 And we're good to go. Thanks, Dave. Good morning. This is the convening of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission and we are holding this meeting virtually. So I will do my roll call. Good morning, Commissioner Bryan. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning, Commissioner Hill. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning, Commissioner Skinner. Good morning, Madam Chair. And good morning, Commissioner Mayer. Good morning, Madam Chair. Okay, we'll get started. Today after Valentine's Day, I hope everybody had a nice celebration and a little bit of a pause. We are convening public meeting number 501 and we have some minutes to share. Thanks, Commissioner Mayer. Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that we approve the minutes from the May 8th, 2023, May 10th, 2023 and May 16th, 2023 public meetings that are included in the commissioner's packet subject to any necessary corrections for typographical errors or other non-material matters. Any comments? I do have a request for an edit to one of the sets. May 10th. Just one second, Commissioner Skinner, because I realized it hasn't quite loaded up here. Yeah, and I should probably point it to... And then the page, because we can go to the bookmark. The second set. The second set and it is page four, so that would be page 31. 31 of a packet. Okay. Second paragraph, the very last sentence. There's a comment. Attributed to me that the commission's appointing authority signed off on availability of funds. I did review the video and I think it was like a testament to that. Well, I think it was set a couple of times during that meeting, but it was a particular reference. I want to just make a correction in what I said if I could. And so I would request that that sentence be amended to read. She reiterated that the commission's appointing authorities signed off on travel based on finances representation of availability of funds. And that finance being our internal finance division. I was just taking the note here, Commissioner Skinner. I know that the team will too, but I like to have a copy of this. I accept that amendment. Thank you. And then the other one, just one more. It's a small one. I think it's page eight of the same set of minutes. So that would be page 35. And it is the second full paragraph. Last sentence on this one too. Commissioner Skinner expressed that she respectfully disagreed with the chair's recollection and recalled that at least one former commissioner, I didn't say former. So if we could remove that word. Can you just, I'm just looking again, is it the last paragraph? It's one paragraph after. I think it's the third paragraph. Oh, sorry. I thought you said the last paragraph, second full paragraph. Second full paragraph. Yeah. Last sentence, Madam Chair. Just asking you have the word former. I remember. Yep. I read these a little bit ago. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And that would be it from me. Commissioner Maynard, if you'll accept that amendment as well. Also accept that. Thank you. Commissioner Skinner, I never liked to have disagreements, but they're respectful. I'm good. Thank you so much. Okay. So with those two edits, we have, you've accepted those amendments and then the second was Commissioner Browning. Did we? Yes. I was the second. With a record. I want to make sure it's clear for both of the amendments. With that, any other comments? I would like to just make one comment. We were speaking right before we got on, just recognizing Autumn for Bare-Raleigh. She is the initial transcriber of all of our minutes. And she has, she sits outside our offices and just is so diligent and does really performs this task with a great sense of humor and a great sense of professionalism, a rare combination. So I just want to acknowledge her good work and thank her because it's not an easy task. All right. So with that comment, Commissioner Browning. Hi. Patricia Hill. Hi. Commissioner Skinner. Hi. Commissioner Maynard. Hi. And I vote yes. So five zero with those two amendments. Thank you. And we want the amendments to reflect my comments about Autumn. All right. She can't, she can't get out of that. All right. So now we're now turning to an administrative update. I think Interim Executive Director Grossman-Ural set this, this week. Yes, Madam Chair. We certainly have a robust agenda today. So I'll sort of, I'll cede anytime and we can continue on. Right. I knew you had an item and we decided to roll it over for our next on the non-disclosure agreement discussion. So thank you for that. And turning to item number four, that would be on page 63. We have a draft annual report to review. And I want to thank you, Tom and Dave Sousa. And of course, Grace Robinson, who was a major contributor. And then of course, this is the effort of the entire team. So everybody gets a nod, but to you right now, Tom and Dave, thank you. Thank you, Chair. We appreciate the opportunity to present the commission with this near final draft of the 2023 annual report. As you mentioned, the draft is in the meeting packet today and had been previously distributed to the commissioners for their review. And I'd like to give a nod to Grace and Dave as well. Grace did a bang up job getting this to a really great place before her leave and Dave has been instrumental in working with our vendor to pull the version in front of you today together. The division heads, as you mentioned, their teams and our licensees provided a great deal of information to complete the annual report. So thanks to them. Once this version is approved, David and I will work with our vendor on any final touches, edits. You'll notice that the table of contents isn't final. That's intentional. That'll be finalized once approved and we'll make any final copy edits. The report will then be printed and shared with key legislative leaders and posted to the commission's website. So we're happy to take any questions now or take any direction. And again, thank you to everyone who helped in this process and to you commissioners. Commissioners, we've had this document for a little bit. Do you have any specific edits that would be helpful? I think we can avoid minor things, but big edits on arrays. Commissioner Skinner. Madam Chair, I'm sorry to ask this, but I haven't had a chance to review the annual report. And so could we roll this over until our next meeting if time permits? Certainly. I'm mindful. Oh, one minute. Okay, I'm getting a compliment of our colleagues. Just one minute, please. Thank you, I'm all set. No emergency. No emergency, which is good news, thank you. So I am thinking, Commissioner Skinner, the production, this is a filing that we need to make, of course, the legislature. We have a few meetings coming up this next week, rather than waiting to the 29th, would we be able to accelerate your review perhaps tomorrow? And then I would attach it to the agenda that we have three agendas that are getting posted by tomorrow morning or nine o'clock because of the holiday. So maybe we could do it, add it to the 21st, would that work for you? That would work, Chair, thank you. All right, thank you. And that I think helps Dave with his vendor and all. Okay. Mills, is that good, Tom? That works great, Chair, thanks. Okay. Commissioner, do we all set with that then? All right. All right. And we're going to turn to our research and responsible gaming division. Interestingly, we might be early for them. There's long, when we see, I see I'm on two pages today, which is a little bit of a challenge. I see Marlene, I see Mark. And are we ready along with the Game Sense Advisors? There they are. Before we get started, I am going to make my own personal apology to you for two weeks ago when we ran so long and you have been so patient the entire day. I have to say, I was just getting nervous over your well-being and the time that we took from you. So thank you. And we are delighted to start our day with your presentation. So thank you again for your patience with respect to our very long meeting last two weeks ago. So thank you. Good morning, Mark and good morning. Good morning, Madam Chair. Good morning, commissioners. Today I'm going to introduce Game Sense for their quarterly report before I do just want to give a little brief introduction. So Game Sense is readily available to all guests virtually on GameSenseMA.com live chat and in the Massachusetts casinos, Plain Ridge Park Casino, MGM Springfield and Encore Boston Harbor. Game Sense advisors promote the responsible gaming strategies by one, creating a responsible gaming workforce by facilitating the new hire and annual responsible gaming trainings for the staff at the gaming and sports way during operators in Massachusetts. Two, preventing problem gambling through the demonstration, interactions and enrollments with patrons on responsible gaming tools from Plain My Way, the first budgeting tool on electronic games in all three Massachusetts casinos to the voluntary self-exclusion programs. And three, promoting player health by supporting and facilitating activities during the national gambling disorder screening day which is Tuesday, March 12th, 2024. Problem gambling awareness month or PGAM for the month of March and responsible gaming education month or RGEM in September. And finally, connecting people who enroll in the voluntary self-exclusion with resources and referrals to programs such as the telephone recovery support, a program that connects people experiencing gambling harm to someone with lived experience. I'm delighted today to have Marlene Warner, the Chief Executive Officer and team at Massachusetts Council on Gaming and Health to present the Game Sense Biscoe Year 2024 second quarter report. Thank you, Long. Good morning, Chair. Good morning, commissioners. Nice to see all of you. Typically you don't get to see me but due to illnesses and conflicts with the new date, here I am. So I'm so pleased to be for all of you. Let me share my screen and hopefully this will work. Can everyone see it? Yes, great. Okay, so again, I'm not Chelsea Turner. I do wanna give a shout out in best regards to Chelsea who's definitely very much not feeling well today. So she's on her way to health but she's sorry she can't be here. And Odessa who ended up having conflict but I am so pleased that JoLynn Barruder and Lulu's Lovensi are able to join us today. And JoLynn and Lulu both joined us in July in the summer and have been amazing additions. JoLynn comes to us with over 20 years of experience in the field and she has just been an amazing addition. First starting off as an evening manager and then now moving to the daytime manager role. And Lulu came to us from EVH and their security department. And she is a ball of energy. You'll see when she's presenting the awards just what an amazing addition she's been to our team. Let's see. And I apologize because normally Phil Sherwood's also here doing this but he also had a conflict. So I'm gonna minimize you guys. There we go. Topics for today. So Chelsea is always great about putting a number snapshot together. We'll talk a little bit about the numbers and what that means. JoLynn will then go into the Game Sense Information Center activities and some of the ways that we're engaging patrons. And then also talk about our engagement out in the community both through some volunteer efforts and some other efforts the Game Sense team has been really putting forth. We'll then turn to Lulu who's going to talk about the champion award winners. I know always a favorite for the commissioners. Again, Odessa can't be here. Otherwise she would be the one talking about the RAB or the Recovery Advisory Board but I'll fill you in on that. And TRS is the Telephone Recovery Support and some of the efforts happening through the GAMLINE. Finally, I'll follow up on marketing highlights and some staffing updates. And you already heard a little bit from long the PGAN or Prologan Limernaz month is happening in March, but we'll talk just a short while about that. So in general, things are looking great. I always wonder as the person leading this effort whether we've hit our max and my team continues to amaze me and surprise me and surpass those numbers. So simple interactions again, the interactions where you're connecting someone to directions or telling them how to get connected to a service they're looking for in the casino. Those interactions are up 23%. And while they're not substantive, they often lead to other substantive interactions. So that's great news. Demonstrations are up 31%. And we know quarter two over quarter, quarter two this year versus quarter two last year in total the substantive interactions which include demonstrations and exchanges are up 14%. So we're really excited about that. Those are conversations. Those are the staff really having a one-on-one or with a group engagement around a substantive topic. And so the fact that we know gambling literacy is something we're really trying to hone in on and that those type of efforts are happening in those demonstrations and exchanges. It's fantastic news to hear it's up 14%. I wanna draw your attention to the VSEs. VSEs are up 58%. And again, at this time we know that people last year were sports wagering had just launched in the brick and mortar. Some folks immediately decided to voluntarily self-exclude around sports. So we're gonna continue to see increases. I think for a while, I don't know if we'll see a leveling off but we would maybe anticipate that. But certainly one of the things that has helped tremendously is the public awareness campaigns. Phil Sherwood our chief communications officer has been very diligent in his messaging and how he's targeting that digital messaging to drive people to get the messages around voluntary self-exclusions. And the other thing I'll say is that because we were able to hire JoLynn in that overnight manager role, 70% increase in overnight voluntary self-exclusions. And it's just at EVH because there are only 24-hour staff. So they're the ones answering them. But people aren't necessarily solely gambling at EVH but the overnight voluntary self-exclusions, whether they're remote, you see 107% increase in remote VSEs or just the staff who are present onsite at EVH are doing those. Those are tremendous, tremendous numbers. Again, it's not the game sense advisor's only job to do voluntary self-exclusions but being there for someone in crisis and need who wants to do something about their gambling, minimize their harm. Voluntary self-exclusions are a great opportunity for us to connect with patrons. Reinstatements of 21%. Again, this is where people are able to meet with advisors who doesn't tell them what they should do or can do but more aptly is talking to them about the resources available to them and making sure that they're still aware of what is available before they go back to gambling if that's their choice, if that's what their choice is. So again, we've seen increases in those. Live chat continues to be a massive way that people get in touch with us, makes sense. We know that a lot of people, growing numbers of people are gambling through their, through mobile platforms in terms of sports wagering. And we're seeing that people are also responding to game sense via live chat that can be accessed both through our website and through the gamesensema.com website. You know, we did see a slight drop in Play My Way and typically we know that Play My Way, when we've seen it launch at all three properties, there's a huge spike because we're making a big effort, you know, press releases and press conferences and special swag, all of that happens in the beginning. So when we're comparing to last year, we would expect a bit of a drop but I think we're at a settling piece. And as you all heard two weeks ago from Dr. Wall, we're still doing a lot better than what we would expect to see in terms of uptake with responsible gambling tools and other jurisdictions. So all in all, we're really pleased with the numbers across all three properties. These numbers are ridiculous to try to see. I apologize for that, but in general, you can see where you see green, that means we're up and when you see red, that means we're a little down. These are the numbers I essentially just went over. So I'm gonna skip over this. Similarly here. And so now I'm gonna turn it over to Jolene who's gonna talk about the meat of the matter, which is what the Game Sense advisors are doing to interface and interact with patrons, with employees and how they really get a lot of this education done. Jolene. Sorry, we had someone walk in the office for a moment. Good morning, Madam Chair and commissioners and guests. I really appreciate your time you taking with us today. So we'll just kind of get right to it, some of our activities that we have here. Throughout this quarter, we've continued to expand or library of responsible gaming activities. We introduced 15 new activities this past quarter. These activities, like everything we do here are aimed at promoting healthy play in the casino environment and sports betting channels. So we're kind of focusing more on sports betting than obviously they had in the past. I think that's a real focus for us now. All of our activities are grounded in extensive research ensuring that we stay at the front line of responsible gambling practices. As a foundation for activities, we adhere to the four elements of positive play, personal responsibility, gambling literacy, honesty and control and pre-commitment. These elements serve as pillars in helping to create an environment that fosters healthy play. We also incorporate other research such as the lower risk gambling guidelines and the responsible gambling framework. As Marlene mentioned, I'm a game sense manager here at EVH and I'm happy to report firsthand that our team has a steadfast commitment to responsible gaming and supporting the responsible gambling efforts and mission of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. We're a community that values transparency, education and research. Together we continue to help create an environment that supports everyone enjoying gaming as a form of entertainment. But if someone starts to struggle, we are there to help connect that person and their loved ones if needed with services that are most comfortable for that individual in need. So it's been a real joy working here and learning all the ins and outs, especially considering my experience. And I think next we're gonna move on, perhaps to some of our community efforts that we do. So first up on the top left with the goat, this is Anna. She's one of our overnight EVH members. In November, she went and volunteered at the Unity Farm Sanctuary in Shelburne, Massachusetts. This is a nonprofit organization that only provides safe homes for farm animals, but it also educates the public and prospers the culture of kindness, which is what we really wanna promote here. Anna's dedication aligns with the GameCensus commitment to making a positive impact in people's lives and the world around us. Below with the squid hat is Lulu's. And also with a couple other members of the Massachusetts Council. Between November 19th and December 1st, as many of us as possible participated in Angkor's Feed the Funnel. These packing parties resulted in putting together and distributing over one million meals for local pantries and in 2023 and 2024, excuse me. It's really heartening to see our casino staff, vendors, partners, and friends coming together to achieve such a remarkable success in supporting our community. Lastly, in December, their GameCensus team with MGM and PPC for the NCPG McGill universities, give a child a toy not a ticket campaign. This initiative educates adults about the importance of not giving lottery tickets to kids and encourages donating a toy instead. Collaborating on this campaign with these properties has been a joyful tradition and where we've continued to promote responsible gaming and community engagement over the years. This campaign has also provided countless toys to kids during the holiday season. And I believe next up will be Lulus. That's right. Thank you so much, Dylan. Thank you. There you go, Lulus. Thank you. Lulus, we are all wishing we had that hat. Hello, everyone. My name is Lulus and I joined GameCensus team in July. It's been a very great, it's been very great to help patrons at EVH that needs their help and to keep their gambling healthy and connects those who need extra help and service. Beside English, I also speak Haitian Creole. That's my living language. I am so proud to help patron in my community to help the questions, everything they need, I answer them in Creole. Now let's talk about some amazing people. They are winners champion to those past quarters, those from the casino staff who shows great leaders and promote responsible gaming. Before I announce the winner, I would like to give a big, big thank you to Madam Chair and Jill Stain for always sending handwriting thank you notes to our champions. It means a lot. And thank you to all the commissioners for supporting GameCensus. Patrons are often tell us how grateful and helpful we are for having GameCensus and EVH site. They really thankful, they really great for everything. We are done here. All right. First, let's start from EVH for our winners. First, we have Ginny Lee, Ginny Lee from WinWords. Ginny Lee is exceptional at customer service and responsible gaming. She helped patron with play my way, explained the program and getting them set up. She also direct those patron that needs support to GameCensus. Second, we have Karen Bella from Security Department. Her last support, positive attitude with guests show her adjournment support to GameCensus. She also entrance in our programs to serve EVH patrons regards advocacy and responsible gaming. Advocacy and responsible gaming. Lastly, we have Andrew Simon from Table Game. Andrew is a standout performance in the on-court opening team with her experience and customer service skill. She educated patrons on responsible gaming and makes her experience great. Second, we have from MGM. Kale Seymour from Environmental Service. Kale quickly assessed to GameCensus when we needed. It was amazing. He support GameCensus and he promote us in saving the day from beginning overhauling. Second, we have Naomi Revere from MGM from Incage. Naomi has been very helpful in explain the program to the process of how a schooling play train can receive their win and loss statement. She work well with GameCensus to help players to receive this report. Lastly, we have Alexa from Security. Alexa always ready to assist GameCensus with anything we need. She's helpful and courteous and knowledgeable. And we have the last one from PPC. Kale, more from Security. Seymour went beyond and above to help patron on this self-exclusion option. His effort was appreciated by the patron in our team. Second, we have Michael from HR. Oh, Michelle, I'm sorry. Michelle help in setting up. GameCensus display was invulnable. She also reach out for a mutual to inform staff and guests about responsible gaming. And we have Peter from Sports Bar Manager. Peter active, please support our mission of responsible gaming. He's true assist to the GameCensus to gaming commission. Thank you for the time for today. Now I'll pass it to Marlene Arches, just fucking. They know who I am. It's okay. Thank you, Loulouse. That was terrific. I really appreciate it. And JoLynn, I think one of the amazing things about these champion awards is that we continue to see new names. And I think that's really important, right? That we don't keep having the same repeat staff members that new folks are constantly learning and being drawn to GameCensus. So I really appreciate everyone's time with that. And I appreciate the individuals. I also wanna say thank you to the three properties who spent a lot of time and energy in addition to the chair's notes that I've heard multiple people say that they hold on to and really treasure. You saw, I think last time Anna talked about how she holds onto the note. So chair Judd Stein, nice job. It means a great deal. And the properties appreciate it and the staff appreciate it. So thank you for that. Okay. So let me talk a little to you about the recovery advisory board. So this is something that we formalized. I mean, in many ways we've had, we've always, you know, we're started by a gentleman in recovery, Thomas Cummings, 40 years ago, but we decided to more formalize this. And the recovery advisory board is made up of 13 individuals, both directly impacted and then affected others, meaning typically family members who have some lived experience. And we use them, but we've also made them available and the gaming commission has used them for kind of all things, you know, to advise in certain areas, to give feedback. So I'd say like pre-programs to advise, to offer feedback in terms of drafts or, you know, new directions with programs and policies. They really offer us a perspective that even folks who are on my team who have lived experience, but are doing it for a job, it's very helpful. These are all volunteers, very helpful for these volunteers to really get an opportunity to offer some of their feedback. So there was an effort to recruit a wide diverse group and we have done that. Two meetings have been held so far in FY24 in the fall. And we certainly know they will be present at the mass gaming commission's conference on May 14th, but there's a lot of things lined up to show them, talk to them about, get their feedback on. One of the things that's particularly exciting and again, has always been a little bit more informal, we're trying to formalize is getting all these individuals trained for media training. So they're comfortable and clear and able to tell their story in a way that's safe for them. So that is something that Phil Sherwood and a consultant we have worked with them on so that they are able to offer their story, like I said, in a way that's safe and feels comfortable. So huge kudos to the members of the recovery advisory board. In addition, again, recovery and lived experience has always been a foundational piece for our organization. So TRS as I mentioned before is Telephone Recovery Support, although Telephone is a little bit of a misnomer at this point because we also can text with folks, we can also Zoom with folks. But this is an effort to follow up to the voluntary self-exclusions and give people the opportunity if they wanna engage further, they can. And so really, it's a pretty simple concept. Somebody decides they want to take the effort to connect with someone, they can connect with a peer and the peer support specialists will let them dive the conversation since that they set up their own goals and we're kind of offering those checkpoints, maybe referring them to resources they didn't know existed, so on and so forth. So we're not talking huge numbers as you can see here on the screen, but very meaningful conversations and connections with individuals who need help. So most of those are happening through, again, through a follow-up to voluntary self-exclusion, but you can also see calls coming in from the GAM line, calls that are being referred from DPH through the health resources and action HRIA and then folks who are using the line to do urge surfing and then the folks who occasionally decide to check on lottery numbers or voicemail, those are the numbers and the way they break down. So another way that we're engaging with community that's in need. Wow, so Phil Sherwood does a tremendous job and as you all know is constantly trying to find a new spin, a new engagement, a new campaign, a new way to take some of the subject matter and make it interesting and fresh. So he has done in this quarter, 200 social media posts for Game Sense that goes out under the Game Sense MA brand, but in addition, the Mass Council brand, he's also put 48 posts out. And then again, those digital ads that I talked about earlier that are really driving those voluntary self-exclusion numbers. We know that just in those two campaigns that are pretty short money, 74,000 impressions and that again, doesn't include the impressions on Game Sense MA platforms, that's just through the Mass Council ones. And then one of the things we've been hard at work at and we're really excited for all of you is working with the MGC staff on the conference, which is entitled Using Research to Rewrite the Playbook. So right now we're sending out materials and information to vast amounts of groups across Massachusetts to fill the seats at the May 14th conference. Again, very excited about that. Last, but certainly not least, I wanna say that we've had some departures that I believe Chelsea talked about last time. And so we've hired some new staff members. So Lori Davis will be at MGM Springfield. And I apologize, because I didn't write down the information Chelsea gave me about these lovely individuals, but they hopefully will be joining us quite soon for a future meeting so you all can meet them. And Anita Pang will be at Ankur Boston Harbor working the overnight shifts. We're pleased to say because when Josh left us in December to move, and he had got married and moved, Joe Lin went from overnight and filled the day slot in terms of manager and Jason DeCarlo who's been with us for the last few years has well over two decades worth of experience in the industry. And now gonna be our nighttime game sense manager on Ankur Boston Harbor. So congratulations to all three of them, but in particular Jason who's moving up into that role. And long, may quick mention of it, but the 2024 problem gambling awareness month is right around the corner. New theme this year, which is kind of exciting, every story matters. And so we will be collecting stories, sharing them through a number of different platforms and verticals. And you'll be hearing more about that after March. Now with that, I'm gonna stop sharing, see if anyone has any questions or comments and really appreciate your time. Questions, questions or first off that big thank you to Joe Lin and Nielous. Thank you for your presentations today. Questions for them and then questions from our name. Commissioners and long thank you for your work that you do all behind the scenes and it's not lost on us that the efforts that you make to make sure that everything is running smoothly. So we appreciate you. Questions? I don't have a question. I just wanted to say thank you again. This is always a really uplifting presentation when you guys come in for the quarterly and I have to say that the 70% increase in the overnight VSEs and when I was like, that's amazing. I'm sure everybody thought the same thing. I just wanted to say it again, that's a great number. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think that Joe Lin, I don't know if you wanna speak to that because you're definitely one that led on that. I think it was, it's a team effort, everyone. I like, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you and I wouldn't be, not the numbers, wouldn't be where we are if you weren't all as a team. So I just, you know, I can't get any credit. Everyone else, I think we all deserve a little bit. So thank you, I appreciate that. And thank you for your time today as well listening to us, I do appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that up. Because one thing Marlene mentioned earlier about the staffing update, Anita Pang will be working and overnight at EBH. Anita speaks, I believe Mandarin and Cantonese. So this is exciting because now we're expanding the Chinese language 24 hours or most the day. It'll be, yeah, I think throughout the day, yeah, I think you're right. And it's incongruent to some of the research, the Asian cares where we saw that there's a lot of Chinese in Chinatown were coming in late at night after work. So this is exciting. So it, you know, I think I just want to point out that, you know, the council and the game sense, they take great care to ensure that the hiring really reflects the community with such as Lulu's, Lynn and the various other game sense advisors. Oh, that's great. Thank you for pointing that out. Madam Chair, I just want to say thank you. I did get to join the quarterlies with Long and team and Marlene and Joe Lynn and I just, I think the public should know that, you know, there's a lot of work and intentionality that goes on to making sure that this is sustainable, that it's growing, that the work is front and center and it's often unappreciated. So I just want to let them know that it is appreciated by us and it's a lot of work. So thank you for what you do. I am going to object to that though, Commissioner Mayne, because it is truly, I think among all of us, so appreciated and honestly around the country, around the country and probably around the world, Marlene, right? Folks know about game sense and they know about your work and they know that you are on the floor of the casinos in a way that no other jurisdiction is. And that makes you absolutely stand out. So I don't mean to correct you, Commissioner Mayne, but you know, it is always really rewarding to me as a citizen of Massachusetts, as a resident of Massachusetts, that the legislature got this right and made this a requirement. And, you know, we're seeing in real life right here with Jolin and Ludo's work. So anyway, Jordan, Commissioner Mayne, and I just want to say that, particularly because you're newer, it's the work that you do is very much treasure. So. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I greatly appreciate it. I couldn't agree more with the legislature's great foresight. Yeah, I think what Commissioner Mayne is probably saying is that we may not say thank you enough. So. I actually, what I'm saying, sorry, Commissioner Mayne, is that the ends are often appreciated, but the means are not appreciated. And that is what I was trying to say. Excellent. That is an excellent point. Madam Chair, may I? Yes, Commissioner Skinner. So I want to echo my fellow colleagues and just saying thank you and recognizing the important work that Game Sense brings to each of our properties. Dr. Wall here a couple of weeks ago referenced the special relationship between our operators, particularly the brick and mortar operators and folks at the council, folks at Game Sense. And I just want to reiterate that we understand the importance of that partnership. He talked in the context of a research project, but certainly with respect to your recognition of the champions, I think that is important. And it goes a long way to demonstrate the appreciation that you have for just having the individuals on the ground understanding how important it is in the work that you do on behalf of the commission, on behalf of the residents of Massachusetts. So thank you. Very special work you're doing. So keep it up. Thank you, Commissioner. On behalf of the whole community. Thank you. Okay, any other questions? Krisha Hill. I'm not sure there's anything I can add except thank you for all that you do each and every day. It is truly appreciated by many, many people. Thank you, Commissioner. Madam Chair, may I? Could you entertain a couple of comments for me about this? A couple of points. Over the last month or so, I've had the privilege of being out at Plain Ridge Park first and then last Friday at Encore Boston Harbor with a couple of elected officials and with other really important stakeholders in our work. And I just, I couldn't be more proud of, especially last week with Jo-Lynn and LuVoo in showcasing the Game Sense program and the work that we're doing. So it really is a pleasure. And the second, and this is just, we started this program back in 2015. So we're coming up on nine years ago at Plain Ridge Park Casino as a responsible gaming center based inside of a casino as directed by the legislature. And as much as possible over those years, we've tried to kind of grow and evolve this program and let science guide it. And so whether it's the evaluation of Plain My Way that Dr. Wall spoke about last week or looking at how we can better serve different types of players through doing a couple of studies on positive play or the development of the lower risk gambling guidelines that were mentioned that were informed by the Massachusetts cohort study or voluntary self-exclusion that we know is an evidence-based practice that helps people reduce gambling-related harms in their lives. And shortly, you'll hear a comprehensive evaluation of the Game Sense program, consumers in general, consumers at casinos that have interactions with our Game Sense advisors, how casino employees value and understand Game Sense. These are all such important steps and better understanding how we can be a better resource to persons who choose to gamble in Massachusetts. It started off, I remember distinctly in June of, I think 2015 when PPC opened and what this program is today is so vastly different and so incredibly good, so much better than what it was when we started. And I think, you know, Jolene and Lulu and Marlene, thank you so much for the work that you're doing on this. And long. Thank you. Thank you, Jolene and Lulu's. Thank you. Thank you, Marlene. Thank you. And I hope Chelsea starts to feel better. Minister. Okay, then we're going to move on again. My apologies for two weeks ago. So happy we can see you today. Thank you. Okay, we're going to turn to item number six on the agenda and just, I know that, Kari, we've asked to accommodate and K-by-flipping the first. And that would be 256.4, the advertising issue commissioners. Kari, is that still helpful? Oh, there's Mina. If that works for the commission, yes, that would be great. Okay, excellent. So I think Mina and Kari, we can, I think it's 148 on our packet. In our packet. Thank you. Let's take positions, continue to mount us. There we go. Good morning, Madam Chair. And I appreciate the courtesy. I actually will be there here for all three items, but my colleague, Christina Marshall, who is on the line with me, is only participating in 256.04. So we figured we'd do that. But first, so 256.04 is coming up before you and actually Kari, I jumped right in, but I don't know if you had anything else. Okay. 256.04 is coming up before you for a discussion. It is labeled on the agenda as a potential vote in case we need a vote, but there's not necessarily a recommendation that a vote is required today or even that we'll get there. But the issue that we are presenting has to do with the provision of 256.04 that relates to the prohibition on the encouragement of particular wagers, of a specific wager of any specific type, kind, subject or amount. This is a provision that when we put in the advertising regs at the outset of the regulatory process several years ago, or actually a year ago, it feels like several years ago, we had talked in quite some detail about what exactly that means. And it certainly means to take the easiest example at a sports book, a ticket writer saying, the Patriots are looking pretty good. You might wanna put a bet on that in the game tomorrow. That's certainly prohibited under this as it expanded to the platforms, similar behavior, that's direct. We think this is a winner. You should bet this winner would in our, our reading of it be clearly prohibited. But there had been some note among sports wager and division, a number of questions they had gotten on this regulation and the sort of interplay between this and folks that may not be as clearly tied to the operator in making the same suggestions and where the line is between the sort of clearly prohibited example I just mentioned and something like the Patriots are playing tomorrow, not considered, but go bet on the game, not on the Patriots, but go bet on the game. Is that a particular bet or not? So we were asked to, I'm working with legal and sports wager division to think about options for helping to clarify that, to make the point either, A, easier to enforce and easier to interpret to the extent that there is any ambiguity on it and also to try to address what I think is a, with more and more states doing this and with more interaction between sports media and sports wagering, the interaction of potential encouragement from someone that might not be obviously related. And so Christina will walk through a couple of options that we are putting forward for consideration, partially to gauge where the commission would like to land on the policy issue and then there may be further tweaks to it, but the goal is to try to bring either clarity in the existing reg that, while we believe is already there, but try to emphasize the enforcement piece of, or to bring additional options that would allow patrons to know that when somebody is speaking about a sports wager, whether or not they are in some way affiliated, endorsing, getting paid by in some other way, the operator or part of their marketing. Okay, so I will, good morning, everybody. I will be happy to go through the three options. As Mina said, these are just kind of suggestions that we have covering what we view as the range of options that the commission has and the way we thought about coming up with these options was thinking about first and foremost, who gets to encourage, suggest, or discuss the merits of a particular wager and then the second question is if we're allowing somebody to encourage, et cetera, a particular wager, what guardrails guidelines are we gonna put on that encouragement? So we've given you three options here. Option number one, the red line starts on page 151 of the packet really clarifies what we understood to be the original intent of this provision, which is that if you're an operator or a vendor, if you're employed by one of those entities, or if you are compensated in any way by those entities, you cannot advise and encourage patrons to place specific bets. So again, that's really just intended to live up to the original intent of the regulation, but clarifying this kind of potential gray area where there are, for example, social media influencers that might not consider themselves direct employees of a vendor or an operator, but are still being paid by them to advertise sportsway drawing. The second option, the red line you will see is on page 160 of the packet. I'm sorry, 161 of the packet. This one takes somewhat of a middle ground that says if you are directly employed by an operator or a vendor, you cannot encourage or recommend specific bets, but if you are employed or compensated in some other way, you're not an official employee, but you still have some sort of relationship. You can encourage a bet, but if you're going to do that, you have to disclose your relationship with the operator or the vendor. And here we've cited the FTC's guidelines on endorsements and testimonials and advertising, which really just require disclosure of that relationship. And then the third option is really the most, on the other end of the spectrum, allowing both employees of the operators and the vendors and folks who might be compensated in some other less official way to make and encourage these types of bets, but providing that anyone who's allowed to do this under this carve-out does have to disclose the relationship with the operator. And then- That's on page 17. Thank you, Madam Chair. All right. And we've also just for all three of the options have included a specific reference to the disclosure guidelines in 16 CFR 255.5. So you'll see that in the language that I just read out for you. And then you'll also see that in section 2506093. It's the same in all three options, but just so you can see it, it's on page 175 of the packet. So again, as I said, those are the three options. There's certainly a range you could, as Meena said, stick with the original language or choose to go in any one of these three directions. Happy to answer any questions. Commissioners, questions for Christina or Meena. Hi, my question preliminarily is the, we were asked to do this and there were complaints or questions, who were the questions from? Where was the ask to do this? I'm sure, Madam Chair, go ahead if you want to. No, I know that, I don't know if we have any numbers of the sports weight training team on, but I think that it originally generated with questions for Jennings. So I don't know Meena if you're able to answer those. If we need people from the sports weight training team which people are there. Sure. I'm not sure if Bruce or Andrew or Crystal are on, but that's correct. It was a, there were questions that they were receiving from operators, trying to understand where that line was between promoting a particular bet where it's sort of obvious you should bet on X or this is a winner versus the other end of the spectrum that I mentioned that is okay, what about the gray areas putting together a parlay? This commission has also seen some things that I know you've tried to address in other contexts like the idea of a can't lose parlay or something like that. So that's where the question was initially coming up. And I think the other piece, and I believe the commission received a letter on all commissions received a letter is the fact essentially asking some of the same questions from the public by an elected official asking the question because I think some of the public are not necessarily sure what's okay and what's not on that. So that, this was the reason, the justice for the discussion. And I know when the attorney general came and gave comments on these rags early on they were very much interested in this topic. Have they been involved in this conversation in these three options or is this still something that we need to do in terms of engaging in the conversation? I'm trying to just remember exactly where this fell in on the spectrum commissioner, Brian, or on the communication, I should say, not the spectrum of it. I believe when then deputy general counsel, Monica was involved, she had reached out to just let them know this conversation was beginning. So, but I don't think that we, I know we don't have particular feedback on these three different options. In the, oh, yeah. Commissioner Brian, I do know that now director Monahan was involved in this issue. I'm not sure. I think it's because I might have raised the questions around whether we should revisit this rag and she, I think indicated that they were. So a while back, she is now on, she was, she had called during the meeting because she was running late, but I see that Caitlin is on the meeting. I'm not sure she can hear us, but she might be able to help answer that. There she is. Hi, y'all, I apologize. I just missed this conversation. So I very much apologize. If you want to restate the question, I can try to answer it. I was just asking whether, I don't believe AG's office. We've had a conversation with them on these and these three options, but I was just looking for clarity on that. I have not spoken with the AG's office about this. So if we wanted to do that, we could, we don't, we go, could move forward on that. Okay, so just for more, I'm coming up from, this is an area that I feel very strongly, we don't want to weaken in any way. I think we've worked really hard to try to sort of draw a line to be at the forefront of this and the ESPN, ESPN-BAT deal, this is getting in some of that area, right? About who can do a BAT, who can advocate, which, how do you wearing the clarity? I'm not a big fan of disclaimers solving it, like letting you do something that we don't think is great and then slapping a disclaimer on and calling it okay. From where I put, I wouldn't change this. I'd stick with option one, but I certainly would want to have a conversation with the AG's office too on their thoughts because I know this is an area that they had an interest in and I agree with them in terms of protecting consumers and making sure that we're not sort of inducing and encouraging specific. So I'm not a huge fan of option two or three. I would hope this is the beginning of a conversation today, but that's where I'm coming from. Could I just build on Commissioner O'Brien's comments because it was gonna be a question I had, if you could just go over the disclaimer and what would it look like or feel like? Sure, I'll start it and Christine, if you have additional thoughts on this. One of the things about the FTC guidelines is that they're not overly prescriptive and it's not like the, for instance, the problem gaming messaging that you require and where there's a specific language that is sort of expected. In fact, we had that conversation as part of preparing these options with responsible gaming and sports wagering and there was agreement that that may be preferable in this case because these things as Commissioner O'Brien's comments kind of suggest come up in so many different contexts. What the FTC's requirements or guidelines really get at is clarity within the framework of whatever the platform is. Those on social media may be used to, for instance, seeing a little one word sponsored and or maybe a check mark next to a sponsored post to make it clear that although this person, this influencer might have their normal posts about a bunch of different things, this particular post is sponsored or this particular thing that they're plugging is sponsored. If it were in the context of say a sportscaster doing a segment on television and they're talking about the particular lines being offered by the sports book that they also get paid to do advertising for, they might disclose that the same way you hear at the beginning of news stories, when good journalism happens, we're saying just so you know, such and such company is a sponsor of our news station. So that's why there's that flexibility because it really could take many different forms. And one of the other keys, we don't want to get lost in a list of disclaimers even in that third option or to crowd out the very important and responsible. The only thing I would add to that is just the specific language of 16 CFR 255.5 which as Meena pointed out is not prescriptive and not particularly detailed, but it requires, it says that a disclosure of a material connection does not require the complete details of the connection but it must clearly communicate the nature of the connection sufficiently for consumers to evaluate its significance. Thank you. Other questions for Meena and Christina? Commissioner, are you inclined to? Not so much as sorry, Commissioner Hill, go ahead. No, Madam Chair, go ahead, Madam. I was very inclined to want to wait to get the ages in here. Commissioner Hill. I would like to see that happen before we make a decision, Madam Chair. Yeah. Commissioner Skinner. Thank you. In addition to that, I see as these questions are presented to us, I see sort of two components. There's the policy slash programmatic component and then the legal component. And I think for me today, the policy question is missing in large part because I'm not really sure what problem we are trying to solve. Commissioner O'Brien touched on the conversation that was had between our sports wagering division and the operators, but we don't have any insight as to what those questions were, what the concerns were. So it would be helpful if we got a little bit more information and it's not just with respect to this regulation, the other two that are on for discussion today as well. I think there's some information that's missing for me. And I might suggest going forward that when we are charged with reviewing potential amendments to our regulations, that there also be a presentation on the program side of things so that we can get the full picture before making any determination. Commissioner Maynard. Yeah, Madam Chair. When I'm asked to alter a reg as debated and thoughtful as this one from an unidentified party for unidentified reasons and without the consultation of the AG's office which we worked with closely when developing this, cynical to even why I would make a change or why would we go this direction? So I think we need some more information. I want to hear what the AG has to say. Okay. And I think there's a consensus here, Commissioner Maynard, with your sentiments. I do want to give our team the opportunity to maybe give more background. Carrie, Caitlin, and again for the sports wagering team, just so that everybody has their say, it may not have been in other documents and it may not have been presented today orally, but we can do that now too. Do you want to weigh in Carrie or Caitlin? I don't want to put you on the spot. Yeah, Madam Chair. I was not involved in this until recently, so I'd have to defer to Attorney Macarius and Director Monahan on that question. Okay, thank you. Sure, I'm happy to add some. Meena, do you want to go first on the context or I'm happy to go whichever. Go for it. Sure. So this provision of the regulation is a little bit of a challenging one, given some federalism issues. So what we'd found is that after it was put in place and then sports wagering started in the Commonwealth and we started monitoring it, we noticed that two things. One, that there are a lot of ads on national broadcasts that may violate the regulation with regard to recommending or encouraging a specific wager, but some federalism issues can come into play there. The second thing is that there is some, I believe the operators take a pretty conservative view of the reg in what constitutes encouraging or recommending, and my language may be a little bit off here, but the provision I'm talking about recommending is sort of a specific wager. And so we started thinking about, again, this is what we've been doing with the regs is sort of stress testing them against the environment and what's been happening. And we sort of started to think that this one is something that we could take a look at and see if we could find a way to potentially modify it, strengthen it and accomplish the goals that we want to accomplish with it, but maybe with some tweaks. And so that's where the conversation started on our end. And I think it's entirely fair to say, because the AG's office was so helpful on the first round, go back to them and have that conversation and then come back to the commission. So happy to take any questions on the history. So Caitlin, I have a follow-up question that springs off what Commissioner Skinner said, which is the context, right? Is then having this conversation in the vacuum, well, what exactly is there conservative interpretation of encourage? We may take the same view, we may take a very different view. And so in terms of that policy broader conversation, I do think we need to have that conversation. Examples may be where operators came in and said, we think this is entirely acceptable. That's what's where Adrian said, well, we don't know. We'd have to go back and get clarity. We've never been asked those questions. So I think as Commissioner Skinner said, that's gotta be part of this process. In addition to AG's office, we need to have a contextual conversation about this. Absolutely. So I think I'm hearing you, Commissioner Ryan, Commissioner Skinner, and I think I would admit that the same thing crossed my mind. You started with a real straightforward example, but I don't know if we have examples of the issue that are clear enough for us to get guidance or change. And here, we did spend a lot of time on this rag and we have been on the forefront of this issue. I also know that we aren't receptive to pivoting, right? If we learn that a change would really benefit the commonwealth and add clarity for our team. But I don't know if we have, I was gonna ask for a whole bunch of examples, quite frankly, to Amita. So Madam Chair, I think to be clear, this is a rag that I think could benefit from guidance from the commission about that. So I like that idea a lot of sort of coming up. Some of the examples, I don't wanna speak for sports wagering about particular questions I've heard, but I will use the example that was somewhat public, which is the, you know, an idea of a influencer or a sports personality who may not, who was non-athlete, you know, is permitted to do this, putting out what they're going to wager or and suggesting that they believe strongly that that wager is a good one. And if you go back to when we had the conversations with the Attorney General's office in the public meetings, there were concerns raised about what an average patron or a reasonable patron might expect if a sportscaster who's around the team or whose job it is to watch sports professionally believes a certain bet is better than others, what that might imply about it. And if that person is a sportscaster entirely unaffiliated with any of the entities, that is simply, you know, input, right? It's just a data point that somebody might care about. If the patron knew that that person was also getting paid by the sports operator, wagering operator, that might influence their thinking. As I read the reg, I would initially, I think I would say that those kind of bets or those kind of, excuse me, messages would have been at best problematic if not outright prohibited and they certainly should have had the FTC disclosure requirements from the beginning of those were already referenced. I think the question that was coming up is just how far that goes. The commission, as Director Monahan pointed out, the commission has to also grapple with who's in its jurisdiction versus not. The operators are, licensees are, vendors are, marketing affiliates are, the ESPN broadcaster, you know, on a national game that says the line is here and wow, that's, you know, I can't imagine they don't beat the spread today. We don't necessarily have that jurisdiction over them unless you know that the operators are compensating them and that's where the nexus comes in. So we were trying to avoid, I know some of the examples sports wagering was concerned about were coming from the operators where do they draw that line or perhaps a read and Katelyn, I believe this is what you mean by conservative read of how, rating it narrowly on the flip side, members of the public say, how can that sportscaster talk about the line is in that a problem? And the short answer is while, you know, you might have, there might be people who would like that to be regulated, that may be outside the scope of what you're regulating if they're not affiliated to your licensees, vendors, et cetera. So that's part of this was also coming from as the public sees more and more conversation around sports betting and candidly the ESPN bet issue I think was another sort of reminder for us to look at this one again because when we first talked about this some of the media platforms, the operators were talking about were coming from companies that were recognized publicly by folks as operators first and media second. I think, you know, it would be hard to say that ESPN's history is just the opposite, right? And so that at least triggered the thought of should we be looking at this again? So I guess we need to return to drawing more and get more information from sports wagering. We'll just have a tee up in the spot and have a little bit of a different fashion so that commissioners have this background. Nina, thank you for explaining. I had remembered during our discussion, I think I made it and said, should it be a display of sorts? And then of course, you know, wasn't appreciative of the FTC's regulation. And then I guess that we would leave it to legal team to coordinate with the attorney general's office. I wonder if we should have the operators weigh in here too. In some practical fashion. I'm hearing the challenge because I'm hearing that right now there may not be full compliance. And they may be struggling to understand how to comply. So we want to always be helpful in that front too, right? So I guess I'd say let's not delay, right commissioners? Madam chair, just a question, a follow up question. So something you said relative to having the operators weigh in. I think Nina earlier though, it's marked up for a vote indicated that there wouldn't necessarily be a vote. And the amendments, there are amendments being proposed. Just process wise, are these amendments, are these proposed amendments should have the commission or should the commission take action today on one of these options? Where does it go from there? Does it go out for public comment? Carrie, go ahead. I can weigh in there if that's helpful. Yeah, of course, we included the vote, as Nina mentioned in the event that the commission was happy with one of these amendments and wanted to move forward. But of course, understanding there may just be a discussion today. If you were to vote today, it would begin the promulgation process, nothing would be filed, it would go out for public comment, for public hearing and come back to you for final vote and discussion of the comments in two to three months. Okay. So I think you raise a good point, Madam Chair, just it would be helpful to hear from, also hear from the operators on this. Yeah, I would agree. It's the context that we're missing, right? It's what sportswear are you looking at? What are the operators saying? I think there's, yeah, that's part of the context question. And it's unimportant. There's a reason why Christina Marshall's involved here. There's some important federal implications and first amendment implications. So, you know, so they'll need a really, yes, also driving these issues. Commissioner Mayer, Commissioner Hill. Cause I think this is a good discussion for us to make sure we give all the direction we want for the team so that when they come back, we don't have more questions. Oh, we'll always have more questions. I don't think we're going to avoid that. I think it's just, we can categorize them. But, you know, just to be really helpful to the team. Anything else? Commissioner Mayer, Commissioner Hill. Nope, I agree with everything that's been said. Yeah. Carrie, what do you think, Caitlin? Yep, I think that all sounds great. We can take this advice from today and follow up and we'll bring it back for future discussion. I want to thank you, Trinny Marshall, for your work today to help us at least initiate this conversation and to be fair, Commissioner Skinner, it was initially marked up just for discussion, but as Carrie pointed out, it was just reserved about, I think, Carrie, you anticipated a post some discussion today. So thank you, Christina. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. So I think then it makes sense to move on, right? To the data privacy reg. Nina, you're going to handle that. That's 6-8 on our agenda. Thank you. Caitlin, thank you. Yes, Madam Chair, I will start there. So we're back at page 136 of the packet. So for framing and context on this one, this is the data privacy reg. As you recall, late 2023, we had a fairly lengthy conversation about multiple waivers that were requested and to extend the timelines for compliance on a variety of things as the operators started implementing some of these data privacy provisions. When we talked then, some of the issues that were coming up in terms of implementation of 257 had been more or less resolved by FAQ's question and answer between commission staff, legal and the operators. And during that discussion of the waivers, there were several points that it became clear about what the commission's intent was. And we discussed a few tweaks to the regulation that we could come back with to make sure that the guidance was captured in the reg to the extent that that was helpful. So that's the context in which we're bringing these up today. It's not identifying new issues or new problems. It's taking from the waiver process as we, I believe the first sets of waivers that do exist will start to expire in the spring, making sure that kind of interpretive questions that were answered are reflected in the reg appropriately. So that's the purpose of this. I can walk through the reg unless there's questions about the framing and contact before we start. Any questions on the background and frame? I think walking us through, Lina, makes sense. And I know this is good, so thank you so much. Sure. So 25702 at the bottom of page 136 has a couple of changes. This is a important set of changes that gets reflected elsewhere as well. I will go over them each time but try to make them consistent. One of the questions that had given, one of the pieces of language that had given several operators some concern is making clear what is necessary to operate a sports wagering facility or to advertise a sports wagering operation. And there was a question of how much, what might be necessary for one operator might not be for another, what might be preferable, et cetera. So we added a slight modifier here for reasonably, which does have some inherent vagueness in it, but it does at least capture that businesses might make different business decisions about what data they need to hold and retain. It doesn't change what the protections are, which we'll get to later, but that they might have to do that. There was also a question which again, the language always contemplated that holding data in case of a threatened legal claim or a reasonably anticipated claim was always there, but there was a desire to hold on to that, especially if there was an investigative kind of purpose for the operator to root out fraudulent behavior or bad actors from the patron side. And then lastly, this same, this provisions also modified with a reference to retaining data or sharing data in the context of asset sales, acquisition sort of corporate agreements. This becomes more important in the sharing piece later, but again, the concern, and this is maybe a concern only lawyers can love, but that is if you are, you don't need to hold data to give to another business to operate your business, but rather to sell it and just want to make clear, yes, that is a normal thing businesses have to keep their data for. So putting more examples than there were there, but we don't believe this changes the meaning of what was intended initially. So I'll pause on this one because I think it's a relatively, it does play into some of the other changes later. Precious for Mina on this. So Mina, did this stem out of that round table that we had in terms of what is necessary? I mean, because I thought that we had clearly conveyed to them that the language that we had incorporated all the issues that they had. So why the need to add reasonably before necessary? Commissioner Bride, I think that's right. In my view that you did do that. The adding reasonably is to essentially codify that understanding that that's what is necessary or not. The commission couldn't make the decision, I think, just as well to say, the rec says what it says and you have heard what we think about it so you can interpret it. It was really to avoid an argument between absolutely necessary and there's no other way to do it other than holding the data versus a reasonably prudent business entity, trying to run its business the right way could hold onto its data. And so I tend to agree with you in some ways that this is already clarified, but this is... Yeah, and that's so I can see what you're saying, but there's part of me that says, well, we clarified this and we talked about this. And so we're adding a qualifier that would arguably weaken protections beyond what our understanding was. So I don't know that it's necessary myself, but that's me as one commissioner. But I think adding reasonably about how they does reflect our discussion, I'm not uncomfortable with it. At some point in time, as grads will stand for the test of time, I don't think any of us, I know that they struggled with what this meant. I don't think any of us would have thought at the time, using reasonable, would be really watering it down. In terms of the last edition, I know that we touched on that and I think it's helpful. I think it's helpful for me to see that codified to Mina. Anyway, I'm looking at it going, well, I also am going to turn to our legal team. I don't think they would be proposing if they thought that it really deepened it outside of what we had wanted. Unless Mina, you think so. Anyway, it could be interpreted. I think that the concern with the word reasonably is always that reasonable minds can differ on what's reasonable. I think reasonable minds can differ on what's necessary as well. And I think what a court would say is something that's necessary, and any regulation has to be interpreted with a reasonability standard to begin with. So that's why we didn't include it initially. Redundant, right. Yeah, right. It would make the reasonably redundant not in the circumstance, right? I guess my point is that it doesn't do any harm either because the standard is assumed. I don't know, when you're talking about us really, this data privacy is another one that we really went over with a fine tooth comb. And so I'm loath to put a qualifier in there that doesn't really seem to be necessary. I absolutely get the reasonably anticipated in the language at the end about sale. I'm just not convinced on that first reasonable. So it's really just the first one. Yeah. Commissioner Hill, Commissioner Skinner. It makes me think about a story when I was a new lawyer, Mina, where I sat down with a woman who was still a great colleague and friend who was a little bit more seasoned lawyer than me. She was on the other side. It was a pretty good real estate transaction. And it was just, I was brand new and she had maybe three years on me. And she said, this is where if I were you and I represented your client, I'd ask for a reasonable. And I said, thank you. Could I have a reasonable there please? And I'll never forget that she coached me on that. Probably not necessarily in the interest of her client, but in the interest of sort of the standards that had come to be expected at the time with these types of transactions. So reasonable really always kind of messes up. It is the standard behind it. I don't know who's asking for it. If they're asking for it to clarify that I get a reasonable point too. And not to, I don't want to say beaded at horse. I know people don't like that phrase, but you know, again AG's office gave us a lot of comments on this. And so I know it's just one word, but to me, I don't see the need for it. And so I'd be curious if they're non-plussed by the request as well, then, you know, so be it. But I am curious to know what their thoughts are on that. I agree with that. And it's not just this particular revision or proposed amendment. I think it's, you know, there are a couple of proposed amendments here that I think would prove us to have the AG's office review again, just in light of the earlier discussions which were quite extensive and we specifically sought the AG's office system input. So on the specific question, relative to this word here, I mean, I think it, I can see it both ways, although I don't have the full context, as I said earlier on the purpose of these changes. But I do understand Commissioner O'Brien's point in that I feel that this, the addition of this word kind of waters down what our original intent was. Commissioner Maynard? Yeah, so I have no comment. I have no comments that are in front of me. I don't know who asked for this. I don't know why they're asking for it. I don't know what they think this change will mean versus what we think the change will mean. It's just hard for me to make a decision on that. And again, maybe Commissioner O'Brien turned my optimism into cynicism over the last year and a half. But I feel cynical about it, which is like if you're asking me to change this, but you're not explaining what and why, I feel odd about doing it. Sorry about that, Commissioner O'Brien. No, I was going to say my apologies that my cynicism has rubbed off on you. Well, I think let's shift from the word cynicism and just say maybe we need more information. It's fair. I don't think it's cynical, you know, if you want to understand, you know, I'm looking going, who asked for reasonably, was it really our team who said it would actually be helpful? I don't know, right? I can answer that, Madam Chair, without getting into a specific operator, because that I don't have as a reminder. The request to add reasonable in front of many things came up in the comments before this was voted on. We mostly for reasons that were, that I articulated before said no in the drafting or the commission said no, but we presented those, when we presented those comments, all of these changes are coming up again, just from the conversation that was had with the roundtable and the waiver request discussion. And so that's that this is intended to reflect where we thought there might be I hate to use the word, but reasonable changes that would reflect that guidance that came from that discussion with the commission at that point that, so that you aren't getting more requests for waivers on them. I will say of the changes here from just my two cents, I'm not sure that this is the one that is particularly of the most importance. It is how I would interpret anyway, I think you now are on a tape recorded meeting with NLB minutes reflecting that you believe it means what it means. So that is, you know, that's sort of where it's coming from, but the comments, the comments were framed Commissioner Maynard and I can't speak to, maybe I don't want to use the cynicism word either, but I can't talk to people's intent on it. The comments were framed as a concern that, well, what if you tell us something wasn't necessary and we thought it was necessary. And what I would say to that comment, I guess on both sides is perhaps this is already implied in there. And, you know, realistically, an agency taking administrative enforcement action would have to prove that there is an issue, that it wasn't necessary to do something. So there is some, there's always going to be some interpretation that the regulated entities have to do with their counsel explaining and they may come to different conclusions or conservative and less conservative counsel out there. So that's a long way of saying you could, you could decide not to put that word in and I don't think it would be as important as some of the other changes that were requested. And just one more thing, if I could, to Commissioner Skinner's point on the AG piece, we did review all the comments as they were coming in and with the AG's office initially. And so our changes here are guided in large part by those discussions of what we understood to be their views on different parts and their advice on different parts that are more within their policy bailiwick on privacy and data privacy issues. So it's, you know, again, this is, these amendments I think carry correctly from wrong would be process in the normal course as well, right? These would not be emergency amendments. So there'd be opportunity to comment afterwards. That's right. So what I mean is, if I'm understanding correctly, this work reflects really the issues that we raise during our discussions, during the waiver process that we're also taking into consideration the comments that we did see as part of our packet. But this didn't, was not driven by anything through the sports weighting division, but rather through legal, to treat our rags to reflect the issues that we raised. And we're trying to capture that here. Correct. And when we did the waivers, when we talked through the waivers, the response to some of the requests for waivers was, I think there were sort of three types of responses. One set was we don't think you need the waiver you're asking for because you're not reading this correctly. So here's what the guidance says. And that resolved some issues. Some said, some of the waivers were handled with, we understand that you may, this does mean what you think it means. And if you need more time to implement that, here's a waiver that the commission is willing to give you. And that was, that's, that's the ones you voted on. And then there was a third category that said, we understand how you could be misreading this. This is what our guidance says on it, but we will come back and we initially said in January or February. So that's where we are to, to make potential tweaks that reflect that. So this is, this is that third category is all these editors. That's the intent. If you feel we're going beyond that as a commission, we of course don't need to, we're not wedded to this particular language. Can I make a suggestion? Can we proceed, not get stuck on first reasonably. I think proceed with Mina's work. It sounds as though I hear you saying we want the AG's office to review. I absolutely respect the contributions that the AG's office has made in our regulatory process. It's been very cooperative. And I know that they have, they have sent it in, in writing to me, how much they've appreciated being able to contribute. It sounds as though Mina's suggesting that they could still contribute to the regulatory obligation process. Can we proceed? Or do you want to, do you want to stop this process now? I think we, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I'm just going to. Thank you. I think it's okay for Mina to continue to walk us through. These proposed changes to get the conversation started, but I don't anticipate as one commissioner being prepared to take a vote on them today. I think what's missing for me as I alluded to earlier. You know, I understand that you're bringing these to us today to respond to some of the concerns we raised in the, some of the initial discussions, but I don't really know what those concerns were. Like, so I need to be refreshed as to what those concerns were. So there's, you know, in terms of framing, I just don't, I don't have that. For instance, on one of the ones we're going to be talking about is the seasonal advertising. I don't know that that came up in any of the discussions that we had at being sort of an exclusion, you know, to the advertising to dormant, you know, accounts. So that's, that's where I come from. I just, I just don't have enough context to really fully consider these amendments today. And just to spare you the time later, I'm going to feel the same way about the next set that we're going to be reviewing in terms of moving the lines. So commissioner Skinner, two things. I do plan to try my best to refresh everyone's memory on, on particular comments as we go through. I expected that to be part of the presentation today. On the next one, just for forecast foreshadowing that one. That's exactly all you did. That is raising a brand new issue. So they're explaining it. And so I do not expect that there will be anything more than a discussion on the line moving, I think is where legal it's on that one. The, so. Actually, before you keep going, I just want to add on, I think it's fine. And I think it's productive actually to keep going and start this conversation. One of the things that might be helpful for me is if you can, if, if someone in legal can send me the date and the link again for that roundtable. So I can refresh my memory sort of independently, right of what the conversation was. And then to the extent that some of this language, it's important to remember that. I'm not saying this is the first time that we're, I'm not saying that it's the first time that we're doing this, it's the first time that we're doing this, it's our first time that we're doing this. We're not just saying that, but I just want to emphasize that we, we know that we've rejected the first time, but you're, you're recommending, potentially putting back in. If there's a way to, when you redline it. Color code if this is language that an operator asked for, you know, so that we know where it's coming from. Cause to commissioner mayors point. If it's sort of something legal came up with as a resolution versus one hour. happy to do that by and large these are resolutions rather than redoing something but if and to the extent I can I can you know easily remember that here I will I'll try to do that as well. Madam Chair is it okay then to go on to the next section? Yeah thank you and so we are moving on to page 137 correct? Yes this was a this was really more of a formatting change because this was the the one part of this exemption that I'm sorry not exemptions the requirement on consent that was discussed quite a bit is do we need to ask for consent for you know if I if I get consent to use your data for you know some third party activity do I need to ask it for each one or categories etc and the commission had been clear in the reg in section d that it was categories it was cleared its guidance we're simply moving it up to make it the section number three Commissioner Skinner we did I and I you know I know you you have many more meetings and many more topics than we do so I I do have some recollection of this topic coming up this is this one is a purely putting an FAQ answer into the text issue there were again asserted confusion or asserted vagueness by some of the operators that a period of dormancy could be anything it could be anytime someone doesn't bet for a while and is that what dormancy means and then there was a suggestion of well does it mean dormancy in the treasurer's mindset right and a sort of abandoned funds me a method and the the one example that kept coming up is what does it mean if to us is what does it mean if someone hasn't been a while but might just pick pick wagering back up so we try to provide the example that is is what I recall the Commission saying was not an issue again I I think dormancy is dormancy you know we we we did recommend the regs the way they were the first time but to the extent that there's any clarity needed it's it's to emphasize this policy guidance I'm with you mean a dormancy to me is dormancy and I just feel like this might be an exception that swallows the rule like how do you define it you know what is it is it which sport teams it's certain four teams is it seasonal in terms of time of year like I just feel like that's a slippery slope and to me dormancy is dormancy I have a memory of commissioner skinner you racing this issue which is interesting to me because I thought it was a good point you don't remember it I feel like it was you yeah I you know I'm gonna sign on to commissioner O'Brien's request to have that link circulated I think to all commissioners I think it would be helpful for us to go back and look yeah I'm not sure if it was during the round table could have been during another meeting too okay that's one thing mean it was it was a series of meetings in addition to the round table right that this emerged I believe that's right and there was there was a conversation specifically on the you know the waiver requests and voting through the waiver requests in addition to the round table and of course there was a the promulgation process itself this reg was written initially over the summer right it was the first time this came out through the normal process and through comments it's a good time to say madam chair that to the executive director this is why it's very important for us to keep pushing these minutes yes those quickly thank you for saying it yes yes thank you um um shall I keep going um I I actually felt that this clarified that discussion in a helpful way to me but I might be on my own here um mission I know I think is off right now but uh yes I guess we should continue um the the next one again this is in the spirit of clarifying what was said during the waiver process um is on page 138 this is that subsection e um there was a one of the prohibitions is um using patrons personally identifiable information to promote or encourage specific wagers or offers based on um an algorithm that is known or reasonably expected to make the platform more addictive on this one I will say there were comments suggesting that we can't do this at all because we use we use algorithms all the time how can we know and what I would say uh what our response to that wasn't I think during the waiver conversation is I think that's misreading the the regulation in two ways one it's if it's known to be making it more addictive as opposed to simply sorting data uh it is true that algorithms sort data then that's an issue the clarifier here is again one that I think would have been implied into the reg if this if enforcement were ever taken that it is not simply a um a study somewhere has said that and therefore you're liable but that you would know but we do want to emphasize that we the other ass was to take the reasonably expected to know out and we don't feel comfortable taking that out because we don't think ignorance of of the research ought to be a defense to do it something so that this was really a another one that isn't putting the implied into and making it explicit was a suggestion the next deletion is really only a deletion because uh to to try to avoid any daylight between how data is stored retained shared that we keep kind of consistent uses it's now captured into uh it it's clear that's captured to 2507021 it didn't need a separate section so this was more of a correction on on the formatting than anything else there's no nothing lost with it there's not an intent to lose anything with it um subsection four on 138 came from um actually a question that was raised by uh director vandalin and a consultant uh unresponsible gaming if you recall at the round table um we had said that the operator initially in our draft that collect and aggregate confidential information and that was taken from other kind of models where where there's reporting um on say healthcare data or other things to make sure that you you're not uh including in public records in public files the the sense of information what the um um responsible gaming folks uh advised was that they were concerned that if they're saying if we sort of suggest aggregating at this threshold point it might limit the access to individualized safety uh you know and um anonymous single entries or something else that might help provide for interventions on responsible gaming so they were pretty adamant that we would move aggregate from it um we we did up up front and instead added the the intent here was to make sure that if the commission is going to get a report that reviews it's not going to have somebody's personal um identifying information right so that that was the um the correction to that that right that came from responsible gaming um on commissioners i'm just gonna so you'll try a minute if you have a question or comment okay um on data sharing uh the changes you see are again trying to make you know to avoid any confusion that that that you cannot share more than your you you can't share something that you're not allowed to keep your you can't share you can't share for purposes other than the ones you're allowed to keep it's it's aligning all of the the different uses because that was a again a comment um an asserted confusion here that maybe these things are different and and how how should we treat them and so so that to avoid any doubt you know that there is or the same standards apply throughout um on page 140 um the um question that came up during the round table a comment i believe this might have been bet mgm but i i may be misremembering that um had suggested that they were uh their their council was wary of um being required you know they were they read this as potentially suggesting that there would necessarily be civil and criminal penalties for non-compliance with um some of the data security protocols that employees would have to face um i think any and potentially again probably mean the same thing but we try to to clear that up with our suggestion to make it clear it's sort of if any um so that's really what that's uh there um number four was one that the operators had also asked about during the round table had had mentioned uh in fact i believe one of the operators had asked for a permanent waiver and this was a response to that that as technology evolves um encryption or hashing may be state-of-the-art one day but may not be another day and so that there'd be some method to um to basically demonstrate to the commission that something just as good will work and maybe even better on a protection um on this particular one we talked uh with uh the commission's it we thought about it at legal and this particular one we wanted to put here for this group's discussion whether it's needed it is suggesting that an operator can ask for approval to do something different of course an operator can't ask to do something different by waiver already so we don't think this one's absolutely necessary but it would the reason to put it in would be to essentially make it clear that the commission will will hear other options if there are ones um but you again could hear that on a waiver standard as it is today um the um so i don't know if there's any thoughts or questions on that one before i i move to the next one um the next point is um that this sorry go ahead and wrap chair this is responsible gaming right um we are down no patron accents in 257 before sorry um this is on um there's some uh essentially um a couple of edits that you'll see through the rest of the document um were to reiterate throughout a requirement that was already there um and i think had come up during the i know i come up during the round table as a suggestion that it it may actually be helpful to have the base data behind uh behind a patron account or behind confidential information for the commission's own purposes and for the operators to have statistics and data on what's happening and what should concern me is if as a patron is if my data is leaked and someone finds out personal information about me or my playing behavior but as long as it's secured and anonymous it actually you don't need to take out of the database all of my activity or who i am or my demographics it would be but it would be anonymous so it wouldn't be linked back to me and so those edits are made essentially throughout the rest of of the reg um to clarify that based on the feedback was we understood it from the round table and the waiver records um but it still allows the response of gaming purposes to get beyond the correct this is this is when an patron has asked to erase their data or essentially have it be removed from the from the patron system um one of the clarifications of patrons really wanted was to make sure you know if someone decides to quit um sports wagering that's entirely you know fair game to say well you know take their data out of any system that might be visible or might be reachable through a network or anything else there are some reasons you might want to keep their personal data which are covered elsewhere for instance for you know criminal activity fraud etc but in general but in addition you wouldn't be getting very good statistics if you didn't know who was coming in and going out at least from just pure numbers yeah so um but that's correct if they're still um engaged in in wagering it wouldn't necessarily be entirely anonymized so that's responsible gaming couldn't reach it um 25705 this is at the top of page 144 um um what had to do with um the policy uh that is needs to be developed in the data program uh for each operator um again this is a clarification that maybe goes without saying and it's making the implicit explicit um that we're talking about personal identifiable information that they have access to not uh entire you know not anything else um and that was I think understood and implied in the in the regs before but what was a this one is a clarification that I believe came as at least a request at the roundtable and Commissioner Bryant earlier asked um if if we you know uh if the commission would like us to come back with comments uh that sort of reflect what was asked one thing we'll have to try to figure out is how to um they just want to be sensitive to it maybe it's not that may not be entirely possible is that some of these may have been comments made in the course of a back and forth during the roundtable with the commission as opposed to necessarily written comments so this is one that comes to mind as well we just want to make sure we're we're talking about the same thing um the um page page 144 um I view this one as in the and I suppose a couple of these are in the nature of making explicit something that's implicit again for the sake of avoiding a red herring uh there was a concern that was raised that while we can't publish our data security policies that would undo them and lots of entities publish our data security policies but they don't say and here's how you hack us you have to you there are limits on that and so this is just making that clear that you yes you have to say what your privacy policy is but obviously you do not have to include in it details that would compromise it um the I think the only other edit was a just a typographical one at the end so that that's really it thank you thank you Mina um I do recall a lot of these issues that you are seeking to clarify here commissioners I understand that you may want more time to go back and look at our work beforehand I'm looking for some guidance from you my apologies madam chair I thought that's where we had landed that we were going through this to start the conversation and then we would well I'm just confirming yeah I'm I'm sure quite certain that Nina would have loved it to be like okay let's move but um that's not where we landed I think so so madam chair just for the sake of sort of the legal side of that if you don't I apologize for the interruption is I think you know we certainly could see the process start here and if that was what was envisioned when we talked about the waivers is having these corrections kind of come in midstream but again I would just be very clear that in our view none of the changes here are intended to change or reduce obligations and so if the commission wants further time to think about this and wants to come back I just want to be clear that you know we're not suggesting these as edits that would alter what was said they would capture the waiver the capture what's in place so I just so that again if folks are listening at home they say well you know do I have to disclose you know to use that last example do I now have to disclose sensitive information no you still don't that's what the reg says but it we the question is whether the commission feels it's appropriate to add more of that language and that's the case except for a few minor like typos or corrections that's the case throughout that's certainly our intent that's you know there are additional you know minds and it's ultimately your decision if you think we did do something in a suggestion here that altered a meaning that's obviously but that that's the intent commissioners I'm going to ask what is it that you would expect the team to do or deliver differently after you have a chance to go back to our capes both the round table and any other relevant meeting what else would you need to get comfortable to consider what you mean is describing as really enhancing the clarity of our regulation anything in particular because we want to make sure it's productive next session madam chair I wouldn't be expecting the team to provide anything additional I think with the clarification that Mina gave it would just be helpful for some additional time to consider these amendments in relation to the earlier discussions and I just I want to I want to be clear I don't you know want to put anybody on the spot it's the opening paragraph in the memo talks about discussions that were had between the legal team the operators and the sports majoring division so right there you know I was kind of I was kind of stuck and going into this discussion thinking that these were amendments that are being that were being proposed that commissioners just didn't have the background on so I appreciate Nina your clarifying that for us and you know at the outset most of these revisions seem just fine but I would like the opportunity to take to take another look yeah I would I would add that I'm sitting here when I was reading it yesterday I was thinking about what what are the hair on fire cases right where are the operators coming in saying this has to be changed now right or we're going to be in violation or we're you know and and those aren't screaming at me right what I'm seeing is this some iterative work for the waivers run out so if there are any of those cases even right now if they're hearing me right now right point them up to our sports majoring division our legal division and let us know right so then I know what what's the most important of these changes and which ones are maybe just you know wish list right must-haves versus wish list I'm hesitant to to make changes on wish list items after we spend a lot of time on this I think what I'm hearing from you is that might be more clarified than necessarily and some alteration of our of our initial intent and I would just caution that you know again to the extent that these regs stay in place for them in the next 10 years or the next reg review right if there's an opportunity to clarify and be helpful over the course of 10 years that's not a bad thing you know we want to add clarity for our team's sake too never mind for the operator's sake so I I'm hearing that they that folks want a little bit of time to go back look and then there's a major point that there's something that's critical we should be knowing about that which is they're not particularly deliverable what about the AG's office do we want them to give their input along the way of you know in the ordinary course or do we want them to weigh in in in advance again with the understanding that they in many ways that it's a courtesy to us and you know it's a cooperative thing but I don't you know I want to impose on them either so no my guess is it's not an imposition given how active they were in giving us comments the first go around so I would just suggest that a proactive outreach to keep you know save the time so that we know next time we're going to come back and vote I'd like to know what that was rather than have it come up in the normal course of just posting out there yeah inconsistency is important and so I think in the past we've been proactive in that way so I don't see a reason to alter that and I think that was even before the regulations went out to public comment right yeah I think if I'm going to I'm going to just jump in I believe they reached out to us initially as opposed to us reaching out to them by the time correctly I mean that is the case right the AG's office and coming in so we can clarify that that's that's my recollection although as since I said I've been thinking these regs have been around for four years and might be that my memory is not perfect on it either but they were very you know and I and I do know that the AG's office has been really helpful on both this and the advertising and so we do want their input but I just wanted to be cognizant also of our process and however it keeps things going that's the only thing and so let's ask them and they'll let us know if they're also fine jumping in during the regular comment period too which I know they did but I remember seeing AG contents you know their input is is vital and just want to make sure we don't say could you get this done by tomorrow that's all and being cognizant of their time as well okay Nina have you got the marching orders on this pretty clear I believe so Carrie and the legal team and I will discuss and we'll kind of we'll take it from there but this is very helpful excellent work today thank you all right and I Carrie will figure out timing when we can revisit this maybe the agenda setting meeting on Wednesday you'll have some input for us on on these charges thanks so much and then we have the next one and Nina I bet you're you're on this one as well I am Madam chair and and I mean before I turn to it just as a you know by way of comment and apology and framing for the last one in the memo when we were talking about sports wagering division and operators meetings we did mean you know prior to the the waivers and so on at commissioner skinner we appreciate the feedback for the future of clarifying that timing better and so the reason I mentioned that is as we go into this one they're in the in the course of thinking about this disclosure issue in particular whether disclosure of an endorsement is enough to allow promotion of a particular bet or whether to stick with the existing language in 256 one of the other issues that we know is coming up in the industry is this issue of line moving and it kind of came up naturally and connected in a thought but but the regs are a little bit different and what is meant by this is that there is a concern again as as I alluded to before that as sports media and sports wagering become more and more integrated which we're seeing everywhere obviously not just Massachusetts that the risks of an odd or line being tampered with for lack of a better word or affected by what an operator or an operator's affiliate or endorsement partner or or celebrity endorser etc says or does is raised a lot of the early sports wagering regulations including your own can't focused on the concerns from the sports governing bodies about athletes doing something or or a referee doing something to affect the outcome of a wager but this concern I think has has been raised now more so given just how real time all a lot of this was so the question that we got sort of as a as a legal question is what do we have in place today that would protect patrons in the Commonwealth from manipulation of sports of lines in sports wagering and it should we be doing anything else and that is again this was framed for this meeting as a as a very preliminary discussion on especially that second point but also maybe a bit of a refresher now that we're a year and a half into into sports wagering of how the regs put together address this issue and that's really what the intention is of this discussion today so we went back on on our it's sorry Madam Chair and a few no it is much of solely for discussion okay yeah and so this starts at page 179 with a brief memorandum on this but then the regs accompanying it are not regs that are being changed there's no suggestion to change them but they're just here for reference so we know so you know what we're talking about with the particular regs in our view there are already several protections against this behavior and an operator an affiliate of an operator who does believe it's okay to to do to do something like this or to try to affect lines with their comments or what they put out in the media would be violating their regulations I start with 247 which is the standards for sports wagering there are a couple of provisions in here regarding how how wagers are identified and the odds and lines are set that get into this get at this issue for instance in the first instance when you're reviewing whether the commission can take in you can't improve of a particular wager or wager category there are criteria whether the outcome can be verified whether the outcome is not it's phrasing the negative is there an issue with it being affected by the wagers placed in other words is this more likely to be a win or lose or a particular payout based on the wagers that go into it so at the outset the commission has the authority to look behind particular wagers and say that are being offered and say or being proposed and say are these appropriate given that the the second is that there are sets of standards that would allow the commission to prevent placement of wagers on events that have been affected by unfair play line moving or other behavior and there's a broad discretion for the commission to utilize any information to consider so again if there is a pattern within a particular sport for instance that's not well regulated that where this might happen or that there is somebody has a creative idea of tying sports wagering to sports activity directly you know the more people wager we're going to put this person into the game kind of idea or something you could very easily say no to that as a starting point um and as I point out in the memo or we point out in the memo the other provisions of 247.03 allow the commission to ensure integrity after a wager is approved 247.03 10 through 12 allow cancelling or prohibiting bets if you are if it becomes clear that wager would be contrary to the interests of the commonwealth that's a very broad standard you also have broad authority to cancel or void wagers as you know as we discussed with 238.35 and these would be you know if there is evidence of tampering with a line if there's evidence of manipulation of the line that would be the route to punish or at least first correct for the sake of the patron and to punish that behavior and you'd have the full range of disciplinary and and you again it can take any information to account so this could lead to an investigation by the IB at the or the commission it could lead to to it could come from complaints it could come from just noticed data etc and then I would simply add that the internal control regulations also require the operators to be on guard for these issues and make sure their employees are not and and affiliates are not acting in ways that are affecting odds in an inappropriate way for instance they have to be integrity moderate procedures I have to be a regular moderate for regular changes in odds that could signal that there is manipulation so there there's a range of things that are there if there is continued interest the commission could certainly make it clear you know in a more explicit way you know what it would consider line moving or not that the pros of that obviously are to I think clarify what is already true today similar to our last conversation the negative part of that that I would just mention is as this is an evolving field and these standards really have to do with a more open-ended idea of fairness and fair play over defining it and over defining what cost use line moving and what doesn't could lead you into a path of having um you know technical arguments being made back to you well you didn't say this was line moving so I'm gonna so we thought it was okay um and that's that's what you have to be careful with I think at the moment this is a you have a sort of robust regulatory structure that could address this if an issue were creating problems um but you know again it's something to just bear keeping an eye on so this is this is perhaps the most uh this is sort of just planting the seed of this conversation more than anything else at the moment I think it's a very important issue to discuss but at this point Mina or anybody from our sports wagering department I have not heard that this has been an issue at all in massachusetts am I wrong about that and quite frankly it hasn't I know it's been talked about in other jurisdictions but I don't that you are brought up today I am not aware of a particular instance in massachusetts sports wagering or um others on the call from staff might might know of something I'm not aware of uh but I I tend to agree with commissioner hill and I would just be uh explicit again that if if we got a call at a and k from uh general council Grossman saying hey we need help with enforcement because the following facts happen somewhat you know uh I would point to these regs and say you have the enforcement capability today to do it so it's not that you don't have it it's um again because the issue is at least being raised as a topic of discussion nationally uh if there is any interest yet to do more I think the topic was raised for insurance purposes commissioner hill so that's the good news because you make a really important point um and then uh what we've got is a legal analysis saying wearing good shape I guess the only thing I wonder and this is not just a chance that there's a deficiency but I'm going to turn to the commissioners in particular to share fine is there any affirmative tools we should be doing in terms of monitoring or auditing or anything like that in this area you know over time so it's funny I mean as all this talk about AI and algorithms and everything else I was thinking about that like is there just something that we should be thinking about keeping abreast of in terms of are there more proactive reviews that can be done and I'm I would think and hope that the operators themselves you know would be at the forefront of this to protect the integrity of the system but um and and I'll be in the independent monitors um right so I think it's that it's very clear that the industry recognizes that it's only sustainable if it's an industry with integrity I mean I think we all understand that and then we're here to to provide safeguards and supports that was the only thing I was thinking and is there anything we should be keeping you know looking forward from either a regular point of view or another request down the road uh just making sure that no I mean I for me I think the the the most vulnerable area right now is what we talked about in the very first right right which is this whether you call it cross-populating integration of the media and the betting markets that's where the risk comes from and I think that that's developing right so that's not that's something I think we all are going to keep our eyes on I think everybody in the industry is but I think I mean from from what Mina's saying I think our regs would allow us to jump in and be proactive or to respond if an allegation came in after the fact that we needed to avoid bets based on something like that and to that point the operators really need to be establishing their guardrails right you know it's commissioners I mean I think they sure felt that was the right the right observation commissioners Jenner I think she went right did we lose her or is she just off we don't see her let's just get her a chance to come back she may have had a technical issue yeah I'm not seeing her on the list of participants no I think she guess we just lost her just technically well if she beat me to the punch asking for a break I'll just throw out there that I was just about to ask for that so no but I don't think she would have just turned off her video I think it must have been no I think she dropped yeah meaning um Mina carry anything else on this that we should be thinking about do we land where you thought we might land Mina on this I well I can't make a clever enough line moving joke here but I um I um no I think this was the point of the discussion is just to make you aware of make you aware that this is a discussion that's out there um and explain the tools for it and again um perhaps you know learning from some of now that you are regulating an industry that's in place as opposed to getting regs up to put the industry in place um we're we're working with a legal team as things like this come up to make sure that we're staying ahead of of issues before they do and this is an excellent area carry to be reaching out to you know other jurisdictions are observing what they're doing and I know that we've done that legal team but again anything innovative this is welcome Tom do we have um do you just came in do we have an update on it seems like Commissioner Skinner's just having some connectivity issues that's what I thought all right um so with that this might be a good place for us to pause I think um we'll we'll have our way in afterwards but um it is noon I wanted to make mention of a possible agenda adjustment we are slated to hear from IEB which would be a relatively short presentation we could do that now but I don't want to do that without Commissioner Skinner and then um our GEU plan to do a security convene and if we were to but so vote in executive session on security general security issues that we've been discussing at the end of this meeting as they as you know um there has been a death in the family of one of our GEU members and folks do want to get to the wake at the end of the day uh and so we could start right after lunch maybe right after the IEB presentation with that executive session and I don't think it will interrupt the course of the rest of the day because we're doing pretty well in timing uh commissioners and Todd how does that sound I think that sounds like a good plan okay and um we want to be cognizant that we do have the attorney general's office joining us but we're going to have probably an hour's worth of casino reports in between I think the executive session for the IEB a little bit developed so we can find what if we came back that um we can get noticed to Commissioner Skinner for lunch break right now 12 12 30 does that work for you am I hearing thumbs up I see works for me hearing okay and Madam Chair I'm here I'm just acting by phone you get a chance now to just say um ask Lena or Jerry for any clarifications on the last presentation uh we um kind of left it that we stopped wearing good shape I don't know what you when you what what you last heard I'll accept that thank you and and review what I missed my apology oh no no problem um but we're going to take our lunch break now from 12 12 30 we'll come back here from IEB and then go to um we'll vote to see if we want to go into executive session for the security item which is the last item on the agenda number number 10 okay and then we'll continue on all right thank you everyone appreciate your time thanks Mina thank you Madam Chair you know good afternoon thanks Dave good afternoon everyone and Dave Sousa or Tom Mills are we live now are we all set we we are live chair okay great thank you so so making sure I have everyone here we have it um this is a uh reconvening of the Massachusetts Game Commission we started our day at 9 30 so I'll do a roll call because we're holding this meeting virtually commissure Brian good afternoon good afternoon I'm here good afternoon Krishna good afternoon I'm here good afternoon Krishna Skinner good afternoon and good afternoon Commissioner Maynard good afternoon okay so we're going to um as I indicated right before the break just swap out our agenda a little bit I think I'm going to turn first to IEB does that make sense still um Director Monahan and then we'll turn to item 10 um and we'll decide whether or not we want to go into executive session I want to note um commissioners that you will need to go to your email because um a memo uh the format which you you're going to become very used to from IEB on the foreign non-elegional compliance matters just was inadvertently kept out of the um other packet today and so um I think that Mills can make sure that it gets included and it's relatively short do what we need to pause on this and do the other item first it could be proceed commissioners I'm comfortable proceeding Madam Chair thank you objection to that and and I did get I did get a email so okay excellent everybody all set then um with Director Monahan and her team's guidance okay I got a thumbs up there and I'm seeing hearing no objections excellent all right then I'm going to turn it right to you Director Monahan thank you thank you Chair um today we have four potential non-compliance events to bring before you to seek your guidance on how you'd like to proceed with those matters and just as a quick reminder the options are to assign the matters to the IEB for further action pursuant to 205CMR 232 to move the matters into regulatory hearing or to schedule a time to go through a process that's set out in the statute 23 and section 16 whereby the commission can issue a civil administrative penalty um and then sort of notify the the operator of that penalty uh and with that I will turn this over to our interim Chief Enforcement Counsel Kathleen Cramer and her team thanks Caitlin good afternoon Chair and commissioners uh as Caitlin noted we have four matters for you today uh you'll see in the memo that the last one is uh essentially divided into two subcategories uh it's the same alleged type of non-compliance but involves two separate events so you'll hear briefings from both Deandra and Zach on those two two matters so I'm going to turn it right over to my team and starting today for us is Nate Kennedy good afternoon commissioners good afternoon Madam Chair you need a little roll call um uh uh what is the word I'm looking for this is our first meeting with with Nate yes I should have probably roll out share yes you wanted to quickly introduce Nate uh we've had a chance to meet but not publicly so thank you I'm not saying roll call because that's what we do a roll out thank you yes I should have done that so thank you for for reminding me yes we have Nate that joined us recently as Enforcement Counsel with the Chief Enforcement Counsel's office Nate came from the Bristol County District Attorney's office where he worked in uh appeals and also handled some trial matters uh prior prior to that he also worked in private practice and was also assistant district attorney in Plymouth County so he brings a lot of experience to us we're thrilled to have him and thrilled to welcome him to his first live stream today well welcome Nate I didn't need to interrupt you but we are just delighted to have you join the team and and thank you and and we look forward to your first public appearance thanks so much thank you very much I'm presenting to you today a alleged violation of non-compliance sports wagering coming from vet MGM this vet MGM is a category three sports wagering licensee and this non-compliance event involved wagering on whether players would receive yellow or red penalty cards across multiple soccer leagues and violation of mass general law chapter 23n section 3 and 205 cmr 247 01 2 e uh the total number of wagers here was over 2500 wagers uh it was part of a parlay offering it involved over 42 000 dollars uh in total handle and it occurred between March 2023 and December 2023 so over a period of uh quite a few months ago so with that uh I'm happy to answer any questions additionally but we'd be looking to the commission for guidance on how to proceed further uh before we turn to questions Nate are you able to reference any statute uh relevant statutory or regulatory measure is that okay Kathleen yes this was a violation of statutory violation of mass general law chapter 23n section 3 as well as the regulation 205 cmr 247 01 2 e right and that's in in the dot I just wanted to make sure in in terms of section 3 the exact language so it's from the definitions actually it's in the sports wagering definitions portion and it says specifically that the there would be a prohibition with outcome dependent um excuse me it's a section three of sports wagering definition it's on prohibited prohibition on injuries penalties player discipline discipline or replay review um so that's the section specifically of 23 and section three okay thank you commissioner Brian thank you Nate and I'm sorry to put you on the spot but you managed as we knew perfectly thank you so much commissioner Brian uh I'm just curious if you can tell us whether this was self reported or discovered a different way and this was uh discovered by our sports wagering division it appears that it also uh came to us via the major league uh soccer they had contacted director band indicating they asked us to please uh prohibit these offerings obviously the offerings were already prohibited so director band sent an email to all operators at that point reminding them uh that this is a prohibited offering that MGM went back noticed that they had been offering in fact uh this prohibited prohibited um type of wager so did we find it independently or was self identified after Bruce sent the alert out so it was it's a little uh the timeline's a little convoluted in the sense that we were notified by major league soccer we then sent the email as I said however we went back ourselves as well and checked and noted that uh bet MGM was offering this so it was uh kind of a simultaneous MGM bet MGM noticed that they were offering it our sports wagering division also made note of the offerings um I think our initial our initial report was from December 19th uh that's when we opened up um internally the uh or noticed the the offering was yes the incident and have we our other operators uh Commissioner O'Brien I'm just going to pause for a second I'm going to turn to um Director Monahan I know that we have been advised that given our role we do want to be careful about the degree of questions that we can ask are we okay with Commissioner O'Brien's question and I have no problem with it but I'm turning to our director um and I would you know defer to legal it sounds just Commissioner O'Brien like you were going to ask if any other operators had similar issues right like is this are we going to see a strand like this or is this a question an isolation for us to determine which path to take right that doesn't relate specifically to this um potential non-compliance matter so I think it would be an acceptable question but I would defer to Todd on that yes absolutely I think that question is perfectly fine I think you just want to avoid questions about this specific incident and uh further details about that uh you know within the region yeah yeah so I guess that's my question is is this as we're deciding which path to take is this um we're going to be multiple operators or is this just that mgm I can happen on that at this point uh commissioner we are only aware of that mgm but uh it's certainly deferred to director band if he has more information if he's received additional information that as to this specific type of wager at this point I think the idea is only aware of that mgm okay thank you director band do you know anything and no you're all set you're on you there's sorry at this point it's just mgm okay that mgm all right okay commissioner is any other questions that you you know I have a question my level oh sorry commissioner's gonna guess hi Nate you and I haven't had a chance to meet in person or virtually um so it's a nice it's nice to meet you nice to see you um I'm gonna ask you to reiterate the time frame that this wager was open please so this was offered from the inception of sports wagering so it was march 2023 until director bans email to all operators in december of 2023 so I believe the exact dates are march 10th of 2023 the offering was permitted as uh and so straight through till december 17th of 2023 multiple events right oh yes this was uh over uh I think 2600 total offerings yes the 2564 that's placed thank you okay any other questions commissioners ma'am chair yes I don't have a question um of Nate would I have a question of can you go over the three options one more time I was having issues with my computer but now it's been cleared sure is that a question for for me commissioner uh through through the chair to you yes okay happy to go through the option so one option the first option would be for the commission to take this up as in a judicatory hearing so um what would happen is it would get scheduled for a hearing and then the parties would appear before you as as has happened previously with some of these non-compliance events the second option would be for you to refer it to the IEB pursuant to 205 cm r232 and based on that reg what the IEB would do is look into the event further um determine if penalty was warranted if so it would um send a notification of that reach out to the to the operator about the penalty there would be an opportunity for conversation and then whether agreed upon or not agreed upon the ultimate recommendation would go to the operator and the commission the committee at which point the commission would um a review and determine whether it wanted to accept or not accept that recommendation so that would be the IEB path um and then the third path would be excuse me there's a provision in uh 23 and section 16 that would allow the commission to sort of probably not today but you could set another time to sort of sit down and based on some initial facts decide what you believe a penalty would be you would then notify the operator of that penalty at which point the operator would have the opportunity to uh either pay it and not contest it or ask for an adjudicatory hearing so that's a third statutorily uh a statutory option for the commission you have an idea of what you'd like to pursue? The second option I think is what I'd like to see send it to IEB have them do their investigation come up send it to us and if we have questions that we want to move forward we'd be able to do that. I want to see this move to a adjudicatory hearing I think um we haven't heard a case of this kind um at this point and I'd like the opportunity um first and foremost to really understand what happened here because I do consider that the um extent an extended period of time um that the wager was available over um multiple events and um secondly uh I'd like the opportunity to set the tone um as to how you know I feel and this commission feels that those cases should be handled by IEB really just to set some guidance in that regard. Thank you Commissioner Skinner um thank you Commissioner Hill, Commissioner Brian, Commissioner Maynard what are you thinking? Commissioner Maynard you want to go first? Or Commissioner Brian? Who's ever? I saw she was off though. I was probably looking at you and she switched right then Commissioner Brian. It's fine um so this is this is one I'm on the fence because I would like us to set the tone but at the same time I think even yesterday's hearing exhibited sort of the defect in us grabbing adjudicatory without saying to IEB go look at it further and come back so I'd like the option where we direct IEB to conduct the investigation and come back to us and we make the final decision on violation and penalty. So that's kind of what I was sitting here thinking Commissioner Brian is I would like the full zone search uh I would like for the commission to own the disposition right and not just in a way of whether we sign off on the disposition that was brought before us but actually organically come up with the disposition as a group um so I guess I would lean towards option two with sort of a resolution in an option three way if that makes any sense. I'm going to ask the question of Caitlyn. Option two IEB does an investigation they come up with a recommendation it comes to us that means that there's no presentation of evidence before the commission in an adjudicatory hearing static so we would have to kind of accept all of um what was presented to the IEB and the questions you asked but we wouldn't really have an uh opportunity question with the second option is that correct. So the second no in the first instance potentially yes let me explain. So if it went to the IEB what the reg says is the IEB would do sort of again investigate further do a full some investigation um and then decide on what it thought would be an appropriate repercussion um and then there is the process at where that that notice does go to the commission and the operator um and then the commission would have the opportunity to approve it in which case if that was the situation um there would be no further evidence presented if the commission decided not to approve that amount based on the information it received in the in the recommendation memo uh basically it would start adjudicatory hearing process so the commission would then sort of sweep that into having a full blown adjudicatory hearing um and the third thing would be even if the commission uh oh actually no that's not true sorry I take that back so so that so the commission would have to sort of reject the IEB's recommendation in order to get to an adjudicatory hearing if the IEB chose or if the commission chose an adjudicatory hearing as we know it would just go straight to an adjudicatory hearing you'd hear witnesses and gather information um so so it's and I may be a misunderstanding you commissioner brian but I don't I don't think there's a middle ground where we can just present more without a full hearing um and without a recommendation if that makes sense tonight can I ask this question please and I'll turn to commissioner brian we did have this issue pop up yesterday where we wanted no more fulsome investigation on certain you know to to learn more facts into question additional members of the operators team as witnesses uh and and IEB has been instructed or directed by the commission to do that I'm gonna come back with that fulsome report um could we right now if we were to adopt the same approach as as what we were doing with that could we right now ask for that fulsome investigation um and then that's used for the um that's used for our adjudicatory hearing I'll tell you what I'm thinking that's that's what I'm looking for yeah I'm thinking of the win matter in terms of procedurally the directive to do the investigation right up the factual report but then ultimately to the extent we wanted to question more and make the ultimate you know disposition and fines etc that was on us sorry to get so excited but that's exactly where my mind was yeah and I had that discussion yesterday um with director monahan because we're trying to figure out the right process going forward and I did use that as an example just now I also had it in my head because in that case to commissioner brian there are two parties yes so that would allow commissioners for you to still ask questions of the witnesses I think the efficiencies that we can accomplish with the second option are clear too I might be in the same camp as commissioner skinner right now because this does feel like a um an alleged violation that uh you know it's telling if in fact we've learned that as that's been reported to us that the the league actually reached out in which we give them great credit for because they're looking after uh their players um that the nature is different than what we've heard so I I like commissioner skinner's analysis of setting the tone but I also like the efficiency of option too but I think in this case I might yield on the efficiency all right well so can I can I follow up on that chair and so I I'm with the two of you I understand what you're getting at um you and um commissioner brian and even commissioner maynard um but I just in the context of the three options that were laid out this doesn't sound like one of them although it might very well be a variation um in that um in the case we heard yesterday or started to hear yesterday and sent it back for some additional information to IAB we had already determined that we wanted to move forward with respect to that matter as an adjudicatory proceeding so I think that would be the first step here and then um you know we could get to you know where where I think we all want to be is that we have a more fulsome investigation having been conducted by IAB before we actually hear the matter right so is there a next step that comes in with the what is the anticipated notice etc to your point goes out to the parties and then the question is do we then say yep IAB is a party we're going to proceed that way where they conduct the investigation and report back to us I think the operator has the opportunity to be heard percent witnesses cross exam etc so I think I think I think it's what what I'm hearing and just just so we'll clarify is that you know the commission would like to proceed to a new judicatory hearing but as was discussed yesterday would like a really fulsome investigation with interviews and um you know potentially documents additional documents from the IAB and in that case the IAB would be acting more as a party more as a you know in a prosecutorial role potentially if it if it found that it there was the violation that it believed um that is sort of in contrast to the way we've been doing these adjudicatory hearings to date where the IAB has actually served as a witness so the IAB has conducted an investigation and created a report and then presented that report but has not acted as a party in so much as it's calling its own witnesses it's presenting a case it's affirmatively stating that it believes there's been a violation of the statutory regulation so all I would ask from the IAB's side of things is if the commission would like the IAB to act as a party here um that it just sort of affirmatively say so and so that we know that we're all on the same page moving forward um and if that's the case uh you know I would I we can mark this up for another meeting um I would ask you know the same question with regard to the other adjudicatory hearings that have been scheduled thus far would you prefer that the IAB act as a party or as a witness because there are differences there and I guess the only thing as point of clarification on that Caitlin is I do feel like in the wind matter the direction was come back with the factual record and it wasn't so much you also making a finding of a violation that that was still left to the body of five and so I guess that's the only distinction yes you were a party calling the witness's during the report but that the ultimate finding of any violation and and penalty was left to us 100 so so the commission would absolutely make the ultimate determination as the body over the adjudicatory body of whether you know one whether or not there was a violation and two if there was a violation what the penalty would be but just again just to make sure I'm 100 sure if we were a party the IEB would be saying we believe there is a violation we're now presenting evidence to you to determine whether you agree or not as the we're like it's like the bench we are the ones in that circumstance who would say I find the evidence sufficient or not absolutely so we would the IEB would come to the commission it would say we believe there has been a violation of XYZ here are the facts we're going to call witnesses you know the the other party would have the opportunity to call witnesses to cross-examine witnesses this is all contemplated in 101 and then the commission would sit as the adjudicatory body and determine whether believe there's a violation or not right yes I can't I'm just add to that there's nothing inherently wrong with any of this we do have a regulation that sets out what the process is and that's why we've proposed these options it's it's grounded in the actual regulation that talks about the IEB's role of making recommendations and what have you the overlying concern with all of this and the reason it was designed as it was which just to ensure that the commission doesn't prejudge a matter that will ultimately end up at an adjudicatory proceeding so I don't there's nothing inherently wrong of course with the IEB fully investigate something and then coming to you as long as we're careful when that happens for the commissioners not to say not to voice an opinion or express an opinion about the merits of it whether it's it's true it's not true it's bad it's not bad what the fine might be what it might not be any of that kind of stuff so with with those additions I think this is certainly workable we might need to take a look at the regulation and adjust it now that it's kind of the picture is becoming a little bit clearer as to what the most efficient and proper process might be so I just wanted to add that I think that this is entirely workable though I know Justin did you have something you wanted to add to that before that sorry if I might just follow up on what Todd just said sure I think Justin was going to follow up on let me be clarified but go ahead thank you I'm Todd I'm glad you mentioned that because that's exactly what I was sitting here thinking when we shifted to this new approach whereby we're getting an oral sort of summary from IEB to decide which path we want to take to consider if you recall we had been getting those reports those non-compliance reports which gave us you know a little bit more a little bit more detail in terms of what happened who you know what the reports say that was submitted by the operators and I know that we talked about bias and the risk of that and so I don't see what is being proposed now any different than that so I just I want to make sure we're being consistent because I was you know I'm satisfied now and I'm not suggesting that we revisit that decision because Caitlyn and I did have an opportunity to connect on it but I think that process is just as good as the one that we're proposing now and that at least we would have a lot more information on which to base a decision as to which of these three paths we want to take sorry Justin and thank you no worries no just a second what what's what I said here I've had conversations like that yes I have an echo so we want to hear you sorry I'm not much of a tech advisor so is it still echoing yeah it might be the if you go into the microphone there there's the echo canceling option or try meeting your doc maybe is this no one no one gets nervous over this take your time do I still have an echo I just tried switch you got it okay good thank you um no problem uh so no I was just saying I did have conversations with Caitlyn about this and the posturing of these non-compliance events from a sort of party versus witness aspect and I'm in full agreement I think it logically it makes sense for IEB to function as a party with these non-compliance events and in the way that's being laid out it does make um sort of the collection of the record and uh the assembly of the materials that the commission will review uh a little more straightforward uh because you have a you have a moving party and in the commissioners will essentially be sitting in judgment as as the body that will eventually oversee and render whatever you know essentially verdict in the matter so it makes a lot of sense I have no objection legally I think it makes a lot of it it's quite logical Justin can I ask a follow-up question um uh council grossman suggested maybe we need a reg check um uh red fix I felt as though perhaps in my conversations with you really preparing for yesterday this question came up only because of the the from in terms of my role of of chairing that was it you know it's always been a little bit of a challenge when it's not party and so are we okay on the record do would we be able to proceed on right I'm madam chair I'll I'll double check it but I I don't I don't think there's an obstacle to doing this within our ranks it's it because there are there are many instances when uh attorneys for the commission do function as parties in in other lower level judicatory hearings before they come before you so having that at a sort of a higher level with these I wouldn't see as necessarily being a legal obstacle but I'll do a comprehensive review just to make sure there's no snafus in any of the regulations that would just seek to you know be in limit on anything we're doing here and I could also confer with uh director monahan about that right and then and bring in uh Todd because Todd hasn't been thinking about this like the two of you because it just is kind of a new dark a new uh issue um commissioner skinner raises the fair question about consistency um and I can I'm also feeling that we don't have an issue there but could you address that Caitlin please director monahan absolutely um so I I understand what you're hearing commissioners saying commissioner skinner just to be clear um it would be consistent with the process that we put in place a few weeks ago so you'd be continue to be getting these sort of shorter overview overview briefs of potential non-compliance matters at the point at which you're deciding which path it should take if you choose for it to go to new judicatory hearing um you will receive the IEB's report um either as an exhibit or a pre-hearing brief we would just have to sort of again figure out the posture as a party but you would be getting that in the context of the judicatory hearing which makes it the appropriate time for you to start digging into the facts and getting all the those detailed facts because you are then sitting as the judicatory body so now we're back to our choices commissioner hill you started with um the the more streamlined one through IEB then we look at the nature of it again at a high level just um what are you thinking I haven't changed my mind I'm still where I was before okay commissioner maynard commissioner brian what are you thinking uh I would like it sent down to IEB for an investigation and then brought back to us I'll uh win that's where I am okay and uh so that's that's really option one um and um is it though I thought it was option two well option one always went to IEB for the investigation it's just the level of investigation it's the level I guess and that's basically the the sticking point for me is what we've gotten back is sort of a cursory higher level that then has required us to do the Q&A in that matter maybe during deliberations come back out ask for more information I feel like it's more efficient to say here is the scope of what we would like you to do go do it and report back and then have an auditory hearing the option two doesn't have an auditory hearing only if we if we disagree with their recommendation and they could offer yeah which I actually think is makes that an option two terribly inefficient at the end of the day but you know I think the idea is that we would probably put a lot of weight in IEB's recommendation so that's why there's the efficiencies there but number one I think maybe I'm over simplifying this I'm just seeing it is that we're giving a directive for the investigation to maybe go deeper than what had been done in the past yeah I mean if that's the procedural avenue is one with the specific directive and as commissioner Skinner said maybe there's another meeting right where the preliminary goes out almost like we did yesterday and we say you know what we need we want you to go do these invest interviews and doc requests and come back director monoham am I am I close here or am I often I will not be offended if I just completely misunderstood and I can't lean to I know that you've been working on these processes as well we'll both be off if that's the case that I'm sure if I get the way you see it I think I think I think I understand what commissioner brian is saying I may just be saying it in a slightly different way but getting to the same point so the direct ship if you know if the commission went with I the commissioner brian's recommendation the IEB would go do a very fulsome investigation interviews document collection the whole nine yards and and at the same time the legal department would work on scheduling an adjudicatory hearing when everything was ready it would get come to the commission via an adjudicatory hearing and in that in that adjudicatory hearing the IEB would act as a party the IEB would make a recommendation as to whether there was a violation of the regulation but it would or a statute but it would ultimately be up to the commission to determine if it if there was a violation of the statutory regulation and then if so what any penalty would be so what basically you'd schedule an adjudicatory hearing but also the IEB would be doing a more fulsome investigation and then serving as a party yeah and in the scheme of our options we're not creating one that's new under our regulation or are we creating what to be a poor choice I think we're just clarifying I think we're just clarifying the role of the IEB as a party or as a witness and I think that is entirely fair for the commission it's just to noted the IEB functions as witnesses and as parties in different hearings at different times so clarifying the role is I think appropriate okay well I don't really care if it's one two or three I like how she described it that's what I must say so the commissioner thank you for nodding your head help me out here so we can move this along yeah I'm you know I and when we did these regs a few weeks ago I worried about this exact conversation right and I hate the horns done by regs that we just put out two weeks ago right and then say well should we go back to the regs I just want it done the way that I think Commissioner O'Brien has described Commissioner Skinner I've heard the chair right like that's the way I want it done so you know looking at our general counsel's office however we get to there is how I want to get there I don't care what we call it one two seven twelve I don't care I want to do it that way Todd we'll turn to you now as general counsel yeah might need to digest some of this um a little bit um because we want to make sure of course that we are getting the commission the information that you would like so you can make a reason decision that's that's the bottom line period of the story the question is like which option is this how much information do you want at the outset like in a setting like this here today what would the expectation be as far as this presentation is concerned of course there are resource issues that they come into play at some point but I think Commissioner Maynard and in all I think we get the point for sure you've been very clear so that's that's very helpful and maybe if we can move through these four today we can circle back and make sure we have a really sound process in place for the next go through could could we do this instead of having to circle back because I think I'm like we're having a lot of circle backs today could we presume that this works and then you circle back if there is a question yeah as long as everyone's clear as to what this is I think Caitlin really outlined it well I see the other commissioners are nodding their heads Commissioner Skinner you nodding your head Commissioner Hill I think we're hearing you but I think it is just some expectation for a little bit more in this case so could we do it that way consensus move ahead pursuant to a plan set forth by Director Ronahan should there be a problem we mark it back up and revisit and then we get things going this is you know thank you to Nate for bringing this matter to us and we'll get going on it thank you thank you okay with that I think I think we're fine then okay thank you thank you just a different approach thanks so much okay then then that was 7a and just to clarify so I I believe if I'm counting correctly I have at least three commissioners in favor of moving to an adjudicatory hearing with the IB as a party but just want to clarify that that's where I think we had Commissioner Brian Commissioner Maynard Commissioner Skinner are you nodding your head and and I'm nodding my head Commissioner Hill was off the original option too thank you I don't think we really vote on these we just give direction so thanks appreciate it thank you all right now we're turning to item B Caitlin yes thank you chair the next matter we have an enforcement counsel Deandre Franks will present for the commission good afternoon madam chair and commissioners the IEB has conducted an initial review of a sports wagering non-compliance incident which occurred at the sports books at MGM Springfield which is a category one sports wagering operator the non-compliance involves six wagers one being a straight wager and five in the form of parlay wagers on a regular season UMass Amherst men's basketball game in violation of mass general law chapter 23 and section 3 in 205 CMR 247.01 2a2 the straight wager was for a little over $100 and the parlay wagers totaled around $80 and just as a reminder the commission was recently briefed on a similar issue a few weeks ago which the commission referred back to the IEB and at this point I'd ask the commission its preference for next steps as to how to handle this non-compliance matter commissioners thank thank you Deandre commissioners option one two three commissioner hill number two again commissioner brian i'm two on this as well remembering it with the other one we just did yeah and and commissioner maynard two because i think we've we've got a record now yeah well i agree by that could you expand we said it's set the tone yeah setting a record almost are set on on this matter similarly situated to this thank you i agree with that thank you so much for the clarification and then commissioner skinner i'm in agreement and there should be a option to matter okay excellent thank you thank thank you and if we're ready to proceed chair we have two more matters they involve the same type of non-compliance but on two different events so we have both uh deandre and zach that can talk about the different events that were offered uh so i'll go back to deandre to start sure um so the iv has conducted an initial review of two sports wagering non-compliance incidents involving bet mgm a temporary temporary category three sports wagering licensee the incidents occurred on two separate dates and both involved the table tennis elite series in which the markets were available for wagering after the outcomes of the matches were known which is in violation of 205 cmr 247.01 to h the first non-compliance incident occurred in june of 2023 and involved nine straight wagers valued a little over $1,600 and one parley wager valued at $20 the second non-compliance incident occurred in october of 2023 and involved six wagers valued at a little over $600 uh bet mgm has allowed all wagers to stand at this point um and uh again at this point i'd ask the commission its preference for next steps as to how to proceed. commissioner hill do you want to weigh in on this one? commissioner brian? uh yes um with with the comment that i thought illegal bets weren't supposed to be paid out so that's just a thought for the day out of me but the armor too on this and i think we'd set the tone on this one as well if i'm not mistaken i i i think so as well um just to be clear i don't think the commission has yet so the situation in this case is that and geonetic correction if i'm wrong um you know basically a game happened and then the results were allowed after the results were known and i thought we had one already out of ppc very very early on very very early on i thought we had one and they avoided it and then we dealt with it could we get clarity because i'm not remembering it either and if that is not the case then i'd like to see this move forward as an adjudicatory hearing so option one you know what we can do is why don't um we'll just pause on our decision making here and if somebody could find out um because it we might have flawed memories or a decision might be pending can't really become um and then we'll go uh to item 10 right now as a matter of timing and then swing back to this issue is that okay everybody feeling flexible on that uh madam chair that's perfectly fine can i just add one timing note for you for consideration we have a series of matters involving the attorney general's office coming up my understanding is their availability is between the window two to four so i just wanted to mention that yeah i've been in touch with them i've got them very much on my mind okay very good yeah thanks so much okay right now i'm going to um prioritize our GEU team um in the wake that they need to attend so uh you know commissioners we do have to consider whether we want to go into a separate session i know mills and um they are available to help us uh but in terms of item 10 uh direct amount of hand do you want to set it up uh yes absolutely so um this is a conversation let me just pull up the agenda apology so make sure i get the language correct um that's that's okay um so this is a matter related to the use and deployment of security personnel or devices or strategies with respect there too at on core boston harbor mgm springfield on plain rich park casino um specifically with regard to firearms and that is relevant for all properties the firearms issue and then uh parking garage security which is specific to mgm so um in light of um excuse me i lost that in light of uh gl chapter 30a section 21 e4 we would ask for an executive session on that matter and previous executive sessions have have occurred um on the same topics um under that that section of the statute that's right so commissioners for of course to from us to move on this i have to read that language into the record and it's the commission anticipates that it will meet an executive session in accordance with gl chapter 30a section 21 a4 to discuss the use and deployment of security personnel or devices or strategies with respect there to an on core boston harvard mgm springfield and plain rich park casino specifically with regard to firearms that all the properties and parking secure garage security mgm springfield and in this case unlike of the agenda the public session of the commission meeting would reconvene at the conclusion of the executive session uh and i and i do see now um uh detective lieutenant uh leo and uh lieutenant o'brien thank you gentlemen do i have a motion please madam chair i move that the commission go into executive session on the matter for the reason stated by the chair second any questions thank you directly on hand um commissioner o'brien i commissioner so hi commissioner skinner i and commissioner maynard i vote yes so we will go into executive session and i think it i'm imagining it's kind of a half an hour discussion perhaps maybe not that long uh director monahan is that fair i think that's fair to set expectations when we come back we um anticipate going to the casinos um uh unless the ag's office is ready we're just going to have to figure it out in no time uh i'm available by phone if this if there's anyone who is giving us further time instructions time okay thank you tom yeah yeah you'll uh the relevant parties will be moved into a breakout room and a screen will be put up for the public um just ask for your patience um and we'll let you know um if you need let us know i'm sorry if you need any help but you should see a message pop up here in just a moment thank you thanks everyone all right i think i've got everybody in there that was included on my list if you have not received an invitation join the executive session other just chime in here set feel free to send me a message and i can move you over thanks very much everybody okay day i'll set wait i flip back on the screen thank you okay this is um thank you everyone this is a reconvening of the Massachusetts gaming commission and we just do a quick world call we just got done a productive executive session and we thank everyone for their patience but commissioner brian i'm here i'm just looking commissioner hell i'm here commissioner maynard i'm here and commissioner skinner uh a little out of order but i'm here i'm sorry you know what it was is if i heard his door so i got distracted i was watching him coming in sorry that i'm out of order thank you um yeah see we both need water but just getting hers now um thank you everyone for your your patience we'll get started um we are going to turn to um chief um gelaney item number eight but before we do so i don't want to forget kaitlyn i don't know if um we have that item seven d if we could hold um what should we go for uh we we have an answer we we spoke with legal um legal label to get an answer on excuse me whether the commission has taken up this regulatory issue before it has not actually seen this this reg so with that i actually think it could take two minutes to finish this up but we can also wait and do that at a time this works i think i think let's take let's let's get it done um so uh commissioners you remember what the matter is the rest with that said we have not we have not visited this before so it's curious because i have a vivid memory of when we had the drachnings wager them saying you've taken this up before and because it was the ppc and it was a it was an after the event being over uh christa ron i did look back at all the decisions from last year and is this one still pending i don't i don't look at the notices right jesson i look at all the notices for every decision from last year and non-address this particular reg so that would that would encompass whenever it's pending i think we have to their pending but it's it's not one of those things so just as a cleanup matter i think we need to go back and look because i'm pretty sure that ppc had an episode where this happened and they immediately voided um but i thought we captured that in part of our dispositions but you're telling us and you think you have the marimat no i'm not thinking of pascaba i'm thinking of um because dracking specifically said you have dealt with this reg before um and it was the request to void it was voiding in that and it was and i said that was a different context because that's what that was but um i'll go back and you may be right that you may be right that it has happened before i don't know what i think it may have happened with regard to like a waiver or something but i don't think the commission took it up as an adjudicatory hearing exactly the difference i think in terms of consistency is we've had this happen before and we've talked about it but i don't think we brought this up as a non-compliance matter for them and we're bringing it up i think that's right just something to keep in mind as we go forward on this with all that said i still believe it's it we could just send it over as is an option to madam chair i do have just a motion with here if you want um to provide any clarification i think that they're referring to psi psi sorry yeah and it was a void and i think it's a different wreck but it was it's a void and a different wreck she's speaking very softly avoid but avoid because it was already the event was over right right yeah right and so this with that was sort of what we've waited it this is now being treated non-compliance and i'm wondering is it because they didn't catch it or we caught it like there's a different treatment just what i'm saying i think i think my understanding again i you know i think the process is sort of relatively new with regard to sort of sports wagering being identified of being notified of potential issue and then turning it to i e b depending on the severity of the issue so it may just have been that we didn't have this process in place in the first instance and it didn't go through a formal non-compliance process now that we have this process this issue has come to us so again you know happy for it to go to the commission happy to take into consideration how a previous one was handled um whatever the commission would like okay commissioners commissioner hill is saying option two mr skinner i'm still not clear on the backs um around the first incident how it differs from this one if at all so i'd be looking to get that information because i do i agree we we should stay consistent if we didn't treat um just we should take the system you know what i don't think it's a problem to roll this over to the 29th happily oh you're on mute everybody sorry um i'm happy we have the matter that that has it also involves a similar uh non-compliance where it was on wagering for after results were no but for the nfl not that table tennis which deandre presented but i'm happy to put it over given the nature it's a it's a regulation violation it's not a statutory violation but i'm happy to put it over for a different date and we can look into um you know what you were referring to commissioner bryan and see yeah past that precedent or practice is how that has been handled and then come back okay i would like that and you're hearing the reasoning is is that the commissioners have prioritized setting a tone so to the extent they've already given some direction that's really important to us so all right does that make sense everyone are we good on that okay thank you for um uh digging into that uh during of course the meeting and thank you for uh your work today uh attorney kramer and attorney mercer uh turning thanks and of course um nate has left i think he's left the room but we thank him as well all right so now we're going to turn to item number eight good afternoon chief delaney good afternoon thank you madam chair and commissioners so today we have a couple of items up in front of you today um we have the plane rich park casino quarterly report as well as the encore boston harvard quarterly report um we will be going into executive sessions to talk about uh capital expenditures for each of these uh like each of these licensees um so with that i will uh turn this over to ppc and for ppc we have with us uh north ground cell the general manager we have heidi uh yates akbaba who's uh vice president of finance and kathy lucas vice president of uh human resources and with that i will turn it over to north good afternoon north good afternoon just one minute let me get my screen share going okay good afternoon madam chair good afternoon commissioners uh plane rich park is pleased to present our update for q4 of 2023 joined today by heidi yates akbaba our vice president of finance as well as kathy lucas our vice president of human resources um i will hand it over heidi and she's going to walk you through the financials okay so you can see that uh we are very pleased with our first year of performance for sports wagering we ended the year at three million in taxable sports wagering uh with total taxes to pay to the commonwealth of 462 000 in gaming revenue we are also pleased with our performance in 2023 uh in q4 we had 37.9 excuse me 37.9 million in slot revenue versus the 36th in prior year state taxes of 15 one racing of 3.4 and total taxes in q4 of 18.4 this is a total of 931 000 in taxes over uh prior year quarter uh for the year uh what we've done is the 155 000 in total slot revenues total state taxes of 62 million raced uh taxes of 14 and total of 76 million 261 an increase of 6.1 million in year over year taxes paid to the state lottery sales so q4 we ended at 594 uh 279 q2 was five uh flashed year q4 uh 532 000 16 an improvement of 62 000 uh over prior year uh we did have one little thing that we did in q4 that improved sales a little bit uh we were able to upgrade five of the machines and reposition a couple machines on the floor and that led to improve sales um so these next couple of slides i'm going to talk about where we ended q4 and then where we ended the year as well in terms of uh some of our goals as well as performance in q4 our total qualified spend was 1.9 million 1 million 252 of that was spent in the state of massachusetts and 300 excuse me 655 794 was spent outside the state for the year our total qualified spend was 6 439 000 of which 3.8 million was spent in the state of massachusetts or about 59 percent and 2.6 was spent in states outside of massachusetts so our local spend so of the million two that i spoke about for q4 earlier uh 4 43 000 11 was spent in our host and surrounding communities and then for the year of the 3.8 that i referenced before that total for the year in spend was 339 355 so our vendor diversity so q4 we did meet our goal uh you can see that we missed in our women's spend and the minority spend and then surpassed in our veteran uh we do have a reason for that and that is that uh we lost a vendor right in the middle of q4 that um was both a wbe and an mbe the primary individual that owned that uh business uh retired and um some of this remaining family it was a family owned business some of the remaining family members chose not to re-register as an mbe so that certainly hurt us in q4 as it didn't give us a chance to recover any of that spend and then where we end the year is we end the year actually surpassing our goal so the annual goal is 21 percent of which uh we we hit that at 23 percent we beat that by 2 percent our wbe spend um was impacted a little bit by that q4 that number is actually 11.49 so about a half a percent off from that overall year uh goal for the year uh mbe we came in right where we were supposed to and vbe really helped us hit that 23 percent um by coming in at six percent on a goal of three and then here's where you can see the the hard numbers in terms of losing that vendor in q4 what that did to us uh you can see that we're down in the wbe and the mbe by 78 and 52 thousand respectively but the vbe uh we beat that spend related to a capital project we had going on in q4 and then the total qualified spend at 1,009 and then q3 of 2023 last year million seven so total qualified spend up 119,000 great thanks i appreciate it so on the compliance side for 2023 ppc prevented a total of 211 guests from entering the gaming establishment of that group 17 were minors 36 were underage and 158 had expired invalid or no identification there were two underage or minor patrons escorted from the gaming area and one underage patron found gaming at a slot machine there were no instances of underage patrons um found or wagering in the sports wagering area and there were no instances of underage alcohol service on the property with that i'll pass to kathy thank you north good afternoon madam chair and commissioners as we look at the employment side you'll see in q4 we had 438 team members that's a little less than last quarter primarily because of the end of racing season we continue to exceed our diversity goal of 15 percent in q4 with 29 percent of our team members being diverse we exceeded our veteran goal of two percent with three percent of our team members um acknowledging their veteran status which is slightly lower than last quarter in q4 47 percent of our team members were women still slightly under the goal of 50 but just wanted to make note that we are um getting back to where we plan to get back to we lost a little um in q4 due to across the close of racing season so as soon as um we pick up with racing season and also in the fall um in the spring i hope for us to to be at that 50 or better in q4 also 32 of our team members were local and that's also slightly under the goal of 35 percent uh 65 percent of our team members are full time with 35 being part time so we'll go to the next slide so with sportsbook the numbers kind of stayed the same in q4 as in q3 with 17 percent being diverse no veterans 22 percent uh women 17 local and 50 percent of that team being full time next slide north all right and then with our supervisors and above we have currently about or in the quarter we had 81 uh leadership team members 15 percent diverse five percent veterans and 35 percent women and then i'll just kind of share some highlights um of the q4 playing rich park casino and pen entertainment community and team member issue initiatives on this first uh slide you'll see that we continue to invest in creating outstanding leaders at the property you'll see some pictures showing the development we did around um our team members with special needs some safety trainings we did and also some guest service training at orientation helping our team members get better at their job we also recognized our aces of pen in q4 the recognition is for best of the best and then we also had some development with our women through the women's linked business network which is a partnership that we have with the uh chamber and also um Heidi and Jenny are running our pen women and we continue to to grow and develop our internal talent for opportunities there go to the next slide north and so you'll see some team member engagement activities we had so many holidays that we celebrated in q4 um not only were we able to delight our guests but really engage our team members with activities that inspired fun at work so you'll see um all the days chocolate day actually my favorite was national grilled cheese day and we continue to focus on hiring days and training managers with our hiring process so that we're getting that excellent talent and our last slide north shows our commitment to the organizations that we support and also we partner with meeting our local diversity um and women initiatives we continue to support um the american cancer society with making strides in q4 like uh filling out the end of the year with helping them get to their campaign numbers um we did some education and awareness in the community around those initiatives we also supported local community events um we partnered uh for some activities for the army and navy game out in the community we did some senior breakfast and we had some military events from a recruitment standpoint so our commitment to be um a good neighbor is is evident in in the activities that we did in q4 so with that north unless there's any questions i'll turn it back to you that concludes our presentation we're ready to take any questions you may have well thank you and people we ask some questions um i need to note in my calendar exactly what day national grilled cheese day commission for the record i was wondering what calendar day chocolate day was on i'll drop both in the chat that'll be great thank you cat the questioners questions if um we want to scroll back um if you need north uh to bring up a slide just let let us know um you have it in our packet as well any questions commissioners madam chair i just i just wanted to um ask uh we we did ask north for for an update on your impacted live entertainment venue agreements do you have anything to report to us on that uh so with regards to that one that will be happy to provide that information in our next quarterly update to you but we do not have any major changes to that so we're happy to remind you what our commitments have been as it relates to that we did um add one sponsorship this past year to the town of north atleboro they have a summer concert series on the lawn and so we were a significant sponsor of that activity for that event the summer other than that most of our other commitments remaining the same as they were thank you madam chair yes Heidi um i was actually having a difficult time hearing you uh there was something wrong with the volume could you elaborate a little bit more about the businesses that you lost in regards to woman-owned businesses and and things of that sort sure you hear me a little better now much better actually okay great i think you had a jet going through your office right then Heidi possibly uh so um it was just in q4 so yeah we lost a vendor uh that was had dual status it was a minority vendor that was owned by a woman it was a family-owned business the primary um stakeholder um decided to retire and and turn the business back over to the rest of her family which was not wbe but what it did remain as an mbe and they chose not to re-register with the commission and they moved the business out of state so and they did that sort of middle of the quarter it really gave us no chance to recover timely enough to hit the quarterly goal on those thank you for that uh further clarification do you mind explaining what the service was or the it was a food and beverage vendor that's what it's about there's an opportunity there there is and our team that manages that's already out on top of that and digging for that spend and i have they've always come through in the past i expect they will do the same this time okay other questions or comments madam chair just to just to thank you um to you north uh Heidi and Kathy for your presentation and madam chair to answer your question for me uh national grilled cheese day is once a week yeah i'm kidding um i just think that this is something that chief maldrew needs to put on a cultural events here at the gaming commission um the compliance record commissioners were pleased with that and the capture of 158 expired invalid for no ids right um folks are still trying thank you for for catching them so absolutely all right then and i um i know we all truly appreciate uh your commitment to community initiatives and the community's well being so thank you for that was that an excellent presentation we do have some more business though to attend to right uh joe uh because this is the fourth quarter yes we need to we'll need to go into executive session to discuss the the capital expenditure uh plan right so commissioners um in order to take care of that part of business we do have to consider going to the executive session i have to read this language the commission anticipates that it will meet an executive session in accordance with gl chapter 30a section 21 a subsection 7 to comply with gl chapter 23 k and interestingly enough also section 21 subsection 8 subsection 7 for the specific purpose of reviewing the proposed multi-year capital expenditure expenditure plan describing 205 cmr 139.09 and any corresponding materials submitted relative to claim rich car casino as discussion of this matter in public would frustrate the purpose of the statue and associated legal authorities where the capital expenditure plan issues covered by a non-disclosure agreement between the master's gaming commission and language car casino in this case the public session of the commission meeting would reconvene at the conclusion of the executive session do i have some old madam chair thank you so much do i have a second second thanks commissioner maynard um commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi mr skinner i mr maynard hi and i vote yes thank you and thank you uh for the public presentation it's excellent and now we'll go into the executive session we'll just wait for tom to direct this but davis susan's inviting us yep there you go just hit join thank you so much again if anybody else needs to be added in please feel free to give me a holler and i can toss them in but invites should have gone out to everybody i have on my list thank you dave or else that you want to take down the screen thanks so much and i think i've got everyone so listen we can be in the beginning commission gotta do a quick world call commissioner brian hi mr hill i'm here thank you commissioner skinner i'm here mr maynard i'm here so we're all set and we um uh appreciate everybody's attention we just had an executive session now we're going to hear from uh chief delaney again with respect to on core good afternoon thank thank you madam chair commissioner so next up we have on course quarterly report um and i'll have update um as well and again similarly we will be going into executive session for uh the discussion of uh capital expenditures um and we have with us today jackie crumb senior vice president juliana catanzariti our executive director of legal and tom coffee executive director of security and investigations and with that i will turn it over to jackie unmute okay uh good afternoon madam chair commissioners um juliana do you want to put up the report and we can get started thank you i'm just going to share my screen everyone can see yeah it's on uh just so you know there it is they're full screen thanks perfect thank you good afternoon madam chair commissioners we appreciate the opportunity for you to present this quarterly report to you today and thank you for your time um so to begin with q4 gaming revenues our total gross gaming revenue for table games was about 86 million dollars and about 104 million dollars for slots that was a total gross gaming revenue about 190 million dollars which resulted in about 47 million dollars and state taxes collected here's the year over year comparison and the q4 23 is the highlighted portion here we have the sports range during revenue and taxes for q4 the total monthly win was about 1.3 million dollars which resulted in about 187 thousand dollars and state retail taxes collected here we have our lottery sales for q q4 which sold about 1.4 million dollars this was a 31.4 percent increase over the same quarter of 2022 and then in this year over year comparison you can see that there was a 50 51 percent increase a year over year so moving on to workforce um if you recall during our last report we noted that there was a discrepancy that we found in a reporting of diversity statistics so that has been corrected um and then in effort to present the most accurate picture of our workforce we've also sort of reconsidered and revised our reporting for diversity statistics i'll go into detail explaining that um in this chart specifically details those employees who are not related to sports weight drawing so i just to make it easier for this explanation to start with the minority numbers first so we've revised this for every quarter so starting with q1 here these are all these will all be new numbers and we'll just use q4 as an example here so the issue generally is that there's a relatively large group of employees who do not specify whether or not they belong in any minority category so instead of just lumping these people in as non-diverse which doesn't really give us an accurate depiction of what our workforce looks like we've essentially removed them from the equation for the minority numbers so if we look at q4 as an example so we had a total here of 3,437 employees the footnote here number four tells us that 585 of those employees did not let us know whether or not they identified as a minority group so instead of just lumping them in there we actually subtracted that 585 from the 3,437 total so then if you when you do that math the total is 2852 so that's really the number that we're working from for purposes of minority statistics here so that's really the base so the total number of employees who self-identified is this minority number right here 2069 and 2069 is essentially 73% of that 347 minus the unidentified 585 it's a little bit hard to follow so I'm happy to answer questions or explain again if that would be helpful Julianne I just a quick question on that is that is that a standard practice in other industries is that something that you've run into before Joe I think I can answer that um I don't know if it's a standard practice but our concern was we were underestimating quite drastically the number of employees who may be diverse because if we were using the bigger number and those people hadn't specified we were essentially assuming that all those 600 people were not diverse that's what that's what we were struggling with so we thought this gave a more accurate picture and if you apply the same percentage perhaps to that remaining number the 600 or so who didn't specify it's it's most likely in the same range thank you and just to clarify we applied the same methodology when we did the calculation of managers above and supervisors and above I'll leave time for questions also at the end if this gets more confusing as we go but um additionally for Q4 we had 2% of employees that were veterans 45% women 88% local and the 91% from massachusetts and 73% were diverse when are well 73% of the reporting the reporting yes the employees who reported and what we're gonna it is and I think what we're gonna try to do too so that we lower that number of non-reportable is we're going to actually reach out to the employees who chose not to disclose the first time and see if they would like the opportunity we obviously are not going to force anyone to do anything but if they would like the opportunity to disclose hopefully we'll reduce that number of people who are unspecified this is a written explanation of what we just went through if that makes it any easier it's what I just explained but the math is here math is not my strong suit so I thought it was easier to put it here attorney president greedy you cannot ever say math is not your strong suit and then as Jackie mentioned these are the numbers for managers and above and to make this sort of a little bit easier we added this column at the end so this number is the number of employees who did not specify for each category so the math we did it's the same exercise in the formula is the same as just we added these smaller numbers here so you could see how many were subtracting to start it's the numbers are much smaller than the entire employee base but and here we have the breakdown for sports waging related employees these are obviously much smaller numbers but the same method of calculation have been applied so you can see that the total number of employees that engaged in sports waging related jobs was 46 um for cute force six of those didn't specify so that leaves you with 40 and then 25 percent I mean 25 62 percent is 25 of 40 if that makes sense it's a little easier to see with these smaller numbers juliana just a question madam chair if I may yes so you were under reporting in all of the categories that you report to us and so by how much is that easy to ascertain I mean I don't remember distinctly what your numbers were at least in the minority category which I'm particularly interested in do you give us a sense of you know what the the difference is how this has helped how how much this has increased your prior reporting I guess so juliana you want to handle this so you want me to respond no sure so they generally hovered around 50 ish before before this um we believe we were under reporting because presumably all of those people that didn't report are not don't don't not belong to minority category so the assumption is that we we'd be under reporting but we don't exactly know because we don't know how many of those unspecified employees would self-identify as belonging to minority group so like jeffy said the plan is to try to get some more of those people to report to have a more accurate representation but we we just don't know exactly what the percentage just looked like there presumably it is the it's similar to what um the percentages look like for those that reported but we we don't know for sure uh commissioner skater I just I just plants back at the quarter one report uh from 2023 and that was reporting 58 minority okay and so it's a pretty significant increase to 73 percent yeah and so do am I understanding it correctly you have 585 individuals that you have yet to account for at least in the minority category okay well for the fourth quarter well it's only up from here so yeah you can see you can see the numbers actually hover similarly around who had reported so q1 was 641 613 they're all in the high fives low low sixes so it seems to be a relatively stable trend I can't do the math fast enough but if we assumed that that large number 500 and whatever were all non minorities that would get you back to the 58 percent that's what we were doing essentially until we realized that it really didn't make much sense that's good clarification I was assuming that you know that they would belong to one category or another but you're right it could it could be the case that they are um not identifying with either of those categories yeah okay um so here we have the sports rated numbers that we were just briefly going over and then the same for um supervisory and above employees here we again pulled out the numbers who ever reported for managers and supervisors and above again the numbers are obviously much smaller but there was actually none that didn't work not to interrupt um your presentation but Joe this is something for us to think about with respect to the other operator something yeah yeah I think it might be worth having a conversation with all of our licensees so that everybody's reporting you know in a consistent fashion right and again before we move on from this point I'd like to thank Commissioner Skinner and the audit team because we wouldn't really have understood this issue had we not gone through the process of demonstrating our numbers to them so thank you I just have one question can in the future can we also see the raw numbers to do the calculation that the chair just did I mean I'm just thinking I'll just be honest with you this wouldn't have flown my time with the governor had I had I presented this way right uh when I was the head of boards and commissions I had to give you know what we had right and um I'm just sitting here thinking I just don't want to I'm happy to see it this way but I also want to see the raw numbers too sure okay so moving on to operating spend um during q4 we had discretionary spend of about 22 million dollars here's the q4 operating spend in each category and then we have a year over year comparison here it's very the numbers are very similar here's the same for local spending by community and then we have another year over year comparison so you can see again the numbers are relatively similar and then finally we have a year over year comparison of Massachusetts spending as a whole so with that I'm going to turn over to Tom our Tom coffee our director of security investigations and he'll go through some of our compliance numbers with you good afternoon madam chair and commissioners thank you for having me um just uh want to summarize uh our uh report on protection of underage miners we had 24 underage individuals on the floor during the fourth quarter of 2023 um we scanned 272,373 IDs and verodox and I like to break down these these uh underages sort of just yeah sorry sorry to interrupt you but uh you know the number that Tom just provided we he said we scanned that many IDs that does not account for all the patrons that came in and out of the casino we only scan IDs for people who appear to be below 35 is 35 thank you so there's a far greater number of people who are coming in and out thank you thank you thank you um so out of those 24 12 were either fake IDs or ID swaps um you know and and we addressed those accordingly with the officers if it's someone that didn't look like uh the individual they're presenting the ID just progressive disposition on those six of the individuals jumped over a railing and four of them went into a restroom and they were um so brought back to the garage and were instructed to leave um four of the individual made on the floor they were non-security employees who believed falsely that um underages could go to Shake Shack or and or ready um so we were able to uh to stop those individuals from gaming or drinking but they were they were going to Shake Shack and ready so um so that makes up for four of those two of the underages on the floor where security officers did not ask for any identification those were fails on our part they were issued a progressive discipline and remedial training on that we do an hour of remedial training with a supervisor present to make sure that uh hopefully it doesn't occur again um out of the 24 that made it on to the floor uh 10 gamed out of those 10 two consumed alcohol and then there were three that consumed alcohol only I will say just as a as a broader note I think we have all the policies procedures and practices in place um we pay a lot of attention to this and it you know usually comes down to human error um and we deal with that um and uh I personally I think those of you who have heard from me before I I view this as a partial mission as well so I look at every one of these and uh if one gets on the floor that's too many for me so um but that's sort of a summary of what we have here we did also um take away 27 fake IDs as well so we confiscated 27 fake identifications any questions so far either Tom or Juliana or Jackie Tom this is Krishna or Brian um this is sort of my my usual question which is can you talk about the what is it the four hours and something on the floor yeah that was a fake ID um obviously it was a uh I believe that one was a uh an individual who used the ID of another so those are IDs that pass in Verredocs so they're not going to flag hot in Verredocs and if you look somewhat or similar looking to the individual whether it's a sibling a sister or brother or whatever um those are pretty sometimes hard to detect so and is it identified when they order a drink or somebody took another look um that that I'm not sure of um I I know there was one I believe that one but the cocktail server did not ask for an ID and I know that that was passed on to human resources and she received a right a write-up as well so we sort of we stress this and we do go to the pre-shifts for the cocktail service um periodically and we stressed that it I look at it as a sort of a three-layered system you know security is the first level of ID check gaming and or cocktail servers of the second and third depending what order you're in so it's really up to every department so in a perfect world um you're going to have three departments IDing the same person if they look down right all right thanks thank you um moving on to human resources initiatives uh in the fall which feels like years ago now we invited all team members to bring their family and friends to the south lawn for a full celebration in our industry it's obviously quite difficult to celebrate bring your child to work day so we enjoy this time when team members can on the one hand uh show off their workplace and on the other hand show off their children to their colleagues um in december we expressed our gratitude to all team members with a gift giveaway in keeping with our hospitality culture everyone received a very special win carry-on suitcase and on november 11th veterans day we recognized our team members who have served uh we did a celebration or recognition in the heart of house uh we also set up a full and hero table in the staff cafe which is our employee dining room as a memorial uh also november we commemorated indigenous heritage month in an effort to highlight and celebrate the rich cultural heritage and experience of indigenous communities we invited team members who had a connection to indigenous heritage to participate in a panel which was aired online and in our heart of house moving on to special events at the end of the quarter we added an additional 4 000 employee volunteer hours for a total of over 11 000 for 2023 uh during the fourth quarter we collected over 300 toys for the city of everett over 100 employees participated in local nonprofit walks for bread of life northeast dark disabled american veterans and the walk to end all simris we also had a fabulous employee sale where employees were uh able to complete all their holiday shopping at ridiculously low prices that ended up raising over 60 000 and then corporate doubled that there's a corporate match so all that money was uh gifted to the win results community grant fund um and so that was a nice end of the year contribution to that and finally it wouldn't be november without feed the funnel uh so employees family members non-profit partners including uh game sense and mass council thank you uh help pack almost 560 000 meals um as an added benefit we also asked the chefs from each of our restaurants to prepare a unique meal using a few of the packages that we packed we had a tasting competition it was very fierce the competition and delicious and the winning recipe uh was featured in less staff cafe we met our goal of packing over 1 million meals in 2023 and finally um our tru donation program remains strong with over 33 000 donated by our guests in the fourth quarter this time we are open for any questions commission's questions jackie and team um jackie great presentation madam chair one commissioner hill i said great uh presentation thank you um jackie we did ask for uh an update on your i-web uh status is there anything that you can report to us on that sure um after we received um e-certificate in january i reached out to the mpac uh regarding the proposed theater the proposed theater for east of broadway to see if they were interested in discussing any initiatives uh choice cybles uh who runs the handover theater in worcester was kind enough to pass along my email to the other members of the coalition and i just recently in the last day or two heard back from the director of the lin auditorium and we're going to schedule a call um and continue discussions great thank you other questions nice nice presentation right um and thank you to tom for the uh compliance report for sure to be sure you're all set on the public piece and as you know we um are expecting as just we did with um pc to hear about the capital expenditure plan but to do so we've got to go into executive sessions so bear with me as i read the language into the record the commission anticipates that it will meet an executive session in accordance with gl chapter 30a section 21a subsection 7 to comply with gl chapter 23k section 21a subsection 7 for the specific purpose of reviewing the proposed multi-year capital expenditure plan described in 205 cmr 139.09 and any corresponding materials submitted relative to anchor boston harvard as discussion of this matter in public would freshly the purpose of the statute and associated legal authorities where the capital expenditure plan issue is covered by a non-disclosure agreement between the master's gaming commission and on core boston harvard the public session of the commission meeting will be convened to conclusions of the executive session we have one business to do do i have a motion so moved thank you commissioner maynard second thank you for the second commissioner bryan i mr hill i mr skinner i mr maynard all right and i vote yes well we will go into executive session and then um return for the never not on our agenda the legal component with the attorney general i think we just get moved now thank you so much just one second you should see something right now we have it thank you thanks i have a little trouble there technically my apologies okay um this is a reconvening after another executive session um thank you to on core boston harvard of the master's gaming commission do i roll call mr bryan are you still here i am still here right mr hill still here great thank you precious skinner i'm here okay commissioner maynard i'm here all right and we'll get started we are turning back now to public meeting 501 still February 15th and we are turning to item number nine on our agenda it will be our last item um unless we have commissioner updates and we're going to turn to legal good afternoon taz thank you la for sending us up here on a few items absolutely good afternoon again madam chair i just i would just note where um i just notified our colleagues from the attorney general's office that we're ready to jump on i see kathleen is here uh we're just waiting i think for uh one or two other folks um so i i can certainly um set the stage but it might be helpful if we just give them a minute to jump on right and we can turn um to our our um packet it's the last item in our packet uh commissioners if you want to have that document ready so page 249 specifically yeah we've used bookmarked it for us and a big thank you to trudy for everything she does so we have kathleen in two places good afternoon kathleen how are you i think um you're on mute but i certainly know i need to get out of two places so do you have your phone also again i'm the last person to give technical advice to but anybody help me out here we see her in two spots and we're getting a feedback up there we just lost her visual thing uh we can uh figure it out you hear me yeah we're good kathleen i was having trouble like the last time i'm not getting my video on so i tried multiple ways so thank you it worked and and i know this is not a problem that's used very frequently so thank you we use it really frequently but our guests don't so hi i assume pat should be on shortly so and then we'll get started thank you for your patience today it's kind of productive day for us but i know a long day for you folks to wait for us uh chair i'm gonna throw a screen up here for just a moment okay thank you hi you can just alert us when pat i think actually everyone's here now uh so whenever we're ready thank you i'm happy to uh good afternoon first assistant lower how are you good afternoon chair i'm well it's nice to see everyone glad to uh have connected successfully this time good well i figured there might have been a little challenge here so i'm going to turn it right over to uh joe at counsel broson yeah thank you uh madam chair commissioners uh first off a pleasure to welcome our colleagues from the attorney general's office pat more the first assistant attorney general kathleen celio the chief of the gaming enforcement division jared rinheim or the chief of the data privacy and security division um and we'll uh we'll be hearing from them shortly but i just wanted to uh tee up the issue for you if i may um and i by the way i should note that i'd also like to welcome katelyn monahan the director of our i e b as well as derek lennon who is our our co who will contribute to this discussion as well so before we turn to um our friends in the attorney general's office i just wanted to set the stage and you'll all recall that when the gaming laws were enacted in massachusetts in 2011 in addition to the creation of the commission itself a division within the attorney general's office which as i mentioned is known as the gaming enforcement division was also created and this is codified in section 11 m of chapter 12 of the general laws and i know of course that we've enjoyed an overwhelmingly positive relationship with the attorney general's office in this space over the years up to and including today and hopefully well into the future section 11 m sets out some of the duties of the division related to casino gaming including things like investigating and prosecuting allegations of criminal activity related to the operation of the gaming establishments taking appropriate action on referrals for criminal prosecution from the commission and providing assistance upon request to the commission amongst other things that the statute describes the law also included a funding source for the division which directs that the division submit quarterly requests to the gaming commission for expenses associated with operating the division up to three million dollars notably when chapter 23 and establishing the oversight of sports wagering was enacted no such language addressing the division was included so in an effort to ensure that the attorney general's office is able to perform in a similar fashion the concept of this isa or interdepartmental service agreement was born the draft document before you which is in the packet as we just mentioned was negotiated by our respective teams and is being presented to you for review and approval if you are so inclined by its terms the isa would make up to five hundred thousand dollars available for the purposes i'll get into momentarily the proposed budget and intended uses of funding are included on page 253 of the packet otherwise the highlights of the document include a description of the purpose of the isa and that's identified on page 251 of the packet which relates to enforcing the sports wagering laws pursuant to chapter 23n to chapter 93a and other relevant statutes it's also a notation that the attorney general's office may seek enforcement against both unlicensed and licensed operators that are engaging in unlawful conduct but then notably there will not be any duplication of efforts between the commission and the attorney general's office further the isa like section 11m itself sets out some of the ways the attorney general's office will enforce the laws including but not limited to taking appropriate action on referrals for enforcement from the commission investigating and or prosecuting allegations of unlawful activity but both licensed and unlicensed operators including fantasy sports operators under chapter 12 section 11m and a half that are maybe engaging in sports wagering related activities and communicating with the commission regarding specific operators who are suspected of engaging in unlawful sports wagering activities so as i mentioned mr. Moore is here to offer further insight and address any questions about this particular approval excuse me proposal and subject to any questions you may have for me or or our gaming commission team i'd certainly like to invite mr. Moore to address the commission and of course we will all be standing by to address any questions so madam chair i'll go back to you and commissioners otherwise we can invite pat and his team to discuss the isa ministers i think we can turn right for pat correct thank you and thank you to your colleagues for joining us today i'm chair commissioners mr. grossman appreciate all that background appreciate the opportunity to join you today as mr. grossman mentioned at that outset joined by kathleen celia and jared ronheimer my valued colleagues from the office i think mr. grossman gave a very effective overview of what we're trying to accomplish here if i could add just a couple of minutes of additional color the goal in our view is to spend better and not necessarily spend more and one thing that i think is an important data point the gaming enforcement division which is created by chapter 12 section 11 m mr. grossman mentioned is financed by the commission through the gaming operators the traditional casino gaming operators to a limit of three million dollars a year the current isa between our agencies is for about 2.9 million and we spend about 2.3 or half in recent years i think that that's somewhat deflated in light of covet i think a more accurate amount might be in the 2.5 range and so when we came into office and were engaged in dialogue with the commission one of the issues that continued to arise is an issue that we discussed a couple of weeks ago which is what are we going to do about the operators that are engaged in illegal sports gaming how can we address that and i looked around the office and said what's the answer to that and the answer was the office is not really set up to address that that i think is appropriately a responsibility of our office but the gaming enforcement division was set up to address the criminal activity attendant to brick and mortar casinos or otherwise flatly illegal and often organized crime associated gaming not to say that we had in place addressed that and also expressly limited our activity to criminal enforcement i think for any number of reasons that is not a tool that is most useful in the context of impermissible sports gaming we have illegal operators who have websites that should be impermissible we have illegal offerings by fantasy sports operators the answer to that conduct at least in the first instance and i hope the only instance is civil enforcement we would like that behavior to stop i don't intend to put the executives at prize picks in jail right and so we would like to explore civil enforcement in this area to see if it can be effective the purpose of the isa is to achieve that when we began this discussion it was nearer to the beginning of the fiscal year the amount that mr grossman mentioned really had in mind a complete fiscal year we're obviously happy to prorate that for what remains of this fiscal year and intend for it to operate just as the other isa does which is spent as needed and refunded as not or not spent as not needed and we intend to hire two ag's whose entire responsibility will be in this area and to supplement them as needed with investigatory staff and resources and want to be very crystal clear on the following point which is that we do not intend as mr grossman noted to duplicate efforts i think that where investigators investigatory activity is needed in this space it will be of of unlicensed i.e illegal operators we do not intend to deploy these resources against license holders there may come a time and it certainly would first be preceded by a number of discussions with the commission of course where we think that for some reason a licensed operator is undertaking behavior that for whatever reason does not comport with our state consumer protection law that is not work that we would be doing from this isa and it has been our intent thus far and i think the commission's intent as well to make sure in any event that our consumer protection law mirrors to the greatest extent possible the commission's regulation so that's not something that we envision but if that does happen it's not envisioned that that would and i don't think it would be consistent with the terms of the isa that we put together for that work to be funded out of out of this bucket of resources so i perhaps exceeded the couple of minutes by a bit here i know it's late in the day let me pause there but before doing so just once again emphasize our appreciation for the partnership for your willingness to consider this i think that it benefits both agencies when we obviously stand ready to address any questions you may have thank you pat this has been a priority that the commissioners has um have voiced individually in a collective group starting you know formally back in may where we reached out to the dlj to to uh indicate that we hoped that illegal activities gaming activities would be addressed so that our group could create a level playing field for our regulated licenses so this is initiative when i think we've learned of it uh generally uh it's one that we support uh but i know now where that juncture commissioners where we can ask questions about the isa in particular and uh if we decide we can move on it today so questions for both Todd and pat i do madam chair uh good afternoon um pat and kathleen and jarrod um i love the idea of doing this i know we've had some conversations with your office in terms of community mitigation funding and human trafficking and this is another avenue of enforcement um a couple of questions that i have about the isa itself and then the funding mechanism the the conversation today makes it seem like the isa is going to be for civil enforcement only but having been an investigator i can see circumstances coming where you're going to cross pollinate and you're going to have something that starts that way and then it might be integrally intertwined with the facts that then you also have criminal charges that could come out of it and so the funding that you're talking about comes from assessments on the brick and mortar uh licensees that we have and i know that there are cost of prosecution recovering mechanisms on the criminal side like 280 section 6 that if you resolved something and you were going particularly after businesses that you could attempt to recoup some of those costs by doing that as a condition of probation let's say on a criminal case and so i'm curious if you guys have thought about um whether it needs to be incorporated or in the isa or just as a practical matter trying to recoup some of the cost of the bad actors since you're probably talking about a lot of money being made illegally so that the assessments that are put on our licensees can be offset to the extent that there is success in capturing some of this illegal market. Mr. O'Brien thank you for that question let me uh address only that part of what part of it which i'm qualified to address so i'll turn it over to my colleague Kathleen uh in one moment i think to address the the scope of the isa question um i think that the goal here is to loosen up what currently is a criminal only restriction on our ability to deploy those resources so not be that uh civil enforcement would be the exclusive remedy but that it would be in addition to whatever criminal remedies are uh are implicated or appropriate as we uh as we determine so this is not at all meant to suggest that if we see a basis for uh for criminal prosecution that meets our enforcement standards that we would somehow forego that i think quite the opposite let me turn it though to Kathleen to address the the recovery question yeah yeah thank you very much especially for the commission to to have us today um i i think that there is obviously when you see get to the point of egregious conduct or something that would um make us um interested in pursuing a criminal um in uh kind of indictment against a company i've also seen um when we've pursued this uh you know an agreement for dissolution of the company as well like so and also recouping money so um if we were to see that and and obviously our our office um deals a lot with um you know setting up the barriers of civil investigation and what to do when it um it becomes a criminal um in investigation and enforcement and we obviously will adhere to those um kind of already set up principles and our colleagues that are doing that um but i think it is something that we would um comp contemplate i know that um this just seemed in general based on the um statutes of 23 n that are not so robust uh for criminal prosecutions as um it may you um it may have wanted as me as a criminal prosecutor but it is a scene that um you know kind of using our efforts then with civil enforcement as a primary means and then if it were to bleed into the the criminal aspect we would we would certainly consider um forceful criminal remedies of companies that we've used prior thanks because just in terms of the assessment on the licensees who are paying the hefty licensing fees and funding for the assessment i'd love to see that as part of the resolutions and when you're going after the illegal market thank you madam chair yes which is good thank you good afternoon pat cathleen and jarrod my question is relative to staffing i think you indicated you were intending to bring on an additional two aag's um to conduct the civil work and we have the dfs matter that we'll be talking about also i think in this session but that's pending right now what other civil types of matters do you envision falling within the um specifications of this isa and as the question really specifically to staff um you know should there is is there a i guess a contingency plan should you we perhaps find ourselves in the position where there's just not a lot happening on the civil side along the lines of what we're seeing with prize picks and and other dfs operators thank you commissioner skinner um for that question i i think the short answer is is yes i think that this is iterative we're going to need to assess um what the needs are and whether uh this amount of resources are needed year after year to address them and it's tough to predict on the front end um there is a world in which we're having to litigate against prize picks for example and that's something that um two aag's by themselves are going to have a considerable uh time keeping up with without any additional support within the office um there is a world in which we tell the fantasy operators that um what they're doing is impermissible and they stop doing it and then we need a next step for this group of individuals to do i think that there are ready next steps that are available i note in particular the chair mentioned um a request to the department of justice to uh enforce um the internet game gambling enforcement act against some of the illegal operators that are more black market than the daily fantasy sports operators they're the illegal offshore market that we're all hearing i'm certain the commission is hearing our office is certainly hearing about it from the licensed operators and asking can we not do something about those operators and czar intent firmly to do something um the internet gambling enforcement act is a relatively unique federal law that actually expressly gives state attorneys general the ability to bring causes of action under it we can bring those causes of action against internet service providers to get the websites taken down um and we intend to do that i think that will be labor intensive on the front end because there are not a lot of states doing it and we're going to need to lead and we're going to need to develop those muscles once we do that it should be pretty routine i would love that the isp start to know who we are know that these requests are coming and have them be a routine thing for us to be able to do and encourage our state counterparts to do as well that's going to it's going to be labor intensive on the front end and should be less so on the back end i think that in terms of what then next i don't know the answer to that and it depends of course on the commission's enforcement priorities and what those look like and whether there is a need to take civil enforcement action beyond the administrative remedies uh that the uh that the commission has at hand through its own commission proceedings the isi anticipates of course and we commit in any event uh that we're not going to do anything there without a request for you all to do it so that is a long answer to arrive back where i started which is i think there's work i i do i think that there's considerable work on the front end and whether that work becomes less going forward that's something that the isa is built to deal with because we're not spending resources on the front end and then uh and and wasting them we're spending resources and effectively seeking reimbursement if it's not spent it's not spent and and it's not going to be assessed on the operators and it's not coming out of the commission so um this is a it's a ceiling rather than a appropriation if you will um and i want to make sure that uh that taw agrees with that characterization but that's that's certainly my understanding yeah i think i think that's absolutely fair i i completely agree with that i would just note to one of the points pat just made this isa on its face is uh set to terminate if it were executed um at the end of the fiscal year uh uh june 30th of this year at which point we can revisit um these principles but um yeah as pat described the idea is that we'll we'll be constantly evaluating um the the efficacy of this and there seems to be plenty of work to be done yeah thank you thank you pat for your comprehensive response we could um just explore that a little bit taw and we've got derrick uh here derrick the um taw just mentioned the termation date i presume this would be something that could be extended easily so that it's seamless in terms of the amount is there um could they spend the entire amount between now in the term in the and in the end there's no necessarily there's not a mandate for pro rate is there there's no mandate for pro rating i'm usually with isa as you allocate the whole ceiling we can do allotments if we'd like to do that we did that at the beginning of the year with the um attorney general's isa just because it was uh 2.9 million and we only had a quarter's worth of funding in under the gaming side one um but under this one pat's already offered to pro rate it down from the 500 000 which he didn't have to right the request came in at 500 so um i don't see a need to put an allotment schedule on it i don't see i mean they will be able to pull reports um to see what it's being spent on because it's one under our appropriation we won't get the details but we'll be able to see that it it's generally tracking where they have it on their isa thank you that's that's helpful so um you know i think we appreciate pat you saying that because it is a short window right that it could be pro rated but to the extent you need to get something stood up um i think we would i'd recommend that we defer to our legal team and and the finance team to figure that out if we execute it unless i'm missing something commissioners no i agree with that chair i i just i i think it's still i mean on the one hand it's late in terms of the fiscal year but on the other hand it's early in the sense that we are just beginning to wrap our uh manpower if you will around this um prize fix issue and uh other other uh dfs operators so i i think you're right i'm totally fine with totally fine with deferring to uh the ag's office and our legal and and finance teams to determine what the amount should be for this fiscal year notwithstanding the fact that we're are probably by the time it's executed will be more than three quarters through visual brand any concerns with that no it's just point of clarification that we are being asked to vote on an isa which is drafted is 500 000 we're not putting caps we're not putting restrictions on that but i just wanted to make clear that that's that amount is not changing even though it's a portion of the fiscal year left right right i would say for the purposes i would say for the purposes of this to not confuse things not to change it even though right has offered to even though right has offered to that's what i would say that yeah we're gonna be the 500 000 to give for this roll forward right okay okay um so questions any other questions on the isa particular and if not are we in a position to move on this i'm happy to offer a motion if i tell commissioners are ready for it i'm not hearing any other questions i'll check in with you pat anything else you want to that you want clarified or um any any questions that you have or anything else you want to add pat cathleen and share a good afternoon no i don't think so i um i just want to express our appreciation to the commission and um note the following just by way of expectation um as we'll talk about i think in a moment um and we're prepared to send a cease and assist letter to the daily currency sports operators we think we have enough uh within the office to staff any litigation that comes out of that for an interim period and we'll be posting these positions as soon as we can it still takes about a month to fill a position so we couldn't spend the 500 000 even if we wanted to by the end of this fiscal year i think um more more important to us is to just set the expectation that um we we will be seeking at least to re-up this for the next next fiscal year um again with the same arrangement that Todd and i discussed of you know we're not taking the money and uh unless we're actually spending it on this it's it's a drawdown arrangement but more important to us is to be able to hire people with the expectation that they will in fact be here for a period of time and develop the skills that we want them to use then to spend money on the front end over the next four months because that that's going to be tough for us to do um but with that i just thank the commission again and i think what you're hearing is we're giving you the flexibility while we appreciate your rating you know we want we want you to be able to achieve the the intent of this isa so commissioners um if we have a motion on the um first part of today's business on the adoption of the isa executional thank you madam chair i move that the commission adopt the uh inter-service agreement or isa as we've been referring to it with the office of the attorney general for certain enforcement and investigatory matters related to sports wagering as included in the commissioner's packet and further discussed here today second and second commissioner skinner thank you um all right any questions or edits okay commissioner bayon hi commissioner hill hi commissioner skinner hi commissioner maynard and i vote yes five zero so that piece of work is complete um thank you and now um we're going to um get a really an update to a report that we had two weeks ago from the attorney general's office um really some of which it's um requires executive session in order to protect the integrity of the um investigation and enforcement so uh read into the record the language that we need to comply with the open meeting law the commission anticipates that it will meet an executive session in accordance with general laws chapter 30a section 21 section a subsection 3 to discuss with attorney general's office strategy with respect to enforcement or litigation concerning the illegal sports wagering market and again the public uh session of the commission meeting will reconvene at the conclusion of this executive session we thank the public for its patience do i have a motion and madam chair i move that the commission go into executive session on the matter and for the reasons just stated by the chair second thank you thank you commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi mr skinner hi commissioner maynard i i vote yes five zero so we will um now go into a breakout room yep day we'll send you there thank you so much all right i bad at everybody that i've got on my list if anybody else needs to be included please feel free to let me know i think jared ryanheimer will probably need to get tossed in as well just because i see he's with the a g o i'm here thanks no problem the david is just uh seven c um i can look that up bruce um and see what specific number we're in yeah or excuse me not seven c i lost the page got the agenda open in front of me no i believe this is nine b yeah i i think i'd like to be in on this uh thing that has to do with fantasy sports okay i'll toss you in and if there's any issue tom is in there and he can sort it out as well okay thanks okay okay we're all back this is again um i'm meeting with each other several in and out sessions and we appreciate the public's patience we are holding this being virtually being efficient and so on to our last roll call of the day commissioner brian i am here click commissioner i'm here thank you commissioner skinner i'm here commissioner maynard so this is here thank you commissioner maynard and this is a public session um and we are turning back to our agenda um to item nine c and i just want to thank the attorney general's office for its briefing um at the executive session we of course have executed is a and um now um from uh really the the work that we've done today uh commissioners we may want to move ahead on the item which is really to discuss whether or not the attorney generally we should request the attorney general to bring an action pursuant to uh chapter 23 and to enforce uh that statute or any rule of regulation of a commission by civil action very consistent um with the purpose of the isa or also our petition bring junk really relative to the offering of impermissal sports wagers as i've mentioned this is an area of great interest um for this commission it's great importance to make sure that the um we support creating uh a level field um a playing field for our regulated licensees and also to safeguard the interests of the commonwealth and those who are betting you know we continuously uh uh explain to the public who the licensed parties are for online sports betting and information is always available on our online on our our website and uh commend our communication division for constantly pushing out material to remind those who are betting to use our regulated um operators they're providing important important uh responsible gaming tools consumer protections and they have met the standards of this commission which are rigorous and fair um however it's not lost on us that there's illegal activity going on and we have some tools to turn to commissioners any discussion and we have of course uh attorney monahan a director monahan my apologies and interim executive director grossman as well as general counsel grossman here and we also have um members of the attorney general's office still with us any discussion to um action that we might want to take todd anything that you need to remind us of i i would just draw your attention to as you referenced madam chair section four of chapter 23 and there's a provision it's a subsection g that provides that the commission shall have the authority to enforce chapter 23 and and any rule or regulation of the commission and may request that the attorney general bring an action to enforce chapter 23 and or any rule or regulation of the commission by civil action or petition for injunctive relief so the commission has the ability to request the attorney general to take action to enforce the law um in the event that um there is a perceived violation or potential violation um so that's that's what section four provides um we obviously discussed um as you mentioned the illegal sports wagering market um and so the matter is now before the commission so any comments or questions or um that you'd like to make at this juncture okay um i just want to thank the attorney general's office uh you know we have been really fortunate to have the attorney general's office um a critical partner and the collaborator with us as we stand up this uh as we stood up this new industry and continue to regulate it and uh it's a valued partnership and we appreciate today's work including the um adoption of the isa commissioner brian uh madam chair i'm happy to move if my fellow commissioners are ready madam chair i move that in accordance with chapter 23 and section four g that the commission requests that the attorney general bring actions to enforce chapter 23 and any rules and regulations of the commission by civil action or petition for injunctive relief relative to the offering of impermissible sports wagering in the commonwealth as set forth in the agenda and as further discussed here today most specifically in the executive session that preceded this motion second any questions or edits to that motion with that commissioner brian i commissioner hill i commissioner skinner i commissioner mayard i and i vote that's five zero thank everybody our legal team i e b and uh sports wagering division and of course the attorney general's office for today's good guidance and the great work up to it okay commissioners it's been um a long day for all of us we started our work at 9 30 and had a half hour break um for that i am so very grateful to you for um your diligence your collaboration and most of all your commitment um do we have any commissioner updates or other business that we need to attend to i'm going to just remind folks that uh we have a holiday on monday when we have three public meetings on wednesday one agenda setting and two public meetings so the agendas for those will be posted tomorrow you'll start getting information on that uh so we have in other words good work i had a bus for today thank you so much i'll take the motion to adjourn to adjourn thank you commissioner hill again okay commissioner brian i mr hill hi mr skinner i commissioner mayard i and i vote that's five zero thank you