 It's been a while since we've met. I will go through the process of making sure this quorum is established, and then we can go forward with the agenda today. Given the unprecedented circumstances resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic, Governor Charlie Baker issued an order providing limited relief from certain provisions of the open meeting law to predict the health safety of individuals interested in attending public meetings. In keeping with the guidance provided, the commission will conduct this public meeting utilizing remote collaboration technology. Any votes will be taken by roll call, and this meeting is being recorded. Tanya, are you all set with that? I am, Commissioner. Thank you. OK. And let me just do a roll call of the members that I believe are on the line to establish a quorum. I believe we have DA Anthony Galuni. Yes. Thank you. I believe we have Assistant Under Secretary Angela Davis, who's the official designee for Under Secretary from EOPS, Terry Reedy is also here today. Oh, you're muted. Present. Thank you. Thank you. Nice to meet you. And then I also believe we have Chief Edward Dunn from the Falmouth PD in his capacity as president of the Mass Chiefs of Police Association. Yes, I'm here. Hi. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. Don't believe any of the other members have appeared at present. I believe before we get started on the main part of the agenda, we also have the chair of the MGC, Kathy Jettstein, who's with us this morning, who wanted to say a brief hello to everyone on the subcommittee before it started. Good morning. And thank you, Chair O'Brien, for today's meeting and convening it. I, Mary Thurlow, invited me to say hello. It's my pleasure today most of all to recognize the members of the subcommittee for first year dedication to this work and also for all of you who are law enforcement officers and public safety leaders for your service over this last difficult 15 months. So the gaming commission recognizes that, and we thank you for your service. I'm really pleased today that you're going to have the opportunity to hear from Professor Christopher Bruce on his reports on the impact of the gaming establishment's work, enroll with respect to public safety in our communities. As you know, generally, those reports have been positive. And we look for you under section 68, I think it's subsection B or C. You have an affirmative obligation to provide recommendations to the gaming commission on mitigating harm that could be presented with respect to public safety because of gaming establishments. And we welcome that. And so I'm so pleased that this committee is convening today. We look forward to your insights. I'm pleased you're going to hear from Christopher Bruce. And I also know you'll be getting on the gaming commission's work right now reviewing the Community Mitigation Fund public safety applications for 2021. You have an exciting agenda ahead. And again, a big thank you from really with respect to all of the commissioners. And I see that Commissioner Cameron is joining today. I'm not going to stay on. I know the governor is having a press conference with respect to COVID-19 right now. And I think that that might be quite relevant to our work and actually quite relevant to your work as COVID-19 restrictions continue to be released. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Angela and Chief Delaney, nice to see you both again. Chief Dunn, I'm sorry. Nice to see you both again and thank you to the DA. Thanks. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much. Thank you. And we can move on to the second item on the agenda, which is approval of the minutes from the last time this subcommittee met, which is more than two years ago. We do not have a quorum that satisfies being able to vote on these. The members have changed over. And so the draft of those minutes is available. Mary Thurlow in our office does have them. If anyone would like her to forward them, please reach out. She's more than happy to get you a copy of those for your review and they are available from us, but it's not something that we're going to be able to vote on today. So with that, we will move on to the third item, which is the presentations from Christopher Bruce. I know a number of people here have had the privilege and the pleasure of listening to the results of the research he's conducted for us. So I'm going to turn it over to Joe to sort of officially hand it off to Christopher Bruce. Great, thank you, Madam Chair. So the first up we have our presentation from Christopher Bruce. Christopher has been working for the gaming commission for a number of years as a crime analyst, looking at all of the facilities, the Plain Ridge Park Facility, MGM and Encore and evaluating crime associated with them. And I guess without further ado, I will turn it over to Christopher. Very good, thank you. Let me get my screen shared over here. And presumably you can all now see my presentation as well as me. It's nice talking to you. I wasn't sure exactly who would be here today. And I know a lot of you, especially those from the commission have really sort of already seen most of what I'm going to talk about. So I apologize for that. But a lot of you not being a part of the regular gatherings that we have with the area chiefs may be exposed to this for the very first time. And I do want to take as many of your questions as possible. And I don't mind at all if you want to go off on a different direction and ask me questions. I have all the data here. I've got my mapping software here. So if there's any questions during this time that you want to ask that I'm not covering about a particular type of crime or a particular geography, I'd be happy to do what I can to answer it. And to make sure you leave here was the questions that you wanted answered. I answered. A little background on me. I worked for 17 years as a crime analyst in Massachusetts for the Cambridge Police Department and the Danvers Police Department. I was president of the Massachusetts Association of Crime Analysts and the International Association of Crime Analysts while I was working there. And I did 10 years as a self-employed consultant, trainer, data analyst for hire, basically. That took me around the world, around the country doing a variety of different workshops and working on a variety of contracts. And it was during that period that I got involved with the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. A couple of years ago, I took a full-time job as a professor of criminal justice at Huston University in Bangor, Maine. And that's where I remain, but I still have this contract and a couple of others that I do and I'm very glad that I do it. So it's a very fun project, very interesting data set to analyze and it keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people. I was recommended for this job, I think by Chief Kyle Higney, if I'm not mistaken, Gail would know for sure, but he works for the Adalboro Police Department. And I'd met him at a number of conferences in the past. He's a big supporter of crime analysis and he used to come to our Mass Association conferences. And I think one of the reasons that he recommended me for the job was because he thought it was a project that could use an analyst's eye. An analyst is a little bit different than a researcher. And I think that one of the ways that this project really differs from what would be the typical research project on the impacts of public safety is the depth and breadth of data that we're collecting for the analysis of the casino impact. Generally, previous studies on the impact of casinos, if you were to look at them up in research journals, this is a screenshot from one of them. They'll tend to be based on UCR statistics. Statistics that are reported by each individual agency to the state crime reporting unit, which then get aggregated by the Federal Bureau of Investigations and then get published every fall in a big publication called Crime in the United States. And because it's such a complex process of collecting the summary data from 18,000 different police departments around the country, there isn't a lot of data available in the publication. I mean, it seems like it's a thick publication, but when you get down to it, they're really looking at national figures for seven crimes, murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft, and auto theft. Arson is in there too, but it's not very consistently reported. And these are just summary statistics. All you can tell is how many of each one of those crimes each agency had during the reporting year. So with that type of data, yes, you can ask some broad questions. Between 2010 and 2011, did crime change significantly in this community, for instance? But it doesn't really glitch you into the details of what happened. And we wanted to do it a bit differently for this study. And so, I wanted to be able to provide the types of work that I had been doing as an analyst all along, to really get down into the details of hotspots and patterns and trends. And that requires more than just being able to calculate what the percentage change was in broad crime categories from one period to the next. So we were looking to do a more detailed analysis of changes, not just for crime, and not just for the seven index crimes in particular, but for all crimes, and for also for non-criminal incidents, things like noise complaints, and traffic complaints, and suspicious activity calls, and the other types of calls for service that make up 90% of what a typical police department does. Also, traffic collisions, of course. How did those change after the casinos were built? We might have seen no change at all in overall volume, but maybe changes in the patterns, changes in hotspots after the casinos are built. And we wanted to be able to identify specifically from the data which incidents were casino related that we knew for sure were casino related because the offender was here to use the casino or the victim was, or there was some other type of connection. And in general, to be able to analyze the specific patterns and problems that changed after the casino's introduction. The work began, obviously, in Plainville after Plainridge Park opened in 2015 with six surrounding communities supplying data to the project. It continued in Springfield with 11 surrounding agencies supplying data. And then on to Encore with nine or 10 agencies supplying data, depending on the period. Maldon is participating, but they weren't able to supply data for the last report. Medford and Cambridge, Cambridge definitely seems to be out. Medford, they signaled some initial willingness to participate, but they have not been willing to supply the data. And it's too bad because they're right next door to Encore. And it's kind of a hole in the research not to have their participation. Saugus was not part of the initial report, but joined for the most recent one. And so this area has been a little bit more mutable than the past area. Although, oh, you notice it is highlighted. Boston, I'm collecting data just from Charlestown because the figures for the overall city would overwhelm the data collection. In all cases, what we did was established a direct connection to these agencies' record systems and combined the data together in a common database devolved a lot of translation because there's a lot of different records management vendors at work here among these different agencies. But generally speaking, the Niber standard, if you're familiar with what that is, the National Incident-Based Reporting System, those standards, which all fortunately, all of the agencies that we've been working with, except Boston, subscribed to, have created a certain consistency of coding across all of the agencies. So it wasn't as hard as it might have been in another state where they don't adhere to Niber's so closely as we do in Massachusetts. It would have been a lot harder to do this, but in Massachusetts, it was hard, but it wasn't as hard as it could have been. So a lot of the work involved just putting this together into a common database and creating the original baseline reports. But the idea was to create those baseline reports, established a baseline volume, what's normal? What's the expected amount of robberies, of burglaries, of traffic collisions, of noise complaints in each area during the period the casino opens? So what would be the predicted volume based on past data? Then what actually happened after the casino opened? And if it changed significantly, can we attribute those changes to the presence of the casino or were they caused by something else? It's important to understand that we're collecting incident level data from these agencies. So it's not just how many did you have, it's line by line information about every crime. What date and time did it occur? What location did it occur? What do we know about the people involved? Victims, offenders, what type of property was stolen or damaged, what type of vehicles are involved? All of this gives us a depth of data collection. They really allows us to fully analyze the changes that we see in the surrounding areas. Although I do want to emphasize that we're not collecting any personal identifying information, most of the data that we're collecting would have been accessible under public records law. It's just a level of detail that you don't get when you have simply counts of crime the way the UCR does. So again, established a baseline. Basically the idea was based on the past data, what would we predict for the period in which the casino was built? And this wasn't an easy, the casino opened rather. And this wasn't an easy calculation necessarily because a lot of the areas were having some fairly significant decreases in crime over the previous seven or 10 years. This is the, these are the trends for the encore region for instance. And you can see all types of crime were decreasing fairly quickly from 2003 through 2020 property crime in particular. And so we have to take into account the direction of that trend before we can predict what the figure likely would have been for the post casino period. Give me 10 seconds, I'm gonna cough for a bit. I just swallowed something wrong there. Okay. So I use basically two sets of calculations in the reports depending on whether the crime has been showing a trend in that region or not. So sometimes you'll have a situation like the one on the screen here where over time the crime figures have been bouncing around an average, but they haven't been going up or down in any consistent way during the period. And so to figure out what would we expect for the post casino period, we simply take the average and if you're familiar with a little bit of statistics, one and a half standard deviations usually and use that to calculate a window, a range of figures that we would expect the crime to fall in after the casino opens in the post casino period. But occasionally, that type of calculation doesn't work when the data over time is showing a significant trend. So in this case, those dots are showing a definite decrease over that time. And so this type of predictive window is just gonna tell me where it's been. That's not telling me where it's going. I've got to use a different mode of calculation when we have a crime that is showing a trend. And so I use regression analysis in order to create the predictive window in that case. And so you'll find a couple of different sets of statistics in my reports depending on whether the crime was showing a trend and again, not just crime, but other types of police activity was showing a trend in the past datum or not. But overall, what you'll see in my reports is a lot of data tables in addition to the analysis is a lot of data tables that look like this that indicate what the predictive window is. This is the most important part here. What was the predictive window for the period in which the casino was open? So if the casino hadn't opened, if nothing had changed in the community, we would have expected somewhere between 606 and 779 aggravated assaults. In reality, we had 687 and that's well within that range. But occasionally you'll have a case like this where we would have expected a 442 to 554 thefts from vehicles. And this period we actually had 674, which is higher than the predicted window, higher than the expected range. And these are the ones that I've really got to analyze in more detail to try to identify what the cause is. And specifically if we can tie it to the casino. So there's a couple of things I look for when I'm trying to tie an increase or a trend to a casino. First of all, I want it to be a logical relationship. Is there any reason we would expect this crime to be influenced by the presence of a casino? And that's pretty broad. It's not just about thefts, but if a type of crime depends on just a lot of people in the area, well, that would make sense of an increased when any major facility opens. I look for a spatial relationship. Are the crimes increasing in a way that spatially makes sense? Are they along travel routes going to and from the casino? Are they within a radius of the casino? That type of thing. I look for whether the demographics of the offenders and victims among the new crimes match the demographics of the patrons of the casino. I like to see corroborative increases across multiple agencies. So it's more compelling when the same type of crime is increasing in three or four different police departments than just in one. And I'd like to look for corroborative increases across different types of crime. It's more compelling if identity theft and credit card fraud and confidence games are all increasing and if just one of those crimes is increasing. And of course, if we have any specific evidence from the crime reports that individuals were in the area for casino reasons, that adds to the evidence. And finally, comparison to control areas is nice. So how did this crime change in comparison to areas that didn't have a casino at all? Now that's been a bit of a tough one because we're trying to do these analyses as quickly as possible. And sometimes that control date is not available until up to a year and a half later. But I've been getting Niber statistics from Cliff Goodben at EOPS and when those are finally available and it's the delays and their fault, it's just the agencies take a long time to contribute and have a long time to contribute. But when they finally have that data, it is really useful to compare it because we find things like identity theft. Identity theft increased a lot in the casino areas but it also increased everywhere in Massachusetts. So we were able to help determine that it probably wasn't a casino cause for that particular increase. So generally speaking, based on all of the data we've collected, I found a few things that I would say hold true for all of the casinos. Number one, the casinos themselves have a lot of activity. It makes sense that they do. They draw millions of people and all those people in one place, inevitably, there's gonna be thefts and there's gonna be fights and people are gonna drink too much and there's gonna be a fair number of calls to service and crime the same way there would be at a movie theater or a bar or a hotel or any number of other places that could be built. And so we've seen quite a bit of crime in the casinos and in the surrounding area. I'm not prepared to say right now that it's higher than we would expect or higher than other casinos. That's research that's still ongoing. But if you do include the casino in the statistics, yes, there's no question that crime has increased for these communities because of what happens literally at that particular property. Most of the changes in the surrounding area have been evidenced in traffic changes. Traffic complaints, things like people calling and complaining about parking, blocked driveways, erratic drivers, things like that, and in traffic accidents. There is some evidence of, I'm sorry, I forgot to have this image here. So this is an example around Springfield for the year after the casino was built. You can see that by street segment, the normal volume of activity compared to what happened in the year that after the casino was built and right around MGM, a lot of the street segments are seeing higher crash volumes and it's a little bit less stark but in West Springfield and in Agawam, a couple of key routes and intersections on the way to the casino have seen increases in activity and thus increases in collisions. It's all about volume. It's just, you draw more traffic to an area, you're gonna inevitably have more traffic collisions. There is some evidence of increases in drunk driving in the areas, not only based on arrests by police departments, which can vary depending on police activity, but also in the number of crashes that have alcohol as a factor. And we have reports from adjudications where drunk drivers were asked to give the location of their last drink before they were arrested for drunk driving in which the casinos have come up half a dozen, eight, 10 times over the course of a year. Again, I'm saving any real serious analysis of that for a comprehensive drunk driving report which will be released over the summer. The immediate blocks around MGM have seen some changes and it's important to think about the geography to understand why that hasn't happened so far as much at least in the other two areas but Plain Ridge Park is right off the highway. You can walk to it but nobody functionally is really going to do that on a day-to-day basis. People take the exit, they go right there to the casino, they get right on the highway when they leave. There isn't a residential community or a business community in the immediate area around it that is going to change based on any kind of foot traffic to and from the casino. Encore is kind of halfway in between the other two but even then, the area that it's built in is kind of an industrial area. It didn't have a lot going on before. That might change. Maybe a lot of other businesses will get built along that strip of Broadway in response to the casino but right now it's not an area that most people would have any reason to visit if Encore wasn't there. And so again, you're most likely gonna be sort of wandering in and out of Encore as part of a visit to the overall downtown area. MGM is very different though in that respect. I mean, its doors open right there out onto the streets of Springfield in the middle of an area in which there's I know a fair number of restaurants and other venues of entertainment. There's very easy to access public transportation coming to this area. And so it's much more part of the geography of the area that it's in than the other two casinos. And for that reason, we would expect it to have more of an immediate influence on the surrounding blocks. Now that influence is positive and negative. There's a lot of extra traffic in the area, legitimate traffic. There's people there for legitimate reasons and that tamps down a lot of crime in the immediate area because people are served as sort of natural guardians for each other. But those people are also potential victims of theft of robbery and so forth. And so those two factors, I think they kind of cancel each other out. For the most part, we haven't seen a lot of increases in the area despite the fact that we've got a couple million new people coming to the region. But a couple of things that did happen, for instance, like this CVS directly across the street from the casino. No, I can't say that it increased after the casino was built because it didn't exist until the casino was built. It opened in the fall of 2019. But since it opened, they've reported a decent amount of shoplifting, a couple of robberies. And I don't think, again, I'm not prepared to say that those are being committed by casino patrons or anything, but the store itself probably wouldn't have existed without MGM. And so that type of development in an area in response to the casino also inevitably draws some additional crime and calls for service. There's a gas station right here, a pride station directly across the street from MGM that's opened 24 hours. It was there before the casino and it did see in a fairly significant increase in activity, particularly late at night. Again, shoplifting, disorderly conduct, a couple of auto thefts from the parking lot. And it's likely that the extra traffic to the region is the cause of those increases. So minor stuff, not anywhere near the volume that I would have expected, frankly, but some evidence of some impacts based on the geography. We do, I have seen some theft burglary and fraud patterns that have occurred after each of the casinos opened in Plain Ridge Park. There was a period of three or four months after it opened that we saw an increase in credit card fraud in the surrounding area. In the case of MGM, we saw an increase in purse snatchings in West Springfield and a couple of other communities after the casino. There was this heightening of this pattern of thefts from vehicles at residences. This is a problem that happened before the casino, but it got worse in the six months afterwards. So basically it was people leaving stuff in their cars in their own driveways and having them broken into at nighttime and having those items stolen. That increased after MGM opened for the first six months. But as I say in the slide here, those patterns have been in limited geographies and in short duration. They have not continued generally after the initial few months or if they have, they'll pop up maybe for a two or three month period and then disappear. Right now we're looking at increase in thefts from vehicles in Charleston and in the residential areas of Charleston, but only for a few months and then they sort of go away. So it hasn't been consistent. It hasn't been persistent in the surrounding areas and rarely have we found any specific evidence leaking those increases to the casinos. And finally, in terms of overall crime statistics, if you don't count the casino itself, the effects on the overall crime statistics have been, I would say barely perceptible, meaning if you didn't know something was built there and you were looking at the trend line in crimes in each of these communities, you wouldn't see a bump after the casino is built. Now, those were the general findings that we had up to a few months or a year ago, really, during the 18 months after MGM and the one year after Encore. And then of course COVID came along. And I kind of liken that to, I'm trying to measure the depth of water in a pond. And I measure it on a calm day when the ripples are minimal and I get a pretty good reading. And when I go to measure it a year later to see if anything significant changed in the past year, just as I go to do the measurements, somebody throws a big boulder into the pond right nearby and the splash of water comes over my measuring stick there and shows me a very erratic result. And I have to somehow figure out, because for some reason that's the only measurement I could take if we extend the metaphor. I have to try to figure out what the real volume is here accounting for that splash of water. And COVID is like that, that splash of water. It's a huge societal trend that overwhelms the statistics. It overwhelms any ability to really pick out the influence of a single facility. When you consider that for a one-year period basically, we had schools closed, we had bars closed, we had restaurants closed, most a lot of businesses closed, and if not closed, operating at very limited capacity. People not going to work for the most part, if they could avoid it, right, working from home. These changes in our routine activities as a society cause some very significant changes on crime in most communities. And those changes were good for the most part, crime decreased for the most part across the country around the world during this period because people were at home, so they were natural guardians of their own property. House burglaries went down. You're not out and about in the world, your car's not out and about in the world, there's limited opportunities for those to be victimized by crime. People aren't out away from their home drinking, so they're not getting into any kind of trouble. All of these things come together to cause these fairly significant decreases. And so the casinos, they were closed completely for about four months. They opened up at limited capacity for about a year after that, or not a year, eight months after that, and only recently have returned to full capacity in allowances, I don't think that they've returned to full capacity in reality quite yet. And so trying to figure out what their contribution was to public safety during this period is a challenge, definitely. And it's not one that I've managed to overcome just yet. I don't know what the solution is gonna be. I've collected a lot of ideas for how to crunch the numbers, but I need to actually do another data collection round, basically, and have the latest data in front of me and try a number of different models and see what seems to work. It's possible that nothing is really gonna work and we're just gonna have to ignore that period and move on from there. But even then, I think we're gonna see some fairly permanent changes. Traffic volume definitely still has not returned to previous levels. And so although fatalities, for instance, of per-road-mile-driven have actually increased during this period, the raw number of fatalities and the raw number of crashes have plummeted by like 50% decreases. And so it's really difficult to, again, pull out the impact of one particular facility out of such broad societal trends. So that's an open question and it's gonna remain open, I suppose, for a little bit while longer, but maybe in the six months or so, I'll be able to tell you what conclusion we came to. Next for me in this series of studies is the drunk driving report. That's gonna include mostly periods from before COVID and I'm gonna be trying to assemble all of the evidence to determine exactly what the casino impact on drunk driving was in the three regions. I'm eager to do a report specifically on crime at the casinos. What trends have we seen? How do they compare to other areas? Are our casinos notably high or low compared to say national trends when it comes to crime? And then of course, by the fall, we will have enough data from the post-COVID period. That's a little bit premature to say that, I suppose, but given the announcements that are likely happening right now, I think that we were released in the end period of the pandemic. I certainly hope that's true. And so in a few months, I should have enough data to do a sort of a post-COVID analysis if things hold. And then there's room here for a really big sort of master report on, okay, now that we've got a couple of years worth of data, at least from each of the casinos, what are the broad research findings here? Let's answer some big questions about whether crime increased and how it increased and so forth. So that's what I'm looking at for the near future. And I did not keep an eye on the chat box here, sharing, which I cannot figure out how to do. I know I've done it before. There should be a chat option at the bottom of the screen, Mr. Bruce. Yeah, I don't think I saw any questions come in during the presentation. When you, I'll put my contact information up there, I'll figure this out. When you share your screen, it reconfigures the teleconferencing software window. And I suddenly can't figure out where the option, yeah, Tonya, do you have the ability to take control back away from me? Because I can't suddenly see, I can't see where that option is for me. Sure, let me see if I can. Okay. Nagle that. Here we go. Thank you. And now, yeah, now the screen looks different. I have all those options down at the bottom again. So anyway, I'd be happy to take any questions or comments about my work. I think for many of you, that wasn't anything new. I just want to say thank you again, Christopher, for the work that you've been doing and then thinking about ideas as we go forward which we can talk about at the end of the meeting, but some of the reports sent to you by you over the summer and early fall, particularly what if any COVID shutdown, post COVID impact, I think that's going to be an interesting one. Yeah. And I should emphasize that sort of a proposed schedule. I'm meant to send that to Mark VanderLinden for approval. So we'll see what happens there. No other questions? Well, it was a pleasure to talk to all of you. I'm sorry, I have to get to another appointment, but so I'm going to pop off. But I hope that was useful. And if you ever have any questions or contributions or comments, please email me. I'm always looking for more information and more ideas about how to do these analyses. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. Thanks, Christopher. Talk to you soon. So that would bring us to the fourth item, Joe, the discussion of the Community Mitigation Fund for 2021. OK. Thanks, Eileen. For those of you who don't know me, my name's Joe Delaney. I'm the Chief of the Community Affairs Division. And one of our major responsibilities with me, along with Mary Thoreau and Tanya Perez, is to administer and manage the Community Mitigation Fund, which we've been in the process of since, essentially, since February 1st when we received our applications. Let me just give you a little bit of background on the Community Mitigation Fund before we get into the particular details. So the Community Mitigation Fund was established with the Expanded Gaming Act, with 6.5% of the gaming taxes going into the Community Mitigation Fund each year. Now, according to the statute, this fund is to be used to offset the costs associated with the construction and operation of the gaming facilities. There are a number of uses, specific uses, of the fund that are identified in the statute, one of which is public safety costs, which is what we're going to focus on today. So each year in the fall, we develop our guidelines for the upcoming round of grants. Now, this year, one of our focuses was on public safety training. Now, it's always been eligible under the fund. But this year, it's the first year we really spelled it out in our guidelines that we would really like to see some applications for training costs for the public safety agencies. So in November timeframe, the Commission votes the guidelines. And around December 1st, we open up our request for responses on the Community Mitigation Fund, which are due back to us on February 1st. And then we start our work reviewing and analyzing and making recommendations and bringing them to the Commission to vote. But there's a couple of key considerations in all of these. And the first is that in order to obtain funding, the applicant has to demonstrate the connection to an impact of the casino. And sometimes this is a little bit difficult because there's not always data readily available to demonstrate that impact. So this is one of the things that we often struggle with these applications is finding that nexus to the casino. And also, our funds can only be used to offset the costs associated with that demonstrated impact. So now a lot of times, it's not really possible to put an exact dollar value on some of these things. So obviously, the review team needs to use their judgment in trying to make these evaluations of what is the impact of what is the cost associated and what is the appropriate amount to be putting towards those types of projects. So with that said, for this year, we've got 28 applications totaling a little over $5.5 million in ASP. And now of those, 10 of them were related to public safety. And just a couple of the highlights of these. We did receive two applications that requested training. So we were happy that some of the folks took advantage of that. One was for EMT training for some of the Everett Fire Department folks so that they can better respond to incidences at Encore Boston Harbor. And the other one included some implicit bias training, human trafficking training, and accident reconstruction training. So we were happy to see those. This year was the year of the vehicle. Several of our applications requested vehicles, in some cases, multiple vehicles. Now, this is where the review team really had to use our judgment on some of these. So in some of the recommendations to the commission, we had to look at what is this request really proportional to what the impact was. And in several of these cases, we really determined that it wasn't. And we recommended really only partial awards of some of these really, again, to reflect that proportionality that we were looking at. And then a couple of the sort of ongoing things that we've been funding regularly. We did continue to fund the Handen County Sheriff's Department to offset the lease costs associated with the Western Mass Recovery and Wellness Center. We also continued to fund Handen County DA's office. And then one other one that was of interest, it was out in the Western region, MGM is required to do these look-back studies to try to identify costs associated with impacts of the casino. And in one of these cases, we did fund some additional public safety costs that were identified in that first look-back study. So at this point, the commission has reviewed 20 of the 28 applications that we've received. The remainder will hopefully be reviewed this Thursday at the commission meeting. And once that's done and assuming we get through those and they're voted, that will sort of complete our work on the evaluation and approval of the grant applications. And then, of course, we need to get out all the various grant documents and other things to the communities to get the money actually flowing out to the communities. So with that, it's a fairly high-level view of what we've been doing. I'd be happy to answer any questions that anyone have regarding the community mitigation fund. OK, non-appearing. Move on to item five. Thanks, Joe and Mary I know the work that you guys put into doing all the community mitigation fund applications in the review process. In terms of the last item on the agenda, next steps from where we go from here into it's been a while since the subcommittee met, we'd like to get in a more regular cadence. My suggestion would be that we schedule something for the fall as the next meeting, in addition to what Christopher Bruce talked about as possible reports that he could present on. We also, we don't know if they're going to be online gaming if we're going to have sports betting that might be authorized. The status of travel casinos, any of those might impact something that would warrant a deeper discussion by the subcommittee. And then I know Commissioner Cameron is still on the line. We are also part of several groups that are going to be co-hosting a couple conferences that relate to gaming in the fall. And if she could indulge us maybe with describing a little bit of what those are, those may also generate topics worthy of discussion deeper died by this subcommittee. So if I can hand it over to Commissioner Cameron to give an overview to this group of what the topics are going to be. Thank you, Commissioner O'Brien. So we are the host agency. They move these conferences around the world. They've been really invaluable to regulators to really come up with best practices, not only from other regulators in the United States, but from around the world. So many of us at the gaming commission have had an opportunity to attend and really learn about how other regulators go about their business. And with investigations in particular, Singapore has a very strong model that I got to learn a lot from. But for this particular conference, it is the International Association of Gaming Regulators, as well as the International Masters of Gaming Law, more of the advisors with the second group but a regulatory presence as well. I'm trying to thank Commissioner O'Brien. Many of the topics is always a couple of blocks on responsible gaming. And of course, our team will have a block there as well. Sports betting is something we know will be coming to Massachusetts, but we just don't know when we think the signal is out there that it will happen. We don't know if that'll be this year or in years after this. We just don't know. But there are several blocks on sports betting, which will be of interest to not only us as regulators but to our enforcement team as well. And I will make sure the representatives from each region will have an opportunity to know when those are and attend if possible to really get into some of the enforcement pieces. Because that is really important to us. How do we tamp down the illegal market with sports betting? And many of us who spent many, many years in policing know that that is still alive and well. So that'll be a piece that will be of interest to maybe this committee as well. Other than sports betting, I'm trying to think if there are any other. Oh, I think of note also will be presentations on tribal casinos because we will have a joint responsibility if and when the tribe builds a casino in Regency, which is Southeastern Mass. So I know that's another piece. And in particular, we have joint responsibilities around investigations. So we'll really have to take a look at that. That may be something the general's office may be interested in. And I will. Those schedules are still being formulated because the challenge is who can come in from what countries? What are the travel restrictions? So there was so much interest around the world in coming to Boston. It is one of those cities that folks love to come to for conferences. But this year is unique. Last year was canceled. This year still remains unknown. So once those schedules get finalized, which should be over the summer, early summer, I hope, then we can get them out to all these members, all of you, members of the subcommittee to see if there's anything you may be of interest for. And you can contact Commissioner O'Brien myself. And we'll kind of figure out a way for you to have come in for that block of instruction, whatever it takes to really make sure we're kind of sharing the wealth when it comes to the knowledge. So that's about all I can say at this point. Again, it's still being formulated, but we will get back to you. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for your interest in participating in this. It's very much appreciated. I know we're so concerned about keeping the casinos safe. And we do really pay attention to this issue. So thanks. Michelle O'Brien. Thank you, Commissioner Cameron. Those were my thoughts on next steps in terms of next meetings and agenda items. And certainly we can keep members of this subcommittee appraise in terms of the conferences that are coming up or anything else from our end. And please feel free to let us know, again, that there's topics that you want to talk about or the timing of topics that you would want to talk about with this group. But before we move to close, I just want to see if anyone else has anything they wanted to bring up today that isn't been covered by what we've talked about so far. Seeing none, I guess we just need a motion to officially adjourn the meeting. I want to thank everyone for coming. I know it's been a while. Again, I hope to get back on more of a normal cadence and topics in a timely fashion. So hopefully we can do that after everyone enjoys a summer of hopefully easing restrictions. So with that, if anyone has a motion, I'm happy to take it. So moved. Is there a second? Second. Thank you. Just doing a roll call on that. Angela Davis? I in favor. Thank you. And DA Glooney? Here. I'm sorry. What's the roll call about, Commissioner? Moving to adjourn. I vote in favor. Thank you. And Chief Dunn? I vote in favor. Thank you. And I vote in favor. That's for nothing to adjourn. So thank you to everyone for attending. Thank you to Joe and Mary and Tanya for the work today. And I hope everyone is safe and happy more of their weekend in summer. Thanks so much. I am ready. Thank you. See you soon. Bye.