 Have I got everyone? Yeah. Good to go, Kathy. We're good to go. Thank you so much. Good morning. This is a convening of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. We are holding this meeting virtually, so I will do our roll call. Good morning, Commissioner O'Brien. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning, Commissioner Hill. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning, Commissioner Skinner. Good morning. Good morning, Commissioner Maynard. Good morning. We'll get started. Today is December 7th, public meeting number 491. We're turning right to the Sports Wadring Division and some presentations. Director Bayon and Manager Bushman, good morning. Good morning, Madam Chair, commissioners. I will turn this over to Crystal and let her get this started. Thank you. Thanks, Bruce. Today we have the quarter, the remaining quarter three reports from our Sports Wadring operators. We'll pick it off with that MGM, and I do believe I saw Josh Wiseman and Sarah Brennan both on the call. Hi, Sarah. Hi. Good morning. Happy to be here with you all. Thank you very much to the commission for having us. Good to see you all again. I have Josh Wiseman, who's the director of licensing with me, as well as Richard Taylor, who's our director of responsible gambling, and Anna Alizar, who is our director of DE&I, who'll be presenting on the relevant slides. Although Rich Taylor told me, he just pinged me that his computer is rebooting, so he'll be joining us shortly, but won't be presenting until later slides. I'm going to kick off. Will you be sharing the deck, or should I just read off mine? I can share. Sure. Yeah, we do have it in our packet, but I think it would be great if someone could share it. Sarah, we have one moment to hold on, but I can share it. Great. Crystal will take care of that for you. Sorry, Crystal. Thanks, Crystal. I have some experience in this, Sarah. I can usually share my deck very successfully with no audience, but I want to have an audience. I understand. Let me just pull it. I don't want to pull it. There's a multi-faceted weapon. Do it all. Sorry, I had to actually dig into my files, and I have three screens, so I want to make sure to share the right one. Just going to have to let me know when to click the mouse. Thanks, Crystal. It was sent in a PowerPoint, so I'm probably just going to have to scroll, but I think you guys should be able to see this. Yeah, I think it's a pedia. Sorry, that's what I meant. One second. Sorry, I'm moving everything around now. Okay, it's all frozen whatsoever, but just fine. And are you able to see the cover screen? Perfect. Yes, yep. Okay, all right, so we should be good now. Okay, so I'll be presenting the first couple of slides here. Our first slide is on revenue for Q3. This past quarter, but MGM saw $8.4 million in revenue. $1.6 paid in taxes. Obviously, revenue and taxes are correlated to the sports calendar, so we anticipated this decline quarter over quarter, this coming quarter with the sports calendar changing and having NFL. We expect the numbers to go back up slightly. Our next slide is human resources. Anna is going to present on resource diversity. There I am. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me. So, yeah, I want to just, you can see obviously our numbers here, but kind of highlight compared to our Q1 and Q2 report. We have had a 7% increase in minority representation in the individual contributor roles. We've also had a 2% increase in women and non-binary representation in individual contributor roles and a 4% increase in women in executive leadership roles. So those are kind of the highlights that you're looking at there. And if we want to move on to the vendor utility unless there's any questions on that. Commissioner's questions? Common? I'll set, Anna. Thank you. Okay, our next slide is our global vendor utility. And you'll see that our total vendor spend across the company went down about $44 million from Q3 from $155 to roughly $110. This has mostly to do with one-time spend during the previous quarter when we launched. It's a natural decline. Our percentage, however, of diverse vendors went up to 2.8 in Q3. You'll see under diversity type similarly spend went down. But our percentages went up for women business enterprise and stayed relatively the same for minority and veteran. Again, on the scale, everything went down just a little bit. We will continue to look for opportunities to spend with diverse businesses as we continue operations in Massachusetts. We can go to the next slide, local vendor utility. Again, went down. We had a significant decline because of a single vendor. That was a one-time payment at the beginning of the year for $1.35 million, which attributed most of the decline last quarter. And again, our spend correlates from the decline correlates with the one-time vendor spends in Q2 that we're not seeing again in Q3. I'm going to hand it over to Josh, who actually, I'm sorry, is Rich Taylor on? Did you make it, Rich, to talk about ourselves with gaming? Oh, here you are. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Some audio difficulties this morning. Good morning, commission. Good morning, chair. Hi, Rich. All right. Next slide, please. So in Q3, we did not have an event of underage access or use. So I'm happy to report that. It's always nice when there's a zero next to this type of number. We continue to be vigilant and monitor our systems to ensure they're working properly. And we'll continue to alert the commission should an event occur in the future. But again, happy to report in Q3. We had zero digital underage use events occur. Madam chair. Sure. Commissioner Hill. Do we hold our questions to the end, or should we talk about this issue now? You know what? Commissioner Hill, first off, I'm sorry, you're still not feeling well, and I appreciate your participating today. I think it makes sense to go ahead and ask your question now. And then with respect to the other slides, we can go backwards. But let's go ahead and ask this one now, Commissioner Hill. And then I want to make sure you get your tea. Thank you, madam chair. So if you didn't hear our last week's meeting with our other operators, the underage use issue has come before our board that there seems to be or could be underage people using your platform by using somebody else's account. Do you have technology set up where you can watch and see if people are using a computer? I'm so sorry. It's okay. In other areas, like do red flags go up? If an IT address is usually used at one address, but all of a sudden it's being used somewhere else, things like that. Commissioner, I'm reluctant to go into specific details in a public setting regarding how we monitor these things. And so what I can say is we take this matter very seriously. And in the course of any of our interactions with customers or as we're reviewing account histories and those types of items, in the back of our mind is the potential of that kind of occurrence. Again, I wouldn't want to provide key details into how we're looking at these things, given that that information could help others defeat those systems. So at this time, like that's really all I'm willing to share in a public forum. I would be happy to go to more detail and something that isn't publicly strained. Madam Chair, I would ask, should there be an opportunity for an executive session that we do that, because I would like to know. So that would be in a future meeting because we'd have to I understand. But I do think there would be an opportunity for us to get briefings on this. Commissioner O'Brien, I see you're turning off your mic. I bet you're in agreement that for a future, we could do something like that, right? Yeah. And that's what I was I think this came up. I think Commissioner Maynard, Commissioner Hill brought this up the last time we got some quarterlies in terms of one of the things I would ask is sort of the phraseology in these that says, that sort of implies an absolute digital underage use is that it be acknowledged that it's sort of identified as opposed. It's not like on a casino floor, right? When you see the person, you can physically see them on the floor. You know whether or not someone's gone in. So there's a process to determining whether the user was underage. And so I would like to see just more of the sports wagering team to this caption in these quarterlies be a little more accurate in terms of these are the ones they were able to identify. And I absolutely hear them saying they didn't they're not going to want to discuss obviously how they the metrics they would use to suss out whether it's a beard or someone passing off their information. I do think it probably calls for us having a meeting where we can have them come in in an executive session, almost like we would about security plans and talk to us about what they're each doing to see if there's anything else we as a commission can do in this area. Yeah. So we can we can look at that and Rich, we appreciate your desire to keep that out of the public. But in this case, I do think there is a clear executive session avenue for us to learn more. And again, your quarterly report just happens to be timely. Commissioner Hill and I were in a meeting where this was raised. And then we've learned a little bit more each time. So this is our fifth report. So I think that we'll make a note for a future not too far in the future meeting to learn more about the strategies, correct? Commissioner Hill, will that be good? Thank you, Madam Chair. And yes, it would be. Okay. Excellent. Thanks, Rich. Thank you. Moving on to just responsible gaming in a broader sense, sharing the numbers regarding timeouts and voluntary self exclusion. What I can tell you is it's really hard to make an assessment with a limited amount of data. Typically, I like to see at least a full year before I can make a determination on if you are outside of the average when it comes to states and these types of tools and limits. But what I can tell you is the numbers in front of you are very similar to other states that are of similar size in terms of the numbers. Typically in the first year, you'll see a lot of activity initially at launch, which means that there will be a lot of activity with tools and tool usage relative to broader population. And then those numbers will start to taper out. And so I don't think we're at the taper yet. Obviously, as you can see there, we went from 234 in Q2 to 271 in Q3. So we'll continue to monitor and see how these numbers move. As just a general kind of commitment to responsible gambling, we are promoting these tools actively with our customers. And so as we engage and talk to customers via chat or email regarding matters that may or may not relate to responsible gambling, we're looking for opportunities to mention our tools, to mention our GameSense information, our GameSense page, and really just make sure that our customers are informed about where those are located within the platform and encourage them to use those tools. And I know that the tools was a question that came up with another operator in a previous session. And I can say that our numbers are very similar to their numbers. And I think we're all facing the same challenge of how do we make these tools more appealing so that customers want to engage with them? And that will be a big topic, I think of 2024 and beyond, is looking at engaging with our customers to make sure that they understand that the tools are for everyone and that we want customers to use the tools. And so more to follow on that in next, not next commission's meeting, but in the future about how we intend to try to get these tools in front of more customers and to encourage them to use them. Hello, Chair. Yes. So it was recently brought to our attention that there is now technology where somebody could put a program on their computer that would disallow any gaming advertisement or any betting advertisement to be put on their computer. Have you ever thought about working with your company to be able to maybe offer such a program to your customers? Commissioner, would you be willing to share that company with me and the name of the company? And I'd be happy to look into that. I believe, and I'm doing this by memory, one jurisdiction, just offer it up. And before you end, I will see if I can get that for you. I'd appreciate that. We'll take a look and see the functionality and if that's something that we'd be able to use at Betemgy. I think, Commissioner Hill, you're talking about Ohio, and it was a U.K.-based company, Gamben, G-A-N-B-A-N, is the genesis of the program. We haven't talked about that in the public board, so it must be that you're having individual conversations. I know it came up. We just got an alert, actually. Ohio launched it just recently. Yeah. And I know that in the working group with Director Vandalin and Commissioner Moore, Maynard and I were the beneficiaries of hearing a little bit more detailed, if you haven't had that conversation with Mark. So that's the company in Ohio, but I'm not sure if I heard it in exactly the same way as Commissioner Hill. I saw it more in terms of addressing the minor issue. Commissioner Maynard, and I'm not sure if you want to weigh in at all on this. The lottery actually released it. It was done in partnership with the lottery and Ohio. Yeah. Listen, I think we have to have a broader conversation about it, but I think Commissioner Hill, asking the operators if they're interested in offering something like that up is something I'm interested in hearing, because right now the state solution, and I don't want to get too far off this because I think it's probably got to be noticed for a meeting, but the state solution may be a little different than if the company's offered something up themselves. So interesting topic, Commissioner Hill. Yeah. I thank you for raising it, and I agree with Commissioner Maynard and Commissioner Bryan. So, Rich, we'll follow up, but we probably need to even tease it out a little bit more among ourselves here. So thank you. I appreciate that, and in the meantime, I think we'll reach out independently to OCCC and just kind of ask them more about the program there in Ohio and get some background on it. Yeah, they're great jurisdiction and good colleagues. So thank you, Rich. Do you, any other questions before we allow Rich to continue? Okay, Rich. All right, one more slide. So apologies for the small text here. I'll use a bigger font next time, but Q3, we attended the National Council on Problem Gambling's National Conference, very proud to share that we were nominees for the NCPG's Corporate Social Responsibility Award. We did not win the award being completely candid and transparent, and it's something that we hope to correct in future award ceremonies. But just to be nominated amongst our peers for our work in this area really helps, I think, validate our efforts and gives us the encouragement to continue to find new ways to innovate in the responsible gambling space. And speaking of that innovation, we did announce a partnership with Kindbridge Behavioral Health. I'm not sure if you're aware of that organization, but we are piloting a warm handoff process in Colorado, where any of our customers who are going on a long-term state-based self-exclusion or a bed MGM platform long-term timeout is receiving a link directly to trained and licensed mental health therapists who are specialists in problem gambling and gambling addiction. And so our hope is that this process, this pilot program, will provide some learnings in how we can better refer our customers who have acknowledged that they have a problem to these mental health providers and see if this is a way to help us get them into treatment as efficiently and as effectively as possible. As we're all aware, one of the biggest challenges of any addiction, especially gambling addiction, is for those who are suffering to get into treatment or get into some type of care plan. And so we're hoping that this experiment, this pilot, will show us some learnings that can help us do that better. So it's still very early. We're a month and a half into the program. We have had some clicks. I'm not at liberty to share numbers because we haven't briefed that regulator in a thorough way yet. But what I am able to tell you is that there are some promising signs that what we are doing is having a meaningful effect on those who are clicking the links and exploring the kind bridge suite of solutions. So stay tuned more to come on that. Our plan was to pilot it for at least a year and see how it goes and then make a decision on a wider implementation. But we're very proud of the work we've done thus far. In addition to behavioral health and NCPG, we also partnered with Epic Risk Management throughout August and September. Epic Risk Management provides lived experience education sessions. These are all individuals who are in recovery themselves, who have dealt with gambling addiction or dealing with gambling addiction. And so it provides a valuable insight to our employees to learn more about the human aspect of gambling addiction and the toll it can take. These sessions have been incredibly valuable to our company. And more importantly to our employees, we're able to see this at the most important perspective that I think we can offer it. We'll continue to work with them as these trainings have really helped our teams be more empathetic and relate to customers who may be experiencing these types of issues. And so I can't say enough good things about these programs that we've worked on with them. And I'm looking forward to the work ahead as we continue to educate and inform our employees to better serve our customers. Questions? Sorry, Chair. One thing, and it's not on the slide and I'm my apologies, but we also made an announcement with nine NFL stadiums to display game sense throughout the stadiums. Very excited and happy about this partnership. It was something that, you know, it was easy to sign off on and we're looking at new ways to put game sense front and center in the public eye. And I'm really optimistic about Q1, Q2 as we will be announcing some other fun items and displaying some new ways of having game sense out there in the public. I'm glad that you added that. And to the extent you can share with us anything in terms of photos that show that NFL initiative that would be great, Rich, at some point. Very exciting. I will send some pictures from out in the wild after this meeting. Great. We like pictures. Thank you, Rich. Commissioners, questions for Rich? For Rich, I'm really pleased to see the follow up with Epic and with Kindbridge. I know that you and I were at a panel together and much of that was underway and it's great to see Colorado taking that initiative. We'll stay tuned for some of the outcomes. Very exciting initiative. I appreciate that and I appreciate everyone's time and we look forward to continuing to work together on an unresponsible game one. Excellent. Thank you so much. Do we turn to the next one? There. Good morning, Transmission Fairness, to you all again. So you may recall that during our last quarterly presentation in August that MGM had not yet had conversations with the Massachusetts Lottery. I am pleased to report that we now have and we're in meaningful conversation with them of a future partnership. The specifics of that have not been solidified yet, but the conversations are continuing and I'm looking forward to reporting back next quarter with hopefully with some more firmed up plans. Happy to answer any questions you may have. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, good news. Thank you, Commissioner Mange. I'll head back to Anna. Yeah, back to Anna for community outreach. Yes. Yes. So if we could go to the next slide, please. Great. I just wanted to highlight. So we have seven ERGs. I consider our community internal as well as external. And so some of our efforts that we have been doing for internal community building through our ERGs. So ERG led is we've had some mental health activations through a partnership with the defensive line. And that comes to us through our black employee network. And those activations have included everything from panels to suicide prevention classes and guest speakers on mental health for Black History Month and I believe Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Our LatinX Alliance also helped us in creating a new employee benefit that is called Goal Sutter, which is an app that was created to teach historically disadvantaged people to secure their financial freedom. It's a Black woman-owned business. If you have not heard of Tanya Van Court, definitely check her out. She is a very cool woman with a lot of accolades leading up to the creation of Goal Sutter. So we have rolled that app out, like I said, through the LatinX Alliance as an employee benefit. So they receive that for free. They don't have to pay the fee that the external people would need to pay for that. And then I guess lastly, our Pride ERG has been working feverishly over the past year to do an overhaul as we are going into 2024 and we had the opportunity to update our employee benefits. We have worked very hard to make those benefits very inclusive. So for the LGBTQIA community, as well as all of our employees, and I'm very proud of the work that we have done there. So those are just a few of the things that we are working on internally with the help of our ERG communities. If we want to go to the next slide, I can speak to some of our external things that we've been doing with our people. So our community outreach. As you can see, we have quite a few engagements. Everything from Latinx Heritage Month, which sponsored a school supply drive to working actually with the defensive line again for a golf tournament fundraiser. And this is, I believe, the third year. We've done it every year since I've been at the MGM where we've done adopt a family program and adopted a number of families and done gift drives for them, as well as grocery store gift certificates and things of that nature. And I would just say that also we have had a few external recruitment efforts that we've done. Over the past year, we've worked with women in tribal gaming and went to Phoenix for that. This is also the third year, I believe, that we have worked with ACES. That's American Indians in Sciences and Engineering Society. They have, that's one of the, I believe it actually is the largest national conference. And for people that are interested in STEM. And then we've also threw our bet on vets ERG. We did a career fair this past year at UNLV with the help of the Veterans Center there. So those are just a few of the things that we have done externally for our outreach. And if we can go to the next slide. So back to our, kind of, some of our internal efforts for growing more equitable processes. We have established, I'm proud to say, yay, after so many, I guess a couple of years, one to two years of trying to get this together. We've rolled out this past year our first empower mentorship program. And that was open to all ERG members at the MGM. So anybody who is a member of our employee resource groups was eligible to join. And we had a little over 30 of our ERG members that went through this program. And 24 of those identified as female, one identified as gender fluid. So a pretty large percentage. And then we had a little over 20 mentors. So a couple of us had two mentees. But that was very successful. We got a lot of very positive feedback. And so we are looking forward to, you know, improving in some of the areas that we felt that we could do better. But overall, we got really good feedback. So looking forward to our second cohort there. And if we want to go to the next slide. So back to our kind of more external facing program. So last year, 2022 into 2023, we partnered with the Tom Joyner Foundation. And we did a series of events virtually and in person at HBCUs across the United States. I believe we had about eight engagements total. And then, and so in that partnership, we were able to offer HBCU students an opportunity to learn from the MGM executives and our recruiters about different career opportunities available post graduation and how to best navigate the recruitment process when they were finished with school and looking for a job. And so because of that partnership, we actually utilized some of the interest in the students that we engaged with to launch again, proud moment for me, our first internship program. Again, and this is something that we've kind of had in the works for a year or so. And so we brought on seven students that we engaged with at the different HBCUs through the Tom Joyner Foundation and had about a three month internship program this past summer. Again, we received really positive feedback. And we met after the fact and we're actually getting together right now talking about how we can improve and what year two of our internship program is going to look like. I believe we're discussing actually working with all of our ERGs, this coming internship cycle to reach out. So we'll have a bit broader reach in the next year in the 2024 internship program. But yeah, so really excited about all of our people activities that we are doing internally and externally at Bet MGM. And I believe that I'm wrapping things up. So that should be the last slide. And I'm sure that there are probably questions. So I will mute and let everybody ask those right now. Thank you. Commissioners, before we go on, I did want to comment on Anna's slides substantively. And I'm sure you have questions. But I did, I meant, and I apologize for this to start our our day with our thoughts with University of Nevada Las Vegas. I'm sure that many of you have been in touch with our colleagues there. And I just know that on behalf of the Commission, we are extending our thoughts and our prayers for that community. So thank you for the reminder, Anna. And I'm embarrassed that I didn't leave with that earlier. So thank you. Questions for Anna and the rest of the team. So, Anna, I just I want to make sure that we pause and reflect on what I thought was a good trajectory in terms of your increases with respect to minority and women hires. You know, you're not going to jump by 10% points overnight. But you did jump substantially. And I think I'm seeing a lot of intentionality in your last few slides around making sure that you're reaching out to the communities broadly. And, you know, we can't take credit for all of our licensees movement in this area. But I'm going to take a little bit of credit to the extent that we speak about DEI regularly. You know, I think it's very healthy for your organization. It's a priority for this commission. You've heard it over and over. And, you know, it's just it's great progress. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. I love working with regulators that DEI is a priority. Obviously, it's important. And to bet MGM, which I'm proud to say, you know, I think that we are a people first organization. It to me, it makes sense that we would be doing those things. But yes, it is a long term, you know, growth. But, you know, you showed some good numbers, I thought today, you know, on the women. So thank you. I know that we love to see the growth in the executive positions. But again, and I'm at least practical in terms of that, needing to maybe take a little bit more nurturing in time. And I also love their program. I loved it when you presented it in your application. I think it's a great thing to replicate. So thank you. Commissioner, is any other questions? Commissioner Maynard? Just wanted to congratulate and on the internship program. Commissioner O'Brien and I are leading an effort here. And we know how difficult it can be to make these decisions. So congratulations and good work on your pride program. And as the chair said, also with the with the increases. So thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited for our people. Anything else, commissioners? Thank you, Sarah, for leading us off. And Josh and Anna and Rich, we appreciate all of your participation. Have a great day. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much. Rich appeared right at the end. There we go. Quick glimpse. So next we have better, I believe, Robert Warren and I think Ashwin is on a little. Yep, I'm here. There you are. Scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Okay, so I've been asked to carry yours as well. Please. Good morning. Good morning, ma'am. Thank you all. My name is Robert. I'm the compliance lead here at Better. Thank you guys for the opportunity to present in front of the commission today. We hope you're doing well. Good to see everyone. Good to see Bruce and Crystal. Today presenting will be myself, Ashwin Krishnan, our head of legal and business affairs, and also our head of people, Lisa La Cassia. Good morning, everybody. Thank you again for making the time and we're honored to be here and present our quarterly results and goals and initiatives to you. So starting off with revenue, you'll see our months of July, August and September. The only thing I wanted to note here is just the uptake in September, largely due to the start of the NFL season. So something we expect to continue throughout Q4 when we do our next report. Hi, everyone. Nice to meet you all. Yeah. So for our workforce diversity, we were able to add, I believe it was 11 new team members in Q3 of 2023. And out of those 11 team members, seven of them actually ended up being minority. Unfortunately, we didn't add any women or veteran to our head count. But one of those new team members were a manager supervisor level. And he was also part of that minority group. So we were able to increase our efforts there. We actually saw a 54.5% increase of minority hiring from in Q3. In addition to that, we have been making efforts to at least have a more diverse pipeline of candidates while recruiting. So including women, minorities, veterans, and in efforts to do that, myself and some others have been attending different types of events here in Miami, which is local to us. We have a women in Miami tech group, which I'm a part of. I do try to do the job of attending any events that they have and pushing our jobs there. And at the current moment, we're evaluating platforms where we can post our roles and attract some more veteran talent, because that is a little bit more sparse, hopefully looking to implement that in Q4 of 2023. All right. Excuse me. A supplier and vendor overview. We just wanted to call out a few things here. We did have an increase in 2.1% in terms of small businesses identifying as far as our business partners that identify as small businesses. And we had an overall increase a year to date for vendor and supplier spend as well. You can go to the next slide. Thank you. Our supplier vendor overview for ownership diversity. And again, we do have done in Bradstreet risk analytics now that we're using, but we still do allow our vendors to fill out a survey and self-identify. As you can see from our last quarter, we had an increase in women-owned business spend. And that went from 3.89 last quarter to 15.29% this quarter. And there was an overall increase in women-owned and minority spend. All right. And affiliation diversity, of course, that went up as well. Some call outs here. Native American went from 2.14% to 14%. So it was about a 12.51% increase. We did have a decrease in Asian-Pacific American spend. But we did have an increase in Alaska Native Corporation in Indian tribes and African American spend. And this, we send in a bi-monthly vendor disbursement form as a part of our reporting requirement. This isn't synced with that, but we kind of just wanted to call it out here and you will see some Q4 numbers. Q4 is only inclusive of October. But we did want to kind of give up to date as to when we submitted the form to you guys. So that's why Q4 looks so low. And this is mass specific. All right. Into the compliance section. This quarter, we didn't- Robert, could I just pause on that one, please? That is mass specific. Would you happen to know the types of services or products that you're purchasing in Massachusetts? Just wondering. I can follow up with you and get you a specific update on our mass specific vendors. Right. And if you could find out too, if they're certified. If you have access to all the certified, as I'm assuming you do, Robert. Yes, ma'am. As you're saying, okay, excellent. Thank you so much. All right. So for minus and under age access, there was zero this quarter. We do acknowledge the note prior from the commissioner and would also like to point out that, you know, we do take very seriously compliance fraud and risk. As you can recall, last quarter, we were able to detect account takeover and under age access from an individual because of his hand. It didn't match the individual that he submitted with the EDD process. So we do have some investigative processes that we would rather not talk about, but we would be more willing to talk about in the executive session for sure. Commissioner Hill, did you want to comment? Are you all set? I'm all set. Thanks. Okay. Responsible gaming. These are some of the requested information from the responsible gaming side. You know, I do want to call out here that, you know, with the active database of about four quarters, one through three of about 4,466. I want to point out here that 40% of our user base are active in using the limits that we have available. You know, we're very aggressive on the limiting front. We impose default limits on users that are 21 years of age through 25. And what we're seeing is a majority of them don't even notice, so they don't even bother to try to remove the limit. They just log on and they start playing and they play. If they end up playing to the limit, then they wait and then they continue to play. So I think that that's a pretty good call out seeing that 40% of the active user base for the first three quarters are engaged in some sort of limited program. So it's 44% are using and remind me, Robert, and I do remember better was innovative in the space. You said that it could be overridden, but it is a default. Yes, ma'am. It's a default. So if they chose to, they could go in and request to have the limit moved, but you also gave us the permit. We were a little more aggressive and it's being studied by the commission and by us as well. But instead of the regulatory next day removal, we don't allow the removal for the limit for the next 30 days. So they have to wait 30 days to remove the limit from the time they requested. And this was granted via waiver. And forgive me if I don't see that in the statistic. Do you have any who waited it out 30 days and then asked for the restriction to be lifted? Yeah, right now, I mean, again, we're 40% of our active user base with a limit on some. I mean, I don't see a significant decrease. The balance, the delta is they do come back and ask for it to be lifted. Okay. Is that right? So they're asking to be, but you're getting 44% to keep that tool in place. Correct. Exactly. Which is, and you know, from our other conversations, that's a very different statistic than what we saw. Okay. Commissioners questions for Robert on that? No, not a question, just really interesting information and curious to see how it rolls out because we, but I'm sure if you recall, there is a disconnect between the daily fantasy sports on this and the sports wagering. Most operators do only the 24 hours. But in the DFS, it is 30 days and better is doing 30 days. So to me, that's something I would really like to see, you know, the impact on RG. Yeah, you may remember the regulation for DFS. The regulation for DFS is what better is doing as well. But better is in the sports wagering context where they all ask for just the 24 hour waiting period or something. So I think a conversation we'll have to circle back to and whether we want our reg to be marrying 30 days that they're doing in the DFS. Well, it's not only the 30 days, it's a default, right? Correct. And the issue of default, right? Yeah, which, you know, you were and you were a head on. And I think that that's very, very interesting. Yeah. Okay. And, and yet to Mark Bandolin's point, you know, we want to make sure that the patrons feel some control and they're informed. But in this case, 44% are sticking with it. So interesting. Thank you, Robert. My pleasure. Being here really quick, I wanted to let the commission know as well that as of this month, long and I will be working on pulling together the reports cumulatively. So you guys will be able to have some insights on that as well. And I'm sure they plan to bring that to you. Just want to like. Crystal, I just missed one word. My apologies that they'll be bringing the They'll be pulling all of the data from all of the operators to provide a cumulative report. So I'm sure they plan to bring that to you. But we, they do all operators report that monthly and they'll be putting that together this month. Right. And so the only difference will be not only should we get the input on how much they're accessed, but also the differences in the tool themselves. And this is a distinctly different approach. So if the others are pretty much, I think they're more similar, right, Crystal? Many are very similar. Yeah, they're actually all pretty similar by red. And there are those some have a at least like this one distinction or two. Yeah, you and I will make sure we understand that too. Thank you so much. I will put all of that knowledge based on long. So great project along. Thank you. You're welcome. All right. Any other questions for Robert on that? All right. Continue responsible gaming. Yes, this is a continuation showing some of the timeouts and some of the percentages of timeouts, the new timeouts, ongoing timeouts, and then total individuals in timeouts. So you can see the timeout duration and the timeout events for the quarter. And we better didn't have anyone come to us specifically to enroll in this quarter. So we have to put zero for that. Finally, turning to community impact. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to bring boxing bullies to Massachusetts yet. But as Ben MGM highlighted, we have been able to do things in other jurisdictions, particularly our home jurisdiction here in Miami and where Jake is based in Puerto Rico. And we're happy to share that with you as well. But our goal is to bring boxing bullies as we stated in our application in last quarter to Massachusetts. Hopefully we'll be able to do that early in 2024. We have been in conversations with Boys and Girls Clubs and other youth programming organizations there where we can make that impact separately, knowing that Jake's availability can be tough around his fights. We do want to launch, as we indicated earlier, the be better subrand in 2024, which will highlight charitable impacts and other community impacts that better is doing throughout the country, but specifically want to focus on Massachusetts for this context as well. Next slide, please. And then finally, the Massachusetts State Lottery. As you recall, we were one of the folks that were very proactive and reached out to them. We still have been in ongoing conversations with them and they're actually waiting on their feedback. We've had a very healthy dialogue proposed a few different ideas. I think you saw the Red Sox video last time and are just waiting on them really to tell us which direction they want to go. But we're very excited about that, very excited to use our talent network and our social reach to really help the Massachusetts State Lottery and get word out. So very excited about that and excited to kind of be a leader in that area. Any questions or comments on that, missionaries? Well, we prioritize that and thank you for the initiative, National. I think that's it. So happy to take any questions on any part of the presentation. Commissioners, then we can... Thanks, Crystal. Commissioners, for better questions, comments. Commissioner Skinner, you all set? Okay. Commissioner Hill, save your voice. Commissioner Ryan, all set? All right. Commissioner Maynard, anything? Thank you very, very much. We appreciate your time this morning. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa, Ashwin, and Alfred. Thank you. And thank you. Next, we have Fanatics. Michael, Mike Levine is on. I see him. Okay. I'm going to share their report. Thank you, Crystal. Got lots of cracks after. I got to call Sarah and make her go out. All right. Hold on. We're appreciative. Whoever manages it, we're very... Thank you. Good morning. Okay. Thank you, Seth. There you go. Yep, there we are. Good morning, Madam Chair, Commissioners, Brian Hill, Skinner, Maynard, and MBC staff. My name is Mike Levine. I'm Senior Regulatory Counsel for Fanatics, Petting, and Gaming. It's an honor to be before you again today to present our Q3 2023 results as they relate to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. With me today are my colleagues, Steph Baldhouse. She is our Director of Community Resources. And Anthony D'Angelo, who is our Head of Responsible Gamble. I will quickly touch on our revenue for Q3. Sports wagering revenue in the Commonwealth was $1.623 million. And our sports wagering taxes remitted to the Commonwealth was $319,036.40. These numbers reflect those previously submitted to the MGC and detailed in the revenue reports available on the MGC website. I am now going to pass it off to Steph to discuss our HR metrics. Thanks, Mike. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Good to see you again. So, sure. Yeah. So, on the slide here are our FBG or Betting and Gaming metrics for last quarter. And essentially, some of the highlights that I just want to call out here is within our minority group. So, quarter over quarter, we've seen some increase there. Within our entry-level non-manager group, we've seen an increase by 4%. And then within our manager supervisor level, we saw a 9% increase quarter over quarter. With the extraction of our Massachusetts-based employees, we've also seen a bit of an increase. So, our total population of minorities increased from 21% to 61% quarter over quarter. Essentially, four total employees to the 10 that we have currently. And then four of our employees in the women category, 25% of our population remained relatively the same quarter over quarter. Crystal, you can jump to the next slide for me. Thank you. Okay. So, FBG participates in the IDEA program, which is essentially Inclusion, Diversity, Equality, and Advocacy. So, our global inclusion team is dedicated to setting these strategies, measuring our goals and holding our commitment to IDEA as a whole. The intent here is to build out a comprehensive plan to drive diverse culture and then also influence our employees, vendors, partners, and fans alike. So, we strive to reflect all communities where everyone feels empowered to bring their full authentic selves to work. Within the IDEA network, we have six ERGs. We call them fans or Fanatics Alliance Networks at Fanatics. So, essentially, these are voluntary. They're employee-led and they're executive-sponsored groups. And we join together to bring a sense of community in the workplace. And essentially, just want to drive shared interests and life experiences. They're designed to help build inclusive workplace, provide leadership in how we celebrate and honor cultural moments, as well as drive business goals forward and support recruiting efforts. So, Fanatics fans essentially lead through events, cultural development or speakers, fireside chats. We also have community outreach, supporting, recruiting new talent, and then drive business initiatives and insights as well. So, as you see here on the slide, oh, sorry. So, as you see there on the slide, we have the six fans there. So, Family First, GBA, which is Global Black Alliance, Multicultural Pride, WIN, which is Women's Initiative Network, and then our Veterans Fan Group as well. Currently, 20% of our global workforce participates in the fan networks. And it is available to all Fanatics employees to participate in. And then we also continue, of course, attracting diverse talent, essentially with our recruitment processes that we have talked a bit about last quarter. But we also focus on retention of our employees, right? And so, with that, one of the big things that we are proud of, and it's newer of a launch, is some of our talent development programs across Fanatics. So, we have leadership coaching, team cultural workshops, and then our newest mentorship program, which is called Game Changers. And essentially, the idea here is to improve employee engagement off of learning opportunities and visibility to leadership for diverse talent, and then enhance cross-company and cross-functional collaboration networks and connections. So, it's essentially giving opportunity to connect all employees and supports our goal of one Fanatics. Idea Day is a popular one, right? So, it's a floating diversity and inclusion day that is available to all employees. It's a paid day off essentially for the employee to take at their discretion and celebrate a day of their choosing. We have Fanatics panel discussions and fireside chats. I think more recently, we had held an event hosted by our Fanatics multicultural fan group. And it was basically to celebrate our Hispanic Heritage Month, which was from September 15th through October 15th. There, we held a culinary event with Chef Kelvin Fernandez, where he took us through his journey of becoming a renowned chef of Hispanic origin, as well as teaching us how to create a dish. And then philanthropy. So, our Fanatics philanthropy team worked with the fan co-chairs, essentially to select nonprofits aligned with our mission. More recently, we announced at the Global Town Hall that there is a new program called Employee Giving. And essentially, it's a voluntary payroll deduction to help make a positive impact in our communities. Some of the nonprofits that we selected was through Family First, we selected Kids in Need Foundation. Through our Global Black Alliance, we selected Black Sports Business Academy. Multicultural was the crown project. Pride was the Trevor Project. Veterans was canine for warriors. And then for the Women's Initiative Network was Dress for Success worldwide. So, this is a newer effort that was recently launched, just actually launched in November, or late November and goes through December. And it's an easy way to kind of opt in, again, voluntary, but there's already generated a lot of excitement across the business here. And that completes my slide. So, Mike, pass it to you. Thanks, Steph. Commissioner, is any questions for Steph before I discuss vendor diversity? Questions, commissioners? We may come back. Thank you, Michael. Okay, great. Commissioners, as I detailed previously last quarter, the FBG brand is one of the newest entrants to the industry and the Commonwealth. That being the case, we're still in the empty stages of our procurement DEI efforts, but we're making good progress. We're committed to cultural diversity and increasing opportunities for diverse businesses. On this slide, you'll see the total diversity spend, which this quarter was $269,794.25. As you'll see on this slide, the total diversity spend does fluctuate from quarter to quarter. And similar to all businesses, this is just based on how our deals are structured with our vendors. As it relates to Massachusetts, our total spend for vendors was $421,951 in Q3. And as it relates to diversity in Massachusetts, our procurement department utilizes the SDOs certified business list to determine whether a vendor has self-certified as a diverse business in the Commonwealth. I'm going to go to the next slide, Crystal. With that said, I'm going to pass it off to Anthony DeAngelo, who is our head of responsible gambling. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Good morning, Madam Chair. Good morning, commissioners and employees and colleagues at the MDC. Just give me one moment. I seem to have lost the screen chair and I'm looking at a blank screen, so apologies. It seemed like maybe you weren't seeing the screen either, Mike, because I had switched it. So it's on the responsible gaming under age one right now. Is that what everyone's seeing? It's on responsible gaming right now. Yep. Thank you. Okay. Yes. That's the correct slide. Yep. Thank you. Apologies, guys. There we go. Okay. All right. Are you guys can hear me? Okay. Apologies if you can. I'm a little under the weather. My kids gave me nearly Christmas gifts of illness from daycare, so apologies. So on the slide you see here in front of you, this is our underage report matrix. So as you'll know, you'll see zeros here. I know this is kind of a hot topic with the commission, especially this quarter. I'm happy to speak to why those numbers are zeros. Further quarter, mainly, and a big part of it, I think, is we do have a very small footprint right now in Massachusetts. Our beta testing ended on August 9th, and we opened to the public then. Our user base as of September 30th was around 30,000 Massachusetts users, and users in Massachusetts cannot actually sign up for Fanatic Sportsbook by providing an under-21 date of birth, as well as Fanatic Sportsbook, even in jurisdictions that allow 18-plus. We are still 21-plus, so we like to use that. It's something we like to call out because it kind of eliminates a potential breach on our end across jurisdictions if we were to be 18-plus, let's say in Kentucky and 18-plus in Wyoming, for example, where it's legal. Underage betters typically will play through proxies if they do play, and we do have methods that I would rather not discuss, obviously, in a public forum to identify those instances and what we do to verify that the patrons are indeed over 21 or not, but just wanted to call that out as a hot-ish topic, and a couple of my colleagues mentioned the same, not wanting to share those secrets publicly. Thank you, Commissioner Maynard. If you don't mind, Anthony, and grab your tea as well. There we go. I was going to say first, thank you for joining under the weather, Anthony. It's been going around here, too, in the office. I just wanted to appreciate the fact that Commissioner O'Brien pointed this out earlier, but you used the word found in your report. I appreciate that, but I do think that I'm going to stick with my November 27th comments. I'll keep it quick and easy here, and I think it's going to require a broader conversation. Sure. No problem at all. We definitely appreciate that, and happy to talk more about it. On this slide here, this is the VSE matrix in mass. Like I said, our footprint is still relatively small in mass. Throughout Q3, we had two accounts that were existing fanatics accounts, and they had signed up for the Massachusetts self-exclusion list, and they were suppressed in August. We had two new additions to our self-excluded accounts within our platform. Most customers obviously are immediately suspended. They no longer receive marketing. They can't wager all that stuff, but we identified two more that came through. Any questions here? All set. Great. The next slide, please, Crystal. These are our tool metrics within the Commonwealth. There are some promising things here. I'm not going to, by any means, take a victory lap on a 0.08% tool usage in the state, but I will say, as we compile the tool usage metrics for October and then ultimately November, we've seen almost a double in every tool usage within the month of October, which is excellent. We attributed to a couple of different things, and we can go back and forth between the slides, Crystal, but if you don't mind, you can just quickly go to the next one with the screenshots. So we attributed to two things. Like we said, we are a very new operator in the state. We were only open to the public as of August 9th, and that brings new customers to us who would have seen the required limit-setting functionality at registration, which is what you see on the left-hand side of your screen. We do feel that customers are using that. We do know that tool usage in Massachusetts compared to other states on fanatic sportsbook is actually higher, and we can get you guys some numbers if that's what you'd appreciate. We, by no means, will take credit for that because there's nothing to take credit for. It was obviously a requirement from the MGC. I think we can take credit for, and on the right-hand side of your screen, and we're working on compiling metrics for this. I want to just briefly touch base or kind of circle back to a comment I made last quarter on the meeting and respectfully not trying to regurgitate old topics, but we had mentioned that we had done research where the general consensus of our population that we researched thought that RG tools are useful, but they were just not for them. There was a stigma around the usage of tools, which I think we're not trying to solve here. I think, Madam Chair, you kind of gave the analogy of you being a good skier. You still work at home. I consider myself a good driver, although from New York, I'm sure a lot of you probably would disagree. I wear my belt anyways, right? That's the kind of message that we want people to use these tools for, but obviously in the current state, there needs to be some work. All things considered and all things aside with regards to the tools themselves, we like to look at things that we can do to make the tools easier to use for our customers. On the right-hand side of your screen, you're going to see really what the customer sees when they're going to set a limit tool on our platform. It is not meant to be intimidating at all. There's no fine text, no attestations, no scrolling down, much like if you were going to purchase something from Amazon.com, they make it as easy as possible for you to put something in your car and complete the purchase. We do the same here with our limit-setting functionality. You go to this page, it is as innocuous, it is as unintimidating as possible, and we're trying to drive it with the amount of data, obviously support so, but we're going to have data put thrown together and I'll challenge our data team to do so, to compile how many customers navigate to our limit tools, then ultimately convert to setting limits. Very similar to how somebody would purchase something from an online store and actually complete the purchase versus abandon in their car. We're looking at ways that we can definitely make the user experience the user, not only in platform, obviously, and get customers to wager, but also to make it easier for them to set tools, find tools, see what limits they have available, things along those lines. So just wanted to call that out as one of the things we're actively looking into, and by no means can I take credit for the right-hand side of our screen, that is all of our UX, engineering and product teams, they're all pretty much rock stars on our side. Thank you for that Anthony. Sure. Any questions on limit setting and what I've shared? Sounds like we'll have more information next quarter and then also I think you'll probably be willing to join in on if we do have a basically an executive session roundtable on this topic of some sort, right? Absolutely, happy to do so. Thanks. That's actually a different topic, I'm sorry, I'm merging them to the two on the minors, but we also on this topic are exploring that whether it can be an executive session versus the public will have to revisit that. Thank you. I think I kick it back to that, you Mike. That's me. Thanks, Anthony. Really, really appreciate your time today. I will quickly touch on the mass lottery. So again, we've had multiple discussions with Executive Director Bracken and his team at the mass lottery. Our partnerships team is working directly with the mass lottery to determine next steps. So there's various projects that may come to fruition next year, but we'll keep the commission apprised as things transpire. And last but not least, I'm going to highlight some of the charitable work over here at Fanatics. Last quarter I presented on a slide that detailed the various charitable organizations that Fanatics supports globally, which Steph highlighted a few slides earlier. Today, however, I'd like to highlight one of those charitable organizations that Commissioner Hill asked to ask me about last quarter. So in October of this year, Make-A-Wish and our parent company Fanatics announced the first of its kind partnership in which Fanatics became the wish-granting organization's official sports sponsor. Through the partnership, sports-related wishes in the U.S. will be granted under the co-brand of Fanatics Make-A-Wish. To kick off this milestone, and hopefully you all will be excited to the names that I will disclose here, we hosted a wish-granting event where superstars Tom Brady and Jason Tatum, along with an individual from the New York Yankees, Aaron Judge, granted wishes for nine recipients. Each of these recipients signed an honorary exclusive athlete contract with Fanatics. They received their very own custom trading card, participated in a pack war, that's a break in where they open up trading cards, and then spent the day getting autographs and running drills with these superstars. So we're very excited to announce this partnership and we look forward to disclosing more of these partnerships in the near future. Commissioner Hill, do you want to weigh in with your difficult voice? Commissioner Hill, don't want to put him on the spot. I would just say very nice. Yeah. You can always say Aaron Judge, he's a great player. Yes. Even though he's on the dreaded Yankees. And I saw he just got a partner in the last two days, which is killing me. I know, I know, I know. Well, that's quite an initiative. And Commissioner Hill, I think you were heard. There you go. So, Madam Chair, that rounds out our Q3 presentation. We're here to answer any questions that Commission may have. Commissioners questions, comments? I just want to follow up. I didn't ask the same information on the Massachusetts spend as I asked the previous operator, only because it's there. And I think I'm reading the slides right. Their spend is much more limited overall than yours. But their number in Massachusetts was high. So, I was wondering about their opportunity that they were finding. So, I'm not going to trouble all the operators for that. It was just that that one caught my eye. And Crystal, you can make sure that I'm reading that, that ratio correctly on that it seemed they just happened to have more Massachusetts spend in light of their overall spend. But thank you. I do see a lot of good progress in terms of the priorities that we're focusing on. So, thank you. Anything else, Commissioners? Okay. Again, thank you. Appreciate it very much, Michael. And Steph, thank you so much. Thank you all for the rest of your day. Feel better, Anthony. Thank you. I appreciate that. And so now we are on to the fourth and final quarterly report from FanDuel. And I see Anthony Rich. It is Rich on Rich Cooper. Okay. Kathy, I give you credit for doing this every day because I'm just scrolling. I don't see anybody. I have developed a great non-marketable skill of being able to read boxes. There we go. All right. I see everybody now. Okay. So, I will let you guys take it away. Okay. Good morning, Rich. I think you're speaking and I want you to know we can't hear you. So, is that work? No. Is it on your computer? Did you accidentally mute out on your computer itself? And just so you know... You need to get computer audio. So, if you click the little caret next to the mute button, just make sure you are, if it says phone audio, make sure you're on computer audio. And just so you know, we don't get nervous about this. This is normal. So, you try those tactics. The other thing could be going in, going out again, coming in and making sure you get the computer audio. Let me turn it down. Am I coming through? There you go. All right. All right. We're halfway there. Excellent. Yeah. I mean, honestly, that's the biggest challenge, right? It's getting through technically. Thanks, Rich. That's right. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair, commissioners, members of the commission staff. Thank you for inviting FanDuel again to present our third quarter report to the commission. I'm Rich Cooper. I'm the vice president of regulatory at FanDuel. Let me briefly introduce the other representatives from FanDuel who are joining me here today to present to the commission. Both of them have presented on our prior quarterly reports. So, you'll recognize them. We're all pleased to be here today. So, I'm joined today by Kida Young, our senior director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and Jill Watkins, our senior director of responsible gaming strategy and operations. And with that, I will share my screen to put up a presentation. All right. Is that coming through okay? It is. It's not the full screen if that matters to you, but otherwise we're good. There we go. Perfect. All right. Fantastic. So, let me start with the revenue report. As you'll see, and these are all figures that were previously provided to the commission in our monthly reports. For the third quarter, total sports weight during revenue in a Commonwealth was $31.2 million. The margin or whole percentage was 11.09%. Total taxes collected on our sports weight during operations in the Commonwealth were approximately $6.2 million. You'll see the monthly breakdowns are also here on the slide. I'll move on to the next topic, to the minors and underage report. You'll see here that for the third quarter, zero individuals were found or identified as being underage and on the sports weight during platform. I'll just say, similar to what my colleagues from other operators have mentioned, without going into too many specifics, FanDuel employees a diverse and broad set of tools to put ourselves in a position to prevent underage weight during and to detect it if and when it happens. And that includes having a KYC process up front that prevents individuals under 21 from creating sports weight during accounts. And then having a robust set of fraud tools to identify instances of proxy betting where an underage individual is using the account of an individual over the age of 21 to engage in sports weight during. And that includes, at a high level, things like geolocation checks, device checks, attempts to identify account sharing and device sharing. So those are some of the things that we do in an attempt to identify instances of proxy weight during, which would include here underage weight during. Let me just pause there because I know that the commission has had questions of prior operators on this topic. Commissioner's questions. No, thank you. I'm happy to go ahead then. Madam Chair. Chair, go right ahead, Commissioner Hill. I don't want anybody to think I don't care about this particular company in this issue, but I do look forward to a discussion in the future about this. And thank you. And that would be the executive session where we could just learn a little bit more about strategies and perhaps always looking for innovations, but we appreciate the high level discussion today. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair and commissioners. And we would appreciate the opportunity to come in and talk with you all about this topic. All right. I'll turn it over now to Keita Young, our Senior Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Good morning, commissioners. So I am pleased to be here again and excited to share our progress in the DNI space. So I am Keita Young, Head of DNI at Fandall. So I think I was before you guys a little over a year ago and I explained then that this is a newly established role and I was tasked with developing the strategy and framework around DNI for the company. And I think this is the third time I'm before the commission and I look forward to showcasing and providing further information about all the progress that shows Fandall's commitment and investment in DNI. So last time I was here, I had shared with all of you that I had hired a DNI program manager, which has been instrumental in getting impactful programming and initiatives off the ground. Recognizing all the great work that we've done here and the need for more support, I'm happy to announce that the team is growing and we are hiring a DNI specialist to further expand our reach and influence across the company. So our four focus areas are diverse sourcing and hiring, talent and development, community and culture, employee engagement and communications. And I'm excited today to update you on some of the accomplishments we've been able to obtain in these spaces. So with diverse sourcing and hiring, we have now a dedicated talent acquisition professional that's responsible for the implementation of our diverse hiring slate program. And we're using this to increase the pool of applicants eligible for senior leadership positions, understanding that representation matters. The plan is to bring about positive change to increase racial, ethnic and gender diversity representation. We believe this starts with intentional efforts to bring forth candidates with different backgrounds, experience, ethnicities, races, gender classifications, who will be considered for these roles. And yesterday our CEO announced to the whole Fandle community that 55% of our senior leadership positions since August have been filled with diverse individuals as a result of this effort. Our efforts have also expanded in our diverse talent outreach. And in October of this year, we hosted our first HBCU community connection event with current HBCU students and alumni to showcase Fandle and opportunities within our company. This event was extremely successful and we look forward to doing similar ones in 2024. We've been very conscientious in our efforts to expand our strategic partnerships and organizations that we look to to help us with diverse talent pipeline growing, gaining greater D&I insights, providing greater support for developmental and growth of our employees. And we're proud to share that we've established and enhanced stronger relationships with over 11 partnerships, including women in sports and events. We're now partnering with McKinsey with their Black Leadership Academy, also with McKinsey for their Asian Leadership Academy, global gaming women, hiring our heroes with a veteran's internship program, UNCF, and many others. So community and culture is a focus here at Fandle. One mechanism that we strongly support and encourage to enhance community and culture is the establishment of our ERGs. A little over a year ago when I started, these groups were very grassroots, but I'm now happy to report we've got seven established ERG groups and two interest groups. There's a lot of activations and great work with these groups, and next time I promise you'll have visuals to show all the great work that we've been doing. Just to mention a few that's happened in the fourth quarter. We celebrated UK Black History Month. We did a celebration of our LGBTQIA plus community with Pride Moments. We celebrated National Coming Out Day with a webinar. We've had several allyship workshops. We've highlighted internally programs, awareness day, and recently we just had our guest speaker, Ben Green, who's a transgender individual come to us and do a 90-minute presentation to celebrate transgender awareness month. Fandle really believes that our ERGs and interest groups play a significant role in fostering diversity and inclusion within the workplace, and to assist and strengthen our ERG leadership, we've provided all of our leads with coaching. This coaching is to assist with topics of working in a defined process, organizational and budget tracking, facilitation and event planning, and teamwork and professionalism. We believe in upskilling our ERG leads so they can be impactful groups here at Fandle. Another area I'm really proud about is our training. We've done a lot of informal and formal training, and one project I'm really happy about and significantly proud of is an informal training that we call The Huddle, and this is led by the DE&I team, where we bring together members of our community. It's an open forum, and we really have robust DE&I discussions. This year we've done discussions. We've had discussions around the what and the why of DE&I, microaggressions. We've talked about allyship. We had one session called cultural fit versus cultural add, and we've also done recently one on inclusive language. And at these huddle discussions, I'm proud to say we have over hundreds of employees that join us to really lean in, understand and provide testimony that's really been impactful in changing the community and culture here at Fandle. Okay, a lot of work that we've done, a lot of things I want to update you on. Now I'm going to go to the workforce diversity slide. So since our last reporting, our numbers have increased in the minority underrepresented category. So last month I had reported we were at 35%. This quarter I'm happy to say we're at 39%. With our women, we last quarter we're at 29%. This quarter we're at around 30%. We are kicking off a self ID campaign, which we're going to start in the beginning of the year to really better understand the workforce community and understand how our employees identify and to get information currently not captured. And you'll see we'll actually probably have more information around our veteran status. And we'll have more reporting to provide to you. Our next slide is our supplier diversity program. And this slide really demonstrates the progress that we have in this space and provides you with our project plan. We have completed our RFP process to identify a preferred vendor that we are going to employ. And they're going to set up a system to help us support our supplier diversity program. And the slide outlines our next steps in that area. So I think that is it. If there's any questions, I will take them right now. Commissioner's questions. Madam Chair. Yes, Commissioner Skinner. No question, just a comment. Kita, it's good to see you again. And congrats to you. These slides look very good. Congrats to you over the course of three years time joining handle. Thank you so much. All right. I think then we can turn to the responsible gaming section with our Senior Director of Responsible Gaming Strategy and Operations, Jill Watkins. Thank you very much, Rich. And hello, all commissioners. It's very, very lovely to be here this morning speaking to you all again. As a quick reminder, when I spoke to you back in August, I believe it was, I had just taken on this role. And we're definitely on a journey in Pando. We feel like we have done a lot of great work over the past couple of years, but we're definitely on a path now where we're trying to really put responsible gaming in the spotlight. And with that similar to what Kira was able to report on, I'm happy to be able to say that we are in a phase of growth when it comes to the responsible gaming team with us currently in the process of doubling the operations team that we have that is actively doing case management and working with customers to try and help them when they need that help. So I'm hopeful that when I come speak to you in Q1 of next year, we'll be able to talk a little bit more about all those amazing individuals we've hired and the work that they're doing at a customer basis. When it comes to our tool usage as well, we have seen similar numbers, I believe, to what other operators have been able to share. One thing I would like to call out is our player activity statement, which isn't a conventional tool, but it's something that we have really started to leverage over the past three months as a way to try and educate customers on what their play is and kind of putting in front of them what they're spending, what they're depositing, what they have won on a more reoccurring basis, kind of like your bank statement that you get on a monthly basis, so that customers are able to realise the behaviours that they're doing. We are able then to take some of that and perhaps nudge them towards certain limits if we believe that that is the right thing to do. But we have been really surprised and encouraged by the level of engagement we've got from doing this, with about 32% of the Massachusetts population in Q3 generating their player activity statement on a monthly basis. So for us, we feel like this is something we're leaning into next year. Again, in Q1 I'll hopefully be able to share more product improvements we're going to make around this so it's even more user friendly and also able to provide users with easier ways to access tools from this statement. But we feel it's a nice step and be able to normalise the conversation about responsible gaming and be able to talk to customers more about their play and what the next steps are for them. If we jump onto the next slide then please Rich. I just want to touch very quickly on our self-exclusions in terms of voluntary self-exclusions. In Q2 we had 75, in Q3 we had less, we had 53. All of those users as with all self-exclusions were immediately excluded from the platform, excluded from all marketing columns and provided with the GameSense website to learn more about the program and any other resources that would be available to those individuals to help them. I'll also call out that in terms of timeouts or shorter breaks, about 0.1% of registered Massachusetts accounts elected to have a timeout and the average timeout was about 70 days. Then just touching on quickly some of the things that we've done around education, responsible gaming education month that happened in September. We always try and make it a big effort. I think for us a big part of this is ensuring that all employees feel that responsible gaming is part of their job as well and that they're well educated on what responsible gaming is, what our goal and our missions are and what they should be looking out for in their day to day job. To that end we did a couple of different things in September to really try and drive that forward. We held our second annual play well day in September which effectively brought the whole company together for an afternoon and then we put on a couple of our sessions worth with our executive CEOs including our president, our global CEO Peter Jackson, Vanduul CEO Amy to discuss what responsible gaming meant to them. We talked through the responsible gaming strategy for Vanduul for 2024. We then had Craig Cartoncom who is one of our responsible gaming ambassadors and who himself has had a gambling addiction and he talked very honestly and openly about his journey which I think resonated very well to employees and then we also had a panel with other self-identified gambling addicts and they talked with their experiences and what they felt helped and we got a really good reception from all colleagues around that and they found it very educational. To then further back that up we worked with Epic who we think are absolutely fantastic and they did some of their live lived experience webinars with us and we had over 788 employees participate in those webinars across the course of September. We also rolled out a new employee recognition program that highlights responsible gaming champions of Vanduul and people who go above and beyond to try and improve this space not just those that work directly in the area and then we also debuted some new creative spots which included a feature with Craig Carton with Gronkh with K-Adams and then we also did a new TV ad around how everyone should have a system much like if you're going out you're going to have drinks you get new for home we wanted to create a similar ad spot for responsible gaming and that also debuted in September and then lastly on responsible gaming we're able to announce a new course that we're doing with front office sports that is currently being filmed and will be launched in 2024 and will be free and available for anyone to do on front office sports in the new year. I'll stop for just a second there before I jump into the charitable stuff just to see if anyone has any questions. Questions for Jill commissioners comments for Jill. Thank you Jill. Thank you and then just to close out I just want to give a quick update on Operation Hope which is our financial literacy program I mentioned last time about the million dollar donation that we have made to Operation Hope and I just wanted to give a quick update about where it's at so we are currently in the process of hiring the coaches who will do the financial literacy these coaches will provide services relating to credit and money management home ownership small business development and just generally trying to empower and uplift people in the communities when it comes to their financial well-being and their financial literacy. We're hoping that this will roll out in January we had hoped it would get rolled out in December but due to some delays with the coach hiring which is now underway and we feel confident about we believe January is the more realistic timeline so again back when I'm back in Q and I can give an update on where we're at with it but we are very very excited about this and we're in the process of doing a lot of internal processes with our marketing teams pure etc to make sure that when it does run out in January it goes out in a bang so thank you all for your time very nice to see you all again any questions or comments thank you Jill I'm interested in your financial literacy program I'll hold my comments for now as I think about my question excellent thank you perfect chair thank you oh there's mango making an appearance today um um I think um for all of those who are suffering from colds and otherwise uh a little mango comfort is is a healthy thing all right um Fandle thank you so much uh Rich Kieta um Jill I think that's everyone thank you and happy holidays thank you you too thank you madam chair and same to you thank you very much all right commissioners so Crystal does that conclude your your work today that's us thank you thank you for stepping in on navigating the the power points and we were happy that you were on none of us could be helpful so thank you dusting off some old scopes I guess yeah um thank you and thank you Bruce uh excellent and that concludes all of your reports crystal we'll look for the next quarterly reports in the future um commissioners is there anything that we could give for guidance for crystal in terms of the template I think didn't we bring up something that maybe we wanted to see or I think it was more it was the the language in the compliance section sort of making it clear that they were you know identified sort of so there's not this impression that there's an affirmative finding of zero it's more these were the ones that we actually confirmed yeah they found a confirmed like confirmed underage you know that sort of thing so yeah I think we can work on that that comes from our reporting which is actually exactly what comes from the licensees so we've actually talked to that reg itself has has the same language and we've talked with we go about maybe updating that language to better reflect what sports wagering would report because as you saw too it's like it said you know it says found in the sports wagering area it's like you're not really finding someone there that comes from the reg so it might be it might be two things right is we don't want to say you don't have to look right so we don't want to write it to sort of incentivize what yeah so it's zero the language is sort of just just probably uses a little bit of a tweak and we we brought that up so it will probably come in the future but I think in our reporting we could specify there a little bit right right okay anything else that you either feel that's not necessary we don't want to ever ask a licensee to overreport is there anything any changes that you recommend or that we should discuss before we move on to our next item because you don't think oh I think I saw him leaning in but whatever you want to go ahead Eileen um I think one of the most insightful things that came out of this cluster of them today for me was the data they have on rg and cooling off and and opting in that sort of stuff I'm assuming mark has access to all of that but I just want to make sure that there's a an efficient way that that information gets over to the rg group yes we receive a monthly report from the rights that are 255 oh or I think we'll be on that but it's oh for something um and long developed attempt lit to make sure that they are getting what they need and consistently and that's why I said next month we'll really have finally everything will be exactly where we want it to be they've been reporting all along but he's just sort of look to figure out how they're defining things versus how we're defining things and so now this next strontium reporting on December 15th should have everybody with the same exact template and then um they'll be able to ruin all that data together to have a full sum report okay and mark and mark is leaning in I I I um I kind of misspoke but I was actually just thinking ahead the executive session we talked about is around the compliance issue the rg issue is around as you know I've used the term making the tools cool or destigmatizing and mark is leaning in I actually think there might be an opportunity for and I mentioned this it wouldn't be an executive session that was my misspeak but um around table of some sort that could include the uh licensees as well as outside stakeholders in this the space so that we can just keep on elevating that discourse and and and you know generate some good ideas commissioner brian at the same time long will be getting great metrics so that mark can be informed from his research um mark um go ahead mark um I would hear if you need anything but since I'm here thank you um yeah I would say you know we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to destigmatize responsible gaming um through the variety of tools that we offer in game sense and I think that this is a space that is right for us to be paying attention to um and so grateful to crystal and long as we're trying to figure out how to kind of kind of wrap our arms around like what is working in this space what isn't working in the space who's doing a good job but not so this is this is definitely a top rg priority for us yeah so mark mark think about a round table that could be helpful um where we get a bunch of voices together it always usually produces uh great insights for us and such we we spend so much time on requiring these these tools you know want to see them going but there was some interesting data today to commissioner brian's point bruce go right ahead madam chair I I wanted to also report that uh draft kings has met all the conditions so they're avoided wager and I verified that this morning um uh do you know what that's a little bit out of order on our agenda so I'm going to turn to councillor grossman um that could be a update that I didn't anticipate at um if you could just hold on that uh Todd or do we wait for another meeting uh well the cat's out of the bag but we should post it um and talk about it at a public meeting yeah yeah because um we have to be we have to be um very vigilant about sticking with our agenda Bruce but thank you um the good news is that we'll have an opportunity to expound on that and I'll turn to our legal counsel for that and anything else with respect to the template excellent reporting right commissioners and I know that we are thinking you know how we want them to report you know we can sounds like at least another quarterly report is expected in the future right so so can I bring up a process question madam chair about that sure these quarterly reports come up very quickly three months goes by like a snap of a finger may I suggest for discussion purposes that we hold these every six months and get a two quarter update every six months instead of every quarter as we I've heard through crystal today that she gets monthly reports that I believe could be forwarded to us and if something should a red flag pop up we certainly could then address it at that time but these come so quickly that I believe for scheduling purposes as well as allowing the operators to be able to you know do that thing that maybe these should be every six months with a two quarter report instead of every quarterly up for discussion commissioners the reason sorry can I ask a question just to clarify bread you mean the presentation itself or the reports like they would still submit you the reports allocated but then just not do the presentation every six months or you mean every six months to a report the presentations I'm talking about your report comes in every monthly and I would ask through the chair that those reports get forwarded to us and if a red flag should go up we would contact you and then bring an operator in if we we saw fit but I think scheduling wise I think probably for efficiency purposes every six months instead of every three months might be okay crystal presentations are those monthly reports reports that if they think they're now presenting to the commission does that add a new burden because we don't see those monthly reports now right um I don't think so I don't think there's really any difference in I mean that you know how they present it to you is a little bit streamlined how they present it in those monthly reports is for reporting purposes in the ability for a researcher to aggregate data right so it might not be as clear to you but certainly we could forward them they're already in our emails so I don't think there's any difference there I thought there was a difference but I think so Commissioner Hill is is that is suggesting those monthly reports crystal could forward or keep in a maybe in a SharePoint file even Commissioner Hill so that we can go to them and and that might even be more streamlined for crystal and then he would recommend rather than quarterly reports I never know if it's by annual right but every six months and and Commissioner like crystal remind me it I I don't believe a rag dictates the timing of these presentations is that correct yes and no so we do have a reg that states they should submit quarterly reporting but it's not about the presentation or the template or anything itself we've kind of identified what we want in that quarterly report because there's a gamut of things they could provide us right so that's what we pull this from but so they could present at whatever cadence you prefer and if we decided to give them relief for that information to be every six months we could tweak that as well unless we want crystal to get that because then it would be monthly monthly and still quarterly report for them Todd you're leaning in oh yeah well no I think I think you've got it but I think this is an important point so I just wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page they are required by regulation to file quarterly reports which are supposed to offer an ongoing view of their financial position that's there is no requirement that they come in and present that publicly that's just something we've done historically and it's a useful tool so you can change the frequency of the public reporting but you we'd have to change the regulation to require the frequency of the quarterly the actual report which is important so I just didn't want anybody to be confused and think they didn't have to file a quarterly report or anything like that they don't have to appear in public before you that you could change but they do have to file a quarterly report right Madam Chair yes Commissioner Hill there is no way I want to change the regulation this had to do with the public reporting yeah and it sounds like the the reg is actually on financial so that you know our report presentation goes beyond that uh commissioners um what do you think of of Commissioner Hill's idea Commissioner Maynard I always appreciate efficiency I I just disagree with the idea I think that it's an important piece I think it's an opportunity for us to engage with the licensees I think we're learning stuff every time we come in I think this the issue under with underage wagering is something that came out of this process right like you know we we got we got to see and discuss enough months of zeros to say wait a minute something's happening here I just I would hate to lose that opportunity I think maybe as the market matures as the industry matures we get there but I just did the math it's less than four hours on this quarter for every everyone that's less than 16 hours a year I I can devote less than 16 hours a year publicly engaging with the licensees on on these topics that's just my view. Commissioner Skinner, Commissioner Bryan. So those are my sentiments as well Madam Chair I agree with Commissioner Maynard I I enjoyed um I I think as we all do um these quarterly reports and I'd much rather continue the cadence as is than to postpone for any period of time the quarter quarterly reports it just gives us a good view into the licensees progress in several different areas I'm always interested in hearing about that and hearing about it timely. Thank you Commissioner Bryan. I do like holding the licensees across the board to the same standards in terms of the brick and mortar come in you know quarterly um so if we were going to do it I think we should do that whole cloth and sort of look at how we do all of them quarterly and can we streamline it a little bit to tighten it up I'm not opposed to that at all to make us most efficient um but and whether we stagger them so we like today where we had a more manageable meeting or whether we put them all on but um um I hear and appreciate and I lot and share commissioners his offer for efficiency but I do think right now um she keep going with the way that we've been doing it I think in hearing them together um like this and this discussion I think also can prompt questions for us right now in terms of regs and other reporting our ideas. Commissioner Hill you want to keep that idea in the parking lot? No I'm going to drive out of the parking lot and pretend that I was never there. Well I think uh I think everybody appreciates the idea of efficiencies and um I uh I think we have a consensus on moving forward with the quarterly reports crystal so you can still if you want to park the those monthly reports into a share point that's accessible for the commissioners that's fine but at least at this point we'll still rely on the quarterly reports thank you. Okay can I make a point actually sorry um I would be open as we go forward to talk about to Todd's point about financial only things that can drop off the report to make it more manageable as it goes on I would be open to that conversation Commissioner Hill as we go on. So right now I'm not going to read any attention. Sorry Commissioner uh Crystal. Sorry. She has a question around another. All right um very quick promotion there um just confirming again Commissioner Rainier that um you mean for the presentation not for the reports because I know as and just to clarify here um Councillor Grossman I almost said Commissioner Grossman is correct it's not a required quarterly report but we do have a reg 239.03 which is all of the other reports due to the commission and so they sort of wraps that up so that's why we do it that way um you know and that includes a lot of these the jobs the statistics the I can't think of them all right now but um those would be separate reports if we didn't do it this way so it's something we can revisit but if you're talking about for the streamlined presentation I can just continue that you know until we have that conversation but something to think about. Well we almost gave the operators a holiday gift. On the other hand they might miss us so we'll continue with the status quo sounds it sounds great. All right hearing no other changes or uh clarifications but for that language to the extent that the reg allows us on that one page on compliance I think we continue to operate the same way. Crystal thank you excellent job and thank you to the operators who presented today and and earlier last month. I'm returning now to item number three and I know we have Dave Maldrew and Nina McCary else it's noon. Commissures does anybody just need to take a two-minute break? Okay I'm seeing those. All right just uh Commissure O'Brien there was a little yeah I wouldn't say no but I don't need it so if everybody wants to keep going I think keep going. Everyone's all right okay all right good morning um Chief Maldrew and and good morning Nina we're turning now to item number three um regarding the interim IEB uh director position um there is a typo on the agenda and it should say director and not direction that's my apologies okay thank you Chief Maldrew I'll turn to you first I think. Good morning Madam Chair good morning commissioners I would like to provide the commission an update on the status of our current interim IEB director position. Interim IEB director Heather Hall has made the decision that she will leave the IEB and the commission effective December 21. Heather has been a part of the team for over two years and will be missed while the IEB screening committee has begun to identify candidates for preliminary interviews and continuing to receive applications we do not anticipate having finalists for the commission preview until after Heather's announced departure date. As a reminder Heather also said his Chief Enforcement Council Assistant IEB director at the IEB before taking on the interim director role and two will continue to serve in that capacity until her departure date. Accordingly we want to bring the commission the question of how to fill the interim IEB director role until the search for the full-time position is complete. The Chief Enforcement Council role is one we anticipate could be filled internally with existing IEB staff on an interim basis. In past practices the Senior Enforcement Council at the IEB has typically expected to step into the shoes of the Chief Enforcement Council when the Chief Enforcement Council is not available for any reason. At this point in time I would like to chair it over to Mita. Thank you Dave and so as Dave described we have currently a situation where there is a need to fill the interim IEB director role and so the purpose of today's conversation is to provide some thoughts on how that might happen. The current work of the IEB screening committee I can share what has been publicly shared in their open session is that they have when that committee just as a reminder consists of Mr. Muldrew and Commissioner Sill and Skinner they has identified a handful of people who may merit screening interviews but they're not yet in a position to be able to recommend finalists to this body for the permanent position and given the holidays may not be able to do that for at least a couple more weeks after Heather's departure date. So the options for then how this is done in the meantime could take a few different forms. The first is having HR and this is probably a part of this regardless having HR under Dave's direction and his class as HR director discuss with current IEB senior staff their interest and willingness to serve in the interim position and also be the person who receives any other interest that there might be in someone serving in that role. Dave could then provide a recommended person to the commission and given the short timeframe that may be the most efficient way to proceed. I've spoken to Dave about that possibility as willing to take that task. Dave could also as another option bring back multiple viable candidates they're likely to be internal candidates but this would mean that they have if you if the commission is then making the ultimate choice on the interim you would have to find time to at least discuss that in public if there are multiple finalists or interview them if that's what you're inclined to do. A third option would be a third option would be to have Dave ask Dave to make the appointment you know if there is only one viable candidate and and sort of report on it rather than have it come back to approval. I would remind everyone that this is a bit of a different role than some other positions in the sense that by statute the chair has statutory oversight and some supervisory authority with respect to the IEB and the IEB director so it could also be left to the chair to work with Mr. Mulder to finish that task just again for the two-month interim position while the screening committee continues on the and I say two-month but that's sort of a rough rough estimate I don't have a crystal ball it could be shorter it could be longer and then a final option might be to add the task to the current screening committee's charge as a separate task that has certainly the benefit that the three folks on the screening committee are already thinking about this issue the counterpoint to that is obviously it's more time consuming the screening committee has to meet under the strict of the open meeting law it might also because Dave's a member limit how much he could communicate it would limit how much he could communicate to Commissioner Skinner or Hill about what he's learning on the interim position so those that's sort of the spectrum of some of the options we've considered so far and the point of today's discussion was to gauge where the commission was in its comfort of how to proceed again knowing knowing the timing strictures and and the on the good side good news side the how the process is going on the screening committee mean has outlined different options questions for Mina Commissioner Ryan so I have two procedural questions in terms of when you say estimated about a couple of months you mean from today or you mean from the date of her departure I mean from today and I'm I um I don't the only reason I am saying that is I think that there have been and again I want to be careful about what can be shared from the screening committee and limiting it to what's public already from public session is that there are already a handful of candidates that have been deemed of enough interest to have a screening interview but you know remains to be seen whether further applications will come in and whether those applicants once screened will remain you know viable candidates or not so it could be that there's a great candidate in a bunch it could be that there is a reader just don't know and when does the posting close or postings internal next or when do they close Dave do you have that date or Commissioner or Commissioner Hill do you remember December 20th yes and Commissioner Brian just to speak to your question we have as Mina said identified a handful of candidates that we would like to move forward with interviewing and currently anticipate that that will happen in January the first week in January can I do a follow-up Commissioner Brian please um Commissioner Skinner I I think I saw earlier in the week or maybe last week that the internal posting was just done does that give an internal candidates and that I mean I'm off with the time frame that you will have but is is not an issue for you or no no I mean I think I would I would defer to Dave to answer this I asked the very question in fact I do that my question during the screening committee might have been the impetus for the internal circulation of that job posting it was posted broadly yes the distinction between internal and external posting other than what we saw last week in terms of the distribution internally so Dave I don't know if you have some additional clarification that I know it's down to you now and Commissioner Skinner it would not be an issue the level of the position it has been posted internally the population we have here we would be get we luxury shorter if there was a true interest in the role that's enough time for us to be modified and to Commissioner Skinner's point it was broadly I saw and and I commend commended the distribution the breadth of the distribution so externally thank you okay sorry Commissioner yeah so where my head really is is you know we need to do this obviously rather quickly I think we could all agree we also want to do it with the least amount of disruption to the unit to the staff in terms of an adding any other work to the screening committees HR etc but I would really love to know you know we talk about succession planning and I think that you know Heather's been on the ground for a couple of years she's stepping out of handling two different roles one of which she's officially in one of which she's been doing is acting and I would love for this commission to know is there a sketch of a plan that she has that Dave Maldrew can further look at to see if we can do this expeditiously reporting back to us I can I can maybe address that because Heather and I've had that conversation and Heather did alert at some point to Nevada having a succession plan I think it might not be you know I think what I asked about was with respect to the Chief Enforcement Council position was there any written policy on that Commissioner O'Brien yeah I don't think we have anything written doing no but I think what Mina described is that yeah practice and I think there might be an update with respect with respect to the Chief Enforcement Council position but with respect to the IEB I think that position if I recall correctly when we had to fill it last was at the commission level on fulfilling it but with that said but she right she has thoughts I'm sure on on who she might recommend or who maybe has raised an interest already or so I actually have thought about that too because I think she has that but you know Mina you indicated that Commissioner the Chief Maldrew could come back to us with a recommendation could we could we because it's such a short term issue could we ask Chief Maldrew to do whatever diligence including what Commissioner O'Brien just alluded to and his own HR you know with his HR experience investigate could he actually look at even more than one candidate and make a determination and come back to us with a selection not just a recommendation for the short term and getting all using his expertise and whatever input he gets from Heather or anyone else could he do that I'm thinking of efficiencies and I'm also thinking of avoiding a costly public process for a very short term hire yeah yeah Madam Chair so I think there's just a couple of things in there and the I think the short answer is yes the limitation that came up when we when we spoke this summer about with the commission about the interim ED role I think was a little bit different for a couple of reasons because it's a commission the commission was hiring as a whole and because there was an intention we were also talked about going forward for the screening committees a screening committee cannot do that a screening committee has to come back more than one but if the commission is asking its HR director to essentially make a short term HR hire that is something that you're you're asking you know him to do just for that purpose or to make a recommendation of a person for a short term hire you're asked him to pick one person to recommend one person essentially and and do the process to get there that's entirely acceptable you don't you're not as long as the commission is not then getting you know the you're he's not doing any deliberation with a subset of the commission or a screening committee it's just him and his staff obviously doing that work and I mean I actually I am wondering about the word recommend versus selection because recommend coming to us then there could be a debate in terms of the person and I'm wondering could we actually and this is me on one of five just putting this idea out could we actually ask Dave to you know yes this expertise and actually say this person I've asked this person they have accepted the responsibility they will serve in this position for the next and the commission says thank you yes I alluded to that a little bit but let me could write I don't think I was I was crystal clear when I did so let me clarify in the list of options yes that could happen I do think given the statute it might be prudent and given the enforcement role that this position has I would just recommend that that recommend date that selection from Chief Maldrew be at least formally then blessed by the chair under section six of the statute so that it's there's no question that even if you're as a group or or yourself deferring to Dave that there's no just you know there's no gulf between the two selections I just don't want someone later at an enforcement action or something else to suggest that the process that Dave didn't have the authority to appoint the person as the interim yeah I mean I envisioned I envisioned us ratifying it so to speak the same way we did when Loretta was actually hired I wouldn't feel comfortable not having some sort of role and ratify myself in part because of the seat that I sit in and I know the chair has a statutory responsibility as well so that's I'm comfortable with going and having Dave you know come up with what is in consultation with Heather and the staff the best recommendation for us but I would like it to come back to us for final ratification however you determine and honestly I wouldn't be interested in inserting myself even though I am very cognizant of the responsibility under the statute it would be my desire to make it the five of us I was just looking at could we all just you know yield to a hiring decision for this very short term given that it will be an internal hiring man we've got some good people who can take over so I'd like to be able to yield to Dave but mainly to avoid public debate Commissioner O'Brien but I'm hearing you so yeah so let's um if we could I mean I feel like for me you know thinking about this since I knew that she was leaving my comfort level is you know for Dave and Heather to come up with a recommendation I'm comfortable with that I you know unfortunately by the nature of what we do I don't know that we can avoid any public discussion in terms of if someone does feel strongly or want to make some other recommendations on that recommendation to us I don't feel like there's another way from my perspective but I don't know what the other commissioners feel like I'm I am very comfortable with Dave um using the input of Heather and others but I probably would say that I would defer to Dave's ultimate judgment and that's not to dismiss Heather it's just it's somewhat protective of Heather as well um but anyway because I'm hearing you say the two make a decision together and I'm I want to well I guess yeah maybe I'm not making myself clear but I do as one commissioner want to have a say in sort of ratifying that decision for some reason I have concerns yeah I know we have to do it in public but I would feel obligated to voice them I see yeah I'm hearing you that you would so it would be Dave coming forward with his ultimate recommendation and then the commission as a whole doing some kind of a ratification right commissioners how do you feel about that process is that's one option then there was the option of the screening committee um right commissioner hill I can't tell you doing the thumbs up but I can't tell for which one the first one oh the mission or O'Brien's um proposal I'm okay with okay push it scanner commissioner maynard commissioner maynard you turned off first I wish I was doing okay thank you oh I think you were first commissioner maynard and I'll and mr yielding go ahead um oh I can go it's fine uh I I agree with commissioner O'Brien I I think that the commission has a duty to make sure that whoever this individual is meets what we think it should be I mean this is a process question um and and a theoretical question if Dave put someone that was and I know he would never do this but was wholly not someone the commission would want I would want an opportunity to have a conversation on that and and I would do that no matter who it was right in that position so I do like the idea of avoiding the screening committee and avoiding um any kind of um situation that happened earlier this year uh with candidates being dragged in for for uh interviews in public for something that's going to last two months but at the same time we have to have a veto over the ultimate person I think as a commission interest Skinner I am hearing my fellow commissioners and I don't completely disagree uh it would be hard to relinquish this responsibility um um but because I think I know what the thinking is here in terms of an interim interim um you know because I've asked questions um because I um have had conversations with um um individuals I I'm I feel I think better than than some of you might in uh delegating the responsibility to select uh an interim to Dave Maltrow Commissioner Skinner I do want to point out I have had no conversations about any individual and I have no preconception of who would be selected here I just so you know Commissioner Skinner and I want to be very transparent to my fellow commissioners I I haven't had any of those conversations um and uh and nor do did um did uh Heather forward that to me even though I believe she might have some information I I'm quite situated differently I don't know if my fellow commissioners have that input but that's not something I have well and and and honestly from my perspective just as I noted um I'm very confident that there's opportunities within our organization for someone to step forward in this role and as am I and just to clarify I I saw I you know I I asked questions because as was referenced I I did not want to repeat of what we experienced um over the summer and so I wanted to get ahead of uh this matter I wanted to be prepared um to make a recommendation today if uh I were called upon to do so so um I in the spirit of um you know uh ensuring that the commission is uh in the best position to carry on the work of the IED I just did some due diligence um Madam Chair. Mina does that present any challenges for us or no I don't think no I don't think it does uh what I would just suggest and we you know I will say that Dave and I suggested the same to Heather that if there are folks that as she talks to people you know says explains you know her transition to to colleagues who express interest that the best thing to do is to direct folks to Dave so that he you know has has the full um scope of everybody who's interested and can talk to them so I think that's completely fine um the only uh issue and I'm certainly happy to talk with Commissioner Skinner or Commissioner Hill or Dave offline is if somebody is also interested in the full position um they should also just be clear that they'll need to go through this the application process through the screening committee to do that and that these two things are are separate apart but no certainly no problem you know if someone has talked to an individual commissioner um that person should also make their interests known to Dave and Dave you know assuming you you take this path of of Dave um selects somebody or record for a recommendation and ratification by the the rest of by the not the rest by the commission so can I I'm sort of in this in a situation like Commissioner Skinner I mean I obviously ask some questions when I learn the news um it's not that I don't feel comfortable with Dave exercising you know his due diligence and judgment I just do feel like I've got a responsibility to ratify the one thing I would like to do today if we could and I assume it is part of it's encompassed by the agenda item is make clear to anybody that Dave might ask or have a conversation with what the salary would be and my assumption would be it would be the same as what Heather Hall had in terms of being the acting director of IEV but it would be maybe nice to get some clarity for Dave on that now as he has these conversations in the next couple of days can I can I ask a question Madam Chair or Commissioner Skinner directed to Mina um in terms of um the option to have the current IEV director screening committee um consider the interim understanding that there's a requirement to advance at least two names in the event that this work it goes to that screening committee and there is only one individual one internal individual interested how does that impact the decision making of the screening committee it's it's a good question um there isn't a lot of clarity on this under the open meeting law but we've considered it in the past for instance in a situation not with the commission where two finalists were advanced and one just decided to take another job before their interview were left I think the ultimate um you know the best advice I can give today not the ultimate advice the best advice I can give today on that is if the the what the screening committee is not allowed to do is select a candidate if there but you also um to paraphrase you'll be there folks don't want to come to the ballpark you can't make that you can't stop them if no one else wants a position you you know you you can't uh create an applicant or sort of put up a strong applicant just for consideration so you can consider your work done given other um needs right so if you know you have in this case it'll be until December 22nd to find an interim if only one person raises their hand after a good faith effort to identify others I think that that is what it is and just okay and I should say right if somebody who who raises their head is absolutely not qualified you're not obligated to forward that as a as an A minor and what an executive session be available to the screening committee um for the purpose of not interviewing formally but discussing um the potential uh role with with with any candidate um to discuss not necessarily yes but again as to screen applicants um so in the same form as as you would be doing it now with the permanent position okay um so thank you that's very helpful and I throw out to my fellow commissioners um the screening committee currently has a meeting marked up for Monday um should should you decide that the screening committee should take this up um the agenda would obviously mean to be amended I think right Nina but um just to throw out for consideration our meeting is on Monday um we have a meeting uh of the whole body of the commission on the 14th um we could uh quickly come to um our recommendation uh to present to the whole commission on Thursday um throwing that out for consideration as one of the options Nina identified to move forward here Commissioner Bryant um I'm I'm still I think more comfortable for expeditious purposes and having the work you guys have in front of you to continue I think the most efficient thing to do in my mind is still have um Dave Mulder do it and come back to us on the 14th Madam Chair Commissioner Hill be in full agreement thank you um and Commissioner Maynard I can see the benefits in either one but I'll just say this I don't want to goof around and lose players off the bench or to the portal right to make a NCAA basketball analogy right that's what I don't want to do so whatever we do I want to make sure that the right people uh are tapped for these positions to come in and and and play um and we have the highest level people here uh we we should you know whatever we do I don't want to goof around in my position is to the extent I have that authority that Amina referenced under the statute to um to assist my my intention was not to do that unilaterally it would only be with my fellow commissioners to the extent I could delegate fully um any authority so that Dave could just come in and wrap it up for us for December 14th that would be my desire I'm hearing um from the commission a desire to ratify in some way um should the decision not you know be what it's expected I am hoping that for those commissioners who did do any due diligence on candidacies that they remain very objective and allow Dave to do his work um and that Dave choose the avenues that he wants to um to make this very short term selection and keep it straightforward um again I understand my role I understand Commissioner O'Brien's appointment rule uh but it is a really short term decision and I say for efficiency and complete faith in our people to make an excellent choice here that I would recommend you know the the process that Commissioner O'Brien I'm yielding Commissioner O'Brien because I'm hearing Commissioner Hill and Commissioner Maynard at least saying they want some role in the ratification Commissioner Skinner you acknowledged it may not be your first choice um I'm just saying I would be fine with the selection happy not thrilled to have to have a ratification what I really want to make sure it doesn't in any way discourage any internal member from deciding to come forward um and with that I'm happy to to entertain a emotion that unless there's further discussion Commissioner Skinner no I guess you didn't turn up here my apologies anybody leaning in for other discussion before we move anything further Mina do we have it right anything that we need further advice on these are complicated processes um and and uh I am appreciative of Mina being able to give us his assistance because he does a lot of this across the Commonwealth so um thank you for making sure that we we we meet all the obligations under the open meeting law as well as um as as do everything we need internally to get it right my pleasure Madam Chair okay further discussion Commissioner O'Brien um so do we need a motion or do we have consensus on process Mina do we need a motion I think we need a motion if we're going to yeah if we're going to end up ratifying whatever I'd like a motion sure uh Madam Chair I move that the Commission authorize um Director Dave Muldrew to make a decision and recommendation to the full Commission regarding the selection of the Acting Director of IEB quest point of order and also CEC Chief Enforcement Council or is that already resolved and we can let's turn to that next okay so focusing restricting to Director the Acting Director of the IEB and to report back to this full Commission for ratification of that recommendation it friendly amendment timing um both prior prior to December for December 14th we can say December 14th I don't know if David if you feel you need to till the 15th but I I can put the December quarantine as the date um on December honor before December 14th and the tenure would be through the selection process of that friendly amendment too sure and that the with the understanding that the acting position would be held um up and up through and until the placement of the permanent Director of IEB is hired and starts further discussion sorry um are we all in agreement that if one serves in the interim process that they still would be eligible for the selection process to be the final candidate is there any yes I may ask you question there yeah I was just going to just take a temperature okay on on on are we all okay that they would still be eligible for the final yes no I just asked if I'm I'm I'm in agreement but what would be the issue there what's the concern that that individual wouldn't be just want to make it clear okay there's no concern just clarification for any person who's Dave approaches in case that comes out um it is a question that comes up um with interim uh Commissioner Skinner um thank you now Dave I'm sorry I just want to get that clarified one is that the 14th is a Thursday I would like to have the 15th to a Friday on the recruiting stamp but unless that's logistically not keep I'm not able to do that well I'll tell you why the 14th it's because we have a public meeting on the 14th okay and so I'd like to add this to the agenda that answers that okay thank you so much Thursdays Fridays yeah but then um today I think Commissioner O'Brien your point it does offer a little bit of a padding for additional time before uh Heather leaves Commissioner um we still have a motion and I think it was seconded it was a seconded with the uh two amendments about timing second okay are we good they're taught on our process the the two amendment the friendly amendment was about that what she included was that it's through the tenure through the um selection process and then um that it would be for December 14th yes I think you've covered the waterfront there okay thank you and then a second any other discussion um mango mangoes yeah he's ready for lunch anything else Commissioner Maynard are you leaning in or just getting ready all right Dave are you all set we'll take I'm all set I'm all set now okay Commissioner O'Brien hi Commissioner Hill hi Commissioner Skinner hi Commissioner Maynard hi and I vote yes five zero now um I do think Dave you have some information about the Chief and Mina um Chief Enforcement Council I I wasn't sure I thank you that my apologies and I in my mind I heard Dave uh mentioned this and perhaps I I didn't hear it the only information is just that with respect to succession planning um at the informal at least I don't think it's a written policy uh within the IED as we understand it has been that whenever the Chief Enforcement Council has been unavailable for any reason extended vacation or anything else the Senior Enforcement Council has stepped into that role Kathleen Cramer who serves in that position has spoken with Dave and is willing to do that here so with respect to Heather's uh normal position that she was serving before stepping into interim that's effectively filled for for now and I think that the the thought process is obviously somebody who might come in after the interim would want to think about you know would want to work with Kathleen on on rebalancing the roles and and staffing needs that but for now I think that's all said questions from Mina on that and Dave you were able to verify that with Kathleen and she wasn't yes I spoke with Kathleen yesterday evening and she was excited and so as we go through this process from an HR standpoint we will put together a letter and we will determine um salary and then have it um forwarded to uh taught for review and then present it and then and then um and then have and then HR would present it to Kathleen I would present it to Kathleen Kathleen yeah uh thank you Dave and and Commissioner Skinner the interim CEC would be expected to serve throughout the hiring process for the permanent IEB director is that correct that is correct are we calling it an interim position or is she just keeping staying in this senior enforcement council position because of the um prior practice I don't I don't have a good question on that I don't have a position on it but I just for clarity given what Mina described um yeah I was I thought it would be acting because the position was actually vacant as opposed to someone's on vacation or temporarily unavailable I thought that she would be acting until the CEC position was filled which she may or may not want permanently I have no idea right and that makes sense to me given that she she would be taking on all of the responsibility yes she right I don't know if there's any legal guidance on that because there's no policy I don't think there's a written policy on this um so Mina um it sounds like I think I think that is entirely acceptable I would to call it the acting I would actually defer to HR um it's fine to extend yeah Kathleen's taking on a different possibilities it's should be reflected for her you know resume in the future but otherwise it doesn't really make a difference I I think that um unless Todd or other uh tell me otherwise I this is not a role that I have the same concern about um having an official title for third parties to deal with as I would with the with the IED director where it's uh where it's called for by statute what's the difference between an acting and interim it's um I'm only smiling commissioner Skinner because um we I get this question a lot and sometimes just a matter of what someone wants to call it but uh I think the common conception that folks have had is an interim is uh filling in um sort of appointed to take all of the duties uh of that person knowing that their role and when someone else is appointed an acting is sort of doing the role and it's not yet clear whether someone else will be appointed to take their spot but what will happen with the role the role will shift etc um typically acting is used uh for instance in the in the when somebody is out on leave or is unable to perform their duties for a short period of time someone's acting they haven't lost the role the the permanent hasn't lost the role this is a little bit unusual because it's a mix of the two mean I have a question between acting and interim compensation is acting does the compensation remain the same an interim we know it's it's um I can't answer that to be honest that's not a legal I want to be fair so whether it's acting or interim we want to pay the person for what they're doing I just was curious that song can we leave that to guidance where that can be offline that Todd and Mina can work with Dave to figure out the appropriate compensation um in terms of the amount I know that we've looked at these interim positions with respect to a percentage of uh salary I I again want to yield to HR's expertise here Commissioner Brian you raise the issue around compensation do we need to do we need to be we're not often I'm I'm I have a direct report and I'm not involved in setting that individual's compensation so I'm very no we'll we only work for acting I mean we went through and had that discussion and so I made it more to the point of the expectation for me speaking as one commissioner would be that whoever steps in into what Heather was doing it would be the same financial compensation and so I would have expected Kathleen slipping into CEC that there would be a conversation to be had with HR in terms of what that bump is going to be yeah do do we need to have that discussion here or are we comfortable yielding to um our council uh Mina and and and uh Derek and Dave Muldron I'm comfortable on Kathleen's position yielding to the to the staff as am I thank you anyone else I am as well excellent thank you so we can take that discussion offline it's good okay um that would be helpful to you Dave um absolutely any anything else I want to thank Kathleen uh thank you for stepping up and willing us to do that with that commissioners is there any other business okay um I'll take a motion to adjourn move to adjourn second commissioner hill I want you to grab that cup of tea even if it's not your favorite beverage with a lot of honey you like honey I know that uh commissioner O'Brien I commissioner hill hi commissioner Maynard oh it's commissioner Skinner my apologies hi commissioner Maynard I and I vote yes have a good day everyone thank you