 faces. Commissioner Cameron, I know that you're off on video today. Good morning. Yes, good morning. Good morning to everyone. Yes, I am after a few days after surgery, I'm not quite able to sit at a desk for hours with my with my leg down on the floor. So but I'm happy to join join the meeting this way. So thank you for accommodating. Right. And I'll keep on swinging by to you. And if you want to just pass, that's fine. But I want to make sure I don't miss the opportunity to call on you. Okay. Thank you. I'll help you out on that. All right, Commissioner Brian. I am here. Good morning, Commissioner Hill. I'm here. Okay, so we're all set. Good morning, Karen. All right, we'll get started. And today is public meeting number 358. We don't have any minutes today. So we'll go straight to the administrative update. Okay, thank you. Good morning, everyone. For the first item on the administrative update, Loretta Lilios is at the state police graduation ceremony this morning. So I'm going to turn that over to Bruce Bann to give an update on what's going on inside of the casinos. Yes, good morning, everyone. I'm going to keep this short and sweet today. I'm going to start out with MGM and let you know that they're changing one of their restaurants in the South End market. They're changing the Heath Grill from to the Macho Taco restaurant. And that will probably open in mid-November or so. Also, Poker is still scheduled to open on October 29th and now with 13 tables. And you'll be happy to hear that all the employees or rehired employees from prior to the COVID opening, they were able to rehire all their employees. At Encore, they're in the process of re-carpeting their high limit area. And that is about two-thirds done. And that's kind of my update for now. Everything else is rolling along smoothly. Do you have any questions? Brooke, could you just say the number of poker tables again, please? I'm sorry. Thirteen. Thirteen. And when you say all employees, that's all the poker dealers, is that they're all ex-MGM poker dealers, correct? And so how many do you happen to know how many employees that? Not off the top of my head, but yeah. It's great news. It's great news. Yes, they're all busy practicing right now for next week's opening. Thank you. Any questions for Bruce? Commissioner Cameron, you all set? Yeah, I am all set. It's nice to hear though that those employees were all hired back and certainly that Director Lilios is attending. What's always an impressive graduation and we certainly need additional troopers. So nice event for her to attend. All right. So the next item on the Agenda 2B is the internal Boston office reopening update. So the date is quickly approaching. We are still gearing for a November 1st reopening of the Boston office. Unless there is any objection by the commissioners at this meeting, that plan is to go forward at that time. We didn't meet yesterday with the working group and our staff has been working on preparations for that. IT has set up a process for the return of necessary equipment. Some people brought equipment home so they could work efficiently remotely. I do have a town hall scheduled for Tuesday. I'll send an email to this entire staff today to give them the opportunity to send in questions. You know, I'm hoping people will feel comfortable if they have any questions. I'll have them send those to Mary Ann. She can compile them and then hopefully if there are any questions, I'll be able to answer them with the staff on Tuesday. The offices won't be open to the public. It's not as if we're going to be inviting external parties into the office. Just staff at this time. Therefore, the doors will not be open. People will still have to have their passes when they go in and out of the front doors on the 12th floor. So folks will need to remember that. The plan is to still have members of the staff filling out the survey that we do just to check, make sure how you're feeling, make sure there's no added risk for COVID. I think the thinking was that's a that's a good safety catch. So we'll just keep that going at least for the next couple of months just for added protection to make sure people who are not feeling well may have been exposed just a reminder to them. HR will provide updated CDC guidance to the staff. For example, what do you do if you've had contact with someone who has tested positive? What are the latest CDC guidelines? We're still maintaining our position of just following the experts and following the the medical advice. That's sort of where we are right now. There is a suggestion by the working group that until the end of the year we do allow for casual Friday dress code at all times. That allows people to wear jeans if they wish and HR can send out the policy on that. But I wanted to at least get the temperature from the commission. If there's any objections to that, please let me know. But I think that would be the plan going forward. So that's sort of where we are with the with the reopening plan. I think we're a go. So just want to open up to the commissioners. If you have any questions or any comments or if there anything you think we might have missed that we need to work on. The other thing is we are also working on office supplies and restocking and getting the office in good shape, putting the chairs back in the kitchen things like that. So we do have a team working on that as well. So any questions or comments on any of that? Any questions? I want to thank the working group and for the work that's gone into this. Can I have one question in terms of I think you brought it up last time? Whether our policy applies to independent contractors? So the policies with respect to vaccination, we are having that applied because we have the IGT team that is at the offices. So we have worked with them so that they can be in compliance as well. We're also in terms of GEU too, I think that's also we're going through the process in terms of any trooper or local police officer who's part of those units also. I know Loretta has been in touch with the chiefs. And any objection on the casual Friday for the duration of the trial period during November and December? Is there any objection to that? Okay. I see Commissioner Hill smiling a little bit. I'm smiling because if you've seen me coming in, I'll fit right in on you. Okay, excellent. Okay. All right. So that's the update we have right now. Please, you know, anyone feel free to ping me with any questions as we get going. So as part of the hybrid work option, we're also having folks submit their request consistent with the policy. The executive director reports directly to the commission. So I've submitted my request form for your consideration today. The consistent with the policy, any managers had the opportunity to request up to two days remote working. So I put in the request request for Tuesdays and Fridays as potential remote working days. I recognize there are going to be weeks where I just need to be in. So my focus is going to be on what the there's team members, what the people need in the office. But as in a bunch of caution, I thought it would be helpful for me to at least identify potential days to work remotely. So I think that requires a vote by the commission. So I haven't opened any questions you may have on that. Sure. And I just want to swing back to Commissioner Cameron on the just on the reopening. Gail, did you have anything that you wanted to add before we move on to Karen's request for a vote on her on her reopening plan? I did not. Again, it was a pleasure to work with the group and see how prepared and how thoughtful the group was with regard to every issue that you can you can think about really with the idea of making this a safe and just welcoming place to come back to. So I just want to thank the team and I'm in full agreement with all of the recommendations. Excellent. Now as to Karen's reopening plan, did everybody have a chance to see it in the documents? I guess that you'd like it to be ratified by us. So unless there's further discussion on it. Finally. Sure. Madam Chair, I move that the commission approve the hybrid work schedule requested and submitted by Director Karen Wells and included in the packet. Okay, no further discussion. Commissioner Cameron. I Commissioner O'Brien. I Commissioner Hill. I and I vote yes. Thank you, Karen, for that. Thank you all very much. I guess my question I had asked Karen earlier commissioners. I think that there's been a Karen during the working group, there probably wasn't much discussion about the commissioners plans. And in terms of I don't know commissioners O'Brien and Cameron, if you want to give any guidance to what you were thinking for how we should be planning for the reopening in the new plan. I'll start Madam Chair. I look, I think first of all, personally, I will not be available yet to come back in November. But I think all the commissioners have always, you know, really been thoughtful about what needs to be done and being in the office when that's appropriate. And I think that we've been successful in a hybrid model. And I think commissioners will and should follow suit with the with the team and be there when it's appropriate. I don't know that there's any need to have specific days. Because I think all of our needs will be different. And according to what days we'd like to be in, we should be in what makes most sense to get the work done. So I just think that'll be up to every commissioner to make to make those decisions and be available to the team whether or not you're in the office. I would agree with Commissioner Cameron. I'm going to be hopefully establishing a routine that's predictable for staff, but I'm also going to be, you know, willing and able obviously to come in different days depending on what the needs of the staff are. But I would agree with Commissioner Cameron. I think we particularly as we go through the rest of the year, it's going to be sort of changing as we go to make sure that everything gets done in a way that works for staff and the commission. Okay. Commissioner Hill, do you want to weigh in on that? And I agree with Commissioner Cameron and Commissioner O'Brien. There's really nothing more to add. I've been, you know, coming in when needed, meeting with staff when needed. And I will continue to do that as we move forward. But so far so good in the way things are moving now and looking forward again to seeing people live and in color. No kidding. No kidding. Great. And of course, Jamie is really good at making sure that we know where we need to be. So thank you. All right. Then moving on to equity inclusion. Right. One more item in the administrative update. I just want to give an update on the equity and inclusion group and what we've been doing. I went into it publicly announced. We have two new members. We have Nikisha Skinner joining and Crystal Howard joining that group. Wanted to welcome them and just thank them for participating. So I just want to run through some of the items and a few updates. You know, we have the five sort of bullet points on the areas that we are focusing on. First one, culture. Now with Tanya's departure, we are looking to have someone to sort of fill in to take the lead on that. We are, we have posted for a new division chief for diversity. So I'm hoping that person will pick up on that, especially now that we're going back to the office. So that ties in with that whole culture of the office being together and what kind of environment we have for our employees. Second one, reg review. We did have a big thank you to the gaming agent team Bruce Burke and sterl and his group. They did submit so the recommendations pursuant to that process. We're updating the form though for the other divisions because it clearly became a little overwhelming sort of on the executive director myself to be figuring out sort of the plan. So with some guidance from our chair, we are putting together a form to submit to each of the division heads so they can look at their own regs and submit it back and they can do it on a rolling basis. So more to come on that and I'll be meeting with the team on what the expectations are, but that's a little bit of a shift from what we're doing to create some efficiencies because this is, it's a, it's a lot, it's a tough project. It's a lot of work. So I want to make sure we don't make perfect the enemy of good and make sure we get going on it as opposed to trying to do everything meticulously perfect. As far as customer service, we're really happy to have Nikisha on the team with the equity inclusion working group because licensing does such a great job in this area. So we're looking forward to her input on this and sort of expanding that going forward. So I think that's going to be a great asset for this whole team and the initiative across the agency. The fourth item, hiring and retention. As reported out by Jill at one of the prior meetings, we continue to have success in this area. So kudos to the HR team on their efforts and also I look forward to the new chief of the diversity division to be involved in that going forward. And then the final item, which has some interesting developments on the procurement practices. So I wanted to just give a little update that we have joined pay setters that pay setters developed to the greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and their large and mid-sized group of companies and anchor institutions and they're committed to using their procurement purchasing power to close the racial wealth gap by intentionally increasing spend with businesses of color. So they demonstrate their commitment to increasing their supply or diversity in both dollars and in contracts across state, local, and national lines of business within increased focus on mass-based communities and businesses of color. In addition, they also often connect with businesses support organizations with existing credible relationships with businesses of color. So they're creating this ecosystem and a resource to increase that kind of spend. The vision of the program is to close the racial wealth gap in one generation, two to have 10% of all businesses in government contracts go to businesses of color in the Commonwealth within five years, and three have 20% of Massachusetts largest minority-based enterprises generate revenue of 50 million or more within the next five years. So we've already been attending meetings. Crystal and Derek have been involved with that and I'll actually be jumping off this public meeting at 11.30 to attend a CEO executive director level meeting today. So I'll keep you posted on developments going forward but we expect this will be a great resource for us to help with our own diversity spend and hopefully contribute to that initiative. So just want to give you an update on what's going on. Welcome any comments on what we're doing or any suggestions going forward. Any questions for Karen on the update on our equity and inclusion commitments? The PACE Setters program is a very highly regarded program that has really captured the attention of many significant businesses in the Boston and in that area across the Commonwealth as well. I know Angkor Boston Harbor is also a member. Karen will be representing the Gaming Commission and I think we're one of the few governmental agencies but as you know the Gaming Commission has been really a lead in this area and so hopefully some of our fellow quasi's and other governmental agencies may reach out to take to follow in our footsteps and replicate some of the great practices that have been established. So Karen thank you for that. I think we also committed was it to is it one additional MBE vendor each year? Was that a commitment to or am I misremembering? I don't recall directly know that I know he's on he's on the call. Did you know that is the requirement? I don't think that's a requirement from us as an agency. However one of the things where we are uniquely positioned unlike a lot of the other pay setters is we can come right to the commission if there's a vendor that meets our needs and ask for an exception from 801 CMR 21 or say you know this is a this is a place that we can really help the ecosystem and make that approval. A lot of other executive branch agencies can't do that and some of these bigger organizations have a hard time doing contracts. We have a large reliance on statewide contracts and we can hear from those if the commission gives approval. So we're really excited about this opportunity. We're really excited to learn some of these vendors and move forward and help with our diverse spend. Great thanks Derek for popping on like that really helpful. So and he's off. Quicker quicker than the door could slam behind them right? Good. Excellent. That's really really good news Karen. Thank you. Okay so that's it for the administrative update. I can move on to item three if that's acceptable from the chair. Yeah I think there's no further questions for you for Karen on administrative update. I'll set up the chair. I'm sorry that is a little difficult. I'm sorry. Yeah I just I just wanted to make a comment that I'm just proud of the work of the working group and how intentional we are. It really does make a difference when with equity and inclusion to take you know affirmative attentional steps. So and I know the whole team has bought into it and it'll just continue to make us a better agency. So thank you to everybody. Thanks Commissioner that's great. And the intentionality matters so thank you. All right and I'll remember Gail to keep on swinging by. Okay no worries I'm not shy I'll jump in. Okay moving on to item number three then Karen thank you. Okay so item number three is the hiring process. So 20 chapter 23k notes that the executive director shall appoint an employee a chief financial accounting officer and may subject to the approval of the commission approve employee other employees consultants agents and advisors including legal counsel. So historically the commission's been complying with this mandate through the budget process as the commission approves the executive director's hiring of a certain number of FTEs. It would certainly be helpful to me as the executive director for the commission to have a defined process to ensure that I have some clarity on exactly which positions you would like to delegate to me and some sort of workable solution for identifying that process. So I've worked with Derek and Todd on a recommendation given that it's likely it likely doesn't make practical sense for the commission to be necessarily involved in every single hire at the agency. So our suggestion and recommendation is that the executive director notify the commission of an opening or a potential hire of any position that would be designated as a major policy making position under general laws chapter 268b and that's what triggers a requirement to submit estate ethics filing and this would ensure the commission has the input into any position that could shape the policy direction of the agency. The commission could then waive its involvement if desired upon notification on a case-by-case basis but the decision would be with the commission. There are certainly other criteria you know I could run through such as salary levels or specific titles if the commission wants. It's just that this solution seems to be the most practical for informing the commission so they can make their decision on what level they would like me to do and which level they would like to be involved. Now once this is settled the staff can write this up as a defined policy probably be quite simple a one pager. We theoretically could also add the affirmation of the commission's hiring commitment adopted in the equity and inclusion statement if you wanted because we've just been talking about that and that is part of our hiring process. So this is sort of where we are we are on this I think that makes practical sense but I'm certainly you know and Todd and Derek we're here and available who want to discuss this further and what makes sense for the commission complying with that statutory provision. Questions for Karen on that. At this stage Karen didn't put a memo in the in the packet on this it would come to us I guess we memorialize it as a policy but I think we could we're in a consensus today we could vote to be you know we put it down for a vote to adopt this policy but in essence the statute does require our approval of every position except for the CFAO and that's not practical so you know and also we don't want to overreach but we also may want to reserve the opportunity to weigh in on certain positions that are particularly important for the the tenor in the future of the commission so the idea was to ask for some kind of a standard that was workable for the executive director and team so major policymaker is a defined term correct Todd under 268a do you want to just remind that that's determined through you and Karen correct Todd in terms of that status and it's quite a high level in this organization that's right the the ethics commission via 268a oversees the major policy process for purposes of filing statements of financial interest which we're all familiar with but yeah essentially a major policymaker is defined as either someone who is the head of an organization much like a commissioner or the executive director someone who reports directly to the head of the organization someone like myself reporting to Karen and commissioners or someone who is the head of a major division within the organization so it's in our case it's limited to about 15 to 20 people at any given time or identified as major policy makers under the statute so given that it's 15 to 20 I suggested to Karen the idea we could opt out to because that might be even broader than what's necessary but it allows you know the commission whatever the makeup of the commission is in the future to to have a say on those positions that may be particularly meaningful and then also give the executive director the authority to just you know go right ahead without our input what do you think commissioner O'Brien do you have some thoughts no I had a conversation with Karen about this and this idea of you know where to draw the line where it is you know presumptively our approval is mandated but to your point we can always opt out if it's something that we feel you know is something that's going to slope the process or isn't necessary the only thing I did suggest too is that there should be a review of who are those people exactly what are the positions exactly whether we need to tweak it to make it tighter or even broader depending on how that turns out it should capture everyone I would think that you'd want to mandate would come before us unless we opt out but I did want to have that overlaid with the org chart just for a point of reference that's a really good idea I think Todd that that probably would help you too to give you that level of comfort that you're including a broad enough group so perhaps Karen maybe we have commissioner O'Brien and you and Todd sit down and go through that as an early exercise and figure out where we are and then maybe the commission could be updated in some way what do you think commissioner Hill well I also was talking to Karen about this and you know my feeling is when you have a major policymaker that would be coming on board I would hope that the commission would have some type of involvement my experience in the past would be that we would have a subcommittee of one or two commissioners who would sit down with Karen and her staff and meet the folks that we might be hiring so I want to make sure that that's part of the process moving forward and then again if we opt out we opt out but I do want to be included in anything that may be a major policymaker but the day-to-day operations I certainly would leave up to Karen and her staff to do the right thing Commissioner Cameron yes I agree with everything that's been said I don't think this is much different Commissioner Hill than what we've done over the years although it is a good idea to formalize the process we typically on any of the director positions which are the policymakers a commissioner has served on the on the committee to interview those final candidates so that's been done over the years and I think it's worked well but but formalizing it and being thoughtful about which positions as Commissioner O'Brien stated makes makes some sense to me as well so I'm in agreement with with this policy and implementing it as we've spoken about today great so I'm sorry go ahead Karen so it makes sense well Todd and I can move back with Eileen on that and then draft a policy and then they put the policy in the packet at a future meeting for ratification or well that's actually we have consensus it doesn't seem like a vote appropriate today so much as giving them the direction to put it in writing and then we vote to ratify the process right so the actual policy right so we can understand that at this time that I'm hearing clearly that commission involvement is something that the commissioners would like to ratify today in these positions with that said if somehow the major policy making standard doesn't work this is a policy it can be subject to change you know it's always subject to change so we'll see how it works what I do like is to have somebody from the commission be aware of who is obligated to file an SFI in that standard um how that gets achieved you know just so that um we're making sure it's broad enough um no one loves having a file an SFI but it is a standard that is used across the Commonwealth so for these high level positions so checking in on that probably with Todd each year is probably a good a good a good idea all right so we won't take a vote today but I think you have a clear consensus if we could get that memorialized Karen over maybe the within a month that would be great yeah I think that'll work and you know I think the commission's already aware the only two positions right now were would be the communications division chief and the diversity division chief so that's those are the only two that are open right now just to let make sure everyone's on the same page but right we'll move forward uh get that policy drafted and get that back into the packet I'll work with Todd and I mean on that and just a reminder to all that uh given that we are subject to the open meeting law we have um the requirement that we don't participate even if it's less than a quorum in the screening out process the initial screening process you know even if there were just two of us we can't do that without triggering an open meeting law issue so um we have to do it in public so um that part of screening in as part of our human resources exercise and we all appreciate all the good work that goes into that process so thank you okay excellent that's very helpful thank you very much yeah just I think it gives a practical standard all right moving on then to we have an outside uh guest today I believe um and uh to responsible research and responsible gaming I want to forget your research and that's the keyword today good morning Mark how are you good good morning Madam Chair and commissioners that's right we we actually have presentations representing both um both parts of our division research and responsible gaming before I dive into those though I just wanted to briefly introduce a new member to our team uh Long Bon who is joining us as responsible gaming manager I'm really excited for for Long to join the team he's a licensed clinical social worker with a range of both administrative and clinical experience but I think will be really valuable as we continue to think about how we evolve in advance our responsible gaming initiatives so um I see Long is joined I don't know Long I don't know if you realize that your video isn't on it would be okay if you don't want it on but I wanted to make sure you know that we can't see your face that's that's just fine um that's fine yeah so we have two items today the first one is the commercial real estate report I'm going to turn it over to Marie Claire Flores-Pascio to introduce that and then I will circle back with uh you to kick off the game since quarterly report yeah there he is good morning though okay great Marie Claire there you are um do you want to go ahead and pick up the realist commercial real estate report please um we'll be starting with the presentation on a commercial real estate report presented by the economic side of the sigma team our presenters are Thomas Peake senior research manager and Dr. Mark Melnick director of the economic and public policy research group at the Hugh Maastana Q Institute um well as part of the gaming act that allowed the extension of casinos in the Commonwealth also recognize the importance of tracking the changes of the new casinos and slot parlor could have in the local economies and this can be a particularly challenging process but a good start is to look at the changes in the commercial real estate market and so today Tom and Dr. Melnick will be presenting findings on a research study tracking how commercial real estate conditions have changed over time in the host and surrounding communities of the three casinos in Massachusetts and now I'll pass it over to uh Dr. Melnick who will start with a short introduction on the economic side of the sigma project great thanks Marie Claire um and good morning everybody madam uh chair commissioners um it's good to see everybody today and I apologize for uh my scratchy throat I have a non-covid related cold so good to still be doing uh zoom meetings uh in context like this but again it's good to see everybody and to introduce our work to some of the new folks uh with the commission most notably Commissioner Hill uh who where will be our first time presenting some of the work that we've been doing uh on the sigma team particularly on the economic side um as Marie Claire uh outlined at the top and in Tom uh maybe could you throw the slides up excuse me uh Tom's going to do the heavy lifting today getting into the uh the nitty gritty uh with the analysis uh but I would want it to provide and take a couple of minutes to provide a little bit of the context of the work uh and in particular what the economic and fiscal side uh of the shop has been working on on the sigma project over the last eight years uh and then uh what we plan to do in the coming years Tom please advance as you guys all know uh in and since this is a presentation to the commission of the mass gaming commission I think you guys are all familiar with the expanded gaming act of 2011 uh Marie Claire touched on some of this already at the top but one of the most notable things as it relates to us is the last bullet there that the requirement of a annual research agenda that examines different elements of the economic, fiscal, social and community impacts associated with expanded gaming in the state uh this was an incredible element of foresight when it came to establishing expanded gaming in Massachusetts it's rare that an industry uh just starts somewhere uh and usually there's been some elements of different kinds of industries that exist uh but with in the instance of casinos in Massachusetts this was a brand new sector uh that had a lot of um priors for people in terms of expectations both negative and positive about what it would mean for the economy and the population of Massachusetts in general but by enshrining an a regular research agenda within the legislation uh for having casinos in the state it allowed us to track in real time what the impacts are on the population in general but then also how those impacts may shift and change over time that's a big part of where the uh segment work has been uh over the last several years um please advance we often talk about our our work in three main phases uh phase one which was our baseline analysis where we are tracking the various elements of economic and fiscal conditions before the gaming facilities were in place our phase two was development and construction phase where we were measuring impacts of the construction of the casinos uh as every as they were coming online that was a period of time that was much longer than any of us uh originally anticipated as the um phasing in of the casinos was elongated uh due to a number of external factors but now we're in phase three uh firmly in phase three which is the operations phase of the casinos where we are measuring and monitoring the impacts from the the three facilities come please advance and so for our work and just bang through the animations i'm trying to go somewhat quickly through this context because i know we only have about 30 minutes for our presentation for presentation and q and a so i want to give that context but not spend too much time on it uh i often think about the economic and fiscal research in three main elements uh there is the direct casino impact analyses that we've been doing which get specifically to the conditions on the ground within the casino or those impacts that are related specifically to the activities of the casino so i mean what we mean by that is our analyses of workforce characteristics operational and construction spending impacts uh related to the casinos the activities of patrons their spending habits both in and outside of the casino uh the impacts on government and fiscal uh in in its various forms you know for example we know down in plainridge uh there was the increase of resources and in uh in plainville was allowed for new public buildings to be built and as well as the impacts on the lottery a second element of our work focuses on more macro types of impacts and in particular economic and community effects so looking at local business indicators of demographic and residential shifts and patterns labor force issues real estate and housing and then an analysis that would compare like communities to the ones where the casinos have been put in place and then the third phase of our work or third element excuse me as our special topics or looking at deeper dives into different elemental things that may be occurring in concert with or impacted by casinos some of these are uh concepts that we would like to explore like legalized sports gambling impacts on tourism in general the horse racing industry and some of which are ones that we are currently wrestling with like this one mentioned here COVID-19 and the impacts on the industry which is a special topic that our team will be putting out for you later on this year but what's important inside of all this is taking into account the impacts of the casinos and the activities that took place there but then also describing community effects uh in general in recognizing that casinos have a direct impact on a number of things but also operate within a larger ecosystem of economic and demographic change our casinos in Massachusetts in particular open in a period of time at the really the tail end of the great recession and is are with us through a robust period of economic growth in Massachusetts and then obviously we know the effects that we've been seeing over the last 18 months with the pandemic so seeing being able to describe and track and analyze what those issues look like for the commonwealth and for the residents of the state come to please advance we're the middle of we re-procure the project back in 2018 we talked a bunch about Segment 2.0 the goals of Segment 2.0 were to continue to track and analyze key legacy topics this real estate report being one of them and engage in more enhanced engagements around community outreach dissemination and collaborative involvements around research in providing a little more topical flexibility for a research portfolio through special topics ad hoc reports and other stakeholder engagement the COVID-19 report that's forthcoming would be an example of such an ad hoc report. Tom please advance this next graphic is just a fancy way of showing some of the work that we've been doing along the way on economic fiscal so a combination of our surveys with patrons operation and construction impacts our analysis of lottery and government spending our survey with new employees and how you know how they why they apply to the casino what kind of jobs they're doing what kind of training they receive and so on that's communities which I mentioned before a look at our host communities and as a as a profile and then obviously the real estate effects which we'll talk a bit more about today so with that I'm going to turn the show over to Tom and he'll go through the methods and analysis of the recent real estate report when we just completed. Hi for some reason yeah so you need to go back I'm sorry you accidentally cut off yourself. Hold on Tom can we can hear you now you can hear me right well you had accidentally somehow you were your video your your audio was off just as you're introducing your slide right there am I right everyone I think so now I can hear you okay. Madam chair I think Tom's supposed to be speaking now but he's he's oh I'm sorry that's what that's what happened all right thank you I thought I saw your mouth still going I'm so sorry good morning Tom yeah but I tried to tell good morning Tom thank you good morning Tom yeah now I can yeah thank you so much I also think it was picking up the wrong microphone but hi I'm Tom I am a senior research analyst here at the Donahue Institute I've been working on this project since about 2014 and I always like to say that the opportunity to work on this project was one of the things that really made my current position attractive to me and one of the reasons I moved back to Massachusetts to do this work so I'm it's always exciting to talk about casinos and work on this exciting project so today we're I'm gonna report on a report that we did on the analysis of commercial real estate impacts and just to give a sense like we've been putting out a series of real estate reports over the years some of them are focused on particular communities some of them are focused on all the communities on this one we really wanted to sort of do a deep dive into the commercial side of the real estate so not really looking at like you know home sales or home prices but we have done a lot of work on that but on this one we really wanted to to sort of do a deep dive into sort of the commercial impacts all right so what we were really trying to do is research how commercial real estate conditions had changed in the host and surrounding community since the expansion of gaming in Massachusetts and you know when we're looking at this sort of the metrics that we use to sort of measure this included inventory so how many buildings how much square foot footage are we talking about and how's that changed commercial vacancy rates lease rates and although the sale of commercial real estate is not as common as residential real estate we did try and look at sales prices as well so in order to do this we ended up using some proprietary data from a group called co-star that really heavily tracks these sorts of things and you know as we looked into this you know one of the things that we just want to say outright is this is a little bit of a difficult topic to study because when you're looking at these things you have a relatively small sample size of commercial versus residential buildings you have like I said you know a lot of the world of commercial real estate is about is leasing not sales of space so you have infrequent sales and there isn't a lot of public data which is really why we needed to go to co-star to get a sense of like lease rates in communities and things like that so the other thing that I think it's really important to bring up is that in commercial real estate conditions there's a lot of factors beyond the casinos that could be affecting the that could be affecting an area's real estate condition so that includes other projects that's going on that include sort of broader regional or national like economic trends so when you look at an area and you say okay a casino came in and then after that the vacancy rate fell the real thing that you have to think about is that doesn't necessarily mean that that it fell because of the casino so one thing that we tried to do here is to look at the trends in the host communities and compare them to trends in the surrounding communities and in the commonwealth as a whole to see how these communities their real estate conditions have changed and then whether those changes were sort of in line with what we've seen sort of in the broader marketplace here in Massachusetts so divergences in those trends you know if for instance you saw a region where most places saw their vacancy rates rise but the host community saw their vacancy rates fall to us we would see that as not statistical proof but like pretty solid evidence that the casino might be having an important impact there so and then our report in order to sort of because they're so different you know our report has a chapter for each host community and we're going to at the end of the report I'll give some high-level results for each of the host communities so just to give some context and a sort of a brief summary of our findings as many of you I'm sure remember very well after the expansion of casino gambling but before these facilities opened there was a lot of speculation that as the casinos opened they would induce a lot of new real estate investment that would really dramatically transform the local commercial real estate landscapes uh I you know I think we give some examples of some of the stuff like from the news back then in the report I won't go into detail on that but you know there was just a lot of speculation that you'd see like things really really dramatically transform so looking back on the past decade it's pretty clear that these casinos really operate in a broader ecosystem of economic activity and in the context of a state that has been experiencing robust economic recovery following you know I think it's easy to forget at the time that these that this legislation was initially passed we were the tail end of a pretty bad recession so just to sort of continue on that overall commercial real estate markets have tended to they've been pretty strong in all three of the host communities as well as in the surrounding communities and in the common wealth as a whole so we've seen in in terms of these trends in terms of what you look at to see it's sort of a strength of a market we've seen results to so strengthening markets in the host communities but we've also pretty much seen that everywhere so while the casinos may have played a role in strengthening the local real estate markets we haven't seen a lot of dramatic divergences from the statewide trends it's difficult to see a lot of examples where you'd say if not for this casino the commercial real estate market in the in this host community would look completely different and that might seem like kind of a boring finding to some people but when you actually put it in the context of sort of the level of speculation about how real estate investment might change in these communities that we had early on in this process I actually think it's it's sort of an interesting I think it's a really interesting finding personally um but that said what we did find was that there are really important differences in real estate conditions between the host communities that uh that I think kind of uh have have sort of uh resulted in some different trends that we can see so I'll go at this point into if I'm going a little fast I just I know I'm a little short on time um so yeah you're good Tom okay great um in Everett um so Everett's commercial real estate inventory and the average lease rates have risen uh since the casino was announced uh for sure uh the casino related real estate impacts though are difficult to really differentiate in the context of as I'm sure all of you are very aware like a really booming regional real estate market this the general trends that we're seeing in Everett we're seeing in a lot of greater Boston communities um and in some places I think things are heating up even quite a bit faster uh than they are uh in Everett uh one one sort of bit of speculation that we have if you actually look at Encore Boston Harbor it's it's set in a place that it um there's some like utilities uh so like big utilities infrastructure and some big box uh stores near it as well as a good deal of transportation infrastructure and of course a river but there's not a lot of what you think of as sort of like a downtown uh infrastructure where if someone was like oh I really want to locate my business next to the casino there's not necessarily a ton of opportunities there for that so I think that there's a possibility that the sort of ripple effects that people uh might have speculated to see uh just the location might make that like not potentially a super attractive possibility I also think it's really important to bring that as compared to Springfield or Plainville Everett is a much more dense much more built out uh community uh land there is much more intensively utilized and in general if you want to build a thing in in Everett or most of the surrounding communities you're talking about taking something down to put something up whereas in Plainville and to some extent in Springfield there is opportunities for greenfield development um so that is like a big difference between Everett and the others uh so just show some trends uh here uh we basically have all of the surrounding communities as sort of thin dotted lines and then we have Massachusetts Everett and an average of the surrounding communities as thick solid lines so as you can see we're here we're looking at commercial square footage and how it's grown over the last decade um Everett has grown a little bit slower than in terms of a percent change uh than Massachusetts although as the casino came online you see them pretty much catch up after very very little addition to their inventory over the first part of the last decade but both of them are really much lower than sort of the average for the surrounding communities which obviously includes uh you know Somerville Cambridge Boston which sort of as uh individual dotted lines you can see really took off at a you know at a whole different level and we're just talking about the level of space being added and the level of development um in terms of vacancy rates as a very dense very intensively used community um Everett has had persistently lower vacancy rates than the Commonwealth as a whole and also lower than many of the surrounding communities um but as a community with a handful of like a relatively small number of relatively large buildings you can see that the trend is a lot more volatile that's something that um is sort of just uh we're going to see that throughout when you're looking at uh a community where a single large building becoming vacant could really change uh the vacancy rate which just to be clear this isn't the number of vacant buildings this is the percentage of square feet which are vacant um you're just going to see more uh volatile rates um but in general you can see that um it has it has consistently been lower um than the surrounding communities and and that was true prior to and true after the casino uh in terms of um commercial lease rates sort of the average average lease rates um you do kind of see that these are inflation adjusted lease rates by the way uh it does sort of look like uh in the time in between you can see we have these vertical dashed and solid lines uh the dashed line is when the uh casino license was awarded in that community um and the uh solid line is when the casino opened um so you can sort of see that in between those things the the lease rate in Everett did start to creep up after being um pretty flat so that's something where it's um there's there's I think there's a possibility that the casino might have had something it's not something that we could statistically prove but I think there's some evidence that the casino might have played a role there um but another thing that I think is important to show is that Everett's lease rates throughout are considerably lower than most of the other communities in the region and that continues to be the case all right so that's what we've got for Everett um for Springfield uh data does suggest that demand for uh commercial and the casino could be playing a role in that um I'll just skip to this but um MGM is interesting uh among the casinos because it has this downtown location um where the other two are sort of on the outer part of the city uh but we have seen inventory um and lease rates rise and we've vacancy rates have fallen that's our type of but we've seen sort of the sort of uh development that you'd expect to see um in all of these communities um one thing that I think is important to note though when you're talking about this is that well first of all economic recovery what we've seen in other reports about Springfield is that economic recovery from the Great Recession uh did start a little bit later in Springfield than in some of the other communities um and so a lot of our findings really make sense in that context it's also important to note that other important economic development projects did occur in Springfield there was a very large manufacturing facility developed in East Springfield um there has been a lot of work about uh having sort of more downtown residential uh I think it's also important to bring out that uh there was a major tornado that hit Springfield uh around the start of the last decade and uh that a lot of the well first of all um MGM Springfield is in that sort of development footprint the point is that like there's a lot of development that likely would have happened one way or another just as a result of the um of having to reconstruct that part of the downtown but I but I really do think if there's a community where there might be some evidence that um the presence of the casino might have actually induced a certain amount of investment and seeing some stuff um Springfield would probably be it uh so just to show um as you can see when we're talking about um sort of commercial square footage uh Springfield has uh risen a faster rate than the commonwealth as a whole and much much faster than it's more I mean for the most part more residential surrounding communities um in terms of vacancy uh they have the vacancy rates in Springfield have fallen since uh MGM Springfield was announced although that as you can see they really closely mirror uh sort of the statewide trends uh as the statewide vacancy rate fell you're also seeing the vacancy fall in Springfield um and in terms of uh commercial lease rates uh sort of the the the distance between the statewide average lease rate and Springfield's average lease rate has like that gap has widened a little bit uh since uh the award of the license to MGM Springfield although it's been relatively stable uh for the last few years um Plainville is a little bit of a tougher community to study uh in general I would say that Plainville uh the story I've always had about commercial uh real estate in Plainville is one of sort of a regional trend and uh Plainville's commercial real estate trends mirror uh those of a lot of the surrounding communities uh in many respects so this area when you think about it um is pretty equally distant from Boston Worcester and Providence so you see actually a lot whether it's um you know uh July Stadium whether it's the Rentham outlets uh whether it's the big uh arena in Mansfield there's there's this seems to be an area that is uh very attractive for sort of uh developing large consumer uh attractions uh for that that are attractive to sort of New England in general um but it's also a community or an area with a lot of mostly residential development and a relatively small number of commercial buildings so that leads to pretty volatile trends and it it is difficult uh to look at these communities and get a really great sense of of how much a single building might be uh affecting things um but what we definitely can say is that uh when we're talking about uh inventory in terms of commercial square footage in Plainville it's risen much faster uh than either Commonwealth or or most of the surrounding communities another thing that uh we did note uh if if you see the report is that uh the in Plainville and also in Springfield for that matter the the percentage change in square footage is considerably higher than the percentage change in uh number of buildings which suggests that the new buildings that are being built in these communities are a lot bigger than what was there before so that could be in Plainville a lot of some sort of big box uh retail uh in addition to obviously the the slot spoiler there um vacancy rates um Plainville's vacancy rates have tended to be lower uh than either the Commonwealth of the surrounding community and like in Everett they've also been a bit more volatile uh in terms of lease rates uh they definitely inflation adjusted lease rates have definitely risen since the casino was first announced uh there has been a lot of development there other than the casino so it's hard to say how much of that was the casino they've also recently fallen um which could just be the result of more uh as we saw you know two slides ago a lot more commercial square footage has come online um it also could potentially have something to do with the fact that these data uh do include sort of the probably the start of the um you know of the start of like economic concern around the pandemic um in addition to a lot of the stuff uh we did do a analysis of commercial sales prices um they're I don't want to get too far into it because there's just so few sales that it's tough to make a lot of really definitive statements about anything but it's something we thought we should look at um it just by community uh inflation adjusted sales prices like per square foot um have steadily risen in Everett um uh sales prices in Springfield uh they were a little bit more stable uh than in Everett uh but the number of commercial real estate sales per year uh has increased pretty substantially over the last decade which could suggest that there's an increased sort of investor interest in Springfield real estate and in Plainville there doesn't really seem to be a lot of clear trends that are discerned much from um so overall sort of conclusion wise um it seems that Everett's you know commercial real estate inventory and lease rates this is sort of just reiterating what I said earlier but they've risen since the casino was announced uh the data does suggest that demand for commercial real estate in Springfield has risen and uh Plainville's trends seem to in many ways sort of mirror the the general region overall I would say that the expansion of gambling in Massachusetts has not had a the sort of dramatic effect on local commercial real estate markets that some speculated that they would um while commercial real estate conditions have shifted over the time many of those shifts are really in line with what we've seen across the Commonwealth um and I would just say on top of that that you know in a lot of ways I actually think that that that finding actually makes a lot of sense to me um in retrospect I think that we shouldn't be surprised about that these these I mean none of these communities are company towns right they've got a lot of other stuff going on in them and the addition of the casinos may have may have played an important role but it uh we haven't we haven't seen necessarily uh sort of a transformative thing I also just want to say that for the record like that doesn't necessarily mean like these casinos can also have a lot of other important impact packs in terms of employment bender spending revenue like there's a lot of ways that these uh facilities can have a really positive impact uh on the communities uh but in terms of this one thing that there was a great deal of speculation so far we just haven't seen it so that is my presentation I'd be really happy to answer any questions that anybody might have thank you Tom um maybe for our discussion we might need to go back to a slide or two but if we could take the slides down so we can see folks great thank you um very uh comprehensive report and today's presentation was excellent commissioner uh Hill do you have a question well it's more of a comment than a than a question I think um and by the way the report is excellent and and very well done and I think everybody can agree uh with that what I found interesting during the report is when we're talking about commercial lease rates and how they've the cost they've gone up in the inventory around Everett and over in um Springfield we see an increase in inventory and again lease leases uh rates going up did you take into consideration as you were looking at this what was going on at the local and the state level and let me give you an example in Everett and in Springfield and certainly down in the Plain Ridge area we've seen a lot of investments by the towns and the state who are looking at actually doing upgrades the infrastructure whether it be water whether it be schools whether it be paving roads for example I know in the Springfield or I should say out in the western part of the state the commonwealth has made a lot of investments in trying to bring businesses out there for economic development and they're redoing you know highways in ways that we haven't seen in decades and you know I wonder if if that is a reason why we're starting to see more uh businesses want to come to those areas certainly the casinos are a piece of it but I'm also wondering is it a coincidence that we're seeing increases in lease rates and in the increase in inventory for businesses because of what's happening locally and at the state level I think that's a great observation uh commissioner and I think that that is exactly the sort of the thing that makes these sort of analyses difficult is that none of these developments are occurring in a vacuum certainly these are major real state investments that the casinos are making but the communities themselves are making a lot of investments just economic conditions are shifting communities are recovering or have I think in a lot of ways recovered from the last recession and are now you know trying to figure out how to bounce back from from last year so there's just these are such complex economic ecosystems and there's there's so many things going on uh beyond just these obviously very important facilities uh so yeah I would uh I would say that that's exactly what makes these sorts of analyses so challenging is that there's lots of other really important things going on at the same time if I can add to that too I'm sorry commissioner if I can add to that too I think you're really onto something as we think about Springfield in particular Springfield was really a late breaker in terms of recovery out of the great recession and some of our other research that we do in the institute and you guys are an important project that we do but we have several others one we we've recently done with wavefinders on the Pioneer Valley housing market and inside of that one of the analyses we were looking at the trend line of the great recession for the state recovery out of the great recession and recovery for greater Springfield and Springfield was way late in recovery it's one of the important things to think about as we see recovery post COVID is what are the communities that will recover faster what are the ones that are going to recover slower as it relates to this particular project what it means is that there was an alignment here on the late breaking recovery of Springfield in general and when the casino comes online right so there was a lot of activity taking place in Springfield it is good in the sense that the community was growing but it was but part of it was that that immediate period right in recovery Springfield lagged and lagged and lagged but again as Tom highlighted these are complicated ecosystems because one large employer is not going to completely transform a regional economy but it's a part of a symbiotic relationship with these things that that helps you stimulate other elements of economic growth. I think what I've seen at least from the report and from what you said this morning it looks like a lot of partnerships have been created in the three different sections of the state so in Everett once we the casino has been built now all of a sudden we see Everett and surrounding communities starting to do upgrades to their infrastructure to bring more businesses in I'm seeing that in Springfield and I'm certainly seeing it in Plain Ridge where tons and tons of money are being put into that area to ensure that we can get people from point A to point B whether it be through business or in housing itself. So could I just do a follow-up to that observation it's exactly what I was thinking about at least with respect to Springfield Commercial Hill it's been again at that important inventory commercial square footage in Springfield slide where it does look like that spread between the Commonwealth's inventory versus Springfield. Springfield looks like it's consistently higher and it looks like it really does coincide with that important casino project that is so integrated into the downtown. You know you raise the right question like were there other government investments going on at that time I'm not sure if they came right at that time if they came as the casino project was coming to fruition and there was clear observation that this was a great time to start investing and leverage the the presence of the casino I'm also not convinced that you raised the question the tornado which again was another timely factor if there would have been some improvements made at the time but never at the scale of the casino of course correct. Yeah I mean I don't know what else would have like what other kind of investment in that area would have been at the scale of the casino in terms I mean you know I guess we'll never know but it seems like I'm not aware of anyone else that was going to be willing to spend what close to a billion dollars on redeveloping that block the worst hit so you know it's tough to say what would have happened in the absence but it certainly seems like that that was probably certainly very consequential. So for the downtown Springfield area and sort of imagining what Mayor Sarno would say that the casino probably has been the spark that has allowed for more tourism and more you know entertainment options driving the economy there of course COVID has impacted interesting and then I'll just get to my second point was that the Everett slide on vacancies right in Everett is really very positive during COVID right and I've wondered if it's maybe yeah Tom can you pull that up so that oh sure yeah I'm looking yeah it's it's relatively better right am I reading that chart right that would be the vacancy yeah I mean it certainly hasn't you can see that there is a good deal of of volatility certain amount of of trend like changes in trends that I don't want to read too much into but it definitely hasn't skyrocketed or you know done anything that's really sort of out of step with the rest of the the community right so I don't like I think my point here and to Commissioner Hill some earlier observation I'm wondering if the three communities have different commercial vacant commercial purposes and you know playing rich got harder hit because in the nature of the commercial opportunities and maybe also Springfield but maybe in Everett is it more manufacturing and something that was able to withstand the pressures of COVID I wondered if you had any insights on that because it looked like it was look better I would vol volatility clearly I'm thinking of course Commissioner Hill of our recent tour in Everett I mean I definitely think that yeah if you're if your commercial mix includes more industrial stuff then that probably is going to be more robust to a to a to a pandemic than if your commercial mix is more say restaurants and other things that you said bars for instance things like that where they were I think more likely to close so I think that it's yeah I think the best quite possible I think you know one of the things that you're scratching at Madam Chair also is that for good and for bad our casinos that we have in Massachusetts are all three very different from each other and situated in very different places right so in Everett's case and one of the great challenges as we think about this from a host and surrounding communities perspective is that Everett is in the middle of a booming metropolitan economy right but one but Everett's role within that booming economy is one that's more of an industrial manufacturing type of infrastructure Springfield on the other hand is a casino that's right in the middle of a downtown right in the middle of the downtown of I know Everett's a gateway city too but you know Springfield is the quintessential gateway city right and it is the economic center of western Massachusetts so the the character is quite different so it makes compared it makes for the comparisons to be challenging because they are not not only can we not isolate the casino itself but we're talking about regional economies that are different from one another right and the roles in which they play so I think in Everett's case when we see volatility naturally as it relates to the pandemic and real estate in general it's overall pretty healthy market and you know part of its its health is that you can throw a ball from Everett to Boston and so I think those kinds of things are obviously a factor in how we see where these trends go which raises for us I think analytically as we move forward into the future is to think about these not only within a regional context but also in a comparison community context in thinking about how places that look like Everett may have changed as well but are not necessarily a host or surrounding community so that gets back to your original point is that the the ecosystem really really matters regional and then of course the state ecosystem but the regional and then the micro so very very helpful and then that to back to Commissioner Hill's original point how the government and how even we at a more specialized level through the community mitigation fund can support the various needs of each community makes a difference I'm sorry to have piggyback so much on Commissioner Hill's excellent observation Commissioner O'Brien or Commissioner Cameron do you want to go next we can go back to thank you so much for bringing that that chart that chart up thank you I mean I had some of the same questions that you did but also you know here in the report understand that it's complicated trying to figure out what variables are in terms of some of these it was interesting to hear that you have other parallel research going on that might inform some of this I'd be curious to know if you have any other research that would be relevant to sort of looking at the impacts of these areas besides the one that you mentioned already one that you've referenced are there any others that are relevant I mean a lot you know it depends on in terms of relevancy like you know I think we're that we do a lot of demographic housing and real estate studies in different parts of the state so I feel like there are things that are you know adjacent that maybe aren't direct on this but like obviously the the housing study that we did in Greater Springfield tells a lot of the narrative around how economic recovery is happening in the region and one of the big stories for us and that is the amount of pressure on low and moderate income residents in Springfield particularly when we think about the rental market and I often talk about this as being low or middle wage in a high cost state right so in a place like Massachusetts we think a Springfield is being an affordable place and especially for those of us who live in the eastern part of Massachusetts it would seem to be but wages are way lower in Springfield so the relationship between housing cost or what we call housing burden tells an important story about pressures on different communities particularly when we think about communities of color which are more likely to be renters and more likely to be working with the service sector that's different than the analysis we're doing here on commercial markets but it informs a lot for us when we think about the pressure points for different populations in Massachusetts and what it means similarly with Everett we've been a part of the team that's done the Greater Boston Housing Report Cards the last several years with the Boston Foundation and those stories end up being quite similar right Everett is um you know it's in that Greater Boston zone but it is one of the more affordable elements of Greater Boston but you know large immigrant community large communities of color high housing cost burdens for folks in those places. Getting into other demographic things too and what COVID and some of the work that we've been doing we found a really strong relationship between the COVID outbreak in communities and their housing stock and in particular overcrowded housing and in that that stood out both in places like Springfield and Everett so yeah I could wax on a variety of different things that we've done over the years but um but you know what's nice about the role that we serve in this kind of quasi think tank role for research around Massachusetts is that every project kind of informs another one because we're always wrestling with the demographic economic development and real estate challenges that different places are facing and for us I think one of the big stories inside of here in that ecosystem story is that the way in which the recovery of the great recession matches or aligns with the real estate conditions that we're seeing in these different communities uh and the the makeup of industries within those communities how much that casino's impact would be on commercial so in a place like Springfield we we could see it more clearly in a place like Everett it's a little cloudier because it's in a place like Boston right um and I think what it highlights for us and it um primes the pump I think a little bit more as we watch recovery post-COVID because while we're not out of this we're not out of this recession yet um I what interests me and maybe concerns me about the lack of clarity of my crystal ball is how the relationship between place and work is going to shift in the years uh in the kinds of choices that people are making in terms of where they locate their business where they locate their homes and how is that going to uh make this picture look different when we come back to an analysis like this in two three four five years and so on so it's not a great answer to a clear answer to your question um commissioner but but those are some of the things I think it for the way we think about this in other ways one thing that I um another it's actually a seat more report that I think sort of informs us in a lot of ways is our patrons um a lot of the we haven't done an encore Boston Harbor patron survey yet but the the the two casinos that we have one of the things that we're seeing is that the overwhelming number of people visiting these casinos are people who are driving there and spending the day there and then going home um I think that when you see that it's like I keep coming back to that I remember uh early on somebody talking about uh wanting to set up a hotel uh at a property in in Greenfield that I'm familiar with because the idea is that there's going to be all these sort of international visitors to to MGM Springfield that we're going to be coming in and they could stay at this hotel two counties up in Greenfield and take the train down to Gamble and then then come back um and like there certainly are people who come in and visit MGM Springfield there's certainly people who stay in the hotels um but what I I don't think we've necessarily seen is this sort of flood of out of the area of visitation that would induce a huge amount of hospitality and accommodations and entertainment options outside of those offered uh either directly by the casino or by institutions like my beloved Springfield Thunderbirds uh who are very tightly affiliated uh with the casino uh so in terms of these like big spillover effects where people are coming in and then um after coming in they're spending lots of money in sort of in the community we are certainly seeing lots of people coming into Springfield and spending their money in the community but a lot of those people are people who are what we're calling recaptured patrons which is to say they're locals who would previously have been spending their money that day out of state and they're now spending it here that's hugely important fiscally uh but but in terms of inducing new real estate investments these are functionally local um and not necessarily the sort of people who you'd build like a new hotel to accommodate um same with like a lot of the outlet state visitors are you know we see largely from the out of state but they're driving in and driving back um and so I think you know the other research that we've done around these facilities sort of explains why like these things they can employ a lot of people they can generate a lot of tax revenue they're not necessarily inducing a lot of real estate investments outside of the real estate investments that are the casinos themselves which isn't saying none but in terms of like completely transforming the dynamics of these places we haven't necessarily seen that and I think when you look at who the patrons are that that's that makes a certain amount of sense right camera very interesting conversation um mark pretty much touched on my thoughts meaning what I was thinking about is the future post-covid um and does this report in any way um give us an indicator in aligning it with other reports for example one of the big concerns with building casinos here as it has been in many communities is my god crime will go up crime and traffic and you know we don't that's that's a real reason well that really hasn't materialized and I know I wonder if people realize that now that the community is not um unsafe or any more than it was before does that does that in any way um help people make business decisions about where they want to locate a business I just didn't know if this report gives us any any way of telling or to your point mark about post-covid what does that mean for where people live and work so do you have anything on that that I can jump in but uh well I pay a certain amount of attention to sort of the the social impacts that we see when we're talking about crime or talking about problem gambling I think that in general there it does sort of fit this this trend that when you're about to make a policy move it's it's very easy to imagine society in some like huge ways being transformed by it and that's not necessarily what we've seen either with the positives or the negatives around these facilities because sort of as mark said like all of this they exist within a broader ecosystem they um but I definitely mark if you've got yeah I think um you know on the future question it's going to be interesting I avoid having real predictive things about this I think there are a lot of things that were overstated early in the pandemic about the death of cities and and the um that we were just going to be remote everywhere you know like we saw population shifts and in major metropolitan areas not being that dramatic um and and I do think that as we've seen through the revenues for the casinos that there's there is pent up demand for people for entertainment right so I think that those kinds of things around leisure and hospitality save the the challenges with workforce size right now that that's a different question than what we're talking about I think that there's I think there's reason to be less concerned about those kinds of things but for broader commercial real estate um these are really going to these are going to be really big questions of you know if you know how does the the relationship between home and work shift a bit I think that we're probably going to see a lot of white collar work in the coming years transition into a hybrid model um of three and two two and three going to the office and not that probably doesn't dramatically change commercial real estate in the downtown um but I think those are the kinds of things that are unclear a year ago at this time I think people were talking a bunch like oh well we're never going to go downtown again right and and I remember doing an interview on fox 25 with this idea is like is this the end of downtown so it was like it seems so inconceivable uh it seems silly to me at the time when it was even happening but I think that's kind of cooled off and uh but I think those are going to be big questions of the coming years as as we kind of settle into a uh a future work um context and how in particular white collar work changes uh in the coming years thank you other other questions for Dr. Melnick or for Tom, Commissioner Hill, I'll set, Commissioner O'Brien, I'll set, I'll set, Commissioner Cameron, I'll set thank you okay uh yeah this just we could probably ask four million questions um this is so interesting I think um uh Commissioner Cameron's point was really the one I would have closed on as well it's that we you know as you said uh Mark we can't we don't have a crystal ball but really the this is just a tough time to really do this assessment because not only are the casinos still so new at least particularly with respect to Springfield and uh Encore they also got hit with a pandemic so with those two you know important conditions how the commercial real estate will be ultimately affected is is just really difficult to assess and as you pointed out the ecosystem of each community in the state itself are such different variables so I think Mark this demands continuing review right and for us to stay tuned to again back to Commissioner Hill's point it's really important to remember in terms of Springfield we have the Elm Street project that's underway which will bring a market price housing right there across the street from the casino bringing important housing options the state has I know a very strong mandate for that it's been self-imposed on providing affordable and market rehousing options and with more people in the downtown area of Springfield that can only hopefully drive increased commercial opportunities and interests so again the government and and and private partnerships are going to influence the very least the Springfield project and and we'll see what happens whatever Tom you're nodding yeah yeah I would agree with that yes yeah so again back to the original observation it really does take a village as they say and and in government and private partnerships are really key here thank you thank you director van der linden and Marie Claire for the the important research it's one that really intrigues me personally so thank you just madam chair to follow up on Tom's point about the patron survey at Encore it is planned we will be in the field with that survey in February and I think it will be really interesting both in terms of we begin to see what's happening kind of on hopefully this back end of what COVID is but in comparing it to what was happening at the other other two casinos as well so we will continue to plug away at trying to get our arms around what the social and the economic impacts are of this new but very strong industry casino gambling in the state so you're going to do that patron survey this is to understand where they come they're coming from correct mark yeah so it tells us where people coming from what are they doing both and how they're spending their money both inside and outside of the casino related related to their casino visit and will this capture patron behavior before COVID or only because you know ever Encore Boston Harbor was only open June 2019 and had to close this door as March of 2020 will include that or will include only post COVID page I believe it's only it's only post post or in the in their current visit to the casino I guess my question my question then would be is it premature to do that without having the whole international market open or will that just be part of the consideration I think it's it's going to be part of that consideration okay and I would just say with that stuff those are those patron surveys are such an essential part of our economic impact studies because they help us to identify what of that spending would have occurred within the Commonwealth like to find the recaptured patrons which is there's no other way besides those to find the recaptured patrons to figure out who are new gamblers who would have otherwise been spending their business on they're spending their money at some other business who would have been traveling out of state otherwise who's out of state but came here specifically for the casino just who's out of state and came here for something else and would like to figure out like where would this money have been spent otherwise which is such an important I mean I really think that question is like the foundation of a lot of the most important conversations that were going around prior to the legalization of gambling in Massachusetts so I'm always really really excited to get those data great thank you thank you everyone thanks Dr. Malik hope you feel better yeah the worst of it's over so hoping by the weekend I'll be money but but thanks again for inviting us and we're always happy to be a part of these presentations and you know we spent so much time making the stuff that it's it's great to be able to share it publicly and to take these kinds of questions and and really deal with some of the other elements of this that layer on top of each other you know the broader context within the the mass economy and what it means for people so thanks for the conversation today and and and for for all the support and getting to do the work that we do thank you so much Mark when moving on then to game sense yeah we are so we're it's time again for a game sense quarterly update I we have several game sense advisors and other staff from the mass council on gaming and health to join us led by Chelsea Turner who is the mass council's director of responsible gaming but we also have some game sense advisors with us too including uh ronda martins who's a game sense advisor at plane rich park casino we have lin ho who is a game sense supervisor at encore boston harbour and Amy gribbrill who is a game sense supervisor at ngm springfield so um without any further i will turn it over to chelsea forgive me um mark i i i looked at my watch and i realized that i realized that folks might want to take a brief um break uh forgive me for disruption and and everyone can catch their breath but my right commissioners you probably would like to just take a brief brief break so it is um quarter of of 12 uh 10 minutes does that make sense okay so we'll come back with five of 12 and crystal you are right on spot in terms of the timing today so thank you thank you chelsea my apologies well so commissioner hill that was your first first um research presentation right very nice very well put together yeah they do a nice job yeah i feel like you may have watched one before you actually joined us too i can't remember what it was thank you so i'm just looking commissioner cameron are you back i am okay great then i'll just do a roll call commissioner cameron i am here commissioner oprahion i am here commissioner hill i'm here so we're all set to proceed now to our our our game sense presentation quarterly report which we look forward to thank you so much for giving us a chance to take a quick break i'll say i'll turn it over to you okay perfect uh good afternoon uh gentlemen judstein commissioners hill um cameron and oprahion uh thank you so much for the opportunity to present to you before today we're really excited to share with you uh some of the things we've been up to at the game sense centers across all three properties um it's okay i'm just going to share my screen i'm sorry chelsea if i didn't do a proper introduction to uh commissioner hill i don't think you've had a chance to to speak to him you've met with him yeah we actually have it's okay thank you thank you so much no worries i'm grateful that you don't need to necessarily introduce me at every time anymore can everybody see my screen yeah just so you know we're seeing your um it's not in the full screen yet if you want to there that's perfect thank you all right terrific so as um as mark indicated today with me are the game sense advisors from each of the properties amy from mgm ronda from ppc and lind from encore um but before we get started i also just wanted to give a shout out to marie claire who helped to gather some of the numbers and data for this uh for this presentation tonight and also for mark and to mark and to marlene for um also their contributions in helping to shape this report so today we're going to talk about a number of things we're going to start with the quarterly numbers which is sort of our traditional format where we talk about how we're doing with our engagements at the centers and on the casino floor also the vse numbers and the reinstatements um how we're doing remote vse's and we're looking forward to sharing that with you we'll move on to talking about our champion awards um at each of the properties these are awards that distinguish uh casino employees at each of the properties for going above and beyond uh when it comes to responsible gambling or problem gambling we'll move into responsible gambling education week for anybody that doesn't know responsible gambling education week is a week in september um this was an initiative started by the american gaming association it is uh traditionally uh patron facing uh unlike pgam which is back of the house facing in other words uh we predominantly focus on reaching patrons within each of the casinos during this week uh by engaging them in a number of fun and educational activities and events and uh really partnering and collaborating with the casinos on these efforts we did do some stuff back at the house as well and we'll touch on that briefly um we had a plethora of activities this year a lot of new fresh material um deeped in research including uh the low risk gambling dialynes and a lot having to do in positive play every single one of our activities touched on something relating to positive play and what we've learned from that research we're really trying to use that to drive what we're doing um in order to try to uh focus and focus in on our efforts um and then um uh september was also recovery month so we want to talk just a little bit about some of the things we did to help celebrate recovery month out in the community we're not going to talk a ton about communications today but we did want to just highlight live chat quickly um that's a some live chats newer technology that we're using um to engage with um patrons and we've had some real successes so we wanted to uh share that with you and lastly we'll wrap it up by talking about sort you know what's on the horizon what's around the corner so first you're looking at a uh slide that shows our casino related interactions these are interactions that involve you know promotions um questions about you know there are player cards at the casinos that kind of thing they don't necessarily involve uh rg or pg conversations um but nevertheless they're really important because they help us to establish relationships with patrons as you all know oftentimes with folks who um are struggling with their gambling or at risk for gambling or even who are healthy you know in order to educate them it takes many many touches um so these are important and if you look at these um lines you know the green line is on core the red line is mgm and the blue line is ppc and it's not surprising of course that um you know ebh has the most because they're the largest casino followed by mgm and followed by ppc it looks like you know when you first look at the slide that the the interactions are going down so you might think oh well what does that mean but as you look at the next two slides you'll understand why they go down because our our interactions in the other categories in in fact the more important categories are going up so this is just the the casino engagements this slide is simple interactions these are also not they they're important all the interactions important because all the touches matter as i just said but these are things like hello how are you oh that right red socks game last night's really stunk didn't it um you know hopefully we'll get them in the next game and he's dead um you know or you know where where can i go where's the cage any sort of anything about directions in the casino kind of just your basic questions so you know not surprisingly as you look at these slides the numbers across all three properties are pretty solid um and you know and tell a good story i think this next slide to me is is more important than the first two the this is um reflects our intensive interactions these are our demonstrations and exchanges this is when we're really getting into conversation with patrons about responsible gambling it can be through inactivity it can be through questions about bsc's it can be because you're explaining the differences on house edge between american and european roulette but these are really as it says in the in the caption up in the left hand corner the meat and potatoes of what we do and you know when i look at this slide i'm really happy about it i'm not surprised that september is the highest um because that's when rgw is so it's going to um be a little bit inflated in somewhat or in some ways artificially so because we are putting so much into that um but these numbers are really good and what you can't see on this slide but i do want to share with you is one of the things i've been looking at is sort of year over year how are how are we doing so you know we have um a little bit less staff than we did last year we also are have staff that are covering the overnight shift at ebh so we've changed things a little bit how are we doing year over year and if you look year over year we are our intensive interactions are up at all three properties so i'm really happy about that um and i think that's also probably reflective of the fact that the casinos have been busy as we all know um but these are good strong numbers that i think um show how hard our staff is working this slide's also a really important one this is our vsc slide um our voluntary self-exclusions um we are actually nearing 1000 um active vscs um on the list uh in massachusetts and we've been talking about um how we're going to um to share that with the public that's a really big number um obviously we've had more than 1000 folks sign up for vscs but pretty soon within the next week or two we'll probably have a list where it's 1000 current vscs so um because people roll off the vsc the vsc list as you know but vscs are a really critical um uh activity that the what's not activity a critical engagement that the our game sense advisors in and this is where a patron has decided for whatever reason they want to self exclude um from the gaming floor and they can do this uh for one year three or five years um and then if they want to reenroll they also have a lifetime be an option but you can't do that on the first round um a couple interesting things one um our most popular vsc is actually the five-year term which um i think is pretty interesting um and the other thing that i think that's interesting if you look at this slide is that we are now averaging a little over one vsc a day um now that's across all three properties but i think that that is um is significant as as most of you know um we implemented a procedure um i was like in the winter this past winter probably about yeah around january where we are able to do remote vscs um which is fantastic so that means that during the overnight shift at um ppc and mgm when we don't when our game sense center is closed the only one that we operate 24 hours is an encore if somebody wants to do a vsc during those late hours we can do that remotely you can also do it remotely no matter where you're from so if you're if you are you don't have to be inside a casino to do a vsc so for people who are struggling with their gambling and going back into casino uh can be a trigger for them it's a great option and then further more um anybody that has transportation challenges again this provides a nice solution and if you look at these remote vsc enrollments you see you know we're really starting to increase that number three in july four in august and nine in september we're not doing a ton of vscs during the overnight shift but this is something we're working on trying to promote a little bit more um we think this number could potentially be higher we're continuing to evaluate this and look at our messaging we're doing things like um mini trainings at pre-shift meetings with security staff and table game staff that might be giving us referrals we just want them to know that um we're there and able to do vscs during the overnight shifts particularly if you're a um you know employee at mgm or ppc then if you come down here these are reinstatements these are people that have completed their term for vse and they want to return to gaming um they need to go through a process um where you know we make sure that they understand what they're doing um and you know most folks usually do sometimes those folks um get reinstated and then shortly thereafter they go and re-enroll for a vse um but we track this data as well um and you can see you know it seems like we had a little bump in august um that this number i think is going to ebb and flow a little bit um we're going to probably continue to see more reinstatements because um you know for particularly if you entered into one of these at on core you're just coming up to that time period where you're able to do the reinstatement so um so we're watching that number as well um and then you can see down here female versus male vse enrollees i think this is a this is an interesting statistic and in part i think it's interesting because our interaction data is different than this our interaction data um indicates that we have more interaction slightly more with females than males so the fact that we have more male vse enrollees is just it's interesting and something we're going to keep watching um and then as you know we have quite a number of vse's who request follow-ups um from our vse outreach and recovery liaison jody who's a person in long-term recovery just does a dynamic job for us at this time i'm going to turn it over to our awesome uh game sense team um who are going to talk about uh our champion awards um and we're going to start with on core and lin ho good afternoon everybody good afternoon madam chair commissioners uh commissioner hill welcome award nice to meet you uh this is lin ho i'm a senior game sense advisor on core uh today i'm going to tell you three of the recipient at on core for the champions awards the first one is augusto tomadon his attendance uh he has many conversations with our game sense advisor about the science of problem gambling and the best way to support both patrons as well as friends and family that um when they are ready they can work towards recovery he always finds ways to learn more about our program by uh interacting with our game sense advisors um and uh to get more information to help uh with his loved ones and also for the people that he worked at the casino with the second recipient is batalo presidio he's a security batalo always extremely helpful whenever asked for assistance in addition batalo is very welcome into new security and spend extra time with them uh to give them a full explanation about game sense and routinely advises them to come to game center uh to uh to get more information he always assists guests to come to the game center for any regarding the gaming habits uh his dedication to promoting the idea of responsible gaming game sense to both employees and guests make him an outstanding candidate for this award um our last recipient is pauline chow pauline chow is in table games uh she is a pit manager pauline has uh been very helpful and supportive uh by referring guests uh to games sense she also has an instrumental uh in helping our newest game sense advisor uh with some of the table games rules on core boston harvard office these provides outstanding customer service and maintains a good connection with our game sense advisor three these three folks are i mean a lot of the employee from on core they are very very helpful and supportive of them and i credit them back to our new hire trainings that we do on a daily basis with their employees so uh i want to pass this on to uh my colleague emi cabral good afternoon guys uh thank you so much for allowing us this opportunity to uh tell you a little about what we're up to uh welcome to everybody new commissioner hill i can't wait to talk to you about uh music and hopefully you're a movie guy too um anyway off track so i'm here right now to talk to you a little bit about the mgm champion awards for this quarter and i will say that the good news is there's so many people to choose from uh within the mgm staff uh so that's a great thing the problem is trying to pick people uh trying to narrow it down so that's a great problem to have and i'm blessed to have it so our three recipients this time around we're going to start with laraine mires she is a table games floor supervisor she's a hard worker she's been in gaming she understands gaming and she understands gamblers and she has completely embraced not only the game sense advisors but the program every time i walk the floor she has conversations with me about what she sees on the floor what's going on with players you know anything that she sees that we might want to interject on and just is always willing to put in a hand to make sure that our players stay safe and they're having fun and they're healthy our second recipient this time around is surely chappell from environmental services surely is awesome uh surely has had multiple conversations with multiple advisors about game sense uh was so surprised that a program like this is happening and really really believes in what we can do to help people and she's kind of my person that she's my eyes and ears and places in the casino where i might not be um you know she doesn't necessarily front face was played with players in a gaming environment but she's always around and she kind of hears the general uh chatter about what folks are saying what myths they're believing in how how their relationship is with gaming and is always willing to bring those stories back and and let me know that she really hopes they come talk to us and i'm guessing maybe at some point they have so thanks to surely and our last recipient this time around is brendan plant again from security he's a model guard uh takes primates work he has escorted patrons over to game sense on multiple occasions and he always does it discreetly professionally and with compassion which is part of what game sense does and he's bought into that he always asks questions make sure he's up to date on any of our changes procedures um what's going on with game sense what we're doing for the week with our with our quizzes in our baskets and he's just always there to make sure that together because it's a team effort we're keeping patrons safe and we're providing them with any relevant resources i thank them all the ones of the past these guys and the ones to come thank you very much and now i'm going to turn it over to ronda to talk to you a little bit about ppcs rock stars thank you amy uh thank you everybody for having me very excited to be here thank you chelsea and marlene for inviting me this is my first meeting so i'm very excited um so i'll talk about our three people who won the awards and the first one is andrew shell he's fantastic he's the first person that came up to me and and made me feel welcome here at ppc when i transferred he uh he actually told me about game sense and was telling me how important it was and um every time he sees somebody in need he'll send him our way and he's just fantastic and i'm so glad that he um is part of this and then we have russell selvetella he's in food and beverage he is so sweet and so kind um he had noticed a guest who is not in a good place and um he made us aware of ronnie um who works with me aware of a woman who's having difficulties or he felt like she was and um um ronnie ended up speaking with her and she really was in a poor place and it was so good that russell could acknowledge that and know what was going on ronnie just helped her out completely with everything she needed so with russell's help she and the guest intern got helped so we're very thankful for russell and then we go to greg who is also very kind i know i'm saying everybody's kind but they really are and um not only does he help with um guests come over to um game sense he also will help us with anything that breaks down at the center or um if we need to get in the warehouse he's right there he's always smiling and and happy to help us all the time so we're very grateful for greg as well now the picture on the side on the right side is um the people who won um the quarter before and that is charlie with mark and michelle and uh lenny and then there's me in the picture as well and what's so great about ppc is they make it into a celebration so they make it fun and um not only do we take pictures but they also take pictures and they not only do we thank everyone that wins but so do they so it's so nice that we can do that together and um it's wonderful and um madam chair i want to say thank you so much for writing your thank you notes and just being a part of everything we're so grateful and thank you so much thank you ronnie i just want to interrupt because i'm sure uh all of us are taken um by the enthusiasm of your three representatives today chelsea we always love to hear from amie and lin and now welcome to ronda this is just outstanding so thank you for taking time uh out of your date to um to to present these champions and ronda welcome thank you thank you very much so this next slide is about rgw it's always fun it's always i very much enjoyed doing tables i enjoy guests i enjoy the craziness of it because it is crazy but it's exciting as well um on our first slide it shows how evh and um will come together with us and put signs up on their end cap now with working at on core i have i've seen these um end caps and people read them constantly they really do because they want to know what's going on so with them just popping this in it's fantastic we're very grateful for evh for that and the next picture is ryan lin and um i miss them terribly they're such good people and that is in back of the house which is i think it's great because um not only do our guests need to know but at least with the um other staff members knowing about um responsible gaming week um they can in turn tell the patrons what is going on so it's very exciting now the next picture is our rag wheel at pbc um what we do is we have um we educational quizzes and we just try to make everything fun and then once when they do that they'll be able to spin the wheel and get a gift so getting a gift is always nice i love it so i'm thinking a lot of people probably do so it's fun and it's entertaining so and educational which is extremely important um the next picture is a gentleman who won our past basket at mgm um in order to win the baskets monthly baskets we do do quizzes um every single month and every day they can do a quiz so um it is not just fun and you get a gift but it's also educational and um you get to meet lots of people and sometimes they'll fill it out and go oh i didn't know this oh i didn't know that so we get to we really do get to touch beat the more guests that way so the next picture is one it's in the back of not the back of the house i'm sorry it's the promotional area on core and when it says it's rare quiet moment it truly is because once they open the promotional section it's constantly busy at these tables it looks so pretty in the beginning and you try to keep them looking pretty the tables but it's very hard because there's always guests asking questions and coming over it's just a really fun time um the next picture is shawn um who is leaning over the desk um i used to work with shawn at on core so i know him um specifically and i know aisha too so he's educating somebody through either a quiz or a demonstration on the ipad so it's fun that we we can actually work with them instead of just handing the excuse me handing them a paper so it is very exciting um and then last but not least there is um tori and me at our table at um ppc getting ready before everyone just comes in and um it is exciting because we can we have paper quizzes then we have um quizzes on our laptop there and then they get gifts and a lot of times what i notice is people will come over and they'll be like what's this and they'll be like oh we've seen you but we thought you would just design people out and this way we can explain to people oh no we do lots of things we educate so it's it's really a good wonderful time so that's our rge w thank you and now i'm going to turn you over to lan who's going to talk to you about our quizzes and activity thank you ronda thank you ronda i miss you yes uh so anyway um during this um week uh rge w week uh we created quizzes and activities at the centers um this year we have positive play quiz quiz and also mooncake festival quiz um play my way quiz uh at pbc and also learn about the low risk gaming guidelines quiz uh we have a near-miss activity and scenario activities um we just been saying is we are lucky this year that the mid-autumn festival uh fall during this week so it attract a lot of asian guests come to the game sense centers and also come to the promotion uh uh tables and i have never seen so much asian population guests that come to our game sense at this uh this time of year than any other time besides new year and we also have a cake uh mooncake giveaway we give away a small mooncake to uh to do a guest but they are very appreciated that things that we do the little things that we do to uh to interact with them and to to educate them about our program and that also shown in the involvement of the asian guests uh through the game sense they always come by um talk to us and we always offer them any kind of advice that we can uh and that also show on the vsc enrollments a lot of vsc enrollment these days are come from a lot of asian players you know so uh i really appreciate uh with the quizzes and the activity that our game sense are creating and to involve all populations uh and everybody can take talks in these kind of quizzes and activities and it's another way of us getting to uh interact with uh the guests from all different backgrounds and all different ages they can always play any kind of games or quizzes that they would like to play when they come to the game sense centers and some of these quizzes here activity that we have uh know the arts uh quizzes and also slot simulator um the swag real randomness activity is one of our most i mean it's very popular to the guests it's similar it just worked just like a slot machine so we kind of explain how the slot works so that way they will inform how slot machines work so they make that better decision when they they actually play at a slot machines we also trivia challenged uh here and also games and at the promotion team that ronda was mentioned earlier that we attract a lot a lot of uh people come to our uh table at encore at mgm and also at playing and i you know uh very appreciated that you know this uh week happened uh and it's so successful throughout three properties and we get to know so much people and people get to know so much about our program we therefore and now i would like to turn over to amy hi guys i hope you can hear me we are actually fulfilling game sense duties at the moment of this presentation doing of the se for a patron so if you hear you know the printer in the back i can yell louder believe me uh so we're going to give you just a couple demos and some of the things that we uh we did during rgw week uh this one here is called the near miss activity and basically what we did here was try to get against immediate reaction to seeing this image of this slot machine with two sevens on the pay line and one hanging right above um so we don't want you to thank guys we want this to be quick we want to know what that immediate reaction is when you see that image and i would argue most of the time the immediate reaction was something along the lines of oh crap i almost hit it or oh there it goes again i used to think that mattered but that doesn't matter obviously because i didn't work when i kept putting money and um you know i almost won oh i lost again these were the typical things that came up and they're all right and we would transition as a game sense advisor into saying yes this is what we call a near miss effect and honestly the bottom line with that is it looks like you might have almost won but the truth is it doesn't mean anything uh slot machines are all run on random number generators and this type of image this type of of spin is just one of a bazillion that the slot machines generator can come up with so it doesn't mean you're any closer or further from hitting a big prize or a jackpot so we just want people to understand that you know if you want to keep playing a machine it's your favorite machine and you're you're happy and you're you're healthy and you're within your budget please by all means we want you to have fun but don't ever think that an image like this that comes up so often has anything to do whether with whether you're going to be coming up on a win a slot machine is never due for a win each spin is independent it doesn't matter what you've seen before so that was a quick thing that we did that i think was actually really successful that got guys you know got these guests actually thinking about immediately what their first reaction is and why and then allowed us to give an explanation another thing that we did was a scenarios activity and i'm going to date myself here um i don't know if any of you all remember as kids to choose your own adventure books where you know you would be a knight on a mission and you would get to a crossroads and then in the book you would get to make your choice of what your next move was and then the story would dictate from there what happened with the with the narrative in the story so this is kind of where i was going uh that's that's kind of how i got to this point let's do something like that with different scenarios from the casino for these guys so scenario one in this activity is you have only been playing for an hour and you just hit for a thousand dollars on your favorite slot what do you do um and this a thousand dollars is a random amount this whatever is a large amount of money for you whether that's two hundred dollars a thousand whatever is the kind of money that would make you go oh my goodness um so they had a few things to choose from here one was grab something to eat and take off because that money is going to go a long way b i pocket half the money or so and i have fun playing with the rest because i enjoy it but this way i know i'm leaving with some and see i play with all of it because it must be my lucky day i want to win more and then based on what their answer is and they might have had a different answer in which case we go from there but most people pick from these so if they answered a great can't can't imagine a better scenario that's awesome it's hard to leave when you hit a prize it goes kind of against everything we think is human psychologically but you did it and you realize that it's not easy to win and that money can can go a long way for you so great on you they might have answered c listen we get it you want to go for it gambling is totally fun sometimes and if you have an early win you get all excited the dopamine's flowing you're thinking to yourself what can i do in the next two hours if i just did that and listen it's your call we tell them but at the end of the day we just want you to know that a previous one has no bearing on future events so just because you got real lucky here right from the start doesn't mean that that trend will continue and we just want you to consider pocketing even just a little bit of that that profit so that you're guaranteed to leave with something um so that's kind of how we would handle that scenario one more quick one for you you accidentally arrived very early for a promotional giveaway it happens all the time believe it or not people do come early all the time either miss read an email or what have you you do not want to leave so you start to play some of your favorite games before the promotion even starts you have used your whole gambling budget you know you must be playing to qualify for the promo prizes what do you do so just to give a little background a lot of times they'll give away free slot play but but your your card has to be in the machine and be active for you to qualify for that so that's the situation here if i've run out of money what am i going to do i know i have to have my card in you know to qualify for this promotion so a i will check on my finances to see if i can afford to make one trip so that i can get in the promotion okay that's showing you thinking about whether this is a good idea you know using your phone to check your okay you know what this week i worked a little over time i can do that i'm going to stick around i'll make one trip b i drove all the way here because of this promotion so i will visit the atm as many times as i need so i can have a chance and see i will cut my losses and make sure i know what time the promotion is next time they happen all the time i'm not worried about it so a couple of the ways this could go hey reasonable idea listen you set a budget you realize that you hit it but you're going to evaluate it and see if one trip is going to be manageable then you can stay for the promotion and again this is promoting that positive play you know honesty and control um what can you afford and how is it going to affect you um so totally reasonable to have that answer b you're going to stay no matter what hey this is normal you drove all the way out here you're excited about the promotion unfortunately there was a little mishap in the timing so it's understandable to be frustrated that you might miss that opportunity but things don't always go as planned especially in gambling believe me after 24 years in the industry and sometimes the better option is to just wait for the next promotion unfortunately spending more than you anticipate can be upsetting and and could cause problems always want to keep it fun and we want people coming back and playing with what they can afford we don't want your your relationship with gambling to become bad because of these situations when you're frustrated so you know come with what you can afford every once in a while the best move is to walk away and wait for the next go around uh is this land am I turning it over to win yes so thank you Amy so as you guys see this big pictures numbers here um the total guests that participate in the quiz and activities over three thousands uh guests who visited the promo table at Bronco is over four thousand guests that engage in exchange or demonstration interactions uh it's over five thousand and casino related interactions uh it's over one thousand a simple interaction as Chelsea mentioned earlier it's uh almost up to five thousand and people reached by trainings in new high orientations are reached uh for during this month uh during the week of RGE is uh 282 so a special thing it takes everybody to make the this uh successful week happens so uh a big thank you go out to all three casinos um MGM um Plain Ridge Park Casino and Encore for their great collaborations and partnership with uh GameSense um they have donated a lot of materials during this week to our program uh such as for Plain Ridge Park Casino they donated 30 gift card of $50 gift card to casino staff who completed a VSC quizzes uh in the back of house and also they donated $500 gift cards to complete the VSC quiz for chess to win also one $100 gift card to expect a great restaurant there at Plain Ridge Park Casino for patrons facing basket and also all the digital signage throughout the properties including the GameSense and training that we total have uh 12 new high training over the past three months um and at MGM uh MGM has sent out a VSC quiz to all staff to do during that RGEW week and also they donated for four MGM pleases for a chess to win to the basket and they also display digital signage throughout properties and I appreciate very a lot of effort from MGM to help this week happening and at EPH uh EPH donated gift cards for the basket giveaway uh they donated four $25 uh for Amaha gift uh Steak's House gift card and also one $50 Visa gift card uh also they also helped us to get out the referrals for the VSC from the employees um and also they allow us to partner up with the promotion team during the week uh of the RGE there and the signage are everywhere from front of the house now they call it not the corner back of the house but they call it the heart of the house which is the back of the house so we very appreciate the the collaborations uh from all three properties and it was a great great success and a special thing and a big thing to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission and also to the Massachusetts Council on Gaming and Health without them I'm thinking that this program exists and it's not successful as we we've seen it successful and thank you very much Marlene and Chelsea for for for you know guiding us to to to where we are right now and I think I guess I can see it uh in the future this program it's just just getting uh much much more successful so thank you everybody for being involved in this particular great great week four for us so as Chelsea mentioned earlier September is also recovery month so very busy in September for the council and for for GameSense and we love that we love activity so in September we certainly did more than just RGEW um GameSense had seven different tabling events free community based designated agent trainings and uh we did a community access tv show Charlie Orduely um did it and it was on gambling in the military service and unexpected risk which is fantastic I heard that went very very well Jody Nealy our recovery liaison and our our primary person that does recovery had six recovery recovery awareness presentations you see up top there on the right she did um she did a presentation to raise awareness at the new beginnings peer recovery center in Lawrence which was fantastic and I also joined Jody for recovery day in spring here in Springfield out in Western Mass and we had a table out there in the park it was a nice day got to talk to a lot of people about the VSC program as well as the new virtual VSC option so that was fantastic and Jody also um had some some some action going on with uh telephone recovery support um so for those you don't know when people do a VSC we offer them a follow-up but those those those follow-ups Jody don't always have to come from somebody doing a VSC so Jody had six participants that she she talked to 11 total people four came from VST follow-ups four were unrelated to to the VSC of those 11 six chose to participate in the tele telephone recovery services which is pretty awesome basically they set up um you know times where Jody is going to do regular check-ins with them over a certain extended amount of time uh whether it's once a week or whatever they decide to do together so that's another fabulous thing that you know that's done that can keep people having somebody in their corner making sure they have all the support that they need on that journey to recovery so super fabulous that you know we got to be involved in recovery month and and do these types of things so live chat is something that's relatively new to us at game sense um just another way for us to reach and communicate with not just even people in the commonwealth people from all over the place um and that's fantastic and I was lucky enough to get one of these calls a couple weeks ago um and we just kind of wanted to show you a little bit about how this works uh had a had had a person call up that wanted to enroll in the exclusion program you know I picked it up uh I asked where they were and they were actually like I said not in Massachusetts they were in Georgia um but they still wanted to do the exclusion mask because they were going to be visiting uh they asked if they could do it online yes we can actually yes we can so what happened was I made a quick quick call to to boston to ebh um ed gardo answered the phone right away and I told him the situation and he was basically waiting in the office for this call uh got back with the patron explained to them what was happening and that we could take care that and you know if they had any more questions jump on but that ed gardo was going to meet all their needs today we're going to take care of them and you know ended the chat and the great thing about this and we love this because we don't always know how things turn out or we don't necessarily always get feedback in this case the person was nice enough to actually come back in and leave a comment thanking me and thanking ed gardo for helping them so that they can recover that means a lot to us um you know that's that warm fuzzy feeling when you're driving home hey we we did something right today we helped somebody and especially in this new format just fantastic and I was so excited to get the feedback and we've been getting a lot of vse's out of out of the live chat and and you know turning people to the right resources so just a fabulous new thing that we got going on and it's going well and now chelsea with a little bit about what's coming up thanks Amy and thank you Lynn and ronda for helping me out today just a quick few things that are on the horizon that we'll be reporting on at our next quarterly presentation one we are doing holiday toy drives in collaboration with the casinos we've worked with ppc on these initiatives the last couple years but this year we're also working with mgm and mass live in springfield and um with encore in the city of everett um near boston so we're super excited really we're honestly piggybacking a lot on their already existing efforts but we just figure the more the merrier the more we can help promote things and get into the holiday spirit and you know we also use this as a way to get our messaging out things like you know it's a good idea to set a budget when you come to the casino it's a good idea to um set a budget are you or sorry you you set a budget when you do your holiday shopping it's a good idea to set a budget when you come to the casino that kind of stuff so it's a fun way for us to um collaborate with the casinos and to do something good for everyone um lower skin wing guidelines i'm i know you've all heard a little bit about that we are getting me deep in those we just had a great presentation by marie claire so thank you to her for for those that effort we plan to really try to use that information inside of the at the casino and also outside in the community and through social media so more to come on that play my way we cannot wait for play my way to come to mgm every time i visit mgm the staff there uh is really looking forward to having that budget setting tool um there they know what the successes are at ppc and it's just going to be another um another skill in our wheelhouse and then lastly pgm we just finished rgw and we're about to start planning for pgm which is throughout the month of march um and that's a really fun time for us as well it's not unlike rgw except for it it's more focused on back in the house and educating casino staff so we are looking forward to that um and without further ado if anybody has any questions we would be happy to answer them thank you very very much for having us here today we really appreciate your time thank you chelsea if we could take down the the great slideshow thank you men and amy and ronda outstanding um questions for from the commissioners want to raise hands or commissioner cameron maybe i'll start with you otherwise there you are do you have a comment i wish you yes one quick question and then a comment um and chelsea this was way back to the beginning of this presentation when you talked about um you should show the slide of um the percentage of men versus women who are um in the voluntary self-exclusion program and i just wondered how that's and you said that's an interesting fact and i wondered how that's stacked up against our the numbers what what are the you know the the percentages of men versus women i know that men in particular young men um sometimes have more of a prevalence but i just wondered how those numbers stacked up and do we have any ideas about why so many more men involve themselves in the program you know we don't really know this is a number we're going to be looking at a little bit more with um mark and long and mary claire um what i do know is that the as i said the interaction numbers at the centers tend to be um uh higher a little bit higher towards females and males particularly at mgm um and we and like you just said we do know that um focusing on in particular young men is a is an area for us to be working on this year um according to the data that we've seen from uh positive play research in particular mark i don't know if you there's anything you want to add to that so you're getting to the correlation between problem gambling um among men versus women correct commissioner cameron that's correct yes yeah mark do we have that stat handy or um i don't actually that's really that's that's actually interesting uh commissioner cameron that's just wondered when when chelsea made the presentation i found it interesting that slide and i just wondered what uh but you you can get back to me on that but just as far as a comment you know we see many many presentations over the you know the years now of of this young commission and um and they're all substantive and they're all actually very very interesting i said but this is always the feel good one right this is always the presentation where there's so much enthusiasm and passion for the program knowing you're doing such good work and really being able to help people so i just i just want to thank you all for your belief passion you're not just going through the motions and how you keep it fresh i mean we've heard many many quarterly reports now but it's hard it's hard to keep a program fresh and you all do it well and i'm sure that's why the numbers are so outstanding with with interactions and um and in every other phase of this so just a big thank you and um always really makes a difference to me to hear it and for the work you do on behalf of the mgc and the council just outstanding so thank you all excellent thanks commissioner cameron you raised the exact question i had when i heard that statistic so i i guess my instinct was i wonder if that lines up with the um the correlation of problem gambling so we'll stay tuned um commissioner uh a brian and then i'll go to commissioner hill uh certainly i had a similar question to that one it was um is do you have a suspicion or anything as to why the interactions with women are more um than the sign-ups does it have anything to do with women being more likely to do the casual interactions and that not follow up or i don't know if you had any further comment on the difference in that number you know it's it's i'm gonna let um amy give you her perspective or or lin or ronda since they're the ones at the centers but it's something i i i think it's interesting i notice it every month when i'm looking at the monthly reports um and and i guess what i would say the the thing i wanted to say before i turn it over to them is that we actually have more male staff so than we than females so about one third of our staff are female um and two thirds are male so in some ways it seems again antithetical so it's just interesting um amy what are your thoughts i would definitely say that we get more females and you can tell this by our monthly data um that come to visit the center for our monthly activities quizzes games etc um whether it's that they're just more willing to kind of lake chelsea said come up and see hey what's this about um and have that conversation i'm not sure i know one of our main objectives this quarter is going to find ways to uh reach out to and and have younger males be interested in in what we're doing at the center so that we can we can speak with them um why do women do less bsc right now than men like i would like to argue it's because more women come and talk to us and then don't need to do the bsc but i could be wrong about that um you know i'm just being but no it's a very interesting question and i'm not sure i would argue that women seem to be more interested in the gift baskets and stuff maybe a little bit more like i said part of what we're really gonna you know barrel down on this quarter is how do we get those young guys you know what kind of technology do we need which what outlet can we use that's going to drive them a little bit more to the center i see that marlene marlene looks like she wants to weigh in do you would you like to i i don't i don't want to interrupt that no i'm just going to say good afternoon and thank you for the questions i i mean i do think there's more for us to look at specific to the sigma data but i think one of the things we traditionally know is that men tend to get into gambling start to gamble much earlier in their lifetimes and women and men tend to take a longer time to just determine that they need help and to access that help women although they start gambling later there's a much shorter time period by which they then determine they need help so that doesn't necessarily explain the bsc piece but it could explain you know some of the interaction numbers in terms of wanting to seek help or wanting to talk to someone who might know more about their gambling so because maybe they don't know nearly as much though but we certainly can get back to us in more of these details and if i can just interject commissioner cameron i pulled it up the prevalence rate in our baseline general population survey the prevalence rate of problem gambling among males is 3.1 percent in the females it's 1.1 percent so it's significantly higher among men that makes sense thank you and that ratio is represented there that's that's very helpful one last thing just a little antidote to add to this is as we are continuing to sort of self evaluate what works and what doesn't at the at the centers and sometimes we'll test a quiz and then we'll and then we'll get some feedback and then we'll tweak it based on you know what works and what doesn't but one of the things that we're really noticing is that the more that we're using interactive technology so what you couldn't see in Amy's demonstrations today is all of that stuff is hyperlinked and it's hard to appreciate what it looks like on the monitor when you're doing it in person but it's different than how you're seeing it that how you guys saw it today and so we've done a number of different activities and quizzes using technology whether it's a randomness quiz wheel or a game where you pick different numbers out and it has to do with odds that we're finding our younger folks are more interested in so to Amy's point the baskets might be attract more females maybe a little bit older and then these interactive more techy things seems to be drawing in younger men which is what we're trying to do so we continue to try to again offer a variety of things to a variety of people but really paying attention to who we're reaching while we're doing it. Thank you. Commissioner Hill did you want to comment or have a question? I find it interesting that through the entire presentation that all four of us kind of keyed in on the same thing which was that statistics on the men and the women because as the presentation was going on that I got that going in my mind as well but I think Commissioner Cameron and Commissioner O'Brien got the answers to the questions that I may have had in that regard so I'll just make this statement as the newbie on the on the block I think when the gaming bill was passed many years ago there are many who felt that bringing expanded gaming to Massachusetts would also bring problem gambling to Massachusetts and I think this program the game sense really is a program that we all envisioned would work for Massachusetts and has worked for Massachusetts as I'm hearing the presentations go on and I see people like Amy and Rhonda and Lynn I'm give their presentations which were very very impressive I can see firsthand the love that you have for this job and the fact that you want to help these individuals it comes out in the way that you present and certainly in the programs that you have offered so my only comment would be is congratulations and great job on a job well done because what you are doing is what we had hoped would happen when we passed the bill many years ago the legislature felt very concerned I should say about what could happen by bringing expanded gaming here and you folks have in my opinion alleviated a lot of those fears which is a hard work to do for this particular issue so thank you thank you sir so we all did focus on that stat or that that you raised first Chelsea and I think we we figured out that there's probably a fair correlation there I was interested in Lynn's observation if I heard it correctly that the VSC numbers right now are showing increase in the Asian community signing in is that did I hear that right Lynn that is correct chair as I work at the encore I see that I observe and I also conducted many of the voluntary substitution and I can see the number of the Asian populations are right and there's one particular month the number at encore is 50 percent of the population is Asian are Asian that sign up for that this program and that credit go to our team for talking about it for community to the Asian populations about the program that we have to offer and a lot of them know about the volunteer substitution that we had so they are taking advantage of that program to enroll into it and they really help a lot of people I have people that come to me and roll it for one year and they came back and they take their name off and then after this then two weeks because you know they came back they say you know what I need to do it again and this really helped me when the time I was out really helped me put my life together and it really helped me put my family together so I see it different by working at the casino and interact with a lot of Asian folks that I interact with and also in the community that we do outreach I do table events I do presentation inside the surrounding communities and we talk about what we have to offer for this population and the successful I can see it in the record that shows and the numbers that we show it's improving and I'm very excited to to go forward with this in the surrounding communities and it's really helping a lot of people. Thank you for that and Marlene that's really I think an important you know really data point of intentional outreach and efforts so congratulations thank you that that's really really yeah very intentional and I will say that you know we've increased our staff um and at Encore and and to Lynn's point not just the community outreach but also I'd say they've done a lot of work um reaching out to the to the staff on site and making sure that a lot of those relationships are um happening so that there's a lot of referrals happening so yeah it's it's working just as we have intended and we only plan to increase those efforts excellent great outcome so I applaud you for that Chelsea and Marlene and Lynn thank you on that and then the only other thing I wanted to like I have so many comments that I noted but limited time so just congratulations um overall with a wonderful um optimistic report and I guess one big takeaway and it was your slide Lynn and I think I've already used the phrase today for something else but it does take a village so I would just want to comment and and echo um our appreciation and gratitude for the three licensees continued collaboration and partnership with with uh game sense and in the council on um all the responsible gaming efforts uh but you know today we celebrate uh I guess it's nine members of the casino staff but we also celebrate the leadership at each property so thank you any further questions for this this group it is it is one o'clock and I think our agenda said uh predicted a one o'clock conclusion to this um wonderful presentation so thank you appreciate it very very much thank you Mark thanks Amy always great to see you all can't wait to see you in person Lynn and Rhonda I'm glad to see you here um when I welcomed you of course it was welcoming you to your first uh presentation here thank you so much I appreciate your time thank you uh Mark are you all set I am I just thank you so much to for this really talented team I'm grateful for that yeah and um so now we are we are predicting a lunch break before we move on to Alex's and uh shorter uh request and the legal division's shorter request so we do we want to stay on for lunch break now do you want to continue and then come back to community mitigation I'm up for anything whatever it works for Eileen you're shaking your head lunch break now I agree all right and Commissioner Cameron says yes all right so we'll reconvene at 130 and then uh so Dr. Lightbaum can plan on that and then we'll hear from legal Todd and then we'll move into our community mitigation guidelines presentation very um very meeting meeting today and I thank everyone for your attention see you at 130 130 thanks Alex thank you so much hi Austin I think we'll get started Commissioner Cameron are you back I am here thank you great uh I'll do the roll call then uh Commissioner Bryan I am here and Commissioner Hill I'm here so the four of us are back thank you everyone for allowing us that that uh short break busy day today and um I think we can get started with Dr. Lightbaum and chatter here so good afternoon um we are reconvening officially public meeting 358 and we are on item number five of our agenda good afternoon uh Dr. Lightbaum good afternoon before we get started on our agenda item I just wanted to remind everybody that um this Monday are the finals of the sire stakes the mass spread races down at Plain Ridge so it should be an exciting day of uh good Massachusetts racing and to that point Dr. Lightbaum I just actually uh responded to an e email from north I know that they're expecting us so and Commissioner Bryan you think you'll be there for the horse racing right so um I'll make sure that Crystal Jamie circle back to you Alex to make sure we have a good itinerary for that visit uh especially to accommodate north I don't want him wondering what our timeline is so thank you looking forward to it right Commissioner Hill okay thank you it's going to be exciting let's hope for good weather yes yes and um with that I'll turn it over to our senior financial analyst Chad Bork to talk about the local aid payments thanks Alex good afternoon Madam Chair and commissioners and welcome aboard Commissioner Hill uh so today I have the local aid for the quarter ending September 30th local aid is payable to each city and town where racing activities are conducted the amounts of local aid is at a rate of 0.35 times the handle from the quarter that ended six months prior to the payable date so with that said this quarter using handles from January February and March of this year the city of Boston would receive $118,264.85 the town of Plainville $16,676.15 the town of Rainham $18,688.49 and the city of Revere would receive $59,131.53 for a grand total of local aid for the third quarter of $212,761.02 there is a detailed breakdown um and calculation of all the amounts included in the packet and this does ask for a vote thank you commissioners were you able to access done Chad's excellent a memo just to go through those numbers and the rate is 0.35 times the handle correct great any questions no questions uh Commissioner Cameron any questions uh no questions as always well done and uh self-explanatory very very clear so you need a vote from us today Chad uh our our failure to ask any questions does not in any way reflect our interest yet or the thoroughness of your report it has become a little robotic well robotic but you know it's so essential to get it just right so thank you absolutely so he's looking for a vote today do I have a motion certainly Madam Chair I moved that the commission authorized the local aid payments to the city of Boston town of Plainville the town of Rainham and the city of Revere and the amounts reflected in the memo included in the commissioners packet and discussed here today I second that okay any questions or comments or edits I'll set Commissioner Cameron I Commissioner Brian I Commissioner Hill I vote yes 4-0 Vivian thank you so much and Chad nice to see you yes thank you and thank you again for your your excellent report okay Dr. Leiphan do you have anything else that we need other than uh to be reminded of other than the excitement on Monday no that's it that's pretty much everything right now thank you well we know that you've been very busy so thank you um and taking care of this important business then we'll move on to item number six thank you thank you Chad and Alex thank you good afternoon Todd good afternoon Madam Chair commissioners and all I'm gonna stand in for Ms. Teresee on this this afternoon you have before you of course proposed amendments to three sections of the regulations it's 134.01 02 and 03 you may recall they were before you at the last commission meeting where there was discussion about these and a recommendation was made that there be language included into these sections that would make clear the intent of the sections and clearly limit the outer bounds of the use of these and so you'll see in each of the three drafts that language was inserted at the end of each section that would do just that these in general by way of background are designed to allow employees in very limited circumstances to come work at the casinos from other or sister properties for limited reasons and related to things like training and purposes of that nature the other thing that these amendments do is to remove the emergency requirement and broaden it to allow for such use in a variety of different circumstances but that the initial allowance is for 60 days at the approval of the IEB assuming they make certain findings and then for any extension which would last up to six months the commission would have to authorize that with one limited exception that Ms. Hall who has joined us as well pointed out very astutely this morning that the section that deals with the gaming service employees does not require the commission to authorize the six month extension so that is just something to take note of we can certainly amend that as well if we so desire but that's what we have before you today so of course I'll turn it back over to you madam chair and commissioners ultimately what we would seek to do since this is really the first time the commission has weighed in on these is to get approval or authorization to move them through the promulgation process which of course includes a public hearing and then they come back before you once again for a final review and authorization down the road after we've conducted all of the necessary and the filed the documents and the appropriate places can show Brian you've taken your mute up do you have a question I had two questions one was I did notice that in 134.03 I had it kind of queued up to ask why the different treatment in terms of not only the bureau deciding on the gaming services employees but the other comment that I had also was part of the reason to go back and edit this was you know Massachusetts jobs making sure this wasn't a workaround and the way it's written now with no more than one six month period in a 12 month period to me I still have pause you could still have someone out of state come in and split a job and have it done by an out of state person and come in I I think that 12 months should be more like 18 or 24 because I feel like at that point you'd have a decision to make about filling the position or not I know six out of 12 didn't seem to give me didn't seem to address the concern that I had in terms of my comfort level 18 months or 24 felt like a better time period to me I throw those out for comments to the other commissioners as well so perhaps to your first question because I did not I missed that but I'm really pleased Heather you know and then the commissioner Brian was also going to note it Heather can you explain maybe any of the reasoning or was it inadvertent which would be fine too thank you chair I don't know I do know that that was the version that I received from Kerry and Todd and I have communicated about it and I I know that I did speak with director Lillio yesterday and she indicated that she was comfortable with the revisions that said you know we can certainly make an adjustment and work with Todd and his team on doing that for sure so my follow-up would be can when we talk about the gaming service jobs could you elaborate on the nature of those Todd maybe or absolutely so the jobs themselves of course are typically unrelated to gaming in any way those are not managerial folks or in the executive level they are people typically in food and beverage environmental services things of that nature that don't touch gaming and don't but but they might be involved in alcoholic beverage service and things like that but so that might be the distinction that we draw between when the commission would like to see a request for an extension versus not if that's a meaningful distinction to draw that's something the commission should certainly consider otherwise we could certainly amend this section as well o3 to just be consistent with the others and say that all requests for the six-month extension shall come before the commission for approval and forgive me for another follow-up question this is just I'm not I'm not adequately informed on how these work so gaming service employees are not in that management category correctives that we are looking to so how often do we give well the the exception for out-of-state folks to come in on this is it I could speak to that thank you sure my understanding is that this doesn't happen very often I did speak with Bruce about it and certainly he can supplement what I'm saying but my understanding is that it's generally that we don't get these requests very often there I think was somewhat of an increase because of some of the staffing issues related to COVID and that we do see this type of request if a property is looking to expand a gaming area but generally we don't see them very often and Bruce I'll certainly defer to you to supplement you know I I think you you might see that excuse me if sports betting passes they might bring in some people that have sports betting expertise to train the staff and and that you know in that end or some new game comes in they might bring somebody from another jurisdiction that has that game to help with training but I don't really see it happening for an extended period of time if they they often do it whenever they need advanced training or something for short periods to bring in people but it's you know not an extended long period with COVID yes they've they've brought in people to help uh because of staffing shortages but uh this is in the common practice that that I've seen you know question for director band um I can't imagine the scenario where it would apply to gaming service employees can you yeah me me neither uh uh Christopher Cameron I uh I don't know you know I think the service employees you know just plentiful here as it is in another jurisdiction yeah that's why I'm struggling with it too Commissioner Cameron yeah I'm wondering why we're even uh including that group within this new regulation it would seem like it would just never apply I can't think of one scenario no I mean the existing version might apply the pre-opening phase I could see as currently written yeah into sports betting I imagine some of those people will be hires and coming to the Commonwealth and sticking around if sports betting were to pass but we're not there yet anyway Commissioner Hill what are you thinking I'm digesting what all my fellow commissioners are saying about this Madam Chair so okay thank you okay um so uh Commissioner Bryan I'm not sure my notes did not reflect whether we gave any direction on timing you know the 12 months versus 18 months did we leave that to it was it wasn't specific it was the concept of not wanting them to continually be able to do this and then the example I gave was like a 50-50 split but it's a vaguest person so to try to write it to avoid that kind of scenario which I think might have been where the six months out of 12 came from I see but to me it it doesn't quite the cynic in me says you could still do it versus 18 months would say you know the if it's going to continue you're going to have to get somebody in Massachusetts if you get over that sort of 50 percent mark and when you say get somebody in Massachusetts meaning the hire needs to be in Massachusetts create a Massachusetts job right and or they have to go through the process of getting licensed as opposed to bringing someone in um and cycling somebody in for half the time and not getting licensed etc as written it's not a one-off I mean you could come in on day 366 and start another six months so it's it's sort of the bare minimum of I think that what I was looking for and it addresses somewhat what I can what I was thinking but as I thought it about it when I read this in terms of six months out of a 12-month period I like the fact that it was person and or physician you know that either of them is going to be captured by that I like that language but I did think that the 12 months should be a little bit longer like an 18 so that at that point you'd have to really start thinking about are we getting somebody in full time and or if this person's going to stick around um and be there again six months out they should be licensed I'm really thankful that you walked us through that because I was having a little bit of a hard time figuring out the six months in six months out and just knowing that it would come before us seemed a little cumbersome because you know at a certain point in time we probably say no you you know you you've got to get licensed now because we would see that repetition so I like your song um Commissioner Cameron what are you thinking when you hear Commissioner O'Brien I think it makes sense and that we could certainly make an adjustment to go to go for a longer period of time and again I don't believe that's the intent that's what the our licensees are asking for but having said that I think us being clear is important as well so um yeah I would I would be in favor of a change like that right and if I recall correctly Heather and Bruce um Director Lily I'll explain that one you may have asked for this and it just seems to be a good practical solution anticipating a need correct I'm okay then being a little bit more conservative on this uh Commissioner Hill are you thinking the same um I agree and I think the two points are really important it's I was really driving home last time about I'd like them to hire and keep these jobs in Massachusetts quite frankly and have them come and live here and be part of our ecosystem um but more importantly too if they are here even on a continuing basis whether it's 60 days 90 days you know months short of six months right you start to the need for licensing starts to arise so it's good to have them come back to us I think even if it's a little cumbersome what else should we so go ahead Commissioner O'Brien yes on oh three in terms of gaming services employees is that do we strike that from the other from what we're recommending changing or do we keep that in there so can I ask the way it's written now under the emergency and under the startup gaming service employees could come and be on the gaming floor unlicensed right it's great yeah and we know that up right so up two and then 30 days passed any either suspension of emergency or opening of the facility I guess I'm not terribly comfortable excluding them from this process I'm not really sure it's necessary that they be included in the exemption altogether but like to Commissioner Cameron's early appointment when does this happen right now I can absolutely see it happening leading up to openings of facility right hope they try to get back online I absolutely see as written it makes sense to me now um and for like sports betting um Bruce says you know if something new starting up like that but right so that would justify changing three then because as written I'm not so sure adding gaming adding sports betting I don't think would be covered by this because the opening refers to the opening of the gaming establishment not just the opening of a new amenity amenity and that's really a lot to come in as written and even for sports betting if we're deemed a regulator I'm not sure we can then necessarily back that anyway right I don't know so what um what are we thinking for a solution here take that out all together Commissioner Brian Todd I mean I guess I'm waiting for a little more not waiting I'm looking for a little more of a contextual understanding of why was it done for consistency sake or is there um is the is the sports betting example relevant to this and maybe Bruce you can answer that one like as written if they wanted to bring people in for that if their gaming service employee level they can't do it yeah I I don't think it really applies to to this particular one I think it does probably for the management positions that got it they would bring in people with expertise anyway for the training you know so yeah it maybe looks like oh three is not maybe oh three should stay as is yes and the changes should be to um one and two I'm just gonna I'm pulling it up um yeah so that would apply to key gaming employee licensees positions which is section one and then gaming employee licensees which is point oh two and then if we change the reference um no more than one six month period in an 18 month period and in each of those sub threes yeah then it could go forward but for a new venture they wouldn't bring in somebody at that level right and if we leave that alone as is that during the pre-opening phase etc is still relevant to those people and it does seem pertinent in that circumstance so if you have a regency and they need to be doing this then it's it's written the right way for them correct I agree makes a lot of sense yeah I pulled it up now so I've had a chance to look at it more carefully Todd what do you think in Heather yeah I think it it's all everything sounds very sensible so if I'm understanding the the proposal on the table it would be to just leave oh three as is so they still can petition for temporary uh employees in certain circumstances as it presently stands and that would just stay as it is in the other two sections for key gaming employees and gaming employees we would make the changes to allow a little greater flexibility but ensure that the six month extension only applies to an 18 over an 18 month period and not a 12 month period I think it makes good logical sense the only thing I would add is that of course we don't know specifically whether these sections will apply to sports wagering operations or not or how they may apply or any of that yet so we may have to revisit this whole thing as it applies to those folks anyway but in the short all the more reason to leave it then because right now the only specter on 0.03 is really regency so and it seems as written it's actually better for that scenario than is recommended to be changed yeah I I can't even sports betting will not apply to gaming service employees it just won't so I think this is this is this makes a lot of sense moving forward and what do you think about I'm hearing commissioner brian reference 18 months rather than the 12 months are we comfortable with that do you want to expand I see commissioner hill nodding his head 18 months seems good can show as well okay I am too it makes it makes better math for me when I I had thought maybe we had offered the 12 months okay any further comments or questions Heather how do you feel about this I know that you're a little bit put on the spot but here you are that's fine thank you for asking um I think it sounds fine I do understand the concept of the 18 months and I you know I understand commissioner brian's point and I I think these you know the considerations are discussing what makes sense okay with all this discussion should we are we comfortable moving or do we just not make a motion do we just send it back now I think um madam chair if you'd like you could make the motion subject to the amendments we just discussed you could leave oh three out of the motion since we actually will not be touching it we'll just leave it alone so the motion if you're so inclined would just apply to oh one and oh two with the amendments discussed today um and then we could get it moving forward of course the commission will see this again um when after a public hearing so we can make any further adjustments necessary if other information comes in from the licensees or otherwise um but I think this just kind of gets the ball rolling okay Todd do we need to move separately on the small business impact statement or can be one motion in the at this juncture it's okay to do it together it's the one you've the final approval it should really be separate they have to buy for k okay okay any further questions or comments before we have a motion commissioner hill you all said or do you have questions I believe I'm all set I I never comfortable voting on something without seeing it all in one but I understand what the amendment would be and feel comfortable that that will be added to whatever we vote on today is there any question that you have in terms of you know that was a lot to digest I'm kind of catching up here as well because I'm I really am struggling a little bit with the gaming services piece um because you're okay commissioner hill or I am okay good commissioner Cameron are you all set with any any question that you might have all set thank you okay then if we're comfortable moving and again as Todd points out there still needs to be the final okay so we have um a chance to still tweak commissioner brian do you have um a motion with the that reflects today's discussion certainly a madam chair I moved that the commission approve the small business impact statement in the amendments to 205 cmr 134.01 and 134.02 as included in the commissioner's packet subject to the further edit in paragraphs three in each section changing the language for more than one six-month period in a 12-month period to for more than one six-month period in an 18-month period and that staff be authorized to take the steps necessary to file the regulation with the secretary of the Commonwealth and to proceed with the regulation promulgation process second okay I do I just want to point out one thing as I understand the gaming services piece is still completely decided by the bureau and that's fine is that correct correct one one in the motion um it's actually sub five in 134.01 and it is sub three and 134.02 okay in the motion so to and to my point uh the oh three the gaming services would still be dictated by the game the the bureau alone the gaming services employed correct I think that's how it's currently written if I'm not mistaken yeah okay clarifying and we're all good with that okay okay then um any other clarifications and you've got the um the correction on the do you want to read it back Todd if you have it the only change I believe is that we're changing 12 months to 18 months yeah okay all right no further questions okay commissioner Cameron aye commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi and I vote yes four zero really helpful discussion a second step Todd but that's okay really really helpful anything else Todd for today that's all we have for you today and I know anything else for this moment because you've got a lot on your plate and as I indicated earlier thanks to your entire legal team for all that you are doing right now I know that you're um you're extremely busy and we appreciate all your good work thank you you're extremely busy all the time but right now particularly busy so thank you so now we're moving on to item number seven community affairs chief Delaney and I know I just saw I saw Mary come in for a second she was here a moment ago I'm sure she'll be back thank you madam chair commissioners so today before you we have our draft of the community mitigation fund guidelines for the 2022 community mitigation fund as you recall back in September we met with you as well as our local community mitigation advisory committees and the subcommittee on community mitigation with our policy questions and as we went through all of those discussions we tried to craft those suggestions that we got from all of these groups into what you see today and then what will happen after we don't need a vote or anything but we will go out for public comment for two weeks and then once we get that back we will take again all of the input that we received today and we also met again with our advisory committees this week try to incorporate all of those things into the final guidelines which will be back in front of you on November 18th I believe so at this point what I'm going to do is I will share the guidelines I'm putting up the the red line version just because it's a little bit easier to see where changes were made from the original and I think we'll just walk through the changes as we made them and how they addressed the specific issues that that had been raised so the first thing under just our overall grant programs you'll see we added a public safety grant as a separate category that was one of the specific things that the commission had requested so we have done that and you'll see there are additional changes associated with that later on in the document all of the who could apply and what cannot be funded are all the same as last year we made no changes to that how much funding will be available right now I've actually updated these numbers a little bit and it looks like when all is said and done there may be as much as 23 or maybe even more than that 23 million or more than that in the mitigation fund so when we come back with the final guidelines we'll refine this number we do like to still leave a little bit of money in the fund just just just in case so we don't try to draw down the last possible dollar this chart here shows the money that's that's rolling over from the regions from previous grant rounds these numbers are actually a little bit off here I as I was refining the other numbers this number is overstated it's not quite eight million that's in and as well as the region be those numbers need to be refined a little bit and I will do that for the final for the final guidelines joint applications we made no changes to this we still provide incentives if more than one community gets together to work on a project and we certainly encourage that this item 1.6 these were some limitations that were specific to the community planning applications we basically just moved this into the appropriate section I'm not quite sure why it was sitting out here I think maybe the first year that we had these specific requirements we wanted to highlight them a little bit more so we just put those in with the grant category so in our categories on the 2015 and 16 reserve grants as you recall last year we said that December 31st this year would be the end of those grants and so we made that change and say that you know that these grants are no longer available for use as they expire in December 31st 2021 we have been getting some calls from folks and other things in fact you just a couple of these folks who have come in using the reserves and Mary is diligently on the phone trying to get folks to to come in between now in the end of the year with some projects on those communities we have left who haven't used their phones under the specific impact grant one of the changes very minor changes we made we said you can apply for more than one specific impact grant that's still keeping the total of them at half million dollars for each community and you'll see here under our specific impact grants we had sort of two categories one were operational impacts of the facility the second part were the public safety operational costs so this whole section has been cut and pasted into the now new public safety grants section we did hear same language from the previous years although we added in a sentence in here that says for 2022 the commission is highlighting the availability of cmf assistance for police training including implicit bias training and de-escalation training that will support the police reform law and I know that was something that commission felt strongly about including in our guidelines we don't mandate it in fact it's not the only training that would be allowed but the commission did want to highlight those a couple of particular types of training as being available in hopes that some of our communities would come in for applications for those types of work now the community planning grants if you recall in our discussion on the policy questions we were talking about the possibility of making it a little bit easier for applicants to apply for funds or really you know not having to do so much work trying to prove that connection to the casino and what we talked about was if the if the commission makes an affirmative statement that that the casinos do in fact cause impacts then uh folks could come in uh communities could come in and state that yes in in these categories that there is an impact and we want to do a grant to address that impact and they would not have to do quite so much work as they've had to do in the past now what we did uh was I started looking through a lot of our research agenda to see if there was anything within those reports that we could use to kind of hang our hat on a little bit and what we did was so there was this report down October 15th 2019 if you're called the Sigma patron and license plate survey report for MGM and one of the things one of the questions that was asked in the surveys was whether uh patrons had reallocated their spending uh and and this this report tried to quantify that uh somewhat and the definition in out of the Sigma study itself talks about says reallocated spending is spending on goods and services which would have occurred had the casinos never open but which did not occur because an individual chose to spend their money at the casino instead so uh and and really I don't remember the exact numbers but roughly half of the the people who responded to this said well it had no effect but there was but half of the people said yes in fact the money that they spent at the casino meant that they didn't spend money uh somewhere else and some of the main areas that that were uh identified in those surveys were transportation housing retail hotels and travel restaurants and bars recreation non-live entertainment and live entertainment so really kind of the gamut of and most of these things seem to be generally in the hospitality type industries hotels restaurants live entertainment things things of that nature um now one of the things that the Sigma study itself says is that attempting to quantify these impacts on any given business or community is exceptionally challenging and you know if it's exceptionally challenging for the for the folks who are professionals in this area it must be exceptionally exceptionally challenging for a community to be able to try to figure this out while they're trying to juggle all the other things that they do so what we stated here is uh really that we think it's reasonable to conclude that reallocation of funds is likely to have an impact on local businesses in those communities that are eligible to apply for a community but a community planning grant you know and I think so that universe of of communities that we deal with is probably the right area you know the further away you get from the casino the less likely uh it would be impacts from the casino um so having the host in the surrounding communities and some of those other nearby communities uh probably makes sense now the second part of this also is that we realize that gaming establishments can provide significant benefits to the local communities um you know you know there are thousands of jobs that are provided and the salaries and benefits that are associated with those the casinos spend millions of dollars each year purchasing supplies and equipment and services they bring thousands of visitors to the area um so you know these benefits present opportunities for communities to leverage the presence of the casinos and their employees and patrons to you know do things increasing business opportunities to provide goods and services tourism opportunities you know attracting the employees to live in the local communities you know there's all sorts of types of things that that communities can do to take advantage of the presence of the casino and I think the real key here is that communities you know typically their budgets are tight every year there's not usually a whole lot of money left over for them to do something that you know might be considered a little bit of a wish list item and so I think that we understand that that lack of local funds to pursue these types of efforts really does you know hinder their the community's abilities to take advantage of of casino related benefits and so what we're saying here is that these planning grants are designed in part to address these lost opportunity costs you know um uh so with all that said now when someone comes into us with an application they still have to identify the impact associated with the casino the only thing is that they don't have to go to extraordinary lengths to quantify that the impact now for instance if a community came in and said um we feel that the casino is having uh you know we've heard from our restaurant of businesses and they've said that the casino was hurt their business their local business now previously we would have required them to to go to lengths to say well how much business was lost did you lose tax revenues did you you know what was the the justification for this for this item and now by saying what we've said earlier that um that the community wouldn't really need to quantify that impact but whatever their plan is it would need to address that impact and again just using a fictional example if they if they said that the casinos were hurting local restaurant businesses they would have to design a um a grant that would try to attract people to the local restaurants they can't do it for some other general municipal purpose so we still need to have um the uh um the casino impact identified and mitigated it's just that it reduces the uh the amount of work they need to do to quantify that impact and you know that is the i'm going to stop sharing here for a moment that's the biggest um change that we made it i'd really love to get some input from the commission on that one particularly or actually on any of the other things that we've discussed up to this point commissioners uh commissioner camera i'll just ask you first do you have any questions at this stage um i think it's exactly how we it reflects our discussion earlier i think it's right on point to everything we talked about and so far um it it's it's a very good document commissioner brian you're nodding your head no i agree okay commissioner hill any comments or questions at this stage at this stage no but i will make a comment at the end of the presentation okay great i'm thrilled um i'm thrilled with this piece of work joe i i made a quick call to you just and and said that um i think we've been trying to navigate the improvements that you've accomplished in this particular section two point new two point four and i'm thrilled and i also think um with respect to the implicit bias training um and the de-escalation training putting that in there it's a reminder that um those are important trainings for the the needs of a casino given particularly um the diversity of our patrons and employees so i encourage you know any community to seek that but i am thrilled with how you've captured two point four it's innovative and smart great thank you okay um all right i'm going to go back to sharing uh again here um so just moving on some of the other highlights under transportation planning grants as we had discussed we eliminated the cap on the category we did still keep the cap on an individual grant of 200 000 um transportation construction grants we maintained that maximum of 33 percent of the total cost being funded by the commission uh we also did uh eliminate the four million dollar cap on the category and increase the uh cap on individual grants from one million to 1.5 million um under workforce development grants this is something that um that we didn't really discuss uh so much on our um during the policy this this came up in in some discussions with crystal and others um so well firstly we did increase the grants uh the cap from 800 thousand to a million with each grant at a maximum of 500 thousand dollars one for each region um one of the things that we had had for the last couple of years was this kind of a bonus for to encourage greater regional cooperation of either 50 000 or 100 000 and and frankly that bonus has just caused nothing but confusion among our grantees um and really when you go down into our uh guidelines a little bit more the first thing that we say is that a consortium application is required we say that it has to be a regional consortium approach and that's what we've been getting so the the the bonus funds um aren't really doing anything in particular and that except causing confusion among our grantees so uh uh we decided that you know we're we're getting the groups that we're looking for so um we just figured it would be better to increase the amount of money that's going out to the region and just get rid of that bonus um because it just wasn't particularly accomplishing anything um the tribal gaming technical assistance grants again proposing to maintain those um should something break loose down uh in with the tribal casino in cotton uh you know should that happen if you recall the the um the uh the tribal casino doesn't fall under the same rules as our other category one casino so there are no surrounding community agreements or anything like that so this money would would help those surrounding communities deal with traffic issues of things of that nature um good anything um move forward on on that and then the emergency mitigation grants uh we're proposing to keep that again there were no uh applications last year for those but we think it's a good idea to have a little bit of money in our back pocket should uh something of truly an emergency nature uh now this this last item um projects of regional significance um we talked about this during the policy discussion and the idea here is not to create a new category for this year but to go out to the communities host communities and surrounding communities and ask them to submit to us statements of interest in this category which these are for these large transportation or economic development projects that would uh be much larger than the than the than the types of uh the projects that we're dealing with today and we know that there's a few out there and in just in some brief conversations with with some of the communities I happened to be out in springfield a couple of weeks ago and was in Everett last week and talking to a couple of their folks and just uh you know running this idea behind them and you know just sitting there half a dozen projects came uh it came out you know that that I didn't know anything about so um so that was the notion but now in in our local community mitigation advisory committees one of one of the concerns that came up was it was asking should we really be doing this as part of the community mitigation fund maybe it would be better as a standalone request of the communities uh you know we don't want to take people's focus away from actually applying for real applications that will that will result in money going to the communities to spend a lot of time on this and I thought about that and I think it really does make a lot of sense to pull this out and do it as a separate standalone uh solicitation with the communities and so we're going to recommend that to do that um and what would happen is simultaneous to the community mitigation fund but not subject to the same deadlines uh we will go out to the communities uh in a more informal fashion this all has to happen going through combines and you know through that very uh bureaucratic process and we feel it would be easier and better to do with uh individual and with the communities and that way we can meet with them and we can talk to the folks out there and and really try to drum up some ideas uh rather than just us sending something out on a blanket say hey just give us I give us projects um so we do recommend doing that and I guess um again I'll just stop right there and um just if you could give me a little bit of input on on on your thoughts on on pulling that out and doing it separately misha hill um thank you madam chair so in the conversations that we had on the subcommittee as well as our um advisory committees in both uh region a and b we actually discussed this quite a bit and it was the feeling of everybody uh almost to a to a person that we take this out of the regs and that we um haven't stand alone and that joe would set up some type of program where he would reach out to these communities and get some type of a statement of interest uh through his office instead of through the regs and everybody seemed to be okay with that and the more we discussed it that I think the more we we thought it was the right thing to do so I would urge my fellow commissioners that we probably should take this language out of the proposal and let it be a standalone action by uh joe's group and Mary's group and we and we did have one comment where I where once person said why don't you do it in both places and I was not not sure about that I think it should be one or the other oh can I just ask how do you once you take it out that's to get basically the statement of interest or the rfi whatever process you use then ultimately you bring it back into the program and integrate it or would you run a parallel program no no so the way I would envision this is this is just gathering information that's all that this effort is doing it's it's communities telling us what kind of projects they have what projects that they think might be eligible for mitigation funds those kinds of things and then for when we're going through this process a year from now the thought is if we have this really robust group of projects that really look like they're eligible for funds maybe we create a new category where we put a big chunk of money towards it you know I mean if we if we're looking at projects that might be in the five million dollar range rather than the five hundred thousand dollar range maybe we want to say hey in each region we can fund one project for five million dollars or whatever the whatever the number might be um you know and all that would need to be determined but the thought was let's do this as an information gathering exercise and then when we have all that information we can make much better decisions on how we want to move forward. Mr. O'Brien or Commissioner Cameron? No it makes sense I know we had some conversations about this when we were talking about the the first looksie through the guidelines and I think it makes sense to be we can be a little more proactive seeing what's out there to see if there's some reason we need to be changing how we're alerting people and guidelines for distributing the money. Makes sense to me. Yeah I would agree more you know more free flowing information leads to better decisions so it's a good idea. And so really taking it out just doesn't muddy the document but you have as Commissioner Hill said sort of our full support to go out and do this next piece of work got it I think it's an excellent idea. Mary? All right now let me just go back to sharing the document quickly here there's not too much more to discuss so you'll see we've added the public safety grant application here and we'll actually delete this 2022 project of regional significance statement of interest uh from that and one of the things as we were going through the combines process we sat down with with Agnes and Mary and I and we were going through all of the things that need to be submitted and one of the the forms that they have in there asks about what communities or what projects are doing for diversity now this is not something that we had done previously on on this in this program and this and this isn't reflected in these guidelines this just happened just the other day and we followed up with the combines folks and they indicated to us that that was not applicable to our program but our thought was you know in interest of you know we've done this with our licensees we do it ourselves we thought that in our evaluation criteria we have all of these bullets that we would at least put a bullet in there that say we would we would you know take into consideration their efforts at using minority women and veteran businesses and you know have them tell us what their proposal is obviously it would be one of many evaluation criteria and you know the thought was you know we we can't really try to you know just say what a goal is establishing targets that is that is a that is a level of effort that is well beyond what what we have the ability to do here I know in a in a previous life I had to do a disparity study for a for a large program and it's you know it was hundreds of thousands of dollars and and literally years of work so we didn't really want to go down that road but we thought it made some sense to at least make that an evaluation criteria and so that essentially I think let me just quickly go through here yeah that is all that I had on the changes that we made and we'll make those that that one change with with the diversity if that's agreeable to the commission excellent addition commissioners commissioner Cameron again I think this is a smart document it it it the team is and I know the advisory groups are very helpful really thinking about how to improve not just handing out the same old application every year but how do we get the best product and how do we help educate folks as to what's what's available to them and we get them to think a little differently about the monies out there so I think it was excellent work really you could tell very good teamwork and certainly accurately reflects the conversation and all the policy work we did so thank you excellent work. Commissioner O'Brien and then I'll turn to Commissioner Hill last given his work with the subcommittee. Oh I agree makes perfect sense to me. Right Commissioner Hill this was a good a good beginning project for you. So this has been a very busy week Joe, Mary and I have become best of friends as as we have the subcommittees on the community mitigation and we have some fantastic people working on that committee as well as our advisory committee and as I said earlier we went through all of these changes the last few days and everybody was very positive about the changes that are being proposed. I don't think there was one negative comment actually made with the exception and it wasn't a negative comment but something that we are going to have to discuss at some point in the near future and I know we talked about it in the last time we got together is it's getting very difficult to prove an impact from the casino with these mitigation funds and on two different occasions during the discussions in the last few days it kept being brought up that maybe we need to look at a new way of distributing these funds to these communities and how would we go about doing that now that's a conversation for another day and one that I think is going to be needed as we move forward especially with the building of the fund getting to what it is now and ensuring that we don't get these funds swept away by the legislature at some point in the near future so I think what's been proposed today everybody seems to agree with and we would move forward with but I do believe there's going to be another discussion that needs to take place within the next few months to year on what this program may look like in the in the future and I'd like to just thank Commissioner Hill for volunteering to be in our groups our subcommittee and I also want to apologize to him because this I believe is the fifth time he's heard this presentation this week. I learned something new every time you said that you give it so if you're someone who learns by rote then this might be your calling. So Commissioner Hill I'm hearing you I think a good step forward on that exact observation is the additional language which would allow communities to leverage the benefit of the presence of a casino as stated and indicate that opportunity cost and and sort of reverse engineer into some great community improvements so that they can gain any opportunity that was lost because of the presence so I think that was so smart and creative in terms of how you framed it Joe and Mary and I know that the local advisory committee and the state subcommittee also really influenced the decision making so thank you and well I know that we still have the you're going to go out to public comment next and then our formal adoption and at the same time Joe you're going to reach out to communities for some kind of training and getting them ready for the application process? Yeah we've got so assuming we get final approval on the guidelines on November 18th we'll go out immediately thereafter to start our solicitation so we should be out on the street before Thanksgiving which is good gives the communities you know a little bit more time to prepare their applications and then on December 14th we will be having a workshop with all of our communities to go over what the changes are but also to you know highlight what some of these initiatives are and we're hoping to have a couple of guest speakers from communities I think Chelsea's going to come Alex Train who you met the other day when we did our tour board I think he's going to come on and do a presentation on how Chelsea went about getting the funds for their community and we're hoping to get one other community to join us just to change things up a little bit. Peer to peer that's really good so further questions on today's guidelines I think there was only one additional change again very intentional Karen to include criteria around the MBE, WBE and VBE so I'm glad that you thought of that so that's the only thing not reflected in the red lines for today right? Yeah okay any further questions or comments do we? I can't remember if we don't need a vote today. No votes necessary I mean the whole intention this entire week with the subcommittees and the local committees and the commission was to get input on the guidelines if there were anything that we needed to change or whatever before we go out to public comment but so we should be set to go out to post I think Mary's got the paperwork all set to go up online and and then we'll take public comment for two weeks and then once we have the vote on the 18th we should be set. Great questions for Joe? I'll set I'll set. Gail I'll set. Thank you. Gail you're all set. I am all set thank you everyone. Okay Joe and Mary thank you and I know that Crystal has been helping to on the work force and also concluding a lot of community mitigation work so thank you to you too Crystal. All right thank you so that we're moving on to number eight is there any other business that we need to address today commissioners? Karen you're all set. I am thank you. All right Todd you're all set. Okay then um barring any other comments or edits I need a motion to adjourn. I'll move to adjourn. Second. Thank you. Commissioner Cameron do you have any questions about that? I do not. I do not. Alrighty then your vote. I thank you. Commissioner Ryan. Aye. Commissioner Hill. Aye. I vote yes 4-0. Thank you everyone very very interesting meeting as always we're so lucky to cover so many varied issues and everybody did such an excellent job. Thank you. Have a great resty afternoon.