 Good morning. Thank you. Already my day is off to a better start. We are calling to order commission meeting number 281 of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission on Thursday, November 7th at 10 a.m. here in the beautiful Plainville Town Hall at 190 South Street here in Plainville. Before we get started, I do wanna let those who are viewing today that we will not be able to provide closed caption, mainly just because of a technical capacity issue. Once we're back in Boston, we'll be able to renew that service. So we will begin with item number two. Commissioner Stevens, please. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair. In your package, you have the meeting minutes from the October 24th, 2019 Gaming Commission meeting. I'd move approval of the minutes. Again, as always subject to correction for any typographical errors or any other non-material matters. Second. Any discussion, suggested edits? Marrying nine. Do I have those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Five-zero. Thank you, Catherine. Moving on to our administrative update, Executive Director Projose. Good morning, members of the commission. Good morning. I wanna update you on a few items, personnel matters, some of the items personnel are working on, and then an outline of today's meeting. So on personnel matters, we have had some additions to our IT operations. Tamara and O'Connor has joined us as the IT operations coordinator. Ben Bishop has come on permanently as our senior service test specialist. And Amadeep Agnohorty, and I hope I pronounce Am and he goes by Am and I hope it's pronounced his last name correctly, has joined us as a senior systems engineer. Also in HR, Natasha Martin is back from leave and she will be based in Springfield and focused on some of the HR issues with our remote employees. We sort of have, you know, we have Boston employees and we have remote employees all valued the same, but she'll be helping with those issues. On some of the issues that the folks are working on, just highlight, everyone's doing great work. Our HR staff is working on an annual review of our employee handbook. So that is something that we will bring to the commission. Finance is actually, as Lance could probably tell us, is spending some time at PPC working on our annual statutory audit. Mr. Ziemba, who I have excused for today, and I will play the role of Mr. Ziemba a little later in the agenda, is working on, in addition to always working on community mitigation, he's preparing for the gaming policy advisory committee meeting, which is scheduled Tuesday at 2 p.m. So he's working on helping to staff that. So in terms of today's meeting first, I would like to thank people from our staff, Marianne Dually, Austin Bumpus, and Jamie Ennis. We, coming traveling as a commission down to a remote location with all our materials, making sure streaming is prepared in all the logistics that go along with it may seem easy, but it's not. Those people deserve a lot of thanks and credit from us. So then about today's meeting, you'll see it is broken up maybe into two sections along with the core of the report from our licensee at PPC. We have a number of racing items in the morning and regulations and research responsible gaming in the afternoon. We intentionally put racing in the morning so they could actually go and conduct racing in the afternoon, which they have, and I think it's a, is it a one o'clock start? It's a one o'clock start. So we're gonna just be cautious of that. I anticipate potentially for those watching that the commission may take a break for lunch after item five. So that would then put us on items six, seven, eight, and nine for the afternoon. So that is my administrative update. Any questions for Ed? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now playing the role is John Zimba. It is our quarterly responsibility to get a report from our licensees today. Lance George, general manager at Plains Park Casino will introduce his team for his quarterly report. Lance. Thank you. Great to be here. With me today I have Dana Fortney, our vice president of finance and Mike Mueller, vice president of operations. We will jump right in. Oh, perfect. Start with revenue and taxes paid. Several comparisons here and in sum, a look at the preceding seven quarters. For Q3 of 2019, revenues eclipsing 36 million and total taxes paid approaching 18 million. Year-to-year comparison for the third quarter shows a decline of approximately 8.7 million in revenue driven primarily by the opening of Encore Boston Harbor. To date, the impact of Encore has been more significant than anticipated. However, even with that solid performance with a win per unit of $314. And we also recognized that Q3 represents only the first three months for our new competition. As we've discussed in previous presentations, the property has always anticipated this opening and the greater than expected impact to revenues does not materially change our operation. Next slide is lottery sales. Again, a lot of numbers here. However, I'll draw your attention to just a few. Consistent with property revenues, lottery sales saw a decline. Sales down approximately 80,000 or 8.65%. Q3 2019 total sales of over 850,000. And not surprisingly, we anticipate going for that these numbers will roughly flow with gaming revenues, solid numbers, encouraging results, nothing material and no material changes to the lottery operation for us. With that, I'll turn it over to Dana. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair, commissioners. Good morning. I'll start with our Q3 spend by state. For the third quarter, in-state spend was 873,000 or 56% of qualified spend, which is a 3% improvement from second quarters, 53%. The remaining spend is split amongst the states on the right. The overall qualified spend from the second quarter of 132,000 is applicable to the timing of payment of our larger capital-related projects. Moving on to local spend. In-state versus host and surrounding community qualified spend shows a slight increase in community spend, quarter over quarter. The second quarter came in at 77,000 versus the third quarter of 103,000. The increase in local spend came from Mansfield from a vendor named Matt Graphix. They completed the banners and indoor signage around the property when we transitioned our loyalty program to my choice over the summer. In-state spend has maintained levels similar to previous quarters in the year. I just want to thank you. I know after getting your second quarter report, I'd raise some concerns about differences with your track record in terms of Massachusetts spend. But I do want to thank you. We had a meeting down with Lance and his team. We talked about kind of what one of the key drivers to that differential was, certainly understand. But certainly remain convinced that you are constantly on the lookout for vendor opportunities and shareings. And we talked about what some of those additional opportunities were in trying to find a mass source for those. So just to follow up on kind of the post-second quarter report that we had talked about. Thank you. We do continue to focus on that. The procurement team has taken some of the recommendations that Joe had. And we'll continue to look for more. Thank you. For vendor diversity, we continue to be pleased, like I said, with efforts made by our procurement team on the diversity goals. Year-over-year diverse spend for the quarter came in at 30% overall on a goal of 21% and a prior year of 27%. Taking a look at the breakdown, you'll note a large jump in maybe spend for the quarter, driven primarily by an increase in our spend with an IT equipment supplier, Millennium Information Technology. We continue with the success story looking at diverse spend from second quarter to third quarter. The decline in webe spend is $63,000 due to the properties transition from Liberty Creative Solutions, their marketing direct mail company, to a company called Maple Direct. Although it's impacting our third quarter numbers, we're optimistic in recovering the spend as Maple Direct is both a maybe and a webe. We're just awaiting their certification before we include them in our report. On to employment. At the end of September, we had 454 employees with 301 or 66% of them being full-time, 143 or 32% being part-time and 10 being seasonal. Our seasonal employment's related to our racing operation. On our diversity goals, we see continued success in our diversity in veteran employment figures while we keep focused on our in-state and local hiring. Just a note about employment, because I always like to, when I see your employment report, then go to your website for your job postings. You have about 20 to 25 job postings available, at least as of last night. That might have changed. But I'm going to have a conversation with Director Griff and I think your team, because I think where a new opportunity might exist is now that community rail service is extended down to Foxboro. You might have the ability to actually attract potential job candidates from up the community line. Down to Foxboro, so I think it'd be a good conversation to have to see how we could work with some of our sister agencies to get the word out about job opportunities that folks close to Boston may not have been thinking about prior to that community rail service. Definitely. Onto compliance. In Q3, our security team checked just shy of 17,000 IDs. They turned away a total of 446 individuals, of which 45 were minors, 96 were underage, and 305 had expired invalid or no ID. We did have two incidents regarding underage for the quarter. Both gained access to the gaming floor, one of which did game. However, he only inserted a total of $10 into slot machines before he was identified by security and promptly removed from the gaming floor. The other was identified by player services before gaming and was escorted from the floor. Neither individual consumed alcohol. Lastly, for compliance, the MAS DOT's traffic monitoring program was released on September 26, 2019. The study's conclusion is that the measured impact on traffic volumes, trip patterns, motor vehicle crash trends, and traffic operations has been relatively minor with operating conditions that the monitored intersections found to be similar to the conditions that were documented in the 2015 baseline study. Take a moment to jump in here for public transportation and a GATRA update that we committed to providing each quarter. Continue to meet. The last meeting we had was on 1028, so we can a half ago or so. As far as current steps or current status, next steps, they will be revising and providing a new route for review and consideration. For a myriad of reasons, the route that was provided previously didn't work necessarily for us or for them. And so we look forward to receiving a revised or their ideas on what a new route could potentially look like. No major hurdles or stumbling blocks just agreeing on what the route will be. We should have that revision this week or next week. It shouldn't be that long. And remind me, Lance, that it's the route to extend the bus service that goes to Patriot Place. So I think there are a variety of different ideas that could be implemented. I don't know that that's where they are right now. It's kind of in their court to come back to us. But the last one we saw was more of a route between Attleboro all the way up to us. It did not involve Patriot Place at that time. Oh, okay. Now was that the only to do, if you will, relative to the study that you just mentioned? It is, yes. Yeah, as we think about relicensing too quickly from now, what, eight months from now, certainly we're moving furiously. We want to get this accomplished. We'd love to have it implemented or agreed to by the end of this year. But as I think about June of next year, that's something we want implemented prior to that. Thank you. Moving to an update on our women leading at Penn Program. Over the summer, we read the book You Are a Bad Ass by Jens and Sarah. The book had a great focus on developing your confidence by identifying common problems that people encounter and giving you a way to face that problem head on. I really enjoy the excerpt from the book that's on the slide, especially the part about the more you push yourself to do the things that you're scared to do the stronger your confidence will be in the future. In our next meeting in the fourth quarter, we'll be recapping the book with our group. And our additional topic is navigating the workforce, which is a module that'll focus on gender bias in the workplace and how to work through those hurdles. Quick question about this program. So you had success last year, the first year of the program, and I saw the numbers eight of the 16. So half of those women were promoted, which is tremendous. Is that word getting out that, hey, this is a great program. It could help you. I mean, are women interested in this program? They are. We try to keep it at a relatively manageable size. And then as women get promoted and move to other properties, we're replacing them. And there is questions that I get usually every month or so about, is there another opening, are we able to join? Great, thanks. With that though, another success story of the group from 2018, we had another promotion in the third quarter. Chelsea Marinucci, the properties revenue audit manager, accepted a position at a larger property with a broader set of responsibilities. She was one of my direct reports. So I'm very proud of her and her development. She started as a revenue auditor at opening and then received multiple promotions through her time there. So I'm really genuinely excited to see what she does, what her future looks like and how she grows her career. The only downside I've heard from her is that it's already been snowing in Colorado. That wasn't exactly exciting for it, but we are very, very happy for it. And are the women, they understand this is a real opportunity, even though they may have to move. That's not any kind of a barrier? I would say for some, they prefer to stay, and that's okay. For others, we have the conversation where if this is what you'd like to do with your future and your career, moving may be a real reality for them in the future. And we just talk about it, a handful of us have moved multiple times and so can lend some guidance on that. So you're being a good mentor, it sounds like. Doing our best. Okay, great, thank you. Moving on to Mike. Good morning, Madam Chair and Commissioners. Good morning. In looking at the marketing section, Plain Ridge Park continues to be a valued partner with our local host communities as we supported many local events this year. We were a top donator for the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life where we had many employees participate. Two employee events we conducted this year to raise money were a $5 jeans day where you could donate $5 and wear jeans all day on Friday. And we also had several cookoff contests throughout the year where everybody would bring in their food and then you would pay a small fee to get a ticket to eat some of the food there and then judge and we'd have winners. So that raised a lot of money for us. We also had great guest participation through our donation boxes located on the floor. This allowed our guests to donate their low value Tito tickets to the cause as they exited the casino. Year to day 2019, we raised a total of $24,900. That included 6,300 from our employee events and another 5,300 from the drop boxes from the guests. Another great event we did supported the Friends of North Attleboro Animal Shelter. This event used guests and employee donations to help stock the shelves at local animal shelters. And we also made financial donations to fund entertainment and to the Plainville Permanent Firefighters, IAFF Local 3415 here. Finally, as you can see on this page, we do continue to support local community initiatives by donating to and participating in the taste of Tritown. This is a local food festival through the Tritown Chamber of Commerce that benefits local food pantries in Foxboro, Mansfield and Norton. Mike, I just, I wanna point out that this is an important slide. When we think about the contributions that our licensees make as corporate citizens, we recognize that in so many ways in terms of the broad impacts that PPC provides for Plainville here. But the fact that your employees are also giving back on an individual basis is significant. It shows that they understand in so many ways the opportunities that PPC is providing and that they are invested in helping. So really a credit to each of the employees who participated in this effort. Thank you. Thank you. Moving on to the next page. Looking at some of our larger sponsorships for the year, we continue our relationship with Rentham Outlet Malls as well as the TPC Boston PGA event and the Fenway Concert Series. Something new for us this year, we've also worked with Beasley Media Group to successfully implement an outdoor concert series that utilizes our racetrack to hold concerts in the summer. It's been a good success and we're looking forward to more of that next year. On the next tab, looking at some of our recent marketing highlights, it includes a MyCash to free slot play conversion, MyChoice, MySummer, and this was our August Mercedes-Benz giveaway. This was our first major promotion we did under the new MyChoice program where we gave away their choice of a new Mercedes-Benz SLC 300 or $30,000 in cash. Also, we had Responsible Gaming Education Week where we offered numerous on-property events that included contests and quizzes for our employees that not only educated them, but offered them prizes as well for being well-versed in responsible gaming. Finally, during the week, we partnered with GameSense to have a watch giveaway where we first 100 guests for all five days of the event that visited the GameSense booth, each received a watch that's pictured here on the right. Mike, can you expand a little bit more on the MyCash and the MyChoice programs? Sure, what we did is we had a, when we paired with Pinnacle, there was two card programs, two marketing loyalty programs, and we combined them into one, which is the MyCash, or the MyChoice card. So the MyCash to free slot play conversion essentially allows them to take all of their points that they've earned and give them yet another option as to how they want to spend it. And this allows them to take their comp points and turn it into free slot play. So now it's just another option. They could go comp at a restaurant, they can comp at the gift shop, or they can turn into free slot play. So did you find, to the extent, you can answer this question that people had points in the two different loyalty programs and decide to combine them? Yeah, absolutely. And they do enjoy the ability to have the one card now at all of our properties across the country. It allows you to play here and earn your points. You can go to Colorado, earn your points, you can go up to Maine, earn your points, and it all stays in the one bucket. Great. In conclusion, we wanted to spotlight one of our local community business partners, Camelot Enterprises. Camelot is a veteran business enterprise located in Stoughton, Matt's, that opened in 1987. We've been working with them for almost two years as our local provider for many items like you see pictured here. Our team especially loves the work they do with their specialty embroidered items that we often use for employee gifts and incentive giveaways. They do amazing work for us and we continue to look forward to a long future with them. And here actually today is a couple of representatives from Camelot that are going to speak. We have Pam Glatter, our sales rep, and Elliot Kaplan, the owner. And I'd like to introduce them now. Excellent. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having us. And thank you for coming. Good morning. I'm Elliot Kaplan, obviously. Camelot was started by me as a veteran-owned business in 1987. I served the military in during the 60s, both in this in-country and in Germany. I don't have a lot more to say about that. We started the business in 87. It was a single screen printing machine expanded it by moving to Stoughton in 1993 to a large facility with automatic equipment, both screen printing, embroidery, engraving. We also offer thousands, literally, of promotional products. We've been working with Eli at Plain Ridge Park. And I think Pam can describe the impact of having PPC as a client for your business. It's been excellent. Pam can speak more to what she's worked with Eli and has expanded the whole situation with GameSense. And then please use the microphone. Sure. Thank you. Yes, hi. I met Eli at a South Shore Chamber of Commerce event and she suggested I apply for the mass gaming. So we sent the application in and we got approved and it's been a great relationship. We started off doing some small things like water bottles and marketing promos and we worked with the Human Resource Department to do employee incentives as well. And then we worked with dining with chef codes and we worked with the loft. And that's expanded now to Encore and to other casinos as well as GameSense. And I really enjoyed the GameSense portion and really understand now the importance of promoting that. So that's been a nice relationship. And I recently met with someone on the mass gaming who does the marketing as well. So it's been a great relationship. I just want to say one other thing. Go to the microphone, sir. Monday is Veterans Day and I think it would be nice if we can recognize the day here today for both veterans and those currently serving. Well, sir, first we thank you for your service. And I think that that is an important point, particularly while we are in this facility to acknowledge that how much we, as a commission and agency, appreciate all those who have served. And we will be remembering that service on Monday. My fellow commissioners, did you want to add? Just a quick question about, sir, did you realize that as a veteran-owned business, there were these kinds of opportunities or was that new to you? It's new to me. Okay, yep. We've looked into what we got, the license for mass gaming. And since then, we've been looking into other avenues as far as veteran-owned situations are concerned. Yeah, okay. Can I ask about that licensing process? I have, we have heard anecdotally that it could be a bit of a barrier for some businesses to go through the licensing process. What's your perspective? Obviously, you went through it and now described the... We had no problems. We thought it was straightforward, provided the information as a veteran and provided my separation papers and all of that. I found no problem with the process. I thought the process was very smooth, actually. Happy to hear that. Yeah, I would just add, thank you for your service as well. And again, I think you're a great example of what the statute envisioned that even though a lot of the gaming employment opportunities were going to be closer to where a casino was located, I think you're a great example of where spending dollars are having an economic impact beyond the region of where a casino might be located. So congratulations on your good work. Thank you. Can I ask a question? Yes. Let me get your name. Yeah. Well, being brought up in the 50s and 60s, JFK obviously was a meaningful representative coming from this area, the whole thing. So we picked that name. Great, thank you. Thanks. Can I ask another question, please? Susan, when you did go through the registration process to become a DBE, did you go through the state office or did you go through a veteran's? State office. The state, OSD, that's excellent. I know that they've been working hard to streamline that process. So anything that we can do to debunk the idea that it's difficult is, no, that's an important message for us to send. And I suspect that they could use the advocacy of veterans like yourself who have had that. If anybody's interested, any veteran wants information, they're more than free to call me. I'd be happy to talk to them about it. Excellent. Thank you so much. Any further questions? And that was a good question to ask. No, I just, the golf shirts look very sharp on here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Lance, does this conclude your presentation? It does, I apologize. Yes, ma'am. We're good. Thank you. Any questions for? Yes, I had a quick question. Yes, yes. Have a serf. Me. Got it. You mentioned at the beginning the impact that competition was having. Certainly. Is your experience, then you mentioned, but it's only been the first quarter. Do you anticipate or do you have experience from other properties where competition came close to your resort? Do you have a strategy? Are you doing a few things differently? Do you expect some of those customers who may have gone off the first quarter and tried their hand elsewhere that you may be able to bring some of those folks back? What, what? Sure. So I think parse out two questions there. One is, do I think that some of our customers will return? Certainly. I think at least, I can only speak for our openings as a company, we have great 41 properties. Certainly in your first year, your goal and your job is to drive trial, drive awareness, build the database. And at that point revenues become more important and they supersede your bottom line number, your EBITDA number. And so at some point, and we did the same thing, you begin to pull back on some of your marketing efforts to try to streamline and make your operation more efficient. And so yes, I do think at some point Encore, when MGM, Penn, everybody tries the same thing and that is the focus out of the gates is to ensure that people are visiting your facility. And then at some point gradually you will pull back. And so I do expect at some point, the level of marketing that is occurring now for Encore probably is dialed back a bit. And as far as people rejoining us or coming back to the property, yeah, normally you see a spike if you're the opening property, if you're the existing property, you see a decline. But as time goes on, we will see some of our customers return. I would point out, however, what is likely to occur is that maybe they're not just our customers going forward, however, it's likely that we'll see a split. So sometimes they'll visit Encore, sometimes they'll visit us, sort of depends on the day of the week. And so while it's not necessarily a loss of customers, it becomes more a loss of trips. Thank you. So you focused primarily on the competition being within the Commonwealth as opposed to from neighboring states. That's your data is revealing that. As far as who our primary competition is? Right now, in terms of that loss, you focused on within the Commonwealth versus from other jurisdictions. Tough to tell. So I would argue that our biggest competition is Rhode Island, given the proximity and geography, about 25 minutes to Twin River from our facility. The challenge there is to try to quantify it. They were already opening, or they were already open when we opened, so we didn't see a loss of revenue per se when they opened. But I would argue that our primary competitor is Twin River. However, we wouldn't have seen a loss in revenue because they were already there, they were an existing facility. So we're only experiencing that with Encore. But if the question is who is our competition, it's the closest competitor. And I think our early research revealed that PPC repatriated $100 million from other jurisdictions, which of course was a goal of the Expanded Gaming Act. So I wondered if you had felt that in any way the other jurisdictions were taking any of those repatriated dollars back. It's interesting for us. What we have seen is that, as we just mentioned, Encore has been very aggressive out of the gates. And Twin River has reacted a little bit. I think the second question you had was, are we going to do things different? We're not. We're not going to get into an arms race or a spending war. That's not who we are based on our size. We're a $260 million facility compared to a $2.6 billion facility. Very different facility, very different operation, very different marketing spend. And so our approach is to let that work itself out. It will come back in line. We're not going to change dramatically the way we do things. And so on those lines, a lot of what could happen in terms of this competition, which was predicted, perhaps falls into two categories, competing for an existing customer and then growing the market. So how would you, can you comment relative to the growing the market piece, which would be something that we for one would be interested in learning? Yeah, so these are all public numbers. And so we're studying feverishly in preparation for our budget meeting in a couple of weeks. And so one of the things that we have found public numbers, if you include Connecticut, Rhode Island, and all of Massachusetts, even with the addition of Encore, I believe the market growth was 3.8%, which speaks to me at least, that it's a redistribution of the existing pie, more so than it is growing the market. Now those are slot numbers only because table games numbers are not released for the state of Connecticut, so I can only speak to those slot revenues. But I guess I'm a little surprised at how small that number is. I think it's certainly easier for everybody when the market is growing. This appears at 3.8% to be more of a redistribution. That's a quick question relative to a lottery. And I know some of the numbers year over year down, I'm assuming some of that is just based on a corresponding dip in visitation. But have you needed to have or thought about having any conversations with our colleagues at the lottery in terms of new product mix or more machines or whatever a solution might be to drive some of those numbers up? Happy to do so. I think our revenues, public numbers are down about 18 to 19%. Lottery revenues were only down about 8.65%. So they are outperforming, if you will, but certainly happy to reconnect with the lottery it has been a while. That's one question on that. And I think I saw the slide and it dressed the ticket sales in the player activated terminals. Do you have Kino as well? We do. And did I miss that in terms of the numbers? That's all included though. It is included. Yes, yes, we have Kino. Certainly at flu use we offer Kino. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes. Thank you. Thank you. Moving on to item number five on our agenda, Dr. Lightbaum please on our racing, our director of our racing division. Good morning, Chad. Good morning, commissioners. Good morning. Good morning. Our first item on the racing agenda is the racing update. And just gonna do a quick one. I know we have a lot of different items on the agenda today. Earlier this summer at Plain Ridge, they held the Spirit of Mass trot for $250,000. And they added a new race this year, the Claire Barton Pace. This was another great way to showcase Plain Ridge and get some national attention. And it had the benefit, there were some people that had Massachusetts ties that actually their horse finished second in the race in the Massachusetts Spirit of Mass race. And then in the Claire Barton, some Massachusetts natives won with their horse. So that was kind of a highlight to not only have a big race like that, but also have New England connections, Massachusetts connections do well through the day. On the screen is a picture of commissioner Cameron in the, with the winner's trophy. Dr. Lightbaum, I think there were many, many people in that race. You included Dr. Lightbaum. I'll name a few of them. They had a nice day of different people come out for it. One of the people in there is the Massachusetts House of Representative Elizabeth Peoria and I apologize if I pronounced her last name wrong. Sportscaster Bob Neumeyer was there. Hall of Fame harness trainer, driver John Campbell was there. And then some local Plain Ridge people, Nancy Longabody, Melissa Rico were in the picture. And then their board of selectmen from Plain Ridge were there and the Patriots' Minutemen. It's quite a day. And do you know the overall attendance? They don't keep attendance figures there because there is no charge of admission. So I think we heard that it was certainly up over the. Yes, they had a nice turnout. It was on a weekend day so that they could do that. It was a lot of people. Yeah, bringing good business to Plain Ridge. And people were excited about the local ties winning races. Yes. Alex, a quick question. And maybe you know this. How did Clara Barton get a race name that way? Don't equate her with racing. I think they were trying to come up with names related to Massachusetts. And that's how they came up with that one. Steve O'Toole apologized for not being able to be here today. He had a prior engagement, but the next time he's at a meeting, he may be able to elaborate on his decision to name it that. The other exciting thing at Plain Ridge, which we just finished up was the Sire Stakes for the Massachusetts Sandler Breds. That program has expanded greatly. They had three legs, three different weekends where they held trials to qualify for the finals. The finals themselves, they gave out $800,000 in purses that day. And the overall was $1.8 million for that series. So it was definitely worth it. I looked back to 2013, which was before any of the gaming money came in, before Penn came. And that year, the total Sire Stakes purses was $253,000. So that's obviously a huge increase. And another exciting thing was for the two-year-old pacing Colton Gelding's division actually had to be split into two different races because they had enough horses for that. So that program is expanding. Suffolk Downs completed their final racing this summer. And I was going to go through and bring up statistics and all that, but those numbers end up in our annual report and all, and people can see those. The final day, they did have 12,000. Over 12,000 people come for attendance. The handle's always been good. They had a t-shirt that you could buy, and the proceeds went to Thorobrid Aftercare. And I just, rather than go through different numbers and all, I wanted to read a quote from Susan Walsh, our chief steward, who's been at Suffolk since she was a hot walker there, which is basically starting at the very bottom level. And then she worked her way up as a groom, became an owner, a trainer. Eventually, she became our chief steward. So her, to quote Susan Walsh, horse racing is, in the end, so much more than a list of winners or statistics on attendance. It's a crazy quilt of memories that can never be erased from those who have spent the best part of their lives here. I thought that was an appropriate send-off for Suffolk. And Alex, I know it's meaningful to you, too. It is, thank you. Do you want to share a favorite story? Let's see. I actually had a baby shower in the, it was given to me in what's called the Trainers Viewing Room. It's right on the turn of the track, so the trainers can stand there and watch their horses work in the morning. And they did it as a surprise. The way they got me there was they had the chief steward at the time tell me that there was somebody coming from out of town to do an inspection on the test barn. And so I needed to be down there. And I drove our people crazy beforehand saying, make sure everything's in. They were all in on the joke. Wow. So, yeah. And that's a personal one. The other things are obviously the horses and the people there. It was incredible, very much like a family. And generations of people through their families would work there. And, yeah, very exciting times. And you saw famous horses. Yes, yeah. They had several horses of the year that attended the Mass Cap, a Kentucky Derby winner that was in it. Cigar was treated as a celebrity. He was banned from New York and had a state police escort the whole way, the horse. So those were definitely some exciting days. So let's see. Our next item is the 2020 racing application. And I'll ask the Plain Ridge folks to come up. So today I have Lenny Calderon, the announcer, and Racing Services Manager, and Jason Savestano, the mutual manager here in Place of Sevo Tool to answer questions you may have. You all have had a chance to have the public hearing for comments. You've seen the application. They've basically asked for harness racing dates, April 6 through November 27. It's a very similar calendar to this year with the one change is that they've added a couple of days. This year they'll do 108. Next year they'll do 110 through an agreement with the Harness Horsemen's Association. And they're going to add the, as two Sundays, that they're going to add. I won't read the requirements. Those are in the memo and come straight from the statute. The number of days that they're going to race will also make them in compliance for the ability to simulcast that legislation is still in there for at least 100 days, which they will have with 110. The one thing that we have done for the last four years is ask that they have an independent review of the track surface done. The first year in 2016, Ed Ryan did it. He's been associated with Freehold Yonkers and is consulted on different training centers, building tracks, and things like that. The last three years, Dan Herbs from Rosecroft has done it with the Maryland Docky Club. So this year we're just asking that they have somebody new come in to do their review. And again, this is basically a standard operating procedure that we've done now for four years. This will be the fifth year. Does the commission have any questions on the application? Do you have any, are you going to approve or comment on who they select in terms of the qualifications of who's looking at it? Just please don't use somebody you've used in the past. They usually bring a name to me with their qualifications. So that'll happen before they. Yeah, it'll be informal. Yes, right. So Dr. Leipelm, obviously from the hearing, this application has very strong community support, which is always a positive thing when we look at licenses every year. So that I look at is a positive thing. Again, I mentioned at the hearing, and I'll mention it again, we really do appreciate the association working with Penn National in order to jointly come together with racing days, which is great. I know there's a long-term contract in place, so we really do appreciate and think that's best when there is that collaboration to do things the right way. And I know the track has been the safety, and we take that very seriously. In fact, I don't think there are too many standard bred tracks around the country that really require the safety check. I think it's a really important piece. And to have someone different, I think it makes sense, too, because we want people to feel. We want it to be safe. Yes. I know you feel strongly about that. You've always had the best interest of the participants, whether they be drivers or horses, their safety. So I commend you for always having that first before anything else, that safety issue. So I think those are very good, strong pieces in support of this application. Yeah, it is a strong application. May I agree? Commissioner Senigo? Yeah. Just to put a final point to the prior comments, the harness horseman association highlights in their comments the need for some replenishment of the track. Does anybody, Jason or Lenny, want to talk a little bit about that? Or are we to take the inspection to be the one to really tell us whether there is indeed some need for replenishment of the surface? I'm sorry, you said about the replenishment? Yes. In the back, there's a letter from the horseman's group saying that the track cover material needs replenishment. OK. Is that something you agree with or disagree with or is it going to be left for the inspection? I guess before you answer it, you got an opportunity to actually take a look at what's going on. I have not, but if you're not prepared to answer that, that's OK. You've heard a Steve O'Toole on that and he's looking into it. OK. Well, let me put the question to Alex. What do you see happening relative to this topic? We'll wait for the inspection. Well, Steve O'Toole was offered to meet with the harness horseman and that's where we've left it is that they should get together. Track maintenance is an ongoing issue. That's something that happens every day. Microphone. Track maintenance is something that happens every day. They have their machines out on the track and all that. And comments from drivers on a daily basis can be made to management. If they notice something, either sometimes the track is too deep, sometimes it's too hard. Those types of things can be taken care of immediately. And I don't know if they, I'm not sure on the stoned us level right now. I was up there on the Steyer State's Day watching. With Steve O'Toole, we could see the machines going around and you could see that it was digging down into there was stoned us there. And it looked like it was deep enough. I'm not an expert on tracks. But again, we have told the harness horsemen that they need to sit and meet with Steve O'Toole on those concerns. And that's something that doesn't need to come to the commission. They can say, we noticed that there needs to be some stoned us in this area. And Steve can take care of that immediately. Dr. Leipam, you are an expert, though, on the safety of horses and what it takes to maintain that. And have you seen evidence of breakdowns with horses, which would be an indication that maybe there's an issue with the track? Yeah, we haven't seen them. That, we did have one that had a fracture that needed to be euthanized. On the standard bread side, we don't see the number of incidences that they do on the thoroughbred side. And it's not unusual looking back at our statistics. Some years, we go without any incidences there. Other times, there may be one or two. And we haven't finished doing a complete review on that particular incident yet. It may or may not have been due to the track surface. So every time there is an issue with a horse, you do look into the matter and see if you can identify if there is a safety concern? Yes, any time there's a horse that dies at the track, regardless of what the reason is, we have an autopsy done on it, a full autopsy by an accredited laboratory that does this. And they give us that information back. We also get a blood sample from that horse and send it to our lab for drug testing. And those have always come back negative. Thank you. What time of year did that happen? Do you know approximately when that happened? It happened maybe about a month ago? About a month ago. OK. Thank you. And at our public hearing, the issue around safety was discussed as well when Mr. O'Toole was here to address the application. Yes. So thank you for filling in the details today. Any further questions about the application? I think when you look at the requirements, the public hearing was very helpful because we did hear from so many of the stakeholders, including the community members and including our public safety officials, the chief of police and the chief of the fire department were able to address issues around the racing. And they really acknowledged that there have been really minimal issues around community public safety. And in terms of the horse racing, I think what I see here is a request for a vote conditioned on, again, what has been the practice in any case of certifying as to the quality of the track. This year, you just want to make sure to be completely transparent with all stakeholders that it would be a new entity that would do the review. Yes. And that doesn't, in no way, puts a negative comment on the people who've done it in the past. That's true. They were all well-qualified. Excellent. Thank you for the questions. So do you want to, for the record, state your recommendation, Dr. Lightwell? My recommendation is that Plain Ridge will have an independent, when we start over again, the Racing Division recommends that the commission approve the application of Plain Ridge Gaming and Development LLC, Plain Ridge Racecourse for live harness racing in 2020 with the following condition. Plain Ridge will have an independent expert that hasn't previously reviewed the track surface, reviewed the track surface prior to racing. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission reserves the right to ask for further reviews during the racing season. So Madam Chair, I would move that the commission approve the application of harness race racing license filed by Plainville Gaming and Redevelopment LLC, also known as Plain Ridge Park Racecourse for the calendar year 2020, subject to the conditions outlined in the memo from Dr. Lightbaum included in the commission's packet and any other conditions discussed at the meeting today, which I believe there were no other conditions that we discussed. So the ones that Dr. Lightbaum has included in the packet. Second. Any further discussion, any additional condition? Okay. Those in favor? Aye. Opposed? 5-0 please, Catherine. Thank you. Thank you. Good luck with the racing season. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Lenny. Thank you, Jason. Thank you so much. If I may say one thing. I know Mr. Sebbins, you asked about the Clara Barton, how we chose that name. If I could give a little bit of insight into that. My understanding is that Paul Verret, our race secretary was looking for, he was going through the historical records that was a native of Massachusetts and he came, I guess he looked through the books there and he came up with Clara Barton because she was a volunteer nurse. She was a native of Massachusetts and she was a volunteer for the Red Cross. So that's how the name came to be. Any thoughts on a Jeff Kinney ceremonial race? I'm sorry for what? A Jeff Kinney race. Thank you very much. Thank you. Dr. Leipel, moving on to item five C. Our next item is the racing and a report for the year 2018. You have it in front of you and it's in the packet so we're not going to read it word for word. Just go over some highlights. Suffolk Downs raced eight days and in that year, Plain Ridge Park raced 110 days. The number of drug positives that we had went down a little bit in 2018. We always strive to do as much education as possible. We have a trainer's manual that is posted on the website. We leave a copy in our, there's an office hallway that we share with the racing office that the horsemen have access to. We leave a copy there and try to get the word out. We have a whole list of medications on the controlled therapeutic schedule that have thresholds and how to avoid getting over the threshold level. So we did see the levels go down a little bit at Plain Ridge, which was great. At Suffolk, it did go up a little bit. That might have just been that with Suffolk Downs, the type of racing there, you're getting so many people coming all at once from out of state that may have been in jurisdictions that may have had slightly different regulations. I don't know if there's, the rulings stayed fairly similar levels between that in 2017 between the judges at Plain Ridge and then the stewards at Suffolk Downs. At Suffolk Downs, there was a claiming issue that the stewards very diligently worked on and did a lot of research on as well as with folks from Suffolk Downs and discovered this false claim that involved maybe 10 different people. So all of those people got rulings against them and that's one of the reasons why the rulings at Suffolk Downs that year were increased. It's not necessarily that all of a sudden there were a lot of issues. That one particular incident happened to involve a lot of people. I'll turn it over to Chad now if he wants to go over maybe some of the financial highlights. Good morning, commissioners. Good morning, good morning. So after going through all the financials in the report, you did a bit of attribution analysis and overall we saw an increase in the revenue categories across all line items, except for the association licensing fee, which was down roughly 3%. And as Alex had noted on the compliance side, the fines and penalties on a monetary value were down slightly, but everything else was up. So overall that was good on the revenue side. I think one of the biggest attribution for that was there was a 7% uptick in simulcast. Suffolk Downs alone was up $10 million in that. So that's been happening over the past three or four years. The simulcast has really been increasing year over year. And then also there was an increase at 13% in licensing fees. So overall it was a lot of positive items on that and I just wanted to put out if there's any questions out there that you had. Dr. Leipbaum, you mentioned when you talked about medication overages and what the statistics were that you actually spent some time with educating people, right? How to avoid an overage. Yes. So that was of interest to me. So you're actually trying to be proactive here in assisting individuals on how to be smart about substances that are allowed, but certainly at only a percentage, right? Only a level. Right. They realized that there's a subset of drugs that are used by even maybe your pet veterinarian who uses every day their legitimate drugs to use with animals to help them heal or get over a cold and infection, different things. And so obviously we wanna be able to treat the race horses with those therapeutic medications. A lot of those also would not be appropriate to find in a horse that's actively racing. If it's a pain reliever, you know, it's certainly appropriate if the horse just got injured but you don't want it in the horse that's actually racing. So it's probably been seven or eight years ago, they came up, RCI, came up with a list of therapeutic medications and maybe added a few over the years, I think it was around 20 to begin with and now it's up to around 30 of drugs that you can legitimately use and it just gives guidelines on when to stop using them, how much you can give to stay under the threshold limits. It's not necessarily an exact science because there's different things that can affect how a horse metabolizes drugs but it is a help to trainers and veterinarians. Great, well I think it's important that you saw fit to emphasize and try to assist with knowledge, right? How to do this better rather than say, we got you on the back end, you're trying to be proactive on the front end so that people don't run into a problem with medication. Yes, we prefer not to have any positives. That would be, that's easier for everybody and we want fair racing so we want it fair for everybody and everybody to be following the same guidelines. Thank you. So it's a great report of course because of timing, we're looking at the calendar year end of 2018. Right. We can probably expect something really similar in terms of numbers for 2019 because racing and simulcasting was probably among the same levels but it is for 2020 that we might see a change. Of course, we'll have to see what that is depending on what happens with the legislation given that now we don't have a application from Suffolk Downs and there's still a question as to whether and how long they'll be able to simulcast in the next kind of year. Correct. So I just want to point that for the record. Yes. I have one quick question, Mary Ann, can you go to slide 34 please? It's the last, it's a photo on the last page. So I just noticed Commissioner Stavins is holding a bucket. Yes. I didn't know if you were doing double duty that day. I'm not a licensed test barn official. I think it was more of a prop. The bucket was empty. For the record, that's a water bucket. It's not a water bucket. Again, if you go back to the fact that it was unlicensed, I didn't know the difference. Did you know the difference exactly? I couldn't know. I'm a great team down there at the test barn. Yeah. Absolutely. I thought the report was particularly helpful for me as I continue to learn more about the horse racing industry, particularly the racing terminology. Thank you very much on that. I have a question that I forgive me for not knowing the answer with respect to simulcasting. Those revenues are treated in this, how are they treated for the purpose of state benefits in terms of local aid and taxes? There's no tax rate on simulcasting, correct? So the... If you could walk me just through how they're treated, that would be great. So the simulcasting is for local aid purposes, is lumped in under the handle. Under the handle. Yeah, the total handle. There's no different treatment. So the $10 million that was extra that came through Suffolk would be subject to the same division as all the rest of the handle. Correct. Okay. Confirming what I understood. Thank you so much. Excellent report. Thank you. And thanks for such a successful season and very ethical and the proactive piece of what you do. It's much appreciated. Thank you. So IMD is a raising legislation update and Captain Blue, our deep legal counsel, did the memo for it. We've both been following the different bills and are waiting to see what happens with that for raising. So in the commission packet today, there is a memo regarding the legislation that is before the legislature. The commissions, the racing statutes, chapter 128A and 128C were scheduled to sunset last July. At that point, the legislature passed an extension until January 15th of 2020. So at the moment, the legislature has a choice. They need to act before January 15th, 2020, or racing in the Commonwealth will no longer be allowed. They can either pass another extension, which would look very much like attachment A to this memo, or they can pass another racing bill. And what you have in the packet are three bills that address racing. The first one is HB13, that is the commission bill. It is broad and it gives the commission a great deal of flexibility to address the issues that impact racing through the regulatory process. SB101 is a similar kind of bill. It has some slightly different terms and it is a little more specific in terms of what's statutory versus what's regulatory. And there are some points in SB101 that would be worth considering by the commission if they were to create regulations around racing. HB322 is another bill. It's set up in a way that it doesn't seem to either extend 128A or 128C. I think it would have some difficulty standing alone, but it also tracks very much what SB101 does and HB13. And then finally, just because it's been out in public, there is HB4070, it's a gaming bill. The reason it's in this memo is because the proponent for that bill has talked about a racing component to any gaming application they would file. So there's been a lot of attention paid to that bill as well. Alex and I can answer any questions. We've been watching these as they've gone through. Again, the date to take some sort of action is coming up. I, first of all, general counsel, I appreciated this memo. I thought it was very well put together. Gave an excellent snapshot of each of the pieces of legislation that we've been hearing about and that are out there. Once again, we're faced with another pending deadline where the can kind of keeps getting kicked on the road a little bit. I think this is, it seems unusual and not common place in the commonwealth for regs of an existing business to keep getting sunsetted. I think it creates some level of uncertainty for operators, certainly some uncertainty for potential operators. And at a time when we know one segment of this industry is doing really well, which is with respect to harness racing by evidence of an extended purse agreement, I think I saw in the packet that we have an increasing membership in the harness horsements association, all good signs that are pointing to success in that industry. And it seems to me that the regs are not keeping up with the state of the industry as it is right now in Massachusetts. So one suggestion I wouldn't, we can certainly consider as I would like to see this commission renew emphasis for the bill that we've had up on Beacon Hill for a number of years and whether that wouldn't be at this meeting, but our next meeting maybe give the commission a chance to re-vote our support for the bill or whether we would allow our chair to put a new cover letter together with our existing bill and send it off to legislative leadership. I think that would be helpful. But again, we're looking at some just in January deadline that we usually wait up until the 23rd hour to figure out whether Plain Ridge or the folks at Suffolk could even do, you know, accept bets or simulcast or anything and it, again, I think we're at the right time in the right moment to give some more emphasis to our bill which kind of creates an open and transparent process going forward as to how we'd work with the horse racing industry. I think Commissioner Stavins, you're referring to the January 15th deadline for 2020. You know, I agree with everything that you say in conceptually, I would add a couple of things. You know, just a very fine point, you referred to regs that keep getting extended and it's really the legislation. It's a statute that I just wouldn't wanna confuse it with the authority that we do have when it comes to promulgating regs and the one that we don't have which is the legislative action. I do think that and agree that the memo lays out really the key summary or the key aspects and the differences of the bills but I think it really, and perhaps this is what you were alluding to, Commissioner, it really might be helpful to revisit the reasons of some of the recommendations when it came to what we drafted. The history and evolution of racing in this state but in many other states as well is one that has resulted in a lot of different numbers and premiums and takeouts and for one, what we feel that are the legislation that we were requiring and met the requirement to submit to the legislature. One of the things that they would accomplish we thought at the time and I think it's still valid now is streamlined significantly the ability to regulate racing. Not just give the industry and the stakeholders certainty which is critical but then whatever cannot be determined have the commission, this body to have the flexibility and to be deliberative, analytical and whatnot and come to ultimately a resolution either via regulation or anything else or votes. So I have to imagine that just given very recent history at the legislature they, because they extend at the 11th hour they may not really appreciate the thought that went into what we put together. I think it's to the extent that we can we should remind that or make it or send a memo like this with some of the additional some of the research that I know we did at the time when we compared the takeouts and premiums in other states and what other states for example have done to try to streamline and update their own legislation. So I think that's some of the things that we could highlight. I'm not optimistic that there's a lot of time to do that between now and January 15th. It's something that we've talked about at some point but I think again this memo begin to really begins to really articulate the key differences and one of simply to me is that with our legislation we think we would have the ability to among other things help the industry as it was intended in the gaming act. The race horse development fund that was put together with its moving pieces, the split and whatnot and was always meant to be an important piece to aid the industry and our ability to do that especially in the federal bread side has been constrained by the recent short term extensions. So. I just want to clarify the process. First off, I think I've given my thanks to you. Catherine on the memo is very, very helpful. So thank you. There was a filing deadline in my right Councilor Blu for refiling this particular SB 13. Yes, and we met that deadline last fall. It was last fall, not in this current. No, because we are, because we are a state agency we filed the November prior to the beginning and that's when we refiled. And that was filed under your name. Executive Director, is that how it worked? It was filed under the commission's name. So it came from the commission. So there was some discussion in last fall as to the support. So what I'm hearing from my fellow commissioners is that while it was filed properly to the channels that might be helpful to in an informal, less formal communication reiterate the commission's position on this particular filing. I don't think today we're prepared. I wouldn't be prepared to necessarily say we endorse this particular exact submission without further clarification with that said, I do think we could have time to get together some, you know, a letter correspondence on the filing. Certainly there is a process that the legislature expects and I'm not sure if we could, this is a question if we could actually amend it at this time or not. So, but we could certainly communicate whether we would suggest in the sausage making an amendment should be made of sorts. So perhaps we can think about it for a future meeting with some work done by Executive Projosian and Catherine and her team. No, I would make the same comment. The draft that's been resubmitted is something that happened, the meat of it happened before I arrived and before you arrived. And so there's been some discussion, but there hasn't been a deep dive. I trust and assume with the expertise in the office that any marketing necessary changes would have been made. But I do think having had this experience in other offices, it's always good to take a fresh set of eyes and look at it again. I do think this is a good opportunity, however, to maybe remind the legislature of our submission and the fact that I agree with you, I remember conversations you and I specifically had disagreeing over an approach having to do with certain monies connected to racing and the frustration in the only the sun setting rather than sort of taking a good look at it. Given the closing of Suffolk, also I think this is a very different landscape. And so I think that's an even more pressing reason to sort of go back to the legislature, remind them of the submission because I do think it is something that needs to be addressed. Yep, I would agree. I think it never hurts to, in an appropriate way, push something forward again. We think makes sense. Further communication is always helpful. I just want to make sure that we all know on the record a process was followed appropriately that there's only a certain window to file. So thank you for that. And we can put it on. If you want commissioners, we can think about drafting some type of communication that talks about the history of the bill, where the commission is now, and recognizes the potential for modifications and as you appropriately call it, the sausage making process. And also I think the other thing we want to just remind folks, I think everyone here knows it and people in the industry know it, but the connection between the racing bill and simulcasting, right? It's not just about racing, it is about simulcasting. When you hear those figures, that's important. So just to remind folks that there are different components of this. Right, and again, the commission really hasn't as a whole voted on this in terms of even, if we know we have a consensus, so it'd be a draft that could help guide our discussion. I think that'd be excellent. I think there's also the component that, because we always think about the impact of what the commission regulates on looking through a wide lens, there are issues around jobs attached to both the racing and simulcasting and the revenue numbers are important too. So we should think with the wider lens as well as the statutory submission. Any further discussion on that? Excellent, excellent job on the memo, thank you. Any, Catherine, did you wanna add now that we've chatted anything that further insights based on what we just talked about? No. Okay, you're all set, excellent. So does that conclude the racing legislative update? Any further questions on that? Then we go into the split discussion 5E for purposes of our agenda. Council will bring up a memo regarding that and just a reminder that Commissioner Cameron sits on that committee. So she can also comment on the meeting. And if you could remind us of the makeup of that committee, I know it's chaired by a gubernatorial appointee and Gail, as our representative here. The horse racing committee consists of five members. The chair is Brian Fitzgerald. He's appointed by the governor. There is an appointee from the treasurer. Emily, I can't pronounce her last name, I'm sorry, Kotunski. There is a representative from the standard red, which is Peter Goldberg, a representative from the thoroughbred, which is Joe Savage. And then Commissioner Cameron is our representative from the commission. Thank you. So as you can see, as outlined in the memo, the newly constituted committee did meet this fall, met a couple of times, had submissions from both breeds regarding what they thought was appropriate for a split. The committee many years ago, the original committee decided it would be appropriate to meet every year because racing was changing, pretty considerable changes, especially with both breeds, right? Penn National, with the race horse development fund and increased monies, increased interest, increased race days. And the thoroughbreds, obviously, the opposite is true, very few opportunities to race. So I think the committee takes all of that into consideration. Race days is one of many, many factors. Really thoughtful review of all of the submissions as well, Dr. Lightbaum and her team is very good at providing the committee with real numbers, hard numbers. Not only on participants, licensees, monies generated, but all of the ancillary pieces that everyone doesn't typically think about, meaning farms, how many horses, how many new horses for both breeds each year, all of the employees, which is a critical piece. And so all of those factors are taken into consideration. And it's a difficult job for the committee because both breeds are very, very passionate about racing and having their thoroughbred racing be successful, harness bred, just harness racing be successful. So there's spirited discussions. I believe the committee, I was one of the four that voted in favor of this split. It really turned out 5% more went to the standard breadth this year because of all the additional, the generation, the folks involved, the race days, all of the relevant factors that were really, the committee was very thoughtful about taking a look at. So the recommendation is for 5% more to go to the standard bred side. And what we did not do this year as a committee was get involved in any of the retroactive pieces. And I think that was a good decision as well. There were many unintended consequences around that that we worked hard to avoid. So as a member of that committee, I think this is a sound recommendation. And one that our commission should approve. Any questions for commissioner Cameron or for Dr. Lightbound on this, on the split? I would just add I was very happy to see the retroactive piece not included this year. I think that was a fair way to treat both horsemen's grip. And the types of factors as I understand that the committee considers is not only the number of race days, but factors around open space. The breeders, impact on breeders, the ancillary services goes beyond the number of race days. And that's where the 5% increase. Yes, because of the additional, you know, the additional, the entire focus of racing, the entire, when you look at all of the other factors that you just mentioned, the committee really did believe an additional 5% to standard bred was appropriate. Of course, the one vote here would be the representative thoroughbred industry. And of course, they're very hopeful that there could be another track here in the Commonwealth and there would be some monies there to assist with that endeavor. So that's obviously a very, we understood completely their point of view and came to this decision realizing all of those factors and considering them all. And like this committee, it's a public meeting. Oh, it is. And there's always an interested group of individuals, passionate folks when it comes to racing all with both breeds and many of them were represented at our meetings this year. Any further questions? Do I have a motion? Yeah, I would move that the commission approved the split of the racehorse development fund recommended by the horse racing committee. It's fully described in the memorandum from General Counsel Blue and Dr. Lightbaum, Director of Racing in the November 7, 2019 commissions packet. Second. For the questions, discussion, all those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Five, zero. Thank you. Now, back to Chad. This is item 5F, the quarterly local aid report. Thank you, Chad. Thank you. Each quarter in accordance with section 18D of chapter 58, local aid is payable to each city and town where racing activities are conducted. The amounts are calculated at 0.35 times the handle for the quarter ending six months prior to payment. The local aid payment for the quarter ending in September 30, 2019 is in the amount of $168,536.99. This amount reflects the total handle from racing that took place in January, February and March of 2019. And on the second page, you will see a breakdown of the handle as well as the distributions that are payable to each city and town. And this item does require a vote. Thank you. Questions for Chad? Looks pretty straightforward. All of the numbers are in order and I'm sure have been checked and rechecked and they're accurate. That's what we come to expect from this team. So that's always appreciated. And with that, if there's no further questions, I would move that the commission approved the local aid, quarterly local aid payments as described in the memo from Chad Work Financial Analyst dated November 7th, 2019, included in the commission's packet. Second. Any questions? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? 5-0. Thank you. Thanks. Now, moving on to 5G, Dr. Leithbaum. So today I have Alice Spiehler with the Harness Horsemaids Association. She's the treasurer and what's your other title? Managing director. Managing director of ATFJNE to talk about their pension plans and different things that are doing benefits for their members. Good morning, commissioners. Good morning. Thank you for having me. Good morning. Good morning, commissioners and thank you for having me. Welcome to Plainville. This is my town. I live here. My husband and I have had a farm since the end of 79 and went on to sell the first farm and buy another 60 acre farm. And he, being local for by trade, built a training track, USTA regulation training track in which another stable shares use of that track with all of us. So I'm very comfortable here. More so than Boston. And I just wanted to meet with you to kind of bring you up to date. Throughout the year I've been trying to do that. I wanted you to see our first year. This is our first year, actually our second year, but our first year of really promoting it and getting people going on that RSV. You can see we increased our participants from 112 to 141. It has been a big, big hit amongst the trainers and drivers. So much so that it's probably part of the fabric that's making racing work over at Plain Ridge. The criteria, the adjustment we made in the criteria because of the less racing days has worked really well and it's allowed them to participate the way it was intended. And our membership has over the past three years also increased from when I came on board. There was 256. We're now at 333 members. So we're really growing strong. And the Harness-Hosman's Association had an election in which all the same people were re-elected and the president, they felt, the membership felt strongly that they were being well represented. And I just wanted to let you know what some of that money's doing besides the pension. We also have, what we offered this year first time was a company, we teamed up with a company called 2020 and we did a vision program for them. And they brought a bus, oh, I'm sorry, I'm not following your order maybe. They brought a bus to the facility and the people were able to come in and have eye exams and the Health and Welfare Fund was able to help offset that cost. So people who would not normally be able to go get an exam or afford the glasses, maybe wouldn't even put the, didn't have the time, we made it really easy for them. So we had sent out a bulletin letting them know we were gonna do that. And I believe you received a copy of a kind of frequently asked question page we put together for them. And it was a big hit and everybody seemed very satisfied. So that's the kind of things we're trying to do. Vision, maybe get into some wellness checks, flues, things like that. We've got some big ideas that we want to work with the members and use that money for. And also, not that it's part of the Health and Welfare but just we wanted to give a little shout out to the fact that we were able to get toughs to offer our members a discount up there if they need any services. And that's the summary. That's exciting stuff. Again, it's, what I referred to earlier is just growth and success on the harness racing side of the business that. And it's all because of the legislation with the Health and Welfare Fund that this is possible. And there's just endless possibilities we're trying to put together for them. And we appreciate that. I agree with Commissioner Stevens that this is fabulous program. I see how hard you work every year to improve it. This is an excellent, I love the frequently asked questions. That's really helpful to people. Also, why are, in looking at those numbers of other states in our state, our numbers are so much higher, right? That first chart we showed, is that just, do you think it is the, is it the pension plan that people really gravitate around becoming members, or is it just the increase of racing that? Definitely was the pension plan that brought members aboard. And people that, I would approach people and I'd say, you know, we have a pension plan. I heard about it. What is it involved? And when I tell them, sign me up. And I just, I can't say enough about it. I mean, but I do have, the other side is people are asking me, what do I need to do? And have I met my quota? I wanna, you know, move on, get out maybe early, go to Florida. I said, well, that was the idea. If you started early in April, you put your six out of eight months in and you needed to leave to head out fine. If on the other toss of the coin, some people would not be here early, but will stay now. They come up to me all the time. I need to stay in November to get my points, right? Yes. Okay, great. That's great. Alice, so you were here earlier discussing, you know, the uncertainty that comes in January 15, mostly around the thoroughbred racing, but of course, you know, it affects the standard rate. If it should something not be renewed, for example. So to the extent that you're not already doing that, doing the following or your membership is not doing this. Do you talk to your representatives or people at the legislature who might, at least you might wanna inform about the success story on this side? Our focus, yes. Very big focus. I have to say I have a brother-in-law who was in the thoroughbreds just passed. I'm passionate about thoroughbreds because I actually started as a groom in thoroughbreds. So I am passionate about the thoroughbreds. I'd love to be able to have them here too, and but we are at our legislative level asking for whatever information they need, whatever numbers we can give to them to keep us going because of a program like this. It's so important. Thank you. And that was it. Thank you very much. I just want to reiterate how happy we are to get thorough reports from you. And we also really want to send our appreciation for close relationships that we work together with Dr. Lightbaughn. It's so important for us to keep those communications really strong so that we can make sure to meet your needs and we can help in our regulatory process. So Dr. Lightbaughn, your leadership here is so important. And this is all reflective here with these increasing numbers. So thank you and thank you. I gotta tell you, originally I started just to do this plan. That's all I came on board to was do the plan and get out. And somehow I became a voice for the membership. And it's been a learning curve for me because I never had taken that role on. I've always been the trainer, the owner of the standard breads. That was originally why we bought the farm to do our business. So I was just part of the masses. Now I've become the voice of the masses. And I have a learning curve and I'm looking forward to working together. I'm trying to see that we can find that common ground and find the avenues that you take to get there. Well, it's very important. So thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Five, eight, correct? Yes. This is a request from Plain Ridge for a substitute judge for Plainville. His name is, let's get myself going here, James Tracer. He is accredited with the Racing Officials accreditation program as a thoroughbred steward. We've talked to the Harness Association, the USTA, about what he needs to do to get accredited through them and they have given him a provisional judges license with the understanding that at the next time they offer the course, that he will take the course and take the exam. So he will be certified through them and that also makes him eligible to get the rope accreditation for dual breeds. Once you've taken the full course for the rope on one side, then you just need to take the breed specific sections to get accredited for the other side through the Racing Officials accreditation program. So my recommendation is that the commission approve the request of Plain Ridge Park Casino to approve James Tracer as a fill in judge and racing official. Dr. Olaipa, although he doesn't have, this candidate does not have the official, he has a temporary accreditation. Right, a provisional. But you've reviewed his qualifications and you're making assurances that he is qualified even though the official certification is in waiting. Right, and what we've done is he's shadowed the current judges in the judges stand and so that he could start learning on that aspect of it. And then he will be, anytime he's on, he would be on with our two judges as well. So it would be our two judges and him for whatever races he was needed to fill on. So you are satisfied that the appropriate knowledge and qualifications are in place to approve this application? Yes. Okay. And Alex, I mean, we have a short amount of time for the racing season left. Is there appropriate time that he would be able to complete certification before the start of next year's race? I believe they're not giving it till sometime in the spring and I don't know if that'll be before the meet begins or not. They may not need him as a fill in at the beginning of the season. This is specifically for circumstances right now for this, you know, for the last month, six weeks of the harness meet. I understand you do need a vote for this, are there any further questions for Alex? No. Commissioner Cameron. So I move that the commission approve the appointment of James Traster as a fill in judge as requested in the letter from Steve O'Toole, director of racing at Plain Ridge Race Course, dated November 1st, 2019, included in the commission packet. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? 5-0. I had a request if we have enough time to go out of order a little bit. If Jason Savastano would like to be able to get back to the track, if we could take the pick in pool racing regulation now and then if the commission. We do have 15 minutes and second director for Josh and I'm not sure if we have more time for it to even go further. I think that's up to the commission. Justin might be, he might also be. I have told the most important thing that lunch is not here yet. So I can, we can give you the high sign and if you want to go until lunch gets here. Can we get a five minute break? Five minute break? For the record, this is exciting. We are ahead of schedule. So we do really note that in the minutes. I think what I'm hearing from my fellow commissioners is that we would like a five minute break and then we could move forward on these regulations. Sure. Thank you. Before we start, I realized that I had not been properly recording. So we had taken a brief recess. I had noted for the record that we were ahead of schedule which was exciting, but we're ahead of schedule enough so that we can accommodate some of our guests and move ahead to item number six. So this is now we're reconvening officially. So starting with item six, Dr. Leipzig and General Counsel Bloom. This is just bringing back the pick in that Plain Ridge had asked for in the spring and it's gone through the promulgation process and is now ready for the commission to do the final vote on it. Okay, moving ahead then with the pickin pools. I understand, General Counsel Bloom, that you're going to have Jason, correct? Speak on this. Jason is with Plain, or the combination of you and Dr. Leipzig will be presenting on it. Okay. Yes. Well, you were very helpful at the public meeting last week explaining it to me. So thank you for being here today. Thank you very much. The main feature of the bet is that it'll stimulate a pool of money and it'll grow. It's hard to hit it. The getting the full pool is with being the unique ticket that would have it. So if you're not the unique ticket, then you get a portion of the pool. And Jason can expand on it? Just like we adopted the pen effector that we have an effect now, which is the... Just like we adopted the pen effector, which we have now, which is our Wicked High Five pool. And it's a jackpot carryover. That's the highest this year. It's gone was $55,000. Generates a lot of interest. We did have a pick five at Plain Ridge at one point. We dropped it for not having enough interest in that pick five pool due to the lack of not having a jackpot go along with it. The majority, if not all of the other harness tracks have a jackpot associated with that particular bet. So we weren't really getting much handle and people are not gonna really bet into a race that has $800 in the pool then minus the takeout and there's not really much back to go around. This now would allow us that single unique ticket where half the money bet into the pool on that day goes back out to the public if the single unique ticket is not hit. And then the rest of it will carry over and build a jackpot at that point. So it will generate, in the beginning it starts off slow and then as time goes, as no one hits five consecutive winners in a row, the pool builds and all of a sudden you're up to a $30, $40, $50,000 pool. Now you have a lot of interest, a lot, a lot of interest of the public having a chance to win some happily decent money out there. And it's something that I really think that we should add. And it's my understanding that this language because it's complex is actually lifted from the rules of the Association of Race and Commissioners International, the exact language. Correct, the current CMR has the language up to, I believe, section F that's currently already in place. We needed to get to move forward with this from section G on. And all of those edits, which are marked in red in our materials are actually exactly incorporated by that association, the same language, no difference. Correct. Really helpful, thank you. Any questions for Jason? No, but I do like that we're following RCI you know, I believe, knowing the organization, knowing how much time and effort is spent on thoughtful discussion about how this should be carried out is important I think and I do appreciate that we are doing that. Excellent, we just try to, we wanna stay with the times if not try to get ahead of them. And the consistency, because these folks move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, understanding what those rules are on a larger level. So they don't have to go from here to Maine and follow a different scheme of things, right? Correct. So I think that's important too for the public, for the industry, and so I do appreciate that. Excellent, thank you. I would just like for the record that on their prior conversation this morning we were talking about chapter 128D, which we have submitted, some of the flexibility that's embedded in that legislation would be really helpful on instances like this. These, the request for this bet, for example, came in March, went through the whole promulgation process, we're finding ourselves now approving this. There would be, I would submit a real parallel to what we have done in gaming, have a regulation that's flexible enough and points to rules of the game that can change as the market changes. Even, and I would guess to venture that we will follow a similar deliberative process in terms of hearing the benefits, the trade-offs, what others are doing, how the market is doing. But under that regulatory scheme, I would say we would have a lot more flexibility to react to things like this. That would be very valuable to have that ability. Absolutely, RCI, they do change the rules. I wouldn't say failure regular basis, but as new bets come, new bets are in place and they want to change things and add things, it'd be nice for us to be able to just pick those up right away instead of having to go through the whole process. It's a competitive issue, in my opinion. If you are, all the betting public is really looking at signals from all other different states and if you're not able to incorporate them here, people are used to others, they'll simply would not, they would result in what you just said to us, you eventually have to drop perhaps a bet because the interest is elsewhere and it has nothing to do with your operational ability, but rather the environment that you are operating within. Exactly. Any further questions? It's a two part process. Do we have a motion regarding the small business impact? Madam Chair, I move the commission approved the amended small business impact statement for 205CMR, 6.35 pick-and-pools included in the packet. Second. Any discussion, questions? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? 5-0. Thank you. Madam Chair, further move that the commission approved the version of 205CMR, 6.35 pick-and-pools as included in the packet and authorized staffs take all steps necessary to finalize the regulation promulgation process. Second. Any questions? Any questions? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? 5-0. Just again, I failed to activate my microphone. The earlier vote was also 5-0. Thank you. Moving on then. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Madam Chair, thank you very much. Commissioners, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. We really appreciate it. We appreciate your expertise. Thank you. So moving on now, I think we have time to go through all of the regulations. Catherine, thank you. So we are now on another horse racing regulation. And Jason, are you leading this? Justin, I see. Jason and Justin, Justin, I know you. It's a kind of a trip up. So yet, we have a number, Dr. Lightbound and I have a number of racing regulation changes. Many of these are ministerial and a couple others are sort of streamlining and updating a number of our regulations. Starting with the first one in the packet is 205CMR 3.01. The change to this particular regulation redacts duplicative language concerning appeals of racing decisions and directs readers to the proper appeal section within our regulations. And this is to start the promulgation process? Or no, it's an amendment to all three. OK, I'll address all those ones in section three first. And then I think we're going to do a vote on everything. And on the bus as to three. Exactly. So 205CMR 3.03, the change to this regulation, very similar. It strikes duplicative language concerning appeals and once again directs the reader back to our appeal section contained in our regulations. 205CMR 3.12, this adds additional language concerning objections to incidents occurring during a race and gives the standard bred judges the authority on racing interactions that take place during a race. So this is not a ministerial. It would provide them with the ultimate authority to make decisions of actions taking place during a race for a final decision. And just to be clear, that means removing any right to appeal. That's what you're saying. That is correct, yes. And we already have that provision in the thoroughbred regulations. OK. 205CMR 3.18, this adds a procedure concerning recusal of racing judges in the event of a conflict of interest or potential conflict of interest. So as you saw earlier today, there was an addition of another fill-in judge that would help to remove any possible issues if this were to become a concern at some point in the future. But it would allow for flexibility with judging of races that there had been to be a possible conflict of interest. And 205CMR 3.29, this formally adds a procedure that has already been in practice concerning a quarantine option for horses that were testing positive for an overage of total carbon dioxide in their blood. So it's essentially formalizing an existing procedure we had already. It adds language to that effect. 205CMR 3.35, this is a new section that it. Just a minute, just lost a second, sir, for rebooting. OK. Thank you so much for being in this. Hopefully, we'll reboot quickly. It's one omnibus for all the three. And then the other sections have an individual one. So it'll be omnibus as to anything relative to three. So 3.00? Anything included in 3.00. I'll always include it in the packet. Yeah, I see. I've got it right there. Thanks. I mean, if you'd rather, if I'm individually identify also. No, I guess I just want to make sure that we understand that the recovered sufficient may be more substantive ones. We'll be able to ask questions after the 3.0, like the confusion 3.0. We're back up. OK. Where did you just start on the section? I was just about to start on the section. No, I'll still on the 3.0. Can we go back to section? If you can go back like this section. Sure. I'll just go back to the last one. I think you count that out. Just in case we were cut off, the last regulation I had mentioned was 205CMR 3.29. This formalizes an existing practice concerning the quarantine of the option of a quarantine for horses that test positive for total carbon dioxide and blood. So again, this was an existing practice. It puts it formally into the regulations. And then I believe the last in section 3 is 205CMR 3.35. This is a new section under section 3, but the language was pre-existing. What this does is it moves the existing language concerning our adoption of the United States Trotting Association rules from the forward of section 3 into its own section, just so that it's easier to find and easier for those who might be looking for a particular rule to understand that, yes, the Massachusetts Game and Commission does adopt the United States Trotting Association rules, which often concern a lot of the granular details of what takes place during a race and what's permissible and that sort of thing. So this pulls that out into its separate section so that anybody who's looking can find it more easily. And with that being said, those are all the changes in the regulations under 205CMR section 3. I'm happy to answer any questions about those regulations at this time. I have a comment, which is I'm happy to see a formal process here for an official recusing and an alternate judge stepping in. I think it's really important that people recognize that we take conflicts of interest seriously and we encourage that reporting as well as the ability to bring another official in, in cases where there's a conflict or a perceived conflict. And that might be worth going through the process with just a little bit more detail so that when a conflict arises, can you just go through the resolution process, Justin? Sure, so what this regulation does is it sets forth parameters that would establish when a conflict of interest does exist between a racing judge and say someone who's racing in the race. So if there's a family relationship or another significant relationship, it sets forth the four corners of when a conflict of interest exists and then it also establishes a procedure by which that person can recuse themselves and also a procedure by which the recusal or the conflict of interest could be waived if it's disclosed to the director of racing, director of LightBound, and she examines it and says, okay, we're okay here and also establishes a procedure by which typically we have three racing judges. If one of them has a conflict, that person can approach the other two racing judges to raise the issue of a conflict to essentially query whether those two are, if they would be amenable to going forward without that third judge, which does occasionally occur and we don't like to be the normal practice, but if it does occur, we now have a procedure whereby it can be documented and set forth so that we know ahead and we can formally have on the record that there was an acceptance of that and it moves along. And there's also the potential for selection of an alternate racing judge because typically it's incumbent upon the person who has the conflict to find an alternate. If they're unable to find an alternate, you can go to the two judge system. The selection of an alternate judge does then have to be approved by our director of racing, which I think is an important step so that it can't just be anyone. It has to be someone we think meets the credentials of being an appropriately educated and experienced racing judge. And I know you spend time every year with training for all of our folks, whether it be our regulatory staff, judges, stewards, folks at the track. So I think this certainly would be appropriate to train so that they understand clearly where it is a new regulation, how to report, what it's all about, the kinds of things that are maybe perceived as a conflict. Yeah, we've made it a practice to have an ongoing channel communication with all of our judges at PPC and at the beginning of every racing season, I make it a point to go down and meet with them at the racing offices and do an initial training about the things that can rise up to become problems. So hopefully that they don't become problems during that particular season and also just to give them any updates on any changes. And this would absolutely be one of those that we would go over in detail. Great, thank you. Very helpful, Justin. Any other questions for Justin or Dr. Leiband on any of the particular regulations because I understand we're gonna vote as on a whole for 3.00 with that said, we could carve out anything, correct? So there's any questions you have on any of the regs? Okay. I think that you were about to ask the question or maybe it was answered, this is the beginning of the process, as I understand it, correct? That's correct. Thank you. All right. With that said, do we have a motion? Madam Chair, I move that the commission approve the small business impact statement for the amendments to 205 CMR 3.0, specifically 3.01, 3.03, 3.12, 3.18, 3.29 and 3.35. Harness race, horse racing, representatives and entations as included in the packet. Second. Any questions, discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Five-zero, thank you. Madam Chair, I further move the commission approve the version of the amendments to the same subsections just referenced to 205 CMR 3.0, zero harness, horse racing, references and annotations as included in the packet and authorized staff to take all steps necessary to begin the regulation promulgation process. Second. Any questions? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Five-zero, thank you, excellent work. We'll move on to the next grouping. Thank you. 4.0. The next grouping of regulations deal with 205 CMR 4.0, which relate to thoroughbred racing. The first in these three is 205 CMR 4.01. This proposed regulation change would strike duplicative language, again referencing the appeals procedure, directing the reader to our proper appeals section, just 205 CMR 1.02, so it's really just redactions. The next in this regulation is 205 CMR 4.03. Again, this proposal strikes duplicative language regarding appeals, again directing the reader to the proper appeals section. And then the final one in 205 CMR 4 is 205 CMR 4.3. This proposal adds a procedure concerning recusal stewards for events over which they may have a conflict of interest, so it's a parallel version of what you saw in the standard bread that we just discussed. This would deal with thoroughbred if the same type of a conflict of interest were to arise in the context of a thoroughbred race. Any questions for Justin with respect to this particular reg? Any suggested changes? Again, we're just starting the promulgation process. Okay, do I have a motion? Madam Chair, I move that the commission approve the Small Business Impact Statement for the amendments to 205 CMR 4.00, specifically 4.01, 4.03 and 4.30. Rules of course, racing references and invitations is included in the packet. Second. Questions, discussion, others in favor? Aye. Opposed? 5-0. Madam Chair, I further move that the commission approve the version of the amendments to 205 CMR 4.00, the specific references earlier made. Rules of course, racing references and invitations is included in the packet and authorized staff to take all steps necessary to begin the regulation promulgation process. Second. Discussion, others in favor? Aye. Opposed? 5-0. The final regulation I have before you today is in 205 CMR 101.02, which deals with the appeal section to the commission. What this regulation does is it clarifies some of the language concerning the timing of racing appeals. This timing information previously existed in the now redacted sections of the past regulations. It's just making sure everyone goes to this section for any and all information on appeals. What this regulation also changes is its streamlines and streamlines some of the discovery procedures with cases of medication overages or violations in the racing context to make it more uniform and standardized so that the process can resolve more smoothly for the hearing officers and everyone involved in the hearing process. And to be clear, my understanding is too that some of the requests that have been coming in were voluminous, taking a lot of time and were in fact slowing down the process as we go and that this will keep it to the relevant material information necessary to move the hearing process forward. That is accurate, yes. That's correct. Any questions for Justin on this? So there's a housekeeping component and more of a substantive component on this one. Any questions? Do I have a motion? Madam Chair, I move that the commission approve the small business impact statement for the amendments to 205 CMR 101.02, review of orders of civil administrative penalties for which is issued by the Bureau. Commission staff are the racing division as included in the packet. Second. Questions? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Five-zero. Madam Chair, I further move the commission approve the version of the amendments to 205 CMR 101.02, review of orders for civil administrative penalties for which is issued by the Bureau. Commission staff are the racing division as included in the packet and authorized staff to take all steps necessary to begin the regulation promulgation process. Second. Questions? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Five-zero. Excellent work. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Does that conclude your presentation today, Dr. Leitha? Yes, it does. Thank you. Well, thank you for your expertise and we love being here in Plainville to do horse racing. So thank you so much. Thank you. We'll break now for lunch. We are gonna be, excuse me, reconvening. Washer. Thank you, pardon me. Thank you. One o'clock. One o'clock and we'll our guests be here. We have, Christopher Bruce is here, so we can. Thank you, my apologies. One o'clock we'll reconvene. Thank you. We're reconvening Gaming Commission meeting number 281 here in Plainville Town Hall. We are now on our agenda and I'm delighted to say a little bit ahead of schedule. So we have now Mark VanderLinden, our Director on Responsible, our Research and Responsible Gaming Director. Thank you. Thank you, Chairwoman Juddstein and commissioners and good afternoon. So this afternoon we're turning our attention to the research agenda. Section 71 of the Expanded Gaming Act put a heavy emphasis on trying to understand what the social and economic impacts of casino gambling are in the state of Massachusetts. Specifically what happens when you open, in this case what happens when you open up a casino in Plainville, Massachusetts? What are the benefits to the community? What are the potential harms that we would see in Plainville and the surrounding communities? This is really what we're trying to answer here today through two different reports that are, two different reports that we have really three different reports. One is the social and economic impacts of Plain Ridge Park Casino and a new employee report, Dr. Rachel Volberg from UMass Amherst and Dr. Mark Melnick from the Donahue Institute will provide an overview of those two reports for you. And then second, we have an examination of four years of operation of Plain Ridge Park Casino. Though it seems like yesterday that it opened, we're four years into it, or greater than four years. And Thomas Peake will lead a discussion on the first four years of operation of this casino. The afternoon we will turn our attention to what are the public safety impacts of casinos in Massachusetts and Christopher Bruce will take a look at three different studies focusing on three different regions of the state where we have casinos, all in very different stages as you very well know. Understanding what crime impacts casinos spring to Massachusetts was also an important piece of section 71. Do you see an increase in specific crimes related to casino gambling? Or as Christopher Bruce says, perhaps we will see decreases in specific areas given a change in the dynamic within each of these communities. Christopher will describe to you what his findings are after four years for Plain Ridge Park Casino, eight months for MGM, and he will describe to you the baseline study forever in the surrounding communities. So to kick this off, I will turn it over to Drs. Volberg and Melnick. Am I supposed to? You just have to speak really closely. Just speak really closely. Okay. In contrast to the instructions that are here in front of me. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and commissioners. It's a pleasure to be meeting with you in Plainville as opposed to Boston. And definitely a pleasure to see this building which I've heard a lot about but have not actually been in before. So let's see. The presentation that Mark and I are going to be doing is a bit of a hybrid. So we had a very large summary, inaugural summary report that we presented to the commission, I believe about a year ago, maybe a little less than a year ago, which looked at impacts at both the state level and at the regional level. And in thinking about that presentation and that report subsequently, we realized that there was probably some value in extracting from that report all of the regional impacts since most of them were specific to Plainville and Plainridge Park Casino and to basically just have a report that's focused on this area and the slot parlor. So I'm going to be presenting on the social and health impacts that we identified regionally. And then Mark is going to present on the economic and fiscal side but with a focus on an updated section that deals with employment at the slot parlor. And then we're going to turn it over to Tom who is going to present to you on a new report that we will be publishing shortly on the operational impacts of four years of Plainridge Park Casino. So to begin with, I'm going to go very, very quickly through some introductory slides. Some of you will have seen these multiple times. So they're just to sort of provide some background about the Expanded Gaming Act and why we have casinos where we have in the different parts of the state. A quick slide just to remind you of the importance of section 71 in authorizing the kind of work that my team and I have been up to for the last six years. And just a quick overview of the essential elements of the research agenda and the parts that we have been responsible for which are the baseline study of problem gambling and existing programs, as well as a much larger study to understand the social and economic effects of expanded gambling as those roll out over time. Again, a reminder of our where in the state the casinos are located and the officially designated hosts and surrounding communities, just for people who might be watching on the live stream or who haven't seen us present before. This is often a useful map for people to see. This next slide is a synopsis of the characteristics of Plainridge Park Casino. It is a slot parlor rather than a full service casino with table games. The next two columns are the host and surrounding communities. It gives you some information about the availability of gambling at the slot parlor and then also some notes about the fact that Plainridge Park Casino was previously a racetrack. The cost of the casino expansion, the size of the operation and the amenities and ownership. And then final sort of quick background slide. We were very fortunate when we started this project to have as one of the members of our team, Rob Williams, who just prior to our project starting had produced a very large systematic review of all of the studies of the social and economics impacts of gambling that had been done internationally from the mid-70s all the way through to 2010. He and his colleagues identified 492 studies which they reviewed. They documented all of the findings of the approximately 200 studies that were actually based on empirical research rather than sort of more theoretical issues and identified actually amazingly enough only seven of those studies out of the 200 were deemed to have what they called an excellent methodology which was based on specific criteria that they developed. Based on that review, they proposed a methodological approach to conducting social and economic impact studies of gambling that made theoretical sense, that enshrined economic principles and social impact considerations and was simple to use or at least that's what they said. I'm going to say as the first person to have led a team to roll out this simple to use methodology that it is not as simple as you would think. It's actually quite a complex enterprise and involves a lot of different sort of hands on the wheel but it's been my privilege to head this project up for six years and I'm very proud of the work that we've done. So just to review some of those methodological principles that we are employing, we like to call what we're measuring impacts rather than costs and benefits because the term impact indicates that a change has occurred without necessarily having to characterize it as positive or negative. There's a lot of disagreement actually between whether an impact is positive or negative depending on where you stand. So we just use that term impact. While many of the impacts of gambling are clearly negative such as problem gambling or positive such as employment, the nature of other impacts or changes is less clear and somewhat subjective and so that is the main reason why we use this term impact. The traditional approach is to use money to measure and quantify all impacts. It's appropriate certainly for capturing most economic impacts or changes but it's actually rather inadequate for capturing many of the social impacts since social impacts often have no obvious monetary consequences and many social impacts are best captured in a descriptive way, a percentage of change rather than trying to assign a monetary value to everything. So one of the biggest challenges in conducting impact studies is that the ability to attribute changes to a specific form of gambling can be quite tenuous. When there's a change in the expected direction that's temporarily associated with the introduction of casino gambling, really all that we can say is that the change is consistent with a potential impact. The likelihood that something is actually attributable to casino gambling becomes stronger when we triangulate this information with the presence or absence of analogous changes in other variables theoretically related to gambling and when other sources of information pertaining to the same variable allow more direct attributions. For example, self reports of gamblers in the population surveys or key informants who tell us that they see certain things as being the result of the casino. We take that as part of the evidence base that we're building as well. So just to turn to the basics of the study overall, this is a graphic that most of you have seen several times. Across the top are the various activities that our team is engaged in. The rows are timelines and basically you can see that in 2020 we're quite busy because there's activity in each of the areas where we are collecting data. So we're clearly past the baseline phase. We are still slightly in the construction phase in terms of getting ready to report on the construction impacts of Encore, but other than that one last report we will be fully into the operational phase once that report is published. So I'm going to turn now to the presentation itself. This is a top level summary, very top level, very summary of a much more detailed 80 plus report that will be available probably once I finish talking to you this afternoon on our website so that people in the audience or just the general public can access that report along with all of our other publications. So let's begin with the social and health impacts. The social and health impacts part of the project focuses on impacts that are primarily non-monetary in nature. We rely on many different sources of data to assess these impacts. Primary data includes the baseline general population survey, the baseline and follow up targeted surveys in the host and surrounding communities, key informant interviews, some of the patron survey data also feeds into our side of the project. We employ a lot of secondary data. Much of this data comes from government agencies in Massachusetts as well as federal agencies and then we rely on the work that Christopher Bruce does to be able to say something about the crime impacts that we also keep on the social and health side but that obviously have economic impacts as well. So to dig down into the specifics of the kinds of impacts that we have seen in Plainville and surrounding communities, somewhat to our surprise, we did not identify a significant change in problem gambling or related indices that is likely to have occurred as a result of the introduction of the slot parlor in this region. There was no significant change in the rate of problem gambling or at risk gambling in the targeted population surveys between 2014, the one we did in baseline in 2014 and the follow up survey in 2016. Nor was there a significant change between those two surveys in the percentage of problem gamblers wanting or seeking help. There were no significant changes between the two surveys in the percent of regular gamblers reporting negative impacts due to gambling, no change in personal bankruptcy filings in the county that were different from previous years and there were no changes in divorce filings, restraining orders or number of cases of child welfare involvement at the county level. With these secondary data, sometimes it's not possible to drill down to the local municipalities so that's why we're reporting county level data here. And this is a couple of quotes from two of our key informants that we interviewed in 2018 indicating that there did not seem to be any impacts on the health and wellbeing of the people of Plainville and that residents have not come forward with concerns about an increase in problem gambling. So that was another sort of triangulating effort to make sure that what we were seeing in the survey data was supported by folks who actually live and work here in Plainville. Turning to attitudes, there was evidence of a significant change of attitudes toward gambling between the baseline targeted survey and the follow-up targeted survey. There was a decrease in the percentage of people who indicated that gambling was not available enough and a corresponding increase in the percentage of people who felt that the current gambling availability was just fine. So they seem to be pleased with what they have but they're fine with what they've got. There was also a evidence of a significant change of attitudes towards gambling in terms of, in the same two surveys, in terms of the state impact, there was a decrease in the percentage of people who felt that casinos would be beneficial to Massachusetts and a corresponding increase in the percentage of people who felt quite neutral, neither beneficial nor harmful. And then also a change in perceptions of the impact of the casino on the community of Plainville, an increase in the percentage of people who felt that the new casino in their community would be neither beneficial nor harmful, a reduction in the number of people or percentage of people who felt that the casino would be beneficial. Finally, in terms of population health, there was no evidence of any change in the health of the population, in the wake of the opening of Plain Ridge Park Casino, no change in the reports of levels of health, happiness or levels of stress, and no significant change in the percentage of people who reported seeking help for their use of alcohol or drugs or who reported a behavioral addiction. So we're going to come back to the implications of the social and health impacts at the end of this presentation, but I'm going to turn it over now to Dr. Mark Melnick to talk about the economic and fiscal impacts. Good afternoon, Madam Chairperson and commissioners. It's good to be in front of you guys again today and thanks to Mark and Rachel for the introduction. I'm Mark Melnick, I direct the Economic and Public Policy Research Group at the Donahue Institute and we are partners with the School of Public Health at UMass Amherst to lead the economic and fiscal side of the work that we're doing as part of the Sigma project. Let me echo what Rachel had been saying a little bit before about just the pride that we have and the work that we've been able to do over the last six years in this project. I think I say this every time I'm in front of you guys, but it's such a unique opportunity when you're analyzing an industry, when it comes into a marketplace that it wasn't there before. There's very few things that ever exist in such a way that you can say, well, we didn't have this industry and now we do, and for the state legislature to have the foresight to say, let's try to analyze all the different elements of impact that might be a part of this. It's a very unique opportunity for us as researchers and while we get to sit here and be the ones that present that to you, there's a big group of folks who support us in the background and on the economic side alone, there's seven different staff members with areas of expertise. So what I'm gonna talk about today will be this high level overview of some of the impacts that we've seen in Plain Ridge. Tom's gonna step in after and do the preliminary operations report of what we've seen over the last four years. Tom reminds me all the time about what innovative methodology and how unique this type of work is because of our ability to leverage data directly from the operators so that we can tell a very complete and full story of what economic impacts look like now and what they would look like going forward. So the big story, though, when we talk about economic and fiscal impacts in Plain Ridge, in Plainville and how it relates back to Plain Ridge Park, is one that's generally a very positive story. What we've seen and what I'll highlight in the data for us is that what we've seen is a unique job growth in the city that outstrips what we've been seeing in terms of job growth statewide or in the county. Not terribly surprising when you put a very large employer in a very small place, but still one that highlights the fact of job growth. Another element of positive that we've seen in the city and region is the, and what I'll highlight in the new employee survey and the latest new employee data that we have is that a large number of folks who are employed by Plain Ridge Park or folks who are either previously unemployed or underemployed, and these generally are folks with much more limited educational attainment than the typical labor force in Massachusetts. What does that mean? What highlights the fact that these are accessible jobs for folks? And so, again, another positive element of the story in terms of economic development and economic activity. The third part I'm gonna highlight is talking a little bit about government and fiscal and what, with the infusion of cash for local governments, we've seen and we're sitting in an example of that because the resources that were leveraged by Plainville are part of what built this town hall. So first, let me talk a little bit about our analytical framework as we do the economic research. There's a number of different ways that we can think about theoretically or logically how we put our work together. We generally group it into three main buckets. I think about it in terms of economic and community impacts, which are more macro level types of things about how a community changes over time. And one of the unique elements of having a baseline analysis but then continuing to track how things are operating. So this could be simple things as demographic changes, population growth, employment growth, other socioeconomic characteristics. These are not things that would change specifically because of a casino or because of any one employer but are the characteristics of community that may shift and have other elements that are related to it. So it tells the story of community. The second element of work that we do is around casino impacts that are much more direct. And those are leveraging in a lot of cases direct data that we're receiving from the casinos. So this talks about direct employment, some of the spin-off economic effects that are associated with that direct activity in the casino so that talks about both direct spending, business to business spending, and then consumer spending that's leveraged through dollars in people's pockets. But then other elements of the casino, like what are the characteristics of the workforce? What types of folks are coming through here? What can we say about patrons who go to the casino and so on? This third element that we refer to as special topics is something that we haven't really delved into yet because we've been doing a lot of descriptive work about the impacts of the casinos directly, but we've seen a lot of questions raised over time as a part of our work on, boy, wouldn't it be interesting to understand a little bit more about what the casinos are meaning in terms of impact on travel and tourism in the community? And I think as we get into a fully operational phase of the casinos, our intention is on all elements of the project, particularly on economic and fiscal, is to roll up our sleeves more and try to understand these more direct economic effects that are happening in communities and related industries. So a couple of things I'm gonna highlight in this conversation first is around employment. I already teased a few moments ago that what we've been observing in Plain Ridge to date is pretty robust job growth in the town over the last several years. Between 2014 and 2016, we've seen an increase of about 300 jobs in Plain Ridge, Plainville, excuse me, to a little over 4,600 jobs. That's an increase of 17.3%. Comparatively, the state's grown about 4% over that time period. Norfolk County and Bristol County have grown about 3.2%. A good amount of this job growth as we've been able to observe it is tied directly to employment that we see in Plain Ridge Park. There are some limitations to what we can say with secondary data with this because of suppression issues and how state data are reported back. So they suppress when there's one major employer and one NAICS code. But the aggregate numbers show this growth and a lot of it, again, tied to what we would expect to see with a large employer moving into town. So we've seen robust job growth in town. Couple of things that we've seen through our mixed methods approach. So we've analyzed secondary data. We analyzed data that we get directly from the operators. But another way that we supplemented our work over time is through talking with local experts to understand how impacts are being felt by folks on the ground, especially where we may see data lags. Employment data always has a year lag to it. So what are people saying in real time about some of the things that we may be observing through secondary data? And so a few things that have come out through talking with different local officials. Here's a quote from Jennifer Thompson, town administrator in Plainville. One of the things that the casino promised was they'd reach out to Plainville folks first in terms of employment and they've kept their word. They're the largest employer and that's definitely had an impact. And then Lou LeBlanc also noting that employment has been a positive impact so far for the community. The next thing I'm gonna talk about is our new employee survey. So what we do is interview folks as they are employed by the casinos and ask some very basic demographic questions about first their characteristics, such as what they've been doing previously for work, what industries they worked in, where do they live, educational attainment, why do they wanna work here. There's a report that's already, we've been doing this data ongoing throughout the entire time Plain Ridge Park has been open. The data I'm gonna highlight for you is for fiscal year 18. Over time we've added new questions because either we're like oh, that would be a great thing to add additionally or through feedback from folks like yourself. But for us it's trying to understand the characteristics of the folks who got jobs here, what their character, what experiences they are having. And our goal is over the long term is to continue to track what's turnover look like and these kinds of things as they relate to new employment. The most notable part, the most notable part which I highlighted at the beginning was the level of accessibility of jobs for folks getting employed at Plain Ridge Park. Here what I have on this graphic demonstrates that of folks who were employed during fiscal year 18, what was their previous employment status? What we find is that 51% were previously employed full time while 46% were either unemployed or part time employed. In fact, so what we're seeing here is that this has been a great element of job creation for folks who may have been lightly attached or unconnected from the labor market. Other parts of this that are positive stories, of the folks who were previously unemployed, 72% of those went from unemployed to having a full time job. And of the ones who were part time employed, 42% transitioned into a full time job. So it's a positive story in terms of economic development and access into the labor market. These data points are very consistent with previous data that we've been presenting to you in the past. The original new employee survey that we had done which was I believe the one year mark showed about 50% of folks were previously unemployed or underemployed. So this does seem to be a trend but would be something we would continue to track over time. We asked what industry folks used to work in, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of folks were coming from Accommodation and Food Services Retail. What's interesting about this though is that some of the industries that are strongest here, Accommodation and Food Services Retail, we see some transportation and warehousing. There's a little bit of manufacturing there. But some of these were industries that were very heavily hit after the recession or during the recession and maybe didn't recover jobs as quickly in some instances. So it does tell a story too as well of folks who may have been disconnected from the labor market because of economic downturn and now finding good opportunities in a new industry. A couple of slides that we had to drop because we were too long of the original slide deck but a lot of the reasons why folks were interested in working in the casino dealt with career opportunity and increased wages. So the first two that we're seeing here, Accommodation and Food and Retail are traditionally low wage industries and one of the interested coming to the casino was an opportunity to make more money. Next slide here is a map that just highlights local employment and where people are coming from during fiscal 18. Not surprisingly, the majority of the workers in Plain Ridge Park are coming from Plainville or other parts of the host and surrounding communities particularly North Attleboro and Attleboro. But as you can see, the kind of employment trends really runs along 495 and some of the major highways and the accessibility that Plain Ridge Park has for people in the broader community. About 62% of the folks that were hired in fiscal 18 were Massachusetts residents, 68, excuse me, 32% coming from other states, Rhode Island and Connecticut. I already highlighted a little bit earlier that casino employment is creating opportunities for folks with limited educational attainment. About 22% of the individuals who were hired during fiscal 18 had a college degree. Comparatively, over 40% of Massachusetts has a college degree, about 46% of the labor force. So what this is highlighting is jobs that are accessible for people with limited educational attainment. Yeah. Could you please say that, the comparison again. Right, right, so the percent of the Massachusetts population with a college degree is about 40%. Work force is a little over 40%, approaching 46%. So comparatively, obviously there's quite a bit of difference here between the folks who are being employed at the casino. So jobs that are accessible for folks with limited educational attainment. On the government and fiscal side, in terms of impacts, what we're seeing is there are some natural increases that are taking place in terms of government spending. Some of this, you know, services that need to increase police hours, fire hours, these kinds of things as well as extra stress on the roads. These are elements of our work that will continue to deconstruct deeper over time. But the highlight from the impact report was that revenues from local aid and the host and surrounding community agreements have more than covered for those kinds of costs that we would see in communities. This next graphic here talks a bit about gross gaming revenue for each individual year, fiscal 16, 17, and 18, and what that translates back to in terms of local aid. So just focusing on fiscal 18 right now, gross gaming revenue is around 170 million. New state revenue from GGR equaled out to 83.3 million, which led to 68 million in local aid distributed around the state. And the map here kind of shows that distribution of local aid, which generally is formula-based and goes to communities with different types of socioeconomic challenges. But we've seen an increase in local aid across cities and towns. And then when we talk specifically about Plainville, the host and community agreements, we're seeing 1.5 million in property taxes annually, 100,000 in community fees impact annually, and then other elements of additional annual revenues that come into the town. And then here, Jennifer Thompson's quote, it's the only town hall in public safety building in Massachusetts where not a penny of tax dollars had to be used, which is amazing. The residents were thrilled. The host community agreement we have only used, is only used for capital projects, we used it twice. Wants to buy an open space parcel, so it has preserved 103 acres of open space in Plainville. And the second one is for the town hall in public safety buildings where we are today. And now I'll turn the rest of the show over to Rachel. So one of the things that we've tried to do increasingly is to figure out ways to quickly and easily share information about the impacts that we are seeing. And so we have on the two columns initially, we have the various areas where we are looking at impacts, and then we have the specific impacts that we're looking at. And then we have change from baseline to follow up. And where you see a level arrow is an area where we haven't identified an impact or a change, or where we see increases or decreases, we have either arrows pointing up or pointing down. So we checked this with quite a few people and it's a nice way to sort of summarize the data. So what this slide shows you is that there were sort of changes in attitudes towards gambling that went both ways, both positive and negative. And there were some environmental impacts that we identified mostly relating to the increase in traffic, but apart from those two areas, we did not detect any significant changes in the indicators that we've been monitoring over time related to social and health impacts in Plainville and surrounding communities. And then on the economic and fiscal side, it's the same idea of how we're showing this graphically. You can see that most of the arrows are pointing up. There's one that we are still working to be determined, which is gambling participation in relation to income, and one where we did not identify any changes that could be attributed to the opening of Plain Ridge Park Casino, which relates to changes in real estate and housing. And I'm just going to finish up our part of the presentation by mentioning that we have two new fact sheets that are now posted on our website and will be available for people to download and print. And I have copies for one of this fact sheet relates to changes in social and health impacts of Plain Ridge Park Casino in Plainville. The majority of the focus is on changes in attitudes, but you can see that graphic there that we also included. And the second one relates to the impact of Plain Ridge Park on traffic issues in Plainville. And that's a picture of our team. You can see how many people there are. And now I think it's time to turn it over to Tom. Before we just shift to Tom, should we just do a check-in to see if there's any particular questions right now? Which remind me, how many reports like these for Plain Ridge have you, have we done? How many reports for Plainville? Yeah, well, let me back up a little bit. You write that some of us have seen some of these slides before and that's totally fine, good context. I have also, you know, you've presented before at times the GRAT, the Gaming Research Advisory Committee and I have attended your public meetings. But I'm interested in just how many times have we, have you presented before to this commission on Plain Ridge? I'm not sure I can answer that immediately, Commissioner. I would have to go back and dig through my records. I'm gonna say it's more than five, but less than 10. Okay, and I guess what I'm getting is there are a lot of data here that does not appear to be changing, which is perhaps a lot of good news. The way I'm thinking about it is how much do we need to keep measuring some of the indicators that may not be changing? So I think what it's important to understand is that the first, either two or three years that Plain Ridge Park Casino was open, there were no other casinos operating in Massachusetts. And we now have MGM Springfield that's been operating for a little over a year and Encore Boston Harbor, which has now been operating for almost six months. And I have to say that although we have not identified changes to date in what we are looking at in Plainville and surrounding communities, it's quite possible that certainly gambling behavior and some of the social impacts and possibly some of the economic impacts will be affected in terms of their trends by people changing their behavior with the change in the gambling landscape in Massachusetts. And it's, I think what one of the most unique features of the study as a whole is that we're looking at both the state level and at the regional levels. And so we're going to be, I think, able to say something over the next few years about what is the impact of a large integrated resort style casino opening in Boston, for example, on the behavior and economics of a small slot parlor in Plainville, 30 miles away. I think it's a question that hasn't been, we haven't been able to answer it yet but we are well positioned to be able to say something over the next few years in terms of the impact of these regional casinos on one another. And I know the answer to this, but maybe we should just state a little bit for the record. Some of the data that you present here is from 2016. Some of the quotes are from early 2018. And one of the things that I'm interested in as we go forward is having more timely reporting on the research that we do conduct. We have a big role in it. We put you through a research review committee which takes time and I know there's a lot of data collection that goes and quality assurance that goes before you can report it. But as we move forward, one of the things that I'm most interested in is being as timely as possible with the information that we're getting so that we are, if anything, able to try to react policy-wise or otherwise to the findings that we may have. Yeah, it's a challenge that we have faced all along in terms of timely reporting, that research takes a while to do. It's certainly the review process that the gaming commission has established has been very rigorous, but also somewhat time consuming. And I've thought about this quite a lot in terms of, are there ways that maybe we, I mean, what we have to do is we have to come up with ways as a research team to perhaps raise a hand before we actually have final results that are ready for public consumption? Yep. So part of what we are intending as part of the, especially on the economic and fiscal side of the shop, it going forward is these, now that the model has been created and now that there are templates of reports that exist, to kind of get away from the full report and rather do kind of quick hitters on updates of various elements. So whether they function as a fact sheet or smaller kind of reports, but there's no reason after a certain point that an operations report needs to continue to be lengthy because we can always reference the older report and say like, well, the newest year is this. And as a couple of data points there. And so I think that those are gonna be ways in which we'll be able to shave a lot of time off because one of the things that makes a report long is when there's a lot of pages and then people need to read it and there's that whole process. And so what I, what we've proposed and you know, there's just separate from what this presentation is, but I think gets at the heart of your question is next level research is to selectively have longer reports when they make sense. Like if we were gonna do a comparison of operations impacts across the three casinos. Well, that should be a full report. And you know, year six of Plainville. All right, well, let's just do that as a fact sheet. And I think that those are instances where we can be faster and your review process can be faster because it's not the same kind of thing that people are gonna be reading through. We've been sensitive to that not just on the review side of it, but it's also in terms of the human consumption side of it. Because attention spans are what they are. And so to have, we want our research to have the greatest impact on the most people. It is intended for a policy audience. It's also intended for general public and the general public is more likely to consume a fact sheet. So these are things that we've been wrestling with internally and as you know, we've been having conversations about this on and off for a long time. Some of it has been the production of a product line that has been set in motion a while back. And then so part of our thinking is, okay, well, when we're fully on operation phase, what does that look like? And so that's some of the thinking and trying to make that more efficient. Yeah, and we're all ears. And I should say, actually, I should reiterate, we have a big role in that through the quality assurance and the review process. But I'm, this is a good opportunity, you know, now that we're into the, going into the operational phase to think and rethink those assumptions made early on about the cadence, the format, because I suspect because you already also alluded to early on, there will be other research priorities that emerge and we need to be able to respond to those. We've had those questions, you know, to you before, you know, maybe a perspective from the city, relative to tourism, et cetera. So it's really important for us to continue to think about what- And for me, the challenge- What does that mean? In those exact questions is that, is that we've created a tracking study that tells stories around employment, characteristics of workers, real estate, lottery sales, all those different things, right? You don't want to lose that, right? You know, but at the same time, it's like you don't want to keep recreating the exact same things over and over again, because like what are you learning, right? We've been having you guys ask really important and interesting questions about the care, you know, about what other industries are impacted, other elements of job quality and so on. So how do you answer those questions while keep the tracking going, right? So that for us has been, how do you repackage different product lines so that you can still do A in a different way so that you can go and do B? And so, again, conversations we've had in different ways over time. It sounds as though this is something that we can continue to explore because it's important to keep that relevancy and to achieve efficiencies, but with Mark, you would hate to lose the tracking. That would come, when I'm hearing you say that's probably not the most, that's not the part of the research and deliverable that's taking up more time. It's the full reporting and- Correct, especially when the systems are in place, right? You know, so it's the buildup of system and then moving it forward. Because that data collection would be too bad to lose that right now on year four, five, right? I mean, I think I agree with that statement. And if, by doing, using the same data and tracking data over time, we also have to balance it with what are other issues that are coming up where we want to direct our resources towards. And if I could just add one other point about the timeline. We have one review, so a round of review with our research review committee takes about six weeks. It would take six, it takes three weeks for our review committee to have it, to digest it, to provide the feedback to our research teams and then they have three weeks to generate a new, a following draft. And if there's multiple iterations, if we go into round, it's not three weeks each time, but you can begin to see how long it takes for us to do this type of thorough research review. I don't wanna compromise on any part of our research review. We perhaps should take a look at the timeline between reviewing drafts and getting it back out. Problem is we have a research review committee that that's not what they do full time. And they're incredibly good, but we need to respect their time and what they can give to it. Yeah, and I think I agree that they're really good, they're really responsive. But to the extent that it's something we've done before and everybody agrees that the methodology is sound or the format is what it is, at least in theory, you would think there would be opportunities there for that research review as well. Perhaps one or less, one or more, or less turnarounds, maybe only one. I know, I am familiar with how rigorous that can be and comments, et cetera, and that's, there should always be allowance for that. Dr. Valberg, I think, let's do it. I just wanna add one more thing to the review process issue, which is that in addition to the review committee, quite a few of our reports need to be vetted by the operators, you know, cause they're giving us their data, but we need to give them the opportunity to review what we are seeing through our analysis. And that is sort of, you know, also built into the review process and adds another sort of layer of complicated interaction sometimes. Well, I just wanna make sure that we're not adding a layer of negativity here because this is wonderful research and reporting, but I am also aware that there's always opportunity to review and where there can be efficiencies achieved and the methodologies that are agreed upon maybe somehow conveyed in an efficient fashion so you're not repeating and reviewing what's already been approved, just like that would work out, but do you have any further comments? No, just that it is, you know, the good news here is that the impacts are not severe. In many cases, there aren't negative impacts to what happened here with the Plain Ridge Experience over four years. So I just a comment that that is good news and I think partly attributed to the work everybody is doing to minimize those impacts. In terms of mitigation and innovation. The one that stood out to me was on environmental, can you elaborate on that in terms of whether they're significant or? So in terms of the traffic, I think it was traffic and noise. Yeah, so the reason that we reported that there seemed to be an impact in terms of noise was actually a specific comment that was made by Lou LeBlanc who is one of our key informant interviews. He's, at the time we interviewed him, he was the head of the Board of Health and he mentioned that there were a number of noise complaints related or during the construction phase of the slot parlor, but that there had not been any noise complaints since the construction ended. So, but we felt it was important to document that. And then also through the use of, or through an analysis of data from traffic cameras around the main intersections in Plainville, we identified, I believe it was about a 14% increase in the amount of traffic that was going in and out of the casino. Not a surprise, certainly given that you have a lot more people coming to the facility, but we again felt it was important to document that as an impact that could be attributed to the slot parlor. So that was an independent look at traffic and not related to Christopher Bruce's work, correct? So in the full report, we look at the traffic data and we looked at Christopher Bruce's traffic collision data as well. Interesting that when we have our meetings with the chief of police of the host and surrounding communities, there was a strong feeling that a lot of the additional traffic was based on ways and other, taking them off of 495 and putting them on back roads, they did not think it was related to the casino. Interestingly enough, and that was an interesting piece in talking to all of the chiefs. So I just, I didn't know that you knew that we had discussed that at length. The traffic issue. So that's sometimes where the research and those who are directly responsible having those conversations are very helpful. Absolutely, thank you for that. Thank you. Sorry to disrupt the cadence. Not at all. Thank you for that opportunity. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, commissioners. I'm excited to be here. I'm Tom Heek. I am a senior research analyst over at the Donahue Institute. And a big thing that I've been working on for the last four or five years is sort of developing systems to track the economic impact of the casinos. And what I want to talk about specifically today, let's see, how do I get it to my thing? I think you might. Yeah, you have to go through it to get it in order. Okay, this might take a second. Oh yeah, I can just start, yeah. What I really want to talk about is what we're calling the direct impact of the casinos. So what are direct impacts? It might be easier to back up and talk about when we do economic impact modeling. What we're really trying to capture is everything that's changed in the economy as a result of some sort of policy decision or event. When we're talking about direct impacts, we're talking about the sort of primary economic activities that are occurring at the casino. So what does that include? It includes operating employment, so people who are hired at the casino and working there. The expenses that the casino is paying out to vendors and government entities and charities and whatnot. It's the revenues that the casino is bringing in and then some large portion of that is then paid to the state government. And those sort of sort of direct trackable things. What this is not covering is a lot of the sort of ripple effects that you see in a community like this when there is a sort of a big economic event like the opening of a casino. So when we're measuring the compensation that the casino is paying out to its employees. Well, those employees are then going out into their communities where they live and they're spending that money. We have a whole bigger economic modeling process that's capturing those ripple effects. It's also capturing when they buy a lot of stuff from vendors. That might cause those vendors to invest, to hire more people or to purchase capital goods. Maybe the biggest thing is when we have a thing like a casino that's their primary source of revenue is patrons that are sort of local to the community coming in. It's not like it's a software company that's producing goods for people all over the world. The consumer base is local and those people were probably spending their money in other places before the casino. Maybe they were spending their money out of state gambling. Maybe they were spending it at local bars and restaurants. And a lot of these questions about these things outside of the casino are some of the sort of hottest public policy conversations that surround these things. We have a really great methodology for capturing all of that stuff, but to really get it working out, we need to do these patron surveys that we do. And we at this point are not doing one of those at every casino every year. We still think it's important to report to the commission on the things that we can get data on every single year. And that's the very rich data set that the folks at Planetary Park Casino have been very helpful in sharing with us. So let's talk for a moment about data collection. Tom, maybe you can get to this later, but where you were going to do this? Why is it important every single year? For me, it's a matter of we want to establish time series data. We want to see how things are changing over time, and we want to see how other events that are happening in state and out of state, whether that's a regulatory event, whether that's a change in the market, how those are coming. In my personal philosophy on data is that you collect a lot of it and you then look at it and you see what's going on, but you don't always know what you're looking for until you can take a look at it. And there's actually some really interesting examples in here where I'll touch on a couple of them here, and then when this actual full report is published in the next few months, you'll hopefully be able to see a few more of them. There were things that we saw that we maybe didn't set out to look for, and it was like, wait, this is going down. That's kind of interesting. And it sort of sheds light on things that we maybe weren't even, we hadn't even thought of yet, as sort of the unknown unknowns or whatever you want to call them, but for us, it's important that we just continue to track these things so that we can sort of establish a time series of how these institutions are responding to the world, if that makes sense. So in order to do that, we've actually got this really great data set. So that includes payroll employment and compensation at the casino. It includes spending to outside entities, so all of the vendors, the government entities, third parties, we've got data on visitation to the casino. We've got, obviously, the MGC makes available information about gross gaming revenue. Taxes and assessments, all of this stuff. And when we look at these things and we compare them to each other and relate them to each other, we're often able to find out just really interesting things and help folks such as the commission to actually answer some interesting questions. So for example, here's a time series we have of payroll employment at every pay period since the start of fiscal year 2016, so about two weeks after PPC opened initially. When we say payroll employment, what we're talking about is employees who received a paycheck during that period. It might not perfectly line up with the number of people there because some people may have left and they're receiving their last paycheck. Some people might have started a few days earlier. They haven't received their first paycheck, but it's a really rich data set because for each of these employees that's receiving a paycheck, we know from that all sorts of things about them, about what they were paid, what sort of position they were working in, demographic information about them, benefits, compensation, and because we have this sort of as a time series, we're actually able to track a lot of interesting stuff about how people's careers change over time and the tenure that people work there and how their status might change, and there's a lot of stuff there. But to give you an example of, this is a graph that shows something about payroll employment. Well, it makes it look like so it was high. It sort of reached its peak towards the end of calendar year 2015, and then it fell and it's leveled out a little bit, and that's true. But it's also true that if you look at, if a different thing, a different perspective, actually the hours worked at Plain Ridge Park is actually higher in fiscal year 2019 than it was in fiscal year 2016. So that suggests that they might be moving towards having more full-time and less part-time people and that there might be less turnover. So that's just one example of why we wanna collect these things sort of as a time series. But yeah, for the last few years, it's really been fairly level. The payroll employment on average about 450 people working employed at the casino at any given time. Let's see. And in terms of where those employees are located, they're fairly tightly clustered around the casino. When we talked about the new employee survey, you saw that with the new hires, but it's true for a lot of the long-standing people as well. Actually over half of the folks working at the casino are coming from 10 communities. And those 10 communities include Plainville plus all of the surrounding communities except for Rentham, which is not contributing a lot of employees. But the biggest are North Attleboro and Attleboro. On average, North Attleboro has about 51, 52 people working at the casino at any given time. And Attleboro has about 43. Plainville on average has 24, 25 people who are employed at the casino. There's also a pretty good number of people in the communities right over the Rhode Island border who are employed and come over here. Thomas, on this, how do you define Metro Boston and Southeast Asia? Oh, sure. So when we're doing our economic modeling exercises, we have, it's a county-based model. So Metro Boston would be Norfolk County, Middlesex, Essex and Suffolk, it's a very large region. Well, Southeast would be Bristol and Plymouth County. Can you tell me, do you have this, and I may have missed it, Tom, 453 jobs now. Do we know the FTE part time breakdown? It's not in this presentation, but I could easily, it is in the full report. I can get that off the top of my head, I'm not sure. Well, you said that it's increased for full time. Yeah, I do believe the number of full-time employees has gone up, and I do believe that the majority of employees at Plain Ridge Park at this point are full-time. I think that's always been the case, but it's gone up. And you may not have this, but I know that one of the goals for taking a job at the casino was increased salary. I know, I think we saw that around 50% have gone from underemployed to earning a living wage. Do you know if their wages, for those who were full-time, if in fact their wages were higher? We haven't done this yet, but one thing that I'd be really interested in doing at some point is actually relating the new employee data to the operating data and sort of tie those together. We actually, we've been working really closely with Plain Ridge Park Casino, and we now have a much richer data set than we've worked with in previous years that would allow us to maybe do some more interesting work like that, but it's not something that we've done to this point. I didn't think you had access to that, so that confirms. Thank you. The other thing. I'm probably asking a question I've been asking in the past. And just to acknowledge Lisa McKinney for her immense help in collecting this data and validating the data and working through some of the data problems that we had at different points of time, but to assure that what we have is what the condition is. And we did have the data, thank you. I knew I'd seen it, but I couldn't remember. So the breakdown is 301 full-time, 143 part-time. Does that sound right? Yeah, that sounds about right, yeah. One other thing that we're hoping to do at some point is develop a methodology for estimating income from tips. So we know what the casino is paying, but obviously for some of the employees, they might be making even more than that an hour from tips, so that's an area where I'm really interested in looking for that, especially when we start running these things through our economic models, because if they're getting that tip money and spending it in their communities, that leads to an even bigger ripple effect. In terms of, oh, sorry, expenditure. The casino, we talk a lot about jobs at the casino, but in terms of the actual money, which is finding its way into the Commonwealth, the spending on employee wages is actually a relatively small fraction of what's going on. Obviously, the biggest share of money that's finding its way to the Commonwealth is the taxes paid on gross gaming revenue, which is very considerable and which has actually grown over the years. Spending on private sector vendors, as well as spending to local, state, and federal governments, whether that's various fees or taxes and surrounding community agreements, that's also spending to outside. Entities has remained relatively stable, but again, is a higher share of spending than employee wages. In total, so obviously 100% of the GGR tax goes to the state, and then some share of the spending on vendor spending and employee spending goes to individuals or entities within the Commonwealth, but some of the employees and some of the vendors aren't here. When you calculate it all up in fiscal year 2019, we're talking about $135.2 million in spending and 86.3% of that is actually going to either the Commonwealth of Massachusetts itself or entities or individuals within the Commonwealth, and that share has remained over 85% consistently throughout the four years of operation. It's interesting to note, spending on employee wages has climbed even though employment has leveled off. Spending on employee wages as well as hours worked. And there's, yeah, we have a little bit, we have some ideas about that that might be sort of settling into a more incumbent workforce where you have people who have been there longer, sort of where people are trusted, either there's people who are being promoted or people who started part-time who are now working full-time. So we're, yeah, that's what we are seeing is actually really specifically in FY19 hours worked and compensation have both increased. Thank you. Talking about vendor spending, it's a pretty diverse field of industries that are receiving some amount of vendor spending, the largest of those industries is wholesale trade. Obviously there's a lot of wholesale supplies coming through the casino, particularly related to sort of the restaurant and bar side of things. But really most of the operating expenses are going to industries that aren't in our top 10. So we're talking about a very diverse field. And when you break that down by in-state versus out-of-state, you'll see that this is one area where the amount of money coming into Massachusetts has declined a little bit. The share of money or the share of vendor spending which is going to vendors within the Commonwealth has dropped off a little bit in the last fiscal year while the amount out-of-state started very high, dropped off and has crept up a little. A lot of that really high initial spending had to do with the miscellaneous manufacturing industry. And in fact it still is. One of the things in the miscellaneous manufacturing industry is gaming equipment manufacturing which is largely done in a couple, largely mainly Las Vegas. So that's where a lot of that is. But it still remains fairly high. Can I interrupt? Yeah. I believe we saw a slide earlier today that indicated a good part of the out-of-state spend goes to New Hampshire. Do you remember that slide? Did you detect that in your research because I understood if it's gaming manufacturing where we would have a hard time competing with those other states, do you have a sense as to anything that's not related to gaming where Massachusetts is losing out on opportunities because either lack of supply or not are being too costly? Is there any trend that you were able to detect on that? I'm not sure about a specific trend or and I'm not sure about New Hampshire specifically as a state. I have done sort of state by state analyses in the past but in this year that wasn't something that I really sat down and looked on. I do know that when you have casino operators who are national or multinational in some cases entities, they sometimes have preferred vendors for certain things like financial services who they're already working with some of their other properties. But I'm not positive is specifically related to New Hampshire. If I can help and maybe someone can correct me. My memory was that Plain Ridge re-did some of their procurements and it was a food vendor and they shifted from, is it Cisco or something, to someone in New Hampshire which accounted for this way? That's a quick portion. They were in Massachusetts. So it was. Right. That accounted for New Hampshire. Thank you for reminding me. Really, with respect to one vendor. Would you point out that maybe some of that data is not yet captured because you're reporting as a fiscal year 19 and we get from Plain Ridge, we get the most up to date. Is this the category you want to pull in? Yeah, so. In the past we've demonstrated this sometimes we've been a map to just showing where different things are and I don't know, I don't recall this in the slide I can now, but this is a good reason to track this on an annual basis too or at least on a pretty regular basis because it can tell you a little bit about, like at different points in time, like is this really going down? Are we missing something as a state competitively or is there some other story to tell about somebody who used to be in mass and isn't anymore or something like that? Right. In terms of revenues, I think you all are probably very familiar with all of this since you published it, but the revenues have continued to be fairly strong. It almost looks to me like there was a little jump where the first two years were very similar to each other and then it popped up a little in terms of sort of the annual totals per fiscal year but overall we are not seeing, even with the, one thing we were really interested in this year was how the introduction of MGM Springfield was going to affect the gross gaming revenue numbers at PBC and obviously we haven't seen a significant effect yet, but we actually, one thing that we kind of did we looked at revenue numbers and employment, which I showed you earlier, and this is sort of where I think we do add a little bit of value is, well we add value in a lot of ways, but this is one where I think I specifically, this one thing that we can do that I think is kind of cool is that we can actually look at these things and say that sort of monthly employment at the casino has over time fallen to some extent, but we also see at the same time that gross gaming revenue has on average risen, which suggests to us that we're talking about a more productive workforce where individual employee, like per employee they're bringing in more revenue than they previously had, which I think you could sort of expect for a new entrant and into a market where the first year or two you're going to have to do a lot of sort of building sort of industry-specific skills and then over time you're gonna see individual employees being able to bring in more revenue per employee and that's what we've seen here. So it's not exactly shocking, but it's really interesting and it's the sort of thing where this data is really valuable because most just standard economic models would assume sort of a fixed ratio between productivity or you know between like output and employment. So you'd say oh well if the employment isn't what it was at the first year then that must mean that the output isn't and that's not what we've observed here. So these sort of data allow us to sort of model things in a much more comprehensive way. One fun thing if I can interrupt you that I think will be interesting over time is to see how that ratio looks with the other casinos because one of the things that we're seeing is a maturing casino labor force, right? So will we see a trend that looks like this or will it look more consistent out of the gate? Especially as we see some level of flexibility between the casinos with staff working in one and then I get working at the other. Like will that translate to some level of consistency in the gates or not? And sort of on the flip side of that, if we track operating revenues against visitation we see the same thing where visitation at PPC has declined a little bit over the four years. But again, on average the operating revenues have climbed and this is one of the reasons we're really interested to continue to monitor patron behavior is one thing that this could be an indication of is that we're seeing the population who is going to the casino shifting to people who are less coming in just because they're curious and more folks who are spending a little bit more money per visit because you've got less folks but more money. How much does inflation would factor in here? I know it's only a couple of years. You know, I don't think it probably Or lower minimums, the business model, higher minimums. I guess that's a possible, if minimums have gone up that could definitely also play a role for sure. Or a slot hold, for example. Yeah, I mean there's definitely things internally in terms of how the casino sets its own rules that could lead to this as well. But it's just, these are the sort of things where I think it's really interesting to sort of continue to monitor these things because this is a trend that we didn't even think to check. We just looked at these numbers and these trends independently and then you pointed out this is interesting, these are going in different directions it's not what you necessarily would expect. So it's something that we intend to keep an eye on. But I think these last couple of slides kind of point to what we begin to learn about the gaming industry which is after three, four years you hit the steady state of operations, right? Employment starts to level out, revenue starts to level out as our licensees get to know their customer and get to know other operations can operate more efficiently. Absolutely, yeah. But that begs the question. That's why we do need to continue to be consistent so we can really see that it's not just a four year steady but a longer. What would be the number of years to really know? Is it a 10 year trend that becomes clear if this day? That's a really great question. Yeah, and it would be nice if there was an easy answer to that, because I think one of the things that's unique about Massachusetts, the strengths and weaknesses of the way this has come together is there was almost spacing of when the casino is actually open. So should we expect this level to consist? So for us, from a research perspective, we're able to disentangle the casinos very neatly and develop our methods very cleanly, the negative in terms of like, so when's the equilibrium hit or when's the stability hits? Well, the elements of where stability hits is when other major casinos also happen to show up. So it's a little hard to say like, well, once we get year 10, this thing should be very predictable. It might be, but I hesitate to say that knowing that when we just open a massive casino and it doesn't run, so what does that mean? Or there's other things. How is online gaming, is that developed? Like how is that going to affect these? Demographic change, how's that going to change? We don't always even know what we need to be looking out for until we see the changes and then you start looking into them and saying, what's this all about? What's the story here? And that's the sort of stuff I really love to do. I would add, I don't wanna, and I know I brought this up with Mark and Rachel and with Mark van der Linden. Again, going back and revisiting the possibility of looking at some ingrained data sources. And we've talked about this, you know, a lot of it is locally based meals tax, hotel tax, stuff that's collected locally because as we saw in Western Mass, Northampton was very concerned about what the opening event would have on their kind of restaurant and hospitality scene. And it'd be a great picture or a great story to tell if we could say the introduction of gaming has actually not impacted or perhaps boosted some of those local numbers because that would get to, you know, certainly interest on behalf of, you know, the communities are designated surrounding communities but it also tell a bigger story about people are coming, people haven't really changed, maybe they're spending habits, maybe there's more people coming to the region. And that's data that's pretty readily accessible but would certainly help us maybe come some fears of some of the local communities to have that data analyzed and what that. So this is, that's my presentation. If there's any other questions, I'd really be happy to answer them. Very, very helpful. Thank you. I'm going to echo Commissioner Stevan's thoughts on the local taxes. I don't know a mark how we can get that information maybe sooner than later before too much time has passed but certainly it would be interesting to see the trends associated with events that are coming into our destination casino licensees and see the local impact. And we are exploring different elements of that. There are some issues with, to the question that Bruce is raising with, I'm sorry, what's the office? It's the taxation office. DOR? DOR. So with DOR. DOR. There are some challenges in terms of how data are able to be disentangled at the point locations but municipalities are a little bit different things. So we are doing some exploration with it that there are obviously confidentiality issues that are coming into the universe. Yeah, I think with respect to the municipality, you're actually thinking how much hotel food and beverage and hotel taxes. Yeah, I mean, how about that? So there's no privacy issues there. It's the same as local, right? Yeah, certainly with respect to individuals, DOR would be challenging. And again, this kind of is to a bigger conversation that we've had is, how can we take the great research that's been done and share it out with a broader group of stakeholders? So this information isn't just being exchanged between us, but it's helping educate the public. It's helping educate the local chamber of commerce about how much is being spent locally. It's understanding the local impacts, the local employment. Even when you go out and do your visitor patron surveys, that's great information to be shared back with the travel bureau is to, hey, this is why I keep coming back to PPC or to Encore or to MGM. So I know Mark's thinking about that day and night, but. And by the way, I should know that they, there's a great estimate that they do get to through the REMI modeling and other things relative to those multiplier effects and whatnot. What you alluded to, which they also responded to, has other difficulties because of how data is aggregated at the municipal level. But to the extent that it can be continued to be estimated or at least put into the context with other data, that would be really helpful. Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it very much. Thank you. One for each of you, I'm going to start using this. Awesome. Oh, thank you. So this is 10 and 11 of our pastries. Thank you. Please enjoy. At this time, I think we'll take a five minute break before we start with Christopher Bruce. Thank you. We're reconvening commission meeting number 281. And we are now on our public safety reporting from Christopher Bruce. Thank you, Director Vindolinden. Do you want to make the introduction? Sure. Just one comment. I introduced his work just before the Sigma team. And to Commissioner Stebbin's point of taking the wealth of information that we have through this research and assuring that it reaches the right stakeholders. Knowledge translation is kind of how that's defined. And I think that the work that Christopher does and his close work with each of the local police departments is exactly that. It's intended to be this type of monitoring system where it's engaging, didactic, and reaches the right audience. And so for one, I think this is fantastic work. And I applaud Christopher's sort of due diligence of making sure it gets to the right people and working with the right people. So with that, I'll turn it over. All right, thank you, Mark. I think this is the first time that I've been in front of you speaking about multiple studies at the same time. So I tried to condense them as much as possible so it wouldn't go on forever. And I think you're pretty familiar with my methodology, my now, in which I'm extracting the data directly from the record systems of the participating agencies so that we have not just summary data, accounts of crime, but actual information about each individual offense and call for service and person involved in crime so that we can check for changes in quite a few variables. That process went very smoothly in Plainville and in the Springfield area. It ran into a few snags in the Encore area with one agency choosing not to participate at all and a couple of others having difficulty providing the data exactly how I was used to getting it. But I think it'll be okay in the end. So we'll talk about some of those issues when we get to the Encore study. And I wanted to talk briefly about the statistical methods I've been using. I deliberately kept them somewhat simple because I wanted them to be understandable to the audience, which of course, to me is principally the agencies that are involved. I think I've covered them before, but just to go over it again, what I'm trying to do really in all of the studies is to identify a window of numbers in which we would expect each crime or call for service to fall if nothing had changed in the community. And as you might imagine, some crimes fluctuate, every crime fluctuates a little bit from year to year. Some fluctuate a lot, some fluctuate a little. And the amount of that fluctuation determines the width of that window, I suppose. So one method of creating that window is just to look, as this example shows you, in sort of the general central tendency of the crime over the previous period. In this case, the crime hasn't been going anywhere, it hasn't been trending up or down. It's just fluctuating around that central line, basically. And we establish statistically with standard deviations, a window on either side of that average where we would expect the activity to fall, again, if nothing had changed for the community. Other times you have a situation like this in which the numbers over the course of the previous period are trending downward clearly. So if I used the central tendency method to establish a window, it would be predicting the past, essentially not the future. And so we have different methods that are based on the trend line that runs, that can run through the data to create the window there, regression analysis, basically. Again, I've tried not to use statistics that are too complicated for this, just to make it more understandable to the audience, although there's gonna come a time in which once we have data from all three casinos, and we try to answer the macro question of what impact do casinos generically have on crime and public safety that it's gonna involve, have to involve a lot more sophisticated statistical modeling, I think. But we're not quite there yet. So the important thing is to understand when you see a statistic in any of the reports that has a dash in between two numbers, that's the window that I predicted either based on one of the two methods, depending on whether crime was trending or not. And then we compare it, of course, to what happens. What really happened during that period to see if it's inside or outside that window. So we'll start with the Plain Ridge Park area here, and the major findings over the four year period since Plain Ridge Park opened have been that the violent crime has been trending upward, but not in a way that I can tie specifically to the presence of the casino. It's mostly related to domestic violence, as we're gonna see that has seems to have been going up for its own reasons. Incidents at the casino itself generally led to Plainville itself experiencing a 7% increase in property crime, a 9% increase in total crime, and a trivial 1% increase in violent crime that I didn't even bother to put on the slide there. So that's at the casino, that's at 301 Washington Street. So if that facility had not existed, those crimes likely would not have existed. And therefore that's the specific impact on Plainville itself. In the surrounding region, arrests have been way down for the six participating communities, mostly in the area of liquor related offenses that has a lot to do with changes in policies for protective custody. Crimes that I think that might be related, or incidents that I think might be related to the casino, I have to do with a credit card fraud only during the first year, that fell away after the first year. Also during the first year, a little bit of, we're talking about single digit numbers, of a disorderly conduct, liquor related disorderly conduct across the street in Plainville Commons. Traffic collisions on feeder roads coming into Plain Ridge Park, particularly Plainville and North Adelboro for those. And then a bunch of stuff that is just related to volume in an area. Lost property, suspicious activity, people complaining about traffic, erratic driving, parked cars, things like that. The more people you bring to a community, the more of those types of calls for service tend to increase. And Plainville was the only one that really had a consistent increase in all of those things over the four year period. Now for the first time, there's two things in this report that weren't in past reports. One has to do with drunk driving. And what I'm characterizing is a mild increase, or at least a mild increase caused specifically by Plain Ridge Park. The fact is I can't separate exactly what's caused by the casino, what's caused by other economic growth in the area. And that's a theme that's gonna run throughout this presentation. And it's gonna continue getting hazier going forward how much we can credit specifically to the casino and how much is related to the general economic growth of the area of which the casino's a part. But we're also seeing expansion of the outlets. We're also seeing expansion of a Patriot Place. And the impact of those is tough to differentiate from the impact of Plain Ridge Park, if that makes sense. Go ahead. Quick question. With the drunk driving. Yeah, I have some more stuff on that. Oh, you do? Well, I'll wait then. Okay. Some things that are happening around here that I don't think are related to Plain Ridge Park, but that we've talked about it with the Chiefs anyway. Again, the increase in domestic violence, mostly in the relation, in the area of simple assaults. So assaults without a dangerous weapon or without significant injury. And what we call family offenses, which are generally restraining order violations or child neglect calls. Those have been trending upward in most of the communities around here. Mansfield, I think, being the exception. But every time we look for any casino relationship, we can't find anything. There's nothing in the narratives that indicates a gambling motivation, for any kind of casino related motivation, which I could imagine a scenario in which those were contributing factors that led to sort of a general increase in angst and frustration among a community that might then lead to violence. But I would expect it to show up once. I would expect to see gambling mentioned one time from a victim's narrative about why her husband had become violent or something like that. It's just not showing up at all. And the fact is you wouldn't expect that type of trend to be so geographically localized anyway. So it just appears to be a more general increase in domestic violence. And Chief Alfred has talked about the general economic or financial woes that might be causing that that don't necessarily directly have to do with the casino. Also the opiate epidemic as well, excuse me. We've seen increases in fraud and identity theft and the trend for the fraud incident seems to be a lot of telephone fraud. People getting calls from fraudsters claiming to be from the IRS or claiming to have their family members and wanting to extort ransom money. But these types of things are increasing all over the Commonwealth. And again, it's not something you would expect to be geographically localized. Fraud out in the street, sure. But not when you're calling a residence, there's no reason not to call any place in the US if you are motivated for gambling funds. So I don't think they have anything to do with the presence of Plain Ridge Park. Just a few examples of some of the crimes and calls for service. The general story I wanna convey here is that the types of things that people generally fear might increase from the kind of facile, direct causal hypothesis of somebody's motivated for gambling money so they go out to the area of community and steal things in order to meet that need. Those are specifically the types of crimes we have not seen increase. The robbery, burglary, thefts from vehicles, auto thefts, things like that have all been decreasing in the area, burglary enormously so. I mean, if I looked at that number and I hadn't collected the data specifically myself, I would seriously question that number. I would assume there was something else going on with reporting for that figure. But all across Massachusetts, burglary is decreasing and it's quite a lot in this area. We also haven't seen increases in, the other hypothesis would be that vice crimes would increase. Drugs, liquor, things like that. But we haven't seen any evidence of that either. What we really have mostly seen the evidence of is crimes or calls for service that are related to the volume of activity in the community. And those are where we've seen the most increases like in traffic collisions, as you can see there. Traffic collisions, I have to mention though, we're already on the increase before Plain Ridge Park opened. And they actually dipped a little bit in 2017, at least based on the CAD data from the agencies. Oh, I'm sorry, no, no, that's based on, I'm sorry, that's based on state crash data. Which we don't, they haven't closed the years after 2017 yet at the state level so I can't give 2018 just yet. So even if Plain Ridge Park contributed to the number of collisions, it was already an increasing trend. So their contribution was fairly mild. And that jives with a couple of reports that have come out of a traffic engineering firm that the casino hired themselves that issued a couple of reports that have basically said that the contribution of the casino has been minor and in minor collisions, right? So mostly fender benders, rear end collisions and almost not even noticeable in sort of a data, in congestion in day to day traffic volume. And I think that that's probably the case. When you look at the police calls for service for traffic collisions, they're increasing more than reportable traffic collisions. Now there's only reportable when it exceeds a certain dollar value or when injury has happened. So that suggests that most of the increase is in non-injury, a minor dollar value crashes that are contributing to the trend. So to get into the alcohols, I'm sorry, I thought you signaled my cursor. To get into the alcohol thing, I thought I saw your hand or something like you wanted to say something. So the question of alcohol related collisions, there's a few pieces of evidence that are showing up in the last, or that I've collected in the last year that we hadn't had access to before. And the first is the last drink statistics from the Alcohol Beverage Control Commission. This is collected during adjudication for drunk drivers and they specify where they had their last drink. These are the figures for Plain Ridge Park. As you can see, it went from one to two to nine in 2017 and then back down to three in 2018. At the same time, I'm looking at collisions that have alcohol as a causal factor. Now the specific fields where you're supposed to collect that in the police systems are not filled out with enough fidelity that I trust that data. But what I can do is look at calls for service for traffic collisions that then led to a charge for drunk driving. And that gives, I think a pretty good proxy for the number of traffic collisions that were caused by drunk driving. And that's these statistics here. Now, in the report. Can I ask you one question about that? Yes, sure. Have you gotten the last call from the court system? Are you getting it from the ABCC? I'm getting it from the ABCC, yeah. Does the court system provide it discreetly that you could get it from the court system or does that have to be, did they forward it to the ABCC? They forward it to the ABCC. I'm not aware that I could get it directly from the court system. The ABCC is the one that always issues public reports about the data. So that's who I went to. I didn't even try to go to the courts, to be honest. And then your presumption is that it comes from the court or is it coming from the court? Well, according to the ABCC's definitions in their public release reports, that's where they're getting it from, you know. And explicitly it doesn't come from the police reports during arrest, which might collect it and might not. So, yeah. Anyway, you can see from these statistics, during the first three years, the numbers were a little bit inconsistent. So in 2016, Attleboro was well within the predicted window, Foxboro was below it, Mansfield was above it, so was Plainville, Rentham was within it, and the total was well below, where we would expect it to be. 2017, the opposite, or not the opposite, it was actually still within the window, but it was towards the higher end and a couple of the communities were above the predicted window. So, 2018 it went back down, 2019 it went back up again. So, you know, when I looked at it in 2018, I had two years in which it was lower than average and only one that it was not even really above the windows. So, only in 2019 did a clearer trend come out of the data, I suppose, but then mixed with that, the ABCC data, I think the story is telling there is a subtle increase in drunk driving in the area that is leading to a few more crashes. Now, I don't want to attribute that to Plain Ridge Park exclusively because Patriot Place, the different bars and restaurants there contribute over 100 last-drink locations in the same period that Plain Ridge Park had, looks like 15. So, you know, it's not just PBC and PBC at best is only responsible for about 10% of last-drink locations between the two at least. And so, the story there is that throughout the region that we've seen a mild increase in drunk driving that's led to a inconsistent trend in crashes, but within the last year at least, higher than normal drunk driving crashes of which PBC has probably a small percentage of it, if that makes sense. It just might be worth reviewing whatever policies are in place for drinking at the casino and ensuring the drug drivers don't leave the location. This is more my own personal curiosity. Does Plainville in the surrounding communities, do they, do patrons rely on ride shears? Yeah, that one I can't answer you unfortunately. I don't know if we have good data on that anywhere. Yeah, of course I'm looking right to the chief who's shaking his head, yes, they do rely on ride shears. So it's consistent with the rest of the Commonwealth, right? Or probably the rest of the country? I have been waiting very eagerly for a couple of years for national studies to come out to evaluate the impact of ride shares on drunk driving because you would think you would have a fairly significant impact, but I'm not aware of any yet and I'm especially not aware of any localized to this region. But yeah, definitely, I'll look for that in future reports. Thank you. Okay, funny, it's not funny, but it's kind of amusing statistically that in the midst of a time that we had a decrease, it's such a decrease in burglaries in the area, we also had a burglary pattern and the only one that I'm aware of in which the offender could clearly be shown to have a casino motivation. So it's a reminder that you can have these patterns even in the midst of big decreases in crime and they might not therefore show up if we're just looking at the numbers. And as you can see from the table here, it doesn't really even involve, except for rent them, most of the surrounding communities. But this guy was arrested ultimately twice for this pattern. And you can see the first five or six of them, he didn't get anything out of, he didn't steal anything. He tried to break into the house, but he got scared away or the dog scared him away or something like that. And so finally in the one, after he's been doing this a week in rent them on October 8th to nights, he got $250 from a wallet, which he immediately took to Plain Ridge Park. He was identified as a suspicious activity there and identified as intoxicated actually. He drove away and the state police ended up charging him for drunk driving, but then later on he got arrested for the burglaries as well, which he committed another one after leaving Plain Ridge Park on the 11th. Anyway, he specifically cited after his arrest that he was motivated to steal, look for cash for gambling. So that's the one case that we're aware of that I'm aware of at least in which that happens. The one case I've been told about in which that has been a clear motivation in the midst of a crime that has experienced 50% decreases in the region. I wanna make sure I understand this slide. This is the same individual? Yes. At all these different days and times? Yes, well, as best as we can figure anyway from the modus operandi, the suspect description and what he admitted to after the crime was committed. I'd have to go back and look at my notes to see how sure I am about all of the individual ones, but I'm 90% sure of the entire series here. So he attempted seven burglaries and he was successful once? Well, five at least, yeah. Before he was five. You're a total, yeah, total seven in which he was only successful once. Yes, so he's not the best burglar. No, he amassed enough charges to put himself away for about 20 years and got $250 for it, so. Yeah. Yeah. So the summary here is that we've had no increase and in fact we've had significant decreases in the classic profit-motivated predatory crimes like robbery, burglary, and auto theft. The violent crime increase doesn't seem to be related to Plain Ridge Park. Neither do the fraud and identity theft increases. We've seen a mild increase in visitor-driven crimes, not crimes, which calls for service like lost property, suspicious activity and traffic complaints, a mild increase in traffic collisions, in minor traffic collisions specifically, and as I said earlier, this is all part of a larger pattern of economic growth and traffic growth in the area from which Plain Ridge Park is gonna be harder and harder to extract individually as the years go forward. Shall I take any questions on Plain Ridge Park before I move on to MGM? I think your comment about the drunk driving charges as a result of a crash are interesting and probably something we do need to follow up on, put a meeting together and follow up on that because crash data is reliable because there's not a, it doesn't matter if there's a detail out there, it's a crash. Right, exactly, yes. It's not dependent on police activity. Correct. And prior to, so we encouraged agencies to adopt methods for recording what incidents they knew were specifically related to Plain Ridge Park. Only Atalboro really instituted something that formalized within their records management system and they don't have it anymore because they switched record systems last year. But during the period in which they had that, the only times that that box was checked was for a couple of drunk driving incidents in which the person said they were last leaving Plain Ridge Park. So we'd had that little bit of evidence prior to it but we didn't really have better statistics until now. I'm gonna try to collect that from the other agencies though going forward because the ABCC data has to wait for adjudication which takes a while. So I wanna see if we can get data from the local agencies too. Okay, MGM. If I, just one last comment. So we, this report at this point is considered preliminary because we haven't, the comment period hasn't closed yet but in order to move this forward as quickly as we possibly could, we were comfortable enough with the data even as is that we felt it was appropriate to share it publicly. But the comment period will give it a couple more weeks before it would be considered final. But we did have the pre-meeting with the chiefs. Yeah, I just didn't have all the numbers. Correct. We didn't have everything but we, you had the basic. Just. Yes. And just to acknowledge Chief Alfred from the Plainville Police Department and we've been doing this for four or five years now and Chief Alfred has been there at every meeting and been a really welcome participant to this process and really helpful to this particular study. So thank you. Actually Chief, I would jump on that bandwagon there. Not only has he been an active participant but because the chief was willing to go out on, I would say a limb but he was willing to work collaboratively with the state police right out of the box which then made it possible and probable for the other chiefs in both Springfield and their surrounding communities and Everett in there. And I know how many calls you've gotten. Hey, how's it working out? Because it's not something that's done readily. So I think that that's really been so helpful with the implementation of gaming, the fact that you were willing Chief to take that chance and say, yes, I'll sign an MOU. Yes, I'll work together. And because that was a successful endeavor, the others were much more willing to come on board. So I do wanna thank you for that as well. All right. So obviously MGM opens in a very different geography from Plain Ridge Park. It opens in an area that has a lot higher population, of course, and historically a much higher crime and call for service totals. So because of that, different analytical methods are really necessary to extract its influence from the surrounding area. In particular, there's the issue of geography. You know, where MGM is right there on a street that you can walk right to the casino, you can park nearby and get to the casino. You can take a bus, you can ride up on Amtrak. You know, it's a lot different from Plain Ridge Park, which exists in its sort of isolated own space there. And things aren't spilling out of Plain Ridge Park to the surrounding community the way they could theoretically at MGM. So you're gonna see in the future a lot more, I think, finite geographic analysis of what's happening around MGM. I don't have a lot in this report just because it's only been eight months. So you know, once we have a year's worth of data, I think I have enough to do more with. It's also notable that, oh well, I'll start with the major findings. So over the eight months after MGM opened, all crimes were well below average during, across all of the communities that participated. They had been going down in the region anyway for about seven years, so that wasn't terribly surprising. The casino, if we just take what happens there and assume that it wouldn't have happened without it, it led to a 2% increase in violent crime, a 2% increase in property crime, and a 2% increase in total crime, 1% increase in calls for service in Springfield police departments own statistics, which isn't a terribly high series of numbers. Of course, Springfield's a big city. They've got a lot of other things going on. It was the top location for crime and calls for service during the region, but its percentage contribution wasn't all that high. And the only things I found in the eight months anyway that I thought were likely related to MGM were, again, increases in collisions and traffic related calls, like disabled vehicles, like traffic complaints, mostly to the south and west of the casino in Agawam and West Springfield. Again, more volume related stuff, general service calls, things like escorts, lockouts, other kinds of public assist calls, as well as lost property. Union Station in particular saw a big increase and I know it wasn't open for many years prior to this, but it saw an increase even above what was happening at the previous bus and train terminals that were being used in the city. And I think the extra volume coming to the casino might have a lot to do with that. And then just across the bridges in West Springfield, we saw some patterns of disorderly conduct and suspicious activity at a couple of the shopping strips over the bridge, some hand handling complaints in that same area. So that was the only obvious geographic impact, but we'll talk about some other possibilities as I go forward here. As you can see from this chart, property crime, violent crime and property crime and violent crime were already decreasing. Violent crime sort of bouncing around historic low just before the casino opened. Property crime still shooting downward and traffic collisions were up in the area before the casino opened. When it opened, it really, the impact was not detectable if you were looking at overall crime statistics for the region. You can see that dotted line represents what would have happened with crime, all crimes is a total crime, that dotted line represents what would have happened if MGM hadn't opened and the thick black line is what actually happened. They're virtually on top of each other and you really don't see much variance. When we look at crashes, this is by street segment. I've got to get a map of these street segments so I can aggregate them better, but it still tells the story. Right around the casino obviously with all the extra traffic, we saw an increase in crashes. As we get a farther away from the casino, the specific, its specific contribution becomes less obvious, but if you look over in Aguam and West Springfield, you see some of the streets that showing increase are on feeder routes to the bridges heading over to the casino. I think obviously what's happening here is on the east side of the river and north of the casino, people are just coming in off the highway a lot more so. It's not affecting the local routes except exactly specifically right around MGM where there's gonna be a lot of congestion naturally, but from the south and west, they're not necessarily taking highways up and so we're seeing more local traffic through Aguam and West Springfield. That's my hypothesis at this point anyway. Obviously we'll have to wait for traffic studies to know for sure what's happening there. And here's the map of suspicious activity calls and in West Springfield, as we can see, there's a shopping center. You guys can't see me pointing. This is a shopping center in that southern area in West Springfield. It's name escapes me, I can't, I had it wrong when we were at the meeting too and I can't remember what they corrected me. But anyway, there's a lot of stores there. Restaurants, a couple of big box stores. Riverdale? Yes, no, that might be a different one. I keep getting two or three confused. It's possible you're right. Are you pointing? Riverdale, this lower area here. I haven't in the report itself, obviously, but I didn't mark it on the map in text. But in any event, there's a lot of stores in there and we're seeing a lot more calls for people hanging out in front of the stores, suspicious activity, pen handling, and so forth. Where it's so geographically close, I think it's at least worth considering that it might be related. But we don't have direct evidence from the people themselves saying, yeah, I'm only here because of the casino. Now, this is an interesting story. Maybe I made the discontinued a little bit too big there, but really put that in your face. You got your point, of course. But during the first four months, we saw an increase in thefts from vehicles and from mostly residential driveways and also thefts of property from residences, like bicycles in the yard and so forth. Stretching south and east from MGM, and into east Long Meadow and Long Meadow. And that went away during the second four month period. Now, that type of pattern isn't terribly uncommon for the region, but talking with the chiefs, they thought it was a reasonable chance that the casino was having something to do with the extra activity caused by the casino. But what they did, they effectively responded to it. So the Long Meadow Police Department told us specifically that they established a D-DAX zone in the northern part of the city there. D-DAX stands for data-driven approaches to crime and traffic safety. It's a method of hotspot policing. It's another project that I happened to be involved with, so it's kind of funny to see them come together at this place. But the Long Meadow chief said that he established a zone up there and put extra patrol officers in that region. And Springfield also said that they had reacted to this analysis by putting extra patrols at various times in that region to the south and east. I don't believe, I'm not sure if East Long Meadow was at that meeting. So I don't believe we heard anything specific from them about what they were doing. But it's potentially a pretty good example of this report prompting some police strategy that then ended the pattern that the report had identified. I like to think so anyway. So we'd have to do more of a case study on it to prove that. But that was the feedback we got from the meeting anyway. And this was another pattern that was discontinued. We saw some during the first four months after the casino, an increase in Perce thefts and Perce snatching along this Riverdale Street section of West Springfield. But there were five of them, only five, and it didn't continue after the first four months. So we never really found out for sure what was motivating that particular trend. As I said geographically, I wanna do a lot more analysis now once we have a year's worth of data. For this report, I did three geographies. One, the MGM block, so the literal block surrounding the casino, then the Metro Center in general and then the surrounding neighborhoods of Springfield. And the only thing that it increased on the block right around the casino was disorderly conduct calls for service. In the Metro Center. Can I just ask this question? I'm seeing references to drunken driving and then I see something like disorderly conduct. But is there any connection to opioid abuse? Have you, that's not being- We haven't really seen anything involving an increase in drug activity in any of the casino regions so far. Now that's heavily dependent on police activity and what they focus on and how many investigative resources they apply. So it's really tough to get data on actual usage without using, like say self-report surveys of people in the region. But so far, no, we haven't seen any evidence. Not even reflected in, say, crashes or reflected in causal factors of any crimes. No, that hasn't been a theme so far. I wonder if it's part of the health if there are calls for medical care. Not connected to. We do have from a certain number of agencies, they code overdoses at least, which is what you're talking about. I think with medical calls that are related to drugs. But even in those, we haven't seen much of an increase. Now I would caution that a lot of communities didn't start recording those consistently until about two or three years ago. So we don't have much of a baseline to do the comparison to. But in the ones that have had that historic baseline, we still haven't seen much of an increase. The opioid epidemic though is something that it started in the, you know, before this decade. Right, in 2005, 2006, 2007. So in any of the period for which we have baseline statistics, we were already in the middle of it. It's not something that I don't think, Chief Alford might have a different opinion so I'd like to get it. But I don't think it's gotten particularly worse in the last five years. Do you think, Chief? No, let's see, we've seen an increase. No? Decrease. Decrease in the last couple of years. Yeah. And I don't know how well they've applied to the local area but there's been some effective national strategies in dealing with opioid abuse. And a lot of law enforcement agencies too are starting to see more of a health issue rather than an enforcement issue. So that's changing the way that they respond and record numbers for those types of crimes too. Yeah. There's been some large changes in the role of the state law enforcement approach. So we're still not seeing, at least in this community, as many violent abuses are related that we have seen, say, two years ago. And some of that may be the treatment side. There's more of that in the local government, the state's made an effort to provide more benefits for treatment. So maybe that's the main factor of the question that we're looking at. Discursions, sorrows, pain, complications, and trying to lessen those. So maybe we are seeing some of those effects as those efforts, as we go forward, with the ability of the time. And I think that we are seeing some efforts to do those approaches. Thank you, Chief. Very helpful. Thank you. So I noted on this map and in the report some statistics that had gone up and down in those three geographies. I don't want to make too much of any of them because none of them were during the summer. So this was a period that ended in April, obviously before the height of what would be, say, pedestrian season in the area. So when I collect the one year data, that's going to be much more meaningful in the analysis of what happened geographically around the casino. At the same time, then I'll also be analyzing what happened in the surrounding communities around their exit radiuses, which I've already mapped. But I wanted to see if traffic to and from the casino caused an increase at, say, restaurants or gas stations, other places that people would use facilities in the immediate area. And so I've got those geographies mapped. They were just waiting for a big enough data set to make any sense to fuel it. So I'll have more on that next time. But I don't want to make too much of it this time, except to say a number of crimes have decreased in the metro center around the casino. And I think that there's a really good chance that long term, all of the extra law enforcement presence, as well as the legitimate traffic in the area, will continue to drive down some crimes, while maybe increasing some others. You have competing things happening, basically. You have a much larger population of people in the area, which classically might increase the number of victimizations. But it also creates a situation where people are acting as mutual guardians for each other, and thus drives down certain crimes. Some other notes we've seen. Just I don't want anybody to get alarmed. So many of the communities have seen increases in pornography. Of course, there isn't much in the way of pornography anymore that's illegal, except for child pornography. And most of what we're seeing in the region, even though the numbers are going up, is not classic predatory child pornography, but teenagers taking images of each other and sharing them around and causing little mini-scandals of their schools and so forth, which I don't want to minimize that. But it's not anything that's related to MGM, or it's definitely its own special thing. Just like Plainville, we're seeing an increase in domestic violence and domestic disputes in the area in some communities, only three of the 11. So again, that's not really enough to establish a huge trend out of. But we'll keep monitoring that. Overall arrests are within the expected range. And so far, I haven't seen any changes at the types of locations that I thought might go up like gas stations, hotels and restaurants. The last drink data obviously isn't complete for the time period that it's been open, but we'll have it for future reports. Amtrak, I'm curious what's happening on the lines going up to Union Station. And if they're seeing an increase, they express willingness to participate, but otherwise haven't provided the data just yet. And I also want to get some more statistics on traffic volume so I can better establish the relationship between certain traffic related calls for service and whether or not it's truly related to the extra volume in the area. That's all coming soon. Any questions on that? So finally, I'll just talk briefly about Encore. There's not really much to say since, oh, I had a little slide, we'll skip that, we talked about it. Encore, there isn't much to say because, it's just a baseline that we've done there and there's no changes to report just yet. Obviously, we've just passed the period in which I can now collect four month data for Encore. I'll give them agencies a month or so to get their coding in order before I do it, but we'll see a report towards the end of the year at the beginning of next. These are the Encore participating agencies and Cambridge is the one that just said no on providing the data at all. A little bit personally embarrassing since I was the crime analyst there for seven years. Things of... Maybe we can work on that. Things have changed politically. Maybe we can ask, kind of just find out what the issues are. It might be worth phone call. Going back, they're the only agency that has a legal advisor full time and I find whenever that position exists, they tend to be a little bit more cautious about it. You can almost never go wrong by not providing data and, but then when you do things appear in the newspaper and so forth. And how did you approach the each participant? How did you get them to? Well, we started by having a regional meeting of all the local chiefs and I like to think I have good context in this area for my previous work. I also have been heavily involved in the crime analysis community and this area, unlike the previous tool, Springfield has an excellent crime analysis unit, but none of the surrounding agencies do. Here almost everybody does. Everett, Chelsea, Revere, Maldon, Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, Lost One, but I think they're gonna get a new one, Lynn does. It's been a lot, it's ultimately gonna be easier to work with these communities because of that. But in this particular case, so we invited them, we had a meeting, most everybody seemed to agree to participate at the meeting, but when it came to getting the specific data set is when we, now I will say to Cambridge's credit, they offered to send me numbers that's, to an analyst that's about as close as you can get to a middle finger basically. So I said, no, I don't want summary data. I need specific data, but anyway, Medford was not able to contribute data for this particular study, but they're willing to do it that we just, I don't know, we just had problems with logistics. So that'll come for the next report. Well, we were successful in getting Foxboro to get on board eventually, so maybe we can try that again with Cambridge as well. And Christopher, there was a discussion about including sagas. Right, yeah, we did talk. It's not a designated surrounding community, but it's a hole in the map. And so that could be on our list of to-dos. Sure, we can give them a call. Boston was surprisingly easy to work with. I had a great experience with them, although they didn't give me a direct access to their database the way that other communities did. They provided what I needed. And just for the Charleston neighborhood, I felt that the entirety of Boston would be just too much data to, it would overwhelm the region, and we wouldn't be able to identify some trends within it. But they gave me Charleston, and they gave me selected reporting areas in the Seaport area, so that where there's water taxis that are going to the casino, so we can see if that has any increase as well. Can we go back to the surrounding communities for a minute here, the conversation about sagas, for example? So what we did when we started this project is initially, surrounding communities really, obviously the easy ones were there's a border to they border the host community city or town. Now other communities applied and said, look, I really believe I'll have impacts, and these are the reasons why, and we were able to designate them as surrounding communities. So I guess did not self-identify or apply to become a surrounding community, which is why they're not included. But for this purpose, it doesn't mean we can't go back to them and say, hey, we'd love to have you participate in this project. I think we should do that because they, obviously with route one cutting right through the middle of the town, and so many restaurants and there's a mall there, obviously, so many facilities on that major travel route, I think that they'd be more likely than even say, revere, which is geographically closer but has less of that key travel real estate to experience much activity. Okay, we'll definitely make that contact then. So, and I believe they use the same record system as some of these other ones, so it won't be that hard to get data if they agree to participate. So the data I didn't collect was from eight agencies from January 1st, 2012, area of population of 430,000 and we had about 300,000 crimes and about 2.3 million calls for service among the data. A huge part of doing the baseline part is just setting things up for further analysis and a big part of that is the geography. How many dots can I, what percentage of dots can I get on the map from the addresses that have been supplied? I got almost 90% and I can keep chipping away at that so that was good, I was expecting it to be lower and the mapping part to be much more annoying here. Also, it's worth noting that the state police patrol much more territory in this region and many more of the local routes than they do in both the Plainville and the Springfield areas. So you're gonna, in Springfield, I'll state police statistics for the highways and that's about it but around here, Memorial Drive, Storo Drive, Rivier Beach Parkway, there's a lot of local routes that have high state police presence and collect a lot of, where the state police is the primary reporting agency for those crashes. You can see some of them on this chart here so we'll be working a lot more with state police data in assessing the impacts here because naturally, Encore is just off of Route 16. As for this immediate surrounding geography, it's interesting how different a challenge the three casinos have posed because Encore, although it is, in terms of the city itself, in the middle of a fairly busy area that has a lot of activity going on, the specific block on which the casino was built was just an industrial area that had virtually no activity in the past. You can see here with just 2018 and just a selection of crimes. But there's some across the road there, there's this mixed residential and commercial area on the other side of Route 99 that had a little bit of activity but generally, and then on the other side of the casino, to the west there's a major shopping center that you can't easily get to from Encore. You've got to go back up to 16 and then over and then down but a little bit of activity in both of those places but generally speaking that block, anyway, that series of blocks hasn't had much in the past. So it'll be easier to detect new activity there but then as far as going beyond that into the surrounding region, you're suddenly hitting an area that just very dense, very dense urban concentration that's got a lot of existing activity and it's gonna be harder to thread out the Encore-involved activity specifically from it. So it's a challenge. Enjoy that kind of challenge. If that footbridge ever gets completed, there's, of course, you've got the Assembly Square area, I can remember the name, on the other side of the river there that has gone through so much revitalization in the last few years and has a lot of things to attract casino visitors. So we might see an increase in activity in that area as well. So each one has a very, very different urban geography and it's gonna lead to different methods of analyzing what happens there. I just threw in one map, this one, there's like four or five in the actual report. In the presentation, I just put in this one map of thefts from vehicles just to show I didn't collect geographic data, was able to map it, was able to identify hotspots. So you can see existing hotspots in Charles down there, in downtown Chelsea, in downtown Lynn, a little bit in Everett but the area where the casino is, isn't a hotspot at all currently for almost any crime so we'll be able to see if that geography changes. Again, there's a lot of stats in the book that show the numbers that you would expect annually for each of the communities. Obviously, we'll be starting with a four month period just like we did with Springfield, doing an eight month, one year and then we'll see after that. I suppose. A summary is that there were some data collection, a few data collection issues, more state police presence of local roads, different geographic patterns. Oh, and yeah, there's much more in the way of transportation that we have to look at here. I'm trying to get MBTA to participate as well because they have their own police department, as you know, and the deals with stuff happening on the train and the stations and in the lots. And so that's gonna be important to analyze if they'll come aboard. But there's a lot more ways to get to Encore than there is the other casinos so far and so we have to look at those transportation patterns and what happens around the depots for that transportation. Any other questions for me? No, excellent work as always and we'll keep the chiefs engaged and make sure we can continue to make this project worthwhile. Awesome, thank you very much. The only question I had about the Boston data, given, I mean, it's not an easy walk, but in decent weather, if people were to go over the bridge through East Cambridge and dump themselves down to the Fleet Center, is there any thought to whether you think there's gonna be an impact in that area in terms of getting specifics? Well, in talking with the Boston police, they didn't seem to think so, but you're right, it might be worth taking a look at that, I'm sure the data extracts they're using to give me the data that I requested could just be expanded to pick up a few additional reporting areas. So yeah, that's a concern, I'll definitely ask them to do that. Okay. It is quite, it would be quite a bit of a walk. Yeah. But you never know. I mean, certainly we're looking at Lynn, which doesn't even, it isn't even on any major travel routes and so I'm making a note to myself but I'll get that additional data. This is great. I really look forward to, as we now have the three on the way, we're able to, you're able to glean some of the differences or similarities and because, yes, they sit in different geographies, but we are of course interested in protecting all of them equally and so again, to the extent we can get some of those trends, that would be really helpful. There's obviously gonna be a place in a couple years for a macro level report that asks some big questions about the impacts of casinos generically once we have multiple years of data from each casino. But yeah, it's been interesting to see all the variances and not just obviously in the geography but also in the type of facility too and what they offer and how many patrons they get and so forth. Right. All right. One last question. I know it's late in the afternoon. Is there anything that you can identify through your work that we could be doing, should be doing, that we're not right now? You're talking about you, as a commission or is? No, no, no, no. For your work and you have a contract to do X, Y and Z with us. Yes. Is there anything you've, because you've been doing this now for a few years, is there anything you think we're missing or could add value to the work you do? Well, one big thing, I guess, is that I need to work to get better data on what's happening at the casino specifically. Okay. I'm mostly getting summary statistics from the gaming enforcement unit, which I can't analyze in the same detail as I can analyze what I get from the police departments. Some of that data is duplicated by what's in the state police record system, RAMS, but enough isn't that I need to do a better job trying to figure out why and what the difference is between what's in RAMS and what's not in RAMS. Now, I understand that there, at least some of the casino, I don't know if this is universally true at all of them. I understand the GEU is using a different database to collect data than they did in the past. Lieutenant Connors was telling me about this. I haven't really had a chance to talk to him about exactly what that looks like and whether I could then get better data from it. But I was originally contracted just to analyze the surrounding area. I included some statistics from the casino just because to make a more complete picture, but since so many of the questions I get are about that specifically I wanna be able to answer them better. And that's also gonna include collecting data from other casinos nationally so we can better sense do any of ours have a unique problem with a particular crime or is that just what we'd expect given that overall volume? Great, why don't we set up a call with Detective Lieutenant Connors just to talk about what's happening at the casinos and if there's a way we can improve the data that you're getting. We had talked early on about the possibility of tasking maybe a fusion center analyst for the state police or something to work with the casinos. And if that's still on the table I think we should have that conversation as well. And of course we've talked also about the whole issue of human trafficking and how hard it is to measure that with police statistics but we're talking about setting up a meeting with some experts on that. We are, we are, in fact we're back on that now and we'll be contacting you soon with the date to do that. And we'll also set up a separate call with Detective Lieutenant Connors just to talk about what we could do differently and if a body at the fusion center we'll figure that piece out. Thank you for that. Well yeah, that's the only things I can think of but if you had a specific thing in mind I obviously wouldn't suggest it. No, I just, you're doing the work and sometimes you see things that you didn't anticipate or we didn't anticipate. And if I just, I recall back when we had the early hearings at the commission and the three primary concerns that communities approached us with were traffic, crime, and problem gambling. And so there was that very explicit charge to take a look at what the crime impacts are and around the casino not necessarily in but it does seem like a natural sort of progression to begin looking at the whole picture, the whole picture, including what's happening in the casino. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Moving on to item eight, commissioner updates. Do we have any updates? I have a quick one to get out just before we reach our allotted time. Our friends at the National Center for Trades Women or the Northeast Center for Trade Women's Equity shared an email with me and others earlier this week and it said that women in Massachusetts now represent 9.2% of apprenticeships in union programs which is interesting because that figure leads the country and the national average still only remains around two to 3%. So kudos to our colleagues and the great work that they're doing and our team, Elaine and Jill and Crystal who have focused on the Build the Life campaign but that's a pretty impressive number. Very impressive. Any other updates? With that, do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Those in favor. Aye. Those opposed. Five-zero, thank you.