 Alright, why don't we get started. First of all, thank you all for for coming today for this is our community mitigation fund municipal block grant workshop. And So a couple of housekeeping items before we get started, we are recording this. We recorded the earlier session on Tuesday and we're recording this one as well we're going to put these up on the website in case anybody wants to go back and review the presentation. By way of introductions. I'm Joe Delaney, Chief of Community Affairs. And with me is Mary Thurlow and Lily Wallace are our community mitigation fund staff. So, a couple that we will be stopping for questions and answers a couple of times during the presentation. If you do have something that you that you want to ask. If you're outside of those breaks, feel free to use the chat function, which is at the bottom, it should be at the bottom of your, your screen. And you can type in questions there and we'll go through those when we when we break for for questions. You can also ask questions at that time. You can ask that you stay muted during the presentations. And I think everybody. I don't think we have anyone on the phone. Okay, so we don't. And let's see. The other thing is we will be loading up the PowerPoint deck that we have today if we haven't done that already up onto our website. So you'll be able to access that. So we're going to be talking with you. We're going to go over what's new with the program, which is a lot. We've really restructured this entire program from what had been sort of a competitive grant program into a block grant program for the communities. So through the what's new, we will walk you through the application form. We're not going to go through every category of grant, but we'll walk through a couple of them. So you get the flavor of what it is that we're looking for. We have put up on our website. And that will be an example form. So you can go into that and take a look at that. And that will be the last thing that we'll do today is we will do a walkthrough of our website so that we can show you how to find some of the things that you might be needing when you're filling out your applications. So with that, I'm going to share my screen and start our presentation. So jumping right in. What's new for this year, as I said, there's really there's a lot that's new. The first thing is that we have done is we created this two tiered program grant program, the municipal block grant, which is the subject of this meeting, and also the regional agency grant which is designed for the regional planning agencies, the DA's offices and our workforce programs. We won't really be talking about that particularly today we have a separate session on that next week. We've invited all of the regional agencies to that one. So on the grant applications for the municipal block grants. I'm going to hear this a couple of times during this presentation because this is this is very important. Municipalities will be required to submit a single application for the entire community. So what that means is if your community is wanting to apply for some public safety money, but they also want to apply to do some kind of a transportation planning study or gambling harm reduction study. They're going to have to all get together and figure out, you know how you want to divvy up the money and and put that all together into a single application. So if a municipality does not apply by January 31st, the community will forfeit the funds for that year. And the statute requires that applications be submitted before February 1. So that is the only date that is in the statute and and we are bound to that. The third thing is we have provided more detailed project guides. And so everyone who was invited to this meeting or who received an invitation from us, the guidelines are attached to that. So if you would, please open those and take a look at them and download them and save them because you will be needing those as you're preparing your applications. But in those guidelines, what we did was we presented what we agree to be the impacts of the casinos. And then we also provided a list of the types of projects that that that could be eligible to to address some of those impacts. And we also added in some items that are not eligible. We have found over the years that we've received applications that that really weren't eligible for funding. So we try to outline those so communities, you know, aren't wasting their time applying for something that's not eligible. And then we have our administrative costs. A community can now use up to 7.5% of the grant towards the cost of administering the grant, and we put there is a cap on that of $50,000. So, you know, the person who is submitting the quarterly reports or putting together the payment estimates for submission to us, all of those kinds of activities, you can charge some of those off against the grant itself. So hopefully that will make it a little bit easier for communities, you know, to recoup some of their costs. Item number five, we are providing this year some funding for the regional planning agencies. Again, we're not going to really talk about that today. This is, those are for, you know, the regional planning agencies that where the casinos are located. And that said, if some of your communities have sort of a regional type of project or you want to work with a few other communities. You might want to approach your regional planning agency to see if that might be a project that is either better done by them or to be done in conjunction with them. So, that's something for the communities to think about a little bit. The next item is we are converting to a fiscal year. So, in the past we operated on a calendar year but, but really, we work pretty much on a fiscal year basis, where we do our reviews through the winter and the spring and try to get awards out to communities by the end of June which will coincides with the typical fiscal year. The one difference here is that by going to the fiscal year. We're just in line with how the commission itself operates and also how most of our communities operate. But what that would do is that the grants would be starting on July one, which means you couldn't incur any expenses before that. And typically the first payments on those grants wouldn't go out until September or their, their abouts. So that is a change to the program. The next item is waivers. Waivers have always been available in the community mitigation fund program if there's anything that's in the guidelines that that you, you know that you can't meet. You can submit a waiver application or a waiver form I should say. But in this case, for the community block grant program. When we, you know, we sent out the amounts to each community every every community received a grant amount that they are eligible for. And if a community has any kind of a particular project that that would cause the community to exceed that grant allotment, you can request a waiver for that project. What we don't want to have happen, you know, with this program is that, especially if some of the communities who are getting smaller amounts of money if they had a, you know, a large transportation construction project or something like that. The, the grant might not be adequate for that so we want to, you know, account for that eventuality. And the last one is in the transportation category we've made some changes to that we will talk about that a little bit later and in addition we'll talk about waivers, a little bit more towards the end of the presentation. So, what hasn't changed. So what has always been the case and this is basically, you know, we are required to do this by statute. Every project that is done under this program has to identify a casino related impact, and the project that you're proposing has to mitigate that impact. So that has always been the case and, and always will be the case. What we've done is we have tried to make that identification of the casino related impact easier for the communities. So, how do you determine a casino related impact. What we do is to go into our guidelines and look in your various grant categories and in each one you will see that we have added in impacts that we, the gaming commission agrees are likely to be caused by the casinos. What we did was we looked through all of our research, we actually used an outside consultant to do some research in other jurisdictions around the country and around the world to see what other kinds of studies may have been done to identify casino related impacts. We did some, you know, internet searches and other things. And, you know, we came up with those items that we agree would be impacts of the casino. And here on this slide so this griot is the company that we use to help us look at some other jurisdictions. So, all of those studies, or, and all of the MGC research and so on is all on our website. And again we'll walk through the website a little bit later. And the last bullet we have here is other. Any other sources of information that we didn't find that you may have or, you know, they have access to or whatever it might be. You know, if a community is going to use something that has not been identified either in our guidelines or in our research. We also provide some good solid justification for that impact and some studies or some, you know, some kind of backup documentation that would, that would justify that. But what we're saying here is if you use our guidelines, you can pick those impacts, and we accept those as being impact so hopefully that will make your lives a lot easier. And the last new item that I wanted to talk about here is we have in the guidelines, we have suggested grant spending across the categories the Commission would really like to see the money that's in this project. There are different categories that that we have so right now there are there are five categories there's community planning, transportation public safety, and gambling harm reduction, and we also have the other category of specific impact which is basically anything that doesn't fit in those four categories. So we're suggesting is we'd like to see kind of a minimum spending of 15% of the grants in each one of the categories which would then leave 40% to be spent, you know, either a higher amount in any one category. Now, originally we looked at this and saying do we want to make this a requirement, you know, similar to like what they do with Community Preservation Act, and we decided to not do that for this year. So this is not a requirement for fiscal year 2025. We will look and see how communities have done with that. We'll look with that suggestion and, you know, we'll monitor that and see if maybe in the future that's something that we want to, you know, to consider. But at this point, you know, we are not, we are not proposing to do that. So, with that, let me stop sharing here. Again, we'll open this up for some questions. Do we have anything in the chat? No. Okay, any questions from anyone? No. Okay. Oh, yeah. Eric. Yeah, I'm just wondering if the amounts that are available in all the categories and all of the grants there are the same as in the October 13 document. Um, we did a finalized documents that the commission voted on November 16 or so. Yeah, I think there was a couple of, there might have been a couple of revised numbers from that earlier. Okay. Go ahead, Lily. I was just going to say, Eric, when I walked through the website later in this presentation, I'll show you, I have both the memo online and the finalized amounts. Awesome. Okay. And did I see it? Let's see. I think Everett had a question. Deputy Hurley. Did you have a question? Yeah, I just typed in the chat, but essentially, none of them would be a group project for lack of a better term. What is it? Is there new financial limitations restrictions? How much can you ask for as an entirety of a group? Well, yeah, we sent so each community received an allocation letter. Okay. Um, so we came up with a formula where we said, where we divvied up the money among the communities. So you have a set amount of money now and then basically, you know, in your case, you'll probably need to get together with, you know, the police department and with Jay Monty and, and some of your other folks and figure out, you know, you know what with the amount of money that you have available, how do you want to try to divvy it up? Okay. And so we, so we really eliminated a lot of the, the category caps that we had because we're saying essentially, you have this set amount of money that's your cap. Okay. If I, if I put my email in the chat, would I be able to get a copy of that? I'm inviting from an invite and I haven't had that information yet so I would love it. Thank you very much. Sure. So I see a question here. What is the timing for approval notification? So, so we would, we'll get your applications in at the end of January. And, you know, we will start reviewing them immediately. But our target is to have all of the awards done before the end of June. So that, you know, so that they're all of the stuff is awarded for the start of the fiscal year. And then let's see. Another question that came through here might come through during the waiver segment later, but I'd be curious if there is or will be any sort of guidance and vice on waivers, or if that will be at the discretion of the NBC staff. So in our guidelines, there is some, there is a section on waivers and talks about what you have to submit and, and what you have to essentially prove on the waivers. Essentially, the waivers are going to be subject to ultimately the commission will approve those waivers or deny those waivers, and they will be based on they will be looked at on a case by case basis and certainly will be based on whether or not there's available funding. If it's a financial waiver, we have to make sure that there's available funding for that. In the current year, it appears that there is, you know, there are some funds out there that would be able to to be used. So, but again, we would have to at that time we would have to look and make sure that there's there are available funds. Another question came to are there any James Floyd I see a hand up there. Thank you. Just a question regarding regional efforts. Bapern is a regional radio system that it's separated into sections of the state. And it's a system that's really, really aging. And it's one of our abilities to have interoperability with communication with state police. Nima femur and all these other things and again really at the end of the day. These are essentially soft targets that if they were to be a critical incident. We need to have something a regional system such as a paper and system that supports that. So the block grants really don't cover that in a sense. If I understood it correctly because it's going to it would include multiple regions that would overlap. How would we approach that. So I think what you what this sounds like to me is that this is really more of a regional agency grant. You know as a as a public safety agency that covers multiple communities. So, so you would not apply under this block grant you would apply under the regional agency grant. And we're having a we're going to we're having another workshop on those regional agency grants next Wednesday, next Wednesday. If you'd like us to send you an invite for that one, we can certainly do that. And but that would I think would have to be the approach and of course one of the things on this is, again, we have to we have to make that nexus to the casino. There has to be an identified impact of the casino to fund any of these types of projects. Yeah, not a problem at all really it's it's really come to a really the 911 report one of the biggest failures in 911 was the inability to communicate interagency and be per and actually facilitates that so it would be supporting that so I think we can do that. Thank you. Okay, so so that I think that would be your avenue is is the the regional application. There's another question here are any of the attachments project specific or are all attachments required for the submission. I'm not exactly sure I understand the question. Can you hear me. Yeah, yeah, I'll try to clarify sorry. I haven't made it all the way through the attachments and so I was trying to understand like the environmentally preferable product form I'm like is that for every project or is that for certain projects so I just didn't know if somewhere project specific, or if everything in that attachment packet has to be submitted with the application. I'm not talking about. Yeah. Okay. I'll go back and review it. I, it's called environmentally preferable product form so I just know that's not a, is that something. Was adding. Yeah, it was part of the application and combines. Okay, so firstly, I'll go out of order here a little bit. You don't need to go you don't need to go through combines at all. Okay, no. You're going to submit you can just get the application forms from our website, fill them out and you're going to email them to us. That makes it 100% easier. Thank you. Yeah, we got we got rid of combines. We still have to go through combines as a state agency, but we found a work around so that everybody didn't have to file through combines so wonderful thank you. Great, great. His boy, I have no idea what that form is. Yeah, I was curious. Okay. Alright, so any any further questions. That was all that was in the chat. Okay. All right, just another grass. I'm sorry. Yeah, if people want to just send me a quick note if you want to receive a copy of the allocation letter to send me your email address and I'll send it off to you after the meeting. Okay, Joe. Okay, so let me go back to the presentation. Okay, so I think we just talked about this a little bit. The application process. And again, please read the guidelines before filling out your application. You know, there's a lot of good information in there. Now, and again, you all of the municipalities have received a proposed grant amount letter. So that went to your CEOs, mayors, town managers and so on and we did copy a number of other people in each community. So if for some reason a community has not received that letter, please let us know. But I believe we've verified with all of the communities that they that they have received one. The applications have to be submitted by 1159pm on January 31. We'll have a time stamp on these things when they are emailed to us so we'll know when we got them. We can't receive them after that. You know, I would what I would say is, if you have an application that you think still might need some work, get it into us anyway, and we can probably just, you know, take some supplemental information later if we need to. But we obviously want to see them as complete as possible. And again, the municipalities may only submit one application for the entire community. We will not accept, you know, a separate thing from, you know, previously we would get something from a fire department or police department, you know, planning department or public works department. Sometimes in some of the communities, we get them from all of those different agencies, we will no longer allow that it needs to be one application, and it will have some parts in it for the different projects, but it will be a single application that will be signed by, you know, a municipal employee who has signatory authority we figure that will typically be the mayor or the town manager or town administrator of some sort. And with that I'm going to turn this over now to Mary and she's going to walk you through the application itself we came up with a kind of a fictional town that we that we did and and just so you can see what what an application might look like. I'll turn it over to Mary. Good morning everyone. So I we wanted to show you this because we really want complete applications this year we do not want people to say, see attachment be or whatever so we're just going to walk through very briefly. And this is what we want the municipal application to look like the municipal grant manager information is critical because they are responsible for collecting the applications and attachments for submission of the full application. The municipal grant manager will receive this information from the contract for each category. As we get into this to the applications you'll see that each category of grant will have its own project contact person and municipalities will need to be able to update any changes which occur to these listings. It's really through contacting everyone that I've noticed that there's a lot of turnaround this time of year so we really would appreciate being updated whenever there's a change in your contract management. It's really critical because when selecting a municipal grant manager that they are responsible for the quarterly reports so the municipal grant manager will compile the quarterly reports from all the project contract people within the municipality for submission to the commission. So, if people can just keep in mind that if there's a change in your employees please. Let us know. Next. Okay, here is the budget category summary. And I just wanted to draw your attention to a couple of things. You'll notice here that the total fiscal year 2025 allocation is 400,000. If you go down to the total of the application you'll see that it's 1477 300. So I just wanted to call your attention to that and we'll explain in a minute. And I also want to call your attention to the public safety and the and the transportation. So this means that there's two specific projects for each of these two categories, and this is the total of those two applications. Let's see. So the grant applications the proposed grant amount was sent out by letter to all eligible municipalities on November 17 as Joe said, and so they're aware of how much funding is available when filling, and then let's go to the next page Joe. Okay, when filling in the description in your categories, please be sure to distinguish it from other grants. The goal of this is to provide like an example. It would be great if you could if you would say the goal of this application is to provide a boardwalk from A to Z. We do not want people to fill in these descriptions saying that this is for community mitigation grant that doesn't help us distinguish between the different grants. You will also note that the descriptions here see as you can see a complete street study of Main Street from Linden and Conversion that these are two different grants. The grant that is going to need a waiver form would be this grant here the 1075 $1,075,000. The overage is caused by the transportation grants and the application would be for that the difference so that you can apply boy I'm having a hard time getting words out today I'm sorry. So you would need to file a waiver form for this multi use path construction. Let's see. Okay. All right, we can go to the next one, and then this one the applicant certification. Again, we need to be sure that you have someone with the authority to commit funds on behalf of the municipality to sign the document. And that's about it. Okay, we're going to turn this over to Lily now to to walk through some of the nuts and bolts of a couple of the specific applications or categories. So, as Joe just said this is going to be the meat of your application you can kind of see here, the different parts that are going to make up the whole municipalities application, all fun different colors so you can feel free as a administrator to just, you know, cut cut out the different pieces and send them to the appropriate departments and then recompile them back together. So you can hit the next. Yeah, and this is simply a word document so it's, I think most most folks have the familiarity with word, you know, these can be cut apart and shut out easily. Yeah, so their online is both a fillable PDF and a word document I did just check that that was updated so if you're having any trouble with that again we will be walking the website later. So we have two examples that I'm going to walk you through real quick. This first example is a community planning grant, you'll see that your community planning grant. Each individual discrete project is going to need a name so that we can make sure we're all talking about the same thing. And then each project will have a project contact so we've made space for two contacts and then we ask if you have you know a whole team working on this that you just circulate circulate it internally. But just give us if you want, you know, one or two people that are going to be the key person for this. With this new style of grant we assume that the main administrator of the grant is not going to know the nuts and bolts of the every single project. So this will be the person will be contacting if we have questions or we want to check in on the status. So the first section is you know the big piece we're talking about identifying the impact of the casino. So there's two main ways that you can do this. The way that we're suggesting if it works for you is that we took all of that research that was done through the mass gaming commission through griot. And we made lists under every single category in our guidelines. So you'll see on the right side here I have a screenshot of our guidelines. And you can see that this community decided to utilize the first impact here under a negative impact saying that competition from the gaming establishment had negative impacts on their businesses. So what's really nice about this year. I'm sure for anyone who's applied to the previous years, you know, you don't really have to drag that out. You know, we are accepting that as a completely valid reason for this grant. You can just copy and paste it right over. You know, if you want to add a sentence or two just describing particularly in your town how that works. You know, we'd love to have it. But at minimum if it's in the guidelines you can just drag it right out. And the more complicated piece of this is going to be if you don't use something that's directly in the guidelines. So if you're not going to use something that's directly outlined in the guidelines. That is also totally fine if there's something that's happening in your community that you'd like to address with this grant program. You're just going to have to do a little bit more legwork in this first section to describe to us, what is happening. What is the impact, and you're also going to have to provide us a little bit more detailed research or evidence on this so you know, previously for public safety is crime statistics, whether that is, you know, a traffic map that you know your community has been a traffic study. But again, if you are not using an impact that's been identified. It still doesn't mean that it's you know not a valid project. You are just again going to have to go into quite a bit more detail explaining what's happening and how that is something that we should be mitigating. Yeah, just to add on to that. As many of you probably know from previous years in doing this, you know the identification of the impact was probably the most difficult thing in the application. And, you know, and we have had to deny many applications because we didn't have sufficient, you know, evidence that that that an impact really existed. So, if you're doing this, this second method where you where you're giving us an impact that's not included in the guidelines. You will still need to do that justification that you had to do previously. And, you know, we need to have sufficient evidence that shows that that's a legitimate impact. Great. So, then, again, like we've very made a very simple looking form but it is a little deceptively simple. So in section two is really where you're going to have to put in what your mitigation is. So this here is a pretty abbreviated mitigation just because of the size of a slide. It would be kind of unrealistic for me to fit, you know, three pages on a slide. In this example, the town felt that they were losing business so the way that they wanted to deal with that was increased signage. So they said that they were going to do signage with their restaurants, hotels and shops, and they were going to use the funding to get a consultant to come in and design it and then have their Department of Public Works make the signs. And then they were going to use this to mitigate by having the casino have some of these signs around there so that patrons that were coming to casino could know about the other resources in the area. So you can see here that below this we also have a mock up of some great stock images from the internet, but of this community signs. So this section should be the bulk of your applications. We really do want to see details if you have scopes if you have budgets if you have diagrams anything that can help explain the mitigation will really help that our review team to understand the project and what you're asking to do. And then you'll see in a later slide that there is also a detailed scope that you'll fill out but this is more again like the narrative piece of your application. So as I put here, you know, this should be the longest section of your application. So show you can hit the next slide. So here is my second example is kind of looking at the new combined transportation planning and construction application looks very similar just enough different fun color. So you'll need to put again a title you'll need to put again a project contact. You can see that this applicant chose from the guidelines and they picked two different pieces about traffic congestion and traffic safety. And then took that and then they use that as a rationale of the issue and then went through and said that they wanted to do a study for multi community shared path to the casino. We've seen this come out from a couple of different communities. And then the piece in the bottom is going to be covered by Joe and a little bit just about the new construction subsidies so we are changing how this looks and how the guidelines are what is going to be eligible to be funded. So if you are applying for transportation, please read that very carefully. And then you can see below that we have the example of a grant budget. This should be a pretty detailed breakdown of your line items. This is how the projects are going to be reviewed. Looking through each of the things if you know we are looking to amend different pieces we want to make sure that we're looking at each discrete piece of your project. So you can see here that they identified five different tasks. We're going to fund a couple of them, but then they were asking for the million dollars for their project construction. They provided a, you know, very pretty big timeline we don't need you to say that the construction is going to begin, you know, March 3. But we do need to have a general timeline so that when we're checking in with you on the for the progress of the grant, we know where things stand and if there's anything that we need to be doing differently. So, I think the next piece goes back to you Joe. So yeah there was a couple of changes in the transportation application as you can see that from the previous one that we've combined transportation planning and transportation construction just into a single transportation category, but we've also changed the subsidy for the transportation construction projects previously, we said that we would pay up to one third of the project cost to a maximum grant of one and a half million dollars we're still keeping that one and a half million dollar maximum. We have created kind of what now really winds up being a sliding scale that smaller projects receive a higher subsidy. So right now what we're saying is we will fund 100% of the project cost up to $250,000 and then we'll fund up to 30% of the costs above that amount with a maximum again of the one and a half million dollars. Now, most communities when they come in with transportation construction projects most of these only come in with probably one project. What we're saying what we're saying here is you can't come in and say we want to do five different projects that are $250,000 and get 100% subsidy. What we're trying to do here is say that we realize it's smaller projects or sometimes it's it's harder to define the funding for that particular project. So, in this case, if there's more than one construction project, it's all additive you have to add the total costs of the project together, and then figure out the subsidy from that. I think I'll just go back to this previous slide you can see that we do the little in part two of this application we do a calculation and they're saying in this case, the construction project is estimated to be $3 million. And based on the guidelines, the grant would be $1,075,000 which is 100% of the first 250,000 and 30% of the amount in excess of that or the 2.75 million. So, and again this causes the town to exceed the grant allocation of $400,000 so a waiver request needs to be done for a project of this nature. And then a couple of other things in the transportation planning category. We added some of the maps into the guidelines that show where the distribution of traffic is going from the casinos. And what we're saying is transportation planning can be done. But it can't be done on just sort of any road in town it has to be on those kind of major routes to the casino. What I'm saying here that any road that's carrying at least 1% of the casino traffic would be eligible for work to be done on that road, but anything that's, you know, really not identified here would not be eligible. Now of course if the community does have some additional information that shows that another road that's maybe off one of these roads is significantly impacted by traffic and has something that can that can demonstrate that we will certainly do that, but our baseline is saying, if it carries 1% or more of the traffic it's eligible if it's under that it's not. And also, you know, we've done a lot of bike paths multi use paths. In this case that for projects that communities want to do the community has to demonstrate that any kind of a multi use path or bike path will connect into an existing path network that would provide access to the casino. So if a community were doing a bike path that was, you know, not going in the direction of the casino, you know that's that's really on the community themselves. So, we do need to see again that nexus of, you know, how maybe employees, particularly or patrons might, you know, use a bicycle to get down to toward the facility. And let's talk about waivers. Again, we say you can request a waiver from any requirement of the guidelines. And that has always been the case. But here it's like if the municipality determines that the proposed grant allotment is insufficient to mitigate identified impacts it may request a waiver for any of those specific projects. And what we're saying here is that this waiver is not really designed for kind of the routine expenses but for, you know, a significant project that would otherwise not be able to be funded under the grant. You know, if a community says well we've got $400,000 and we're putting 100,000 in each of the four categories, and you know, in one of the categories, the community says well we could really use $102,000. And that's not the kind of thing that we're talking about here. You know, that's something you should probably, you know, maybe sharpen your pencil and get it down to the $100,000. But this is for something where if the community again at a $400,000 allocation, and you've got this million dollar project, it's clear that it could never fit in the allocation so that's what really what the waiver is for. The waiver forms are on our website and also, you know, we discussed them in the guidelines as well. And with that I'm going to turn this back over to Mary just to once again walk through the application submission process. So as, as we mentioned before, we, we, we always have to post through combines, but what we want applicants to do is to submit their, their applications through us at MGC CMF at mass gaming dot gov by January 31. We just found that too many people had issues with the combine system and things were getting lost in the ethernet. So this way they come to us and then we we upload them on to combines after that we've received them. The applications must be submitted as one word document, please try to integrate and label your relevant attachments as part of your application so if you're sending something in for a specific impact please make sure that the attachment is labeled for the specific impact application. If you have any questions prior to submission please contact me contact any of us we're happy to talk to you about it. Any questions are good questions, but we really are emphasizing that the due date is the 31st at 1159pm. You've been working on a an application and are waiting for information from an outside source for your application. But don't think it's going to be in on time for you to submit by the January 31 deadline, submit the application and let us know that you're waiting for information. Because it you cannot come back to us on February 2 with whatever information you are waiting for and apply then it doesn't work that way. So I'm hoping that you will feel free to contact Joe Lily or I with any of your questions. Yeah and just adding on to that Mary there's one thing that I did want to mention. We talked about each community receiving, you know, an allocation amount for their grant. If for some reason your community can't identify projects that add up to that total you can come in with a lower amount. You know we'd love to see everybody come in for the for the for the total amount but you know if for whatever reason, your community only identifies, you know, one or two small projects, come in with that anyway. You know we won't, we won't penalize you for not coming in for the full amount you can certainly come in for a lower amount. And I think at this point. We've got some questions. Can we. We're going to do the website walkthrough first and then we'll do some questions. All right, so I'm going to stop sharing. Okay, so if everyone can see my screen. This is the Massachusetts gaming commission website. Just a quick little point out it is mass gaming.com not mass gaming.gov as you might suspect so just make sure you're seeing that. If you go to your about section here you can scoot down to community mitigation fund. And then you will see our new and updated website. So there's a lot of great information for you to use here. This is our main piece which has the combines posting. And as well as the trainings that we currently have. We will be posting all of the training videos, as well as the PowerPoint here, probably this afternoon. So this is kind of your little basic background on the program. If you go into the side rail on the left, you'll find a piece for the application guidelines. So right here if you click, you will get our full program guidelines as we noted you really should read through those fully and make sure that the people that are filling out the different applications are reading through their sections fully. As there have been a lot of changes and there are a lot of great resources to strengthen your application. Eric asked for earlier here is the final allocations by municipality and then if anyone in your community is wondering why that was your allocation there is a memo from the October meeting of the commission on the final funding numbers. So one of the pieces that Joe pointed to earlier was all of the great research that has been done. If you get a chance, both internally the gaming commission has one of the strongest research agendas in the country. So there's a lot of really great research that you can use there to bolster your applications. Specifically, if you are looking for funding for a community engaged research study the commission has a bunch of those that you can look through to get some ideas of what might be relevant to your community. Joe had mentioned Rio which is a third party that we use to create slide decks on that then led to a lot of the choices of impact so there are three of them one of them is specifically on economic impacts one is specifically on public safety. And one of them is on priority population so if you are applying for anything related to any of those three groupings these are some pretty in depth slide shows that will give you some examples. And then for those applying for transportation, we have uploaded both on core mg on course distribution maps as well as their table mgm distribution table and map and ppcs distribution maps so please use all these things we put them up there for your benefit, and they will really help strengthen applications. So, again, if we go to the left side, you'll see a section titled FY 25 forms. If you click on here you will get into the actual applications. So, for municipalities you can click right here and get your application form. And we also, as we said, made a fake application for the town of Sudburnham that you can kind of read through here this one I think is about 25 pages. But you can kind of see and get a feel for what an application might look like. And then if you are applying from a waiver make sure that you're filling out the municipal waiver form. If you are a municipality. And then our regional applicants will use these forms. Also just as a fun note for everyone who currently has a grant, if you're looking for any of these forms they are still on here for your waiver request form your budget. And all of those but please make sure that if you are applying for this year's waiver, you use the municipal FY 2025 waiver. Another great resource on our website is that you can click and find every single award that we have granted from 2015 onward. This is our archive just click through a year. And then you can go through these and see some of the things that were funded previously, just because they were funded previously doesn't mean that we would necessarily fund your project. You know word for word copied it over they are taken on a case by case basis, but you can see all these applications if you're looking for projects that you might want to do in your city you can see what has been previously awarded. So that is kind of a brief run through of our website. Okay, I think we will open things up for questions again. I'm going to start with what's on the chat. Let's see where we left off. One second. Okay, the first bit is the allocation what's listed on page 29 of the guidelines. I believe so. Is that we did include that as an attachment. Didn't we. Yeah, no trouble navigating here. Okay, I can run through that. What are the limitations on waiver requests. Is it a number of waivers over time a dollar amount. What are the criteria for consideration of waivers. So I think in the guidelines we have what the specific requirements are for a waiver. I don't remember them exactly off the top of my head, but there isn't a limitation on waiver requests. For instance, let's say you were doing a transportation construction project one of the things that we require is that they have to be ready to go basically within a year. So we understand that people are necessarily going to have that project ready to go that went right when they apply so we're saying that for this coming year your project has to be ready to go by June 30 of 2025. So we don't think we, our project is going to be in the ground until September 1 of 2025, you could request a waiver asking for an extension of time. So, so that's the kind of thing now as far as a, you know, on the on the financial amount, you know, we haven't specified that is, you know, a number of the number of waivers or so on but, you know, I think, we envision it as being sort of like there's going to be a single project that is going to that would cause your, you to go over your grant amount. And then that would be, you know, a single waiver request for that. So then the next question is on the transportation planning eligibility map how recent is this data and is will it be revisited periodically. These did come out of the original environmental reports that were done for the casinos. One of the things about updating this information is, you know, the studies that the facilities are required to do. Don't really break down all of the locations where the traffic is going like they did originally. You know, they're only looking at like traffic intersections and looking at changes and levels of service and things like that so it's you know, trying to update that I think we would have to kind of go back and work with the licensees and what we're going to try to do is get some additional data from them regarding their patrons and employees and where they're coming from and so on. We're not really able to do that for this year. But you know we have to get that data we got to get it anonymized and make sure it's what we're looking for but yeah we, we do want to try to update those numbers and that would affect. Of course, part of the grant amount is based on traffic so that would might modify that as well. My question our municipalities encouraged to apply for more funds than allocated. I wouldn't say that necessarily. I would say if there is a clear need in the community to address a specific impact that would cause you to go over that amount. You know you can do that. I think we looked at this as kind of a conversation we're saying you know that a community could possibly have something that would that would go over their grant amount, but you know at some point. There would not be any excess funds that we that we could even award those grants. So you know it right now we do have some some extra funds in the program where we can do that. But if that surplus that's in the program is is is whittled down in future years they may there may not be money so I would say you're not encouraged to apply for more funds and allocated. But if the community really has the need, you should certainly feel free to do that. It's for a funding waiver is that only to exceed the overall amount or could it be used to fund more from certain categories than others within the overall amount. So for this year we're not requiring spending within the different categories. We gave a suggested amount for the categories but that is not a hard and fast rule so so you can move money around in the in the categories as you see fit. So you would not need a waiver. If you were using more money in one category than enough. The waiver would only be required if you're going over the total allotment for the community. So we've met for again talking about updated traffic. Stuff we certainly want to try to do that. Just we're not really able to get that done for while we were making all the other changes to the program this year. And then let's see. Oh do categories need to be equally used no the answer is no they do not. We want to see communities spend money among the different categories because we know that there are impacts and all of those. I guess what we were kind of getting at when when we looked at this originally is we don't want to see a community say like we want all of the money to go to public safety or what all of the money to go to construction and you know to the exclusion of other things that are worthy in the community. And that's why we thought about. We're not requiring money to go into the different categories but again, we are not requiring that for for this year. We'll see in the future what what what else we might want to do. Also asking where can the suggested split between categories be found. That is in the guidelines. We're asking you know 15% of the grant amount be spent among those four categories and 40% that leaves you with 40% that you can put sort of wherever you want. And again that's just a suggestion. At this point, no, no hard and fast required. Okay, and that is everything that's come up in the chat. Are there any other questions from folks. All right, none appearing. Thank you for coming. And as Mary said, if you guys have any questions, any follow ups to anything feel free to reach out to us via email phone call, carry your pigeon whatever whatever way you want to contact us. You know, if you have ideas for projects and you want to bounce them off of us we're happy to listen. We can't give you firm decisions on things. You know when we're talking about an idea but we can give you some guidance at least on on how you might approach some of these things. But again, thanks for coming. We wound up having a pretty good showing. I think we're up around 40 folks on the call today we have 75 people at our meeting on Tuesday so we've, we've reached a lot of folks and you know what if there's anybody else in your communities that you think needs to needs to be involved you know we'll have all of this information up on our website. You know we really look forward to this new process we think it's going to be, we're hoping it's going to be easier for all of you we're hoping it's going to be a little easier for us as well. But you know we're really looking forward to this. January 31 is our deadline, and you know we look forward to working with you guys over the next years. I guess happy holidays to everyone and we'll all be in touch. Thank you.