 The incident in circumstances resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic Governor Charlie Baker issued in order to provide limited relief from certain provisions of the open meeting law to protect the health and safety of individuals interested in attending public meetings and keeping with the guidance provided. The commission will conduct a public meeting utilizing remote collaboration technology. If there is any technical problem with our remote connection and alternative conference line will be noticed immediately on our website mass gaming calm. And this will be recorded as well. And in order to get started, I guess we need to take a roll call Mary would you run. I'm going to turn it over to the chair and you can ask me. Why don't we turn it over to the chair and we can do the roll call. Mary, I think that we were also going to introduce chair judge Stein, just to the group and she didn't want to say hello I'm not sure she's in the home meeting but she wanted to say hi and just introduce yourself because she is someone. So, okay, we'll introduce Kathy judge Stein, the chair of the mass gaming commission, and then we'll go to Rick Carvie yellow and we'll do the roll call after that. Perfect. Thank you Mr Chairman for letting me pop in here briefly. I first off I understand we may be almost neighbors I live in Winchester right on the Medford line. But anyway, thank you I wanted to pop in briefly to thank all of you for your service and commitment and I will bow out. Excuse my disturbance. I've come to appreciate in the last year and a half in my role, the really the vital role that each of you are filling is contemplated by the legislature in the expanded gaming act. Seeing your local voices today showing up for these meetings really assists us in mitigating the impacts across the region, and in your individual communities. I've learned through john's good work and now Joe and always Mary right this common thread that your participation really forms the found very foundation for the extent extensive process that goes into the awarding of the community grants. And for that I just wanted to take the opportunity to stay and express my gratitude and to wish you and in yours well. Thank you. Thank you and it's, it's nice to see your faces I wish it were in person. So, I'm looking at the names and faces and hope that the personal meeting is sooner than later, but I thank you and and Mr Chairman. The roll call vote is for the purposes of the process so that everybody knows that you're in fact a quorum. So, good luck. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Kathy. Thanks Kathy. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, so Rick, if you can just do a roll call the people that you see on the members and if the members can just respond here. Okay. They'll call the roll be Paul Sheehan. Here. Karen Wells. He's on mute. It's okay. Sorry I'm on mute. I'm here. Thank you. Here. John the priest. Here. Ron Hogan. Yeah. Bruce Stevens. Here. Todd Gross. Here. Nick Ron. Here. Here. Jackie crumb. Thank you. Tanya Perez. Hello, I'm here. Dick Lennon Derek Lennon. And Justin Sterrett. Here. And it was the Enrique. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Did I miss anybody? No, I don't think so. Okay. Okay. Motion to accept the minutes from the November 9, 19, 2019 meeting. Make a motion we accept those nets. Second. Motion is seconded. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Okay. We have an update on the ethics course of compliance. I'm very cognizant of the formal measure management. I want to take over. Sure. Thank you. Mr. Chairman. My name is Todd Grossman. I'm the general council. The gaming commission. It's nice to be here. Nice to see so many familiar faces. And the fact that I do see so many familiar faces means that many of you could probably offer the training that I'm about to some thoughts and comments on the provisions of the state conflict of interest law to all of the subcommittees and in fact we offer ethics training to all of the full-time employees of the Gaming Commission on an annual basis. It's just helpful to make sure that everyone is always mindful of some of these tricky provisions of the conflict of interest law as you navigate through your role here on the subcommittee. So I'm not going to give you a full-blown overview but we'll just hit some of what I think are the high points of the conflict of interest law as it applies to subcommittee members like yourselves. And if it's okay I'll share my screen here with you all so you can see this PowerPoint. I welcome anyone to please pause me and ask any questions that may be on your mind. I won't be able to see everyone so please feel free to chime in at any point and here we go. Alright so first as you'll all recall this is a subcommittee that's created under chapter 23k at section 68 which makes this a state agency under the state conflict of interest law and all of the members meaning you all are state employees for purposes of the state conflict of interest law. A municipal employee. Todd we're not seeing you at least I'm not seeing your document. Okay let me try that again. How about now? Yeah there we go. Okay much better. For the first time I didn't ask if everyone could see my document because I just assumed and that was the one time you couldn't see my document. So again that makes all of the committee members state employees and because of the amount of time you spend on the subcommittee the limited amount of time you are considered special state employees under the conflict of interest law. What all of this means is that on an every two year basis you are required to fill out the online to complete the online state conflict of interest law training and when you complete it as many of you know you do get a certificate that you can print out and we have on here to send it to Char Baudard but I will suggest we all send it to Tanya Perez who you heard from a little earlier. She is the assistant with the commission who helps us with the oversight of the subcommittee so if you can send your certificate when completed to Tanya that would be excellent. If we haven't already sent it out we can send out a link to the online training to each of the committee members so you have it and feel free of course to ask any questions along the way to me if I can be of any assistance with that. If you've done the if you're a municipal employee and you've already done that training you do still have to do the state conflict of interest law training there are some differences between the provisions of the state conflict of interest laws and the municipal conflict of interest laws. So as you'll all recall if you've been exposed to the conflict of interest law before there are essentially two forms of conflicts of interest there are financial conflicts and then there are the so-called appearance conflicts the financial conflicts are ones that say that as a special-state employee you may not participate in a matter that may affect your financial interest or that of an immediate family member or a business organization that you're affiliated with and so it's important to highlight a couple of these terms the first is the particular matter of peace and that means there has to be a specific situation that has arisen that you are involved with it can't be a remote or speculative type circumstance that is of concern it has to be a specific situation a particular matter and in the case of these subcommittees discussions about mitigation and communication related to the casinos and the community mitigation fund are considered the particular matters so if you're in any way dealing with community mitigation related to the casinos or community mitigation funds in your day job then you could have a conflict now it also there also has to be a financial interest involved obviously meaning that there is money involved one way or the other and it could be a positive financial interest or it could be a negative financial interest it doesn't matter as long as there is money involved in a particular decision or if someone's financial position could be affected by a particular decision and it has to involve either you or an immediate family member so your spouse or your children or your parents or a business organization that you're affiliated with and certainly if you're in the private sector your business organization is pretty clear if you're a casino representative it's certainly the casino but in many instances it's also been considered a municipality so if if you represent a municipality you need to be mindful that any decision you make that may affect the financial interest of that municipality could trigger the state conflict of interest law which is why if you were to happen in this particular setting to discuss a specific application for funds that has been submitted by your municipality there would be a conflict if you were to continue to sit on the subcommittee to talk about that application because there would be a financial interest that your business organization your city or town would experience if you were to discuss that particular matter so those are financial conflicts of interest and the other type of conflicts are what are colloquially referred to as the appearance of a conflict of interest though the term appearance doesn't actually appear in the statute they're typically looked at as situations where a reasonable person looking from the outside in might conclude that you might act with bias in your job meaning in the performance of your duties here as a member of this subcommittee the Commonwealth and the Commission expect in the law anticipates that you will perform on this subcommittee without any bias towards any individual or towards any particular organization other than this subcommittee and the Commission and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts so if someone looking from the outside in has a reason a valid reason to suspect that there is some outside interest that you may have that could cause you to change your opinion then you need to typically disclose that and what the law generally says that if you disclose an appearance meaning a situation that looks like a reasonable person could conclude that you might perform your job with bias and you disclose it then the law says that one cannot reasonably conclude that you're performing your job in such a way and that of course assumes that there's no financial component so it's not a financial conflict of interest so disclosing of things is always a good way to deal with appearances of conflicts there are gift provisions that you're likely familiar with the law says you may not accept gifts and gratuities of substantial value which the ethics Commission has defined as $50 or more that are given to you for or because of official acts performed or to be performed or given because of your official position the under the enhanced code of ethics which the gaming Commission has put in place which applies to all gaming Commission employees the Commission has said that employees can't accept any gifts regardless of value so in your case you can in theory accept a gift of up to $50 though you need to be very mindful of doing so and there are other provisions of the law that may counsel against doing and one of those provisions is the next thing on this slide which is an unwarranted privilege which provides that you can't use or attempt to use your official provision position here on the subcommittee to secure for yourself or others unwarranted privileges or exemptions which are not available to members of the general public so if you were to accept a gift that's given to you because of your position here on the subcommittee then that wouldn't could in theory be an unwarranted privilege even if it's less than $50 so you need to be very careful about things like that typically an unwarranted privilege that the best example that always comes up is for individuals who get pulled over by the police who say hey do you know who I am that's the classic unwarranted privilege if you attempt to use your government position to get out of a ticket or some other type of accusation or allegation that is an unwarranted privilege and it is illegal under the conflict of interest the provisions of the state conflict of interest law that are the most nuanced and often difficult to navigate but often the most applicable to individuals who serve on these subcommittees are the divided loyalty section of the conflict of interest law they're found in chapter 200 268 a section four there are two main provisions that you should be aware of and I know many of you already are very familiar with but we'll run through them real quick paragraph a talks about employees not being allowed to directly or indirectly receive or request compensation from anyone other than the Commonwealth or a state agency in relation to any particular matter in which the Commonwealth or state agency is a party or has a direct and substantial interest as that applies to your role here on the subcommittee that means that if in your day job you are compensated by a city or town or other business entity to handle matters that relate to mitigation or use of community mitigation funds or submission of a community mitigation fund application you would run afoul of this position provision that is if you are being compensated if you're in a voluntary position with the city or town or other business organization you would not run afoul of this provision because you're not being compensated so it's something to be mindful of if in your day job you are paid to deal with anything that relates to the same subject matter you're talking about here as a member of the subcommittee a similar prohibition is found in paragraph C of section four which says that no state employee shall act as an agent or attorney for anyone in connection with a particular matter in which the Commonwealth or a state agency is a party or has a direct and substantial interest and it has been determined that the Commission and the Commonwealth do have a direct and substantial interest in community mitigation and the use of community mitigation funds so here the provision says you can't act as an agent or attorney for anyone other than the Commission or this subcommittee when it comes to being an agent that includes things like communicating with someone like Joe or Mary or Tanya or me on behalf of the city or town or a private entity or filling out an application and submitting it to the Commission for a request for funds or anything like that you can't act as an agent on behalf of someone other than this committee in relation to community mitigation related matters and if any of you happen to be attorneys you similarly can't act as an attorney and offer legal advice to a municipality or a private interest in relation to the use of community mitigation funds or the application for community mitigation funds or community mitigation unless you're talking about it as a member of this subcommittee so those are the three areas there's the receipt of compensation acting as an agent acting as an attorney for anyone other than this committee as it pertains to community mitigation matters that should raise your antenna as to a possible conflict of interest if you find yourself in those one of those situations the state ethics Commission has broken it down into bite-sized pieces for us to try to digest a little better and they're set out on this particular slide in this fashion and it falls into the following bullet points if you're a paid municipal employee you may not do any paid work for the municipality relating to matters before this subcommittee if you're an unpaid municipal employee you may do unpaid work for a municipality relating to matters before this subcommittee that would apply to someone who perhaps is an uncompensated member of a municipal board or commission or something of that sort and whether you're paid or unpaid municipal employee you can't act as an attorney for the municipality or communicate on behalf of the municipality with the subcommittee or with other state agencies with regard to matters before this subcommittee that is matters related to community mitigation essentially it's important to note though that if you are a municipal employee whose responsibilities did not relate to the impact of gaming on the community or anything related to that it's unlikely that you'll face any issues under section 4 by serving on this committee there's a few quick examples that we'll run through and I'll conclude and open it up to any questions example number one a subcommittee member and it may not work as a paid municipal employee to prepare a community mitigation fund application requesting funds nor work on municipal activities that are funded by an award from the community mitigation fund so after your city or town receives money you can't then work to make sure that the funds are put to good use or used in accordance with the application secondly a member of the subcommittee may work as an unpaid municipal employee to prepare a community mitigation fund application or may work on activities that are funded by an award but can't sign the application I may not communicate meaning you can't serve as an agent on behalf of a city or town with this subcommittee or with other state agencies about this mitigation work that you do here as a member of the subcommittee a subcommittee member may not offer legal advice to a city or town in relation to an application or award whether you're paid or unpaid by that city or town and finally section 17 applies to municipal employees and it essentially says that subcommittee members can't act as an agent of the subcommittee and communicating with the municipality meaning you can't go back to your municipality and offer specific advice based upon your role here as a subcommittee member though there are exceptions to that for example if the municipality designates you as a special municipal employee you can do things of that nature so again as I say every time I present this and you probably heard me say before the intent here is not to make you an expert in the state conflict of interest law no one can certainly get to that point but just to recognize when you may be faced with an issue under the state conflict of interest law I certainly welcome you to contact me or any member of our legal staff here at the commission certainly you could communicate with any city solicitor town council or other legal council you have including with the state ethics commission who offers advice via an attorney of the day service they offer free of charge and confidential to people who call all great resources and I certainly encourage you to make use of any or all of those if any of these issues should arise so I'm happy to take any questions if you have any general questions this is a good forum to discuss them if you have specific questions related to yourself or your situation I'm happy to take them offline as well so we can open it up and then if there's nothing else to turn it back to you Mr. Chair and to Joe does anyone have any questions or taught I don't see anybody's hand up any questions okay here we can see none taught thank you very much thank you okay next discussion of the 2021 community mitigation fund policy questions Joe Delaney thank you Mr. Chair good to see you all and just before I dive right into the document you know this was my first year leading the process of the community mitigation fund which I've been obviously been involved with for a number of years but with John departing I've taken over that role and also have taken over the role of the primary person coordinating these local community mitigation advisory committees and so on so it was certainly quite a challenge to try to do this remotely and with you know being new in the role but I think all in all things went pretty successfully we got our grants out by the end of June or I should say we made the initial awards by the end of June and the beginning all the grant documents out in between but of course one of the things that we learned in that process some a few questions came up and that we're gonna that we're looking for some input from this group and you know we sent the the draft document out to you folks I think on Monday and I'm sure you've all had plenty of time to delve completely into that nine-page memo and memorize every word but what I thought I would try to do here is what you'll see is when we go through this a lot of these are questions that sort of come up every year and I think are somewhat you know the answer is is sort of self-explanatory but what I would like to do is walk through and sort of highlight some of the the key pieces where we would really like some input from from you folks and you know obviously if you have input today that would be great but as I said I'm sure you haven't all had a chance to read through this and I'd like to hit some highlights you know we had our Region B meeting yesterday and we wound up not getting a quorum so all I was able to do was listen to myself talk it would be nice if some of you folks had some input while we're going through this so I'm gonna share my screen here with the policy questions this is the same document that that you folks received leave on Monday I'll blow this up a little bit so everyone can see I think and so I'll go through these one by one and many of them I'll just gloss over pretty quickly item number one should the Commission plays an overall limit on grants for the 2021 CMF I think this is something that you know the obvious answer to this question is yes we only have a certain amount of money to give out so we certainly need to put a limit on that but what you'll see here is just in our 2020 result we authorized 11.5 million and spending out of the 2020 and we only issued about 6.7 million in new grant funding and that was due to several reasons one is you know in the western region we didn't receive enough grant applications to total the 5 million that was set aside for the western region COVID-19 caused us to modify several of the grant applications specifically the workforce grants I'll talk about that in a little bit and also we had you know frankly some applications that really didn't make the justification of the connection to a casino or that their project would really address a casino impact and so we really you know based on the guidelines we really couldn't award some of these these grants you know on most of them we thought geez we love the idea of the grants but you know we can't just give out money without having that nexus to the casino so item number two is should the Commission continue to place a per grant limit for the 2021 CMF awards and I think we are suggesting that we should limit the maximum amount of grants and you can see here these are the numbers for 2020 and I guess I would ask for folks to take a look at that and see if in fact they think that's appropriate we do talk a little bit about the transportation and construction projects a little bit later you know we had some fairly large applications and we need to see whether or not we want to keep that number the same or revise it so then the third one this is you know should the Commission continue to place a limit on grants in each gaming region based on the projected tax revenues generated by the Community Mitigation Fund for that region so we've done that in the last couple years basically money generated in Region A stays in Region A money generated in Region B stays in Region B and then we set aside a little bit of money for the category two facility in Plain Ridge from Plainville excuse me and you know I think that's you know that's one of those things these items that we still certainly want input from the regional folks on it had seemed to have been the consensus in years passed from both Region A and Region B that we should continue to do that and in here under the 2020 results this is essentially verbatim from our guidelines last year that talks about how we would split up the funds how unused funds would be rolled over from year to year and then after three years funds shall be allocated back into a general fund and I don't think we're proposing to make any changes to that we're only sort of in our third year of the process so I think it certainly makes sense to keep that you know the same as it is until we at least get through that three year period and see where things stand just backing up a little bit I did do and I'm going to just really call this a back of the envelope calculation because you know with COVID we went three months without generating any revenues we just re-open the casinos the numbers for the casinos at least in my perspective for August I mean they're running at about 80% of the pre-COVID numbers for gaming revenues which that surprised me I didn't expect it to be that high will that may remain the same for the rest of this calendar year we don't really know so we're going to keep refining these numbers as we go along but my initial indication is that we'll have about eight million dollars available for Region A and five million dollars available for Region B so this takes the money was rolled over from last year plus what we expect to have generated in 2020 for revenues so I guess while we were going through this and the casinos were closed and we didn't know when they were going to be reopened you know we were very concerned that revenues might be way way down from where they were but you know the numbers are surprisingly to me at least better than than than we kind of expected okay number four this is dealing with workforce grants so we've done workforce grants for the last several years we've been sort of targeting about last year we had 700,000 proposed sort of 350 for the East 350 for the West and we did get applications for that but once once the casinos closed down which was after we had received applications you know we realized that you know especially culinary hospitality those kinds of things not just at the casinos but all over the Commonwealth you know restaurants were closed hotels were closed and that essentially there's sort of a you know a lot of employees in these areas and these grants really need to be tailored to an impact from the casino so while we were going through this process we essentially said that you know we can we can continue the adult basic education classes because look everyone who works at a casino needs to have a high school diploma or an equivalency so we agreed that we could keep that portion of the program and what we ended up doing was the region A they asked for 350 and got 172 region B asked for 350 and they got 199 because essentially we had to cut out those sort of hospitality and culinary related pieces of them so I guess the real question that we have for you folks is how we would love to get your opinion on how we should proceed this year you know the casinos are now back open but you know they're not open certainly like the restaurants and other things aren't open in full strength you know MGM has not opened their hotel at all encore has just opened it on limited days of the week so you know they're not up to full staff so again we'd really love you to think about that and and let us know what your thoughts are one one comment on that sure just a rhetorical question should we consider any responsibility to be training many people that were displaced by the casino industry and may not come back farmer employee and farmer employment levels should we could some of this money still be used because essentially they've been impacted by the casino layoffs as sort of a route like the idea of a retraining for those folks whose jobs may might never come back right certainly you know I think I think that's a that's certainly a very worthwhile approach to look at again so I guess you know we have to be careful again you know COVID-19 caused this impact and not really the casinos caused the impact so we have to address a casino impact now obviously those people who work at the casino are severely impacted so but I think that's that's definitely a way to look at things and maybe we can you know we'll talk with with Joe Griffin and others to maybe think about that I think that's a great idea yeah Joe if I can just jump in for a second it's an interesting question that you raise Jill and I were actually on a call a little while ago with some of our state training counterparts and obviously the but they're seeing unemployment numbers is that you know the hospitality sector has really been hit the hardest in terms of folks that are unemployed and I know that they're pursuing some federal money to to maybe help out like $15 billion I think in federal money to support folks who everybody all professions across the board who have been laid off so you know we asked them to kind of stay in touch with us and let us know what they were doing especially as it impacts folks who were in gaming or any other type of hospitality job but it's a good point good question to raise okay so number five this was this deals with our construction projects that was which we had for the first time last year so our guidelines allowed our target was $3 million statewide with no project receiving more than $1 million and you'll see from our 2020 results we got over six and a quarter million in applications we did actually go over our target by a little bit because it was we wanted to make sure that we got all the projects that we felt were really important so we went a little bit over that so given the amount of demand I think the question that we have is you know do we want to and also considering it looks like we might even have an increase in amount of money available in Region A do we want to maybe raise that $3 million target I think the million in one case we did go over the million dollars and we'll talk about that a little bit but I think the millions probably an okay target these are all waivable of course so if there's a really compelling reason to go over that we can but given the amount of demand maybe we want to think about increasing that construction project money and so this also and this is a question we raised this last year when we created the construction project category but we didn't really act on so should the Commission cap the percentage of construction costs at the Community Mitigation Fund will fund so our guidelines really said that we expected our funds to be only a piece of the costs and that it'd be other federal state or local or other funding available to pay for the rest of the cost now we by design I think I think I raised it last year saying maybe we should put a cap on this and I think this group particularly said no no let's leave it because you never know there could be a project that's really a hundred percent caused by the casino and and so so we did we just we left it at that and as we got our applications in the local match ranged from about 90 percent down to 0 percent so we actually had two projects that proposed no local match at all hundred percent Community Mitigation Fund funds and you know and they were rather far afield from the casino and while they did demonstrate that there was some casino impact the review team didn't really think that those that the mitigation funds should be paying a hundred percent of these costs so anyway we had we had a little bit of a difficult time with this because there was sort of no cap on it and in fact we did we funded five of the projects and actually in two of the cases we reduced the funding on the project to better align with the mitigation of casino impacts you know again every one of these projects there was a fairly you know there was a good size benefit to the community over and above the impact of the casino so yeah you're solving a casino impact or helping a casino impact but you're really providing a tremendous benefit for the community so the way that we did this you know there were none of these projects where we said really hundred percent of this should be paid by the mitigation fund so the highest percentage we want was about one third of the project cost I think that was a project out in West Springfield you know one of the examples that we have was John your project in in Chelsea the Beachham Street William Street corridor you know I think in the end that was maybe about 15 or 20 percent of the project cost was funded by Community Mitigation Fund with a huge you know portion from federal grant and local funds and so on and that was kind of the idea that we had that yes this is solving a casino related impact but there's usually a pretty large impact so the question I guess that we have for you guys is do you think we should put a cap and if you do think we should put a cap what do you think it should be and again all of these things like everything we do with the Commission would be would be waivable if there was you know really justification for it. My concern on that one and it is if you're relying on other funds and other grants the timing may not coincidental on all of for example if I'm going to look for Mastoc funds and I have to get on the tip I'm looking five to six years in the future to get on the tip it just so happened on the Chelsea one that they work together but that's not going to be the case all the time. Right right okay so under item seven this is sort of a holdover from last year we're talking about you know funding large transportation projects or economic development projects and you know this talks about not only the Community Mitigation Fund but the Gaming Economic Development Fund and we had talked about last year about going out and doing kind of a solicitation with folks for kind of multi-year projects and things like that and you know quite frankly due to the COVID and all that that just simply didn't happen and our thought is for this year let's let's try to not really reinvent the wheel for this year let's kind of keep status quo for this year and then maybe maybe that's a something to look at for the 2022 fund rather than this year. Number eight this had been talked about in the past but we never really acted on it and this is should the Commission consider the creation of an emergency reserve within the Community Mitigation Fund for unknown impacts that arise after February 1st 2021 the idea here was look if something really came up and I can't picture what that thing might be but then again I didn't picture a pandemic either so you know emergencies do arise saying that if we put aside maybe a small amount of money that said if look if something came up after applications were in and it would have to be something really of kind of an emergency nature that someone could come in and ask for Community Mitigation Funds for that impact and we're talking about maybe putting aside a couple hundred thousand dollars and that it would expire each year if it wasn't used this would be similar to the the money that we put aside we put aside every year for Region C you know if we always put a couple hundred thousand aside in case the Tribal Casino gets up and rolling this is that same idea and I think it's you know again in a previous program that I was in we did have an emergency set aside and it was almost never used but it was used in a couple of occasions and it was really important to those communities so to me it's in my mind it's sort of a little bit of no harm no foul it's a small amount of money that could be put aside and the likelihood of it being used is probably pretty small under number nine this is dealing with you know we allowed public safety operational costs as part of the guidelines in 2020 and the question whether we should continue to do that so we did we did struggle with this a little bit we did have four applications for public safety operational funding and two of them were approved one of them was approved with a reduced level of funding and one of them was denied the one that was denied was actually the city of Springfield fire department has a they call attack unit that's only operational one shift a day and they wanted to increase that to three shifts a day and that was really determined that that should have been included or was included in their post-community agreement and that we really couldn't fund that so again just that question of whether or not we should continue to do that number 10 we are starting to get some of these look-back studies traffic studies and other things and we do have our own research agenda and this question was how should we use those in making our determinations and I think you know the answers we should certainly be using those in our evaluations of applications from our licensees region C tribal casino nothing has really changed in the last year I think you know we put aside those $200,000 each year and it just rolls back into the fund if it isn't used and I think we're recommending to do the same thing again so this item 12 we ask this every year and should the commission require a dollar for dollar match for its community mitigation fund grants and this is just a listing of what we do require and we already talked about that transportation construction grants that we discussed in number six above but some of these other ones you know again we are finding that in some of these applications that the impact that they're addressing is it's not really well defined and these a lot of these things seem to be more just beneficial to the community at large rather than addressing a casino impact so we did end up denying a few applications this year that were sort of in that category so part of this question really is is if we require a match you know like a dollar dollar dollar for dollar match the community has some skin in the game and they can sort of have part of this grant go towards their really their local community general and then part towards addressing a casino impact so I guess think about that one a little bit on and obviously if you start requiring a dollar for dollar match we will probably have a reduced level of applications you know the more money that's required from the community the fewer applications we would probably get so we'd really love you to think about that and sort of opine on on your thoughts on that especially with many of you being you know working for communities so if you all remember we back at the beginning of this program we gave reserves out to each of the host and surrounding the surrounding communities to try to plan for the opening of the casinos and now you'll just see in the discussion a bunch of them have used their entire reserve but we still have a bunch that are sitting out there who never touched their reserve or going to use a portion of it you know this money was appropriated five five years ago Bruce was it yeah you know so our thought is that you know we can't just let this money hang out there forever and I think at least my thought was for in this ground tell the communities maybe you have one more year to find a study or something to do to use that money or you know I think we're getting down to a use it or lose it kind of situation maybe I don't know what the right time is maybe it's a year maybe it's two years I don't I don't know I just so anyways think about that a little bit Joe yes if you could maybe let the communities maybe they're not aware that these reserves are staying there where they maybe they've changed administrations and not know they're available if you can make us aware what communities have not applied their reserves before they run out oh yeah yeah Rick so my plan is is for actually for this fall you know starting in October you know again since I'm sort of taking over this program what I want to do is actually I want to meet with every community that we have grants with or reserves with or even communities that we don't have anything with and go over what they do have because there have been and this drives Mary insane where you know we have staff turnover and we have new administrations and new appointees and all sorts of things and and it certainly is a distinct possibility that there are communities out there that have no idea that they have these reserves thank you okay so non-transportation related planning I think you know we provided those grants for those communities who had used all their reserves to do some more planning to try to take advantage of the casinos and so on and I think we're not proposing to make any radical changes to that but these were the ones that we were having a little hard time people were some of the communities seem to be trying to do something that was for local benefit but trying to get a tag into the casino that and some of them just simply didn't work that well okay let's see okay administrative costs again we don't allow administrative costs in any of our applications except for the workforce programs where we do allow seven and a half percent of the total grant go towards administrative costs we weren't proposing any changes to that on the 16 it's the grants involving private parties in the past we had some issues with cities trying to get money to private parties and they ran afoul of the anti-aid amendments of the constitution and so on and we really kind of ratcheted down on that in our 2020 guidelines and we're not really proposing any changes there joint applications we are we have been and continued to encourage joint applications and I think we would love to see you know multiple communities get together especially on some of these grants that we've given out where you know for tourism purposes and other things rather than one community trying to do something for tourism purposes we'd love to see two or three or four communities get together and sort of do a more regional approach rather than this sort of you know we all we always talk about our 351 fiercely independent cities and towns but we'd love to have communities work together and try to do that so we do have incentives for that that we've already developed to try to encourage that number 18 should communities be limited to one specific impact grant we have done that that is waivable we have waived that in the past we're not proposing a change to that so under number 19 the hamden county sheriff's office we provided them back in 2016 they were in the footprint of where the mgm casino stands today and there is their western massachusetts correctional alcohol center was there and they had to move to a new building and of course their lease went way up and we agreed to provide two million in lease assistance over five years so they had to come back each year for an application for 400,000 well this year marked the fifth year and at our meeting with the sheriff's office after we finished our regular discussion they broached the subject of providing this assistance going forward now there's nothing that would prevent the sheriff's department from applying for a community mitigation fund application regardless they're they're eligible they're you know a state agency they were impacted by the casino but you know this is one of those things that that i think the the commission ultimately needs to decide whether or not this is appropriate to continue to to give them money and as it relates to this i think we would certainly require a lot of backup documentation to demonstrate that it's still warranted but part of the thing is right now in the western region you know they haven't been spending all of the money that's been allotted to them so there is money available in that region so i think this is going to be more of a question for region b but we certainly would welcome your region a's input into that number 20 we have a few grants out there that have not expended any money yet and you know of course those sitting out there and a couple of them look like they they may never end up spending money we gave grants to everett and summerville to design a connection to the assembly row headhouse in expectation of a bridge across the mystic river you know given the circumstances today with covid and everything else i'm not sure that we're going to see a bridge over the mystic river at any time soon so we don't really feel like we want to spend that money to design a connection to a headhouse that might never be built so the notion there is and there are a couple of other grants that have been sitting around for a few years where we haven't expended money on them i think we need to either well firstly we need to talk to those communities and find out if they intend to spend the money on that and if so when but i think after sort of beating the bushes a little bit we have to get to a point where we just don't want money tied up that's not going to be spent and that could increase capacity for either of the regions or for bigger projects or things of that nature and joe similar to the other one again maybe these communities don't know they have the grants with it with changes of administration changes of personnel absolutely and again that's that's part of my that's part of my topics of discussion for this fall with all of our communities and this this one here should communities be allowed to apply to more than one category of grant for the same project and john this goes to you and you were very clever this year and your application this was the the williams and beecham street corridor where chelsea did apply for money under the construction grant and also applied for a specific impact grant i don't think the the commission ever thought that that would be the case and i think my recommendation here is really to to i think have projects apply under a single category every one of our dollar values is waivable and if a project really is worthy to have that waived the community can make that argument and in this case we did give the grant under both categories because what we probably could have done we could have given it all under construction and waived the limit or but we just gave it under the two categories because it was a really great project that was you know it was really a relatively small amount of money compared to the overall project costs you know chelsea did a great job they did their own traffic study to demonstrate the impacts i mean it was really you know john you guys did a fabulous job on on that on that project which is obviously why we granted all of the money on that and and really that was exactly what we envisioned for those construction projects that on how they how they would work so but my my thought is that that seemed to be kind of a loophole but maybe we should maybe we should close and then under item 22 these are all just the the things that we used to evaluate the grants and we're not really proposing to change any of those i don't think we need to go through them so with that you know so that is a quick overview of what our policy discussion is and you don't need to feel compelled to go pine today but i think at our next meeting which is mary early october i'd love to get all of your input at that meeting so if you can spend some time between now and the next meeting you know reviewing these and and preparing some comments or if you do have comments today be happy to listen to them do we have any do we have any questions for joe so this is well over at the city moment can i make a suggestion what might be helpful between now and the next meeting that that a revised document is sent out that we can type comments into and maybe share it back with you also that you've had the the chance to pull those together and you know prior to what we need again next time i think it might work better than you know then then started from scratch at the next meeting i know i'd prefer to have the time to be able to sit down type in comments send it back and to the extent anybody else feels the same way yeah i think that'd be great that would that'll be very helpful um so mary is there a let me just just jump out of this document mary is there um can you send them i guess a word probably just a word copy or of the document so that they can mark it up all right well yeah we'll make sure that we'll make sure that that gets out to you um and this is my that i have a couple comments on the presentation yeah number one is it is a question for the commissioner and when we were talking about conversations with the partners on training there has been a conversations on a high set or the high school department with partners sorry about that mara how are you good did i knew good um i mean based uh the two workforce applications i'll just start with what we did in 2020 the two workforce applications i think continued to both focus on adult based again in some g ed programs is applied to by the metro north regional employment board and the uh ho yo community college was the entity out in western mass what we did not take action on was the balance of the application which was on gaming or specific to our gaming establishment skills training so that could have been culinary or the gaming school or something that was specific to somebody who might be hired at mgm and on four but i think we all realized that continuing the the support for the ab programs of the g ed programs continue to help position um those job candidates uh to complete some education and training to put them in a position to apply for a job when it comes back but we didn't want to stop that kind of dead in its tracks we thought we were seeing some success for the programs that we were supporting okay so my experience and more after co or during COVID-19 is has been that we have seen an increase of participant in the high set program so which is the the high school equivalent when we have a program with bonca hill community college and we have seen that definitely has been a lot of demand so what i think is that the participants unseen too and not working right now have been laid off so i mean let me take this opportunity to go back to to the path and to in the high school diploma or the high set and also continue with the education so thank you so much for that and then the other piece is related to the construction and i know the target amount of the grant it was one million but joe you stated that we have received more grants and we have dispersed more so maybe we think about you know what was the target versus the actual and my increase that amount so that's one and then the the last one is on the workforce on the administrative costs allow one which is 7.5 percent my experience that has increased significantly and even to 15 percent so total of what we are allowing right now just a yeah i think i think jill and crystal had done an evaluation of what sort of some of those typical costs for and they were finding them at sort of between five and ten percent so we just kind of kind of cut it down the middle okay okay so that's my comment from now so there wasn't there wasn't a real super high-tech analysis of that thank you thank you any more questions for joe all right thank you thank you joe okay next use of the community mitigation fund for uh for administration purposes um chief financial officer Derek Lennon is here to give us an overview of Derek and just before just before Derek jumps in i would just like to add and so um barry and i i'm just going to mute myself i'll listen in but barry and i can't really be involved in this discussion because this has a potential to affect our salaries so um with that i'm going to leave it to Derek and i think Todd's also here on sort of the legal side of things take it away Derek thanks thank you um thank you for having me here always always nice to see new faces i used to use some of these grants um i've gotten out of that role for the last two years but um seemed like the groups have done nothing but get better on the applications have done nothing but get better um projects are getting bigger as well and with that comes the idea of managing this grant portfolio as joe pointed out the dollar amounts continue to increase now that we have tax dollars flowing in and we really don't have fully dedicated staff now i used to work at the office of grants and research at public safety where um we took in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money and i was at housing and economic development where we gave out all of the transportation grants economic development grants public works grants took over a big portfolio of those from mass dot and with most grant programs it comes an administrative pot of money with this one we haven't taken any because the tax dollars haven't been flowing in i put a proposal into the budget this year to start using some of it and the commission wanted us to go out and draft some regs um on the overall program to formalize one just the process that has kind of grown and then two have public process where people can input into what the right amount of of administrative funds would be for this for this program um as you can see we have joe delaney working maybe 50 percent of the time on on this grant uh mary spends about 75 percent of her time we have just brought tanya on to help out with this but you haven't seen any site visits from them part of the part of the process for grant administration is getting out and doing sub recipient monitoring you do an excellent job submitting invoice reports to us mary goes through those with me before we send out the next installment of money but you know there are some areas that we could really do better at making sure that this money is spent in the best possible way as well as when there's leftover money finding a use to get it back into your hands and that's something that we're we're trying to work through with the regs too so off timing requests amendments to them how to get those done when when the grant cycle doesn't doesn't go perfectly so the intent is to probably get anywhere like joe was talking before between five and ten percent which is standard with most grant programs of what the funding will be has to be a lot of discussion i know the commissioner have talked to me about how to break it up between region a and region b as the pots of money for grants go get distributed between region a and region b so any input you can provide us ahead of time your thought processes would be greatly appreciated because it helps to shape the regs that the legal team is drafting and to have a discussion around that thank you derek do we have any questions for derek who does the work now so right now mary does a lot of it joe does a lot of it my my grant my um budget director who just left does a lot of it i'm pitching in when mary and joe have issues crystal does a lot of it working but she's working on another set of state grants at the same time funded by the the casinos jill does a lot of it so we don't really have dedicated resources we're trying to tap into like five ten percent of everyone um to not overstress it and we're at the we're at the point right now where the program has really grown in the dollars coming out warrant some dedicated resources to pay attention to it some of the things joe brought up grants that haven't been used in three to four years being able to check in with the licensees get real timelines on what's going to happen not having that going between five six different people and trying to track it down when you're looking at the whole portfolio um so that's really the the impetus of this we've been talking about it at our internal compliance working groups this is one of the areas that we think that we really need to strengthen our oversight strengthen our um our just understanding of what's going on with each program and having some dedicated funding would would be helpful and i think it i think it helps to protect the resources in the long run so that state auditors ever comes through everything is perfect um as it can be you know they'll always find something but as it can be and it's not well you know we're trying to make it work as best we can so rick can i um just run with the city of all this so rick i i mean i certainly don't feel like it's not a reasonable request my my feeling on these types of things is that instead of it being topped down a percentage five or ten percent i always feel like it should be bottoms up which is a proposal to say we feel like if we had the following resources to support administering the grants that it would be a responsible way to go about it and then we look at where that lands and feel you know or some of the right folks look at it and decided it leaves um you know sort of leaves us in a responsible place from that perspective but i don't like just saying let's allocate five or ten percent to administrative costs because it's random right i mean as the grant gets bigger your your your administrative process percentage of the grant should go down right i mean that's this the way these things should work so you know i don't know if you have to proposal is going to is going to entail a proposal to to add x number of folks to be able to handle grants so that as you said you're not pulling a little bit from you know a handful of people but but i would think that that would be a better way to do it so that it's it's really black and white and not just a throw a number at it and then you know it just it finds a way to get spent so that's just my input so so that's actually where we started off by shifting some resources off and then going to the commission and a budget that's a that's a good point of view um and we'll definitely take that back for for discussion with Todd in the legal room but this is the type of comments we need and you know are seeking from the bigger group because the commission we can make it that the commission approves and administrate a budget and it's not to exceed a certain amount every year you know and that's one way to make sure that what you're talking about is really scrutinized numbers and there's a there's a really good justification as to why we're doing it rather than because we can spend 10 percent so i understand what you're talking about i've been from the federal world with sometimes you're sitting there trying to figure out how to spend that money so it doesn't go away Derek i um i would agree with Ron but also just that i i think it's uh appropriate and the norm to get some administrative money out of this budget now and i think we should should be going down that path but uh again probably through a budgeting process maybe with that annual review of what that budget already is but i certainly think it's uh there should be some money allocated for administrative expenses thank you any any more questions for Derek okay Derek thank you very much thank you very much mr chair next up update on the 2020 awards okay um so we did uh you know again we i talked about them a little bit earlier um what we ended up having was we you know we had proposed 11 and a half million dollars for last year and and we only budgeted i mean i should say we only awarded uh about 6.7 let me just share this um this is just a spreadsheet that Mary had pulled together um just showing what our grants were for the last for the last year okay so um this doesn't quite fit on the screen terribly well but you'll see here we had budgeted um six million dollars for for the east okay and we actually awarded 3.9 million in the east so rolling over a little bit more than two million into the next year um and we had budgeted five million for the west award about 2.7 million uh so that again a fairly a good amount that rolls over now we do have the category two and the and and the um tribal we have to allocate those to east and west but as you can see that see that the total amount of 6.873 uh is what was awarded for this year here so um you know and again those reasons why we wound up with the reduced amount you know part of it was due to due to covid those workforce planning ones we reduced um you know again we determined there were a couple that were not eligible city of springfield i think was asking for four hundred thousand dollars for the fire department there and that was not funded at all um you know and there were a number of others that we uh that the transportation construction projects that we talked about uh that that we ended up not funding the ones that a couple of them that proposed you know zero percent matching funds and that kind of thing so um that's essentially where we are which means that we do have a fair amount of rollover that we can roll over into this year so i guess with that um i'll open it up to any questions that anyone might have on the 2020 do we have any questions for joe i guess i guess uh no questions okay uh next steps so just just for the for the next meeting i think primarily what we want to actually out in the in the western region they had asked me to do a little presentation on you know what what the status was due to covid you know what our revenues were before what they've been after what employment was before and after and i think that certainly makes a lot of sense to do a quick report on that so i will plan on um doing that at the next meeting but i think the the key thing for the next meeting is if you can look at those policy questions and sort of opine on um you know on what your thoughts are on them you know on what way we should go because the the commission will certainly take those under advisement in their decisions on what the final guidelines end up looking like um and mary is there anything that i'm forgetting that we should talk about at the next meeting yes in fact a very important thing well this is for not next steps this is other business can i so at the next meeting we anticipate holding the vote for the chair for this committee and for the member representing the subcommittee for community mitigation so we'd love to hear from members who would like to be in these positions um i think uh rick have you found it to be an onerous task or no i'll always stay in the area if uh if we if we get a a raise in uh pay i think ron said the same thing if we can double our salary from last year okay i think we can do that right yeah i have no problem continuing on mary if that's if that's the committee wants okay so that'll be at the next meeting we will have that as one of the first items start campaigning now rick sorry start campaigning now and ron i think you you were the representative to the subcommittee is that correct that's correct you still interested in that i'm i'm happy to continue if that's the desire of the group and i'll step aside the moment anybody else has any interest so i'll do whatever whatever works great i'll take half a rick's raise okay any um any other any other business before we adjourn um i just wanted to say so the next meeting is october 14th at 130 to 3 the same format as today okay okay well just mary you'll send out that document for us to make notes on yeah mary i think you you were having some technical difficulties there i don't know if you heard so the the policy document the policy questions we're hoping you could send that out in a form that they can mark up oh sure okay yep so just so that we can if everybody can you know type in their comments that might be easier to to digest okay great okay i make the motion to adjourn by john spree second that second second okay all's in favor thank you everybody thank you