 Again, welcome everyone and I think that so our first order of business is the minutes from the November 19, 2019 meeting. Mary, did those those get sent out under I'm just looking at the agenda here they don't appear to be under that under this cover. They had been previously. Yes you're muted again. They had been previously sent out to members. Okay. So we need a motion from someone to approve these minutes. I see Jennifer moving. Okay. Do we have a second. Second. Any further discussion. All those. Can you do a roll call for the vote. Or Tonya. I have a question. Yes. On the second page. Item 204, the second paragraph. Third line. You're talking about explaining that the subcommittee meets twice in the fall. And the feelings are taken to the subcommittee. Should that be two subcommittees right there? Mary, do you have those handy that you can put that up on the screen. I can share it if you'd like. Oh, great. Thank you, Tonya. No problem. Okay, we're looking for the for the minutes though, Tonya. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. These are the old minutes. Okay, we're looking for this November minutes. Okay. November of 2019. Okay. Third time's the charm. No, that's not it. If you can close your view, I've got them. Okay. Yep. I'll let you take over. Yeah, I just need you to close to stop sharing. Okay. And whoops, stop share. There we go. Now I want to share. Let me go to. Okay. I'm sorry, page two. Yeah. And. At what time, what was it? Um, The second paragraph. Okay. Okay. You see where he says he explained that the subcommittee meets twice in the fall and members thought then feelings are taken to the subcommittee. Oh, I see. That was confusing to me. Oh, okay. So he was describing the community, the subcommittee on community mitigation, which meets twice in the fall. And I think he's referring to the subcommittee. And he's saying that the subcommittee on community mitigation and community mitigation, the CMAC thoughts and feelings are taken to the subcommittee. Yeah, that'll do it. That's the only question I had. Okay. All right. And they'll see M. Okay, how's that better? Perfect. Okay. Any other. Corrections changes. Okay. Very good. So those will be the new revised minutes. Okay. Sure. Okay. Jennifer Bonfiglio. Yes. Mary McNally. Yeah. Bellamy Schmidt. Yes. Carmina Fernandez. Yes. Judy Theocles. Yes. Samuel Darkwaugh. Yes. Laurie Tanner. Yes. Alison Ebner. Yes. Richard Sullivan. Can I abstain? I wasn't at the meeting. If you need it for a quorum, I'm happy to vote yes, but. Okay. Ellen Petashnik. Yes. Okay. All right. So nine in favor of approving the minutes. Anyone opposed? No. Okay. So the next item on the agenda is I think actually before we do elect, we need to elect a chair for the commission for the next year. Do we have any volunteers for being the chair for the next year? Anyone? Volunteer. I guess. Okay. Fabulous. Great. Would someone like to? I would second that nomination. Rick Sullivan will second. Great. Should we take a roll call vote? Yes, please. Okay. Jennifer Vanfiglio. Yes. Mary McNally. Yes. Many thanks. Bellamy Schmidt. Yes. Carmina Fernandez. Yes. Judy Theocles. Maybe she's muted. Yes, she's muted. Was that a yes, Judy? Yes, that was a yes. Okay. Samuel Darklaw. Yes. Laurie Tanner. Laurie Tanner. Allison Ebner. Yes. Richard Sullivan. Absolutely. All right. And Ellen Petashnik. Ellen Petashnik. Yes. Okay. Congratulations, Sam. That's a very important role here. Trust me, it's not a heavy lift. It's just working with Mary and Tanya a little bit on agendas and you will essentially share the meeting and sort of run the agenda. Awesome. Looking forward to it. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Samuel, you're in a very clean campaign. We appreciate that. Refreshing nowadays. And now we also need to elect a representative to the subcommittee on community mitigation. Again, that's the subcommittee meets a couple of times in the fall and we have one representative from the Region A LCMAC and one from the Region B. So we need to elect someone from this group to be the representative to our subcommittee. I think I'm already a representative and I don't mind continuing. Okay, great. Great. We nominate Jennifer Bonafiglio. Sorry, I put you that. To be our second representative to the subcommittee. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Should we take a vote? Yeah. Okay. Jennifer Bonfiglio. Yes. Mary McNally. Bellamy Schmidt. Yes. Okay. Kermina Fernandez. Yes. Judy Theocles. Yes. Samuel Darkwell. Yes. Laurie Tanner. Allison Ebner. Yes. Richard Sullivan. Yes. Ellen Petashnik. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Jennifer. Okay, that's great. So the next thing on our agenda is the discussion of the policy questions. And I think I will share my screen here, folks. So that when we tried to meet at our last meeting, we didn't have our quorum. We weren't able to discuss this item. I'm hoping that some of you folks have had a chance to take a look at this. And you know, we're not proposing any real sort of wholesale changes for the Community Mitigation Fund for this year, given some of the challenges that we went through in the last year trying to get all of this done. So you'll see a lot of these questions are similar to what we deal with on an annual basis, but I won't dwell too much on a lot of these as they are either somewhat repetitive from previous years or somewhat self-explanatory. But I will go through each one of them and sort of dwell on some of the new items that have arisen specifically as part of the 2020 application. So the first time, should the commission place an overall limit on, okay, I just got a note from Mary before I get into this, that to give, we do have, you know, some new members here. So just giving a little background on the Community Mitigation Fund before we get into these questions, it's probably in order, Sam, for you particularly. So the Community Mitigation Fund was established at the very beginning of the program, at the very beginning when the initial licenses were issued, a certain amount of money was placed into this. And the money is available for the local communities, the host community, and the surrounding community and nearby communities to secure some funding to help address casino-related impacts. And just in 2020, we had $11.5 million put towards this that was split apart to the east and part to the west and funds things like transportation planning studies, we had some transportation construction work, and we have this category of specific impacts where folks can identify a particular impact of the casino that we can then put money towards mitigating that impact. So with that, I'll get into the guidelines, the policy questions first. So the first one is, should the Commission place an overall limit on grants for the 2021 Community Mitigation Fund? You know, each year we have put a limit on the amount of grants. Obviously, we have a limited amount of money that is generated each year from the licensees. So again, we're recommending to place a cap on that, and I'll get into those numbers in a little bit. Under item two, should there be a per grant limit on CMF boards? And if anybody has any comments, please jump in at any point. Maybe I'll go through a few of these and stop and then see if there's any questions. So for each of the different types of grants, we have placed a cap on the grant amounts, essentially just to say, you know, we want to have people to have, you know, a fair representation of how much money we have available and sort of where we think things should shake out. So we're not really proposing any changes to those categories. Of course, all of these things are waivable by the Commission if, you know, someone were to identify a huge need for some particular reason, the Commission can waive those requirements. And then question three, should the Commission continue to place a limit on grants in each gaming region based on the projected tax revenues for the CMF by the gaming facility in that region? So what we have done in the past is the money that was generated by MGM Springfield would stay out in the West and the money that was generated by Encore Boston Harbor would stay in the East. And actually some of these numbers are a little bit out of date here is that right now we're estimating that there'll be about $6 million available in the East and about $6 million available in the West for this coming year. And that includes money rolled over from last year that hadn't previously been used. And also this, so that all of this right up in here is right out of our guidelines from last year that explains how we allocate the funds and just, you know, it's the intent to continue to if there's unused funds in any region that those would roll over for a period of three years. So the first money that was generated was by MGM Springfield in Callity Year 2018 that we used in 2019. So then the money generated in 2019 was used in 2020. So we're really just in the third year of this program of the funds rolling over. So I don't think we want to make any sort of wholesale changes with that. Now item four, this is something that we need to think carefully about. The question is, should the 2020 CMF continue to be used to support and leverage resources to help residents of Springfield or Everett obtain their high school or work readiness credentials to be eligible for employment? And if so at what level and should the scope of these grants be limited due to the effects of COVID-19 on the hospitality industry? So last year we expected that about $800,000 would be given out for grants on workforce. And in fact we received applications for about that amount for about the $800,000 amount. One of the problems that we ran into is that part of these grants were for adult basic education, but a large portion of these grants were in the hospitality and food and beverage industry. And once COVID hit and the casinos closed and the hospitality industry and the restaurants all over the place were closing down, it was realized that these grants have to address a casino related impact. And the thought by our licensees was that once they were able to reopen that there would probably be kind of a glut of employees in this area. And in fact, you know, MGM Springfield, they haven't opened their hotel yet, you know, many of their restaurants are still shut down, as is the same with the airport. So for this year we need to, you know, we're saying that adult basic education seems to be necessary. Any job at a casino requires a high school diploma or an equivalent. So we're suggesting that those things would be available, but we need to really carefully consider what we fund for any program sort of outside that adult basic education. And I'm going to stop there for a second. I don't know if anybody had any thoughts about that particular issue on what we should be doing with workforce grants. I was just curious if this file could be shared or like emailed over so I could look at it later as well. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah, you should, Tony, would you make sure that Samuel will get that? Sure. Yep. Thank you. You should get it as part of your packet, but I will definitely resend. Thank you. Yep. So does anyone else have thoughts on the workforce? I'm just thinking that it made sense to have larger amounts granted at the beginning of when the casino came in because that's when they really, you know, went after the other, the tellers and everyone else in the industry. Obviously now with COVID things change a little bit, but I'm thinking over the time that amount probably should be reduced because they have their staff pretty much set. I mean, I'm sure there's little differences here and there, but it's not going to be as widely, they're not going to be pulling as many from the other industries as we, you know, as when they first opened up, I think. Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, their workforce and actually I am going to go over a little bit about after we go through this, if we have some time about, you know, sort of what the effect COVID had on, you know, employment levels and some other things. But the, I think you're right. And, you know, I think for this year, we're going to really ask our grantees or the people coming in for these grants to try to be, you know, kind of creative in their thoughts on how they do some of this stuff because, like I said, you know, putting people, you know, Holyoke Community College has a wonderful program, a wonderful culinary program that a lot of folks came through. But if the restaurants aren't open, then, you know, and that is, is often there's a lot of, you know, sous chefs and chefs and other and waiters and waitresses and others in that industry. It's hard for us to put money towards it when it's really not an impact of the casino. It's not that these aren't wonderful programs. They are. We'd love to be able to fund everything, but they really have to be due to an impact of the casino. Cheryl, I have a question. I assume as with many other things, that whatever amount would be determined would be potentially waivable by the commission for an increase or not. Yeah, you know, I mean in terms of the overall climate and need, but like to keep a little window open to then help totally uncertain these times are. Yeah, everything is waivable by the commission. On the workforce grants, we haven't had anyone really asked for that. We've kind of set a limit and that's what the group is, you know, the group that's putting the application together is pretty much stuck to. But yes, they are all certainly waivable by the commission. Thank you. I also agree, but you make a good point that things are so uncertain at this time. I do think it'd be good to redirect some of the funds, maybe a waste away from the hospitality related training, although I think it's tough right now to get people, some people to come back to work. So even though we're saying there's a lot of people in the industry out of work right now, it's not always easy to get people to come back to work. So we might want to keep some funding available for that. Right. The other reason for keeping funding available is that the hospitality industry traditionally has a very high turnover rate. So you need to have a pipeline of people for when jobs turn over. So there should be some minimum amount of workforce programs going on to address that. And especially in these times when people are if they can't get jobs, they may go into a completely different career and never come back to hospitality. Right. I'd also be curious to know if there's any data from MGM on kind of the population that's currently working, the types of positions, if there's segments of the workforce that they've identified that they would bring back sooner. That kind of information might help guide some of these decisions as well. Yeah. As of right now, MGM has about a little under 600 people working at the facility and they had over 2000, just over 2000 when they shut down. Or I should say at the end of 2019, that was the last quarter that we had full data for. They had like 2004 employees and they're down to just a little under 600. And you know, a lot of that is, you know, some of the restaurants are closed and those are pretty labor intensive. You know, the hotel is closed. They just reopened one floor of the hotel and that's just for invited guests. It's not open to the public yet. But you know, did they just reopen the Chandler Steakhouse for just Friday and Saturday nights? The Italian restaurant. The name is escaping me. They changed it for a little while. The Costa, I guess it is. They're closed. The tap is closed on, I mean, they're only open, I think. Hey, Joe, I can save you a little bit. Jose Dogato. Oh, hey, Jose. So yeah, so I just wanted to correct one thing. So we, since we reopened, we first started with a little over 700 folks. As of right now, we're ranging somewhere between 800 and 900 as of right now. And many of that, as Joe mentioned, is contingent on one, some of the positions we had are kind of shut down, particularly on the table game side that, you know, we were restricted on some of the games we cooperate and table games are pretty manpower heavy. And as Joe mentioned as well, the hotel is not open for public bookings at the moment. We right now are doing just one floor. Some of that is just demand. But the other piece of it is, is we're taking a very slow approach to kind of reopening. You know, health and safety is kind of our main priority. So we don't want to open up things too fast. And we want to kind of remain under that, you know, restrictions that we have in terms of the capacity. So I don't have any data in terms of breaking down the positions. But what I can say is right now, you know, where the problem, you know, 858 to 900 range. I don't know if that answers the question. Yeah, thanks, Jose. That's great. Okay. So moving along, anybody else have anything on the workforce that they wanted to add? Okay. So number five, should the commission continue to allow funding to pay for a portion of the construction costs of transportation projects? So last year was our first year where we actually paid for construction. And those grants were awarded in in June. And that construction needs to start by essentially next June. So they have, you know, time to get out to bid on the project and so on. We received, there was a lot of interest in that we received over six and a quarter million in applications. We originally we set a target of 3 million statewide and we actually funded 3.2 million. So, you know, it's our thought is we should probably keep the status quo on that. And maybe the question we should we could possibly, you know, increase that 3 million to all the statewide target, since we had a lot of interest last year. But then one of the issues that came up on that is should the commission cap the percentage of construction costs that the mitigation fund will fund. So our guidelines last year said that the commission anticipates any CMF assistance provided will only be for a percentage of the cost of any such project. And that significant other federal, state, local, private or other funding will be available to pay for the cost of any such project. So we didn't put a hard cap on what the commission would pay. What we found is, you know, the whole notion of this is that while the transportation construction project is addressing a casino related impact, that there was generally a much larger ancillary benefit to the community that's associated with the project. And, you know, you know, if you're increasing, you know, if you just the example here is West Springfield, we provided a grant of a million dollars to West Springfield for the name of the streets escaping me right now, but right at the North End Bridge there. We provided a million dollars out of a $3 million construction project. And we felt that paying, you know, about a third of that was was probably a fair amount. You know, they did demonstrate that there was a relation to the casino about the traffic that's using that corridor. But the reality is that this project is also a, it was a complete streets project, it was providing better pedestrian access and bike access and a whole lot of other things that the town was benefiting from. It wasn't particularly associated with the casino itself. There was some ancillary benefit. Yes, if you can get more bikes through there and they can get across the bridge and use the bikeway along the river and go to the casino that way. So there was definitely some ancillary benefit, but the thought was that it was a that, you know, if we wound up funding 100% of these things, it's a little bit of the tail wagging the dog. So in this grant round we got a bunch of applications and a couple of them provided no local match at all. And they were fairly far afield. These were in the eastern region and they were pretty far afield from the casinos. And it was, we were hard pressed to say yes on projects like that. You know, we asked the communities against saying, you're proposing to put up anything on this. They're like, nope, we want 100% money from the mitigation fund. And we just simply couldn't do that. So the thought here is that we raised this issue a year ago when we sort of created this fund and we decided not to put a hard cap on it. I think my thought is that having a cap on it, maybe 25% or up to a third or somewhere around there is probably kind of the right number. In this case, this year we, the highest we want was about one third of the project cost. So I don't know if anybody has any thoughts on that particular item. Okay, not here. Any? I think I don't think a cap should be put on it. I think the whoever's determining should be given the ability to make that determination within the grant request. That's my opinion. I think there should be, I don't know about a cap, but I think that there should be a requirement of a local match. I don't think you need to set a cap because it may depend on each project, but I think that we, you know, at least should require some sort of a match. Agreed, yeah. Yeah, you know, that's, that's when you start running into some difficulty. What's the right number? You know, is it, is it a dollar for dollar match? Is it a, you know, and when you're doing that, you're essentially setting a cap, right? Yeah, it's Rick's solving. I mean, I don't have a problem with, with the cap as it's been explained. I mean, I also wouldn't have a problem saying up to 50% of the total cost because having been around long enough to know that not even all the communities access their money for transportation projects as a result of the casino. So I think finding that link between impacts from the casino and these transportation projects, I mean, I think 50% is probably more than adequate, but I would agree with the previous comments that, you know, there absolutely has to be some kind of a local, local match if it's that important to the community. So, you know, maybe up to 50%, but I don't, I don't have a problem with, with no cap as long as there's, there's some contribution from the local community. Yeah, I have to agree there. I'm under the understanding that funds are available elsewhere as well to provide for these construction projects and transportation projects. So I think that instituting some sort of match is important. And to your point, Joseph, I think that we should kind of try to iron out what that entails. Is it a dollar for a dollar? Is it a dollar for 50 cents? I think that's something that we should, if we, if that's where we want to go and say that there should be a match, I think that we should put some numbers to that. Judy Theocales. Yeah. I like the idea that Mr. Sullivan put forward that there should be some kind of a cap, but perhaps each community's situation and what they're going to be putting before the commission would be varied, that maybe, you know, the commission should just go with guidelines, you know, some match and leave it up to them to decide what is adequate and what is not. Yeah, I think, you know, that was sort of the way it was last year where we said, you know, in the guidelines, we were expecting significant federal, state, local, private, other funding and so on. You know, and again, we had some people coming and saying, well, you know, we don't want to pay anything. You know, which is, I mean, I guess you have the right, but the, and the other thing that need any to remember is that any of these, if we put any kind of a cap on it, everything that they, that's done in this is waivable by the commission. These are guidelines and not sort of hard and fast rules. So I think if we were to do something like that and, you know, we'll want the language in the guidelines to be, to basically say that, you know, the community would have to really demonstrate, you know, that the impact from the casino was really causing the lion's share of this. I mean, if the problem is most of the transportation related impacts from the casinos were right directly around the casinos and they were required to build upgrades to those intersections and other things as part of the project. So it's, you know, that's where it gets to be a little bit difficult. Yeah, I would have to agree there. Granted, my, my whole knowledge of this definitely isn't as high as I'd like it to be. But if I, if I understand correctly, I think that some of the problems that we should be trying to mitigate are a little bit more important than traffic, I would say. So some of the negative effects of casinos, such as like what it does to spending power in the communities and the type of people they attract, I think mitigating those issues might be more important than some of these traffic woes that some local communities are dealing with, especially when they can get money from other sources, almost seems as if they're just using that commission to fund projects that they didn't want to pay for otherwise. All right. Well, great. That's that's excellent input. I appreciate all of that. So under item seven, we're talking about funds for large transportation or economic development projects. We've been talking about this for a while. There's some information about the Community Mitigation Fund and the Gaming Economic Development Fund at the back of this document. We won't go into it in detail at this point. So number eight, this is a new item. It's been talked about a little bit in the past. And after what, after our experience in the last year, we thought it might make some sense to do this. And it says, should the commission consider the creation of an emergency reserve within the Community Mitigation Fund for unknown impacts that arise after February 1, 2021? So our due date is actually the 31st of January for applications. And the thought here was that, you know, what happens if something came up, you know, during the course of the year and it says applications have to be in before February 1? What happens if something happens in March or May or July that's really a serious issue? Would there be a way for us to do this? And, you know, I used to work in another state program where we had an emergency reserve. This was in the water and sewer arena in the state revolving fund. But we would put some amount of money aside. And in most years it was never used. But in a couple of years, one example was the town of Plymouth, their main trunk sewer that brought all of their wastewater from the town to the wastewater treatment plant first. And that was really an emergency. And we were able to get money to these folks quickly. So the thought was here, you know, is there a way to do that? And we could simply do that as part of the, you know, establish in the guidelines what the rules of that would be. And saying, you know, this isn't just a way to circumvent the process just because you might have missed the application deadline or something. And it would really have to be something that's truly an emergency. And I can't think of an example right now, but then again, I didn't think that it would be a pandemic hitting either. So I guess I think we think it's a pretty good idea. We were talking about putting basically a couple hundred thousand dollars towards that, which is in the grand scheme of things on the whole community mitigation fund is a small amount of money. And if it doesn't get used, that would just roll back into the system. And we could do it the next year. And we could just leave it on as a sort of the money rolling over from year to year wouldn't increase. But and then we can reevaluate if it's, if it's, you know, not used in a couple of three years, maybe you don't want to have it or maybe you do. I think it makes tremendous sense. No one thought we would have tornadoes. No one thought we'd have Lawrence blow up with gas explosions. There's so many uncertainties. Having this flexible and responsive amount of money is I think a great idea. Yeah, I think it's a very good idea. But I would let the money increase if it's not used. It goes into a fund that gets larger and larger each year to maybe figure out what the maximum should be, say a million dollars, but you've got a nice cushion in case of some horrible thing that happens. Agreed. Great idea. Yeah, perfect. Excellent. Okay, number nine. Last year we did pay for some public safety operational costs for maximum $200,000. We did have four applications under this category. Two of them was approved. One was approved with a reduced level of funding and one was denied. The one that was denied was actually was the city of Springfield fire department was looking to expand their tactical unit to 24 seven operation. And you know, when we looked at the the host community agreement, that's something that definitely should have been covered if they wanted, if that's one of the things they wanted to pursue that should have been covered under the host community agreement. The other one was in West Springfield. They were losing some funding for they had some grant funding that that was being lost. And then a couple others were in Everett. Number 10, utilizing all the various studies that we have available to us, we want to continue to use those and develop that information when we're evaluating our applications. Item 11, Regency potential tribal casino. We've been setting aside $200,000 for that region should anything happen with the tribal casino. That money was going to go to SERPED is the regional planning agency there to help the communities surrounding Taunton should the tribal casino move ahead. We don't expect there's going to be any movement on that this year, but we'll probably continue to just set aside that 200,000. This is similar to that really that emergency grant we just talked about. Item 12, should the commission require a dollar for dollar match for its CMF grants in here? Here's a list here that says, you know, we don't require matches under most things. We talked about that transportation construction where we really asked for a significant amount, but like on the specific impact is no grant on some of these planning grants. We, you know, we ask for in-kind services and some other things. So I don't know if you just want to think about that a little bit. You know, the thought is the notion of having some skin in the game is always kind of important, but also if you require that, you tend to get fewer grant applications, you know, when communities have to put up their own money. But part of the problem we had last year is some of these applications weren't there was some relation to the casino, but again, there was much more of a local benefit. And, you know, we love all of these projects, but we have to fund casino related impacts. And there were several of these this year where we were saying that really this was just more the community trying to get a grant for something that maybe they shouldn't be trying to get a grant, or at least from us. And then under 13 here, should we place a time limit for the use of previously authorized reserves for the 2021 community mitigation fund program? So, you know, back in 2015 and 16, each host and surrounding community was given $100,000 to do some studies and other things, sort of really in preparation for the opening of the casino. And we have a number of communities that have only used have not used any of that money or only used a portion of that money today. And sort of our thought is we can't really leave this money hanging out there forever, you know, without it being used. So, the thought here was to try was to say to to say to these communities here, you have some time certain going forward to get this money used or you're going to lose it. And our thought was sort of to maybe have them at least have the money committed by the end of calendar year 2021. You know, and I am starting to do some outreach to these communities because there are some of these places they may not even know that they have this grant out there. You have a turnover in administrations or there's a turnover in the planning staff or something like that. And, you know, they sort of forget about this stuff. So, we're going to remind those communities again, that they have the money out there. But our thought is that at some point we have to say, you know, enough is enough, either use the money or lose it. I don't know if anyone has any thoughts on that in particular. We agree with everything you just said. I think the expectation and most grants is that there's a expiration period. But I also believe that there may be communities that aren't aware that they have the funds right now because of the change in administration. So, that outreach is probably is crucial first, but setting a deadline is a good idea. We have talked about a year in our last non-meeting as an appropriate guideline for notice. Yeah, I think, you know, and a lot of the a lot of these reserves were used, say, for hiring a consultant to try to work with local businesses to try to take advantage of opportunities with the casinos and things of that nature. So, our thought was that we would probably give them a year to maybe not to have the money completely spent, but at least to have it committed. You know, if they had to do an RFP to get a consultant, they would have that opportunity to do that and get somebody signed up. And, you know, we don't want to just take money back if we don't need to, but we need to understand if these communities really have the intention of using this and if they do, they need to do it soon. Yeah, I mean, if they had the opportunity to access in 2017, so I mean, if you put a five-year window on it, you know, that's 2022 or maybe that's only another year from when you're talking anyway. I mean, if they haven't seen it as a need in five years, chances are it's not really casino related. And I understand the last months with COVID perhaps are not indicative of impacts, but again, I just go back to an earlier comment. If communities didn't access this money, these monies kind of right away, I just don't see where there's a direct impact of any real significance with the casino over a five-year period of time. So, I would have no problem putting a cap on it and saying, you know, it is use it or lose it. Yep. Yep. Agreed. Agreed. Excellent. Agreed. Okay, so item 14, this is authorizing funding for non-transportation related planning in those communities that have expended their reserves. So, these were, you know, we initially had these transportation planning grants and then when communities had used up their reserves, we came up with this category sounding very bureaucratic of non-transportation planning grants. I'm actually proposing to change the name of that category just to community planning grants, which sounds a little bit more friendly, I think. And, but I think we're proposing to continue those going ahead. Again, these are those types of planning projects that look to maybe try to take advantage of opportunities with the casino, you know, take opportunities of maybe attracting folks who are coming to the casino to maybe come to their communities and things of that nature. Those are types of things that have been done. So, administrative costs, we did allow some administrative costs on workforce development programs. We don't allow them in any others. We're not proposing really any changes to that. Private parties, we do not give grants to private parties. We can only give them to governmental entities, although governmental entities have, you know, sometimes work with nonprofits and others that can be considered having a public purpose. We're not proposing any changes to those guidelines. We did tighten them up last year and we're proposing to keep those the same. Joint applications, we do allow joint applications in the planning grants that we do and we certainly encourage that. We would love to see more joint applications where, you know, sort of multiple communities are working together to maybe take advantage of a, you know, an opportunity with the casino or whatever. Under 18, should we limit communities to just one specific impact grant? We have been doing that since the beginning, $500,000 maximum. Community can have multiple pieces to that $500,000. You know, you could have a piece that comes from the planning department, another from the police department, another from the party department, as long as the total doesn't exceed the $500,000. But again, and there's also, this is a waivable limit if they really determine a need, a specific impact that has a larger need than that. So under 19, the Handin County Sheriff's Office, so just as a little bit of background on this, if you don't remember, the Western Mass Correctional Alcohol Center was located in the footprint of MGM and when that property was bought up that lease was terminated and the Sheriff's Department had to find a new location for that, which they did. And their rent was significantly higher than what they were paying in downtown Springfield. So what we agreed to do back in 2016 was to give them a total, the commission decided to give them a total of $2 million for five years at $400,000 per year to help offset the cost of that. So this year is the last year of that and somewhat predictably, the Sheriff's Department, after we met with them earlier this year, said, hey, what about doing this for another five years? To which we obviously made no commitment on that. And look, as a governmental entity, they can request funds in this category if they want to do so. There's nothing that prevents them from doing that. It's just, I guess they wanted to kind of have that more set in stone than them just taking a chance on getting that. So I don't know what any of your thoughts might be on that particular piece. Judy, I think you just muted yourself there. Well, my first thought is they've had five years to find a cheaper place to rent and they obviously haven't done anything about it. So I'm not inclined to give them $400,000 a year going forward. My thought was if they need anything that they should come before the commission with a separate grant, I would not be in favor of pushing this along for $2 million for another five years. I think it's insane. This is Mary McNally. I don't know that it's insane, but I agree with not extending it for five years. I agree they could probably find a more economical space, although I'm sure they don't want to relocate yet again. But I would have them apply as any other applicant. I agree with the previous points as well. Also, I would think that asking them to provide some sort of information regarding have they seen an increase in the amount of people at the center since the casino came up, anything like that? If not, then it seems like asking for those funds is or an extension on those funds wouldn't be a good way to move forward. I think Samuel made a good point. If they can demonstrate an increase, you know, if they can demonstrate any type of impact caused by the casino, then an application would be worthy, but to just ask for another $2 million over the next five years, they're just basically hoping everybody says yes. Yeah, and I think, you know, as I said, they are certainly eligible to apply for a grant from the Community Mitigation Fund. I mean, there clearly was an impact to their operation and them having to move. Now, I think we would probably want to understand from them, you know, how much time did they have left in their lease when they moved out? You know, I mean, if they were in a 10-year lease and they were in year two of it, and you know, maybe there is a couple more years, maybe there's a possibility of phasing it out, you know, saying that they can come in for a grant application, you can get 300, 200, 100 of them, nothing, and then saying, you know, you know, just to say, like, you know, at some point, you got to be able to stand on your own two feet here. You've always gone to the legislature for appropriations, which, you know, really hasn't happened since this was in place. It was like, you know, they say, oh, we asked and they said no. So, you know, so I think there's some things we have to think about that. And, you know, ultimately the commission will need to decide this policy question as we're developing the guidelines, which, you know, will be in front of the commission next week, I think, starting to present these policy questions and guidelines to them. So this input is really valuable from all of you on this. I think for me, and it's a lot of anecdotal response, they had obviously a real challenge finding their current location. Public opinion and real estate searches were not necessarily seeking out this program in the neighborhood. A long-term commitment I would be opposed to, but again, going back to the current environment we're in, the number of people that are losing jobs and mental health issues that are going on in the community, I would not expect that the need for their services would be less. So I think be supporting something like you had suggested, John, not a long-term commitment of phase out and making it real clear that Long Hall isn't something that the commission fund can support. Right. Great. Thank you. So item 20, we have a few older grants that we awarded where none of the money has been spent due to various and sundry reasons. So again, we need to talk to some of these folks to understand if they really have any intention to spend this money, but if they don't, we should probably be rescinding a couple of these grants or most of these grants and putting the money back into the program. Agreed. And then on 21, this was interesting. The question is, should communities be allowed to apply to more than one category of grant for the same project? This actually, we never sort of envisioned that happening, but it happened in 2020. We had a community, it was a transportation construction project, and they filed on a specific impact category and under the transportation construction category. And as it turns out, the project was really good. And what they probably should have done was just ask for a waiver from the dollar value on the transportation construction category, but they didn't. Anyways, it was really a good project. And we did end up funding it. We don't think that people should apply. They should pick a category and apply for the grant in that category. And if they think that they need relief from the caps on the category, they can certainly ask for waivers from that, and there's a whole waiver process to do that. And then you'll see these items onto 22 and some of these supplemental items. These are just the things that we use to evaluate the grants. So I don't think we need, you can feel free to read through those at your leisure. And if you think there's anything else that we should be doing, we'd be glad to hear it. But with that, I'm going to stop sharing that. And so that's pretty much it on the policy questions. And again, thanks for the input on that. It's really very helpful to us. And I think especially to Commissioner Stebbins, who's getting to listen to your comments and will ultimately be one of the people deciding what's going to happen on the guidelines. So the next item that we had on here was the discussion of the guidelines. And I don't think we're going to do that today, since you've just really gotten your hands on the policy questions. Mary sent out a copy of, and these are a very rough draft. And what they did was they sort of pulled in some of the language on things that we haven't necessarily decided yet on, you know, like a cap on the transportation construction and some suggestions and changes to the language on the sheriff. And I just wanted to start that process. So I guess what I would ask is if you can read through those draft guidelines and, you know, I think we can talk at our next, Mary, what's our next meeting schedule? I believe it's the 17th of November. Is November 17th, 130 to 3. Okay. So I think what will be, I guess what we can go through all the guidelines there, because we'll be coming back to the commission with final guidelines in early December. So why don't we, why don't we put that on the discussion of the guidelines for that meeting as sort of the top agenda item? And yeah, and these guidelines will be going out for public comment after the meeting next week. But they are just the draft guidelines. Right. And I think, so Bellamy, I think it was you who asked for a little bit of an update on, you know, COVID and the casino reopenings. So what's the impact? I did pull together some numbers. I don't have a document to share with you, but I thought I would just, I can just kind of walk through some of the issues. So employment is obviously one of the big ones. And we just did hear from MGM that they had about 800 to 900 folks working there. But again, they were over 2000, 2004 was the number that we had at the end of 2019. And that was those were the folks working at the facility for MGM. There were some, you know, folks in the movie theater and some of the leaf spaces that were additional employees. Encore was at about 4,400 employees at the end of 2019. And they're at about 2,600 now, 2,600, 2,700. And Plain Ridge Park Casino was at a little under 500. They're at about half of that today. So obviously the employment is down. But so what does that mean? I mean, a big part of this is that a lot of the operations are closed at the facilities. So like, for example, on Plain Ridge Park, their gaming floor is open, they're doing their horse racing. They just ramped back up to 24, 24 hour day operation. But all their restaurants are closed, all the sit down restaurants. So all they have open, they have a food court open with the Dunkin Donuts and Smash Burger and stuff like that. And again, MGM, you know, their gaming floor is open at a reduced capacity. What they ended up having to do was separate everyone by six feet. So that meant, you know, if you had a bank of say four slot machines, you'd have to shut off the two in the middle. So people sitting at the end were six feet apart, or put up plexiglass, things of that. No poker, no co. Am I back? Yeah, so there was no poker, no craps, no roulette when they first opened the commission just allowed roulette to start coming back in. You know, again, the restaurants are open at a reduced level, sometimes just the weekends, sometimes Thursday through Sunday, that kind of thing. You know, encore, same deal, reduced capacity of the gaming floor. There, their hotel is open just Thursday through Sunday nights. You know, MGM hasn't been open yet. They've opened up partially. Again, their restaurants, some of them are just like Thursday through Sunday, Wednesday through Sunday, that kind of thing. So there's definitely a significantly reduced capacity. You know, no one is doing conferences or things of that nature, or you can't do big functions, you know, both MGM and encore have their big ballrooms and other things that can't be used. But what I thought was very interesting is the gaming revenues. So looking at MGM first, so for the August of 2020 gaming revenues, so that was the first full month that they had back in operation because they came back in sort of the middle of July. So discounting July, their gross gaming revenue was $18.5 million. Now by comparison, in August of 2019, their gross gaming revenue was $21 million. So their gross gaming revenue just the first month back was 88% of what it was the year before, which I don't know what I was expecting, but I don't think I was expecting that right out of the shoe. So I'm just comparing it to the last month of operation. So February of 2020, which was their last full month of operation before they shut down, their gross gaming revenue was $21.9 million that month. So the August of 2020 numbers, 84.5% of the pre-COVID numbers with a reduced number of slot machines, a reduced number of table games. You know, encore is similar. So their August of 2020 gross gaming revenue was $42.4 million. And in August of 2019, and at February of 2020, their gross gaming revenue was just was the same at $52.5 million. So they're at about 81% of their pre-COVID numbers. Plain Ridge Park, very similar. They're at about 84% of their numbers from a year ago. So the gaming portion of the properties are doing pretty well, I would say. Thank you. We don't have the numbers for this September. Numbers will actually be coming out today, Tuesday, on Thursday, it looks like. So I haven't seen those numbers yet. That will give us a better idea of whether this is sort of pent up demand that people just wanted to get back out, or is it a trend, or is it the numbers getting better or getting worse? We just won't know until we know. Which is why we need to be very careful about the community mitigation fund since we get 6.5% of the taxes on those revenues going to the community mitigation fund. The estimates that we do for how much money we're going to put in the fund for 2021 will bear on what happens this fall in September, December, and the gaming revenues. So that's essentially what has happened. They were closed for four months basically, and they're back opening, they're phasing things back in. Bruce, anything else you wanted to add on that with the reopenings? No, I would say you hit on something, the important piece, which is the revenue figures. As Joe said, mid 80% of the revenues that they were doing at full operation were excited to see, and we just gave them approval to reopen their roulette tables. That's really obviously for Encore and MGM, and configure the table safely and make some changes to the rules and allow three people to game at a roulette table. It will be the five or six people kind of putting bets over their friend's shoulders, but hopefully the way we've partnered with the gaming operators to reconfigure roulette, we can keep it safe and enjoyable for everybody that's playing. And just a word of thanks for all of you for helping out and being part of this committee. We greatly appreciate the input and taking notes on your thoughts as you've gone through the guidelines with Joe and answer the question. So thanks to everybody on the line. I'm curious if there's any anecdotal evidence that the gamers who are making up that 84% are pretty much the dedicated regular folks, and then the rest were really more just occasional recreational and maybe played for shorter periods of time and therefore didn't really win very much. And that's why you're seeing, that you're seeing that it's like the 80-20 rule, 20% of your clients, 80% of your revenue. Do you think that that's possible? It's a great question. Sometimes the way we can dig into that data is with player card information, but it's a good question to ask. It's a great question to ask. We actually have a meeting coming up on, I think, this week that looks at a lot of the data that we've collected on the success of MGM and some of the research that we've done on MGM and their impact. I think we can still probably get meeting notices out to everybody on this committee if you have some time and would like to listen in to some of the results. Okay, so Mary, just next steps. You're muted, Mary. You're muted, Mary. The next steps are just review the guidelines and we'll be discussing them at the next meeting. Okay, and if anybody has any written comments or anything on any of the policy questions, feel free to get them to me or to Mary and Atanya and all three of us. Again, the more input that we have on these, the better results we get out of all of this. Again, we do appreciate your input. I think that covers the agenda. I guess with that, we could get a motion to adjourn. Atanya, could you just do a roll call for the vote? Thank you. Jen Bonfiglio? Yes. Mary McNally? Bellamy Schmidt? Yes. Carmina Fernandez? Judy Theocles? Yes. Sam Darkwa? Yes. Laurie Tanner? Yes. Allison Ebner? Richard Sullivan? Yes. Ellen Potashnik? Yes. All right. Thanks again, everybody. Do appreciate it and we'll see you the next time. Okay, thanks. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you.