts residents. We are about 0.65, I think we're at 20 employees. I think last time I reported we were at 19. And this just essentially just gives up with our veterans numbers, we actually are gonna be doing this year a self ID campaign so we can identify all of those who associate with this veteran population. But like I said, we have a veteran's interest group and we have about 80 members that are involved with that interest group. Are there any more questions on this slide? I'll set. All right, I'll go on to the next slide, vendor supplier diversity slide. So Fandall earlier this year committed to developing and executing on a plan which involved identifying and engaging minority-owned, women-owned and veteran-owned businesses in support of our external diversity efforts. We've outlined for you a comprehensive plan with phases, which would include several steps. What we've learned along the way is that we really need a dedicated resource to this and we have invested in a partnership with a dedicated resource between DE and I and the procurement team. As outlined in the slides, here are our steps that we plan to instill. We are identifying and determining which vendors qualify as business owned by minorities, women and veterans. We're in that process right now. And then after that, we're gonna actively promote business opportunities that are available within Fandall through information sessions. We're gonna participate in vendor fairs and other events. We're gonna establish a process which allows business owned by minorities, women and veterans to register with Fandall as a preferred vendor. We're gonna provide training to our procurement department and our key purchasing business units on our diversity strategy and goals within this area. And then our last, I guess, step is that we're gonna review our vendor agreements to include a provision that requires vendors doing business with Fandall to utilize diverse suppliers in connection with providing services to Fandall. I think that's all I have. If we have any more questions regarding that, I'd be willing to answer them at this point. Commissioner's questions. I do have a question. If we could go back to the previous slide, just concentrating on the veteran's data, do you have any insight as to what your barrier is for obtaining that? Is it just that you're relying on self-disclosure and folks just aren't willing to share that information? What seems to be the issue there? So I think it's on our part to really reach out and have people self-disclose. We actually haven't done that. We're in the process now of doing a self-disclosure plan where we're gonna roll out. And that's when individuals will be able to identify. Right now we're not tracking that information and we have to just get it. Okay. And on the vendor supply, excuse me, supplier diversity, have you engaged any outside consultants? I know you mentioned a partnership between your HR and procurement departments, but what about any external support? Is that something that you're considering or have engaged? That's definitely something that we are considering. We haven't done that yet. Like I said, we realized that, I think that we were spread a little bit too thin in terms of our efforts and we realized that we needed a dedicated person to rely on this and we actually have someone that's gonna be doing that. And they certainly will be relying and reaching out to external help to really help us formulate a robust program that's effective for us and our vendors. Okay, thank you. Look forward to seeing the program, yeah. Thank you. Okay, great. Hi, everyone. My name is Jill Watkins. As Corey mentioned, I'm the new Senior Director of Responsible Gaming here at Fundill, which I am very, very excited about. I have worked in Flutter Entertainment for the last eight years across the UK, Ireland, our international group in Europe and for the last three and a half years in the US based out of New York. My world's previous to this were largely quite business-centric and I worked in our commercial function across various roles, across promotions, building budgets, P&L, and more recently actually in focusing on our new state launches and coming up with our plans in order to launch them. So myself and Corey in a different life worked very closely together in order to get states like Massachusetts Live a couple of months ago. I'm very, very excited about the transition, having worked in the industry for just gone eight years. It's something I've seen firsthand what happens when companies do this really well and when companies fail in this area. So I'm very passionate about the role that I can play in Fundill's future in responsible gaming and I feel very excited about some of the initiatives that we are going to be taking on in the next couple of months. To kind of kick off our first piece on this, we're just going to comment quickly on our minors and underage report. So since we went live in March, we're happy to report that we have had no minors or underage active on our site. So good news for us there. And if we were to move on to the next slide, Corey, please, we're going to focus a little bit more on our responsible gaming numbers. So when we report back up on how many people have joined the VSE list voluntarily, we've had 75 users in Massachusetts. Additional to that, we've had 51 users who initiated on the Fando site a closure of their account for responsible gaming reasons. And these are a mix of temporary closures, so timeouts and a mix of exclusions that will be permanent and split of them is 34 to permanent and 17 to temporary. As I mentioned, I've recently joined the team. I'm not the only new addition to the team. In recent months, Fando has made some other changes internally to really strengthen our commitment for responsible gaming over the coming months and years. And this also includes the hiring of Alison Cutler to be our new vice president of sustainability and responsible gaming. Alison is responsible for our policies, products, commercial operations, advocacy, effectively anything that touches the responsible gaming space. And she joins us from a consulting and a political background and has hit the ground running so far. She's currently in week six and I'm currently in week three. So we're very much looking up to speed but both very excited and motivated by the prospects ahead of us. Do we have any questions on those two slides just before we jump into our community impact? Questions, commissioners? I feel, I just wonder if commissioners if you want any insight on these ban dual closures, the permanent temporary, I might be the only one who needs a little bit of education on that. Yeah, I can touch on them very quickly. So our permanent closures are when either we do an investigation, a case has been flagged to us or a user has exhibited behavior that we think airs on the side of being unusual for the player. And we would then initiate a review of that customer to understand what their play has been, what their interactions have been with their support staff and different parts of the business. And then if we deem that maybe something doesn't look right we often try and reach out to that customer. Sometimes we don't always hear back. So then it becomes a bit of a judgment call around where we feel their behavior is at and if it warrants them being excluded. Another reason why someone could be permanently excluded that's an issue in the Fando side would be if they contact RCS and explicitly say can you close my account? Oftentimes people come to us first and then maybe subsequently join the state exclusion list. So a lot of time people will maybe recognize that they are struggling to play responsibly and they will opt for us to exclude them from Fando specifically first. And then for the temporary ones as well they're often used for users who are maybe going through a period where they're unsure of like if they're managing their play correctly and they can opt for a time out which is effectively closes their account for a period of time and then that time lapses and their account is then reopened. We are very cognizant of not contacting people during that time out or letting them know specifically your time out has laps come back on we were very clear on if the user decides to come back that's their own choice. But it's kind of two mechanics there for users to be able to manage their play if they feel like they're not comfortable with us. Thank you. No problem. So then I'm going to move on and touch on our community impact if there's no more questions on this. And as I'm going to talk about we are very committed to setting a standard around what it means to be a responsible operator and how we can contribute positively to all the communities that we are in. We have three different buckets of what we do. Some of them we would have heard previously when we presented it we would have mentioned before in our responsible gaming section around our contributions and support to the ICOG which does really fundamental research on the younger segments of the population in the US specifically. And we have found as an operator that it is hard to get research on responsible gaming generally and even more difficult to get on the younger population and understand what it means to them and impacts it could be having. So our donations to the ICOG helps us just fundamentally understand better that cohort of the population. Meanwhile our contributions to the NCPG help fund their Gildee grant program and that's effectively helping communities and organizations across the country with preventive programs for responsible gaming. So trying to help to isolate those behaviors I touched on earlier and provide people with tools who come to them. And they're both things that we try and talk about and promote in our media when we discuss better responsible gaming efforts. So people are aware of these programs and that they're available to them. Then to touch on Massachusetts specifically initiatives. I'm very, very happy to be able to talk about our Operation Hope donation. This is something that is a very new announcement. It hasn't been fully publicly announced yet. So this is the first time we're talking about it in a more public forum. And it's going to be a partnership with Operation Hope and we'll start with a two year commitment. Operation Hope is a nonprofit organization focused on making free enterprise and capitalism work for under-served areas of the population. We're going to be giving a million dollar donation to support financial literacy, specifically in Massachusetts. And this is going to be helped by a subsection of Operation Hope called their Hope Inside initiative. And Hope Inside basically serves millions of individuals throughout the country to try and increase their financial literacy and help them understand better where their money is going. Budget better and just have more freedom and control at the same time of where their funding is going. The program is going to launch in Q4 of this year and we're hoping to announce it soon more publicly and really kind of get media behind to get people knowing that this is there for them to use and to let some of our customers know Massachusetts as well about it. And we're just very happy that we're finally able to do this. It's something our partnership with Operation Hope has been in the pipeline for a while and for us to be able to put it live and to share it with you guys that's going live in Massachusetts with a million dollar donation. Very exciting to us. The last thing I'll touch on is just around our other community support that we do in Fando. So across all the states we're live in, we really try and leverage a lot of local charities to just showcase that we're present in a state and that it means a lot to us that we're building like positive links in with the community. So these are just an example of a couple of the charities that we're currently working with across the US and all of them we've kind of ongoing relationships with and our investment and what they do varies depending on the organization and their focus area but we're excited about them all. Any questions and any of that? Madam Chair. Yes, Miss Shahan. Just a clarification. Did I hear you say it was a two-year partnership with Operation Hope? Going to start as a two-year. Yes, correct. So it's going to start as a two-year commitment and then we will review and see where we go from there in terms of length of time and investment. So is that a million a year or is it half and half? It's starting as a million in full and then we review as they hit the million. Oh, very nice. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Very nice donation. Thank you. Great idea. And then thank you, Jill. Thank you, Kira. And then last we just wanted to mention we have had a very successful meeting with the lottery about potential business opportunities in ways that we can work together with them and we look forward to continuing those discussions. With that, we're happy to take any questions on that or anything else. But with that, we have concluded our presentation. Commissioner O'Brien, Commissioner Skinner, Commissioner Maynard, Commissioner Hill. Madam Chair. Yes. So is there any way that you can give us or elaborate on the conversations that you've had with the mass lottery? What I've heard is a lot of conversations taking place but I really haven't seen a lot of action taking place. So is there anything you can share with us publicly? You know, I'd say we had our most senior business development executives on the call. We have had a number of ideas that we discussed during our January licensing meeting about how we can work successfully alongside lotteries in order to promote both businesses. And we ran through those ideas, they seemed interested and engaged and we continue to discuss that. But beyond that, you know, they're sort of business discussions. Okay. As you know, this was an important issue for the entire commission. And I just want to ensure that doesn't get lost in the weeds, you know, as businesses are coming here and doing business here. That's all. Very much understood. Commissioner Maynard. Thank you, Madam Chair. Corey, I am really struck by the zero underage with the size of the size of Fandall. What do you think that's attributable to? Is it a employer customer? Something you're doing? I'm just, I'm trying to figure it out. It's actually remarkable. Yeah, sure. So I think that at this point in the sort of development of the online gaming world, the KYC approaches that we all use have gotten pretty good in terms of, you know, determining exactly who the individual is who is the time to register for an account and ensuring that they are of age. I also think, you know, it is known that if you want to use a legal regulated sportsway during that, you need to be over 21. I worry about the illegal market in this respect. You know, I think if you're underage, it's much more likely that you would go to an illegal or unregulated app rather than one of the regulated apps. But, you know, over time, I'm sure there will be cases that we do identify. When we do identify them, they can often come up through our customer service where they tend to contact customer service and we're able to either identify ourselves that they're underage or they help themselves. And over time in future quarterly reports, you know, unfortunately, there may well be some. And to that point, so if there was a situation where a parent called customer service and said, hey, my kid grabbed my app, did this, did that, that would be reflected in this report? Yes, it would be. Okay, all right, thank you. It's kind of a plus report, huh, Commissioner Mayer? And if they did report, a parent did report, it's the practice to shut them down the whole account or what is, if the parent's not before, what do you do? We would shut down the account, but that's correct. Yeah, at least until we could be absolutely certain that it was only the parent who was operating the account if it was in the parent's name. Okay, thanks. Commissioner O'Brien, any questions? All set, all right, Commissioner Skinner, all set. All right, Commissioner Hill, all right, thank you. Thank you. Corey, it's nice to see you again. Thank you very much. Thank you all for your time. Thank you. Great to have you. Take care. And continued good luck to both of you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, okay, moving on to Wynn-Bett, right? Crystal, manager, Commissioner? Absolutely, we have Jennifer Roberts from Wynn-Bett to present the third and final report. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the commission staff. Thank you for allowing us to present our report today. Wanted to make sure you can see my screen. Also, so I'm Jennifer Roberts, vice president and general counsel of Wynn-Bett. And again, I wanna thank the commission for allowing us to reschedule our presentation to today. The presentation will focus on our operations during Q2 2023. And while Wynn-Bett is undergoing some transition currently, I want to emphasize the commitment of Wynn-Resorts to continue retail and mobile sports way during within the Commonwealth. So I'm also joined by Jackie Crum, senior vice president and general counsel of Encore Boston Harbor. She's here in case there's any questions relating to the property. Okay, so our revenue, you will see obviously has increased to Q2, the publicly reported information is provided here. And so you have had a snapshot of what our activities have been in the Commonwealth. Moving on to workforce diversity. For all employees of WSI US LLC, which is our Wynn-Bett entity, we've maintained a strong workforce diversity representation over both Q1 and Q2 with over half representing diverse groups. And you will see something that I'm proud of is that at the executive level, we have a 78% represented by women. And so you'll see that there's some modification into Q2, but still a strong representation here of women at the executive level, which means director and above. So happy to answer any questions on that. Questions for counselor Roberts. Madam chair, I don't have any questions. If you can just go back a couple of slides and just give us a couple of seconds to take a quick hand. Of course, I didn't want to go, I did go too fast. So we did provide Q1 information to allow a comparison. And so during Q1 we had, we labeled gender and minority representation among our employees. And you'll see the figures here are all Wynn-Bett employees. And then you'll see broken down by kind of line level, the front customer facing employees to manager and then executive level, and which is a director and above the representation there. And that's Q1, so you compare that to Q2, still pretty similar representation for gender and diverse workforce, as well as 75% women at the executive level and above, but over half of the workforce comes from a diverse background. Perfect, thank you. Yeah, sorry, I'm not going too fast. So what we have emphasized here is that you can see that our initiatives, our goals and plans have been represented within our number. So we remain committed and have had consistent percentages of representation. And that can also be attributed to the low turnover that had occurred during those two quarters. And in ways, the reason we have a good representation in numbers is we have a lot of areas of focus where we encourage hiring diverse talent within all levels of the company using job board targets and encouraging once they are hired, encouraging ongoing growth and development of our employees so that they can advance into the company. So we've had programs called WinBet Academy, which provides leadership training, skills training, and we've even had internal kind of training and mentoring programs. For example, in my own department, we had a member from the customer service team that became part of the compliance team through some skills training and improvement and growth commitments within the company. And when it comes to vendors, we are committed to identifying diverse vendors. Currently, our vendor identification is voluntary, but we have worked to identify vendors in the Commonwealth that come from diverse backgrounds. And so this slide is a little kind of represents a figure like where you see the WBE in particular, like 93% to zero. What that means is the actual funding for the vendor relationship was paid in Q1, but these services extend to Q2. So the numbers may look a little skewed and that's explained on this slide. But we have again worked hard to identify diverse vendors and continue to remain dedicated to contracting with diverse vendors as well as having a discretionary spend be distributed amongst diverse vendors. Jennifer? Yes. Hi, I just, I noticed that you're focusing on Massachusetts spend. And I realized that when that is in the process of reducing its footprint in certain jurisdictions. And so hoping for next time, you could give us a bigger picture in terms of overall what the diverse spend is. And does that make sense? Yes. Yes. Okay, good. Because this has been carved out for Massachusetts. So we can give you a bigger picture of all diverse diversity spend. Yeah, definitely still interested in Massachusetts of course, but also looking to get sort of a comparison, I guess. Of course, happy to provide that. Thank you for mentioning it. So moving along to compliance, like our colleagues in this space, we have not had any minors or underage access to our accounts. Again, this is primarily the reason is that, they have to input a date of birth as well as go through like a KYC identification process before an account can even be created. So we have had zero attempts or have found any registration of minors accessing or attempting to access WinBet. And that also we have just submitted our report that for last month, we also have had zero numbers of minors to attempt to access WinBet. So moving along to responsible gaming, WinBet does comply with the voluntary self-exclusion program offered in Massachusetts and also offers through its site and app its own exclusion program where patrons can exclude themselves for a period of time. And we honor that voluntary self-exclusion. We also offer other tools like the other operators have identified things like time limits, betting limits, deposit limits and cool off periods. So those continue to be offered to patrons and we've had a healthy success on maintaining the VSE enrollments. So when it comes to lottery, although WinBet does not directly participate in the sale of lottery products, we do work with our affiliate on Corbostan Harbor who does participate in the sale of lottery products on property. So we continue to rely on the relationship of our affiliate company and on Corbostan Harbor to ensure that Massachusetts state lottery sales are not negatively impacted by sports budgeting within the Commonwealth. And finally, on community outreach, our WinBet employees are invited to participate and have participated in many community level engagements for throughout the WinResorts family. We've had many employees participate with donation programs as well as programs like Feed the Funnel, excuse me. Feed the Funnel, which is packing meals for local charities. We have a UNLB Boyd School of Law pre-law fellowship program that comes to visit our site every year. We're active, many of our employees are active in the Global Gaming Women Organization. And we have a sponsored school classroom volunteering. And as well as on Corbostan Harbor also has several volunteer programs that the employees participate in and that we always encourage through our measures within WinBet. So that really concludes our presentation of the quarterly report. And again, I appreciate the commission's willingness to allow us to postpone the presentation until today. We were happy to do that, Jennifer. Thank you so much. Questions for Jennifer, commissioners? Maybe if we bring down the slide, we can just check. Can see everybody again. Yep, let me stop. All right, just, any questions for? Madam Chair? Yes, Commissioner Hill. Very good report, Jennifer. And I appreciate you coming before us. The only red flag I saw, and it's a minor one, but one that we care about deeply was the lottery. And I understand the physical property has a relationship with the lottery, but we really do expect that our online folks would be reaching out to the lottery as well and see if there is any partnership that you can have with them. And then we're very, very new into this. And I'm not sure that the lottery knows exactly what they need to partner, but I would hope that maybe before you come before us next time that a conversation between you and our state lottery director Mark Bracken could take place. Great, so noted, and I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Any other questions for Linda? And we appreciate Jackie from being here as well. Okay, thank you. Thank you. I look forward to seeing you in another quarter, Jennifer. Thanks so much, commissioners. It is just about quarter of 11 and we've started at nine before turning to our racing item. Does it make sense to have a bit of a break? Commissioner Bride, what if we come back like five of 11 or something, 10 minute break? Okay, I think I'm seeing all nods. Yes, we'll reconvene just before 11. Thank you so much, everyone. I think I'm on it, I was, okay. So I'm just, I guess, I think I'm on it. Hi, Mr. McHugh. How you doing? It's Paul Umbrella. You're on mute. Oh, okay. Now Paul Umbrella, I said hi. Hi, Paul Umbrella. Oh, he's muted. Hi, Paul. Hi, Paul, how are you? It's Alice. Hey guys, just as a heads up, we are still live streaming even though we have the signup that says we'll be resuming shortly as an FYI. Thank you very much. I'm in front of the volume. Okay, Dave. Paul's up. Thanks, Dave. Okay, this is like the name of the measures of gaining commission. We just took a short break and we started at nine this morning and do our roll call. Good morning again, Commissioner Bryan. Good morning, I'm here. Commissioner Hill, good morning again. Good morning, I'm here. Good morning again, Commissioner Skinner. Good morning. And Commissioner Maynard, good morning again. Good morning. All right. And it's just 11 o'clock. So we're gonna turn to item number six. I wanna say to those who present today, I know Dr. Leica, you have your test in order and I'll turn it right over to you, Dr. Leica. Thank you. Okay, thank you. So I think it'll be helpful if I give an overview of the statutes and a little bit of the history. And then, as you mentioned, we have several guests today to talk. Alice Ginsburg, Managing Director and Bobby Q. President of the Harness Association of New England. Colin Barolo, the Executive Director of the New England HBPA. Mindy Coleman, Council for the Jockey Guild. Abit Kebasa, Jockey, and Edwin Molinari, Jockey. So I'll begin with the item we have today. Dr. Leica, can I just ask for people to mute while you're speaking? Just for background noise, please. Thanks. Thank you. So the item today is determined how much shall be paid annually by the Horseman's Association, Horseman's Organizations to the Jockey or Driver Organizations for Health, Life, or Other Benefits to Active and Disabled Jockeys. That is by statute. It's from 23K section 60C. The chapter 23K section 60 establishes the Racehorse Development Fund. Not to go into too much detail on it, but it does give some background for what we're doing today. That fund establishes money to go to the different groups as the commission has discussed before. The first thing it does is split it between the two breeds, the two racing breeds, the thoroughbreds and standardbreds. There's a horse racing committee that is in charge of doing this. There's a representative of the governor, the treasurer, the mass gaming commission, the HBPA and HHANE on that committee. The governor or their representative is the chair of that committee. They submit their recommendation to the MGC and the MGC can either accept it or not. The MGC can't change it. They can only send it back to the committee. So over the years, this committee's met multiple times and over the years, the split has been changed due to the changing conditions of the two different industries. The last time that committee met was in March of 2021 and the commission approved their recommendation on April of 2021. And that split established a 50-50 split of the health and welfare benefit money, basically the 4%, which is what we're talking about today. Let's see. In 2021, the commission also had some discussions about a separate statute. The 128A, the racing statute has a section five, which includes 65,000 going to the jockeys. And with the end of Suffolk Racing, there was discussion about if this money could still go out or not. And that worked with Mindy Coleman with the jockeys bill. I can't shut the volume up son of a bitch. Bob, I think you need to mute yourself. Perfect. There we go. Thank you. So after discussions and all the commission decided they could still give money out because there's still simulcast money coming in. And so that money has gone out on a regular basis. Again, that money, it's a little different from the Racehorse Development Fund money. That money by statute, by law, goes to active retired or disabled jockeys. And there really wasn't a way to say that there were active jockeys at a facility in Massachusetts once Suffolk Downs seized racing. So now it goes to retired and disabled. The 23K section 60, which is what we're talking about today goes to by law to active and disabled. And again, there's not really a way to give it to active. Jockeys in Massachusetts now since there is no racing. So it's just the disabled that we're looking at for that. So again, in 2021, both the horse racing committee, the gaming commission to approve their split and then approval of the 128A money. And then the commission asked for public comments regarding the 23K money. So we got the comments. They were part of the packet for the commission meeting that we had in September of 2021. And at that point, the commissioners voted to direct the Thorbett Horseman's Association to give to the Jockeys Guild, which is the representative group, a thousand for each of the four disabled jockeys for a total of $4,000. And on the harness side, after looking at their program where the drivers are included in benefits, the commission decided that they did not need to give extra amount out of that money specifically to the drivers because they were already covered under that. So that brings us a little bit up to date on that. The, again, and the harness horseman's association will speak today, but they have various benefits. In the harness industry, it's set up a little different from the Thoroughbred industry in general. So again, their drivers are part of their horseman's association going on to the HBPA. Their organization does not include jockeys. They're in the Thoroughbred industry, it typically doesn't. The jockeys have a national organization, the Jockey Guild. And there is not a similar organization on the harness side for harness drivers. So there really isn't a organization of standard bred drivers to give money to under the section 60 payments, even if the commission decided they wanted to, but they are included in the benefits of the HHA anyway. Oh, let's see here. Thinking, this is the actual item sounds fairly simple, determining how much of the money of the 4% should go to the jockeys and the drivers. As you see, there's a number of statutes that come into play and it's helpful to keep in mind all of these things, all these moving parts at once. Also, I wanna make it clear that I understand and I know the commission has in the past that there's a great need for these funds and that everybody who qualifies for these funds these funds are valuable for them and we recognize that and we wish there was more money that could go around. Obviously, if you move money from one group to another, it's decreasing the money that's available for the other. So I talked a little bit about the coverage on the standard bred side, on the thoroughbred side, Paul Ambrillo, the executive director for the NEHBPA is here today to speak. He says that they're currently paying out more in benefits than they're receiving from the Resource Development Fund. And then we do have Minnie Coleman from the Jockeys Guild to speak and the two Jockeys, Edwin Molinari and Abed Kabasa. A few options have been discussed. The commission can determine a dollar amount to go to the guild to disperse to the four Jockeys who would qualify as disabled. Another option is when the resource committee meeting, committee meets again to perhaps give a small increase to the HBPA that would be targeted towards the Jockeys. Ideally, in 2021, it was kind of like the ideal situation where the resource committee met, determined the split and then the commission was able to meet after that to determine what percentage should go to Jockeys and drivers. The committee did not meet last year and so there was a little bit of a concern about was that amount going to be changing and would that affect what the commission would want to do as far as the 4% goes? The committee has not met again this year and I feel that we can't really wait for that committee to meet. The commission needs to go ahead and determine amount. If for some reason the horse racing committee met next month and changed the percentage that was going to the horsemen's groups, they could perhaps bring up what happened and what transpired in this meeting as to how they felt their percentages should be affected. Does any of the, I know that was kind of a quick overview of a very complex issue. I don't know if any of the commissioners have questions for me. Madam Chair, you're on mute. I am. Commissioner Hill, yes, please. So is there an explanation of why the committee has not met in two years? No, let me jump in. Commissioner Hill, I think that probably the explanation is a little bit complicated, but of course we do have members, but our chair, that's the governor's appointment, has gone off, if I understand correctly, Dr. Lightbound, he resigned, and that appointment I believe is outstanding. We also were quite involved in sports wagering, and I don't think you've had necessarily the opportunity, but you do sit on that, you're my destiny on that committee. So we should be working. I think one of the reasons why we didn't convene is because this considerable work was done, and then we also had, at the same time, there was some change in the composition, we had an applicant for Thoroughbred Racing last year, and that landscape continues to be open, but I think probably we should convene a meeting, and I think we can work with the governor's office to get that chair designated. Commissioner Maynard, you know more about that process than anybody here, but I know that you were very helpful when the last chair, because I did reach out to the governor's office last time, and that chair was appointed. So I think today the fact is that we have the split that was represented in that very thorough decision making in 2021. Commissioner Cameron sat in on that, Commissioner Hill, very active committee, and now, as Dr. Lightman points out, there's not a requirement to me at a particular time, but I'm hearing that perhaps we need to get the committee engaged again. With that said. Thank you for that explanation, and then if there's anything I can do to- I think we can definitely work together. I think it's probably just a transition issue. Okay. Understood. So Dr. Lightman, it's 50-50 and nothing has changed in terms of horse racing since that was established. Correct. So that's one important fact that thoroughbred racing has not reengaged. Correct. So do you want to start with Ms. Tisbert, or do you want to, Mr. Ambrano, how do you want to proceed, Dr. Lightman, so that we get all the information we need as we think about this issue? Yeah, I think it would be helpful to start with Ms. Tisbert and President McHugh, Bob McHugh was also on their item, may be a little less complicated. So I think it'd be helpful to start with that. Alice or Bob, I don't see Bob right now. I don't know if he or Alice is going to speak. Can you hear me, Alex? Yes, thank you. Hi, I'm Alice Tisbert, Managing Director for the HHA&E. Bob is, I believe, able to speak. I'm trying to get, see if he can chime in. He's having some feedback issues from his computer and he dialed in with the phone and thinks star six will unmute him. Do you know if that's correct? Anybody? Try star six to unmute. I'll turn to our experts, but he muted himself, because we're thankful for that. Yes. What if he disengages and tries again? Okay, how's that? There we go. Okay, thank you. So this is Bob McHugh, the president of our organization and he's going to speak to me. Good morning, it's still morning, right? Yes, it is, good morning. Good morning, Mr. McHugh, how are you? Mr. McHugh, I think that we're all set to hear from you. Okay. Thank you. I'm still getting some kickback. So is this fine? Can you hear me? We can. Okay. Clear, we're not here at the platform. Sorry. Since the money came in on the race house development fund and I want to give credit, particularly Alice. We were very hard to develop programs with the intent in mind that the purpose of the RHTF is to build and strengthen the mass hosting racing industry. That retirement savings plan in particular, that has been wonderful for trying to get trainers and drivers into Massachusetts to race here. I can tell all the time, people are so interested in that plan because unlike maybe the thought of the past until the advent of the race house development fund there was no plan, there was no savings plan for drivers and trainers. So this money has been critical and continuation of it to both advanced people racing here now and to encourage trainers and drivers to race here in the future. Since that, we've added a division plan, a dental plan, and that applies to all members of our association. And that's to encourage people to join our association, people who may or may not have been racing here in the future. So without anything we've done, this has been really successful for the hands off future. I do, while I do think we're better off with a strengthened and strong thoroughbred industry, we are an ongoing concern. I mean, believe me, I'd like to do what we can for them but it just seems to me, we're giving them half, we are giving them 50% now and they don't have an industry. So all I can say is I get to emphasize that everything we've done in mind was mean the intent of the average TAF that I get to finish to build and strengthen the mass fostering racing industry. And I think what our plan is done, hopefully we'll continue to do to strengthen harness race. Questions for Mr. McHugh? At this point, I do want to wait and hear everybody and everyone. Well, all right. Thank you. Dr. Leipan. Okay. The next person we have to speak is Paul Umbrella, the executive director of the New England HBPA. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Madam Chair. Paul, before you start, may I recommend Madam Chair that everybody go on mute again who is not speaking? As long as we can bring Bob back. Yeah. Good. I should be able to unmute him if he has challenges, but then going forward again. Okay, great. Thanks, Dave. Thank you, everyone. Can you hear me fine? Yes. Thanks, Paul. So a little history first. So the thoroughbred industry was very instrumental in writing a language in the 2011 Gaming Act that actually protected both breeds and was instrumental in writing a language for both the purse accounts, breeders accounts and health and welfare accounts as we see it today. The language in question, I think first of all, I didn't realize there's two things in play, not one was the split, but also the issue with the Jockey Guild. The intent of that language in 23K, from my understanding, and again, 128A and C as we know today is very challenging, but the intent of that language was to theoretically limit interpretation but give both industries that flexibility to offer potential benefits under the health and welfare market to those organizations. So while the Jockeys Guilds today receives the 65,000 under 128A as Alex had mentioned, it also opened up that language. As you read it, it says owners, trainers, employees, we would love to give money out to Jockeys, we would love to give money out to grooms, valleys, owners, but based under the articles of our organization, we today only give out benefits and only can afford to give out benefits to trainers. So with that said, obviously I think it's always been challenging for interpretation when you read that language, but it clearly states the gaming commission will determine how much the organization pays. And again, I think the intent at the time was to replace the 65,000 from 128A to then give both organizations that flexibility to use the money as they see fit and based on how they budget or what they budget. Now, if the commission doesn't know, also in 2021, both organizations, the Standard Breds and Thile Breds did agree to leave the split, now whether it was in the records or on the documents, at least for two years to leave the split as it was as it is. We also felt that specifically under the health and welfare bucket that both organizations should continue to receive the 50-50 split because if we had more money, as Alex said, we could do more. We also feel that both the breeders and health and welfare buckets with lack of racing, rightfully so, should not be impacted, right? Just because we don't race doesn't mean other states have done it. Breeders, industries thrive in other states without racing. We're trying to do that today. On the breeder side, which I also serve, we're trying to get creative with other programs to kickstart our breeding program. On the health and welfare side and to correct Mr. McHugh, sorry, but our organization is the longest standing organization in the country since 1935. We've been offering benefits to our members for over 35 years way before the Resource Development Fund came in. We were the first organization to offer jockey insurance to the jockeys in which Mindy can attest, the guild has received millions of dollars as a result of those insurance policies. And some of the current jockeys have received over six figures in premiums, which my trainers will never receive my mouse close to that number. So I don't think we should really, in my opinion, really consider changing the split now because I thought that was more for the HRC committee and not this conversation that this was more about the guild. But the fact is that we have been giving out benefits to our members and over the years, unfortunately now, even with the Resource Development Fund, but the lack of racing, we do not have the funding to continue. And over the years, last year I told you we had to cut our scholarship program. The year before that, I had to cut health and welfare because it was too costly to put trainers on health and welfare. However, I did help them find programs through Health Connector and Mass Health. And this year, as you folks have received our financial statements, we are now dipping into reserves and I'll probably have to make more cuts, probably in 2024. We do offer life insurance. We do offer eyeglasses. We do offer benevolence and we do offer the old age assistance which all have been established way before the Resource Development Fund even existed. So for me, my concern is that while the jockeys guild already received $65,000, there is no money that I think even between both breeds which seem to be, you know, standard breads seem to be getting by fine. I don't think any additional funding should be allocated on top of the $65,000 the jockeys guild has already received. I'll be more than happy to answer any questions. And we'll save questions until we hear from everyone. Dr. Lightman. Okay. The next person we'll hear from is Mindy Coleman, Council for the jockey guild. Good morning, Chairman, commissioners. This is Mindy Coleman on behalf of the jockeys guild. Speaking on behalf of our organization as well as all the jockeys who have regularly rode in Massachusetts, we're respectfully requesting the commission's consideration for distribution of funds that has been discussed today under that percentage from the Race Horse Development Fund for the jockey and driver benefits. According to chapter 23K section 60, the commission is the one who shall determine how much shall be paid annually by the horseman's organization to the throw bread jockeys or standard bred drivers organizations. The guild is the organization representing professional jockeys in American throw bread and quarter horse racing. And the guild has and continues to be recognized as the organization representing the majority of jockeys in Massachusetts. We have been the organization doing so for decades with the exception of the years of reorganization which began in October of 2007. In 2012, we regrained the majority of membership in Massachusetts and we were once again recognized by the commission as the representative of jockeys. Although there is no live racing in Massachusetts, throw bread racing, excuse me, the commission has continued to recognize the guild in that capacity. The funds that have been distributed under 23K is applicable to the active and permanently disabled jockeys for health insurance, life insurance and other benefits as Dr. Lightbound had previously indicated. Because there is, unfortunately there's no live racing been conducted in Massachusetts since 2020. The only, we haven't been able to establish a standard for active jockeys. Therefore, it's all been reserved for our four permanently disabled or those jockeys who suffered a career and during injury at a Massachusetts track deeming them permanently disabled. Unlike the funds that have also been referred to under chapter 128A section five, the language in section 60C does not include the retired jockeys. Based on the qualifications that have previously been presented to the commission for qualifying members who are disabled, as a result of those on track injuries in Massachusetts, since 2008, there would be four individuals who would qualify for the funds in the event that the commission deems it distribution to the guild for those individuals appropriate. As done with the distribution received in 2021, any funds provided to the guild under the RHDF would be provided directly to those individuals. The guild, it should be noted that the guild does not retain any funds at all received from the Massachusetts gaming, whether it be under chapter 128A or 23K. The guild receives those funds and then distributes to the individual riders based on the qualifications. And while the distribution obviously that we just recently received under 20, I'm sorry, 128A has been most greatly appreciated, there's always the additional need for those jockeys who were disabled during racing in Massachusetts. We continue to recognize there's many factors that must be considered by you as you make this determination pertaining to the amount of funds to be allocated to the guild in order to contribute for the benefits of the throwback jockeys. Now, one thing I would like to do is to provide some additional insight and assistance for the commission with regards to the questions that have come in with regards to the concerns that have been expressed to the commission from outside individuals with regards to the eligibility and or receipt of funds under the racehorse development fund. As our legislation indicates, the commission has a discretion to distribute to such organization. Although there was not a distribution under the RHDF until 2021, there is a reasoning for this. After the RHDF was established, the guild submitted letters to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission in the early 2014-2015 time, requesting that additional funds be made to the active and disabled jockeys. However, there were discussions between the New England HBPA, track management and representative of the commission during the latter part of 2014 and 15 about several different items, including the funds being provided to the guild especially in light of the fact there was a sunset clause at that time in Chapter 128A. This is where we received the 65,000. It was set to expire in 2016. However, obviously Chapter 128A has continued through the adoption of various legislation since that time. It should also be noted during that time as Mr. O'Reilly had referred to, the New England HBPA was funding an excess policy to provide benefits for jockeys in the event of an on-track accident, which was in addition to the on-track accident policy that was currently being provided by Suffolk Downs. The policy was established in the 1990s with input from the jockeys at that time. I was regularly discussed with the colony of jockeys over the years as changes occurred. Additionally, there are several jockeys who have received benefits under this policy, including temporary disability, excess medical coverage, and lump sums of payments for permanent disability. One thing I would like to correct with what Mr. O'Reilly said, the guild itself has not received millions. There are individual jockeys who received those benefits. The guild itself has not received any funding or any monies directly from the Massachusetts Gaming Commission that were used for the purposes of the organization. As said, any and all funds received have then went out, directly been redistributed to the individual qualifying jockeys. It should also be noted and recognized that the New England HBPA was the only horseman's organization to provide for such additional coverage in addition to the on-track accident policies that were being provided. In light of that fact, and that the guild was still receiving the $65,000 annually for qualifying jockeys under Chapter 128A, and the additional benefits were being provided by the New England HBPA through the excess coverage to the active and disabled jockeys as well as the uncertainty of the future of racing in Massachusetts. It was the opinion of the guild at that time that this was a reasonable exchange for the portion of money that the commission may have deemed necessary that the guild would receive on behalf of the active and disabled jockeys under the RHADF. It should also be noted this excess policy was provided by the New England HBPA until 2020 and only ceased due to the fact there was no current live racing in Massachusetts. As far as the eligibility of the funds received in 2012, when the guild was again recognized as the majority representative of jockeys in Massachusetts, the guild, along with its active membership in the Massachusetts colony, established a criteria based on the number of mounts ridden in Massachusetts since 2008 for active, retired, as well as those jockeys who were permanently disabled at a Massachusetts racetrack. Initially, jockeys had to be a member of the guild at that time and was required to do so until 2021 when we went back to review the criteria based on the distribution of funds. However, in 2021, I'm sorry, there were changes that were made to that criteria, allowing those that would have otherwise been eligible under the previous criteria, those individuals who were not members to otherwise be eligible under the previous criteria. Each year, the guild has reviewed the criteria for eligibility and if it all changes, they are, those changes are submitted to the commission for its review and consideration. As always, the guild greatly appreciates the long-working relationship we've had with Dr. Lightbound, Chairman Stein and the commission in general. We thank you for your time and consideration with us today and if there's any questions, please feel free to ask. Thank you, Ms. Coleman, Dr. Lightbound. Okay, the next person we'll hear from is Jaki Abba-Kawasah. Can everyone hear me now? Yes, thank you. Good morning, Mr. Kawasah. Okay, good afternoon. I'm gonna start by saying that, first of all, my dog ate my homework, so I had to scramble to put whatever I got together at the last minute here. And I'm gonna start by telling you a little bit about myself, then I'm gonna move on to talking about the comments that were made. Then I'm gonna ask the chair, maybe she could answer now, that while I'm speaking, will I be able to ask some questions along the way? Certainly, Mr. Kawasah. This is an opportunity for you to ask questions. Thank you. Okay, then I'm gonna ask that once I get going and that maybe whoever might have some questions may try to reserve them until I'm done. We'll do that, we'll do that. All questions will be reserved, thank you. Thank you. Okay, so like I said, I'm gonna start by explaining a little bit about myself and about the situation that we got at hand at the moment. So I'm Jackie about Kawasah or disabled Jackie about Kawasah and I've been in racing since 1973. I got hurt in 2012, I've followed racing, you know, represented riders and racing has been my life. But nonetheless, I need to tell you a little bit about my injuries so that I can move on from there. I got permanent head injuries. So I started racing, I've been in racing for a long time. Head injuries, so I stutter, I take speech therapies. I got vertebrates, brain, bunch of stuff. And you probably sometimes might not notice it, but you know, so I'll have difficulty sometimes with my speech and I'll shake a lot. That's also attributed to the head injury. And I'm gonna do the best to address this matter. You know, I'm probably gonna say a lot about other Jackie's injuries and disabilities and situations that they may be in financially, what not maybe towards the end, but for the moment, I'm gonna move on and I want to first of all thank the people that I talked to and make comments. People like Vernon Bush, George Fargus, Susan Kelly, Doreen, our radio. Edwin of course is gonna be on with us and I believe he's gonna speak after I am through here. So I listen to what everybody's had to say so far and I don't wanna go off my sketch here. So in particular, I'm gonna probably want to address everyone in writing cause I'll be able to take my time and address everything that was said by all those individuals. For now I'm gonna address the memorandum, the letter, the memorandum, the authorization for director of racing, the Harness Associations Letter, the Jackie Skills Letter and the New England Horseman Phenomenon Associations Letter. I'm gonna get out. Mr. Kawasa, those letters are in our packet commissioners. That's part of the comments I believe. Yes, but it's important for me to respond to those, to what's said on those, that information. Yes, we're looking forward to hearing your comments. So before I continue, I wanna mention to some of the commissioners that are new to the board that this is an issue that myself and Edwin Malinari initially bought to light. We approached the HBPA first. We approached the commission, Lightbound in particular and then addressed the board. Then we talked to the guild that had no awareness of anything that was going on. So from that point on, I've been asking to be heard. And I thank the chair for finally, after all this time since 2020, some time that I've been asking to be heard. And we're at a point that now I need to untangle all of this situation. And I'm gonna do the best that I can to do that. And I think that, so again, for the new commissioners to be aware that this is an ongoing issue. Today, you wanna probably speak about the split for this upcoming, this previous fiscal year ending. That's what it appears to me. But I wanna be clear that what I wanna talk about is that of course, but let's not forget that our issue is that we have this problem lies because we discovered it. And for all those years, the jockeys were being left out when the rules are clear, the commission is to determine to the HBPA how much money they're supposed to give to the jockeys. It doesn't even mention about the jockeys guild or the jockeys organization. It says to the jockeys. So, and you all have your rules and regulations and I ask you to look at it closely. So, and anyhow, then for the moment, I'm gonna go to the memorandum. The memorandum was put together by, I'm gonna imagine Alex Lightbound and Ted Grossman because both of their names is on here. And am I correct to ask Lightbound and Todd if they both were the ones that put this memorandum together? I can assure you that that was the benefits on their names around it. Yes, Dr. Lightbound and Councilor Grossman did prepare it, yeah. Okay, so then I'm gonna go and I have a few items on there. Actually, I got like 16 issues with that document. So, I hope you can bear with me. So I'd like to start with probably the first paragraph where it talks about the 128A584 which is the 65,000 that have been going to the jockeys skill. I'm not gonna dwell into 128A at the moment but we have issues with that to discuss because today we wanna try to stay on the resource development fund. But the issue I have with it here and it's gonna continue to come up is because everybody is thrown that out there because we're receiving those funds that we're not entitled to the funds from 23K60. But nobody's mentioning about what other funds the HBPA was receiving and receiving to the SAMLcast and all of that. If you wanna say that we shouldn't receive the money or that 23K is supposed to substitute 128A which is not true, it's not true, it's not true. It's not true, it's not true. Which is not true but whoever's throwing it out there wants to plant it on the board's mind and it's not true. Just read the statutes, the laws, it's clear that it's in addition and I'll point that out down the road and I'll just leave that at that for the moment. So the resource development fund, second thing is the committee is responsible for considering various criteria, determine their recommendations, the commission shall only change the distribution percentage upon a recommendation by the commission. Nobody there is mentioning that provided further that of this amount, the commission shall determine how much shall be paid annually by the horseman slick organizations to the thoroughbred jockeys. Again, there's no mention of jockeys organization to the jockeys and it's not true. To the jockeys and hopefully all of this will come together that it'll make sense if it sounds like I might be rattled. Three, there's some mention there on the fourth paragraph as to, there have been times that the committee recommended that changes be retroactive and the Mass Gaming Commission has approved retroactive changes. I'm gonna come back to that. I just thought I'd mention it for the moment but more than likely I'm gonna come back to that. Commission has approved retroactive changes basically because this is what we're looking for here retroactive money for the money that was supposed to be allotted to the jockeys from the inception of the resource development fund, whatever year that may have been 2015 or 14 or 16 on forward. I'll also mention at this time before then I've moved on that in 2019, after we bought this to your attention that finally the commission made a determination and because of everything that was fed to the commission they determined that they were gonna give $4,000, $1,000 to four disabled jockeys. Here's my check on cash, okay? So that this matter needs to be resolved. Besides, I'll take the opportunity to mention that the jockey skill is mailing out 1099s that's gonna be an issue that we need to talk about. And people are having to pay taxes. 1099s are a big issue with a lot of the riders. I'm gonna ask another question to Paul Umbrella at this time. Does anybody that they're giving money to from the resource development fund is anybody getting a 1099? Maybe he could answer. Mr. Cabalza, I think if you want to direct questions you can direct questions to the commissioners but this is, I think we want to. And I'll direct the question to the commission and the commission can answer me then. And I do know that at that last public meeting we did discuss your question around taxes and we determined that that probably is not in. But the question that I'm asking right now is I'm not gonna talk about what was talked about in all of that, I'm gonna get around to all of that. My question at the moment, so I can move on is anybody that's receiving money from the resource development fund by the HBPA receiving a 1099, that's all I need to know at the moment and I can move on. We'll come back to all that other stuff later. I think my answer, and I'm gonna turn to Councilor Grossman, my answer is that, I suspect the answer is that the gaming commission because taxes really are not under our responsibility in jurisdiction, we would not be able to get necessarily an accurate answer. But Councilor Grossman, if you want to elaborate, I know that you were going to send a letter of some sort and we had asked for that at our last public meeting to go to Mr. Kavasa and the Jockey Guild. Yeah, that's a fair question, Mr. Kavasa raises. As you indicated, Madam Chair, and I agree with, that's not an issue for the gaming commission to resolve. We are not the experts on tax law. And so I think we will decline to get involved with how certain funds are taxed and whether they should be taxed. I know either Mr. Kavasa or Mr. Molinari indicated that they have communicated with the Department of Revenue and I would suggest that that is the appropriate entity to be communicating with about that particular issue. It is important and we're in no way suggesting that it's not, but just that we are not really the appropriate forum to be resolving the tax issues. The other issues are fair, but that one is not really in our lane, if you will. Okay, so then I'll say this. The gaming commission is supposed to look out for all licensees best interests, right? So we bring the issue and the matter to you and though you don't want to get involved, you have to consider what our issues are here and make an effort instead of dodging us and know that whether 1099s are required for that money or not. It's not a hard question that you can't address. You could talk your way out of it and that for the moment and I'll just take it as that for the moment until I come back to it. Yeah, why don't we put the tax question into the parking lot right now, Mr. Kavasa? I do understand as Councillor Grossman said and I've seen Mr. Miller saying just for right now because we want to make sure we hear all of your issues and perhaps we'll be able to give more light. Okay, well, again, it's a fair question for you to ask and I like Councillor Grossman's recommendation to work with DOR and if you need help getting the right connection at DOR, we could do that but I would hesitate to provide tax advice because we want to get it right. Okay, go right ahead and we'll, but we're just putting it to the side right now. We're not dismissing it as important to you. Okay, and the question was initially for Mr. Paul Umbrella and I'll move on and we'll come back to that. Thank you. So anyway, it gives a breakdown here as to the funds of the 4% health and pension, the 80% distribution per person for lab racing, I'm gonna say make a comment in regards to that. For the life of me, I can't understand why the HBPA is agreed to give up that percentage that way and didn't protect their members. I wanna make sure that I'm saying that on the record and 16% distribution for the breeders on this site 75% to stand the bread, 25% to throw bread. I got thrown off, oh, I kept, okay, nevermind. And then the 4% 50-50. I wanna say now to the president of the HONEST Sportsman's Association, first, Robert McCook, Mr. McCook, I'm not looking or asking to try to dip into what you are doing there. I think it's a fabulous thing what the HONEST people are doing. I see Peter Goldberg is not here but and I like to thank him on the record as well. I like to mention that when this issue was bought and you had one of your first meetings, that Mr. Goldberg, if you go back to that video, Mr. Goldberg at that time indicated that he thought the jockeys deserved to have been getting what they were entitled to. And I like to thank him for making that comment and I wish them well, wonderful job. If they can do it, there's no reason that we shouldn't be able to do this, not at all. And I'm gonna skip six for the moment. Oh, not well, it talks about the thousand dollars that were given to each jockey and all of that. And again, like I said, they go to the check for the thousand dollars. They sent me a 10.99 along with this that they never retracted that 10.99. This has never been cash and we got issues with the 10.99s. I'm gonna move on. Okay, so seventh item I got half of it is Todd and Alex want to push the issue that the New England Horsemen's Benevolent Protective Association was already funding and insurance to benefit the jockeys. What they don't tell you that that's a policy to benefit the owners and trainers. So the jockeys don't sue them when they get hurt on their horses. That would be like, you asked me to pay you your car insurance and you run me over. And I'm paying your car insurance, you run me over and you're covered. The jockeys already have a catastrophic injury policy through Suffolk Downs, through Sewries. All of this that has been planted is untrue. And this is not a trial here today. So I'm not gonna go into details precisely how to point it out to you. How to prove it to you really because it's gonna take more time. But that I have the facts, the evidence to back it up without a doubt. That policy has been in existence since 2020. 2020, 1990, 1990. The race horse, so they've had HBPAs had that policy from 1990. Race horse development fund money comes into play in 2014, 2015. So then we owe them money for them having that insurance policy from 1990 till that Mindy wants to say that that they had gotten together and came up with that solution. Of course, I'm gonna address this and all the comments that were made on this meeting and writing. All the record. The Jackie skill is not working in good faith here. But I'm gonna leave that more for towards the end. Again, it talks about the McDonald's insurance, which is, well, it's the same thing, I'm sorry. They put in there about the 128A, 65,000 that the Jockeys are receiving. They wanna drill it into you. That money, 23K is not supposed to substitute 65, the 65,000. The 23K money is in addition. Read the rules clearly. While we just had this break, I'm presuming Mr. Umbrellum and Ms. Coleman and Mr. McHugh, you are all available. Yes, ma'am. Again, that 23K money is in addition. But you put it in black and white, the board's gonna look at this, it's gonna take that face value. And I'm here to tell you it's misleading. Todd is misleading, Alex is misleading the board here. So it's about the race, so it's about to run a little bit. Gonna skip that, hopefully I didn't miss something. Okay, here we go. In discussing the agenda before the commission today, the amount of money from the Racehorse Development Fund that shall be paid from the horsemen's organization to the Thurbert Jockeys. Need for funds is larger than the funds available. The need for funds is larger than available. That is true and I agree with everyone there. At this time, I like to talk about the money that the eight pole was receiving. That's $80,000, that's $80,000. That money's been sitting there for a couple of years now. Mr. Caposo, could you repeat for me who has that $80,000, please? Well, that $80,000 was going to the eight pole that was run by Mr. Green and Sheryl Edwards. But they decided after, I think it was 2019, not to request for that money because Suffolk Downs pushed them out of the property. And if they had to get a location outside the property, it just wasn't going to be feasible. Mr. Green and Shirley God bless them. They've done wonders for the people at Suffolk Downs in Rockingham and New England in general for many years. Many years. But again, what's the HVPA doing? They know that money's there. Why not ask for that money if they ask them for that they don't have enough money? And I don't know if it's the right time to throw this in, but maybe I should before it goes out of my mind. But Mr. Umbrello, you don't have enough money to do the things that you would like to do. But I got another question. Did Mr. Umbrello get himself a nice raise this year from that fund? Madam Chair, what I'll do with respect, this is getting out of control. Mr. Umbrello, you've had your chance to speak, Mr. Cabasa speaking, but Mr. Cabasa, I would like you to limit to not anything to do with the other individuals, but just in front of us. I understand. It's part of this issue. It's part of this issue. The HVPA has got issues. They got their members for a long time. This has been coming to the commission. Okay? You had another organization that was trying to bond the commission with Ligorio. God rest his soul. He's no longer with us. Okay? People have been coming to the commission with a lot of issues with the HVPA, and we've been trying to bring to your retention issues with the jockey skill. This is the forum for this. We want to, I appreciate that, I appreciate that, Mr. Cabasa. I am going, I want to hear you and we want to give you your time. I'm also going to just make sure that, you know, we don't lose track of the key issues for you. That's what we really want to focus on. These are all key issues. Thank you. So, and I just, what I was gonna, what I just said, I was just gonna say it anyway. So I'm gonna skip that. I don't know what paragraph this is, but in the body of the race, next to last page, I'm almost done with this. They've been talking about the 65,000, he puts the, they put the link in here to the meeting of 22521. And I asked that the commissioners that had only learning about this now to go back and ask the commissioners that are aware of this situation also to go back to this meeting and just look and see and all of what took place and so on. Because that's why I commanded Goldman. I believe that was the meeting where you got Goldberg. Okay. But if initially that myself and Edwin Molinari would have bought this, would have been allowed the opportunity to be heard like we've been asking for, we wouldn't be here today because what we're saying now today, we would have said it back then and not let this get out of hand. And I knew that at that meeting by allowing myself and Edwin Molinari how the fix was in, how many that's supposed to be representing us, us, the Jockeys, the HBPA, lightbound, Todd, Cameron all saw the problem and instead of resolving it, like we asked to decided that you were gonna collude and come up with all this nonsense. It's not gonna work. I've been careful about documenting and so on. I'm hopeful this board will result our issue. And when I have to go further, it's not necessary. That's all I've done throughout my whole career, throughout my whole life, all these years in racing. All I do is absorb, document and just take it in. I want it to be an official. I want it to be a steward. I want it to be a commissioner with what I'm seeing and that I don't wanna wear two and three hats. I don't wanna get into this political hooray or anything like that. Now I'm at a point where that's done deal. But because that was my inspiration is why I conducted myself and just took it and watch. But what I was seeing, you go to the Jockeys school, they're teaching you to be a management steward. I want it to be a state official, the politics. Mr. Kibasa, I'm going to, I wish we had unlimited time, but we didn't, so I want, and I just wanna make sure to be your, I wanna help you be your best advocate. And I'm very pleased that you're having the opportunity to speak today. So thank you. I appreciate it, and I'll try to conclude this here, wrap up with whatever I got and just let you know that, whatever I'm leaving out because of time constraint, but it still needs to be addressed. And then I would like to then maybe schedule another meeting to finish my presentation. And as you've noted, you always have the option of recording your thoughts too and sending them to us in writing. Okay, well, I can, if you're looking to shut me down right now. No, I'm not, no, I really am not. I'm just saying, as you gather your thoughts again, I wanna make sure you take today's opportunity as to really highlight your main concerns. Today, the issue of course is around that 23K language. Right. And so if you had a recommendation to put forward. Yeah, my recommendation is we gotta look at numbers here now. And based on the numbers that we come up with and come up with a number. And I'll tell you if I'm okay with myself personally. And I think that I could speak for a lot of people. I'm gonna mention now that it's in my mind. We've been asking for the gaming commission, the jockey skill and the HBPA to inform all these affected parties because I've made a public records request. All I got is names, no phone numbers or contact information. That's fine. The jockey skill and the HBPA are mandated. I can't point out specifically right off the top of my head but it's in there in your own rules. And to be more specific, it was brought up in the committee meetings for everyone to inform their membership. It's not one person that I've spoken to that have told me and I've double checked to see that they inform you that they, to this day, we're asking everyone to let all these people know. The only people here today are the ones that myself and Edwin that discovered this problem, the ones that we did get in touch with that some of them made some comments. But nobody wants, the commission I've grant you, the commission's duty is only to put it on the website. So you're covered. But the HBPA and the jockey skill, they're not doing what they're told to do, okay? So you wanna keep everybody in the dark and then put out press release that how they were put out, which was untrue and not give the facts, the true facts to the jockeys, to the members. There's so many jockeys in need that jockeys that have committed suicide that are disabled. Maybe they walk and you could see them walk and then, but they're not right. You know, there's issues, financial issues, all of that. This money had, it had been being distributed and managed properly. At the beginning, I tried to address the commission with this about forming a committee of organization that represents the Massachusetts jockeys like they do in Delaware, California, some of these other places. Why? Because we're not getting what we supposed to be getting that we gave our life to the jockeys scale organizations and paying them dues for every month that we've written. They stand here and tell you that they are not getting any money for distributing this money from 65K, 128A. They got meteorites contracts that they've been getting paid. They're making money, they're not doing nothing for free. Okay? And on top of it, they wanna come back a 1099 in that. You're opening up a can of worms. I wanna nip this right here, right now. We don't wanna get into that, we're gonna have to open the books and all of that stuff. That's not, you know, I'm just saying, I'm just saying. Mr. Cabasso, would it make sense, perhaps, interest of ensuring clear messaging today that we maybe give you a break and turn to Mr. Mulneri and hear from him for a second. I'm not a second, my apologies. Hear from you, Mr. Mulneri. I think if you ask Edwin, he might be okay if I could continue and try to at least finish this portion and I do wanna give Edwin the opportunity without a doubt, but... Okay, why don't we go with a couple more minutes and then I'm gonna turn over. And again, I know that Mr. Umbrella and Ms. Coleman and Mr. McEw are giving you the same courtesy that you gave them. Okay, go right ahead, Mr. Cabasso. And I'll just keep a little track of time to make sure we hear from everyone. Okay. This paragraph here brings me back to the matter that the HPP gates got a lot of issues. They got issues with their life insurance. The McDonald's is for their benefit, not for the Jackie's benefit. So if a rider gets hurt, you don't get sued and there's a lot that goes on with that, you know, the riders that put in claims and that wind up getting, excuse my English shafted and whatnot, but there's issues. I need to make mention here that the president of the HBPA, I think it's for there, his business is insurance. I think there's a conflict there that is coming up, these things are coming up because when people don't do the right things and now you're getting the magnifying glass, put on you to check to see what's going on. Things come up. So I think I'm gonna be closing this document here by saying that I talked a little bit about, again, the commission shall determine how much shall be paid annually by the horsemen's organizations to the Thoroughbred Jockeys. You don't make no mention about Jackie's Guild, I mean, Jackie's Organization or the Jackie's Guild, any of that sort and I don't appreciate and I don't wanna be represented when I'm being misrepresented in this matter, in this matter only and I'll be addressing that with them down the road. We've been asking the Guild to lobby to include the retired Jockeys, because we know you can't do it, you gotta lobby the legislature, you gotta do it in that, what's being done. I'll let you know, nothing's being done. When this problem was brought to the attention, when this problem was brought to their attention, Mindy, Coleman, Terry Meek, Alex Lightbound, Gail Cameron, Todd Grossman, Colombrello, Anthony Spadier, and others, you made the conscious decision to co-do and cover this up. It's not right, it's not right. Let's cap this and so that it doesn't have to get, go any further or get any ugly up than what it already is. So I concluded this document, this memorandum, I already praised the honest people for what they're doing, the document. So in other words, this memorandum, 95% of it is trash, that's where it goes. So with that, I think we'll turn now to Mr. McLean-Ari, Mr. Cabasa. Okay, I'll just remind you that I didn't conclude my presentation, and I have a lot more to say for the record. And I hope that you would put up another meeting so that this could be addressed, and the people need to know these writers, these people they need to know. And if you guys ain't, not the commission, because the obligation is to put it on your website. If the jockey skill and the HBPA don't wanna keep them in the dark, we're gonna push, they're gonna find out the truth. And I'm not done, but I hope that I'm gonna be hearing about another presentation so I can conclude. Thank you very much. And I'm sorry that I'm having to call time right now, but I do have to because we wanna make sure to hear from Mr. McLean-Ari, and then we'll figure out next steps, and Mr. Kavasa, I am very pleased that you were able to present today. Mr. Mollinari, do you wanna follow up with your colleague? Yes, can you hear me? We can. My name is Edwin Mollinari, I am a disabled jockey from Suffolk Down. My first question is, is Mindy licensed in the state of Massachusetts? I'm gonna... Mindy, could you repeat the question one more time, please? Is Mindy Coleman licensed in the state of Massachusetts? You know, it's fair to ask questions, but it's gotta be questions that are in our realm, and yeah, I should... Okay, Anna, I want to know if the law said that the commission shall determine how much shall be paid to the jockey's organization, or if say, if any, like Mindy Coleman said. So I think the question is, we have, do we follow the law, or do we do what we hear from other folks who weigh in? I think commissioners, we probably all agree that we do hear from all stakeholders and we take everybody's opinions into consideration. Is that fair, commissioners? Did you hear that question presented that way? I think that's the best answer I can give, and I've been sort of answering, but my fellow commissioners chime in too, but I think Ms. Coleman has had the opportunity to speak, and we've heard from other stakeholders over the course of time. So the law said that the commission shall determine how much the horseman organization shall pay the jockey's organization, right? And you said that the committee didn't get to there because one of the, in two years, because one of the persons retired. I think what, I don't want to be misinterpreted. There is another body that does not have to meet, think, they did establish that 50-50, which has not been really challenged until now, and that's why we're having this, or the issue has come back up, and that's why we made sure to put this matter on the agenda for today with you and Mr. Kibasa joining us. So, thank you. But what happened with the ward in those two years? What happened with the, with shall determine in those two years? That's the commission. And the years before, and the years before the law was established, the commission failed to determine an amount for the jockey. They didn't follow the law. You're, you know what, Mr. Monterey, you've raised a very fair point. And the other day when this topic came up, I know that at least one of the commissioner joined me in saying, we need to be timely on this and we are meeting today on it. It came to our attention. So, and we recognize that we needed to go forward. So you are raising a good question. Last year, it, last year, this matter did not come before us. And we, You know, Mr. Monterey, I will take responsibility for that. I am as chair, I do need to hear from the team on certain matters. I probably should have inquired about this and I did not. So I will take full responsibility for that. And what can we do with those years that they never determined, that the commission never determined an amount for us? I can only, I can only address my work. So you're not gonna do anything about it. No, I'm right here right now hearing you and I am. We did, we did make a decision in 2021 and you're well aware of it. And my understanding was that status quo was in place and it had not been disrupted and did not need to be disrupted. However, I think I'm right that in this provision and what I was told the other day was that this is an annual requirement. And when I heard that the other day that I said, we need to get this on the agenda and so we're here. Yes. So what are we gonna do about the money from before? So what I'm hoping right now is for you to give us any, as I appreciate you're pointing out that we didn't do it. And so I'm taking responsibility for that. But for today, if you're able to shed any light on what you would recommend, but it is the commission, not that committee that determines this amount under 23K. You're aware of the decision in 2021. If you had been there in 2021 and I'm sorry, I would have had you there if I hadn't known that you wanted to speak. Instead of the $1,000, the $4,000 amount, what would you have recommended? Well, what is fair, it made me sad when the owner's organization knows that they are receiving more than us because when they were raising, we were getting from the $65,000, we were receiving like 2,500. And the horsemen organization, if we divided how much they get and we divided between their members, it comes to like $7,000. So it was like a difference between what we received, the 2,500 and what they received, you know, like 7,000. And we would like to, we take more risks. We work harder and our careers are shorter and we still don't ask for more than them. We wanna be equal, you know, we wanna be 3D equal. We don't want to get more than owners and trainers even that we take more risks and all that I said before. We want equal, equal money. So you just have to see how much they get in total, divided between the members. And that's the same thing that we should get. My opinion also from the 23K section 60 is that the money should be divided equally between the members of the New England HBPA and the juggies, now they're disabled but the years before for them is the active juggies because like Kavasa said, the retired juggies are not included. I've been trying with the commission and with the juggies guilt to include the retired juggies in there because it's a mistake that they're not there. There's not a reason on why they are not there. They are in there in the 128 and they should be there in the 23K section 60 also. So another problem is that this commission is allowing the juggies guilt to break the law because the law said that the money is for health insurance, accident or life and other benefits. The juggies guilt saying a letter every year with the 1099 saying that if we don't use 100% for health if we don't send receive totally in the amount it's not that we can send half or no, totally in the amount that they send us that they would report it as income but not as income that come from the state of Massachusetts. Income that come from them is like they are paying us with their money and it's not like that. I contact the governor's office, they refer me to the Department of Revenue and I spoke with Leona Orongizum and after I sent her copy of the 1099, copy of the letter from the juggies guilt and copy of the law, she agreed that they cannot do that they are breaking the law because the lawmakers made when the lawmakers put that it was for health insurance accident and other benefits. It because they understood that we only live from health insurance, we need food, we need a place to live electricity, water and having the juggies guilt without asking the juggies they are putting the criteria by themselves and approved by you because you have to approve that that that area but illegally, illegally taking the other where fairs out and just put 100% for health. And that's illegal by the Department of Revenue. And I say, I sent you an email and I told you about it. You couldn't contact the Department of Revenue and even the special concert from the juggies guilt but when you don't want to find the truth, you don't call. You should know, the only thing you have to do is call them and say, this is true because the money is coming from the gaming commission from your commission. So they are illegally changing the law, breaking the law to make us, to fit their benefits because without that they wouldn't be able to report as income. So we should check with the federal government is they are reporting that 65,000 completely like is their money and because at 1099 is from the people who pay you like your job and things like that. If we were to pay taxes, we should be getting the 1099 from the state of Massachusetts, not from the juggies guilt. And you approve that criteria. The commission approve it knowing that they are stealing from the state of Massachusetts because that's stealing from the state of Massachusetts. And then, like in our agreement that the juggies guilt have with the horsemen organization not to go after the money from the 23K Section 60 to help them pay for an insurance that is not an insurance for us, it's an insurance to protect them from being sued by the juggies. Like I said, I'm gonna sue them, I don't qualify. I call it from because I didn't sue the owner of the clinic. So it's not that they are putting the insurance for to protect us, it's to protect them. The juggies guilt never inform anybody. Mindy violated the rule 307 Massachusetts rules of professional conduct, the part one client and lawyer relationship. She never informed any juggies. Mr. Molinari, we're gonna be very careful. Mr. Molinari, the one thing I'll ask is for you to be respectful. Again, we're not pointing at particular individuals. This is all about so that we can understand how we can do the best policy. So... No, but I know what I am explaining to you. Why is she changing the law? Why the juggies are breaking the law because they didn't inform anybody. Okay. All right, so that was helpful, Mr. Molinari. And I think we've heard quite a bit, commissioners, I'm gonna pause now to see if you have individual questions for any of our guests, as well as for Dr. Lightbound. I'm also gonna pause myself, but I would like to make the recommendation that after our questions, we decide to table this, digest all of this before we take action on this matter today. That's my suggestion. Why don't I go to questions first? Questions, commissioners, for either of you. Can I just say one more thing? Yes, yes. I finally complain to the attorney general bureau of criminal investigations against the commission and the Juggies Guild and the New English BPA because you are involved in criminal activity. The commission and the Juggies Guild, they are trying to cover up that you didn't follow the law and determine them for us. They are trying to say that is an agreement and it's like... Well, Mr. Molinari, I am appreciative of the fact that you've pointed out very clearly what the law is. And I also have that clarification made just last week. And so I appreciate, as I said, you've been very helpful today. So commissioners, do you have any questions? Any questions for Mr. Ombrello? He has his camera off, but I understand he's available. We've got Mr. McHugh, we've got Ms. Coleman, and we have our two members of the Jockey League. And I know you join me, commissioners, in recognizing that these gentlemen have really suffered significant injuries from the sport that they loved and also the sport that provide entertainment to so many. And so we just wanna extend, I wanna extend on behalf of my fellow commissioners, appreciation for what you've done in the past and also for coming today. So now questions, commissioners. Any questions? Councilor Grossman or Dr. Lightbound, do you have anything that you wanna add today? I mean, I could add a lot. I will just say, I think the one thing I will point out is that it's wholly unfair to accuse Mindy Goldman of any kind of criminal wrongdoing. There is no evidence of that. Councilor Grossman, I don't think... I just didn't wanna disturb. I don't wanna leave that unaddressed. I just don't think that's fair. And that's all I want. I have proof, I have evidence. You know what? We're not, I think Ms. Coleman is here. I think that we understood that it was, there were some personal attacks made and that they were inappropriate, but we understand that their point of view was delivered. Mr. Grossman, do you have anything else that you could advise the commission on? I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, obviously. I don't even know where to start exactly. Okay, we won't start then. Dr. Lightbound, do you have anything else you wanna add? Yeah, I would just like to add that we, before this meeting and before the meeting we had in 2021, we did put out for public comments on this issue and we did get lots of written comments, both times. And the comments from the two jockeys that spoke today or in the commissioner's packet, if you wanna, I believe you've read them already. We did receive comments from some other jockeys and for the most part it was about eligibility issues. And so I did speak with Mindy Coleman about that and she's going to follow up with the individual jockeys and describe the qualifications. And if they have any questions or anything, I will follow up with them as well, but that was something that was beyond the scope of this meeting to address. But I just wanted to let anybody who did comment, both Mindy and I will be following up with them. May I say something in response to Alex's statement there? Yeah, we had no other choice but to make a public comments because we had been asking to be heard in person that gave you the opportunity to do what you did. It's wrong. Alex? Okay, so Mr. Cabaza, I think that we've addressed that point, so I'm gonna close on comments. I appreciate my colleague, Attorney Grossman's desire to correct the record. Today, we heard a lot of opinions and I think part of our job is to, as the five of us commissioners, it's to digest this meeting and return after we digest and reflect on both the written materials and on the oral comments made today. And I know that my fellow commissioners, you will exercise your judgment on determining what you need to get further clarification on and what probably is things that you don't need clarification on. So we really appreciate everybody participating in this meeting, and I think it's a great opportunity to, I know it's an emotional matter for you all. And the one thing I can assure you is that in Dr. Lightbaum, there's such commitment to the horse racing industry and the integrity of the horse racing industry. And that, I don't think there's any debate and even if you don't always agree in Massachusetts, really prioritize it. And also the safety of the individual athletes. And that includes, of course, the horse athletes, but also the drivers and the standard bred. We don't have any live thoroughbred racing right now. But if we did, we would be right there supporting you as well. And we're just going to have to figure this out. Mr. Molinari, Mr. Caposa. And I'm concerned that we may not have the jurisdiction and full authority to solve all of your questions or issues, but we'll do our best. And we very much appreciate the representatives from the associations and what your hard work is. And we appreciate everyone's patience today. Okay. Yes, Ms. Chair. Yes. Yes. I just like to say that with all the respect, you just did what you just asked Todd not to do. And he stuck up for Mindy. You just stuck up for Alex. And Alex may have done a lot of good things in the game in that. I've been around New England for more than Alex. And so you just finished doing what you just asked and had to do and depending on her covering up for her. Mr. Caposa. You've got to be a little cautious with what's going on because this is what we're talking about. Okay, Mr. Caposa, thank you. I think to the issue around Ms. Coleman, I think she knows exactly how we feel she. And so I appreciated Attorney Grossman's point. And I think Ms. Coleman understands. That's why it's created a problem here. Well, you know, I just think that we have to be really careful when there are personal allegations made. And I think we have an issue with facts. And all we're doing is addressing it, nothing more. I don't take it personal, even though some of it might be personal, but their behavior, it goes far beyond this issue at this moment here. Okay. I'll leave it at that. And Mr. Caposa, we have heard you today and a lot of what you have said has not been personal. And that's, and that I appreciate all of those comments. I understand it's emotional too, and that's where personal may fly around. But the other information that you've provided and Mr. Molinari provided today, very helpful and we will be able to reflect on it. Okay. I'm gonna move on now, commissioners. And we thank all of our guests. It is now 10 upon, thank you so much, Mr. Molinari and Mr. Caposa, Mr. Umbrell, Ms. Coleman and Mr. McHugh. Thank you. And Ms. Tisbert, thank you. Thank you. Okay. So we are gonna move into sports wagering and we've got quite a few matters. We've got guests who I might be standing in the way. Oh, I forgot. Why don't we finish up with six B and then maybe do our lunch break, right, commissioner Maynard? Does that sound good? Yeah. And I think it should get relatively quick though. All right. Thank you. That's a light boundy. You mind if I start? No, go ahead. It's all yours. So Madam Chair, fellow commissioners, this delegation of authority document that's in the packet today captures a series of conversations that commissioner Hill, very far bound and director Grossman, I had leading up to the May 16th, 2023 meeting where the topic was presented, as well as the discussion that we had on May 16th from three, specifically when we looked at the document, commissioner Skinner wanted to, and I went back and watched this commissioner Skinner, which I rarely watch our meetings afterwards, wanted to clarify that when the director of racing exercised authority, there'll be a notification at the next meeting, which is in addition to the yearly update that we typically get from Dr. Lightbound. I think that was capturing the last sentence of the document as well as section 10. But I also want to point out that Todd and Dr. Lightbound got this finished pretty quickly and it took me a month to review it because again, I went to rewatch the meeting and after some of our other meetings and other things we were working on, one of the last thing I wanted to do was rewatch the meeting, but we did it. And I tried to make sure that it was captured in there and they did accurately capture everything that's in the May 16th meeting. That's all I have to say. Commissioner's questions and excellent work. Dr. Lightbound, I'm glad that we've got this project done. Yes, thank you very much to everybody who contributed. Group effort. Group effort. Any questions or suggestions on the delegation? And it's particularly meaningful today given that Dr. Lightbound was having to turn to the old delegation for yesterday's call. So. Yeah, the example she used in the meeting was if it gets hot on a race day having to cancel. So I thought that was pretty, pretty awesome. Yeah, yeah. That was what I think made me ask last year. Yes. It was when it started, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was hot. We had those hot days last year. So is there any, any suggested changes? Commissioner, we had a chance to review it. That Commissioner Skinner looks like you're all good. No, I'm all good. Commissioner Maynard, thank you for doing that. Do diligence for us both. I actually tried, but just like you referenced among the many documents and items we had to review for today, I just didn't get around to it. I did call up the May 13th, not May 13th, the 2013 delegation that we worked on on May 16th and compared the two and there's some cleanup that was made and so, but it's essentially the same document. I really couldn't remember what my concern was when we met and I did want to go back to refresh. So again, thank you for doing that. One of the things was to memorialize it as just informed alone. That was going to be really helpful for Dr. Leipa, which you accomplished. So I know that was one of Alex's desires. Okay, so do we have a motion? No, Madam Chair. I move that the Commission approve and adopt the Massachusetts Game Commission authorization for greater embracing as included in the motion packet and discussed here today. Second. Any questions, edits? Michelle Brie. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Commissioner Skinner. Aye. Commissioner Maynard. Aye. And I thought, yes. Five, zero. Okay, so it's five of one. Should we return at 130? Is that too long? Is that just right? That is just right for me. Good, Commissioner Skinner. Okay, so for the public, we'll return to our sports wagering and we've got some waivers, got some house rules and then we've got some internal work as well as a look at our responsible gaming framework. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for a productive morning. Appreciate it. Looks like it's getting warmer out there, Brad. I just read where the electric grid is pretty full right now. So if you can take down the screen, thank you. It's about 92 degrees here. 91 here in Revere. And I'm two blocks from the beach. Bruce, if you come back with a little bit of wet hair, we'll know where you were. Yeah. That's wishful thinking on my part, Kathy. This is when the locals like the beach, Kathy, because all the tourists are gone once Labor Day hits. I know, I know. Okay. Thanks, Susan. We are streaming live now? Yep, we're all good to go. Okay, great. So this is a reconvening of the Master's Game and Commission and we met early at nine this morning and we've gotten through much of our agenda, but we'll have some good work ahead before we get started and we'll do a roll call. Good afternoon, Commissioner Ryan. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Commissioner Hill. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Commissioner Skinner. Good afternoon. And good afternoon, Commissioner Maynard. Good afternoon. All right, before we get started, I wanna correct something that I can't really correct it, but I want to clarify that over a lunch break, I learned that perhaps the chair of the First Racing Committee has not resigned. So we need, I don't know the status. I may have been told something that might not have been completely accurate. So we'll check into that and because Commissioner Maynard, I know you are so familiar with the appointment, maybe you and I can just follow up on that and then we'll circle back. Commissioner Hill is the designee on that committee and determine whether or not there needs to be any appointments and maybe everything is in place. Okay, so just we'll follow up. And then Commissioner Hill in order to make sure we comply with open meeting law up a way again. Okay, but I do wanna make sure that the entity itself is all intact. And then the second thing I wanna note is that I understand from Director Vandal-Linden that an issue arose with respect to item number nine on our agenda and he would ask that we roll that over. There's a question that arose with one of the suggestions for the research agenda. So we'll plan on rolling that over to the next meeting or whenever Director Vandal-Linden is ready. Okay, so we're gonna turn then on and thank you again for getting that delegation of authority memorandum done, that's good work. And again, we appreciate all of the input from the many participants from the horse racing community and we wish the horse racing community good luck tomorrow as racing resumes today. They're taking a break and playing rich because of the heat. So now we're turning to item number seven and that all starts in our packet on- To 126. 126. 126. Thank you. At the packet I'm looking at. Okay, thanks Crystal. So we'll turn back to Director Van and I would know we've got Crystal and Andrew waiting in the links. Yes, we have waivers for you today and house rules and once again, a whole smorgasbord of sports-waivering items for you. Right, we'll go first. I think in the packet, it's kind of a little bit out of order, I believe. So you said 126, Crystal. Yes, 126 is the first waiver on 248.04 from BETTER. Okay. Yeah, I think there was a good reason to go slightly out of order. That's just fine. Is that the order? Is that where you want to start? I think we start with the item on the agenda which is the BETTER waiver request, thanks. Take it from here. So BETTER put in a request for a waiver from 205, CMR 248.044 which is the Agent Identity Verification Regulation related to the authentication questions and or an alternate method of authentication approved by the commission. That latter part is an important piece here because we internally went through a process reviewing some of these alternate methods with IT and BETTER was one of them who approached us for what their process would look like and was approved for it, but now they do need time to implement that. So that's what this request really is. It's to give them a temporary waiver through December 6th, 2023 to ensure that that implementation takes place and puts them into compliance. Questions, commissioners? Yeah, so Crystal, I assume they're otherwise in compliance with KYC and verification and this is foodstrapping? This ensures that they move, yes, they are but this would ensure that they have the time to move into the approved, we're calling the flow of how the KYC process will go. Okay, I think you're just gonna have to indulge me and walk me through what's gonna change when they finalize what they're asking to get an extension on versus how they're functioning now because they're doing KYC now. So how does this change that in 90 days? So they, and I think that's all detailed in their, the alternative method which is the lower part of page 128 but essentially right now, I believe right now they're using ID comply but I think this allows them to move the flow of this to give them the like selfie and ID check as component of this instead of the very basic KYC that they had come on board with. Okay, so it's ratcheting up. They might end up running out of time when they get it done for summer. Okay, thanks. If you want further detail on what that tech actually looks like, I'd have to pull someone in but do a while we could get answers as you need them. I'm just looking at the timing and that one is through December 6th. This one is through December 6th. 90 days, 90 days, yeah, okay. Commissioners, there's a few speaking the same. Do you want to go through them all first before so we can think about this or do you want to do them in individual? So I'm wondering if we do all of them just because I know the last time we had questions about the date. Whether it was going to be one universal or whether they all needed to be different. Maybe it helps to go through them all and explain why they have maybe slightly different dates. I think that makes sense too. Commissioners, everybody else agree with that? Yeah, okay, good. All right, then Crystal. And just for a little history on that, when they first came to us they were all concerned about how they would actually implement or evaluate. So we gave that universal date just so that they could check the mechanic, get it set and if they couldn't, they came to us but it also gave us internally that period of time to review the alternate methods because a lot of them had much more secure methods than the security questions would be. So to do that in-house with the IT team that just took some time. So these are sort of the above and beyond time frames based on us getting those approvals. But the next one that would be the FBG in 131 is the page that I have in the packet. That's the FBG Fanatics Request. In this case, they actually intended to launch on time and then ran into some issues when they went to turn on the system that had been approved. So now they're just putting in an emergency request to just give themselves a couple more weeks. I think this one's through September 15th. This would give them time to go back, specifically they address finding the root cause and analyzing the root cause and then implementing the fix to the issues because it caused waves across all of their jurisdictions. As far as I understand that conversation actually happened while I was out last week. So Director Band could back me up on that on exactly what those details are but they really only need two weeks to just review and make it properly. Director Band, did you want to add? Yes, they were concerned about it crashing their systems in all their jurisdictions when they started to implement it. And that was why the emergency requests came in. All right, do you want to go to the next one then, Crystal? Yeah. So similarly, the next one is on page 134 that comes from VetMGM. Again, they went to launch the system that they had developed to match with the approved OIC verification. And they again, they need about two more weeks through September 15th to identify what happened there. They have a very detailed analysis of what happened in their request. Same thing, they just need to make sure the technology is working and then turn it back on. They've gotten all those bugs out. Then, age, sorry. That's through just September 15th as well. September 15th, yes, take a time frame there. And then, WinVet actually slightly different but they had been part of the uniform waiver when it was considered, though they had originally identified late September. And so when the temporary waiver was only approved through 9-1, they're just unable to make that work. So they're requesting, still to late September, so we would recommend giving them through the 30th. They might go live sooner than that, but that's the history on that one. The better is asking for 90 days. The better is asking for 90 days. They're a smaller shop, but they also have to, they have a large waterfall of systems that they're putting into play, including that selfie ID check, which I really like, but it's also a lot more to implement. A couple of them have that process in there, so it's nice to see that they came through. Some of these processes that we were verifying were really thorough, so it's good to see. Questions, commissioners? So that is the 248.04 requests. Sherry, I don't know if you want me to go into the one that follows this, but essentially it's just related to 248.04, for it was a request we got in to tie it into some of the internal controls. We're not sure that's necessary, but it did come in, so we wanted to put it in your packet, and it's just really related to the waiver being approved. And so that's on page? That's on page, should follow. One 39. Thank you, one 39. And so essentially, only bit MGM came in with it, they were just very thorough because 238.39 relates to all of the internal controls for 248. So they were just saying that they would need a waiver of that if in order to not be out of compliance, but essentially I think it would be covered by having a waiver for 248.044, if that's the reason that's in your packet. Right, and I just noted that we haven't, just a slight typo on our agenda, because it says better, but it was bit MGM that made this read fast. So I'll just note that, okay, that MGM. So as I understand this, this would be applicable whenever there's a request for a waiver, right? I don't know if legal has looked at this, Todd. Yes, I'm sorry. So you're referring to the 238.39 issue that we're discussing? 139, 238.39, and I see Carrie. Yes, I like Carrie just. Yeah, good afternoon Madam Chair and commissioners, happy to chime in there. So I think that, I don't really think that the 238 waiver is necessary. It seems sort of duplicative where the waiver would be in place for 248 and then 238 sort of bootstraps in the internal controls. And of course, 248, we've had a waiver in effect since June already on that item. And we didn't have a waiver in place on internal controls. It does seem like we could potentially open the door to future, a slippery slope a bit if we are always needing to add in any sort of internal control item as well. And again, it seems a bit duplicative to me. I don't really think it's necessary. Does that mean our reg might need to be tweaked? How do you mean? Well, is it the reg that's saying, I haven't looked at the reg that they're asking if our waiver from this reg, right? Because it implicates the internal controls. So they're asking for a waiver from the section of the internal control reg that requires compliance with 248. But I think if a waiver is in place for 248, then it's sort of, by default, you would also have the waiver from the internal control. It's not in non-compliance. Exactly. Okay, that's another way of saying it. All right. We don't think there'd be a concern of because we know they have a waiver. That's wrong, yeah, they're not in non-compliance. Got it. That was very thorough on their part. It's not similar ones with play management, but it was directly related to the reporting. But in this case, it's related to the internal control. So I don't think we would know they have a waiver there. Okay, good. So we, so back to item number 7A. Commissioners, do you have any questions? All right, we probably shouldn't, they're each asking, two are asking for September 15th. When that asked for later in September, Crystal was recommending end of September, betters asking for 90 days. So I think we have to have different motions. Commissioner Hill. Thank you, Madam Chair. I move on one amendment. I moved that accordance with 205CMR 202.032. The commission initial waiver to better holdings, Inc. doing business as better from the requirements outlined in 205CMR 248.044 as included in the commissioners packet through December 6th, 2023. As granting the waiver meets the requirements specified 205CMR 102.034 as consistent with the purposes of GL chapter 23N. Second. Any edits? Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Mr. Skinner. Aye. Commissioner Maynard. Aye. That's well, yes, five, zero on that. Commissioners, do I have another motion? Madam Chair, I move that in accordance with 205CMR 202.032, the commissioner, excuse me, the commission issue a waiver to fanatics, betting and gaming from the requirements outlined in 205CMR 248.044 as included in the commissioners packet through September 15th, 2023. As granting the waiver meets the requirements specified in 205CMR 102.034 and is consistent with the purposes of the general laws chapter 23N. Okay, again, under discussion, Madam Chair. Yeah. So did I hear Crystal correct that maybe we should would put all of these at September 30th, that you felt comfortable with that or not? I certainly, that's not to you, but they're slightly different. I wouldn't put betters under September 30th because they do need the implementation time, but the other two are an emergency and WinVet originally came in. So if you think it's simpler, identify it. Emergency ones anyway, we're hoping wouldn't come back. Good, but it's the times they've identified in this case, it's a little bit different because they all have been approved for different processes. So see you guys. Madam Chair, I have no further concerns. Thank you. Okay. And I have a second from Commissioner Maynard. Discussion, any further discussion at its questions? My discussion is, did we all move it? No, I didn't hear the, I'm having trouble hearing you. Sorry. You're garbled on my, maybe it's just my computer, but. Mine too. None of us could, you might just have shifted your microphone slightly, Commissioner Maynard. That's fine. I also have every air conditioner in my household. I said, I was trying to figure out if we agreed to move the date to meet one standard date or not. No. No. You did not. September 15th was the motion and I'm okay with that. Okay. Just as the motion was made. Any further questions at its discussion? Okay. Commissioner Bright. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Commissioner Skinner. Aye. Commissioner Maynard. Aye. And I vote yes. Five, zero. Okay. So then next. Yep, Chair. I'm gonna be taking the request for 248, 16. Continuing with the theme here of waiver requests, the sports wager and the vision as received two. Sorry, Andrew, I think we have to vote on. Yeah. I think you, I couldn't tell who was speaking. I was like, is that commissioner Maynard asking a question? No, I apologize. Then I saw your vote. No, I said next. I said next and that's fair. I should have said, because yours do we have a motion for the next item. So, Andrew, thank you. We're on bed MGM, is that where we are? Yes, bed MGM. Sorry. I move that in accordance with 205, CMR 202.032, the commission issue a waiver to bed MGM from the requirements outlined in 205, CMR 248.04, and is included in the commissioner's package through September 15th, 2023, as granting the waiver meets the requirements specified in 205, CMR 102.034 and is consistent with the purposes of general laws chapter 23 in. Second. Okay. Any discussion on this one? Okay. Mr. Ryan. Hi. Commissioner Hill. Hi. Mr. Skinner. Hi. Mr. Maynard. Hi. And I vote yes. And then the last one, Wendat, and then we'll turn to Andrew. I can take that one. Thank you. I move that in accordance with 205, CMR 202.032, the commission issue a waiver to Wendat from the requirements outlined in 205, CMR 248.044, as included in the commissioner's package through September 30th, 2023, as granting the waiver meets the requirements specified in 205, CMR 102.034 and is consistent with the purposes of general law chapter 23 in. Second. Thank you, commissioner. Okay. Any questions on that? All right. Commissioner O'Brien. Hi. Commissioner Hill. Hi. Commissioner Skinner. Hi. Commissioner Maynard. Hi. And I vote yes. 205.0, Commissioner Maynard. I was glad that you asked the question you did because I wasn't sure I heard it either. So thank you. All right. And so item seven B, we're all set on given carries advice, right, Crystal? Okay. Yes. Yes, that's correct. And now to our interim sports waitering operations manager who earlier appeared in his other capacity. So thank you for hanging in with us today, Andrew. Yeah. Madam chair, I think we are on item seven B. The item that Crystal was discussing was encompassed in item seven A. Oh, you know what? Oh, oh, my mistake. Sorry. Thank you. Thanks, Grace. So it was encompassed in, it was the MGM. You know what? That's what I'm not interested in. It was the MGM part of 24844. Apologies. I meant, yes, we're good. We don't, I guess that's up to you. Grace, no, I had missed it. I had asked about that at lunchtime. I've missed it. So thank you. All right. So now we're turning to item seven B. At what page, Andrew? Page 119 of your packet. Thank you. I have your handy-dandy list, but we've got so many things. All right, I'm all set now. Okay, ready? I'm ready. Okay. So continuing with the theme here of waiver requests, the sports wagering division did receive two temporary waiver requests in relation to 205 CMR 24816 responsible gaming limits, section one. And this allows the patron to set self-imposed limitations on sports wagering at any time and the operator must offer daily, weekly and monthly deposit and wager limits. And going in order of the agenda, better is up first. And as we said that because on page 119 of your packet, better has submitted a request for waivers from certain provisions of this regulation. They are requesting extension of the waiver for an additional 120 days through December 30th, 2023. This timeframe better feels would be sufficient to allow their software engineers and product team to further test and implement the requirements of the regulation, specifically the implementation of a clear and conspicuous notification, which informs the patron that can set self-imposed limitations when they play their first wager. And on page 124 of your packet, better has attached an image of the notification they will implement. And it should be noted that better already has in place such notifications when patrons register for a new account and when they make their first deposit. Furthermore, better is also seeking a permanent waiver related to 205, CMR 248, 16, section two. This section of the regulation states that a change to make these limits less restrictive shall become effective the next business day after the time period of the previous limit has expired and the patron reaffirms the requested increase. In an effort to better promote responsible gaming, better does not allow patrons to make their self-imposed limitations less restrictive for at least 30 days. So better is going above the single business day in the regulation and sets this timeframe for 30 days to make such limitations less restrictive. The detailed waiver request is in your packet and after review, the sports waiting division has no issues with this request for a waiver for 248, 16, section one. And then lastly, we would like to commend better for requesting more permanent, stricter responsible gaming limits than what's currently required in section two of the regulation. And after speaking with responsible gaming director, Mark van der Linden, the sports wagering division would recommend granting this waiver for initial time period and review the data in the future. Questions or comments? Commissioner O'Brien. So yeah, no, the comment that I have is, I agree with you in terms of lauding them for doing this. This is also more consistent with the AG's office regs on fantasy sports and how they do the 30 in terms of making it less restrictive. So I like that better is going in that direction. I do think it's also something we need to talk about if we wanna circle back and look at our own reg and whether we wanna follow suit. But in terms of this, I think it's a good move. I think we should grant the waiver. We brought that up when we were looking at the reg. Remember, Commissioner O'Brien? Yeah. So, Commissioner Skinner. Can I just get clarification, Andrew? You said that better is requesting to impose more restrictive measures for section two there, 248.162. Correct. Correct. The regulation states that if you wish to change yourself and impose limitations and make them less restrictive, our regulation says that does not take place until the next business day. Currently, better has it in place where it changes after 30 days. And better is requesting a permanent waiver to this regulation. So I'm still confused because that second sentence does not come into play unless the operator is imposing less restrictive measures. And because they are not here, why do they need a waiver at all? Crystal, are you gonna jump in? I was gonna say, I'd have to have you clarify the question, but I did wanna add that director Van Der Linden was brought in on this when we started talking about it and had some of our own recommendations, which I included in the memo, but he could probably answer some questions, I think he's on. Yeah, I'm right here. If you could clarify your question, Commissioner Skinner, I'm sorry, I kind of only caught the latter part. Rather than do that, Andrew, could you explain the waiver again? And that might help me the second time around. Yeah, of course. So better is seeking a permanent waiver related to 248.16, section two. And section two states a change to make these limits less restrictive. To become effective the next business day after the time period of the previous limit has expired and the patron reaffirms the requested increase. Better does not allow patrons to make their self-imposed limitations less restrictive for at least 30 days, that is their current process. So better is going beyond the single business day in the regulation and has this timeframe set for 30 days to make it less restrictive. They are requesting a permanent waiver to the regulation to keep it at 30 days. We are recommending an approval of this for a time period to review the data in the future. To review them. To review the data in the future. The data, yeah. And Madam Chair, may I weigh in on this a second? Sure. I think it's an interesting proposition to extend that time period. So I think that if we should measure it, I don't want enrollment into play management settings to be seen in any way as punitive or when somebody comes to the end, feel very frustrated if they need to make wait an additional 30 days or it may be that it would be a disincentive to enroll. So it may be a positive responsible gaming tool. So I think that it's something that we should measure to see what the effect of that 30 days is. Madam Chair. Yes, commission. So thank you, Andrew, that second time around I knew would cover it. So I am clear on exactly what this request is about. And a question to Mark on your note just now, is it your recommendation then that the commission not grant a permanent waiver here and instead for a shorter duration to allow some review and assessment? That would be my recommendation. Commissioner Skinner. So can I actually add a procedural question here, Commissioner O'Brien, excuse me. A request for permanent waivers, kind of a funny thing, right? Because that assumes that they will, that nothing changes. So they wouldn't be waived, we wouldn't actually get a permanent waiver. I'm understanding commissioner, the director on fandoms request, but I wonder do you, assuming that they continue with what they're doing, the permanent waiver makes great sense, if they changed it somehow, right? The way the right would still be in place. So I don't know, do we give permanent waivers? I guess that's really my question. Didn't we do this once already with better because they do 25 and up? Did we give it a permanent waiver? Is that what we said? I thought we did. That is correct. It's just process, you know. Right. But you get my point, it's very articulate. Yeah, but there was no, to your point, Madam Chair, there was no question or issue raised when they were doing the 25th. Mark has raised a concern about whether there's gonna be unintended consequences in terms of silence. Right, so I understand his point today. So I wonder if it's, you know, I don't know if Mark has a timeframe he's thinking of, but I'd also, I wouldn't want to do a waiver and then have better have to come back and say, look, that's not enough time for us. We're just gonna have to do this again. So I don't know, Mark, if you had like a six month, one year, is there a time period you're thinking of where they'd have to come back and request again or? I would recommend somewhere around nine months. We're collecting the data across all operators on enrollment. I think that there's a lot of information that we should gather before we determine whether this is a positive responsible gaming. Condition, so nine months. Commissioner O'Brien, I believe that was in our memo as well. We recommend it is six to nine months. I think this is two different, I may have said this, but this is two different waivers, essentially. That's right, yeah. It's a waiver to 248161. That's the 120 day waiver to implement and the permanent waivers of 248162. So let's do the first one. Can I have a follow up? Sorry, just a follow up. Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead, Commissioner Skinner. I just had a follow up on your point about the permanent waiver. So should the commission grant, I mean, I know it's kind of off the table for this discussion, but should at any point, the commission issue a permanent waiver. If the operator decides that they want to revert back to the language, the existing language in the reg, would they then have to come before the commission again to get approval for that? I mean, we don't have to answer that now because it's not in front of us, but I see your point in terms of the funkiness of the... Yeah, I think, as I was saying it out loud, I think that's probably what would happen if they saw the permanent waiver, they would know that their intent had shifted if they did go back. So we would have to leave it with them. If we're issuing permanent waivers, I guess the condition attaches as long as your practice stays that way, right? But yeah, I just hadn't, I didn't remember that we had already issued one so I appreciate the history. But yeah, Commissioner Skinner, thank you for sticking with me on that point. And so maybe what we should do is first, let's do the first one, just to make sure we don't, on the temporary waiver, they need that time for implementation. Does anybody have any questions for Andrew on that one or Crystal? And then should we move on that effort to... I do have a clarifying question. So, better offers the self-imposed limitations. It's just that they are seeking the waiver on the conspicuously displayed portion of this regulation. Correct, the notification upon your first wager. They already have the notification in place for new account creation as well as first deposit. And how much time are they seeking? 120 days through December 30th. Yeah, through December 30th. Andrew, does the sports wagering division have any concerns about that time period or that waiver? None. Okay. Thank you. I knew your memo said that. Thank you. And sorry, it's right there, 120. I'm reading the summary, which is up above there too, 120 days. Do I have a motion? I can make the motion, Madam Chair. I just wanted to clarify with the team of the recommendation from the sports wagering division is six to nine months. And our recommendation is nine months. And so I just wanted to... No, this is with respect to, I'm sorry, because I am confusing things. If you look at page 119, there's two requests, one for temporary waiver and one for the permanent. And we should do them separately, right? Is that what's being recommended? Yes, but my question was for the first part of the temporary waiver for 240 days. They're looking for 120 days, 120 days. There are two requests, right from that. I think one is the temporary waiver. The six to nine months is the other. It's just kind of exactly the same thing. So yeah, 120 days, yeah. Okay. With that then, I move that in accordance with 205CMR 202.032, the commission issue a waiver to better holdings, Inc. DBA better from the requirements outlined in 205CMR 248.161. As included in the commissioners packet through December 30th, 2023, as granting the waiver meets the requirements specified in 205CMR 202.034 and is consistent with the purposes of general laws chapter 23N. I agree. Any edits? Okay. Michelle Bryan. Hi. Commissioner Hill. Hi. Excuse me, Commissioner Skinner. I, Commissioner Maynard. And I vote yes, five zero. All right. Now to the permanent request. The only issue outstanding is the timeframe and Director Vandal Lendon is asking for an ability to study. We let it, there's some implications on the RG. I think I'm, I want to just reiterate that Commissioner Bryan, you referenced the AG recommendation and I remember we did, we did discuss this. Yep. Yeah, fantasy sports is more restrictive in terms of if you want to lessen your limits. It's 30 days. Was it like 180 or something? It was really long, wasn't it? I, it was definitely longer than what we had. I don't remember it was that long, but it was longer than what we were bringing in our ranks. I'm making it up probably. Commissures, do we, I guess, Mark, I'd say if there's going to be a study and there's any implication for it to be contrary to responsible gaming, we want to know sooner than later, right? So you're saying that nine months will do it? I hope, Madam Chair, the numbers of people that enroll in play management settings is small. And so to get a large enough pool of people who enroll in order to understand, is it a disincentive? Are there unintended consequences of 30 days that we need to have a large enough pool of individuals? I'm just now learning more about enrollment rates of these types of play management tools. I would recommend that we revisit it in six months and consider an extension on that. We don't have enough data to understand how patrons react to a 30 day. So, and what I mean by that is, is there lower enrollment in play management settings for better? Once somebody enrolls and they disenroll and not come back to reenroll in it, perhaps because the 30 days was too long. I think that there are just some on the surface, it seems like a very good responsible gaming move. But as Commissioner O'Brien said, what are the unintended consequences? And I think I would just, I'd really like to know that. Or is this a best practice? And we should require that across all operators. Data, I think that's just key to better understand it. Okay. Anything else for clarification from Mark, Commissioner? Somebody want to make a motion? So I can make a motion for closer to nine months out, which is about June 7th, which is a Friday. So I don't know if we want a different date than that. Go to the middle of June or whether we want to. Why don't we say June 1st? Which is a Saturday. That's fine. Is that a Saturday? Okay, then June 3rd. June 3rd of the Monday. I move that in accordance with 205 CMR 202.032, that the commission issue a waiver to better holdings Inc. DBA better from the requirements outlined in 205 CMR 248.162 as included in the commissioners packet and further discussed here today through Monday, June 3rd, 2024 as granting the waiver meets requirements specified in 205 CMR 202.34 and is consistent with the purposes of General House 23 in. Back in. Any further discussion? Okay. Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Commissioner Skinner. Aye. Commissioner Maynard. Aye. And I believe, yes, five zero. Okay. Okay. Next is a similar but hopefully less confusing waiver request from PSI, Pet Sports Interactive. PSI has requested a temporary waiver from certain provisions 205 CMR 248.16 section one. They are requesting an extension through the end of this month through September 30th. Approval of this extension will allow their software engineers and product team to adequately test functionality to clearly and conspicuously display to the patron the ability to set those self-imposed limitations when a patron makes their first wager. This extension will also ensure PSI has the necessary additional time to fully test their solution and that it does not adversely have a negative impact on the user experience before it is made available to its customers in Massachusetts. It should be noted similar to better PSI already offers new patrons the option to set these limits at a time of new account registration and at the time of any deposit. Again, the detailed waiver request is in your packet and the sports wager division has no issues with this request to implement the requirements of the regulation. What page of the packet please? Sorry. 115. 115. Yes. It's out of orders. Page 115 is the memo. Yeah, sorry. I must have put these in backwards but it starts on page 115. It's okay. I think we changed up the agenda. It's fine Grace. 115. Questions for Andrew, Crystal, Bruce, Commissioner Hill. I saw no. Are you ready to move? I am Madam Chair. Thank you. I know that the that in accordance with 205CMR202.032 the commission issue a waiver to Penn Sports Interactive from the requirements outlined in 205CMR248.161 as included in the commissioner's packet through September 30th, 2023 as granting the waiver meets the requirements specified in 205CMR102.034 and is consistent with the purposes of GL chapter 23N. Thank you. I need further questions or edits. Okay, Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Commissioner Skinner. Aye. Commissioner Maynard. Aye. I go yes, five, zero. Okay. So now Lay Ridge Park Casino and I'm looking with that memo. I believe that is on page 113. Yes. Were you able to find a chair? We decided the reason why, remember Grace, we decided to shift all the waivers at the top. We're just, we're rationalizing the packet, Andrew. Thank you for your patience. Of course. All right. So here we are in the house rules, yeah. Yep. So the only house rule we have today comes from Clay Ridge Park Casino's in-person sports book. Part of this is an update to the requests that presented two weeks ago on the August 24th commission meeting. If you remember, PPC had requested an update in their language of section 14 of their house rules for obvious errors and the process to avoid or pay them out on mechanical or technical human errors. There was some discussion during the last meeting on the sports book using their sole discretion to pay out these errors in accordance with the correct odds or price. And after meeting with PPC's compliance team, they have since updated their language to include MGC approval for both voiding and paying out these certain vets. As it reads in your packet, in the event of any obvious price error, all vets in such cases will be deemed void or paid out with the correct odds or price. However, either option shall require MGC approval. This removes the entire language of sole discretion that was in question, the sports book to pay out vets in such cases. Additionally, PPC has also replaced all mention of Barstool sports book with the sports book at Plain Ridge Park throughout their house rules. There were approximately 80 name change updates, one of which was actually within the section 14 of their original requested change. I'd also like to add that PPC has not only removed Barstool language from their house rules, but they are currently completing the process of removing it entirely from their property. This is just one more piece to that. And concluding here, the sports wagering division confirms all requirements have been met under 205 CMR 247.02, and it's no reservations about moving forward with approving both of these changes. Thank you for that, Andrew. Commissions, any questions on these house rule changes? We have a motion. I move that the commission approve the amendment to the house rules submitted by the category one sports wagering operator, Plain Ridge Park Casino, as included in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today. Second. Questions and it's discussion. Okay, commissioner O'Brien. I, commissioner Hill. Before I say I, thank you, Andrew, for reaching out to PPC and getting back to us regarding that language. I. Commissioner Skinner. I, commissioner Maynard. I. And I vote yes, five, zero. Thank you. You're very welcome, commissioner Hill. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. Crystal, great job. Thank you. Madam chair, commissioners. Thank you to all of you. Excellent work. Thank you to the, the licensees too. Okay, commissioners. Now we're turning to item eight. We've got some help coming in. Um, chief Maldrew, chief London, and, um, Mina, I think was in earlier, but I mean, he might be joining us in a bit. See. Okay. Hi, John. Got John. Good afternoon, commissioner. Good afternoon. Commissioner, some will have, I'm just turning to the right page again. Sorry, everybody. I think it starts on page 142. Yeah. I've got Chris, uh, Grace's handy dandy bookmarks. There we go. Okay. Thank you. Who's going to take the lead? I can do a quick introduction, uh, background. And then I'll turn it over to Dave and just one more. Start by saying thank you to, um, John, Dave, uh, for all the hard work on this process. Um, and as in the memo you have in the packet, you have a memo that, um, starts by giving a brief overview of this process. Um, it started on July 27th, where we discussed how we'd even go about bringing in a, um, on July 27th about how we discussed bringing in a search firm to help with the executive director vacancy. Um, and we talked about the typical thresholds of what a search firm would look at between 20 and 25% of the annual salary. So we would first exceed the incidental threshold. Then we talked about the process we went through in the past of looking at, um, statewide contracts, and that did not lead to any, um, good firms in the past that did C level suites searches, uh, and that left us with the possibility of RFR, which would be a long-term or a procurement, um, exception where we would look for an intentional spend with a diverse firm and we could use the, um, best value process which we've used in the past. We asked for some time to go back and vet the, uh, supply diversity office list of certified firms to see if we could even find some, uh, firms that would be able to do this. John pulled up, um, STO's list of certified vendors, did found about, I think, 40 or 50 firms that met the basic criteria, um, and then we en, enlisted the assistance of LEAF to, um, do some additional vetting. There is a summary of their report in there of how they went about vetting. That was a three-pronged approach. We can dig into that a little deeper if you'd like. And we had, the HR department had developed some questions that we would put to a potential, uh, search firm. And those were asked by LEAF of the firms that responded or were within the, um, the three-prong criteria that met the three-prong criteria approach. All of that information is in your packet. And if the commission chose to use a search firm, there are five firms that could be, uh, could meet the criteria that LEAF has put forward. And it's up to the commission whether they would want to use one or multiple, um, during that vetting process. And we can dig a little deeper into the information. I know that it was requested and it was my mistake at the meeting on August 17th to not give you the information from LEAF, um, because I thought that had to go to just the vetting committee. But now you have all that information that staff had at the time of the meeting on August 17th. David, if there's anything you, Bernice, or John, would like to add that I missed, um, please. And so just like, I don't know if this is, at this point in time, I don't believe so. I'll wait till we move forward. My recommendation is that from HR, from a human resource, is that we use multiple, that we use agencies, diverse agencies, and we use multiple agencies. Reason being is that you would normally use one agency. It's called giving them an exclusive, meaning that you would not use anyone else. Having never used these folks, I am my, my recommendation is that we go with multiple agencies, and therefore we are casting a wider net. And we are also able to recommend to them, encourage them, to go out and identify all candidates, including diverse candidates. And that is something that's very specific to our, um, goals as we move forward. So those are really, I would be the liaison between the agency and the, um, commission, commissioners. And steps can be identified where you would play a, play the role and identifying candidates, we could work that out. But those are my, um, my observations, my thoughts on the issue. I think that would be the best way to recommending the commission to go forward. When you say multiple, are you saying multiple from this list, Dave? I'm sorry? Multiple from this list. Yes, multiple from the five, correct. Okay. And I believe two are certified and three are not, but they are five are all eligible. So multiple in my mind would be the, the best route. No more than, I would, I would say two, absolutely. It looks like, um, one got certified. Yeah. Four of them are certified and one is potentially eligible to be, uh, certified. Okay. So that's improved. Okay. Great. I'm sorry. I'm missing it. I'm sorry. Commissioner Maynard, go ahead. No, please. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Um, could you clarify which firm is not certified but eligible? It appears it's GUM's partners. Thank you. But the other four are certified. Yes. I'm, I guess my question's only about, and you have to remind me, I know that we talked about this last time, about remuneration, right? Are these firms only paid when they provide a successful candidate or are they paid when they provide candidates? From what I understand, these are contingency firms. So they would be paid upon complete hire of the individual, successful hire. And then based on their contract, which we would find out, we would then determine when that payment would be made within normally it's 30 to 45 days upon start date, not upon offer. Because we have a vetting process, which needs to be processed. And that is something that would be discussed with any agency. We need to be able to go out a minimum of six weeks to make sure that the person that the person is vetted properly. You mean for background, after? Background check, excuse me. Background of this, excuse me, sorry about that, I'm sure. Would they get something for, if the individual didn't pass background, that would be negotiate. Would that be a matter? Would that also be to Commissioner Maynard's point? Would they get no compensation if they don't pass background? There's no compensation. This is successful hire, this is not a retainer. We won't be paying folks for effort, we'll be paying folks for hire. For lack of a better way of saying that, not to be flippant. Hire based on our standards for hiring, which is background check. Got it. Correct. And that would be a little down some of these five vendors as well. Some may not agree to those terms, right? We have reached out, we're leaving these types of negotiations once it makes a decision. That's exactly right. Because that would all have to be ironed out and identified prior to any providing them as a agency for us. We would have to make sure that has been confirmed with them. Commissioner Maynard. I'll start the conversation. If they're certified and if they agree to the terms of all of them, if they find a successful candidate that is hired and passes background check, I'm perfectly fine with moving forward. Both would be my, I'll kick off the conversation. Can I just ask clarification from you, Chief Lennon? Did you, was your point that we're not sure if they would agree to those terms? But if we assume the best of all possible worlds. Okay. Commissioner Maynard just pointing out the best of all possible worlds. Okay. Correct. And these may be some of the discussions that you want us to go back and have with these five partners. We've had a chance to talk about it. Are you willing to agree to these terms? If not, we may have to come back to you with another discussion. And, you know, this is all part of that. Are we choosing one? Are we choosing multiple? I think if you were choosing one, it would be a lot easier to agree to those terms for all, you know, for all of them. I think if you say that to all five, you'd probably have one or two whittle out and say, I don't know if I have the capacity for that. If I, you know, if I'm competing against others, that's just my hunch. But it may come back all five say yes. And we get the greatest of all worlds, which would be nice because we'd be adding another vendor to the certified list as well. Right. So that would, and we are here to support them in that. Letha said they would support them too because it's from their database. So it wouldn't be a heavy lift on their part. We would be, we would be helping out on that certification process. I'm going to ask a question ahead, Commissioner. Sorry, I'll get better, I promise. I'm just going to turn and ask for any questions. So you, we're actually in sync, Commissioner Skinner. So this, this, I'm going to ask a question. The answer might be obvious to most of you, just noting where the offices are located for these farms. I think all but one of them have a Massachusetts presence, but that does not mean that their reach in terms of recruitment and search is limited to Massachusetts, correct? I mean, these will be, these farms conduct a nationwide. Search. Absolutely. Okay. Perfect. In fact, that would be one of the qualifying questions I would ask, or we could ask, what is their experience in conducting regional and national searches? Okay. There is a firm that's listed here who that does not have much experience with C-suite positions. Their focus primarily has been mid-level management. And so I would, I would be okay with, and I don't know whether that firm is certified or not. I think I have to flip back to determine which firm it is. But I mean, that would be my only hesitancy with moving forward with that firm is that they don't have the requisite experience with this kind of a search. All right. Great, Commissioner. Commissioner Bryant, Commissioner Hill, thoughts? I've differing to Commissioner Hill. I wanted to make sure anybody else that wasn't going to be going further into the process had a chance to voice what they wanted. So my initial thoughts would be that we would go with numerous companies, you know, more than one, that'd be okay with that. How we make that decision, you know, remains to be seen. But I think from what we're hearing from staff, that is probably something we should do. And I'm okay with that. Michelle Brown, we want to hear from you. I know that this is such an important piece of the puzzle. Do you have any consternation about the use of these firms or a combination of them? Any, I have the same thought as Commissioner Skinner on the one that she flagged. And my only question really for Dave and Derek, we've used these things before. And I know, Derek, your involvement may be more limited than maybe what we thought originally. But is having too many cooks in the kitchen problematic? Is there a sweet spot in terms of how many firms you deal with in this? Or is it better to capture maybe the four out of the five on that list? My experience, I have experience here. My experience that I've used to, because the court, what happens also is that if you have too many cooks, they said identifying the same people. And then you have a problem of who received what first, because if you were at a higher, now you have an issue of saying, well, I referred that person to you also. And it gets very, it could get awkward. So I've used, I've done searches, headed up searches, and the private sector side, which is different, the private sector side, the process is still the same where we've had to. And so what, sorry, go ahead. I would leave that up to the vetting committee, right? After you've had a chance to contact the five of these, see who works best with your assumptions, right? The commission really, it's been clear during this process, the commission really wants to have their hands on this and doesn't want to turn it over to a search firm solely. So anyone that comes forward with that probably want to, it's going to be hard for them to change their process and the way they go about things. So that might be a good disqualifier too. But as long as you identify all the problems that Dave's pointing out, all the problems that Commissioner Hill has pointed out in the past of using a search firm, and you have those on your mind as you went to view these four or five in the search firm groups, I think that you can come up with the sweet spot, whether that's one, whether that's three, if Dave likes two, maybe it's two and the vetting committee likes two, that's throughout you go. But I wouldn't say there's a perfect formula for it. The benefit we have is we have a very involved HR department in all of our hiring processes, unlike in some other institutions where the HR kind of just farms it out. So I think we're at a benefit here for using a search firm. Absolutely. Any other questions, comments? I know this isn't marked up on the agenda, so I'm turning to Councillor Grossman. But I'm going to ask the question to see if we need to think about this. Last time we met, Commissioner Hill, you raised the issue around the second screening committee that might be used for the election of the IEP director. And I'm just wondering, are there any efficiencies that we need to be thinking about in terms of search as we think about this? That's all. Maybe with the next agenda setting, maybe we think about that unless it's pertinent now, maybe it's not so far off the agenda for us to be thinking about that. Derek, I don't know, you're nodding your head. We could absolutely, if the commission chose to do this as an intentional spend, and it's in our best value, which I truly believe it is, it's a small procurement, right? It's under $250,000. We do have the capacity to say this is in our best value because we want to meet our diversity spend numbers. And I think this really shows that we're not just talking the talk when we talk for our licensees, but we're walking the walk as well. In this scenario that we have this ability to say, this is the only one we're going to make it available to, then yeah, do it for both. We get a double spend here. We could use it for the IB position as well. IB, direct to position. Commissioner Hill, what are you thinking? I don't think I'm agreeing with Derek on this one. Okay. So let me put a little bit more thought into this. And we challenge this. As a back burner, you can always say we leave that as an option. You don't necessarily have to do it. You can go just the CEO route, come up with employment opportunities as well as our job posting boards. And then if you don't get good results, you can turn to this option. Or we can just hold it in the back burner and bring it up if it's needed. I like keeping it on the back burner for sure. Let me think about this a little further, Madam Chair. I don't think we need to go that route for this hire, but I'm certainly willing to listen to my fellow commissioners. And staff, of course. So you can turn for the altogether, okay? I was just thinking of the efficiencies are splitting it out, but we thought four was too many. So, okay. Let's put that on for agenda setting purposes so that we can have a good discussion on it. All right. So commissioners, do you have any other questions for Derek, Dave, or John? Or I'm having a little trouble today, Vinicius. And I'm looking at you. You're glowing from the white circle behind your head. And I actually love it, Vinicius. And thank you for all the work that's been done on this. It's really important work. I was wondering who that angel was with the halo on. Yeah. Madam Chair, I'd like to add also that with these five organizations, with these five organizations, we have an opportunity to expand our portfolio of diverse vendors when it comes to placement as we move forward. And these folks, now that we know they exist, we can develop our HR can develop relationship with them. They may be able to be used for not so much for executive, but also for critical for all management positions that, you know, to make sure that we are continuing to reach our hiring goals. So it's another way of expanding our efforts. I agree with you. Chief Montrell, I do. I think it's excellent. Okay. No other questions? Mr. Maitre, are you thinking or are you? What have you got on your mind? I already said my piece. I was not as altruistic as Michelle Bryan. I was sitting here thinking, if I do have to work with these folks, I'm going to give my opinion early. But that was, you know, that's, I think that, you know, going back from my experience, my rule in the governor's office was, anybody that wanted to give me a candidate, we were going to, we were going to look at that candidate and we never restricted, right? And then the piece about the reason I asked Derek and folks about the payment is to me, being a good steward of the tax dollars too, I would only want to pay them if they had a successful candidate. But so that's, that's as simple as I was thinking. I said, hey, if they've got a good candidate, throw them our way. You know, we don't know what we don't know. And we'll pay them if it's a good one. So that's, that's it. I haven't really changed what I was thinking. But, but I am willing to go with my fellow commissioners on, on Halberg rule. Can I ask a clarifying question, please? If we go with the executive search, because I'm reading, I think Commissioner Hill's mind, if we go with the executive search firm, and it's not exclusive, as I'm understanding, do at the same time we use our own approaches as well, if it's not an exclusive arrangement with an executive search firm, in other words, you know, the typical postings that we do. And I see Derek nodding his head. And maybe you said that I missed it. My apologies. Yes. So that was a clear point that I took away from past meetings. I went back and reviewed all the genders and the actual meetings to get a feeling of what was, what was going on with this. And that was a feeling from the body that we didn't want to turn this over to just an executive search firm. We wanted our HR department, this vetting and screening committee heavily involved, and they would be running the show and the search firm would be assisting them. So we'd still be putting the CEO posting out, still be doing all of our regular advertising, touching our affinity groups, and then asking this to supplement. So Commissioner Hill, that might be a helpful addition because to Derek's point, his early point is that if they were successful, that would be really advancing our goals around diversity spent, right, Derek? And we do know we need to be in tension about that. So I understand your point. Thank you, Commissioner Hill. Thanks, Derek. Okay. Thank you. Were you chiming in, Dave? Are you chiming in? No, I was just stating that as we meet with the agencies and work with the commissions, HR will play a critical role in ensuring that identifying what candidates we already have in our systems that are already, that are going to be refurbished by the agencies because we are not going to pay for someone that we already have. Oh, good point. And that's critical. And that's again, when we look at this and what that process looks like, I will, I can explain later, but that's a critical role. So if we have Dave Maldrew in our system and Dave Maldrew surfaces through an agency, what does that look like? And the agency has to agree that if that's the case, then no, we would not. Understood. That's good. Any other clarifiers or questions? So, again, of this list, for our certify in one capacity or another, one is double certified. No, two are double certified. Correct. In the fourth, is eligible to be certified based on its ownership? It just hasn't gone through the process. Got it. And that can take some time. It can. We've experienced that with a few other vendors. The good thing is, the time limit, as long as it happens within the fiscal year, we still get credit after the certification happens for the spend. So commissioners, are you prepared to move on this today? Or do you have further questions? Do you want further information? Do you want further research? I have an additional question, just really playing off of what Dave mentioned. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but your recommendation is to move forward with no more than two of these search firms. Did I hear you correctly? I just installed my experience the question was, have I had experience? My experience has always been working with two. If it's three, that's fine too, but I have worked with two. I recommend, in this case, in this particular case, based on their abilities, if we had three, that's fine. I wouldn't go more than that. Plus, if they cover other areas, if we happen to have one or two that are regional, and we have one national, that could justify three. So, sorry to answer you in that way, but it's not as strong that it's only two. Yeah, but you're not advocating for us to move forward with all five. I would not. Yeah, so then the question becomes, how do we whittle the list down? I mean, aside from what I flagged earlier, I think we have a certification issue, which may or may not be an issue, assuming that there can be some negotiation in terms of what we expect of that firm moving forward and getting certified. But the other factor here, I think that's going to weigh in. My decision is the length of service, the length of, excuse me, the length of time these firms have been engaged in this kind of work. And so I just, I guess I'm looking for some guidance as to how we go about carrying down this list of five. Well, we could recommend there's not a lot. We could have another process. I don't know what I would do. And I've done this with customers where the commission can interface with a representative of the commission, can interface directly with the agency. I could be present as an HR person. And you can ask questions, qualifying them. John, we did something similar at Robert Half, correct? So we could do that and do it in the public and have all five of us make that, do that process, or we could delegate it. Oh, I forgot, public. To Derek and John and Nisfa and Dave to come up. Because I think when I'm hearing from Derek, it's a real possibility that they're not all going to agree to the ideal terms that Commissioner Maynard suggested. So maybe we have them do like a cursory outreach and then if they come back and we say, and they say, all five are in, then maybe we, and you're not comfortable making, you know, coming back and say, we selected two or three, then you come back and ask for more guidance. But could we delegate it to them and should be comfortable and they take into consideration experience and all those, we could talk about maybe value, things that we really want and experiences one in certification. Second, Commissioner O'Brien. No, I was wondering, I didn't know, I thought the dial I was heading in the direction of, except for maybe the one that Commissioner Skinner implied originally, did the other four proceed where the, whoever the members of the screening committee, the vetting committee would then go forward and sort of do the final selection of no more than three. Now to keep the process moving, but I'm not supposed to continue to involve all five, but in terms of trying to move the process along, I didn't know if that was what was being thrown out. Well, if we're going to have a screening committee make that selection, then my, and the screening committee includes potential candidate for the IEB position, then we should, I wasn't envisioning that, I didn't think we were going to be having anything to do with the IEB selection. No, the search firm. If we're going to end up using this, that was, that's, but couldn't it just be another process? I mean, does it necessarily implicate open meeting law? I wouldn't think so. Oh, it's not the open meeting law issue at all. You're talking about a conflict arising between the interim IEB director and the potential of serving on the executive director where that person may be interested in the full-time IEB director. So we can put up, we can put up all kinds of barriers if that, and what I was recommending was similar to what Commissioner O'Brien was recommending. If this, if the firm's doing the work for the selection in the review group, we can have John sit in on that to help with the procurement and to help with the, with the selection of vetting down from the five. But, you know, at that point, it would, we're still doing a best value procurement, right? So you still want to have your team together. So it's either going to be all five commissioners or it's going to be the vetting committee that does it. And it may be a little quicker, a little easier if you have the vetting committee do that. And then the commissioners, kind of like we did with the application, can tell you what their priorities are when vetting. You know, the commissioners on that selection criteria, on that committee. Well, my input on this is that it is critical in my mind that the commissioners have buy-in on however number we use one, two, or three agents, five even, that you have buy-in. That from the very beginning, you feel comfortable that these folks are capable of conducting an effective search. And that's really that that's more important than anything because it really is, if you have questions, about it, then there's probably a reason why you have a question. I guess I just wasn't thinking that the screening committee was selecting the executive search firm. I thought that commission was and I might thought was to just continue to use the team to little down, find out, come back, tell us. I actually think it would be quicker. Like, okay, come back and tell us of these five who's interested and we might only have two anyway. That's really what I was thinking. But if we will, the screening committee to do that, I actually think that's more process because you're including people who are not, we've got two commissioners on the screening commission so far, committee so far. And then there are other people that we don't know yet. So I had that same understanding that the full commission would be deciding which search firm or firms move forward with. And I think that was a specific request made by Commissioner Hill, though I don't want to speak for him. I thought about that's how we agree to move forward. Relative to additional information gathering, I'm perfectly fine delegating that to Derek and John and Dave and the rest of the team. Because I do worry, you know, whether or not we'll be able to get one of these firms to sign on to this project. Particularly, I know compensation has been mentioned, but you know, where I don't know how these search firms generally operate. I've never dealt with a search firm, but it does strike me as somewhat unique for the commissioners, the search committee to be so closely involved from the search firm perspective, to be so closely involved in the review process, the determination as to who to put forward for potential consideration. I think that that might be more of a bigger ask than we realize. Because essentially, you know, where it seems that we might be altering their business practice just a little bit. But I don't know, I'm just, I'm wondering that. So that's kind of where I stand on this whole thing. So hoping we can, as a body, make the determination as to which search firms to move forward with. Michelle Hill? And Nina, I'm not sure if you have any experience, if you're thinking about screening committees and if it's typical for them to run a big body to do the procurement for the, for an executive or is it the big body? Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, it's either, in my experience, and this is mostly on the local level that this has been done, but it's either the full body itself or somebody who is not, or frankly, it's the HR director just doing it or the procurement officer. It's actually rarely a long discussion because there's not usually this many options for search committees to do that. But yeah, it's kind of one of the two, but it's not usually a screening committee itself. They're kind of working with that entity after the fact. I'm also mindful of the time here. So I think it is good to move forward sooner rather than later on this, just a question. Is the executive director, has the job been posted yet? Because I do think, you know, parallel to what we're talking about in terms of the search from shouldn't that, shouldn't we be posting that position? I mean, just what's that process like? I think that's all part of the screening committee's work. Isn't it, Nina? Well, but I understand that, but why, what's stopping the position from being posted? Right now, it hasn't been posted because we still are determining we just finished the job description and we wanted to make sure that we wanted to make sure the, I wanted to make sure the recruitment process was solid and we could certainly post it, but I didn't want to make sure the commission was involved. Independently, we can post it, but if we're not ready to have the internal processes in place, it could get, we could get high volume. We could have a lot of, you know, how are we going to interview? So I thought there were a few questions that we need, but we could certain once the decision is made, we can post it quickly. And we're using that's the same job description that we use. We have an up-to-date, we have a meeting where we approve the updated. Right. We did, we did do that. Yep. We did that. Thank you, Commissioner Bryan. I need definitely memory helper today, so thank you. So we've done that, it could be posted, but I'm looking at Mina for direction in terms of process. We have not yet selected the screening committee and I presume that that would come under once it's posted all the processes that are about selection, including the general ones that the HR department would do those falls under that screening committee, right? Because we're going to do a combination. It could. Yeah, it certainly could. There's some flexibility on that. You could, you know, exactly what you asked the screening committee to do. Again, you can have the full body put up the the job description. You can have that rolling and then the screening committee starts, you know, as applications come in. There's a lot of flexibility. The screening committee is meant to make the work more efficient. It's not, there isn't a rigid process on that. Commissioner Skinner. Yeah, I mean, given that we've already determined that, you know, we want the search firm's work to supplement our own and the screening committees. I just, I don't, I don't, I mean, I don't think that it would hurt to post the job description now. I just, I'm still not seeing the issue with doing that. I mean, again, just in the interest of time where this has been on the agenda now, you know, several times, I just, I think we should take advantage of. Okay. So let's, let's get back to, let's get back to item 8A though. Um, search firm, we've been, we've been given an option of five names. We can decide to have the screening committee do that work, or we could ask, we could delegate it. I think there's some efficiencies and just ask Derek and, and Dave and John, at least want to check in with these folks and find out do we have anybody? Madam chair. Yes, commissioner. That's exactly what should happen. Thank you. Please, let's move on this. Thank you. I just am looking for a motion. I'm looking for somebody. I don't know. I don't know myself, but I will. I don't know if we need a motion, but while I wasn't getting, I, I couldn't tell if I had anybody agreeing with me. Commissioner Hilsa, I'm very happy to hear. I'm agreeing and, and hoping we can move forward. There was a, there wasn't. I think there was a sense for at least one commissioner. Maybe it was going to be in screening committee. So do I need a motion that we're going to delegate to the, the four members of the team who've been working on this process to come back and tell us that who's in and up to most three will be lucky. I think if it's three, we'll be lucky if it's two. If it's only one, are we still comfortable? We'll find out. And you don't need probably two weeks to do that, right? My hope, my hope would have been that we have decided today that we're going with some search for firms. We have now said to these four, go ahead and pick them. Do they have to come back to us now? I don't, I personally between you and I, I don't care who the firms are. That's, that's just me. Personally, you and me and the, in the entire public. So I don't know what else to say, except that I think the staff can, can look at the five that have been put before us and can pick the two or three and let's move forward. That's, that's how I feel. I'm with you. Okay. Here, here. Thank you. Thank you. That's why message received. We will, we will do that. We will bet with the conversation here today. We'll bring that back to the group and see who's willing to sign on the dotted line. Yep. Okay. Everybody, do we need a motion and a vote or is everybody comfortable with that direction? Just one. I'm comfortable with that direction. I heard you. I am. Okay. Good. Commissioner Skinner. Good. I was waiting for it and I saw Commissioner Maynard and Commissioner O'Brien nodding the head. All right. Let's go. Great. Good. Now, so seven AA done. Selection of the screening committee. Where were we? I think we only need one other slot. Right? Wasn't that it? That was a question. Commissioner O'Brien, I think we'll probably need a refresher because I'm No, that's what I was thinking. I think Cruiser Hill might have a better memory of this than me. I think it was Heather. There was a discussion of Derek. I think Mina's going to address the Derek issue because there was a question about about the fact that Derek, Derek raised himself. That he is hired pointed by the CDL. And Mina, did you have some thoughts on that? I did. If and I just, you know, in fairness to Derek, I don't assume that still that he's still somebody that you would consider. If you were to include him, I think you would have to as you know, there's there's a potential that someone could suggest that there's a conflict. There could be a conflict of interest because eventually Derek is Derek's position is hired by the executive director. It's not necessarily a conflict of interest. But as a precaution, what we would probably recommend is a filing under the State Ethics Act and then approval from the commission that you believe that Derek can act and partially not withstanding that ultimately the person that is selected would be the person who has the appointment authority over it. It's certainly not unusual when staffs involved that it is somebody in that role again. A lot of times the hardest person to hire is that sort of CEO type role of an organization because they do have others reporting to. So that's sort of the long and short of it. It's because of the potential for that. We would recommend a disclosure form and an approval if Derek was involved. And but other one, but we don't see it as an absolute block. Chair, I have a question. Mina, and I'm sure you know this answer. Would that apply to myself also that this person would be my direct boss and I'm involved? I know I'm ahead of HR, but is there a conflict there? My understanding is it was slightly different. David, and I think it might have to do with who, you know, who your contract goes through and whether it's by statute. Dave, the by statute the executive director is, does make the appointment of the chief administrative officer. And it is different. I mean, he raised a good point. And I think there isn't necessarily a conflict. It's really an appearance issue that you're getting at. Right. Mina. Dave raises a good point, but I think you know, it's certainly the appearance part. You know, there's no as I sort of what I was alluding to is there's no way around that for staff at the organization to be hired. HR directors are often in this position where they are hired person that they are eventually going to be reporting to. So I don't think it's the same for Dave. I think the statutory reason is why we would suggest perhaps a little bit more of a precaution of, you know, a documentation precaution with Derek. Thank you. Okay. So who do we have? We've got Madam chair. Yes, commissioner. Before I make my comment, I see that Derek is still around. And before I go and make my comments and I'm in public. So I have to ask it. Would you be interested still in being on this committee? Very interested. I just wanted everyone to know about that section of the statute. So while they made this decision, it was an informed decision. So Madam chair, if I can just make an opinion of what the commission committee should be, I think we had agreed on commissioner O'Brien, commissioner Maynard, Dave Moldrew, Heather Hall. And then of course, the fifth position was up in the air because of the issue with Derek. And I'm going to continue to push Derek to be on this committee because of his experience. He's done a lot of work already to get us ready to move forward with this. And I think Mina has now explained to us all he has to do is sign a disclosure form. And if he would be willing to do that, we've had two meetings now to talk about this publicly. So we're not hiding anything. It's been out there transparent. So I would urge my fellow commissioners to add Derek as the fifth member of this committee. And I would end it at five. We're going practical. Could we make any motions subject to the commission agreeing today to accept that disclosure? Mina, can we do that? And then we don't have to go back to it. Right. No, in fact, because you know, this is sort of a slightly funky process here. It is funky. Because the disclosure would actually go to the appointing authority. Which is the executive director, which is the interim. Interim interim executive director Grossman is really the one that would officially sign off on that. You know, you can certainly given, you know, his you can sort of give him your your thoughts on it, which by appointing, I guess what I would say is can I add a wrinkle in the event in the event interim executive director Grossman is interested in the position. We need to just keep him absolutely. And that's what I was actually going to get to. Thank you. And I think you read my mind. So because of that wrinkle, I guess what I would say is if you were to skip over the person who appoints Derek today, which is the would be the interim, the person, the folks who appoint the executive director are you is this group. I think you could fold it right into the motion that the commission has no objection to it. And to the extent that a formal sort of approval of that disclosure has to happen from the interim executive director, it will be done as you you know, based on your vote today as a ministerial act as a call. And and these disclosures are just filed. There's it's so there's no action to be taken on them. So let's pull that into a motion in the interest of being practical. Mr. Boehner. Should we ask and I know the answer to this Derek. So don't take offense to it. But shouldn't we ask Derek on the record? Yes, you should ask the question. I'm not interested in the executive director position. And I assume Heather. Yes. Thank you. It's not interested in the executive director position. Yes, that's right. And Chief Maldrew. I am not interested in the executive director position. And I'll further my answer that if at any point I think there is a candidate that I cannot be impartial on, I will let the committee know immediately. And you'd be willing to sign the disclosure. I will. Yeah, thank you. And I think that just to be clear, that would apply what you just said, Derek. And I appreciate that that applied to all members of the committee, including the commissioner. So I'm going forward. You guys will figure that all out. I think we can we're close to a motion, Commissioner Hill. I'm trying. I have the first part of it. It's the second part I need help with. So so mean to help me out. Sorry. Um, Commissioner Hill, if you could start with the first half, which I assume is to appoint the screening committee, I can, I can. I think what I would add at the end is subject to the filing and as necessary approval of this. Disclosure statements by the by Mr. Landon, which, which the commission believes are appropriate, given that Mr. Landon's interest in the position is not so substantial or interest in his role in the screening commission and his employment interest is not so substantial as to affect the integrity of the services the commission receives. You can, you can add a so moved at that. I know I said a lot. So at the end of that. Yeah, good luck with that one commissioner. I know it's a lot there. So, but there is trying to get the the statutory criteria as well. You got to walk me through it Mina. So subject to the filing and necessary disclosure statements of Derek Landon. Yeah. And further, the commission votes that in its opinion, Mr. Landon's interest is not is not so substantial as likely to affect the integrity of his service on the screening committee. Let's let's simplify it there. And further, the commission votes say it again, you're going too fast for me and I'm sorry. Sorry. And further, the commission votes that in its opinion, Mr. Landon's interests are not so substantial as to affect the integrity of the services his service on the screening committee. Subject to the filing, necessary disclosure statements of Derek Landon and further the commissioner, the commission's votes in its opinion that Mr. Landon help me one more time. That Mr. Landon's interest is not so substantial as to affect the integrity of his service on the screening committee. Substantial to affect his work on the screening committee. Shall we try it? Let's go for it. Is everybody ready for that, Madam Chair? I'm ready. So I move that the commission named the following individuals to the executive director screening committee. Commissioner Eileen O'Brien, Commissioner Jordan Maynard, Dave Muldrew, Heather Hall, and Derek Landon. Subject to the filing and necessary disclosure statements of Derek Landon and further the commission votes in its opinion that Mr. Landon's interests are not so substantial to affect his work on the screening committee. Second. Thank you, Commissioner Skinner. Any further discussion? Okay. Commissioner, you should all feel comfortable voting on this even if you're involved. Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Commissioner Skinner. Aye. Commissioner Maynard. Thank you for the commission. Aye. It's not like you had to follow it, but I know you wanted to vote for the other three also. And I vote a big yes. So thank you. Five-zero. It was just encouragement. Vote for yourself. Excellent work. Now to Commissioner Skinner's earlier point, you know, there's now a committee to turn to you in terms of steps that should be made to advance the selection process. If that includes tomorrow posting that, I guess I'm, Commissioner Skinner, if you want us to direct them to do that or do you want to just let them take over now in terms of the process? Yeah, I just ask that it be considered. Excellent. Thank you. Very, very good. Good, good point. Okay. Number nine. Well done, everybody. Well done. Particularly the team members. Very, very helpful. So important to our overall mission. So thank you. Just one minute. I have somebody in my house. Later. Um, we have item number 10. I have one commissioner update. And that's really to thank there's a committee that I worked with Grace Robinson to form after, you know, once what's wagering was stood up, we recognized our mission statement. It's really due to be reviewed and overhauled to reflect at least that expansion. And a committee has convened. I asked our most senior and our most junior commissioners to lead that. Michelle Bryan is chairing and Commissioner Maynard is joining her. And then a nice group of our members. I want to get them all right of our team. And that includes Tom Mills. Dr. Lightbound. Dave Maltrew, I think you just want to Dave Maltrew, you might want to mute. Thanks Dr. Lightbound and Judy from our for our legal department representative, Gutt Crystal. And Lily John Scully and Todd and his executive director role. And so I want to thank you. That's important work. And I know you've met a couple of times. And I'm sure that the the commission will afford to. You know, maybe a couple of updates unless you get your work done. So play them all. Look forward to hearing your recommendations. So just want to thank you for that important work. If folks are looking at our at our mission statement, it is it is evolving. So thank you. Any other commissioner updates? Can I just one, please? Is Derek still on? He's off camera. There he is. There he is. I'm here. Happy birthday. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I wasn't going to let you get away without being put on the spot. No better way to celebrate than I can actually. Wait, and all day commission meeting too. We celebrated all day with you, Derek. All day. September 7th. Happy birthday. Hope you're doing something special. Yes, spending with the debt with the family. Excellent. Both families, the M.G.C. family and then my family. I'm going to I'm going to date myself. Are you going to the ground round? You betcha. I remember the ground round. One of my favorite restaurants. Popcorn. I get the day. I get the day. Popcorn. Drop your peanuts on the floor. Yeah, the popcorn on the floor. I love that. Many times at the Cleveland Circle Ground Round. Yes. Always a great birthday. They spot if I remember correctly. Madam chair, you know me. If we get near the end of a meeting, I'm probably one of the first that want to go. But I would like just to take a couple of minutes if it's okay with you. Commissioner Maynard and I actually attended Saratoga a couple of weeks back at a conference. And with your permission, I just wanted to briefly just give you a little bit of an update of what took place over there. It was a very good and informative conference actually. Patrick Brown, who is the founder and organizer of the conference at Saratoga, welcomed all of us and put together terrific panels that were really very educational. One interesting panel dealt with technology and gaming, new challenges and new solutions. And many of the topics discussed during this panel this panel discussion dealt with consumers trusting in the technology used in gaming and eye gaming, wanting better protection for consumers instead of underground and unregulated gaming and increased revenues for brick and mortars who have added eye gaming. The subject of illegal gaming on city streets came up a couple of times and how technology can better protect consumers from unregulated markets. And the technology also being used to get increased interaction with customers to gather patterns and making products better and for RG purposes. The downside of the technology we learned that needs to be looked at is the illegal betting that is still taking place, money laundering, and of course terrorism was brought up as part of gaming. Other subjects brought up was the philosophy of taxation. Too high are we pushing people underground for their gambling and things of that sort. And another great panel discussion that took place regarding consumer protections and federalization of gaming. We heard from Congressman Paul Tonko of New York who has proposed legislation that would ban all advertising related to sports wagering in the United States. It's called the betting on our future act. Not surprisingly, this act had some detractors in that room who did not support the legislation for many, many reasons. And I have to give the Congressman some credit. He explained why he filed the bill, which is for many reasons we have discussed during our regulation from the nation process. Also on this panel was Marlene Warner, our mass council on gaming and health director. She was excellent and shared what states like Mass have done through regulations to address some of the Congressman's concerns. And by the way of the four presenters, Massachusetts was mentioned three times for what we have done in our regs for RG and advertising. And then lastly, I'll talk about the subject of harness racing and industry. The subject was an industry in decline or transformation. And interestingly enough, there was not a precise answer to the question. I heard the pros and cons of the question, but each jurisdiction had different proposals on how to enhance harness racing, which we found to be very interesting. Some of the pros, you know, had additional amenities to racing partnership with racing and casinos. Thoroughbred racing and harness racing in Saratoga, as you know, take place. Commissioner Maynard and I actually went into one of the casinos where they have the harness racing and we were able to talk to a couple of the workers there and, you know, made it very clear that when the Thoroughbred racing is taking place, the harness racing does not take place, but instead of during the day it will happen at night. And then, you know, getting more press to cover harness racing, whether it be here or across the country is something that needs to be needs to take place. Used to happen back in the 60s, 70s and 80s, but not so much now in today's world. And, you know, some of the cons, I just said lack of press, some of the negative press that we've read dealing with equine deaths, illegal drugs and horses, you know, not the same for harness industry as it is and as we've seen in other horse industries, but something that, you know, a lot of people are seeing and trying to understand. We're not seeing young people get into this industry like, you know, we did in the past. And it was an interesting fact that we heard in the 1950s more people attended horse races than football games, which I just couldn't even comprehend in today's world. So again, it was a very exciting conference and very educational. And I would urge, you know, next year, for those who have never been to Saratoga, that you take time to go out beautiful country, but more importantly, great education on an industry that we oversee. We still had some questions after we left, actually. And we are working with Dr. like mom and PPC Commissioner Maynard and I where we're going to meet with their leadership to talk about some other issues that we didn't get clear answers on. So thank you for giving me a few minutes to give you a little update on the conference. Very informative. Thank you, Commissioner Maynard, anything you wanted to add? That was really comprehensive. And I agree with the sentiments of Commissioner Maynard and quietly, I will say for those that palace entry when we weren't working, Commissioner Hill did drive me around to all the different springs and allow me to look at those and drink from them and go back to where but no, we had an opportunity to sit down with all the stakeholders. We heard a lot of different opinions and came came away knowing that horse racing is a live industry. It is a long industry. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you for that. Any other Commissioner updates? Any other business? All right. So, Commissioner Hill, I will turn to you for the last business of the day. I move to adjourn. Second. Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Commissioner Skinner. Aye. Commissioner Maynard. Aye. I vote yes. Five-zero. And thank you, everybody. It's a long day, but a lot covered and a lot done.