 We're going to start with a virtual roll call. Michelle Ryan. Good morning, I am here. Morning, Commissioner Hill. Good morning, I am here. Good morning, Commissioner Skinner. Good morning, I'm here. Thank you. What gets started today is June 22nd. It is public meeting of the Master's Dating Commission number 283. Thank you everyone for being here today. I know we have item number two, the approval of meeting minutes. I understand that maybe some commissioners may have received but I have not received any. So if you don't mind if you could switch that Secretary Hill over to the next evening. That would be fine. Okay, all right. Thank you. In terms of item number three, we're offset administrative update. That could direct the wells. And by the way, the mistake wasn't anybody's, but apparently my, I can't seem to find them in my email. So my, Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the commission. For the first item on the administrative update, I'm going to turn it over to Assistant Director Van to give you an update on what's going on at the Casinos. Thank you. Got myself unmuted there. Good morning, Chair. Good morning commissioners. My report today includes MGM and Encore. There wasn't anything to report from PPC. MGM has now officially begun construction on their new, the relocation of game sense. They're continuing the Friday music days out in the plaza. And then they also are playing the Springfield Thunderbirds viewing parties outside. Table games have been going successfully on their starting of 24 seven games with no issues with the added hours. Encore has had zero significant events with the upcoming EPH. They've had giveaways continue at the free giveaway of Black and Decker Corgis Drills, Stanley's tool cases, Red Sox grill sets, and therapy massage sets. Other than that, there's nothing significant to report. Any questions? I have a question, Bruce. Could you just update me on poker, just to remind me where we're going? Yes, as far as poker goes, since we last spoke, MGM is now running 14 tables, seven days a week. They operate from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. And they have approximately 50 employees working in the poker room. Encore poker is now running 15 tables, Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. through 8 p.m., and they have about 36 employees running the room. Can you hear any reports from waiting lines or things like that, that either is still good? No, ma'am. Thank you. All right, any other questions, Bruce? Just to follow up on that, is there like an app where you put in to get on the tables, Bruce, as opposed to like a physical waiting line? It's a physical waiting line, right? There kind of goes down the hallway upstairs. At both MGM and EVH or just EVH? EVH. And then at MGM, there's... MGM, there is a check-in place as well that you go and stuff. I'm not sure if there's one you can do online or not, but at least to my knowledge. Bruce, do you mind checking now on our next, yeah, well, commission meeting on the wait time poker? Sure, I think that really varies depending on the day, but every morning there's a line, I know at EVH to get in because there's a decent-sized crowd that wanna play. Oh, so there is a line getting in at EVH to get to the table? Yes, yes, until there's openings per se. Now, if you could just find out a little bit more specifics around the numbers of people who will wait in line depending on the time, that would be great. Thanks so much. Sure. So for the next item in the administrative update, I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Lightbound for an update on the spirit of Massachusetts in racing. Good morning. So we're going gun hoe down at Plain Ridge. The licensing department's in about 100 more licenses than this time last year. It is a little hard. Our system doesn't follow the one versus two versus three year. So it doesn't mean that those 100 are necessarily new. They may be returning folks, but it's still very active, which is a good sign. The purses that have been handed out so far this year are just under 4.5 million. And just to get a sense of how this has changed over the years back in 2015, when the Racehorse Development Fund first picked in, the purses for the total year were 4.2 million. So we've already exceeded what the amount for that entire year were just in the few months that we've been open. Just as a point of interest, the Wicked High Five, one of their bets down there that carries over is up to 30,000 now. So it'll generate a lot of betting interest, I'm sure. We have had a fair amount of fines this year. The judges are enforcing various whipping regulations and working towards getting that everybody in compliance with that. So going on to the Spirit of Mass Day, just wanted to remind everybody about it. It will, it's on July 24th, which is a Sunday. Coming up quick, there's a two o'clock post time. The featured races will happen later on in the day and they will have a time schedule of races out closer to the races. Again, the Spirit of Mass Trot is a $250,000 purse. Claire Barton, $100,000. And they're bringing back the Birkbeck with Pace again, which is popular for the local horsemen with at least a $50,000 purse. They also were able this year to hold a couple of $100,000 races, a Pace in April and a Trot in May. So there's plenty of first money going out. Any questions? Could you just repeat the, after the Claire Barton? Yep, the Claire Barton Pace. And then they have what's called the Birkbeck with Memorial Pace. That's right. And that's a $50,000 purse. Yeah, thank you. And that one's geared more towards the local horsemen. Local ones, yeah. Thank you. Questions for Dr. Leiband? Yeah. Uncuriousity who is Birkbeck with? He was a long time trainer in Massachusetts that was beloved in Pasadena Bay. And they had a Memorial Race Forum at the old earlier and were able to bring it back. I think I'm not sure if this is the second or third year that they've had it. So with the added purse money, they were able to bring it back. Okay, great. Thank you. Any other questions for Dr. Leiband? Mr. Skinner, Commissioner Hill? Good stuff. I love this. Thank you, Dr. Leiband. And I think it's gonna be beautiful whether I'm sure I can. Okay. And then, Karen, are you all set on your administrative update? Yes, I am. We'll move on to item number four. Good morning, Director Van Linden. Pleased to see you and Dr. Begum. Great, good morning, Chair and good morning, commissioners. I'm joined today by Dr. Rodolfo Vega and his colleagues at JSI, Zulma Ribera and Andrea Roja. They're going to be presenting a report to you, bridging the research to practice gap of context matters, understanding the life circumstances of Hispanic residents of a casino neighborhood. Before they get started, and I turn this over to Dr. Vega, I just wanted to give you a little bit of context. As you know, and much of the public turning in to our meetings know, the MGC has established a comprehensive research program to study and assess the social and economic impacts of gambling in the state. We've long been committed to making this research open and transparent by discussing it at our public meetings and posting the research to our website. In addition to research examining issues related to economic impact, public safety or program evaluation, the MGC has established a line of research called community engaged research. Community engaged research is an approach that emphasizes joining with the community as equal partners of the research project. In other words, doing research with communities rather than on communities. Often the focus of this work is with communities considered to be at greater risk of experiencing gambling related harms. Since 2018, the MGC has funded five community engaged research studies that focused on veterans, on individuals working in Boston's Chinatown neighborhood and African-Americans and older residents. And then finally, I feel recall the Asian CARES study that examined the root causes of problem gambling within the Asian communities in and around Boston. While undertaking community engaged research, researchers seek to understand and address the impact of the introduction of casino gambling in Massachusetts by talking directly with members of a specific community to inform programs, services and strategies to prevent and mitigate gambling related harm. This type of research relies on the community to determine the research topics and or questions that are being asked. While community-driven, we still require that it adheres to the same scientific rigor as our other lines of research, including competitive selection process to select the project, as well as an external review process once the final report has been delivered to us. And our external review process includes a number of highly qualified researchers closely examining the report and providing feedback on the final draft. The procurement process for community-engaged research encourages applicants to think expansively about survey methods, qualitative research approaches, community engagement strategies that promote racial and health equity and other creative ways to assess the social and or economic impact of introducing casino gambling in the community. Dr. Vega and his colleagues sought to answer this call. Dr. Vega and JSI team members, Zoma and Andrea, built a research capacity with community residents to form a community research team. And as you'll hear today, that community research team conducted a variety of research activities to capture and report on the life context of Hispanic individuals living in Springfield, revealing a community that is overwhelmed by numerous stressors and disproportionately impacted by problem gambling. We hope this study will help to advance the development and implementation of culturally responsive interventions to mitigate gambling related harms within the community. Dr. Vega, this is a long-awaited report. We really look forward to hearing about it and I happily turn this over to you. Good morning, Madam Chair, Commissioner Sobraya and Mr. Keir Skinner. Good morning. Thank you for giving us this opportunity to present this very important study. Mark, Mary Claire, Krista, thank you for your support, reviewers, Victor Ortiz, thank you for all of your, thank you for all of your comments. Andrea and Sulema, Andrea, can you share the first slide? Looks like I need access to share my screen. Okay, yes, the title of the presentation is Bridging the gap, Bridging the research to practice gap. Context matters, understanding the life circumstances of Hispanic residents of a casino neighborhood. Dr. Vega, excuse me, just I think one second, we're not seeing the screen. Is that okay or do you want to? She is going to come up, Andrea, is trying to get access to it. And when the screen come up, I will repeat the title again. I just wanted to feel the empty space, the empty space. Thank you Dr. Vega, we appreciate that very much. Like when you are in a radio station that is dead air, you know, I just want to make sure, I want to make sure technically we're helping Andrea. So we can pause for one second. Okay. Andrea, there should be a share screen icon at the bottom. At the bottom, do you see that? I do, but it looks like it's blacked out. I might, I don't, I might need a host access. I'm not sure if the person who was organized this meeting could send that way away. Mark, are you able to share the screen if you have the slides, maybe faster? I am happy to do that. And so that is okay with you, Rudy and Andrea. Of course, of course, I think, thank you so much. Dr. Vega, we are so used to these little technical things. I don't want anything to be lost in your presentation. And then maybe we can broaden the screen. Madam Chair, last night we went through a trauma of 64 people on the call and it was traumatic, everything dropped dead. So yes, I'm recovering from this trauma. The title is, Bridging the Research to Practice Cup. As you know, things that are created in a laboratory or in university setting take many, many, many years to reach the community. Context matters, understanding the life circumstances of Hispanic residents of a casino neighborhood. So in the title, you see the three most important things coming across in here. Let's go to the next slide. Let me give you an overview of the presentation. Surma Lee is going to give you an overview of our partner, neighbor to neighbor and how the study came about. Then I'm going to give you the rationale for the study. Then the methods, findings and implications. Pretty standard, a pretty standard format. Next slide. Surma Lee. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Aruvi. Hi, everyone. My name is Surma Rivera. I am an organizer for Neighbor to Neighbor, Massachusetts. We are an organization that's led by community at the grassroots level. And so we believe that both closest to the problem have the solution. And so we are community members who knock on doors, do tabling events, who come together as a community. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. And we listen to the community's experiences, right? Their concerns, their hopes, their wants. And we engage members to build within their community, which we call base building. And we have them step up into leadership positions and to take actions within the community and help them be part of the process in the decision-making tables, right? And make sure that those voices from the community are at these tables so that the consideration is done or we can make decisions. And so when I met Rudy about three years ago, maybe four, he was really interested in like, what this grassroots organization like entails. And I was telling him like, Rudy, we do things, right? We educate ourselves. We get down to the nitty gritty of the ground. And we really understand the self-interest of the community so that we could either give recommendations or just talk about what it is that we need as a community and we take action. Well, I was like, listen, we're here to do things. Okay. Thank you, Sulema. That phrase, next slide, please. That phrase that Sulema Lee mentioned as I engage the community and work with them. That phrase stayed with me. We do things. I am not working with an academic institution or a research institutions. I am working with the community actions and they do things. So why do that do things brought to my mind? It brought to us the whole issue of implementation sciences. Let's go back to the next slide, please. Implementation sciences. And implementation sciences, that is the study of methods to promote the adoption of evidence-based practices, interventions and policies into healthcare and public health settings to improve the impact on population health. You may also know implementation sciences as translation research. Let's go to the next slide. Thanks. I heard this rumor, I heard this before. It takes 17 years for something that was developed that is proven at works or university or experimental settings to reach the community. I was looking for that reference and I was able to find the article, the study that documents that. I thought that that was like an urban legend. Implementation sciences allow us to establish accountability to funders and to the communities and to the end users of the interventions. And also it helps us avoid implementation failures and show the next slide. Oh my goodness, do we know about implementation failures? Historical, the New York City voucher experiments, the comprehensive child development programs, the scarce rate, low birth weight prevention programs. If you Google historical failures program, they will come up because historically in the field of evaluations, they were failures. They produced no results. And some faults included attributes that were lack of understanding of what is the community context, the life circumstances of the faults that we're working with. Let's go to the next slide. A basic tenet of implementation sciences, we need to understand the context of the intervention of what the context of what the context is and the next slide. And historically, social sciences, we have done a poor job understanding the life context of those most affected by inequity in our society. Of course, I can go into Google or into government databases and take a look at the demographic on Springfield and see how many are homeless, how many living with HIV, how many are undereployed, the diabetes rate. I can see all those figures and I can see those inequity. But to get to understand, to get to understand them, that's an in-depth understanding. That's the challenge. And like Surma, you may want to mention what you told me. You say something that if you want to do something for us, with us, you need to understand us. Right. That was something that you, yeah, that was something that you told me before. That is correct. So when we're speaking about the community and the decisions that are made for them, when you go deep into the community, it's a different narrative. And so the idea of me saying that to you, Rudy, was saying that there's a lot of decisions that are made for our communities but not necessarily by our communities. That is because there's not a real understanding of the community. Let's go to the next slide. For understanding context, it makes too much sense. Architects, before construction, before developer plans, they look at the landscape to see drainage, the direction of the wind, where the sun rises, the structure, all of that before they build a building, right? A speaker before a presentation will, speaker before a presentation or a performance artist will go to the stage and take a look before the event or the presentation to see where the audience is sitting. I used to be a long-distance runner and before I run the New York marathon or Boston or San Francisco or Oakland marathon, I would examine the course where it goes up, where it comes down, when do you run with the wind and against the wind? So I understood. So it makes, it makes intuitive sense and the understanding of context. And let's go to the next slide. And so far, to remind you, I'm giving you the rationale of the story, how this came about because this is a story, okay? So bear with me. How do we define context? Well, it's the physical and psychosocial features of the places where people live, house in neighborhood, work and play. And some of you are going to think, Rudy, those are the social determinants of health. Let's go to the next, let's go to the next slide. Well, yeah, context is what this, that's the stage where the social determinants of health plays out, the culture, history, and then behavior comes out. One more slide on context. The next one, including context, allow us to see the differential impact when there are differences between race or gender ethnicity. Allow us to facilitate the replication and sustainability of the interventions, ensures alignment with the priorities of the community and engages key community stakeholders who will lead and champion in intervention and friends by including, engaging solely and the neighbor to neighbor, those are community champions. And I am glad that this is an outcome of this engagement to have these champions in the community. Okay, I was trying to serve you in the importance of context and why is it important and irrational. Now we are going to talk about the methods. So this was a community-based participatory research, CBPR, was qualitative research design, was a purposeive sample. We selected folks that live and work around the casino, that live around the casino. And we took the whole issue of community-based participatory research very, very, very, very seriously. Let's go for the next day, the next day. With community research team from neighbor to neighbors, we have, we provided, we created space to discuss research methods to talk about the basics of problem gambling, to talk and discuss the sigma story, gambling in Massachusetts, to talk about what the office of problem, what the office of problem gambling services at DPH, what they do to talk about structural historical racism in the history of Springfield. And it took, and this took us just about one year. And thank you, Mark, for bearing with us and being so patient. So what did we do? That shows in the next slide. We did community mapping of assets and resources. We did team format interviews. We did GIS mapping of gun violence incidents. We did a photo voice studies, the funding. And of course, in the next slide, we can show the next slide, Mark. And the next slide, we recruit about, we did like 24 interviews with folks that lead zip code 03 and 05. That's the zip codes where the, those are the scope of the casino is located. There were four males and 20 females. If you go to Google and you Google poorest zip code in Massachusetts, it will say that it was 01105. And 01103 is one of the top seven poorest zip codes. Of course, we did do diligence. And in the next slide, you can see that we screened them for the gambling severity index. A mini screen, Dr. Warburg, thank you. And Williams 2012, 10 of the people were non gamblers, two low risk, three moderate and one high risk gambling. And here I am going to, let's go to the findings. Before we go to the findings, I did want to add that as a grassroots organizer, it's completely normal for us to like knock or speak to about a hundred people and get about one or two people to participate or even be interested in participating. So for that number that we received, we had to reach out to a vast majority of people just to get people to participate. I just wanted to highlight that because 24 interviews is one thing, but to get to 24 interviews, just think about having to speak to a hundred people, only two, three people responding like yes, and then following up with them to see if it would actually participate. So it is a long diligent process. Surma, that's a great point. And I remember we documented that it took one of our interviews, make 60 calls to get one person. And yes, that is true. It was in the midst of COVID. It was a very selected sample or only people that lives in O3 or O5 and then also Hispanic. So it was very difficult. Let's go to the next slide. Surma Lee and Andrea, you are free to pitch in as I discussed the findings. There were four core things. So I'm going to talk about the findings. Then I'm going to talk about the implications or so what. So you got these findings, so why is that important? OK, the four findings are pervasive stress in many, many, many different life contexts. They were distinct and opposite view of the NGM casinos. Positive and negative about the NGM. We talk about normative aspects on gambling and also, of course, about the COVID-19 impact. Let's go to the first theme of findings. These things, stress and trauma are pervasive in the respondents life context. It was manifested in the area of family, neighborhood, employment, and housing. Problem gambling and relationship to drug use is a longstanding, was seen as a longstanding problem in many of the family. As we discussed gambling, please, let's not forget the opioid epidemic and how it is proportionally impact folks in Springfield. And also, let's think about the relations between the opioid and the drug use and gambling. Let's not forget about HIV AIDS also. Crime is a daily occurrence. Stealing, prostitution, insurance are not far from the casino. Employment uncertainty, there is employment uncertainty. Jobs are there, there are jobs, but not many jobs will live over wages. Housing prices, rent prices going up, seeing as unaffordable. Before I ask Andrea or Sulema to comment, I want to show you this slide. Mark the next slide, please. This slide shows, it's a geographical information system slide documented 1,279 homicides, robberies, and assault involving firearms in Springfield. Okay, those are crimes involving firearms between 2014 and 2016 and 987 between 2017 and 2019. What I want to pinpoint here is that most Hispanics, they live where the cluster of those incidents are. Each one of those dots represents one or more or more one or more incidents. We have more detailed maps, but I want to show you how the life experiences of the folks that we interviewed is very, very traumatic when you know anything related to a gun in your neighborhood or in your block, look how many are there. Sulema and Andrea, I already mentioned about the stressors of drug use, the crime is a daily occurrence, housing prices, rent prices going up. Do you want to, anything that I should add? No, I think that in reviewing this again, it's like looking at the social economic impact on the Latino population. It just reminds me, for me, like of my dad moving up here of Puerto Rico and trying to find a job and was laid off and this idea of having to hustle was a normal thing in my house. And so we had to survive, we had to eat and some of the implications of that mentality of having to pull yourself through your stress that when you don't have is, this is a consequence of that. Just wanted to add. Very nice, very, very nice. Let's go to the next one to the second theme, respondents they had distinct and often opposing views about the presence of the casino in the community. Mark, you said 1040, can you give us a time check? You've been going for about 25 minutes. Okay, and we have like 15 minutes. Okay, so these are some of the findings related to this theme, that the casino has improved the aesthetic of his location. And so my, I remember something that you say at the meeting that we went from disaster to Disney, something like that. Like the first world was disaster or reuse another term to Disney to show the incredible change in that, in the aesthetics of that, of the neighborhood. There is an increased police presence over the same time this prostitution, drug dealings and environment are worsening. And also crime has been redistributed to other parts of the city. It is important to say these are not factual statements. I am reporting the views of the community. This is what the community is reporting to us. These are their perceptions. They are valid perceptions because that's the reality and they act accordingly. But I just want to say that they are not, like we are not saying that a prostitution drug is increasing because we have studies, we have presented some studies to the commission that shows that that's not often the case. So I just want to highlight that. Surma, anything to add to this? No, that's here. That's it. This is fine. I just wanted to highlight that this is about the perception of the community, right? And their understanding of it. And these were the commonalities from what we gathered from multiple. I do want to add in though quickly too, in terms of prostitution and drug dealing, community members mentioned that it looked different now that the casino is there. So instead of having folks engage in business on the street, now it's inside of the casino and it's happening a lot more used term low key. So it does look different. I'll also say too that some of the perceptions have been that, and I'm looking at that last bullet, that crime has been redistributed, that the area around the casino has been polished up, but it's not necessarily that crime has decreased, it's more relocated. Because more resources have been allocated towards the casino, they've been pulled out from the rest of Springfield. And so now crime is being pushed out. So I just want to make that point about that last bullet. Thanks so much. Yes, thank you so much. And also let's highlight that many of the participants and knowledge and say things like, really, crime, prostitution and drugs have been in this neighborhood way, way, way, way before the casino was established. Okay. Now it has changed or it has moved, but just to say they recognize that it has been there before the casino was established. Let's go to the next one. Respondents, they are, folks, that is a normative, normative being part of normal life. I guess aspect of gambling is as a particular, as a family, something is a family activities and people recognize that as well as its negative consequences. I am telling you two things, number one that they recognize that they recognize the signs of problem gambling in certain others. And that gambling is an intergenerational issue. Okay. Like from the grandma to the parents to them and now with many of the participants across generation. And something that I want to point out is that when we are talking about gambling, we are not talking about a lot about casino gambling. Gambling is expressed in many ways in Springfield, blackjack, cup fights, bingos, car races, the numbers, but Bolita from the Dominican Republic. So it's expressed in many different way. Surma, do you want to share anything about this? Yeah, so it's something that taps into the hope, right? Because you're speaking about disproportionate communities where the inequities are like real. And so when it comes to a generational wealth, it's not there, right? When it comes to mental health, a lot of times in our communities it's just not there. And so when you talk about like social gatherings, which a lot of times that's what we do for socializing is we gamble. We play cards, spades, whatever the case may be. And so when it comes to the hope aspect, right, is that there is a win, right? That's what we go in there for, we're trying to win. But when we deal with the repercussions of losing, that's when it becomes dramatic, right? That's when it becomes a real problem. And then for some reason, I don't know if it's just our community, right? So we tend to hover over that negative aspect. Quickly, it's a story about the Mexican bingo. I never heard before of Mexican bingo and all of a sudden it became a thing in some places. Right, so it's like bingo, it's done with money and it's like you play four corners, outer box. And so there's different ways to win a lot of money, right? And it's fun, right? And so you start losing because now you're losing your money, right? Same idea. And so we do it to gather families together. We're engaged for hours, right? And throughout those hours, we're like laughing, but then we're fighting, right? And when people lose their money, they're out there and we go back and try to get some more. And sometimes, you know, it just becomes really negative at the end of the day, you know, where it does have an impact when you leave that social gathering, it still has the negative repercussions, whether you've made someone feel a particular way or, you know, they just gambled money that they just didn't have just to think, just because they thought they were gonna get more. Thank you, Sulema. Let's go to the last theme and that's the impact of COVID and folks where people getting laid off and losing jobs, the stress of supporting the family with, well, the families and school in the face of a digital gap, not everybody had access to the internet and also a lot more mistrust in government. COVID exacerbated the stressors that the family was experiencing. Okay, so let's go to the next one. And the next one is a slide, mostly for the implementation science, nerds and geeks, you know, like they let you know, wow, what are the features of the participants life context? So what are the dimensions that you found? Well, we found a number of them. Sulema, one of them is intersectionality. Yeah, sure, I can tap on that a little bit. So when we talk about intersectionality and we talk about community, like it's important to find, to consider the self-interest, not only of the individual, but also as a community as a whole, how race plays out in it, how gender plays, how class plays, how ethnicity, religion, political views, there's so many categories that you want to take into consideration because they all have a universal impact on the individual and the community. And, you know, so that's how, you know, intersectionality just, you know, has to do a lot with like climate change, the environment as a whole, their lifestyle. So all those key factors is something that we should look into and give consideration, you know, for either putting in or taking something out of that community. And then the intergenerational component, the past experience as I, you know, as I talked about with the Mexican bingo, why we're talking about stress and trauma. And for some reason that just continues to hover over us as humans, I don't know why. But we're seeing that there's like a wide display of like mental stress and trauma, right? And there's a spectrum that is still untapped to. So understanding that perception, understanding of people's experience are consistently like evolving and their responses are usually negative when it comes to like their experiences around like something that's been carried down from a moment or family trauma. And so here in Springfield, at least historically, right? At least in the Latino population, you know, they faced a lot of environmental and capitalism and just racism as a whole. So from the highway 91 being built and breaking up the Latino population to divides because of the economy, the Connecticut River, the years of heavy industrial exposure to pollutants, mold flooding has happened here. There's been riots, serious climate change impacts, right? Policeness conduct and the economic downpours. And so historically, the Latino population has been suffering through all of this. Rudy, I don't know if you wanna take the culture and go? Is it okay with you? I think that we only have like four minutes and 37 seconds and there's some important things that we need to talk. Some of them go ahead, but just to say that these findings are in the report, other dimensions include, of course, culture, ethical moral issues, for some major, that's a French term, like things happen, hurricanes, tornado things happen, part of your life. Issue of safety, leisure society, those are the different features of the environment. And if I were to develop an intervention, each one of these should be taken into consideration ideally. Let's go to the next one, Mark. So this slide is about Sohuat. So Rudy, Surma, Andrea, you told us a nice story about the people in Springfield, so now Sohuat. Well, the Sohuat is that if you know that there is a drug use opioid drug use problem in the city of Springfield and you present a model of responsible gambling that is an addiction, that metaphor may not be aligned with many folks that are in recovery. What do you mean? Are you mean that to be, to me, to use drug responsibly? I just couldn't do that. Another implication, if you know that gambling is an intergenerational, that comes from parents to grandparents, so are we including the family in our interventions? If you know that gambling is expressed in many ways, it's not only the casino is like the numbers, the key note, the scratch tickets, the car fight, car racing, Blackjack, Mexican bingo. So you have to take into consideration interventions, perhaps such as exclusions. You can exclude folks from a casino, but there are so many options for that person to express his or her needs. Another implication is if you know how wonderful, how committed community members are in Springfield, perhaps we may want to involve them some more in our policies. If you were to know how proud Springfield folks are, Latinos, about their culture, then perhaps we can include more of the cultural expressions in our interventions, in entertainment options for them. And also an implication, this allow us to future theoretical direction, like if Mark were to ask me, so Rudy, what do you think, what would you like to do in the future with this? Where are we going with this? And I would say to him, I'll go to the next slide. I will say to him, you know, between theoretical racism, between structural racism and health outcomes, there is a black box. Yes, we know about social determinants of health, they impact health. Yes, we know that structural racism impacts health. How that's the black box, the how we do not know. Recently, David Williams at Harvard University has been talking about toxic stress, that it is the ongoing stress from the day that you wake up in the morning to the time that you go to sleep at night, it's ongoing stress experience about racism, so many context that that ongoing stress, that's what explain the black box. And if we go to the next slide, I will finish my presentation by saying that perhaps we could do a thought experiment, we can come up with theoretical thinking to say, you know what, all of this crime, structural racism, housing insecurity, food insecurity, financial insecurity, that results in chronic stress. And then I need to escape, I need a break. And if the casino is there, and recreational gambling is there, that will go there and take advantage of that. Once you are there, not everybody is gonna be, it's going to be experienced problem gambling or becoming at risk gambler. You know, I don't mean to say that, but that for those that are vulnerable, that exposure will make it more likely. In some, if I were to pursue this work, I will pursue it in the framework of stress and trauma, stress and trauma. And that's the end of the presentation. Reviewers from Mark, thank you so very much for your comments and Mark and Mary Claire and your team. Surma, neighbor to neighbor, for thank you so very much. Thank you, Dr. Vega. Mark, do you have any comments before we go into questions? No, thank you. Thank you, Andrea, Zulma and Rudy. Your work is fantastic. And it's exactly what we hope to achieve when we seek to engage the community in the research process. It fills the gaps. It provides detail and nuance to the research that we do. And our ultimate goal is that we hope and look forward to seeing an impact from it. Thank you, Dr. Vega, this is very well presented. And thank you to both Zulma and Andrea. Commissioners, questions for our team here today. Commissioner Bryan. Sure, thank you. Thank you very much for that. As you may or may not know, my background is in law enforcement. And so when I hear, we've had the series of reports looking at the baseline and that, you know, the areas in and around the casino and the surrounding communities. And so the, what really jumped out at me is the comments about perception that the crime has not changed necessarily is simply relocated, is intriguing to me, whether you had any anecdotal examples of that or things that would sort of guide future research in terms of looking at that impact on the surrounding communities that are physically right outside the casinos. One example, and Zulma, you can think of others, is how prostitution has moved either online or inside the casinos. And in the report, we describe, you know, an incident like that as someone witnessed that that's one of them. And Zulma Lee. Yeah, so, you know, when I think about that, I instantly think about like institutionalism, right? Racism, sexism, all those things. And when we talk about relocating, you know, just think about gentrification, right? It's the thing that happens everywhere that there's diverse communities and over-policing. And this is the thing that I was talking rude about, like it looks like Disneyland, right? These things don't necessarily stop the crime, right? But they get redistributed, right? And as people are trying to survive, right? And hustle, right? Because they can't make ends meet, right? And they're moving into different sectors of the city. This is how it gets redistributed, right? And we're working in different spaces because it's just not isolated, right? And it goes hand in hand in how gentrification happens, which is like, you know, a problem for us as community members who are stapled in these communities, but good for businesses, right? So as we're looking at the city as a business and we're trying to uplift our communities, is it really lifting our communities or is it just really like pushing our communities into different spaces with the same action? Now, I will add that a lot of community members too when talking about sex work, you know, describe that you have to view the person as holistic. So this is someone who's trying, as Summa said, to make ends meet. And so they're gonna make that happen anyway possible. And I think that that's something that gets taken into consideration as well. And so community members also mentioned that resources are allocated in different ways since the community has moved in. So I think those are the moving pieces that, you know, community members are trying to make ends meet. Resources have been reallocated based on the casino construction. And as Summa said, you know, there is household culture. So folks are gonna use, you know, online or interpersonal relationships. So there's a lot of play. So more of, I guess, more of a follow-up question also for you in terms of our research scene going forward and looking at continuing to look at the impacts around the casinos, whether anything that comes out of the commentary of the people living in these neighborhoods should feel like we need to be, you know, there's sort of the historical assessment of these are the impact neighborhoods in the vicinity. But I'm wondering if there's a deeper conversation to be had about looking whether that, how that's changed since the casinos have opened. I would like to collaborate with you and save your input because that's not an area of expertise. I don't know if you saw the report that Bruce wrote on crime. I'd like to say he hasn't changed that much, but yet at the same time, the perceptions of crime increase, you know? So that is more of research. I don't know that distance between perception and reality. I don't know how to deal with it. I think it's really important to layer this together. I mean, through our traditional public safety research, we try to get at perceptions and part of getting at perceptions is looking at calls for service. That is a linked perception. But I think that the research that you've done and issues that you've highlighted should certainly be layered in and it can stand alone, but it can also force us to take a look at our public safety research and perhaps turn another stone in how we're looking at issues like prostitution or sex work. Right, Mark, I think it's interesting that you see the call to service as a metric for that perception. I wonder if Donna agrees with that. In other words, would community members be as likely to be calling in issues or are they... I remember one of the interviewees... Sure, I remember one of the interviewees saying that, you know, if we'd know that there's prostitution going on, where's the free health clinics for STD testing, right? Or treatment and the interventions around, like, those dramas that they are experiencing that was just one of the recommendations. So, yeah, for me, if there's something that's going to be implemented in a particular community, understanding the self-interest of the community is always ideal because then you can implement either services or outreach programs, whatever it is that the community needs to help heal that community. If that answers your question, that was just... I think, Mark, am I right when you say call to service, is that the cost of the law enforcement or is it for actual services that would address these systemic issues? Yeah, I mean... Mark, would you like to clarify because I want to make sure I understand. I understand it's calls to police, calls for public safety services. Right, so I wondered, Selma, that was... And it's an interesting question. If that's a great metric for us to be using to capture the perceptions in the community or members of the community not inclined to report, local criminal obligations of criminal activity? No, I don't think they are. Coming from a community perspective, there's been a huge gap between the community and police for a long time, historically. So it's not inclined. You literally have to go out into the community and speak to them and do that intervention because they're not gonna... From my understanding or my experience, they're not gonna come out and say it. So that's an interesting... Mark, we're learning right now a little bit about the import of why this research is so critical because there is a gap, wonderful. Commissioner Brand, did you have another follow-up? No, that's the type of thing that I think, Mark, is we go forward with the next phase that we have to keep in mind as we're studying impact. Great. Commissioner Hill, Commissioner Skinner, you're both unmuted. Commissioner Hill, thanks. So I just want a clarification if I couldn't. I think it was Andrea who made a comment midway through the report. The perception we've talked about not being necessarily what's really happening there, but I think I heard you say that the homicide, robbery, assaults, and in more particular, prostitution was taking place at the casino. And I don't know if there's any data to back that up because that would be very helpful to us as regulators. I had not heard that and I'm kind of concerned from that remark. So I wondered if you could clarify or elaborate a little bit more about that. Absolutely. Thank you, Commissioner. I think that was a combo between Rudy and my comment. So one is that there is a difference between fact and perception and this is a conversation starter. But two, I think that perception is one that's shared among multiple interviewees. And as Rudy said, prostitution has gone virtual through the dating apps and things of that nature and folks might meet up at various locations including the casino. And so that that perception is shared among multiple interviewees. As I said, there's a difference between perception and fact and just to say too that resources have been reallocated. So when someone's mentioning, if that's happening, we need to have free clinics, STD testing, things of that nature. It is a conversation starter. And then, and just to clarify again, the data that you showed on your PowerPoint it looked to me as though the crime has actually gone down since the casino has come forward. And I'm hearing you say that it's maybe being spread out but the two examples that you gave us show that in those areas, in both locations, crime had gone down. Did I read that wrong? That was on the scattered graphs where the incidents, in fact, on the course of time, Dr. Vega did go down. I think you were stressing that the cluster show how crime is focused on the Hispanic community. But I think Commissioner Hill did see also that the numbers of incidents seem to have gone down too. Okay, Commissioner and Madam Chair, just to be very explicit, we cannot say based on the findings of this report, we cannot say that the crime has increased or decreased. We can only report on the perceptions of our participants. The definite study on crime was authored by Bruce, I forgot his last name, and he'd been selling it not too long ago. And that's the definite study of crime and his conclusions were that there was not like a significant increase in crime. What the community strongly perceive is that, okay, crime, this is not happening here because there's so much police around. Now it's happening in other places. That's what they call relocation. Thank you, Madam Chair. Okay, thank you. Commissioner Skinner, thank you for your patience. Dr. Vega and team, thank you very much for your presentation. Nothing about us without us. Ms. Rivera, I think that's the phrase that you were alluding to. I heard it most recently at our last public meeting. We had the good fortune of hosting Commissioner of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. He was speaking about issues important to the disability community. That phrase is actually coined by James Charlton who was a disability rights activist in the 1980s. But it's evolved over the years to include other underserved and disenfranchised groups. And I think it is an important conviction to have. I am appreciative of the work that you do at Neighbor to Neighbor to incorporate that conviction into your work. And I think it's something that should continue to drive your work and others, especially as we are seeking to find interventions that are workable. I'm still not clear where we go from here as a commission, as regulators to the casino industry. How do we translate your findings into tangible action? And I'm not expecting an answer. It's just certainly worth further consideration and discussion. Thank you for your words, Commissioner. The findings of these studies allow us to make conditional statements. If we know this, then we should do that. If we know the family that gambling involves families intergenerational, intergenerationally, then we should do what? Perhaps we should do great interventions that attract the family. If we know that drug use over those death is a significant problem in the city of Springfield, then what could we do? So the findings here allow us to create an if then conditional statement. Thank you. Any follow-up, Commissioner Scander? No follow-up. Just again, just a big thank you for your work. Thank you, Commissioner. Yeah, and I'll wrap up, Dr. Vega and Salma and Andrea. Thank you so much. I've been waiting anxiously really for this report. I think it's so critical and you've captured it in your presentation just to begin with Mark when you said that we're doing research through this community research funding, not community research on communities, but with them. And I want to commend you, one, Dr. Vega, for your partnership with neighbors to neighbors and recognizing how that partnership would strengthen and propel your work. As Salma, you've made clear how difficult it is to get members of the community to work with you on these kinds of surveys. You've captured, and yes, 23 things, like when you think about the research that we've done, where we're getting thousands of context, and those are even hard to be clear, but you've got, what, the 24, that may seem small, but when you explain the yield, you have to be commended for getting those 24 voices, those authentic voices to trust you so that they would work with you. And in turn, we are hearing perceptions, and years ago, I worked in the child welfare world, and we relied on the perception of the child because you weren't always going to get the facts about the child. And I liken it in my work on that to the work that you're doing. I think Mr. O'Brien, Krisha Hill, and Commissioner Skinner, this is a beginning of a conversation and how we can use these important perceptions. This may be a challenge, but also some of a gift because members of the community perceive this, and they perceive insecurity on safety, and they're experiencing insecurity on housing and food, and it's the last one that you had, Rudy. It was about crime, housing, food, their last train. They're experiencing that, the perceptions for the community are clear. So some of it's systemic that we're not going to solve. Like, I do think that there's opportunity for us to use resources that we have in research to continue this conversation, certainly around public security and public safety. I also just want to ask this, and I know that they're a little bit short on time, but if you could just briefly touch on it, but briefly explain, is there any way we can be doing more to help the community understand the interventions on responsible gaming? Is there anything that we can be doing more by infiltrating the community in the way that works? And Ms. Rivera, you know what I mean. We don't want to infiltrate and just do what is exactly not helpful in a way that engages the community. Can we be doing more in Springfield? And we may not be able to answer that, but Mark, that is one immediate, a connection that as a regulator of gaming, we might want to be considering. Udi? I will allow, I will yield to Suma Lee. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. So this is much deeper than the casino, right? This is about capital racism, right? This is about a conditioned behavior that we've in this house of ism around racism, sexism, classism, all type of isms, right? And they, how they're interconnected into like structural pressures, right? And this is what the community is facing. This is, we've been dehumanized, we've been divided and we've been controlled. And so when you look at the individual part of it, everyone has a different perception, experience and understanding. And so to address people on an individual corner, that's where the counseling's come in, right? That's where the understandings come in and understanding why they're doing what they're doing. I don't know how that's done, right? But even on a community level, right? Building those relationships between you all and the community and understanding the community needs to build that trust within each other can be a start, right? I don't know, but I do know that there is a huge trust factor when it comes to our communities and anything that's put into our communities, whether it's good with good intentions and they need to, you know, to bad outcomes in the long run and those things constantly need to be assessed. So I really don't have a recommendation besides the continued counseling, right? And the continued relationship building between the communities to get to know the community but also have the community be a part of that growth process. I would say that we need to establish a significant participatory mechanism to bring the community at the table so that the community can inform decisions. Yes, I understand there is a community panel that is in Springfield, but is that the level of, can we enhance or strengthen that level of participation? We did this study and we brought in the voices from the community, but this study, this data was collected about a year ago. You know, it's no real-time data, but the time it gets to be analyzed and transcribed and all that, it has like over a year has occurred. So that's one thing that I would say a significant participatory mechanism for the community to be at the table. I mean, even listening sessions work, right? Allowing community to come into your space and speak about their experience will get you better understanding. So yeah, I agree with Rudy that participatory part is super important, but also knowing who's participating, right? Because we do have a lot of people for me, right? In my integrity, I channel the voices of the people in my community, but there are folks who say they are the community and really are not. So also taking a deep look at who's a representation there when it comes to the participants. I understand. Very honest, so that's another, perhaps something that you can follow up and figure out how that's, that can work from our regulatory perspective. Very, very nice report. Very, very informative. And I thank you too, Mark, for setting the stage on the process. And of course, Dr. Vega, for your early slides explaining the process. We should, we should all. Any further questions? Commissions before we exclusively researched them. All set. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you so very much. Thank you, Mark. Okay. All I'm going to do something a little different today. We are going to go straight to finance without a break, but I'm going to allow us all to turn off our camera and stretch for 30 seconds, if you don't mind. So I'm going to engage in that myself and we'll be right back with Chief Lenin on finance. Thank you. Karen, did you stretch? I absolutely did. Great idea. I think this should be an on-going issue. It's got a lot of practice. Yeah, because even in a regular meeting, people get up to get a cup of coffee or, you know, in the room and we're going to adopt that. All right. Maybe I'll make sure to say when I say 30 seconds, I actually kind of move it. There we go. Commissioner Hill, do you like that convention? Say that again? Do you like the convention of stretch? I actually had a Gatorade I needed to go get. So thank you for that. Well, that's what I said, you know, in a typical meeting, conference when you get up and you get something to eat, but people walk around the room a little bit and I learned from our last seven hour meeting that it's a little crippling, right? All right, Mark, I mean, Dave, you can bring down the screen, please. Thank you so much. I'll set now. Sorry about that. I couldn't find the exit full screen button. That's okay. I'm scrolling from myself for our materials. Thank you so much. And thank you for being so nimble. All right. Good morning, still Chief Lennon. How are you? I am good. Good morning, Madam Chair and commissioners. I'm joined by Agnes, John, Doug and Noel today, and we are here to request approval of the gaming commission's FY23 operational budget of 44.39 million that funds 104 FTEs and four contract employees. On June 9th, we discussed and reviewed a budget that funds a gaming control fund at $35.7 million and 89.94 FTEs, the racing and oversight fund at $3.1 million and 9.06 FTEs, the community mitigation fund at 310,002 FTEs and the public health trust fund at 5.26 million and three FTEs. The gaming control fund budget is funded from 5.18 million in fees and assessments and a $30.52 million assessment on licensees. As a reminder, there are some exposures in this budget, the GEU overtime and our litigation budgeted items, these two items have been budgeted at minimum levels and that's similar to what we've done prior years. The commission's anticipating an assessment of 30.5 million on our licensees to fund the gaming control fund budget and there's also a $5 million assessment for the public health trust fund on our licensees. The assessment as well as slot counts are estimates and will be revised once actual slot machine counts and gaming position counts are realized on July 1 of 2022. We posted the budget memo in corresponding attachments to our website for public comment on June 10th. As of today, we've received no public comments. The public posting closes on Friday, June 24th. We're requesting that the commission vote to approve this budget with the promise that if we receive any comments between the time of approving the budget and the closing of the comment period, we'll bring those comments back to the commission at a subsequent public meeting for consideration. Those are my prepared comments for today. I'll take down the general overview of the budget if there's any additional discussion. Any questions for Derek and team? So it would be if there were any particularly substantive comments, we could do an amendment to whatever decision we were to make tonight, correct? Correct. Okay. All right. Now, if there's any questions, I know we've had chance to really review this with Derek in the past, but questions you didn't raise before. Commissioner O'Brien, are you all set? Commissioner Skinner, Commissioner Hill. I'm prepared to make a motion, Madam Chair, if you're ready for that. Excellent, thank you. I move that the commission approve the FY23 budget as contained in the commissioner's packet and discussed today in our previous commission meetings. Second. Thank you. Any discussion? Thank you, Commissioner Skinner, for your work as treasurer with the budget preparation and to the entire team. You're here and we thank you. Okay. No further discussion. Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Commissioner Skinner. Yes, 4-0. All set. Thank you, Derek. Thank you. And I just want to say once again, great work by the team here in the well, Doug Agnes and John, as well as Nakisha and Karen in the whole team that this is a bottom-up budget, right? It starts with the division heads meeting with their teams and goes through many levels of review, but it's really a whole agency effort. So I just want to thank everyone. I see John Scully nodding. This is your first budget with us, correct, John? Yes, that's correct. Yeah, it's a very transparent process. Thank you. All right. Of course. Thank you, Derricka. Thank you. All right. We're supposed to apparently have a break, but this was so short. If the last break was sufficient, we'll move right on to the community affairs or do we want to take along the break, commissioners? I'm okay to move forward. I'm not seeing any, okay. Same with the other two. Okay. Then we're going to go right to Chief Delaney and his team, Mary Bill and Lily Wallace. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair and commissioners. We have a few things on the agenda for today. The first item that we have up is relating to the east of Broadway development that Encore is doing. So if you'll recall back in March when the commission took up this item, in one of the conditions it required, condition number seven required the submission of certain information regarding the pedestrian bridge within 90 days of the decision. And so that decision was rendered on March 14th, which put the 90 days at June 14th. So I had some correspondence with Encore and they've made some changes to the pedestrian bridge and so on and their designs are not yet complete. So they were unable to meet that 90 day deadline. Initially Encore requested a 30 day extension, but after some discussions and some talks with the development team felt like 60 days was more appropriate just so that we make sure there's enough time for them to get stuff into us for the commission to consider it. And we'd rather not come back to the commission several times to keep extending this. 60 days just seemed like it was more appropriate. So also they've indicated that if this extension is granted they'll make sure that all of the necessary submissions come to the gaming commission first before it goes to any other agency, for instance the planning board and so on. So these types of delays are pretty common in something like this, design plans sometimes go in fits and starts a little bit. So we don't have any problem with doing this extension. And so Jackie I think is here. I see her name up. We went a little bit earlier than anticipated. Oh there she is. So in case you had any questions for her in particular she is here to answer that or any questions from me. Good morning Jackie. Good morning Madam Chair and commissioners. You're looking for an extension. We are, we would very much appreciate that. The design phase when we actually started working through it and getting more detailed, it made sense to actually move the bridge a little bit and reposition it. So our design teams doing that is currently doing that and then of course as Joe said we would submit that prior to moving that forward with any other agency we'd submitted to you first. Can I ask in moving it, does it mean that it will shift to a different entryway? It could. So we're looking at two different designs right now. The main, one of the purposes, I shouldn't say the main purpose, one of the purposes of moving it was to ensure that it was solely within the city of Everett and not a little bit within the city of Boston and the city of Everett because that would cause some problems in terms of the maintenance and operation of that as well as the permitting, it would obviously impact the permitting as well. In doing so, there's a number of different designs that work nicely. So we're just seeing from an operations perspective what we work best, but we are looking at a couple of designs still or in the general vicinity. Questions from Ms. Crum. Commissioner Bryan. I guess my only question is more of a suggestion in terms of the extension requests, which is that the 60 days seems reasonable going along the path coming up with ideas, but to the extent that there's anything that can be coming to us before that, I think the preference obviously would be to come in prior to that date because if changing the access point does alter any analysis obviously, that would be a little more of a substantive issue than simply looking at the plans on something that we approved in March. Absolutely, and our goal would be to come to you sooner rather than later because if we do want to move this forward, we realize that that's the first step in getting this going. Commissioner Hill. I have no questions. I was ready to make a motion, but if other commissioners have questions, I'll wait. Oh, I thought you were going to be in Commissioner Skinner. I don't have a question. Just a comment to piggyback on Commissioner O'Brien. Technically, the 60 days provided for in the decision has passed and so I agree that, although this is the technicality, I think it's important to get things in front of us well in advance so that we can have time to consider before the deadlines come up. Come up. Okay, then there are no further questions. Jackie, thank you for coming. And I guess I'll take a motion, Commissioner Hill. Okay, Madam Chair, I would move that the commission amend condition number seven from its May 12, 2022 decision relative to the development east of Broadway to grant when mass LLC and additional 60 days from the original due date to file its plan relative to the pedestrian bridge with the remainder of the condition otherwise remaining in full force and effect for purposes of clarity, the due date will now be August 11th, 2022. I second. Can I offer a friendly amendment? Sorry, I think the date references May 12. Is that the correct date? The date of the decision? The date of the 14th or May 12th? I thought it was March 14th. March 14th was the original decision. Then it was a 90 day. Yes. Yes. So it's March 14th. That's just a. The commissioner Skinner, the written decision came out on that May date. That's, but the actual date of the decision was in March. So it's the difference. Okay. All right. The commission issued its memorialized its decision in a May 12th document that included that condition of the, I'm getting to us 90 days from March 14th. That's, that's. Yeah, that's what I was saying. I just wanted to. Is that fair enough? That's a, and if I recall correctly, March 14th, you weren't here yet. Right. All right. So I second the motion. Excellent. Thank you so much. Any further discussion, clarification? Okay. Commissioner Browning. Hi. Thank you. Commissioner Hill. Hi. Thank you, Mr. Skinner. Hi. My vote. Yeah. So four zero. Thank you. And Jackie, thank you. Good luck. Thank you. I appreciate it. Mr. Gordon. All right. Thank you. Thank you. And so we have two other items in front of you. There's the remainder of the community mitigation fund applications and an amendment to the 2021 workforce grant for a Springfield technical community college. And if you don't mind, I think I'll take that one first. That's a pretty simple item. So Springfield Technical Community College is asking to redistribute some of their funds that they had left over from the last grant round. They're asking to redistribute $22,521. We're recommending that the commission redistributes $16,896 and the reason for that. Essentially the $5,625 that we're not recommending funding was not covering something that was really gaming related. It was for para educators, educator training, which is not really something that's related to hospitality or anything of that nature. The rest of the funds, the $16,896 were all for things that had been identified in the grant application. So therefore we are recommending the $16,896. And Lily is here with us as well. Lily did the analysis on this and worked with Crystal a little bit. So if you have any questions, be happy to answer those. And if I can't answer them, we have Lily here as well. Lily, do you wanna add? No, I think Joe did a great job. I think the other thing that was the piece that we added which is a great expansion for them was that was not a part of the original grant was actually doing training in different languages. So they're expanding their program to offer Spanish speakers as well. So I think that's a great step in the right direction and an awesome program that they're looking to start. Excellent, thank you. That's an important addition. All right, any questions for Joe or Lily? I guess the question that I'm having is so originally this grant went out to STCC and then was it also Holyoke and Springfield Public Schools? So is this a try request or are we just amending what was a try issuance based on STCC's request today? So yeah, the grant Holyoke Community College was the lead agency with STIC and the Springfield Public Schools and the monies were distributed to the different groups. So $104,000 went to STIC originally and they had the 22,000 that they hadn't used of that that they wanted to repurpose. So it's only their monies that they're asking you to reallocate. It doesn't allow it. So technically, you know, HCC is the agency that the money goes to them and then gets sent to the other groups. It's a little cumbersome. We're actually trying to change that up a little bit this year where STIC gets their own money and HCC gets their own money. But yes, this is just the STIC piece of it. Yeah, I'm just looking at the wording on the motion. It's a little just making sure we're gonna say this correctly. We worked a lot with accounting to try and get it a little bit clearer for this upcoming round that we just granted. So hopefully it'll be clear and moving forward for everyone. Any further questions? All right. If you don't need a motion on this one and Tricia or Brian, I'm gonna turn to you. Certainly, Madam Chair, I move that the commission amend the 2021 grant initially awarded to Holyoke Community College and then a portion of which was sent to the Springfield Technical Community College by authorizing the redistribution of $16,896 of the STCC award toward continuing the Hand in Prep Workforce Development Program and the inclusion of a bilingual co-instructor. Second. Thank you. Any discussion, questions? I'll turn briefly to Council. Does that work? All right. Tricia or Brian? I. Tricia Hill? I. Tricia Skinner? I. I vote y'all for Sarah. Thank you. Excellent work. Thank you, Lauren. Joe? Okay. So now we are on to the last nine Community Mitigation Fund applications. So we have some public safety and some specific impact applications. And so I will dive right in with public safety applications. The first application in front of us today is the city of Boston, the police department. They're requesting $256,300 for increased police patrols in Charlestown and downtown Boston, additional funding for training and overtime, two vehicles for the human trafficking unit and accident reconstruction equipment and training for the fatal collision investigative team. So we are recommending funding a part of this grant in the amount of $106,000 with $81,000 going to the human trafficking unit and $25,000 going towards additional patrols. We are not recommending the funding for the accident reconstruction equipment and training and we'll go into those reasons in just a moment. So this application really is dealing with three specific issues. It's almost kind of like three applications in one. So the first one deals with really a general increase in calls for service to the police department and certain crimes that are happening in what they call areas A1, which is downtown Boston and A15, which is Charlestown. The second issue is some increased assistance that's being provided by the Boston Human Trafficking Unit to the city of Everett and the state police. And the third relates to certain increases in collisions in those same two areas A1 and A15. So I'll take each one of these separately. So in order to address increases in calls for service and crimes, the city of Boston is proposing to increase patrols in the casino area, primarily the area from North Station all the way up to the Everett line through Sullivan Square and up to Alfred Street and also to increase the detectives hours to try to implement some strategies to combat the increase in car theft and larceny in the Charlestown neighborhood. So the city did provide some information that demonstrated in these increases in calls for service and crimes. But they really weren't able to make a strong connection to an impact from Encore. We went back and took a look at Christopher Bruce's study that he did on the Encore Casino from its opening until October of 2020. And he did identify that the region has experienced higher than average totals for thefts from vehicles. But he was unable to trace that in any substantial way to Encore. So with that said, the review team was saying that the additional money for the detectives to look at strategies for combating the increasing in car theft and larceny doesn't really have a nexus to the casino there. Now, the review team did agree certainly that traffic has an impact on Sullivan Square and Rutherford Ave. In fact, almost 70% of the casino-related traffic in some way, shape, or form goes through Sullivan Square. So we felt that some additional level of patrols seemed to be appropriate, particularly during high traffic periods. The application said they were gonna focus on 12-hour blocks between 4 p.m. and 4 a.m. during high traffic weekends and weekdays. The review team really thought that maybe that should be a little bit more targeted, maybe focusing on really those sort of peak traffic periods which were on-core, typically in the evenings, on Fridays and Saturdays, that may be 8 p.m. to midnight when there's really high traffic or maybe some of the late night hours after the nightclubs close and things like that. So the city was requesting just a little over $75,000 for the additional patrols and for the detective overtime. We are recommending that an award of $25,000 be made for the additional patrols. And I think in the future, if some of the additional crime studies we do do show that there's a nexus to the casino, the city could certainly come back in another round if it should become warranted. So the second item, the Boston Human Trafficking Unit has assisted the city of Everett Police Department and the state police on human trafficking investigations, some of which have been related to the casino. So we certainly agree that that does constitute a nexus to the casino. What Boston is requesting is funding for some training at the Mass Attorney General's Office Cyber Conference as well as some internet crimes against children training. They're looking for funds for detectives overtime to assist Everett and the state police and funding for two undercover vehicles. So the review team, we fully agreed that the training and overtime funds were appropriate. With respect to the vehicles, this is a notion that we introduced last year of looking at the proportionality of the request relative to the impact from the casino. So there are currently four vehicles that are assigned to the Human Trafficking Unit. And regardless of whether Encore ever existed or not, the city of Boston would still need to maintain that Human Trafficking Unit to address issues that already exist in the city. So replacing 50% of the Human Trafficking Unit's fleet seemed a bit out of proportion with the identified impact. So we are recommending one vehicle. And this is actually quite similar to the request that Foxboro made last year relative to their undercover folks and association with the Plain Ridge Park Casino. So we basically came up with essentially that same evaluation. And then the third piece of this one relates to accident reconstruction. Now, the city is alleging that there's been an increase in crashes in those areas A1 and A15 from 2012 to 2021. Now, accident data goes kind of up and down year to year. There's not, it's not very linear. It's not like there's a steady increase or a steady decrease in numbers. So it's a little bit hard to figure out exactly what the trends are. But what we really did was we looked from 2018 to 2019, which was the year before the casino opened and the year in which the casino opened to try to make some kind of connection there. So the city provided us this crash data. And so in area A1, they showed a slight decrease in accidents actually from 2018 to 2019. They went from 914 to 896, while A15 showed a slight increase in accidents between 2018 and 19 from 306 to 312. We didn't really try to use the 2020 and 2021 data just due to the pandemic having significant impact on the amount of traffic and so on. But you add up those numbers and it's actually shown a slight decrease in accidents after the opening of the casino. So again, we went back to Christopher Bruce's study and he stated that there is no evidence of an encore related increase in crashes on local roads. Again, I'm sure we'll be continuing these analyses going forward and once traffic's back to normal, which seems to be pretty much now, maybe these will show different trends in the future but as of right now, we just aren't seeing that connection to the casino. So we're not recommending that this piece of it be funded. And encore certainly was in support of this application. So I know that was a little complicated. So with that, I'll open that one up for questions. Wish I had a question, which is a comment that I was with the group when they were working through this and following up with Boston. And I think the end result is the right place to be in terms of the distribution of the monies. Yes, I want to thank Commissioner O'Brien and Secretary DeWales, who put their public safety background helped out in the community mitigation grant reviews from Public Safety. So thank you, appreciate it. Okay, any further questions, comments? And that's with respect to all three buckets, right? Commissioner O'Brien? All right. All right, we'll move on then. Okay, so the next one is the city of Everett. Their fire department requested funds for the purchase of an ambulance, $250,000. The review team is not recommending this grant for funding because essentially it's really fulfilling a general municipal purpose and is not directly correlated to a casino impact. So just as a little bit of background, the city of Everett does not currently provide their own ambulance service. They contract that out through a private company right now. Now, a couple of years ago, the city decided to provide their own ambulance service and have started moving in that direction. So they've purchased an ambulance, which is expected to go into service later this summer. Now, according to the application, the state's Office of Emergency Medical Services requires the city, when you have an ambulance service, you have to have not only one ambulance, but a backup. So when that first ambulance is out on calls, then a second one would be available. Now, as of right now, the city has an agreement with the same private company to provide that once they get their new ambulance to provide that backup service. So this grant, if awarded, would fund that backup ambulance. So the city wouldn't have to rely on the private company to provide the backup service. Now, the stated impact here in the application is an increase in calls for service from Encore. Now, the city receives significant funding in its host community agreement, which is designed to mitigate the known impacts of Encore. And what it states in that host community agreement is that the impact payments constitute wins mitigation efforts and are in full and complete satisfaction of all local government impacts, whether or not identified in this agreement. Now, given the scale of a development like Encore, the city had to expect a significant increase in calls for service, any place where there are tens of thousands of people per day and 24-hour operations, the city certainly had to anticipate an increase in calls for service. Now, the primary purpose for community mitigation funds is to mitigate unanticipated impacts. And so the review team wasn't convinced that this increasing calls for service was unanticipated. And the city also talks about their difficulty with their private ambulance service and them being able to maintain enough staff to provide service. Now, this, as we understand, it is sort of an industry-wide issue in the EMT and paramedic business that staffing is always difficult. Now, again, the provision of the second ambulance would allow the city to end a part of its contract with this service. But regardless of any impact of the casino, this really seems to be the city making a business decision to provide their own ambulance service. And it's not really being done in response to a casino-related impact. And certainly, this may prove to be very beneficial to the city and we're not questioning what kind of decision they're making that are in the best interests of their city, but we simply can't find that connection to the casino to recommend an award. So therefore, we are not recommending awarding funds for this project. Questions on that? I'll set commissioners. All good. They're holding their heads, Joe. Excellent. Okay. The next one up is Maldon and this is for some traffic signal upgrades on Broadway and they were requesting $200,000 to replace existing traffic signal equipment at four intersections along the Broadway corridor. This would include things like the traffic control boxes and the traffic signal posts and heads themselves. So on this one, we took a long hard look at this and again, the review team is not recommending funding for this grant because what they have identified as public safety issues, they really seem to have been in existence before the opening of Encore and it doesn't appear that Encore has made these conditions any worse. So we're not recommending this. And just again, a little background. This application was submitted under the public safety category and I think we talked a little bit before about we had a couple of applications that maybe didn't feel like that might have been the right category. But we do agree that traffic signal controls do aid in public safety, keeping vehicles moving appropriately, having pedestrian crosswalks and so on. So we do agree that it could be filed under the public safety category. Now, in the application, they talk about increases in traffic congestion on Broadway as the impact that this is designed to address. Now, going back to the environmental impact reports and we've talked about Broadway a bit in some other applications, about 1% of the casino related traffic would be expected to use Broadway in Malden, which based on the traffic studies would be about 240 vehicles a day. So we do agree and we have agreed on other applications that there is an impact on Broadway but it is quite a small impact based on the traffic studies that have been done. Now, after we did the initial review of the application, we went back to the city and asked them to provide us some additional information that might demonstrate that this increase in traffic is actually causing public safety impacts. And so the city came back to us with some crash data on Broadway between 2012 and 2021. And what they tried to do was kind of look at the 2012 to 2015 period as one piece and then 2016 to 2021 as the second piece. The critical piece of 2016 is that was when the start of construction of Encore happened. So, there presumably be some uptick in traffic due to construction related traffic as well. Now, when we reviewed that data, the crash data that was submitted didn't really show any particular trends that would indicate that any kind of increase in traffic from Encore is causing additional problems in the area. The number of crashes between 2012 and 2015 ranged from 76 to 86 on that stretch of road. And from 2016 to 2021 ranged from 72 to 78. And again, we discounted 2020 as not being pertinent. I think that the crashes dropped to something like 50 or whatever, really outside of the trends. So, there were also a relatively high number of non-botarist crashes, typically pedestrian crashes that have happened here, or crashes I should say with pedestrians. They went about four per year in that 2012 to 2015 time period and about three per year from 16 to 21. Now, look, this section of road has a lot of accidents and it has a lot of non-vehicular accidents. However, looking at the data, we just can't see any trends. There doesn't seem to be any kind of an uptick in accidents or incidents. So, we just really couldn't find that connection to the casino on a public safety related impact. So, for those reasons, we're not recommending awarding this grant. Any questions on that one? Questioners. No. I think I'm, can I lose commission? Did we lose Brad? I think he may have. Oh, Karen. We know he's in the building. He's obviously... Check, stand by. Thank you. He's got a contact with the issue. It's funny because I didn't note the disappearance. Thanks, Karen. I have a question that I'm sure I can go ahead and ask or a comment down. Is noteworthy that in our memorandum that the licensee points out EVH support says EVH supports the city of Malmö's request for planning to upgrade traffic signals along the Broadway corridor. The safety of all members of our community is our highest priority. And we are happy to support the city of Malmö's efforts to help protect the well-being. So, they're noting their support and Joe, what you're noting is that given our guidelines and our statutory framework, they just haven't demonstrated the nexus that we need. Yeah, exactly. And again, actually, we didn't put it in particularly in this one, but going back to Christopher Bruce's study where he said there's really no sort of uptick in crashes that could be attributable to the casino. It's sort of another piece in support, but the... Yeah, I mean, look, we love all these projects. Yeah. I mean, if we didn't have to make that nexus to the casino, I'd love to fund them all. I mean, I think what's being proposed here, upgrading these signals probably will improve the safety of the road and the safety of pedestrians and do all of those things, which is great. But just absent that connection to the casino, we just, that's job one in our case, and it's kind of a toggle switch. If you identify the impact, we can say, yes, if you can't, we just, we can't. Yeah. So, Commissioner Hill, I looked for you to see if you had any questions. I have to say, I didn't see you disappear. We've got to get that fixed for you. That's fine. No questions. So the only comment I made was that in the licensee's response, Encore did say they would support this in terms of a safety feature for all the members of the community. But from Joe's perspective, I guess the evidence doesn't give us the support we need to do our job. So, and now you're back. So no questions. No questions. I definitely can continue on with the next one, Joe, please. Okay, so Medford, the city of Medford is requesting $191,100 for the purchase of three public safety vehicles, an electric vehicle charging station, and a speed trailer. So the review team, we reviewed this one quite carefully and we are recommending awarding partial funding of this grant and the amount of $68,300 for the purchase of a pickup truck and a speed monitor trailer for the police department. We are not recommending funding for the fire department, for two detailed vehicles and the charging stations. So I'll go through these separately. So I'll do the police department first. So now the city of Medford has identified increases in traffic accidents and traffic complaints as the impact of the casino that this is trying to address. Now, again, and we do this typically with all of these, we go back to the environmental impact reports that estimated how much traffic was gonna travel in any particular direction. Now that estimated that about 12% of the traffic related casino would use Route 16, going through Medford and an additional 1% would use Route 28 going up into Medford. And again, the casino generates about 24,000 vehicles per day. So you extrapolate out those numbers and it's over 3,000 vehicles per day are using Medford roads. And we certainly consider that to be an impact of the casino. So the city also did present us some data that showed increases in calls for service and accidents from 2018 to 2019. And I think the accident data that they had, I think was not submitted to Christopher Bruce in his study. So now the use of speed boards is an effective method of improving safety and having a dedicated vehicle to deploy the boards and other safety equipment that the city has will certainly help Medford improve safety for all modes of travel. Therefore, we are recommending this portion of the application for the pickup truck and the speed trailer. And again, just this is very consistent with some of the other grants that we've done in the in years past, I think for Plainville and Foxboro and a couple of other communities in the provision of safety related vehicles. Now with respect to the fire department request, the impact that they are trying to connect with is they're saying that the construction of Encore Boston Harbor itself has led to an increase in construction activity in Medford, which of course in turn has resulted in increased demand for fire inspections. The application didn't provide any documentation to demonstrate that connection. So when we did our initial review of it and asked for supplemental information, we asked the applicant, excuse me, for any additional information that was available concerning the growth and development in Medford and how that was attributable to Encore. And the city's response was that they said based on conversations with developers, we know that EVH is a significant demand driver for these developments. Typically, we have not taken sort of anecdotal evidence as being sufficient to justify an impact from the casino. So without having any tangible documentation of an impact, it's really not possible for us to parse out what portion of development in Medford might be attributed to development from the development of Encore. And because we can't really make that connection, we are not recommending awarding funds for the two fire department vehicles. And I will open that one up for any comments? Questions? Questions, comments, off that. Okay, the next one is the town of Plainville. They are requesting $238,700 in funds for police officer training as well as some hardware and software purchases for their virtual training. So we are recommending awarding partial funding of this grant in the amount of $142,200 for the training costs that are associated directly with the Plainville Police Department. The review team does not recommend funding for overtime costs associated with other Metro-Elect communities or for the virtual training hardware and software. So we'll go through this a little bit on the reasons why we are recommending this partial award. So Plainville's requested training funds for fair and impartial policing, human dynamics and conflict resolution and de-escalation training. Now of course in our 2022 guidelines, we spelled out certain training costs being specifically eligible for funding. With the rationale behind that is that, it's reasonable to assume that police in the hosting surrounding communities will certainly come into contact with patrons or employees of the casino in their regular duties. And as such, and similar to several or other applications this year, we are recommending that the training for the Plainville Police should certainly be funded. Now, interestingly, this application included $56,000 to $58,000 for training of additional police personnel in other Metro-Elect communities. So Metro-Elect is a consortium of 46 local police departments located primarily south and west of Boston. So these extend all the way up as far as Wayland. So some of these communities are quite distant from the casino. And we understand that Plainville would like to share their training resources, but community mitigation funds really have to be focused on casino-related impacts. So, well again, we think it's great that they wanna help some of these other communities. We are not recommending funding for those Metro-Elect communities to make sure that this is focused really on casino-related impacts rather than broader impacts. So again, we're recommending funding $142,200 of their original $198,200 requested for the training. Now, the application is also requesting a little over $40,000 for equipment and software. This would be used to augment the training simulator that is owned by the Plainville Police Department. And again, we understand that Plainville would like to upgrade their training equipment. Excuse me. But we didn't find any real nexus to a casino impact that's driving this upgrade of equipment. So we're not recommending that application, that portion of the application. So again, with that, we're recommending the $142,200 rather than the 238 set. And with that, I will open this one up for any questions or comments. Questions, comments? All set? Yeah, I think I just would reiterate, Joe, what you're touching on is when, I think I'm accurate to say that the State of the Art Public Safety Facility that they have was really funded by their community host agreement. And that very innovative arrangement with their bond issues. Those dollars did come from back that the casino came in. But again, community mitigation dollars can't be used to actually either enhance those original improvements. And one really wonderful feature is that it is such a State of the Art facility that they do offer a lot of regional support. But again, it doesn't tie into the nexus that we need to make to see in order to fund them. So, so we're getting a lot of the idea of regional support, but it just can't necessarily be funded by us. Right, but their facility really is a, it's a Plainville facility, but they do generously serve a lot of the region or provide space, you know, it's just, that was definitely in their mind. So, thank you. And it's 142,000, so it's a generous grant purchase. Yeah, that's a lot of training. That's a lot of training. But I remember, you know, we know that that's kind of always at the bottom of the budget. So it's a piece of promise. All right, excellent, thank you. Okay, so now we are onto the specific impact applications. First one is the city of Everett, their fire department is for public safety communications equipment. So city was requesting $353,000 for the purchase of 72 radios to replace antiquated radios that do not work effectively at Encore Boston Harbor. We're recommending partial awarding, awarding partial funding for this project in the amount of 122,600 for the funding of up to 25 radios. And so, you know, Encore, I mean, Everett has been having their fire department has had difficulty with their existing radios inside the Encore Boston Harbor facility. You know, Encore did put in a signal booster in the building because, you know, buildings of that size, they need some kind of basically a repeater to get the signals throughout the building. And even with that booster, the older model radios were not working effectively in the building. So now we do agree that that does constitute an impact of the casino. So this, Everett has 103 total radios of which it considers 72 to be antiquated. So this request would replace all of the remaining antiquated radios. And, you know, as we looked at this again with that notion of proportionality, we were saying that really we didn't feel that this request was sort of proportional to the casino impact. And we had a meeting with the fire department with the fire chief and we talked a little bit about how their system works. And there are three fire stations located in Everett of which one primarily responds to incidents at Encore. And so we agree that it would probably be appropriate to replace the radios at that station as well as providing a few spares. You know, should some kind of a larger incident occur at Encore where at least the supervisors or whatever in some of the other locations would be able to have radios, newer radios. So in our conversations, we were looking at what the staffing levels were on the shifts and so on. And we came up with, you know, that they probably needed about 18 to 20 radios. And we figured, you know, five or so spares would be about the right amount to have on hand should they need them. So we finally came down to 25 as being probably the number that would mitigate the impact. And just in addition to that, Everett has filed for some other grants and has been successful on those. So of the 72 that they were originally proposing, they really are probably down to somewhere in the mid-50s range that they need. So this 25 really gets them a long way towards that replacement of all of their radios which they ultimately want to do. So we are recommending the 122.6 for the 25 radios. And I'll open that one up for comments. Questions? Looks like everyone's all set. Okay, so the next one is the Everett Police Department. They are requesting $309,000 for public safety equipment, extra late night patrols, and also for some dual band radios to improve their interoperability with the gaming enforcement unit. And we are recommending a full award of this grant. So this is similar to the city of Boston's where it's addressing several discreet things in the same application. So I'll go through them sort of one by one. But so the three specific impacts that they're talking about. The first one really is the presence of the parking lots located across the street from Encore which require frequent police details. The second item relates to the late night activity at the casino that is at least in part driven by the 4 a.m alcohol service. And the third is the lack of communication interoperability between Everett Police Department and the gaming enforcement unit. So looking at the first item, the parking lots across the street. So when the casino was first proposed Encore only owned the casino site itself. There was no anticipation at that time of Encore developing parking lots on the East side of Broadway. So now with the development of those parking lots that created a significant pedestrian crossing demand at that location that had not been anticipated. So Everett Police Department provides regular police details at busy times at that location. Typically, weekends, sometimes Thursday evenings, sometimes Sundays. So the review team didn't agree that that was an unanticipated impact of the casino. Now, what Everett Police does right now to provide additional safety, they use portable light towers down there in the evenings that they borrow from their public works department. And those aren't always available to them. Sometimes there's a water main break or there's night road work or other things that the DPW needs, they get pulled away from the site. And if you've ever been out there at night while the street lighting is appropriate for vehicles, it is kind of dark for pedestrians at that location. And these portable lights really do provide some good lighting in that location. So they're requesting two of those portable light towers that would be dedicated to that location. And the review team thinks that that is appropriate. In addition to that, they're always using other safety equipment down there, cones, courses, signs, things of that nature to help cross people safely. And they have to cart those things back and forth to the site. So they are requesting a storage container that they can leave down at that location so they can securely store those materials in that location. And also on that storage container that they're looking at, the one that they're looking at actually contains a small area for an office where an officer could do paperwork or other things that would be weather protected down there. So the review team felt that that was appropriate to have the storage container and the lighting. So with respect to the late night patrols, we have been funding late night patrols for the last couple of years during those peak periods. So essentially, the impact of the casino, the late night alcohol services in part causing the crowds to leave a little bit later from the casino. So where the Ever Police Department envisioned 2 a.m alcohol service ending when the project was being proposed and was expecting sort of a large kind of slog of traffic coming out of there at that time that has skewed a little bit later. So these late night patrols have allowed them to do additional patrolling in those hours. And we talked with the chief, with chief Maisie and he said, one of the real benefits of that has been being able to help out the gaming enforcement unit with prisoners, typically when someone is arrested at the casino, the officer from the gaming enforcement unit he has to either bring them to Everett or to the state police barracks to book them which can sometimes take up to 90 minutes to do and that takes them out of the casino. And when these late night patrols happen they're able to have Everett police take the person down to do the booking rather than the gaming enforcement unit which gets the folks back patrolling the facility where they should be. So that's one of the benefits that the chief had expressed to us of these late night patrols. And then with respect to the radios a couple of years ago we did purchase dual band radios for the Everett police officers that are assigned to the gaming enforcement unit that allows them to talk with state police and so on. But what's happened is, there's a lot of coordination between Everett police and the gaming enforcement unit and the police department has been working on replacing radios on a pretty regular basis but what they would like to have is having dual band radios to get to all their supervising officers so that they would be able to correspond better with the folks in the gaming enforcement unit and specifically the state police. So again, we are recommending this portion of the grant as well. And I will open that one up for any questions. Questions, comments? I'll put that. Again, just a nice and serious response I'll come up with some questions. Okay, so the next one is Mansfield. This is for Route 106 traffic safety impact mitigation. They're requesting $186,200 for the purchase of a pickup truck, a motorcycle, a trailer, some speed boards, some pedestrian crossing beacons and other traffic safety equipment. We are recommending partial funding of this grant in the amount of $64,500, particularly for the speed boards of the traffic safety equipment and the trailer. We are not recommending funding for the pickup truck motorcycle or the crossing beacons. So again, this is one of those projects where we had to look at is the request sort of proportional to the impact. Now Mansfield has identified the increased traffic volumes, traffic collisions and calls for service on Route 106 as the impact associated with the Plain Ridge Park Casino. And again, going back to the original environmental impact report, it didn't go all the way down to 106 in Mansfield. With an estimate of how much traffic might use that section of road. But so we tried to extrapolate out kind of a worst case scenario. And under that worst case scenario, we were looking at about, you know, maybe 2% of the traffic from the casino might use 106 in Mansfield and that's probably might even be on the high side, which would be about 125 vehicles per day. And again, while we do agree that there's an impact on Mansfield's roads, it really is quite modest. And given that modest impact, we tried to say, well, one of the things that they are requesting that really might have an impact on that and is that really proportional to what's being asked? So we do agree that the speed board and the other safety equipment would definitely have a positive impact on traffic operations. And they are looking to locate these on route 106, which, you know, if traffic were heading towards the casino, that would likely be from Mansfield, that would likely be the route that they would take. One of the interesting things that they said in their application is that they were gonna put, you know, the problem gambling hotline number on one of the message boards as a public service message, which we thought was great. And then, you know, having a trailer to store this equipment also seemed appropriate. The other items, you know, Mansfield already has a pickup truck that they can use to move around these speed boards and this equipment, which they already do. You know, they put a couple of speed boards regularly down by Great Woods, the Xfinity Center, I guess it is these days. And they leave that there for the whole concert season, which probably makes sense, and this will give them another option, you know, to have, but they do have the equipment to move those around. And also, they requested a new motorcycle that would replace an aging motorcycle. And, you know, one of the things in our public safety applications is that these are supposed to be things to supplement their activities, not really supplant them, replacing one for another. That's just capital maintenance, and that's not really the purpose of this grant, that this would just be supplanting what should be existing community funding. So we're not recommending the motorcycle. Now the pedestrian crossing, this is proposed to be placed over by the MBTA commuter rail station. Now currently, there was a grade-separated crossing of Route 106 for pedestrians to access the station. And that's just, you know, engineer speak for a bridge. So, you know, so there is an existing way to cross Route 106 without adding an additional pedestrian crossing. There are several commuter parking lots and some higher density residential development that do result in some significant pedestrian activity along 106. But this is really, you know, for the commuter rail station. This does not really have to do with an impact from the casino. And considering that most of this pedestrian traffic would happen in the AM and the PM peak hours, which is not really the peak time, traffic times for the casino, this just seems to be addressing an MBTA related impact rather than a casino related impact. And again, we fully understand why the town would like to have a pedestrian crossing in this location. And it probably makes sense to have a pedestrian crossing in that location as an extra added measure. But it does not seem to be related to a casino impact, which is why we're not recommending that. And this is almost identical to Foxborough's application last year. They had requested pedestrian crossings in their downtown, which we didn't approve again because they weren't really able to prove that there was a casino related impact. Always a good idea, but, you know, we just weren't driven by that casino related impact. And with that, I'll open that one up for any questions. Questions, comments. I know Mark is in our own video, but he may be listening. Joe, can we put in the parking lot the idea of including in a guideline? Is it suggestion that we recommend if you let signage include the responsible gaming or encourage that inclusion of responsible gaming? Those just seem like a great idea. Yeah, I mean, I thought that was a nice touch on the part of the folks in Mansfield. Yeah, I'm not sure if Mark was aware of that, but in this particular grant, it's for speed signage. And they said that they would include language around responsible gaming. So I guess we might want to coordinate a bit. Yeah, I was half tuned in there, but I think that's a really creative, interesting idea. We'd be glad to work with them on that. Yeah, maybe just, you know, evolving guidelines. All right, any other questions or comments on that? All right. Okay, so this next one is our last one. No rounds of applause, please. This is the last one of all of them, Joe. And how many in total? There were 43. And I'm actually gonna go through a little bit of a summary after we're done. All right, but so this is a little bit of a drum roll. So thank you. Yes, so the last one is the town of Plainville. They're requesting a community resource officer. So they're requesting $171,600 for the funding of a community resource officer over a period of two years. The review team is not recommending awarding funds for this grant. And I'll go through this. There's a number of reasons why. And again, not suggesting that this isn't a great idea. It's just that, you know, addressing a casino impact is what we have to look at. And we're not convinced that this is doing that. So firstly, again, the commission requires that any award of community mitigation funds must be in response to an impact from a gaming establishment. So, you know, one of the first questions we ask in our application is what is the impact that's attributed to the operation of the gaming facility? And, you know, the applicant didn't really articulate what the specific impact was that this officer was going to address. You know, they stated more or less what benefits that this officer would have saying that it'll bridge some gaps, allow us to be proactive, you know, try to identify missed opportunities and so on and so forth. Which again, all good ideas, but it doesn't really address a specific impact of the casino. And again, the application goes on to describe numerous incidents that the Plainville police have responded to, you know, outside of the gaming establishment that could be related to PPC. And again, similar to what we talked about with Everett, you know, Plainville has a host community agreement with PPC that states Plainridge desires to mitigate impacts from the development and operation of a gaming establishment through the means described herein. You know, there are significant payments to the community for those expected impacts. And again, the opening of a casino with the large volumes of people in there, you know, increases, you know, some of the crimes and some of the traffic impacts certainly had to be expected as part of the development of a casino and should have been anticipated. So again, we're not convinced that this is sort of an unanticipated impact. And thirdly, you know, each of our licensees has a gaming enforcement unit that's established to handle crimes that happen on the licensees property. And of course, under certain circumstances, the GEU needs to coordinate with local police departments. And, you know, the application indicates that the community resource officer can improve communications with the GEU and PPC. There's really no indication that the current system is not working effectively or that the proposal addresses any particular deficiencies of that system. And again, the application talks about a lot of different activities that the community resource officer might undertake, some of which are associated with the casino and some of which aren't necessarily associated with the casino and are more sort of general municipal purposes. But the application states, it says that Plain Ridge keeps us informed about many of the events, but we struggle due to our current environment of reduced staff and increased demands on service. And, you know, the review team, we certainly sympathize with the realities of staffing shortages, but those shortages themselves are not due to an impact of the casino. And again, we have no doubt that Plainville could use additional staff and that a community resource officer could provide value, but we were just simply unable to tie this request to a specific impact of the casino. And therefore we don't recommend funding of this grant. And with that, I will open that up for questions. Any questions or comments for Joe and team on this final grant? Okay. Joe, a few questions, but we had a very thorough briefing and very thorough memorandum and appreciate all the work that went into it and the work of your fine team of Mary and Lauren. Okay, so I did do a little bit of a wrap-up. Did you wanna do your motions first and then I can do the wrap-up or would you like me to do that and then your motions, your? Let's do the motions and then the wrap-up. Okay. So do I have any motion? Do you wanna deal with the denial first? Do you wanna deal with the goodness first? It's all well done and thoughtful. Thank you. Let's do the good ones first. There we go. Good news. Thank you. I'm not sure how. Deal with me one moment. That's okay. Madam Chair, I would move that the commission approve the applications from the following applicants for funding from the Community Mitigation Fund for the purposes described in the submitted applications and materials included in the commissioner's packet and for the reasons described therein and discussed here today. They are as follows. The city of Boston, two grants. One for human trafficking unit for 81,000 and additional patrols for 25,000 which were total $106,000. To the city of Medford for $68,300. Town of Plainville, $142,200. The city of Everett, $122,600. City of Everett, an additional $309,000 for the police equipment. And the town of Mansfield for $64,500. Second. And further, that the commission staff be authorized to execute a grant instrument commemorating these awards in accordance with 205 CMR 153.04. Second. Any discussion, clarifications? All right. Pusha Graham. Aye. Pusha Hill. Aye. Pusha Skinner. Aye. Vote yes. 4-0, thank you. Excellent. Yeah, we have a beginning of a motion on the denials. Madam Chair, I move that the commission deny the application for funding from the Community Mitigation Fund for Accident Reconstruction Equipment and Training for the Faith Collision Investigator Team submitted by the city of Boston for the reasons described in the memorandum in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today. Second. Any discussion? Okay. Pusha Graham. Aye. Pusha Hill. Aye. Pusha Skinner. Aye. I vote yes. 4-0. How about on the city of Everett? I have a motion. I'll make a motion. If it's all right with you, Madam Chair, I would do, I'm just going to do one remaining motion for the three and suggest that we vote to deny. So Madam Chair, I move that the commission deny the filing applications for funding from the Community Mitigation Fund. First, from the city of Everett for the purchase of an ambulance. Second, for the city of Maldon to replace existing traffic signal equipment. And lastly, the town of Plainville's request for funding for a resource officer. Second. For the reasons discussed here, for the reasons in the memorandum and is discussed here today. Second. Any discussion or clarification? Thank you. Thank you. Hearing none, Mr. Ryan. Aye. I love the video. Thank you. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Commissioner Skinner. Aye. I vote yes. 4-0. Thank you. Okay. Joe, if you could wrap it up, that would be great. Okay. I'm going to just share my screen here. That is not sharing my screen. That is sharing. It's not sharing the right screen. Let's see here. Bear with me for one moment, please. Wouldn't be a proper meeting without some technical difficulties. Okay. So this is just. A little wrap up of where we are and how we got here. So this first slide is our. Our applications. So you'll see. Bottom right hand corner or total of 13.35 million in applications that we received. And I thought it was kind of a little interesting this year. The applications in region B exceeded the applications in region A by a little bit, which is not usually the case. So that was good. Yeah, it was good. I'm going to put that in the chat. I think we've got about a million dollars in the category two. Facility. So the folks around plan rich park have certainly been. Active in, in applying. So on the status of awards, I put a bunch of asterisks in here because you had not done your final votes yet. But. But I think these numbers are now accurate. So you'll see that. impact, 1.3 million total, just under a million in transportation planning, the big winner of 5.7 million in transportation construction, a million in workforce development, and about 600,000 in community planning. And I think as you'll recall, we tried to make the community planning category a little bit easier for folks to apply for. And I think that was pretty successful. And we're going to try to look to do some of that and maybe some of the other categories for next year. So the total awards, almost 10.5 million, which is by far the highest number that we've done. I think maybe the high number before that was around 8 million. I'll have to go look that up, but so we're certainly putting out more money than we have before. And just a comparison, as you know, we did a lot of hard work to try to get more people in this year, which I think we were pretty successful at. So comparing 21 to 22, we had 28 applications in 2021. It's up to 43 this year. Now, of course, our funding target went from 12.5 to 21 million, again, because as these monies roll over each year, if we don't fully expend them, that number continues to grow. So in 2021, the total ask was a little under $6 million, and we awarded 4.8. And this year, again, the 13.35 and awarding almost 10.5. So again, by all measures, I think we were quite successful at getting more people in here. I mean, was that the easing of the pandemic? Was it the hard work that we did? Was it some combination of both? I think it was, and we will certainly continue to reach out going forward. And we'll be having our conversations over the summer on our guidelines for next year and into the fall. But any questions on the status? About the commissioners? Sounds like we're all set, John. Excellent summary. And I just wanted to really thank the review team and my staff. This year was kind of challenging. Our review team was down a couple of folks, and a bunch of people stepped up to the plate and helped us. At first was Brad. He took over for Bruce Stebbins as the liaison to our review team and jumped right in with both feet and did a great job. And I wanted to thank Eileen and Karen Wells as well for helping us out with the public safety applications. Kate Hartigan left just at the beginning of our review process, and she did do some work for us initially, so doing kind of an early review. But Karen and Eileen really stepped up to help us out in that arena, which frankly is an area that we always need help in because some of that is very nuanced. And it's not something that the lay person just really understands easily. And also Marie Claire joined our team this year, and unfortunately we won't have her back on our team next year. But she helped us out in reviewing applications. And of course, Carrie Teresa sat through most of our meetings with us helping us out on legal matters. But also, she has been great chipping in on reviewing several applications for us as well. Carrie's done a great job for us. And of course, Lily Wallace, and last but not least, Mary Thurlow, the number of hours and time spent by these folks is really immeasurable. And it is a yeoman's job to get this stuff all together. And Lily just started with us back in December and jumped in really right into the deep end and has learned this stuff quickly and has been a great help getting us here. And of course, Mary needs no introduction. She's been doing this since the very beginning and has just done a fabulous job with all of this. And also, a couple of outside groups, MassDOT helps us out. Lionel Lucien and his staff help us out in reviewing the transportation applications. And we even had someone from outside looking at all those radio applications on interoperability, which was great. So again, a true team effort to get this all done. And I really appreciate everyone's time enough. Thank you, everyone. Commissioner, any questions, comments? I just want to reiterate quickly. I know we all want to get to lunch, but never having jumped into that level, I have to say I knew there was a lot of work involved, but you don't fully appreciate it till you sit in even a fraction of it. And there's a tremendous amount of follow-up coordinating with the applying agencies, etc., to get the information to really make an informed decision that everybody, Joe, Mary and Lily in particular, really do a tremendous amount of work on this. And so we owe them a debt of gratitude every year. I concur with those words from Commissioner O'Brien. This was my first year to Willie and I were at the newbies. And we learned a lot from from Joe and from Mary. And we appreciate it. But boy, a lot of hard, hard work goes into getting these applications through the whole process. And they do a wonderful job. So thank you and congratulations. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. Thank you again, everyone. And I do think they take advantage of being close to Crystal's well-timed agenda and great for lunch now. It is just past 10 of, let's turn on reconvening at 120, please. We do have a full afternoon ahead. So thank you, everyone. And thank you to the entire team who participated so far. We appreciate it. See you back. Thank you. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, everyone. Sorry, a few minutes late here. We're going to get started now. They're reconvening last gang of commissions public meeting number 383. It is the June 22nd, 2022. We're going to start now with our legal division. And I see Carrie, where you see right here, front and center. I guess we'll start off with you. Good afternoon, Carrie. Great. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and commissioners. So we have several items for you today from the legal department. We'll start out with the updated public records policy procedures and flowchart. I'm sure you recall that these came to the commission in mid-May at our May 12th meeting. And we had a lengthy discussion at that time. And there were just a few proposed changes. So I've made those changes and I'll just show them to you now if that's all right. I'm just going to share the policy first. All right. Everyone can see that. If you could make it a tad bigger. Sure. 190. Good. Okay. That's good. Thank you so much. Perfect. Okay. All right. So I'll just scroll down and just point out the few places I've made changes since the last time we looked at this. In this section two here, the language had said that requesters would be encouraged to submit requests in writing should someone receive an oral request. And the commission just asked that I strengthen that language a bit and have staff direct people to submit their request via either the email address that we use for public records requests or through the portal that is still in progress. And then the second sentence here that's highlighted, I just deleted it just based on our discussion seemed duplicative. We're already discussing in this section the fact that requests may be perceived in different ways. I'll just scroll down. In section 11, this is regarding the potential vendor for the technological services for searches, which we'll discuss once we get through these documents. There was just a request that I add commission approved here. So I inserted that language there. And then 13, I think I must have deleted without highlighting what I had brought before, but this you may recall, we had we had inserted a threshold of 100 hours, at which we would begin to set to assess the fee. And the commission asked that we remove that specific hour amount and just leave it more discretionary that we do have the authority to assess the fee in the event of very burdensome request. So I've amended that language there. And I think that is it for the policy. So I'll just stop share and just show you just two similar changes to the procedures and the flow chart. Apologies, I have a lot of screens open. Okay, so here are the procedures that we had drafted and discussed at that last May meeting as well. The only change here is similar to in the policy or move the language relating to the specific 100 hour threshold. And then if I scroll down, there's just some similar language also related to fees that went into the policy that I also inserted into the procedures regarding the discretion to assess fees. So if there are no questions there, just the final share on these ones is the flow chart, just one very small change. So the only change to flow chart. And let me just scroll up to remind you what this looks like. This was two pages that we went through in May. And I've just removed again, the specific 100 hour threshold language. Carrie, do you mind scrolling up to the top, please? Sure. Okay, I'll stop for questions, right? Carrie at this point. Yep, happy to answer any questions. And then just as a reminder, we would be looking for a vote on the policy, but we may want to have the discussion about the vendor before that vote. If there's any question about whether we're going to keep that language in the policy or not, or I think you could vote on the policy as written and then still not use a vendor. But that's up to the commission, how you'd like to handle that process. So any questions or comments on the policies? We did have a chance to talk about them in full some fashion before, but that doesn't mean we can't address anything new. Commissioners, are you all saying no? All set? Can I make a friendly amendment on our flow chart? I don't know where it is, but right now it's structured so that if it's either it comes in to you and Carrie, you have that envious role of being our records access officer. You make a determination as a request from the media and then it skips over to you working with Mills as our communications chief, or if it's not, then it's legal. I don't know if it needs to be written in stone, but it might be a good reminder. I encourage you, Carrie, in the legal department to always integrate your work and review with the custodian within our organization of the records and that you report and communicate with Karen as our executive director. Productions are not necessarily those that are terribly straightforward, but any which might trigger particular risk or sensitivity, complexity that the executive director should be made aware of. And I'm saying this because, unfortunately or fortunately, I've had a great deal of experience in the world of public records and my personal experience says it takes a village. So the flow chart might almost need an asterisk that you'll be working with all the stakeholders in the organization to make sure that it's completely compliant with the law and also that we're also informed of just as appropriate. Sure. Yep, we can add that in. It probably is in the chart. I don't know if you get my chance. I do. And there is something I will admit I didn't fully go back through all of these for today, but there is something somewhere, whether it's in the chart or the procedures about working with the person who's providing the records. But I'll go back through and see exactly where and see if there's something more specific to add. It will take you a bit longer, but ultimately, I think it will help you and make your job easy. If that makes sense. Yes, sure. All right, so I'll stop share of this one. Are there any other questions on any of those? Not carrying one, just the analogy piece. Yeah, so we can talk about the technology and then circle back to the vote on the policy. So just sort of for background on the technology issue, we've seen a bit of an uptick in more large scale complex public records requests. And previously our email and our data was on the state servers and we use the specialized division at EOT to conduct all of our searches for us as they do for many state agencies. And that division at EOT really does nothing but handle e-discovery searches and their staff members are e-discovery experts who are trained in conducting these types of searches. So when we migrated to our own system, we were no longer able to use the EOT services because our data wasn't stored on the state platform anymore. So we, meaning legal and IT, we've been working on sort of practicing these searches and attending training to try to learn as much as we can about the best way to run searches of our system. But it can be quite complicated and we don't have an e-discovery expert on staff currently at the commission. So what we'd be proposing would be using an outside vendor to conduct these more complex searches and the vendor would operate for us the way that EOT used to when our data was on the state system. So just in terms of exactly what they would do, excuse me, I apologize for my coughing, I lost a bit of a cold. So specifically when we worked with EOT, we would take in a request, we would send the request to them, they would review the request and sort of interpret it with us, we would work together on the best way to sort of form the search. They would suggest the most efficient search criteria and returns to return as many responsive records as possible without also returning thousands of unresponsive records so that we would save ourselves as much time as we could. So they would run the searches for us and then they would deliver their results to us for review. So, you know, when responding to these public records requests, we really want to be confident that we've gotten as close to 100% as possible in terms of capturing potentially, all potentially responsive records. And we believe that the best way to do that would be to use an e-discovery expert. So essentially they would be using their expertise to tailor the search as narrowly as possible to be as close to that 100% mark. Of course, recognizing that really no one could ever hit exactly 100% confidence that everything had been captured. So in terms of how much we would expect to use a vendor, should we go down this route, ES used to handle all of our searches simply because we didn't have access to run the searches ourselves. With a vendor, there are some simpler searches that we could certainly handle where there are clearly identified search terms, a date range, you know, it's one custodian's mailbox, something like that. But we would anticipate really only using them on an as needed basis for the more complex requests. That might be once a month, but I would sort of keep in mind it just depends what happens, what kind of requests come in. And when I say one request, you know, it might be that one request has 15 or 20 components, then it might be that five of those would be quite simple. And legal and IT could run those searches and maybe five are much more complex that we would want assistance with. So this is kind of the background on this issue. We're open to any questions or discussion. And Katrina is here as well for any questions on specific IT issues or also just on the searches in general. Katrina and I have spent a lot of time playing around in the tool trying to get some experience with the best way to run these searches. But yeah, we're happy to take any questions or you'd like to discuss at this point. Can I just interject? Understanding that as an option, you might understand we need to figure out what our other options are as well. If that would be having some specialized personnel at house or enhanced training for people at house, can you just give the commissioners a little background on that? Yeah, of course, there are certainly options. We could bring on an e-discovery expert who is a full-time commission employee. My understanding is that that would be probably someone with an IT background. They could reside anywhere within the agency, but that's my understanding at least of this sort of role in general. I did speak to people at a number of other independent agencies and everyone I spoke to, they do use sort of an IT function, an IT person to run these kinds of searches. Karen, what you were kind of looking for? Yeah, and then one thing we also were thinking about is that we have the discretion if we potentially have this as an option, how much we use it. As Carrie mentioned, it could just be very few high-risk ones where we really need to have some expertise and the rest we do in house or there's a range there. My expectation is that also having this option may also be a mechanism for training of our own staff if they're working with this with Dispender, but maybe Katrina can give a little more light to what exactly happens and what would be some options for the commission. Thanks, Karen. Good afternoon, Madam Chair, commissioners. To add to the conversation, the technical portion, so we do have tools in place that we can utilize. The challenge really becomes when we do get those more complex requirements from a records request that includes multiple search terms with some sort of conditional, I don't know how to say this other than saying it the way I'm going to say it, it's almost like a compounding conditional statement. If you search this and you find this and this and this, then give us this back and those become very complicated Boolean searches and that's where the search criteria is really important because how you phrase that Boolean search is what's going to dictate what you get back as results and so those are the types of searches that we really are referring to when we say complex ones. Most of the ones that we do perform and I work with Kerry heavily on validating whatever results that she gets at her first class, we do have a pretty thorough process that we go through to ensure it. The simpler ones are easy enough to do internally and between myself and another IT person within the division, we're happy to always help the legal team do those. The complicated ones because of the way the Boolean searches have to be structured, it does require a little bit more expertise and there are more robust tools than what we do have that can handle those types of searches better than what we have internally that's part of our native solution. I hope that helps. Would you let us know how this would work in regards to payments? So do you have somebody on a retainer? Do you pay as needed with that work and is there a cost that you know of that we should know about at this point? I may not be the best to answer this but I don't think we have a specific cost that we know of yet. I don't think we've gotten to that stage in this process but I did, I would envision using them just on an as needed basis so only paying for the actual work that they're doing, the actual projects they're doing in the time that we're using them not sort of just for a time period. And that's one thing we could explore is sort of a cost analysis that we had you know in-house doing it versus the occasional or had this as a resource what would the cost be so that's maybe something we'd want to look at because resource-wise it potentially might be less expensive to just have you know this some of their contractor available for the ones that we feel that may need something but otherwise do it in-house and then you know looking at what the you know the resource allocation so if we need someone it could be within you know an IT sort of background but within the legal department or someone within IT there are things that we can do there but just wanted to get some feedback from the commissioners on the approach and any thoughts on this and you may have some questions and want you know us to go back and do some more research on this so I think we're open to how you know whatever you'd like us to do. Katrina if we were to go the route where we would hire somebody and staff we may have trouble identifying someone like that is that an accurate statement or is this something that would be easily attainable? It would be challenging there are two paths to that that we could take one try to find someone with that background specifically and bring them in to work in that type of capacity as well as some additional security functions and work with legal on retention policies and I mean digital retention policies and how we do all of that or we look for an IT person that have familiarity with the systems and send them to training to get their knowledge ramped up and up to speed and then that person can in turn train other folks internally as well not that the first person couldn't do it either. I think the second option would be easier trying to find someone with experience already might pose a little bit more challenging but you never know until you put the job description out. Thank you Madam Chair. I think I mentioned this one of the first times we talked about it which is I feel like we're probably going to want to figure out what the relationship is and what the options are for an outside vendor in case we get a mammoth request it's just a big ask you know and I'm also thinking about what we might have coming down the pike in terms of IT demands and so really my question a little bit for Kerry and a little bit for Katrina is is this something that's doable in-house for the most part with the idea that there would be the lifeline to a third-party vendor if we got hit with a pretty voluminous request. I think that's sort of how I envisioned it at least sort of exactly how you described that it's not that we would need this function extremely frequently it would be you know those one-off occasions where we do receive really complicated requests and you know I say that with the caveat that it could be that we get three at the same time that are very complicated and then for six months we don't get any. It's all of course dependent on what we receive from people so I don't think there's any downside to either option from my perspective at least if we wanted to bring on you know a full-time commission employee I suppose the only question I would raise would be if we could pursue contracting with someone for the interim while we were looking to hire someone in case we did get an incredibly complicated request in the meantime but yeah to answer your question at least from my perspective I don't think it's something that we would need to use extremely frequently a service that we would need to use extremely frequently. Yeah I second what Carrie is saying as well we can do the simple ones as is right now and it's the more complex ones and that tends to ebb and flow from a volume or request perspective but we would benefit you know there's always a benefit to having an additional you know person on staff and there's always plenty of work so they won't be bored that's for sure but that you know that's an option I think when we discuss this with Karen and Carrie and myself we were open to options and you know obviously there's a cost benefit to either having someone or an entity do it on a contract basis or having an employee or an FTE doing it you know internally and so we were open to both or any other option as well. Carrie my understanding is that we wouldn't necessarily have enough for to hire necessarily hire a full-time person to do that this would be their whole job we wouldn't necessarily have that no that's right that's right so it's allocating the resources either that we have and we do the people here learn how to do it and maybe if we have a larger request or something you know it may be that most financially viable to just have this opportunity but we'd have to find if we were when we talk about hiring someone we'd have to fold that into other other work as well this isn't something that it's just this is all they do because there's not enough work for that is that right that's right that's right that's um a good point and I think why Katrina made a good suggestion as well that it could be that this person is a and forgive me I don't know all the IT positions but this person is a more traditional IT employee who commits the you know we could send to many hours of training to become an expert that he discovered expert in this way who then could also serve the IT department in other in other ways. What other ways would that be so is there you know what other responsibilities fit neatly within the skill set of an e-discovery expert? So the e-discovery sits so let me see if I can break this down so the e-discovery tool that we have sits on our 365 platform the 0365 platform and it is massive and it is a lot of work to manage on a day-to-day basis with the you know the limited resources that we have you do have to have a knowledge of that so someone with a systems administrator background with a focus on the e-discovery portion of 365 so if you think of 365 um uh almost like uh uh I don't know how to say almost like a container and there are different modules within that container each module within the container usually has an expert and so for our folks that we currently have at the gaming commission we have you know individuals that are running multiple modules are working with the whole environment and so it'd be helpful to have someone with a little bit more concentrated knowledge because larger entities or larger organizations that do utilize the 365 platform you have specialists in each of the modules I hope I explain that well I get it you did um but I I'd all the same be in favor of the consultant approach to have uh conduct these searches on an ad hoc basis because I just based on this discussion I don't get the sense that the volume is really there to hire an FTE so I am for just for just public records requests alone let me clarify what's that so I'm not a fan of consultants I'll be real frank I don't love the idea I know that I asked if there are any other state agencies that used a consultant and Karen I think you said that you couldn't you know find one I know that the public records review I know that EOS is available to do that because honestly I helped set that up but the governor's office and many other secretaries chose never to use EOS and so they do it all in their own offices and I learned to do the searches a lot of my fellow lawyers I learned to do the searches and we had always a college grad who ran our office who was my go-to person to help me learned to do the searches was a different system than EOS because it was an early system I also had at the treasury a different system all together where the IT team could do an immediate vertical search of every every document and we worked really really closely with the IT the legal team and work really closely if you were to call HHS and in our former colleague Sheriff she she would be able to introduce you to folks who do including herself who do these searches all the time and are in fact e-discovery experts but not because they were when they were hired they've become e-discovery experts because they just do so many of these every day and they're voluminous they're great they're thousands of pages and I know that because I did them so I've had trouble in carrying when I talked about trouble with the idea of sending all of our documents out for a consultant for them to review for you to have to then it's it's like my husband does it with dishwasher it's like taking out the dishes and you're touching it five times before you put it away I just feel like it's going to be you looking at it and then deciding that's too big and then you've got to talk with the consultant and then you've got to be informed with the consultant if it's not a member of our team just seems like an extraordinary expense if it's voluminous and not and we're not going to gain anything because we're never going to develop expertise we're not going to develop internal expertise we're going to always be dependent on somebody outside um and somebody outside who's looking at all of our records and in a short period of time right because it's a 10-day window and we have to be responsive and then at the end of the day we have to also be able to say to whomever we know that this consultant did a really good job and so it's outside of our out of our control right um and and we have that experience where we have to be able to to demonstrate confidence in our searches um I just am not a fan of the consultant I'm a huge fan of us getting trained to do this and be really smart about them I don't think any of this is outside of any of our personal capacity but it is tedious um the other hint that I always use was when you have those voluminous requests you work with the requester to say these are the search terms I'm coming up with this is what we're going to do this is how we're going to call it out to begin with because otherwise it's so big and it's going to be expensive and you make those negotiations so in terms of the options of either hiring somebody or going with a consultant if we need to develop expertise internally and we need more people to do that I mean I know we need more IT Karen I know we need that right um I'm just a fan of getting us trained and and I do think there are people around the Commonwealth that we can be reaching out to say how the heck do you do your searches um and Katrina I know those are they're complicated but people are doing it across the Commonwealth they really are well and that's why we suggested we were open to different options um as a proposal it you know if we did get someone in we could get someone trained as an expert who can share that knowledge internally as well but we don't have it on staff right now especially with the the lean team that we do have um the option to to uh use a consultant was to be cost effective and it was to you know deal with the issues on an ad hoc basis but I don't think we're uh committed one way or the other and I'm sorry Commissioner Skinner for jumping in front of you please go ahead no problem um Kathy I just I wanted to share that that I too had the benefit of the HHS following the procedures around e-discovery and you know for a time as general council at DTA I served as the records access officer I was trained on whatever software there was that was in place at the time so I don't want to um underestimate what it takes to to understand exactly what you're doing when you're conducting those searches it's not easy and I understand the benefit of extensive training I I want us to you know kind of be um cognizant of the fact that this is not something unless if you it's not something that um you are going to get and be good at unless you do it over and over and over again it's the repetition that it then becomes you then become an expert and I just worry that if we are training someone we don't have the volume to get that person up to speed and and in a way that is that is that is constant that they would be able to retain that information I mean again I got trained and we didn't have those voluminous complex public records requests often enough for me to to get good at those searches so I just want to make sure that we're taking that into consideration if especially if we have an FTE um that may or may not be hard to find who is splitting their time between uh conducting these searches and other things I just worry that we're we're not going to truly get the expertise that we're seeking yeah and I I'd mentioned as I think in the past when we've discussed this that I've had mixed results with trying to use um some of the existing services not for anyone's lack of trying but just resources and getting in the queue in terms of prioritization which is why I always conceptualize that is doing the best we can in-house but having the lifeline of the vendor in case we need it for a complicated mammoth quick turnaround and so that's um I have not had the experience of being the frontline person having to do the searches like like you and Commissioner Skinner but that was my experience in other state agencies so whether this is something that could be rolled into part of the responsibilities in what may be an expanding IT role in this office depending on what happens in the next six weeks or so is another question um but I hadn't rate I hadn't thought at the point that Commissioner Skinner just raised too which is sort of the the frequency of this and whether or not that would be a significant part of someone's job description or not. I can only say that um as a member of the Governor's Legal Office team for five of us four one was the chief he did not do searches four of us did do searches we were all trained not lawyers were trained and again a non-lawyer was trained and same as treasury it was one individual who was really the lean but she would come in and work with me when it was really complex and then we had the IT people working with us and we just would put our heads together about best search terms um I guess I just want to make sure that it's it's a really it's it's a difficult task it is not a rewarding task it can be a lot of hours to get it done there's also a way to if it becomes anonymous we can see this you know relief from the Secretary of State's office um it's really important to the integrity of the organization that it's done so perfectly that's all I can say is that this is not an administrative task and so I guess the idea of using somebody who's outside of our team doesn't sit as well with me as somebody who's on the I just don't have I don't know any experience of public records documents going outside of the agencies um for public records service I know that I think Carrie you got some intel that some of the independent said oh maybe we should be doing that I did yeah some said let let us know what you do because that sounds like a good idea I guess it's just very much wrapped up in my own personal experience and expertise I think we could do it and the teams that I'm familiar with they're no bigger than the ones that we have here if anything they might have been slightly smaller so I I guess I really wonder how extraordinary the problem is but I do feel the weight of Carrie what sounds Carrie should just should not be her task alone that's what I can say because I I managed them I mean I was really lucky I got nice said Carrie like you I got really good assignments but I managed them but it was all a village effort everybody got in there together and did them and and then we worked together on the solutions and solving them to make sure that they were precise and smart and and filled with integrity so anyway um I mean I'm signaling a little bit uh the commission is a team of four I won't support a consultant in terms of the FTE I'd ask Karen for more information like this juncture without more information I you know I just there's a motion for a consultant you know I I probably may not be deciding though but I just probably think that that might be jumping ship a little early and there may be sort of other information either you or other commissioners they want us to go back and get because for example the cost of the of the our potential consultant it's astronomical that may knock that out of the box if it's you know so there there may be some other things we could do to research to help um with your decision and then also to your point about you know working together as a team we can look at um some of the the public records of what we have and what we're doing and identify um where there may be issues like this is the kind of thing we would send out and this is the kind of thing we wouldn't send out things like that to give you more information for that decision so I mean from my perspective and and I did say to Karen Warner I said oh yeah I'm just not a fan of it but I um I mean I'm happy and could be convinced if I knew what the consultant does and if I saw an example of what they do and how they work it through and how they think about it it does mean you know the consultant will be reviewing all of our um our our I mean everything that we have would be now every every document we have and that includes share point and all of that would have to be available to a consultant. I have a really hard time conceptualizing that in my mind but I would love you know I maybe I could be convinced but right now I would not think it's I don't think it's necessarily off fiscal Karen but it could be if I mean maybe if it's a huge savings then I understand the process better um and what it looks like well there's also the other there's also just a bandwidth in terms of well we're having this conversation in isolation what is the responsibility of the general counsel's group is not just this and so it's not just also in my mind sort of the size of the actual request but what exactly is the GC group dealing with and they've got some things that are backlog right now already that we're trying to catch up on while we have something else like force spending potentially staring us down so I think we have to be I don't want to be too myopic about how we assess this either in terms of what kind of backup we need and I'm two people and I've said this before Kathy but I have had experience with sending very confidential things out pursuant to confidentiality agreements and non-disclosures when I was a prosecutor so I don't have that discomfort um that you have in that regard I did just want to reiterate that as well well I think that maybe it sounds like discomfort in terms of confidentiality I suppose I might have that but I'm more thinking about the strategy of going through our documents and their ability to assess when they're not an internal member of the team how do they read the documents it really would just be plucking based on the search terms and then we're still going to have to call for all of them so it's literally it's still be an incredible time I will say this I understand what EOTS did and and they took the all the documents and they called for us um and they called for state agencies that Katrina used I get that and that's what I assume a consultant for this I'm just not familiar with one consultant that does this for a state agency of public records purposes I am familiar with it for the purposes you mentioned for litigation right so I could be convinced Eileen I'm just not convinced right now but I'm not going right off at about the load of work for the legal team and for the IT team I am not my off about that you I think Karen knows more than anyone more lawyers more IT whatever it takes to make sure that you know we can keep up with our work and keep up with the quality of the work and you know that's I understand that's also a fiscal discussion too but Gary did you want to say yeah I just Katrina you may remember this better than I do but this consultant that we did speak with they did mention that they are on the state system they have contracted with agencies not on an ongoing basis but on specific projects related to records requests and discovery requests and those types of things that is that is correct they're actually on a particular contract that we've used in the past including the comptroller's office it was a contract actually driven by them at the time and at the executive office of energy and environmental affairs we also worked with another consultant called target that also is on statewide contract that provided these services so there are contracts and mechanisms in place for being healthy to hear more details and how much what's your if you know sort of the turnaround time so hypothetically you know sports betting passes you know we're doing a lot of work on that and we get some kind of massive request if we wanted to use a consultant that's on statewide contract what would be the turnaround time it entirely depends on what you set up at the beginning of the engagement so one of the reasons and then I'm speaking entirely from experience that one of the reasons at EA that we did use a consultant for some of the more complex ones were we got so many just to comply with the return and the expediency for requests we did utilize them for some of that so that a we could keep up with the workload but also we can respond in an appropriate timeline so that it entirely depends on your SLA and you know how many agencies they have on contract at the time etc etc but you know it's definable how many um public record can we put a year on Carrie I would estimate about 75 a year but I say that again with the caveat that sometimes one request contains 20 separate requests within that one so in terms of like the actual request that come in from an individual request or the average is probably about 75 but we do receive some that have five ten fifteen twenty components to them and what percentage do you think take um that you have to seek longer than the 10 days perfect question uh small it's a small percentage um let's see I'm less than 10 maybe less than five even I'd have to I'm not entirely sure but it's not a it's not a not a large number of them and even you know this I think I said this earlier in terms of those ones with several different components um sometimes some of those components might be for a specific document that we could easily locate some might be again those quite simple searches where it's just for a date range and one person or one term and then some might be those more complex searches so that's not to say that if we did have a request with 20 components that all 20 of those pieces would um go to the vendor or the the e-disk every effort on staff or whoever it might be we can um we could sort of flush out the options a little bit better for you as far as you know could beef up the it department to give legal some support and doing the searches and then do some research on it you know the the option of of this sort of uh uh consultant to the cost of a statewide contract or if you want to get more information possibly more weighing in completely it's we can still keep going the way we're going and then just give you more information if that's helpful which is what do you want to do do you want to move today on um on a matter I'm not ready I'm not ready to move on this uh issue I would like some more information please Brian's Mr Skinner did we move on the policy itself and continue to work on the vendor issue or are we taking the whole thing off for further discussion mine is just with the new uh position not with the regulation so in terms of I think what Commissioner Bryan's referring to correct correct me if I'm wrong Commissioner but um there's a reference in one of the documents where it but I think it's like an a may or something um use a contract contract um a contracted party or third party that commission approves do we take that out or do we um do we move if it's frame right I mean I guess where do we just is this entire is seven egg just going to be bumped out to vote on with the understanding that you know that the general council and IT group will work under that framework and guidance going forward but we're not actually going to vote on it until we pass out the third party vendor issue and or FTE I don't see anything wrong with moving to adopt the policy because that's you know the the the issue of the external consultant or FTE is it completely it's a you know a sub part to that so is that in the policy is it referenced in the policy or the diagram or is it just an independent discussion it is referenced in the policy I'll just pull it up again and show you what the language says it's the section of that it says it says a commission or commission approved consultant and we haven't I mean we haven't approved one so that language essentially doesn't take effect right it's 173 of the packet yeah so I like I said I'm okay with the vendor so I it's not I think maybe if the chair and commissioner Hill I think you you guys are the ones who um what what's your comfort level with the language with the policy as is today well it has to be approved by the commission I'm only one voice so if the commission approves it I'm fine with that um um I like I said I could be convinced um I really want to make sure we're not spending money on this unnecessarily either to an FTE or um to a vendor I know it's additional work I just am not sure um about whether or not with some good training we could all be helpful in terms of this on the very few the limit searches that we get so if we put the commission approved language in there it still has to come back to us for approval anyways correct who the third party vendor is I guess um I guess what it could mean Brad it could be does that mean that our team thinks they can go now and get a third party vendor just we approve not using a third party vendor but who they choose to you know select as a third party my understanding from the discussion madam chair is that unless and until the commission signals us or votes to use the the a vendor we do this in house that's my understanding yeah I mean that's I think you have a split I think what you have is a split among the four of us right now yeah with two of us feeling comfortable two of us saying maybe no or I don't know yet so that's why I'm wondering if it's better to not vote on it so that there's no until we have sort of more information to make a a vote one way or the other right if more kind of chair and is saying I think the discussion here is is very clear in terms of what the commission expects um for more information before we agree on the contractor approach but taking the language as it's written I think it's fine you know again I'm I know I'm only one vote so I'm happy to um to have the policy be adopted as written if somebody were to move um because as Karen points out you know um you know she's hearing that we just need more information I suspect uh Commissioner Bryan and Commissioner Skinner you wouldn't it doesn't hurt to get more information at this juncture so um adopting the policy gives the guidance and then we can just learn more about whether um an outside vendor makes sense in light of maybe a little bit more information so I'm happy to move um on the policy today if we're ready to go forward on a vote I am okay uh Madam Chair I move that the commission adopted the updated public records policy and public records request procedure as included in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today okay thank you any good discussion and then thank you everyone for the full discussion on the matter um hearing none for the discussion Commissioner O'Brien Hi Commissioner Hill Hi Commissioner Torrisey go carry oh thank you honoured yeah congratulations on the promotion it has been a long day I know I was going to say I'm done my little bit of water left I'm out of here Commissioner Skinner you know it was your you just switched places on me so I just looked I go and I read it absentmindedly but my heart is in this my heart is in this I've got a day from the Commissioner Brown I've got a day from Commissioner Hill and Commissioner Skinner hi and I felt yes thank you and um we have four zero carry thank you so much attorney Gracie we are good all right great and then we'll revisit that maybe just a little bit more data and as I said I'm uh all ears okay thank you sounds good all right so moving on to the next item from the legal department it is 205 CMR 133 this is the voluntary self-exclusion regulation so this regulation came to you on April 28th and you voted at that time to begin the promulgation process we had a public hearing on this regulation this morning that was presided over by Commissioner Skinner at which we received no public comments and we've also received no written comments I do want to point out though that I received some edits from Commissioner Skinner during the public comment period and just being very mindful of the open meeting while I didn't want to circulate those in advance of the meeting they are largely cleanup and clarification edits so I thought given that it's not an extremely lengthy regulation that I would just pull it up on the screen and we could just go through those changes if that's all right with all of you I will share that I'll make it a little bit bigger all right so the edits are the ones in blue and like I said they're really just mostly cleanup and clarification issues but I'm just going to scroll through and kind of let you take a look since you haven't seen these yet on this page just adding the directive from 23k and just cleaning up some of this language in this first paragraph Carrie could you just remind me where the these edits came from from Commissioner Skinner that's why I didn't circulate them in advance of the meeting just wanted to be mindful of the open meeting law okay all right okay I'll scroll down yeah I definitely am trying to look at what was in there originally I'm looking at the original now and it should um it should just be the the blue changes the red are um what we're in before the other one the other wasn't complete insert yes yep um this one looks like it was probably an oversight in the first draft because it would have read within 48 hours of immediately upon completion um which of course doesn't uh make a whole lot of sense so um just deleting the immediately upon and keeping me within 48 hours of completion I've got to think about this now and read it I guess I'm trying to figure out and the key shift you could just talk me through your logic what you didn't like about if you could correct it what what you didn't like so that you corrected it that would help me well within 48 hours no the red the beginning it's the red the red is not my language my edit the blue until immediately upon it's blue the red is yours Carrie the red is what came before you in April um yeah I'm looking at the oh I'm not mine that's early doesn't have this red the on your screen well in my packet oh let me just scroll down there all right I've got that thank you yep so yeah so all of the red that's fine that's fine okay great um all right so I'll keep scrolling um just some cleanup here with um pronouns to eliminating barriers to equity and inclusion we cleaned up um anywhere there was here or she or it wasn't there were some uh some instances where it's that application or individual and really excuse me applicant or individual um just cleaning up those that language there okay and we'll see that a few more times too down here yep thank you um just correcting some numbering here and then also just um sometimes the reg capitalized voluntary self-exclusion and sometimes it didn't so just making that uniform throughout this section four um initially uh just read that the petition for removal from the bsd list was submitted to the designated agent but um excuse me uh these these edits from commissioner skinner um just proposed that the petition comes to the commission or a designated agent I did check with um mark on that as well and that's of course fine um it could happen either way that's no problem with that process and cary I think that language appears uh elsewhere in the regulation the commissioner for a designated agent that's why I made it uniform um this next one here is just a citation correction it looks like maybe at one point let's scroll up at one point maybe this list was changed and there may have been an e at one point but that you no longer exist so just um correcting that to d here um and again just some capitalization issues as I continue to scroll what's the green uh the green was there before it just means that it was moved um right thank you um just again just some clarification language here um authorized by the commission to access the voluntary self-exclusion list the same thing just some more clarification language nothing substantive here um there is one red that is new um just because um I made it but just clarifying what tito means just put in ticket and ticket out there um again just clarification here by submitting a request to the commission instead of just saying with the commission more capitalization um and this d is also just language cleanup um just consistency in the sentence uh doesn't change the substance of what it says a couple more just clarification that language clarification issues here again not substantive changes I think that is it so if you feel that you need any more time with this um I can certainly uh we can push the final vote to the next meeting or if you're comfortable with these changes that we've seen is there a largely just clarification you could vote on it today um either way is certainly fine questions are you all done any questions kary just yeah can you put that back up there's if the word two should also have been stricken from that the page you were you were lost um right at the end so where it says assess the civil administrative penalty I think oh yes thank you should also be stricken yeah precious you want to move on that so that we can finalize are you comfortable or do you need time to do some changes I'm prepared to make a motion madam chair okay go right ahead I move that the commission approved the sorry I move that the commission approved the final version of 205 cmr 133 as included in the commissioner's packet and as discussed here today and authorize the staff to take the steps necessary to follow the required documentation with the secretary of the commonwealth and finalize the regulation promulgation process uh my apologies for interrupting commissioner center I believe we need the motion on the amended small business impact statement first it's just the technicality but um okay and are we our commissioners okay I don't think we've seen that today is it okay to move yes but are we are we good with it there wasn't a discussion on it today so I just want to confirm we're good to move forward so I move that the commission approved the amended small business impact statement relative to 205 cmr 133 as included in the commissioner's packet further I move that the commission approved the final version of 205 cmr 133 as included in the commissioner's packet and as discussed here today and authorize the staff to take the steps necessary to file the required documentation with the secretary of the common wealth and finalize the regulation promulgation process thank you thank you thank you commissioner all right any further discussion on bsc okay great commissioner bryne hi commissioner hill hi commissioner stein hi and I vote yes four zero I'll set thank you mark thank you for the help you did on this as well cary thank you great thank you um okay next step um we have in your packet you have a copy of 205 cmr 103 which is the regulation to related to access and access to excuse me and confidentiality of commission records so I'll just kind of give a little background here and then we can get into some more detail in the reg but this regulation essentially creates a process by which information or record records or portions of records can be deemed by the commission to be a quote unquote confidential information and therefore exempt from disclosure so you'll see the version in your packet is color coded and there's a legend at the top identifying what each color means so I can just kind of give the brief overview here and then we can walk through if you'd like but this regulation as it exists now essentially consists of language that's either unnecessary or duplicative of other laws and you'll see those areas flagged in green some language that seems to be better suited for policies and procedures versus regulatory language and those areas are flagged in purple and then areas that create this sort of redundant or duplicative process and maybe inconsistent with the public records law in certain areas and those sections you'll see flagged in red so we're proposing eliminating this regulation in its entirety which would eliminate confusion and redundancy and would streamline the process to which it relates in terms of keeping confidential information exempt from disclosure just in terms of a summary of this regulation like I said it creates this process for the commission to deem certain records or portion of records to be confidential information there's no statutory requirements that this regulation or process exists it evidently was this regulation was created in the early days of the commission when I believe there wasn't yet any staff and the commission was sort of establishing its framework it was it was promulgated before the commission entered into non-disclosure agreements with the licensees non-disclosure agreements are mentioned in the regulation of course because they are authorized by statute but they hadn't yet been executed and they're now a tool by which certain records or portions of records can be deemed confidential by the licensees and withheld from disclosure so I just want to point out as well that this term confidential information which is the main subject of this regulation is a defined term it's defined in another one of our regulations 205 CMR 102.02 and it's a two-part definition so it consists of records which are or contain the first part is trade secrets competitively sensitive information and other proprietary information provided to the commission the bureau and their agents and employees in the course of an application or an investigation and part b is trade secrets and other information protected from public disclosure by a non-disclosure agreement so just pointing out that under the definition of confidential information anything that would fall within that definition would be covered by the statutory exemption to the public records law and then just sort of further note that if that definition were to go beyond what's permitted to be exempt under the public records law of course we wouldn't have the authority to to do that through regulation we wouldn't be able to go further in the regulation than the statute does so I just want to point out as well that eliminating this regulation wouldn't eliminate the mechanism for the licensees to deem certain types of records to be confidential it would just streamline the process for doing so so right now there are two existing mechanisms there's this regulation and there's also the non-disclosure agreement and as we go through you'll see that the process created by this regulation is arguably far more burdensome than the nda process so eliminating the regulation would mean that these types of requests would all be done by petitioning the commission to add categories of information to the non-disclosure agreement and then finally there are various points throughout this regulation where the infrastructure that it creates for this process may conflict with the public records law and its timing requirements so that's kind of the overview of the regulation and its purpose and kind of why we think it could be eliminated so if you'd like I can pull it up and we can walk through each section or I'm happy to kind of take specific questions or however you'd like to handle this regulation any preference I'm wondering so the when you and Todd talk we're bringing this up with me the one that I thought was sort of the one most worth talking about is the areas that are probably best suited for somewhere else not complete elimination we're done this year in consistency but a good idea but maybe not in a rig so I think that might be the most fruitful conversation for me anyway sure here why don't I pull it up and we can those are the purple ones so you can take a look at those I appreciate your your color yeah you got it I appreciate the color coding a lot all right so the first one is this section related to people designated as certain types of custodians of records and who is designated as being responsible for the personal data system so these designations are required by statute so they are designations that the commission needs to make but it's really not something that needs to be done through a regulation this could certainly it could be through a policy or it could be not even through a policy it could be done just as ordinary commission business and you may want if we do eliminate this regulation you may want to look more closely at this language I don't know if there are any changes that you might want to make to who is designated or how it's done but I think in terms of this proposal it's really not necessary to be in a regulation and certainly not in this regulation any questions on that particular one there are a few more all right I'll go to the next purple so this section 103.09 relates to information provided during the rfa1 and rfa2 process so this is when the applicants are applying for the gaming license there was a lot of detail about how that process works and I'm not sure if everyone is aware of how this worked at the time but there was a specimen created of what the application would look like and the specimen identified certain sections before the applications came in it identified sections that whatever was submitted under that application would be kept confidential so this sort of lays out a lot of that information and again there's nothing wrong with any of this information some of it would be useful were another region to open or you know another license application process to begin but doesn't really seem like it needs to be regulatory language it could be procedural language but the commission keeps elsewhere in the event an application process begins again. So this was the area that I thought was the most right for discussion given that region C is still out there and what we may have coming to us in terms of applications in the near future so if this entire reg gets eliminated then the question is you know then we don't have a policy on it anymore right so what do we want to do with section 0.09. Just the only place it is it's nowhere else in the bank I don't think it's anywhere else there I know there's more detail about the rfa1 and rfa2 process elsewhere but I don't think the specific information is elsewhere. Well to come out and put it into a different reg right I mean or a policy document right it's more I given that region C is out there and we may have more coming our way in the near future the question I thought we might want to make sure it's either preserved as a freestanding nothing but 0.09 while we think about it a policy or is there another reg where it finds a home. So I thought that that was Kerry's recommendation was that purple would be preserved in a policy outside and if we I suppose if we decide that we need it to be a reg we could you know introduce it as a reg but right now it would be to come back to us and it would be by vote today preserving it as policy you would reformat it etc right but I thought that was for recommendation with respect to purple in our home yeah oh I'm sorry I thought it was to strike 103 um so we're proposing color coding was sort of recommendations in terms of height characterized it yeah I think it's a little bit of both of what you're both saying so to to strike the regulation 103 in its entirety but the purple section the language you could move elsewhere if it's language that you want to retain so you know you could vote today if you it should you vote that you would like to move forward with you know we're sending this regulation you could vote specifically to preserve certain sections as a policy or as we get down to one of the later sections there's a specific place that it seems like it would make sense to go and I'll get into that in a minute or we also you know I'll note that given the time that the promulgation process takes we could even bring this back at the next meeting this language as a policy and you could vote on it then you wouldn't have to work it into a motion today if you didn't want to is that I think that that where I understand it's rescinding it as a regulation right the language literally copying pasting preserving it and a policy which in in many ways would be adopted by vote today just to reformat it for maybe our our blessing in the future in other words not we don't want to get I think to Commissioner Bryan's really good point we don't want to have it evaporate right yeah if it were for a week right um as official policy and I mean I I guess that's how I viewed the um the process commissioners I don't know and I loved I loved the um the structure you proposed care I thought it worked but I may be missing something Commissioner Skinner Commissioner Hill Commissioner Bryan I'd like to see us hold on the vote today and proceed as Carrie suggested in terms of creating that policy document to present to us next time I don't think she was holding we're holding on the vote today I was suggesting that if you if you uh wanted you if should you come to the conclusion that you're comfortable with the reg rescission you could vote on the reg rescission but not include any mention of the purple section and we could come back with the purple section uh at the next meeting with an actual policy and you could vote specifically on them then if you wanted to we send everything but the purple but the purple right well it would still rescind all of it because it would no longer be a reg yeah but then we would bring the language separately or we could rescind the reg today and have a different motion that says adopt that as policy today right next yep um I'm very interested in taking care of the the job of rescinding uh today unless there's a real reason to hold Commissioner Skinner do you think that that process would work I do um I just I'm mindful of sort of you know I think Commissioner Bryan alluded to this earlier actually mentioned it the workload of our legal folks so as long as it's it's in short order that the um policy document comes to us for review can I just show you while this policy piece is ongoing just the other section that is purple because I think this is relevant to this part of the discussion as well this section 103.14 relates to security protocols for the storage of records and access to records and things like that so this is also information that again we probably want to keep somewhere but doesn't need to be in the regulation um and I know it's been mentioned that it would may be suited best for the network security plan which I I believe is in process of being drafted um but I don't know if Katrina I think that's the Katrina project I don't know if she's still on in correction and would want to correct me but um so just my point being that um destruction oh thank you is that right Katrina is that still in process yeah so so the policies have all been drafted they're about 25-esque amount um they're with Derek Lennon for review at this moment before we submit it or resubmit it to legal for final review but it will include a lot of the security protocols so I'm not I have not been privy to this paragraph here uh but I'm sure it will cover a lot of it if not we can work together to make sure it does okay great so um so my point on that is just that this section might not be one that where the language would just lift out and move somewhere else this might need to be incorporated into what's already existing in that network security plan but the information we would want to maintain um so that might be a situation where well I should say it would be a situation where that network security plan would come back to you for a vote and this language would be included in that what do you think the timeline is on that in terms of when that would be in front of us again the network security plan yeah I'm gonna ask Katrina on that one so the it's so we call it our information security plan because it's not network specific that's okay um like I said it's with Derek for review and then resubmitting to legal I would love to get it in front of you guys and about I think it's going to take about a month um but that was something I think we're going to review with Karen because I'm not sure and Karen feel free and jump jump and correct me if I'm wrong yeah if the ISP would have to be voted on or just presented from an informational perspective yeah that's something we we had discussed and actually a bit of research that a bit because it's a question of whether that's just a executive director kind of process for the agency or whether that's something adopted by the commission which is made a determination on how that's going to work so I mean just in in terms of timing just a reminder again that if if we do move forward with beginning the promulgation process on this your final vote would likely be August or September so this would still be in effect until then so if the if the sorry I already forgot the word that Katrina changed in the plan but if this policy that we're discussing came to you in a month or two this would still be in effect when that was was reviewed and potentially voted on so yeah so I guess that's just it I really don't want there to be a twilight zone where we strike something that we still want to keep and it hasn't found a new home um so if what we're going to do today is start a process with the understanding we're not moving to finally strike anything and make it an effectual lesson until we've decided where these are going then I'm okay with it but otherwise I would just want to defer until we're ready to go so do we have a a mechanism is there a is there a clock carry where if we vote today we're supposed to wrap up within 90 days or whatever it is no we don't if we're not ready um there's no uh like deadline when it has to wrap up so if you vote today what I would do is I would um work with the publication schedule and set a timeline for all of the components of the promulgation schedule and figure out what the date would be what the earliest date would be for the public hearing and the final vote and if we feel that that's too early I can just push it back there's no requirements that we complete the process within the shortest amount of time possible um I know that is there an outside window or no I don't think so um I will double check but as far as I know there's no outside window okay so let's just remember what the original issue is here is that this reg has been relied upon because you know it's confusing this redundancy with respect to our process and as I understand it what carry is closing is that she through the proper process begins with our approval the rescinding of the entire reg so it just won't be a reg all of us are agreement that the at least in extensiveness that the purple language that carry has highlighted is actually really important for us to retain at least as policy and it could maybe be made into a reg if necessary in the future we can write today do all of that with the proper motions it can be memorialized on a piece of paper in the future for presentation but we could say this needs to be adopted as formal policy with the additional security measures that aren't here now anyway they're not here now anyway right so we could say as you know as may be amended in the future by the recommendation of maybe RIT folks and maybe something else but that's going to come down the pipe but for today we could start the process of rescinding and literally say could you copy and paste that purple language and put it into a policy to preserve it and by our vote you would be preserving it and I think it's kind of I think that works structurally and substantive work and then we get the the process of rescinding the problematic regulation under land would you like me to take this down for now so we can all see each other thanks Karen I know I was just looking at you so can I just get a clarification madam chair so we would vote to rescind that would be one motion and I think I heard 103.09 would come back to us as a new regulation and 103.14 would come into in the ISP is that what I've heard and is that how we would move forward I think sorry madam chair it's not that any section would come back as a new regulation it's that the the three I think it's three the three purple sections would be preserved or moved to a policy so the whole reg would be deleted but those three sections we would retain as policy language and then this section that we were just talking about the security plan section when that document that IT is working on is ready we would amend what we had essentially preserved today to incorporate those two together but the entire red all the what are the three colors I'm talking green red and purple green red and purple are all part of a regulation that is in the secretary of states you know book of regulations that would get lifted ultimately over a 90 day period that you know of our typical promulgation just we haven't really rescinded it but that's the same process and then but today we would not be losing we would not be losing anything other than it won't be a reg it would be policy approved by the commission and and I think we could say the purple language unless there are numbers if we want to use the numbers we should just illustrate for Brad's purposes no there are numbers and so I guess the point that I'm making is there is in theory a live issue with point oh nine in terms of applications and regency one I think point of theory we haven't talked about but it's a question is do we want to have that as a regular policy or not you may you may not and then I think there should have universal understanding that point one four would remain and just would be housed under a security plan for the IT I just want to do it in a way where we don't have any voids you know so that's the 90 days like that was just referenced like as long as there's no outside window where there's a chance we don't bring something like the security protocols back prior to being stricken then that's fine well I think Commissioner O'Brien I think that Kathy's point is that instantly today oh 309 and 14 would become policy versus regulatory language and then we could review them and amend them in the future right they don't necessarily all logically go together so now we have this sort of bizarre clump of three and then we still have to come back and revisit now the cleanest way of doing it right but that's fine as long as there's an understanding we're not taking any action to have it finally stricken until it has a better home I guess that's my concern because the original proposal for what we were moving on today was to simply strike it and then sort of have a discussion that was my understanding I like that carry proposed that the purple language be preserved for policy but it is the rescinding of the reg that is true but I don't think you ever thought that that that purple language disappeared but they used you and legal team were comfortable with it being adopted as policy to your earlier point Commissioner O'Brien I think it's a good one I think at a certain point in time and it may be sooner than later we could decide is any of that purple how do we want to organize that purple policy and does some of it need to be a wreck I'm not sure right this second we need to make it part of a right but that's a really important question for legal do you come back and say well actually with respect to the application matter it should be a wreck but the security should stay policy I think Commissioner O'Brien right it's not it's a little messy because it's not nice and neat but they were all in one rug anyway um and it was under confidentiality and so I think we can if we need to separate them out with a different heading carry to be helpful in the policy for right now even today I'm happy to do that that makes it clearer um so what would the purple the purple headings be if we divide if it were divided um rather than just purple language I can just share this first each year if that's helpful with this the three purple heading so it would be 103.03 on the personal data system and then 103.09 on the applications and then 103.14 on this the security protocol and we could treat each separately if that makes everybody a little bit more comfortable and then um yeah they could lift right out and the the headings right now could be the titles of the policies really just drops the exact language right in a policy that's approved as of today so then they're in place and can be revisited as necessary but then to Commissioner O'Brien's point there wouldn't be any any gaps in sort of coverage of this language and then we circled back to see does any of it need to be promulgated into a rag which I'm not really sure about how you assess that so I think in the occasion rather I'm all ears I don't know you know if we should do that because of course to Commissioner O'Brien's point Regency and anything else right um could arise unexpectedly so we want to preserve that can you just remind me of the distinction between red and green um green uh those are the sections that really just are unnecessary and duplicate other laws and red is are the sections that create that process and infrastructure um duplicity and copy exactly redundant yeah dual dual processes what do you think commissioners say we ready to move I think for me it's kind of six and one half a dozen and the other because as Carrie said we're just voting to be to you know if we do give an affirmative vote we would just be moving to the begin the promulgation process and these regs will still be in effect until we take a further vote to file the mess finals or to you know file the paperwork to send them as finals so I think for me it's it doesn't matter whether we take a vote today or not it's he's still going to be in effect until the file we just know because it's a 90 day window so I thought Carrie said that there wasn't a starts now and then it's days so today would trigger the process right Carrie am I right yeah it's um not necessarily specifically 90 days it's just it tends to be approximately 90 days from where uh how the timeline works with all the required deadlines um but I think sort of what I was saying is that it could certainly be longer than that I mean there are you know there are times when um the final a final regulation comes back for review and approval and there might be additional changes or additional comments and you wouldn't vote on it on that final day it might get pushed to the next meeting so that certainly happens it doesn't have to be approved right on that uh final date sort of like today where we had the public hearing on the reg in the morning and then you vote it it doesn't have to be that same day it could come to the next one if we needed more time on something um so the 90 days doesn't serve as a deadline right exactly but but if we wait the process is still there exactly and um does it do we need to get public comment on the sending I'm sorry can you say that again public comment on the sending yes so um this would go out for public comment and we would have a public hearing on this reg and then it would come back to the commission well I think we're getting the process underway um that I'll take a motion look up you know I if we're not going to move on this then let's let's put ourselves on move on on the next item there's not going to be a motion to get this process commissioner brian you don't want to move on that you're not prepared I'm sorry I I if someone wants to move on it that's fine okay is anybody prepared to move on this ground today to get this from the rescinding okay I don't see that okay thank you I guess we will wait for you to put the purple language and could you yeah could you let I'm not quite clear on what you would like as the next step in that yeah what what what can carry the legal team do to make you more comfortable to get what has actually been a confusing regulation rescinded I don't have a problem rescinding the regulation it's just I I would like to see as commissioner brian said the the the gaps that there is no void so in terms of the purple language in each of the sections where will that go if we move on what if we move then to let's take the purple language three sections and make that policy right maybe we do that first so that there's no gap what if we were to do that that would create a redundancy but we've got redundancies all over the place anyway so what if we did that then it's preserved would you be willing then commissioner scaring me to cut you off and I'm wondering if if that would work and there's no gap but with respect to with respect with respect to I think let me get back to the section the ISP there would be a gap because the policy is not it's drafted already but it's not finalized so that's like that's at least one gap right Karen I think I'll yeah so I do have another suggestion that might be I don't know if this will be more helpful but what you could do is vote to within the regulation today and then at the next meeting I can come back so you can see what they would look like with these actual the three purple sections and you could vote on them then and this regulation will still be in effect at that time so there wouldn't be any timing issues if it seems like what we're struggling with is the the motions and what the what the urgency is I mean this regulation was promulgated when um so I mean I I would hardly think that you know another you know a couple of weeks would would do a disservice here what is what is the rush uh well right now there are dual processes for this this uh these requests for treatment of confidential information which um does create a burden for staff and the commission should these requests come in and there are also our conflicts with the public records law so um to me it's important to resolve those conflicts as soon as we can so you know like I said if you want oh go ahead sorry could I just ask you in terms of 0.03 my memory of that conversation was that stuff was still going to go back and make sure we didn't want to change anything out of that is that accurate I think um I think it's a section that the commission might want to look at more closely and see if there's anything you want to change I think that was kind of my point in presenting this but in terms of presenting this reg I wasn't really focused on the actual language in those sections if we were just going to move it somewhere else in the interim part of my hesitation that I don't want to take this punt it somewhere else and then skip that conversation too so however we craft emotion on this today I think we need to make sure we understand that the three sections three nine and fourteen will be preserved and possibly edited so I don't want there to be this understanding that like we're accepting these without edit because my my memory of the briefing was that at least one section deserve further discussion by the commission in terms of did we want to keep it in its current form yeah I think that's right I think um you know at any of your policies of course can be updated and changed at any time so if we're just worried about sort of losing these to the ether somewhere we certainly can move them and read just and revisit them as time allows but they it wouldn't change what exists right now so if we if you vote to begin the process to rescind the reg all of that language would be maintained in a policy that you vote on either today or at the next meeting and then if we do bring it back even if you voted today we could still bring it at the next meeting if you'd like to look at the language more closely and make any changes to it but there would be no gap in terms of coverage of that language existing I I think that Kerry and the legal team are recommending that this be rescinded and they're you're right I'm just going to send one of the books for a long time and in the course of of work they have realized that it causes confusion and they are coming today with a recommendation that the process start today and the process starting today um you know we could start everything in a month or two but the recommendation today to start today and and and and we're not being willing nearly about about the the language that everybody's identified as as important and many of us are lawyers here we all know that we're serving in a policy every policy can be edited we already know that it's going to be substantially edited by some more provisions from it but that's not in the reg now and we were living with the reg as it is so what's come to light is that you know we'll have some policies I think an outstanding question is when you move something out of a break to a policy is that final it may well be that more of our that many things could be in policy not regs and I and I really don't know how that determination was made I wasn't here at the beginning but I'm very comfortable with legal's recommendation about putting that in preserving this policy for now and and with Commissioner Bryan's point that it's not it all that it's subject to editing it to Cary's point it's not gonna there's not going to be a gap because the reg will still be a reg on the on the books but I would say it might be really good practice right now to just say all right we understand that but we want to adopt that formally to preserve it make that note and then the then the reg can go about public opinion without all these additional caveats that commission has raised today anyway I still just want to give my shout out on the color code without this accent all right Chris Schott Skinner do you have any any thoughts no no further thoughts chair Commissioner Hill well I'm there I'm ready to move forward with resending with resending this but I'm trying in my mind to put words together so we make sure we have the three sections come before us again so how would we do that I think that's what we all want is that am I accurate so you could you could use the the motion language for the small business impact statement and rescinding the regulation on the condition that sections 103.03.09 and 4.14 be preserved as or be maintained as policy language or move to policy language I'm not sure what the best word for that would be I would I would only feel comfortable with that if it's tied in with prior to moving forward with finalizing the promulgation process and that they become sort of some approved policy bias prior to the expiration of that time period so I can move and I would have to be blunt prefer this I'll be sort of hashtag before we do this but I can move and see if it's palatable to the four of us um move that the commission approved the small business impact statement as included in the commissioner's packet and authorized staff to take the steps necessary to file the required documentation with secretary of the commonwealth and proceed with the regulation promulgation process to rescind 205 cmr 103 as presented and discussed here today subject to the direction that sections 0.03.09 and 0.14 be preserved as policies of the commission and those policies shall be finalized prior to moving into the final promulgation process hey any further discussion all right commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi mr. Skinner hi I vote yes for zero all right thank you well done Harry well done okay now you've got one last one I guess that Todd's taking over appreciate appreciate that that worked very much okay item number uh 70 all right good afternoon so this one is slightly different than the one you just looked at in that there is no recommendation as far as amendments go this regulation we're talking about by the way 205 cmr 115.01 and then it's subsection 4 is being brought before you for just a an initial review of the content to determine whether there are any amendments that the commission is interested in pursuing so you'll recall that this is the section of the regulations that prescribes this specific information that all qualifiers are duty bound to notify the IEB of upon their occurrence as we often say of course suitability is ongoing and so though a determination is made at a particular point in time as to whether a person or entity is suitable that review is considered ongoing that is discussed in a couple of places in chapter 23k first it's in the declaration section and section one in subsection three that says that gaming licensee shall be held to the highest standards of licensing and shall have a continuing duty to maintain their integrity and financial stability and then again in section 13 subsection b says that an applicant licensee registering or any other person who shall be qualified under this chapter shall have the continuing duty to provide any assistance or information required by the commission and to cooperate in any inquiry or an investigation conducted by the commission so you're all of course familiar with the ongoing duty requirements of qualifiers and in adopting this subsection four of 115.01 the commission sought to identify those pieces of information that it was particularly interested in knowing about when it came to a qualifier's ongoing duty to update the IEB and the commission and in doing that it laid out 14 categories of information that a qualifier is responsible for notifying the IEB of the regulation that we're looking at here was of course adopted a number of years ago so this just seemed like a good time to bring it before you to ensure that it still captures all of the information that you as a commission find important as well as the mechanics of the notifications themselves and again there's so there's no specific recommendation before you at this point it's simply an introductory review of the section so we can see what the next steps may be and again I would just reiterate that this section applies to both the gaming licensee and each qualifier so you'll see that we've highlighted a number of provisions within subsection four there's a couple of overarching comments that I'll just offer to you and then we can take a look at the particulars here the first is just the introductory paragraph before we get into the lettered subsections I think there's a couple of things worth taking a quick look at and that is within the second sentence it says that the gaming licensee in each qualifier shall have a continuing duty to notify and update the IEB in writing within 10 days of the occurrence unless an alternative filing time is authorized by the executive director or we're applicable gaining knowledge of the following and then we get into the list so there's two parts in there that I think the commission might be interested in taking a look at and the first is that the reg gives the qualifiers 10 days to notify the IEB of everything in the list so that's the timeframe that was prescribed here and then of course it gives the executive director authority to allow for more time in particular circumstances so it's important just to understand that that's the existing rule that you might wish to address or talk about now or in the future and so Madam Chair and commissioners before we dive into the specifics I just wanted to kind of pause there see if there are any comments or observations before we remove any further questions sounds like no one wants to comment okay fair enough so we could kind of go about this in a couple of different ways I mean we can go through each one but I would submit to you that there are a couple in here that might warrant more care are you looking for our feedback now uh yeah I mean I I don't want to post to our later date whatever you're comfortable with I mean we can kind of tee it up here so you can take a look at it and think about yeah I'm gonna I want to make sure this is a really important issue this this um what I'm speaking about it's already been a long day right um if we can't really delve into this I think that we should be fair to ourselves and maybe ask Todd to come back um because I don't want to miss an opportunity to inform Lee about this is our chance I know that with respect to the language that we just read in our recent suitability adjudicatory hearings that language was a subject of our discussion so I just wonder um should we pause here and and give ourselves a break and and put this on for a later date it would be okay it's three sixteen and I know we have a couple more matters in Todd that's not because you weren't doing it no absolutely this is not urgent no I think this is better luck for a time when we're not spent on other things I think so um commissioner I um I can't read a room because I'm reading a screen but it's been it's a long day and we know that we knew that it would be a long day today um I want to make sure we uh we we have a chance to take a break get us something to eat and then come back to um Karen's matter and I know that there's one commissioner update or matter that I need to bring up um and I think this is really a substance of discussion that Todd I don't I want to make sure it's helpful to you we all agree yeah do you accept my apology if that's directed to me no apology is required thank you for offering that though no I'm happy to bring this up whenever all right I think that that makes great sense we got through three really important discussions around regs and the last one was was a complex both um all excellent work though and I want to thank you and then I see Heather has popped up and maybe it makes sense too because I know um director Lilius is out so maybe it will give us all a chance to to prep ourselves around this particular um reg okay all right so um with that said my apologies but I'm just gonna what is it call an audible is that it is that appropriate commissioner hill um and it's 319 now 320 um what if we uh take a 10 minute break is that enough or do we need 15 minutes Michelle right I'm gonna yield to you what do you want for a break no I I'd want at least 10 so we come back by 330 okay let's walk her out again 330 and then we'll go right into item number eight um and Karen will be also thank you everyone I appreciate it very much we'll be back at each one uh 330 thank you okay I'm all set if others are all set okay we've got the um we're reconvening so after a short break public meeting number 383 at the um gaming commission I'll just do a quick roll call uh commissioner O'Brien I am here commissioner hill I'm here commissioner yeah we're all set we're going to um me zoom on the agenda item number eight before I turn over to Karen I just want to remind everybody as we know two pieces of legislation which would legalize sports wagering and Massachusetts are currently before the legislative conference committee under negotiation each bill does designate the MGC as the regulator of sports wagering in the Commonwealth I think that we all appreciate that each piece of legislation contains specific policies and prescriptions that we as a potential regulator could only consider and begin to address after a bill um were signed into law but we um have been thinking about this and we do believe that we are able to make certain assumptions that are neutral and not tied to any one policy but relevant regardless of any particular legislative outcome to legalize sports um wagering in the Commonwealth so where we can act um on those assumptions and take preliminary um administrative actions we we can perhaps put ourselves in a in a better position a stronger position to implement any sports wagering bill that is signed into law in allowing us to be a nimble and effective regulator so with that just a setting of the stage language I think Karen um Executive Director Wells is going to um introduce one of those um potential administrative actions so thank you thank you madam chair and members of the commission you know as the chair had mentioned um there are certain things we really can't do until we see what the legislation is should it pass but just in the interest of being proactive and trying to get a handle on things we have identified a few a couple of issues for potential discussion today and leave it up to the commission because the open meeting law I can't talk to you as a body accepting an open meeting so to get your collective input on ways we might want to go forward it's helpful for for me and for the rest of the staff to sort of get the commission buy in and in the potential approach uh in sports wagering so the first issue which we do as Kathy indicated neutral um would be uh what is the approach we're going to take to the adoption of technical standards for potential sports wagering legislation so I do have Katrina Jabba Gomes our CIO on here is along with Todd Grossman who know a lot about these GLI standards and the approach so different states have used different models for the process of technical standard and those approaches vary from drafting those regulations internally to relying heavily on what we do GLI standards GLI is a company and they have established technical standards which many jurisdictions across the United States deem as best practices so we've been looking at that the jurisdictions that tend to do their own regulations tend to be the biggest jurisdictions with many casinos and a lot of technical expertise within a bigger department and so as such given the size of Massachusetts in fact we only have three casinos in the size of our staff we're recommending that should sports wagering become legalized and the gaming commission is deemed the regulator that Massachusetts generally rely on these GLI standards for technical compliance of online platforms specifically we're looking at GLI 19 interactive gaming systems version 3 version 3.0 GLI 26 wireless system standards version 2.0 GLI 33 event wagering systems version 1.1 and standard change management program guide version 1.0 and GLI 20 kiosk version 2.0 all those documents I understand are in the commission's packet today at this time it would certainly be premature to formally adopt any regulations but some kind of direction for the staff to review and potentially tailor these standards as the best practices for Massachusetts would be helpful in our preliminary preparations should sports wagering become legal so this was one of these initial questions for the commission if you are interested if this seems to be the approach and you adopt that recommendation that sets us to sort working in that direction if you did not want to go in the right direction we needed to get some really work on these internally and do our own standards from the get go we would need to plan for resources for that and how we how we would go about doing that so some direction on this would be helpful I'll pause there to see if there's any questions before going into the second issue and see what the feedback is from the commission questions questions from Karen I have a question madam chair yes Karen review and tailoring of the standards what kind of document would would culminate from that process is would there be a policy document or would we eventually get to drafting a regulation it would be in regulation and I'll I'll you know call on Katrina and Todd to comment as well let's start with Todd I think that ultimately what we are trying to do is expedite the review and preparation of the materials in the event as the chair pointed out that sports wagering does fall to the commission so we can't obviously bring a regulation to you for adoption anything like that I think everyone understands that it's just a matter of understanding the basic direction the commission thinks it might like to go in when the event this happens so we can start preparing the reg for your review and as Karen mentioned the GLI standards are pretty standard you know for use we the staff has looked at them we do support them this is not a binding decision by any means the commission could revisit this if and when we're called upon to adopt actual technology standards but this to answer your question directly would allow us to start preparing the document so that if and when this does happen you know within the first you know couple days weeks etc we could present you with a draft as opposed to having to start the ball rolling then so it's really a time-saving mechanism at this point I would suggest underlying this whole discussion more than anything thank you Katrina did you have a comment on them and the expectation of these these get adopted through regulation correct yeah exactly you both covered it perfectly I would just add I just to piggyback on what Karen just said of course the commission has adopted a wide variety of GLI standards in the context of casino gaming they're all in section 143 of the regulations so I would contemplate doing it in a similar manner or essentially the commission says something like we hereby adopt GLI 33 with the following amendments and then you would go through and identify areas that you might want to adjust put our own stamp on it address any specific policy questions that are fleshed out in the standards themselves and things along those lines I think even GLI would tell you they don't ever contemplate that you just pick up the standard and put it in place and leave it there there are certainly a number of areas that the regulatory body has to consider and see how it fits into our own set of laws and our own sensibility it says to how you'd like things to move from a policy perspective so this will allow the staff just to start preparing that document for you Madam Chair I just want to ask this question I am leaning toward obviously giving you the that we would rely on the GLI standards for technical compliance what I would also want to be assured is that we're not just relying on GLI standards that we're actually looking at other jurisdictions and what they have done for their regulations and I know GLI works with a lot of other jurisdictions and I get that but we all you know we're up in Maine a couple weeks back and what we all came out of there was each jurisdiction does things very very differently and some have used GLI some maybe have tried to do it on their own so I just want to be assured that we're looking at all jurisdictions as well as the GLI standards as we're putting together our regulations yes I'm just going to say the I can indicate that the IT department has already been in contact with other jurisdictions and already making establishing those relationships and asking questions and going through technical standards with them so I'll defer to Katrina to give you some more specifics but yes we are 100 percent agreeing with your approach yeah Commissioner Hill that has been part of our research for the past couple of years we've worked with multiple jurisdictions we've even have an internal matrix of which jurisdictions adopted which GLI standards or if at all all of them so we do have that research available to us internally as soon as we're ready or approved to kind of move forward with looking at what those impacts would be in our jurisdiction where I'm moving forward with specific term okay so um so for this piece uh the staff plan is is to go forward and uh continue with this approach unless the commission thinks differently please let me know this can also be revisited if something else comes up and you want to bring it on uh at another commission meeting but I just wanted that all the commissioners to be aware as a body this is this is what we're thinking this is our recommendation and um you know my takeaway from uh there does not seem to be any objections to that so I just want to confirm that is there any objections going forward? I do think we were prepared to we were prepared we reserved the right to vote on it to give you direction with the understanding it wouldn't be an adoption of a regulation but that's commissioners we could just leave it as consensus or you could formalize it I know that you have a second piece here as well to assure some let's just pause on the first with the um the standards themselves would we like to formalize um direction um with with a motion or are we prepared for that I'm prepared uh to move in that direction but I'd like to hear the second part of this all before we do vote okay so uh the second piece is um what should be the commission's approach to the technicals uh testing of any sports wagering uh platform to ensure compliance with the massachusetts laws regulations um before that platform is able to operate so should sports betting pass should mobile betting be allowed in for sports wagering uh part of the regulator's job is to ensure that whatever's being rolled out by a licensee meets the requirements of the law meets the requirements of the commission's regulations so there are um a few approaches that the commission could take uh to to ensure that that is happening um one is that the commission could require licensees to contract with an outside vendor to do testing uh to massachusetts standards and then provide the results to the ngc in that circumstance best practice would would dictate that we would audit those findings by an outside vendor that was hired by a licensee but that is one approach um the other approach is to hire a personnel to conduct all the testing in-house so we would increase our it staff to do that kind of testing before those platforms could go live a third approach is to contract with a third party vendor ourselves to conduct all the testing directly for the commission so the vendor would be to us and then another option where it would be to utilize a hybrid model where some testing is done by the staff um and some is contracted out to a third party vendor so you could blend a couple of those approaches this may be something you may need some more information on want to get some feedback and i'd be curious to see what kind of information be helpful to you as a commission you know our recommendation and looking at this internally is at this point we explore contracting with a third party vendor for that initial testing and then once operations are up and running we work to to migrate to a policy where we have a hybrid model and that way we're not completely dependent on a third party vendor and we develop some experience over time but if we would not be delayed in getting any mobile app mobile app up and running in in an attempt because we'd be trying to get our staffing and hires made during the time we were trying to go live with certain of these licensees mobile apps so that's that was a sort of the that that's the framework there may be certain questions you have that we can either answer today or get back to you on but i wanted to put that issue out as well because because what may be helpful down getting some of the approach on the front end will help us be more efficient in how we influence that approach down the road any any comments on that from Todd or Katrina commissioners questions for Karen on the second part is that unknown i'm sorry and i i'm just trying to read faces no okay um karen i um i appreciate that's the uh recommendation i'm a little bit i know um the first two options probably would not be the best particularly i i'm not sure that for a technical testing we would want to relinquish control to the licensee now and then i think we've seen models for the testings on how to correct Katrina and that's just a very big investment so from my perspective i'd like to recommendation on that if it helps to start i guess what you would take with the redirection from the commission you would take steps to maybe identify that third party contractor um professor now right we would certainly not enter into any kind of contract with the third party vendor unless and until sports betting passes so this would just be preliminary steps to you know explore that option and i potentially identify it how we would do it potentially what the costs would be things like that so we could get ahead of the game uh but obviously without the law being an effective movement uh entering into any contract and for our licensees these initial steps that you're you're recommending today if you give direction um are not so heavy on on the staff or on resources that become sort of an equity issue correct right commissioners do you have any questions or comments Patricia Skinner do you have any questions or comments oh i don't okay i just saw your your mute button changed and i wondered if you were going to speak sorry i don't know do you i'm okay moving forward with the recommendations that have been made by staff today um michelle brine do you have any further questions before emotions uh i don't i mean the gli i think to me is pretty straightforward the the second question to me um aside from getting information about some of the vendors um i feel like it's too early for me to give an opinion on question number two other than simply getting information from some of the vendors should we separate out the motion then maybe start with first part a person who i think that would be just fine um i would move that the commission directs to have to review the technical gli standard to describe in director wells memorandum for possible adoption sure should sports wagering become authorized and placed under the jurisdiction of the commission second i think the second goes to commissioner brian uh all right commissioner brian hi mr hill hi thank you just get it hi and i vote yes for zero thank you so that's one directive to to move ahead um sort of preliminary steps now in terms of the testing um commissioner of brine is there would there be a motion that you might make that you're most comfortable with on that well the conundrum that i'm having too is i mean we don't know what kind of procurement process if any we're going to have to undergo to engage a third party vendor if we're the ones that are engaging with somebody so information gathering is one thing but in terms of you know the language that was suggested of exploring contracting with a third party vendor for initial compliance to me i think that's premature right now i do yeah because i i feel like with procurement rules i don't know what we'd have to do with whether conversations with anybody then takes them out of the box forbidding etc i have concerns in that area director wells and we we can hold on i mean we could explore what the procurement process would be without connecting with any particular vendor and potentially report back and all of these these are all just these are all options and you know i'm sure we'll come up with somewhat other ones that may be able to bring before the commission but none of these have to be done now so i don't want there to be any kind of messaging that this needs to be resolved now this is just an effort to you know try to get ahead of a few things and if there's uh not a comfort level uh staff will just put that to the side and there's other things we can do that that work great if not we'll address them if and when the legislation passes and we're the regulator so we'll just we'll just wait and see so this is really just what the commission is comfortable with so totally respect uh commissioner o bryan's opinion on that and certainly can hold off if that makes sense there's one thing about um the contracting isn't it and i'm i'm thinking about the procurement processes in massachusetts and the state the state um contract uh i'm i'm wondering because i and then maybe this is what you could explore without writing i'm up with procurement rules as i mean suggests is is it exploring the landscape of who does this or maybe between it's a very limited number anyway is that the issue it is it is a very narrow landscape and i think you know from the conversations i've had with karen and others the goal is to really um allow us the opportunity to start exploring and and having conversations i don't know and and i i hesitate to say this but i'm gonna say it anyways even with putting something like what you would normally call an rfi a request for information i don't even know if we can with legislation not approved and so that really restricts our ability to do certain things and i think you know my understanding karen and jumping and correct me if i'm wrong you know the goal really was to just allow us to continue exploring and doing research about vendors or businesses or contractors that work in this field that are highly specialized although we do know it's narrow we do want to do our due diligence and rfi is interesting um because if you frame the rfi to say you know we have no idea what's what future will bring but in the event um what's we're adoring is legalized in massachusetts and trust me these vendors are watching it carefully right um you know you know this is the information we're seeking and and i wonder i don't turn into our legal team and and others but i don't i don't that could be a vehicle unless there is some legal instruction that i'm not thinking about i'm not that's something to explore in and out of south maybe i don't know i mean if you're thinking the same thing yeah i mean it's one thing also to go to you know a couple states couple jurisdictions that have the options that you lay out right i mean i i think in house is not realistic so if you're looking at completely third party you know licensee does it and we audit how's that handled what are some of the companies that do that and or hybrid where we're contracting but then you're still going to have a small universe but if you took a couple jurisdictions that do both of those scenarios you could talk with the jurisdictions rather than the vendor and i think you're going to stay for footing in terms of not tainting any procurements going forward and we could go forward to do that i think katria you may have already spoken with some other jurisdictions in that respect is there anything you could share at this point from the jurisdictions that are similar to us in size and sort of you know design and complexity they are using some if not all of the gli standards and they have partnered with a gli and in some cases they did partner with gli in order to draft and get their regulations and a lot of you know a lot of the ones that did do it it was for expediency legislation got passed they had you know three to five months to get sports wagering up and running so instead of you know trying to do it internally creating it from scratch or not having enough resources to dedicate to it you know you take the best of what's out there experts in the field to help you you know take care of some of those items right out of the gate so you're not spending you know extraneous amounts of time trying to do that so we have seen that in our research and you know again the landscape of sports wagering especially with regulations and standards and procedures and everything else it is a very small niche and there's there's a distinction between a contract with a vendor to do regulations and then a contract with a vendor to do the testing correct even though they might be the same company yes that is true so any example of geo fencing if you're looking to do testing for the mobile apps setting if massachusetts decides to restrict and this is just an example if massachusetts decides to restrict betting at federal buildings or state buildings and or tribal lands we will have to test to ensure that the mobile betting is not allowed into that that specific geo fenced area so that would be a very different vendor than you would like executive director walls just explain regarding regulations so some of the benefit of even having this conversation today is to even put these issues on the table my expectation is that if the legislation does pass there'll be a lot of issues that we really couldn't deal with at all in front of the commission until the legislation passed you're going to be getting a lot of them potentially all at once so it's it also gives you a time a little bit of time to think about this and uh let's do one that a little bit before making any kind of decision uh about what to do there any other questions for karen or treatment for time commissioners so um do we want to give any uh formalized direction to guarantee the testing of the exploring third party vendor option or other options on the so i interpreted the request as one to allow one approach over the others right and not necessarily so the and so the the third party vendor approach right um my understanding or the way yeah the way i interpreted the the ask without necessarily um contracting with a third party or putting out an rfi or or anything that moves in the direction of procurement it's just that um you know this is a recommendation of the the direction um that staff karen and staff want to go in so i mean maybe we need to define more narrowly what explore contracting means well perhaps there is a little disconnect push up get a very good observation so karen in your your um your memo your staff recommendation is and with respect to the early dealt with the first part um but at this point would be the explore contracting with a third party vendor for initial testing and then once the operations are properly running they work to my right to move um to more of a hybrid model so we are not completely dependent on the third party vendor so you do say explore contracting which is a language in our draft draft motion and commissioner brian and so i think that it's the recommendation comes from you you with your expert team of the floor options suggest moving on number three now a language it seems to be maybe concerning us as explore contract but would it be helpful for us to still give some kind of direction as to the four options is that i think maybe that's a better way to think of it because i think what you know the the thinking is behind this is it if we're totally off base and you know the commission and the staff are like not looking at this in the same way i just want to know that now so i can uh adjust course so if maybe the better way to say it is if you if third contracting with a third party vendor is just not an option and you don't want us to do that let's not waste our time and explore what that would mean and how we do that who the vendors are and do some of that preliminary work maybe that's a better way to think about it maybe i i did go back to one and two i kind of dig my quick my quick feelings about one and two maybe it would be helpful if you're in a position now to say because i guess if it were one it's not a work to do right correct correct and if it's number two there's a ton of work to do correct it's number three there's some really important due diligence to do and then the hybrid sounds like that we could do it off at the right off right at the very beginning orange you suggest maybe even over the course of time but number four as presented would be to to do the hybrid as a staff exactly okay so um can i view the position because i know commissioner brian sort of went back to number one and wondered about should we explore that more are you in a position right now to give some advice as to why you chose exactly why you're making recommendations for you is this commissioner scanner might close to your point is that right yeah yeah yeah and i i mean i think you know we we spoke to it earlier katrina and um caren did in terms of you know checking in with other jurisdictions seeing what they're doing trying to do due diligence around what vendors are out there provide this this type of service without necessarily engaging in a procurement a formal procurement process yeah you just have to be mindful how you do that yeah so that you don't take the process later that that's there's one thing to me to have to go do research and that's what i'm saying talking to other jurisdictions in terms of how they're doing things and who their vendors are etc and then doing third party research on that person and contacting that person in terms of vetting contractual concepts and said i don't think that's a good idea right now i love to get everybody everybody equal access for input yeah and so i didn't hear that that was one of the action that the team was planning on taking actually contacting vendors well yeah but the language is not was a little less precise in terms of what exactly executing on number three was going to mean yeah yeah but it's but it's at the right time contract but so i'll give an example of what would potentially be helpful is if we drafted and figured out a scope of work for any contract that we would do we could do that and not put it out and not disclose it to any other third party vendor but work on that internally if the commission thinks that using a third party vendor is a potentially a viable option depending on the legislation and what happens and you know all of this is all conditional so it's not as if this is necessarily how things are going right i mean for me to be honest and i think i mentioned this to Karen is what would be helpful to me in making these decisions is you know give me a jurisdictional real-time example of one through four yeah you know which jurisdiction does one you know the pros and cons and this is why we don't recommend i would want a little more information before i tell you to go down a rabbit hole on one you know my gut can say three and four starting with three and moving to four looks good but i feel like i don't have enough information to want you to go so far as to draft a scope of work can i can i see if they do have the information today i understand that there are jurisdictions that use the various i'll be perfectly blunt madam chair i don't think my brain is in any condition to process this to then give them further direction to have them spend any appreciable amount of time yeah i don't all right so um uh i was kind of curious but we'll to see why you ruled out one and two and uh but i guess that that's i didn't i didn't rule out one i ruled out the no no not you no i was curious as to why as to why the staff did not look at the jurisdictions but why why not one two right four that was really what i'd almost want a more fulsome presentation on one two three four and what it is that you guys know right now in terms of why you're pointing toward okay so why don't we roll this one over for next our next um i'm not sure uh with the next meeting is that make commissioner hill and commissioner skinner get more information um but commissioner bryan's given the right caution um about yeah that's a really good point on the procurement yeah yeah we've got to be careful um but with the right baby steps you could you could position yourself well but that's a very you know what you want here yeah and and it's something that plates procurement so we want to be really really careful so okay and we can just um we've got some we're giving you a little direction so it's super helpful and even you know even if there's an advance or at least we're fronting some issues for you and we can have a further discussion later that's fine and again i think that we all recognize these are are significantly no they're narrow enough of of issues that it it's smart and not waste to go to proceed should the law change so um to the extent that's helpful Katrina and team karen thank you all right so we'll roll that over then if you don't mind karen do you have anything else to add on that nope i'm also thank you and i'm thinking you're going to have to forgive me because um you don't have to i think i beg for your forgiveness um on item number nine it's something that you and i talked about uh but i didn't give it a heads up um we do have one matter that is awkward because we always operate under the open meeting law but um as you know we have been without um an official executive assistant commission for a while but um kind of moves probably terribly swiftly because chaplain that's such fabulous job for us but um that's not there but commissioner o brian and i um worked with karen and team um to devise a job description that was posted and we got how many would you guess like about 50 applications or just under that yeah just under that so what happened is karen and team went through them made sure those that met the uh qualifications we've done the process and for hiring positions in the past um and they narrowed down who qualified who met the job description and then the two of us reviewed and narrowed it down to what we thought was for um best options now in the past we've done this where um uh a team of two commissioners with other folks um made a recommendation to the rest of commission and a hire was made but because this is an executive assistant for all of us we wanted to be inclusive in the hiring decision we could have you look through all 50 again and see if there's you know and give a list of the um what we are viewing i think i need you to narrow it down maybe we're eight maybe you've narrowed it down to five um and it could be do them all and see if you you know if we've missed something um but the one thing we're going to make this inclusive which i'm recommending i think i need your recommending is is something that's difficult and that is is that our candidates would have to come and meet with us in a public forum i would recommend that it be done in a live setting um at our offices with the right public notice um i would uh our team can always attend any any meetings are public but perhaps everybody would recognize that it's um uh maybe a matter that they don't need to sit in on um and then we could meet with the individual candidates they would have to be informed that it's public and if somebody from the public wanted to come or somebody from the staff wanted to come we would have to allow it um so the alternative is for um for two of us to go proceed and make a recommendation for the hire like i can tell you um raise my internal kid so um missioners we'd like to get that on on the books it would be a special public meeting of course um separate from our missioners commissioner hill and i mean maybe before we move on what what have i missed i don't think anything but the awkwardness of the open meeting law i'm i'm sure that number is not as high as it was a little while ago so some of this may maybe have decided for us because of course they may not have wanted to tell their employer or they may move down to other offers it's a very awkward process it's an awkward process it's closed down so yeah we slowed down a bit but mainly because we've been so you know we have been meeting a lot right so um but we do need to work on this and we could also via the job description um is down now i believe um well we're looking for input this is this is a first for us um so uh kisha grab kevin did you say that your your recommendation the two of you um is to make it in an inclusive process and so that and so am i correct in understanding that that is your preference yes so the calling down we did do that as a matter of of what we've done in the past and then we realize that okay we've narrowed it down but we really want to include two of you in the interview process and unless we all decide it's too awkward um and we also can be differential if you want to defer to us in terms of narrowing it down that's fine or if you want to review them all and and and include another couple of whatever that's fine too as long as i'm returning to our lawyer as long as that's okay this is not an an easy situation normally these positions um that are have to be done in public you know there's a lot of open meeting law about the school committee and sure brad you saw it in the local school committee superintendent you know the school school superintendent search um the executive director searches have to be done but if we're going to be inclusive there's no way for us to not do this in a hosted public setting it would obviously um we never have to stream we never have to stream but we do in this instance it would be my suggestion because it isn't really a hiring that we that we keep it public and open but not necessarily straight that's because this would be my my i think we both thought about that and i'm sorry we have to do this in public but of course it's the only way for us to address these matters yeah i agree with you that it is it would be an awkward process and it would probably scare potential you know candidates um away um but i want to i want to you know be mindful that your recommendation is to be well inclusive and so i don't want to you know i'm going to be really you know let's be clear we are having this conversation because we want to be inclusive but we are recognizing that there is this and if if we all say it's better to make sure that the candidates are comfortable in coming in and then you would um we would ask that you defer to us i said to to um i think i don't want to make that decision without speaking to you because it is my inclination to always include all of us so i'm comfortable with deferring to the two of you unless you're saying that that's not what you want to happen how about you commissioner know i feel the same way as commissioner schinner does i trust you to have gone through the process and done your due diligence and would hire the best person for this position and i would have no problem allowing you to do that for us okay commissioner brian you feel comfortable with that yeah i mean it's the first thing i said too and when we had this conversation was you know a lot of people that they have to go public were just withdraw i mean why would you risk telling an employer you haven't told yet or just not go through a process for what is not sort of an ed position um but as as the chair said we also didn't want to make that call you know without going out to the broader commission in terms of having this conversation and i appreciate you raising this as as as an item um today kathy thank you well and we appreciate your confidence in us it's just it's not ideal um um and and if we don't have a candidate that um we think will be just perfect for all of us and we hope but um you know we had a strong uh there was a strong response so all right then that gives us our marching orders uh commissioner a brian will get the process underway all right well thank you for that and thank you for your consideration both of you uh i'm just going to appreciate how i framed it and i appreciate your your making me think about that so thank you all right any other commissioner updates no all right 420 what kind of uh hey 20 minutes ahead crystal we did take them some item off the i would love to be happy about that for you i'm happy about that for you you made it thank you and thank you crystal for all your work this was a um a lot of um moving parts on on this meeting so thank you so much all right then um unless there's some other business we got a lot done we have some work to do that tom will uh pass over for the next agenda and uh our next meeting public meeting is in a a few weeks uh crystal for the um so we believe you lie i almost said 20 second but that's because 20 second has been over and over in my head for the last two weeks it's the 12th and then yep and then um 28 28 so the 12th and the 28th perfect all right well thank you then um and jacklyn thank you she just she came on briefly thank you for all your work all right so a motion to adjourn everyone so moved second you commissioner brian hi commissioner hi christina skipper i i vote yes or zero thank you so so much have a great great day i'm going to the red socks game have fun hi