 All right, it looks like the folks signing up have slowed down to a trickle. So I think we can probably get started. So firstly, this is this is our community mitigation fund workshop for municipalities. Thanks everybody for coming. Just a few housekeeping items before we delve in. First, this is being recorded. We are doing that so that we can we can put this up on the website afterwards if people want to listen in to what we had to say if they weren't able to make the meetings and so on. And so my name is Joe Delaney. I'm the chief of community affairs here for the mass gaming commission and I'm joined by Mary Thurlow who's our senior program manager and Lily Wallace our program manager. And pretty much for the folks who have dealt with the community mitigation fund before that the three of us are the people that you deal with mostly because we're pretty much the whole show here. So, so with that. So during the process of this we will stop a couple of times for questions and answers. We would ask that if you had any questions while we're presenting if you could use the chat function. So you see that at the, you know, on your. chat function to type in any questions and we'll keep we'll monitor those and as as we're going along, and certainly answer them during, during the breaks. We also do ask if you can stay muted during the presentations that would be greatly appreciated. When we do get to questions and answers. I do see a couple of folks I think who checked in on the phone. So I'm not seeing anybody now. If you do, if you do call in on the phone star six would be what you need to do to unmute. And also, we will be loading the PowerPoint that we're going to share with you up on our website so that you can take a look at that afterwards, if you need a bit of a refresher. So with that, I'm going to start sharing my screen we've got a PowerPoint presentation to go through. We will. Okay, is everybody seeing that. Okay, so again, this is our community mitigation fund our municipal grant workshop. So what we're going to do today is we're going to go over. So what's new with the program which is a lot. We really revamped this whole program for the year. So what we will do after we go through some of the highlights of the changes we will then walk through a grant application with all of you. What we have done is we put together an example application we created our fictional town of Sudburham, and we will walk you through parts of that we have also uploaded this whole example on our website. And the presentation will also walk you through our website a little bit so that you can help you find the things that the resources that you need to find on the website. Okay, so let's jump right in what is new for the 2025 grant round. The first thing is, we have created a two tiered grant program the first part is the municipal block grant which is what we're here to discuss today. And then the second item is the regional agency grant so that is for like the district attorney's offices and regional planning agencies and our workforce programs. We will not be discussing that here today we have a separate workshop set up for next week for those regional agencies but so so today we'll be focusing on that the block grant program itself. So on the block grant program, all of the communities have received a grant of proposed grant amount for their communities that identify how much money that can be applied for. So, so you have all of that. So the regional on the municipal block grants, excuse me. The municipalities are required to submit a single application for the entire community. For those of you who have, who have come in for grants before with us. Oftentimes, different departments would submit their own grant applications for instance a community might have an application from a police department from a fire department and also from a planning agency. For this year of going forward, I should say, we will be requiring a single application for the entire community. So what that means is that, you know, the community is going to have to get together all of the various departments who are looking for grant funds are going to have to get together and decide how to divvy up the amount of money that has been designated for your community. So, so once you do that applications will be filled out on the various categories and then submitted to us as a single grant application. You'll hear this from us a few times today just because it's it's very important. These applications are due to us by January 31. If we don't receive an application from your community, the grant funds for your community will be forfeited for that year. That doesn't mean you can't come in in years after that. But, but we have a statutory requirement in the expanded gaming act that says all applications have to be into us before February 1, which in this case obviously is January 31. So please keep that in mind when putting together any of your applications. The third item is we have tried best we can to provide some more detailed project guidance for the communities. We heard this in in a lot of the outreach meetings that we did is that anything that we can do to better define what the impacts are and what some other types of projects people can do would be appreciated by the communities and we have tried to do that as much as we can. So, in the guidelines in the in the 2025 guidelines. What we've done in each grant category is we've said, here are what the impacts are that we recognize. Here are some of the types of projects that you could do that would address those impacts, and also we've provided some ineligible projects. We've had in the past. Communities come in and asking for things that really weren't eligible they were either sort of routine municipal expenses or other things. And we've tried to pull those out and, and so we would certainly ask all of the communities to read those 2025 guidelines. I believe when we sent out this meeting invitation we attached a PDF copy of the guidelines to each and every person who who was invited to this meeting so you should all have those guidelines and we really hope that you take a good look through them because they have changed quite a lot from from previous years. The next item is administrative costs previously we did not allow any of the grant funds to be used for the cost of administering the grant. We will now allow up to 7.5% of the grant to be used for administration with a cap of $50,000. So what that does is for those folks who are pulling together the quarterly reports or the payment requests or any of the things that are associated with the administration of the grant. Some of those that that time can be charged off against the grant itself. So hopefully that will ease the burden on the communities a little bit. The next item funding for regional planning agencies, we're not going to talk about this extensively today, because this these are falls under the regional application. So we are providing $250,000 to each of the regional planning agencies that are associated with the gaming establishments. So those are MAPC PVPC and SERP head. So if a community or communities have have something that they consider to be a more regional impact that they want addressed it might make sense to contact your regional planning agency to talk about that with them to see if there is some opportunity to either use those grant funds for those regional type projects. And then the next item was we are converting this to a fiscal year you'll see on all of our documents now it's the FY 2025 CMF grant so technically there will be no 2024 grant we did this. The commission itself operates on the state fiscal year and I think all of our communities operate on that same state fiscal year that starts July 1 so we just wanted to come into alignment with that. And then item seven on waivers. We've always had a waiver process for any of our guidelines and we will talk about this at some more like later in this presentation. When we developed this block grant program, our fear was that we couldn't run into a case or two or three, where a community may have projects that exceed the allotment that they were that they were given. And what we did in order to address that, at least initially in this first year of this block grant program is to allow a community to request a waiver from that amount. You know, sort of a specific project that might kick them over on on that amount. So, we will talk about this more later, and also this item number eight. The transportation category, we've done some changes there we've combined the transportation planning and the transportation construction categories into a single transportation category. We also have put some limitations on on the planning projects themselves on what what's eligible for for projects not just for planning but for transportation projects. And also we've changed the method of calculating the subsidy for transportation construction projects. So we will go through those in more detail later in this presentation. Now what hasn't changed. The basic tenant of this program is that every single project has to identify a casino related impact. And every project has to be designed to mitigate that identified impact those things have always been true in the program and do not change now. What we are trying to do here is is to make it a little easier for communities to to identify those casino related impacts, and also provide some guidance on what types of projects might be eligible to address those impacts. That has always been the case and will be the case, as they, as long as the law exists as it does, which requires us to mitigate those casino related impacts. So, how do you determine a casino related impact. What we did this past year is, you know, we heard loud and clear from our advisory committees and from some outreach that we had with communities that helping the communities identify the casino related impacts would be would be a great help. What we did was we looked at all of our research that we've done over the years, we've looked at we have a consultant that we've worked with this company Grillo, who has done a lot of work in the problem gambling arena, but we also asked them to look at other jurisdictions and other studies that might have been done to see if we could identify casino related impacts. So again we looked at our own research. We looked at other things on, on, on just looking out doing research out on the internet, where we found, you know, guidance documents by, you know, like the American gaming Association and others that that talked about some specific impacts and how to try to prevent them. So we tried to compile all of that, and include as much of it as we put into our guidelines. And again, it's very important that you look at the guidelines. And that will outline sort of those things that we recognize as being impacts, or you know, likely impacts of the casino what we did learn in our research is that there's, there's a lot of of some of these things where, where the, where the studies say, well, it may be associated, it could be associated with the casino. And we tried to take those things that, that we considered to be likely to be associated with the casino as, as being the casino impacts. And that said, if a community out there has something else that is not included in our guidelines or in some of these other other research they've done research on their own or whatever the case may be community can certainly submit that along with their application. And we will, we will certainly consider it but the bar obviously is higher on something like that, that it is picking something right out of our guide. Okay, and then the last item I wanted to talk with before we get to some questions and answers. When we crafted this program we have, we have several categories that grants can be done in. And the commission really would like to see the money spread across these various categories. And really when we looked at this we thought about, you know, similar to the Community Preservation Act where they have I think three categories of grants that say a certain amount of money has to be spent in each grant category. We thought about doing that but in the end we decided to not make that a requirement, at least for fiscal year 2025. We put in sort of a suggested minimum spending for each category, saying 15% for community planning, transportation, public safety and the gambling harm reduction. And that would be 40% that could be spread among those or in the specific impact category as appropriate. I understand that some communities that are getting the minimum grant amounts. It may not make sense to try to split those those amounts up into, into multiple categories. And we get that. But we would like to see the issues that addressed in, in, in all of the categories so for the at least this first year we're going to just monitor this. And we'll, you know, we'll monitor how the communities do and we'll look at it, you know, for next year to see if we want to make this a requirement or if we just want to keep it as a suggestion. So I'm going to stop there with. And I'm going to stop the sharing and open things up for questions. There is a question from Bill Dignan of Cambridge. Does the first bullet on page five about projected impacts mean that funds may not be used for climate mitigation, such as flooding prevention related to the Mystic River. Yes, again, the, the, the answer to that is if, if a connection can be made to the casino, an impact from the casino as contributing to flooding on the Mystic River, we could certainly consider it but I would say that that, that would that would probably be a bit of a stretch trying to trying to equate the casino with with the flooding of the Mystic River. And Joe, this is Bill. So, yes, so the, so the fact that the casino produces emissions that contribute to climate change would not be considered. You know, I mean, you would have to say what we know what what percentage is the casino contributing to climate change based on everything else that happens in the community. I mean, again, it would, it would probably be a pretty bit of a stretch I think to try to to try to make that next is to try to quantify how much the casino was contributed. Are you are you requiring quantification for all other categories as well. No, what we're saying is if you if you use one of the, the impacts that are identified in our guidelines, you don't have to do any. Okay. For instance, we said, like in transportation we're saying that, you know, the increases in traffic associated with the casino are likely to cause increases in congestion on the roadways. So if you do a project that decreases congestion on the roadways, and it addresses it addresses congestion on, you know, sort of those major routes to the casino. There's no quantification that you really need to do on that. It's, if you're going off the board and not picking something out of the guidelines. That's where we would require more justification. Okay, I respectfully ask the commission to reconsider that, because I think climate related projects are something that communities really want to do. And I think it does contribute to that. I mean, I'm not, I'm not dismissing it out of hand but we would have to see what the application look like to, to, to, you know, to make that connection. Okay, so let's see we have a couple other questions. One from West Springfield we have an equipment needed the police department is the FY 2025 mean we wouldn't be able to make the purchase until July of 2024. That is correct. But with these we will, you know, we'll be reviewing, as we've done in the past, you know, we review all of these things come in January 31 we review them through, you know, February, March, April, May, and you know we try to get all the awards out by by the end of June. So we have another question here the MGC block grant requires all some projects submitted as one grant application. What if the MGC decides one portion of the grant is awardable but not the others with the town for the whole grant application or could it be awarded a piece of the full budget. Yes, we would, we would not reject the entire application. And what would typically happen on this as we review these things. I think this process is being far more collaborative. You know in the past we would look at the applications and then just send out a letter saying hey we have these questions and ask you to respond. We think in this case we would be able to, you know, we able to work with the communities closer to saying, Hey, maybe if you tweak this thing this way we could get, we could get that in under the grant. So we may run into a few things where we say no, there's just, there's just no way, but we would certainly award the remainder of the grant to the community. And then we say on regional application initiatives should these ideas always go through the regional planning entities or kind of a couple of municipalities get together on their own. Yes, multiple communities can certainly work together you can pool your money. We do talk about that in our guidelines that that it's absolutely eligible for communities to work together. I think just of the example of in the last couple of years. We had, you know, Fox world playing bill and rent them working together on on a sort of a regional initiative, and we definitely don't want to discourage anyone from doing that. What I thought here was if there if there was something that was on that really needed to be dealt with on a more regional basis that the regional planning agencies might be a better way to go. But definitely we want communities to think, think about working together on on various initiatives. Let's see it says here Medford currently has a traffic engineer position through previous casino funding. As we move into FY 2025 and we improve our parking department we to hire a traffic enforcement officer with a position like this be eligible. So we talk in the guidelines about the hiring of staff. The one thing is we won't pay for an entire position. We don't have to do the community mitigation fund. And anytime that someone is hiring staff they have to demonstrate that that you know what time of theirs is being spent on casino related items. That has proven to be a high bar to pass and I think still still would be. In the past is we've had communities certainly do some, you know, increased patrols and things like that that were, that were done with overtime where they could really parse out, you know, that hey we're doing late night patrols because we're seeing an increase in DUIs or whatever the case might be. And we think that's, you know, due to the casino, and we want to do some four hour blocks of late nights on Fridays and Saturdays. So that's something that we've done with Everett for the last couple of years. So, you know, hiring a traffic enforcement officer. I think community would be hard pressed to say that that officer is spending 100% of their time on casino related items, which is something that would have to be certified to the commission. And I think it's probably either we could fund do partial funding of a position but the community would have to come up with the remainder of the funding, or something more like an overtime, overtime position, you know, type of work. Another question for clarification can administrative funds cover staff time. Yes, I mean that's that's what that's largely what this is for. And again, this is for the people who are, you know, administering the grant, I said the people who were doing quarterly reports and putting together payment estimates and, and doing all of those kinds of things that are of an administrative nature, you know, to to to administer the grant. You know routine staff time. You know, unless it's directly associated with the grant. You know, we wouldn't really be able to do that. Another question. Due to traffic related issues with the casino, our local police departments allowed to purchase a cruiser for traffic purposes. This would not be used for a regular replacement of a vehicle. You know, we have allowed purchases of vehicles, but these have to be something that supplement the operation and not supplant existing operations. So, last year we had a lot of requests for vehicles, and a lot of them when I want to ask well what's what's the status of this it says well we're going to buy these vehicles and replace two vehicles that we're going to get rid of. And that is clearly supplanting existing funding you know communities have a responsibility to replace their vehicles and, and do that in a timely fashion. And, and, and that's not something that's due to the casino at all. You know, in in so if it has to be something that sort of over and above what the community currently does, and it has to be related to the casino. So I mean it's hard to answer the question directly by saying yes or no. But in whatever proposal you're doing you would need to demonstrate to us very clearly that this is not just a routine municipal expenditure that they're trying to push off on the community mitigation. So let's see the next question we have a lot of questions here. This is this is good. Our community received an allotment number is this the amount we can expect as long as we meet the grant guidelines, or this more of a top amount we could possibly expect. So that is the amount that you can apply for. You know, as long as you are following our guidelines and apply for projects. Again, the two things that have to be done you have to show a casino impact, and you have to show how your project will mitigate that impact. If you do those two things. You know, you will get you will get the grant so it's it is our hope that all of the communities apply for the full amount of the grant and they all get awarded the full amount of the grant that's what we would really love to see. So the next question is, can we combine into one project a traffic safety request from us playing bill and surpad. In short, I would say yes, we would have to obviously see the details of it but again, we allow different groups to work together. You know, if, if. Since this was a request with from North Adelbar title and North Adelbar and playing bill and surpad working together can, you know, if North Adelbar and playing bill wanted to use surpad to do some kind of study for them they could they could funnel money to surpad to do that, or if you know so again we encourage projects that that that, you know, they go across multiple communities. The city regionality whenever we can. Question here about whether any major changes to the public safety portion of the application. No, not particularly, we did. It was in the public safety area where we did have a lot of items that came in that have come in that really aren't eligible for funding so we did. In the public safety area there are a number of exclusions on on things that are not eligible for funding again we talked about sort of routine replacement of equipment or vehicles or things like that. You know, there are, there are certain things that are the responsibility of a of a police department or fire department, you know, EMTs to, you know, provide equipment to their employees and you know, so, so there's that, you know, we, we did put some of those exclusions in there. Question on table 6.2 dash nine. I'm not going to be able to answer that in this public me I don't have the question from the city of Springfield, Andy will have to talk offline about that. About the particular details on that. Okay, it seems that is all the questions that anybody else have anything, you know you can unmute to ask a question if you wanted to. One quick question. Yes. Like, good morning. I had a question regarding a, it's a police issue in the, I'm not familiar with the Boston area police emergency radio network. So that's been in place since the 1970s as an original radio system use for emergency situations. And every community that's part of the, that would be involved in the encore area, as well as the Plainville area are all part of the Bay Pern regional radio network. Anyways, this system is in need of some upgrades it's got some equipment needs that are, you know, near the end of life. If we were to apply. I'm assuming that would be under the regional agency grand part of it. That's what I want to clarify. Or would it be a different way to do that. So, are you talking about Everett applying for it, it would be, it would be all these communities surrounding, not just ever it would be all the communities that are eligible in the every region, as well as the Plainville region. It covers this radio network covers is everybody in those regions. So it would be a would be a large group and I know you mentioned like MAPC. That's what I'm just trying to understand how, how we could go about doing this. You know, on the regional agency grants, you know, we spelled out some very, you know, specific agencies because we have DA's offices we've got our workforce grants and we have the regional planning grants, but other agencies can apply under that, under that grant. You know, but again, they've got to make that nexus to the casino. You know, we have a situation we're down down in the Plainville area one of the regional. I don't remember all of the details of it. One of the regional groups down there that does some like emergency response and stuff was looking for radios for their operation and we weren't able to really make any connection to the casino from that group. So that one might be, I'm not going to say no to anything, but that one might be a tough sell because I remember, you know, ever came in and needed some radios because you literally couldn't communicate from outside the casino into the inside of the casino. That certainly made sense and we agree that that was a casino related impact. But again, that's going to be that would be the challenge for something like that. And I think is to make that that nexus. Yeah, I mean, this system is is used and emerge like for example there was an emergency at that on core of playing playing bill. When you have multiple agencies responding. That's what this radio network is designed for for interoperable communications between multiple agencies. That's what it supports. There's not any large scale incident in and around their playing bill. I mean, I mean, I think there's a nexus and connection. I mean, obviously, I appreciate you, you know, you're saying it wouldn't be automatically be no but you know, maybe we'll just get some get some paperwork done up on it. Yeah, yeah, you know, I'd start talking and see what you know what comes out of it. Okay, thank you. So a couple more questions did come in. One is can community submit an application prior to the deadline and get a response prior to the deadline. You can certainly submit before the deadline, but you will not get a response before the deadline. I mean, we can tell you that we received it. But that's that's about it. We don't open these things until after, you know, on February one is the day that we sort of open the applications and start our review process. And then would there be any flexibility to change use of the funds after award, since needs may evolve if the application specifies a particular project that we find our needs change, will we be able to alter the use of funds later, perhaps by resubmitting a request to revise the application. The only answer on that is yes. You know, typically we've had many grant applications that have come in where their scope has morphed a little bit and you know, we've certainly made changes to them. You know, we would. We would like to keep those to a minimum if we can. It's just it's just a lot of review things have to go back to the commission for votes and so on. But yeah, that's certainly is something that can be done. And I see Aaron Vega from folio has his hand up Aaron. Thanks Joe and thanks Joe and Mary and Lily for putting this together obviously we've been able to utilize this funding for a little while it's great and I think that the new format will be interesting. I think we have, I think we have a company from Hoyok on this call hopefully our DPW and our police so they can be part of this this grant application to make sure it's one application coming in from the city. My question is under the community planning part in that section. I'm assuming we're going to probably apply for a waiver perhaps because, you know, as you know, again, I can, we can bring this offline if it makes more sense but you know we're still trying to capitalize on the tourism effect of MGM casino here in Springfield and we've had some really great success with our website with some of the collaborations going on our mural tours and so like that event event shuttles coming from MGM to events in Hoyok. I'm hoping we're going to be able to, it's not normal city practices so it doesn't fall under stuff that should be covered under the city, the explore website is completely independent. I don't see it, you know, not continue so just wondering under that community planning can we sort of look for that waiver to kind of continue some of that work that we've been doing. Yeah, you can you can request a waiver from any provision of the guy box. You know, and obviously, there's a waiver form and, and you need to submit documentation backing up why it's, you know, why waivers appropriate and so on and so forth and, you know, we haven't always granted waivers but you know, waivers are certainly eligible for any particular requirement in the guidelines. All right, thank you. Okay. I have a question from Springfield parking authority do we have to be included in the application from the city of Springfield, even though we are independent from the city. We are a quasi state entity. So we are trying to figure out how we should proceed with an application for the next round thus far we have not received any assistance from the gaming commission even though we have been significantly impacted by the casino and it's free parking. So we have, we have done grants with the parking authority before, and those were done through the city. So my suggestion would be that, you know, that the parking authority. This is a municipal grant program so you know anything would have to be done through the municipality. I mean, we, we, I know we did one grant to look at the loss of revenues or something from, from that but I believe that was done through the city but yeah this this would have to be done through the city of Springfield with their application. Okay, so that's all the questions so that was great. A lot of very good questions. I'm going to go back to sharing my screen and let's see. And I'm going to go. Alright everybody's got that. All right so on the application process. The. Again, we're, we'll ask you please please read the guidelines before filling out your applications a lot of good information in there. Also all of your municipalities have received the proposed grant amount letter and that outlines what needs to be done to do that we sent that to the, the, basically the CEO of every community and we copied several other people in each community so if for some reason any community has not received their grant amount letter, please let Mary know and we'll make sure that's done but I think that we've gotten a lot of questions from everyone on that. So again, application must be submitted by 1159pm on January 31. We do this all via email now since we did started last doing that last year, we'll go through that a little bit and a little bit later. And again just the one application per community. And it also needs to be signed by an employee with signatory authority so that's typically going to be the mayor, the town manager or something like that. I'm going to turn this over to Mary, who's going to start walking us through the application process a little bit. You're on mute Mary. Can you hear me now. Yeah. Okay, sorry about that guys. So we're going to briefly go through some of the application portion so that people can understand the information that is vital to our program. This first one is the information we need to see in the application. The municipal grant manager will be responsible for collecting the applications and attachments for submission of the full application to the commission. The municipal grant manager will receive this information from the project contact for each category. And as we get into the applications, you will see that each application has a has a specific area where you input the information for the contact person. Municipalities need to make sure that they update if there's any changes to these listings. I know just from my past couple of weeks of contacting communities. There's been a lot of municipal personnel moving around so we really need accurate information and if you know someone in your municipality is leaving their position and that they have a part of the community mitigation fund that they manage. It's vital that we get this information. One point to consider when the, when selecting your municipal grant manager is that they're also going to be compiling the information for the quarterly reports, which they'll receive from the project contact people within the municipality. So you want to you want this person to be someone who's going to be there and can contact easily all the other sub managers of this program. Next. Okay, let's take a look at this budget category summary. If you look at the top line total FY 2025 allocation is for 400,000. So I'm pointing this out because if you look down at the total, you can see that the total exceeds the allocation amount. So I wanted to point that out and I also want to point out that both the public safety and the transportation grants, you'll see that number of projects is two. So this means that there's going to be two separate applications under public safety and two under transportation. Let's make sure I just let me just add in there so that yep that FY 2025 allocation that's in the upper left that would be the proposed grant amount that was sent out to your community. So, if you've got 500,000 or 800,000 or whatever the number is that that should be included in that upper left. Yeah. Okay. And if we want to go to the next slide Joe. Okay, so here it shows that indeed under public safety, there's two discrete applications for different amounts. And you'll also note that again, based on that 400,000 under transportation, there's a $1 million grant. This is the application in which a waiver would be needed because that would bring the total of the whole application over the 400,000. The details on the specific waivers will be discussed a little bit later in our presentation. And I would just add on this, Mary, on the on the descriptions. We'd like you to give us a nice, you know, brief description of the projects and not just have them be, you know, mitigation grant or something like that. We're going to move these into our database and we're able to run reports that show, you know, what types of projects we're doing and, you know, we'd like to have a nice, you know, type description of what your project is. Okay. And here, we need you to make sure that the application is signed by someone with the authority to commit funds on behalf of the municipality municipality on the document. And that's about it. Okay, so we're going to turn over to Lily who's going to walk you through some of the particular details of the application. So again, as we said, one of the big pieces here is that you're going to be submitting one application. You can see here we have some fun different colors for the different categories that we have. So what you can do is if it's easier for your municipality is your administrator can send out these forms and then have one person compile them all back together. But you'll see that under each of the categories will have some similar things that are needed. So you can click to the next one. So we're going to be going through two different example applications. These are a little bit short just because the length of application we're looking for would not fit on a slide. So you can see here we're going to walk through really quickly a community planning example and then we'll walk through a transportation example. So under this you'll see that your projects, each individually need a name so that we can identify them, and you can identify them because if you're asking for multiple things under a category want to make sure we're talking about the right project. So you're going to be able to have two spots to add a project contact so this is going to be the day to day point of contact on this piece of it. Obviously we know that your administrator might not know that need gritty of what's happening with these individual projects. So this is who we'll be reaching out to if there's questions on that specific project. We gave you a space for two different individuals and if there are more individuals in your community that need to be CC don emails we just ask that you do that internally. And again just please try to fill this out as fully as possible so that we know who we're talking with and how to get a hold of them. So then you're going to get into the meat of your application so the first question that we're asking is about identifying the impact of the gaming establishment as you know we've said a couple times. There has to be an impact for there to be a grant or further to be a chance of a grant. So you'll note in each of the different sections, we even just put the page numbers right there in the guidelines to tie to where in the guidelines you can find examples. So this image on the right is a screenshot of right out of the guidelines. So you can see that in this application they looked at the negative impacts under that were eligible under community planning. The competition from a gaming establishment having negative impacts on businesses was an eligible activity. And so they just copied and pasted it. It can be as simple as that for something that we've identified. You know if you would like to add a couple sentences in here just, you know how it particularly impacts your region. That's totally fine but if you're using something from the guidelines again it'll be pretty quick pretty straightforward for you to make that connection to the casino. But using something directly out of the guidelines. It's going to be a little bit more tricky for you. So what you're going to have to do if you're not using something that's in the guidelines is you're going to have to actually go through and provide a pretty detailed explanation of the impact and provide some sort of evidence or relevant research to why you think that that is an eligible expense. Like I said there's lots of resources online. You know you can use resources, particular to your community and this will be under every category so if, for instance, you know you want to petition that some road that we did not identify is something that should be used you know you can provide the traffic studies that your community has done on any of those kind of pieces. So again if you are submitting this with something in the guidelines you know this section can truly be you know one to three sentences. So you expect a pretty sizable explanation of what's happening and information pointing to, you know, you know, what is, what is happening there. So that kind of looks like what our community planning application looks like and I'm going to say our second section this is going to be really the meat of your application this can be, you know, multiple pages. If that's what it takes to get this section done again like this is short because it needed to fit on a slideshow. So your second section is you're going to describe the project in detail and how that project is actually going to address the impact so this should be the detailed description of what you were doing. In this section you can also, you know, we love, we love attachments but we love any scopes diagrams any bids. So you can see below in this one they are looking for some way finding they felt that, you know, if they could do some increased signage, they could kind of mitigate some of that lost business by letting the casino patrons know that these businesses existed. So below there's a design mock up of some signage that they're looking to pay for. And they kind of they really outlined saying that you know they want to do a current signage study and they're going to do that with their actual internal Department of Public Works versus doing it with a consultant. So again like this piece of it really you want to spend the most time explaining to us what you're trying to do. So here I'm just going to jump into what the transportation and transportation construct planning and construction application will look like, as you see, pretty similar. You have a project name, you'll need to put the grant contacts in there. And you can see in this application they also pulled out directly from the guidelines, what they wanted. So they did not have to rationalize what the project was and then you can see that in the second piece. They're describing the traffic study that they want to do. They said that they did a preliminary design and their estimated construction costs is 3 million. And then based on the subsidy, how much they're going to, they're looking to get so Joe will go into more depth about the new subsidy rules. And below that a proposed MGC grant budget so each category will have a proposed MGC grant budget. And if you're looking through that you can see that you're going to have to do a description of the purchase or work. So if you are applying for public safety equipment, you're going to itemize each individual thing that you're looking for. You can see in this they were looking for different phasing. They identified the different tasks that they were doing, and they also identified the timeline, the timelines important for us so that when we're going through your quarterly reports we can look and make sure that the project is running on time or if it's not. We can look at some different ways to remedy that. And so again like this will be included on every single category will be expected to put in the grant budget. And this is a really important piece because when we're going through and reviewing applications this is how we are going to look through each of your individual budgets and determine line item by line item. If you know the commission feels that this is appropriate for a recommendation of funding. And you can see in this they said that the town has funded multiple stages of the design. And they're asking for the construction and funding on this. So I think just an important thing to note is if you happen to have been working with a consultant already and have a budget. Feel free to include that as an attachment, but you must fill out this section and you may not just type see attached. So I think that's about everything on that. And I will turn it back over to Joe to go into the subsidies. Okay, great. Thank you. So on the transportation construction subsidies. We do not fund 100% of construction projects, typically. What the commission has determined over the years is that, even though some of these construction projects are mitigating a casino related impact the benefits to the community at large are typically greater than than that of which the casino related impacts. So, what we had done in the past was we were we were funding, essentially one, one third of the project costs up to a maximum grant to one and a half million dollars. Now we've kept that one and a half million dollar cap, but in response to a number of our communities requesting this what we've done is essentially created a bit of a sliding scale where smaller projects get a higher percentage of funding than the larger projects. What we've done is we're saying that up to, we will pay 100% of the project cost up to $250,000, and then we'll fund up to 30% of the costs above that. So actually, I'm going to click back to the to the previous slide here. And on the on the second page of that. We talk about in this case we had a $3 million project, and based on the guidelines the grant will be 1 million 75,000 so that's 100% of the first 250,000 and 30% of the remaining 2.75 million that gives us the the 1.075 million in that case. So of course that would exceed the total grant amount in this in our fictional case. So a waiver would be required and I'll talk about that in a minute. So what essentially this does is it creates a sliding scale so for a project, you got a $250,000 project we would pay 100% of it. But if it's a $500,000 project we're paying a lesser percentage and as the project gets larger and larger, we wind up, you know, sort of at that maximum value of 1.5 million we're still roughly at the same amount we were in the previous years of about one third of the project costs. Now with that said, we are for most communities when they've done transportation construction projects have typically only come in with one project for the community. But we have had instances where more than one project might come in. What we're saying here is that you can't come in and do say I want to do three $250,000 projects that have the community mitigation fund pay for that entire amount. What we're saying here is that if you're doing more than one construction project, everything is additive here only the first $250,000 gets the 100,000 100% subsidy. So, you know, essentially we just didn't want people to try to kind of game the system on that, but we did want to give some relief for those smaller projects that that might have a little bit harder time. You know, finding finding money for them we've had a couple in the past, you know, blue bikes and things like that, where the community wasn't able to come up their own money and some of these smaller projects, getting that 100% subsidy was was was okay. On transportation planning eligibility. So for transportation planning projects. You know what we've done through through the course of this through the environmental impact reports and so on, the licensees have all done these various maps that show the percentages of traffic are going from the casino. And for the for planning projects, you know, we're saying that, essentially, you can do studies and things of that nature on on any of the major roots to the casino. And what we're saying by major roots is anything that carries at least 1% of the casino related traffic. So in my lines we've included this map that you see here, as well as maps for Springfield and for playing plane bill, showing where the traffic distribution is going. Now, if the community has some data that shows that other roads are significantly impact, we impacted we would certainly consider that, but this has sort of been our baseline and we've used this kind of methodology in our evaluations of applications. You know, in some cases we've had communities who are looking to, you know, do work on really very, you know, roads that weren't really impacted by the casino, and we weren't able to approve those. So what we're giving you is these this roadway network saying that you know, if you're doing any work on any of these roads that are over 1%. And with that, if you kind of do any other road, you're going to have to need to provide some more information that will convince us that they are significantly impacted. And then the other thing is also for bike paths, what we're calling multi use paths. We funded a lot of those, but we certainly do need the community to demonstrate that that those bike paths are or multi use paths are part of a network that would take people to the casino. If a community is just proposing to build a piece of a bike path that has really, you know, sort of no potential of people going down to the casino on that route. We aren't going to fund that. And we have funded, I know, I think in Cambridge last year we funded a design of a bike path that that didn't have a sort of a direct nexus to the casino, but there is a plan for extending other parts of bike paths and so on. So, you know, if there's something as part of a proposed network that would lead to that, you know, can't guarantee that every piece of a network would be built but. But again, we need to have sort of that that nexus saying that that that this bike path that you're that you're proposing to build is going to have a good potential to be used by folks who are going to the casino. And then waivers. Again, we said, you can get a waiver from any requirement of the guidelines you need to fill out a form to do that. But particularly with this new block grant approach is we're saying that if any municipality determines that the proposed grant allotment is insufficient to mitigate the identified impacts. It may request a waiver for those specific projects. Here we're saying that we don't expect this waiver to be used just for sort of routine expenses. You know, if you've, if you've got a grant of $400,000 and you put $100,000 into each category and and some of one of the group says well I really need $103,000. Our suggestion there is maybe you ought to fine tune your your scope a little bit, but these are really more for a project that really couldn't be done, unless you've got a waiver. So we expect that these would typically be the larger transportation construction projects and things of that nature, rather than sort of the more routine expenses that that a community might might expect to have. Okay, and I'm going to go on and Mary's going to run through this last slide again this is sort of reiterating some of the things that we've said before. You're muted Mary. I always do that I apologize to everyone. So, as we know the applications must be submitted by combines or through the MGC CMF by January 31st at 1159. As Joan noted, that is a statutory deadline. So we have no flexibility with that. The applications must be submitted as one word document so your municipal grant manager will be in charge of assembling all the different portions of your application and submit it as one document and please call us contact us. If you have any questions prior to submission, we are happy to work with you on this project and especially we have a number of communities that it's still fairly new. So please do contact us. And just to add to that, I think, you know, we really want applications to come in by email. We are required as an agency to go out through combines, you do not need to use combines at all. We after the factor required to put this stuff up into combines, which is what we did in this last year. I know that combines causes problems for a lot of folks. So please just use the MGC CMF at mass gaming.gov email box and that is where we want everything to come in. Yeah, we have found that using this mailbox is very helpful. And then what once we receive your application, it is downloaded into combines. After the fact after we receive it. Okay, and then. So Lily is going to walk us through the community mitigate the the MGC website. So you just so you can see where to find some of the some of the information that you might need to see. Okay, so I'm going to stop sharing here. So this is our website. Just a quick something that throws everyone off is that it is mass gaming.com not mass gaming.gov. So just make sure that you're making note of that. So this is what you'll see when you get to our main page. If you just go to about you can find the community mitigation fund. Or in the guidelines, we've made it a clickable link. So we have done a lot of changes to our community mitigation fund. So there are a lot of great websites. So there are a lot of great resources that you can access here to help with your application. When you click community mitigation fund, you will have an at a glance of where the combines is. And down here where it has the municipal trainings we will be posting the trainings as well as the slide show. Our contact information is on the website and the basic information for how to apply. If you go into the sidebar over here and you click application guidelines, it will bring you to the application guidelines. So this up on top, you can click it and you'll open up our guidelines. We also have some resources below. So the first one is if you're interested in how we got to our funding formulas and you were not part of that process. There is a memo on how those numbers were decided, as well as a copy of the final allocation by municipality. So if you just didn't happen to be on the email list, your application allocation is also right here. So one of the big things we are trying to stress this year is that there is so much wonderful research out there that will make your lives a lot easier. So you'll see here some resources this will link you to the research agenda. Then we also have specifically the community engaged research that's been done so this might bring some inspiration to projects that are happening all over the state that might be relevant to your community. As Joe mentioned, we did work with some consultants this year and we have some pretty extensive slide decks where you can learn more about impacts that may be caused by the casino that could be relevant to your application. So we did those in three different categories. So one is economic impact. One is public safety impact and then one is priority populations. So these are groups that can be disproportionately impacted by the presence of a casino. So if you are applying and any of those are relevant to your category, I highly recommend you look through those. And then for everyone that is looking for a transportation related grant, we did pull these out of the really very long documents that came out when the casinos were originally coming through. So there are trip distribution maps for each of the three gaming establishments in the state. And you'll see that both on core and MGM have a distribution table as well. So you can use those to look at the different maps that were done to help bolster your application or to understand more if your roads are in the 1% category that Joe was talking about earlier. Again on our sidebar if you go over here you can find the FY 25 forms relevant to the application. So you'll see up on top we have the municipal FY 2025 application form. So this is your main form that you will be filling out. And as we had mentioned we did make an example application if you kind of wanted to see what you know a community could look like for their application. And again like this application is around 25 pages so this is not, you know, necessarily a quick application. Once you fill it out but you know we want to make sure that we have all the details that we need to review your application. And again as Mary said, if you have any questions this can be a very collaborative process before your applications are due. So we're happy to sit down and meet with different towns and understand a little bit more about what they're trying to accomplish. So here is the waiver form for the municipalities. And this will need to be submitted with your application form. If you are requesting a waiver at the time of your application. Down here is if you are a regional agency here is your relevant application form and waiver. And then for everyone who is currently has a grant just let you know that our calendar year 2023 to 2015 grants, your forms are still also located here. And then the last piece here is we do have an archive of every single grant that we have received. And a grant that has been awarded previously could provide some inspiration. I will say that just because it was previously awarded does not mean that it is something that you know we will you know out of pocket say yes to, but there are some really great projects for some inspiration if your community has some funds and you're wondering what to spend them on. This can be a great area right here to look back. So you just click the number, and then we'll have all of the different applications and what they were awarded my category. So, that's kind of a quick run through our website. Okay. Thanks Lily. I think, so with that, I think we will stop here for questions. And let me see where we, where we left off. Oops. Okay, so the first question here was can the grant be a PDF document since graphics are sometimes hard to include in a word document. So if I guess if you can, if you can get your whole thing down to a single PDF document, I think we would certainly take that. What we found last year was we asked for PDFs and we would wind up getting, you know, 12 documents submitted that we would have to pull together into a single PDF. The thought here was if it was a great if it was a word document. We could do that but we can certainly put it in there. So if you know how to please submit it as an editable PDF. When we get all of our applications we need to intake them all and so it does take us a lot longer if we need to manually rewrite your application. So you're welcome to send us a PDF and also a word document or an editable PDF. I just know some folks after they get them signed will just scan them in. So that sometimes, you know, we'll add a lot of extra steps on our end so if possible, you can Google how to make an editable PDF. And it's pretty straightforward. It's a plea for myself there. A lot of data entry. Yes, there was a lot of re typing that happened last year that was on it felt like I was in secretarial school actually until what date are we able to email you a specific project questions. I would say right up until the deadline. Well, I won't be here till 1159 on January 31. So, anytime between now and then we'd be happy to talk with you meet with you if you've got a specific project that you're, you're not really sure that it sounds like it fits we, you know, we'd be happy to talk to you about those things. A couple of things that just came to mind are, you know, if your community for whatever reason cannot identify enough projects for the full amount of the grant that we proposed. You can submit for a lesser amount, you know, you don't have to come in for the full amount if you can't identify projects. But we certainly don't want you to lose out on all of the money by thinking that you have to come in for the full amount. Obviously we'd love to see you come in for the full amount. You know, and also, once applications are received, as I said earlier, I think, especially this first year of this, this, this revamp, you know, we'll work with each community to try to, you know, if we see there are some issues with the application, we'll try to work with you to make some modifications or do what we need to do to try to get all of these things to fit. We understand that, you know, we're making some wholesale changes to this program. And we want to work with you to the extent that we can. So, with that, let's see. Okay, are there any other questions, you folks can put your hand up or. Okay, well I'm not seeing any additional questions. Again, feel free to reach out. So some of you may have accepted both this meeting and the meeting on Thursday, the meeting on Thursday will be identical to this meeting so you don't feel the need to feel the need to attend both of them unless you have some other questions, and so on. But so yeah, this is, we will be doing the same exact meeting for, for Thursday. Oh, another question did just pop up. Any movement on ever casino doing a patron survey to see how people arrive there with roots and modes. A patron survey actually was just completed and was presented to the commission, I think last week. So that should be up on our website in our research area. Mary Lily maybe you can just. It's up on the research area. Okay, maybe maybe you can find the link to that and send that to bill. Okay, if there's nothing else, let me just so there's me and Mary and Lily, we're around. You know, I'm sure this will be taking a little bit of time off around the holidays but we will do whatever we can to help you guys through this process and, and, and it's our fervent hope that this will make the process a little bit easier for communities give communities a bit more certainty and how much money they're going to get. And, you know, and hopefully make this process smoother for everybody involved. Thanks again for coming to appreciate all of your time and look forward to working with all of you over the next several months. Mary Lily anything else. All right well I guess with that we will we will close out for today and again look forward to to working with all of you. Thanks. Thank you very much.