 All right, I guess why don't we get started. Again, thanks for everybody for coming. This is our community mitigation fund regional agency grants workshop. So just a few housekeeping items before we get started. First is that we are recording this meeting so that we can post it up on our website if anyone wants to refer to it later when they're filling out applications or whatever will be up there on our website for people to take a look at. And so my name is Joe Delaney. I'm the chief of the division of community affairs here at the gaming commission and I'm joined by Mary Thurlow who's our senior program manager and by Lily Wallace who's our program manager and you know we are we are it we are the whole community mitigation fund. So anytime you're dealing with us you'll be dealing with one of the three of us. So in this today we're going to go through a presentation of PowerPoint. We will stop a couple of times for questions and answers. If you do have any questions as we're going through the presentation itself we would ask that you can just use the chat function at the bottom of your screen. If you scroll down there you'll see it'll appear and you can type any questions you have in there. You can also ask questions when we do break for the Q&A. So if and also if we would ask that you please stay muted during the presentation. I don't think we have anybody who's on the phone so that's good. And also the the deck the the PowerPoint deck that we'll be going through today we will be posting that up on our website probably today or tomorrow and so that'll be available to you if you want to take a look at it. So what we're going to do today firstly is we've made some major changes to the community mitigation fund program for this year. So first thing is we're going to go over what's new for this year and once we do that we will then walk through the application process a little bit for you, give you some ideas of what that looks like and what we're looking to see, and then lastly we will we will walk you through our the mass gaming commission website a bit just so you can find the community mitigation fund page and find the resources that you might need to help you fill out your applications. So with that I'm going to share my screen and get the presentation started. Okay all right so jumping right in so what's new for 2025 the first thing is we we have sort of revamped the whole program into this kind of and we're calling it two tiered grant. The first is a the municipal block grant and we had two workshops last week on that and of course that is just for the municipalities that are eligible to get community mitigation funds and the second piece of it is the regional agency grant which is the topic of this presentation today. So one of the things that we had a number of meetings with our advisory committees and with stakeholders and all through the summer had had a bunch of meetings and talked to a lot of people and one of the things that everybody had asked was if we could provide better project guidance. So in our guidelines this year what we did was we created within each grant category you'll see a few different things. One is a listing of those impacts casino related impacts that we agree are likely to be caused by the gaming establishments. The second piece is we've identified the types of projects that might be eligible for funding that would address those agreed upon impacts and then the third thing that we did in each one of these is identify some ineligible items. Over the last couple years we've had some projects come in that really weren't eligible for funding these are things that normally should have been you know paid for by municipality and not from the community mitigation fund so we've identified some of those as well. So I would encourage all of you to take a good look at the guidelines in the category that you'd be applying in and you know look at some of those things that we've added. I believe everyone who has received this presentation or this invitation excuse me has what now has a copy of the guidelines those work attached to that invitation so you know you can open those up and save them and you know refer to them as you're filling out your applications. And then the next item is administrative cost we are allowing administrative costs to be charged against the grant up to seven and a half percent of the grant amount and with a cap of $50,000. So I know on the workforce grants we did always allow administrative costs but we have extended that out now to other grant categories. The next new item is funding for regional planning agencies this is one of the topics we'll be delving into more deeply a little bit later. So up to $250,000 is available for the regional planning agencies associated with each gaming establishment so again we will talk about that in more detail in a few slides. And then lastly is a conversion to a fiscal year we had always done this as a calendar year but you know the the gaming commission operates on a fiscal year all the state agencies operate on the same fiscal year and most of our communities operate on the same fiscal year so we thought we would bring this in line with with you know what everyone else is doing. So on the next item you know who is eligible for these regional agency grants so if we go back to the law that created that allowed the casinos in Massachusetts which is mass general law chapter 23k in there they identify who is eligible for community mitigation funds so they talk about local and regional education transportation infrastructure housing environmental public safety and they spell out specifically the district attorney's offices then they talk about police fire and emergency services. So as you can see that's a pretty broad swath of things that could be funded under the community mitigation fund. Now for this year and you'll see in our guidelines that we have focused on three areas these are the regional planning efforts which we just mentioned regional public safety and that is something that we have been doing for a number of years now but hoping to get some more interest in that and then regional workforce education programs and again we've been doing these workforce programs for a number of years now and and propose to continue that. So now given that with that said those three areas are our focus of course if someone came in in one of those other areas that we mentioned I'll go back to this previous one where we talked about the you know transportation infrastructure housing environmental so on someone could certainly come in and apply for that. Since it's not the focus of our efforts this year if there is any one that comes in for that for any funding outside of those three categories that we talked about we really would like those folks to contact us ahead of time so that we can have a conversation about what it is that they're proposing and you know is it eligible you know what are the impacts of the casino all of those kinds of things now with that all said private and nonprofit organizations are not eligible for direct funding so you know last year we did have a a nonprofit come in looking for some money and and we just simply can't uh we can't grant money directly to a nonprofit now also nonprofits maybe can be funded if a if a regional agency a state agency comes in and wants to use a nonprofit as a as a subcontractor or something that is a possibility but private and nonprofits are not eligible you know directly to apply for these. So what hasn't changed here the basic tenet of our program is that each applicant has to identify a casino related impact you know that that's job one and once the that casino impact is identified the project that you are proposing has to mitigate that particular impact that has always been the case with this program and it and as long as the law stays as it is that will always be the case with this program so so what is different for this year uh with respect to that how to determine the casino related impact in years past we would uh say to a community or an agency tell us what your impact is provide us some documentation that shows that that really is an impact you know we want we want hard numbers or something that that really demonstrates that that is an impact and then tell us what you're going to do to to fix that one of the things our applicants have had a difficult time doing is actually making that nexus between an impact and the casino so what we did this year and I mentioned this a little bit before in brief but we went through all of our research that we've done we went to earlier applications we did just research on the internet and and a whole bunch of other things we hired a consultant to help us look at what other jurisdictions are doing with respect to impacts and in our guidelines we now say in each category that there are certain things that we recognize as impacts of the casino so when you're putting together an application if you pick one of those things that we have predetermined to be an impact of the casino that's all you need to do you need to pick that impact and then of course you need to show us what your project is is doing that will address that impact but we're trying to make it simple to to to find an impact that that you can then address now if you don't use one of those impacts that's in our guidelines or in any of these research studies you will then have to go to a whole lot more detail on what that impact is and how it you know how it is connected to the casino and how you're going to address that so with that I'm going to we'll stop here for some questions so let me take down my PowerPoint and let's see okay we don't have anything in the chat yet anybody have any questions that they would like us to answer at this point no we've got a quiet group here today oh eric yes just a quick note of appreciation we do appreciate the fact that you have segregated out the regional efforts and have identified the monies that could be made available as long as we meet the criteria so we just appreciate as an rpa being recognized that way okay great thank you okay we've got one question that's popped up in the chat can you define what you mean by administrative costs that are allowed so um you know primarily we're looking at this as you know the people who are actually administering these grants the people who are doing the quarterly reports uh who are putting together the payment requests and so on you know the time that they spend doing that can be charged against the grant essentially um so it's it's not if you know if someone is working um you know some money goes to the you know to um a DA's office and you know that money is earmarked to help offset salaries you know that that's already there but it's really for the person who's doing the administrative work to to kind of keep everything to keep everything running with the grant okay any other questions no okay I will um right I'll go back to sharing my screen on our slideshow okay so let me talk a little bit about the regional planning grants again we mentioned this earlier that up to 250 000 dollars can be granted to the regional planning agencies for projects that address regional impacts associated with the gaming establishments so in this case there are just there are three regional planning agencies that are eligible for these funds which are the metropolitan area planning council for region a which is the encore region the southeast regional planning and economic development district that's for the area around the plane rich park facility and then the pioneer valley planning commission which is for region b which is the area around mgm and I guess just on on these again we're really looking for regional type projects I think if there's a project that really only affects one community probably that community should be coming in for a grant under their own um community mitigation fund application so again these are things that we're looking at as being sort of regional in nature um that that you know the cover sort of more than one of one community in in the area and with that I'm going to turn it over to Lily and she's going to talk about the public safety grants and the workforce grants yeah so the other two application categories we have for this regional grant are going to be for public safety grants and workforce so for public safety grants we have historically received these grants before from the district attorney's office from the sheriff's office for all of the regions and so we're really looking to expand that as we've seen some real successes particularly in hampton county with their use of these funds so in fy 25 we're going to allow for up to $100,000 for these grants and these grants will be um you know if there is some other spectacular project that you have please come and talk with us we've had some lovely meetings with both the regional planning agencies and some of our regional public safety folks that have come in and had some conversations on how they'd like to use these monies and I think it's been really um eye-opening of some of the great projects that are are underway so if you are uh confused or concerned if you are an eligible regional public safety agency make sure to reach out um again this is not for nonprofits this is governmental agencies only and with the expansion of these funds there will be um some requirements Joe if you want to go to the next slide yeah just before we go there Lily I just wanted to add in you know we did cap this for the DA's offices at a hundred hundred thousand dollars um you know we've been funding Hamden for the last several years and that's been in about I think about $75,000 which seems to be about right um we just wanted to make sure we gave the DA's offices some idea of you know what kind of expenditures we were looking at and um you know especially for those DA's offices that have not participated before we just wanted to give you some idea of you know the sort of the maximum we were looking at if the needs are greater than that you know it's something that we can probably visit down the road um you know as as these projects come in Joe uh and so with you know new monies come new responsibilities so we are going to require that there is some expansion of uh recording of the different cases that you're dealing with this will go into a little bit more detail with the actual grants if you are granted but you can see below these are some of the different cases um and categories that the commission is particularly interested in um and kind of trying to do some more tracking around this in relation to the casinos so um again really if you're looking for one of these grants and you're not you know outlined pretty directly as a district attorney's office please reach out to Mary and Joe and myself so we can just make sure that you're applying for this the correct way um and I think that's about it for public safety okay as you're at anything else and then oh and I will say uh again when uh later in the point in this slideshow we're going to walk through the um website where we have all of our previous grants listed so you can look at what some of the other regional public safety agencies have done that have been successful in their applications um but under regional workforce workforce is pretty much the same as it has always been for our folks that are on the call that have previously applied for it it does require consortium application um and historically we've seen um Holyoke Community College come in in the west as well as Springfield Technical Community College and Mass Hire and a bunch of different subcontractors in the east so we really want to focus on a holistic approach to workforce development but again if you have any questions and you have not previously applied for this category please feel free to reach out to the team and we can definitely talk through your application and your ideas uh we did increase the regions so each one is now getting a 750 instead of 500 so we are hoping that with that funding we'll see proportional expansion of the programs that are currently offered or things that you are looking to expand into uh and we historically have only given out one grant per region so um that is really we'd love to see people work together and that is why we require consortium application on those. Okay I think we'll with this we'll turn it over to Mary who will walk through the application process a little bit you there Mary. Hi good afternoon everyone um you're going to see a common theme throughout the program uh today and I'm just going to reiterate some of these on this one page because they are important that the guideline that everyone read the guidelines before filling out your application and this is really critical to helping you understand and make sure that you're applying in the correct format and the correct type of application we also want to make sure that please by 11 59 p.m. on January 31st submit your application now in the event that you are waiting for a study from someone to put into your application and you do not receive it file your application and just state in it that you are waiting for a piece from somewhere but if you don't submit it the application by January 31st you're not going to be able to apply for this year. Yeah just just to add on to that but you know that is the only statutory deadline that we have in in the law it says that applications have to be in before February 1st so we give you every minute possible but if they come in on February 1st or later we we have to reject. Applications also need to be signed by a CEO or someone with signatory authority who can who has the authority to commit funds on behalf of the agency. Okay and here this is pretty rudimentary but this is really critical we need a grant manager assigned to each application that grant manager should be picked with the idea that they'll be able to follow this project through to the end or and has capacity to do the quarterly reporting and other obligations of the contract. Please be sure to update the commission if there's a change in management of the grant it's really critical that we have contact information throughout the process. Next yep okay so on here you'll see that there's three separate categories we want to and we a description so please provide a description that will distinguish your application from others. An example if you could say that in the description I want a regional traffic study on route XYZ to street XYZ which is a feeder road to the casino that is a good description. Do not say application of the community mitigation fund or something you know we we really want something that will distinguish your application from others because it is going into a database and it'll go under your under your entity's name and the next line will be what the description is so it's really critical that they're well described. Next um and on this one I just wanted to add a couple things on this one uh Mary the um so on some of these grants you know an individual agency may have more than one grant project I should say under their grant I think on the public safety ones those would mostly be just a single project as of the workforce development ones but I'm more thinking in the regional planning where an agency could come in and maybe ask for two or even three different projects that would total their grant amount so in here you know you can add lines into this budget summary and and you can you know add you so you can have like sort of three different projects under regional planning which would each have an individual name and an individual description so um so these are expandable if uh if need be. And then here is the all importance uh signature line and again this just has to be signed by someone who has the authority to commit funds on behalf of the agency. Okay and I think at this point we'll go over to Lily who will go through uh some of the more details of of of the application. Okay so the application can all be found on combis and online and we'll be walking through where you can find that later but um as you can see we've just been cutting out some of the the key pieces to walk you through. So for all three applications you're going to see some similarities and those are you know the the main crux of the application the meat of your application is your impact and your mitigation. So under each of these categories we have identified impacts um that we have determined through different commission and external research that you know if you decide that you would like to do something to you know in relation to this positive impact to um for instance capitalize on the fact that the gaming establishment has attracted a large group of patrons and their employees to establishments that would otherwise be present in the area. So say you want to take advantage of this aspect and do a large marketing uh study for that area um you would just take this piece and you are welcome to copy and paste it directly from the guidelines. We're trying to make this as easy as possible if you're using um impacts we've already established so you can just pop that right in there and say that's what your uh impact is and feel free to you know add a sentence or two just about how it um impacts your area particularly uh and then that's enough uh as joe mentioned earlier if you do not use one of the impacts that we have identified you're going to have to do a little bit more legwork you will have to provide us a little bit more of a breakout of some research or relevant information that is related to the impact that you are trying to prove exists um and that is uh a piece that you can look more into detail in our guidelines. So once you have filled out piece one about the impact you're going to fill out piece two which is how your project is going to address that impact and how it's going to mitigate that impact. So section two while it looks like a tiny box for the purpose of the slideshow will be a pretty big box on your application. So use this opportunity to kind of give us a a pretty detailed breakdown of everything this is where you're going to include any kinds of attachments of scopes of anything that you've done so far um we should be able to read this and have a very good idea of what you're doing and make sure that you include in this piece any you know very clear action items or products that you're hoping to develop as a part of this mitigation. So this next piece is going to kind of be a line item version of section two so this is going to be your budget. I know a lot of folks do have external budgets that come from other agencies and unfortunately in this situation please see attached will not work on our end so you are going to need to go through and fully fill out your budget. The way that our database works is that we go through your applications and we insert every line item and then we take your applications out line item by line item and that is how we determine funding. So for instance if I am a district attorney's office and I'm looking for funding for personnel I would put my first line item as 200 hours of you know this person's time at 20 hours or at $20 an hour and then that would be my budget so that I as the reviewer know exactly what that money is particularly around salaries around who that is going to and then my next line item under that could be you know for instance pens and pencils related to the the increased work that that one individual is going to have to do sometimes need a lot of pencils so each of these pieces should be discreet in what they're describing so that we can have a good understanding of each of the pieces. So for regional planning and as Joe had mentioned earlier you might have multiple projects each of those projects will have their own individual section one section two and budget you'll be able to just copy and paste over the sheet that is currently online but for everyone feel free to attach any kind of scopes or outside budgets that you have any attachments but this piece must be filled out so that's just an important piece that we want to make sure again like please see attached is unfortunately not appropriate for this section and Joe I don't know if you have any other pieces you wanted to touch on for their budgets. No I don't think so and I'll take this last one here before we walk you through the website just again on your application submission you know it says your applications must be submitted via combines or emailed to mgcsmf at massgaming.gov you do not need to submit to combines at all you can submit directly to our email at that email address we encourage you to do that you can submit through combines if you really want you know we'll go in there on the morning of February 1st and check and see if anybody filed that way but we last year we got rid of the need for combines I shouldn't say that we still are required to work with combines but we came up with a workaround to make it easier for our applicants to just file directly with us we still deal with combines but you do not and again January 31st at 11 59 p.m. if you do not submit by then we will will not accept your application so we're asking that you submit this as one word document you know integrate any attachments or whatever it is that you have in there if you if you can you know if you're having problems with that or whatever the case may be please feel free to reach out to us there's mary's email address on this but the power point here which will be up on our website it's got all of our contact information in there so with that before we stop for questions one more time it's going to have lily walk through the website so you can find what you will stop sharing here okay okay lily uh we're gonna walk us through the the website yep give me one second joe you just docked me off so okay there you go okay so this is our wonderful website just a quick point our website is massgaming.com not massgaming.gov as you might assume so just to make sure if you are looking for it that could be the issue if you go to the about section and you just scroll down you'll find a tab for the community mitigation fund this is our overview of our program so you'll be able to find some of the basic information including the due date and the convice posting as well as after we get done with this all of the trainings will be the recordings will be posted here as well as the slideshows so some of the pieces you're going to need are in this left rail so the first piece is the application guidelines as we tried to really hit on today please read the guidelines we all spent a very long time working on them and they have a lot of detail and a lot of pieces that you will need in order to have a successful application so you'll be able to find those here another piece that we are really trying to get folks to look at this here is all of the other wonderful resources that we have on all of these topics you know we want to receive wonderful applications so we have tried to really give you all the tools that you need to succeed so if you look down here we have compiled a list of the Massachusetts gaming commissions own research agenda we have the top research agenda in the country so I promise there's a lot of good stuff in there and then specifically within that community engaged research so you can see some of the projects that are happening across the state in relation to different communities as Joe mentioned earlier we also worked with a outside contractor called griot and we produced these slides one is specifically about economic impacts of the casino one specifically on public safety and one specifically on priority population there's a lot of good information in these that could really help your applications depending on what you're looking for and then we also have some maps down here for anyone looking to do anything around transportation planning so you can feel free to look through all of these again a lot of wonderful resources available to help strengthen your application and then if you go back over here on the left rail you can find all the forms relevant to your application so if you go through here make sure you are clicking the regional FY 2025 application form and waiver if you're applying for a waiver not the municipal ones those will be a little bit more confusing so just make sure you're clicking regional and then just a note for our current grantees if you're looking for forms like your budget forms or quarterly report forms those are still going to be located here just on the bottom the third a helpful resource that you could look to if you're trying to think about some projects that might be make might make sense for your application we have a full archive of every award that we have given in every application we have seen while having previously funded a program doesn't mean that we'll fund it moving forward or even if you copied and pasted it we really like to take these on a case-by-case basis so feel free to use some of these as inspiration but again if you have any questions you see that we have our contact information here on the side and you can feel free to reach out this is you know a nice piece about this grant program is that we're able to be so collaborative so we're happy to meet with anyone I received two emails during this meeting actually to set up meetings so happy to meet with everybody at anyone who has an idea and has something that they'd like to run by the team before the application deadline all right well thank you Lily so at this point we'll open back up for questions I do see we've got one here in the chat so why don't we start with that one it says a section in the guidelines mentions a negative impact on hospitality and entertainment industries use the NAICS code to define you certainly could do that we're just sort of generally talking in general terms on that I you know I don't think we have to get that specific I think we all it's one of those things I think you know it if you see it you know if there's you know if it's hotels if it's restaurants if it's entertainment venues if it's movie theaters if you know I think we all have a general idea what those things are so I don't think we need to get quite to that level of detail okay and Alice Casey I see your hand up hi thanks for doing this this is uh so helpful so a question about eligibility so it looks like um a DA's office would fall under regional grant public safety that seems like sort of the logical spot for it however my question is what about the other two regional grants are we disqualified if we come up with something creative for the planning or the workforce or is that an option so on the planning it's only the regional planning agencies the three that were identified okay um so that's kind of a pilot for this year so we wanted to keep it sort of to a small kind of subset of folks but the workforce ones again those need those are really kind of large-scale workforce training programs you know and again it has to be a consortium it has to be several groups working like out and out west we have polio community college working with springfield technical community college and the city of springfield uh to do a whole bunch of different things uh same thing in the east so you know theoretically you could apply for that but you would have to certainly put together a if you look back and see what our previous folks have done uh you you would have to put together a pretty robust group to to kind of beat that group out I would say so um so it wouldn't be so we wouldn't both be like there isn't the potential for both of us to get an award like that if we came up with something similar where we were partnering with you know our local colleges on some level you know potentially we we we generally set those up to do one per region so so if we got a second application in a given region it would then be competitive with the other application but we're probably okay great wonderful thank you got it other questions nobody anyone anyone euler um okay well if there are no more questions again I want to thank everybody for taking some time out of your day to to to go over this with us uh we hope that it is helpful to you um and again we um encourage folks if you have ideas for projects that you're not 100 sure on or um you know you want to expand something that you have been doing previously or whatever the case may be please feel free to reach out to us um we will we will try to um uh to meet with everybody who wants to meet with us and to discuss all of these things uh as usual we do have some vacations and things around the holidays but um you know someone should be available most of the time to answer questions and you know hopefully help you guys do better applications and um you know I guess we will we will be working with all or many of you over the next weeks and months as we hold this whole program together so thanks for being here and I hope you all have great holidays thank you