 folks know this meeting is being streamed and if you want to watch it and actually not have to tie up your phones, you can go to our website, correct Austin? And it will be clear where you can gain access to the streaming process. We'll get started, but in order to proceed virtually, I'm going to call our roll call. With the recognition, we will have a formal recognition of our new commissioner shortly, but I'm going to call on him out of order. Good morning. Are you here, Commissioner Hill? I am present. Great, thank you. Commissioner Cameron. Good morning, everyone. I am here. And Commissioner Bryan. I am here. Good morning. And there we are, the four of us. Good morning. I'm going to call to order public meeting 356 Commissioner Hill, you recognize that of all of us, Commissioner Cameron has been part of those 356 meetings. I also want to recognize that this week honors two important initiatives, one that will be addressed by our director of responsible gaming, but this is in fact, responsible gaming education week. So you'll hear about that. It's also climate week. And I just want to acknowledge that because of the thoughtful legislation that Massachusetts was afforded when gaming was expanded, there's a provision for environmental mitigation and our licensees have been leaders in that, and recognizing that Springfield over the course of last year received its platinum lead recognition. And of course, when Encore sits on the Mystic River where there was a $70 million cleanup of that river because of environmental mitigation. So the gaming industry have our leaders beyond the gaming floor. And I just also want to recognize really the heroic efforts that occurred over the last few weeks out in the West with the wildfires were occurring in the South Lake Tahoe area. The Nevada casinos along the state line between California and Nevada opened up their doors to provide shelter and food provisions for the brave firefighters. So the gaming industry has wide effects and I just wanted to acknowledge that. But moving on to really our important first discussion. Today we want to welcome Commissioner Brad Hill. It is my honor today to officially introduce Commissioner Brad Hill as a member of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. Brad was appointed commissioner by Governor Baker, Attorney General Healy and Treasurer Goldberg effective on September 16th after his widely respected and lengthy tenure as a member of the Massachusetts State House of Representatives. Commissioner Hill was elected to the House in 1999 and was appointed Minority Whip in 2009 and Assistant Minority Leader in 2015. He proudly represented the 4th Essex District which includes his hometown of Ipswich. As a state representative, Commissioner Hill worked to deliver bipartisan common sense results on a wide array of issues, including coastal and environmental protection, education, criminal justice reform and healthcare for his constituents and the residents of the Commonwealth. In addition to his extensive legislative experience as an elected state official, Commissioner Hill has served as a former local official and long time public servant. He served as a member of the Hamilton Zoning Board of Appeals and as a member of the Ipswich Board of Selectment and worked as a legislative staffer in the Massachusetts State Senate. Already, Brad has been hard at work as he's brought new viewpoints, energy and smiles to our team with his years of government experience and applicable nature. And as the Gaming Commission prepares for possible regulatory responsibility in the event sports wagering is legalized in Massachusetts, we are especially pleased that Commissioner Hill brings key insights as a past determined advocate for the Massachusetts gaming industry and author and filer of six pieces of legislation to authorize sports betting. Commissioner Hill is remarkable in character. As a cancer patient, he received a bone marrow transplant in 2013 while continuing to serve in the house. He has over 20 years of basketball coaching experience and this year will return for a lucky seventh season coaching JV High School Girls Basketball at Manchester Essex Regional High School. We'll be chairing you along, Commissioner. Commissioner Hill and his wife, Amy, are the proud parents of two adult children, Zachary and Courtney. On behalf of my fellow commissioners, I am delighted to welcome you, Brad, to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission and the entire team, many who are here virtually with you. Your extensive experience in state and municipal government will bring critical new perspectives to the commission as we continue our work with the benefit of the commonwealth. I know that in addition to being a talented and dedicated public servant, you have earned the respect, admiration and friendship of your colleagues on both sides of that political aisle in the Massachusetts legislature and way beyond. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to work with you going forward. So welcome. Thank you, Madam Chair. I can, I'll tell you, I'm gonna be very brief in my remarks because we have a long meeting and you wanna hear from our friends on the screen, not me, throughout the meeting, but it's an honor to serve with you and my fellow commissioners. If anything I've seen in my first week, it's the professionalism and the dedication of my fellow commissioners and your warm welcome has been very appreciative and I can see already from the vast experience of my fellow commissioners and the willingness that you have showed me over the last week that you're gonna be my mentors over the next few months. So if I'm calling you, expect a call because I will be calling you to get your experience in these matters. You all will be mentors to be moving forward and I just wanna give a quick shout out to the staff of this amazing agency. They are phenomenal. I have been put in a position where I have been meeting them all every 30 minutes for the last few days and the information that they know and the experience that they have in this industry has been phenomenal and certainly looking forward to working with them. And I would just lastly say the past and present commissioners of the gaming commission have set the bar very high for me and anybody that comes after me as to our responsibilities to ensure this industry is one of the best in the nation. And I think you're proving yourselves to be just that and I'm looking forward to working with each and every one of you. So thank you for the very warm welcome. Thank you. Gail, Eileen, would you like to just, you've had a chance to meet in real life, which is wonderful. Yeah, just quickly, Commissioner Hill, I really look forward to serving with you and my remaining tenure. It's been a pleasure to speak with you on the phone and then get to see you and meet you in person. The one piece, and I usually have intelligence, but I did not know you were a basketball coach. So that's something when we talk on the phone we'll have to chat about because I briefly coached high school basketball here in the Commonwealth and I officiated in New Jersey for many, many years, high school basketball. So we will talk hoops when we have the appropriate time but welcome. You'll add great value to our commission, your energy, your enthusiasm, your willingness to just grasp all the material and the expertise you bring will be invaluable to us. Really look forward to working with you. Thank you. Eileen? Sure. I was happy to meet you face to face the other day and I feel like it's a six degrees of separation. The more I talk to you, the more I found someone else we have in common even though you and I never worked together over the past decades in public service. But I agree with everything the chair said and the picture camera said, I'm really looking forward to your participation and your input and assistance as we move forward. I think it's gonna be great and I'm sure I will keep rationing up the number of people we have in common and everyone speaks very highly of you. So I'm really looking forward to it. Welcome. Thank you. Virtual clap. Okay, excellent. Thank you and Commissioner Hill. We're gonna get right to work. As you noted, we have a busy day and we're gonna have Executive Director Wells give us an initiative update. Thanks, Karen. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the commission. And on behalf of the staff, Commissioner Hill, I'd really like to welcome you aboard. I know we've met in person and you've met the team. We're very, very excited to have you here and look forward to working with you going forward. For the first agenda item, item three A, the onsite casino updates. I'm gonna turn that over to Loretta Lulios and Bruce Bann to give you an update on what's been going on on property. Thanks, Karen. Good morning, Chair, good morning, commissioners and good morning and welcome again, Commissioner Hill. So this item has been a recurring item on our agendas that Bruce and I try to give some highlights of what's been happening at the properties, especially with a COVID emphasis, things that have been impacted by protocols and so forth around the pandemic. Since we gave our last update on September 9th, things have continued to go well. All three licensees are continuing to monitor and comply with any updates to COVID-19 related orders. At Encore, the sports bar that I reported last time had already opened. Operations are continuing to be steady there and it's continuing to go well. There is a new arrangement where NBC Sports Boston will be broadcasting a show weekly on Fridays from the sports bar. So that's something to look forward to. That starts at the end of this month and goes through the end of the calendar year. I do have an update around the nightclub memoir, which is a nightclub operated by a big night entertainment group and they are a vendor to the licensee, to the casino there, because at the last meeting, I think we talked about that memoir would be implementing a vaccine confirmation policy from guests. They have determined that they will not roll that out for this category of venues that they have. So that has been a change of plans for them. They have one venue that they will be doing that at and that is at the garden with TD North, but they are not planning to do that at memoir or their other nightclub. So that was mentioned at the public meeting so I wanted to update you on that. With respect to MGM, on September 13th, the city of Springfield put a city-wide mask mandate into place, reintroduced that for indoor facilities. And in terms of when that may be lifted, the city's continuously reviewing city health stats moving forward. And this mask mandate applies to individuals in the casino except when they're eating and drinking. MGM was prepared for the new order. Before the new order, you may recall, they had already reinstated mask mandates for employees. They were able to quickly update their signage, their social media and their other web-based messaging, notifying guests of the requirement. And they have masks on hand for guests who need them. There have been no significant issues with patron compliance. This Saturday will be the first MGM-sponsored agenda meeting to be called. They have a quality. So on the 9th, September 9th, I reported to you that the Commonwealth Lounge in the Knox Bar had just reopened. They've continued to be successful, especially on the weekend nights where there is jazz entertainment at the Commonwealth Lounge. And on September 30th, there will be a day, afternoon, morning and afternoon hiring event at MGM. At Plain Ridge, two weeks ago, I reported that they were continuing to expand the hours of operation and adding beverage servers as they are able to get additional staff. That is continuing to move forward. They are continuing to hire for fluties, which has not reopened to date, but they're expecting to be able to provide an update on that venue soon. They are gearing up to reopen that. And they have had two on-site vaccine clinics that have been operated already, that have been made vaccines available to their staff as well as to the general public. So those are my prepared comments. Happy to try to answer any questions. And of course, Assistant Director Band is here to touch on any gaming-related aspects. Bruce, did you have anything you wanted to add? I can't hear him. Can't either. I don't see that he's on mute. Yeah, that's so strange. There you are, Bruce. There you are. Good morning, commissioners. As far as gaming operations go, at MGM, there is one update. They've started to remove about 20% of the slot machines in the poker room in preparation of introducing poker. As far as the other casinos, I'll give you an update on slot machines and table games. PPC currently has 1,004 slot machines operating on the floor. MGM has 1,607 slot machines. Encore has 2,689 for a total of 5,300 operating slot machines in the Commonwealth. MGM has 52 operating table games and 15 stadium games operating. Encore has 182 operating table games and 54 operating stadium games The Commonwealth has 234 operating table games and 69 operating stadium games. And that's kind of it. As far as operations go in the casinos, things seem to be going very smoothly. There's nothing to report that isn't operating correctly currently. Commissioners, questions. Can we shoot Cameron? Yes, I have one question for Director Lillios. You mentioned the opening of fluties being anticipated and you mentioned staffing. They're trying to staff up now. Is that opening tied to the inability to hire staff promptly or is it more operational needs, the timing of the opening? I think it's the challenges that exist on a broad level, especially in food and beverage areas with identifying, finding folks to fill the positions. So that's it. Yeah, thanks. Okay, thank you for that. That is your question. Yes, I wondered if they were timing it because this was the right time based on their operational needs or if it was strictly the shortage of staffing. I think it's the challenge in food and beverage. Okay, thank you. Yeah, Director Lillios, I wanted to follow up on the conversation about big night and the decision to not ask for a vaccine through the center. Do you know, and if you do know, is it something you can share the rationale for only doing the large venue and not some of the smaller clubs that were originally mentioned when this came up? What I was told, I had a conversation with the operator yesterday and what I was told was that their relationship with TD North, it became a requirement for them to do. And of course that the size of that venue for them stands alone, stands apart and is dissimilar to the other venues that they run. So they were prepared to move forward as a requirement with TD North. So that may be something you wanna think about but their other venues, they were not choosing to do that of their own volition at this time. So it wasn't necessarily a complication of enforcement. It was more based on a vendor relationship. Correct. Yeah, if I understand correctly, I think we saw that yesterday, right TD North announced that it would require either proof of vaccination or test results. So the test results as well, correct, Lorena? I believe that's true, Kathy. I believe that's true. No, thank you. Commissioner Hill, do you have any questions? No, all set, thank you. So anything else, commissioners? Thank you. Director Lillias and Chief Ban. Now moving on to a reopening plan and that would be with you, Karen. Yes, that's correct. So as you're aware, the commission has voted to reopen the offices on November 1st in the Boston location. So we have our reopening working group that has been meeting on a regular basis, planning and reopening of the office. Some of the items, just to give you some highlights that we discussed at the last meeting, we need to work on the policy for requested exemptions from the COVID vaccination requirement that the commission also voted on. So the legal department is working on that. Additionally, because we did have a policy that allowed for a hybrid work option for certain employees, the HR department is working on a form so that employees who are requesting to work in a hybrid mode can work with their managers and come up with a plan and that would be documented and approved. The other thing we're working on, I know with all the commissioners, we're at the public meeting this week working on the training for the hybrid public meetings and testing that equipment out. We also had a discussion about hybrid meetings for staff and commissioners just on a everyday basis during our workday. So the expectation is that the larger conference rooms, we would potentially be using that same owl camera. What you do there is you would just plug that into your laptop, the laptop connects to the screen so that people in the office can see people who are working remotely and vice versa. We're also looking at potential options for certain other offices that have conference tables, for example, chair of the executive directors of the commissioners and a few of the executive staff have some room. So there are some smaller cameras, we're looking to purchase to see if we can facilitate some easy hybrid meetings in those offices just so we have a variety of options. The plan is to have required training for staff the two weeks before the office is open so have people come in and just get acclimated and try that out. A lot of the discussion was on, especially with technology, new technology, you have to use it in order to learn it. So, you know, practicing and trying it and getting people acclimated, it's gonna be a little bit of a change and we're gonna have to get used to that. One thing I noted just thinking about it last night we did have a brief discussion at the meeting about potentially that first week keeping the meetings light because we may wanna do some training, people get acclimated, a little sort of social interaction because we've been stark for that for a year and a half. There is a commission meeting scheduled that Thursday. We could keep that on the agenda and the schedule but the commissioners may wanna think about whether they would wanna bump that and maybe get acclimated before having a full commission that first week. So I'll just put that on the radar screen and let you think about what you wanna do with that first week. But other than that, we are just gearing up thinking about things that are coming and I'm certainly open to any suggestions or input from the commissioners on what you'd like to see when the office is reopened in November. And I think folks that have been in the office, for example, during the trainings kind of funds to each other. So I'm hoping there'll be a lot of chatter, a lot of connections once people get back into the office and we have a successful reopen. Any questions? Questions? Commissioner Cameron, Commissioner Heal. Could you just give a little bit more information about the exemption piece on the vaccinations? We're starting to see this unfold everywhere as we saw yesterday at Boston Gardens. I know there's a lot of concerns about their, right now under state law, I believe there's exemptions maybe for religious or for medical purposes. I know the word HIPAA keeps coming up about the HIPAA laws. And we wanna make sure that we're not going to be putting anything in place that would be against what the HIPAA laws are. So can you just touch upon it a little further? I will discuss this a lot more, but... Exactly, yes. So at the prior commission meeting, the commission voted, and I can send you, there's a memo that accompanied the packet. I can send that to you. But we tracked what the governor did. So what the governor and the attorney general also they've required vaccines for employees. They have some lead time, but there is a component of a religious exemption for sincerely held beliefs and a medical exemption. So similar to what the attorney general's office has done, they implemented the mandate, like notified folks, but then we're working on the policy so that we have a documented policy for the folks. Because as you've mentioned, this is a new issue. It's certainly gathered a lot of attention. So what our legal department is doing is we are connecting with other state agencies, the executive branch, we are connecting to see what guidance we can get from other state agencies and also outside counsel. Because to your point, we want to be mindful of privacy and just any kind of state or federal requirements for this kind of mandate. So we're just taking an incremental approach and being very careful. Thank you. I have one question to Karen, second, Dr. Wells. With respect to everyone coming in, I think it's a great idea to do a two weeks test. And I presume that each division is figuring out their approach to the three two split. Yes. On that, I'm going to leave, it is for you to decide, but whether there might be some decision to have perhaps commission days, be days where most managers choose to come in because it would be nice to get as many of us together. My main question right now is it is really important that we support the hybrid approach and the flexibility that we know is important to offer. And we've done that during COVID where people have set up very, very comfortable situations at home. I have a lot of office envy, you know, many of you, particularly Katrina set up. That said, we've also folks are very productive with double screen, double monitors and equipment has been issued to the home office. And I think that's really important to keep that intact so that they can be really productive when working and taking advantage of our hybrid policy. In turn, I feel that the experience of the office should be equal and not compromised. And I'm concerned that we might slip into a mode where we'll just come in and plug in somewhere, you'll be fine, maybe you can't have two screens in both places. And I know this is an issue of resources. Right. So this is why I wanna point out the challenge because I can already sense it. Some folks have their better set up at their office in Boston. Loretta, I don't know if your office set up is if you feel more comfortable in the office, you know, technically than at home or if it's the exact same, but I do know a lot of our team really relies on multiple monitors. So are you anticipating helping to sort of equate that can we afford to do? Yeah, and we did discuss that yesterday. It is a little challenging because the way the policy that the commission approved is drafted, we will certainly have your equipment at the office. So people may have to bring equipment back to the office so that you have a full set up. But there may be some discretion for giving out some equipment as resources permit for some things at home. We also recognize, you know, there is a challenge for the IT department in maintaining a service for equipment that we own that's in remote location that someone's home. So a lot of the equipment is gonna expect to be coming back to the office, right? So that's part of your plans. Yeah, yeah, and I know that was part of the policy, but I just wasn't sure how. Yeah, and it is tricky because, you know, people are used to it, you know, a lot of it depends on resource allocation and how much money and how much we wanna invest. But for the convenience of folks that want to work at home and it is, you know, it's a requested, it's in the policy, it's a privilege to work at home. IT is also working on recommendations. There have been folks even during the pandemic who have bought their own screens or bought one of the cubes for there to plug in their laptops. So we're trying to sort of work it out. It is not the easiest issue. I mean, there are challenges from both sides as you have identified because we want the office. This is where you work, you know, to be a welcoming and good place to work, but we also want people to be productive at home. So the expectation is that managers will sort of work it out. For example, if we have a team that has, you know, people working on off days, they may switch off a certain office so that they can get both screens and they work on different days, but maybe one day when everybody's in together, they have a, you know, a different setup or someone puts in somewhere else. So I think this is one challenge that everyone across the country is looking at, you know, for equipment. Okay, so I knew that that was part of our policy. I just wasn't sure how it's going to be implemented over the course of November 1st, but the working group is figuring that out. Yep, yep. Well, it is going to be a challenge and, you know, we will take into consideration the November 4th date, but we can do that next week on Wednesday. So Crystal, note the dates going forward that we can choose during our agenda setting meeting. All right, well, great. I myself still work out a closet and just set everything. That's why I have the envy of everyone's office and rotate around whoever's working in the house. So thank you, there are no other questions. I mean, and Gail, I know you sit on the working group so you're very well-versed. Thanks for our questions. Patricia Hill, are you all set? Okay, all right, work in progress. Thank you. Now we're going to shift to item number four on our agenda. Welcome to our Alejandra Montenegro, Montenegro, Alejmonte, and I haven't said your full name for a long time, Alejandra. Here we are. Welcome today. We are looking forward to your update on the independent monitor work that you and your team have been doing. Commissioner Hill, you had a chance to meet with him with respect to a briefing to keep bringing him up to speak. And you were a part of the welcome, but we would like to have you introduce your whole team and we'll get started. We know you have a Muslim report for us today. Thank you so much, Madam Chair and good morning, commissioners. It's a pleasure to see you all again, at least virtually. I would like to introduce my team who you'll be hearing from, not just me today, but from everyone. So I am Alejandra Montenegro, I'm with Miller and Chevalier's independent monitor in this engagement. With me are my colleagues Anne Sultan, Catherine Pappas, Nicole Gokchabai, and Alexis Zau who'll be driving our presentation today and also Preston Pew, who's part of our team from Kroll and Mooring. So it's a pleasure to have you here and as I said, you will be hearing from all of them today as well. Alexis, if I could just ask you please to project the presentation. Thank you so much. If we can go over to the title page, that would be wonderful. Great. So we'll just start briefly with the agenda of what it is that we'll be covering today. So if we can go to the next slide, Alexis. Thank you. So we'll be briefly giving an introduction of where we are just for everyone's context. We are right now in the middle of what we're calling our phase three review. So this is an interim report to give the commission the benefit of understanding where we are, where the company is as we continue our monitoring exercise. We're going to give a brief overview of the company business and how it's shifted in the last, you know, six months or so since we last spoke to you. We'll also walk you through at a high level, the summary of review and testing activities that we've conducted will provide overall observations. And then as the commission well knows, we're evaluating the company's program through different hallmarks that make up the compliance program. So we'll be again giving high levels, high level observations on what we're seeing under each hallmark and then concluding with some general observations and next steps. So that takes us to slide three. Alejandra, during the course of your PowerPoint, if there's a natural time for maybe to call questions on a particular subject matter, rather than hold to the end, please interject. Please, we would absolutely love questions throughout the presentation. It's hard, commissioners, it's hard for me to monitor right now because I don't see all of you. So I think we'll take Alejandra's lead. If you have a question, I don't think it's disruptive, is that fair? It's not disruptive at all, please. We believe in making this a dynamic engagement. So please do feel free to interject. Thank you. This is just to remind us of what it is that we're looking at, right? We're looking at the various hallmarks, as I mentioned earlier, that make up an effective compliance program throughout the course of our review. We've taken a deep dive into each of these areas. We've made observations, and as you all know from our previous reports and presentations, have made a number of recommendations to date on to help the company really enhance the program that it already had in place. We can move on to slide four, please. And I will pass it over to Nicole Gochabye, who's gonna walk us through the company business as it is now. Nicole? Thanks, Alejandra. So the company's reopening and ramp up efforts are ongoing following closures and capacity restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Operations ramps up in both Las Vegas and on court Boston Harbor, signaling a return to some normalcy. With that said, there have been continued personnel changes and key compliance-facing roles, including at senior levels, which the team will discuss in greater detail and subsequent portions of the presentation. It's also worth noting that the impact of the pandemic has resulted in continued delay and implementation of certain recommendations with all of our testing being conducted remotely, although we do hope to conduct site visits before the end of the phase three review period. Next slide, please, Alexis. So during this review period, we continued to review documents, conduct interviews, and test various components of the company's human resources compliance program. Specifically, in this interim phase, we reviewed approximately 400 documents produced by the company, conducted virtual interviews of 20 individuals, including employees, compliance committee members, and members of the board of directors, and observed a compliance committee meeting and a board of directors meeting. As I noted on the previous slide, we did not conduct any of these interviews or attend these meetings on site due to the pandemic, but we hope to do so before the end of phase three. I will now pass it on to Alejandra to provide an overview of our overall observations unless the commission has questions. Thank you. Thank you so much, Nicole. So are there any questions about our process so far before we start moving into the substance? Great. So teeing off of what Nicole just walked through, I do really want to emphasize that during this phase, as has been the case throughout the entirety of the monitor ship, we have continued to see a high degree of cooperation from the company, and that really is at all levels. We've received prompt responses to requests for interviews with current employees. And as Nicole noted, that includes senior management and the board. And I want to emphasize sometimes our requests have actually come with short notice. And even with that, the company has been able to identify times for us to interview the people that we've had to speak with. Documents and requested information were provided in a very timely manner, which we do appreciate and allows us to give you a more fulsome review of what we're seeing. So during this phase, I do want to highlight that during this phase, the general counsel of EVH of Encore Boston requested weekly standing meetings between the monitor team and when legal in HR. And while this might appear to be a small development, it actually has been extremely helpful for the monitor team. And we really do commend Ms. Crumb for that initiative. It's provided us ongoing points of contact, increased visibility into the progress on recommendations. It's allowed the company to ask questions, sometimes our recommendations are not as clear as we hope they are. So for really for us to engage in a much more dynamic and ongoing manner with the company. And it's also provided an opportunity for us to receive real-time updates as relevant developments occur at the company. For instance, changes in personnel and where backfilling of those positions might stand. So we welcome that and we look forward to continuing those discussions. At the close of phase two, as we entered into this phase, we had issued a total of 58 recommendations. As of this week, I'm happy to say that a vast majority of those recommendations have been completed or in the process of being completed. There are several that we'd agreed to push deadlines on. A few that deadlines have not yet come due. But the most pressing recommendations, updating policies and procedures, updating and rolling out trainings, really enhancing communication around HRCP issues, those recommendations have been completed in a well underway and we're happy to see that. And also including some of the recommendations that we made with respect, or I should say all of the recommendations that we made with respect to responding to patron misconduct. So we're quite pleased with that. We can move on to the next slide, please. Thank you. Excuse me. What we have seen for the last two years, the company has really demonstrated a commitment to the effort of developing and enhancing the core elements of its compliance program. And that includes improving policies and procedures and trainings. And that honestly, it sounds simple, just modifying some policies, but it really can be a very heavy lift, particularly given the reality that the company has faced in the last year and a half. In many respects though, that really is the easier part of the endeavor that the company is undertaking. As the company now starts to move from the design and implementation phase of its program, it really is gonna have to demonstrate a commitment to transformative institutional change that will last. And as we progress through this journey, that's really what we're gonna be looking for. That means that the company's commitment to HR compliance really is gonna have to be demonstrated at all levels of the organization and you've heard us talk before about the importance of not just tone at the top and demonstrating conduct that's consistent with compliance at the top, but also at middle management and throughout the organization. And that can happen in very large and seemingly small ways, but each one matters. And so that brings me to two concrete examples that I think are worth noting of where we hope to see some progress in the coming months. One is that during the course of this monitor ship, if you've heard us report before, individual members of the board have expressed commitment to compliance. And we take that commitment to be sincere and that's extremely important. I cannot understand how important that personal commitment is. But you've also think heard of say that we ascribe to the show don't tell principle. And so while it's incredibly important for us to hear commitment from board members, as I'll discuss shortly, we do believe that an opportunity remains for the board as a collective body to demonstrate more concretely its collective commitment to HR issues. The second issue that is worth highlighting is that we've also observed a lack of, what I'll call formality or governance around the company's recruiting and hiring processes for certain positions of authority within the organization. And while it's more concerning, is also we've observed perhaps a lack of appreciation at the executive level management for the compliance risk that can arise when there is that informality in the recruiting and hiring process. That's particularly the case when hiring results in the selection of candidates that can be perceived to be close professional or personal contacts rather of members of executive and senior management. So we'll be keenly paying attention to these issues and these dynamics, particularly given that in your decision and order, you correctly noted that concentration of power can lead to reticence of those in positions of authority to push back, particularly reticence of people who are not in positions of authority to push back. Now, of course, in that context, you were referring to the founder lead model that existed under the former CEO, Steve Lynn, and as you all know, we certainly do have, we have seen the company make meaningful steps to move away from that founder led model. But when I was reading your words again, it does also apply to concentrations of power, I think in management level generally. So as a result of that, as I said, we will continue to pay attention to how the company recruits and selects, particularly for vacancies and senior roles to ensure that it's doing so in a formal and disciplined manner. We will also then of course continue, it's critically important to monitor internal investigations into allegations of harassment and discrimination. Preston will explain later in the presentation that the company is in the process of updating its workplace investigations policy consistent with our recommendations and observations. We've continued to observe, really review, files of investigations that the company has conducted and identified ways to improve, can continue to improve on its execution. So we'll continue to work closely with the company on that and Preston will walk you through some of the themes that have observed, that have been observed through our reviews. So I'm now gonna pass it over to you, Ann. Nicole, if you could move to the next slide on culture. The first hallmark that we focus on is culture of compliance and conduct at the top, without the right culture and messaging from the very top of an organization. It's difficult, if not impossible, to have a strong compliance program underneath the top and throughout the organization. So during this phase of our assessment, we have seen some specific progress by the company with regard to our recommendations in this area, which is great. First, the company has taken steps to develop a communications plan that's focused on creating a speak up culture. For Ankur Boston Harbor, the HR department developed a year long plan of quarterly communications to employees regarding reporting channels and trying to encourage use of those channels for reporting issues. We've seen a similar plan in place for Las Vegas, which also includes the added positive component of a quarterly spotlight on a particular compliance policy. And these are very good first steps, but we are also looking for the company to be more strategic in its thinking about communications with employees on HRCP issues so that the effort is continuous and sustained. So the company should integrate, for example, the results of monitoring and testing activities or investigations findings into its communications plan and its communications objectives so that they can be educating employees on exactly the areas where they are seeing HR related weaknesses. Second, we've seen the company make significant progress in filling key personnel positions, which are listed on the slide. Importantly, Ankur Boston Harbor has now filled both the executive director of human resources and the executive director of labor and employment roles, both of which are really critical for the HRCP. With respect to the wind resorts limited, executive director for performance management, compensation and benefits, which has been vacant since August of last year, the company we understand is currently reformulating the role and searching for an appropriate candidate to fill the role. And Catherine will discuss that role a bit further in her comments on incentives and discipline. Alexis, if you can move to the next slide, please. And Alejandra, I will pass it back to you. Excellent. So this takes us back to the board of directors, which of course is critical as the highest authority in the company to help and create a culture of compliance and code of conduct. And it's been a while I think since we talked about the standard under which we're evaluating the board. We turn to the standard that the DOJ provides us and its guide to an effective compliance program. And what the DOJ tells us there is that the board of directors is the governing authority as the governing authority shall be knowledgeable about the content and operation of the compliance and ethics program and shall exercise reasonable oversight. So the DOJ gives us two specific questions that have guided our own assessment. First, what type of information does the board have of that available to it from senior management? And what compliance expertise has been available on the board of directors? And from a from a monitorship standpoint, we evaluate those questions in two ways. One through one-on-one interviews with board members. And typically in a monitorship, you also have the ability to participate and observe board meetings, particularly those aspects of a board meetings that touch on the subject matter of the of the monitorship. In this case, that would be any discussions or information or presentations to the board on HRCP. In this, in our monitorship, we've had consistent access since the beginning to individual board members, but until recently have not had access to observe a full board meeting. You know, through those individual meetings, as I mentioned earlier, we have continued to hear expressions of commitment to compliance. And again, we do not question those sincerities, sincerity of those commitments and really expect that we're gonna continue to see the board find ways to identify how it can concretely demonstrate that commitment. Not just to us, but to management and to all of its stakeholders. When we did observe the board meeting, we saw, frankly, many of the things that we wanted to see, right? We saw HR and legal compliance functions provide the board with a detailed update on progress made on HRCP. You know, at this stage, they were still reporting on many of the enhancements that we were already aware of, but in a way that was important for the board to receive that. Not just hearing it through our reports, but also hearing it through the very stakeholders that are driving this forward. They also provided reports on internal reporting trends from incidents in Las Vegas. In this session, notably the reporting did not include trends analysis for Boston, legal and HR explained that at that time, the new reporting line, which we'll talk about in a bit, had not been up and running long enough and that Boston will be included in the next scheduled report out to the board, which is gonna take place next year. The board meeting was virtual, but reading the room at least online, the board members did appear to be interested listening. We did hear questions about the data presented, which is important to demonstrate engagement. And then I think notably for me, frankly, at the end of the presentation, the chairman asked me to speak to the board about what we as a monitor team expected to see from the board and how we would ultimately be measuring their commitment. And frankly, I appreciated that question. It's one that I had been hoping to get as it really does start to demonstrate a willingness to get it right. And I do hope and encourage that that level of engagement continues. Another metric of culture. Could I just interrupt? Yes, absolutely. When the chair did ask that question, could you give the top three things that you said or answered? Absolutely, yes. So one was continuing to request the type of data and information that would allow the board some transparency into the effectiveness of the HR program. Two was that the board has been a recipient of information regarding investigations into harassment and discrimination that the company sees. And one of the areas that I suggested the board could expand on was really pressure testing, some of what they're hearing about those investigations, be it the trends that they're observing or conclusions or resolutions, but really not stepping, we would never ask a board, of course, to step into the shoes of management in how they're carrying out investigations. But it's a way to demonstrate to management that, hey, we're paying attention, right? We're holding you to account on ensuring that you are operating this program in a way that's consistent with our expectations. And the third piece really tees off of that, which is to find tangible ways to demonstrate to management that they are going to be held to account. Boards, of course, pass down financial and operational KPIs. And while boards often struggle, of course, to hold management accountable to those standards, it's harder sometimes to identify what sorts of KPIs you can pass down to management on these particular issues, but it can be done. And even if they're more qualitative, again, they matter, particularly coming from a board, understanding that the management team is going to be assessed on how they engage on these issues. So those were the three top issues, Madam Chair, that we shared with them. Thank you. You can apologize. No, please don't apologize. And I will, please invite questions as we talk, but I will be conscientious to stop more, to ask for more questions. So any other questions on board engagement? Great. I'll start. Great. So moving, another key metric for us on how companies, management boards, demonstrate a commitment to compliance really is how they allocate resources to compliance functions. And here, of course, that's HR, ER, legal, the compliance department itself. What we've seen, they really do carry a heavy load and since the pandemic, they've had to carry much more. So we'll be with the same amount of resources. We're continuing to monitor, particularly because the company continues to ramp up and expand its operations, how adequate those resources are, not just in numbers, but also in the competencies that we're seeing in the different functions, not to say that there's a question of it, right? But just to make sure that it keeps pace with the program as it continues to mature and as issues continue to evolve. So we've seen some symptoms of delays, for instance, as we mentioned earlier in the last phase of the company's ability to meet recommendations, which we understood, and that was in large part due to COVID, but ensuring that even when other emergencies emerge and resources have to be diverted, that the resources are sufficient to still be able to maintain and carry forward these important initiatives. We're starting to see a surge in hiring, for instance, and we understand it's caused significant pressures in the company's ability to keep up with recruitment and the screening that comes behind that and the onboarding of employees. So we'll continue to monitor that very closely. Any questions on culture of compliance and conduct at the top before we move on to the next hallmark, which Anne will walk us through? Okay, Anne, over to you. All right, so the next one is proper authority, oversight and independence. And here we've really focused on the delineation of responsibilities among the various HRCP-related functions, as well as on individuals and the compliance committee's independence and authority in exercising their roles. As you might remember, we had previously expressed concerns that the compliance committee itself was comprised with two out of three individuals who were personally known and recruited by the Wind Resorts General Counsel and none of whom had significant HR expertise. We were therefore pleased in this phase to see the company act on our recommendation to bring on a new fourth member of the compliance committee with relevant HR expertise. And we look forward to speaking with her in depth and observing more meetings of the compliance committee in this phase and future phases to ensure that the committee is and is exercising its independent role. It's also important for the company to conduct a self-assessment of roles and responsibilities related to its HRCP. We understand from the company that they have engaged in this exercise, although we have not yet seen the results of it. And so one of the things we look forward to doing in the rest of this phase is looking at that process and the results that came out of it. And a few minutes ago, we spoke about the company's efforts to onboard employees in key compliance related roles. One topic that's emerged from that is that the company doesn't have the formal process that we would like to see for recruiting for senior positions. Alejandra spoke generally about the types of risks that can result from that. And while we haven't yet seen evidence of specific compliance risks actually materializing, we do wanna see the company increase its governance around recruiting and hiring to mitigate against the risks that they do. Are there any questions on proper authority oversight or independence? All right, then we can move to policies and procedures. So prior to our monitorship, the company had already taken steps to develop policies related to various HR matters, including harassment and discrimination and investigations. And in the first two phases of our review, we recommended certain enhancements to existing policies, particularly to address the risks that we had identified through our baseline review and assessment. The company has implemented those recommendations and during this phase has been in the process of rolling out the new policies, including the ones that you could see listed on the slide under the first bullet. Ongoing efforts are underway for the company's enhancements of its code of business ethics and code of personal conduct. And the monitor team has agreed to an extension on the completion of those documents because we understand they're subject to a more formal internal review and approval process that includes review by the board. So we look forward to seeing improvements in those documents, particularly to encourage employee engagement rolled out soon. As you've heard us say before, it's not enough for a company to simply update its policies. Companies have to take steps to properly communicate those policies and take reasonable measures to ensure that all employees understand the policies. As Catherine will talk about in a few minutes when we get to the topic of training, the company is beginning to take steps to socialize and promote its policies to employees with greater intentionality. The monitor team will continue to pay particular attention to the rollout and relaunch of updated policies. At the same time, we recognize that not all policies require formal rollouts and communication campaigns writ large, but we do wanna see the policies that really go to the heart of the HR compliance program get attention in the rollout and be really disseminated to employees to make sure that their understanding is complete and that they can utilize the policies. The monitor team appreciates, of course, the natural emphasis on the company's core harassment and discrimination policy, particularly in light of its rollout of the new reporting platform and our recommendations. And as I noted when we earlier discussed culture, the company has developed a 2021 quarterly communications campaign, which consists of thematic messaging such as speak up or we're in this together. And the company has been quite creative in the campaign. They've used banners, digital displays, napkin holders with QR codes containing messaging. They've disseminated the message through we shifts which are their daily internal messaging to employees. And that has all been good. We'd like to see other core policies also receive attention in that kind of rollout campaign. We also wanna note that the company has formalized its policy review committee, which will review all HR policies on a yearly basis to ensure that the content of those policies remains fresh and accurate and is being effectively communicated through the policies and otherwise. This is particularly important to ensure that the company's policies continue to reflect the risks of the company. And it's one of those aspects of our work that ensures that the HRCP will continue to be sustainable even after our review is finished. And lastly, there are other initiatives underway to promote HRCP policies. Catherine, again, will speak about this more in trainings, but we wanted to highlight that the company has recently launched a pretty creative initiative to promote core HR compliant policies. On the next slide, we have a list of a few things that we wanna see by the end of this review period, which we've really touched on already, but include updates to the code as well as rollout and efforts to promote understanding of and engagement by employees with the policies. Happy to take any questions you have or otherwise pass it to Alejandra for third party relationships. I had one quick question. This is Gail Cameron. In listening to the level of engagement you're having with this company, you are offering them a roadmap to not only mitigate their risk, but also engage in a very, very healthy productive culture for their company. You're giving them all the best practices here. I know that when you're being monitored it's difficult sometimes to see through we have to meet these commitments, but is there a sense from the board or the senior leadership team that, wow, this is something that will help our company? Alejandra, do you wanna speak to that on board? Sure, absolutely. I think they're starting to be, right? I think initially the focus as you all noted is on let's get these deliverables out, right? Let's make sure we're meeting the concrete recommendations and expectations. And so when I mentioned earlier the more difficult lift starts now that's exactly what we're talking about Commissioner Cameron, right? Is the company fully appreciating what it means to develop a living and sustainable program. And I do think they're starting to see it. And we've seen examples of where the company is starting to think outside the four corners of our report. And I don't wanna ruin the punchline because there are some really, I think, creative things that the company is doing. But those are the types of examples that we're looking at for them to understand that this really is, as you've noted about transforming culture and not just about developing policies. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions on that? Alejandra, this is Commissioner Ryan. Just to follow up a little bit, I know one of the last times we heard from you because of COVID, some of the emphasis on what you're talking about embracing this, seeing the positives in the report wasn't really there. Somewhat out of necessity. Do you see that as still an issue here or are they actually starting to sort of move to implementing things beyond ramping back up? I'd say that there are still remnants of that, Commissioner Ryan, where it's something that has to be done. It's something that the monitorship is requiring them to do. But I really do think particularly when you look inside of particular functions, like HR is taking more ownership of these issues with the new hiring of the DNI executive director, we're starting to see, again, the company, particularly within those functions, who are the ones that own this program, more ownership and I think more creativity in their work and where they can take it. But to answer the question directly, I think the embracing of this as a value proposition in and of itself, we still haven't seen that fully manifested across all levels of the company. Thank you. One area, so what this really tees off of this question, I think Commissioner Ryan, is you've all heard us talk about since the baseline report, really what we identified as a high risk was third-party relationships. And in this category, we're talking about guests and patrons who really do present a meaningful risk to employees based on behavior that we observed through investigations and that was reported to us in focus groups. This was probably one of the areas that was, I think, required the most self-reflection and probably forced the company to step out a little bit more of outside of its comfort zone on how to address those issues other than how it was already doing it, right? Through trespass and through security, but to be more proactive, if you will, and how it managed this. We reported in our last report that the company had already started to update its policy around guest interactions with employees. And we were really pushing for them to do more. And I'm happy to report the company has developed now patron standards of behavior that they are going to be rolling out in various ways. One, they've included these standards in terms and conditions that are going to be available on hotel email confirmations for guests. The language is also going to be included in the terms of conditions of the win rewards card. So anybody who holds a wins reward card will have the language of what's expected of guests. And it does address threatening and discriminatory and harassing not just behavior, but also words, including offensive remarks about race, ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation, all of the protected classes. And of course puts patrons and guests on notice that the company reserves the right to take all actions permitted for violation of this policy. That language will also be on the company's website. It's going to be in the spa consent form. And in the nightclubs where guests just enter and they're not really signing any contracts or documents, there's going to be signage outside of the nightclubs that has this behavior, these standards of behavior laid out. The company is also providing cards, like almost like little, you know, little cards that servers are going to carry. Anybody who's on the casino floor is going to carry with the standards of behavior available. And that's going to do two things. It's going to allow the employees to remember what is permitted and what isn't permitted. And also in the event that it becomes necessary, they can present those cards to offending guests and patrons to remind them of what the standards are. So we see that as truly a significant leap forward in this category and we're happy to see the company take that step. They've also, and Catherine's going to be talking to us about this in a minute, also develop some really well produced training videos to touch on these issues designed to one message to employees that misconduct by patrons and guests will not be tolerated regardless of the value of the guest and really give some good tips on how to navigate the situations. We also, as Ann pointed out, we have seen increased messaging from senior leadership really designed to encourage employees to speak up against patron misconduct. And we hear all the words that we're looking for, right, which is no matter who it is, no matter how much of a, you know, high tip where they might be or high, high value player they might be. So we're encouraging the company to continue those efforts. Alexis. Do you know if there are any of their peers who are leading in that fashion on this issue or is this put them sort of at the top of the class? I think it puts them on top of the class. That's great. And that was, you know, I think some of what was challenging for the company really to embrace is are we really going to be in a position where we're going to tell our guests, right? How to behave it. It felt uncomfortable at the beginning, but they've, you know, they're doing it. So we really hope they continue to do it and to find ways to keep it fresh, if you will. Richard, do you have any questions? I know that we're going to shift and hear more on this, but any questions that I've heard around this point? So big development, right? It is a big development. It is. I can't see your face. Are you all set? Sounds like it. Okay. Great. If we can go to slide 14, Alexis. Thank you. So by the end of this monitor ship, really we expect a lot more of this, right? But we do also, so we have the guest and employee guest interaction policy that really outline security procedures that are going to be followed if there is an issue with a guest. We want to make sure that those procedures are also clearly reflected in security's own internal procedures so that there's no ambiguity. We also really, because the front line, people who are going to be engaging with employees who are facing offending guests are middle management. We want to continue to see message that's specifically focused on managers and supervisors, particularly those on the floor to explain what the expectation is. And this is, you know, given comments that we heard in focus groups that different managers respond to these situations differently, we want messaging that's gonna ensure greater uniformity so that employees feel protected regardless of who is on shift. And then of course sustained efforts to continue to promote a speak up culture we'll be looking for. So Catherine, I think that brings it over to you with training and guidance. Good morning, everyone. So since our last report, the company has continued to engage in a combination of in-person live trainings as well as online trainings, some new online trainings and some new videos that they've been able to put together. And our team has been able to observe trainings virtually or be a video recording and also participate in some of the new online material. So kind of zooming in on the employee interaction with guests and other third parties that Alejandro just foreshadowed, I would be talking about. The company produced an online training with modules focused on management responsibility in those situations as well as employee guidelines and reporting. And one of the nice things about the training is that they start with a video from property management. So folks in Boston here from the president in Boston, folks in Vegas here from the president in Vegas really speaking to how inappropriate behavior is not going to be tolerated and the importance of speaking up. And kind of a really sincere and clear message on that from the company, which was great to see and great to see it tailored to property. Following that, there were several modules featuring vignettes showing employees in common situations involving potentially improper guest interaction. So that included cocktail servers as well as spa employees. And at each module, employees are prompted to answer questions designed to highlight key elements of the policy. So the target audience for this training is any employees with a job that requires regular interaction with guests. So that includes everything from housekeeping, concierge, slots, food and beverage, spa salon, all of those kind of positions. And one of the nice things about the training is that it's tied to the company's online training platform we learn and it requires employees to access it through their personal account. And so in that way, the company can easily track compliance with the requirement to do the training. And our latest understanding is that 84% completion rate in Las Vegas and 75 completion rate at Encore Boston Harbor. So we're happy to see that. We did note that the food and beverage employees in both properties are lagging behind their peers in terms of filling out the training. And so going forward, we're really gonna be monitoring to make sure that that group is fully trained on this important policy. So this is exactly the kind of testing and training that we've been recommending. So we were really pleased to see it and we'll continue to watch for the company to develop trainings that address potential gaps in knowledge for these kind of position-specific realities. Anne spoke about the rollout on the company's new reporting platform to zoom in on that a little bit more again. The company really leveraged existing communication channels to reach their employees. Anne mentioned they have pre-shipped messages. They have banners, written messages through the wire, which is the kind of internal site. So really kind of leveraging communications across the board, including communications from senior leaders on the reporting platform. We noted that the company also has monthly management newsletters, monthly leadership newsletters. And these are materials addressed to supervisors and above. And although they're not tailored to the kind of the anti-harassment and discrimination space, we view them as an additional channel through which the company can set the tone. As Anne also foreshadowed, we were happy to see the company bring some creativity to training on compliance programs. There were pop-up events in both Vegas and in Boston. They were compliance stations that were back of house run by human resources personnel with trivia designed to test employees on what they consider their five core compliance program policies. That's the preventing harassment and discrimination policy, personal relationships, employee interactions with guests and third parties, which I just mentioned, the code of ethics and the code of conduct. And employees were kind of asked to answer trivia questions and then were given things like tickets to minor league games or movie tickets if they stopped by. And one of the nice things was that we were able to also see senior leaders stop by to really encourage and show commitment to the event in Las Vegas, the CEO and the general counsel stopped by the event. So really great to see that commitment from the top for the importance of these efforts. So we would definitely encourage the company to continue bringing their creative minds to this endeavor and coming up with other events to really encourage and incentivize compliance. And finally, turning to implementation of the company's preventing harassment and discrimination training, we were able to observe the training in Las Vegas virtually and view the training in Boston via a video reporting. We noted that the Vegas training started with a video that used hypothetical scenarios to show the risks of relationships between subordinates and supervisors and covered issues like quid pro pro harassment, hostile environment and retaliation. And then following the video, there was a live session in Vegas with the executive director of human resources. And we really thought that she was engaged and filled at drawing out questions on participation from the group. And in Boston, again, so that was delivered by the general counsel in Boston. She was again, really engaging and dynamic. She emphasized not only that the company doesn't tolerate harassment and discrimination from anyone, but she also used the training as a way to discuss how the importance of diversity at all levels of the organization prevents discrimination throughout, which really gives the why to diversity inclusion efforts. Which brings me to the last bullet point on this slide. The company has incorporated diversity and inclusion training as part of its preventing harassment and discrimination training. This video isn't specific to the company. It's from an external provider, but it does provide advice regarding unconscious bias and tips on how to overcome it. It is a really positive step for the company in response to comments that we heard during our focus groups in the baseline that employees were really looking for more training on diversity and inclusion issues. And the company has indicated that this video is going to be replaced by a more tailored diversity and inclusion video that's gonna be developed and delivered by the new senior vice president of diversity and inclusion. They're also tasked with developing the NIH strategy, employee resource groups and the diversity committee. One other video development is the human trafficking training. So the company has recently developed a human trafficking training to accompany its policy. Again, really happy to see the company doing its part to tackle what is a really, probably pervasive issue. We had the opportunity to view the video that goes along with the training. It begins with a survivor story and then transitions into kind of key terms and guidance on how to identify and handle potential human trafficking. And one of the things we really wanted to highlight here is that we saw both property level and when resorts level leadership in the video as talking heads. So we saw the general counsel from Boston. We saw the CEO win Las Vegas as senior vice president of security. So people in really high up positions lending their voices to something that is a really serious topic and important. If we can move to the next slide, Alexis. So as we continue in this review period, like I mentioned, we expect the company to continue to identify and develop trainings across the organization, including for folks in specific roles like employee relations or security, specific training for managers and supervisors on policies relevant to the compliance program. And through the reporting campaign rollout, we've seen that the company is able to leverage existing channels of communication to communicate these policies to employees across both properties. So we would expect to continue to see the company doing so for other policies going forward. So if that I can pause before turning it over to Preston if anyone has questions, great. Catherine, this is commissioner Ryan, the delta between the competing, the stats on Boston versus Las Vegas in terms of completion of the training. Do you have any concerns about that? Or do you find the reasons for that not to be alarming at all? I don't think that we have any kind of specific concerns related to the delta between the two. It's something that we're gonna keep looking at. I know that they're in the middle of a push to kind of get, make sure that the numbers are up at both properties. So we'll be looking to see how that develops, especially in the next few weeks. Thank you. Okay, great. If we can go to the next slide. Great, thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for your time today. It is really a pleasure to be here with you. We're gonna talk just for a few minutes about internal reporting and investigation. We know of course that that's a critical part of what's being examined now. And it's really key to the overall success of the HR Compliance Program as you've heard from our team today. We've been, and since you've seen, really since our baseline report, it's been a focus throughout. Our testing since the submission of the phase two report is included a review of, as you've heard, communication campaigns, policies, interviews with management personnel and personnel involved in investigations and a continued review of investigation files. Since the submission of our last report, our team has been pleased to see the rollout of a new reporting platform as you've heard about that has a multilingual reporting options. And again, communication campaigns at both Las Vegas and Boston are regarding that platform and the importance of speaking up. As we've noted, these campaigns have included important communications from senior management showing, again, what you've heard from Alejandro and others, a top-down commitment. We've also been pleased to see that the employee relations counselors and managers are engaging in case file review meetings at both properties to address questions regarding ongoing investigations. In short, they are certainly paying attention to how investigations are done and not just seeking to get them done. We've reviewed 34 investigations files so far in this phase. Of course, you know, this phase is not complete. None of those files included incident reports from Las Vegas and files reviewed demonstrate the, particularly the security. Security continued prompt attention to allegedly improper sexual behavior or comments from guests. And that's important because of course, you know that security is very much a gatekeeper. They often see things first. As in phase two, however, we noted that there was somewhat of an inconsistency in how certain complaints, similar complaints were classified. So for example, alleged sexual misconduct might be generally described as a suspicious incident, an injury, or simply a complaint. And this inconsistency, of course, can impact the company's ability to conduct a really meaningful monitoring. And to go back and look at trends, the same types of trends you heard us refer to earlier. In prior phases, we reported on employee concerns regarding access to particularly ER personnel during off hours. That was something that we'd heard about more than once. Employees who worked overnight or on weekends were concerned that ER frankly was not available to them. And so they weren't able to immediately address issues arising during their shifts. The company has extended employee relations in-person, has not, excuse me, has not extended employee relations in-person hours, noting that employee relations is available by phone and email outside of in-person hours. And that staffing overnight requires having more than one counselor in-person and that can implicate some safety considerations. The company has posted signage providing email addresses and phone numbers to allow for communication with the appropriate ER personnel outside of regular business hours. And our team will continue to test the adequacy of the staffing of ER through the rest of this phase. And we think it will be particularly important to engage with focus groups to get an understanding of how they feel about ER's availability. Since that's one of the ways that we learned about this gap in the first place. Yes. Excuse me, this is Kathy. I didn't really understand the idea that there's safety considerations by having overnight additional employee relation resources available. Did I mishear that? No, I miss, if I probably misstated our commissioner and I apologize for that. The reason that they need to have more than one person on duty is for safety. In other words, you can't just have one person behind the desk. But they're saying they can't, but they just have not done it yet. They're doing extra signage. I just misheard it. It's a resource issue that they haven't executed on. That is correct. Thank you, I just misheard. Thank you so much, President. And I'll note, commissioner, also that this concern that we heard was before COVID, right? So it will be interesting to see how, if at all, COVID has affected it, right? Maybe it hasn't, maybe it has, I don't know. But again, we'll continue to test this through the focus groups that we do. Well, we certainly have been engaged in 24-7 operations for many months now. Okay, thanks. Yes, thank you. So one of the core recommendations that you'll recall was in our baseline assessment, was that the company update the investigation's policy to include clearer guidance and structure for investigators. And with respect to intake, a special focus on that and the routing of reports, understanding conflicts of interest, understanding credibility assessments, right? The importance of that. And we also focused on the need for substantive guidance on just steps that are taken during the investigation. We are happy to report and to build upon what we said in our phase two report, which is that the company is addressing those issues. We've seen an updated policy. It is not yet final, it's still in draft form, but we do expect that it will be finalized soon. And the draft that we've seen, it addresses the most important issues that we've raised in our assessment. And again, we expect that the policy is gonna be finalized and rolled out before the conclusion of this reporting period, okay? Really that policy is a roadmap for, as you would expect, not only current investigators and counselors, but obviously folks who join and who are new. It's, we also expect that the company will develop focused trainings, of course, for personnel under the policy, such as the standalone, but it's something that they'll train folks on how to understand and how to make it work. And obviously answer any questions during that. Our testing continues to show opportunities for improvements, such as placing a document collection as a priority issue for investigators and ensuring that investigators feel empowered to make credibility determinations, weigh different types of evidence, and to evaluate document and identify policy violations arising during the course of the case. Again, those are critical parts of this process, right? So credibility determinations, weighing different types of evidence. And again, looking at not just the issue that was presented, perhaps in the allegation, but if other issues come up as the investigation is taking place, knowing what to do with those as well. We think that these things demonstrate the importance of implementing of the companies implementing their amended investigations policy, and again, conducting the training that we referred to. Again, the policy and the training should really zero in on document collection, witness credibility, the use of corroborating evidence, documenting findings and considering policy violations. Again, other than those that were presented in the allegation and really just being able to issue spot. Intelligently. So are there any questions on investigations? Question, this is Commissioner O'Brien. One of the themes that keeps reoccurring in the past has been the company's appreciation for conflict of interest or the lack of appreciation, maybe in certain circumstances. Have you seen an improvement in that in terms of the investigations and the policy that they are having dropped on? So I think certainly the policy speak to it. I would say that of the files that we reviewed, I don't think conflicts of interest were a central issue or a large issue as maybe they were in prior periods. So that, and I think in our view, what we would say is that it's somewhat of a we'll see. I think we've certainly heard from the company that that is something that they are paying attention to. And we just hope that if a conflict comes up, that it will be appropriately handled or going forward. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you, Commissioner. Any other questions? Okay, with that, I think we'll turn it to Catherine. We can go to the next slide, thank you, Alexis. So in this phase of our review, the review of investigation files that Preston just covered also informed our analysis on incentives and discipline. We also had the opportunity to review a couple of enhanced policies, the progressive discipline and performance policy and the revised employee of the month program. And finally, we've been able to have interviews with relevant personnel who are involved in disciplinary decisions. And we're continuing to review the company's efforts to develop programs with compliance-based incentives, some of which I already spoke about in our section on training. So starting with the policies, we were pleased to see that the company was able to update its progressive discipline and performance policy in line with the recommendations that we had made in our baseline assessment to first provide additional guidance on how to determine appropriate discipline based on a holistic view of the evidence. And second, to clarify roles, responsibilities and authority during the disciplinary process. The company also updated the employee recognition program policy to recognize that individuals who excel in, quote, the standards of behavior associated with our compliance policies can be recognized through this program. That was one of our recommendations as well. So during the remainder of this phase, we'll be looking to review the dissemination of the policy to employees, which would include the provision of examples of how employees might earn this kind of recognition for that behavior. We'll also be reviewing decisions related to the program to test whether the policy has been effectively socialized with employees will measure rates of participation and whether it's effectively recognizing the behaviors associated with compliance. We were, as I mentioned earlier, particularly pleased to see the company engaging with employees through less formal programs. The pop-ups that I mentioned in Vegas and Boston really brought the kind of creativity the company should continue to apply to the task of incentivizing compliance. And we look forward to seeing what they come up with in the next few months. At the time of the baseline assessment submission, the company was in the middle of designing a performance management system that was going to apply to all employees. As you may recall from our last report, the executive director of performance management, compensation and benefits was really driving this initiative and she left during the last phase. And so the position hasn't been filled. As Anne mentioned, we understand that the position is being slightly scoped differently that has been posted and will be filled. So we'll be looking to see that job description and to monitor the performance aspect, performance management aspect of that role. In the coming weeks and months, we expect the company to assign the responsibility for developing a performance management program to an individual who has responsibility over both properties. And we'll expect to see a work plan for that program as well to recognize compliant behavior by both managers and employees. And finally, we'll continue to test whether the disciplinary process is really ensuring consistent outcomes, particularly in the harassment and discrimination space. So I can pause for questions otherwise I'll pass it back to Alejandra. Thank you, Catherine. So we move now to risk-based reviews and the design of a compliance program, regardless of the subject, really has to be pegged to the risk profile of the company. And no risk profile is ever static. So the recommendation that we made that to us is really important in ensuring the sustainability of this program is that the company developed its own HRCP risk assessment procedure. It did that. We reported on that in our last phase. Internal audit developed a comprehensive risk assessment process that tees off of government expectations and recommendations of effective compliance programs that includes DOJ guidance and EOC guidance. It takes into consideration the observations and recommendations made in our reports. And we've seen now the first round, the first cycle, if you will, of that risk assessment procedure being implemented. Internal audit concluded its 2020 risk assessment process which followed from what we can see in the documentation, the procedure that was laid out that was designed. We're now entering the second phase. So that will be really important for us because we've requested now the ability to actually shadow some of the activity that internal audit is going to conduct in conducting that risk assessment that will include interviews with management and with other employees and stakeholders to ensure that we wanna see how it's actually implemented. As well, so we'll appreciate that opportunity. By the end of this phase three, really we look forward to seeing the completion of that 2021 HRCP risk assessment program and process. And what we really wanna focus in on too is that feedback loop that makes these risk assessments meaningful so that what was learned from the 2020 risk assessment is informing the 2021 risk assessment and is ultimately informing enhancements to the program beyond even those that we will be making that will organically be coming from the company. So we're excited to see that. And I think you've heard me say before, this is not an easy thing to develop and we're quite pleased to see that the company was able to develop this in the timing that it did. Really focused on a bottom up approach position by position analysis of where the risk of harassment discrimination comes from. Any questions on this piece? If we can move to monitoring and testing then please, Alexis. Monitoring and testing, they already had a practice before we even came into the monitor ship of escalating all sexual harassment and discrimination allegations to the Wynn Resorts General Counsel and to the compliance committee. That practice has continued. It seems to flow very naturally. We were able to observe, as Anne mentioned earlier, a compliance committee meeting where we saw readouts of some of those investigations and saw some questions from the compliance committee. We always wanna see more. We are hopeful that the company's reporting ability on these trends will be enhanced. Right now it's still quite manual though, we understand from HR that it's become less burdensome process now that they've understood what the compliance committee and the GC wanna see in the reports. But we do hope that that's supplemented by the more automated monitoring that's going to come out of the new reporting platform. We'd love to see trends by claim, by departments, over periods of time. So again, the company can use that monitoring, not for the sake of monitoring, but to ensure continuous improvement. We've also seen, Katherine spoke to us about the online training and in those modules, so in the training after each module, the company injected questions, a little bit of a quiz, that were really designed to reinforce what had been seen in the preceding module and also what key elements the company wants to highlight from its policy. I will admit, we all took the online training. We were very intentional in trying to game the system. So I would intentionally try to fail or skip to see how effective the training itself was in allowing, preventing just the click through, right, that some employees might be tempted to engage in. We couldn't game it. So if we did fail, we were, you know, asked to retake the module or to retake the quiz, which is very helpful and really it was a very effective, effective online training. Any questions about that? Okay, if we can move on to slide 22 then. So this is the last hallmark and this is the general controls environment focused around specifically issues related to harassment and discrimination. We have seen an updated policy and procedures for the initiation review and approval of settlements that are related to claims of harassment and discrimination. What we really wanted to make sure there is that there is meaningful governance around these settlement agreements, that there's pre-approval before settlement negotiations go in, that there's dual approval, particularly with respect to settlements that might involve officers and senior management of the company. You might recall in our last phase, we also reviewed separation agreements and we had some recommendations related to just aligning the Boston agreements with the Las Vegas agreements. Those changes are still underway. So we'll continue to monitor this, you know, not a lot of activity, thankfully, under this bucket in terms of settlements coming out of claims around senior management and officers, but we're hopeful that with our monitoring and also with the ongoing activity that we see through internal audit, any issues that arise under this category can be detected. Any questions on this last hallmark? Or overall, because that's the last of the hallmark so we can move on to just next steps unless anybody has questions from anything that we've touched on. Before we, because I do wanna drop the slides so we can just do any kind of questions. I know you have your next steps. So maybe everyone can hold their questions just to hear your next steps at a high level and then we can go back to them. Absolutely, happy to do that. And we've touched on the next steps throughout the presentation, but just in summary, we are gonna continue, of course, to monitor recommendation completion and implementation. As I think I hinted earlier on, we are going to start moving more into hands-on monitoring and testing. So really attending more meetings, shadowing internal audit, looking to see activity beyond what is required by recommendations. So really hoping to see a maturation, if you will, of the program in the coming periods. We hope that if public health continues to become safer, we do plan to conduct focus groups. It's been now, it will have been two years since we conducted the last round of focus groups and it's gonna be important. Nothing is gonna tell us how effective the changes have been better than actually talking to employees who are on the floor. And now I think there's going to be enough lead time between these changes and employees having lived under them. So we'll be looking forward to having that. As I mentioned, we'll be shadowing internal audit in their risk assessment procedures. And we've continued to request observation, participation in compliance committee meetings and board of directors meeting forward to engaging with both of those committees or those bodies with regard to HR related issues. And then our next report, I think our final report on this will be early in 2022. So maybe if we can lift the, that's great. Gives me a chance to look at my fellow commissioners. Everybody, yes. And I should say final report on this phase, just to be clear. Yes. And you said which date? I know that. I think it's an early 2022, but we'll need to align on when you. No, your question will be, Brian, and I'll be checking in with you on that process issue. Commissioners, very close to report. A lot of great news. And then some good, good as commissioner Cameron pointed out, opportunities for to improve to the best practice possible. Have questions. Commissioner Hill. I think commissioner Cameron had her hand up first. I missed it. I saw yours. Commissioner Hill, please. You go. So my fellow commissioners, I'm going to tell you right off the bat. It takes me a while to digest a report like this at 10 PM tonight is when all my questions will come out. However, I just want to see if what I understood you to say today, see if I'm right for where we're going. And then I'll just bring up a concern of what I heard is correct. It sounds as though we're happy with what's happening at the lower levels in regards to harassment and things of that sort. They're putting in procedures to help. I'm putting it into three different levels, the upper management, then we have the middle, which would be the workers, maybe middle management, and then of course, third party. And what I'm hearing is that level two and level three are being addressed very, very well. And that we're happy with that. But I think I heard is that some of the recommendations that are being made aren't necessarily happening at the upper level. Am I wrong in that assessment of what I heard today? No, you're not. I think that when we thank you for your question and it is wonderful to speak with you. The changes, if we think about design and implementation where that has to happen at the lower and middle level, that's been carrying forward. And we've seen support from executive management for those things to happen. What we wanna see is that what we call or what I call transformational change where we're looking to see more than, yes, we support these specific initiatives and having executive management really be at the forefront of ensuring that their direct reports understand we are in this with you. It's great that we have leadership speaking on trainings, great that we have more communication, but really finding more ways to concretely demonstrate that commitment is what we wanna see. So that transformational change, Commissioner Hill, we've not quite seen yet throughout all levels of the organization. And in your opinion, moving forward, are we going to see that? I'm an optimistic person. I think we will. You know, I think my hope is as they begin to see that this really, I'll say two things. You know, in my experience, once management and business starts to see that this actually has compliance in this space, has a business value to it, in employee engagement, in retention, right? Everyone loves to work at Wynn because it's a high profile company. But what we wanna hear is, we love to work at Wynn because they get it. We feel seen, we see engaged, right? That's one bucket. And then two, you know, if we look at what's happening through regulators beyond yourselves, and I think, you know, you got this as a body very early on, more and more regulators are starting to care about these topics. We see, you know, more and more boards of directors, frankly, facing liability and exposure for not demonstrating the level of engagement, right? There's the Activision case that's been very public in recent weeks. Those sorts of issues, I think, will necessarily compel the board and executive management to, you know, if you will, really find that there's more to it than just developing a program. What I think I heard you say in your extremely capable staff say is that they could be leaders and they have become leaders from the middle level down. And I think I heard the chairwoman say they are top of the class. So if I was on a board of directors, I would wanna be that leader for the entire country. And I would hope that that's what they're thinking moving forward. That's exactly right. And I wanna, you know, it's more nuanced than, you know, middle and below. There are, we have seen really particular leadership in, you know, I'm happy to just call the position not by name, the general counsel of EBH has been, I think, really instrumental in driving change, the change that we are seeing. I think she truly has been instrumental. We have a, you know, there's the property presidents at EBH have, you know, I think also demonstrated quite a bit of commitment there. We know the former president of EBH is now at Las Vegas. So we hope those where we have seen a lived in concrete commitment that it starts to become infectious throughout the organization. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Commissioner Cameron, I guess it's your turn. I missed your hand on the side. Much of the conversation that just transpired were the things that I wanted to talk about. First of all, I love, I am not part of the team that sees and hears these reports all the time. So to hear this, I love how comprehensive this is. The way your team goes about monitoring, and I've seen mine is more, my experience is much more in the policing world. I've seen lots of monitorships and part of that experience. But the way you do it is firm, but yet helpful. We want to see this progress. This is good for you. Let me explain why. Let me give you the best practices. It's not an I got you approach, which I think is really helpful to the company. They're lucky to have you as a monitor. And as you just talked about, I look forward to seeing some of those transformational changes and the company at all levels, board and senior leadership really understand how helpful this could be to their company, the culture and be true leaders in the world with these matters when it comes to gaming. So I hope for that to happen in the future. And just a thank you to you for the way you go about doing your work. Really appreciate that comment, Commissioner Cameron. It really has been a privilege. We took this charge on very seriously when we were fortunate enough to be selected by you and really do sincerely appreciate your comments. And I'm particularly thrilled that the entire team gets to hear them as well. Thank you. Commissioner Bryant. I think what I'm really looking forward to hearing too somewhat following up on Commissioner Hill's comments is advancement in an appreciation on behalf of the company in terms of conflict of interest, both at the board level and at the every level of the company in terms of investigations, that sort of thing. I mean, I'm happy to hear about the interim report on how things have advanced. I will be really interested in the next report in terms of dotting into some of the details and seeing how it's going in on the ground at the board at the investigations level. So I'm very happy to hear. I somewhat have been advantaged because I get to hear this sort of along the way as opposed to some of the other commissioners. But I'm looking forward to the next one building on what you've talked about today. And thank you to you and your team for all the work that you've been doing and presenting pretty clearly and concisely this morning. Thank you, thank you so much. And we will continue to be keenly focused on conflicts of interest issues. And at this time, because it is interim, we've held back on more of the type of data or evidence, if you will, that we typically put into the final report. It would be premature in some cases, but we do appreciate you understanding it is flagged as an issue and we'll continue to monitor that and report on it. Thank you. So I just said three points. And then I'll just circle back, make sure we're all set on the hundred. First on process, Commissioner Cameron and Commissioner O'Brien Charmin, if I've misstated, but to be clear, we safeguard the independence of the independent monitoring very, very carefully. So we really don't hear deep details, but we do keep, you know, we'll have a very occasional check-ins on process. And it's always, their independence is, you know, the absolute paramount priority. And then, you know, you're hearing from them. This, in this instance, I think probably the big decision that Commissioner O'Brien with the help of Councilor Grossman, should we have the monitor deliverable be a full-sum written report or PowerPoint. And I thought this was very effective and I really enjoyed hearing from the entire, all the team that when we did do the procurement of the selection process of this team, Alejandra Preston brought forth the entire team that you saw today. And now, you know, this is why, one of the reasons why they prevailed because the bench is so deep. So for that, thank you. Second, I do echo Commissioner O'Brien's concerns about the conflicts of interest. If we could hear more about that, I think that would be good on the next report. And also in terms of the hiring practice and also there, any of their remedies or the mitigation they've done with respect to conflicts in their outside Council help, I'm interested in caring about that. Is Commissioner O'Brien, should we elaborate in any way on that? Is there anything else for missing? Okay. Oh, sorry. Okay. And then what I really heard today too that maybe I hadn't focused on in the past is that we're seeing them check off the list of the best practices that they need to engage in in order to address what we as a commission found needed in our decision. But what I'm hearing you is that, yes, they're implementing, they've got it, they've got the policies now they're implementing, but that transformative piece that you're looking for, it's not simply for them to be the leaders in the class, which I'm delighted to hear that they may end up being there. But it's transformative in order to sustain these practices and it's the sustainability that will accomplish what we had hoped for from an independent monitor that once you leave, it will be so embedded in the organization that they can continue to be the leader. And the risks that we were concerned about, the risk of harm and actually past harms, right? Have been fully addressed and there's a sustainable structure. And that's my big takeaway today. Is that fair? That's absolutely fair. That's absolutely fair. And that's the natural progression of these endeavors. And I recall when we first had the opportunity to speak, one of the objectives that we laid out for you was that at the end of this, we wouldn't just have a program, but really we would have a program, I believe the words we used were that was embedded in the DNA of the company and that really was in cadence with its operations. And so that's really what we're moving towards as we continue to progress. So absolutely the right takeaway. All right, and with respect to Commissioner Hill's comment on the, at the top in the board level, when we, you weren't there, Commissioner Hill for the hearing, but I know that you've been brought up to speed and you're working on that. Part of the issue on the sustaining the license was the transformation of the leadership. And we did get to meet with the entire board. And I think all of us know that the assets are there. It's a board with increased diversity even since we met the board with the sensibilities, the skills, the leadership to get this done right. So I really appreciate Chairman Satchey asking you for that. This is new to them. So I'm glad that they asked. And I think if I understand the role of a monitor is that you don't tell them what to do. So they need to keep on asking and keep on acting. And because I think I made the mistake of one saying, oh, why don't you just tell them? You know, something like that. But that is a key question. And so I think that the work, I have complete confidence in the depth of that board. So thank you. And I do have to add, I'm sorry, Madam Chair. I do have to add, I absolutely agree with you that individually, and that's why it was very deliberate in distinguishing individual versus the board as a collective body individual. We've been highly impressed with the caliber of members that the board has. I think one of the nuances for us, frankly, coming into this was the fact that the board has, the company effectively has two compliance bodies overseeing it, the board of directors and the compliance committee. And, you know, while that's wonderful, I think it has allowed for an unintentional tendency to let the compliance committee own all of these issues. Not, you know, shirking of responsibility by the board because they have a body that's focused on this. But the compliance committee is an advisory role. It's not the governing body of the company. So part of it, frankly, is trying to figure out where the board can expand into a space that I think has historically been viewed as within scope only of the compliance committee. That's an interesting observation. Commissures, do you have, can you provide any question on that observation? Okay, Commissioner Cameron. I think we view that as a really important asset that that, but I see what you're saying, Hantra. Commissioner Hill, do you have any other questions? Nope. We thought we'd start with a softball. Really. Great information. Excellent information, really. Thank you so much. Again, I'm just gonna do a look at all my, the commissioners, Karen, I think we're all set then from the team. Council Grossman, thank you for your help in the process of this work. And thank you, everyone, stay well. It's really nice to see all of you here. Preston, thank you so much. Anne, Catherine, and Nicole. And I didn't see Alexa, but thank you so much. Thank you all very, very much. Have a wonderful day. Thank you all. Have a great day. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Bye-bye. Okay, we're gonna, excellent. If you don't mind, we'll continue to move right along. We have a full meeting and- Sure. 10 minute break. Yeah, I was just gonna ask if we could have a short break. We do have lunch planned for, you know, I think I'd like to sort of stick to our schedule, which was for 12.30. Two minute, like, bio break and come right back. Austin, if you could accommodate that, that would be great. Heat up our coffee or tea, if it's commission or camera. Okay, thank you so much. So I think we're back, Austin. Thank you so much. And thank you for the quick break, everyone. I appreciate it. Excellent report. Now we're moving on to the legal division. Let me see. Todd's not quite back. And I know we'll be hearing from Carrie. There she is. Good afternoon, Carrie. Nice to see you. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and Commissioners. Nice to see you all. So we have some changes for you today to the rules of the game for Ultimate Texas Hold'em. As you know, changes to any rules of the game for table games currently come before the commission for approval. In the near future, we anticipate bringing a draft regulation to you for review that may streamline this process. And we look forward to speaking with you about that in the coming months. So I just want to sort of give you a heads up on that. But in the meantime, the red line draft of Ultimate Texas Hold'em is in your packet. These are really technical changes that will bring the game rules in line with the current GLI standard related to automated shufflers. The current GLI standard and the game rules are inconsistent right now with respect to dealing procedures from an automated shuffler. So Gaming Agents Division Chief Bruce Band, Gaming Agents Division Assistant Chief Bert Cain and Regulatory Compliance Manager, Sterl Carpenter, are all here today and can give you a little more detail about the changes and answer any questions that you might have. So I'm going to turn it over to Sterl. Good morning, Sterl. Morning, Kathy, and greetings to the new commissioner. So what has happened here is in your packet. Ultimate Texas Hold'em is being dealt by a computerized shuffle machine. And the shuffle machine has a set way in which it produces the cards. The reason behind this regulation change is that game protection has evolved on the ultimate Texas Hold'em due to cheating and it has changed. And in this change for protecting the game, GLI has changed the way the shuffler operates and the regs have not caught up to the new change in dealing procedures. So everything else on the game is exactly the same. It is just the dealing procedure in which the cards are delivered. And that's pretty much the basics. If anyone has any further questions, I'll be more than happy to answer them. I have a quick question. Oh, apologies, commissioner. Commissioner Cameron. Yes, Sterl. So this new methodology, which is now GLI has signed off on, does it keep the game safer? Is it more difficult for others to cheat with this shuffler? Yes, so the method that it does now is it spits out the five cards for the community first and then issues two cards to every spot. In doing so, they cover the five cards. The cards for the dealer is not shown. So if any marks are on the cards that no one can see, it is very difficult for that player who has mocked the cards to take advantage of that. And in dealing this way also, it protects all those procedures. Thank you. Carrie, would you like to walk us through the red lines just so we have a general sense of what they do? We have an understanding of the policy for the red change now. And we also have Bruce here. He's just having some video issues in there. I think I might have fixed that for you, Bruce, or else maybe Katrina behind closed doors. So it's all set. But Sterl, that was very clear. I would suggest that Bruce Burke or Sterl walk us through the specific changes here, but I do just wanna note that this is just a change to the rules and not to the actual regulations. So this isn't something that would need to go through a promulgation process. Thank you. It's important. We should just let Sterl continue. He has a very good grasp of his regulation. Okay. So on the website, this is the change to, as Carrie stated, the rules to the game. And in this change, your main changes just are highlighted in section eight where it states now that the dealer will deliver the first stack of five community cards in the manner as to not disclose the value in accordance to the procedures provisions in section nine. The dealer should then place the two card hands and then it continues as it used to state. So that's your main change into this rule of the game. Before it used to say the two cards would come out and the dealer would deal out of his hand and we do not want that, as we've said before, we never wanna deal it to be dealing out of their hands. So that's the other game protection that this is dealing with. So that's why GLI has had this certified on the Shuffler and that's why the Shuffler is programmed in this way. Or as you go down into section C, it says at this time, the dealer's hand shall remain in the nest. That's where the cards come out and they're left there until all the patrons have acted on their hand. As you can see, they used to put the dealer's cards would then be placed on top and then put in front with the cross out in the area designed for the dealer's hand. So those are the two main steps that they're doing here to change this and now is in compliance with the rules and the way they're dealing at the casino. Again, if we have any other, if you want to go through, there's more of language cross outs for section nine. So by references of section seven is crossed out because the section seven is no longer addressed and then the burn of the cards in the dealer is crossed out because the cards are now in a different way, there is no burning. That is the final step is that five cards are put in the front first, there is absolutely no burning of cards for dealer error. We are not the only jurisdiction that is doing this, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, pretty much anybody that uses this shop work uses this method now. Commissioner Hill, do you have a question? Are you feeling good about this? I'm feeling good about it. I'm in my head, I'm spinning. You know from old school to new school, a little bit to get used to it. So if I understand you correctly, so in no phase before you burn a card, boom, boom, boom. So now it's just five out and then that's it for the rest of the game. Yeah, correct. Before they used to put three burn a card, put two burn a card and then give the dealer's card. So at that point, there were errors there and there were also other cards being used. Now it's completely removed. Yep, very good. So it brings us into full compliance. Correct. Yes. Commissioner Cameron, Commissioner O'Brien, any questions for Sturro? I see no, but it is a rule change. So we don't have to go through the whole promulgation, it just is immediate effective upon our vote. That's right and then we'll post the updated version on the website. Okay, if there are no further questions, we do need a vote today. Commissioner Cameron? Yeah, I'm happy to make a motion. I move that the commission approve the amendments to the rules of the game of ultimate Texas hold them as included in the commissioners packet and discuss. Any further questions? Addance, thank you to the legal team for working with Bruce's team. Commissioner Cameron? Aye. Commissioner O'Brien? Aye. Your first vote, Commissioner Hill? Aye. And that was an aye? Yes. Okay, and I vote yes for zero. Consent. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for your attention to this and I know that we'll look forward to the full summary of you that you've got underway. Thank you. Okay, moving on now then to our finance team. And good afternoon, Derek. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and commissioners. We love your background. Thank you. Got a lot to put up. It's always, it's ever changing. So that's a good thing. Some of them- We just wonder what kind of tape you're using. I hope. Masking. Masking tape. Yeah. Definitely don't want to take the paint off the walls. All the things that you can't get rid of with the magic eraser. Welcome, Commissioner Hill. Good to see you on these meetings with all the other commissioners. Today I am joined by Douglas O'Donnell, Revenue Manager for the Gaming Commission and Agnes Bolier, Procurement and Budget Office Manager for the Gaming Commission. We're here to do the closeout report for fiscal year 2021. Initially, the commission approved a $32.4 million budget of the Gaming Control Fund requiring an assessment of $29.67 million on licensees. After three quarterly updates, the budget was revised to $32.9 million and the assessment was dropped to $27.6 million. As a reminder, the Gaming Control Fund is composed of both regulatory costs as well as statutorily required costs. The breakdown of those are on page one of the memorandum. The majority of the costs, however, are regulatory costs and that comprises $27.43 million of the $32.9 million budget. Total Gaming Control Fund spending for FY21 was $31.25 million, which was $1.65 million less than the approved budget. That's a 5% underspending. The table on page two of the package shows a digital budget, revised budget, and final spending in variants by each budgeted spending category. We have included some explanations for the variances. For the purposes of this presentation, I'd like to take a look and focus on the largest variances, which are in the administrative expenses, the EE object class, operational services, the JJ object class, and the IT non-payroll expenses, the UU object class. The EE underspending is associated with the lack of travel and the agency didn't FY21. As you'll remember, we initially reduced our travel to approximately one third of the FY20 level and budgeted all of that under the executive director. We did not see any out-of-state travel and we only did minimal in-state travel due to the COVID restrictions and closures during FY21. The JJ is where our gaming enforcement unit is funded from. The 1.2 million underspending is a combination of attrition, prudent use of overtime, and a bill that was late getting into us from a municipal department. As referenced in that table, the 271,000 bill that did get submitted to us late, which represents expenses from April through June for a municipal gaming enforcement department will be added to our FY22 budget. Have to pay those bills, it's just the timing of when it came in. The underspending in the IT area was a combination of prudent use of funds by the IT department as well as an inability to get equipment due to the demands COVID has put on IT assets. We had allocated an additional 250,000 to the IT department at the close of the third quarter to deal with some of our migration to the cloud. And IT department did do some targeted engagement with consultants to assist our staff in doing that and deal with some of the attrition we've seen in the IT department. However, we were unable to renew some of our equipment to get new equipment leases, which required us to renew older leases at a reduced cost as well as purchase some of the assets that IT had wanted to including the revamp of the commissioners conference room and the commission public meeting room. So, you know, there was a lot of things that led to those underspending on the IT side that we wouldn't have experienced in other years as well as in the gaming enforcement and on the travel side. Moving on to revenue, MGC's final FY21 revenue was 33.21 million, which was slightly above our last projections. The table on page three of the memorandum describes the variances, but if you'll walk through those, the main area that we saw increases after the third quarter was actual revenue received for the independent monitor. As you will recall, we budget and receive revenue as the expenses come in when we receive the revenue for the independent monitor. So that's the only reason it's not there. It wasn't anticipated to come in. It's just we didn't know what those bills would be until we received them and that's when the revenue comes in. So that kind of leads into our final piece of the memorandum. The MGC's final spending in the gaming control fund was 31.2 million. The final revenue was 33.2 million resulting in revenue exceeding spending by 1.95 million. However, there were 97,900 of independent monitoring fees that were paid in FY21, but the revenue wasn't received in FY22. And as Encore Boston Harbor is solely responsible for paying those fees, we credit that back to all of the licensees as part of the overspending, similar to what we did last year, which leads to a surplus of 2.05 million in the chart on page, the table at the top of page four walks through how we arrive at that amount. 205CMR 121.05 paragraph two describes how the commission deals with surplus revenues. And we have chosen to credit that to the licensees next year assessments in the same manner of proportion as to how that excess amount was assessed in the previous year. So we have included at the bottom of page for a lot of other tables, which show how we assess the first half of the year, how we assess the second half of the year assessment on our licensees, added those together to get a weighted average for the full year, and then apply those percentages to the $2 million surplus. And this is what the licensees can expect to get as an credit to their FY22 assessment. Included in your packet is an attachment that lists each appropriation and corresponding revenue source of budget to actuals. And at this point, if you have any questions, we're open to hearing them. I know there are a lot of tables, a lot of charts. I apologize for that. Tried to simplify this into a whole year is worth of spending into one document is not always easy. So we're open to hear any questions you have. And Doug and Agnes are here as well to assist with any of those. I think you're on mute, Chair. Thank you, Derek. Questions, commissioners for Derek? Commissioner O'Brien or Commissioner Cameron from the Alternative Commissioner Hill? Okay, Commissioner Hill, you are on muted. The only thing I wanna bring to our attention and maybe we're gonna have to discuss it at another meeting is the IT budget. As we know, we had a little get together on Tuesday to test a hybrid meeting. And I think we were told at that meeting about what it was going to take in order to bring new technology into that particular room. And it's gonna be a cost that was quite large actually. So I just didn't know if anybody wanted to touch upon that particular line item because I think moving forward, that's gonna be something we're gonna have to discuss and consult it. Yeah, we did discuss that a little bit on Tuesday and for the benefit of all commissioners. That's a good question. The IT budget is really lean. Katrina keeps it that way. She does have some money there for equipment replacement, but this is something we would either one take a look at once we get the estimates in hand as to other projects that are delayed already that we could scoop from. There are other categories that are under spending that we could scoop from or is this something we wanna go back at a quarterly budget discussion or before then to say we're gonna increase the assessment for that or just carry the deficit anticipating that we'll get some reversions like we have in previous years. Karen? Yeah, I completely agree with Derek. There are options in order for us to purchase that equipment. I think that is a priority and we'll defer to the commission on decisions on how they want to do those meetings, but we can make that happen. As Derek outlined, there are several avenues. Thank you. And so for Commissioner Hill's point, our meeting the other day, which was an open meeting, but really a working meeting to test equipment for conducting our public meetings, that there is, I understand that you're going to look at the room and assess it for restoration of the equipment that we had in the past and come back with a, that would allow for the experience that we had in the past, but completely including the hybrid experience that we're experiencing right now. There would be no change for the virtual experience. It would be integrated into what we did before. So it's another hybrid option and you're going to look into that process. So if you could plan on probably reporting back on that in your administrative update, Karen at our next board commission meeting, that'd be great. Absolutely. Now, as part of that, Katrina is planning on getting some consultants in to take a look who are on statewide contract, as well as our contractor who we have that does our remote. Is there any commissioner that would like to be a part of those discussions? Because we are putting all things on the table like, do we have the right setup? Is this how it should be? I know that during that meeting, some commissioners are saying it's fatiguing to sit up in those tall chairs that long of a time too. So is there a commissioner that would like to be on that, so that perspective as well? I think we can work out those details offline. Thanks. But I do think to commissioner Hill's question, I think it even goes beyond the public meeting needs. Commissioner Hill, I think that we heard in our briefing from Derek that the IT budget is lean and that maybe we need to actually increase it to address some of the operational needs. I don't want to put words in your mouth, Commissioner Hill, but. I think I also heard from our update earlier in the hearing that we may be looking at possibly getting double screens for other employees to go back home and things of that sort. And I assume that this line item would be part of that as well. This is where that would be funded from. And I know that Karen, you've also got some other systemic automations that you're doing. So I guess if I can piggyback on commissioner Hill, I appreciate our chief information officers desire to operate mainly. We also just had a very informative conference thank you, commissioner Cameron, executive director allows that really prioritized investments in IT given cybersecurity threats. So maybe revisiting that, as you say, commissioner Hill line item is warranted at this time. So we like her leanness, but we also want to make sure she can operate. Anything further on that issue? Mr. Sobriana, thanks. Any further questions on today's presentation from Derek? Now, it's my understanding that the reg suggests that we have sole discretion as to whether we wanna revert that those dollars or not. So you do need a vote. And it is your recommendation that those dollars do revert back. Correct. So the gaming control fund requires us to give the money back. It's whether we give it as cash payment to the licensees as a refund or as a credit to their next year's assessment. And we have always done it as a credit to the next year's assessment. And that ties a little closer to the statute, but we did when we wrote our reg give us the ability to if in a tough year, and there was a huge amount of money, give it back directly to them as cash. So we're pretty close to sending out the next assessment because we're on a quarterly schedule again. We're recommending a credit to their next quarterly assessment. You know, it was not marked up for a vote, Derek, but you do need that, correct? Commissioner, I'm gonna get- I'm historically had a vote. Yeah, so that's okay. I feel comfortable that we can proceed and give the authorization that you need if the commission is so inclined. Commissioner O'Brien, I'm gonna turn to you with your legal skills. Are you comfortable making a motion? If not, then we have Council Grossman here as well. I mean, so you're just looking for a vote on solely related to the decision to take the surplus and credit it to next year, right? Correct. That's the only thing you're asking for. That's it, that's it. So Madam Chair, based on what is in the commissioner's packet and the discussion here today, I would move that the commission approved the request to take the surplus from FY21 and credit it to the licensees FY22 assessments. Second. Any questions? Commissures, Commissioner Hill, do you have a question? Okay. All right, then we'll go ahead with our local vote. Commissioner Kim. Aye. Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. And I vote yes, four zero. Thank you and thank you for the excellent work and thank you for everyone. This was a tough year and all of those savings really did help the licensees and kept us also very accountable. Thank you, Derek. And thank you, Doug and Agnes. And that is one thing we really want to point out, Commissioner, is that the team here, it's all of the MGC because each director is responsible for their own budget. So we have given a lot of responsibility to the directors and they have all done an excellent job of managing within their budgets, making sure that they remain accountable to the commission and to the licensees. So this is really a reflection of the great work they've done. And on the revenue side, it's a lot of Doug chasing down people. So he and his team. So it's a lot of hard work. So, I get to stand up here and present it, but it's the whole agency doing the work. Agnes is smiling away. Agnes, thank you for all that you do. And again, a very important observation. We know that each Karen's team members, the chiefs and directors really are responsible for their own budget. Your guidance is really important. And Karen, you're working hard to make sure the team is fair. And as always, we're very transparent with the licensees. So thank you, great job. Nice to be able to give them some credits for next year. All right. Then we're moving on to item number seven, a bit of a celebration this week. Here's Director Van Der Linden. There you are, you magically appear. I do. I wasn't sure if we were going to a break. So I stayed hidden for a bit. Anyway, good afternoon, Madam Chair and commissioners and a special hello to Commissioner Hill. So glad to be able to work with you. We do have a bit of a celebration. It's responsible gaming education week. Happens every year around this time. It's part of our commitment to promoting positive play and reducing gambling related harm. We enthusiastically support responsible gaming education. RGEW as it's called was originally developed by the American Gaming Association back in 1998, prioritized responsible gaming as an integral part of the gaming industry's daily operations. The annual advocacy week provides an opportunity to strengthen employee training, promote gambling literacy among casino guests and further advance responsible gaming programs. So the gaming commission, as you know, supports responsible gaming year round. And it relies heavily on partnerships. The partnerships with our game sense team and the Mass Council on Gaming and Health is integral in our effort. Our partnerships with each of the casino licensees is also centrally important to our ability to effectively carry this workout. So in that spirit, I wanted to just highlight a few activities that are happening this week and know that these are just a very few examples. I've asked the Mass Council in our game sense team to come back next month during their quarterly report and provide a more complete outline of kind of what's going on at each of the casinos this week. But just as a brief highlight, here are a few things. So I was actually out at Plain Ridge Park Casino on, when was it, Tuesday and had the opportunity to meet with the game sense team. They had launched a number of different activities but specifically during that day they had a table set up right at the entrance and were engaging casino patrons as they were coming in and a different responsible gaming quiz that they had offered every day, a different one every day both front of the house as well as back of the house with PPC employees. Plain Ridge Park Casino also did a pretty robust campaign in pushing out digital signage throughout the property. They also provided over $3,000 in gift cards and the support that the game sense team was rolling out. I had a really nice meeting with North Bronson and Lisa McKinney at the property and it really highlighted their commitment, their ongoing commitment to supporting responsible gaming. At MGM, they switched out their digital signage to support responsible gaming education week. They've rolled out a voluntary self-exclusion quiz that was sent out to all staff and similarly to Plain Ridge Park Casino, the game sense staff has participated different activities every day of the week. We had originally hoped to roll out, play my way at MGM this week. So there was actually a lot of activity planned around this but we look forward to doing that within and then in the next few months or so closer near to the end of the year. I also wanted to highlight MGM corporate has a strong commitment to responsible gaming and as you know, they corporate wide adopted the game sense program. They also have a designated staff at the corporate level to support responsible gaming efforts throughout their company. I had a nice meeting with Daniel Miller, their compliance officer and the MGM corporate RG director, Garnett Farnes last month to talk about how Massachusetts is doing responsible gaming. How we've created a model really not just within Massachusetts but around the country and they were very complimentary to our efforts here. At Encore Boston Harbor, they've donated gift cards for several of the responsible gaming activities that are being carried out by the game sense staff. Similarly, they changed out a lot of their digital signage to support responsible gaming education week. They have done an extraordinary job and this isn't just this week but over the past three months as they're doing their new hire orientations and doing their refresher trainings, our game sense team at that site has reached over 1500 casino staff in the last couple of months. I think it's a true testament to that partnership to include and make sure that responsible gaming is integrated into their employee training. Again, these are just some of the examples of what's happening during this week and a little bit more. The game sense team always does a great job during their quarterly report. They're gonna come back with some more specifics of what's happening this week but that's the end of my report too. Thank you. Questions for Director VanderLinden? Commissioner Cameron? No questions, just it's nice to hear about the reports and what each casino is doing. It's always a nice event. I've been out there in the past to see what they're doing this week and how they engage even more effectively with the patrons who do that on a regular basis but with the extra attention to this week. Just really good work and thank you for giving us a full report. You're very welcome. Commissioner Hill or Commissioner O'Brien? Questions? No questions. Thank you. Mark, thank you and good luck for the rest of the week and we look forward to the licensees reports and their quarterly reports coming next month in November, so thank you. Great, you're very welcome. Thank you very much. Okay, I think that what we thought would work for the rest of this meeting is to take a bit of a lunch break and then we'd come back and devote an hour so to Joe Delaney and Mary Thorell's report on community mitigation. And we have a few matters to vote on as well as some to digest. So does that make sense? Commissioner is to break down. Okay, we're just running a little bit long but not bad. What if we took a full half hour, 1.15, does that work for everyone? Okay, excellent. So we'll reconvene this meeting at 1.15 and Austin will put on a slide. Thank you so much. Gail, did you get showers? Gail, I'm sorry, what was that question? Did you get a rainstorm? Because during our meeting, we did. No, not at all, sun's out here. We got to think that there was a rainstorm and people going to yard work outside in the pouring rain. It's almost the opposite here, not yet, probably later, right? Austin, I think we might be all set. Great, thank you. So it's 1.17 and I think I see all of us here. I'm gonna do the roll call and reconvene public meeting number 356 of the Gaming Commission. Commissioner Cameron. I'm here. Commissioner Bryant. I am here. Commissioner Hill. Here. Okay, and we're turning now to item number eight on our agenda, Chief Delaney. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you, Madam Chair and commissioners and welcome, Commissioner Hill. I'm looking forward to working with you. So today for the agenda, we have a couple of items. The first are some requests for the use of reserve funds. We have Hamden North Adelboro and Mansfield and then the second item that we will talk about is our policy questions for the development of the 2022 Community Mitigation Fund Guidelines. So with that, I will jump right in with Hamden and I'm gonna just share my screen here and just throw up a map of the area so we can sort of put this in context a little bit. So the red line here that you see, that is the boundaries of Hamden. As you can see right over here where it says Springfield, that's right about where the casino is. So Hamden petitioned to be a surrounding community back a number of years ago and they were denied that being a surrounding community. But at that time, any community that petitioned to be a surrounding community was granted a reserve for that with the idea being there's probably some impacts on that community but maybe not high enough to the warrant, quite warrant surrounding community status. So back in 2016, Hamden was given a $100,000 grant a reserve grant and they have now come in and asked to use that money to do some pedestrian related improvements in the community. And as you can see in downtown right about here, there's sort of a main route that does take you into Springfield. And it was estimated that some traffic from the community itself and from some points east and maybe some points south would come through Hamden on their way to the casino, either employees or patrons. Now what their proposal is, is this Allen Street and Summers Road are essentially that main sort of north south route through the town. And they would like to do some improvements to for pedestrians on there. Right now there's nothing out there in particular. There's no sidewalks, there's no crosswalks. There's really not much of anything there with respect to pedestrians. Now up on Allen Street, their senior center is up around this vicinity. And then down you see a little bit below here on this Spring Meadow Lane. This is a senior housing complex and directly across the street from that is this village food mart. So there's actually quite a lot of pedestrian traffic walking over to the food mart and so on. And then of course there's a church across the street and a few other takeout places and restaurants and things of that nature. So over the years there has been more foot traffic in this area. And in fact, the town got a grant as part of their community compact to actually design some sidewalks and crosswalks and pedestrian improvements. So what their proposal is initially with us, the 100,000 probably isn't enough to fund the whole thing, but is to get a crosswalk across Summer's Road and build some sidewalk. And this crosswalk would be one of those protected ones that has just the flashing lights that you push the button and the lights flash so that the traffic will stop. And then to get folks over to the grocery store and then to start the construction of sidewalk up along Summer's Road heading towards the senior center. The thought is really that right now, the 100,000 probably won't get them the whole project but it'll certainly get them started and get them a good way on that. So given the fact that some traffic from the casino was using this, any increase in traffic, particularly in a rural community can be, you had 50 cars to the streets of Boston, there's nothing if you had 50 cars to hand and that might be a bigger impact. So the thought here is that this is a good start. Any pedestrian safety improvements that could be made would certainly be well-served in this area. So we are recommending the funding of this. So with that, I'll open it up to any questions. Questions, anyone? I can't see Commissioner O'Brien right the second. Commissioner O'Brien, do you have any questions? Let's see if I can find you. There you are. Excuse me, no. I'll stop the chair for a second. I actually think this is a, thank you. I actually think this is a good way to use mitigation funds. I like the request and public safety is really important and there is somewhat of an impact based with some additional vehicle traffic there. So I think this is a reasonable request. Great. Commissioner Hill, questions or are you all set? So do we have a motion? Okay, I'll set. Thank you. You do need a vote. Commissioner Cameron, do you want to move on this? I'm happy to move. I move that the commission approve the town of Hamden's request to use a hundred thousand of its reserve funds to implement the pedestrian safety improvements to the area of Summers Road, Allen Street, as described in the submitted application and materials included in the commissioners packet and as discussed here today. And further, the commission staff shall be authorized to execute a grant instrument, commemorating this award in accordance with 205-CMR 153.04. Thank you. Second. Thank you. Any further questions? Okay, commissioner Cameron. Aye. Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. I vote yes, four, zero, Vivian. Thank you. Next, Joe. Okay, so the next one is North Attleboro. And again, I'll just share this so we can see what the location is. Again, the red line is the corporate limits of North Attleboro. You can see the Plain Ridge Park Casino is here. And the community is asking for a hundred thousand dollars in reserve funds to do a study on Kelly Boulevard, which is also 152. So again, as you can see traffic from the casino, again, most of the traffic does go North towards 495 and Route 1 and other spots, but think about a third of the traffic goes to the South. And, you know, some goes down Route 1 and some does go down Route 152. So they are looking to study this Route 152 corridor through town to see, you know, they have a lot of congestion problems on that road and they're trying to find some solutions for that. The traffic study that studies that PPC has done, which they were required to do, the look-back traffic studies have shown an increase of traffic on Route 152. So, you know, and actually in some cases that the increase appeared to be fairly significant but probably not entirely due to the casino due to other ancillary development in the area and so on, but certainly PPC is a contributing factor to that increase in traffic on Route 152. So, you know, this obviously we've done, excuse me, numerous traffic studies in numerous locations over the years with this program. And this is, you know, really right up that alley. This study would allow them to at least identify some potential solutions to problems and, you know, look, if they were to do a major reconstruction of Route 152, it would be a project in the many millions of dollars. So we look at this really as kind of seed money to get that process started, to help the community do some planning and help address some of that impact that's associated with the casino. So we are recommending the $100,000 grant for this project. Questions? Jim? Thanks, Jim. Brad and I had the benefit of a two by two with Joe. Thank you. Eileen or Gail, do you have any questions on this one? Again. I was just going to point out that it is very consistent with grants that we've authorized in the past and again, you know, any way to improve safety and I think it's a good idea. And I agree with the team's recommendation. Commissioner Hill, do you have any questions that you may not have asked yesterday? No, everything was answered. Great. Commissioner O'Brien, Elsa. I'm all set. Nope. Seems appropriate to me. Commissioner Hill, would you like to make your first motion? I can make a first motion. Sure. I move that the commission approved the town of North Attleboro request to use $100,000 of its reserve funds to hire a traffic consultant to study the Kelly Boulevard corridor as described in the submitted application and materials included in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today and further that the commission staff be authorized to execute a grant instrument commemorating this award in accordance with the commission's recommendation. Second. Thank you. Any further edits? All set. Commissioner Cameron. Aye. Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. I vote yes. Commissioner Hill, you'll notice I don't do an alphabetical order. I do it in the seating order when we're physically together. Doesn't always work virtually and with respect to the boxes. Occasionally it does. So there we are. It's completely my visual. All right. So the third one, third request that we have today is actually an amendment to an existing. Reserve grant that we gave to the town of Mansfield. So just a little history on this. We have a little history on this. We have a little history on this. We gave the town of Mansfield a grant of $100,000. And they wanted to use that. At the time. To hire an analyst. To review. Their police data from their. Their records management system. To help identify the direct and indirect. Impacts of playing with Park casino on the community. Now, in the first year, they spent a fair amount of money out of that grant. I think it was 12 or 15,000. But in the years since, you know, they've brought, they have a person who comes in and goes through their, their records and codes things appropriately. It's really ends up being a very small amount of money. A thousand or $1,500 a year. So we had actually called Mansfield ourselves to say, Hey, is there anything else you could use this for? You know, this, this grant would last about, you know, 50 years at the rate we were spending the money. And thought maybe it could be something with a little bit more impact. And they came back to us with this proposal, which is to use $45,000 of that reserve. For training. And they want to train every officer. In the concepts of, you know, diversity and sensitivity as well as the fundamental concepts that were embodied in the Massachusetts police reform law. So, you know, again, we always have to make sure that there's a, there's a connection to the casino here. And the thought here was that, you know, Mansfield directly a butts. A plane bill. And that I'm sure that the police department has interactions with folks, you know, in their routine, if they're doing routine traffic stops or anything of that nature, they may come into contact with patrons or employees of Plain Ridge Park. So it seems that, you know, given their proximity and, you know, I think the other piece of this is while training has always been an eligible cost in our program. Last year was really the first year that we, that we really pulled that out and tried to make it that a bit of a focus, given the police reform law that was passed and so on. So, you know, I think the other piece of this is while training has always been an eligible cost in our program. So, you know, we think that that would be a great benefit. So we are recommending this one as well. Comments, questions. Commissioner Cameron. Commissioner Cameron, I know that you, you and I, we're in agreement that. Training. Could be, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, allowing them to utilize their funds in this manner. Hi, Madam Chair. I concur with my fellow commission on training it's going to be something I think we're gonna see again. I think this won't be the first time that we see applications like this. We were just talking yesterday, Joe and Madam Chair about the police reform bill and how the monies did not follow the training. And a lot of the communities, especially one surrounding the three casinos they're gonna have to be looking into finding ways to better train their police officers when they're pulling people over and things of that sort. So I think this won't be the first time we see an application like this on amendment. And I'm glad to see that we're able to help out communities with this type of funding through this program. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Commissioner O'Brien, are you comfortable? Any questions? No, I am. This is consistent with some of the applications we got last year as well, anticipating what was coming in terms of training in the statute, et cetera. So this is consistent, I think, with other requests that we've already done. Do you wanna make a motion? Certainly. Madam Chair, I move that the commission approve the town of Mansfield's request to use $45,000 of its reserve fund to train every officer of the police department in the concepts of inclusion, diversity and sensitivity, as well as the fundamental concepts contained in the Massachusetts reform law as described in the submitted letter and the materials included in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today. I further move that the commission staff be authorized to execute a grant agreement commemorating the award in accordance with 205-CMR-153.04. Second. Excellent. No further discussion? I think we're just all pleased to see this. Thank you. Commissioner Cameron. Aye. Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. Michael Yes. Four-zero. Thank you. Okay, so next we will move on to the policy questions for the 2022 guidelines and I will share the memo in a moment to walk through it. But first I'd just like to take a couple of minutes and just walk through our process a little bit. So the development of our community mitigation fund guidelines is really a three-step process. The first step is what we're doing today, reviewing the policy questions. And these are questions that have come up over the course of the year or years in some cases just where we're trying to figure out where we want the community mitigation fund to go, what kinds of things we want it to fund, do we have certain things that we wanna focus on more than other things in any given year. So we raise these policy questions and look for your input into those. Now we have already gone through this process, the same memo with our local community mitigation advisory committees and our subcommittee on community mitigation and have gotten a lot of really good input from those groups. So we will take all of that input and the input that we get today and what we will do then is craft our draft guidelines and we'll be coming back to you in about a month with those draft guidelines for review. And similarly, we will review those with you as well as all of our committees to get input on the final guidelines. And then once those draft guidelines are approved, we will put those out for public comment for a couple of weeks and then do our final guidelines which we hope to have voted at the second meeting in November so we can get right out with our solicitation for projects shortly thereafter. So any questions all on process before we jump right into the questions? Okay. Let me share the memo. So again, just that reminder that we put in here that the Community Mitigation Fund is to assist the host community and surrounding communities in offsetting costs related to the construction and operation of a gaming establishment. And it goes into the various eligibility's there. But that's sort of the key point is to offset costs related to the construction and operation of a gaming establishment. So the questions that we're considering here, what I'm going to do is I'm not going to read every word of every question here. But what I will do is I'll give you what some of our thoughts are and what some of the input that we receive from the other committees were and then asked for your suggestions or ideas or whatever with respect to each of these categories. So just to be clear, people should jump in, right? You'd like that. Yeah, I'll go through each question and then ask for comments on that particular question. Great, thank you. Okay. So the first one is, should the limitation on grant amounts be increased? So we have current limits on all of our grant amounts. For the most part, we think they're okay, but there's probably a couple of areas that could be tweaked. One of the areas is in workforce development. Very surprisingly, that has just continues to be demand on that. We funded this for a number of years and sometimes you think maybe after a little while, you've trained everybody that you could train, but there still is a great demand for workers at the casinos and to backfill other people, jobs that go to the casino. And this has been very successful. So our thought is that we probably want to, might want to raise that to about $500,000 per region. What we're hearing is that the casinos are still having difficulty finding people to come work there. They're holding job fairs and other things, but just getting those qualified people is very difficult. So that's our thought there. And then under transportation construction, transportation construction costs, just have gone through the roof a lot due to the pandemic and due to supply chain issues and other things. So we're thinking that it might make sense to go up to about maybe a million and a half on transportation construction. The other categories we think are still about right, transportation's planning, a couple of $100,000 buys you a pretty robust transportation planning, plan for roadway improvements, $100,000 community planning for those tourism plans and things of that economic development plans, that seems about right. So really it's just those two. So with that, is there any thoughts that the commissioners have on that, whether they like those ideas or if there's any other ideas that you have? Commissioners, come to Karen. I can chime in. I think both recommendations are solid. I think we see with what Sullivan Square is an example of how expensive that work is. And yeah, we know in the hospitality area in particular, there's an ongoing need. We heard about that this morning, right? Having trouble staffing foodies. So I agree with both of these recommendations and in reading the background, I know that the money's there. We have the money available. So upping these limits, I think makes sense. I have a quick question, Madam Chair. Yes. So I agree with my colleague on increasing, but I would just ask that by doing that, are we now putting possibly some communities that would not, who would normally apply for grants, like giving out more to communities instead of maybe now lessening that amount of communities getting grants per year? Would this hurt that process? No, I don't think so. Okay. So maybe just to follow up, let's talk about like workforce development grants if they are increased, which I fully support and I'll mention why, to Commissioner Hill's question if I'm understanding correctly, do we have a cap on the number of awards we'll make? In other words, if we're giving more, does it mean less recipients? Or do we have a cap on the number of anyway? Well, in the particular case of workforce, we only have one per region. So having 500,000 essentially puts a cap on that category if we do two grants. But they could pair up, right? You could partner if you wanted to, right? Yes. And that's, we require a regional approach for these things. We require a consortium to come in. Well, I guess if someone came in, that was just a single entity and they were the only applicant would probably consider it. But I guess we strongly encourage group applications and that's what we have received traditionally on those. So the other thing out of the order is- So in terms of transportation construction, you could have as many awards as possible as long as the funding's available? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and given what we've done the last couple of years, there seems to be plenty of capacity in there to have these increases without having sort of a reduced number of grants. I mean, if I had my crystal ball and could see how many, we could get buried with applications. I don't know that. And if that happened, we may have to reconsider exactly what we're doing and we can always refine things as we go. But given our last couple of years, it seems like this is proven. And also if I understand correctly the process, right? If we lift it and it turns out we have such demand, we may not be able to give as much even if there was requested for the full amount. We just might have to reduce a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Okay. On the workforce development, I just wanted to note that I'm hoping to, that we, Commissioner Cameron has pointed out the food and beverage need and the culinary arts programs. But also these dollars can support programs for ESL, English is the second language as GED development to bring the workforce into a position to be a competitive entry level applicant. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. And they do. I mean, they have historically and it's expected that all of that will certainly go on into the future. And there's other things that they do, teaching people job hiring skills, how to write a resume, how to dress for an interview. All of these things is a lot of these little programs that they have that are really great. And to Commissioner Hill's question, I think this is a good example with workforce development. We see it in region B with the community college as well as the technical college in Springfield. They team up. And what is attractive has been to me anyway is that they don't compete with one another. They offer different programs. So if you're interested in one program, you may go to the technical college in Springfield. And if you're interested in a different program, the workforce development will take you in another for that program. So I think that's really makes the point about, it's not about having less for someone else if we increase this, but encouraging that work together so that it's effective and efficient for the region. Okay, any other comments on number one? Commissioner Browning, are you all set? Yeah, no, I'm all set. It's consistent with what we talked about in terms of what we thought the changes might be. So I think it makes the perfect sense. Great. Okay, so moving on to number two. So one and two are similar, but somewhat different. So in historically, and we were only giving out a relatively small amount of money we were in this sort of three to $4 million range, we put caps on the categories in total. So we have this cap of a million dollars on transportation planning grants, 800,000 a workforce. We put 4 million on transportation construction. Some of these others, we didn't ever put a limit on them. And the idea behind that was at the time was we wanted to make sure that some money got to each category when we only had a limited amount of funds. Now, this year we're looking at potentially a spending number of maybe over $20 million. So these caps seem to be a little bit archaic given the current status of the program. And I'm thinking these could either be raised or eliminated. I don't think there's really any need for those caps anymore. Again, I suppose you could envision a scenario where one category we get buried with applications, but I don't really see that happening. I mean, given what we've got in the last couple of years. So my recommendation on this is really, let's just eliminate the caps for this year and see how they go. And if we ever did run into that scenario where we got a ton of applications in one category, we could always revisit that and say, hey, we gotta make sure money gets to the other category so we could reinstate a cap if we needed to. Any questions or comments on respect to that? All good. Can I just ask one question? Joe, refresh my memory. I think in the past, if we had no caps, right? In the past, when we've seen an application that may ask for a great deal of money and we don't see the justification for that much spending given less, right? So we always have the ability if something comes in for say, a really large amount of money and we see the need, but we don't see the need for X amount. Haven't we done that in the past? We've done, yeah, we have. We reserve the right to award the full amount of the grant or a partial amount of the grant. In fact, we've done that in numerous cases. Some of the public safety ones on various equipment and things, we've said some of this stuff really doesn't relate to the casino. So if someone asked for 200,000, we maybe gave them 100,000. So we always have that ability. And conversely, on all of these limitations above, we have the ability to waive any of those. If something that's really worthy comes in that's above one of these category limits, we can waive that if it makes sense to do so. So there's really not a lot of risk to removing the caps. No, I really don't think so. Thank you. Okay, any other comments on that one? No. Okay, so on number three, should the number of grants per community be limited? I'm gonna start with the second part first on the workforce development where we have one per region. We'll recommend you that we just, let's just keep that at one per region that's been working really well. And we're gonna, we're talking about increasing the amount on that category. So I think we should just kind of leave the status quo there. On the specific impact grants, we always said one per community with that cap of $500,000. What we've been finding over the last couple of years is that, again, let's say we get a public safety grant for $200,000 and then the planning department wants another grant for $300,000. Those would be administered by two completely different groups in the town or the community. So actually it's easier to administer the two separately than it is to just administer one in some of these cases. So we're suggesting that they can certainly have more than one per community, but I think we still wanna maintain this, $500,000 overall cap. So if they wanna have $500,000 grants, one $500,000 grant, a $200,000 to $300,000, we're fine with that. So our recommendation is that we probably eliminate this particular provision out of the specific impact. Any thoughts on that at all? Commissioners? Okay, so this- Another one accepted, yep. Sorry. So these next two items are really the big ones that I would like to get a lot of input on these on how we wanna move ahead with this. So item number four here says, should the commission pursue an expansion of CMF eligibility by either a statute change or within the current framework of 23K? So, and I'm gonna kind of put aside the statute change for the moment because they're really, if we were to try to do anything for the 2022 guidelines, it really wouldn't be time to get a statute change between now and November to make this happen. So I think that's something that we may wanna think about down the road a little bit, but I think for the 2022 guidelines, we probably don't have the time to do that. So what that leaves us is within the current framework, what can we do? And in the background here, we talked about how really for the last couple of years we've been under-expending the allotment of community mitigation funds and the biggest hurdle for our, grantees or for our communities is making the connection between the casino and the impact that they've identified. Now, look, in some cases, it's simple. You know, if you're doing it, if the traffic study shows that traffic is increased by a large amount after the opening of the casino, it's something that you can point directly to. Some of the other areas, and the area that I've been focusing on is on the community planning grants, where these are grants that typically we've done things like economic developments, tourism, marketing, training of local businesses to try to take advantage of the presence of the casino to become suppliers to that, things of that nature. And trying to quantify what the impact is is very difficult. Now, what our thought is, and again, this is something we have to vet through our legal department. And I wanna talk with Mark VanderLinden about our research agenda to see if there's any things that we can hang our hat on. But what could happen in this circumstance is that the commission could affirmatively state that there is an impact. And I think the example that I'm gonna use is restaurants. Now, if someone goes to Encore or to MGM and goes or to Plainville and goes to Rare or goes to the Chandler Steakhouse or goes to Fluities when that reopens, they're not going somewhere else that they might have gone in their local community. So I think that the commission can say that there is an impact to certain industries. For the hospitality industry, the entertainment industries and others, there is an impact. And in doing so, that would relieve the burden of the community from having to dig through every tax receipt to figure out if their meal taxes have gone down or something else to try to make that connection to a cost associated with the casino. Now, that wouldn't relieve them of the burden of addressing a casino-related impact. So if a community, again, using the restaurant analogy said, we believe that the food and beverage offerings at a facility are negatively affecting our local restaurants. And the commission agrees that that's states that that's an impact of the casino. They would still have to identify how they are going to mitigate that impact. And it could be say, well, we're gonna come up with a program that tries to target patrons or even employees of the casino to come to our community and try our restaurants and through some kind of a marketing effort or something of that nature. So it still has to address a casino impact, but it just doesn't take so much work to make that nexus. So that's what our thought is on that. And for this year, we're thinking just for the community planning, because it's a fairly discrete category that I think we can wrap our arms around. And then if that's successful, maybe doing that in some of the other categories where it makes sense. So with that, I'll open it up to comments and thoughts that you folks have regarding that. You know, I think that sounds reasonable, Joe. I really do, because there are some, we've seen this where some impacts just are very difficult to kind of quantify. And we've really wanted that nexus. So I think this is reasonable. And if it really isn't there, we probably wouldn't approve it if we can't see any way that there's an impact. But if there is and it's reasonable, I do think it makes sense to consider this option. Commissioner Bryan, I'm kind of liking it to sort of judicial notice or something like that, that we basically come up with some assumptions that the commission agrees with and gives Joe and his team a go ahead. What are you thinking? Yeah, I'm thinking back on some of the things that were, like, you know, when you see it sometimes. That's exactly the point. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not the litigator that Commissioner Bryan is, but I think that's exactly what the term is judicial notice where you just don't have to prove it. And it will give, I think, an opportunity for more candidates, more applicants. Commissioner Hill, what are you thinking? You've got a good briefing yesterday. No, I was gonna actually almost say word for word what Gail said. It seems very reasonable. And Eileen put it right out there. We're gonna know when we read the application if it fits or if it doesn't fit. So Joe, in process, do you think that we do it upon review of the application or do you think we have to, like, kind of give some assumptions or is it a combo? Well, what I think we need to do is in the guidelines we will have to, affirmative, we will have to make the statement in there of what we determine the impact to be. So if, and I'm hearing that you want me to proceed with this. So I'm gonna have to, between now and the draft guidelines really work up some very careful language, I think, along with our legal department to make sure that we're, you know, stating exactly what it is that we think is eligible under this, I'm not gonna call it an exemption, but this, you know, the other categories are still gonna need to do the same thing that they've always done. This is, this requires a little different justifications. So I think that's what we wanted to do is have that in the guidelines so that when we go out in December with our outreach to our communities, we can say, hey, we've made a change in this category. And what we're saying is that we know that there are certain impacts to the communities and we will enumerate what categories we think those are and that if you come in with an application under those categories, you don't have to do all the hard work to make that connection to the casino. Now, that would still mean it would be open for other categories within there. It's just that those would still need to make that connection to the casino if it isn't in that list that we give them. I think we need to be pretty prescriptive in this. That makes sense. Commissioner Cameron and Commissioner O'Brien, I've asked, I think I noted this earlier that with a new commissioner, we want to have them working with Joe's team. And so Commissioner Hill will become involved more on the process. I think it would be a great opportunity for him to learn not only about community mitigation, but meet everyone that's such a cross-departmental process. Gail, I see you shaking your hand, you agree? Yeah. You're a great idea. Thank you to Commissioner Hill for being willing to put the time in. There'll be some meetings, but good meetings. So Commissioner O'Brien, I imagine you would agree too with that, yeah. So that makes sense. I understand why you need to put it into the guidelines. And just our local community mitigation advisory committees particularly, because those are made up of our communities, they really liked this idea that it, you know, that to make it a little bit easier for the communities to apply. So that it was very well received. Okay, so I'll definitely have my work cut out for me in the next month, putting together these draft guidelines on getting some good language in there, but we will move ahead with that certainly. So item number five, we've actually brought this up in this forum before, and we had always really tabled the issue. And the question is, should we authorize the use of funds for large transportation or economic development projects? So we know that there's some big projects coming down the pike, you know, we know that Sullivan Square is gonna be reconstructed and that's gonna be mostly federal and state money and actually on course providing some money, but could there be a circumstance where the city of Boston would need to come to us for some money? Certainly I could see some possibility there. You know, we wanted to get the bridge across the, the pedestrian bridge across the Mystic River, and it looks like DCR is actually gonna try to build that, but we also wanna see the connection into the orange line, you know, which requires a bridge over the railroad tracks and escalators and elevators and so on to make that happen. And that's an expensive project. We know that Everett would love to do additional bus lanes on Broadway or bring the silver line down there. You know, I mean, there's a ton of different things. You know, West, you know, we know that MGM, not MGM, excuse me, the city has bought up a few properties directly across the street from MGM. And they're looking to, you know, go to developers to redevelop those, but knowing the history that we've had with 31 Elm Street, we know that these historic structures are exorbitantly expensive to renovate and so on. And could I see a circumstance where the city of Springfield might come to us for some funds to help renovate those buildings, could be, you know, there's other things they'd love to see a bridge from the Mass Mutual Center over to MGM. And, you know, so they've got some things out there. And, but none of these are imminent. These are all still a couple of years down the road. So what our thought was here was that rather than trying to create a new category for these kinds of projects, what we thought we would like to do during this project solicitation round is to ask the communities, all the communities, but more of the host communities and maybe some of the surrounding communities to submit to us a statement of interest in this category. And in doing that, they would tell us just what the project is, what the rough magnitude of the dollar value is, and how they see it having a connection to the casino. So what we can then do is see what that universe of projects is out there, how much they might cost. And that would give us the ability to say, hey, how much money do we have available? How much could we potentially put towards these things? You know, would we just provide some kind of matching funds or, you know, how much capacity do we have? So it would give us a lot more information to go on to create a category of this kind, if it made sense to do that. So that's what our thought is, let's go out with this solicitation and just get some information from the communities that will help guide us in deciding whether or not we want to develop this kind of category. So with that, I'll open that up. Any comments, questions? Fishers, Patricia Cameron. I have a quick question. Joe, are you suggesting that you solicit information before we make a decision whether or not to authorize the use of funds for these larger transportation projects? Yeah, I think what we just want to understand is what's the universe of projects that are out there and what are the ideas that the communities have? And we wouldn't propose to fund anything this year. We would just take that list and then next year, saying if it makes sense to do so, create this new category that we would open up and then we could say, hey, well, maybe we just do one per region and maybe it can be up to $4 million or $5 million or whatever the number is that seems to make sense based on what people have told us what they think they're going to be doing in the next few years. I think in the past, the reason this issue got tabled was we were always concerned that we had enough money for the projects that we had on hand, right? That money was a real issue, but now that we have a better idea, more money into the fund, that may be a reason to consider this, correct? Right, and we may have, in doing so, when we see what these projects are, we may have the capacity to fund some of them. Okay. And if there is a reasonable connection to the casino and we have the money available, why wouldn't we? Okay, thanks. Mr. Billion. Can I ask you also, is this in effort to deal with some of these projects where we historically give you money for a certain period of time and some of these bigger projects are going to require other federal or state agencies to sign off or give monies over a course of years? Is this also trying to address that part of it in terms of us knowing when we can contribute to a bigger project? Yeah, and we know that some of these might be multi-year projects and other things and that was another question that we've had in the past year, we fund multi-year projects and our difficulty there is that we don't have any guarantee from year to year as we found out previously when casinos suddenly had to close and there was no money being generated that we can't guarantee that there will be money available for a project over three or five or 10 years. Right. Okay, thank you. Mr. Hew? I just would like to know what the thought of the commission is in regards to fully funding these type of projects or would we be partners in funding these projects? Looking at public-private partnerships, I've always been a big believer that we shouldn't always fund 100% projects moving forward but we would partner with people. That'd be the intent to go or we'd be looking to fully fund some of the possible construction projects. Well, I think in some respects, you have to look at them on a case-by-case basis but I think that the notion on this is that we would provide some funding for a project and they would probably be cobbling together several sources of funding and that we would be the one that might be the one that makes it whole. If there's a funding gap, we provide that or if let's say a community gets a certain type of grant and it needs to be a local match, they get a $10 million grant but there has to be a 20% local match and they're like, where are we gonna come up with $2 million? And maybe that can come from the commission. Because again, a lot of these things are, while they may be projects that will address a casino impact, there's probably a much larger benefit to the community as a whole than just mitigating the impact. So the thought is we don't wanna really be the tail wagging the dog. But like I said, that connection to the orange line, if anyone were to make an argument that we should fund the whole thing, that might be the one. Because it's so close that it would make a direct connection for casino patrons right into the orange line and employees and other things. Or that, again, that still might be in partnership with the city of Somerville or the city of Everett or any number of agencies, mascot, whatever. I love the idea of learning the landscape. I think that's an excellent approach. Like you said, we couldn't really get it, it's not gonna be in place this year. And it's kind of like an RFI, right? Joe, you wanna find out really even how you would write guidelines or inform us as to the parameters. So I love the idea. And I'm completely, I think Commissioner Hill, I was gonna use the word partner too. And historically, at least with some of the, not necessarily, oh, I think I haven't had the experience that commissioners Cameron and O'Brien have had. But our guidelines have, I don't know if they've mandated or just encouraged that other pots be demonstrated that they're either federal or other grants, whether they're coming from a private institution or a public institution. We've got guidelines on that, haven't we? In terms of- I can't remember if it's a mandate or if it's a- Well, we had to do that interpretation one of the last times when we were looking at the crosswalks and the work that was going on in the neighborhoods next to Sullivan Square, right, Joe? Yeah, yeah, we ended up issuing a waiver. So on our transportation construction grants, we only will fund up to a third of the project cost. You know, and so the rest of it has to come from federal, state, local, private, whatever sources of funds, but again, always waivable. But in the other categories, we don't, in fact, we talk about that a little bit in one of the subsequent questions about whether we should require a match or if we just should continue with in-kind services as the match or we'll get to that in a couple of minutes. So in other words, with respect to the, thank you for reminding me. I thought that was a really interesting project. Commissioner O'Brien for reminding me which one I was trying to think about. You know, that's again, something we could decide as part of the guidelines for these really large projects. But I think the first step of finding out the lay of the land and the interest in our capacity is key. Okay, so these next several are just things that came up during the course of the year. None of them are particularly important whether we do them or not. But I'm just gonna bring them up just to get your thoughts on them. One question came up was, should a separate category be added for public safety grants? You know, as of right now, the public safety grants are a subset of the specific impact grant. I'm not exactly sure why we set them up that way initially. But what we found last year is, I think we got 11 specific impact grants and nine of them were for public safety and two of them were for other type items. So the thought was maybe we should just pull that out as a separate category. We don't need to. I didn't know if it just might be a little neater and cleaner if that were its own category. Do you wanna give your thoughts because this is our opportunity? Commissioner O'Brien. I would think so because there's usually a little bit of inside baseball that has to go on in terms of what you guys know and learn about the requests. So I know Kate has helped you guys in the past too. And obviously, Commissioner Cameron is far knowledgeable about what they asked for. But it does seem to me like it should be its own category. Okay. Commissioner Cameron. I see no need. I mean, especially when you give me those numbers, nine out of 11. And I think it is important that every community understand exactly what the specific impact someone may not realize that could be used for public safety. So if we can clean that up everyone's very clear about the different. I know how well you train these communities and work with them. But if that seems to be the direction the specific impact grants are going in, we could without any problem, right? Just make it a separate grant category. We would still keep the, if we do that, we will still keep the specific impact category. Because if you remember up at the top of this memo, there's all of those different things that people can apply for money for. They talk about housing, environmental stuff, things that we've never seen an application for. And somebody could out of the blue come in with an application on something for housing. Why would we have to deal with it on a case-by-case basis? Because we don't really have particular guidelines around that other than it has to be the nexus to the casino and so on. Joe, I think it's a good idea to separate out just for pure transparency purposes. Would it be helpful? I know you have it at the top of the memo. When you put it out and you could, could you do like a parenthetical after the specific impact and give some examples as a, I know that you also do it in your trainings, which I assume you're gonna continue some outreach around this process that for applicants to learn both from us and from each other. And I just wonder if specific impact is cut. It's the only one that is not necessarily intuitive. Yeah, and somewhat by design, if you find an impact that doesn't fall within one of our categories, that's, well, actually, when we started out, it was all specific impact. Oh, okay. You identify an impact and then we'll take your application and review it and tell you whether you get the money. Then we realized we were getting a lot of stuff in for transportation planning. So we added that category. So it's been just kind of, and then we said, well, maybe we should start doing workforce. So we created that category. So these things, it's just kind of an iterative approach, but we've always had that specific impact as the catch-all for kind of everything else, if you will. Yeah, yeah, I agree with everyone. And Commissioner Hill, are you in agreement to separate out the public safety? Yeah. Okay. We will do that. Number seven, this is, we always have this question of this, should the local match provisions be reconsidered? So as I said, we don't really require a local match other than in-kind services. We always tell them, you need to tell us what you're doing for a local match and on most of the applications that comes back saying we'll do in-kind services. Except for transportation construction, where we will only pay for a third of the costs and the other two thirds has to come from the community or other federal, state, private sources of funding. And that seems to be about right. We did grant one waiver last year for that area right near Sullivan Square. The reality is most of these construction projects have a benefit to the community is significantly greater than the impact that it's mitigating. It isn't mitigating an impact. So we thought that one third, two third was good and I wouldn't recommend changing that. And again, given the environment that we've been working in to add in hard local match provisions by saying, you have to provide 20% of the funding and we provide 80 or 40 and 60 or whatever the number would be, that would in effect dampen our participation, I would think. Communities are hard pressed to come up with money and if they had to come up with 50 cents on the dollar, they're like, well, we're not gonna go for that grant. So my recommendation is that we don't really change anything here. But to my earlier point, it's waivable. It's a requirement, but it's waivable if it's tight, but we wanna encourage that partnership as Brad suggested, at least with those and maybe we could do it with a larger project. Yeah, yep. Any questions for Joe on that one? Okay, then another question came up. Should our program, we're a calendar year program. Should we use a fiscal year rather than a calendar year? I think all of our communities work on the same fiscal year that we do and it might be convenient to do that. Again, this is one of those things that doesn't really matter and right now we're developing a database for our entire community to manage the entire community mitigation fund program. And of course, we've been working on a calendar year system since the beginning of time. So I would suggest that we maybe not do anything on this year, let's get the database up and running and see if shifting over to a fiscal year has any impact on how we manage things. I'd rather get up to speed on this new program and not sort of throw a monkey wrench into the works right away. So I'd recommend just keeping it as a calendar year program. And again, this is one of those things that it doesn't really matter that much just to somebody raise the issue and we don't wanna bring it up. Can I ask a clarifier? So your first sentence is seeing that essentially works on the state fiscal year? Yeah, well, we always try to get all of our grants awarded by June 30th so that they all go out at the beginning of everyone's, all the community's fiscal years. So in essence, we're kind of working that way already. Okay, that's what I thought. But by statute, the February one is a... Yeah, applications have to be in before February 1st each year. Okay, and then the last of the main items on the reserves, if you recall, last year, we said this year is the last year of the reserves. And we've reached out to all of the communities that have reserves left and a few of them come in, the ones you've dealt with today have come in. But we do still have some communities that have not reused their reserves and we've offered to meet with them and chat with them and try to figure out an approach to spend the money and they have not done that. So I do envision, perhaps in late December, having a couple of communities, say, hey, can we have a couple more months or something to that effect? But we did say in our guidelines that it ends at the end of December 31st, 2021, if you don't have the money committed, we're not saying yes, we spent. And of course, those communities could still apply for CMF funds if they do identify an impact at some later day. They're not precluded from applying from funds, it's just now those funds are no longer earmarked to that community, if we roll them back. So I guess the question is, should we give a little leeway to folks if they do come in at the end of the year or should we just stick to our gums that we put in the guidelines last year and just roll the money back and pull off the Band-Aid, I guess. Commissioners, pull off the Band-Aid. Well, I think you made it clear what the deadline was and I do think it's important to meet deadlines. Having said that, if somebody really does come to you next month and said, look, we have the plan but it'll take us an extra month to put it together, can you work with us? I think we've always done that as well. So I think it's really a case by case basis. Mostly if there's no plan, we let you know that the funds will revert but knowing that they can reapply when they have a project that works. But you just pointed out, maybe you'll get something next month. I don't see any reason to say no, even though you have a plan, it'll take you an extra month. I think we could authorize you to, I want a case by case basis if you get one or two that happened to come up with the plan just a little later than we would have liked. Yeah, it's always something we could come to the commission with and say, hey, we've got these couple of communities who came in and it looks like they're gonna go ahead and grant them an extension, I guess. I'm wondering if the request for the extension should come in before the February date? Just, it's one thing to say. This would be before the end of December. Right. Right. Just, you know, because otherwise just, I don't know. It seems like, they're almost there but you need some more time. That's one scenario versus, you know, you thought of it way after the fact to me. I'm not, I don't really like that idea. Yeah, you know, I'm just trying to be a nice guy. I know you're a nice guy. Because I also want you guys inundated with, you know, little things popping up here. You know, like there's also, I think, a reason and a cadence that helps you guys in terms of making sure you stick to a rhythm for the year, you know? Yep, yep. I think that's right. Commissioner Hill. Yeah, my feeling is, Joe, your organization has reached out to these communities, not once, not twice, but numerous times to let them know that they need to spend the money and that they've chosen not to do that up to this point. I'm a rip the band-aid off type of person. There it off. Yeah, with fair warning and we're giving it to right now, right? And so there's a, you know- We're all saying the same thing. I wouldn't even entertain a request that came in after the deadline. It's just, they have a plan, it's just about there. You know, that's one thing, right? But not something that comes in well after the deadline. Right, right. Okay, great. So these other items, I'm gonna read through these really quickly. I'm not gonna stop for each one. These are mostly questions that come up every year. Back next year, I'm thinking I'm gonna just eliminate some of these questions because it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to go over them every single year necessarily. But if anybody does have any particular thing on any one of them, feel free to jump in. So on the first one, overall limit on the grants, you know, of course we need to have an overall limit on the grants because we only have a certain amount of money to give out. So, you know, what we do every year is we take what we get from taxes through the end of 2021, in this case this year, plus any money rolled over from previous years and that's what we put out on the street. We usually keep maybe a million dollars back just in case. But, you know, we try to put out essentially all the money that we have in the fund each year. Allocation of funds by region. So we came up with a formula that a couple of years ago now we're actually going into the third year of it where the money generated in region A stays in region A and the money generated in region B stays in region B. Both of our groups of advisory committees wanted the monies to stay in their respective regions. Now we did come up with a formula that, you know, if money is really building up in one region and not the other. And at some point, some of that money needs to roll back to be able to be used by any other region. And we've not had to do that yet. So we don't think there should be any changes to that. And these next several are all of these, you know, should we continue to do these things? So the workforce development grants, you know, there still seems to be a major need for that. Transportation construction grants that so far has been quite successful. And I think we'll still see more transportation construction projects come in. The community planning grants have also been very successful and in fact seems to be one of our larger groups of grants. The emergency mitigation grants, that was, we enacted that last year, if you recall, where we just set aside a little bit of money in case something came up during, out of the sequence that we normally do, something that was really an emergency that would have a major impact on the community. Again, it was one of those things that we can't really even envision what that might be. But this was a little bit in response to COVID and giving us a little more flexibility should some kind of an emergency come up. Joint application, should we continue to authorize them, we do and we've always encouraged them. I think we'd love to see on some of these community planning grants to have two or three communities work together and you could get a far more robust plan that's a little bit more regional basis. We'd love to see that and we encourage it. The region C status, we put aside $200,000 each year for technical assistance to the Taunton and the surrounding communities should the tribal casino move ahead. And we've done this every year now for a number of years, because the litigation and so on has not all been settled out there and but we're recommending to continue to put aside that amount of money should things cut loose down there. And that would go to SERPED, which is the regional planning agency down there to help those communities with traffic related items and things of that nature. Private parties, we do not allow grants directly to private parties. We do allow grants to communities that some of those funds may be funneled to a private entity should there be a public purpose of that private entity. And we always have to make sure we've done that a couple of times what we need to ensure that that meets with the anti aid amendment of the Massachusetts Constitution and so on. Again, not proposing any changes to that. And then the last one is the Hampton County Sheriff's lease assistance. This is for the Western Mass Alcohol Correction Center that was in the footprint of MGM and they had to move into a new building that had significantly increased lease costs. And we gave them money for a five year period initially. And then last year, if you recall when we did the guidelines, they had asked for us to fund them for another five years. And we said, no, you're an eligible entity so you can come in and apply for funding just like any other entity. And they did last year and we did give them a grant as well. So no proposed change there. In fact, our guidelines last year we eliminated the reference to Hampton County Sheriff because there was no specific, the money that we had earmarked for them had run out and they were just a grantee like an entity like any other that was eligible for mitigation funds. So that is what I have for you today. If there's any other questions on any of those other categories, please feel free to opine at this point or if you wanna shoot me a message or anything, you can certainly do that. And Mary has arrived. Mary is back. Here we are. Commissioner Hill meet everything behind the scenes. Mary Thurlow. Hello, Mary. She's the brains behind the entire operation. There we go. Nice to meet you, Mary. Mary, you're on mute. Okay. I'm not sure if you heard Commissioner Hill say he was, it was nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. So any questions before we let Joe and Mary go? Karen and Todd, you've been hearing this. I think it's, you know, this is really what you needed to continue on your next phase of work, right, Joe? On the guidelines. Yeah, we'll definitely need to consult with the legal department on the language that we used to write up this. I had a conversation yesterday with Carrie and told her roughly what we were doing and she, you know, got some level of comfort with that. But definitely we have quite a bit of work to do over the next, you know, three or so weeks that we need to pull together these draft guidelines. Any further questions for Joe? Commissioner Cameron, Commissioner O'Brien, Commissioner Hill knows. Okay, I really appreciate this discussion. I've actually benefited a few times. So it just shows takes, I think many tries. It's very, very, very well done. Thank you. Thank you all for your input. You know, this really is valuable in crafting this and all of the input that we got from our advisory committees and so on. It's really helped us get in the right direction on this. Okay. Then we're all set. Then just moving on to commissioner updates. I know you didn't need to vote, Joe. So that's just good guidance for you. Before I turn it over to my fellow commissioners, I just want to make a note. Today was a very special day to celebrate the, you know, Brad's first full commission meeting and also to welcome him officially, although he's been at work for a good week now. But in turn, we also haven't had a chance to do a proper goodbye to our fellow former commissioner, Enrique Zuniga. No, it's been very exciting, a little bittersweet. Enrique had to go be a public servant for someone else faster than we imagined. And we are really excited that he was named executive director of the new post commission, peace officer safety training commission. He will be doing very critical work and bringing sensibilities that we all saw at work here during his tenure with us. It's just that he kind of left, right? When we were getting, you know, that would have by for at least a day and in fact it all happened where we stayed neutral at four. So with that said, I don't know if Enrique probably isn't listening. He's busy at his new job, but we will be inviting him back to one of our public meetings so that we can acknowledge all that he did on behalf of the commission for really nearly 10 years. So just wanted to note that. But today was commissioner Hills Day and it was a big very, you saw the diversity of the work, right? Brad, who's not in his head? I did, learned a lot as I've been for the past week and contributed a lot too. So thank you. Next, I want to go to other commissioner updates. Commissioner Cameron, I wonder if you want to kind of give an update on the Niagara conference or anything else? I think we talked about that enough, madam chair. I think I just want to thank everyone. A lot of work was done by lots of our folks and a lot of good presentations made. I think we really, people were impressed with the work that we do here and getting to know our team. So just to thank you to everyone who participated, whether it be as a volunteer or a presenter or however else. So just a big thank you. Any other update? Commissioner Bryan. I guess I would just say another big thank you. Thank you to all the members of the team. Many are not on now as they are doing their jobs. But Karen can relay this huge thank you to the folks who have done such a great job on welcoming Commissioner Hill and briefing them. It was very, as he pointed out, very, very meaningful. I want to thank Jamie and us and Crystal Howard for their work supporting Commissioner Hill's first few days. It went pretty smoothly. And then of course, even Karen greeting you with a parking pass, so right at the door. So all of that, I know Commissioner Hill meant a lot to you and I want to thank everyone for those efforts. I think it was also a two and a half, was it four hours? Maybe it was 10 hours with the legal team. I can't get Todd to smile. It was a long time. No, thank you for all the work. So with that said, if there's no other updates, then we'll need a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Second. Any questions? And it's okay. Commissioner Cameron. Aye. Commissioner O'Brien. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. And I vote yes. Four is zero. Thank you everyone. Great meeting.