 I will take attendance and read the pandemic language. Keith Slattery. Present. Justin Sterrett. Paul Sheehan. Yeah. John DePriest. Yeah. Ron Haugen. Yeah. Richard Caravello. Yeah. Brad Rossin. Eric Barossa. Vincent Panzini. Dave Bancroft. Yeah. And Myra Negron-Rosch. Here. All right. Given the unprecedented circumstances resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic, Governor Charles Baker issued an order to provide limited relief from certain provisions of the open meeting law to protect the health and safety of individuals interested in attending public meetings. In keeping with the guidance provided, the commission will conduct a public meeting utilizing remote collaboration. Any votes will be taken by a roll call. This meeting is being recorded. And back to you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Tanya. Motion to accept the minutes of the last meeting. I'll make a motion to accept the minutes of the last meeting. I second. I second. Second there. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. OK, we just we do need to do a roll call for the vote. Do a roll call. Yeah, sorry. I do have the meetings, by the way, if anyone needs to see them. But we can live without them. OK. Tanya, can you call the roll please? Sure. Chief Slattery. Sorry, was that a yes? Yes. OK. Justin Sterrett. Paul Sheehan. Yes, aye. John DePriest. Yes. Ron Hogan. Yes. Richard Carvello. Yes. Brad Rossin is not here, nor is Eric Barossa. Ben Panzini is here. No. Dave Bancroft. Yes. And Myra Nekron-Rosh. Yes. All right. That is one, two, three, four, six. In favor of approving the minutes. OK. Next, Joe, you ready for your thing? Yes, I am. So just a quick update on a couple of things before we get into the guidelines. I think as you probably all know, the governor's new guidance has reduced the hours that the casinos are allowed to remain open. So that went into effect and is in effect and will be in effect, I guess, until we find out something different. But essentially, what's happened is so MGM is they're going to be open from 10 in the morning till 9.30 at night. Plain Ridge Park is running from 7 AM till 9.30 at night. And Encore is running from 9 AM to 9 PM. I think in addition, Encore has also shut down the hotel until such time as we go back to a more regular schedule. Jackie, did you want to add anything in on that since you're here? No, I think that's right, Joe. Thank you. OK. So that's sort of the new things that have arisen. So with respect to our guidelines, so the last time we met, we were going through the guidelines as they were approved by the Commission for Public Comment. And we actually, we received only a single public comment on this. And I thought I would just share that with you. This actually came from the metropolitan, the MAPC, Metropolitan Area Planning Council. And this was just sent in as an email from Raul Gonzalez. And we consider this, and I'll walk through it with you, that some of the specifics and the primary request here was sort of maybe expanding the authorization under the workforce grants a little bit more. And we did make a couple of very minor corrections to the guidelines with respect to that. But in the main body of this, so it says, the impact of the casino to small businesses in Chelsea and Everett were considered to be competition for retail and hospitality business. Now with COVID-19, casino business is compromised into much further extent. Local small businesses are suffering even more. So the recommendations that they are saying is they would like to see us add a new grant category to support regional small businesses separate from workforce development. So this actually is already covered under our community planning grant. If you recall, in the past, we've had several communities coming in trying to, you know, developing plans to work with their local businesses to try to find ways to tie business to the encore casino and so on. So we really think that that's already pretty well covered. And then on an item number two here, they talk about high unemployment from hospitality and retail industries now includes unemployed from the casino itself. And saying that those workers need to be upskilled to help them break into a new career if they're not able to be re-employed by the casinos. And, you know, under our workforce grants, that's not something that would be prohibited. You know, whoever is proposing those grants would need to, you know, make a good case to us that that's appropriate. So what we do plan on doing is we're doing some outreach workshops that we're going to be doing in January for communities who will be applying for these types of grants. We're going to do one for workforce and one for sort of all the other grants. And we were going to try to, we were going to raise this as a possibility, you know, for those people who would apply for workforce grants, that that's something to consider including. This item number three talks about including ESOL training programs that's English speakers of other languages and adult basic education programs as part of the workforce grants. We have been doing that really since the workforce grants began. All of these include an adult basic education component in them. And this item four, digital literacy training is needed. And that is something that's actually been included in a couple of our grants where I know out in Springfield, I just remember particularly one of the groups was providing Chromebooks to the people in there to help them with digital literacy and writing resumes and things of that nature. So we think we're covered on that, although we did add the words digital literacy into our sections talking about workforce. And then this item number five talks about wraparound supports for families, particularly on food and housing insecurity as these aspects of like directly intersect with small business livelihood. Under the way our program is set up, we didn't think that there was anything particular that we could do with respect to that. That's not really kind of in the lines of community mitigation for the grants. But anyways, so this one set of comments, we felt that we've got a pretty well addressed in our current guidelines. So again, the guidelines that we gave to you the last time, they've stayed essentially the same. We did do, obviously, kind of scrub through them to make sure all our spelling is right and everything is good. So there's really no major update to give you on that. These will be going in front of the Commission on Thursday for a final vote. And then we roll out the program right after that. So if anybody has any particular questions on that, I would be happy to answer them. Any questions? I can't see the whole screen, so. OK, I'll unshare that. OK, so I think the next item we have on the agenda is Mark van der Linden, who's going to give us an update on our game sense and some of the other research agenda. Sure, I'm happy to do so. Hi, everybody. I'm Mark van der Linden. I work with the Gaming Commission as director of research and responsible gaming. So I thought I would just kind of go through and just give a bit of an overview. Won't go into any great detail about the research agenda. Certainly, there's far greater detail. And if you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm going to give you links to a lot of the reports that exist out there. I also want to say some of the research that I'm going to be talking about largely relates to Region B. I recognize that I'm talking to a Region A group. I'm doing that just because Region B is a little bit further ahead. MGM opened about a year before. So I wanted to give you a clear picture of kind of the comprehensiveness of the research and what will be coming to Region A. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. Let's see here. Somebody's is not showing up for me. Hold on just one second. You ever have this trouble where you're trying to find the right screen to share, but it's just not showing up for you? There you go. I'm just showing right now. I'm showing the research agenda home page. Is that right? Yep. OK, that's not what I want to show you. Hold on just one second. I'm trying to get to a slide deck. Let me try a different way here. Well, Mark, it looks like Teresa just hopped on to save the day for you. OK, hey, Teresa. Hi. Would you mind sharing your screen of the slide deck that we had developed here for some reason? Oh, wait, hold on one second. I think I just found it. Now are you seeing a slide deck here? Yep. I think it just needed you to be in. All right, I apologize for that. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the research agenda and a little bit of the background about the research agenda. So there's two pieces that really inform the work that we're doing and the type of research that we're conducting. The first and probably the biggest piece of it goes back to the expanded game of the actual law that legalized casino gambling in Massachusetts. Section 71 provides a lot of detail on precisely what we are directed to do research on, the topics and the areas. But generally speaking, it's to understand the social and economic effects of expanded gambling and use the findings to inform evidence-based policy and regulation. There's a whole piece on looking at or conducting research relative to neuroscience, psychology, sociology, epidemiology, and etiology of gambling, which is interesting and really tells us that we have a long ways to go. It's extensive, and we probably won't touch on some of those areas for years to come. Hey, Mark. Yes, sir. Things don't seem to be scrolling through on this. We're still on the cover page of your presentation. Hold on one second. There we go. Can you see that slide? Section 71. Yeah, we got it. OK. So as I was saying, section 71 of the expanded gaming act provides a lot of direction for us to go from. The other piece of it is a responsible gaming framework. And this is a document that the gaming commission developed primarily to inform our responsible gaming strategies so that the gaming commission and our licensees are on the same page in terms of the type of work that they will be doing. But there's a whole other piece to this, which is to create and translate knowledge to support evidence-based decision-making about gambling policy and regulation. This piece really is important because we're generating a lot of data. We're creating a number of reports. But as you know, that the reports are only as good as they are being used to inform policy and regulation. So what I see is that between these two documents, it really provides a pretty clear set of marching orders for us. So the MGC doesn't carry out the research agenda on our own. We rely exclusively on contractors to carry out the research agenda. Our primary vendor for the social and economic research and certainly the research that I think this group would probably most be interested in is being carried out by UMass Amherst, their School of Health and Health Sciences. That group is the overall contractor. For a lot of the economic work that is being done, they are in a partnership with the UMass Donahue Institute. This is important because this represents a neutral body of academics that are carrying out the research agenda and the specific studies. And this is unique in Massachusetts. There's a lot of fair amount of gambling-related research looking at both the social and economic impacts of casino gambling in the United States. But to have this type of neutral body carrying out the research is actually unique and an important aspect of it. So the methodological principles, just a little quick, it's simple. It's how much money is involved and where does it come from and where is it going? Assessing the impacts for years before and years after the introduction of casino venues. This includes both the social impacts as well as the economic impacts. So if you take a look at the studies that have been done, a vast majority of them, even at this point, are setting the baseline so that we have something to look at for the years to come. And then finally, comprehensively assessing the potential economic and social impacts and utilizing multiple sources of information for triangulation. Wherever possible, we want to try to look at multiple sources of information. They cover the same area. It does a much better job of being able to determine causation if you're looking at multiple sources of data. So just building the baseline. So we took a look at, we used primary and secondary data sources, looked at both statewide as well as regionally for each of the locations where casinos are. We have baseline indicators, as I said before, in both social and health as well as economic and fiscal. To drill down just a little bit further in the social and health, we covered these specific dimensions, looking at problem gambling, crime, population health, demographic impacts, and environmental impacts. And you can see below that it speaks to the specific types of studies that are being carried out. On the economic and fiscal side, again, the big bucket areas that we're taking a look at are direct casino impact. And so for example, within direct casino impacts, we're looking at employment, revenue, and expenditures. We're looking at personal income, business establishments, real estate and housing, and government and fiscal. So an example of how we take this data and try to extend it or reach out to as many people as we can is just last month, we have an annual research day every year, but the annual event that we had last month rolled out a number of different studies that focus specifically on the impacts of energy in Springfield. So you can see here that we've done a study looking at new employees of NGM Springfield. This includes reasons why people are seeking employment, their employment status prior to joining NGM, their geographic residents of employees. We did a release findings from a patron survey. And this was really an important piece of looking at this, going back to what are the methodological principles. Where is the money coming from? So taking a look at how much money was coming from out-of-state gamblers versus in-state gamblers, what parts of the economy was money coming into MGM Casino? Where was that being diverted from? Or what percentage of that was being diverted from other sectors of the economy? We did a MGM first year operations report looking at the full economic impact, not just the dollars and cents, but both the direct and indirect impact of MGM on Springfield, on the region, and on the state. And then finally, probably one of the most significant studies was taking a look at the gambling attitudes participation and problem gambling. So if we think about impacts that a casino could possibly have when they open up into an area, how does it affect people's gambling behavior? Do they continue to gamble, but just more now that there is a casino? Does the prevalence rate of problem gambling increase because you're introducing a new casino that's just down the street versus a situation where you have to drive quite a distance in order to get to a casino? Those are the types of questions that we address. And again, it goes back to what is our mandate as it relates to Section 71 of the Expanded Gaming Act. I provided a link to you, both the video presentation as well as just a slide deck if you want to fast forward to specific areas. This just covered part of the way in which we're taking a look at impacts within each of the region. And again, think about this is where Springfield and MGM is, and this is where we're heading with Region A. So that wasn't the full extent of the research that's being done here, the other areas. We take a look at real estate impacts, both residential and commercial trends, both looking at the baseline, so before MGM Springfield as well as after the casino opened. We take a look at the impact of the casinos on public safety. So this is actually an interesting area that we released the first post-opening report for Encore Boston Harbor. But we will continue to take a look at and doing a pretty extensive analysis on crimes, calls for service and collisions in the host community and in surrounding communities. So we've already set up a baseline for Encore. We've done a six-month report. And the 12-month report is in the works right now, though it's like many things complicated with the presence of COVID and the shutdown of the casino for the period of time during that first year of their operation. There was a report on the construction of MGMs. And this report for Encore Boston Harbor is actually expected to be released within probably the next month. Actually, it's on the commission agenda right now for December 3. I'm hopeful that we'll hit that mark, but I'll make sure that I send out the notice of that to Joe and Tonya. We also did a host community profile for Springfield, as well as Everett, setting baselines on a lot of the different conditions within the cities. And it may seem odd that we take a look at lottery revenue, but we do to the extent that within the Expanded Gaming Act, it's explicitly stated that we need to protect the lottery because it's a major source of revenue to local aid around the state. Here is the link to the Gaming Commission research page. It's easily sorted. So if there's a specific area of research or a specific study in any of these areas, you can easily navigate through it and find the study that you would be looking for. You can sort it by region so you can look at Everett or Springfield. Anyway, we recently revamped the website in order for it to be a little bit more easily used. Another area that I wanted to draw attention to is mode, the Massachusetts Open Data Exchange. We are sitting on a mountain of data that our research teams have done a great job of using and analyzing and doing multivariate as well as univariate analyses in a number of different ways. But that's, to me, the tip of the iceberg. So there is a way for researchers to access the data and to get the raw data files to do their own analyses. We're hopeful that this will be in the years to come a rich source of new information using the existing data that we have right now. That's the research in Nutshell. Before I kick it over to Theresa to talk a little bit about the gaming commission's responsible gaming efforts, I was wondering if does anybody have any questions at all? I provided a very high level overview. Hey, Mark, this is Joe. I was just wondering, given, especially with on-core, with MGM, luckily we had a period of time of continuous operations, where now with on-core, you've got, we get less than a year of it being open full-time, then we went into the shutdown, then we went back into the reopening, and now we're at a modified number of hours. I guess, do you see us needing to get back to a real steady state of operations, of full operations before you can really make any good assessments? That's such a good question, and I have such a bad answer, which is, I don't entirely know. So I think, so one of the studies that's in the work, it works from the UMass Donahue Institute, is a study looking at what have been the impacts of COVID on the gaming industry in Massachusetts. I think, and it's primarily drawing upon, it's exclusively drawing upon secondary data, both what would come from our operators, but also data that's a secondary data that is available. I think that it's almost as if we're setting a new baseline moving forward, and that we will take a look at impacts of casinos during this time, but there's probably going to be a big asterisk beside each of the reports during this period of time. It's still worth taking a look at. I think that our casino operators play a role in both generating tax revenue and providing jobs and economic benefit to the host and surrounding communities. And it's probably arguably really important now is it was when the expanded Gaming Act was passed for those exact reasons. So sorry, I've kind of talked around your question, but that's the best answer I can give you. Anybody else? Any other questions? If I may, the COVID impact report, economic impact report, they're going to, obviously we got to cut it off at some point with some time parameters on that. So the timeframe for that is looking at calendar year 20. So you get a picture of operations just before COVID, you get a period where the casinos were shut down. And re-opened, we know that this is probably going to extend for quite some time, but we'll be taking a look at that snapshot of time where we get a variety of different scenarios here. Mark? Yes, right. Well, I mean, Joe made the point that, I mean, it's very hard for you to get a gauge where we really haven't been open for a year, especially in the employment aspect of what's happening. Every time you turn around people, more and more people are getting laid off over there. But I think the employment aspect has been really a hurt to the community. As I say, I don't think anyone's, there's no friends that work there, they're no longer working there or on something for a while. And I've got friends in the gaming community in Las Vegas, too. They're feeling the same impact out there, too. The gaming community throughout the whole country is suffering because the COVID isn't immune to any other states. So like I say, I've got in Las Vegas, they're barely at 30% how they're operating over there. So, I know it's hard for you to get something, like I say, especially when we haven't had a full year. So I would think that at some point, once we get back open, the screw will go back and get a full year to date, so we're not studying on this region anyways. Yeah, so the idea, Rick, is that these operation reports, taking a look at the impacts is on an annual rolling basis. And so, I hope that what we're looking at is a look in time where we will definitely see an impact on the casino industry in Massachusetts and that we'll have a sustained number of years afterwards that you can really begin to see kind of a prolonged impact of the gaming industry in Massachusetts. But I hear everything you're saying, Rick. Any other questions for Mark? And here we can see, Mark, do you have more information you want to go over? Yeah, Teresa, are you, let me just stop sharing my screen. Teresa, so I'm going to turn it, Teresa Fiore is a program manager for research and responsible gaming. Her primary area of focus is the game sense program, so she'll tell you a little bit about that, as well as the voluntary self exclusion program. So, Teresa has a few minutes to talk about that as well. Sure, good afternoon, everyone. I'm just going to share my screen with you all. Okay, can everyone see that? Good, so thank you for having me today. I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with the game sense program, but the gaming commission is required by statute to provide an onsite service to help mitigate gambling-related harm and to respond to persons within the casino who may already be struggling with their gambling. And so, for anyone who doesn't know, before I talk a bit about the conclusions of the program, this is realized through an onsite, what we call a game sense info center, which is an office just off of the gaming floor in a high traffic area that is staffed by trained professionals in responsible and problem gambling. So, we were operating under a 24-7 pilot program. Unfortunately, of course, we had to cut back due to the casino hourly restrictions, but we try to be there for as many guests and as many staff members as possible. So, let me advance this. Can everyone see these changing? Great. So, what is game sense? We define it as an innovative, responsible gaming program which encourages players to adopt and or maintain positive behaviors and attitudes that reduce the risk of gambling-related harm. So, what we mean by that is, we want all individuals visiting on Corbos and Harbor or any of the three casinos in Massachusetts to keep gambling as a safe form of entertainment and never progress to the level where their gambling is going to negatively impact any area of their lives. Now, should they already be presenting with a gambling problem, our game sense advisors are there to respond directly to those individuals and we have tools and resources available for them. So, who does game sense serve? Primarily, we are there to support casino patrons, anyone coming in and out of the casino. Our game sense advisors will work with, we'll try to engage and speak with. We also have in casino advertising promoting both the game sense program and responsible gaming tips as well as resources for persons who have developed a harm or a problem with their gambling. And our sort of communication foundation is based on what we call a stepped care approach, which means that we are going to communicate to individuals differently depending on their level of gambling engagement, their behavior and how they're reacting to the presence of gambling in the Commonwealth. So, it's a sort of safe level, we have positive players. So, information that a positive player might need is very different than what an at risk or a problem player might need. So, on the problem end of the spectrum, we have what we call a voluntary self-exclusion program, which is a program which allows persons to voluntarily exclude themselves from the gaming floor of any Massachusetts casino. And again, we see VSC, the voluntary self-exclusion abbreviated as the VSC program is a tool to help individuals who may be struggling. GameSense is also there to support casino employees. So, we put a lot of time and a lot of effort in providing trainings to all new hires within the casino, as well as providing ongoing and refresher trainings to the more advanced level to shift managers, to casino leadership, anyone who sort of requires that extra level of knowledge in individuals who we like to work with and have personal relationships with because they can really help to further our mission of ensuring that all players who enter the casino are playing in a healthy way. This is a program which between 2015 and I wanna say 2018 was evaluated by a third party, the Cambridge Health Alliance Division on Addiction and is part of that evaluation. The researchers found that 88% of casino employees rated the responsible gaming training is very good or excellent. So, we think we're doing a pretty good job with those, but there's something which we are constantly working with, you know, leadership to evolve and update so there is relevant possible for our casino staff. Casino GameSense advisors also work out in the community. So, most recently they've been working with high-risk groups, say seniors at community centers who may have a trip plan to one of the casinos to share with them responsible gaming tips before they even get to the casino and to introduce themselves, you know, actually show their faces, whether it be digitally or in person, to encourage them to say, hey, you know, if you have any issues when you're at the casino, please feel free to visit us at the GameSense Info Center. So, here's a picture, I don't know if you can see my mouse of the GameSense Info Center, this one happens to be at MGM Springfield. So, we try to design them as welcoming spaces where guests and staff can walk in, have a casual conversation. They're also equipped with private offices for individuals who may be struggling with their gambling and wanna have a more sensitive conversation with our GameSense advisors. So, we try to be as flexible as possible to meet all guests and staff wherever they need to be met and however, you know, they're comfortable. So, is, you know, one of the sort of programs which I consider to be a tool within the sort of GameSense Toolkit is Play My Way. And that is a budget management program that's currently in pilot at Plain Ridge Park Casino. It allows individuals to set a predetermined monetary limit on their EGM electronic gaming machine spending. And it notifies them as they approach and even exceed their pre-pup budget. So, we, you know, there's different variations of this across the world. In Massachusetts, we have sort of taken the stance where we wanna provide as much real-time information as possible without, you know, cutting people off. And the idea behind that is that they may not be ready for that. So, it may not necessarily be beneficial to them, but we feel that between Play My Way, between GameSense, we have sort of the tools that people need to maintain gambling at a healthy level. And voluntary self-exclusion is the other big program that sort of falls within the GameSense Toolkit. So, like I said, this is a program where individuals who are struggling with their gambling can voluntarily enter into a contract with the Mass Gaming Commission, where they say, hey, you know, I'm struggling. I do not wanna be allowed on the gaming floor of any Massachusetts casino, you know, can you help me invoke this control? So, it's an in-person enrollment, more than 85% of them are done with our GameSense advisors. So, again, you have that really important face-to-face touchpoint, and this, you know, I have 779 individuals currently enrolled in the program. That number is more like 875 now of persons actively enrolled in the program, and another 160, I would say, who have gone through the program and removed themselves. So, I touched a bit on community engagement and some of those, you know, presentations and trainings that we do out in the community. We also have a website where individuals can access our information 24 or seven and get in touch with a GameSense advisor if they're at home, if they're on the road, and that, you know, can be accessed through GameSenseMA.com. These are just some metrics, a quick snapshot of the program. I especially like these graphics, I'm not sure if you can see my mouse here, but you can see each of these symbols represent a casino staff member and the green symbol, I think I can zoom in, but you can see, I'm pointing to it right here, the green symbol represents the GameSense advisor to, you know, however many staff that casino has. So, I think it really illustrates how important casino staff buy-in and training is, especially when we're thinking about the larger casinos like Encore, like MGM. Some more metrics. Advertising and marketing. So, like I said, we do have Incasino sign-in, which is branded according to GameSense standards. You can see this is a slot bank, I believe at Plain Ridge Park Casino. And it's hard to tell, but this is actually one of my favorite ads. It's a cartoon of Benjamin Franklin and it just says, keep your Benjamins on a budget. And the call to action is, you know, visit the GameSense Info Center to learn more about adding a budget and sticking to it. So that's sort of the theme and the tone of a lot of our messages. We have also, you know, held advertising space on buses. I believe this is a bus in Springfield on the casino route in downtown. And then, you know, these are just some more screenshots of our website where we have some interactive elements. GameSense and the news, we have been picked up by a few different news sources, which is always exciting and a lot of work, but it is good to see us getting our name out there since it is such an important program. And, you know, we have really great feedback on the effectiveness of the program, you know, not only from guests from staff, we use the program, but also through our evaluation. And here's just a picture of one of our GameSense teams. So right now, I wanna see, we have 21 staff members known as GameSense advisors across all three casinos within the Commonwealth. And like I said, you know, they're reachable pretty much at any time at this point, online, even if they can't physically be at the casinos in person around the clock any longer. And that is all I have for the GameSense piece. I touch a little bit on Play My Way. I touch a little bit on voluntary self-exclusion. Were there any questions or Joe, Mark, did you have any other topics you wanna need to cover? Thanks for the minute. That was good, thanks, Theresa. Yeah, nothing else, nothing else from me, Theresa. Okay. Anything else, any other questions? I do have a question. Mara. And the question is, do you do, once we have participants joining this program, do you do a pre and post evaluation and is so how that those look like? Sure, so for voluntary self-exclusion, I think that's a program you're referring to. Yes, we did evaluate that program in 2017 and there was a pre and post done. It's something which we actually would like to evaluate again, but, you know, with COVID it doesn't make sense to do right now. But the finding that really jumps to mind right now without calling up the actual report is that individuals who enrolled in our program rated it much more highly than voluntary self-exclusion programs which they had enrolled in in other states of jurisdiction. And we attribute much of that to, you know, the very leader-friendly FAQs that we have available in multiple languages in brochures. We attribute that to that sort of in-person component of the enrollment where somebody can really sit down, not feel judged, not feel like they're getting in trouble which has been the feedback about VFC programs and other jurisdictions and just feel like they're having a conversation with somebody who's really there to support their choice, realizing that it is a really, really difficult choice. So I would say that that's sort of the top finding that comes to mind. I don't know if you had any other specific questions about it, but that evaluation is available on the research piece, which Mark mentioned. And actually, Teresa, the other piece of this that I find really important too is how are people doing after they enroll in the voluntary self-exclusion program? Have they reduced their gambling? Are there, how is their mental health and health? And in each of those areas, by and large, you see improvements of individuals who enroll in the program at follow-up. And that's not uncommon of voluntary self-exclusion programs, but as Teresa said, that some of the enhancements, the engagement strategies that we use, I think also come up in that. We've also done an evaluation of the game sense program and taking a look at what is people's gambling literacy and pre-commitment to how much they want to spend. And there's a host of areas in which people take a look at. The results of the evaluations that we have have led to enhancements to the program. So for example, right now, we're working on what's called an initiative called Positive Play, where we begin to say, not all players are the same. What do we know from our evaluation? What do we know from other research where we can begin to tailor the message that we're delivering to specific types of patrons so that it resonates more or it's more targeted to help people stay then kind of that healthy or safe range of gambling. Thank you. And my follow-up question is for how long an individual stay in the program? Do you have an average? The voluntary self-exclusion program? Yes. Teresa, you have that data, I believe. You know, since I pulled that number, I'm pretty sure that it has changed, but we offer various terms for individuals. So the shortest term is one year followed by three years, five years, and then you have a lifetime option upon completion of one of those shorter terms. So if that's something you're interested in, I can certainly get you the overall average. Thank you. And I would say that it's kind of split amongst the terms. One of the interesting things, Teresa, is that since casinos reopened, the most common duration is one year as opposed to a longer-term pre-COVID. And anecdotally, we heard from the Game Sense team that people took that break, that three-month break, when casinos were closed and felt like they wanted to extend that break for a slightly longer period. So an interesting byproduct from the COVID shutdown. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. Is that it? Any more questions? Joe, you have more input, Joe? Just on the next steps, if there's no more questions on the research agenda, just some of our next steps. So this sort of concludes our, this group's work for this year, once the guidelines come out, for your information, a few things. Once, I think I mentioned earlier this Thursday, the commission will be taking up the guidelines and assuming that they approve them, we will then go out with our solicitation. We're actually out a fairly bit earlier this year than we have been in the past couple. The past couple of years, we've gone into December before we finalize these. So this will give the communities a little bit extra time to get their applications together, which is good. And as I said, we're gonna hold three workshops between December and January. The first one being for, once the commissioners approve this, we're gonna send out a letter to all of those communities that haven't expended their reserves. And explain to them the process, the new process. And then what we're gonna do is in the middle of December thereabouts, we're gonna have a workshop with those folks to try to, we'll talk through some of the other good projects people have done and see if there's a good way to get those funds spent. And then in January, I said we'll do a workshop for the workforce applications, because that's really a sort of a completely different animal than some of our other grant applications. And then we'll do a third one for sort of the general grant programs. Again, we wanna stress to folks that you gotta find that nexus to the casino and we wanna really see, the hope is that these outreach sessions will maybe get some people thinking a little bit and also maybe help us get a little bit better applications than maybe we have in the past. So we have those coming up. And then of course the application deadline is January 31st, which is actually on a Sunday. And normally under normal circumstances, we would either push it to the Friday before the Monday after, but since everything's done online here and through the Combine system, we just kept it with the 31st of January. So those are the things that we have coming up. I think in the past, we have talked about trying to maybe reconvene this group a couple of times during the year. And I think thus far, we haven't been terribly successful in that. I think we have done it a little bit in the past, but I think the idea is we would like to have this become a bit more of a regular type thing than just happening in the fall, maybe a meeting in the spring after we get applications and we could maybe walk through that a little bit and maybe talk about some of the other things that the Game and Commission does just to keep these groups informed. That's why we had Mark come to this one to talk about that system and we have other things going on as well. So I guess with that, I guess that was all that I had. Mary, did you have any last thoughts? We can hear you, Mary. You're still muted there, Mary. I'm sorry, I always do that. No, just trying to make sure everyone knows the dates and let it be known in your communities that we're gonna be having these dates to keep an eye out on the website. We'll be sending a lot of emails out regarding these meetings to assist people with their applications, which is kind of exciting that we actually have time this year to be able to do that. There is gonna be a public safety report that's gonna be coming out sometime in March. So maybe that's around April and maybe somewhere we could try and schedule a meeting around then once the study comes out. So I think you find that interesting. How's that from there? I think we're good. I'm all set. Mary, I lost my screen out here. Mary, if you can send the committee out, the outreach workshop date so we can get it to our people. Yes, yes. That'd be helpful in case they're not, everyone's busy with all the stuff and that's the way we can do it. I don't see why we can't schedule a meeting now for sometime in April, just to get back together. I mean, no reason why, Joe, do you agree? Yeah, absolutely. I think that'd be great. Yeah, just to convene and then the library knows what's happening and if we have to do another meeting, then we have to open up. Yeah, well, why don't we just take a, we'll take a look at the schedule a little bit and send out an end. Far out as it is anyways, but let's plan on an April meeting. Okay. Okay. Any further business? None on this side. Yeah, any old business coming? Anybody has any old business they need to discuss? Hearing and seeing none. Do we have a motion to adjourn? I make a motion to adjourn. Second. Second. Tanya, if you can call the roll. Yep. Okay. Keith Slattery. Yes. Justin Sterrett. Paul Sheehan. Aye. John DePriest. Yes. Ron Hogan. Yes. Richard Carviello. Yes. Brad Rosson, Brasapinzi, David Bancroft. Yes. And Myra Negron-Rosh. Yes. All right, so that's one, two, three, four, five. If I can wish everybody a safe Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you.