 set. Good morning, all I wanted to say that today is already September 8. We are meeting virtually and so part of the process is that we must take a roll call from my fellow commissioners. Good morning, Commissioner O'Brien. Good morning. I am here. Good morning, Commissioner Hill. Good morning, everyone. I am here. Good morning, Commissioner Skinner. Morning. I'm here. And good morning, Commissioner Maynard. Good morning, Madam Chair. I'm here. Okay. Today is, as I said, September 8. It is the public meeting number 390 for the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. We'll get started. But if you allow me, I just would like to make a few opening remarks. And I will invite my fellow commissioners to weigh in afterwards before we turn to Treasure Goldberg. And we're very honored to have her presence today and members of her team joining us on our first agenda item. As we get underway today, I want to offer thanks to the team at the Gaming Commission and to my fellow commissioners. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Gaming Commission's work, I wanted to just offer a little bit of an explanation that we are a public body that is required to do all of its work in public. We're bound by the open meeting line. We take that seriously. Commissioners can't get together outside of a public forum to discuss or work on any matter. We simply must perform our work in public. Today's meeting is called a public meeting, which simply means a meeting of the Gaming Commission held publicly. We stream these meetings for easy access to the public. The discussions you hear in these meetings is a product of each of us having worked to understand the issues in front of the commission. And sometimes these meetings include experts and other invited guests like today we are fortunate to hear from Treasure Goldberg. Public meetings like today's are different from public hearings. Those hearings offer the public the opportunity to weigh in on our work. We will be scheduling soon public hearings to hear from the stakeholders in the public at large. Also be inviting written comments. Our process will not be complete without the public's input. All of our meetings are posted to our website and YouTube channel. I want to thank our team for the work put in to prepare the items we'll discuss today and of course at future meetings. I appreciate the attention on these meetings and passion for the topics we plan on discussing today. We plan our meetings with the intention to have impactful discussions and deliberations that move issues forward. Today's agenda is focused on sports wagering. You will hear discussion that focuses on critical internal work needed to stand up this new industry. Our goal with this process is to make sure that such sports wagering is introduced correctly, operationally and legally for the benefit of integrity and consumer protection. We accomplish this goal by working diligently to develop policy, establish a regulatory structure and equitably, barely review and license potential operators. We know that the NFL kicks off tonight. And that due to the nature of sports wagering, interest is peaked. We are rooting for the pets. Our process will play out as it would have whenever this law came to the Gaining Commission to regulate and we will not compromise getting this right for anything. With that said, we also are aware of the import of timing. It's also a great deal of work to do, not just on the issues of sports wagering, but also prioritizing the integrity of gaming across the Commonwealth and continuing the impactful programs across our divisions, such as community mitigation, responsible gaming and other essential teams. I want to thank you all for the Gaining Commission for that continued commitment. I want to thank every Executive Director Wells for leadership on that. And I just want to turn to my little commissioners to add anything else before we turn to our staff guests. Good morning again, Commissioner Browning. Good morning. Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, I'm thankful that you made that statement on behalf of this body and pointed out how we function as a body. There are people on the staff who went through this process with the casinos and the launching of the brick and mortar casinos that we have. And I for one intend and think everyone here intends to uphold that standard of excellence in terms of executing our statutory responsibility to launch sports wagering in the Commonwealth, but to do it in a way that is responsible, fair and inclusive of all of the interests. And while we are mindful of the fact that there are people out there who are very anxious to start being able to place the waiters in the Commonwealth, I do want people to understand that looking at the various states as well outside the Commonwealth who have done this, I believe the median is about eight months from the signing of the legislation to the actual placement of the first bet. I think Maryland itself took a couple of years before they even had the application ready. Our staff has done a tremendous amount of work in anticipation of the possibility of this being put on our plate. I think they are doing a fabulous job. They're putting their heads down and they're getting the work done to do this. But as you said, we intend to do this correctly as quickly as possible, but correctly is the priority. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Hill. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you, Commissioner O'Brien, for your comments. And I want to just share a little story of something that happened to me this morning as I was driving into Boston. A 40 minute ride that took almost an hour and 45 minutes to get in. A lot of traffic, which allowed me to be able to listen to sports radio longer than I normally do. And as I was tuned into 98.5 today, I was listening to the Tetra and Rich show, which is usually a very, and is a very entertaining show. But today, I actually got a little frustrated with it because they had a guest on and they were talking about sports betting. And they made a comment that some think that we might be able to make a bet in three weeks at our brick and mortar casinos and our semi casting facilities. And obviously that's not going to happen. And it was frustrating because of the hundreds of thousands of people that listened to that show and think that they might be able to place a bet here in Massachusetts was frustrating. So Madam Chair, I was very happy to hear your comments and to share with Commissioner O'Brien and her comments that other states who have done this, it has taken a while for us to be for them to be able to put regulations together. And in some cases, as was mentioned, up to two years. And I'm not saying that's what's going to happen. Obviously. But I hope that the media can understand that putting information like that out to popular shows is very harmful, you know, to the process, I think. And if they want the information and correct information they can tune into us almost weekly, from this point on, and get updates of what's going on. And I share with Commissioner O'Brien and her comments, our staff and certainly the Commission is working very, very hard to get this up and running in a very timely way. I'm very impressed with what I've seen so far. And I think the discussion that we're going to have today will enlighten a lot of people where we are and what we're going to be doing in the next few weeks. But you know, a little frustrating to hear a popular radio show put out information that that I think was, you know, sadly, not even close to being the truth. So with that said, Madam Chair, I'm looking forward to today's meeting and I'm certainly looking forward to our Treasurer and her remarks as we start this meeting. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Skinner. Good morning again. And thank you to my fellow commissioners and to the staff who have been working so hard over these past several weeks and months to prepare for this new law. Commissioner Hill and Commissioner O'Brien and Chair Judd Stein have laid the foundation, really, the expectation for the going forward. I know I'm eager to get this statute implemented. But I want folks to understand that there is a lot to understand in the gaming world from things like consumer protection to responsible gaming to the technology standards, some of which, you know, we'll hear about today. But I want to make sure that we are informed about what it is we are undertaking as an agency that we are diligent in implementing the statute that we are upholding the same level of integrity in and licensee operations that the Commonwealth has come to know in the gaming world. That will take some time. We are putting in that time, you know, over time to make sure that we are in a good place. We'll get there. It was said yesterday that we will have fun while we're doing it. We are in this together. And we just ask for the public's patience as we move forward. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Maynard. I love having the benefit of going last, Madam Chair, because usually all the good things have been said. But I do echo you, Madam Chair and the fellow commissioners, we take our charge very seriously. We want to ensure that this risk-waging happens swiftly, but safely. The team here is taking every measure to ensure a fair process for all applicants. And we appreciate all the interest in this topic. I truly believe that the more input we get through roundtables and through other forums, the better. I also appreciate that Madam Treasurer is joining us today. And I'm excited to hear her thoughts on this important topic. Thank you. Thanks so much. And for that, we thank the public for its patience. Just trying to clarify our obligations as this agency. And we again thank the legislature and the governor of parts trust in us to do this right. And now we turn to Treasurer. Good morning, Treasurer. Goldberg is just a delight to have you here today. And we thank your members of the team too. And if you want to maybe introduce them, that would be great. I'd be happy to. First of all, thank you, Madam Chair, and commissioners. It's a delight to be here with you. Obviously, I would love to have seen you all in person. But we're at least able to do this kind of public meeting. And in fact, what we are finding, which I'm sure you are too, is that you get increased attendance by including remote options, less difficulty having quorums. It allows people from across the state to join in. And so I am hopeful that in the future, we will support the combination of hybrid meetings because it invites increased participation, and particularly for the public. So I'm delighted to be here with you today. And I actually I appreciate your deliberate and transparent approach to the regulation of sports betting, which you just shared with us, which I very much concur with. In fact, as we sort of worked our way through looking at the potential regulations, and we're trying to understand some of the ambiguities, we were working on clarification. And I'm sure that you are doing absolutely the same. And since many of us on this call in these kind of roles, understand process takes time. I'm a little surprised by what you heard Commissioner Hill on the radio this morning, but I'm not completely surprised because I had times I'm on with those folks and they're open to correction. They sometimes are having fun. So I'm joined by Mark William Bracken, who is not only the interim executive director of the Massachusetts State Lottery, and doing a superlative job, I might add. But he also serves as assistant treasurer and executive director of the unclaimed property division. My policy folks are on the line, among others. And we have some just watching from your YouTube channel. But today, questions can be directed to myself and to Mark, because we look forward to discussing the many points of intersection between your work and our work, which includes the lottery, financial education. And prior to jumping on the line, you heard me talking about baby step savings plan and savings for the future being one of the best ways to avoid debt. And that is an issue in terms of when people are doing responsible gambling. And but this must might surprise you, there are actually unclaimed property issues that have come up as we've looked through the regulations. So turning first to the obvious, the lottery, one of my primary responsibilities as treasurer is to ensure a consistent and growing source of unrestricted local aid for all 351 of our communities, our cities and towns. And as you draft sports wagering regulations, I urge you to look at and incorporate provisions that will enable the lottery to continue in that vein to deliver consistent revenue as a direct result, valuable resources for every community in the state. Just for some perspective, lawmakers project that sports wagering will generate $60 million in state revenue annually. Only 16.5 million, which is 27.5% will be earmarked for unrestricted local aid. By contrast, the lottery produced approximately $1.1 billion this past year for our cities and towns. Simply put, the lottery plays a very vital role in generating unrestricted local aid for our communities. And it is imperative that we work to ensure it continues to do so. We already are facing mounting headwinds. In fact, we're actively monitoring a concerning trend sales of the lottery's top two product categories, scratch tickets and Kino, which together make up nearly 88% of all lottery sales were down six and 5% respectively last month. When I looked at the numbers for this past week, that trend was continuing. Combined with new entertainment options soon to be available to consumers who have increasingly limited resources on concern that this trend will negatively impact the lottery's ability to deliver the levels of unrestricted local aid that it has grown to do so. To help hold local aid harmless, I seek sports wagering provisions that mirror the regulations governing the existing gaming licenses, specifically requiring that prior to receiving a license, applicants present a plan to mitigate any impacts on the lottery and requiring that licensees partner with the lottery on cross promotion, both in person and online. So far that we have found that this framework has resulted in a productive, not to mention profitable relationship with existing licensees. For example, the Plain Ridge Slopplaller is one of the lottery's top performing retailers. And we are building towards similar results at MGM and Springfield and Encore and Everett. I am confident that implementing the same framework for the lottery's relationship with respect to sports wagering will prove beneficial both for operators and for the local communities that depend on the lottery. Looking further down the road, I strongly encourage the commission to include the team of experts at lottery and at the treasury as part of the required study of the feasibility of allowing retail locations to operate sports wagering kiosks. Many, many of the interested locations are licensees of the lottery and or the alcoholic beverages control commission, which also falls within the purview of my office. So as you can see, I feel we can really add to the conversation. I would also like to note how much I appreciate and value our partnership when it comes to financial education. My team at the Office of Economic Empowerment has enjoyed working with you to train Game Sense advisors on all of the tools and resources that we have available to benefit players. We also look forward to incorporating casino gambling and sports wagering model modules into our Credit for Life fair programming. And for some perspective on that, prior to COVID, we had already reached 50,000 high school students in those fairs. And we're developing different ways of reaching them via online and in person programming as we move forward. Critical time for kids to be learning about these things. I welcome the opportunity to build on this and expand this partnership to meet needs as they change. Finally, I encourage you to look at the example of other states, Iowa in particular, when it comes to abandoned accounts. I recognize the legislature specified that unclaimed winning sports wagers shall be deposited in the sports wagering control fund if no claim is made for the winning wager one year after the relevant game or event. However, the legislation does not speak to abandoned or stagnant accounts. Currently, the leading sports wagering firms do not treat these accounts as unclaimed property when unregulated. Instead, they take them into revenue after a certain amount of time through drawdowns and fees. While my office would consider these accounts miscellaneous accounts and reportable as unclaimed property as defined by state statute, clear definitions and administrative rules will protect consumers, enabling enforcement through the Treasury's unclaimed property division. Left unaddressed, I am concerned that operators will continue to implement business practices that we here in Massachusetts would deem inappropriate and in violation of state law. So with that, I thank you again for the opportunity to speak with all of you today. I am certain that it will be the first of many conversations and we are happy to answer any questions that you may have and now you see why, in particular, I have Mark Bracken on the line because he has two hats on, both of which I'm sure you have questions about. Thank you so much, Treasurer Goldberg. I'm going to just open it up for a no particular order. Who wants to lean forward and address it? Okay, Commissioner Bryan, there we are. Yes, thank you, Treasurer Goldberg. I was pleased to get the letter, pleased to hear you speak today and also wanted to reiterate. I had raised that question in terms of ADW accounts which, as you point out, there's the winnings that aren't claimed and then there's sort of the preloaded value on those accounts that are currently not treated like abandoned property. It's a practice in the industry, as I was told, that's been going on for quite some time, but particularly going through the regulation draft process right now, it's an opportunity, I think, for the Commonwealth to once again lead in terms of protecting the consumer in this industry. So I thank you for taking the time today on that topic as well as the others that you talked about today. I'm looking forward to working with the lottery going forward. Thank you, Commissioner. What's interesting, just another aside, not to make Mark blush, but Mark led the unclaimed property administrators nationally. So he is not only aware of what we do here in Massachusetts and not surprising Massachusetts leads in this space, but he also has an understanding of what that was why, how often do we cite Iowa when we're talking here in Massachusetts, but why we know what is being done in other states across the country. And I think we can add to a lot of these conversations. That's excellent. Commissioners, any questions or comments for the treasurer? No questions, but a comment. Thank you for coming this morning, and I too look forward to working with you and your administration as we put our regulations together. These are very important issues and we recognize that for you to come on personally, you know, meant a lot to all of us. Thank you, Commissioner. I want to reiterate when I was referring to the the study group. I'm sure you are aware that we have thousands upon thousands of retail operators and we're very, very engaged with them. The lottery has made a meaningful difference in a lot of mom and pop operations and a lot of operations across the state. We are anxious to grow their business always, and so I think that we have a unique understanding of them and them in the wagering world. So I want to reiterate that I believe we can add a lot to the conversations as you look at that kind of opportunity. Commissioner Skinner. Thank you, Treasurer Goldberg. Mark, I didn't get a chance to say hello earlier. Good to get to see you. Madam Treasurer, your comments are very important. I think this is the right time to be considering your proposal as we move forward to draft regulations. It's a no-brainer for me and I, you know, I hear from at least two of my fellow commissioners that, you know, they also think that this is the right direction that we should be heading in as an agency, as a body. I did get a chance to review the Iowa processes, those rules. I think that's a good model for Massachusetts to look at, and certainly other jurisdictions, but I thank you for providing at least the foundation, the basis for us to start thinking about these very important consumer protections. Well, what's interesting is, you know, I brought up Iowa, but of course we in Massachusetts always want to do it a little bit better. Absolutely. What would you add? Is there something in particular you would add in terms of versus Iowans or anything, Mark, that you note? I'm sure Mark has ideas. Yeah, so we can revisit. I'm not putting you on the spot. No, no, that's fine. I think more specifically it's, because it's not enumerated exactly inside the state statute, we're doing it through the reg. Obviously, you know, Iowa does it in four sentences, New Hampshire does it in two, and they just kind of punt it off to the unclaimed property law. I think it would be nice to have a couple specific action points inside the regulation, not just referencing Chapter 200A, but also just putting on notification some of the consumer protections as we spell out, because then a lot of times in our state statute, we then kick some of the stuff into our regulations. So it could be confusing for a licensee to go from their regulation to statute to our regulation, where I think it can possibly be done directly through the gaming regulation, and we'd be happy to send over a couple of those bullet points if you're open to that. One of them would just be noticed to consumers, because that's really kind of the impetus here, and I know Commissioner Skinner kind of, you know, she used the terms that used the two words that we like to hear best, consumer protection and her opening statements, and that's really what this law is about. A lot of people don't realize this law was enacted in 1952, so we're celebrating 70 years of unclaimed property consumer protection, annually returning over $150 million directly to the hands of people in Massachusetts, and we're taking into custody anywhere between $200 and $250 million to protect that money, so it doesn't get lost out in the business world. So we, you know, we're very proud of what we do with the unclaimed property division, you know, we're diligent in returning money, and also, you know, we have been able to work with some of the casino prod, the license, the current licensees and the brick and mortars, especially playing rich casino, has been very generous to us about giving us space to put when we do our tangible property auctions, we get to go, they give us space to put our stuff out on display at the casino, because it's high traffic, and you know, you get a lot of great eyes on it, and we've been in conversations with MGM out in Springfield to do the same thing, so we already have a symbiotic, we already have this relationship with some of the casinos, much like the lottery does, as the treasurer mentioned, and you know, we just want to make sure that both the, it will be less the brick mortar, and more of the online licensees, because these will be actual accounts that we're talking about. We already, in this one, 23n already contemplates the uncashed tickets, but these are really players' accounts where, if they had a winning or deposit of money, that that money sitting inside their account, so we want to make sure those accounts are protected, and like I said, we'll be willing to send a couple of bullet points over that we think could strengthen Iowa's law, but like I said, in the end, New Hampshire did theirs in two sentences, Iowa did theirs in four, and they both work, so you know, once you get past the concept of this is what we want to do, it's not a difficult feat to, you know, I'm sure the regulator, this will be one of the easier parts of the regulation. Thank you, Marguerite. I can attest to that mission, because the first time I met Mark, he looked me up and I did have unclaimed property, and it was over a thousand dollars, and I felt I had won the lottery, so thank you. Interesting connection between the two. Yeah, very, I repeat that often and promote that program because of it. I wanted to just get back to a couple of your points. Well, I want to first turn to Commissioner Maynard. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mark, and I am happy to learn of your leadership at a national level. I know that we've had an opportunity to speak before, but I also knew of the Treasurer's leadership at a national level, and when I was looking at the letter yesterday, it hit me that, you know, you would have all sorts of insights, Madam Treasurer, on what's going on throughout the country, so I appreciate you highlighting Iowa for us and to echo Commissioner Skinner, I look forward to this partnership continuing in a new way and welcome it. So that's all I have, Madam Chair. Thank you, Commissioner, and one of the things that I want to reiterate is, when you talk nationally, and I tell people about the Massachusetts State Lottery being the source of unrestricted local aid, and the numbers that we do, and on a very people are shocked at our tiny operating overhead and how much actually goes back, it's highly unusual for it to be going so in unrestricted local aid. Now, for those on the call who aren't aware of why this is the case and why it's unusual, is when Proposition 2.5% was instituted in the 1970s, there was enormous concern, particularly on the part of Treasurer Robert Crane, that local communities would suffer dramatically, and so the Lottery who is celebrating their 50th anniversary this year was created specifically for that goal, and it is, I'm a former chair of the Brookline Board of what is now called the Select Board, but at the time was Select Moon, and I said just don't worry about it, just select me. I will tell you, those were essential dollars, just thinking back quickly to 2015, when we had 110 inches of snow, there was no local community that hadn't, they had, we have snow and ice removal funds, it's a line item, nobody had that kind of money, and that's exactly what it was used for, so it's a really, you have to sort of have a tactile sense of what the Lottery means to our communities and our state to understand why we need to protect the Massachusetts state Lottery, and particularly given that we are not online and some of our competitors are increasingly online, we need to develop some relationships that ensure that the Lottery is able to sustain itself, and when we come to those conversations about what happens within our retailers, it's important because you, we're all public servants here, at the end of the day we have to think of what's in the best interest of the people in our local communities, and that's what the Mass State Lottery is about, as is returning, unclaimed property, and just so you know, Madam Chair, I rush to the new list and call everyone I know, and I become the most best friend and most popular person they have in their roller decks for quite some time. It was a very exciting moment, I think Mark probably saw me jumping out of my seat, so thank you. Just a couple of quick follow-ups, we will follow up on with respect to the Lottery piece. I want to just note that, and Karen, Director Wells, you can correct me, perhaps Commissioner Skinner or Director Lilios, but we were in Nevada for a seminar on sports betting, and I learned, what was I thought, a remarkable fact, that the casino industry doesn't include their entertainment and hotel and restaurant, just the gaming business raises one billion dollars annually. Charter Goldberg, make sure I'm right on that, but that's a fun fact for you to know, because I said, oh that's really interesting, Massachusetts State Lottery actually raises 1.1 billion. So, you know, I did think they might want to reconsider their tax rate, perhaps, right, but just as a note, is that your memory, Commissioner, were you there for that? Yep, that is exactly my memory, yep. Well, it is why I, that is also why when I began my remarks, I wanted to explain that, and I always explain publicly, my profits at the Massachusetts State Lottery belong to the people of Massachusetts. We're not a private profit-making enterprise, we're a profit-making enterprise, but that is for revenues to go to the people in our state, and that's a very, very different mission, and so when we're looking at numbers and actual business operations, it's really critical to keep that hat on, keep that perspective on, and I believe in a Commissioner Hill, you were working on the original gaming legislation, and I know how deeply you care about your own personal local community, that that was one of the reasons why holding the Lottery harmless was a phase that was always highly esteemed in those deliberations, and it's more complicated today with things being online, the Mass State Lottery not being online, but we believe we could develop ways of cross-promotion and potentially, hopefully, we will be online someday in order to fully be able to compete and exist in the world as it has evolved. Thank you. Just a couple closing remarks. We do, for those who aren't familiar with our regular day-to-day business, we have quarterly reports from each of our current licensees, casino and they do, in each quarterly report, always report on their lottery sales, and that is a reflection of that mandate under 23K to hold the Lottery harmless and to make sure we protect that valuable asset for the state. It's noted that it wasn't in 23N and we'll be exploring what this implication is for us, and we're very pleased you brought it to our attention, and I'm also pleased to say that we are, we're delighted with our current licensees collaboration on that effort. So the second part I wanted to note is that I think our Director of Responsible Gaming is on, Mark Vander Linden. He's been working as well as Commissioner Hill and I with your team we're very, very appreciative of their work on the financial literacy. I had been hopeful for that. It took another, another great state public servant at Peleski to connect us all together, and I appreciate his, his work to do that, and I know Emily is on, we just are very appreciative of that work where we would love to be able to give those tools to new gaming members and also those who are on the other end who are at some point where we can give tools for those are, you know, really credit reforms, whatever for those who have gotten into trouble. So we appreciate that partnership. It's been very exciting, but I wanted to close with Mark, Mark Vander Linden's just joining us, but Mark will be addressing the two studies that we need to do by statute and I had already mentioned to him the need to work with the lottery on the kiosk question so your letter only reflects our intention. So we'll make sure that absolutely your team is included. That's a, those, those establishments, I know how much they enjoy Kino and so many of those establishments we know that it will be critical to understand the impact on, on those establishments in the lottery. And finally I think we've talked about the abandoned properties and I think that that's going to be something that will be quite simple to address. So thank you. Any other further comments? Madam Chair, I, I appreciate you touching on the other points. I know a lot of the focus of the discussion was around the abandoned accounts. So thank you for, for, you know, kind of tying it all together. And I do look forward to working with you, Madam Treasurer, you Mark, and I know Emily is on. Hi Emily. But looking forward to working with you in these, in these very important initiatives. Anything else, Treasurer? No, I really, of course it's very helpful that, Madam Chair, you have a great deal of understanding about the operations within the Treasury and how they interrelate, as do your other commissioners. So it was, I was a delighted commissioner, O'Brien, when you were the first to respond about your concern about that type of consumer protection. So with that, I think that we have a really good start on, and we can work together on ensuring that we ultimately have the best product of sports gambling for the people within our state, while at the same time making sure that in the future we protect the other things that help support our local communities. And I always tell people, local communities aren't bricks and mortar. They're the people who live there. So thank you for your time. Thank you, and this I think was a perfect way to convey this important message. Thank you so much, Treasurer. Thank you for having all of us, and we're here to work with you. Thank you. Okay, so we will now turn to, I guess, our next item, which really is a general item under Director Wells. We'll get started. Good morning, Karen. Morning, Madam Chair and members of the Commission. So we have a number of items on the agenda, and I'd like to just note that these really all impact the timeline. I know, obviously, you heard from Commissioner Hill. A lot of people interested in moving this forward. I understand that. So there are a lot of items on today that will help move the process forward. We've got some discussion on the reg structure. Certified independent test lab regulations will help us move quick more quickly. House rules, staffing internally will obviously help us up this up. The licensing criteria discussion, and then technology approval. So there it's quite meeting there. There are a lot of substance issues this morning. So I'm going to turn it over to our General Council, Todd Grossman, to get started. Thank you, Karen. Good morning, Madam Chair, commissioners and all who are joining us here today. We are, of course, about to embark upon a journey that will see the Commission review a sizable number of regulations in the coming weeks and months. And as we've discussed in the past, the regulations will ultimately serve as the framework which will guide many of the critical decisions that the Commission will be called upon to make, ranging from temporary to initial licensing, the approval of the commencement of operations all the way through to ensuring the lawful operation of both in-person and digital sports wagering operations. So before we jump into looking at specific draft regulations, we thought it would be beneficial to address a few important legal issues and principles that may help inform that decision making. We'll first ask Lon Povich who has joined us, and there he is, from the firm Anderson and Krieger, and he's actually, we have a number of attorneys from the firm joining us here today. You'll see Amina Macarius and Dave Mackey on as well. They've been offering us tremendous assistance and counsel to date and will continue to do so throughout this process. But today we'll ask Mr. Povich to address two issues for the Commission. First is the role of regulations versus policies and then to get into the promulgation of regulations by the use of emergency promulgation provisions of the law. Then I'll address some of the administrative issues related to the filing of regulations with the Secretary of State's office, including the assignment of section numbers. We'll then move into two actual sets of draft regulations for your review. We're not intending necessarily to review the entire regulation promulgation process here today, as we've done in the past, but we can certainly touch on some of those laws and principles as well. So then I'll present that first set of regulations. Those relate to independent test labs. After that presentation we'll turn into our Associate General Counsel Judy Young. We'll be joined by Burke Kane and Sturl Carpenter to present a draft of the House Rules Regulations. So with all that as just kind of a preview of coming attractions, I'd like to turn things over to Lawn Povich to jump right in to those matters I just mentioned. Good morning. Thank you Todd. Good morning Chair Judd Stein and to the commissioners and to all of you who are joining us. It's a pleasure to be with you this morning. I've really been asked to discuss two issues. It's sort of the scope of when regulations are a better choice to use to put in place governance matters versus just a standing policy and second the issue of using the emergency regulatory powers in Chapter 30A as opposed to the regulatory process that we're most familiar with whereby a public is hearing is held before the regulations. Turning to the first question, you know the administrative procedures act is interpreted by the SJC provides a broad definition of regulations and should be interpreted accordingly. The leading cases carry of the commission of corrections which as I said was decided in 2018 and it basically said that if policies relate to the organizational structure of the agency they can be in policy form but anything that substantially affects the public should be in the form of regulation and obviously this is one case it's been followed by a superior court case also around the Department of Corrections with the same type of language but basically although they're just words it does lay out a pretty strong preference for regulations and the use of the Chapter 30A regulatory process when such rules are being established by a commission this commission in exact in addition and I apologize if there's a little background noise sorry in addition the gaming commission has a long precedent of issuing lots of regulations governing the brick and mortar casinos as you've discussed and one would think that things that were covered by regulations as to brick and mortar casinos should equally be governed by regulations relating to the sports wagering process that you're undertaking so you know there's a mosaic of what's going to go on here there's a there's some temporary licensees which we can discuss in in a minute there are there are more permanent licensees these things will have to get rolled out over time I assume but generally speaking as we put together a plan for the regulation of this industry one would think that there would be a strong role for regulations following the precedent of the commission before but also in some appropriate cases the use of internal policies all consistent with Chapter 30A and the guidance from the SJC so that's a that's a medium level overview of the first issue which is regulations versus internal policies referencing the guideline between things that affect the public broadly and things that are more directed to internal management affairs so I'll just pause there for a second to see if there are any questions from the commission or the staff on that first point any questions good morning Maura morning okay okay the second issue which we were asked to look at is the use the appropriate use of the promulgation of emergency regulations and at the highest level the difference between emergency regulations which can go into effect immediately upon the adoption by the commission under a standard that I'll discuss in a minute versus the traditional 30A process is that the public hearing in emergency regulations takes place after the regulation goes into effect instead of before the regulation into effect so emergency regulations can be adopted immediately upon a finding by the commission that the regulation is necessary for the preservation of the public health safety or general wealth and that observance of the requirements of notice or the delay to allow the requirements of notice would be contrary to the public interest so that type of finding would have to be made by the commission at the time that regulations were adopted as an emergency regulation and the commission is under the relevant case law given every presumption in its favor and not questioned by the judiciary about the emergency nature of the proceedings unless and the key language from a SJC case being back the language dates back to the 60s talks about the commission being palpably wrong in determining an emergency under the statutory scheme and once the emergency is determined the regulations or the regulations promulgated as an emergency regulation it stays into effect for three months during which time if nothing is done the regulation expires and more typically what is done is the public hearing and comment period takes place and if any changes are necessary they're made and then the regulation becomes permanent not an emergency regulation but a permanent regulation at the conclusion of that three month period there's a lot of mechanics around all this around the notice to the secretary and other acquired notices but but the real question is when does the commission believe it's necessary their regulation goes into effect as immediately upon its promulgation and then takes public comment later I should say that there are ways to take public comment without a public hearing informally during a regulatory process I've done recent work with another commission where regulations were discussed publicly the comment was invited not necessarily to a public hearing mechanism but it was you know well known what the commission was up to and members of the public did have an opportunity to send in comments so there are sort of high British hybrid like models that are allowed and again turning to what you're dealing with in this case one the new gaming sports gaming statute does specifically say that the commission can as necessary promulgate emergency regulations in section 4a and at the same time as we were discussing and and commissioner Hill reported from sort of public perceptions there is some sense of timeline contained in the new law around sports or aduring that would seek to easily create a situation where in the best interest of the goals of the commission in fair gaming and public safety in the public interest while moving expeditiously on certain aspects of the new law regulations should best be in place and that would seem to be ones that might be promulgated by an emergency under emergency construct under chapter 38 but again this is all these are all tools available to the commission as the general counsel Grossman talked about as the commission puts together its regulatory scheme for this new industry in various phases and aspects and moves thing along they move things along so in as with many things in the law both of these principles it depends but I think they are tools that the commission should and can consider and of course we're happy to support you in this as the mosaic of sports gaming regulation so again I'm happy to take questions on emergency regulations or that or anything else from the commission or the staff as you wish can I see Commissioner Hill believe in first actually I think Commissioner O'Brien did and I okay Commissioner O'Brien my apologies thank you sure just a couple of questions for you on one do you have an advocate site from the 1960s case that talks about the assessment for the exercise of discretion on this yeah the 60s the pioneer liquor mark versus the ABCC 350 mass one at page 10 and it was cited in American grain products versus DPH which is 392 mass 309 at 323 which is a 1984 case okay right and then a question that I had in terms of of the process if we were to proceed normally we face with a circumstance where we as a body say that's this does not qualify as necessary to preserve the public health safety and welfare if after that time circumstances change what that we as a body now determine things have changed such that we now feel like that particular reg now falls within that category how is the process affected at all in terms of I'm assuming we still have the right to then say we're putting these into effect as emergency regs yeah I think you can make that determination at any time and you're not bound by a prior determination especially given your predicate which is something's changed right so um if nothing's changed I mean you know there is great discretion in the agency to do this so while challenges in any event is always plus like litigation is always possible you know you start in a pretty strong position but a long long discussion and finding that there is no emergency immediately followed by a lack of discussion that there is you know is a is a more suspect circumstance than to you know make a good record in any case at any time you find an emergency to support that determination but assuming as I said the circumstances have changed to the point where now the the body determines that there is there's nothing that bars you from using the emergency process having started under the normal process is that a fair statement that is a correct statement okay thank you thanks commissioner hill commissioner hill thank you so I've been juggling with this for the last couple of weeks and when we're looking at possibly putting together emergency regulations obviously not something to be taken very lightly and I was looking at the criteria that allows for us to be able to to put forth emergency regulations and you talked about it briefly with public health safety public welfare can you talk a little bit more and enlighten me about public interest like what would fall under public interest as I'm trying to decide what avenue we want to go down for regulatory promulgation well let me do let me do my best to answer that what I think about when I think about what the commission is facing in this case and where uh the exigencies come from I really and my colleagues and I really focused on the temporary license space first I mean there's a pretty strong imperative in the in the legislation about granting temporary licenses and getting this getting the sports gaming sports waging operations up and running and you know that legislative imperative frankly a little bit less than the sort of public imperative but they do sort of go together demonstrates that the undercurrent there's a strong presumption in this bill that the commission should move expeditiously to start this this type of gaming and make it available to the public and you know there have been some other cases in which you know the legislature has given an indication that it wants things to move quickly and that has been a basis to support an emergency regulation funding and at the same time you know given the fact that the commission as you've all discussed wants to balance providing this gaming option as instructed by the legislature while at the same time protecting the citizens of the Commonwealth seem to create a situation where the public welfare would be protected both by having a decent regulatory scheme in place when the temporary gaming is launched and at the same time temporary gaming is supposed to be launched in an expeditious fashion so you know I think if you take things as a whole I have to think you have to think of like look what the legislature is asking the commission to do understand the there is some sense of expeditiousness created in that and the way to create regulatory schemes expeditiously is to do a by an emergency basis I mean I want to reiterate that the difference in emergency regulations is when the public hearing takes place so by before the regulation is a permanent regulation there is a full opportunity for the public to comment through the process laid out in chapter A 38 and as I said before you can get some public comment even in emergency regulations system by you know discussing it publicly at these kind of meetings and you know providing for comments by email or whatever you wish to do so you know I think I think in a situation where the commission is tasked with moving promptly the prompt way to do regulations is an emergency basis and can be supported by the language in the case law thank you Mr. Skinner I just wanted to clarify one point if I may just to be clear Commissioner Hill the language in the statute refers to the general welfare and not the public interest and you know and it'll ultimately be up to the commission's discretion as Mr. Povich just mentioned as to what the distinction between those two things is and whether there's a distinction between them but it's important just to recognize the law talks about general welfare for the adoption thank you it's hard first Lawn it's very nice to meet you we haven't met until now but the virtual introduction is just fine really good to meet you it's hard for me to get my head wrapped around the notion that there is a threat to you know general welfare of the public or the health of the public or you know a public safety issue if the commission doesn't act to promulgate emergency regulations so that it can issue temporary licenses to sportsway during operators so those cases that you referenced that cite specific examples of where you know this kind of a situation has has past muster under under the emergency regulation process is going to be those cases are going to be really important for me and also I think the timing of the public hearing and the public comment period is going to be important you know if we do decide to go the emergency reg route I would be looking to have those processes proceed as expeditiously as possible you know either after the the emergency reg is promulgated or simultaneously any I mean I think I think it I think it all has to be taken together in a systemic approach so I think the timeline around temporary licenses and the timeline around regulations concerning temporary license these the commission should look at you know holistically and even more holistically in in you know the permanent license process and I think once the discussions proceed around timeline and preferences to the commission these issues should be considered and and revisited but or just discussed in the context of whatever timeline you come up with I think my goal today was to to discuss the tools that were available to the commission and the level to which we think they were would be supportable subject to commission's decision of course or the framework under which they would be supportable as preparing for commission's discussions at most point so everything is very important it's very important to put all these things in context and you know we have a general scheme of the context that is the temporary licenses should go before permanent licenses but the and I know we may talk about this the coming weeks but the extent to which the extent to the regulatory scheme which you want to put in place in the temporary license scheme which should probably be the first question and the timing around all of that and the timing around the granting of such temporary licenses will be the factual basis on which we'll have to put these general principles that I discussed earlier to the test I'll set Commissioner Skinner for now I'll set for now thank you will we get Commissioner Maynard? It's very nice to meet you too I'm sorry I should have started with not it's not been started and not ended with that Commissioner Maynard thank you Madam Chair thank you thank you Councillor isn't it true that you know in the what we will call the normal regulatory process these regs are opened up a lot right I mean there's continuous change continuous hearings reg reviews it's pretty standard right yeah yeah well yes and no the answer is yes it's standard but one of the reasons people discuss what's the policy and what's a reg is you know anytime you change your reg you need the public process associated with it but you know I'm less familiar with your early work because I wasn't in prior practice at the time but I know that the regulations governing the brick and mortar casinos have been reviewed revised and updated and I think most regs should be reviewed review revised and updated but you know it takes some process and it takes some learning but you know obviously this commission and every commission and every person gets smarter as things go on and time goes on and I would anticipate that whatever is done to get this industry off the ground is modified as people get wiser as a real world experience in Massachusetts plays itself up so I agree with that I appreciate that and I think you know I'm a simple person and the way that I look look at this issue is you know the options are as you've laid out pretty you know pretty there's no perfect option right if we do the regular notice and comment period and review process then the timelines elongated if we do the emergency regulations and I'm just talking this out and you can jump in where I'm wrong which I often am if we do it at the front and we let the comments happen on the back end you know there could be some as Commissioner Skinner has pointed out some wrapping your head around the fact that that we're doing that but then to me the worst option is to allow temporary licenses to go forward with no regulations in place which is another menu out of options if you look at it logically so my point in asking that first question is getting emergency rags out the door and then having a situation where the notice and comment period comes after isn't too much different than if we did the regular review process and then had to amend those regulations later down the road so it's just something I'm thinking and feel free to pick up on anything I just gave you a whole lot there that I'm wrong on no no I don't think you're wrong on any of it and I think Commissioner Skinner's point I want to finish your Skinner's points that you know to get as much public comment in as early as possible no matter what however you the commission might decide to do this is a valuable way it's not it's not totally yes or no you know green or red it's if the timing works out in the way that it all rolls out if you have two or three discussions of a set of regulations before they get issued as an emergency regulation and you allow public comment on those you know you haven't fulfilled the 38 public hearing process and you'll have to go back and do that after the emergency regulation but but you know you'll get some input into it and you know the post commission which I have represented since it's start did some of that on some emergency regulations that they needed to get done because they had a statutory mandate they had a date you don't have a date they had a date by which they had to get some things done so it was it could be seen as an and they had to start they were in a startup base so you know it supported an emergency regulation but they did take comments before the regulation went to place so frankly they took so many comments that when we had the public hearing on to make that regulation permanent maybe there was one person or two people who showed up but my general recollection is like no one showed up to make comments that was just that case that may not be this case but as again that's I aligned with commission Skinner's point that getting as much no matter how you proceed getting as much commenting as possible as early as possible within the realm of getting it done seems to make a lot of sense Commissioner O'Brien Yeah I did just want to point out a couple things one in in response to what was just said in terms of launching something without regulations we have a statutory obligation to implement certain regulations prior to sports wagering launching independent of the temp license issue that we're talking about and I did also want to point out I like Commissioner Skinner's struggle with the concept that this alone would satisfy the 30 a requirement on the emergency reg and finding that the in the broad sense without you know a deeper discussion on a particular reg in the particular circumstances that the failure to do so would then be against the public interest so I'm in the camp that Commissioner Skinner is in which is I want to hear what people have to say and I do want to point out that there is also in a resource question in terms of emergency because as you point out we would then have to go through in a formal comment process with a staff who would still be under a lot of stress trying to get everything else done and so I think that that is not without its negatives in terms of being able to move expeditiously across the board on what our regulatory drafting and implementation obligations are but as Commissioner Skinner said I you know want to read the cases also that you cited today to sort of inform me as we go on a case by case right by right basis where this question is going to be before us so I thank you for those cases and I'll send you a couple more sites great to them that's all I appreciate that thank you I'll offer my insights Mr. Povich thank you so much for your presentation it's been really helpful for me you know it looks like from my perspective that we have a lot of very great legal support to allow us to use this emergency regulatory tool we have other tools available I led today with the statement that we're not going to do anything to compromise the integrity the industry that we stand up consumer protection is always at the forefront of our minds the health and welfare of the patrons are at the forefront of our minds but I did forget to say one thing I meant to remind the public that right now there is no legal platform in massachusetts to bet on any smart event there are the various organizations who are trying to reach out to those individuals because they've heard what's wagering has been legalized you won't get the consumer protections that we're going to offer you through the system that we're planning on organizing right now if you bet today on one of those platforms that is not regulated they may suggest it is pursuant to law the law is in place our regulatory framework is not yet in place so I really do think that there is a public safety and a public welfare issue here it may not be exactly what the mission is a post right it's a little different but it is certainly something that we can legitimately lean on and I would love to be able to defer to our team they come in with recommendations this is where we really need to use those emergency tools because I'm mindful of Commissioner Bryan saying it's bandwidth although we absolutely are hoping to make sure that our team is given all the resources they need to be able to accomplish their work so that bandwidth is an issue I'm also mindful and I've led with this public input is absolutely essential to our work we will be we've we've already already started round tables with stakeholders we will have public hearings to get public input and it may be in connection with a particular regulation but I happen to get the chance to speak with Commissioner Stinger earlier today but it will also be full hearings where we get input written statements and comments on various issues or on the entire statute we have to figure that's that next step but I do think particularly given what Commissioner Hill started with today the word is out that you can bet no or you're going to bet in two weeks and I I want I want to be able to provide those consumer protections that'll to our our public residents and mass judges who are interested in sports betting in a way that can be timely and again without sacrifice so Lawn I thought it was an excellent presentation I appreciate your work today so I turn it over I guess if there are any other comments perhaps some Attorney Grossman Attorney Povic what's next what do you need from us I don't think I well I defer to your general counsel but you know my intent was to provide just an overview of the tools to set a context as as Todd said before for the cut discussions that will follow you know there's obviously to state the obvious there's a tremendous amount of work for the commission and staff and those of us who are happy to help around this but I think you know once as the plan comes together we'll can refer and I will circulate the other cases as your colleagues suggested but as you know as the plan involves as the mosaic as I call it comes together we'll have to look at what tools are available and when and how it all makes the most sense to do it so this is just this is more by way of primer and by way of asking for any kind of determination at this point I think I have the executive director leaning in I'd like to defer to her yes so the part of the reason we also asked for this agenda item to be on this morning was we are moving forward with the drafting of regulations and we did identify two of them the item 3B and item 3C which would help move the process forward so we have those ready to go it's just the commission's discretion how you would like to handle that this morning we wanted some kind of uh as as Attorney COVID said some kind of primer so you had some kind of educational tool in the meeting but it's your call how you would want to go forward with those regulations but we do have them available should the commission want to take one action or another they're just available okay and so I'm seeing that's that's certainly the case and and uh and it's my understanding Councilor Grossman you're leaning in you actually it was just thank you anyway right back over to me thank you Lawn much appreciated that was very helpful we're gonna before we dive into some of the regs that Karen just mentioned it's one other procedural issue I wanted to bring to the commission's attention you may be wondering why the drafts have the numbering of the sections that they do so I just wanted to address that quickly before we jump into the actual drafts we have been in touch with the regulations division of the Secretary of State's office and as you all likely know the Secretary of State is the state entity charged with the oversight of the code of Massachusetts regulations and the entity with whom we file all the forms after the commission approves the promulgation process and we wanted to connect with them to ensure that they were certainly aware of the fact that we will have a pretty decent volume of regulations coming their way and just to understand what the framework will look like for the numbering process and while we feel like we have a really good understanding of that and we're both on the same page we are still working our way through it and so what you will what you'll end up seeing is that we identified the preferred model if you will being that we would mirror the framework of the sports wagering regulations after that which is already in place for the gaming regulations on the theory that there will be a lot of overlap topically speaking not substantively necessarily because of course there are different bodies of law that govern both sets of regulations so as you'll see as we go through this in some cases we may be able to just amend a gaming regulation and add in the words something to the effect of and sports wagering there are other places where we can't do that based on either the way that the construct works with the filing of regulations or the enabling statute so just by way of example the first regulation that will come your way that we'll talk about momentarily relates to independent test labs on the gaming side we have a series of regulations that talk about independent test labs they're codified at 205 CMR 144 so the theory was since we're going to have to have regulations about independent test labs on the sports wagering side we will put those at 244 so there'll be a mirror version of regulations at least again topically on the sports wagering side similar to those that presently exist on the gaming side but instead of being in the 100s they'll be in the 200s so that's why you're seeing what you're seeing what you'll also observe is that since we're not going in order from one to 50 if you will section 101 102 103 and we're jumping in at different points that we need to reserve certain section numbers with the idea that we'll come back to those as the process unfolds and for example again coming back to the independent test lab regs that we're about to talk about you'll see that we've numbered that one 244.06 and the reason why we didn't start at 244.01 is that in 144.06 it talks about how the labs themselves get certified on the gaming side so we've lined that up on the sports wagering side with the idea that we'll follow up in the near future with another series of regulations 244.01 .02 .03 that talk about similar provisions related to independent test labs so if that wasn't too confusing that is the reason why we have set everything up the way we have hopefully it'll come into clearer focus as we start moving through this but we're trying to kind of build out the framework out of order in some ways and that's why it was important that we identify the proper numbering system in advance the last point I just wanted to make on this and then if there are any questions as I'm sure there are I will certainly pause there though we feel confident in the framework we are presenting to you and I'm just talking about the numbering system primarily it is possible that upon filing the secretary will identify some issues with things like that so what we will ask for and what you'll hopefully include in your motions when we get to the point that we ask for votes on these drafts is the flexibility to adjust the numbering in the sections and things along those lines that don't affect the content of what the commission has approved just so we don't have to come back before you for formal approval to change a number or a section labeling or something along those lines so we'll deal with them I'm sure I'll set with that right yes in terms of changing the numbers yeah so that I mean we'll see that in some of the motions I anticipate we may have coming our way even today but that's why that is in there so with that let me pause for just a minute before we jump right into the first regulation are there any questions about anything I just mentioned about that I may just interject before we move on it is already 10 of 11 I want anyone who needs to stretch their legs it was at this juncture if you'd like to continue for the mindful fact that the meetings can be really passed Michelle I would like a break if we can you're on very quickly Madam Chair yeah I think that too so Todd did I cut you off at the wrong point did you have a short point right that's a perfect time for a break okay excellent thank you to all those who are attending well it's 10-54 or we convene 11 okay excellent thank you hi Dave Dave I think we're probably all set to take it down okay sounds good thank you people are rejoining okay good good morning again to all because we're using this virtual platform to conduct our public meeting I'm going to take a little call again Commissioner O'Brien I am here Commissioner Hill President Commissioner Skinner I'm here Commissioner Maynard I'm here all right we're all set to continue on I'll return back to on our agenda we were just really starting our our item number three thank you again to Lon Kovach for his presentation and now Councilor Grossman I'll return to you thank you great thank you Madam Chair so we'll jump right in and look at a draft regulation in light of everything that was just discussed I'm in your packet there's a brief memo a draft of 205 CMR 244.06 and a small business impact statement accompanying the draft as I briefly mentioned moments ago we do intend to bring additional sections of the new 244 to the Commission at a future date but today we're really just focused on 244.06 related to independent PESLAB certification by way of background as as you may know the Commission's existing regulations 205 CMR 144 require that an entity be certified by the Commission as an independent testing lab prior to being permitted to perform compliance testing of electronic gaming equipment that's used at the gaming establishments and to become a certified independent testing lab the entity must be able to test the equipment for compliance with various GLI standards that we've talked a little bit about and we'll talk more about in the coming weeks relative to those electronic gaming device an entity applying for certification as an independent test lab has to go through an approval process and ultimately be certified and that process is detailed in section 144.06 of the regs at present there are two labs that are certified by the Commission one is GLI itself and the other is the lab called BMM and they have received that certification under section 144. So the draft that's in the packet of 244.06 would authorize essentially those two entities or really any entity that's certified as an independent testing lab for electronic gaming devices on the casino gaming space to automatically be certified as an independent testing lab for sports wagering related devices. This would allow for a couple of things it would first of all kind of allow for sports wagering vendors and operators to have an understanding of where the commission stands as to how that will work they can begin commencing their relationships with these labs in the sports wagering space. And secondly, given the unique nature of the work that these entities perform in the limited universe of companies that do this type of work it would allow the commission to directly contract with those either of those two entities to assist in adopting and amending these industry standards related to sports wagering. It would help us to stand up the regulation drafting process a little bit quicker. So that is kind of the overview of what this regulation talks about. We can certainly walk through it but I think the essence of it is essentially just that again it would allow the existing labs to be certified automatically as sports wagering independent test laboratories. Ultimately what is before you is a certainly at a the threshold would be to allow the staff to commence the promulgation process in the ordinary fashion but the specific request is that you consider authorizing the emergency adoption of these in order to help expedite the process. Of course we just talked about all of those principles. So if that isn't something that the commission is inclined to do today we can still if there's a comfort with that move them through the regular promulgation process. Let's let's ask questions about the substance first and not about the emergency versus regular promulgation. Questions about the substance of this regulation? I have a question madam chair. Later in the agenda Karen's going to talk to us about testing options. Does this regulate is this regulation needed regardless of which option the commission adopts? Yes that's a it's a diff that would be a different section of the regulations it's in sorry I don't have the site right in front of me it's in the 140 it might be 143 it's a it's a different section that talks about approval of the equipment for use. So the way it would work because they are all connected so it's it's it's a good point to have a good understanding of in order for the equipment that Karen will talk about to become approved the whether it's the commission or the operators themselves or the vendors of the devices would have to bring the equipment to a certified independent Tesla. So the lab itself would have to be certified under the process we're talking about now. But it doesn't it's not directly related to the process that will be used of later on we what we're talking about now will need to be done one way or the other. And we do have our CIO Katrina Jagger on for any technical questions. And we did consult with her and that team on the comfort level and having this this red front forward today. Questions for Katrina or I have one follow up to you. Can you remind me it is an independent testing that process. Do we form any kind of audit function or how do how do we assure that they're doing their job? Yeah. So the two independent testing labs that general council Grossman referred to BMM and GLI they're currently certified obviously to do our regular gaming testing. They go through a pretty rigorous process initially to have been allowed to do testing in our jurisdiction along with other jurisdictions like us that do regular story one you know because I'm sorry category one category two regulations. So on an annual basis we do do an audit of the facility itself where most of the testing happens. We get a walkthrough with that we do have a compliance checklist that we go through with both labs to ensure that they are adhering to and meeting our requirements as well as industry standard requirements. So they have a pretty good hopefully it's an excellent compliance history on the regulatory side for gaming. Absolutely. So Madam Chair actually if I could follow up I had a question on this earlier in Katrina maybe if you could answer and I know I've heard from Karen's answer the the choice of the word shall as opposed to may I didn't know if that was a specific choice or whether it should be may in terms of giving some discretion if there are other vendors maybe the confidence level is not quite so high or any issue comes up where you want the ability to not automatically qualify or whether you want the shall. Can you direct us to the shall please? Sure a person certified as an independent testing lab pursuant to 205CMR 144 shall be authorized by the commission to provide testing services of sportsway during devices. I didn't know if may or shall is the better choice there may be giving the discretion obviously to whether they don't want to certify for some reason or whether they're everyone is comfortable with shall. I'm I'm struggling I'm sorry I'm looking at the memo on the right packet page eight yeah I'm looking out I I am I wonder if she was looking at motion all right no the text of this yeah I would ask Todd whether this is the this this language mirrors 144.06 is that is the shall in in that regulation no this is entirely different in that obviously in 144 there's a process laid out for the labs to become certified here we're just saying essentially if they've already become certified they shall be deemed certified under the sportsway during space so the language is different it's the same general subject matter which is why it's in 244.06 but it is different Todd I don't want it to be shall I mean don't we want them to so the shall would remove any discretion on the agency's part if there's other concerns so I know at present with the two we're talking about no one has concerns my question is does staff feel comfortable with not having that discretion going forward to the extent that other vendors may come forward approved on the slot side but maybe you don't feel comfortable with them on a sportsway during device Commissioner O'Brien if I can jump in just momentarily I think your concern might be elated in part by some of the other language in this paragraph before you that kind of brings over some of the reporting and other obligations from 144 over to 244 and makes them applicable so that if there were a problem with either of them we could take whatever action would be necessary again it's not to I'm sorry I'm just trying to move that's not my concern my concern is that you have an entity that is not as versed in sports waging equipment as these two companies are but who would nonetheless qualify under slots so not something that would necessarily be a notification requirement that's covered in this current reg but whether staff needs the ability to say I get it but you know what you actually weren't who we were contemplating when we put shell in there I understand I understand I get you because the rest of it I'm fine with that that's just the one word I'm looking for a little more discussion or assurance on understanding I leave Commissioner O'Brien is that if you had another entity that wanted to be a certified intended Tesla really for casino gaming there's an automatic in the future so it's that really ties into that process on the sort of on the front end I hear what you're saying right so I'm always loathed to write regs or statutes based on something at present that's not fixed and static you know thinking about well what happens if you have another entry into the market and we don't feel as comfortable with the shell I have a follow-up question Commissioner O'Brien because I have the same I have the same concern does 205 CMR 144 would that allow we use that tool to bring in a new player into this into this game if they do pop up I mean there is a real issue here about saying well we're just going with who we know when there's other players in the game across across the country and could pop up across the country yeah I think that is it is certainly a possibility I think the practically speaking there are only two companies that do this it's not to say that there never could be another one so your your concerns are certainly well grounded and maybe Katrina can speak to this a little bit more clearly but as a practical matter I think it was probably fairly solid ground but what my thinking is is that if there's a process in 205 CMR 144 to add some one in that may take care take care of this but I'm you know that was that was my and the other issue Commissioner Jordan is as Karen may may have briefed the commissioners in advance the expectation is that as this is sort of an initial threshold reg but that we would go back and come before the commission with more detail on 244.06 which may address those concerns saying in the next six months within the next six months so I think Todd is correct it's not necessarily a practical issue but a legitimate I'll call on the on the exact language as Commissioner Brian pointed out so I guess my question I guess to move forward is is it is there a downside to saying may which would leave my concerns and maybe you know Commissioner Maynard's as opposed to needing the show does the may get you where you want to go and allay the concerns that I've just expressed does it make it more lenient is I guess maybe I'm reading it wrong does it it makes it more flexible it makes it more flexible for the commission it gives the commission more authority to withhold approval if for some reason you have this new player in the market who may pop up that qualifies under slot but we don't feel comfortable with under sports wagering yes Lenin had it's a comment on this because he's been working on this with us as well sir yeah thank you so you've got to follow yeah like you know what I've got to I heard somebody speaking and I couldn't identify on who that was is that Katrina who was speaking no I believe that was see a full Lenin Derek I think no the torn hand be right before Derek Secretary Karen Madam Chair oh right before Derek Commissioner Skinner thank you I just I just commented I just gave an answer or tried to in response to your question that would be helpful for me to hear thank you it's only my opinion but but may using the word may just gives the commission more flexibility in its decision yeah so it may be fabricated the same and continue obligations outlined and okay I guess I just wonder if it's um is that a strong I think than being unnoticed but that's fine may may could work Derek you wanted to chime in hello good morning hello so all all these concerns that you are talking about we addressed and I think and we addressed it behind the scenes and it's probably not here in the public meeting as as staff came out we do plan on changing this reg to allow for specific testing regarding sports wagering qualifications that being said we need someone to come in and help us draft those regs for the sports wagering regulations so we need this reg to certify the current independent test labs that we know are doing this and other jurisdictions another lab may come up the process under 144 not 244 for certifying would not allow another lab to be present because it's similar to a entity qualifier or a vendor primary qualifier prior to us getting these regs established and permanent so we do understand that there may be someone that comes in that is just a gaming lab but not good for sports wagering but the feasibility of that actually happening before we can get the regular regs written for sports wagering are next to zero I'm not going to say zero but next to zero the may does not hamper us one bit versus a shall the shall just requires that there are two and it gives our operators the ability to use one that they would prefer versus the other and not be tied into one but I'm sure Katrina in team intent is to allow both BMM and GLI to do this testing and let the operators choose who they'd like to go to so it doesn't change one way or another and I think it does add some flexibility but we did think about all the issues you're bringing up and in order for us to get to that place to make it really solid we need this temporary or this emergency reg and it helps to expedite the timeline okay so if we were to amend the shall to may could we have a motion I know we probably want to discuss the emergency versus standard I am am I hearing from you Director Wells that it's your recommendation on the case by case analysis that you would like this to be an emergency bag would you say that correct sorry my my audience not that great thank you any discussion it's time for another question yeah yes absolutely in terms of the actual devices that will be tested is there much difference in the sports wagering world versus the gaming world and and and can you just give a couple of examples of the kinds of devices that are contemplated here for testing so I can feel that one Commissioner Skinner so there are a variety of devices that are similar to our gaming side to the sports wagering side so for example a kiosk or a card reader or a you know some other mechanism for patron management that works with our retail operators or our land-based casinos that are doing sports wagering when you start getting into the sports wagering centric world of online their systems their different platforms their different components to each of these and you know for example you know there's this geofencing that's that's usually the most popular when we talk about is you know if you're going to authorize online betting you need to have geofencing capability to ensure that any transactions executed into the jurisdiction is done within the jurisdiction borders within the parameters if there were additional locations that were prohibited for any reason that would also be taken into account so that type of technology would have to be tested and certified and that's where these labs really come in handy has a very simple example it's not a simple example but as one example to demonstrate the differences between our traditional casino gaming versus online sports wagering and does the word devices capture technology to or do you need to have that language expanded a little bit to include the geofencing technology for instance I believe that and again to CFO Lennon's point we are coming back to this reg and it will be written a little bit more robustly and a little bit more all encompassing than what it is right now the goal of this is really to authorize the existing to independent test labs and just as an anecdotal note they are the only certified independent test labs in the continental United States there are a couple other ones but they only deal with tribal organizations and they are the most commonly adopted by all of the manufacturers and operators as well so this is why we felt pretty confident taking this route with doing this emergency reg for allowing them to be the name certified independent test labs for sports wagering so I believe more exhaustive parameters will be in the later iteration of 205 I'm sorry yeah 205 I don't know what the number is 244.06 so they will be more language around that but for now I think some devices with supplies for what we're trying to get accomplished today thanks Katrina I think that's a really important point for you to make Katrina thank you for noting that in our you know we all hope for newcomers to every industry but in our time frame right now these are the two okay other questions for Katrina again executive director Wells you've indicated a desire on this respect to this this um drag that you would like to be able to move forward that this is an initial step necessary for us to continue to do other work Derek thank you for your input and without this rag in place the work will be stalled is that my my understanding if you don't like today it expedites the process on both the tech end and the right end okay do I have a motion or do I have other questions I have another question talking about the emergency part of this or the I was actually addressing the emergency we just heard from the executive director that if we don't act today it will stall work I think Derek Lenin just made it clear that this is an initial step that needs to be put in place it is the executive okay if I could madam chair I guess I'm just looking for a little more particularity and clarity on the statement by staff in terms of why the expedition the expediteness is necessary and I've heard some of it but if someone could articulate for me the need for expediteness past the normal process and how that plays into staff's ability to prepare as this is unfolding and every all the other requirements in the statute I think it would be helpful for the record for me great thank you why don't I take a stab at that and maybe support from the rest of the team so if you if you yeah I know in here I'm just going to give you a little bit when you sit back it's hard to hear okay yeah I'm just standing so I think the the simplest way to describe it is that overall there is an enormous amount of technical requirements involved in regulating sports wage rate and if you go back to the conversation at the earlier part of the meeting about you know why can't we do this in three weeks there is a huge component of setting up regulatory standards for tech and also checking that and that's really important for the integrity of the operations so the reason that we are asking to move this right for it why we have it as your first reg on the first day we're doing regs and have some sort of urgency is if because we know that these two labs are the ones that do this in the United States if we can move forward with a procurement that identified that limits it to certified in a tenant test labs we can get them on contract more quickly and if we can get them on contract more quickly they can give us the technical expertise not only at in Katrina's side of the house but also assist with the regulation promulgation in the legal side of the house so that's why we're doing this and why we're sort of carving that out is something somewhat urgent because if we have to wait and do a more fulsome procurement process it could be a long time before we can get the services that we need and these are really specific services that we know our staff's expertise are going to be critical to implementing sports wagering so that's the that's the landscape I don't know if Derek or Katrina or Todd want to chime in but that's my understanding yes and I think Todd can chime in on this as well because he was actually part of the drafting of 144 and that whole series so GLI standards are very technical to begin with then they have to take our statute and see if there are any contradictions to their to their standards and then write those into our regulations so that when a manufacturer comes forward or an operator comes forward with their product they know what we're testing to and they know that it has to meet that baseline code so you know we have a lot of responsible gaming in our statute that's probably not in a lot of GLI's standards for every jurisdiction across the continental U.S. that has to be written in and the operators have to know what GLI is going to be testing to so that's an area that could probably take one of our attorneys or an outside council months, weeks to draft or with the assistance of GLI since they know the standards or BMM since they know the standards and they test them every day they could help to draft those really quickly and get us up and running and get the operators and the licensees who are coming forward knowing what their systems have to do Katrina or Todd if you'd like to add to that Yeah, I think that's spot on and I think Karen already said this but just to reiterate if we're to distill why the regulation is important without it we're unable to establish that these entities are uniquely positioned to do this work which would likely mean that we have to put together an RFR we have to post it for I'm sorry as it's 60 or 90 days I don't even recall up the top of my head and work through the formal procurement process as opposed to being able to establish that these are the only entities that could can do this work in which case we believe we can directly contract with them so that's kind of the long and short of the urgency of the situation at the moment I think that's that's accurate anyone can feel free to correct that and if I just may add one more thing this also will be directly related with item G on the agenda as we set up the regulations as we create the platform requirements the compliance pieces that need to go to all of the operators and their understanding of what their adherence needs to be any equipment that's shipped into the jurisdiction would have to be certified and approved and this allows us to help speed some of that process up if we delay that or there's any delay in approving you know the primary two labs in assisting the gaming commission in in doing this work that's definitely going to affect the timeline of when the operators that are working through application processes if they're trying to ship in any equipment systems platforms devices etc they would be prohibited so can I ask you a final point in terms of the procurement interplay is it a fair statement to say that absent the emergency treatment of these any engagement of these particular vendors could potentially then in a following procurement process create issues with contracting with them if they communicated with us outside the process meaning absent this if we or our staff try to communicate with them to get their technical expertise to draft regs would it create potential conflict and procurement issues going forward does this does this emergency implementation solve that issue or is it a non-issue I have a question again just so that I can sure so traditionally if you are going to do a procurement communicating with a potential vendor before you put out the procurement could create issues contracting with that vendor out of the procurement process right well it could it could right it could and it could not so if you look at the current SSS process so the sourcing certificate process that OSD puts out they actually look at that as a best practice to go out to all of the vendors and get advice on what we should be doing now if well but advice on what we're doing so narrow yeah if we came up with something that's so narrow that only one or two vendors could respond to it you're absolutely right that is a huge flaw and this is what we're this is what we're saying we think that these are the two vendors that can really help us with this so so this is I guess this is the point for me struggling with the emergency request what I'm asking is whether the finer point on this is does in fact relate to the procurement in terms of is there a risk of not being able to get their expertise moving forward and drafting the regs that we need to draft particularly as you point out the responsible gaming side yes if we started engaging with them but we haven't started engaging with them we know I understand that I'm just talking about the emergency process yes the emergency process is is very helpful now we can go the typical route as Karen pointed out and as Todd pointed out it would be you know we'd probably have to do the 40 day World Trade Organization posting and then we'd have a full-blown procurement we'd pull a procurement team together we'd review all the responses and we're looking at and I know that there are members on the commission that likes to speed it up as much as possible so we cut down on all kinds of areas of negotiations and just draft the procurement really strong and we have some good people on our team right we've got three people with a sort of sourcing certificate through OSD so we could probably cut it down to two to three months of the actual procurement before we'd have someone in to hit the ground and start helping us draft no one on the commission would compromise the integrity of the procurement not one bit not one bit of the integrity I'm just saying you know cutting down the timeline we do a lot more pre-work so that we didn't have the negotiations on the back end with the vendors they know exactly what their requirements are up front right I appreciate that Derek very much and thank you for reminding us that we do have those three certifications now yes are there other questions on the proceeding with the recommendation to go forward with the emergency basis with the understanding the alternative just one final question for me I think the emergency procurement rules don't apply here right so if we did not promulgate the emergency reg or the reg under the emergency provisions we couldn't we couldn't rely on any emergency procurement provisions that OSD has in place right I do not see any life limb or property on the line here yeah and that's my struggle with promulgating an emergency reg I mean I I you know completely respect but we do have a statute in front of us commissioner Skinner and I and I think that that's why we just had the analysis in front of us from from councillor Povic so I think if you are looking for OSD's guidance from that no but I don't think that the request for the emergency to use the emergency reg tool today is done in any kind of a arbitrary fashion by our team that's not what I'm suggesting at all all right no no I just want to make sure if I understood it the OSD doesn't provide but we have other is that what you were saying I know what you mean it's essentially the same criteria a threat to public safety public health or you know general welfare and and you know I just I'm struggling with that so I think you know it's a good segue into the emergency versus regular promulgation discussion well it was actually ready to for us I thought we had concluded it I thought we would move on to whether there's a motion that reflects what the team has come to us for today I'll reiterate my argument nothing is going to compromise the integrity of the industry that we plan to stand up today we had from council and from our general council's office advice that told us the various reasons why we can use this emergency tool responsibly and reasonably and defensively in other words that it would be it would serve a public interest the legislature notes in the statute we may use the emergency regulatory tool we would have left we always want legislative language to be a little clear but that's okay it also mentions that you know general welfare is at stake I led with the idea in my early discussion that we have folks who are at risk right now because of the new law in place we have very viable arguments and interests here and our team is coming to us to start the work we can stall it but I I would like for everyone to consider what's the long-term plan here what's the long-term plan this is a very initial step we need to take in order for the team to move forward on very important technical regulations Gli and beyond are as Katrina knows better than anyone I've had the privilege of revisiting the lab so I'm very familiar with it any of us can visit it and I encourage all of you to do that but there are other players in town right now that we know of is that fair Katrina am I overstating that there's no other there isn't a competitor that is widely accepted as Gli and BMM amongst the regulatory bodies as well as the manufacturers and operators there are smaller independent test labs that work in the tribal market which we are not in but BMM and Gli are the two foremost and the only ones other than I think one other test lab that I know that works in tribal like I said that do what they do in the continental US so with respect to commercial casinos okay thank you I make that argument and indicate my comfort level to use this so that we otherwise our alternative is of course what we're familiar with we're also familiar with doing emergency rags we have certainly done them in the past we have certainly done emergency rags in the past with respect to our casino business I'm very appreciative of today's presentation so turning once again to legal counsel just are we to interpret the emergency regulation provision in 23N as authorizing the commission to promulgate emergency regulations without regard to the recognized standard so long as we follow the appropriate procedures no I I wouldn't say that what I would say though is that chapter 30A sets out a standard for the emergency adoption of regulations and for our purposes it essentially says you have to find that it's necessary for the preservation of the general welfare to your point there is language in as Mr. Povich discussed earlier in chapter 23N and it all it says and this is what the chair was just I think referencing is that the commission may promulgate emergency rules and regulations in accordance with applicable procedures for the promulgation of emergency rules and regulations the issue with that is it's very non-specific it doesn't really address what the standard would be but I think the reason why the council has gained comfort in presenting this to you in this fashion is that we have to read some utility into the fact that the language was included in 23N and assign it some meaning even though on its face it doesn't really provide much guidance because if the language wasn't there then the 30A standard the general welfare standard would just be the standard so what do you make of the fact that the legislature and the governor included language in 23N about it well the sense is that it was generally designed to afford the commission even more discretion that then 30A offers it that's one interpretation of it you know but it does not in any way suggest that we can disregard what chapter 30A sets but that's just a holistic review of both sections together I mean for what it's worth I did not interpret it Commissioner Skinner as to obviate the need to look at 30A for guidance in terms of emergency rigs that's certainly not how I'm going forward with this question and I am struggling with it somewhat as you are in this particular circumstance give any interplay between being able to need the technical expertise to make sure that the regs protect the citizenry they have a comfort level with this so that I may not have another regs going forward but that I feel you know staff given the procurement requirements and the commonwealth and the need to go forward on this particular issue I feel okay with the emergency request on this particular reg but it is going to be a reg by reg question for me yeah and I'm you know that that's you know exactly where I'm trying to get where I'm you know trying to get my comfort level right so thank you for for providing your your perspective can I just I was like I'd like everybody to pause and take a breath and and I understand everyone's I understand everyone's argument I'd like to call the question but I think that I'd like to have director Wells get a little bit of a last word if this was the very first item on the agenda for today and that was purposeful I imagine can you explain what the implications are if we now on this reg and this is the particular reg commissioner Ryan has said she's struggling with this particular reg I think it's being connected to procurement and there's a lot of completed issues and I want to make sure we sort those out so that everyone is comfortable but Commissioner Wells just exactly what will happen if we don't pass Commissioner Wells there we go you can come over to my office right right here right I'll happily take a happy to get over Karen if you could just remind everybody client actually need to be fresher what would be the next steps we would have to do if we don't adopt as you had you had asked us the approach for an emergency so we would have to go back and do a timeline analysis because I think we this the team here we're trying to do this as quickly as possible we recognize there's great public interest in doing this as quickly as possible so we'd have to do an analysis we can certainly get the services much more quickly if we do the if this reg is passed we would then have to do an analysis of whether going through a standard procurement process without the reg which is going to take longer doing the standard procurement process without the reg we're waiting for the reg to be promulgated through the normal procurement process and then doing what we need to do I've probably deferred to Derek on which is faster it both add weeks if not months to the timeline well let me just help that's no shorter than 60 to 90 days correct Derek yeah that's that's the best case in 1990 days so is there work that what will be the impact of not having this done as the structure has the impact having expert advice on regulations regarding technology for both in both brick and mortar and online wagering which is of critical importance and then also impacts our ability to stand up operations for the regulation of such online and brick and mortar technical components of sports wagering Katrina might be able to elaborate a little bit further but these are these are germane to what we do so much of sports wagering is the technical technical compliance and making sure that these operators doing what they need to do so much of the regulatory job that we have is ensuring that these platforms are legitimate and without that in place we would not be doing our jobs so we really need this piece of things to move forward quickly otherwise we're just we're just waiting and so I am I am concerned about the timer attorney povich can you help us assess the risk here for the gaming commission is there any risk analysis that you're able to help on sure I mean obviously no lawyer is ever going to tell you that there's no risk but picking up on what attorney grossman said about the language around emergency regulations and picking up the theme from the bill which begins with the temporary licensing sections there is clearly an imperative to go forward the general welfare would seem most protected and the public safety in a broad context would be most protected if you go forward subject to appropriate regulation it seems as if this technology piece is a gating issue and in order to move expeditiously most important on this piece and again as commissioners or Brian and Skinner say taking the regulations one at a time but looking at this one first viewing it as a gating issue in the context of getting a system up and running given the realities of the procurement system and the OSD rules and the like and the regulatory process which has a public hearing first taking that all together with the my opinion would be that it would be proven if the commission would move forward in this way and certainly within the commission's discretion and therefore for a very defensive defendable if in the unlikely event I think it was challenged Madam Chair can I ask a follow-up absolutely Attorney Povich I just do you is this something that can be accomplished via an internal policy or does this have to be accomplished through the emergency promulgation process I mean it just in drawing I mean that's a very good question but you're just saying regulation versus policy and Grinna and I'm relatively new to the commission but as I understand this type of has been done by regulation in the past is that correct just drawing on your the memo I'm just wondering I mean it would if the impact is on outside parties you would think that these vendors would qualify as outside parties and that's where the impact would be also on the parties whose technology they would be testing and pining on our outside policies as opposed to it would be internal operation it would be but it would be their expertise that the commission would be relying on and drafting regulations there would still be regulations promulgated that speak to the more public facing process but just strictly with respect to what executive director Wells is saying the work that she's saying needs to move forward I guess I'm wondering if this could be accomplished to an internal policy I mean I won't belabor it yeah I would be I would see the risk of doing this through emergency regulations slightly less than the risk of doing it through internal policy okay because the internal policy case is only this one case from the SJC for a couple years ago which is extremely broad there are lots of people who'd like to see more interpret who work in this area who'd like to see more interpretation of this case but taking that case at its broad language I would find that a more troubling place to go although a good idea but a more troubling place to go than going by way of emergency rig but you know as the commission wants we could do and we could defend but the emergency rig seems to have little risk and with the policy the risk is probably not substantial but the language of that case is extremely the DOC case extremely broad okay thank you Commissioner Skinner good idea well I mean I'm trying to get to you know this this yeah yeah and just one other issue and then I'll relieve the staff and my fellow commissioners of the agony just what how quickly can we get these regulations out for public comment how quickly can we hold the public hearing should we do should we proceed it on an emergency basis that's going to be important to me we always advise the process takes between 60 and 90 days if we run it really tight and are able and the dates happen to work out with the secretary's filing schedule and what have you we can do it in about 60 days is that under the emergency that was the question for the emergency yeah that would come into effect immediately no I think you're asking within how quickly we get public input even though we they become effective but we get to I'm hearing and I think it's a really important point from both Commissioner Skinner and Commissioner Ryan that it's important for us to hear the public input as soon as possible because we could pivot correct we could pivot and put and change our right if all of a sudden they heard that we made a mistake is that correct absolutely oh I if if I'm understanding your question correctly now we can schedule public comment next week I would be my request and so I think that that's an important piece of your of the consideration director Wells when when you come forward with a recommendation to have something complicated by emergency right has a little bit of a timeline on how we're going to get the the really important public input on them despite our using that tool of of the you know expedition and and and I'm respectful of the bandwidth I'm sure that Caitlin and Kerry and Judy are going oh my but the reality is is that there's it's not such a formal process to get that public input that we couldn't be nimble and I think as as as as Lawn mentioned has to be done anyway because the break expires so you have to do the work anyway and I'm not too concerned about that Lawn expires in three three months of the conclusion of three months yes okay and you have to be mindful of the again as Todd said you have to be mindful of the secretary's publication schedule if you want to change it but if you I mean get change it on the whatever that would be the 89th day you have to get that process rolling somewhere between 60 and 90 days but you know we have to think about how much notice we need to do public hearing as well right yeah so just to pick up on that theme if we were to schedule a public comment period for next week that would not satisfy the statutory public hearing right that would have well it would actually practically speaking be more like two in two months because the notice has to appear in the newspaper and has to be in the mass register and there are a few other filings that need to be made so you can't just schedule the public hearing you know for next week that would just be an opportunity to gather public comment that doesn't satisfy the statutory requirement but as a practical matter you would know whether there is any input this was some of the duplicative resources comment I was making earlier that there is a trade-off in that regard to move this way because you would still have to do the formal notice to get the comment after if you switched over so but to Commissioner Skettish's point you could still substantively seek comment but you could see comment earlier and you could see yeah that's the same point set a different way you could see comment now and you can vote at a subsequent meeting which could be as soon as you scheduled I don't know what the timeline is and I don't want to so process on and I continue to be comfortable with seeing this as an emergency but you can declare it could be an emergency six or seven days from now or two days from now or today okay we have in front of us a matter and I know that our team is looking for us to vote on it if there are no further questions or comments is anyone I'm willing to make a motion I am great thank you Commissioner Hill I would move that the commission approve the small business but excuse me is that the right one yes yeah I move that the commission approve the small business impact statement and the draft 205 CMR 244.06 as reflected in the commissioners packet and discussed here today and further that staff be authorized to take the steps necessary to file the required documentation with the secretary of the Commonwealth by emergency and thereafter to begin the regulation promulgation process I further move that staff shall be authorized to modify chapter or section numbers or titles to file additional regulation sections as reserved or to make any other administrative changes as necessary to execute the regulation promulgation process I have a question on that last bit of language I understand the numeration part of it but to file additional regulation sections as reserved or administrative changes are these ministerial changes Todd yeah so as you'll see in the rig that we're going to talk about next that since this is 244.06 there might be they may require that we file 010203 and 04 as just reserved and that's what that part means okay Madam Chair my only request would be that the motion specifically say that the first shall in the proposed regulation be changed to May for the record thank you thank you so and I'm okay with that can so you amend your emotion to reflect that the regulation would the amendment discuss today you want brand yeah I'm just reading it here I was just specifying me as discussed here today means that the first shall becomes a yeah especially if you're saying with the next shall become May I guess I was saying the amendment but we want to stay shall today you want to reread it with that in mind it deal is yes well here can asking me or Commissioner Hill Commissioner Hill I'm just trying to find that I'm trying to find that language so bear with me I can if it would be helpful I can share what that would look like and the only other point I would make well Commissioner Hill is looking is that this would seemingly require them to be brought back before the commission for approval under this section since it's a May and it's not an automatic certification and that's not a problem at all but that's I think procedurally speaking what we will need to do unless you want to authorize that the two labs now but I just wanted to mention that would you like me to read the entire motion again can we just hold on one thing does that slow us down in a way that they can't get going or we can just move on in a future meeting is that what you're saying Todd yes I don't think it significantly slows anything down it just requires well I think one additional step that will likely be able to be taken care of fairly I think that's what I was sort of struggling with before I wasn't able to articulate it thank you okay Commissioner Hill so we're just changing from shall to may is that accurate okay so take what I said before get rid of that I move that the commission approved the small business impact statement and the draft 205 CMR 244.06 as reflected in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today and further that staff be authorized to take the steps necessary to file the required documentation with the secretary of the commonwealth by emergency and thereafter to begin the regulation promulgation process I further move that staff may be authorized to modify chapter a section numbers or titles to file additional regulations sections as well my apologies we weren't really clear but that part is fine I think we just wanted to have the change where it says and discussed here today we're recalling the way back it's been it's already a long morning where commissioner of ryan wanted to shift the language in the regulation from shall to may so we're really at the regulation is on page eight that language so we're losing so it's adding the phrase and specifically that the first shall and the draft regulation shall be changed to may that phrase just has to come in after the and discussed here today part of motion that in discuss here today changing the shall to may good thing you have that radio background Brad reread it for the third time it gets better each time so as reflect I'm just putting this so as reflected in the commissioners packet and discussed here today and further that staff or and so right after and specifically that the first shall in the regulation shall be replaced with the word may want to make sure it's the first shall right yeah it's the first line okay good yeah and we would put that under after the commissioners packet and discussed where would you want to right after and discussed here today that's in the third sentence the third line yeah okay and try it again let's do it I move that the commission approve the small business impact statement and the draft 205 CMR 244.06 as reflected in the commissioners packet and specifically that the first shall in the first sentence of the regulation be changed to may and further that staff be authorized to take the steps necessary to file the required documentation with the Secretary of the Commonwealth by emergency and thereafter to begin the regulation promulgation process I further move that the staff shall be authorized to modify chapter section numbers or titles to file additional regulation sections as reserve or to make any other administrative changes as necessary to execute the regulation promulgation process Do I have a second? I second the motion Any further questions, discussion? Okay I'll take a roll call for Commissioner O'Brien Hi Commissioner Hill Hi Commissioner Skinner Stain Did you say upstain or say Upstain and Commissioner Maynard Right Okay So I hear and I vote yes So four ayes and one abstention All right It is I'm looking at the clock 12.06 Crystal Please accept our sincere apologies because we are way off your well-lined timeline I can only say it worked that we cancelled our have been anticipated meeting today I think it makes sense that we continue on to item 3B So I'll turn back to Councilor Grossman Thank you Thank you, Madam Chair Momentarily, I'll be pleased to introduce our Associate General Counsel Judy Young who along with Burke Kane and Stirl Carpenter will discuss a draft set of regulations governing House rules just by way of quick introduction it's important just to recognize how this fits into the overall construct of Chapter 23N and why it's being brought before you today and that is when you look at section a Chapter 23N it's Section 6C that's the section that talks about temporary license which of course the Commission will address in the coming week or weeks but as part of that process the law specifically says in Section C3 that all sports wagering conducted under the authority of a temporary license shall comply with the House rules adopted under Section 10 so this is a necessary component to any temporary licensing that may come about if or when the Commission reviews that process so I just wanted to set the stage as to why you're looking at this today and with that I'd like to turn things over to Attorney Young to take it from here Thanks John Good afternoon Madam Chair Good afternoon Commissioners Good afternoon Good to see you and it is afternoon It is, it is All right so the legal division in partnership with the IEB has drafted 205CMR 238 so Section 3 House rules and we've provided a memo and a small business impact in the meeting packet for your review today I think before we start it's best to kind of ground ourselves in a definition of what House rules usually are the research that's come into this regulation and then also a few notes and then we can kind of walk through the regulations together taking time to pause these sections and answer some questions but going back to the beginning House rules are best defined as the policies that guide and govern transactions excuse me between a sports wagering operator and their patrons they're aimed at providing guidance, clarity, support notice to patrons who will place wagers within an authorized in-person facility or also within a mobile digital platform nearly every jurisdiction that regulates sports wagering has these regulations pertaining to House rules albeit some are different than others and some jurisdictions have more extensive requirements for licensees our legal team as well as the IEB has done an extensive amount of research comparative research in drafting our reg and including specific requirements for operators within the Commonwealth in accordance with the provisions of 23N while in operators House rules will be unique to each entity that will operate within the Commonwealth and that the commission will ultimately regulate as they could have different offerings and programings accept different wagers the things that we'll talk about later on in the presentation it's ultimately the commission that will have the authority and the ability to prescribe what policies procedures and notices will appear in an operator's House rules and then ultimately the commission will approve them before operations can commence I do want to add that out in addition to these House rules however the commission will also develop additional regulations that further pertain protect guide licensees and interactions with patrons including player wagering accounts as the treasurer mentioned earlier this morning self-exclusion responsible gambling advertising problem gambling supports and the problem gambling support hotline and additional provisions of 23M so with all that I will walk you through the regulation section by section we'll discuss it I also just want to add briefly that we've had some internal discussions after the the reg was submitted into the packet today and so as we walk through I will point out those changes to you and then at the end of the presentation if it's if everyone's amendable I can show you the the red line changes that we've made before you go you ultimately make your vote is that okay so good okay I'm seeing nods okay so starting with absolutely fabulous starting with our regulation and just to kind of expand on what attorney Grossman said previously we have gone ahead and reserved section 238.01 that is the definition section of chapter 238 the uniform standards of accounting procedures and internal controls as we're as pertaining to sports wagering so very similar to the previous regulation of the commission walk through this will sit in the 200s within the regulations of the commission and we've gone ahead and reserved sections 01 and sections 02 prior to house rules appearing so that the ultimately when we do file the secretary will know that we're going to go back and file these things any questions on that or the numbers and reserves or any codification before we get into the reg specifically no help okay so these first three sections are procedurally moderate models excuse me after 205 CMR 138.02 a licensee system of internal controls it follows the submission the approval and amendment process and lays them out in sections one through three starting first at the scope as general counsel cross crossmen excuse me mentioned we are discussing the approval of house rules as they pertain to temporary licensees and also the approval of house rules more generally as they pertain to sports wagering operators within sections six and 10 so you'll note that dual addition there within session one the session also goes on to state clearly and again later on within the section that an operator shall not conduct sports wagering in a matter inconsistent with its approved house rules but it also shall not commence operations until its house rules are ultimately approved by the commission so Judy I have a question about the language choice there the second sentence an operator should not conduct sports wagering until the commission has approved the house rules even as you described it you said their house rules so don't we need to say the operators house rules because right now it just almost implies once we approve this house rules reg you know I think that's I think that's an excellent I think that's an excellent distinction we could make that change to to their house rules as it is going to be an entity specific excuse me submission right so you either has to say there or the operators either one of those yeah I'll get that Judy you can keep going awesome thank you to okay so next we have our submission protocol ultimately a sports wagering operator and that includes a temporary licensee will submit to the commission as proposed rules and again not commence operations until they are approved with what's laid out in subsection three so there's no questions I think we could get into the more expansive process within section section three excuse me but I can pause here as well I think you have a question sure go ahead question the sentence that says a sports wagering operator shall not commence operations until its submission is approved in accordance with 205 CMR 238.023 is that citation accurate and if it is what is the rationale for bringing this particular regulation forward 238.03 without 238.022 if an operator wouldn't be allowed to proceed without their without approval of their internal controls sorry commissioner can you repeat that one more time for me I'm trying to see exactly where you are yeah so so in order for an operator to commence operations the commission needs to approve the internal controls and that's just according to the sentence that I just read but we don't I mean so I guess I'm asking why are we taking this set of regs 238.03 in isolation from 238.02 free like doesn't it make sense that they come together as a as a you know companion I see I think ultimately that is a typographical error I think it should be referring to 238.03 subsection three the approval process below however this section was modeled after 138.02 that pertains to the submission of internal controls and so I think when we moved this over ultimately it kind of modeled the submission of internal controls whereas in these 200 level regs we have house rules going first given the fact that the statute directly cites to house rules needing to be approved and then ultimately the submission process that will be laid out in 238.02 once it is drafted and ultimately brought before the commissioners will likely be very very similar okay so the citation in the second sentence should be 238.02 I'm sorry 238.03 subsection three that's correct yes so I'll make that change as well yes should it be both 023 or just 033 well currently the section isn't that we would that we could add to this regulation isn't currently enacted so we cannot cite the secretary will not allow us to cite to a regulation even if it's on reserve so we can come back to it later on and add it during like a regulatory review process but not currently well can I ask a question then to follow up on commissioner Skinner's question which is if historically we have done this so that it has to be done consistent with their internal controls and we're marrying the process are we losing something in terms of integrity by not having 0.02 ready to go what if we were to do just a practical solution and say in accordance with its internal controls because I don't want to lose that regulation that makes sense or tossing forward yeah I don't think I'm sorry I was just getting a little anxious yeah okay I loved it thank you I think what you'll see is that actually oh three the section that follows that Judy's about to discuss is actually nearly identical to the section you're talking about so we have captured it yes we have not we're not lowering the standards or lessening the controls in any way it's just that was a typo I think the proper citation is to 238.033 and what you'll see I hope when we look at 033 is that that is basically the same process we use for the internal control so we'll have this standalone procedure for house rules that should give the commission the ability to make the same judgments it does with internal controls and I guess my point speaks to more of the emergency nature of these regs is if an operator won't be allowed to commence until the commission has approved the internal controls doesn't that defeat the purpose of putting this forward on an emergency basis when we when we don't have 238.02 before us yeah I think that one of the next series of regulations that we will present to the commission and I don't have an exact timeline on it but in the near very near future we'll likely relate to some sections of the internal controls so it is entirely possible that 138.02 will be brought before you but I'm not 100 percent certain of that at the moment so I don't think that that needs to necessarily stand in the way of this section moving forward I think this can be looked at on its own and the process here kind of will withstand the type of scrutiny I think you're all interested in seeing and sets up its own process for house rules that will likely be parallel to those that you'll look at when it comes to internal controls but it's also fair to I think establish this process now so everyone is aware of what the future holds with house rules and then Judy just a general comment house rules at times is capitalized other times it's not same thing with sports wagering operator just throughout the document so just flagging that for you thank you shall we proceed or does anybody else have additional questions on section two I'll set everyone all right thank you yes Judy okay so moving into section three or section three subsections a through D this guides and is very very similar to 138.02 to the submission of internal controls again it ultimately dictates what the executive director or how the executive director shall review the submission and to what standard of compliance so we have listed there 23 in and relevant provisions of 205 CMR 238 subsection five so below that is the actual listing of the house rules that the commission ultimately decide to approve review or modify it discusses in which case the when the commissioner I'm excuse me when the commission and the executive director will review or ultimately approve the submission or go back and advise a sports wagering operator in writing of any deficiencies and provide them an opportunity to make the required changes as necessary at the very bottom of paragraph a also lists how a sports wagering operator can dispute a determination or recommendation made by the executive director to the commission and how to ultimately resolve the issue so and in what we don't answer issue should be resolved sorry go ahead so I guess the way that sentence reads though it implies that you made the operator may dispute any determination or recommendation made which shall resolve the issue so is the fact of raising the dispute determinative it kind of is opposed to what is the resolution what's the act that resolves it is it the ED who then resolves it at that stage right yes so I think that needs clarity in the language though it may be missing a comma or what have you but I think the point is is that the ED flags any issues and that the operator can then essentially appeal directly to the commission which shall resolve the issue so that's the way but yeah but it doesn't really say that so how do we rewrite it to say that it just says which shall resolve the issue it doesn't say yeah and the commission that will solve it or the ED shall solve it I'm having some pause here with yeah I actually think the edits were catching here as we go on this one because it's a pretty important right but I mean I did struggle on that and I kind of reconciled it in my mind what it meant so let's just go through the language Judy if you could read it to us again yes so the starting with the sentence the and section A the sports wagering operator may dispute any determination or recommendation made by the executive director to the commission which shall resolve the issue upon the recommendation of the executive director the commission shall review the submission for approval at a public meeting so ultimately we could add some clarifying language in there of how the executive director would resolve the issue and what standard of review could be utilized by the commission at a public meeting if it's helpful hey the sports ring may how about may appeal I mean it feels too strong this appeal I mean yeah what is the process they would have any determination I can get made by the to the commission so you really did want I had thought well perhaps it was an informal back and forth between the director that you were getting at it kind of resolved that in my mind because ultimately I saw that the commission does have the right to revisit any issue but if it really is that if there's a dispute then we should clarify that they have the direct right to come to us so the sports wagering operator may is this a is this an adjudicatory is it an appeal no at this point I wouldn't I don't think so I don't think so either I think if you just remove that one comma would that clarify the sentence no because I think the to the commission isn't may dispute made to the commission dispute to the commission is a little yeah I mean what does dispute mean really yeah at the appeal is it complain is it you know what does that mean proceed may challenge may challenge any determining before the commission I mean I think I'm just I think there's just a little bit of a word a word smithing it really is a word smithing for resolution of the issue hopeful hopeful resolution of the issue is that and I assume that that means that it's final resolution with us yes I think we could add some language in that final sentence about the commission having the final you know if there is a disagreement process initiated that the commission would have the final say at that public meeting that's mentioned in the final sentence and is it final under 30a or is there anything else not to my knowledge I think that it would be final can't go to the court okay I would may challenge any determination or recommendation made by the before the commission in order to resolve the issue is that too soft I mean on the recommendation executive commission shall review the submission for approval yeah I guess I am I'm I'm having trouble reconciling those two sentences also I mean because yeah I should I did I think I read about them twice three times yeah and if I'm struggling with it I worry about operators trying to figure out what the process is I feel like this needs to be reworked but maybe we should table this and go through the rest and then circle back yes I think that's a good idea I do think it's more we don't need to complicate it I think it's more worth smithing as long as you know in your mind Todd what and Judy what the process actually is can't uh executive director and we'll just say x meets with operator x they the executive director recommends something operator says no the executive the operator can comfortably say thank you I'd like to go before the commission okay give us a chance to see if we can rework some of that language yeah but then and then even the second Judy as you're doing that too so the meaning of that last sentence in terms of I'm not really sure what that means in upon upon recommendation of the ed commission shall review the submission for approval a public meeting I'm a little confused what that means because are we supposed to then lay approval to something the ed did and it's not final to we approve it or is it we still have if they're already coming to us to complain then there's no role for that like I I'm not really sure where that fits into the process could I could I possibly help good good afternoon chair nice to see you as well commissioners executive director Wells if I could be possibly helpful here this process is what it's doing is mirroring what process we do for all the casinos that that we do right now and it's one thirty eight oh two subsection two if I could read that subsection two because that's already accepted and this is what Karen does on monthly yearly changes to all of our submissions so the commission shall refer the proposed the proposal submitted in accordance with 205 CMR one thirty eight oh two subsection one to the executive director who shall review the submission for compliance with G MGL C 23 K 205 CMR 138 and other applicable sections of 205 CMR upon completion of review the executive director shall either approve the submission or advise the gaming licensee in writing of any deficiency and may include any other recommendations and or required changes intended to ensure that the robust system of internal controls is implemented the gaming licensee may either accept the recommendation or require change in writing or advise the executive director in writing as to the reason for its disagreement the gaming licensee may dispute any determination or recommendation made by the executive director to the commission commission which shall resolve the issue so they're saying that you as the commission will resolve the issue between the executive director's decision and the licensees and you will you will determine the pump if you look at that though that also to go back to Mr. Skinner's earlier point about the internal control section that incorporates and is part of that section and the detail is not in this reg that's in front of us these the when we're looking at these regs we have to look at singularly the internal controls and the operators will not be allowed to be in operation until the internal controls are given and that these house rules are approved and their internal controls are approved so the I believe what we're doing here is we're just getting these house rules first the internal controls are going to take I mean we usually have 90 days they're supposed to be given to us prior for just the casinos I'm assuming we're going to mirror it in such a way where sports wagering they're gonna have there's going to be a great deal of information so they're just trying to start this process I don't know if that's helpful or not I hope I've helped no I got that part it's more if you're but where we have this reg in front of us in isolation and so we have to look at it does it make sense to us and the language and I had pulled that up as well starl thank you for reading it um there is more detail and specificity in that than is what is in front of us yes so can you remind me of that next sentence the last sentence upon the recommendation and the executive commission shall review that's in there as well review the submission for approval on a public meeting yeah was that I'm was that to me no yes strong it doesn't it is included correct in yours standing upon the recommendation the executive commission shall review the submission for approval at a public meeting it's not it's not in 138 allows I think allows it for 23k I I I stopped at where where you guys decide it there is a little more there's the commission or the executive director may revisit any provision of the internal controls at the time and direct adjustment as necessary so that's after the process so that's why I mean that's where we have that in the red in front of us so that's helpful but I think it's the additional sentence is included because I think the difference between 23k and 23 and right so um you needed to bring it back to the commission all right and um on the gaming side the ed is authorized to just improve the internal controls by right that's what I'm saying that requires the commission to do it correct right yeah so that's why that line does not appear in that that's what I thought yeah okay um so I did struggle with the convo but it was helpful to go through the exercise so upon the recommendation of the executive director um the commission shall review the submission for approval at a public meeting um that's not necessarily with one that's just in dispute that's what's helpful that's correct and that sentence is also mentioned prior to the to highlight the highlighted section that we're going to go back and rework um so upon completion of review we can state that language for approval at a public meeting um next to the sentence regarding submission if you don't think it would be you know too long of a run on sentence I mean I hate to say this but I think I'm going to want to see a red line version of this absolutely be able to process and if I can if I did get clarity is it the intention that the commission approve the house rule submissions that's how I read that's how I read this at least not by statute we have the statute says yeah thank you so that's the difference under 23k the executive director has authority to do the internal control process that's why we get those in email so there's a little distinction between the two uh so I just was struggling a little bit with the last language but I'm sure that you can get clarity on that Todd and Judy definitely let's continue okay um so me um explains you're on section subsection b 3b Judy yes yes thank you so again picking up where sterl mentioned we have a subsection b that's also found in 138 02 the commission or the executive director may revisit any provision of the previously approved house rules and require adjustment of necessary and provide for a 30 day implementation period so this implementation period um mirrors the current implementation period within 138 02 and also I should add that 138 02 is a part of the reg review process that we are also modifying to include that 30 day implementation period so these these two regulations will continue to model each other we've also gone ahead and added language and I'm happy to show this to you via red line to also give the commission or its designate the authority to direct immediate change if it's determined that a licensee is not following the house rules as prescribed by the commission or if there's something in their house rules that's in direct conflict with 23 n or 205 cmr I'm happy to screen share that with you if you like because I couldn't follow that jude I'm sorry no it's okay really give me give me one moment and I'll just pull it out for you I'm hoping somebody silently joins me and in being a little bit challenged right now so thank you just one second I'll find not going to silently join you I'm going to openly join you and say um I'm probably going to need um time to process this before about just what's going on yeah okay I understand okay well just need a little bit bigger no problem press up that's better me there okay so this is this is section three and you've added new language that's not in the packet yes I apologize after some internal uh discussions we um we realized that we had to we needed to add a little bit more language here to give the commissioners additional discretion and authority to direct immediate changes so we have that 30-day implementation period of which a change or an amendment can be made and implemented by a licensee but also we wanted to cover instances of direct conflict with the statute or other regulations that would require immediate change so that's that red line language right here can you make it a little bigger Judy sir okay questions on this I I have a couple I was at commissioner hill bigger smaller if you could just expand the whole screen I think that would be helpful very you're welcome so under the statute the commission must approve the house rules by statute is that correct yes it doesn't say the commission or it's designee this says the commission correct that is correct yeah um you know Caitlin um you know I'm a little bit concerned about a delegation of a statutory authority so um I understand the need to be nimble but I'm wondering if there's something that's in direct conflict with the statute I think it should be brought to the commission's attention anyway so we could address it I understand there's probably the expediency issue but so removing the reference to designee and giving the sole authority to the commission would be something madam chair was more comfortable with I don't think it's giving it to us I think you're correct you're right yeah because I'll give away that I think we've been that was a that was important for the authority right right right thank you and again I'm that's just me being cautious because our recent SJC decision absolutely and so Caitlin just note because I brought it up to Caitlin and I uh just as a note we can revisit it if we feel that there is room right absolutely okay thank you all righty um so you know what Judy because I'm not sure if we're all seeing the same thing I'm seeing just the bottom portion of B so were there any other red lines above no I've just highlighted this area that we've discussed previously um just as a reminder to go back and rework that language and then bring it back to the commissioners I can also stop the share this is within section Z this added red language here and if the proposed amendment does not lessen the applicable administrative or substantive provision so subsection C covers the amendments to house rules that are ultimately submitted to the executive director and discusses how they're approved if they're in compliance with 23 n specific sections of um of this house rules regulation and other sections of 205 cmr and then also codifies to be sure that the proposed amendment does not lessen any sort of applicable administrative or substantive provision so this so that says amendments to how shall be submitted to the executive and approved so that's giving them approval to the executive director there so yes that goes it kind of returns these amendments to house rules um to the executive director for approval but we could easily tailor that so that it mirrors how ultimately rules are submitted and approved by the commission commissioners agreed on such so this is the distinction between 23 n and 23 k juby if i understand it correctly that's correct 23 k she has full authority to do that for the internal controls um house rules it comes back to us ultimately right that's correct so i think it's it's worth discussing amongst the commissioners for expediency state given the amount of um of different licensees if you all wish to have the amendments brought forward to you um to to figure out if they're in compliance but it's an easy change to make by the legal department well it yeah so my my question for the legal department and then i'll stop on this point is if we're required to approve house rules by statute that i assume we would be required to approve an amendment to the house rules under the statute and so i'm given this recent sjc decision i'm concerned about and actually prior to that decision would be concerned about delegating statutory responsibility so but i could be fine yeah i can't oh is that i mean okay now we can yeah it's me it's i think i agree with you kathy oh okay good i'm that way off commissioner skinner i see also you have your phone down i agree okay i had that down as as one of my comments um madam chair i'm just gonna stop share so i can see folks um while we go through comments but i will make that change and then i can reshare the documented folks are comfortable judy i think there also needs to be um some adjusted language relative to the approval because the way it reads you know whether it's the executive director or the commission shall be submitted and shall be approved i think we need to build in some language that gives us the discretion to approve or deny that's just where the language just not just a little bit needs to be tweaked a little bit yeah commissioner skinner i'm understanding you you're in um section 3a where it talks about approval or the modification process you'd like to see language regarding denial outright this is this is c okay i see a first sentence implies that as long as it's submitted it it it shall be approved and i don't think that's the way we want that to read understood i do see the process as karen does all the work okay i see Todd making changes to the document but then i'll i'll reshare it after he's done um so then moving on to section d if everyone is comfortable it discusses uh the commission or its designate performing inspection necessary to ensure compliance i recognize that we previously changed that language or its designate in the above provision um i'm open to discussion regarding and removing it from there as well yeah i think it just to get right any inspection necessary to ensure compliance maybe i'm wrong on that we can designate inspection right done by the iab and the licensing division yeah okay i don't believe there's a statutory requirement for inspection by the command at all no yep okay so next moving down to session four uh we have the placement and the accessibility of house rules this is uh statutory language they shall be accessible to patrons prominently displayed within an authorized in-person wagering facility that phrase authorized in-person wagering facility is how the legal department and the iab will refer to in-person sports betting facilities i think the colloquial term is retail retail facility but just for the sake of transparency and ease an authorized in-person wagering facility is the term that we use within our regulations and we'll continue to use unless the commission deems otherwise thank you for that absolutely um and also the second portion of that regulation discusses prominent prominent feature within a sports rig wagering operators website or mobile mobile platform so making those house rules available on either sort of instance commissioner is that language that's taken from other jurisdictions language where does that because i'm wondering what i'd like to know what does that mean exactly like is someone going to put small print on the opening page but then once you leave it disappeared like what does it mean we can tell you about this in the retail sports book Karen can tell you where when it looks like she went and got the uh house no i'm not i'm talking about the online online i think it's yeah for mobile application it's like well what does that mean on the platform in the or the mobile app so i've seen different things in different jurisdictions during during my research and i mean i welcome the input of general counsel grossman and sterling Burke on this but some some some platforms allow patrons to click through and saying you know and agreeing to certain provisions i am you know the legal age to place a wager in this particular state i am currently within the geoconfines of this state and i have you know read and been made aware that the house rules are available and then there's a hyper link within those three to four provisions that you click through that ultimately allows you to launch onto a separate page that pops up and you can view the house rules almost like terms and conditions on other websites not related to sports wagering i've also seen mobile skins or mobile platforms in my research that simply just have you indicate that you are of the legal age to place a wager and that you are in the state that allows you to place that wager that's it and then simply has terms and terms and conditions or otherwise house rules within a clickable link displayed on the upper right hand side or lower left hand side of the page or under the contact us provision i think ultimately the commission can can really define what prominent display means so that's that's that's my question is yeah are there other jurisdictions about prominently featured or is that a definition that we're going to have to come up with for this section i have not seen many definitions if any i will be honest pertaining to prominent display and what it ultimately means but i do think the commission you know has that discretion to to outright define what prominent display means especially for something as various as a mobile platform if i may in in my research from other jurisdictions they they leave it open for interpretation by the their commissioners or their review they're either executive director but what is normally performed is that the house rules have to be accessible on their main page so what that's what they mean by that prominently displayed means it's part of that menu like some people have like little lines on the side of their apps but as part of that drop down menu prominently with one of those features has to be written house rules so it's easily accessible so that they know when placing a wager all of the rules that they are accepting between the licensee and the patron and sterile not to put you on the spot but are you familiar with any cases where people have tried to say yeah that's good enough and and another jurisdiction has said that's not prominently enough yeah it's it's it depends on the jurisdiction so exactly so so so just just for knowledge of Missouri they they usually have the the toughest right and so they don't have sports wagering yet so i'm sure of michigan i mean on Missouri would state you know prominently means and they'd go into a detail what prominently means um right you you as the commission as as i read the statue can decide all of these features on what you decide is prominent is up but do you have any anecdotal information in terms of another jurisdiction that's launched where someone they've been found to be not satisfying that prominently displayed prominently featured requirement i have i have not i'm not uh not knowledge of those but i am knowledgeable of um i've you i've accessed a couple of apps and like in Rhode Island the drop down has house rules immediately accessible so it's it's pretty pretty prominent throughout the industry that those house rules are displayed very um upfront with all their customers thanks Judy yes that too the reference to an authorized in-person wagering facility um at that that's getting at the retail facilities yes i think you said um but the sports wagering operator speaks to both mobile and retail correct correct yes thanks and i will just add that uh sports sports wagering operator is defined within excuse me within 23 and precisely my point thank you i've looked up a couple of other jurisdictions uh Commissioner bryan and it looks like in some of the language i've seen all it says is that they have to put it on their website doesn't say specifically where they have to put it on the website right i guess i'm contemplating i don't want to see workarounds where you know people have a tab and they can just jump past that uh right you know i'd like it to be sort of prominently displayed or featured trying to figure out what that means i was just wondering about the jurisdictions had some language on that i can continue my research i'm happy to it does seem that it definitely varies based on the jurisdiction that the mobile operator a great majority of these are mobile jurisdictions that only have mobile sports wagering um it's really it seems that to the regulatory body and what they ultimately provide for so to uh judy's point hello everyone um oftentimes when we're reviewing submissions at the casino we will always ask for additional details when they give us the details we will guide them and help them to get to a point where we're happy with those additional details also so i would think that you know prominently displayed we could ask for them to define that a little better and if we weren't necessarily happy with it the commission could ask for more details about how they do that and i'm just wondering if going as a jumping off point do we want to have a threshold you know saying add a minimum you know just to be sure i'm understanding you correctly commissioner brian placing like a minimum within section four would be something that you're interested in like a like a spatial requirement of some kind well that's i'm trying to understand whether this is going to be in a definition in the beginning i mean we have a placeholder for definitions for this reg so is it going to go there or is this going to go within the body of you know 238.03 speaking just personally i think that it would it would be better for the term to be ultimately defined within 238 subsection 01 as i anticipate that prominent display will guide other regulations or other regulations that ultimately come forward will be used within them so i'm thinking about the problem gambling hotline and other things that need to be probably properly and prominently displayed yeah i know this and this speaks to the struggle that we're having or i am having things differently and yeah having one in front of us where the first part of the reg is not done yet so completely into this yeah and just to be clear it's prominently displayed and prominently featured so yes right right but let's yeah yeah we can we can probably narrow it down to one figure out what the term of art we want to use but i think we want to you know we want to be careful to not assume you know what that means because of technology you know to be asking for something that is just extraordinarily expensive or not even workable without knowing it for an operator we said yeah to change it up so the truth of the matter is that house rules are the adoption of house rules our group of house rules is really a critical step in in the application process Eileen just for informational i pulled up a couple of other jurisdictions and it looks like they display their the house rules and things of that sort in their terms and conditions yeah so you would go looking for it in the terms and conditions of when you're wagering on a mobile application that's what you said Judy did say it's like terms and conditions you know right when you're doing any kind of online engagement when you go to a sports book in retail you know that it's not as though the rules scroll and big and big font across their their hung um on the wall and i can't remember if they there was some kind of an electronic i can't remember if they had an electronic scrolling on the side Loretta and Karen and Mekisha but um i have i have never seen it on the mobile device i don't know yeah i'm concerned more with the mobile application right i understand in order but but of course it can't stay there permanently because they wouldn't be able to do this so um you know and it's also pages no but can also access to it can be easy or can be difficult or fleeting so that's what i think maybe that's the idea it's not necessarily commonly featured but rather easily accessible i mean maybe that's what you're getting at right because um you can't be always on the screen otherwise the screen will be unusable um yeah but it takes to a circumstance like all of us that just say okay the cookies to move on or you know as opposed to knowing that you can get access to go look it up if you want to know i i agree with you i'm assuming it's in menu of some sort uh yeah just rules and all the all the items are next loretta do you have any do you have any input on this loretta i i recall the um the in-person rules being like literally on pieces of paper on the on the board you know marked and available you know plenty of copies available i have seen some of the uh mobile uh usually on a link on the home page as i recall it's been called uh house rules and not not terms and conditions but that's my that's my recollection that's fine okay so we'll revisit that language um it is now one o'clock um i don't think and i've ever been this off on the on running community um but i think it's been a really important discussion um and we're making some headway um i guess that we had thought that we would be done by quarter of a month on this issue it's one o'clock i think that we need to take a break um it's we haven't got we're just going in now to the the next next part of the house rule discussion care and what's your recommendation um i would i would think we could take a half hour break and then we would move to um finish up the duty and then we need to get to um i don't know if there's any prioritization for us to think about maybe we can do that at lunch time i feel the only thing i'm wondering is do we have an outside speaker we do and i'm and i'm taking that into consideration i know that dr valver was very jealous we said take something out of order no she's yeah she said she would be talkable with okay okay i want but i want to honor that flexibility may not have been right after dinner right so let's right check in on that um if i could if if we could consider prioritizing the budget matter um i think well my goal is not to minimize anything my goal is to be mindful of time as we go forward but so the financial is next after judy okay so i think that that i agree with you so we've got that and then it's kind of the anything that needs um to be voted on i would like to make sure that we keep everyone and then we'll check in on dr bolberg so it could be worse right um we've made some good headway uh so judy thank you for hanging in with us and we'll um break now one to one thirty for lunch stretch our legs everybody take some good breaths and we'll come back down renewed and i'm revived uh and finish up on this matter figure out the plans for this matter and then we'll turn to dara pt and and commissioner skinnard all right then is that does that work for everyone uh commissioner maynard commissioner maynard we are extremely appreciative here i will say madam chair that i did say to crystal that i think will be done by 330 mountaintop and that translates to 530 or 630 here 530 yeah yeah yeah yeah well i'm not far off on the dinner thing i think i'll text my husband okay everyone thank you for um this time thank you i'll be back at 130 i was sad to see our the queen died i just saw that it just came across my screen end of an era yeah it's an end of an era my gosh 70 years on the throne someone who had a tough job and did it pretty did the best she could do you think you know yeah that's a shame it's amazing that she greeted the new prime minister what was that yesterday or the day before yesterday yesterday yeah no tuesday it would have been tuesday wow they've had enough time to do succession planning but we'll have to see how it goes i'm embarrassed to ask this but who's next Charles is this Charles yeah longest the longest waiting in waiting in history 73 years he's been the air yeah i i am struck by looking at the line of succession the odds of a female raining over that country in my lifetime are almost zero right so you know she had that you know that that long term and now you know it's um it's a lot of male airs so it is the end of an era for sure commissioner this is Mina from Anderson Krieger the the good news there or maybe not good news but the same could have been said when she became queen you know that the chances of her or when she was younger that chances of her becoming queen or any female queen were a pretty long shot then too yeah take some serious turns you can think you can have a long period of decline say that Wallace Simpson can be thanked for the queen's reign now he's the king now like that 15 prime ministers so what does this make Camilla she doesn't is she queen or is she having some other title queen concert queen concert oh oh was he newsed was there news yeah she passed away queen yeah yes i didn't get noticed so there i just got an alert on my ipad as we're sitting here yeah it's less than eight minutes ago the bbc you're in the second day's call list Kathy sorry you're not on the first call so again you're on the second call list you didn't make the first call list you're in good company Kathy i didn't get noticed either yeah no i got it just popped up on what right away with uh Wall Street Journal i knew that they um i'd heard the news coming into work you know me Kathy i try bring up a subject matter while we're waiting and this was the one i this was the one i brought up well i'll tell you Karen and i didn't have a chance to look at anything like that in crystal so that we did get a plan so i think babe we're all set um i don't know if that was probably all part of our live streaming we're people first that's very sad news very sad news but um what a life lived right um okay um we'll just pause for a second see if everyone is here okay um so we did have a chance to think about our agenda i first need to because we're meeting virtually getting commission's reconvening and we're going to go through a roll call i'm commissioner brian i am here commissioner hill president uh commissioner spinner i'm here and commissioner jordan maynard i'm here madam chair thank you um and and notably um commissioner maynard had a long time vacation plan beautiful last and he has donated as a long time public servant today's time so we thank your spouse first and we thank you so i have to do it we'll keep on moving along um all right so um and just in recognition that we did obviously the the sad news of the passing of of england's um long time martin we know that's uh Elizabeth and um you know uh it is a a marketing history so um thank you for updating me on that news we'll move on then to um where we were we have decided that probably makes sense on Thursday September 15th one topic we have not addressed really publicly but we have certainly been reviewing it is the provisions regarding temporary licensure um all as any piece of legislation there's always complexities attached to various parts and there are complexities that will arise in that discussion we will have um so we thought it would make sense to really focus on temporary licensure next Thursday uh in order that the house rules are um are really uh combined as part of the temporary licensure process so it seems to me judy uh that probably be mostly efficient for our commissioner particularly commissioner um scanner and commissioner brian to bring any further edits to you of course commissioner hillan and commissioner mayor will do the same um on the house rule reg and then you could revisit um your portion of the house rules and we could combine that into next Thursday's meeting certainly before that feel how does that feel to you um i want to make sure that everybody understands that and and particularly judy the work that's being done right now is real-time work and and and judy i appreciate your being able to be so flexible to incorporate all thoughts and thinking so thank you um and then my pleasure and then we'll we'll work on on that piece how does that feel good to you um on the house rules for next Thursday absolutely i think we will definitely okay and so then um then that automatically turns to the next subsection um 3d so we will um ask Derek to go forward but i wanted to also excuse director lilios i know that there was a little bit of a change anyway with respect to your presentation so i knew you wanted to pivot we'll work with you to figure out how best to incorporate your ask into our our future meetings and then we'll go to director wells on the important well their own part discussions on criteria for the application process under fng and then we'll turn it to our rng discussions and we are hoping that's around 330 um and i know that crystal's reaching out to dr bolberg and um and uh uh dr voters okay so thank you and and thank you again to the legal team and all of its good work and particularly judy we really appreciate it all right um and then i see john scully has joined us thank you good afternoon Derek and thank you for your helpful input earlier good afternoon madam chair and commissioners thank you for having me i'm going to apologize ahead of time if i go into a coughing fit um i have a sinus infection or something going on in our money at antibiotics and um it's usually short lived so maybe i'll just put like my presentation up on the screen and read along no i'm joking um thank you for being here when you're not feeling well um it doesn't surprise me that you did that so thank you thank you i'm joined by Douglas O'Donnell and john scully today and i want to give a lot of credit to commissioner skinner for the grafting of this memo simplifying it down so that we don't get caught in the weeds while trying to make a very important um um vote here today um we're here to request the initial sports but uh initial budget for sports wagering chapter 173 of the acts of 2022 an act regulating sports wagering created mass general law chapter 23 this statute enables the commission to implement and regulate sports wagering no startup funds via a direct appropriation were provided in this um so we're here today to look for statutorily provided fees and assessments to fund the startup of the agency in order to do this in the future we plan to come before you um and draft review draft for the commission's review and promulgation regulations as mentioned in the beginning of your packet don't want to get caught up on those because that's not the main point of this but it's just part of the um process for going forward we feel that by drafting these regulations we'll be able to get funds into the sports wagering control fund both the initial suitability reviews as well as the administrative and regulatory responsibilities of establishing the sports regulating industry in the commonwealth section 15 of chapter 23 and creates a sports wagering control fund the sports wagering control fund is a vehicle the commission would utilize to carry out its regulatory oversight and activities related to sports wagering the commission is the trustee of the fund initial funding for the sports wagering control fund will rely mainly on application fees and background investigation costs in addition we will be looking to create an overhead rate which will be coming forward in a future regulation to assess to the direct to assess to the direct application and suitability review costs once the commission is awarded category one two and three licensees licenses developing in the annual sports wagering budget will be a very straightforward process utilizing an assessment tool very similar to how we developed the budget for our gaming of control fund now that we've provided a general overview and it is a general overview so i don't want to glaze over things but we will come forward with more details in the future of how we fund both the investigative as well as the regulatory startup costs i'll get into the point of the actual item we're requesting an actual uh an approximate two point two million dollar preliminary budget for the sports wagering control fund i want to emphasize that this will be an iterative process and will change as the commission continues to make decisions review and authorize regulations and start building a timeline for the implementation of this chapter our preliminary quest is for 12 FTEs six contract civilian investigators and legal and financial consultants the majority of these costs of dealing with the suitability reviews and investigations the costs that are not directly related to the suitability or investigative costs we would fund through an overhead rate applied to all direct investigatory costs at this point i'll pause for any questions or comments um and uh you know i i do want to point out again i want to thank nakisha um commission of skinner for really helping us to get out of the weeds on this and bring it back up to what the actual request was which is there do you want to comment i just want to thank you Derek um you know but i i really can't take all the credit um you know as always you and the rest of the finance team do a phenomenal job communicating exactly what you need from this commission i um also want to uh make the other commissioners aware that um the financial overview that Derek speak spoke about earlier um as they relate to the regulations that will come before us at a later time um so we haven't completely gotten away from the original form of the memo um you'll see that at another meeting um i also want to say that the staffing request is not absolute um some of the hires may not be realized depending on the the various decisions that the commission makes um for instance around vendor licensing um there may not be a need to have the additional two license specialists or um the the additional two legal counsel again it's a fluid request um what Karen and the team uh are seeking is you know the discretion really um to utilize the initial budget funds um in accordance with uh developments as they as we move forward is that fair Derek and Karen that's completely fair and spot on and that's why i you know i try to emphasize it's going to be iterative and as the commission makes decisions we'll continue to come back to you and give you updates on um on what we what we think we need to do i mean a hiring process as um the HR team will tell you takes a while takes a while um so even if we have a position posted and the commission makes a decision we can always pull down that posting um the contract civilian investigators um are a little quicker process and that's in the uh outside cpa consultants john already has a posting up with the language in that we may not do this depending on what the commission decides to do going forward um but those will be quicker timelines once the commission starts to um get regulations in place for the actual application the fees for applications and suitability reviews and those can be executed much quicker questions for Derek and Mr. Skinner i um maybe it's a comment more than a question i saw this number and i was a little concerned that it was quite high um the request of almost two million dollars not really knowing exactly what we needed for FTEs and some of the other issues that were brought before us i guess i need to be convinced a little more why it's 2.1 and really not half that because you can come back to us at any time and i know you're going to say to me probably if we have the money in the bank we can do these things you know very very quickly and of course that's something that i would support but it just seems like it's a it's an eye-popping number to me so i think we just need to discuss it a little bit more and maybe i can hear from my fellow commissioners why we do that much today when they could come back to us at any point and ask for an increase with what they truly need at some point in the near future anyone respond to Mr. Hill Commissioner Skinner oh i'm happy to to defer to the executive director wells i think that you know this is the this is what the team perceives as the the necessary resources to move forward on this initial basis again as decisions are made you know i mentioned vendor licensing if there's a decision by the commission not to license vendors you know that cuts out a lot of a a lot of the source necessity right there but i'll i'll let Karen and Derek speak to your to your question in greater detail i'll start out Derek if you can back me up afterwards on any details that you have Commissioner Hill the sort of the the request actually i would suggest is actually sort of the starting point we may need more than this but this is sort of our best estimate of what we would need and as uh Commissioner Skinner and uh CFL Lenin noted we don't have to make all these hires depending on the on the positions we could just go ahead but if you break it down as as it's identified in the memo this we the commission already authorized the vision the chief of the sports wagery division the only ask is that there be two support personnel at this point to support that and given the number of applicants that we have and the potential number of licensees because i know if sports wagering um you know goes forward as as as we see it through the statute we could go from having three licenses to having an additional i think it is uh 16 licensees once all the final licenses are granted that doesn't even include what we'd be doing or the situation with temporary licenses so the the amount of contact that we have to have with licensees is going to exponentially grow so that part of that position the chief of the sports wagering division is the interface with all those licensees to sort of have some support there is uh definitely uh important the i e b the four f t e's two financial investigators into enforcement council given the number of licensees we're going to have the background investigations and the financial component part of the analysis on the suitability of these applicants is to ensure not only their financial integrity but also their stability they're going to potentially be owing a lot of money to the people of the common law so their financial stability is critically important to make sure that their consumer protection is in place at the licensing division as commissioner skinner pointed out we did put in for two f t e's if we do license not if we go through the licensing process and the suitability process for all of these applicants i think you know we had some number of uh around 50 of the notice of intent the amount of forms that will come in you have to have an increase in the licensing division to process those forms now if there's if we're cutting that down because we're not licensing vendors then that may uh that may uh reduce the need for the for the work in licensing but i think two licensing specialists may actually be conservative um at this point we're only asking for two f t e's a sports way during systems analysts and information security and privacy analysts for the it department there is more uh ask more of an ask in the it department that we expect to be coming in front of you later so given the technical aspects of the uh monitoring of the online platforms i think those are more than justified and then the other contract in for services the civilian investigators the cpa consultants legal and then the incidentals those really are the short term ask because with the suitability investigations and then legal for the all the regulations that need to be stood up so that's that's why i know it seems like a big number you know i remember when we were doing the startup for investigations back when we stood up casino licensing one investigation we had consultants come in one investigation for one licensee there were some of them that cost two million dollars each just for one investigation so we're trying to be a little more physically responsible here by doing it in house and um figuring out the ways in which we can leverage our contacts against the civilian investigators and that kind of thing and then uh the other thing is that we will be pro-rating it Derek can explain this a little bit more but it's you know it's not like each of them is going to get a two million dollar bill i think if you divide it by you know the 19 or whatever number we end up having um i think the share was like 115 k per licensee per year once all of them are up and running which given the amount of volume of the increase in work does not seem unreasonable to me personally but we'll defer to however the commission wants to handle this and operate accordingly that was very helpful thank you Mr. you'll just follow up on the regular just wait a second hold on i've got a lot of people leaning in right now who goes next i would like to add i want to just add on to what Karen mentioned particularly around the regulations piece we've got over 200 that we anticipate coming before the commission if today's discussion around you know the the the the independent uh certification um in the house rules is any indication there's going to be some hefty significant discussion and i think you know that's where the the legal resources will come into play keeping track of the emergency regulation process if that's the way it goes or the regular process tracking the deadlines legal is going to need some assistance there in particular okay and i think i saw next director lilias and then commissioner main it okay director lilias yeah hi good afternoon and and and derrick may be well poised to to address this but i did want to address that there may be the conception that for anyone operator license we're talking about one operator license but 23 n requires us to identify any individuals or entities that have certain ownership interests or control abilities in those countries uh companies so any one operator license is comprised of license applications from uh multiple entities and multiple individuals so um that's you know part of where our numbers numbers come from yeah and and we did scrub this with both the licensing as well as the iab division for just um entities um for the gaming side you know there are usually about 10 affiliate affiliated entities with the um primary parent company as well as 15 um individuals that need to be reviewed and have deep dives on to um for vendors if we end up doing the vendors the average would be two affiliated entities per vendor and four to five deep dives on individuals so that starts adding up when you have a notice of intent of over 40 um individual of over 40 companies now whether all 40 come through or not we we don't know right um once a $200,000 fee comes down that's that's a whole whole another discussion but say you get half of those um we'd have four million dollars anticipated without doing any additional buildings and as Karen said when we um did this the first time through the average for a suitability and then a review of the application was over a million dollars now that was all outside costs um but and we think we've gotten much better at this when we look at a vendor now um we're closer to you know 20 25,000 so we hope we're much better at this for um for the prime entities and their affiliates at this point but um and the other point that I want to say is that two million dollars of those positions that's not the full year cost um a lot of those positions are scheduled you know some of them are right away as soon as possible and others aren't until um like a revenue accountant isn't until December or January um you know when we could hopefully bring someone in if we have temporary licenses up and running and we have to collect revenue um so so we can pair it down um we we could go through that exercise now if you take a look at the CPA consultant costs and the legal consultant costs I'm sure there are other people who say that's way too low um and those are just estimates at this point so by giving us a bigger budget of the 2.2 million which is far less than any of the application fees that we even would likely see come in from the from the onset it gives some flexibility to come forward to you and say we'd like to shift money from this area to here versus increasing it so that was part of the part of the thought process but we can pair it down if that's what the commission wants to do there is there is room in there to do that I'd like to turn to Commissioner Mayer then thanks so thank you Derek and and actually I'm one of the ones that took a look at the the initial numbers and said is this enough Derek and um you know I do believe uh Commissioner Hill that we do have to be good stewards of public money and I think it sounds like there's an opportunity for us to look at this on the back end um if if the needs change but I would rather build the arc and and the flood not come and so you know I I'm one of these that look at this and say let's make sure that we have the resources on the ground let's make sure that we're ready for this let's make sure we can execute and then if we have to adjust on the back end I think that's something that all of us are willing to do to be good stewards of public dollars further questions or comments I love that we have instant chatter all at once Commissioner O'Brien um just to say that I I can respect everyone's views um you see the numbers for the first time and they can be uh eye-popping I wasn't here back when the Casino's launched I was in the AG's office but I do remember the legislature appropriating monies to get everything up and running we're not in that situation right now I think they've done a tremendous job working with what they have to get us going um I don't think I fell where our Commissioner Maynard did um I was somewhere in between Commissioner Hill and Commissioner Maynard but I I sort of went through the numbers and feel comfortable with the ask that's in front of us right now so um thank you everyone for your input is there any other further discussion I'm very comfortable with this Derek thank you and Commissioner Stenner and Karen and team um we would we um we do you do need a I lost the motion page but we do want to take action on this today right sorry yes madam chair and I'm happy to move right now yes thank you commissioner I did make some adjustments to the motion um hopefully um you all indulge it's just a slight tweak um I moved that the commission authorized an initial budget of two million one hundred ninety three thousand four hundred twenty nine dollars and eighty six cents for sports wagering operations including the hiring of additional positions and consultant spending as necessary as included in the packet and discussed here today I second that motion as as amended I think you don't have to say as amended because it was just moved this is just draft language for us exactly yeah okay anything further any further discussion so as presented by Commissioner Skinner and seconded by Mr. Maynard Mr. O'Brien I Mr. Hill I Mr. Skinner I Mr. Maynard I and I vote yes so five zero great thank you and and um I'm really hoping that we that you get all the help you need because you not only have been doing your full-time jobs but you have a whole lot more work on your plates and for that we extend our appreciation and I'm hoping you get just the right help um we'll move on to um again uh Director Lillios thank you um for being patient as we shift to Director Wells item three at so this item Madam Chair members of the commission is is critically important as we go forward we have on the agenda today a discussion for commission input into what is the criteria for evaluation of the final operator licenses so I'm not talking today about temporary licensure this is the criteria and the process for awarding the final operator license and as you know from the statute that includes category one category two and category three licenses so what the team here has done and many thanks to particularly um you know Flynn and Derek who really helped me sort of pair this down the recommendation is that the commission discuss these proposed criteria and that we can take the input from the commissioners and then go back and work on some kind of draft application for your consideration this is going to be really important because as you know we have numerous applicants potentially for these operator licenses so evaluation criteria and doing it in a way that's fair and transparent is going to be really important there's going to be a lot of scrutiny over the process and it's important that you know we all come together of an understanding of what's really important to you as the commission because you will be making the decision about who gets these licenses so the recommendation here is that similar to the process for casinos there'll be two parts to the application and two parts to the evaluation one is required by 23 n sections cd and that's the suitability portion so that's the investigation that the application would be information that is required by the investigations and enforcement bureau to do a real suitability deep dive into these applicants to ensure integrity and to protect the citizens of the Commonwealth that our sports way through so the process that we're recommending is very similar on that piece to what we've done before where the applicant would go on undergo a scoping process which identifies those qualifiers which director lilias just described so as she said it's not as if company XYZ just comes in and they just investigate company XYZ they're investigating company XYZ the entities that are subsidiaries or parent companies and then numerous individuals of personal evaluation of individual suitability for numbers of the board the directors the cdo cfo people that have ownership and control over the operation so the recommendation is that the applicants for licensure submit the business entity disclosure form which is what we used and many jurisdictions use in the U.S. for entity investigations in the casino business as you may know from the history of gaming is that a while back it used to be that entities that were applying for licensure in multiple jurisdictions had different forms for every different jurisdiction they were applying to so the there was an ask by the industry to regulators can you all come up with one type of form so we don't have to be submitting different forms every time we go for licensure and and go for relicensure so the recommendation is that we use the business entity disclosure form which was created as a result of that initiative and the multi-jurisdictional personal history disclosure form which was part of that initiative for individual qualifiers we're also recommending the massachusetts supplemental form which provides additional information in massachusetts we want to recognize that certain entities and individuals associated with that an applicant have already been found suitable by the commission and i think there's um support in that in 23 n section 6c which talks about the commission using information obtained from the applicant through their 23k suitability investigation so we don't think that it's required that if you've already been through suitability and already been found suitable that you'd have to apply all over again and submit those forms so but that we also recommend that the iub be given the authority to request any supplemental information that they deem appropriate so that's sort of the thinking on the suitability investigation and what we'd be looking for the second piece of the evaluation is the evaluation of the proposal itself to be a sports wage ring operator so this is where we really like some additional commission input and see where you are in this because we've never had the opportunity to discuss this with you all together so the this suggestion is that there be certain criteria you can have as many of Kathy do you have a question I just wanted before you got into evaluation should we just pause for any questions about do you think that's okay because I do hear you I know you really want the input on the evaluation but are there any questions or input on the on what kind of framework Karen has presented perfect so on the proposal evaluation as you know in the first commission meeting we had after the legislation was passed which was that first week we submitted a compilation of potential information that could be in a sports wage ring application thank you to Jacqueline neck for putting that all together she did a lot of research and other jurisdiction so that was sort of a broad brush approach just so you are educated and what other jurisdictions look at when you're they're looking at sports wage ring and giving out licenses so what we did internally is we had a group meeting and discussed okay if we were going to make recommendations to the commission about you know how to do this we did go back to the fact that the commission when they did the operator licenses for the casinos that they sort of had five different buckets of criteria and that seemed a good way to organize what they were looking at and it worked well and so in the evaluation process because it would evaluate specific criteria individually so we put together some suggestions for the commission of if you wanted to mirror that approach what the criteria would look like so I've got some recommendations but the commission is free to discard the recommendations come up with other criteria modify certain things within a criteria or just discard one or two and add another one or two however you'd like to do it but we had to start somewhere so we thought it may be helpful to you to have at least something in writing something to work off of so the suggestions are that one of the first thing we look at aside from the suitability investigation which is kind of a yes or no you're either suitable or you're not suitable and if you're not suitable you're not you're out you cannot you cannot operate in the commonwealth if you're an unsuitable company but what might be helpful to the commission is that during the process of that suitability investigation you may there may be information that would be helpful to the commission in ranking different proposals and one of the areas I'd suggest might be helpful is we could look at the applicant's history of compliance with regulators and other jurisdictions or their litigation history or some other areas where you might be able to differentiate between applicants who are suitable but they may have differing levels of compliance with their regulators or some evidence one way or the other of initiatives on corporate integrity you may have a company that just has some positive outstanding things that they do for corporate governance and may want to value that in the evaluation or you may have an applicant that is somewhat problematic in that area and although suitable you may want to weigh that as part of your criteria so that's number one the second item is the sports wagering experience and expertise you may want to compare applicants or even be you know I want to be careful that some of these applicants it's going to be a competitive process and some of these applicants for example category one category two and the category threes that are tied to the casinos of the simulcast facilities won't necessarily be competing against each other for a certain license but similar to what we did in region B with MGM there's still an evaluation process on the proposal to see do you want to even give them a license so this criteria would work for both of those facets of the evaluations just bear that in mind as you're looking at this um so the sports wagering experience and expertise that may be you know what kind of offerings do they have to the customer and what kind of experience does the customer have with their product you know what is their demonstrated successful experience and other jurisdictions what is their expertise in particular aspects of sports wagering operations you may have an entity that has a particular area of expertise that you highly value you may want to score that highly um overall confidence as an operator in other jurisdictions and or an ability to successfully innovate these are just suggestions on questions that we could ask for evaluation criteria the third area is economic impact to the commonwealth this is something that we looked at with the casinos and think was very effective and nearly helpful for the commission in making the decision so areas where you may want to inquire in that area are job you know how many jobs is this going to provide for massachusetts residents you know what is the projected revenue of a particular operation what is their luck local construction spend how are local businesses in the construction field going to benefit what is their diversity hiring and spend and what's their local vendor spent we have placed a great deal of value on diversity hiring and spend in our casino operations it probably makes sense to continue that with our sports wagering licensees and you may come up with some other criteria but that's an area that we strongly recommend you consider the impact to the commonwealth and then the fifth area is responsible gaming and we would suggest that the applicants commitment to responsible gaming and their ability to implement operations that will protect the consumer and protect the most vulnerable should potentially be a criteria for you to consider we could indicate in the application that they must demonstrate successful school how they successfully exclude self-identified problem gamblers or what are their mechanisms for putting that in place what's their approach to monitoring patron spend have them describe to you what their responsible gaming initiatives are and also their advertising plans I know advertising has been quite the topic of conversation in the sports wagering industry so that may be an area where you could consider advertising and then the final area is technology as I mentioned earlier technology is a critical component to online gaming and online sports wagering so it would be helpful I would suggest that including inquiries regarding technical competence from the applicants would be helpful for determining licensure issuance if the company does not have the tech capabilities to run a successful operation we are going to have some issues in the Commonwealth so addressing that on the front end through the application process I suggest would be helpful so that could include demonstrated reliability of their platform what are their geofencing capabilities or plans for geofencing what is their know your customer technology what is their accuracy of payouts what's their history so those are just the examples that we've put together for these different criteria so at this point hoping there's a robust discussion on what the commission thinks of these suggestions and how would you like us to go forward so that we can produce something for you which will help you in evaluating who gets licenses in the Commonwealth and Massachusetts for sports Rachel so I'm happy to answer any questions and I do have members of the team that worked on all this available so we can have an ability to answer any questions you may Excellent outline and presentation Karen okay commissioners ideas or thoughts with respect to Karen's presentation to see Commissioner O'Brien's hanging in Yeah, thank you Karen for this really the biggest question or comment that I have is it's in here already but I just want to make sure that however it's written up it's clear to the applicants that you've got the section on sports wagering experience expertise and then you have the technical component but just to make sure that when the applicants filling out the sports wagering experience expertise that it's not restricted to the retail experience that they and that they specify so that we're not getting a vendor that you know maybe is fine in retail but not maybe they don't have that level of success in their mobile experience yet and so not lopping it all together but also making sure it doesn't get lost when just asking about their tech experience their tech expertise Karen Yeah, so I think to your point we're planning on using one application for category one category and category three so the category one and two that's for retail operations even though they have a connected online operation but the connected online operator has to be licensed as a category three so they'll have to fill out the application as well so it may be you know what I'm thinking in my head is there may be questions in there that are relevant to retail but they could put NA if they're not applicable to the to the category three applicants and the reverse there may be something that's you know for example the geofencing issues that's going to be very relevant to mobile operators but not so much obviously to the category one and two right but if they have the experience I'd still want to know about it in terms of I don't want to find somebody who's got some a bad rap sheet so to speak on their mobile experience or maybe their retail but not you know I want to get the whole picture even if they're only putting in for a category three most of these I realize a lot of category threes are only mobile but not everybody now we may find out more as we get to know who these applicants are and figure out how this works but I think I think you're correct and that more is better in the breadth of information we can get to the conditioners and also good right and particularly as just three where they're discretionary as opposed to mandatory for the three I think it's really critical to get as much information as we can good other other insight if we could just go back yep thank you madam chair and to talk about the economic impact to the commonwealth and I these are absolutely five of the bullet points you put up I love I hope we can include them and I think everybody would probably agree what I would also like to see I'm not sure how we would word it being that they would be a mobile app instead of a brick and mortar or retail operation but I love what I see when we get our quarterly updates regarding community engagement and even though these companies are you know running off your phones or the computer they're going to be doing business here and I would love for somehow to know how they might be community partners in regards yeah to you know food banks and all the things all the good things that we've heard from our retail operators what they might you know propose I'd like to see that as part of the application yep absolutely I'm sure if I could just add to that when you said it's different for mobile we often will say that a license in this game world is a peerless privilege and so they are have a license in Massachusetts they really are here and so they can engage in the community I think that's a wonderful idea all right great another idea could you see are you moving or not yet I wasn't but you know I'm good to stand on the recommendation that comes from Karen and the team while reserving the right to you know comment and and and and give suggestions along the way as they get started on a draft I do have a question the evaluation criteria that you've laid out is that for the permanent licenses yeah yeah not temporary and I know we've got that discussion schedule for the 15th is is they're going to be recommendations on for for evaluation criteria on the temporary licensure right again before the 15th we're going to have to discuss next week so there's a threshold question about the temporary licensure which needs to be answered first yeah and we will give you your options based on the the answering of that threshold question thank you but I think I think it's great work in terms of what you've put forward as far okay Commissioner Maynard do you have input on the criteria and people can be thinking about you know this is chance to hear to have Karen hear our thoughts Commissioner Maynard Karen and and I had an opportunity to talk about this when it was in draft form and I think this is perfect I of course you know can see where we may need to get additional information as we go but this is this is a really great starting but I agree I think it's a great starting for me and it made me really think about a few things Karen and Derek I know that when when we've worked on an earlier selection process it was a very meaningful distinction in terms of a very competitive selection process and that's just the issue of diversity equity and inclusion as perhaps its own separate criteria and I so I might want to elevate that I love the idea of course to be diverse firing and spend and I'd also include the supply chain which is actually part of sort of procurement in master's anyway but I'd also challenge them to perhaps consider an MBE the minority own business as a joint partner or joint venture bring that partnership to the table and I think you know elevating we can talk about how to do that well but I think elevating that remember this is not necessarily all of the suggestions on making aren't necessarily musts or or that there shoulds and when I think about the procurement world but I wouldn't mind separate out that topic all together and we could build it out on the technology I'm not even sure if it's supposed to be in technology but I don't know better I've learned a little bit more about kiosks and there are compliance issues with kiosks or challenges I should say and I see thank you Katrina for chiming in so I wonder if we could learn a little bit more about their plans for their this is on the retail side right only so that challenge and Katrina and maybe I don't know if you want to chime in I don't know how we frame it but it should be almost kiosk compliance history is what I was thinking and you're absolutely right man chair so the kiosks would fall under the devices we used to term earlier as devices platform systems so that would fall under the sorry technology realm one of the you know one of I think what you're referring to is a particular area where there was a specific issue with a specific brand of kiosks and so that is something we would work with the if allowed the certified independent test labs to ensure that those specific kiosks are run through the gambit of tests and compliance and auditing and that's one of the benefits of working with those specific test labs and making sure some of the and this is why you know when when working with executive director Wells on the technology component of the criteria I you know I voiced my opinion of the importance of including this because to exactly this point the certified independent test labs only do it in that instance they substantiate that it's able to do what it does that's compliance it's performance etc but it is up to the properties and the manufacturers to ensure that these specific type of devices or equipment are kept up to par with any security patches or updates that are needed and that's where the competency comes in from their adherence to compliance and industry standards so that is an iterative process that the operators and the manufacturer is typically work with the independent test labs and there's a lot of efforts that go into that and so that's where that again to reiterate the competency of the entity really comes into play to ensure their compliance and their commitment to ensuring that they're kept up with technological and security trends and changes especially in the market that we're in today so so that's part a and and they do because I can never have articulated that way and this is the thing that's still only like her 88% we covered in here we kind of like her at 88% and that's really really helpful in terms of part B so I the compliance on the the integrity of the machine is Katrina then there's also the compliance issues of that you don't have the same control over knowing your client or customer KYC through the use of kiosk as you get even at the sports book or obviously in the sports and a mobile device and we touched on this in our round table and I've learned a little bit more is that you know don't really I don't think you have to swipe your ID or anything to get in you put into an account number and and I don't know if that's up to information if there are kiosks in the future that are going to be better but I just wondered if we should be evaluating and it might be at least to learn something kiosk history but those who are going to be doing retail on technology too and Katrina I turn to you do we need would it be helpful to understand their history on the of using of data use for instance using official data you know because we do have that tier one tier two distinction and in our in 23m so data used and then data security anything like that is that all right or do we miss that is it not in here somewhere well so the so I I believe we came up with some abbreviated examples it is not a comprehensive list all the things that were we will be looking at for competency with criteria that would be rolled in with the assessment of their information security plans as well so yes that that is something we have you know tracked off as an item that we would include as part of the process yeah I think it might be helpful for us to know who has experience you know with respect to using the the official data used then up to responsible gaming and I know this is again a scalpeless but if advertising plans I guess I'd love to then to talk about youth and vulnerable populations and then I also think probably is this the place where we talk about promo and the whole issue that came up to me do we ask them about there but how they're planning on is that is that chewing precise yeah I'm not sure that would be in the application that would probably for the commission direction before they would watch okay all right and then new final things and then a process question for once we get through the categories we have a report from treasure Goldberg we are including here issues around diversity hiring and spend which I think we all really feel so critical and it came in through 23k but we don't really do we have direction under 23n precisely on those issues because I'm wondering if we should be talking about a lot anything that they would be willing to do for the lottery mitigation impact can we put that as a if we need to speak with legal about that yeah why don't we coordinate with legal about any requirements specifically in 23n and yeah I'm not sure like connecting DEI in the lottery bill no I did just wondering in terms of topics that are outside the statute you know are they comparable I don't know and then finally we haven't talked about e-sports and I I know you just want to see your head explode today I don't really know what we're going to do about e-sports can we put it in the parking lot and not forget it or do we put you know I just don't know if that's a separate application process or not right I know I've heard of of different reactions and many of which were consistent with your your expressions just now all right and then my final thing it's a little bit on the as I said it's more on process so I don't know if anybody has any more input on the pockets the only one I was going to add and I don't know where you put it in or even if you can but given the research that we like to do and some that we've been tasked with whether they can speak to any experience they have dealing with researchers with scrubbing data their capacity to do it I think would be helpful to know so my process question and maybe we're going to get to about you know I first I have to think Jacqueline but for this precise assignment it's such an excellent job and she does put in I know it's just a a draft and an example or a sample drafting sheet this is where I think it's going to be huge challenge to get the scorecard right if we end up with a large pool that we have to bring down to zero to seven right so I've done enough procurement procurements to know I am no expert and I I also know there's mathematics involved in how you do it make sure it's fair and equitable but my my thinking of course is that we have to have enough leeway to be able to be fair equitable and precise enough to be able to distinguish and so I'm very interested in the criteria and I'm also very interested in how will we actually evaluate these once this comes in front of us so I don't know if there are any thoughts for that today and if you're planning on that to come before us Karen and more of a nuanced fashion that's really helpful Madam Chair because that is a question for the commission ultimately how do you want to make these decisions so when we did the casinos it's not as if there was a point scoring system but you could do a point scoring system and that may be helpful particularly where you have we're in a situation it's very different from the casino licensees where we've got a lot and so to your point differentiating in a large group is very difficult and we really do want to be fair and transparent and and as objective as possible so I think we can look at some models but if any of the commissioners have any insight into how you would like to evaluate or how you would like to make your decisions it would be helpful for me to hear that now so I can sort of get going and do some research on best practices for whatever approach you want to end up taking I don't know if there are other jurisdictions that would be making a similar kind of reduction in their final application process but that might be helpful too but anyway I'm I'm wrestling with that in my mind I think we've got the criteria buckets are really well defined so next steps but it it was on my mind anyway and then Jacqueline's good sample made me realize that I could bring it up today because it did include that scorecard so commissioners what do you think is there anything further you want from Karen on this matter I'm seeing nose all set okay excellent job Karen excellent thank you to my team because I give them all the credit that's definitely teamwork all right then we're turning then to discussion of process for approval for use of sports wagering systems and devices here we are so I am going to ask our CIO to help me out here because she is the expert here but the bottom line is we're looking for some commission direction here not necessarily obviously we don't have a reg in front of you now we're just looking for some that preliminary direction we would go back and write regulations and then bring them to forward to you for final approval but the bottom line is we're looking for some direction on how we're going to approach technical testing so Katrina already gave you some information about that but in this context we had a discussion several months ago before sports wagering was passed about this issue I think the staff position now because we're dealing with it post implementation of the statute is that we're sort of adjusting our recommendation Karen yes Madam Chair I'm sorry for the interruption do we not need to take a vote on the evaluation criteria? No I just need some direction we reserve that in case there was an issue I see okay yes thank you okay so the best practices for regulation of particularly online wagering is to make sure that everything works properly and is in compliance with regulations and laws there are different approaches we can take to making sure that that happens one is requiring the licensees to contract with the certified independent testing lab to provide testing and then provide us with the results within of the option to audit those results to ensure compliance competency and accuracy the other issue is for to allow them to initially submit spoke I'm sorry and then the the other option is to allow them to initially submit certification that their platform equipment and softwares in compliance with another jurisdictions technical standards and then they result submit the results of technical testing to Massachusetts standards is identified in what I first described so the first one would be they contract with a certified independent testing lab that independent testing lab certifies that their platform is in compliance with all Massachusetts laws and regulations second option is they give us a letter they already have because they were tested in another jurisdiction and we let them go forward for say 30 days or Katrina may be able to give you the standard operating procedure for that method and then they have to test to Massachusetts standards within a period of time this is something that came up at the round table I believe North talked about it when you were speaking with the licensees so that's those are the two options if we have the licensees contract we could also theoretically hire personnel to conduct all the testing in house at the MGC there are jurisdictions that have a robust program to do that I would recommend against that for the following reason it's very hard to get IT personnel right now and it's also going to take a long time to get personnel get them trained get them up to speed and then do the testing so for efficiency purposes that's probably not the best move for Massachusetts right now and then the other option is to contract for us to contract with third party vendors conduct all the testing directly for us so initially we had thought that may be a good option if we were able to do the contract months ago but given that we didn't do it months ago in the time frame our recommendation is that we go ahead and recommend that we utilize the approach where they contract with an outside vendor they submit their or their jurisdictional platform is in compliance with whatever regulations they have in place in another jurisdiction and then they'd be required within the say 30 days to submit that they're in compliance with Massachusetts regulations so that's sort of an over Katrina did I miss anything there because I know that's a lot of technology stuff and you're certainly more of an expert than I am no Karen you covered it pretty well I just you know I just I do want to add a couple clarifying pieces for your consideration as well there can be a vast difference on allowing an operator to launch in a timely fashion so if we if we select to ensure that they are compliant with the Massachusetts standards and that they will contract with the independent certified testing labs that will do this testing against the mass regs which obviously needs to be drafted and promulgated and approved that's obviously going to add a significant amount timeline to the back end of that the recommendation that we did propose was to begin with approach number two migrating to approach number one as we go from a temporary licensee to a fully licensed operator and the reason for that is expediency to market and there are a couple couple caveats that we did outline in those but regardless of what option we choose you know as as an example geo-offencing would have to be something we test for whether we do it internally or externally and so you know we're really just looking for that guidance to help us move in a specific direction in my apology failed to mention there is a theoretical fifth option of using a hybrid model where we do some of it in-house and contract some of it out but for the same reason that hiring staff would delay the process we're not thinking that is particularly practical at this point So Katrina I pose this question to Karen and I pose it to you in terms of option two which is that option to me is only as good as our trust in the other jurisdictions technical standard requirements so do we want to restrict to any particular jurisdictions which I know gets more complicated given our licensees particularly the the MG I mean when that only operates in two or they're certain that we want to exclude So that's a really good point so in our analysis when we recommended one approach over the other in our cons section we would absolutely and it would be my strong recommendation that we do select jurisdictions that are very similar to Massachusetts especially with our policies our laws etc that we would most likely you know have in our regulations I think they would be the best jurisdictions to accept certifications from Okay and then in terms of the thought of this being a temporary process is this something you talked about temp license versus regular etc and it seems to me this is a process that the process itself should become not necessary so rather than linking to type are we talking about a sunset provision in terms of the regs like are we are we asking for this request such that it expires after a year whatever it is you know what I mean referring to the out of Massachusetts do you know what's better correct yeah I think that's correct yeah just to number one right yes no it's number two to be able to refer to a different jurisdiction right right so once we migrate to one option two would have a sunset and become not not available anymore right correct that's why we're talking about launch purposes and right to it's not but I mean I think I guess my preference in terms of going back and thinking about reg writing would be that it would be a sunset provision not you know an option that would would key into a type of application or license but would rather be a sunset provision keying into the launch of our regulation of sports wagering yeah so we could put you know six months on the set provision or something like that I agree right right right here okay your audio is a little off I think and you might be standing and so just just to add I'm good for you your speakers just a little bit off I can't work but yeah I think Commissioner Ryan's point is for Todd and for regulation drafting is to make sure that we don't have to revisit it or anything that it should have a sunset provision right I mean yeah that's a good point okay any other questions on this we had we had thought about this earlier and of course you remember notes grounds have brought this up during the round table this topic as to on the benefits of being able to tie it to another jurisdiction Katrina did you say that you did you would end up prescribing a list of acceptable jurisdictions yes and that would mean regulation itself Karen all right I guess you could do out deferred to Todd and how we do it we could put it straight in the regulation or we could have the regulation refer to a policy or something like that but I'll I think there's some value in maybe having it in a side letter I think that's probably right well we can take a look at it we'll start putting it together and see how it flushes out but I think we understand the direction that we'd like to thank you yeah appreciate it okay and then I think of the only question I have I know Katrina is like there during this time do we have any auditing functions we would have some it wouldn't be as extensive or comprehensive as when we migrate to option one again you know option two was really to try to get you know that window of so for a simple example I think this really speaks to north's question as well you know allowing a device or a piece of equipment or a software or platform into the jurisdiction right now they can't right now they couldn't we can't certify for short window of time correct correct and so that allows them to expedite their timeline for being able to launch to move forward so there will be you know again accepting the other jurisdictions GLI or BMM letters that adheres to the standards we adopt off of the authorized list plus our own internal compliance again goes back to that initial request earlier this morning working with the certified independent test labs to be able to help substantiate some of that it will take a burden off of the staff otherwise we'd have to hire quite a few folks in order to do that internally so it really does have a domino effect you know both ways in some of these proposals today so I would just know if for any reason it doesn't sound like it's a practical concern that it did number two where we're starting it goes into an extended period of time that we have some audit function of course just in one but it sounds as though it really is a compressed time period it is and again we would have some audit functions exactly what that looks like right now I'm not sure until we start you know digging into the standards great thank you any other questions so you don't need a vote because there's a my question is is there consensus that we should draft a regulation that goes with option two and would include a sunset provision is that that's what I'm hearing I just want to make sure right we could do a vote on that so that you could move ahead for regulation or is it or do we have a consensus I mean if it's a consensus you're looking for I'm okay with moving forward yeah now we can all get into the details with the draft right okay yep get the standard you're all set as well I see not I'm all set yep thank you all so much hey all right um Karen are you all set 10 I am thank you all right so um we're now turning to our responsible gaming portion research and responsible gaming portion director van van manager van manager van all right I just can I ask for or just a five minute break before we move into the next okay five um and I'm teasing of course why don't we come back at 305 and then mark that will give you 25 minutes I think Dr. Volberg is coming on around 330 if we if you're down earlier so I'm sure she's tuning in okay we'll take a a little bit of a break 305 thank you thanks Dave okay we're returning to gaming commissions public meeting number 390 after a short break I'll do a roll call commissioner brian I am still here and commissioner del alive and kicking that's a good thing commissioner skinner I'm here commissioner maynard I'm here madam chair great thank you so much and particularly Jordan again thank you so much all right um mark I turn to you thank you thank you for your patients today I'm in it for the long haul chair I said I'm in it for the long haul so yeah well you're not alone good afternoon chair good afternoon commissioners I'm going to to bring to you first a discussion on efforts from the research and responsible gaming crew on the implementation of the sports wagering act I'm going to combine H&I on your agenda into just one one piece before we pivot and turn to the ad hoc sports wagering report which is number four on your agenda so the research and responsible gaming team reviewed the act regulating sports wagering generally we're pleased to see the legislature and governor expressed a continued commitment to studying sports wagering impacts with a keen focus on preventing and mitigating gambling related harm embedded in the new law are many specific responsible gaming requirements and we feel confident that we're prepared to implement each one of those the good news is that we're not starting from scratch since the passage of the expanded gaming act in 2011 the MGC has successfully implemented a number of measures intended to promote positive play and reduce gambling related harms much of this work or in fact not all of this work is really built on responsible gaming framework which aims to create a sustainable socially responsible and accountable approach to gambling and commonwealth we believe that with some adaptation of this framework that it's well suited and can be used in our approach to sports wagering as well as you're aware we've also produced two white papers in the past year or so that are intended to inform measures for sports wagering the first which was released last June just over a year ago was a white papering on responsible gaming considerations for responsible gaming policy and practice and the second was a white paper on responsible gaming considerations for advertising that was produced and released just a few months ago and not least of which and coming up just next week will be hosting a sports wagering round table that will focus on responsible gaming where we will be inviting a number of experts in this field to come and share their thoughts opinions ideas and expertise on the implementation sports wagering especially in a digital space so we've identified three responsible game requirements in the new law that really build on existing efforts in section 13 of the new law there is voluntary self-exclusion as well as self-imposed limitations section four includes operator employee training on responsible gaming and problem family and so while there are efforts in each of these areas the commission will certainly want to consider what changes in these measures should be made to accommodate sports wagering especially especially in this digital and online platform so for example I think a a key issue that's being discussed is when we think about voluntary self-exclusion are we talking about one overarching list that would incorporate sports wagering and casino gambling are we talking about two two separatists or another example would be the requirement of self-imposed limitations what how should this be how should the commission execute this should we look at a model that's very much like play my way or should we look at branching out and and more broadly understanding what play limitations mean I think this will include a conversation with with some experts in the field a literature review and possibly understanding also what what technology is available for us to implement such such a measure there are other responsible game requirements outlined in the new law that will need to implement certainly where possible will as I mentioned will turn to the framework we'll look at models and other jurisdictions and if possible look at best practices and in the specific area so for example advertising credit prohibition or consumer access to account history and details all of which are are included in this bill the commission will need to draft regulations to support and certainly last but not least is the question about how to adapt the game sense program to sports play during individual format game sense has been a cornerstone of the gaming commission's responsible gaming approach now for a number of years and we I recommended the commission take a very close look at how we can continue to advance game sense and into this space and it has been done for example the British Columbia Lottery Corporation uses game sense in a variety of ways that I think that the gaming commission should consider there may be other jurisdictions as well that that would provide some shed some light on this area turning to are there any before I turn to research are there any questions just about the responsible gaming and requirements and how how to approach it commissioners questions remark at this stage all set great okay thank you okay so turning to the research agenda we're pleased to see that the sports play during act also has specific requirements related to research and I don't take this lightly I think that Massachusetts and the expanded gaming act and again with this is unique we have a commitment to research that pretty much no other state has and this commitment is as I interpreted is really there to inform the commission to inform other state players on on how to proceed how do we maximize the benefits of gaming and the commonwealth and equally important how do we how do we mitigate harms which may come from it and this can and should be driven by our research agenda there are three specific requirements related to research outlined in the law section 23 of it is a requirement basically that directs the commission to align the objectives of the sports wagering research agenda with the existing research agenda that's outlined in section 71 of 23k and the underpinnings of this section require the commission to conduct research to understand the social and economic effects of gaming and the commonwealth to maintain information relative to neuroscience psychology sociology epidemiology etiology of gambling the sports wagering act also directs the commission to integrate two studies section 20 and 25 to the existing research agenda that will help understand the impacts of sports wagering in the commonwealth and provide recommendations to the legislature study one is a look at a study examining the feasibility of allowing retail locations in the commonwealth to operate sports wagering kiosks this was mentioned earlier today in our discussion with treasurer golbert the second study is a study on the participation by minority business enterprises women business enterprises and veteran business enterprises in the sports wagering industry in the commonwealth so we've begun to scope out each of each of these studies and have been discussions with the sigma team to explore options of perhaps mending their isa to include both of one or both of these studies and the existing isa for our research agenda well we'll pivot to the new requirements of this law you can see that actually we've been examining sports wagering for quite some time sports wagering behavior specifically many of the studies posted on the gaming commission's research agenda the gaming commission's website the research agenda page includes a number of studies that include an examination of sports wagering behavior this has been important will continue to be important because we recognize that understanding sports wagering behavior doesn't work in a vacuum that it's really understanding gambling behavior more generally that that gives a better picture of where we need to go in our mitigation efforts so we this information you'll see in the coming agenda item has been used already and will be included in the study that Dr. Boulder and Dr. Williams will be discussing with you so just to conclude there's a lot of work to be done there's a lot to consider and while we have somewhat of a roadmap on how to proceed here there's still a lot that is unknown sports wagering is new and it's very very new in the world of responsible gaming where could I follow up on the research and I'll turn it over to my fellow commissioners I know that there's a very aggressive deadline and there's a way to get a study done of some the right scale and that deadline in December and then I know we have resources to be able to maybe flesh out the research more down the road you mentioned that you're speaking with Dr. Wilk Boulder's team is that because there is room on her current contract to include these two without additional or expansion of the cost of the contract there would be an additional cost with within the contract okay so we believe it's the exploration is does this fit within the original scope that's outlined within the original RFR and the existing contract I'm wondering if there's an opportunity here for some you know if this is where we would there be an opportunity to I'm thinking about both because I think both studies impact people in communities of color I would love to see on the research team a diverse team and I guess I would I would you know we're literally going to be talking about I know both spells out the statue the impacts on MBEs so can you give that some thought whether there's a partner for Dr. Wilk or whether it gets procured out these are just it's an opportunity here and you know we have a statement of purpose that we follow where we prioritize potentialing around these issues so we can certainly consider that there's the bind is is one if this is well suited for the Sigma team and it's within their sort of scope of expertise that is a that is important information to is are you saying is it or that is I believe it is within their scope of expertise it is okay and next making sure that that it's within the scope of the R&R of it that we're allowed to do so and then finally it is the very very tight timeline trying to move these two projects research projects forward and perhaps someone who perhaps there's someone at UMass that she can think about in terms of bringing to her team of color at the very least I think it just would be an opportunity for that voice to be heard so I don't want it I didn't mean to jump in I just have to have that on my mind other questions from Mark on these issues either the research or the RG part I'm really interested in learning a little bit more about the game sense piece Mark and and the mobile and I didn't realize that British Columbia Slottery was doing something so I'd like or maybe I forgot so I don't know what it really looks like I'll need to get more information as well okay good good I'm not so behind in but Karen I think on the own diversity issue maybe there's an opportunity here I just hope I don't want to pass it by if there's an opportunity and I think your suggestion of being creative and maybe within the contract I think that the thinking behind using the existing contract is because the parameters of time are so right I'm aware of that I think that's a good idea to explore well and there's also if we think about it it's almost we do some kind of a report for that time frame if we do in fact move forward then maybe there we really but again to the extent that Dr. Bolberg is I don't know if she's hearing me now and maybe she'll if she comes on but I do think it would be there she is you know just an perhaps an opportunity Dr. Bolberg were you listening in yes Madam Chair I was can you hear me I can I wondered if you wanted to comment ah well um I would like to comment first of all our research team is not entirely devoid of diversity we have for example a PhD student his name is Alvaro Castro Riva de Neira he has been working with us since 2018 I believe when he started in the graduate program at the Department of Epidemiology he's actually going to be doing his dissertation using our data and he has been responsible for managing a good chunk of our key informant interviews and focus groups that we conducted the last two years or less in in a broken way in Springfield back in 2019 and then in in Everett and surrounding communities more recently so we do have someone on our team who is fluent in Spanish he's originally Ecuadorian and he has at this point quite a lot of gambling research experience as well the other thought that I have is I could approach a group that I've been working with sort of informally over the last two years at the University of Massachusetts Center for Community Health Equity Research where there are a number of investigators they are not focused on gambling at all but they do have very good connections in both the Everett and surrounding communities as well as even more so I would say in Springfield and Holyoke and surrounding communities that's those resources are included and I'm glad that you did hear me because I knew that there'd be a good answer but we are I just wanted to be sensitive to that and also create as a true opportunity Dr. Volver I know that you are aligned with that priority as well so thank you Mark are you all done with your report and then yes okay I've been sitting here and I obviously the law that was passed dictated some dates for these studies to be done I think I'm going to offer my historical knowledge of the legislature here for a moment so bear with me when the House first took up sports betting we put in dates that we thought would be appropriate because we thought the bill was going to pass sooner than it did and those dates were the very same dates that were put in at the end of this bill that was signed into law and I think the intent of the legislature would have been to give the mass gaming commission more time to do these studies a year and a half in fact if you look at when we passed it compared to what it was ultimately passed so I'm bringing that up for informational purposes that I am not totally sure that the intent of the legislature was to have this study done in such a short amount of time and when you look at the piece of legislation and I shouldn't say this but I'm going to say it because I think there's some who may be worried that we need to get this done as soon as possible I'm arguing we don't that when you're doing these pieces of legislation and you have two different bills you have two different dates and then they just cut and paste and they weren't aware that they were giving a very short amount of time for the mass gaming commission and there's no language in there that says if we're not done by a certain date that something bad happens to the mass gaming commission so I think as one commissioner want Mark to know and staff to know you could folks do spectacular work when it comes to the papers that you do and the reports that you do and the groups that you work with and you do that because you're given a fair amount of time to do them this is not a fair amount of time to do what we think I think what the intention of the legislature was I don't think they're giving you enough time and I think it was done by accident I don't think it was done on purpose as we all know it was it was put together early morning of the last day of the session and sometimes when you're going through a big piece of legislation like this one you sometimes miss things like dates from the previous bills that were passed in the house and in the senate so I as one commissioner and I and I hope maybe my fellow commissioners feel the same way I don't want you to rush any report any white paper because of something that I perceived to be a mistake that maybe could be rectified later by the legislature but I want people to know that that date has been around for over a year and a half and it was I think just an oversight when they were putting the the bill together that they didn't change that to 23 instead of 22 I just want to put that out there Madam Chair for people to understand and Mark I know that you feel very strongly that this is what the law said and that you need to get it done and I'm not as I don't think I'm as concerned that we need to have this done by that certain date in the in the legislation and I want to make sure that it's done right so Madam Chair I'll just leave it that Madam Chair may I may I just say one quick thing any any research project we have has certain steps that need to be taken before we even begin the research and that's that's this scope a thorough scope of understanding a timeline what it entails what are the what is the methodology what does analysis look like and we're very committed to to that piece of it and making sure that we hold to those research principles and and and process to to create a report that the commission will be can stand behind okay I've given a little guidance I think all of us have been subject to study dates and bills and laws a long time graph we've been on the other end and you know when you are offering under statute you you meet the deadlines but I I mean my guidance to Marcus you just give what you can that is reasonable for the deadline and as and I would say that we're very fortunate to have a framework research framework and resources that would allow them to really accomplish what we like probably what should have been set out for their adequate time but there's something that can be submitted to me that deadline and then say appropriately more to come of course you know today we heard from Georgia Goldberg and she's very interested in this study so it does need to be a quality that we come to expect from Dr. Goldberg and team and from Mark and all the researchers who support the work of the gaming commission so I think we're all probably aligned but I think former Rep Hill you should know that generally folks do take those dates seriously and I think that's a good thing right but I do think you're right it might have been just in here right because these are significant studies really important not only significant in terms of the quantity of work that will be associated with them but they're really important so I think I think they are yes yes they really are so that's why I guess I wanted to make sure we this is an opportunity and and Dr. Goldberg I appreciate your outlining that you know the community based resources that you use since this these two studies just speak for making sure that we have community voices involved and making sure that we don't somehow impact the communities of color in a way that we didn't mean to because of lack of representation so I'll let you guys figure that out but Mark will we get a report on that and what the next steps are do you say you're just planning on proceeding now I don't know what the procedures are caring honestly on on these matters these studies so there's no you know it doesn't come before us we'll just and not necessarily I mean we by expectation we give an update as an agenda item but I don't think there's any commission action necessarily at least at this point yeah okay should we turn to the next matter then Mark you want to tee it up sure I would be glad to tee it up Dr. Goldberg and Dr. Williams one thing before before we launch into the ad hoc sports wagering paper just a quick clarification of their affiliations on the agenda it affiliates with the UMass Donahue Institute the UMass Donahue Institute is an important partner in our research agenda and they are a subcontractor for the SIGMA SIGMA project but Dr. Goldberg nor Dr. Williams has a direct affiliation with them so Dr. Williams is professor faculty of health sciences and coordinator of the Alberta Gambling Research Institute at the University of Lethbridge and in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada Dr. Rachel Goldberg is a research professor at the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst together they are the co-principal investigators for the SIGMA project which is the social and economic impacts of gaming in Massachusetts so just a quick clarification on their types I hope I got that right Dr. Goldberg, Dr. Williams so it's been well over a year the gaming commission saw an incredible likelihood that sports wagering would be coming to the Commonwealth and therefore wish to begin to do some lay some groundwork to understand it the white paper that I mentioned for my last piece looking at the responsible gaming framework and looking how it may be applied to sports wagering was a step in that process the report coming to you today is another step in that process the ad hoc sports wagering report so last fiscal year we had a few reports one or two where the gaming commission could define exactly kind of in sort of mid-stride mid-fiscal year a topic that they felt would be worth taking a very close look at the gaming commission in November of last year said it would be really important for us to take a close look at sports wagering and understand the impacts that may occur with the introduction of the legal sports betting in the Commonwealth so the report that's coming to you today is the final product of that ad hoc report so they're you know they're they didn't have a lot to work with quite honestly but what they did do is they examine the current status of legalized sports bettering in the US they did a thorough comprehensive literature review on demographic and behaviors of sports betters attitudes about sports betting harms associated with sports betting and then finally they and and certainly probably most importantly they took a look at what research was already done in Massachusetts to examine sports betting behaviors as well as the NCPG National Council on Problem Ambling had done two different studies one in 2018 one in 2022 that did a national survey of sports betting and so together with those those pieces of information they bring to you the report today so I will turn it over about any further explanation to Dr. Wolberg and Dr. Williams thank you thank you Mark so I'm going to hopefully be able to share my screen with my slides if I'm not able to do that I'm going to have to lean on you and ask you to share your screen and advance your slides or perhaps Marie Claire can do that so let me do this oops sorry let me family that's my my father my daughter and my niece from a couple of Christmases ago so Dr. Wolberg it's reminding me one time during your presentation you had the entire parade go by your head and do you remember that do you remember when you had it's reminding me one time you had a parade go by your office oh yes yes that was early in the pandemic it was it was and they they were protesting something and and I happened to live on the same street as one of our city council members so they did a drive by test right in the middle of some presentation that I was giving hopefully that won't happen today that was a pandemic moment which we had caught we probably do have it on tape somewhere yeah and probably is on tape somewhere exactly yeah thank you so can can you just confirm that you're seeing my screen we're all set okay all right so I just want to start by saying that you're mostly going to be hearing from me the reason I asked Rob Williams to join us is because he is deeply knowledgeable about both sports betting and online gambling as those have rolled out internationally and so I thought rather than just taking questions myself that if anything came up that I felt was more appropriately answered by him that I would just put him on the spot so I'm going to present the slides and then hopefully we'll have us a little bit of time for questions so in March of 2013 the gaming commission selected our research team based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to carry out the study the social and economic impacts of gambling in Massachusetts it included a comprehensive baseline survey of gambling behavior and problem gambling prevalence that was conducted in 2013 and 2014 well before any of the new casinos became operational but since 2013 we have been collecting and analyzing a wide array of primary and secondary data and in 2019 the gaming commission re-procured the study and selected us to continue it until I believe mid 2025 so this slide provides an overview of the structure of the report that we have submitted in the interest of time today I will not be discussing the history of sports betting in the US when we get to identified outcomes I will be focusing only on the substantial amount of data that we have on sports betting behavior here in Massachusetts but there is a tremendous amount of additional information into the report on national trends as well as a review of the scholarly literature that is primarily focused on jurisdictions outside the US so this is a slide showing the methods that we use to collect the data on sports betting legalization regulation and operations as well as some of the social and economic impacts and you've already heard a little bit from Mark about what we did so I won't go into any detail here sports betting has been widespread but not legal throughout the United States since the 1950s and as I'm sure you all know in 1992 Congress passed the professional amateur sports protection act which prohibited states from sanctioning or sponsoring sports gambling but despite the legal prohibition sports gambling continued to be popular and in 2011 New Jersey passed legislation to legalize sports betting and was immediately sued by the major professional sports leagues as well as the NCAA seven years later in 2018 the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not prohibit states from allowing sports betting and the race was on so this slide shows it's taken from the American Gaming Association's website we accessed it I believe on May 16th but this legend here serves as a helpful synopsis of the development of sports betting across the United States this table presents information about the types of sports betting operations that are permitted in the states that had legalized sports betting as of May 2022 it shows that two-thirds of the states passed legislation that permitted both land-based and online sports betting operations while nearly another quarter of the states passed legislation that permitted only land-based operations three states elected to pass legislation permitting only online sports betting and while it's not shown on this table there are four states that elected to provide sports betting only through amendments of state tribal compacts to allow sports betting at tribal casinos or on tribal land in addition to the variation in permitted types of sports betting there is tremendous variation in tax rates in licensing fees in the types of wagers that are permitted in acceptable forms of payment in the data that's used to establish odds et cetera et cetera et cetera so we were only able to identify 16 states of the 30 more than 30 that we looked at that allocated funds to provide services for people experiencing gambling problems six of the states that do not provide funding up there in the this group here six of these states have sports betting only at tribal casinos or on tribal land and the states that do provide funding have either specified specific amounts to be expended annually or a percentage of tax revenues generated by sports betting in that jurisdiction so in conducting our review I was interested to see that each state has had to balance the demands of existing gambling operators including casinos, lotteries, racetracks, and tribes with other stakeholders that would like to offer sports betting as an adjunct to other retail services including bars and restaurants but also sports arenas there is substantial variation as this slide shows in the government agencies that have been given responsibility for licensing and or operating sports betting but the most common approach is has been to designate the casino regulator which is certainly the case here in Massachusetts with the legislation that passed here the next most common approach is to designate either the state lottery commission or the agency that operates the lottery there's another approach is to include sports betting in compacts with tribes already operating class three gaming as I mentioned before the number of licenses also varies more variation in whether states will require licensing fees both either upfront or as renewal fees about half of the states require license fees there are restrictions placed on the types of bets this is primarily focused on whether or not to allow betting on collegiate sports the one area where there is great consistency however is in the age limit set for sports betting with only seven of the 31 jurisdictions the 30 states and the District of Columbia allowing people aged 18 and over to participate the rest of these jurisdictions require betters to be 21 so turning now to operations the main direct economic effects of legalized sports betting we anticipate will be jobs and income derived from people obtaining employment in the new sports betting industry there are going to be indirect economic effects these include business to business purchases needed to provide sports betting and then there will be induced effects which are generated by people who are employed in this new industry spending their income in the states to purchase goods and services however as as we note on the slide these indirect and induced impacts will not be entirely new since the majority of these impacts already occur due to the illegal market so I just want to sort of underline for you that the anticipated revenues from sports betting in Massachusetts really are are much smaller than the revenues that are already being generated by the Massachusetts casinos and by the Massachusetts lottery so even in the best of scenarios where sports betting generates a little over 60 million dollars a year in tax revenue that represents only about five percent of the revenues generated for the state by the Massachusetts lottery and about 35 percent of the revenues generated by the casinos so I want to turn the focus now to Massachusetts specifically and present some information from the variety of studies that we have conducted as part of sigma so you can see here a list of the surveys that we have done the baseline general population survey and baseline online panel survey were done quite early on we had targeted surveys done in Plainville and in Springfield one year after each of the casinos in those cities opened we completed earlier this year a follow-up online panel survey at the same time that we were in the field with our follow-up general population survey and then last but not least the Massachusetts gambling impact cohort study was underway in Massachusetts from 2013 to 2019 so in practical terms the existence of sigma means that we actually have a very substantial amount of information about sports betting in Massachusetts prior to 2018 when Paspa was overturned however only the general population surveys the baseline and follow-up yield data that is representative of the Massachusetts adult population the online panel surveys and the cohort study provide important clues to what was happening with sports betting in Massachusetts since 2013 but those data cannot be generalized confidently to the population as a whole so this graph is from the baseline general population survey and shows the frequency of past year participation in different types of gambling in Massachusetts back in 2013-2014 and you can see that the lottery was the clearly the most popular form of gambling followed by raffles and then out-of-state casino gambling so although sports betting was illegal in Massachusetts as were casinos at that time or I guess casinos had been legalized but they were not operational the past year rate of sports betting in our baseline survey was actually 12.6 percent the other information that we have about sports betting in Massachusetts from that early date relates to the demographics of sports bettors so we identified that men were twice as likely to have bet on sports in the past year compared to women that sports betting was most popular among adults aged 25 to 54 as well as among those with college or graduate degrees compared to those with less education or actually also to individuals with higher education at the doctorate level and finally respondents with annual incomes of $100,000 for more were more likely to have bet on sports compared to those making less than 50,000 so that's just a little peek at what we knew what we found out about sports betting back in 2013 and 2014 it aligns very well with what we know from the international literature on the demographics of sports betting as well this table presents information about gambling participation from the baseline general population survey compared with the baseline online panel survey and I just want to draw your attention to the fact that these are unweighted data so this is not representative of the population but what it does show you is that past year participation in sports betting was higher among the online panel respondents compared to the general population respondents for every type of gambling except raffles so these were all quite significant differences they were entirely expected because we know that online panels tend to include large proportions of heavy gamblers this table provides a comparison between the baseline online panel survey that was carried out in 2013-14 and the follow-up online panel which the survey was completed in April of this year and you can see that the rate of sports betting was significantly higher in 2022 while the rate of pathological gambling which is the most severe category of our typology of gambling was also significantly higher in 2022 now the differences between these two surveys in addition to time these differences can be partly explained by differences in the wording of the questions we used about sports betting in general another potential reason for these differences is the use of different survey companies for the two surveys and some of the difference likely reflects the introduction of legal fantasy sports betting in massachusetts which occurred in 2016 so the question of whether these differences are real or not will be very much informed by the analysis that we'll be doing over the next six months or so of the follow-up general population survey this chart focuses on data from the 2022 follow-up online panel survey and it shows that problem gambling rates so this is problem gambling rates amongst people who are engaged in specific types of gambling but controlling for the number of other types of gambling that they're doing so we know that sports bettors tend to be heavy gamblers and the question is whether whether it's a particularly risky type of gambling in and of itself or if it if the higher rate of gambling problems amongst sports bettors has more to do with the amount of with the other types of gambling that they're also doing so going across this this graph shows problem gambling prevalence so that's the percent among people engaged with a particular format so for this would be table games and sport spending is this red dotted line here and you can see that the rates clearly converge when people are engaged with five or more types of gambling but what really stands out is that casino table games clearly represent a risky form of gambling when people even when people are not involved with other forms of gambling whereas sports betting is much more in the middle of the pack finally I have some data on gambling participation across the five waves of the cohort study that was conducted from 2013 to 2019 again while it's not representative of the population the results do provide insight into sport spending behavior over this time period so we started with a cohort of 3139 Massachusetts residents they were selected from the baseline general population survey and stratified and selected on the basis of their gambling behavior with oversampling of risky gambling so this chart is actually not based on the full cohort but it's based on the gambling behavior of the 2087 individuals who participated in all five assessments so this is lottery participation by the same people over five assessments between 2013 and 2019 what you can see is that lottery participation and sports betting so lottery participation and sports betting here remained pretty stable amongst these individuals whereas out of state casino betting gambling dropped after the opening of Plain Ridge Park Casino while Massachusetts casino gambling so these are our new casinos increased particularly after 20 or in 2018 excuse me after the opening of MGM Springfield and this is also an interesting change here although it's small online gambling did rise amongst our cohort members in starting in 2016 when daily fantasy sports were legalized Dr. Boeber could we go back to just that distinction sports betting versus online gambling yes any overlaps there in that definition of online gaming the definitions that I this is always a little bit confusing when we say eye gaming sports betting yeah there there is a significant amount of overlap between sports betting and online gambling but in this case and Rob I'm going to ask you to clarify here because you're more a little bit more familiar with the questionnaire than I am I don't think we the casino play online and that would be illegal in Massachusetts but is it casino play online is it casino games online yeah it in in my recollection I believe we asked about casino games played online online we also I think we asked about these sports these sports these sports okay yeah we actually it's probably I'm sure we actually asked about any type of online gambling sports betting online casinos online instant scratch tickets online horse racing any type of online gambling so I was a bit puzzled by the the increase in in 2016 but it may simply be coincident with the general increase in online gambling that's occurring throughout the western world in the last several years so it's okay so it's a whole gamut all right that's really helpful thank you but it it is a weird increase isn't it Rob thank you wouldn't say it's weird it's certainly discontinuous I mean those rates are now much more similar to what you would expect in other North American jurisdictions the jump from two to seven is a bit unusual for sure and I'm not sure what accounts for that thanks sorry to interrupt okay I just want to make sure we have time for a few questions so the when we look specifically at economic and social outcomes in the literature the the outcomes identified to date with respect to economic outcomes there does seem to be mixed evidence regarding the question of substitution or cannibalization of other types of gambling although I have to say I was I was even more struck by the notable lack of research that exists on any economic impacts of sports betting I literally we we literally only found two articles related to substitution or cannibalization and nothing on any of these other economic impacts which we believe would be very important to understand in Massachusetts job creation recapturing gambling dollars from the illegal sports market or from neighboring jurisdictions that have already legalized sports betting all of those are empirical questions for which we have no data at this time and another sort of caveat that we included in our review of the economic impacts is that there is a potential for economic harm in Massachusetts if sports betting does cause high rates of problem gambling or if a significant portion of revenue from sports betting operations leaves Massachusetts turning to social outcomes there is a very singular focus in the social research on problem gambling as the main negative impact arising from the legalization of sports betting so at this point we are estimating that sports betting participation in Massachusetts based on the baseline general population survey is somewhere between 13 and 20 percent of course and as I've mentioned we know that or we'll know more precisely what that is once we have analyzed the data from the follow-up general population survey over the next few months but we we were able to compare Massachusetts state data from the Engage survey that was conducted by the National Council on Problem Gambling to both the national data from that survey as well as a number of other states where sports betting has been operational and we were quite struck by the evidence that sports betting in Massachusetts in 2018 and in 2022 that rate looks quite similar to what's happening at the national level in terms of the national surveys Don Feeney and Keith White gave a presentation at a webinar back I think it was in March where they discussed that the fact that there was some evidence of increase in gambling harms in their national data and we have noted that problem gambling rate is higher among sports bettors than it is among other types of gamblers but that primarily seems to be because sports bettors tend to be involved with quite a number of other gambling activities so there is the potential that legalized sports betting in Massachusetts could lead to an increase in rates of gambling harm more broadly as well as problem gambling but we think there's an opportunity here to as as we had with the casinos to try to minimize and mitigate based on information that we have already available to us in Massachusetts so getting to the end the maximum economic benefits which are different from revenue maximization but maximum economic benefits for Massachusetts will depend on the sports licensees in Massachusetts capturing a substantial proportion of the illegal sports betting market there is also the potential for some job creation and of course there are tax revenues so the we believe that the the benefits will be obtained by recapturing money that is either leaving the leaving Massachusetts because people are betting on sports illegally or in neighboring jurisdictions and the benefits are most likely to occur if we can generate substantial Massachusetts based jobs and of course the tax revenues so just to finish up here there is a significantly higher rate of gambling problem gambling and at-risk gambling amongst sports bettors in Massachusetts based on all of our Sigma data however the relationship between sports betting and problem gambling is not straightforward and again this is because sports bettors tend to be such enthusiastic gamblers on a variety of other things so that said there are groups in the population that are of particular concern as state sanctioned sports betting becomes available in Massachusetts and we have specifically identified adolescents emerging adults women immigrants college athletes and individuals in recovery from gambling problems as groups that are of particular concern here in Massachusetts based on a broader international literature so there are quite a lot of recommendations included in the report but I want to focus my final remarks today on our recommendations related to research and responsible gambling we do think it will be important for operators to be required to provide player data to the gaming commission to allow a full assessment of the impacts of legal sports betting in Massachusetts another advantage to having access to player data is that this could potentially provide early warning signs of emerging issues and it is very much our experience over the years that the gaming commission has much better success than we as researchers do in getting the licensees and operators to provide that level of information there is good international evidence that in play betting is disproportionately utilized by problem gamblers and we believe the gaming commission would be wise to give careful consideration to whether and how to permit this type of betting in Massachusetts and then finally with respect to responsible gambling we do think it will be important to require operators to provide RG features on all of the online sports betting sites in Massachusetts I know this is a not a very popular position but we believe that this that these RG features should be opt out rather than opt in they should include limits on deposits losses and time spent betting there should be readily available information on cumulative money losses and time spent on websites automated alerts for patterns of betting that predict future self-exclusions this is a type of study that's been done by in a number of different international jurisdictions and seems to have provided some interesting information but we'd like to very much see if those patterns of betting also predict self-exclusion in Massachusetts another idea we have that is a little bit innovative is to provide bonuses and rewards for responsible gambling actions rather than or in addition to rewards for increasing expenditure and finally we think it would be wise to restrict sports betting advertising and celebrity endorsements to the extent possible in order to in order to prevent use in particular and emerging adults from getting into difficulties and that is all I have thank you and this is in addition to the gaming commission's research web page we also have all of our reports posted and you're welcome to come explore and be in touch with us if you have questions thank you I guess that recommendation first of all thank you very much this is I mean it's like voraciously taking in any information on sports betting so it was great to get this in one spot and I like a lot of the ideas but some of them I wonder how we implement so something like banning celebrity endorsements I mean you know I'm watching TV last night and you know when New Hampshire thing comes on and they've got all sorts of ads for stuff so do you know of any other jurisdiction that has implemented that kind of thing or how they did it Rob correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Australia and is it Italy have actually banned advertising is it just during just during play playing time or is it more general I can't remember the details but certain jurisdictions have banned advertising all together and other jurisdictions have banned celebrity endorsements those are mostly European countries I don't know logistics of how they do that but they have done it and then your idea about the sort of getting the benefit for doing the responsible gaming what's the model for who pays for that I mean is that an incentive that you get the licensees to buy into or is that who would pay for that kind of incentive well I think it would be it would be incumbent on the licensees or the operators to provide those incentives but like you know there there's so much that is that is provided as incentives to individuals to bet more or to bet longer and Rob and I have had this discussion about you know how could you incentivize people to you know to behave you know in in ways that are sort of more aligned with what they may want to do I to be honest I haven't really thought about how that would be paid for but perhaps it could be a partnership between the the operators and the gaming commission and I'm sure that that mark could probably come up with some good ideas as well if I could thanks Rachel we incentivize enrollment and play my way which is a responsible gaming tool as you know so that that is incentivizing a response use of a responsible gaming tool we have kicked around and we'd love to explore ways that we would incentivize that going forward obviously you'd need to be careful about about what structure that takes and I'm not putting any of our licensees current or future on the line but there is a commitment to responsible gaming that I've seen and I think new and innovative ideas are always on the table to to accomplish that Commissioner O'Brien I was also you know there's even the the American Gaming Association on their responsible gaming code of conduct calls out celebrity endorsements or entertainments that would specifically appeal to you and so this is that is that is a pretty commonly accepted practice however how it's employed and to what degree with what success I think is a different question but I think generally speaking that is that is common and that is a good practice now I mean I like the idea of it but when we have a market that you know people are talking about billboards you know you have the other out of state casinos they're not subject to the same rules in terms of what goes on a billboard even in the Commonwealth and and now you've got potentially ads with celebrity endorsements coming in out of from out of state it might be hard to do but I like the idea other questions also want to say excellent report excellent report thank you commissioner thank you so we have um we have the report and of course we've gotten we received the report um the draft form Dr. Volberg and you know that we passed on to the legislature right before they passed the bills they had the benefit of it um we'll continue to use it as a reference as we do our work and um I guess uh uh our next not sure what was next for your projects for us perhaps these two important studies are going to be priorities for you so yeah well um at the uh just the general population sorry the general population survey I know that that's on your oh yeah yeah so um we anticipate receiving the data from nrc which collected the data um we we were out of the field in I believe late March of 2022 um but because of some spending uh issue or resource issues we have not yet received the data so we are um in the process of amending their subcontract so that we can get the data and then there's going to obviously be a period of cleaning the data and analyzing the data we have a report on the follow-up general population survey as one of our uh deliverables in FY23 I believe it it'll be coming to you in uh first draft uh somewhere around uh March or April I believe so that's very much um in the front of our minds we also have uh the data use you got a little taste of the follow-up online panel data that we collected in 2020 in April of 2022 we have some more work to do with that as well as a small technical report that we're going to be submitting to the commission in early 2023 and uh oh and then at the end of the fiscal year we included a report for the commission on gambling advertising so that's going to be coming up but um further down in the list of deliverables excellent excellent well thank you don't don't imagine that our lack of inquiry is anything but it's been a long day but all of these topics that you've been on are so critical and and we have been thinking about them and this has been a great resource for us so thank you um a long day for you too we want to I just want to express my appreciation for your patience today on the timeframe shifted you know honestly so thank you um if I can just um just make one final comment uh manager uh several of the commissioners are are new to me um I can introduce you I'm sorry that's all right um but I just wanted to emphasize that you know between us Rob and I have about 80 years of um gambling research under our belts uh we are um always uh interested in um questions that the commission may have and we will always do our very best to be responsive to uh questions that you might want to send us by email so um let me formally introduce you um I don't know if you've met commissioner hill my apologies I feel and so you must have presented in front of commissioner hill then of course we have commissioner Nikisha Skinner who joined us in March right my memory's right that's right correct correct and commissioner Maynard just joined us on the day that the law was the bill was passed uh August 1st uh so well he was appointed officially then so um Dr. Volberg and Dr. Williams my apologies nice to virtually meet you Dr. Drs. Volberg and Williams and as the chair said our lack of questions at this point is no indication of our lack of interest it has been a really long day and and we are just about headed into the evening so I for one I for one I have you know kind of mush for brains at this point absolutely I understand and commissioner Maynard well I I also echo uh commissioner Skinner um as far as it's a pleasure to meet you both um we did review um the document that you um just went over and um again our lack of questions I think is no indication for how we're going to use this data when we make decisions going forward on this important matter there's pleasure to meet you both and if there's anything um that we can do uh same please reach out absolutely thank you okay mark thank you thank you Dr. Williams we didn't hear much from you but you are right there thank you so much for all the work and Dr. Volberg it's always great to see you mark anything else and everything right anything and everything but um enough for right now thank you chair yeah thank you all right then you know we just have a little bit of business done for the official record I don't think I'm making any um grand announcements to the public but um we do have um we've got plans for which we're doing uh round tables coming up and one is uh suspect we may see Dr. Volberg or one of her um representatives that will be on the the 12th correctly if I'm wrong on on these oh no the 13th is the round table yeah thank you very Rachel thank you Crystal um that's on the 13th and that's on responsible gaming we'll have experts from the field who will be looking precisely at the statute and giving their thoughts so I suspect we'll be hearing from our friends at UMass again and get you know even more clarity on these matters and then um we are looking forward to the round table that's yet to be scheduled for the uh mobile operators and that will come um later in this month we'll just keep on monitoring our website if anyone is still on okay is there anything um I haven't addressed right now September 15th we uh have another public meeting we have actually a public meeting on the 13th with respect to the first basing application on no oh I'm sorry I'm losing I need a calendar Monday Monday is the application for the horse and what day is that that's Monday the 12th oh thank you I I thought I heard no so that's the 12th 13th is the round table then we have the 15th which will be on temporary licensing so we're keeping this the other one thank you um anything else okay can I just one thing I wanted uh do you mark an opportunity to mention the play my way on Monday oh my good thank you just one one quick comment thank you so on Monday um play my way the uh slot machine-based budgeting tool will go live at Encore Boston Harbor um it's been uh in place at Plain Ridge Park Casino since 2015 at MGM since um earlier this year in March and so um having it launch at Encore Boston Harbor represents a significant milestone that at every casino there is a consistent budgeting tool for for patrons to use so thank you very much to um all of our licenses really for their their work their partnership and and creating this and offering it to patrons are you having a kickoff and if so what time um I can get you there will be a press release going out there um is an opportunity for anybody from the press to uh come take a look and test play my way um I believe that's around 10 o'clock commissioner thanks and commissioner hill there is a conflict for us because we have a a meeting and that was what happened with MGM so mark and I were lamenting that but I I don't know if everyone we see I think if all of us received the video that was done by Encore Boston Harbor and we look forward to their partnership and hope that they continue to you know but they also join in promoting um but I know that mel's is working on the press release and we will certainly lead a mark on the 12th our meeting um with a play my way update okay if it's at 10 o'clock then we can announce at that very time so can I have no problem uh adding that to our agenda informally um and if we wanted to amend our agenda actually um best that we could do that too uh tomorrow to play my way at the beginning of our our meeting on certainly good okay for an announcement okay um mark you'll be over Encore I assume I will be at Encore Monday morning at seven o'clock yeah so just make sure to get a coordinated statements from you and do caring okay yes all right so it'll be uh it will be uh our efforts will be going on uh announcing we just can't be there with you I understand which is a rats and by the way uh Jordan and I got to see how the play my play my way works the MGM so next time you visit uh one of the facilities that Burke can arrange to have that opened now I mean have someone use their card to show you how it works pretty pretty smooth nice job mark okay um again it's been a long day focused on one subject matter we've certainly done that before on uh under 23k now we have only 23 and here we are I just appreciate everyone's efforts on all the work that we do every day and all the efforts on this new uh responsibility so um move to adjourn madam chair pardon me move to adjourn yeah can I just say push a meaner please enjoy the rest of your day um thank you it almost looks like the sun is set on you I have I have plenty of sunlight left in park city so um that's one benefit to starting this meeting at 730 um this time so I plan on using it good have a great rest of the day um there's a motion on the table thank you um commissioner Brian hi commissioner hill hi mr skinner hi mr mainer hi and I vote yes thank you for thank you Todd and thank you all