 Are we all set? No, just a second. I'll make an introduction. No. Yes. OK, thank you. Thank you. I'll set Dave. We're all set. We're live. OK, thank you. So good morning. This is the convening of the Massachusetts Game Commission. We are holding this meeting virtually, so we will do our roll call. Notably, Commissioner Skinner is enjoying her vacation day today, so you won't see her. And Commissioner Maynard is just in flight and will be landing shortly and joining us by phone and then shifting to video. So my roll call will be good morning, Commissioner O'Brien. Good morning. I'm here. And good morning, Commissioner Hill. Good morning. I'm here. And with me, that makes our quorum secure and we'll get started. We do have a very robust agenda with a lot of really different topics than we're looking forward to many outside speakers. So thank you. Commissioner Maynard would be normally introducing the minutes. Item number two, our public meeting is number 474 today. It is August 24th. And we will bypass the minutes for now and turn to our administrative update. And then when Commissioner Maynard joins us, we'll go back to the minutes. So our administrative update is not being presented by our interim executive director because he is on vacation. But we are turning right to our gaming agents division, Chief Kane. And good morning, Burke. And you do have a PowerPoint for us. Yes, I do. Good morning, Chair. Good morning, Commissioner Hill. Good morning, Commissioner O'Brien. Nice to see everybody. Today I'm going to give you a brief casino update followed by some DOR numbers on a PowerPoint for the fiscal year 2023. So let's start with Plain Ridge Park. As we know, PPC is in the final stages of a sports bar and expansion of the casino floor. There'll be a more complete update coming your way in the next 10 to 14 days. Aside from PPC's many popular slot promotions, PPC has also initiated the Penn Heroes Program. Penn Heroes is a loyalty program for the heroes who serve our country and community. Members of Penn Heroes receive exclusive discounts, perks, promotions that aren't available to other Penn Play members. PPC also has initiatives to help serve those who serve us through employment, scholarships, and more. This program is open to active military, veterans, first responders, along with a companion of their choice. Over to MGM. Today, literally right now, five years ago, we opened the doors to MGM Springfield. So today marks a five-year anniversary of the opening of MGM. To honor that, MGM is introducing a $5 commemorative chip to celebrate this anniversary. Additionally, recently, a couple weeks ago, MGM hosted celebrations for the new inductees into the Nate Smith basketball Hall of Fame. There's a combination of public and private celebrations all around MGM for these new Hall of Famers. Encore, aside from the many popular casino promotions held at Encore, Feed the Funnel was coming back to Encore last year with the support of 1,000 volunteers and in partnership with PacShack, Encore packed over 400,000 meals that were distributed to local Boston community. And that's a brief update. Is there any questions on that before we go on to the DOR slide? I think we would just add that we congratulate MGM Springfield today on their fifth anniversary. We know there's some celebration occurring today and we would love to have joined the City Council and Mayor Sarno and folks at MGM Springfield as well as the members of the public that are joining the celebration. With this agenda in front of us, we had to regrettably decline but our sentiments have been mailed to them. Thank you to Communications Director Mills and Grace Robinson for coordinating that. And commissioners, I don't know if you wanna add anything but we'll have the chance to see them shortly when they present their quarterly report. Commissioner Hill, Commissioner O'Brien, all set? No, I think you handled it very well, thank you. Okay, all set. Thanks, Burke. Okay, if we can move on to the PowerPoint, I think I'm gonna have Andrew help me share the screen right now. Can everyone see the PowerPoint? We can, thanks, Andrew. So as you can see for fiscal year 2023, the DOR intercepts at each of the casinos are listed on the top line, 2.1 million at Encore, 530,000, 32,000 MGM, and almost 900,000 at Plain Ridge Park for a grand total of 3.6 million in some change. And Burke, just a reminder for folks exactly what the DOR intercepts are because I know that's a big number. And that's a good point. In Massachusetts, if a patron wants a jackpot of $1,200 on a slot machine or a table game progressive jackpot which has over a 300 to one payout, the information of the patron's personal information will be run through a DOR system to see if there's any back taxes out to Massachusetts and to see if there's any outstanding child support obligations that may be collected. And as you stated, chair at the three casinos, 3.6 million is a lot of money to be collected. And it shows that the system is robust and really working. The other lines, expired vouchers, expired lost and found, unclaimed jackpots. After a one year period, these numbers are turned over to the mass gaming fund. You can see those numbers by category there. Additionally, the BSE payments if a voluntary self-excluded patron wins a jackpot, for example. Once their information is run through the system it would be noted that they're signed up for exclusion and thus that that money would be confiscated and surrendered to the mass gaming fund. State exclusions were zero and underage forfeitures were a little bit of money that was also collected and turned over to mass gaming. The second slide can compare this year's totals to last year, 22 versus 23. Interestingly, the DOR intercepts were both 3.6 million as in change for a total of just 36,000. And you see the other totals of the other categories. Any questions on that? Madam chair. Yes, cushion. So the red flag that I see here is the BSE payments that seem one, they've gone up, but two, they do seem to be awfully high. Can someone explain to us why BSE people are being able to even make the best to be able to win these dollars? Well, the BSE patient is gonna come on to the if they're gonna come onto the floor they're gonna walk through the entranceway. And unless you look to be under the age of 30 an ID may not be requested. So thus you can enter casino floor. And if you play a slot machine, for example, they would not put in a player's card and they might be playing for a while. But once the jackpot gets activated, now request for information identity is gonna be requested. And that's when that's found. A lot of, I could find out the percentage but not a lot of this is happening at table games because routinely on table games you're asked for a player's card. If it's a large buy-in surveillance may be watching wanna be interested in who that is. The casinos do a best job they can scanning over these thousands of pictures of people. So that they can clandestinely walk into the casino at times. And if they play the casino a slot machine and not activate a taxable jackpot, they could go undetected. Andrew, can you go back to the first slide please? So I'm just looking at each property. So just give me one second. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Madam Chair. Maybe that's a good question for us to turn to with Director VanderLinden and how detection can be improved. Commissioner Hill, I'm sure that's what you're thinking. That's where I'm heading. And I have written down the question. Yeah. Thank you, Madam Chair. That concludes what I have for you with the update and the DOI numbers for 23. Thank you. Thank you, Barkan. It's an important slide. And the comparison is so helpful. So thank you so much. So next, we are turning to Community Affairs Division and Chief Delaney, Chief of our Community Affairs Division. Good morning, Joe. Good morning. Thank you, Madam Chair and commissioners. So today we've got a couple of quarterly reports for the second quarter of 2023. And first up, we have Encore Boston Harbor and with us, we've got Jackie Crum, Juliana Catanzaridi and Tom Coffey. And with that, I will turn it over to Jackie. Good morning, Madam Chair, commissioners, Brian and Hill. I thank you for the opportunity to be here today and present to you. I'm going to turn it over to Juliana to get started. Sure. So I'm just going to share my screen. Can everyone see that? Perfect. Great. Good morning, Madam Chair, commissioners. As Jackie said, we appreciate the opportunity to present our quarterly report today. We have a lot to go through and I know you have a long schedule, so we'll try to get through this as briefly as possible. So beginning with gaming revenue taxes and lottery sales. During Q2, EBH had a gross gaming revenue for table games of about $86.5 million. And then a gross gaming revenue for slots of about $105.5 million. This resulted in a total gross gaming revenue of about $192 million and about $48 million in state taxes being collected. Here is the year-over-year comparison just for reference. So as for sports wagering, the total Q2 win was about $1.7 million and about $251,000 in state retail taxes were collected. Here we have our lottery sales during Q2, which totaled a little less than $1.5 million. And again, here's a year-over-year comparison for reference. So moving on to workforce, Jackie and I are going to discuss some of our more group-focused hiring activities shortly, but to put the numbers in front of that. At the end of Q2, we had about, we had 3,530 employees. These numbers don't include sports wagering related employees, which are separate, and we'll talk about those in a moment. Juliana, just before we go deep into the employee status, I'm remembering that Commissioner Maynard and Commissioner Skinner are here, but I just want to pause on your lottery sales. Sure. So, commissioners, I think it's notable that Q2 is much higher. And so I don't know if there's anything that you could credit that difference, either Juliana or Jackie. Sure. I think, and Juliana, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I think this was second quarter, not third quarter, but we did a major giveaway, a lottery giveaway, ticket giveaway. We did last quarter too. I think that's where the majority of the difference comes from. Well, that's appreciated, right? So thank you. Madam Chair. Yes, Commissioner Hill. So is it safe to say also that we're seeing a lot more folks coming through the casino than we did in 2022? I've noticed, you know, in restaurants and things of that sort, that they seem to be doing a lot better post COVID. Could that be a reason why are you seeing more people coming through the casino than you did in 2022? You know, it tends to go up and down. So per month. Like July was a quieter month for us in terms of just the volume of guests. We're starting to see a pickup in August. So I think it really just varies, but you know, I haven't seen an appreciable difference in the total number of people coming in and out. Okay. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Jackie. Thanks. And thank you, Juliana. My apologies for the disruption. No problem at all. Okay. So the total number of employees was 3,530. So as you can see of that total number, 59% were minorities, 2% veterans, 45% women and 88% local. We actually did have four more female employees than last quarter, but the percentage remained the same just because of the way the numbers panned out. So here's the breakdown for supervisory and above employees from, again, these are not related to sportsway drying. So moving on to sportsway drain specifically, at the end of Q2, we had 28 employees, seven of which were minorities, 11 women and 23 local. And again, here's the breakdown for supervisory and above employees. So just to talk about our recruiting efforts a little, we did conduct some consciously targeted recruiting last quarter. Two really large events that were great for us were the Greater Boston Chamber of Commons Women's Network Lunch. There we were really focused on female food and beverage workers in hiring and also the Women's Veterans Conference that had more than 1,000 attendees and we were able to establish a bi-monthly informational session for potential employees here, which hopefully will benefit greatly. These were part of 38 hiring or recruiting events that we hosted or attended over the quarter. And we also engaged directly with Big Sister, Rosie's Place and then several other organizations as women's focused recruiting sources. Do we have any questions? No, but I think if folks are wondering about the 52% in the sportsway drain, you do have a good story on that and you've shared it before Jackie and Juliana that the women candidates emerged very strong, strongly qualified. So the numbers, the percentage is excellent. I know it's a smaller number, but I want to note it again. Thank you. So moving on to our operating spend. Our total discretionary spend for Q2 was about $22 million. Of that, 22 million, 8% was spent with minority businesses, 2% with veterans and 11% with women. And then the breakdown locally was about two and a half million dollars with the City of Austin, 1.6 with Everett and then 1.3 with Somerville businesses or just some of the ones to highlight. So if there are no questions on this portion, I'm going to turn it over to Tom Coffey, our Executive Director of Security Investigations to discuss the minors on the gaming floor. Tom, are you available? I am, I'm here. Perfect. Good morning, Madam Chair and fellow commissioners. As you know, my name is Tom Coffey and I appreciate the opportunity to go over this important matter. So in this quarter, we had approximately 746,000 visits to the casino and that information was obtained from casino marketing that includes players that are playing cards and not on cards as well. So we had 12 incidents of either underage or minors getting onto the gaming floor. And I'd like to break those down in a couple of different categories, sort of how we did last time. And four of those were children or infants. So those were sometimes on the floor for literally seconds. Ross and Valence team, and we both report those as a minor on the floor for the regulation being strict to the reg. So four out of those 12 were children or infants and were fairly quickly either, you know, the parents would talk to where they were escorted off the floor. Five of the individuals had IDs, fake IDs that passed our Veradox system. And as you remember last time, Veradox is a really good system, although it's not foolproof. And as I stated last time, we worked with Veradox, so all five of those IDs have been sent to Veradox and they, you know, then put those types of IDs into their software to try to play catch up. I would say we had one, what I would consider a fail on our part for sure. So we had someone come in with a fake ID that didn't pass Veradox and the officer, the security officer wasn't paying attention and allowed the person in. And subsequently we take internal action on those type of issues. And then we had finally another was just a fake ID that was, you know, looked reasonably like the person that was carrying it. So again, I think our officers do a great job, particularly with the volume of customers coming in here. But as I stated in the last meeting, my goal is to be on this call someday and say zero. We had two gambling and one consuming alcohol. I will say there was, there's one that you'll notice if you've seen the report for the length of stay on the floor, there was a, one of us called wouldn't want to mention who it was, but it was a very high profile celebrity who was traveling with an entourage of people. One of the persons in the entourage was the 20 year old son of the individual. And they did go to Fratelli, should have been ID, should have done better on that one as well. But there was a group of seven or eight people on this sort of a bubble around this person. And that person did not drink or gamble, but did have dinner at Fratelli for quite a long time. And then went over to went back for an issue with his adult parent for an issue there. So that's a summary. Tom, Christian O'Brien, can I ask you just on the Fratelli, was Fratelli supposed to card or was they supposed to get carded to get on the floor to then get access to Fratelli? It's supposed to get carded to get on the floor, so that's on us. Okay. Just to clarify. I'm not sure we're gonna serve alcohol. Right. If the person that tried to approach his alcohol, they wouldn't have been asked for ID as well. In Fratelli's, guys. Okay. And then Tom, I have one more follow up. The IDs that were good enough to pass Veridox, and then you guys identified them. And if you don't want to do it publicly, let me know. But curious as to how you were able to identify that those in fact were fake. So Veridox again has glitches. Without going into every single report, I can tell you that on some Veridox machines, they flag is fake, and on others they don't. So that's usually the case, or someone is really diligent and says, hey, let me take this ID occasionally. We will take the IDs up to memoir. They have a different system. I don't think we did that in these cases, but we have done that in the past, but obviously a very good question. But most of the time, including these, I would say that they were tried at another Veridox. I know on a couple of these for sure, machine and they did flag. Okay. Thanks. Welcome. Any other questions? Mr. Hill, any questions? Okay. So I'll take over. I'd like to present some of our HR initiatives this past quarter. First, our board approved a revised version of our code of business conduct. And this may not sound like a big deal, but it took us about a year to rewrite it. And the goal in rewriting it was to make it so that it was reader friendly for our employees that they could actually wasn't written in legalese, which is really difficult for a bunch of lawyers trying to rewrite it. But I think we succeeded and it's a much better document at this point. It emphasizes our dedication to the highest ethical standards. We also launched a campaign encouraging employees to let us know if they have personal relationship with other employees. And this is an effort to ensure that there are no conflicts or perceived conflicts. Our policy prevents a manager from supervising someone with whom they live or have a personal or familial relationship. This policy was reinforced to our Heart of House campaign and our HR team visited almost all departments during pre-shifts to reinforce the message. On April 20th, we hosted our second graduation of our English for Speakers of Other Languages classes. This has been one of our most popular offerings. And at the suggestion of one of the graduates, we started advertising the class in different languages, which is also greatly increased enrollment. That should have been obvious to us that if you advertise it in different languages, people who don't speak English, but I'm glad that somebody raised it and we were able to correct that. On April 26th, we announced our Stars of the Year program. This is a really big deal. So the two stars are Treana Weaver and Kadeem Coulter. And both employees were able to take a guest and their managers. They went to Las Vegas for a few days and they attended a star studded celebration at Winlos Vegas at Delilah. They got spa treatments. They were taken on a shopping spree. They got dining and of course money and a chance to win more money. So it was a really a big deal and these are truly exceptional employees that we have. We launched our fifth module in the leadership training program. And you'll see that this quarter we really did a lot in terms of leadership training. It's definitely become a focus because we know that we need to train the managers to train to get that to go down. This module is focused on communication and how word choice, tone and body language matter when talking with our employees and how different employees respond differently depending on how you communicate. In keeping with us, our learning and development team went through a certification class on emotional intelligence or EQ. And this training will enable them to train other leaders to communicate more effectively, improve employee engagement, navigate change and diffuse conflict productively. We launched our second round of focus groups in an effort to better understand how we are doing in terms of communicating our cultural compliance with our employees and to inform and improve this process. The good news is that 100% of our employees stated that the company has made them aware of our policies. What's really interesting though is that there doesn't seem to be one overwhelming source of information in which our employees get their information about policies. Rather, our employees identified many different means of communication including hard of house campaigns, trainings, pre-ship, new hire orientation and our internal web called The Wire. So I think that we enforce the importance to us of there is not one way that works for everybody. And so we need a broad range of communication. Okay, next one, sorry, Juliana, thank you. We are very appreciative of our continued partnership with Game Sense and thank you Madam Chair for your personal recognition of our employees who have successfully incorporated responsible gaming into their daily roles. We celebrate these employees in our heart of house to commend their efforts. In terms of community, as an active member of the Lower Mystic Transportation Management Association, we hosted a bike tune up station for our employees and blue bikes gave our team members the opportunity to test ride their bikes and has offered a free annual subscription to all team members in an effort to encourage alternate forms of transportation. We also celebrated Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by hosting a panel to explore and share the culture and experiences of team members from the Asian continent and the Pacific Islands. We continue to reinforce our preventing harassment and discrimination policy with a video featuring our CEO Craig Billings. Craig reinforced the importance of speaking up and reporting any instances of harassment and discrimination to ensure that team members feel respected, safe and have a fun, comfortable and engaging work environment. In addition to the video message, beginning on May 1st, we also put collateral throughout our heart of house to provide team members with a multitude of reporting options that they have available if they choose to make a report. Likewise, our See Something, Say Something campaign was created to develop a team approach to safety by raising awareness of behaviors that may indicate suspicious activity. And Juliana, you know, a lot of put slides with me and them, our executive team hosted a pop-up compliance event during which team members were asked questions about our policies and received a Dunkin' Donuts gift certificate for answering correctly or if they didn't answer correctly for allowing us to gently educate them. It's a good picture, Jackie. It's a good picture. Our leadership training continued in June with a visit from our chief operating officer and former president, Brian Gilranz, who discussed the importance of building trust and confidence with all team members so that team members feel empowered to take ownership and make decisions. We also provided the Briar, Myers-Briggs type indicator personality to encourage our teams to understand individual differences, communication, and employee engagement. Finally, we offered sessions with our casino service and sales teams to assist them in identifying common challenges and to increase productivity. In terms of promotions, in May, we were very excited to host our grand opening of Rare Lounge, which is now open seven days a week and is truly a very special place. Some other pictures of the opening celebration. In Q2, we continued our TRU patron charitable contributions raising approximately 26,000 for Casimerna, last hope canine rescue, Panmask Challenge, and the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts. In addition, in Q2, our employees volunteered over 2,700 hours serving organizations such as Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, the Mystic River Watershed Association, Camp Harborview, and Cradles to Crayon. We also raised money during Pride Day, which was donated to Fenway Health. So I thank you. Are there any questions? Commissioners, Commissioner O'Brien, Commissioner Hill. I don't have any questions. I did wanna say, Jackie, it's nice to see the conflict of interest training that you guys are moving forward with there. I really appreciate seeing that. I have no comments at this time, except a great presentation, and thank you for your hard work. Thank you. Yeah, I echo both commissioners. Excellent presentation today. Juliana and Jackie and Tom, we appreciate the thoroughness, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good day. You too. All right, back to Chief Delaney. Yeah, so next up, we have Plain Ridge Park Casino to present their second quarter report, and we've got North Brown cell with us, and Heidi Yates and Kathy Lucas. And with that, I will turn it over to North for PPC's presentation. Thanks, Chief Delaney. Good morning, Madam Chair. Good morning, commissioners. Plain Ridge Park, please present our Q2 2023 update. And as Chief Delaney mentioned, joining me today are Heidi Yates, Mark Baba, our Vice President of Finance, and Kathy Lucas, our Vice President of Human Resources. I'll pass off to Heidi, who's gonna walk you through the financials, and then I'll be back to you for the compliance portion. All right, good morning, Madam Chair, commissioners Hill and O'Brien. I'd also like to offer congratulations to our fellow licensed EMGM on their fifth anniversary. That's always a big achievement, and always good for the Commonwealth. For Plain Ridge, you can see our retail sports wagering, 630,000 for Q2. This is a little lighter than Q1, and that was to be expected as major fall and winter sports completed their championship and playoff series. And we've moved into a summer light pattern of sports wagering. Our gaming revenue continues to surpass our prior year. So you can see that we're 39.1 million in Q2. State taxes collected are 15.6. Racehorse, 3.5. Total tax is a total of 19.1. This is an increase in taxes paid over prior year, 1.2 million, and an increase in revenue of 2.5. Our lottery sales. So we're also pleased to show that we have improved over Q2 of prior year, coming in at 645,000, an increase over 2022, 160. Like Encore, our marketing team also did do us a promote during this time, but we also did have sales for a mega million jackpot that hit and went from Powerball that hit in April. And then we had early sales also for the billion dollar, billion dollar Powerball that hit in July. So our spend by state. So the total qualified spend is 1,478,000. Prior year was 1,074. That's an increased year over year of 404,000. You can see that we've spent 633,000 in states outside of Massachusetts and 844,000 in the state of Mass. Our local spend. So our host and surrounding communities, which are always very, very important to us, of that 844,000, 86,000 was spent with our host and surrounding communities in Plainville-Rentham, North Avalboro, and Foxboro. And Commissioner Bryant, you had asked last during our Q1 presentation about spending Northern parts of the state. So we identified those as areas we wanted to look at in Suffolk and Essex County. And that spend for the Q2 is 291,000. Our vendor diversity. So we have hit our goal in Q2. You can see that we were right on the market for WE spend and veterans spend surpassed that goal. We are off a point on our minority spend. And this is related to a new vendor that we are looking to use that had not quite finished their licensing process with the commission during this quarter. And we are now able to use as we move through the balance of the year. And then this is just the hard numbers that support what we were just talking about in terms of hitting our goal. You can see that again, the WBE and the VBE are right where we expected them to be. There is the shortfall in the MBE and total diverse spend and qualified spend are very similar to what we spent in Q1 of 2023. Great, thanks Heidi. So on the compliance part in Q2 of 2023, PPC prevented a total of 235 guests from entering the gaming establishment. And of that group, 25 were miners, 47 were underage and 163 had expired and valid or no identification. We did have two underage people who were escorted from the gaming area and there were no instances of underage gambling and no instances of underage alcohol service. So with that, I will pass to Kathy. Before we go on North, I just wanna check in on the compliance or earlier slides. Any questions commissioners at this point? Commissioner, all right. I did, North, I had one question about that. And if you don't wanna, again, if you don't wanna say in public, let me know, but how was it that you were able to determine the people that you escorted off? Like how did you determine that the infection should not have been there? So there were people who were trying to gain access to the floor through an unauthorized entrance that we became aware of and we encountered them there. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Commissioner Hill. No questions at this time, Madam Chair. I know you've asked in the past and I'm interested in this. I may come up in the next presentation, but in terms of the addition of the sports book, are you seeing a younger demographic and is that you should be commended for your compliance numbers are excellent, but I just wondered if you're seeing some new challenges there. I don't think from a security standpoint that we're seeing any new challenges in that area, Madam Chair, I think that certainly there's a more, just visually you sometimes see a different crowd that you had seen there before. Sometimes it's a little hard to separate that out when you look at the database of what's happening in that area, but I think just even from a visual standpoint that we probably are having a few more male, skewing a little bit more male during certain hours, during sporting events and stuff like that, but we have not had any challenges as it relates to security or underage gaming from that perspective. We're confident with the procedures that we have. Excellent, your numbers are very good for this quarter. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, North. Good morning, Commissioner and Madam Chairs. As you'll see from the chart here, our numbers for Q2 with diversity, we are still exceeding there and we're also exceeding in our area of veterans with our goals. We still have a little bit of an opportunity in reaching our goal with women. We are at 43% in Q3, still slightly under our goal, but we're remaining the same as Q1. I think I've been saying for the last couple of quarters, we just can't wait until the end of Q3, the beginning of Q4, when we're able to share better numbers and I'm seeing it now with our hiring for our restaurant and bar and also as we're expanding our banquets. So fingers are interlocked that at the end of Q3 and in the beginning of Q4, I'll have the ability to go back and share that we've met our goal with women. We slipped a little bit on the local area and I think a lot of that is we're seeing a little bit of an insurgence of team members coming from the local Rhode Island area and I think a lot of that has to do with our referral program, not incredibly concerned with that because we'll do a little more local recruitment as we're continuing to hire for the restaurant reopening. As you can see also, I just wanna go back a little bit north in regards to where we stand with part-time and full-time. 62% of our team members are full-time and 38% are part-time. Next slide, please. When you look at where we are with Sportsbook, you'll see that we have three or 17% of our staff is diverse. We're showing no one in Q2 as a veteran. We've actually hired two veterans so those members will show up in Q3. We have 22% women and as we grow into football season, we're probably looking to add a couple of positions there and also readjusting with our part-times so we might have some growth there and locally at 17%. We are at 56% of our team being full-time there. Next slide. Could I just ask, because I'm assuming there's overlapping and I could reverse engineer that, but that's a lot of math for me, what is the total number of Sportsbook employees? Sure, we currently have 18 team members in our Sportsbook. 18, excellent, thank you. You're welcome. And then with supervisors and above, we actually have 69 team members that are counted in this group. Of that, 17% are diverse, 5% are veterans and 32% are women. Again, we are excited that we're adding some additional positions with the restaurant and also with banquets. So from a leadership perspective, you'll see some movement there. We're also focusing on our leadership development with our internal team members. We just launched our new cohort of emerging leaders for the Emerging Leaders Program. And this program, if you remember, when we did it last year, it allows our early team members to receive sponsors and educations that will help them expedite their readiness to pursue management roles. From that program last year, we actually were able to promote four emails. And so we're super excited to bring that program back again this year and really entertain the opportunities for leadership, not only for women, but for a lot of our early team members who may not have had that opportunity outside. Next slide. And so finally, my last two slides, talk about what we're doing in our community and then what we're doing here at the property. And so you'll see in QT, we were able to support organizations that allow us to align with our commitment to meeting local diversity and women initiatives. First and foremost, we supported the North Attleboro Animal Shelter and making strides against breast cancer through the American Cancer Society with Tito Box donations during the quarter. We also had Derby Day. And during our Derby Day, we had the Derby Day fundraiser for the American Cancer Society, which specifically focused on making, they're making strides walk against breast cancer. It's important for us, we are really invested to bring awareness based on the impact in our own community and for the team members on property, whether it's them or their family members who are fighting cancer. I'm excited as you'll see in the pictures to be able to fundraise for them. And we're equally excited that North is our area leader for making strides with Menwear Pink. So, we're hoping that for the Boston Walk on October 1st, that we'll have a lot of support there. Then you'll also see that we supported Rolling Thunder on Memorial Day. Hundreds of bikers who turned out to recognize not only Memorial Day, but show their support for our still, our POWs and our Miss Indian Action in remembrance for their service to the country. And we also supported locally the Plainville American Legion with their annual flag lane for Memorial Day. And with both of these organizations, we provided donations to help them with their cause. Next slide. And then for team members and here at the property, we're super excited. We celebrated our eighth anniversary this year. We had some internal activities for that and also guest-facing activities for that, just truly exciting to be a part of the community for eight years. On the team member front, we awarded the Penn Diversity Scholarship to a team member son on property, so Paul Racine, who is a team member on the racing side, his son Adam was awarded the Property Scholarship from Penn Entertainment. So really nice ceremony, had had opportunity to celebrate with his family. I think we all love supporting the college experience because it's an expensive one. We also acknowledged our team members of the quarter and we said goodbye to our leap, the interns that were in the development program. So we had Joe and Emily who completed their two-year process and we celebrated them. They actually both decided to stay with the organizations and no longer are interns with us, but have positions in marketing supporting the larger organizations. They're super excited for that. And we have the opportunity as a property to celebrate Pride Month and also Juneteenth with celebrations across the property and also supporting externally organizations that again, align with our values. So with that, I'll turn it back to North unless you have any questions for me. Questions, commissioners? None at this time, Madam Chair. Thank you. An excellent presentation. Thank you so much, North. Madam Chair, that wraps up our presentation for update for Q2. As Kathy said, we've got a lot going on here at property and so we're looking forward to coming back to you shortly and sharing what's happened then in Q3. Okay, Chief Delaney. Madam Chair, can I just ask one, did we hear when the restaurant was going to be opening? You have a keen ear, Commissioner Hill. We did not, but we were looking forward to sharing that very soon. I think we'll be able to share some news with the world on that one very soon. Thank you. You're welcome. I think that is a matter that needs to come in front of us at some point. It is. Thank you. Yes. Right. So Chief Delaney, are you all set? Yes, I am. That completes our report. I'll be back later. Let's talk about Community Mitigation Fund, but for now that finishes our report. Our quarterly reports for our casino facilities. Thank you so much. Turning now then to sports wagering division. Item five, I can't even count the number of sub items. Director Band, it's both overwhelming, but when I see that you've got both Crystal and Andrew there to assist you, I know it's going to be well run. Madam Chair, we have a smorgasbord of items for you today. That's right, that's right. I'm here today with Crystal, the business manager and Andrew Staffin, who's our interim sports wagering operational manager. I will let them take it away. Crystal, I guess you're kind of first up. Looks like we're gonna, good morning. It looks like we're just gonna continue to roll into the quarterly reports from PPC to Penn Sports. And I believe we have Adam Cates. He will introduce the crew. You hear Adam? Yes, sir. There he is. All right, great. I can start for PSI. Or Sam. Whoever, go ahead. It doesn't really matter. Good morning, Madam Chair, commissioners, MGC staff. It's nice to see you all again. I'm Sam Haggerty, Deputy Chief Compliance Officer and Regulatory Affairs Council for Penn Entertainment. And we're really excited to present our quarterly report to you today, our first quarterly report for PSI in Massachusetts. And as Crystal said, I have here with me Adam Cates, who's the head of compliance for Penn Sports Interactive. And I also have Greg Court of Arty, who's our VP of Finance for Penn Sports Interactive. So without further ado, I will turn it over to, I think Adam's gonna share his screen for our presentation. Yeah, I'm gonna be one second, Sam. I'm just trying to get some technical difficulties out of the way here. No problem. Good morning, Adam. Good morning, Greg. And good morning, Sam. Good morning. Good morning, Madam Chair. Okay. Can everybody see that? Yes. Perfect. All right, Greg, over to you. Can everyone see the screen appropriately or no? Not now. You had it before and then it just went to a white stripe. There, we got the first page. That better? Yes. Yep, that's better, Adam. Thanks for your patience, everybody. Thanks for the introduction, Sam. Good morning, Madam Chair. Good morning, Commissioner Hill, Commissioner Bryan. Happy to present our financial results for Q2. As you can see on the slide here, our sportsbook generated 4.7 million in revenue. Tax is a little less than one million for Q2. On 59.1 million of handle. Obviously our first full quarter since our online sportsbook launch was successful and as Heidi alluded to earlier for the retail sports section, we're seeing sports seasonality come into play here as we move into the summer months away from the key March madness and sports seasonality in Q1 and continue to see that through the beginning portion of Q3 as we move into the football season. If no questions there, I'll pass it over to Adam to cover the rest of the slides. Thanks, Greg. Good morning, everybody. This is my first time speaking in front of the Commission today so it's a pleasure to be here and we thank you for the opportunity to present our quarterly update. I'm gonna jump right into the workplace diversity numbers. The chart at the bottom sort of speaks for itself but I did want to touch on some of the work that our talent and acquisition team has been doing in Q2 and beyond. As you can see, this is our first quarterly presentation so our quarter over quarter numbers will sort of become more of a reality as we get further along in our tenure. We've only launched in March so our quarterly data is a bit limited right now but I can tell you that over the last quarter we have achieved sizable increases in hiring of both women and minority candidates. As you can also see, we have 28 individuals who are employed in the state of Massachusetts. What's not on this screen what I thought would be helpful to share as well is 39% of our Massachusetts employees are fitting into a diverse category and we look forward to those numbers increasing. I did want to highlight one of our partnerships that we've recently engaged with the Black Professionals Tech Network. While it did not happen in Q2 it will be happening in future quarters and we're excited to share the progress that we're going to be making. This network has over 77,000 members in North America 43% of which are female. So we are sponsoring a two day annual event with this organization that we plan on doing a full court press on in terms of getting our company's information out there having some recruitment activations. So we fully expect our numbers in these categories to increase in Q3 and the years to come. So while I don't have an update for you in Q2 I can assure you that these numbers will be going up because our talent and acquisition team is doing amazing things in the space trying to engage with as many different diverse networks and organizations to help increase these numbers. Sorry, I'll pause there if there are any questions. Questions? I think we're good, Ed. Onto our vendor spend. I know that some of the other operators have been given percentages so we will take this back and sort of contemplate that for our future presentations but in terms of dollars spent very similar to what I just mentioned about our talent and acquisition teams our Penn Corporate Procurement Team is also very heavily engaged trying to identify diverse vendors and suppliers in this space. It's proven to be a little bit challenging in the online wagering space but that being said these numbers that you're seeing here while there was a slight dip from Q2 compared to Q1 the numbers aren't necessarily where we would like them to be and we have fully intending to ensure that we continue to work towards meeting our vendor diversity spend in this space. So I will look forward to providing you with updated metrics and more exciting developments in this area and different in future quarters to come. Madam Chair. Yes, Patricia Hill. So if you can speak to this and I don't know if you can or not I know what is spent at a brick and mortar can you tell me like what is it that we would be spending on and in the world of sports wagering? Do you mean across the board like a holistic figure? Yes. I wouldn't be the one to answer that one. My world is compliance but I was happy to present our diversity spend today. I can certainly take that back and maybe we can provide some additional color in future quarterly presentations. I know that this specific format might not be as informative as you'd like it to be for this quarter but we can certainly improve that in Q3 and beyond. I'm just curious as to what the difference is between brick and mortar and sports wagering. So we can work on that. Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you Adam. I'm sure Krista will help on the template. So thank you. Moving on to my world which is compliance. As you'll see here, so we're focusing on underage activity. So we are in the online space. So I did want to make it very clear and give some assurances that everything that you see on the screen the 11 instances that we had none of which involved underage individuals successfully registering for an account. We've got a very strong set of controls of the KYC and account registration phase. So all of these 11 instances that you see in front of you our internal investigations team does a fantastic job of trying to identify different behaviors or transactions which may give us reason to believe that there are other individuals who are potentially associated to an account. So as you can see in the chart on the right hand side the vast majority of these instances that we've outlined here relate to a payment method mismatch. So in those situations, if we do have individuals who are attempting to transact with payment methods that are not in their name, we suspend the account immediately and we do a full blown investigation. And there are 10 instances in the previous quarter where we identified that the names that were tied to the payment methods that were attempted to be used did belong to underage individuals. So in all instances, every account was closed permanently just based on our suspicion that there might be somebody else involved. But I also just do want to give some reassurances that we did not have any issues or instances where individuals under the age of 21 were able to successfully register for an account. Any questions on this slide? I'll start. Okay. Moving on to some further RG metrics. As you can see here, this is our quarter over quarter and our month over month voluntary self exclusion figures. I did have the team go back to get a little bit more context for you today. It's not on the screen, but I did want to share that all of the exclusions that we saw in Q2, they all came from the MGC directly. They were not in app self exclusions that our patrons did on our platform. Also, we had 1,706 patrons in the quarter set some sort of RG limit. And that represents roughly 5% of all users in Massachusetts. Of the individuals that set limits, the most popular one that we had was a deposit limit followed by a max single wager limit. Our team also recently submitted to director band and his staff a proposal for us to use an additional limit that was not currently in the Massachusetts regulations. So I'm proud to say that we are also offering loss limits. Very similar to spend limit, but we also give patrons the ability to set a loss limit, which effectively limits the amount of funds that they can lose in any given period of time. Again, this is something that we're very excited about offering and it just gives our patrons even more tools available to them to make sure that they're enjoying the app as intended and that they're still enjoying everything that they're doing on the app. Okay, that wraps up the compliance portion onto lottery. So in June of 2023, through our contacts at Plain Ridge, we were able to meet with the lottery and we discussed some fantastic ideas that we're looking forward to implementing in the future. While it did not happen in Q2, I can kind of give a bit of a sneak preview of what we're offering in Q3 and beyond. The lottery was very excited about the opportunity to work with us. And beginning this month, actually, our contacts at the PPC were able to facilitate some lottery ticket giveaways. So we invited all of our Penn Interactive clients in Massachusetts to attend the property to claim free lottery tickets. We're also giving out lottery tickets to any guest that visits the property and signs up for the Penn Interactive online wagering platform or the Penn Play loyalty program. I'll have some more details to share with the audience that it reached and how effective it was in subsequent presentations. But in Q2, that was sort of our first introduction to the lottery. So while the events that I just mentioned didn't happen in Q2, we're very excited about the progress and the trajectory that we're on with lottery going forward. And wrapping it up with community events and charitable outreach. So in celebration of Earth Day, we had our team members visit local parks to help revitalize the green space in the areas near the office. This was a Penn Interactive wide initiative that took place at all of our satellite offices. That was a success. Another event that we took place that took place that we were very excited about was we partnered with Major League Baseball's Toronto Blue Jays team. And we had over 100 team members attend a two-day event where the Blue Jays had bus loads of children from different backgrounds in different schools come and have various activities on the field, meet some of the Blue Jays staff. And it was an overwhelming success that we had over 100 members of our staff attend and volunteer. And it was a fantastic event. We really look forward to doing that again. We also sponsored a team for the Baycrest Cycle for Brain Health initiative. This is a fundraiser that helps support innovation and research into brain health and various effects that happen as you age. We also committed $75,000 over a five-year period to the Reading Hospital Foundation. This is something that we look forward to working with the Reading community over the next five years. And we hope that this $75,000 donation makes really good improvements and ways in the future for us to continue our relationship with them. Lastly on the slide here for International Women's Day in March, our International, sorry, our women's interactive group does a fantastic job raising awareness throughout the year. But for International Women's Day, all of our satellite offices held various sessions and seminars to promote and facilitate diversity in the workplace and focus on females in the sports, wagering in the online gaming space, the different experiences that they have and just promoting overall diversity in the workplace for all of Penn Interactive. And finally for Pride Month in June, for Autism Awareness in March and Juneteenth, we had various sessions throughout our satellite offices as well throughout the day in different celebrations with our entire staff to just raise awareness, education and just discuss these very important topics. And we look forward to doing events like this throughout the year for every month and for every event that happens that we want to highlight and share more information with our staff on. That concludes the presentation. Greg, Samantha and myself are happy to field any questions. So just one point, we can go back commissioners. I want to commend you for adding the new limit, the debt limit. And I think probably it'll be interesting to see the response and use for it. So I'm sure Director Bandel and then we'll be interested in hearing about it as well. So commissioners, that is a new limit that our reg allows of course more restrictions than what we require. So thank you for forward thinking. Commissioner, is anything else, there's favorable lottery stats as well. I'm sure you noted that. Commissioner Hill, are you leaning in? I can't tell. I am leaning in. Okay. Thank you. Before we get to the lottery, the community outreach and charity, when we were hearing the applications come before us, you know, months ago, I really was trying to envision in my mind how online sports betting was going to be able to do this. Because brick and mortar, you can understand it's easy, but I want to commend you on your community outreach and charity work that you've done. It's incredible work. And something that this commission cares about locally. And the fact that you understood what we were asking during the application process and to see it finally being put into motion, I want to congratulate and thank you for. And the lottery, as you know, is something that we really care about. And I want to commend you for reaching out and having a dialogue with our lottery and continuing that dialogue moving forward. You know, when the legislature passed 23K and 23M, the lottery always came up as a discussion because we have a very good lottery that if you don't know, the revenues go back to our cities and towns almost fully, you know, with the exception of prizes and expenses. So the fact that you're reaching out to them, coming up with programs, I'm looking forward to your Q3 report to see how things worked out with them. You should be complimented on that. So with that, Madam Chair, I'm finished with my questions and comments. Excellent job. Commissioner O'Brien, are you all set? Can't see you. Yeah, I'm all set. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So Adam, congratulations on your first presentation to the commission. First of all, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure to be here. And thank you for all the very positive feedback. I can't take credit for everything myself, but I will certainly relay that back to the teams that are working very hard to make sure that, you know, we are able to share amazing updates like this. So more to come from us and we look forward to it. Thank you again for your time. Thank you. Okay. And I know that it makes sense then. I guess we're turning them to the next quarterly report for you, Christopher, thank you so much. You're welcome. So I have Curtis Lane from Caesar sports book to present their quarterly report. Morning. I'll actually turn to Lisa. Okay, great. Good morning, Madam Chair commissioners, MGC staff. Lisa Rankin VP of compliance and licensing. Pleasure to be in front of all of you again today to present the first quarterly report for Caesar sports book. I'm the call today. I have my colleagues. Curtis Lane, our digital compliance manager. Heather Rapp, our SVP of corporate social responsibility. Greg Schenber, our director of diversity, equity and inclusion. And David Schulte, our VP of procurement. And with that, I'll turn it over to Curtis to kick off our presentation. Thank you Lisa and thank you to the commission for the invite to present our quarterly report today. To start, we'll look at our revenue for q2. As shown on the slide, we had a decrease in revenue taxes collected and handle. And this is largely due to, you know, the seasons of our larger leagues such as NBA and NHL, those, those leagues winding down during the period. But we expect an uptake. And all three of these buckets come on the start of the NFL season in key three. Are there any questions on this slide? Okay. If not, I'll, oh, sorry. All right. Just one, just checking in to see. Whoever just spoke. Could that be commissioner Maynard? No. Okay. Okay. Thank you. If good, I'll proceed. I'll throw it over to Heather Rapp, our senior vice president of corporate social responsibility to discuss workforce diversity. Good morning, madam chair commissioners and staff. Thank you so much for having us. We're excited to share results after our first quarter. Similar to what we shared in our application process. We wanted to talk about our workforce diversity as Caesar's diversity. We wanted to highlight our company goals to increase the representation of women and people of color in leadership roles as we are on a path to achieve full gender and racial parity. So as you can see on the bottom of this slide, our 20 25 goals are outlined as 50% of management roles will be held by women within both the mid level, which is considered supervisor and manager, as well as senior leadership, which is considered director and above populations. And then our racial and ethnic goals, 50% of leadership roles will be held by people of color. And the second part of that goal is that we commit to increase the representation of people of color in senior leadership. By 50% of leadership roles will be held by people of color. And the second part of that goal is that we commit to increase the representation of people of color in senior leadership by 50%. Curtis, next slide, please. The ways in which we'll achieve this will, there's a range of actions and tactics that we use to really reinforce this culture across all of our communications, training channels, and ensure that there is equitable access to these programs for all team members. We call out attracting diverse candidates. We extend our searches to historically black colleges and universities, as well as other schools with diverse student bodies, and then eliminating bias from our hiring process, using inclusive language in our job postings, and also focusing on building diverse candidate slates. Through driving inclusion and retention, we have our inclusion assessments among our team members through our team members surveys. And we're also very focused on our employee resource groups, or in our case, business impact groups, or bigs, which are groups that bring together self-identifying team members and allies to support each other. Lastly, developing our team members through advancing our leadership development and succession planning for team members with DEI in mind. Really, DEI is woven into our culture in many different areas. We provide training, sponsorship, mentorship, with a DEI focus or lens, and focus on expanding our human resource policies and processes. Next slide, please. So if you take a look at our goals, we recently released our 2022 performance against our goals. What you see here is the performance in 21 is in the middle column. The performance in 2022 is in the right column. So if we're looking at our goal for women, 50% of leadership roles held by women within both mid-level and leadership, we are at 45% in mid-level leadership roles are held by women and 30% in senior leadership roles are held by women. You can see there's a slight decline there from the senior leadership from 32% in 21 down to 30%. That is a function of the data in 21 did not include our Caesars digital team members as we were still going through the acquisition with William Hill. Those team members are in fact included in the 2022 numbers. So we do recognize that it pulled that down a little bit. Obviously it's our focus to get back to where we were and continue to grow. Our racial and ethnic goals performance for 22, we have 43% of leadership roles are held by people of color. And when we say leadership, that is supervisor and above and we, the second part of that goal was to increase the representation of people of color by 50%. We actually exceeded that goal and increased the representation of people of color in senior leadership roles by 106% against the 2022. And that is a function of the data being slightly different from 21 to 22. But we are focused on maintaining that performance as we move forward. Any questions on that? Okay. I will send it over to Dave Schulte for supplier diversity. Good morning, Madam chair and commissioners. This is my first opportunity as well to present to this commission. So I thank you for that opportunity. And as it would happen, technology has failed me and my video camera is no longer working on my laptop. So I'll need to get that addressed quickly. And within Caesars in 2022, our operational and capital spend with certified diverse suppliers, total 7.1 and 9.3% respectively against our total spend. We currently are going through an audit of these numbers. And so that 10.51 that you see located on the, in the graph may fluctuate up or down. Once that that audit is completely completed. We, the Caesar sportsbook, we continue to participate in the company's DEI initiatives initiatives and overall goals pertaining to the minority owned women owned disability owned LGBTQ owned, as well as veteran owned businesses. As previously advised, the Caesar sportsbook expenses are primarily covered by a centralized services that are functioning within Nevada and New Jersey. But with that, we intend to continue to source and look for Massachusetts vendors wherever possible by to do this. We are developing an internal supplier dashboard that will allow us greater visibility of available certified suppliers, as well as non certified suppliers within the state of Massachusetts. And that this dashboard is going to be opened up to our strategic sourcing teams and our procurement teams, which then gives them a viable place to go and look for Massachusetts suppliers, diverse suppliers throughout our company. And that would be both within our brick and mortar casinos throughout the country, as well as our Caesar's digital sites. With that, any further questions? Questions for Dave commissioners. I'd like to add one thing. You had asked the previous presentation to separate the spend between the brick and mortar casinos and the Caesar's digital. We do not have that displayed today, but we can certainly obtain it and we will have it for the next reporting cycle for sure. Thank you for that. And now I'll hand it back over to Chris. Okay. Thank you. On the compliance side on this slide, we have our statistics on one, any prohibited individuals either found or attempted to sports wager on our platform. Any individuals turned over to law enforcement and three, any accounts suspended due to underage activity. So as shown in the slide, we didn't identify anything for the quarter. Any questions here? It's a good slide. Okay. Thank you. Moving on to responsible gaming. For the quarter, we noted. 83. Enrollees for the state VSE program. Additional. RG updates to know Caesar's and Q2 expanded our self exclusion program to be a universal policy. And this means that if a patron bands at a retail location, the exclusion would also apply to the online space as well. Also we implemented an enhanced 21 and over policy. With that change for jurisdiction where. Gaming is allowed for those 20. I'm sorry, 18 and older. I'm sorry. Caesar's will still restrict access to those 21 and older. Any questions here? Okay. If not, I'll turn it over to Lisa Rankin VP of compliance and licensing for our lottery update. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We've had an introductory call with a Massachusetts lottery representative. Early in the summer. Candidly, we had some ideas that were related to our anticipated retail location. So we're doing somewhat of a pivot. So we've brainstormed internally on what sort of. What are the steps that we can present to, to the lottery. And so our next steps is holding that holding a call with our lottery representative. To go over our ideas and move forward. With some sort of cross marketing promotion with the lottery. I know this was an important aspect to the commission. So any questions on that engagement? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think we'll. Look forward to next steps, right? For sure, Brian, for sure, he'll. Not just. Nice to hear that it's going in the right direction. And sometimes we get the responses that nothing's. Been attempted on this front. So it's nice to see that you've moved forward. Thank you. Hey, and I would just say that. I'm very happy to see that all the companies, including Caesars, out to the lottery. This is, again, you heard me say this already today, something that's very important to not only the commission but to the state and the fact that you're reaching out and try and engage with them is a favorable, a favorable thing and we appreciate it. Thank you. We look forward to having more news next quarter. Would you mind indulging me on a Mr. that's Mr. Lane. Curtis, I would you mind just going over the screen right before lottery? I'm not sure. I think it's an enhanced, it's a new implementation, but I'm not sure if I understand it. Would you just explain the last bullet a little bit so I understand? Right, and some of our jurisdictions because Caesars is pretty much has a lot of jurisdictions across the United States there and some jurisdictions, particularly in the tribal areas, 18 is the minimum age for gaming. So what Caesars has done here is even with regard to those jurisdictions where 18 is the minimum age, we're saying that 21 across the board is going to be the minimum age to game on our platform. Thank you. I probably was concentrating on the bullet beforehand, so thank you. That makes sense now to me. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Okay, and back to you, Lisa. I think you are going to shift to the responsible gaming. I think if lottery is done, we can move over to community outreach. Yeah. Thanks, Lisa. I wanted to share with the commission what we've done as far as community outreach directly in Massachusetts. We have partnered with the Massachusetts Military Support Foundation, which is led by President and CEO, Don Cox. We've provided financial support in the amount of $50,000. Fantastic organization. The mission is to provide program services and goods that help satisfy the needs and well-being for veterans active duty military and their families. We also really seek to harness our skills and the skill set of veterans and the skills that they acquire throughout their military career and how those can be applied into the business world. We have our veterans recruitment program called Enlisting Heroes, and we partner with various organizations across the country as well to identify ways that we can help veterans transition from their military career into a successful career with seizures and entertainment. So excited to partner with Don and his team at the Massachusetts Military Support Foundation and continue to have conversation in ways that we can identify additional opportunities to leverage the partnership. Next slide. I also wanted to touch on a few nonprofit partners that we support through our Caesars Foundation, which is our private charitable foundation. These are our national partners that have outreach across the country. We've been a longtime supporter of Meals on Wheels. We celebrated our 20th anniversary with them last year. They received a Caesars Foundation grant in 2023 for $300,000. As you may be aware, Meals on Wheels Massachusetts has 24 different chapters across the state, which provide both medically tailored and culturally appropriate meals to seniors. In addition to financial support, we support Meals on Wheels in a variety of ways through volunteer opportunities, both delivering food as well as programming that they have that puts us in touch with seniors really just as a touch point when you think about some of the potential isolation issues that seniors may face. Boys and Girls Clubs of America, we have a fantastic newer relationship with Boys and Girls Club of America, but certainly a lot of opportunity with this organization. We began our partnership in 2022. They received a $500,000 grant from Caesars Foundation 2023. They received a $250,000 grant and Boys and Girls Clubs serves children at over 90 clubs across the Commonwealth. For us, what we have found is that we have Boys and Girls Clubs within 10 miles of over 90% of our properties. So it's a really great connection there. Again, we support both financially or currently supporting the project called Project Learn. And then we also support through volunteer hours as team members go out and volunteer at various clubs across the country. There's also supply drives and a variety of other opportunities with Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Lastly, National Park Trust, which if you're not familiar, is a fantastic organization whose mission is to acquire missing pieces of our national parks that privately owned land, which is located adjacent to the parks boundaries. They also focus on bringing in children from underserved communities to our national parks through a program called the Buddy Bison program. We have partnered with National Park Trust for the last several years. In 2023, they received a Caesars Foundation grant for $144,000. And most of that, I would tell you, goes to support the Buddy Bison program. But one of the things that we're really focused on with our organizations is a trust-based philanthropy. So providing the funding to the organizations and allowing them to use it as they see fit rather than being incredibly specific with the funding to maybe go to a need that isn't as urgent at that time as others may be. National Park Trust preserves the Minuteman National Historical Park and also provides Buddy Bison programs at Adams School and McKay Elementary School near Boston. Any questions I can answer on community outreach? Hi, I'm Madam Chair. Heather, you're pulling at my heartstrings. One of my organizations that I care so deeply about is the Meals on Wheels program. I actually remember as a very, very young boy, my mother was involved with Meals on Wheels and at Christmas time, she would make cookies and she would add those to the dinners that we would serve to the seniors. But more importantly, and I think you mentioned it in your remarks, sometimes during the day, the only people they see are the people that are delivering these meals, which is, you know, sad, but also, you know, something that I'm proud that this organization does. And the fact that you've reached out not only with Meals on Wheels but with the Boys and Girls Club and the Buddy Bison program that you actually are doing it here in Massachusetts is something that this commission applauded you for. But again, pulling at my heartstrings with the Meals on Wheels brings back memories and certainly an organization that I know does so much for so many. And just the fact that you're opening a door, you know, to someone's life is so important. Sorry to make up your time, but thank you, Heather. I agree. It's a fantastic organization, incredibly proud of our partnership. I was trying to think of the specific name of the program. I think it's called Beautiful Wishes where our team members can even just write notes to seniors that are then delivered. So we have team members that are trained to pick up phone and make the phone calls and create contacts. My grandparents were also recipients of this when I was young. So certainly fantastic organizations across the country that we're proud to partner with. That's great. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Commissioner. And thank you, Heather. Now, my pleasure. This is your last slide, correct? Correct, Madam Chair. We appreciate the staff's time and the commission's review of this. And if there are no further questions, we guard the end of our presentation. No. Commissioner O'Brien, are you lost that? So I just want to thank Dave for his first appearance. I'm not sure if there were other first appearances, but thank you so much. This is, these presentations do take time to prepare, and it's not lost on this commission. So thank you. The reporting keeps us accountable, as well as our licensees accountable, and so are the greater goods. So thank you so much. Anything else, Crystal, from Cesar's on its report before we move to the request that it's made for the waiver? I don't believe so. I think that's the next item. Okay. So the turn then. Is that a Andrew or is that a Crystal? That's me. Okay. I'll continue. I think Andrew and I are well split. I think we kind of go half and half. Excellent. So continuing with Cesar's, they have put in a request for a temporary waiver from a reporting requirement, which is 205CMR, 25045, and that pertains to play management. They're looking for their request to go through October 15th, essentially to design the report and the various data points, which require some technical implementation. The sports wagering division understands they need to build this report. I think our only concern is getting the data in the meantime, which we're not sure whether they are able to provide manually or not. But if they couldn't, when we've discussed this with Mark Vanderlin from Research and Responsible Gaming as well, we would just want to make sure that once the report's designed, we could get the data that was from July, August, and September. Retroactive, right? Okay. Commissioners, you have this document in front of you. It's on page 107. That's the memo from Business Manager Bolsheman. Question. Mr. Lane, are you presenting? Yes. Commission, step in here. The data that the commission is looking for is something that we don't track manually. We'll have to rely upon the system to supply the data points that you guys are looking for. So as such, an automated report at this time is our only option. And just based off of the other initiatives that we got going in Cedars Sportsbook, we're shooting for delivering that on October 15th, the waiver request. I understand the request and I don't have any questions at this time. Commissioner O'Brien. So I guess my question is, it could be partially for legal too, is how long has this been in effect asking this information of Cedars, of all the operators? I'll defer to Caitlin on that one, but 255 I think was about, I think it was mid-July, which is why I included July, August, and September in the reporting period. So they've identified that they weren't going to be able to report. And so this was the solution was to put in the request. So 255 was voted on for final promulgation on June 29th, 2023, which means it probably went into effect a couple of weeks after that. So about the 715 day. And have we heard from other operators requesting this or is this the only one in Spain? Right now we're receiving reports from all but one other operator and that operator were in discussions with just about legality of confidentiality, essentially, of some of what they're reporting. Everyone else was able, many could not report in July, but were able to turn it around in August. So we gave that timeframe. So it's just a little extra time for Cedars. Yeah, I don't have a problem with it if they need more time. I'm just wondering about the October 15th is, since everybody else did it, is there any way to do it a little faster than the 15th or is that really the outside date? We have Circle October 15th to deliver, but certainly if we can do it sooner, we'll do it sooner. We understand the urgency of this report. And again, just due to the other initiatives that we got going on here, that was the timeline that we realistically wanted to present to you guys. But again, if we can deliver sooner, we'll deliver sooner. Okay, great. Thank you. With that, commissioners, if there are no other questions, do I have a motion to by the grant or not grant this request? Madam Chair, I actually will move that in accordance with 205CMR 202.032, the commission issue a waiver to Cesar Sportsbook from the reporting requirement outlined in 205CMR 255.045 through October 15, 2023, as granting the waiver meets the requirements specified in 205CMR 102.034, and is consistent with the purposes of GL Chapter 23M. Second. Okay. Commissioner O'Brien? Aye. Commissioner Hill? Aye. And I vote yes, so 3-0. Thank you to Cesar's and we wish you luck in that. Madam Chair, I didn't know Commissioner Maynard was on. I thought I saw his name. I am on, but I appreciate that. I would also vote yay for the record. Thank you, Commissioner Maynard. I'm sorry. We just took the slide down and I did not know you had come on, so thank you, my apologies. Just for clarification, I'll just ask Commissioner Maynard your vote. Aye. Aye, so that's 4-0 on this matter. Thank you and welcome, Commissioner Maynard. With that, again, thank you, Cesar's, for your and good luck on progress on that matter. Okay, so now we're moving on to Item 5D. Yes, that will be me again. If you would give me just 30 seconds to plug my computer in, it's dying. I'll be right back. Madam Chair. Yes, Commissioner Hill. Can I ask for a five minute break? That'll be great. Five minute break. I could use it. I'm dealing with an air conditioning issue, so thank you so much. Okay. We'll return it a quarter of. Wow, thank you. I'll set Dave perhaps. I'm good. Excellent. And I believe, Commissioner Maynard, you're going to stay on mobile for right now, correct? Yes, and I will be on screen as soon as possible. No problem. Thank you. And Commissioner Maynard, if you don't mind, we'll stay on Item 5 and turn to your minutes later when you're on video and we get through the sportsway during division. Does that work? I appreciate that a lot. Thank you. Okay, excellent. All right, so thank you for that short break. We're holding this meeting virtually, so I should do a roll call. Commissioner O'Brien. I'm here. Commissioner Hill. I'm here. Commissioner Maynard. I'm here. And the four of us are here and Commissioner Skinner is enjoying a nice day off on her vacation week. Okay, so next then we have Crystal, sportsway during operator requests. Plural. Thank you. Plural. So continuing with our waiver requests, we have received several requests from our operators in relation to the two of five CMR 257, the sportsway during data privacy, which go into effect on September 1st. And they were voted for finalization on August 8th. The significance of the requests right now has to do with overall evaluation and meeting to really do some discovery to provide accurate requests on what the timeline would likely look like for 257 implementation. So the initial requests for the majority were asking for 60 days, which would be on or around October 31st, to do some of that scoping and initial work to come back with requests that would then identify a timeline as to which the true waiver date would need to be through. In addition, we received a couple of requests, which were related to 205 CMR 230802, which is the reporting component for 257. So in line with that, we would just whatever the commission approves as far as waiver times, we'd match the waiver time so that the reporting component also matched the waivers for 255. Can I just be reminded from Caitlin and team, this is least 257 is we're still waiting from comments. 257 is done. It's the data privacy regulation and it goes into effect September 1st. And, you know, Mina turning me curious from Anderson and Krieger has been very involved with both the data privacy reg and evaluating some of these waivers. So he's happy to answer questions too on this. So we're all closed on comment period and it goes in fact, I guess, September 1 is around the corner. Yep. Okay. Commissioner's questions on this for Crystal. We have the memo is again at page 110. Yeah. So Crystal, can you walk through? Are there any peculiarities? Is it just a date? It looks like there's some detail in maybe betters request specifically. Is it anything different or now or I'm just trying to get a sense of the nuances between the request or whether it's all the exact same request just varying dates. So essentially they all were requesting about a 60 day period to evaluate some of them the dates were a little off because of when the waiver came in or when or whether they were considering it from this date. And like I said, Penn and Penn Sports and Penn and Plain Range came in with an October 15th date. That would give them a few weeks earlier to submit but it was the same a contemplation they just needed time to scope they needed the full evaluation. So ultimately we would prefer that it be the same uniform date so we can come back to you with all their waivers at the same time for this particular regulation. Betters was slightly different because they need to develop a form for 257 and they were giving a timeframe based on that but their waiver is just 3rd December 30th so ultimately it would be covered in this uniform date and then if they needed more time they could come back with that waiver. That's how we were looking at that. So you could certainly grant betters waiver and then just do the uniform waiver for rest of the controls. Commissioners, if you recall this is our data privacy regulation is cutting edge and in the conclusion of this memo they do know at Crystal notes that this timeframe that they're mentioning would provide commission staff with time to engage in the request for the communication and closed gaps related to operators lack of clarity and potentially gain insight via a roundtable discussion. So there's a recommendation I think perhaps bringing the stakeholders together and what's been a helpful vehicle for us on sometimes understanding where there may need to be a little bit more nuanced discussion. I don't see the roundtable completely yet but that's something we can explore in this discussion. It might be helpful and Mina I don't know if you've thought about that where we could gain more insights to be to improve the regulation. Yeah Madam Chair, thank you. We have thought about it and talked a bit with Crystal and Bruce about it as well where it could be useful. I think one thing that the commission could certainly invite for conversations at the roundtable is I see sort of two to three but dividing them up first within the regulations. The regulations have affirmative obligations of new security protocols or enhanced security and data privacy protocols that operators are asked to implement and what I understand from the waiver request that they're looking for time to be able to do the technical work or identify scope out the technical work that needs to happen to create those processes. So I think that's one topic that could be a topic for roundtables make up here's an understanding of what the regs say. It's not a common period of course it's to understand what they say and to try to implement them. The second set of requirements in the regs is really not a matter of building new things or adding new protocols. It's about restricted and prohibited behaviors that the reg identifies for instance the targeting of particular populations using data that might be available through patron accounts. With respect to that I think it will be helpful for a roundtable and I think this is part of the ongoing reporting that the commission has asked for in the regs is to understand if there is if there are also any concerns or needs for clarity on how to do that and whether there are adequate safeguards in place at the operators because that strikes me as a different category than it's not building something it's not not doing so it's not doing something that's being asked of them. So if there are concerns technical concerns about being able to assure themselves that their employees and third party vendors are doing that that may be something worth discussing but I think they're two different categories and may proceed on different timelines. I would say you know that who else you involve you mentioned stakeholders we've given some thought to to that and I certainly would say that there was robust comment on this there was robust comment that this was done in the normal course as opposed to the emergency course so our view is that this really should be an implementation period and of course everybody wants to get this right so as opposed to I did see you know candidly some of the language and the waiver requests is phrased in the form of some of the comments that were received and I think at this point the commission has made its point clear of what it wants to see so what you need to what a round table would serve is to understand how to implement the right so as long as that's the focus that I think that makes perfect sense. So I guess the other question that I had was um is there anything that they can actually implement is this a whole cloth I mean are certain things that they can implement in the immediate future come 911 or is everything in here something that they need to October 30 to assess? I don't believe anything would be able to be implemented in just two weeks but the waiver request would be to come back with what they can implement soon sooner rather than later and then we'd be looking at depending on how you prescribe that how many different dates or how many different I recommend that we look at them having some sort of recording component as to how they're going with this if they have like a lengthy plan but um they had indicated parts of this would take some time and parts might be be able to be done sooner but at this point they can't tell us that so the request is to come back with all of that information in 60 plus days. Madam Chair and if I may just add to that to Commissioner O'Brien's question I think it is if I'm reading again this is an implementation question I guess I would still urge in the early days of that 60 days if possible if if you are going to have a round table to again focus on making sure that we're talking about implementation of new things that have to be done versus prohibitions I I'm assuming that one of the things that's a little different about the waiver because it was stated so broadly is I'm assuming that someone is not saying I am targeting problem gamers today and I don't know if I can stop that within 60 days not to be facetious but if that's that's not a waiver request that's a request to violate an existing rat that's different than saying I need 60 days to implement the new security procedure so I just do think there the sooner you can have that conversation with the operators in a round table maybe better to help clarify that. Yes that's what I'm struggling with I understand some aspect you know of needing to go through and come up with an implementation game plan but this was also done in the normal course and and so I I think to attorney Macarius's point I don't want it there to be round tables re-litigating what was in there unless they come back and say to us look there's absolutely no practical way to implement that's a different question for me in a different conversation so you know conceptually needing some more time to come up with a plan I understand but I guess I was hoping that given how this came before us they would have had a little more clarity on exactly what the challenges were before they asked for the date out. Thank you. If you were able to glean from their the conversations you've had are they struggling mostly with technical issues to implement the first problem that Mina talked about which was you know enhancing the data security protocols or are they struggling to comply with the new prohibitions in other words are they struck by the prohibitions and I see director Banda is also leaning in that they were struggling with almost all the issues they actually met as a group and to a licensee they were having trouble figuring out how to implement this and that's why they asked for the more time for this they were actually trying to help each other as to how they were going to implement and of course everybody's software is is different and each one was felt that they needed more time to you know approach us intelligently and not have problems with their software after they made some of the implementations. Yes I think there were several different facets of challenge so first they were asking us questions that we still need time to work through because they were trying to identify what some of their challenges were and exactly what the commission means by some of this and then so we need some time for that but then second they it didn't seem so much the prohibitions to your question but it did seem heavily with re-implementing the data privacy piece and the opt-in the opt-in is going to take a specific amount of not just time to technically do but to identify exactly how it impacts not just the general software but then each component of the app the wagers what they would have to be asking for the opt-in on and then making sure that actually functions throughout um the player experience um so there were there were several elements that I had heard and of course I speak some of this language but I'm not the expert here so um there many of them were saying it might be helpful to get some insight not just from us and the commissioners via this roundtable but from data experts outside. Nina did you say before you go on did you say there were three because I had you mentioned the enhanced data security protocols and then the restricted behavior and whether it's a tech issue versus a non-compliance issue is there a third did you mention a third? So I was I decided I created three buckets and I combined two of them I think the sort of enhanced data protection has sort of two ends there's a patron facing side and the back of house side so I kind of mush those together but there are you know what they need to be able to present to in their platforms versus not to Crystal's point though you had asked Madam Chair about sort of stakeholders and thoughts we've given to that one conversation with the team internally is it may make sense for some of the among the stakeholders that be really helpful would be data privacy experts from the operators obviously because they have to implement it but from outside the operators whether that's at GLI other vendors and you know certainly I kind of goes out saying I know the Attorney General's office has had interest in this their involvement either in the roundtable or as I think I'm speaking with Grace I did I identified GLI and the GL as well as outside experts well commissioners what do you think do we use the you know collaborative tool of a round table here to to learn and I think that anyone who's listening or hearing that our focus is on we have a newly adopted well it'll be in effect September 1 regulation that needs to be implemented with that should we be listening at the same time I will never be against a round table because I learned so much from them yeah so I certainly would be happy to say to you that yes let's move forward with that yeah Commissioner bryan or Commissioner Maynard I think Madam Chair Jordan I think that I'm more in the camp of let's make sure it's focused on implementation the other thing I was thinking about when Mina was talking about experts and is you know I think it would be interesting to have an independent expert on the tech to explain how heavy the lift is or isn't in regards to to what we're looking at I mean it's hard for me to put in perspective I saw the word years and crystals memo you know is this something that really can be done quickly and it's just a matter of resources or is this something that can't be done quickly and you know remember that we got this entire industry launched in massachusetts in in less than eight months so things when I see the word years I get a little nervous so that would be something I would look for an around table but I do support the idea Commissioner Maynard in the past some we'd ask those types of questions of GLI I don't know if if you're thinking of GLI or another independent voice I mean if we can find another voice or perspective in addition to GLI I think in my you have that memory too perhaps director Bander you recall we've asked GLI exactly how difficult things would be to what tech point of view other ideas commissioner Maynard no and I'm not thinking of anyone specifically I'm just thinking of whoever comes in to speak to us I would want them to be able to do it in an independent fashion yeah not tied to any one operator that makes good sense okay so data privacy expertise tech expertise um commissioner Brian yeah I think I don't know if it was Caitlin or Mina who said this my concern with round table again is just making sure we're staying in the same process which is um this was the decision to implement the question is questions about implementation and I would want there to be balance in terms of the tech representation that's being talked about whether that's the AG's office who has that internally whether it's some other entity that's not GLI even who participated in drafting breaks with us so um I will want to make sure that it's very narrowly tailored to the question of implementation and not going back policy-wise to re-argue as opposed to really limited to tech and capacity to implement I had the same reaction to the reference that somebody might be asking to bump this out into you know 2024 or the end of the year that was troubling to me so in terms of process if we get the sounds like we have a consensus done around table with the right guardrails is a positive um and but at this point in time because this red goes into effect September 1 we would need to grant a waiver for compliance of some sort um the dates are somewhat different um recommendations Mina on how to proceed with that maybe or Caitlin um Caitlin if you hear that certainly um I think our our thinking is it may make sense to have a 60-day waiver with a you know clear understanding that there is a during that 60-day that operators are asked to provide further detail and implementation plans and with the intention for the commission to be holding additional round tables discussions etc during that time yeah I think that that sounds right sort of an implementation timeline not just a plan but a timeline of when they can meet the various requirements not just that you know we'll do it all by next date so Mimi you would be looking if we did the waivers to November 1st not November 17th did I hear that right the reason we chose November 17th was to give them the 60 days and then come back to a commission meeting so that would give legal and ourselves time to evaluate them once they came in plus I looked at the commission meeting schedule so the November 17th is really like in line with your public meetings otherwise they'd have less than 60 days um and commissioner with your question I don't have a strong feeling about about those extra uh couple of days two weeks I just think um that's up to the commission you know how how you want to include that timing this was voting I believe a week or a table I've got some background noise um somebody's speaking in the background okay so better is looking for him beyond uh November 17th but what I'm hearing is with the round table uh we can revisit another waiver if necessary but perhaps the round table will give the necessary light to get things going so the recommendation that manager Boschaman makes is for November 17th to grant a waiver it's a universal waiver um commissioners anything further on this right now Grace and Trudy will start looking at possible dates for that round table it probably should be sooner than later but we want to make sure to uh commissioner brine and commissioner mayors point it's um got strikes the right balance and participation okay do I have a motion then if I'm not hearing any further questions for our sports um wagering division Adam chair thank you I move that in accordance with 205 cmr 202.03 just want to make sure I have the right one yes I move that in accordance with 205 cmr 202.032 the commission issue a waiver to all licensed sports wagering operators from the requirements outlined in 205 cmr 257 and in the internal control requirements outlined in 205 cmr 238.027 l and 205 cmr 238.027 m through November 17 2023 as granting the waiver meets the requirements specified in 205 cmr 102.034 and is consistent with the purpose of gl chapter 23 m any further discussion oh sorry do I have a second second okay oh you can have it commissioner brine says second is there any further discussion on this okay commissioner brine hi mr hill hi mr maynard hi my vote yes so four zero thank you now returning to house rules this is now shifting to andrew yes uh good afternoon madam chair commissioners good afternoon and before we get started I just want to acknowledge that andrew steppin joins us he's wearing a couple important hats right now and today he is wearing the interim sports wagering operations a manager hat uh director band is there smiling because he knows that uh andrew also plays a big role in the casino side of our our work so welcome in this capacity andrew yes thank you chair thank you everyone today I'll be bringing forward house rule change requests for five of our operators as well as a new event catalog petition request and chair this is my first house rule change presentation I'll leave it to you if you wish to vote on each house rule individually or vote on all of them at the conclusion prior to proceeding to the new event petition I think we should do individually um yeah I see Caitlyn that would be preferred if possible okay um I'll pause briefly after each operating change request for that vote and discussion questions um we'll start with the single house rule change for on-court boss and harbors in-person sports book the only requested change is in addition to their general rules section 14 where they wish to add the statement winning wagers are rounded up to the nearest penny this is outlined in gli 33 event wagering system section 8.5.2 um subsection t which gives an overview of the payment of winning wagers where payouts may involve rounding um information on how these circumstances are handled shall clearly explain rounding up in this case and to what level on-court boss and harbour has requested to round up their winning sports book wagers to the nearest penny as to not short the patron on any winnings um and this is talking fractions of a penny for example if a winning sports book wager is 25 and 0.244 cents on-court on-court round up to 25 and 25 cents so that point that 0.244 rounds up to the nearest whole penny of 0.25 also I should mention in this gli section of 8.5.2 all of this information shall be made available to the player or to the public and with that being said the sports wager and division confirms all requirements have been met under 205 cmr 24702 and has no reservations about moving forward on this on approving this change commissioners any questions for andrew on this particular request hi there commissioner maynard um with that do i have a motion for um on-court boss and harbour madam cherry moved the commission approved the amendments to the house rules submitted by the category one sports wager and operator on-court boss and harbour as included in the commissioner's packet and discussed her today second thank you any questions commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi mr maynard hi Michael yes 40 thank you okay we'll move on to the house rule changes for plain rich park casinos in person sports book uh two additions to their house rules have been requested section 14 has been added to include language for any error including computer algorithm or software malfunctions or mechanical typing technical or human errors which lead to erroneous odds or obvious price errors in such cases all bets will be dean void with mgc approval or in the sole discretion of the sports book the bet will be paid out in accordance with the correct odds for price the second proposed change is an addition for section 16 of their house rules which is taken directly from gli 33 event wagering systems again section a dot 5.2 uh subsection and again this details 20 standards by which the operator must make information available to the public this house rule addition is verbatim from the standard which outlines varying communication speeds or broadcast transmissive transmission latencies for inplay wagering wherein the operator ppc in this case may incorporate delays in the registered time on an inplay wager to prevent past post wagers and cancellations and again this is online with gli 33 the sports wagering division confirms all requirements have been met under 205 cmr 24702 and has no reservations about moving forward with approving both of these changes questions for andrew on ppc's request so andrew i have one on the first one on number 14 because i'm troubled by the end of it that says or in the sole discretion the bet will be paid out in accordance with the correct odds or price i thought we had a whole conversation of the body five of us in terms of what was considered an obvious error another same palpable error so the first part of it talks about they need mgc approval to void but the second clause almost seems to give them the out to just pay it out so which seems to be in contravention of what we all agreed we wanted to do with obvious errors i mean calling it palpable error i don't think changes the analysis um yeah i'm gonna turn to director band if you're able to help me out here yeah i i i kind of thought that's what we kind of agreed on is what andrew stated here is that they couldn't pay it out if uh you know who's that if i'm not didn't misunderstand what we did no it was the question so the the result of what they call palpable error in the first instance lines up with my memory which is yeah they can come to us and say this was a mistake but we want to vote and we go yeah got it but then that last clause basically seems to be the exception as well as the rule that basically says or in their sole discretion they can choose to just sort of amend it and pay it out so that's and i don't know if legal remembers how we did this or and i i hate to do this to andrew because i know you remember the other top of his head and he walked out the door with this knowledge but um i just want to make sure that that language is not yeah kind of the exception swallowing the rule that we all agreed we wanted to apply to these obvious errors did me it's for the payout i think to be expecting to come back anyway kaitlyn i don't remember i think the issue was if there was an obvious error or what they considered to be an obvious error and they wanted to cancel the wager they have to come to the commission in order to cancel that wager um i'm not sure that the commission dealt separately with if there was an obvious error and they wanted to pay it out um i think they would pay it out if they didn't cancel it right so yeah well but it says with the correct odds or prices it's not i'll pay it out to you as mistakenly done oh yeah no i think it's yeah and that i think once yeah i think they have to come back i don't i don't think that i think they need to rewrite the end of 14 to say or in their discretion they request to come and pay it out but i think they still need our commission to do it and i'm not opposed to them having that as an option yeah but i feel like as written it kind of they need to clarify it more the they need to rewrite the end of it to basically that with mgc approval should encompass both of those clauses i think both of those options we'll get them to rewrite that for it does i agree yeah to make it clear that they have to come back to us either way yeah okay so at this point um commissioners with that piece outstanding should we just continue and not act on this at this request this time or should we or should we make the other change would it be helpful to make to focus on the other change and vote on number 16 number 16 exactly it might be helpful to do that at least and ask for a rewrite of number 14 we could do that commission brian i'm wondering if if it were would be paid out in accordance with the it's it's the really where the benefit falls right almost as what's troubling well it's just as as written it basically says they'll they're deemed void with mgc approval which is sort of the clear you know it shouldn't have gone up the door and this is or in the sole discretion the bet will be paid out in accordance it seems to remove us from the process entirely which was not what we as a body said we wanted to happen with obvious error yeah anyway so we could we could turn to 16 if everybody's comfortable with that one we'll bring the a part back to you number 14 yeah okay so are there any questions on section a number 16 okay so with that um it's a little bit of a finessing the emotion um i'm happy to move thank you commission um i move that the commission approved the amendment to the house rules submitted by the category one sports operator plain rich park casino as specified as section a introduction number 16 and included in page 185 to 186 of the commissioner's packet and further discussed here today second thank thank you any um questions or concerns about that all right commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi commissioner maynard hi about yes so four zero on that partial request okay we'll work with um cleaners park casino and rewriting number 14 perfect thank you mention yep next i'll cover house rule changes for mgm spring fields in person sportsbook um any commissioner's packet and i have a memo which briefly summarizes the changes for their customer care and settlement rules as well as changes for their baseball boxing and mixed martial arts american football and golf rules however i have also included a comprehensive overview of all requested changes within exhibit a some of these rule changes are additions to pre-match baseball wagers outcome of first pitch and minimum minimum length of play for a golfer very standard language updates for these events and after a full review of mgm spring fields requested changes the sports wager division confirms all requirements have been met under 205 cm r2 4702 there's no reservations about moving forward on approving these changes questions commissioners of course you're starting with the memo and then all of the red line language indicates the particular changes so they're extensive correct pages in your packet is pages 189 through 191 i think i have a general question madam chair for andrew um just really curiosity more than anything else i noticed there were a lot of baseball changes and all these various house rules i was wondering if there's anything that that caused it or nope just additions to their um pre-match wagers or player profits um player total bases or first pitch just some additions to their language got it madam chair i have no issues with anything that was proposed by andrew or mgm at this time anything commissioner brian if you had a chance to do a last review you're all set then then commissioners if there are any further questions for andrew um are you prepared to move i'm madam chair i'm prepared to move that the commission approve the amendments to the house rule submitted by category one sports wagering operator mgm springfield as included in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today second thank you any discussion michael brian hi mr hill hi mr maynard hi i go yes or zero moving on to five h andrew yes similarly uh bet mgm has requested several changes to their house rules again in your packet i have a memo which briefly summarizes the changes as well as a more detailed overview of all the requested changes listed in exhibit b bet mgm plans to launch its same game parley plus feature at the end of this month across all their sports books many of the updates to their house rules include language for this feature which i'll go into detail in just a second as well as similar changes to their customer care and settlement rules and also changes to baseball boxing and mixed martial arts american football golf and soccer rules again many of these changes are similar to mgm's in person sports book as well as additional language for that same game parley plus feature throughout and to go into a little more detail on that the same game parley plus feature this is a parley that includes at least one same game parley and an additional straight selections or additional same game parleys from other events so for example tonight the red sox play the astros in houston you praise the same game parley wager on the third baseman red sox justin turner to home run and the astros first baseman hosey brave to get a hit this as you know is a same game parley now for a same game parley plus you could add a wager from another event so you have your same game parley with turner and a brave now let's say you want to add the nationals to be the Yankees tonight as well this would also this would not be called your same game parley plus as it's adding another event i was i think it might just frozen for a second as you can see in exhibit b if any selection within the same game parley settled as a loss or same game parley plus the settle as a loss the entire same game parley plus is settled as a loss and one other added note my example is just using baseball this could be used for any events or mixed sports so you could keep your baseball same game parley and also add something with nfl preseason to form your same game parley plus after an extensive review of that mgms requested changes the sports wager revision confirms all requirements have been met under 205 cmr 240 702 and has no reservations about moving forward on improving these changes any questions for andrew again extensive in terms of redlining anything jump out at you commissioners no questions for andrew no okay then if we're prepared to move on this request i'll take a motion madam chair i move that the commission improve the amendments to the house rule submitted by the category three sports wagering operator bet mgm as included in the commissioners packet and discussed here today second any discussion okay commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi commissioner maynard hi and i vote yes so four zero okay um last change request here house rule changes for fendul again in the memo in your packet i've summarized the changes for dead heats the four events of american football basketball cricket and ice hockey as well as technical and grammatical corrections for australian rules baseball and the motorsport sections i've also included a much more detailed exhibit outlining all of these changes fendul has requested to their house rules which is in your packet and exhibit c for example in their dead heat section they have included a calculation for american football additions have been made to specific markets such as college football regular season wins first drive parlays and first play the game of scrimmage the two largest overhauls are changes to their house rules for cricket and ice hockey many of these changes are additions or expansions of their current markets as well as condensed portions of others i can see some green line in there as well that's just some language has been moved around within their house rules finally after a full review of fendul's requested changes the sports wagering division confirms all requirements have been met on 205 cmr 240 702 there's no reservations about moving forward with approving all of these changes any questions commissioners commissioner bernie you're leaning in yeah i only have one and it's again commissioner maynter said more curiosity than anything else but on page 203 when they talk about markets denoting a start time anything delayed more than two hours of the official start time i think of baseball games maybe that is there are there like league league caps on how late they kick these off because i can see a rain delay in a day baseball game that might run past that just curiosity more than anything else i think commissioner brian within that section where they listed two hours that is for football football only i'm i'm yeah football only i'm i'm unsure about baseball if there is a time limit for those but that two hour edition was for specific market specific markets for american football and is that the max i'd ever delay a football game it's curious no no i meant i meant like the nfl oh i'm unsure about that i can look it up for you okay just curious thanks i spent a little bit of time uh discussing the nfl draft there's just a couple changes there there's no implications of concern right with right we all in section i have to tell you andrew i i i don't know if you can just explain it a little bit more to me yeah i may have omitted that all in section yeah within these um within the red line just from a practical point of view of the implication of those two changes draft exact order markets betting is all in the order the order of the the um the draft selections are being taken um if one is out of order the entire event loses that's my understanding oh could you say that one more time please yeah so it's really nfl draft for the order of the nfl draft um for the for the draft exact order the marketing benefits are all in so if one player is taken out of order from your wager the entire that loses that's my understanding oh any other questions commissioners sounds like everyone's all set are we still examining it's quite a few again here the context from andrew any concerns or questions clarifications i i don't want to ask the same question but essentially i was noticing too at least a couple operators changing their golf their golf rolls around um what happens in ties and what happens um depending on if someone pulls out early um and so i didn't know if anything caused that anything recent in the sports world or if it's just everyone's kind of falling in line to the same same order of play i don't believe there's anything that we've been made aware of as far as the reasoning for that um just a little more security on their end i'm also putting a lot of faith in bruce and andrew and crystal on cricket i will say that on the record cricket before bruce is a cricket yeah but i wouldn't put too much faith with that do we have any emotion of course um the official name of vandal is that fair for our purposes commissioners i can do that um madam chair i move that the commission approved the amendments to the house rules submitted by the category three sports weight training operator bet fair interactive us llc doing business as fangle as included in the commissioners packet and discussed here today talking for the questions concerns okay commissioner brian hi uh commissioner hill hi commissioner maynard i'm looking for commissioner skinner my apologies and i well yes of course they're all thank you and that concludes the house rule change request um the last item i have for your review is a proposed event by fandal fandal has submitted a petition for a new event requesting the professional pickleball association the carbana ppa tour to be added as a new section of our event catalog the ppa tour of the professional pickleball association is a professional pickleball league that is sanctioned by the ppa it is a us-based professional tournament involving domestic and some international players uh tournaments are conducted around the country in a similar way to the atp and wt a tennis course um pickleball prize money is awarded for reaching different stages of each tournament in 2023 alone prize money will total 5.3 million dollars professional players compete on the tour for ranking points and players points factor into their tour ranking which ultimately determines their base compensation all wagers would be settled on official results from the ppa tour themselves by way of official score sheets the ppa tour is currently an approved wagering event in the eight jurisdictions of connecticut illinois wyoming michigan tennessee colorado maryland and washington state with pending approval in the three jurisdictions of new jersey pennsylvania and arizona um fandal has submitted the petition uh drafting proposed house rules and has answered every applicable question uh fandal has also submitted supplemental information with regards to how they plan to offer wagering on pickleball and the internal controls fandal will use to ensure the product product is offered in a controlled measured and safe manner lastly fandal has also provided us an official 86 page rulebook from us a pickleball within the memo i did also provide a link to the carabana ppa tour and just a reminder fandal is only proposing events which are part of the tour the sanction tournaments uh for example there is a tournament starting today i believe in kansas city the kansas city open which is included in that ppa tour i'd like to further add that there have been no incidents reported by us integrity on this event and even further during my research i was unable to find any major incidents or scandals um surrounding the sport or the tour itself um in closing here the sports wagering division confirms all requirements have been met under 205 cm r 24703 and it's found the operator fandal has answered all the applicable questions on the form uh the operator has informed the professional pickleball association they are making this request to the massachusetts gaming commission and the operator has received explicit approval by the ppa commissioner on behalf of the ppa tour to submit wagering applications in all jurisdictions in which it operates sure thanks andrew commissioners question commissioner hill now that was going to be my question what you brought up at the end is have they reached out and they have and not only have they reached out they got a response in a favorable way yes pickleball is huge i i can't go to any tennis court in in uh my area anymore without there being some type of a pickleball whether it's my friends in the senior center or just uh you know the a new and improved sport that's been picked up by many yes it's rising in popularity during my research and it's one of the fastest growing sports even i can play any andrew can i ask just to clarify you just mentioned us integrity when i looked at the integrity revision on that page 236 of in our packet it almost sounds as though windows is working prospectively on integrity matters or ppa uh tours currently working with sport radar to implement integrity policies and i just just wonder how that fits into this is it because we've got other fabulous state regulators who have approved not sure what pending approval means if there's something outstanding in their process you know we turn off into new jersey and pennsylvania and virginia and arizona too for guidance i just wondered if you could explain the integrity piece a little bit better and and u.s integrity integrity's role looking through us integrity i wasn't able to find anything on their reporting system but i do know that fandal or pickleball and fandal are working with sport radar to implement these policies for training purposes for players and referees um in that matter they go through they go through training administrators and owners stakeholders they're subject to all the integrity training um through sports radar it doesn't happen usually after the um sports approved or is it always is it ongoing as opposed to my understanding of reading the risk of compliance documentation that is ongoing training for the probably referees administrators stakeholders as such it's not just a one-time thing after their proof it's constant monitoring of the sport the coaches the referees and the players yeah madam chair i had the same questions that you did the language of currently working with to implement seem prospective to me um and i know and there's nothing before us that would indicate there's questions about integrity in general like we had with some others earlier in the catalog and i'm not implying that but that did give me pause on this request right now i was curious and if you knew still pending in new jersey and about a bat struck me too as to why it hasn't been approved there yet what the what the reasoning for the the still pending is what that what that means yeah what that means is it is it tied to the questions that we just raised in terms of when you get your sport radar when you get your integrity finalized you know we'll come back and flip a switch i'm just curious um i will follow up with um with the compliance email rep handle i'm unsure why they're pending in those three jurisdictions pending and again i just i'm i'm wondering if this document that follows your memo it looks like it's dated july 28 so it's current i just wonder if it was choice of language or if this is standard process commisional brian i i caught my my eye i know to to for us to be adding something in a catalog where new jersey and about have not yet struck me and then that language about the perspective so that's the only hesitation that i had with this request right now is is a little premature for me once they get a little more clarity on that that i don't have any other issues with it sorry i wouldn't be adverse to this if um during our end up having a lunch break if there's someone who could clarify that somehow that in fact it's not perspective um and that work is done that might be helpful or why it's normal that it's ongoing you know in other words the integrity piece has been satisfied from vandal's perspective and then it's ongoing that would be helpful to me i don't know commissioners how you feel about offering that up yeah i'm adam chair and i also thought to myself could pending mean that they've put in the request but it's not been scheduled in those jurisdictions that came across my mind when i was reading it so i mean i would mean just like what we're facing right now right yeah my inclination because there hasn't been an issue um is is to be very favorable but i would like answers to those questions that the chair and commissioner brian raised yeah i don't want to stand in the way of pickleball but um probably if those are questions that could be answered by a call um or during during um a break andrew if you're able to get that that might be helpful yeah of course is that a practical solve here okay commissioner brian's nodding her heads too so good all right we'll just do a little hold on 5j um so andrew well done and uh what we get four out of six that's a lot a lot of um a lot of items for your first appearance so thank you and i will follow up with um your pickleball answer finance we we can find out why it's not approved in new jersey yet with a simple fall or yeah and and then anything about from them on just that language that suggests that that the work on integrity is is is underway and and not addressed it's just in that paragraph it's right above integrity revision that'd be really helpful before we turn to item six you know it is 10 of one i'm thinking about lunch i'm sure my fellow commissioners are too i thought it might make sense to go back to our minutes if that makes sense and it might bring us up to the round number of one o'clock and then um have a lunch break and then we'll see if um andrew can go back to 5j and then we turn to uh chief delaney does that make sense commissioners do you like that yes yep okay no all right so commissioner maynard um we um we did hear from berk and i know that he can update you on that um you had his powerpoint and then we just um we turned directly to him and bypassed item number two so you've got three sets of minutes i appreciate that i will say a couple things one is is i found an error on the last page of the january 27th meeting minutes um should be a 40 vote not a 50 vote i've talked to judy judy's already corrected that um i was going to see if there were any other um errors but i was also thinking before we start there um i may ask that the february second minutes be held since commissioner skinner was there and i imagine could do that but the 27th in the 30th she was not so i think those are proper to be brought up right now is that good that is good so should we should we um commissioners if you have a chance to review them um we could hold um a fair point hold on the february second minutes all right is there are there any edits or questions regarding january 27th and january 30th no okay could we bundle them together in a motion perhaps happy to do that thank you commissioner madam chair i move that the commission approved the minutes from the january 27th 2023 and january 30th 2023 public meetings that are included in the commissioner's packet subject to any necessary corrections for typographical errors or other non-material matters second second thank you commissioner hill okay any questions on either all right commissioner o brian hi commissioner hill hi commissioner maynard hi and i vote yes four zero and we'll hold over or roll over found february second thanks commissioner maynard uh so this brings us to just short of one o'clock um probably a 30 minute lunch break commissioners i think it's just about 125 does that make sense or if i may make a request as you know i have to leave early today due to a family funeral happening if we can show it not up to 20 minutes because i would like to hear joe's presentation and discuss it and i want to make sure there's a time to do that can we do 25 i i wasn't supposed to be working today and i've got a kind of handoff or responsibility somebody on the break so i want to be able to eat too so can we do like 25 to split the difference there we go all right um so that brings us to like 120 mr hill okay let's do it so we can get something to eat thank you everyone we'll be back um at 120 okay just think we can bring down the screen and people chime in i'll set thanks dave okay we'll get started right away this is a reconvening of the massachusetts gaming commission and we'll do a roll call because we're holding this meeting virtually commissioner o'brien good afternoon good afternoon i'm here good afternoon commissioner hill good afternoon i'm here good afternoon commissioner maynard good afternoon i'm here and we'll get started we are um returning to our public meeting number 474 and i see that andrew has returned and i wondered if you had any information for us um on five j that allows to go forward on that yes for pickleball so i was able to speak with the representative from the end one of the questions was why is pickleball still pending in the three jurisdictions of new jersey pennsylvania and arizona and the response that i was given was that some jurisdictions act faster on approving some of these sports or events where some of the other jurisdictions take a bit longer time to review and approve their request for the new markets and house rules so nothing to do with the integrity or issues with the sport those three jurisdictions that they are pending in of jersey pennsylvania and arizona have not raised any issues with the integrity of pickleball again it's just a timing aspect um they've submitted these requests just in the last four weeks that's just timing for those three jurisdictions okay the other question was the um actual integrity with sports radar the document that was in your packet is dated july 27th of 23 since then it's been four weeks and i believe the ppa tour just released a press release today stating that they have completed their training and they are in agreement with sports radar they're going through those trainings and the all the members of the sport are being trained or are trained those referees the administrators stakeholders so it's not that they're in talks or perspective with sports radar they've actually agreed to that and those trainings are underway or near in position excellent any follow-up questions commissioner brian are you satisfied yes just for clarity that means that that that sort of prospective language is now sort of the active present tense correct i can send you the press release from the ppa tour as well okay uh there we will okay well that that answers the two questions i had and and commissioner brian i think you joined me on those so uh commissioners um i'm satisfied and and i and i know andrew that you had made the recommendation to move forward on this request so yes i have yes okay madam chair i actually if everybody's ready i would make a move thank you i moved at the commission amendment the official catalog of events and wages to include the professional pickleball association uh kavana ppa tour as included in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today second thank you any further discussion commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi commissioner maynard hi oh yes four zero excellent andrew took care of that and i appreciate your using some of the lunch break to take to address those questions we'll move right on to um thank you andrew again thank you um move on to our community's fair division and chief delaney uh you're going to return to the policy discussion thank you madam chair and commissioners um so today we wanted to continue our discussions about some potential modifications to uh the community mitigation fund um as you recall we met back on july 27th to start this discussion and at that point the sense of the commission was to move ahead with um sort of uh flashing this out just a little bit and um creating a framework for some of the possible changes which which we have done and is included in in your packet which is just a quick update uh we've done a few things in the interim uh in addition to generating uh that developing that framework um on august 10th we had a meeting with our grantees uh to talk with them about uh what some of the challenges were with the program and and some of the ideas that that we had um it was a very good meeting uh we had over 40 attendees at that meeting um which was really great um attendance especially you know in the middle of the summer um and uh essentially we went over with them the same presentation that we went over with you on the on the 27th uh on july 27th and you know the feedback that we got from that was was again that you know that we were sort of correct in our assessment that the biggest challenge that they face is the um you know identifying and quantifying the impacts of of the casinos and um in general I think to a person uh for the people who commented they really did like the idea of having um our guidelines be more prescriptive where we said where we tell them what the impacts are and we also tell them what some of the solutions to those impacts might be um you know just to give them more guidance on on what uh uh what was what was uh you know what's acceptable and um and then also there was a lot of um definite interest in the idea of a block grant approach um the comments that we received back on that were that uh you know again we talked about the capacity of some of these communities to to be uh developing grant applications and so on when there's no guarantee that they'll get the money um several folks commented that they felt that that a block grant approach would sort of level the playing field a little bit amongst the communities that uh you know where we have some communities that have dedicated grant writers who take a lot of advantage of the program and then you have these communities who who don't and and have not been able to take advantage of the program so there was definitely um a lot of good comment in that area um and also this week on tuesday we held our local community mitigation advisory committee meetings and our subcommittee on community mitigation um and commissioner hill was in attendance at both of those uh meetings and um i would say that the comments that we received were very similar to what we received when we met with our grantees um the the idea of having a um more prescriptive guidelines uh was was universally uh agreed that that would be a good thing to do and same thing with the block grant approach uh you know the the key question that came out of all of this was well what is the formula going to look like uh you know everybody wanted to have some idea you know well what what does that mean for us um you know one of the things that we did hear from uh particularly from springfield was that that they felt that the you know the host communities should uh get a larger share of the money because um they they take up a much larger burden um of of those impacts so um you know again the the the comments were generally positive on on the notion of a um of a block grant approach um so what i thought i would do now is just kind of walk through the framework uh that we put together and that is in your packets starting i think at page 240 um so what we've done as you all know community mitigation fund we get six and a half percent of the gaming taxes go into the community mitigation fund from the category one facilities and also six and a half percent of the any fines that are that are generated from those facilities so what we looked at here is saying that a block grant approach probably can't work for all of the things that we do a block grant approach works for the municipalities but for those things like the workforce development programs that we have and district attorneys offices and so on a block grant really wouldn't wouldn't work for those so what we are proposing is having uh sort of a two two piece approach to that and the first we're we're calling it the municipal block grant program which would be for all of the eligible communities um and then what we're calling for lack of a better word program uh set asides and those set asides would include the workforce uh program that we currently run uh the district attorney's offices the hamden sheriff's office if we decide that that we're going to continue with that and then any regional agencies the regional planning agencies and so on now on the municipal block grant side what we're proposing is that all of the money is generated by the casinos would would go into that uh block grant program so right now in region a we're generating about 12 million dollars in funds in region b it's about four million um and so uh and what we also looked at is the category two facility which is of course plane ridge park um they actually are within the boundaries of region a and and given the amount of money that is in region a we felt it's probably appropriate for those communities to get to use region a funds historically we've kind of split it up between region a and region b um but since you know there's such a a discrepancy in the amount of funds of region a um generates it seemed more appropriate to do that but again that well that's not a question we need to decide today that's really going to be a policy question that we would be bringing up later and again on the program set asides uh we have our workforce grant program which as of right now sits at a million dollars a year 500,000 for the east 500,000 for the west um you know in the interest of trying to get more money out uh we could consider increasing those amounts again a policy question that we don't need to decide on today uh and also district attorney's office is right now only the hand in uh district attorney's office uh has come in for money and I know with commissioner O'Brien we're going to meet with some of the other uh the da's and try to gauge their interest in participating in this and we think is you know there's a really good um there's money here for them and they should probably be taking advantage of that um so we're going to try to grow that piece of the program just uh through having additional da's offices uh participate uh the hand in sheriff's office again that's a policy question we won't really talk about that particularly today and then you know we put on here regional agencies we haven't really thought too much about if we want to try to set some money aside for you know the pioneer valley planning commission and and the um the MAPC and um so anyway what we're looking at there for the funding source is you know right now we have balances that you know unused balances in the fund and our thought was that we could dedicate those funds to these set-asides and then essentially those surpluses would would reduce over you know some period of time um so that is you know so that's the the basic approach to to doing that and and I think on the program set-asides you know with the workforce grant I think we would we would put that out just as we do now as being competitive and saying that you know we have money available region a and region b um with the district attorney's offices I think we would just set aside a certain amount of money and tell the da's office you know we'll come up with an application form for them to fill out and so on and what you know what we want to see um so I think that side should be pretty straightforward so I'm going to focus the rest of this presentation really on the municipal block grant program and what we think that might look like. Joe just before we continue it can you remind me and Commissioner Byron maybe you remember have we ever had any of the district courts reach out for um any relief I don't know um Eileen if if the da's if we're talking to the da's offices that we should also be thinking about that I just I don't know there's data to support the court so yeah I think well firstly you know the law itself particularly spells out da's offices it does not talk about the court district court okay all all it says is um public safety agencies including the district attorney's office you know police fire ems things like that um so that might be a little bit of a stretch yeah I guess I thought that at one point we had gotten something my apologies you know I mean and I think we could have we could certainly have legal take a look at that and see if that fits within the framework of of of 23 yeah and Commissioner Byron you were leaning in I don't know what you were thinking I just I didn't have a memory of us hearing from the courts okay thanks okay so um moving on so what would this municipal block grant program look like um so what we would envision this as being we would get a single application from a community covering all of the projects that the community is proposing to use the funds um and this you know so the application would be broken down into categories as we do now so we would still have uh you know several categories um and of course this the the funds going on to the communities would be based on a formula which we'll talk about formula some of the things to consider in a formula um in a little bit um and right now so we're proposing five categories and those are transportation community planning public safety gambling harm reduction and also um specific impacts so those are essentially the categories that we have now um with workforce development as being an additional one and you know we kind of pulled that out of out of this the block grant piece and what we are proposing here uh in this uh in this uh memo is you know having kind of a targeted minimum in each one of the categories similar to what they do with the community preservation act where and in this case we're saying 15 percent is the target for each of the four uh categories with nothing under specific impact and that would leave them 40 percent to move among categories as they would see fit um some of the comments that we got um on this were saying that you know that may not really fit particularly well with every community and our ideas we don't want a community to just take the money and put it into all into transportation or public safety or something just every single year um where it becomes almost like a general fund kind of expense even though it would not be um and so I think maybe for the first year we would put a target on there and say you know you need if you're not going to do that you need to explain to us why you're not going to do that and how you might meet that in the future or something like that you know maybe we don't we don't say that that's a hard and fast rule this year but you know you should we want to see the money spread around to the various categories is what the long the long and short of it is and so in your memo you'll see that under each category we have sort of four uh items here we have impacts eligible projects ineligible projects and then the the target of 15 percent uh minimum spend and for for just illustrative purposes I put together um again a framework not not not a final guideline but on what these guidelines would kind of look like um so so for we did I did the one for transportation and so what we're saying in in the in the example is that you know that we've reviewed all of the traffic studies for all of the uh facilities and we've reviewed a bunch of um research uh that's done that's been done on traffic I've looked at four or five different studies that show you know sort of what uh the impacts of increased traffic are on local roads and public safety and things like that so what we're saying is that we've done the research ourselves and that based on that research we've determined that there are a number of impacts that are due to traffic and so you know the first impact they were saying is you know increases in traffic are likely to cause increased congestion along the major routes that lead to and from the casino I think that's almost self-evident um you know secondly increases in traffic are likely to lead to increased motor vehicle accidents um some of the studies that I read say that you know up to a certain point uh you know that that is true and but of course when congestion gets really really really bad and everyone's going so slow that accidents actually reduce a little bit later on but by and large uh increases in traffic lead to increases in motor vehicle accidents and also um you know that increases in traffic are likely to increase the potential for conflicts between vehicular and bicycle and pedestrian traffic and then also that there are some air pollution impacts and so then what we've done next on that is saying we've identified a number of things that folks can do to try to address these things so in this category under transportation we're saying this is going to cover both transportation planning and transportation construction it's just all transportation related items so and you'll see here and I won't go into them we've identified a number of different types of studies that folks could do to try to reduce congestion or improve roadway safety which are sort of the two main focuses of the identified impacts and then also we put together several eligible projects for transportation construction and as of now we're proposing to keep you know the cap on transportation construction at you know one-third of the project costs um as we do as we do currently and in there you know we talk about bike share networks to things like blue bikes and so on which we've you know all of these things that you see here are things that we've funded in the past um you know road and traffic signal construction um you know to improve safety or reduce congestion trail construction you know bike paths and so on um you know bus lanes things of that nature um and then when we talk about ineligible projects um you know here we're saying that you know things like simple repaving projects those don't really address the casino impacts um you know improving the condition of a road is fine but that's more of a municipal type expense than something that's addressing a casino related impact so we're saying that those you know those shouldn't be um eligible unless of course that repaving project is also improving safety you know they may do um repaving with some um complete streets kind of things that help uh you know improve traffic flow or improve safety um so you know we would consider some of that but you know it needs to be um it can't just be primarily to be a repaving a road um project primarily associated with aesthetic improvements again we love it when people spruce up their communities but that doesn't necessarily address an impact of the casino um and obviously projects that don't I address impacts identified that we identified um and then you know with police costs associated with traffic safety we're saying that you know we like we funded a lot of the speed boards and other things which are traffic safety um issues but those really should be funded under the public safety category so we're going to try to steer people into the kind of the right place for those things so that's what essentially the framework would look like now uh we are right now working with Mark uh Vanderlinden and Bonnie and their team they have a consultant that they've been using company called Rio that that that we're going to use as well and they're going to do some literature searches for us in jurisdictions outside of our jurisdiction other places in the United States and Europe and you know places that are similar to what we are you know there's been many studies done by many people but um you know we we want some help in that particularly on the public safety and the gambling harm reduction and to a lesser extent on the community planning to help us identify known impacts of casinos um you know we have we have all our research that we're reviewing but we thought we would try to expand this to a wider group to say hey if there are if there are impacts that have been identified at other casinos is it reasonable to conclude that that would be an impact here uh you know maybe some things that we didn't think of so we're working with them on the other categories um to do that um and then we come down to the the block grant uh distribution formula which is you know this is going to be I think the secret sauce in here that that everybody's going to be uh interested in uh and initially what we've done is saying what should we be looking at uh in in developing so the first thing is you know distance from the casino I think everyone would agree that the further away you get from the casino the impacts of that casino are reduced from not only from a traffic impact but from you know crime or any of the other any of the other things that you you tend to see that you know further way you are uh the impacts would diminish um traffic distribution is another one that we think we we definitely need to consider um you know if you look at the way traffic is distributed um it has a larger impact on certain communities than it does on others and just using encore as an example um you know the the Boston city line is almost right there at the entrance to encore and 70% of the traffic turns right going directly into Boston so uh you know Boston is handling a much larger share of the traffic impact than any other community um so you know we need we need I think we need to consider that as traffic is one of the larger impacts of the this um but when you look out in Springfield you know a hundred percent of the traffic goes out onto Springfield streets and then it then it you know it it gets it diffuses as it goes further out but you know I think um I don't remember what all the numbers are but you know each of the communities you know absorbs a certain amount of the traffic after that so um so I think we do need to consider um you know that that impact and it's not going to be the same uh in the east as it is in the west I mean it's just geographically it's different uh physically it's different um you know and by the same token um uh you know MGM Springfield has the interstate right there you know so a very large portion of their traffic jumps right on the interstate so how much of an impact is that on the local community so those are some of the things we need to consider some of the other things that we had questions on and I think we're going to do a little bit more research on this and you know we'll need to and again these are kind of policy questions that that don't need to be answered today but um but would be if we move ahead with this one is you know should employee residency uh impact the payments I think we can get that data from uh our licensees uh you know anonymized that say hey there's you know 300 employees that live in Springfield and 200 employees that live in West Springfield or whatever that you know whatever the number might be and you know should we think about that as as a consideration in a formula um you know the other should we tailor the formulas for each region or do we just want to have one for the state I mean I think you'd probably want to just have one formula but you know the two regions particularly uh on the category one casinos they're very different from one another um you know the locations the access to highways and and sort of um the distance that some of the surrounding communities are from the host community so um something to think about you know and again should the host communities receive um the largest payment as they bear the largest percentage of the impacts um again that that may be true uh but those you know those communities also do receive direct payments from the casinos that are you know some some substantial amounts so I think we need to look at what host and surrounding community payments are and how that plays into it um and then also should there be a minimum amount of money received by the communities and I think our group thinks yes there should be um and that would probably be different in each of the regions in region a region b and um in the category two um and you know I think we would look at each one of those and and see what you know what those minimums should be because you know different amounts of money are generated in the regions and then the last one is again it's a policy question that we that we ask every year about should um the money do you know generated in region a stay in region a and should the money generated region b stay in region b and you know we've heard loud and clear from our lcnac is that they they want it that way and they don't ever want it to change um you know uh but anyway so that is that those are some of the considerations in a formula um you know I don't think I'll go through the I gave you some information on what the review and approval process would look like you know I think on the block grant process it would be you know we would get a we would get work plans at the end of January and we'd review them this would give us a little bit more flexibility to say to a community you know if they had something that we felt need that doesn't really meet the guidelines you know we can then talk with them and say hey if you do this that looks like it would meet the guidelines and would you be willing to consider doing that so it seems like there's a bit more flexibility to go to go back and forth with the community to work on their work plan um and then you know ultimately I think you know I mean these work plans um and again this would all be up to the commission uh you know once they're finalized we're recommending that they be brought back to the commission for final approval and you know we can review them with the commission and what you know what projects are being proposed and so on and then just like uh our current grants we would do all the grant instruments and contracts after that um so um and then I I did list out for you a bunch of policy questions not we don't want to talk about those today but these are just some of the things that have been raised um over the year and we will be coming back to the commission with all of these policy questions in a more in a more detailed fashion but one that I just did want to highlight was we had a couple of different requests from folks to allow administration costs to be covered by the grant um we haven't normally done that except on our workforce grants and in our workforce grants we allow seven and a half percent to be used for administration um you know most grants do allow some administrative costs and again you know that that is that's money that we can get to the communities that we're not getting to them now if we do allow that so something to to definitely consider and so with that that's really the end of my presentation um you know we put this down for a vote and again I'm not sure it absolutely needs a vote I think it's again we can just get a sense of the commission whether or not you want us to move sort of to the next step of this process which essentially the next steps here would be to come back in the in September with all of our policy questions and at this point we would we we come back with our policy questions that need to be addressed by the commission we would have a what I'm going to say is a rough draft of our guidelines um you know more than a framework but certainly not finalized and then the third piece that we would come back with in September is a distribution formula or perhaps two or three different you know kind of examples of what it would result in so that's that's where we are and I guess I'll stop there and take whatever questions you have and see where we want to go moving forward Questions for commissioners well our Chief Laney commissioners Commissioner O'Brien so Joe the the one you just touched on most recently the administrative cost the seven and a half percent that's the one that probably gives me the most cause um I mean I think you made a reference to it earlier when you said you know we don't want people using this to sort of just rotate through and go into their general fund and supplement and um I mean seven hundred percent obviously isn't going to pay for an employee but um if they came into different categories 15 30 I mean you're looking at like what almost 50 percent if they went into various categories right that could potentially then each be deemed to have an administrative cost we would say seven and a half off the whole thing not per category not per category so per municipality per municipality yep okay so they actually could pay a salary with that yeah if you had a million dollars 75 thousand I you know I mean that's honestly I I I always kind of raise an eye about with block grants in terms of just grant compliance and and could have contract management but um I mean I'm hearing you on all this stuff and that's sort of the one more I got to that and like kind of the eyebrow went back up I I I I totally see it when we're doing workforce development it absolutely makes sense to me in that context um so I'm not sold on it here so I just throw that out for conversation yeah what was represented to us and I haven't I haven't verified this independently was they saying that the community development block grant the federal block grant allows 20 percent of their funds to be used for admin like which is that's a lot but but you know so so it's it's it is certainly not um uncommon for for grants to allow admin funds but I guess I'm more or less agnostic on it I I don't I don't really you know I know so I'll do I've got Commissioner Hill first Commissioner Ryan thanks Joe correct me if I'm wrong during the discussions this was also brought up for to try and help some of the smaller towns yeah those which are having difficulty being able to apply for some of these grants because they don't have the personnel or the the funding to be able to do this so they've been missing out and I think this was an opportunity for that the smaller towns to be able to get some assistance to be able to get the funding that they maybe haven't been able to get in the past yeah an accurate statement absolutely we just certainly did hear hear from that from out west for sure well Commissioner O'Brien one of the things that we're looking at for a policy question is saying you know if we do a percentage do we also want to cap for some of the larger communities of saying you know 7.5 percent of a million dollars is very different than of a like 200 thousand dollar grant so I think that'll be a a policy question for you guys to debate at a later point I mean like 7.5 percent but no greater than this real dollars right okay we did hear from the small towns just so that you know and we really I say we our Joe and his staff have really bent over backwards to try and help those communities that in the past have not been able to take advantage of this grant program and that's because our grant program there was did we require them to keep administrative costs out yeah because of the the affirmatively because it was considered budgetary issues yeah you know we initially we were saying hey you know we think the community should have some skin in the game and well we couldn't really do a match we were saying well at least if you're doing the admin costs or some in-kind services or something like that we would consider that but we you know we never required a particular match and 7.5 percent to commissioner's point in the hole can be really impactful 7.5 percent generally doesn't typically cost all administrative costs right it's like yeah and in our research on doing this most state grants do between five and 10 percent so we kind of felt that we'd split the middle yeah that's one more we did the workforce stuff that's I think crystal had done a bit of work on that or maybe even Jill before that looking at what admin costs were and and you know we we just yeah came down in the middle Madam chair yes commissioner so on the question of the block grant as a new proposal I want everybody to know that it's something that I am very supportive of and after hearing from the groups this week whether it be our advisory group or the subcommittee I would say over 90 percent of those that we talked to would like to see that this program become a block type of a grant program moving forward I think Joe was fairly eloquent in in the way he let us know and I've seen over the last two years that it's becoming very very difficult to try and tie this program to the casinos as it was when it was first implemented I think it would be easier for the agency to be able to implement this type of a program compared to the program that they've been doing over the last few years so I'm very very optimistic that if we were to do a block grant type of program it would benefit not only the cities and the towns but certainly we would be in the scope of what the legislature thought when they passed this program to be implemented can I do a follow-up of course I'm wondering I love the idea of the block grant I think I was on record last time so but I do wonder for our while we're examining these processes carefully whether we should be including and perhaps you'd have us underway generally an evaluative process you know a robust evaluative process and an auditing program so you know it's it's going to be a different if we adopt this is a different approach and it might be the right time to really do those follow-up steps that are you know a matter of best practices for grant programs oh yeah we've already started that you know we last winter we started doing that particularly out in the in region b we met with most of our communities out there and walk through closeout procedures and their record keeping requirements and all of those various pieces you know once we were in full swing of community mitigation fund in February through June we those kind of went on hiatus a little bit but it looks like it was sort of that December January timeframe you know once our guidelines are out and before we receive applications in that seems to be kind of the sweet spot time for getting out to visit some folks even though the weather may not always cooperate quite so much in that time period but but we are definitely doing that and that's definitely an ongoing effort I'd like to see it somewhat organize them I understand the audit piece and that's so important right you know stewards of this of these important funds but I am really interested in the evaluative part so that we know if it works right Commissioner Hill as we go along to if we're going in this different direction you know is it is it working Kimmy and you always you always get back to us and we always hear about the programs but I just think it could be institutionalized in a great way here yeah you know I think like anything you know we will continually looking at look at how it performs how well it performs if it performs you know I mean look if we get if we get to January 31st and and half of the community still don't apply for it it's like well what can we do you know have it again look have it again right you know we're looking at this as in some ways we're saying this is sort of a ineligible phrase but like a last-ditch effort before having to go back to the legislature for changes you know if we if we do this and then this doesn't work then you know we have to rethink everything. Commissioner Bryan? Yeah so I had two questions one similar to what the chair just mentioned in terms of compliance you know my background coming from the IG's office you would very often get allegations of misspending of grants that didn't have sort of specifics on them or specific reporting requirements back so I'm thinking again about that administrative cost like did they have the responsibility to have that person tag their time sheets you know that says yeah I spent you know this much of my week on managing and implementing the grant or you know are there going to be things like that either advisory directives mandates on the grant sort of question one and then answer that one and then I the other one was something that Commissioner Hill had said that I wanted to follow up on. Well yeah so right now we require quarterly reports from all of our grantees and we will continue to do that and the other thing that we do is you know this is all this is all done on a reimbursement basis now we used to do it where we we gave them some money up front and then gave them more money and gave it in tranches but now we're saying with your quarterly report you get a payment so hey if we don't get your quarterly report you're not getting your payment so that's that is one good method to keep you know people in line but yeah I think with I'm not sure Lillian maybe you know on the on the workforce do we track their their seven and a half percent admin cost particularly yeah I mean we have different breakdowns and reporting requirements for them so we'd be happy to look at you know what we're doing over there and see how we could you know play out here or look at some other grant programs and see how they're tagging it I think that a lot of the folks that we have funded that are related to the grant are full-time positions so they're you know it's kind of like they're very clearly doing programmatic work so I think it's a good question and be happy to look into a couple different avenues that we could do that and I think we can definitely do that you know in their reporting if they're utilizing funds for admin purposes they're going to have to submit to us whatever you know some tally of the hours that the person spent on on the project or whatever it is yeah I think that's fairly standard for for most grant programs that you know I'm sure I'm sure we can crib that off of someone yeah I think much like the police patrols where they're you know very easy to you know kind of code them in and they do submit coded in time sheets I think that you know there are some opportunities for us to figure out a way to have that represented in the data right and then my other follow-up was Mr. Hill made the comment that you know close to 90% of the people they came in this community said they want the block grant etc and I'm just curious what if anything from was the other 10% agnostic or were they raising concerns with it and if they were what if any were they saying that that said don't do it well I don't think anybody really said don't do it you know we we heard from from the dor uh Sean Cronin who's on on our group he expressed he said well you know why are we sort of trying to get this money out you know like if people aren't coming in for it why are we trying to sort of push it on them and okay and you know I think my explanation back to him was saying that look even our own researchers have a difficult time drawing a bright line between the casino and an impact you know often you'd see in Christopher Bruce's days well it's likely caused it's it's you know it's you know that you know we think it's caused by that but there's not often this perfect connection right so so if our researchers have difficulty doing that how is a community on their own going to say here's an impact and here's what all the documentation that we have to justify this impact because I mean that was essentially the way that our program worked you tell us what the impact is you can't just say there's an impact you have to demonstrate that there's an impact through data or whatever it is it can't just be sort of an anecdotal kind of thing um and you know that expectation of the communities is probably unrealistic you know and they also there is a reality here that you know somebody we fixed all the impacts there are some impacts that will go on forever as long as there's a casino there the district attorney's offices will handle an increased caseload due to arrests that happen at the casino that wouldn't happen if the casino wasn't there and that will that will never stop you know so yes you may address some of the impacts on traffic and other things but there are definitely impacts of the casinos that will go on um and that will that will never be fully addressed so I understand the the the thought there is like you know but I think the reality is is that as a commission we need to try to help these communities define the impacts and define the solutions and then let them basically do the implementation of these things um and that's I think what this program is really trying to do yeah these aren't going to be like exclusive right so sort of like I think conceptually what I thought you're saying too is we're gonna sort of give you the guaranteed impacts that we see unquestioningly when we're looking at this that doesn't preclude a municipality right from saying look here's this obscure thing peculiar to our locality that's you know that's also going to be considered and is it under the old analysis well so so yeah that's I didn't really explain that we do have the fifth category which is specific impact so if they if they have something that we that's not identified they can identify it and and um and yes they would have to provide some justification for that I'll give you an example of last year um was an example where saugus doing the street treats for air pollution we've never seen anything like that and you know they came in and it's like oh this this is interesting right and at first you're almost like really but then you know you read the analysis and they're saying hey you know there's this many more cars on the road from the casino with this you know that has this many pounds of carbon dioxide etc etc you know you do some of those calculations you know like well well that that really is an impact and this is a way to address that impact it's it's perfectly legit so yeah we would absolutely consider all of those things um and and I again one of the points is saying when when you're submitting a work plan it's a little bit different than submitting an application I mean it is their application but once you have a work plan and you review it and again if there was something that was novel like that and we said well you know we need a little bit more justification for that you know can you can you generate something that does this or this or this um you know we have the ability to do that with a work plan we didn't really have the ability to do that with um the application application before we would we were asking questions of them and at times we're trying to through the questions lead to an answer but we often didn't get the answer that we were hoping to get right right you know so I think this process will be um it will be more collaborative in a way I mean so that's gonna you know that's gonna make more work on our side a little bit but I think it's gonna it's it will be a lot smoother than the other process that we had which was sort of review everything send letters out to everybody and wait a few weeks to get them back and then review everything again and all of a sudden it's June and we gotta get this thing done you know so I think this this process should be uh I I think um smooth if not necessarily easy I'm sorry little I did you I felt like I cut you off at one point no I was just saying the only piece of concern that we got back from any community had nothing to do with the structure they all liked the block grant it was just the you know at the end of the day we want to see the formula see how much money we're getting and we don't want to lose any money that we're currently getting right makes sense yeah and look the reality is depending on what the formula looks like there could be some communities that get less money than they get now because you know we were giving money to many communities who weren't who weren't coming in for anything you know so again we're not getting into what the formula looks like today we're going to spend the next month assuming we're giving the okay to go ahead on this um to come up with that and look that's when that's when it's you know you guys are going to earn your salary on uh on making decisions on what you want these formulas to look like Lenny did you just ask to say that that's how we're going to earn our salary you will definitely be earning your salary thanks it's just after a couple of long days just this past week I think uh we look forward to your formula that's what I'm saying um commissioners this might be a good point where we do we give the green light to this team to continue on and come back with the formula in the after four to five weeks I would like for that to happen yes Michelle brian yeah I said I I had this ingrained opposition to block grants um but I hear Commissioner Hill I hear Joe I hear Lily um and so I'm okay going forward you know coming up with the formulas pressure me or I totally support anything that we can do to make it easier for these communities and I did tell Joe this so I want to say it um on the record and that is you know when you look at the program and you really dig in there are a lot of things that have happened that would not have happened without this program so you know when I think back to the legislation and I think back to Governor Patrick signing it I think it was totally envisioned um that this would exist in this would exist in this way and that's why we're trying to and as long as it's used in a proper way as Commissioner O'Brien brought up I I totally support you have your green light and thank you very thorough very thorough um memorandum thank you so much well and thank you uh precious I do I do think um you know and look when we get to September or even October um you know if if things for whatever reason go sideways on this you know um you know I think we'll still be able to run our program you know as it as it exists but you know I think as a fallback you know I mean we can take this year's guidelines and go out if things don't um work out uh but we'll you know we're gonna do everything in our power to get this thing done and and move it forward good so should we move on to item 6b then yes that would be great thank you okay excellent well done thanks Lily so this should just be a pretty brief discussion North Attleboro is received a CFF reserve grant of $100,000 back in 2021 if you're calling 2021 we were telling communities that you you know you need to spend these reserve funds or or we're gonna take them back and so North Attleboro came in to do a study of Kelly Boulevard which is um just down the road a bit from from PPC and uh in the interim after that grant was signed a developer is proposing a 300 plus unit apartment complex on Kelly Boulevard and through the planning board and others was required to do a study of Kelly Boulevard and uh and that came up with some significant improvements that need to be made to that roadway and the total cost is $6.2 million and you know the developer is not responsible for all of that because Kelly Boulevard had its own issues before the development which is one of the reasons why North Attleboro wanted to do this study in the first place but now since they haven't needed to do the study they would like to use that $100,000 towards the construction of Kelly Boulevard um obviously our limit on uh transportation construction is one third of the total project cost clearly $100,000 is well less than one third of $6.2 million um they have cobbled together several uh sources of funds they got a mass works grant uh playing bills kicking in some money North Attleboro is kicking in some money the developer is kicking in some money and this would just be um this would just you know finish off the uh the funds for that project so we are certainly recommending uh allowing that change in use for their uh grant that memo is on page 246 yes missionaries do you have any questions for joe commissioner hill do you want to move uh sure madam chair i move that the commission approve a change in scope to the North Attleboro 2021 reserve grant of $100,000 to use the funds for construction of proposed improvements to rather than a traffic study of Kelly Boulevard is included in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today second thanks any questions or edits great thank you commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi commissioner maynard hi and i vote yes four zero excellent work well that that concludes uh my work for today thanks joe thank you very much we appreciate it um we'll move on then to item number seven madam chair yes before we move on to that next section i am going to excuse myself from this meeting at this point um i apologize to you the commission and the public for having to leave but i'm sure you three can handle what's in front of you very well without me so thank you and i will see you also and we're thinking of you and your family thanks commissioner hill okay um so we're moving on to seven um item number seven legal and i see that katelyn is available and i believe um perhaps um attorney rocales but maybe not precarious i always put that r in there um yes and k will be helping today with these regs um i believe attorney macarius and attorney commoners will be here um so we have four regs for you today two regs are coming back for their final vote um and that is 205 cm r2 30 review of a proposed agreement with a category three licensee and 205 cm r256.05 advertising to youth then we have two regs that you will be seeing for the first time and those are 205 cm r2 19 temporary licensing procedures and 205 cm r2 31 renewal of a sports wagering license so with that i will turn it over to mean it and paul for uh to start uh thank you katelyn and thank you madam chair uh paul is finishing up a separate call so i'm going to start off without him and uh may take these slightly out of order if that's okay to accommodate that um and hope you can join us uh but let me start with 205 cm r2 30 uh which is um appears on page uh sorry here i'm using a different platform than usual so i'm not sure i have the page 248 248 thank you appreciate that um there are no comments on this one this is the review of a proposed agreement with a category three licensee this governs agreements between category one and two licensees and the uh and a category three um and so i have nothing to add uh for this one and it's just ready for final adoption unless there's questions questions commissioners okay i'm going to turn to my two fellow commissioners do you have no questions are you prepared to me this is i move that the commission approved the amended small business impact statement and draft of 205 cm r2 30 as included in the commissioners packet and discussed here today and further that staff be authorized to take the steps necessary to file the required documentation with the secretary of the commonwealth to finalize the regulation promulgation process second okay and edit okay commissioner brian hi commissioner maynard hi yes three zero thank you all right thank you madam chair the next regulation is uh 250 605 this is coming back for final promulgation of the change made by emergency this is a section regarding um the signage um and the uh me to include 21 plus language on signage um the is currently subject to a 90 day waiver which i believe expires in the next month or so but the regulation itself is coming back for the final adoption we did received uh did receive one comment on this and it was really a question for clarification um and it had to do with whether the 21 plus language uh associated with with stationary signage would be needed in two different contexts uh one is for branding and locations viewable on a television broadcast but not in the venue itself uh the example given um is the top of say an mba backboard at td garden um so it might be visible in an overhead shop that may not be visible in the garden i will say just anecdotally i i think i have cheaper seats in the commenter because i i can usually see that but um the um the the question was simply you know if it's somewhere where you can only see it that way the second example was uh branding that's super imposed onto a sports venue in a television broadcast and what they that refers to for in case uh others don't uh don't see this normally when you're at the arena a particular sporting arena you may see uh nothing at all or or you know a green um um wall but at home one might see um an ad or a branded ad brand branded logo for a sports wager and operator so question was does that apply uh the language based on the language of the regulation is currently proposed uh the answer to these two questions would be in our view that um the um to to the extent that the branding is in an arena whether or not it's likely to be visible within the arena if it shows up on the broadcast it should have the 21 plus language and that is based on the fact that the wording is displayed on signage or a fixed structure at a sports venue where it is likely to be viewed so if it's going to be viewed at home by folks over 21 on a on on fixed signage then it's subject to that however the language is displayed on signage or a fixed structure so it would not apply to the superimposed logos and that is uh I know that that's a consideration we talked about early on with the sports wager it was advertising because this gets into what is shown on a broadcast which actually may be difficult to address depending on whether the feed is local or national this is in-game advertising typically that's shown I think an easy example to picture is behind the batter at February park for instance and so it's it's not always clear that the operator would be able to section off massachusetts versus other so this was not the intention to capture at this rate again all this is by way of clarification assuming the question and my clarification today don't change your minds on the reg we're ready to move forward with the language as is it appears at 250 page 254 the red language is what was added by emergency it will be finalized at this point commissioners are you all set with the reg as is and with Mina's explanation all set I see commissioner brian nodding her head I'm good so I guess we still have to have a vote on that that can be you're prepared to move I can move Madam Chair I move that the commission approved the amended small business impact statement in the draft of 205 cmr 256.05 as included in the commissioners packet and discussed here today and further that staff be authorized to take the steps necessary to further require documentation of the secretary of the commonwealth to finalize the regulation promulgation process second okay any questions or edits just a reminder that this is under the advertising to you back okay uh mr brian hi mr manor hi my vote yes three zero okay moving on then seven c thank you madam chair so starting at two page page 259 excuse me there is a um memorandum followed by two regs that I'd like to explain a little bit together that related 205 cmr 219 it's a revised version of that an amended version of that and a draft 205 cmr 231 both of these relate to the renewal of temporary and full sports wagering license in prospect of these full sports wagering licenses the the procedure for 219 to start there and 219 shows up at page 261 initially if you'll recall this was discussed several months ago now the idea was to have a temporary license that would terminate after five years um and um that concern that was expressed by some operators was that they're that a license could terminate as a temporary license even though there it may be for reasons outside of the licensees control that there's an investigation pending etc or a suit full suitability investigation in particular uh accordingly the commission had um asked for a regulation to allow temporary licenses to continue operating after that five-year period if there was commission if it was sort of not the operators fault that that was happening um so um the way we have uh sought to address that is uh just to be clear and this sort of tries to balance cost of renewal and getting to a full license is to one have essentially a one year limit duration for a temporary license before it's renewed the operator would be paying an annual license fee at each point of a million dollars at each point and we'll go through the statutory steps for a new temporary license so sort of allow for additional temporary licenses instead of expiration of the license um and depending on when um that you know which which renewal it is there may be different levels of scrutiny applied uh consistent with the prior regulation so the first time an operator seeks to leave request to for a renewed license i.e. the second temporary license uh it's a pretty pro forma request making sure nothing material has changed however um you know if there is new information that can be taken into account for the third temporary license i.e. the second renewal there would be a new preliminary suitability report that is meant to address the concern that i believe was raised when this was discussed of of not acting on stale preliminary suitability data so now you're sort of two years away from the end of the temporary you you have um you get new data but it's not all the way to a full suitability analysis which may still be pending um and then it kind of recessed to another two years of more of a pro forma approach now that you have the revised uh or updated suitability um and the idea after that is that you would have flexibility to determine which of the two approaches you want to go again the hope for all of this is that there is not a need to trigger uh this is i think we've as we've discussed in the past this is a regulation that has had a lot of complexity to anticipate potential scenarios that i think it's everybody's hope and intention are not needed um and that there'd be full review done before all of this uh but it's a sort of belt and suspenders approach to make sure that the commission is balancing uh adequate review with updated and and timely suitability information with fairness to the operators who may not be at fault for the for the delay in that um in getting to a full suitability uh proceeding so it is it reads as a brand new regulation but that is sort of the the overall structure commissioners do you want amina to walk us through the bag are you satisfied with your own review so amina is this i feel like we've read this before is this just a rework of kind of i feel like i'm talking about this for ages but this is a uh yes it is a rework of a prior one it's hard to say that i you know the reason we didn't provide this as a red line is they think it it would be a lot of moves just too much out of too much yeah but yes it's a rework to reflect that earlier comments i think what happened the last time we talked about this which feels like ages ago actually at this point was at the outset when sort of deciding what a temporary license would look like and understanding that we kind of we'd come back over this summer after temporary licenses were issued to think about what these are going to look like several years into the future from now with the not that we ever ended up in a lull in in activity but with with sort of that first phase of licensing completed this was an appropriate time to bring this back up reflecting and and you'll see you know it's to sort of walk through the sections briefly you know there's still the same setup about the temporary license request process because that's how the statute phrased it has to be requested of the commission the the big piece of this that i think is important to keep in mind is this idea of different levels of review for the second license versus a third and then it goes back to what's more like the second license and that's that's reflected on page 264 that distinction and really the big feature here is that that third temporary license has an update of the suitability the preliminary suitability report to avoid the stale data issue and then as you get back into years four and five you get the you get the ability to do a more pro former review after five years i think we left it more flexible and again if we need to we can adjust again within the next five years but we just want to we didn't want to try to forecast all that at this point okay I mean to my apologies and i may have been reading and you may have said it my apologies for not being a better listener but under the under the rag it's up to three years for IEP to do and then that rag allows for relief to IEP if they come back to the commission is that what it is is that right and then there's the fourth and fifth year is that what you're getting at under today it's not so much it's not so much at the IEP comes back and I apologize by the way there there is I had forgotten that there wasn't a packet but there is a red light version starting into page 267 my apologies for that at the at the third year it's not so much about what the change is not that the IEP requested or not although that is certainly going to contemplate as part of the process is how you would know you know why a license may be pending for that long madam chair the issue is at that third year the operator still submits an application for leave to obtain a renewed license but this time rather than just to perform a kind of acknowledging whether or not there have been material updates the IEP actually goes through the process that it would have in the past year for preliminary suitability to make sure the preliminary suitability report is up to date they essentially go seek the information again make sure it's up to date as opposed to relying on a more pro forma review to make that that there have been no material changes or certification there have been no material changes in other words I believe in the past when we talked about this there was that the the five-year term you know one one option was to just have a five-year term and have it simply expire at the end the concern there was that that was an awfully long time to have reviews ongoing but that the safety valve option of having the IAB necessarily request the extra time didn't always make sense because the operator may or may not still be you know engaged in in wanting another temporary license this has the operator asking but you know with the acknowledgement that the rationale will be because the suitability review is not done but what I think I'm hearing is then so now they they're kind of coming into some kind of a sort of partial not quite temporary suitability review and not quite durable suitability but they're subject to something in between is that is that kind of how to imagine so IAB can sort of say well we've got this concern that concern we need two more years or is it we're just not done we need more I mean I guess I'm wondering does this help who's this I think when I remember Commissioner O'Brien bringing this up we wanted three years because we were hoping that a suitability would be done as efficiently as possible without compromise to integrity but that sometimes we felt you know and Commissioner O'Brien I don't want to put words in your mouth but five years you felt were too long because it's not because of of risk to integrity but more IAB should be getting to the full suitability unless there's extreme circumstances like such complexities I mean I do understand certain investigations are going to be so complex they could require more time and that's what I was thinking we were getting at so I think it was also to balance sort of making sure there's efficiency on on the IAB's end and then also cooperation on the applicant's end and so this was sort of these check-ins were sort of designed to motivate both of those and allow for a process that sort of did these check-ins and revisits so that somebody didn't get I actually think was Commissioner Maynard said you know you don't want to find out it's four years later and they're still only paying their million dollars on their 10th and they've been operating and and so we were taking all of those things in figuring out how do you kind of tranche this so that both of those competing possibilities balance each other out and I think that's what they were trying to do with this yeah um because there was a level if there weren't cooperation going I would hope that we would know that a lot sooner rather than later yeah yeah you know what I mean right right and that's why I said at the outset I you know I think this is the hope that this is a very complicated rag that will never matter in a sense that you know this will be done but the way we try to balance all those factors so it's really a host of things it's sort of ongoing integrity because of changed facts efficiency so that the IAB is not sort of having to layer on multiple temporary license reviews while it's trying to do the full suitability review fairness to the full full licensees of not having paid so much more than the temporary licensee so that's where the annual fee comes in and then fairness to the operators that they're not being forced to undergo you know more suitability review when it wasn't their fault they are cooperating but there's more to be looked into and so the balance there is to sort of recap it with those factors in mind the first and second year after you get your temporary license the renewal is pro forma in the sense and for those of you who may ever have witnessed or been familiar with local alcohol beverage licensing it's very much a if you submit the paperwork you say you're you're going to renew unless there's a known change circumstance that's sort of the end of the review it's really pro forma paying the fee year three is where the commit where the IAB in this case would prepare a new preliminary suitability review so would actually be under the same standards to your question madam chair as the current preliminary suitability review that happened in this go-around in the past year that would happen again at year three while certifications that kind of thing exactly but with the full certification as opposed to um saying yes I'd like to renew which is essentially years one and two so it's the the that happens again at year three and then after that it goes back to sort of the pro forma you you if you express an intent to renew there's no known reason for an update you know the commission doesn't need to pull it out or the bureau doesn't recommend saying actually we have a red flag that's been raised or something big material change it just goes on that way so it's essentially redoing the preliminary suitability at year three I think is great it does look complicated doesn't first blush second fourth and fifth temporary licenses madam chair yes commission my memory is very similar to commissioner o'briens which is this was really trying to solve for a practical problem that could come up but that no one hopes comes up and at the end of the day I remember being really really worried about you know kind of like a lot of people hold the breath with some simul casting every time it comes up and waiting to see I worried about the licensees you know right sitting around waiting to see wait a minute am I able to operate on this date or am I not and why so yeah it's complicated I hope it's an insurance policy we never have to cash in yeah um but at the same time I think we should provide a route that both incentivizes the everyone moving forward quickly and turning in things quickly and and being very cooperative with the IEB and at the same time giving the IEB time to do the work but giving given some certainty to I can operate I can continue to operate and the fairness on on the fees which was really important to is there a provision if they're not cooperative there is a provision in general if they're not cooperative um into like yeah it's not necessarily in this section but at any time when an operator is not cooperative throughout suitability um that is there are sanctions for that and there are opportunities for the commission to intervene come forward with us because right I mean that would be a red right exactly and so this is not really contemplative to address driving you know an investigation dragging on for that purpose it's it's because of really issues you know we we've talked about as issues outside the operation control I think that's true I think it would also be outside in a lot of ways outside the IEB's control you're not outside the IEB's control because um you know whether it's a resource issue or not getting information from external agencies external right yeah external agencies as opposed to the operator so yeah got it okay I'm good thank you for getting me through it again um I I knew the core issue but the reg itself when I reviewed it so a little confusing again thank you I think go ahead Matt I would recommend voting me separately if that's okay I can then discuss due 31 they're related but not um they should be taken separately yeah I think that's right so this is the 219 temporary um commissioners I can move thanks um I moved that the commission approved the small business impact statement in the draft of 205 CMR 219 as included in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today I moved that the staff be authorized to take the steps necessary to file the required documentation with the secretary of the Commonwealth by emergency and thereafter to begin to be wait do we need this on the emergency Mina yeah I believe so Caitlin is to begin the regulation promulgation process I further move that the staff shall be authorized to modify chapter or section numbers or titles to file additional regulation sections as reserved or to make any other administrative changes as necessary to execute the regulation promulgation process second okay any further edits or questions are answering that motion okay I'm sure Brian hi commissioner hi I vote yes three zero thank you then we'll turn to the related 231 that starts on page that starts on page uh two yeah so this is this regulation I see um Paul may have joined us so uh if he has anything I'll start and give him a chance to take a breath in between meetings but this is the full license renewal process so if there is a this is at the end of the permanent license permanent license to be renewed this is a pretty straightforward regulation it really mirrors 219 in the sense that has an administrative sufficiency review at the end licenses do not expire while timely renewal requests are pending that's under subsection four on page 276 because another key key feature the bureau conducts an investigation you know for the purpose of renewal the commission goes through the process of evaluating it and if it says if it if it does renew it it the operator pays an honor fundable license fee of five million dollars which is by statute and they and we move on for another five years with a renewed license there may also be in subsection 10 I just want to note this on on page 277 a limited extension if there is a non-renewal to wind down operations you will in the next couple of weeks or month or so be seeing a regulation from us on wind down not in this situation but in other you know situations due to closure of a company or decision to pull out of the Commonwealth etc we will be making sure that that kind of aligns with this but that this is sort of a more open-ended ability for the commission to allow for a sort of safe and efficient dissolution or wind down really not dissolution and there is an application fee as as there always is for these things so that's that's really it Paul enough there's anything you want to add for 231 the the only thing that I would add and you may have said this on 219 first of all this is structured in the same manner as 218 just like 219 was once again if you read through the regulation it pretty much proceeds chronologically from the receipt of an application to the issuance of a renewed license and second of all I just wanted to remind you of the statutory provision that this that is that enables this regulation which is chapter 23 n section 6 f and that subsection provides that full licenses may be renewed for five year periods upon payment of a five million dollar renewal fee provided that the operator shall continue to meet all requirements under this chapter and the rules and regulations of the commission and with that we'd be happy to answer to answer any questions I have a general question we've done one renewal of ppcs right for you know not under 23k so did you say you kind of looked at you use the 23k renewal as a basis I'm just wondering if there are any lessons learned on that process we used 205 cmr 218 which deals with the initial issue on civil license as our starting point for all of the procedural steps and the options the commission has to evaluate the renewal request and the overall structure of the regulation I don't I initially drafted this regulation some time ago but I don't recall reviewing the chapter 23k regulations and I'm not sure I was aware that ppc had renewed I mean I might be more familiar I also wasn't I don't think we had ppc particularly in mind Madam Chair but we did to as Paul mentioned 218 was also based on 118 or the equivalent I came up with exactly 118 so I'll do follow a similar process where you know applications taken in it's reviewed for sufficiency and then you know you retain all of I think the key point in all in renewals you retain all the same ability to look at factors and see compliance with the past process in terms of lessons learned from prior application process from what I understand about your renewals in the past or or even looking at ongoing compliance nothing by the time you get to a renewal assuming the internal controls and reporting mechanisms that are put in place through other regs have been followed you should have a pretty good sense of how things are going obviously I think that's been evidenced again today from from the rest of your agenda so that by the time you get to the renewal process if it's not reforma but it is a much simpler process in the sense that the commission knows the entity and knows what issues need to be addressed if any commissioners I do recall for the ppc renewal that we did hold a public hearing I don't know if this I don't see that here I don't know if we need to put that in our reg but you know getting we did hear from the public the renewal if you remember that commissioner brian I don't know if we do that every year with the racing license we do that we public comment where we knew all of our license to I don't know if we need it in the reg if we'd like to include I mean for consistencies that we probably should it's a statutory requirement for racing as a part of because the racing licenses aren't renewed it's actually a new license every time so it's a statutory requirement it's not required here but certainly you could do it yeah um if I may be there was not a requirement in 218 uh if I remember correctly to host a public hearing on any particular application although I do believe there was a requirement to host a public hearing on the competitive category 3 process generally yeah um the commission had the option to do so and I and I believe did but I would not um I did not think we should impose more public hearing requirements on renewals than on the initial application and so it's unclear that we could did this reg support us if going down the road the commission sitting at the time wants to do that does this support that move exactly is it clearly an option to another commission if they want to do it it would be very easy to make that tweak to make it explicit so in subsection seven in reviewing the renewal request the commission may takes you know any of the actions listed in 205 CMR 218 041 we would also add 205 CMR 218 05 which is the regulation that says the commission may conduct one or more meetings to receive public feedback to present and so forth because it does make it mandatory but it makes it clear that it's an option yes I like that I I agree madam chair and commissioner brian I think it's I think it's important um I I would go one step further and say to Paul's point you know perhaps we should have should have been in the right to begin with and we did end up but um and so I don't know if I would you know stop at at that but given it given discretion to any future commission it's fine more a reminder of a best practice we probably can always hold a public meeting or public hearing okay anything else this is very this one unlike the other one for me was very straightforward to read Paul thank you and and Mina um but commissioners do you have other questions could I make I just want to confirm with Paul I don't think we need this one by emergency but want to confirm before that is that is correct it will be several years before this regulation is implicated we can certainly take three months to receive public feedback okay so no word is you necessary okay anything else that's why I stumbled on the last one Caitlin so I'm glad you did this no that was a good question that you raised on Jordan so all right um if there are no other questions with this pretty straightforward vague um the future I have a motion I move that the commission approved the small business impact statement and draft of 205 CMR 231 as included in the commissioners packet and discussed here today and specifically also is further amended today and I move the staff be authorized to take steps necessary to file the required documentation with the secretary of the common law to begin the regulation promulgation process I further move the staff be authorized to modify chapter section numbers or titles to file additional regulation sections as reserved or to make any other administrative changes necessary to execute the regulation promulgation process second any edit question okay commissioner brian I wish I'm here I and I felt yes three zero great work legal team uh I just want to thank A&K thank you Paul thank you Nina and of course Caitlin thank you for you're standing in for pretty much everybody right now so a little bit of a skeleton crew this week it's not lost on me and I'm sure it's not lost on my fellow commissioners so thank you Caitlin um all right so now um I'm going to turn to my fellow commissioners we have next on the um agenda the um the hiring process I am looking and I see Derek I don't see Dave while drew I see Denise while I thought most importantly I don't see our fellow commissioners and I wonder if we should proceed today um you know this was I think commissioner is going to be very fair to her she had anticipated working this day of her vacation but she ended up working on Monday at her vacation and those are two of the sun of your today and Monday with two of the sun of your days of her vacation so um I'm hoping that she's enjoying every second today with that um and then of course um Commissioner Hill has a funeral obligation so with that um how do you feel about rolling this over yeah it's ironic to me that the two people who were including and yourself sort of allowing you through the opportunity to continue to participate as much as possible or two of them aren't here today so right kind of defeats the purpose a little bit and I really would want their input you know because um yeah all right and so uh that would also um would be with respect to the selection committee which means that mean it seems like you may be able to be excused uh we're in love with those two items um does that make sense and Derek I see you're here I know that you probably have been anticipating this throughout the day but you probably have been able to observe that we've had some moving parts I'm okay with that thank you for your patience okay thank you ma'am okay thanks me and thanks for everything all right so then we'll move on um to perhaps our most critical piece of the day um and that is a commissioner update before we move to the actual one list of honor agenda commissioners do you have anything else no so um Loretta Lilly else is in the house with her video on um and there she is she's actually in the office which for everybody anyone who's in the public knows that she may be violating a ruler too but hey what the hey you know uh she's the director of IEB um I think actually in your neck of the woods in that office everything's nice and tidy it's right where Marianne I think is or has been observing and looking at things are happening that's right here we're mercifully pretty um unaffected back here in our corner of the office so we do have a contingent here and it feels all feels pretty safe that's good that's good well um we appreciate your being there and and we also know there's a reason why you're there is because you are you are winding things up so today's public meeting milling marks of bittersweet occasions for all of us where we're saying goodbye to you um our IEB director Loretta Lilly else Loretta as many know has held multiple positions here at the commission since her arrival nearly 10 years ago and she has made consistent and meaningful impacts all along the way we at the MGC in the commonwealth have been the beneficiaries of Loretta's depth and expertise in investigations and law enforcement she has been a very um loyal and rigorously a rigorous collaborator within the industry setting standards for legal investigatory writing that folks try to emulate across the country she's steadfast in her positions as she works to advance the mission of this commission and Loretta is no sure to feel this as she takes on new challenges I have appreciated Loretta's thoroughness and attention to detail in every facet of her position but in my role I've really been able to enjoy watching Loretta's style and leadership evolve and witnessing really with her expanding pride in each and every member of her team I have loved most when she's reported to me about a new idea or innovation proposed by one of her division leaders and her expressions and and how she conveys that information to me always shows the level of her support and always the level of your excitement Loretta and I have truly loved and appreciated when you've described an opportunity for growth and development of one of your team members you note potential and you value excellence Loretta you should be very proud of the team that you have inspired you're leaving them with a clear playbook that will serve the commission for years to come you are truly the consummate professional and public servant diligent and tireless working to get things just right um you've inspired all your colleagues across the commission throughout the course of your tenure I learned that upon my first day here and I know that there are a few more chapters that you plan to attend to in your life professionally and I'm wishing you the very best as you move into your next act I want to wish you and your husband Sam and your daughters and your grandchildren the very best in life and most importantly the very best in health I have to thank you for all that you've taught me with personal level and shared with me on a personal level I'm going to miss you but I am ever grateful so with that um I'm going to turn to my fellow commissioners and I'm going to know also that um there's a little bit of a celebration a little bit later this evening and we do um look forward to um further kudos being given to you director yes I really appreciate it thank you very much for those wonderful words I mean the world to me Mr. O'Brien or Commissioner Maynard um I don't know where to begin no so Loretta and I've actually known each other since law school so I'll put a little plug in for northeastern law school um this is this is what you get when you go through there um which I think I've said to people and I'm sad that I'm saying this um on the last leg of the stool but that when I was asked to consider coming down there were three factors that definitely made the decision to jump in easier one being Brian Connors one being Karen Wells and the third being Loretta Lilio not to disparage anyone else that was here at the time but I had professional and personal interactions with them where I knew that if they were in an agency and independently involved that you couldn't go wrong coming down and I think Loretta has shown that in every agency that I've been in with her and certainly here as she stepped up um first is the chief legal counsel enforcement counsel and then is the director of IED um and there to support Karen and us in whatever way that she could um I never doubted your intellect Loretta I never doubted your legal analysis and I never doubted that you were being completely honest and forthright with me in your um assessment on something your position on something for uh for the commission for legal issue anything like that and I think that the integrity and the consistency that you show your entire career on that um is remarkable I think that the Commonwealth is losing a tremendous public servant I totally understand and appreciate your decision to retire I have said before I will say again I tried to talk you out of it I know other people did too hoping that you would stay a little bit longer I understand it's the time that you've decided to go um sadly I've had um COVID has reared its head for me I am I am not going to be able to get in Boston it looks like like I thought I'm I'm still trying so I might be able to get there late um but what I will if I can't I'm going to use that as leverage to make sure that you uh connect with me and maybe some others and we do a redo um in the fall once everything is under control but um I wish you the best Loretta I I know the people from your team think the world of you and I probably will say so in their own words now but um I I wish people also knew the other side of you in terms of you know the the stories that you have of growing up and in your careers before you became a prosecutor and um one of my lasting memories I think and if anybody asked me to describe you would be the sort of news reporter voice and cadence um just doing a cutting cross examination of someone um I think that was a skill that was remarkable to have I was very impressed by it I think we're gonna miss it um again enjoy retirement and um I know where to find you and I'm gonna have to buy you a drink if I can't get there tonight thank you so much again just really have a well thank you very much Mr. Maynard I don't I don't want to repeat anything that's been said and I had some time to think about it over the last few days and um it's funny you mentioned that Commissioner O'Brien the biographical piece of Loretta comes to my head before the work stuff does and I don't know how much of the public knows and I'm not going to put her on the spot or embarrass her but you know Loretta really um really made her own way in life and she you know Boston born and bred and and swinging all the way to the top right to get things done and um I think that you know when you come from that background and and you make it to be a long great public servant um you have a certain way about you that it's both passionate but also empathetic and um you know something that has stuck with me that Loretta said and because it was said to me a lot um is uh you have a really thick accent and maybe it should go and um you know she didn't let it stop her and she thinks she may have mitigated a little bit I don't think she has and I'm sure she doesn't think Fine has either um but uh you know it's it's important um that in public service we're more than just statutes and regulations people are policy and Loretta was policy here at this organization and I appreciate her I look forward to a continued friendship and I hope that whatever the next chapter is that you write it the way that you've written every other chapter of your life Thank you so much Let's turn to some of your colleagues who are here um you know what I'm going to put Chief Counsel Hall and enforcement counsel Hall in charge of choosing the order um takeover please Heather thank you chair I will just say really quick um Loretta I can't thank you enough you have been a shining example of a leader you have been a compass for the IEB pointing us in the right direction and you've been an anchor when we dealt with some challenging seas so thank you so much for your leadership I'm going to turn it over to Monica next thank you Heather Great thanks thanks Heather um thanks chair um so Loretta um on behalf of the financial investigations team thank you for everything you've been just such a big and positive it you just had a big and positive impact to each of the member of our team and it's really hard to express in words what you mean to us um we have just accomplished so much under your leadership and we're just been so proud of having been part of your team it's hard to say goodbye but we wish you all the best in the next chapter whatever it may be um don't forget us because it's impossible for us to forget you so thank you impossible to forget you thank you Monica how about Burke hi Heather hi uh chair Loretta uh I've I've only been in the chief position for I guess nine months and working with Loretta has been so so much fun to have her as boss but more importantly as we've grown to just become friends I was joking with her this morning you know we've learned so much and I'm in my fifth decade now of casino regulation in compliance and I was telling her uh Loretta I think you're a first valid hall of famer in my book so um we're gonna miss you it's been fun we've learned a lot I learned a lot so uh you know we'll stay in touch thank you Mark speaking of people with a lot of gaming experience how about Bruce Van well it's been like going on my tenth year knowing Loretta and uh I have a lot of Loretta stories I could tell which I'm not gonna do right now because thank you very much she would appreciate that uh but I'm really gonna miss you Loretta it's uh it's been a fun 10 years here and uh we'll miss our our talks and conversation and uh I hope you keep in touch I plan to I plan to I need to get a tissue excuse me I hope that's not because of me how about Cara all right well I believe I am maybe one and one of the newer people at this point who will be speaking but uh and I feel a little bit cheated I would have loved to have more time uh to learn from you uh but what I wanted to say is on behalf of the licensing division we want to thank you for your instrumental leadership guidance and tireless dedication you will be missed but we do wish you the best our mic for Sean on we can hear from everybody we can hear from anyone who's here everybody it's about Caitlin hello I have to follow on with Cara and say it has been a real pleasure to learn from you um you're such a role model Loretta and I wish we had more time but when the going is tough and there's a hard argument to be made I'm gonna always think of you and you know your brilliance your ability to explain an issue and your calmness um so thank you for everything you've taught me in the last year and um you were able to stay in touch we will thank you so much we will how about Mary Ann hi all hi Loretta it has been an absolute pleasure we have been together working together for a long time and um I just want to thank you for your kindness over the years to me and your guidance and um I'm sure we'll stay friends take care good luck whatever you do Loretta so um don't be shy of your accent be strong in that almost as strong as I am and educating people that it's rain ham instead of rain them um so um we are definitely gonna miss you you know been here a decade you've been here before me starting off with your role at the AGs and working in the legal office which many people don't remember before you went over to the IEB um you've touched on everything here and we are going to miss you we're gonna miss your your wit uh your dry humor as well as the just knowledge that you have of the agency so I know you've put a lot of that back onto your team and they're very lucky to have had you and we're gonna miss you I echo everything everyone has said Loretta you're simply the best so I'm so happy and thankful to have been a part of your team I hope you know and feel how respected you are and how appreciated you are um I'll miss your presence you're always such a steady presence when we're dealing with any sort of crisis in the IEB um I'll miss your wealth of knowledge your kindness and your sense of humor and wit as Derek just mentioned and absolutely wishing you all the best and hope you have some much-needed relaxation coming up thank you so I don't want to call anybody else out but feel free to raise your hands I know Stephanie would like to say something too Stephanie and Zach maybe yeah hi Stephanie hi so Loretta as a newer employee you've been welcoming and supportive you're our strong leader whom we all admire and personally a role model not only in intelligence but also in grace you set the bar high for our team and we'll honor your legacy here for many years to come we will most certainly miss you thank you so much Stephanie thank you Andrew hi Loretta you've been a huge support for the gaming agent division huge supporter of myself as well um we're really gonna miss your guidance and just your knowledge in the division we'll truly be missed with this gaming agents thank you thank you Loretta uh you know since I think going back to when I interviewed to come on board you've been a really welcoming presence you know throughout the entire time I've been here and to kind of echo everybody else I feel like a calming presence as well in situations where you know starting things up starting a new year I felt like kind of your influence made me feel comfortable made me feel like I could thrive so I wish you all the best going forward it's been great working with you thank you so much. Vanessa? Heather um I think Vanessa has had her camera on. Yes I'm probably the the newest one here on this call but I just want to wish you well in your retirement I wish that I had more time to get to know you as a person um but the leadership that you've shown that I've been able to witness is tremendous and you know I think during our um DEI session I think you knew I was directed in that question about how can we get good people like the people in this room to stay that was kind of directed at you um uh I wish you could stay but I do understand and um haven't retired from an agency recently for after 31 years I know this was a very difficult decision for you to make and I knew that I know that you weighed very heavily on this decision before you made it um but I wish you well. Thank you Vanessa thank you so much. So Heather I think that's everyone um on our screen uh I guess I would propose that I'd like um you know my fellow commissioners aren't here uh commissioner Skinner and commissioner Hill but the five of us um have signed a certificate that will be presented and it may be reread um but I'd like to read it into the record uh I know that we wish we could all be together right now in person uh it kind of stinks that we're not in our public room um I don't know eating ice cream or pizza while we do this um but we're pretty good at virtual rooms and so here we are um and again the reason why we're not together is because of that 12-inch pipe that flooded um our floors so on this and I have to thank Marianne Dooley um for all of her work and to help with the certificate um Marianne knows just how to get things done and almost with the right heart um so um there will be a frame involved thank you so on this 25th day of august 2023 the massachusetts gaming commission proudly presents the certificate of appreciation to Loretta Lillios and sincere appreciation for her distinguished service to the massachusetts gaming commission and the common level massachusetts Loretta Lillios as deputy general counsel chief enforcement counsel and director of the investigations enforcement bureau led the agency in its historic implementation of casino gaming and sports wagering in the commonwealth a person equipped to address with ease the most complex of matters director Lillios has served with the utmost integrity to advance the interest of the commonwealth effectively building a dedicated internal team while nurturing positive relationships with industry stakeholders the mgc extends its profound gratitude for her extraordinary and impactful contributions tireless professionalism and exceptional tenure as a public servant and that's april 2014 to august 2023 signed by the five commissioners who you are currently working with i suspect the others who you worked with join in these sentiments thank you Loretta virtual pause thank you i mean i'm just um so appreciative i'm a little embarrassed um the whole thing just means so much to me you know chair you use the word bitter sweet and that is uh how i feel now you know the countless accomplishments of this agency and it's relatively short history uh i i beg me so much to me but through it all i just do not take for granted that behind all of those are the people who worked individually and as a as a team here the ones that have a very public face and these public meetings and you're just as importantly the ones who are working outside of the public view but through it all everybody's had a common goal of doing the right thing and keeping integrity from the center in everything we do you know i've worked with all of the divisions over my 10 year 10 year here and just across the board the professionalism and expertise of my colleagues here just very very fortunate um and i see all these newer faces and i see that the future of the agency uh is uh in good hands with all of these younger people uh younger and tenure i mean not necessarily younger in in years um you know for the ib my heart and soul is here it's such a deep bench of the highest quality professionals made um heather you your legal team monica and your team of analysts and experts for your team the heart and soul of the agency uh caring your team it all starts with licensing and the you know safely scheme enforcement unit uh with um like leo shana bryan jade collette and the leads of each of the properties um just you know the top of their game so thank you from the bottom of my heart it's been an absolute privilege for me personally and professionally to be part of this team thank you very much well if there are ice cream cones available we'd be toasting you with them right now yeah you know it's just COVID first pipe so we're going to find a way so we will find a way to make it all happen so we always do we do so cheers to you loretta um and uh for those um who will gather tonight we're looking forward to it um commissioners mr bryan commissioner maynard anything you want to add before we close this meeting no just that i hold you to it levada we're going to track you down in the fall and do it again for those of us that they can't make it in there perfect thank you loretta thank you so much okay into the whole team um it's hard to share your sentiments publicly but it certainly is meaningful and i know levada this um you know they could have gone on forever and every sentiment is heartfelt so we're wishing you the very very best and with that move to adjourn second okay commission bryan i commission maynard i night vote yes three zero thanks everyone