 That this meeting is being streamed publicly and recorded as well. And so given that we are using the virtual platform. We'll do a roll call. Good morning. Commissioner. Good morning. I'm here. Thank you. Good morning. Commissioner Hill. Good morning. And good morning. Commissioner Skinner. Morning. I'm here. Okay. Thank you. We'll get started with the call to order. It's public meeting. Number 380. And before we turn to the minutes, I just want to explain first that there have been changes in our agenda today due to unexpected developments. Well, Dr Vega and director Vanderland and we're fully prepared to move forward. There are some competing factors in the rest of our agenda, which have required us to delay that presentation to a future public meeting. For that, I thank Dr. Baker, particularly for his flexibility. And this also means that we'll have to be a little bit flexible today as we go through the agenda, because we are reordering things as we go along to accommodate the presenters for the rest of the meeting. And then second, I really can't proceed. Thank you. Thank you. And right now without acknowledging my heavy heart, and I assume the heavy heart of everyone else. As we acknowledge the shocking tragedy that occurred yesterday at the broth elementary school in Texas. 19 school children and their teachers. Lost their lives while I an armed 18 year old barricaded himself in their classroom. And I'm very proud of that. And I'm very proud of that. And I'm very proud of me to digest that. And I, I imagine none of us on this. In this meeting today or on the call today. So in thinking about what I might say, I know that we automatically pray for the families that are affected. And we think of the, the lots of life. But I did ask our chief of people. For some thoughts on this. And he immediately said. How important it is for us to remember as state employees. That there are significant resources available to our generous EAP program. So that if we are our families, we help, we should seek those resources. And well, I can't really, those resources really for our overall health and wellness. And of course that includes our mental health. And I can't really. Say to the public what they should be doing, but I am confident that we have so many resources available now to help individuals. And I just will take David Mulcher's good advice and encourage members of the public to remember that. And also to seek those resources when they're troubled. So with that, we'll just continue with them. And I think we're recognizing that yesterday while we were. Managing five suitability hearings. And it was an all day process from 10 to five. That tragedy was occurring without really our, really our knowledge. And for that, I'm sorry. But today we start off our day with a little bit of a heavy heart. So we'll get started and turn now to. Have the. I believe Bill was a backing I know of former secretary O'Brien on the minutes. Yes, bear with me one moment, madam chair. We haven't got three minutes. We didn't. Okay. So I didn't read any. It's on the agenda as a placeholder, but I don't believe there were any minutes for today. Yeah. That's because they're not, I just wanted to check and make sure I didn't receive anything. to the next meeting. Thank you. Okay. With that then, we'll turn to, we'll turn to Director Wells and the administrative update. Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the commission. For the administrative update, we just have the on site casino updates by the gaming agents vision. I see Bruce Banner there. I thought you had mentioned something about Lewis, but I'll turn it over to you. Yeah, I thought the meeting was tomorrow. That's why I was going to have Lewis. Oh, okay. Got you. All right. Confusing. Mine's short today because of the quarterly updates, but I do have two updates. MVM will be starting construction on the new game sense area on June 20th. We'll be moving from the current location to the new location, which is the Redenton area award center. And on core by this weekend, we'll be moving the poker room from the current 13 tables to 15 tables. So we'll be doing adding two more tables. And that's kind of it. If you have any questions, any questions for Bruce on that? So two more tables at ABH. Okay, Karen, do you have anything else for us? Anything else for today? Thank you. Okay, great. Thank you, Director Wells. All right. And as I mentioned, item number four will be moved to a future meeting. So at this point in time, if everyone is prepared, Chief Delaney will go forward with your quarterly reports. Thank you, Madam Chair and commissioners. So today we have all of our licensees reporting, and maybe not all in order. I know we've been moving a few things around this morning, trying to take care of everybody's availability. But we have up first MGM Springfield with their quarterly report. And we have Dan Miller here with us and his team and Arlen Cabarro and Chris Kelly. And I'm not sure who else Dan, I'll turn it over to you at this point. You can introduce your team. Thanks. Thank you, Joe. Good morning commissioners, Lady Chair. So yes, we're usually we would have four main speakers, a couple are out of the office today on PTO that they've obviously very much well deserved. And so you'll get a little bit of the Arlen and Dan show with a sprinkling of Gus thrown in there as well. And so let me just try and share my screen quickly for the presentation. What's that one there? Are you all seeing that appropriately? Yes, Dan, we can see it. Okay. You might want to, I don't know if you want to enlarge it. There we go. Perfect. All right. And so just also kind of finish off this introduction. We have chosen to update the general style and look of our presentation to the commission. One was due to flow. We felt that some of the time we would jump back and forth from speaker to speaker a little too frequently. It would be good to keep blocks together of similar content. And then also we wanted to mirror those of our fellow licensees so that you as the commission get a better idea across all three what we're presenting to you. So you'll see that change as we go forward from there. I will hand over to Arlen who will give us updates on all of our financial related numbers and figures. All right. Good morning everybody and thank you, Dan. So we'll go ahead and get started. So reporting on our gaming revenues for the first quarter in January we generated 18.6 million in gaming revenues and 4.7 in taxes. In February we generated 19.9 million in gaming revenue and 5 million in taxes. And in March we generated 24.3 million in gaming revenue and 6 million in taxes. Ending the quarter with a total of 62.8 million gaming revenues and 50.7 in taxes. And then we move on to the next slide. We can see that our total gaming revenues quarter over quarter increased about 18 percent contributing an additional 2.3 million in tax statements when compared to the same quarter prior year. And there are no questions. We can move on to our lottery sales. Our total lottery sales for the quarter was 311,000. An increase of 10 percent over a prior year. At the slide drop we see in January it was driven by Omicron. Wake would be our expectation. Are there any questions on gaming revenue or lottery? Moving on to our diversity spend. Our diversity spend in total was about 9 percent. Our total biddable spent 851,000 for the quarter. Can we just stay on the slide for a second? Thank you. Thank you. And we did see about diversity spend. We did see an increase quarter over quarter from 7 percent in total to 9 percent. And in this slide as you can see our total Massachusetts spend remained strong with a total of about 46 percent. There were total spend staying within state and 27 percent locally. And Dan, I guess go back to you. Yes, thank you, Arlan. So taking up from our regular compliance slide and here we'll talk about the underage. With the first column showing an increase quarter over quarter from the end of 2021 what we're attributing that to is we as of February 4th allowed access to our south end market by all ages. Up until that point we had cut that area off and pretty much anywhere north of the gaming floor was considered 21 and over. But with obviously the relaxing of restrictions, the move forward to return to a full service resort that we wanted to open that area up for approval. The other thing during the quarter is the amount of family programming that has also increased at our two management properties at both Mass Mutual and Symphony Hall. So we have had a lot more families around the facility than previous to that. And the final thing I'll throw there as well is also family staying in our hotel. Previously we did not have the hotel full at every level. But as it has grown and each floor has opened we obviously are welcoming more guests to that which include family programming. What I will say conversely to that I took these numbers I compared them against both the first quarters of 2019 and 2020 and these are over 80% less than they were in both those quarters. I didn't compare them against 2021 Q1 because clearly there were a lot of restrictions in place then and we also weren't allowing so many people access to the floor or access to the facility as we are now. Moving over one column and seeing that there was some gaming in February and March that's a little bit of a mixed bag sadly where three young gentlemen between the ages 18 and 21 were able to get to a table game and play to the hands of Blackjack. In that particular case both the dealer and the floor supervisor that table were both disciplined for that for not having checked the idea appropriately. The other three that were they were slot play they were in actual fact involved guardians or parents that helped their underage gain access to the floor and then allowed them to either push a button while they were playing or in one case it was gave a child a dollar to put in a machine but obviously we stopped that got them off the floor and did the appropriate reporting. Clearly I'm very very happy that we continue to see zero amounts of any consumption of alcohol by underage and then the final column those that we are preventing are to our security based checkpoints around the floor or anybody that's presenting us with a fraudulent or or fake ID that we run through our system it comes back and then we decline their ability to access. So any questions? I just have a comment I've asked for this in the past I'm just wondering if you could differentiate between underage and minors when you report to us. You did it in your oral presentation I appreciate it that was the question I was going to have the breakdown of 18 to 21 versus under 18 but if going forward you guys could mark that in the quarterly make it more apparent it would be great. Thanks. No problem thank you Commissioner. Daniel I had a question. Sorry yes I'm sorry. Great to see you Daniel. You too. The the time stats that you have noted at the bottom yes is that so in the gaming area is that while gaming or which column do those stats correspond to? Is it just in the gaming area generally or while gaming or some combination? Generally it could include a combination so so example the people that were able to gain stayed on the floor longer than those who possibly you know literally put a foot on the floor as it were and so when you see those numbers there often appears a bit of a skew giving average time in gaming areas 25 minutes out of all of the number of incidents if we added up 13, 20 and 23 clearly mainly they were only on there for maybe one, two, three minutes at a time before our security or another employee approached them and managed to get them off the floor it's really when we have a singular incident that is longer that it skews that average time. To some degree maybe what we should be using is sort of a median average as opposed to a mean average that might be more accurate in this case. Thank you. Any other questions? All right then I will hand it back to the lovely Arlen for our workforce this time. Thanks Dan. In reporting our employee numbers for the quarter we ended with 1,203 employees which is about an increase of about 230 employees compared to the same quarter prior year or 24 percent. On the next slide we can see the same breakdown just broken out by Supervisor Annabelle. Thank you. And it's back to me again. I feel like we're playing a game of tennis here and it's I don't know if it's 15 love to me or 30 love to Arlen so let's see if I can get a match point. So clearly the commission understands our our loyalty to the Springfield community in the way that we try to you know help our local first responders so in in the first quarter we were able to have two events one was inside of our top golf swing suites that was attended by local paramedics and EMS responders and then the second event was actually inside of our tap bowling area and what I'll just draw your attention to quickly is so that the lower center photograph of those two police officers about to bowl we were all amazed that they could bowl with full sized temp in bowling bowls with their utility belts still on so that that was gun and everything and they were bowling like champions so can you imagine what they'd be like if they took those off and then lastly the food pantry the local pantry that we donated some money to and some some time of volunteers you may remember when we closed for COVID we actually donated tons of food to them so they wouldn't go to waste and then we have continued our relationship with that local pantry throughout out the pandemic and will continue clearly with them it's a very very worthy cause and we want to make sure that we're proponents of them helping them out and then of course something that I'm very very personally proud of is the rollout of playing my way on on March 31st you're very aware of what happened that day with some of the the press that went on and that sadly you couldn't make it but luckily I jumped on in the morning was able to give you a little bit of a running total at the time and suffice to say what I wanted to end at least this slide with I did check this morning we're right at around 1700 persons that have signed up or enrolled into the play my way program since it started and the other small statistic I want to throw out there is of that so that 1700 is 99.7% of those who have signed up period and have continued to stay enrolled in the program so are clearly seeing some use and some some benefit from it I think that's a great continued sponsorship of this program that 99% of people are choosing to stay and use it to their benefit so and then where of course Beth would usually jump in here this relates slightly to those couple of events that we held for our local first responders that our tap swing suites and our bowling alley are now open to the public so where they weren't previously and we've been slowly react reactivating amenities excuse me those two areas are now open the the parking garage that is adjacent to the mass mutual center everything is on track there for a demolition and reconstruction I believe the last thing I heard was that that was going to begin in end of July sorry end of June early July and then we over at MGM Springfield are in talks with the necessary parties because of course our parking garage will probably become the main parking garage in the city for a lot of additional persons predominantly our own employees over at mass mutual center we want to make sure that we've got availability for them for that this is where I'm going to hand it to Gus just briefly to give an update on 31 Elm Street that I think is quite positive. Good morning chair and the morning commissioners thank you there for the opportunity to speak a little bit as you on the 31 Elm has been an ongoing project in Springfield for a while there was an issue with a capital gap that was created presumably because of the chain supply chain and inflation costs fortunately the city and the state combined to fill that gap as a result the project is now back on track I wanted to report to the commission that although this is a Q2 event in which we'll you know speak more about in our next presentation I did want to advise the commission that MGM has funded fully funded its 16 million dollar commitment to the 31 Elm Street project that money was issued funded to mass housing last week and we are hopeful that mass housing will not take its steps to issue those funds combined with other sources to the developer to get the project fully going it's already underway but not everything is funded we're hopeful that we can fast track this project thank you. I'll just add briefly that from our offices here at 95 State Street where that building is directly across the street when we walk in every morning we look out the window we can see the construction work that is continuing to occur there now so it's very reassuring to know it's all on the right track and that it's moving forward so and then finally our entertainment offerings so to the left side of the screen you can see everything that went on during the first quarter I could be biased but I'm a big queen fan so the Krilla Queen event that was held up in the Aria Ballroom was very entertaining one of the big things for Springfield is the Thunderbirds are in the playoffs again that's that's only very recently so I guess it's strictly a Q2 but it was due to their play during Q1 that got them there and I believe it's the first time since they've been the Thunderbirds even though the you know Springfield has had a local AHL team for many years that they've made it to the playoffs so they're all very very very excited and that's some of that programming I was speaking to earlier as we move into you know what's coming up next you can see the the different types of events there I know lady chair you're a John Mulaney fan so you know he's coming to Mass Mutual Center and and what I'll leave you with because it was it was such a boom to us last year that we could not not reintroduce it is the free music Fridays that we'll be bringing back in the summer throughout you know so that's going to be a fantastic every Friday open air outdoor it's just a coming together of the community that we clearly haven't seen in the last few years for obvious reasons so let's let's bring more of that to the city so I will collapse that down are there any any last questions I have a quick question madam chair if that's all right so now that we're starting to see some openings with the COVID starting to go in the opposite direction of what we've been dealing with over the last couple years have you seen any increase in the convention center being used more than it was the last two years and if so how that's affecting the MGM commissioner hill yes we we definitely have and so forgive me you're talking about the mass mutual convention center or ours I'm talking about well both now that you bring it up okay so yes on both counts I think the I'll start with the mass mutual center they they were by far closed the longest out of any of our properties and so the moment they were able to reopen they had done such a fantastic job of asking upcoming groups to delay their visit and held on to that business that came back so we didn't have so many cancellations which is true here in our convention center as well and only yesterday I was talking to our executive director of sales for the convention center here at MGM and and she is booking out every single month of groups trade shows you know she's doing everything she can to get that kind of group business back into this facility so it's uh it's on the grow so would you say that that has grown is there a percent in your mind that you can tell us today how much that has grown over the last few months I wouldn't I'm sorry I wouldn't like to put a percent to Johnny I mean it is significant from the perspective of going from none to to a lot uh you know so it's zero to a hundred from a speed perspective um but I couldn't tell you month to month how it's grown that's how I would you know so thank you any other questions if I was able to hear me okay yes thank you I'm having I can see audio issues are popping up a little bit so there was um I just want to thank um MGM for addressing 31 Elm today thank you attorney Kim I know that that really has taken an entire village and I commend best housing for a lot of ingenuity a few years ago to get the project going from the state and and now it sounds like it continued their commitment which is great news I don't know if we understood there was a piece missing and unless I missed that last time um Gus or Daniel but um it's it's great news to hear that the city and state are seeing the project through and we thank you for your commitment I know that the gaming commission um through the committee litigation program is thinking about 31 Elm and so we're delighted that the project continues and Joe if you can just make sure to sort of keeping Joe Delaney a prize um on on 31 Elm would be great I think maybe you've already probably been doing that Joe but um we are very very interested in that project understanding what it will mean for the the benefit of your business and the benefits of the Springfield it's very exciting okay Joe a prize uh as we progress that's great great news the barge is also um another real collaborative effort right so um all good news for development good to hear that's going ahead despite all the challenges so thank you any other questions for MGM at this time um I know that um we were also asking for an update on poker yes lady chair so um currently our poker room is at 14 tables um I might get this wrong now and say three weeks or two weeks ago we increased uh the length of time uh that the the poker room is open so previously we were open 11 a.m to 3 a.m every day now it's 10 so going an extra hour in the morning um and so we've seen that increase that's worked for us um we're gonna you know monitor the volumes in in that area um and continue to see how that grows um no immediate plans to add any further tables than we've got in there um but we seem to find that uh the the number of players that we have meets that number that we've got right now um we don't have long lines of people waiting to get onto a table um there there are some waits at times um but everything just seems to be at the right numbers for you know tables versus demand at this time um but it's something we're always keeping an eye on to determine if that needs to increase so on um the other thing that we we are in the process of um is the the section of slot machines that are still in that poker room area um are being converted to video poker as well so that uh it appeals better to those who may have to wait for a table um you know sort of make it a round uh in the environment for them so Daniel can you remind me is it how many days a week is it from 10 to 3 all day seven days a week yes every day now yes questions for uh Daniel on poker I guess I have another question then um I'm always interested in understanding the um connectivity between the jobs and table games and so um I feel those are really good good good jobs right Daniel um so with the expansion of two tables how many jobs come with those two tables oh um with two extra tables since we reopened um you're catching me as not being a a poker person um but I would you know conservatively yeah conservatively say maybe half a dozen um if we're looking at the the number of dealers for the shifts um and then potentially at least maybe one more supervisor in that room you know so the thing I will say at least holistically as well is everything we're doing is not hampering our attempts to um higher we are continuously hiring so right and so that means six jobs is important right six jobs so and then um in terms of table games overall I think our last report I'm sorry I don't have those figures in front of me um indicated that you're still quite much lower than pre-covid on games table games overall it's do we have any statistics on those numbers by chance today um I'm from poker but I just wondered again yes I can get you I can get you those numbers I can send it to the team um yes we do expect that our current table game revenue to be lower than it was prior to covid we have and it has to do with how we have um rearranged the casino floor um and you know move tables around and added slot machines and I can get you those specific numbers um after the call right and it's important for us to keep track of the table uh table game numbers because of course it's all part of the the overall um mix of amenities that are so important to a category one property um and and of course I'm also thinking of those jobs to Ireland so maybe maybe for our next report um I don't want to put you on the spot but I think that would be helpful for at least me uh commissioners I don't know if you want have any follow-up questions on table games generally or poker but in jobs but that's that's something I I do want to keep track of and then and then before um if you do you have any questions I'd like to say one more question lady chair just one more thing to add to that we are currently in in the midst of a project to move our table games the regular table games project um because they currently open from 10 a.m to 3 p.m daily as well but to go 24 hours and that will that will increase uh one the availability and two the positions so yes okay excellent see there we go um any other questions I guess um I I guess I'm wondering just anecdotally um if you can comment on the challenge of hiring with respect to food and beverage and how that's impacting your your numbers are up which is great on jobs but I just wonder how how you're addressing what we understand is really a national issue since the last time we spoke for three months I know it's a challenge so right now um one of the things we're doing we actually have hiring events every Tuesday um focused on food and beverage positions we recently were able to reopen Costa um which you know shows you know that our numbers are getting stronger Costa um we opened up the pizza counter um on the weekends Fridays and Saturdays and we also opened um the restaurant with the limited menu on the bar um also opened Fridays and Saturdays and we're also starting to get ready to um extend our hours on our counters at a southern market so we're seeing some results from the changes we've done but in terms of um overall hiring correct I mean we're able to open those outlets because we've been able to hire them so having our events like you know we hire every Tuesday we bring them on site we interview on the spot um and we're able to hire them do job offers on the spot and the the popularity and the volume we're seeing with events like that is what's kind of helping us be able to reopen some of these amenities so an increase okay well thank you for keeping us surprised on that too um all right I think those are my questions but anything else questioners I'll set Joe I guess I'll turn it back to you but thank you to MGM for its quarterly report today thank you for the time okay so um next up we have Encore uh Boston Harbor to give us their quarterly report and we're uh joined by Jackie Crumb uh Senior Vice President General Counsel uh Julianna Catanzariti and uh as well as David uh Darkangelo from the Massachusetts uh Commissioner of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. With that I'll turn it over to Jack. Well I'm actually going to turn it over after saying hello to everyone I'm going to turn it over to Julianna. Good morning Jack. Good morning. I am just going to share my screen hopefully is everyone able to see. I'll set it to you. So Madam Chair, Commissioner, good morning. We'll begin with an overview of our gaming revenue taxes and lottery sales for the first quarter of 2022. So during Q1 our gross gaming revenue for table games was um 79,459,000 gross gaming revenue for slots was about 94 million dollars which resulted in a total gross gaming revenue of about 174 million dollars and about 44 million dollars in state taxes collected. So here we have a year over year comparison uh you may remember that during the first quarter of 2021 we were still operating on limited opening hours and also limited gaming positions so I'm not sure how helpful this comparison is given that Q1 of 2022 thankfully we were um operating in a 24-7 schedule. So our lottery sales for the first quarter totalled about 818,000 dollars which was a 33.4 percent increase over the same quarter of 2021 but again this is considering um the limited operating hours that were in place during that time and again here's the exact year over year comparison. So moving on to workforce during at the end of the first quarter we had a total of 300 3,000 I'm sorry 482 employees. 2,403 of those employees were part were full-time and 1,079 were part-time. Of those total numbers 54 percent were minorities 2 percent veterans 45 percent women and 87 percent local residents um and that there is additional 3 percent of employees that we don't consider a local but we're massachusetts residents so 90 percent of our workforce is massachusetts residents. Here is our breakdown by supervisory and above employees um so in manager and above positions 46 percent of employees were minorities 44 percent were women and six percent were veterans and then in supervisory or above positions 59 percent were minorities 43 percent women and five percent veterans. So as for our operating spend so our diversity and local figures related to our operating spend per q1 are all based on a total discretionary spend of 20,324,000 dollars so of that total discretionary spend 8 percent was spent with minority business enterprises 2 percent with veterans business enterprises and 14 percent on women's business enterprises. Um this is the same broken down by local spend so more than half of our total discretionary spend was spent with businesses in massachusetts and you can see here about three and a half million was spent with Boston businesses 1.6 with Everett businesses and over a million dollars with Somerville businesses and that's an addition to those amounts spent in um Chelsea Maldon and Medford. So Juliana before you move on to the compliance um the your women's numbers your employment percentages you're slightly still behind the goal. I know that it's been a bit of a struggle can you just speak to efforts to try to get that number up to the goal? Sure Juliana I can answer that so we have we currently have about 200 open positions and we're focusing on those 200 open positions to try to see if we can bring more women in um those um so we're reaching out to our local community groups as well we're also reaching out to some of the trades that we use during construction to see if we can reach those communities. Okay and what are the 200 open positions are mostly all over across the board? Yeah so a lot of food and beverage still um as the hotels come back and conventions come back we have a lot of positions open in in those areas so um hopefully we'll be successful in doing that we have some uh positions that are a little bit more flexible in terms of schedules so as we bring those positions back we're hoping that that'll allow some uh potentially allow some women who have been out due to child care issues to be able to rejoin the workforce. Okay so Brian's going to ask your your question about child care. No I think Jackie usually throws it in anyway but sure is it is it available your child care center? There is there is still availability in the child care center the last time I spoke with them they said that they were they were in a little bit of a hiring problem as well so they needed to add additional people so they could open up more spots so I know they were working on that but I think that's that's been a trend that we've seen across every industry. Yeah and but your employees continue to avail themselves of it which is great. They can yes there are still available spots. Yeah okay thanks. So moving on to compliance um so before I go through these numbers we wanted to mention a few recent changes we made to address some of the issues with minors on the gaming floor so first as you may know we've had an issue with the red eight door because that so red eight is a restaurant um that has an entrance that's not in the gaming floor so we have that door on the side that we will security officers will permit minors essentially to go right to red eight and then exit through that door um that's been an issue as of late so we have posted a security officer outside of that door during hours when red eight is in operation so if you look at the first column of this chart for example in February um there were 13 minors intercepted on the gaming floor a large majority of those came from that red eight door we posted the security person there the first week in March and you can see the march numbers drastically reduced um so I mean out of our goal is of course always to have zero minors on the gaming floor but out of approximately 150,000 people each month um we're working really hard to lower that but it's it's a massive amount of people coming in and out so um the four that we reduced to in March was something we were proud of um additionally we have um we have a staffing permits we've instituted a policy where security officers can only be stationed at a casino entrance where a veridox machine is for about two hours at a time so that means that a security officer is only sitting there checking IDs for about two hours at once um it's it can be a monotonous job we want to make sure they're fresh eyes on all forms of identification so that's also helped a little bit just making sure that we're turning those people over and they're not there for hours at a time checking IDs um the last thing we've done is we also have security supervisors now conducting random checks at the veridox stations just checking in with their people and making sure everyone's alert on the ball and um and paying attention to the IDs that are coming in so those are three major things that we've done that um appear to be really helping with the minors on the gaming floor preventing that from happening um do we have any questions about these numbers commissioners um so the only question i have you have the tally at the very end that gives the under 18 i i appreciate that um any of those is there a further breakdown in terms of any of those actually intercepted gaming or just on the floor so i i think so there was a lot of those instances where parents have accidentally exiterate red eight with very small children like in baby spin strollers and whatnot um i don't think any of those minors actually gamed for the most part they are literal children with their parents okay and then the that you've got the longest time period on the floor being about two hours do you know the circumstances about one i do so that was a 20 year old minor i believe who used the valid ID of a family member to access the floor um so it's scanned through veridox it was a family member so i presume they may have been some um they may have looked alike enough for it not to cause any concern and then i think he actually attempted to make a transaction at the cage in the cage was suspicious of his identification so they called over security and i think he admitted that the ID was not his got it thank you you're welcome any other questions i am going to turn over the next section to jackie and juliana is this the updated one i apologize we had to update our deck at the last minute um is this the updated version it is okay yep this is good so as you know we instituted a process on our ticket redemption units where patrons if they so choose to donate their remaining change can do so to four different charitable organizations it's been really successful our patrons seem to seem to appreciate it you can see the total numbers of tickets that is a very high number unfortunately the dollar number isn't as high as the tickets obviously but um it's a well received donation to these charitable organizations we do plan on changing out or rotating the organizations uh as of july 1st so uh under special events uh i wanted to introduce you to our executive vice president of operations damien o'rearden uh damien has been with us uh is it about a year now damien yeah ten months jackie believe it or not it's time flies yes um and uh i've asked damien to join us because we had a really special um honor this this first quarter and to tell you a little bit about that damien good afternoon everyone very nice to uh very nice to meet you all um as jackie said i recently joined the team i had worked for risk cards and for about 17 years at about six different properties and i got the amazing opportunity to come and join the encore boston harbour family in uh in july so it has been an absolutely fantastic experience i i think one of the one of the big things that that we wanted to focus on uh from an encore boston harbour perspective is always we pride ourselves on our service and our um our luxury levels of anticipated service and we wanted to achieve our forbes uh fifth star for the resort and that can be a big task for any property and it can be especially a big task for larger properties as you all know we're 671 rooms and an average forbes property is a usually around 200 to 300 rooms so uh we were very fortunate of about two months ago we received the wonderful news um that we were awarded our forbes five star for the hotel and also for the spa and that we awarded the forbes five star for rare steakhouse which makes it the highest rated steakhouse in boston and so we are actually the largest five star gaming resort outside of las vegas and there are only six five star gaming resorts in north america the vast majority of them being in las vegas there's one outside in pennsylvania and this would also mean that we're the largest forbes five star on the east coast we are only one of five five star hotels in boston and certainly the largest and our spa is now uh one of only three five star um spas in the city and i think you know a big thing with us going for this forbes is very highly coveted and i'll get on to that in a moment but um coming out of the pandemic this was a huge achievement by the team and it just goes out the the focus of the company and really delivering that luxury experience to all of our guests and also like everyone stacking was a challenge and i think everybody on the on the call acknowledged just that and and this was our first year going for our forbes five star award normally it takes a number of years and as i said it's usually a smaller property so the larger the property the more difficult it is and then as you're all aware we were only open four days a week from a hotel perspective until september and then we went for seven days and and for the team to achieve this has has really been an absolutely fantastic and so with that just a little bit of forbes on the on the next slide so if you're not familiar forbes forbes is the only travel guide and they're the only independent global rating system for luxury hospitality and they actually rate every single luxury property across the world there's actually seven hundred thousand hotels and resorts in the world there are only three hundred and twenty three forbes five star properties and there are only by just over 100 forbes five star spas in the world and that goes across 74 countries so it really is the top luxury hotels and resorts in the world we are one of only about a hundred properties that has a five star rating for our hotel and also a five star rating for our spa which which we are very very proud of just to give you a little bit of a little bit of insights about what forbes look for when they when they come to the property so they actually evaluate over 900 service standards when they come to the resort and they actually just do one official audit a year so you get one chance to earn your forbes five star award it's an anonymous visit so they will come like any other guest and they will stay with us for a number of nights and they will go through and inspect every single part of the resort from a front of house perspective we have absolutely no idea that they're here and then what happens is about two weeks later they will contact us and let us know that they have been here and then we have to wait for the rating process which actually happens at the beginning at the beginning of each year one of the big things is when forbes it's all about the service and it's all about the consistency of service so really when they come they're coming to inspect what they expect and they're very very thorough and while we have an absolutely stunning resort and only 25 percent of the score that they give us is really on the physical facility the other 75 percent is all about the luxury service and they just kind of put up a few classifications that they look at cleanliness cleanliness is paramount and so everything from every single part of the resort has to be absolutely spotless that's the minimum point of of entry and but really what it's all about it's about the food and beverage facilities it's about the sense of luxury but then it's all about our consistency of service and making sure that the graciousness thoughtfulness and sense of personalized service is there and as I said when they do their inspections they're anonymous so we don't know who they are we don't know if they're just a regular guest so we could have 400 guests check into the resort today one of them could be the Forbes inspector we will never know but really what they're coming to see is what is the typical guest experience are we delivering that sense of luxury and that five-star experience to every single guest on every single interaction that we that we have and so it was a great testament to the team here being in just our first year going for the Forbes award and that we were able to accomplish the five-star for the resort the five-star for the spa and then four-star for for rare did anybody have any questions for me no questions from me but huge congratulations we had gotten this news a little while ago but didn't know really how to digest it Damien so this is very exciting commissioners I'm sure you join in congratulating on for this and I also suspect it was within the imagination of our prior commissioners when they gave the original license when I arrived and things were underway that vision was well in place and it's now to your credit that's being acknowledged so congratulations commissioners any questions or comments for Damien? No questions from me I just want to add my congratulations to the encore team very well done he must be very proud and I think we are too. Thank you and I must say I think you should see the lift that it's given to the team like all of our ladies and gentlemen just that sense of pride to be one of only 100 resorts in the entire world that has a five-star hotel and a five-star spa is huge but I think it's it's just a great testament to the amazing team that we have and just how passionate everybody is about the guest experience and thank you for acknowledging that just to reiterate what Damien said this belongs to our team members they worked so hard to achieve this we actually did a huge back-up house celebration for them over two different days and we called all the different ships and we laid out a red carpet we made sure that that they understood that they had earned this award this was not accomplished by management this was accomplished by our day-to-day hourly employees. So just to add my congratulations to everyone and Damien welcome. Thank you so much. I hope you're having a good time. Thank you Eileen you've got a good Irish name. I was going to say and it's nice to see another oh apostrophe show up on the screen. Yes that's for sure lovely to meet you all thank you very much for your time. Thank you thank you hi Juliana if you just want there we go um so in addition during the first quarter we had a an event where we it was just a team appreciation event frankly we'd found out that we had the Forbes five-star and we weren't able to tell people and we wanted to just celebrate them before they even knew it was coming so we did this a little bit earlier um and it was uh gave out prizes and whatnot for employees. How come we don't get notice of that one? The doughnut wall was really spectacular my job was to give out the doughnuts and I had to get trained into food safety to do that uh it was quite complicated. I would have loved to have seen that Jackie that's great that's great. Jackie she did it very well. Um also uh January was um National Human Trafficking Prevention Month and we developed a module we actually revised our anti-human trafficking policy and developed a module which we actually started rolling out in December and it was for all guests facing in front of house uh employees and very proud to say that at this current time we have 99.15 percent of our employees trained on this module. It was a really impactful video that was put together um and it was uh launched both here and in Las Vegas. Did you say 91 or 99? 99.15 percent of employees at EBA have all been trained. Great. Yeah also uh problem gaming awareness month uh Game Sense was fabulous in terms of handing out prizes and really asking questions and getting our employees engaged uh once again uh in problem gaming awareness. So this was a food drive that we did in the first quarter as well. We collected more than 21,000 pounds of food for Bread of Life which is our local food pantry in the city of Malden and volunteerism. So uh obviously during COVID our volunteer numbers were not where we wanted them um but we're really proud to say that as the first quarter um our employees have volunteered over a thousand hours and I'm even more pleased to say that um now sitting here in May our employees this year have volunteered 4173 hours. We have a goal of 12,000 hours uh for our employees this year which amounts to about um four hours per employee. And uh another award we got the Traveling Legion Global Vision Award honoree. I think this was a um this was a wind resorts award. One of the things they looked at as far as Uncle Watson Harbor was the rooftop solar array and the four megawatt battery farm that we have. And um David you're on as well right? Yes I'm here good morning. Nice to see you again. Good morning David. Good morning. Hello Madam Chair, commissioners. So um one of the things that we were asked to talk about today was our accommodations that we have at the resort for visually impaired individuals. So we have a number of things we have a lot of trainings that go on primarily for the guest rooms. At check-in we have our staff read the hotel policies and procedures to the guests. We also installed in the room have a feature called room valet which features alarms noise prompts and shaker pads for guests beds in the event of an emergency. One of the things that we're currently looking at is to try to integrate that with guest personal device so that if they have their phone with them they could use that. On the casino floor what our dealers are trained to do is if someone who is visually impaired sits at their table is to actually read through the entire game. So for instance if they're dealing Blackjack they will read to the person exactly what cards are delivered to every single other player as well as the dealer's cards and the outcome as well. The one thing our employees are trained on is to be very careful about touching people's money and making sure that if they're asked for assistance that they help that it's all done in front of the cameras so that we can try to ensure that there's no issues there. Obviously we still have gaps. One of the gaps is slot machines. David was kind enough to come and visit us at Encore I think last month and we were discussing that. Unfortunately it's just not the technology isn't available yet. So I did see David I looked up and there was one slot machine developed quite a couple of decades ago but I don't think it ever took hold and I think part of the problem is there's so many different types of slot machines available and to just create one slot machine may not be the appropriate way of addressing this. I was going to say something else but we looked at different ways of we're trying to be thoughtful in terms of ways that we might be able to mark slot machines in order to allow visually impaired persons to play those. We did also with the assistance of the IAB we changed our policy with respect to jackpots. So for instance if somebody is playing with a visually impaired person and they're the one who pushes the button we would have the discretion to award the jackpot to the visually impaired person rather than our current policy which is the person who actually pushes the button. So that accommodation was appreciated. David was there anything I missed? No I think that's right on and that reasonable modification definitely satisfies the request that brought us here to begin with it was one of our consumers. So I think going forward it's great and I'd ask the commission though to consider when you have an operator here that and this is going back to my time just as disclosure when I was a city counselor in Maldon working on the surrounding community agreement getting to understand the Wynn organization but also my time on the architectural access board working on all of the accessibility features for the hotel. This is best in class stuff so the fact that we're here talking about this problem maybe you know my people would think like oh it's a bad thing this is a great thing because it means that people with disabilities are frequenting the place which is great news you know as as we were there touring there's people with mobility disabilities there's people with hearing disabilities there's people with visual disabilities that's a great thing that's a welcoming environment for people with disabilities so I think the operator should get a lot of credit here and when I'd ask the gaming commission to consider is they've done as much as I think they can do reasonably to modify under title to to modify the stuff that they have going on whether it be games whether it be the other services they provide maybe writing a letter or somehow engaging IGN and some of these other big manufacturers these third parties that are supplying some of the machines for the for these locations and seeing if they can get into a dialogue come to massages we'll show you we'll we'll provide groups and you can try to do it because I'd be willing to bet if they could configure a machine to help increase accessibility for people with disabilities it's probably going to be a hit machine for everyone like it's a good you know time has proven that when you make things accessible for people with disabilities that quickly gets adopted into pop culture and everything automatic door openers great example escalators great example uh you know if you want to go back to Alexander Graham Bell the invention of the phone system in the internet I mean he was trying to he was trying to make a device so his deaf wife and mother could communicate and it you know it turned into the information super highway that we're on now but anyways if we could get into a dialogue with them take the heat off the operator because the operator can only buy the games that are on the market David um absolutely we can take you up on that great suggestion and I actually would if you wouldn't mind first up on full disclosure I've had the pleasure of working with David in past positions and and his passion and his advocacy is clear but it's small I love that David um but that but it's smart and and um he's in the positions that he's in because he's really good at them and he has great ideas so commissioners I think we should take up the offer that David's presented and if David I can um perhaps we could ask you to meet with us um and some we do um I have convened a working group um for equity diversity and inclusion and this fits right into that so I think if you would allow me to have you join one of our meetings it would be very much about oh that'd be terrific one thing while you mentioned it madam chair I did notice that in the DEI thing disability owned businesses wasn't there I saw at WBEs MBEs we have Dolby's in Massachusetts yes we sure do maybe we could get that spent and then additionally I just as disclosure I am here as my role of commissioner a mass commission for the blind but I think we could probably leverage uh the national council on disability as I'm a member of that as well on this this is definitely a national issue uh so you know any initiatives that you want to put me on sign me up great commissioners I don't hear any argument against that correct there we go um and what I also love is that you honored um on car with best in class and that's fitting for today's um presentation and the fact that they welcomed your input and implemented it and responded to it so it's a testament to that so Jackie thank you for this and thank you for the I didn't know these services could be available I never thought about it so I learned them in this very short uh two bullet you know I guess with multiple bullet points but two sections I learned a lot about um what the best in class would offer to people who need um special accessibility in accommodation so can I mention one other thing I do want to mention the name of our consumer to put it into the public record here Thomas Consonetti he is a frequent visitor there they know him well the staff knows him well he's the one who raised this and it really does take uh fortitude on behalf of a person with the disability to bring these issues forward so I want to definitely give him credit you had people with disabilities at the table here changing policies so nothing about us without us is a is a phrase in the disability community and that happened here he was at the table you know bringing me in this is this is a good thing so let's be best in class in Massachusetts excellent great I should also mention that we have recently conducted a full audit of the entire casino uh accessibility audit uh so we are going to be implementing different uh as a result of that audit we're going to be implementing additional measures uh to make sure that we are more accessible um one of the primary things that we're going to be doing is updating our websites across the company to win resorts not just ebh but to be um to be accessible to visually impaired individuals uh the other thing is uh automatic door openers are still a really big thing we want to make sure that we have those installed so we've just approved a plan to to do that as well great any questions for David or for Jackie on this particular slide it's new to us I see commissioner brian well first of all I love the phrase nothing about us without us I mean it's so on point for things like this and I think it's great the involvement that you've had and it makes me think we need to have conversations and let the other licensees know um what you've been doing um edbh and see you know show them the success that you've had so they can communicate with you and take a look themselves yeah we'd be happy to share our policy we we've written up a full policy on um on accommodations and trainings that um all of our employees have to go through to to make sure that we're as accessible as we can be uh I can't see everyone but commissioner hill or commissioner skinner do you have any questions for David or Jackie I don't have any questions for David except a big hello uh blast from the past we have worked together as well uh in our past positions it's nice to see you Dave and uh Dave and Jackie thank you uh for a job well done everyone knows David from from the past I first met David a million years ago when he was with the city of Malden yeah well we go back to the late 1990s don't we Dave the legislature yeah a testament to great advocacy and passion and commitment David and uh that smile doesn't hurt either um so my smile is because after this meeting I'm going on vacation where are you going for a week I'm don't tell me it's not wearing a public siren but that's great I hope you have fun and we'll find out for you later um excellent well I'm also hoping the smile is a little bit because um of your appearance here with on court because you you've shown some great partnership here so thank you um and commissioner skinner did you want to close out I did I just wanted to take the opportunity to say hello to David and uh chair Judd Stein you took the words right out of my mouth I also wanted to thank uh David for his advocacy and passion oh thank you commissioner yeah okay so thank you David and I'll follow up um um with connecting you directly with us um and and of course I know that you've met with director wells with with um attorney prom so she'll stay completely in touch with you but I think well and she's on the same um working group so we're working both circle thank you so much thanks for the thumbs up thanks again everybody thank you appreciate it okay happy vacation Jackie next slide uh next slide please Juliana questions we took care of some um any other questions on the presentation today commissioners I think um uh commissioner brine I'm sure that you I think you were aware of the training that was going on on human trafficking but I am impressed by the fact that it's at the milium throttle practice of 100 percent I think is going to be working with the public safety committee on this important subject matter as well so thank you um maybe the question I have um Jackie I continue to get calls and walking around the streets I get people coming up to me regarding the poker room and can you just give us a quick update I know you uh told us in the past you're going to be increasing the tables um I think when you told us how many you were going to be implementing I was taking a little of that uh because of what used to be there and what is being proposed to be there um it was a little worrisome to me and people who had heard you make that remark the last time we talked about this so could you give us a quick little update on that sure so uh as you know we're increasing the tables as of this Friday by an additional two tables um the poker room is currently open Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m to 8 a.m we are looking at whether we can expand those hours further and I think uh that'll go a long way in terms of expanding the offering um the question had been asked of MGM regarding the number of jobs that that are associated with each table so I've been told that each additional table that we add we add 1.25 dealers which is not really two yes and um an additional in additional 1.1 1.125 supervisory level employees so that's for each each additional table um I think the biggest uh first of all I'd like to I feel what Daniel said we are seeing that our lines are diminishing with respect to um with respect to getting those tables we're hoping that we can further do we can further expand the offering by changing the hours and expanding the hours um but really at the end of the day it's it's a matter of real estate we we're frankly out of real estate and uh any each table we add will have a substantial impact on the our revenue as well as the tax revenue that goes back to the commonwealth we're happy to provide for the details of that so help me understand why we're not open on the weekends for this I would think I'm sorry I would think that we would see an increase in players going on the weekends but it's not being offered and I would think business wise that's usually when restaurants do the the best business I would think it would also be in the case for poker rooms um from what I see up north and it's uh you know I've taken a little tour of some of the New Hampshire places and that seems to be the bulk of their businesses on the weekends so I'm a little again taken aback that we don't even offer it on the weekends so I I think the primary issue that we have with the weekends which again we're going to revisit and um is coming out of COVID um we saw a lot more people driving to the casino than we previously uh previously had so what we're trying to do now is we've just put the boats back in the water we're trying to increase uh different modes of arriving here uh but our parking has been almost a capacity every single weekend so I think that's that's part of the concern is just a parking crunch uh we're hoping as as people feel more comfortable returning to public transportation that we can relieve that thank you so I just to follow up on that um that correct me if I'm wrong Jackie but when you're talking about we're out of real estate you're not talking about other table games disappearing if you expand poker you're talking about slot machines disappearing correct that's correct okay so just also and I know you know this but I think it does bear stating that in addition to tax revenue we also are concerned about job and the resort experience and so it's not simply maximizing the slots revenue and and you know totally absolutely understood yeah the same way that you're balancing it and and it well I can appreciate that the parking is a bit of an issue it also seems to be again you know a profit choice of saying that you're going to try to get the parking in for the people that go to slots and turn over more than the poker players who it's my understanding stick around longer but again you know to commissioner hill's point that's tax dollars traveling outside the commonwealth also going up north um that probably would stay in the commonwealth if the tables were available so you say you're re-evaluating it I know you know all these things but I do think it bears repeating understood and you know I think um having the flexibility to make these changes is really important for us too when we started our slot offerings were in fact I'd be surprised if there is a handful of slot machines on the floor that are the same as when we began the slot machines have changed dramatically we were you know before we had rows we changed that configuration during COVID we went with bigger machines that are more that have more separation between them so I think the entire floor has changed we're constantly reassessing to see where that pressure is we have people complaining to us that we don't have certain slot machines that they liked from before so I think there's always um there's always that balance and we we do take it into consideration of course other questions for Jackie on the poker we have um one question that's unrelated to today's report um and Joel if you could chime in here on details but I'm wondering if you could update us on the impact of the closure that's occurred over at Southern Square the impact on your employees and of course on on business if any um would be more than happy to obviously it's a huge huge traffic concern the traffic's been backed up every single day uh as as you're probably aware all of that all the way back um no actually I'm not and I'm not sure but maybe we might want to set the stage a little bit more in terms of what happened to what it is and what the plan is and I know Joe has the details I have enough details but I really think we want to put it out um yeah with uh Madam Chair would you like me to just run through sort of what what has happened sure that'd be helpful Joe and then Jackie and China so the um the city of Boston has closed the underpass underneath Sullivan Square uh for a period as I understand for about six weeks so that they can do a full evaluation of the condition of that underpass if you've ever driven it it is uh in bad condition and in a lot of places with concrete spalling off and so on um but uh so the intent is to close that for six weeks then reopen it do some design work and do some repairs on on that later later in the summer perhaps into the fall um as and that's as I understand it today I haven't I had just one conversation with the city of Boston about this and that's my understanding as it stands today so with that starting at the stage Jackie so um and Joe you can correct me on the number but I was told that approximately 60 percent of the traffic that goes through Sullivan Square actually utilizes those tunnels so people who are commuting from the northern suburbs will come in that way and shoot right through under the tunnels without going through Charleston but um it's caused significant backups from anyone for our employees and guests who are coming from the north um principally I'd say the north uh although it's closed coming in from the south as well um the backups in the morning and Juliana could probably speak better to this because she's she sits in that commute it's do how long has it been taking you I think before this it was maybe 20 minutes and now it's regularly 45 to an hour so so our employees are definitely feeling that they're they've asked us you know like what can we do how can we stop it um we understand the city of Boston's doing doing this analysis we're working with the city of Everett as well because obviously it has a giant impact on Everett have you heard anything from patrons um we have not so um I think for the most part our patrons tend to come as um not the same hours that the morning commute is going on so people have adjusted as well they're they're going round they're they're coming from the south instead of coming from the north but uh the biggest issue is that morning commute and um and our employees questions for that matter Joe anything you want to follow up on on that no we're you know we're monitoring it um I think and you know I think it's you know this the city the city has done this it's their road to do that but I think if if it's having a negative impact on on you know visitation to the casino and obviously revenues to the Commonwealth then then our we'll certainly be concerned about that so you're saying you and Jack you'll say touch on this um the only other thing is excuse me um on communication plan I know you had to react quickly but I haven't gone on your website excuse me for that but if you probably have been notifying patrons of they're figuring out how to go around because they learned the first time or to notify them um I when I spoke to our transportation manager he said they were notifying patrons I'm not sure where it is but he did say that they were having communications with patrons regarding that the pretend the time frame and everything for closure okay well thank you for that update anything else um madam chair I just I just wanted to ask Jackie if you could um just give us a quick update on the development across the street I know we have some things that are due back to the commission in the not too distant future yes and we are working on the deliverables uh where it is right now is we've submitted a letter to MEPA and MEPA is um evaluating that so um as soon as we have a response from them we'll be able to proceed accordingly but we are we're continuing to work on the design taking into consideration um the uh the request that you had and um I think we haven't told June is that right Joe to yeah I think the uh March 14th I believe was the date that that was approved so we we gave you 90 days so it'd be middle middle of June right so we'll we'll have those in time great okay that was all that that was all that I had uh manager thank thank you um Chief Delaney and thank you Councillor Crum um and uh Juliana uh thank you for the presentation today we appreciate and I see that uh David is still on um again we thank you for for your contributions today pressures are we all set all right thank you um moving forward then on the agenda next we anticipated um at this time we'd be having our lunch break I offer a short break unless you want to go we're going to go next right into community mitigation which is item um item five B and then um Plain Ridge Park is presenting a little bit later just because of their schedule after community mitigation um I think I've got this right Crystal we'll go to the legal division's piece and then finish up with PPC so do we need a short break now should we go right into community mitigation yeah if I could have five minutes that would be great okay we'll do a five minute break um and that gets you ready Joe um Chief Delaney will you be all set for that I am ready to go okay and and I know your team is ready to Mary and Lily thank you so much thanks we'll be back in uh five minutes 11 30 thank you hi Dave if you can take uh down the screen we'll see who's here also thank you so much all right so we are reconvening on May 25th public meeting number 380 a reminder this is being screened recorded and we'll do a roll call Commissioner O'Brien I am here Commissioner Hill I'm here I'm here right thank you we'll get started we are um as I mentioned we're going a little bit out of order on our agenda we have skipped down to item 5D our community mitigation fund applications again thank you Chief Delaney big day for you today indeed thank you madam chair commissioner so welcome to I guess this is round four of community mitigation fund applications um it's um this year it does feel a little bit like a heavyweight fight with the number of applications that we have so so today we are taking up the community planning applications and uh in the interest of trying to keep a kind of a relatively even workload we pulled a couple of our specific impact and public safety applications forward into this meeting so we don't jam things up too much in June and I guess before we get into the particulars of each application the one thing I'd like you to remember with the community planning applications is that in our guidelines last year we did make some modifications to the community planning category where the commission made the determination that there are certain impacts on the local communities specifically in areas such as restaurants retail entertainment things of that nature and in doing so it relieved the burden of our applicants from having to do a detailed analysis and trying to quantify the impacts that that that the casino is causing so that's sort of reflective in many of our applications this year where perhaps in previous years we would have asked a community to do a lot more work in that area they have not had to do that so we think it's made it a little bit easier for our applicants while also realizing that we do know that there are certain impacts that take place so with that said I'll jump right in I think as we did in the previous rounds we'll go through each particular application and then open it up for questions and then do votes at the end so the first application we have is the city of Everett and this is for the development of some guidelines design guidelines in their industrial district they are requesting a hundred thousand dollars for this work so the review team is recommending that we award the full amount of a hundred thousand to the city of Everett for this now the impact that they have identified associated with Encore Boston Harbor is really the fact that the development taking place in the lower Broadway area and Encore also purchasing additional land in the neighborhood and developing that has put additional pressures on other properties in the area and there's been a lot of properties that have been up for sale that have changed hands and that are looking to be redeveloped and essentially what we had before Encore was a pretty static neighborhood where not a whole lot had been changing over the years and the building of Encore is really putting development pressures on this neighborhood and the city really wants to try to get out ahead of that development rather than responding to it trying to come up with some plans that would improve that area and we did give them a grant a couple of years ago to look at their designated port area which is adjacent to what you're now calling the entertainment district the lower Broadway entertainment district and this effort really expands on that to look at the rest of the industrial district down there you know the idea is they're looking to refine their their zoning policies and develop guidelines that will allow a mix of industrial and mixed use development that will complement the the development that's going on on Broadway now and not just reacting to sort of unfettered development by just sort of allowing things to happen as they might otherwise so the review team really likes this proposal thinks it's it's a good use for funds down here and will certainly we hope complement the development that Encore is doing and help the community guide development in the area of that so with that I will open that one up for any questions it's like everyone's all set chat thank you okay great um so the next one is uh Foxboro Plainville and Rentham uh a regional destination marketing plan um this is a joint application which is something that we always try to encourage we like to see regional approaches to things um so the review team is recommending awarding this grant in the amount of $136,000 to the three communities to develop this regional marketing initiative just a little background we did give the three communities an earlier grant it was actually using all of Foxboro's money but it was also to assist the other communities in starting the development of a marketing plan for particularly looking at the regional draws in that area of course Foxboro has Gillette Stadium and Patriot Place Rentham has the Rentham outlets and Plainville of course has Plainridge Park Casino so the earlier efforts started the development of a website and so on and this would further develop that effort they're looking to do some professional photography and videos and so on and and the continued development of a marketing plan for the region um and again we really like this application uh you know they include not only the the town of Plainville but Plainridge Park Casino itself so clearly a connection to the casino this is really uh an example of someone who's looking to or a group of communities that are looking to take advantage of the presence of the casino to leverage that presence and the visitation that it gets to also bring those to the other communities and also again taking the people who are coming to Patriot Place or Rentham and encouraging them to also perhaps visit the casino as well so really nice proposal to try to encourage additional visitation to the area that will help not only the communities but potentially the casino itself so again we recommend this grant uh and uh be happy to answer any questions on this one. Questions on this? I'll set again. Okay um the next application is the the city of Lynn um a marketing campaign uh the city has actually withdrawn this application from consideration um and I'll just give you a quick explanation of what what had happened that precipitated that um so back in 2021 we awarded Lynn a grant to start the development of a marketing program and and that included a few different pieces the first piece was the development of a a video which they have done the second piece was hiring a marketing professional to help the community develop a a marketing plan and then the third piece of it was to do some um advertising buys be it uh billboards or uh you know online or all various types of advertising so when phase two came along to develop the marketing program Lynn developed a request for uh proposals and and sent that out and got no applicants um you know so there were no takers for that uh which was a little bit uh concerning but the city's going to give it another try they're going to try to do a little better outreach to firms to see if there's other folks that might be available to do this and then if that is not successful um they may actually come back to us and try to revise that proposal a little bit to possibly do some of the work in house they've uh recently uh hired some additional planning staff and they do think they might be able to do that but but obviously that would require a revised scope of work and some additional work on on the on the part of the commission so given that uncertainty the city felt that it was a little bit premature to be requesting additional money so they have withdrawn that application and if they are successful finally in in advancing the 2021 grant they would probably be looking to come back in maybe next year to uh to apply for some additional funds so i will open that one up for any questions okay not appearing um so the next application is uh Malden the city of Malden they are requesting a hundred a hundred thousand dollars to perform a study to convert the former Malden district courthouse into the Malden center for arts and culture you may recall that this was in front of the commission last year the same request and uh the commission denied this last year primarily well really for two reasons one is that the city had not taken ownership of the property as of as of that point in time but also under our old guidelines the communities did have to do some significant additional work to try to make connections to the casino and we weren't really comfortable with the connections that they made last year they did a better job of it this year but also again our revised guidelines make that job a little bit easier for them so we felt satisfied that the connection to the casino was was satisfactory this year now the other piece is this the city still does not own the property but they have filed a bill to do that and uh you know commissioner hill has done some outreach to his uh former colleagues uh on on beacon hill to to to discuss the um the status of the bill and and um it seems like that will move forward this legislative session and and should be completed before the uh the legislature adjourns at the end of july so what we are recommending here we are recommending awarding the full amount of this grant uh for the hundred thousand dollars but we are asking that a condition be placed on this that we wouldn't um actually finalize the grant documents with the city until they have taken possession of the property so what we would do is if the commission agrees to this um we would we would draft up our grant documents so on and so on but we would just hold those in abeyance until we got um some confirmation that that the bill has passed and that the uh you know the property is in the process of being transferred to the city um so i know that was a little bit complicated so i will uh open that one up for any questions um i i just had a question and maybe brad you can answer it more than than joe i know commissioner skinner and i were wondering about the statute and the verbiage whether it was a shell versus a may um it it looks like it's de cab may transfer and then the rest of it basically focuses on what maldem would do in restrictions and then allows them to further sell as long as they have the same kind of restrictions um the status of it now maybe you can just fill in a little bit more about sort of why you're optimistic that this is something that's going to happen in the near future and then another question which brad may or may not know which is whether or not there've been any other parties interested in this it looks like the property belongs is in the name of um the court the trial court and we've going from that subdivision out through de cam to malden so i don't have an answer for your second part of the question the first part of the question is that the bill was moved out of committee and went to ways and means and they're going we made a phone call to the sponsor of the bill who had had conversations with the chair of ways and means and it looks as though they're going to be dealing with all of these local bills hopefully in the first week of june or second week of june so he i'm going by the word of two legislators who have talked to each other that the bill will be done relatively soon okay so it's right for them to say yay or nay yeah june so go through the house first um i believe this is an article 97 so it has to have a roll call by the legislature and has to pass by two thirds two thirds vote and then it will go to the senate for the same process but it should be done by july 31st for sure according to the sponsor of the bill and the other things i think our thought on this was that um you know even though that the the city doesn't own the property today that to delay it would would it would make them have to come in back in next year and when we have feel pretty good confidence that it will move ahead this year we thought that the delay you know would have been kind of excessive um so that's why we're recommending it for this year i think we're putting language in that we wouldn't give them until the ownership uh took place and and may be comfortable with um chief delaney's um level of comfort on that um whatever it is um you know i think we just you know once the city it takes title i mean right yep i think that's i think that's fine and and you know and the issue is if they didn't take title we could just never reward this so i mean it's it's you know right and the funds would the funds would revert back yeah i mean i think if you know if it would go out if it was determined that this property went to someone else uh for whatever reason or or the bill didn't pass or whatever or the mold and then sold it out to another party that's the only thing i want to make sure our verbiages is they could take title and then spin it out um to another not-for-profit consistent with the same ideas but it wouldn't have to be the city um so i just as long as our language not only conveys that but that this is for the city's use yeah but i'm not sure if the fact that it goes to a non-profit i know we have the anti-aid issue but there's case law that suggests if it's still really consistent with the public use except i guess where i'm coming from is a vote on this is it's one thing for the city to come in and ask for the funds for their purposes to do this that i'm okay with i'm talking about it this ultimately for whatever reason stalls and at the end of the day isn't maldon but some other party that might change my desire to vote for the funds i see as opposed to being illegal um illegal construct isn't necessarily yeah i'm not talking about anti-aid amendments so much as conceptually um who's coming asking us for the monies so we you know joe's kind of nodding his head i mean i think you get where i'm coming from in terms of the wording i'd want in the but it's so it's to perform a study to convert the former maldon district courthouse into the modern center for arts and culture um so i think you know our notion on this was that we didn't want to just give out the money without knowing that the city was actually going to get this you know to do a hundred thousand dollars study for something that can never come to fruition we felt would be you know maybe an improper spending of funds so we wanted to make sure that that the city owns the property then they can study it and if you know if they determined that they wanted to either hire a company to run this heart center or whatever i mean look there's many other things that would have to be done to this property before it could be converted into an art center this is just simply a study of the property itself you know we we could have okayed this without them owning the property but again that just felt like it was you know yeah i mean we rejected that last year so i am just remembering where we're all we're on this last year i so the fact that it's a study and that they're closer to owning it um i guess i understand commissioner grind your point that you'd wonder what was happening down the road but given that it's a study um as long as it's executed by the city then yeah yeah yeah yeah oh the study would need to be executed by the city i mean it is a grant to the city itself they i don't believe they could then assign these funds to someone else that's yeah that's my yeah and my scenario that was what i was just wondering about so yeah now it applied to all of our grants right yeah honorable okay so at this stage the study feels um feels appropriate with the condition of of still ownership i think right commissioner brian right okay commissioner skinner do you have questions on this no um commissioner brian's questions and the discussion covered it for me but i do want to just clarify um that the uh grant contract would not be executed correct until unless and until malden established ownership or control over that yep that's correct the the idea here is we would you know we would go through out we would develop our contract and our grant like we like we do but we would just we just would not send that out for signature or we wouldn't you know we wouldn't sign it until such time as we've gotten those assurances so based on that and again um the earlier discussion i'm okay with with moving forward on this one you know and i think we'll we'll need to talk with with todd and his folks and carry just on what you know we would we would need to get from the community that would sort of satisfy that requirement all right so the next one is city of medford um what they're calling the wellington transformation study so they are requesting a hundred thousand dollars to complete a planning study for the revitalization of the wellington area in medford i wanted to look at land use redevelopment urban design infrastructure and so on we are recommending the funding of this study so what they are looking at they're looking primarily at the wellington tea station area as well as the old or what's the current meadow glenn mall area so these are all areas along route 16 which is a made one of the major routes to the casino from particularly from the north so there's a lot of traffic that goes by these areas and again this is as a community planning study again they they don't need to do a whole lot of hard work to say you know what the impact of the casino is but but this is trying to do two things one is they're looking to do some redevelopment in that area particularly transit oriented development mixed use development that can attract some new investment to the area but the thought is is that you know the the properties as they exist today are not a particular draw for people who might just be passing by going to the casino but having more mixed uses where there might be restaurants and other entertainment and residential and other things that there might be a better draw for potential patrons and employees of the casino but also to to mitigate any of those negative impacts those things that we have determined things like impacts on restaurants and retail and entertainment that that area might be might be seeing so again you know they're going to hire a consultant with these funds to do this study then they want to look at the zoning and land use and infrastructure and access again to mitigate negative impacts as well as take advantage of new economic opportunities that would be derived from on-course so again we are we're we're recommending this one so open that one up to any comments any questions right not appearing um so the next one is uh Northampton continuation of their the development of their Northampton live website so we are recommending awarding the full amount of this they are requesting $75,000 but we are also recommending that as part of this grant that the commission require the city to develop and provide to the commission a plan that outlines how Northampton will transition this website into a self-sustaining platform and we are asking that that be submitted with their first quarter report after the project is awarded and just a little bit of background on this one the commission has awarded grants to Northampton in the past we gave him a reserve grant initially and then we issued him additional grants in 2020 and 2021 for further development of this platform this website now in 2020 we did reduce the amount of their request because a portion of that money was being proposed to be used for sort of day to day operations of the of the website and you know under the community planning category you know sort of day to day operations aren't really considered as part of that so we did reduce that application and then of course that was being approved while the pandemic was just hitting us and in full force you know we you know obviously couldn't predict what the future was going to hold so through 2020 you know Northampton and their businesses were having a difficult time like like they were in many other places and partially because of that you know the city had some ideas on how they were going to try to raise local funds to help support this and you know the difficulty of asking businesses for funds when they are really just trying to survive was was difficult if not impossible so Northampton again requested money for 2021 which we approved and you know we were not really envisioning funding this platform beyond 2021 but again no one could really predict you know how deep and severe the the pandemic would be so again I said the review team was a little reluctant to to recommend this initially but we did talk with the community you know we sent a request for supplemental information and then we had a conversation with them and you know got a couple of assurances first you know again we needed to ensure that this was really for development of the platform and not just for operational costs and then secondly you know we talked with them again about this notion of making this a self-sustaining type of application you know the review team doesn't really believe that that that you know community mitigation funds should be used to to fund a program you know forever it's that you know on things like this if it's truly going to be successful it should be something that the community is behind that their businesses are behind and that you know they have the ability to keep this operational without without subsidies you know sort of in perpetuity in the end we do recommend that this be done but the other thing we are asking is that this be conditioned not as a condition of awarding the grant but as part of this grant year asking the community to provide us with with a written plan on on what efforts they are going to take during this year to make this self-sustaining and you know and to do that going forward and I just wanted to say this raises a bigger policy question I think for the commission that we'll want to discuss more I think after today of you know where should this program be going I mean should we be limiting funds to communities should we be funding things long-term should we not be funding things long-term and I think these are questions that the commission will need to need to answer I think probably before our next round of funding but I just wanted to sort of I don't think we need to discuss that today but sort of just want to tee that up as a you know a future topic of discussion and with that I will open this one up for questions questions I I have maybe a comment rather than the question I'm pleased that the working group decided to move ahead on this mainly because our community guidelines did shift a bit that helped on community planning to really make sure that opportunity costs are lost right I'd love it if maybe Mary and and Lily work with you Joe as as you do your outreach for Northampton to maybe I don't know about the opportunity I'm just surmising that there might be an opportunity for them to do something in conjunction with the appropriate neighboring communities like similar on marketing efforts like what Foxboro, Plainville and Redtham have done I know that there's maybe a martyr spread of you know geology geography there I'm sorry and that it's a little bit further from the casino than certainly in Plainville in those surrounding communities but I just wonder if there's an opportunity for them to collaborate with other communities and and and perhaps submit something that will have bigger impact I feel like their website was an attempt to do that and I maybe I'm happy you've confirmed that they're not using the funds for operational purposes but I just wondered if that might be something down the road again I know you probably are going to do your brown back training sessions and perhaps this if we are assuming that we approve the Foxboro Plainville Redtham collaboration that might be a model for them to use. Sure yeah I mean you know we we always encourage you know sort of regionalization we give some bonuses for doing that you know the you know you can lead a horse to water. I understand and maybe I'll repeat this more eloquently down the road as we close out these but I do love the collaboration that we saw in the earlier you know marketing because it really is to to leverage opportunities that the casino brings from the region so thanks and thanks for sticking with Northampton. Next. Okay I have no other questions on that so the next one is Revere. They're called the Broadway placemaking and branding program so they are asking for $100,000 to look at opportunities to analyze opportunities and develop best practices to establish Broadway as a full service and viable commercial destination for residents and visitors so a couple things that they're doing they're going looking to try to do some branding of the district identity this is their central business district in their central shopping area they're trying to improve the public realm through wayfinding and some you know branding signage and also to develop some cross marketing campaigns as part of this and again the review team is recommending the funding for this this program so again the the city really is trying to you know to do two things trying to mitigate some negative impacts of the casinos but also doing some of that outreach to try to take advantage of the presence of the casino there in Revere we did give them some money a couple of years ago to develop a tourism video which they are just finishing up and they're looking to try to use that in conjunction with their marketing plan that they're putting out to help maybe attract some of the casino patrons or employees to the Broadway area you know again some of the wayfinding signage you know there's a lot of casino related traffic that uses route 16 passing through Revere and you know they're trying to put some signage down in those areas to attract people to that area so this you know a lot of things that they're doing here you know they're identifying you know just some of these opportunities to leverage the casino and again we we agree that there's there's a reasonable expectation of an impact on Broadway businesses and that this plan should help improve the visibility and marketing of Broadway to help offset those impacts and and maybe leverage the presence of the casino as well so we are recommending this one and open this one up to any comments any questions everyone's all set looks like thanks this is okay we've had the advantage of very good briefings from your team so thank you okay the next one is a joint application of Springfield West Springfield and Holyoke a tourism hotel promotion the communities are asking for $315,000 to fund a tourism hotel promotion called the funds on us designed to encourage overnight hotel stays and boost hotel occupancy in the Springfield area so what essentially this project would do is do marketing outreach to uh they're targeting the New Haven area the Providence area and the Boston area to try to encourage uh folks to spend a couple of nights in the Springfield area and if uh if two nights were booked in uh sort of that western mass area around Springfield um they would receive $100 visa gift cards um for those stays um the review team is not recommending this application for funding for a few different reasons um so the first reason really is is is you know identifying the impact of the casino uh the way that this was presented to us in the application was that the development of MGM Springfield was expected to bring a lot of overnight business to western massachusetts and that um quite a number of the hotel chains built additional hotel capacity in the Springfield area in anticipation of this increase in volume and the impact here saying is that that increase in in um visitation uh didn't really happen uh now what the the application submitted us a chart that showed uh occupancy in the area and and what it was showing is that there that there was not really a significant increase in occupancy after the opening of MGM but one of the problems that we had with what was submitted was that that this chart didn't really take into account this increase in hotel rooms they have presented to us that there was an addition of 862 hotel rooms uh in the added in the area between 2013 and 2019 um you know we asked them for some additional information about room stays and things of that nature that might be a little bit more indicative of of how uh the population in hotels has changed and they indicated to us that that information was not available for for the area so i guess on the first point we weren't really convinced um that there was a significant impact that was associated with MGM that that um that sort of caused this this impact the second piece of it is um you know this category is community planning and what we were seeing here was really this didn't really constitute community a community planning activity if you look at our guidelines we talk about eligible planning projects must have a defined area or issue that will be investigated as well as a clear plan for implementation of the results you know what we have here is a program that's sort of fully designed this this almost seems like a um an item that might come out of a planning study but this isn't really the planning study itself so in the second piece we weren't really convinced that this really met the intent of the community planning category but then the third piece of this um uh you know Kerry Turisi uh did some investigations for us on this and we really have a question as to whether the distribution of gift cards essentially to private entities raises issues under the massachusetts constitution's anti-aid amendment and of course the anti-aid amendment essentially prohibits expenditures of public funds to private recipients where those expenditures substantially benefit the private entity so in this case where we would be taking community mitigation funds purchasing gift cards and giving those directly to private entities there was some pretty serious concerns that this would uh run afoul of the anti-aid amendment now while Kerry didn't go into a really in-depth legal analysis of all the nuances of this um you know we felt with the first two pieces of this and then with this that it just really uh we really felt that we couldn't recommend this for to advance and so with that i'll open this one up for any questions which i think i might have a few on one questions looks like everyone's more set than you anticipated i guess i i try to read the room but okay well there are no questions on that one i'll move on so that was our last community planning application and the next three either are uh specific impact or public safety applications um the first one was the city of boston and this was a specific impact uh application and they were requesting uh five hundred thousand dollars to develop a pilot program for community defined and culturally specific activities that will serve as preventive strategies to address problem gambling um so first thing the city of boston has actually withdrawn this application but i would like to spend a few minutes to talk about this um this application firstly the review team really was intrigued with this application and marie claire did our review our review for this and i think we we all liked the notion we all agreed that problem gambling and the applications under this under that would be you know eligible for community mitigation funds but i think when we looked at the application there really wasn't much in the way of specificity on what kinds of programs were being proposed it was more of a very general kind of application and you know in these applications we do require people to have a really specific proposal for us that we're funding um and so when we went back with them with our request for supplemental information asking them really for this specificity the city indicated to us that they would really need to do an awful lot of work in this area to to get us that information that you know they'd really have to essentially develop do much further development on the program and they didn't feel that they would be able to do that in the time frame that we needed in order to approve this so they did withdraw the application and but we are really encouraging them you know to meet with mark van der linden and his team you know outside of this process and i think we've actually already got a meeting set up with them to do that to to see if we could maybe steer them in a couple of directions i mean we're not going to obviously write an application for them but but to say hey these are some of the things that you know maybe we've been thinking about and can and just steer them in a direction that that has a little bit more specificity in it and and maybe have them bounce some ideas off of us and and see if you know next year we could get a really uh a good application that could move ahead with this we don't want to discourage them from doing this but it was just that the condition that it was in was just probably something that um you know without a lot of additional work would be difficult for us to fund and so i'll open that one up for any questions from the uh commission questions on this and i know that mark and i don't know if marie clear is available today but i do um agree with your analysis on this but i do think that there's opportunity in the future in this arena and mark i know that we've we've spoken about this in the past because community level um intervention is different from the work that you do through the public health trust funds um and that they're that they don't have to be everything on on a response game doesn't have to be channeled through the public health trust fund so but i think there just seems to be that they may need more guidance on application development and they'll look forward to your training right joe might yeah that's your mark yeah i think you know and mark and i have going to have some conversations around this i think mark is trying to speak but we're not hearing anymore i'm here sorry i couldn't quite be good look sorry joe i'm sorry all right thank you i mean i was just going to to say yes i i wholeheartedly agree i think that especially working with joe and marie and lily um kind of talking this through a little bit it seems like it's an exciting area for us to do some work through the community mitigation fund so it sounds great for marie excellent good okay any questions for either joe or mark commissioners on this one okay thanks thanks for being right there mark my apologies okay okay so the next one is the hamden county sheriff's department uh their lease assistance um so this is a grant that we've been funding for the last several years uh six i think years this is um so this is dealing with the western massachusetts recovery and wellness center um so that the wellness center was located in the footprint of where mgm springfield now stands and they they needed to move out of that facility and so mgm identified a location for them and and you know assisted in the build out of that project and um you know this is um a a facility that is um required some you know very specific equipment and so on uh security and so on so it's not just uh like this could move any anywhere at all now in the lease that they signed there were some uh it was significantly more expensive than with what they were at mgm they were attended at will and had been there for 29 years or something to that effect so they had a you know quite a good relationship with the landlord and and and it was quite a reasonable cost but you know their costs increased significantly even their rents at the uh in downtown springfield at the mgm site even included their utilities so um their rent not only their rent went up but their utilities went up and so on so back in uh 2016 we agreed to fund this project for five years so we had uh 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 were funded uh with the first uh tranche of money we put up two million dollars 400,000 a year for the five years and then after that um they asked for an additional five years but um it was decided by the commission with the advice of the local community mitigation advisory committees and the subcommittee on community mitigation that um you know no we shouldn't give them another five years but they certainly are an eligible entity and we should consider them on a on a year by year basis and they you know they applied last year and they have applied again this year we did give them another grant last year so you know really nothing has changed in the interim uh you know they're in the seventh year of their 10-year lease so of course they they were at mgm and you know the the siting of mgm caused an impact on them so the impact I guess still exists um and uh you know the the increased in costs uh were what the impact was so you know the review team is recommending this for funding but again um similar to the discussion I think that we need to have we talked about with north hampton same thing with this I think the commission we have you know a couple of new commissioners since the last time we voted this um that we should probably have that discussion on what is the appropriate role of the community mitigation fund in funding these things on a long-term basis is there some point where we say that we have sufficiently mitigated that impact or no actually before we get into that conversation because I think my memory and understanding of where they stood with their lease when they were relocated and where they are what we know now is a little bit different than last year I mean we were functioning for a while under the understanding they had had a 10-year commitment essentially at the old place that they had to walk away from so that 10-year umbrella came from this concept that like well we would have been able to stay put absent being moved by the casino right but now what I'm hearing is actually they were month to month 10 and it will essentially or year to year 10 and it will and now they're being left into a 10-year lease so I'm looking for a little clarity on that because that's not the understanding I had the last couple of years we voted on it and I know I did express wanting more information about their lease and feeling like at a certain point you know they need to move on from asking for the money on this. Yeah what what had happened was I think we were under the assumption that they that they had a lease on the original property but I don't think we thought it was a a 10-year lease and we did ask them for that and we were told that or they couldn't find a copy of the old lease and we did find some earlier documentation from back in 2015 that indicated to us that they were a tenant at will in that property rather than under a lease but I think the point was that they signed into a 10-year lease at this location so the presumption was I think at the other location they had been there for 29 years there was no expectation that they were going to be thrown out for any reason I guess you know unless the property got sold out from under them. So can I just as a point of clarification did they give you the document that showed they were the tenants at will or did you find it in prior submissions that them? Yeah we found it in a prior submission. Okay so they never produced that back to you? No they submitted but they said it in an earlier submission right yeah they didn't disclose that that they are tenant at will. Okay. Did they produce the lease document that demonstrates they're locked in for a 10-year term? Yeah we have we have that we have that copy of the new lease which is what they used to demonstrate the increasing you know the increase in cost. Commissioner Bryan I'm I'm with you though I I did rely on that it was a different representation made earlier in the earlier years when I voted on this so that's why I'm having trouble with it and I'm just trying to find out how maybe that yeah maybe the tenant at will was was um that language was in an early submission before our time. Right. And there's another question and I think you and I discussed this Joe when we talked about this before which is this this is also a very different question when there is money available I mean so allotting this money does not mean needing necessarily to deny another applicant. Correct yeah there is that were in fact the case I definitely think I would be taking a different posture. Yeah I think you know if if there were if there was more competition for the funds and we're saying that you know this is competing against something else we would then have to weigh sort of which one we felt was more worthy of the funds but in this case we we don't need to do that. Right and they I don't know if it's proper to say they're locked into this 10-year lease like it's an anchor because they got a lot of benefits getting that 10-year lease right because the MGM paid for the build out right. Yeah I'm not sure exactly how I know that the MGM did the build out I don't know who ultimately was paying the cost of it you know they did the contracting for them because it was just easier for them to do that. I'd have to go back and and the bed build out was done just shortly before I started with the commission and I remember you know talking with Brian Packer out there about it but I you know the exact details of who paid for it and how much I'm not 100% clear on. Commissioner Skinner do you have questions Commissioner Hill? I'm sorry Commissioner Skinner go ahead. Right ahead go right ahead. So I have mixed feelings about this one and I have throughout the the process of sitting down with the team on this. I'm having actually issues with some of the applications that are coming through that are more operating and maintenance than they are anything else and I feel so this one is operating and maintenance this is part of the sheriff's budget and I just feel very strongly that we need to have that discussion on the guidelines moving forward on what should be looked upon is operating what's looked upon as construction. In this particular case and Commissioner O'Brien and Chair Judd Stein you've already brought it up and I was going to bring it up as well. What was represented early on and what actually is happening now are two very different things and I'm not sure if I was on this commission a couple years ago that if I have the information today that I that was represented two years ago. I'm not sure that I would have supported it. I don't really want to support this today but what what brings me back to supporting it is the $400,000 has been put into their budget for the next fiscal year and it's probably too late for them to go back to the legislature and actually ask for the funding as the budget's being done as we literally as we're speaking up in the Senate. I do think moving forward Joe and I don't know how these discussions take place or when they'll take place but I think we need to let them know that this may may be the last time or at the very least that maybe we're going to start looking at cutting the $400,000 down a little bit as they get closer to the 10 years. That may be something we're willing to do but this one I'm a little gun shy on. I don't want to really be supporting it today but I also don't want to be putting the $400,000 in the red because they're depending on this when that that discussion probably should have taken place back in December January February. Well and just to be clear also the chair was there as well but that message of this might be it has gone out to them for several years in a row. Yeah so because it was originally sort of a five-year commitment but sort of splayed out annually and then when I got here it was pretty much ending and then it was okay coming before us each year and I know at least for the last couple of years we've had the exact conversation that you're talking about and that that has been conveyed to them I'm sure. Yeah and and excuse me Commissioner Hill I think what I had a comment. Oh sorry. Well I think I can be brief given the earlier comments I agree with Commissioner Hill the budget issue that we might be putting the the sheriff's department in is a really good consideration on the operating and maintenance expense point. I you know raised that earlier with Joe and in the two by two and and and I'm on the fence I was on the fence before Commissioner Hill mentioned the budget issue but I I really would like us to reconsider I mean I'm uncomfortable with with with telling Northampton no that we're not going to you know grant the award in the future relative to their operating and maintenance expenses for their website but then saying yes to this operating expense for Hampton. But I don't think I think they'll be clarified with Northampton that they weren't using it for operating expenses. I think that that was clarified it was for their pro marketing program on the development of their website if there was some confusion in the past now it's clear that they're not used it for operating. And I think the other thing is is that you know under different categories we have different guidelines like for instance on the public safety it can be used for operational costs under you know community planning you know these are planning efforts and they're not you know sort of day-to-day operations so it is under a different category the this is under the specific impact category and under the specific impact category we don't our guidelines are are fairly broad saying if you've identified something that's an impact you can file under that doesn't sort of fit under any other category you can file you file it under the specific impact category you explain to us what the impact is and if we agree that that's an impact and this offsets the cost of that impact we can approve that so so there is a it's a little apples and oranges but not completely I do recognize the distinction in the category but I didn't understand that Northampton had relayed that these funds were not being used this time for operating and maintenance of the website so that's a good clarification yeah that's right I I said it is in my was that accurate Joe yes okay good thank you yeah yeah so I think that I do think what I'm hearing is with respect to specific impact we we don't have a clarifier whether or not operating costs are allowed I don't know if this discussion means that that I would be comfortable saying in every instance operating costs aren't permissible but I do think we really want to think about right right and like anything you know the commission can always waive any particular requirement in the guidelines if if it so chooses if you know someone makes the argument that that something should be included and you know that that's doable but I think you know again this is really comes down to the broader policy question on on on the use of the community mitigation funds and I think Commissioner Hill the the process that we'll go through is probably in you know once we're through with this process like in July August we will start teeing up those policy discussions you know over the course of the year Mary keeps a running tally of all of these issues and then we put them into a memo to the commission and have discussions not only with you but also with the local community mitigation advisory committees the subcommittee on community mitigation so we're hearing from the communities we're hearing from the commission ultimately obviously the commission is the one who decides what goes into our guidelines but uh I came in on the tail end of that last year so yeah right exactly so so you know these are well these questions come up on on an annual basis uh as we go through these presentations and always the same kinds of issues come up so I think um you know this would be a good opportunity again with with two new commissioners going through this process um you know different perspectives you know we can um we'll have those discussions and see where they lead us so where have we left it with your recommendation yes we are we are still recommending that this be funded for this year and then I think the follow-up though because to commissioner hill's point is that if we're concerned about the budgeting process which I think commissioner skinner wants to be really aware of that fairness factor we need to be able to message earlier yeah and and the message really comes out when the guidelines come up okay because we we literally have dealt with this subject in 2020 we dealt with it in 2021 and we'll be dealing with it again this year and if the commission decides to keep status quo then the guidelines come out and and it's you know then it's eligible if the commission decided that that funds were to be cut off then we would have to make that known in the yeah I guess I want to make sure that forming guidelines we're not just thinking of one application you know what I mean so oh no I mean we need to be about that all right we certainly need to be consistent across you know and and we always make that known when we do our our outreach is you know we go through what changes have been made in the guidelines and you know if if if we're saying that you know communities can only come in for the same thing so many times or whatever whatever the the end result might be we'll have to be clear about that in our guidelines and in our outreach Joe do we know what they asked for for funding did they ask for the full vote on their lease for their funding for budget or did they go in and only ask for it as if we are going to be matching that's that's my understanding on how they have how they have budgeted this so that's I mean that's a conundrum too in terms of why they're not asking for the full amount and looking for another source and I agree I don't want to you know and this isn't just the sheriff this is also sort of a this is their sort of rehab you know there's a there's a broader social impact to not giving them the money but that's troubling to me that there's almost a presumption that that they're not going to another source to say this is it and I don't have a guarantee and so I don't know what if any understanding a legislature may be having in terms of assuming we're just going to keep funding at least for the next couple of years right because it assumes always that we would have the money and vote to give it to them exactly so and we've met the last several years that's not exactly where we stand and yet they're still not asking for the money that's I'd hate to see that be a calculated risk that they take and and services are not available because of that choice so I would think maybe the link to this meeting and the follow-up in terms of if this is going to be voted to be awarded this year they I would have hoped that they listened to us in years past but I'm thinking that that point in particular maybe needs to be conveyed to the applicant. Mr. Skinner what do you think? What's the total amount of their rent annually is it it's it's greater than the 400,000? Oh yeah I don't have the I don't have the lease in front of me but it's Lily or Mary I don't know if you know. I don't have it on me. No this is just a small significant portion we have it in the past asked them to and we never really got a good clear answer as to why they have not incorporated this as part of their budget through the legislature. So in other words there is a this is just covering some of it. Makisha and I'm not hearing why there's a particular logic to what portion or anything like that. Well this was the delta you know I mean smaller than the delta. If they're paying what they would have paid if they stick with it right? Right so it was the delta on the rent but in addition to that they're also paying utilities that they didn't pay for before so we're not making up the whole shortfall but it's a piece of the shortfall. The delta of the rent that's right. So is this information required as part of the application process? Yeah I mean we have the copy of the lease I just I just don't have it in front of me. Yeah but I think to your point like how much the balance is it's not because I was thinking oh I wonder how they choose but I forgot that it's the delta of what they were paying. So the the the specific impact of their their move was the increase in rent. Yeah that was 400,000 okay. I do have it up in front of me. Thanks and sorry it was just slow driving. So it looks like can I share this? Yeah Sorry my computer is not moving. Okay so this is what we received from them so that it's quite a bit different than just the 400,000. Can you make that a little bit bigger please? Yes it did not scan it very well. That's okay it's getting clearer. So this is this is what they sent so it's over a million. It's about 1.1 million so that's us. Yeah that's what I think it looks like. This isn't sensitive information that we're sharing. No it's public. This is their this is their de-cam. Yeah public yeah. So this is what they provided us with their monthly expenditure so the 400,000 is not the whole. So is it 1 million plus 400 or 1 million minus 400? No that's what they're at least. No that's literally this is their 400 of it. So they were paying almost a third. Yeah so they were paying 600 and now they're paying 100. So we're taking care of that delta. Yeah. And you can see there are some increases over the over the life of the the lease. Not that you can see them well. Not the best scan document I've ever seen. And then it's been in through our process but it's really helpful to see it Lily. Thank you for bringing it up. And what year of the 10 years are we are they in now? They're in year seven. So this would be eight. No this is year seven. Okay so at best if we continue to fund as we have been then we'd be on the hook for another three years. This again it just begs the policy question we could be on the you know I mean if we agree to fund it we could fund it beyond 10 years or not. I mean it's not it's it's completely within the purview of the commission on what you want that to be. This again this is why it's a policy question on you know when when is enough enough. Well Joe and correct me if I'm wrong I feel like the first time I saw this after the five ran out did they ask for five again? Yeah. And we said no. Come in each year. Same conversation we're all talking about but you can come back each year. Yeah but I feel like our questions are being a little more pointed and I don't know that I don't speak for anybody else but a level of frustration maybe with the lack of specificity in terms of efforts they've made to not come back and ask for it. Yes understood. Okay are we ready to move on to the next one? I think so I think for right today and what's in front of us today we're good right commissioners but I think we have some things to think about. All right thanks. The next one is our last one which is Saugus. This is for some solar lighting on the northern strand community trail just by way of back. So they're asking for $187,000 under the public safety category to add solar lights to the northern strand trail. So just as a little background the northern strand had been constructed from Everett up into Medford and then a couple of years ago the state extended it all the way up to Lynn so before that it had just been an old rail trail that was just dirt and now it's paved all the way up into Lynn and so Saugus would like to add some solar lights to this so it would be more usable in the evenings. Now this what's interesting about this one is when we introduced the public safety category which first was a subset of specific impact and is now a standalone category I think at least internally we had envisioned this as being for public safety being for public safety agencies being things like police, fire, EMS, DA's office, things of that nature. I guess we didn't really think about it in terms of constructing something that provided some safety. So when this application came in we first kind of looked at this and said gee this feels more like a transportation construction project than it does a public safety project. So we did ask the community you know why they chose to do this as a public safety application and they responded back to us. I thought it was a very good response that the community had which was that really what kind of precipitated this was after the Northern Strand was built there was quite a bit of outreach to the Saugus public safety group to the police department asking what they can do to improve safety on the bike path at night so that they could use it in extended hours. So really that was kind of the driver for this and so you know what they had responded to us that that there was you know definitely interest in providing a safer nighttime environment on the trail and they also noted a study that was done by New York City back in 2018 that found that crime was reduced by 39% by the addition of lighting to public use spaces and you know when we see this as really an opportunity you know in the summertime when it's light until 8 30 at night there's maybe not as much of an issue but on those sort of shoulder seasons in the fall and the spring when it's still getting dark early this would provide an opportunity for people who are coming from or going to the casino to maybe use this you know thinking more in the terms of employees you know later into the evenings and where they would feel safer so I guess you know when we looked at as a review team you know we certainly felt that you certainly could look at this as a public safety project and again I think this comes down to our guidelines for next year that I think we want to tighten up our guidelines to reflect you know a better you know just where we want things to fall and that doesn't mean that we don't want this type of project to fall into public safety it's really up to the commission to decide whether we maybe want to expand public safety to include these types of things or do we want to tighten it up and make sure that these get included in other categories so again a topic for discussion I think for another day but basically the review team came down on that saying yeah we think you know you probably could consider this in either category but it's not unreasonable to consider it as a public safety grant as it is improving the safety of travel on the northern strand and you know as far as the you know the use you know we're fine with with the use of this we did one like this for every last year on the northern strand they did come in under the under the transportation construction category but you know so again we're I guess we're fine with this one as it is but we definitely want to look at our guidelines for next year to make sure we're being abundantly clear on on what category things should fall and with that I will open that one up for questions. I already decided to expand on public safety because that means you know that's the I could see why they would want to put this under public safety quite frankly so yeah I mean like I said there's there's definitely that it's just that we didn't have anything in our guidelines that was really clear that this should go one place or the other which is why we're considering it in the category in which you would submit. Yeah yeah okay bike trails and lights commissioners questions very consistent with our work in the past right commissioners okay um thank you Joe anything else that is it for today that is it for today they tuned for round five and six in June and and thank you to Lily and Mary um commissioners if you don't have any further questions or as a team here I know that we have uh approvals to be made is there someone who um starts up our very questions before we go to that okay do I have a motion then I certainly will attempt to do a motion madam chair thank you I move that the commission approved the applications uh from the following applicants for funding from the community mitigation fund for the purposes described in the submitted applications and materials included in the commissioners packet and for the reasons described therein and discussed here today they are as follow the city of Everett $100,000 town of Foxboro plain villain rent them $136,000 the city of Malden $100,000 upon submission of satisfactory evidence to the chief of community affairs that it has appropriate ownership or control of the subject property the city of Medford $100,000 town of Northampton $75,000 on the condition that the city develop develop and provide to the commission a written plan that outlines the specific steps that it will take to transition the subject website into a self-sustaining platform this plan shall be submitted with the first quarterly report to be submitted by october 1st 2022 to the city of revere $100,000 to the hampton county sheriff's department $400,000 and to the city of sagas $187,000 and further that the commission staff be authorized to execute a grant instrument commemorating this award in accordance with 205 cmr 153.04 second any discussion okay commissioner brian hi mr hill hi commissioner skinner hi and i vote yes thank you and now with respect to this one outstanding application i believe i have a motion do we not have to move normally no we do yes okay i'm going to make that motion thank you thank you i move that the commission deny the application for funding from the community mitigation fund for safety improvements collectively submitted by the cities of springfield west springfield and holy yoke for the reasons described in the memorandum in the commissioner's packet and discussed here today second thank you any further discussion on that okay mr brian hi mr hill hi commissioner skinner hi and i vote yes four zero i i did vote last time correct thank you um all right um with that i believe chief delaney you've completed your your community affairs work today am i right uh not quite we still have plain rich park casino to do what oh that's right my apologies and of course they are ready to go next so um we're now um they they needed to go between 1231 45 1245 it could start so i suspect lisa is prepared so this is now we are prepared there we are this is item five c on our on our agenda and then we're going to be able to resume the um the agenda in order thank you everyone good afternoon and thank you for your patience absolutely good afternoon if you're ready for us to present and i'll share my screen and we can get ready to go let's see share screen and assuming you can all see that i think i should be ready to go we can see it that's all right fantastic good afternoon madam chair and good afternoon commissioners plain rich park is pleased to present our q1 2022 report i'm joined this afternoon by kathy lucas our vice president of human resources and heidi yates akbaba our new vice president of finance um i will present the slides on compliance but right now i'm going to hand it over to heidi who will cover the slides on the financials and i will take over for her when we get on the section of compliance good afternoon it's a pleasure to be here nice to see you all right uh you can see that q1 2022 was very similar to q4 that q4 2021 for us both had slot revenues of 33.7 million state tax at 13.4 versus 13.5 race tax was three million in both quarters and total taxes were 16.5 so a smooth transition into 2022 for us next slide yep lottery sales continue to perform well for us by outperforming q1 of 2021 by 49 thousand or up 10.7 percent year over year we continue our marketing promotion efforts to support lottery sales next slide q1 total qualified spend from massachusetts it's up 200 thousand over q4 of 2021 which was 412 thousand dollars operational spend is what drove uh this increased uh spend for plain ridge the qualified spend outside of massachusetts was driven by the purchase of an it server equipment uh and cash recycling machines which were from specialized vendors in illinois next slide q1 local spend with our closest neighboring communities was 76901 leaving 87 of that 612 thousand or 536 thousand in massachusetts communities that were outside of our local region next slide okay so let's talk about uh vendor diversity we were able to exceed our overall goal of 21 primarily by surpassing our minority spend this was driven by purchases of tito tickets some it equipment general printing and maintenance supplies from minority owned businesses the we the wbe spend was slightly below target at 11.78 percent the percentage on this slide does round up so uh we did fall a little short of our q1 goal and vbe spend as well but we have no concerns about meeting our overall annual goal in that area next slide okay so putting some uh dollar figures to the previous slide you can see that uh wbe spend was down 22 000 to q4 there were some capital projects uh that were um benefited in q4 by our women owned businesses that did not repeat in q1 the mbe uh spend increase related to the aforementioned goods uh that were uh mentioned in the previous slide and you can see the 4k delta and the bbe spend to q4 and that was largely driven by equipment and apparel purchases that also did not repeat in q1 okay great so and on the compliance side in first quarter we prevented a total of 169 patrons from entering the gaming establishment seven of those patrons were minors 23 were underage 139 had expired invalid or no credentials there were two instances of underage patrons accessing the casino floor and there were two instances in which an underage patron gambled thank you new earth good afternoon madam chair and commissioners um we'll look at the information on our employment slides these employees referenced were current as of q1 in 2022 we had 325 team members we continue to exceed our diversity goal of 15 percent in q1 with 24 percent of our team members being diverse as well we exceeded our veterans goal of 2 maintaining six percent from q4 and then we exceeded our well in q1 we achieved 42 percent of our women team members goal of 50 percent which is a little bit of optic from our last couple of quarters um but it's still held back because our casual restaurant embankment departments haven't reopened in q1 our local team members were 34 close to our local goal um the areas that are included in this count are adelboro foxboro neansfield mirth adelboro plainville and rentham and you can also see on the slide that we had 70 of our team members full-time and 30 part time we did not have any seasonals because recent didn't open until q2 next slide north well before you move on actually can i ask about the women's stat um so you said that um you seem to be attributing the eight percentage delta to primarily the the restaurants that haven't opened yet right so fluties which is our casual dining restaurant usually we have anywhere from 13 to 20 servers that are usually on the female side heavy um we do have male servers but it's usually more female oriented so that's about you know anywhere from 13 to 18 persons there and then with management it's usually that 60 40 split higher on the female side for managers in the casual dining and then similar to banquets we're you know with our our banquet servers so we do have event bartenders that we brought back but we didn't haven't brought back banquet servers yet or a banquet manager and what's the projection on that in terms of bringing that stuff back online so i'm going to defer to north yeah so i think with with this department it's certainly our desire to get it open with banquet we are slowly reopening that um we're starting to get requests for events so those things are coming in and as we do uh we're taking those things those things realistically for about three to four months out right now um is kind of the the schedule of what we're seeing in those requests are kind of starting to pick up a little bit with regards to the food outlet again that's one where our biggest impediment to being able to reopen that outlet right now is culinary staffing like most of the rest of the restaurant industry getting cooks is is the hard part front of house staff is less difficult for for us to come by at this point we continue recruiting um we do have some additional outlets that will be opening this summer primarily on the patio um but it is our intention to open that outlet so is it really a staffing issue that's holding up the reopening it is okay thank you you're all right so in this slide it speaks to our supervisors in above and you'll see 26 of our supervisors identify as diverse five percent are veterans and 31 percent are women next slide north so just wanted to share some information in regards to what we're doing around uh our community initiatives and diversity and inclusion in q1 we were able to support two organizations that align with our commitment to local diversity and women's organizations with Tito box donation the first being the boston proffin foundation which advances and supports education by providing underserved students with the financial assistance needed to attend college specifically their focuses on furthering the education of young black women who enroll in who enroll as freshman in a four-year college or university and then new hope which ends domestic and sexual violence by engaging survivors stakeholders and communities to build an anti-violence movement they seek to create communities free from violence where individuals and families are able to achieve their full potential we were also able to make donations to the american cancer society um under the making strides breast cancer in the real men wear pink campaign and then to the friends of north adalboro veterans who we partner with in the past for their local holiday event next slide north and you've all met hidey today exciting news is that hidey joined us as our vp of finance increasing the level of talent and experience on our executive team tremendously some other notable mentions we did go back to johnson and wales university for more talent we did pick up some interns that will start with us this summer and thanks to your presence at the 2022 racing opening day we were able to celebrate steve and dom's milestone anniversaries in a monumental way north also hosted our town hall meeting during the 2022 goals and our 2021 successes with the team and then we also celebrated women's history month and had our first local community sip and sell giving local entrepreneurs primarily women the opportunity to showcase their items for sales so thank you any questions commissioners i'm sorry i mean i have a question on regarding the the banquet in the restaurant opening north in can you just maybe touch upon where you've reached out for these culinary jobs because we've been in the community we just dealt with the community mitigation funds and i know in the past we've given grants out to local community colleges to try and feed that world that you know no pun intended to feed that industry to try and get some help for the casinos and surrounding restaurants and boston and out more importantly on the western part of the state can you just kind of touch upon how have you reached out to community colleges have you reached out to like a bridge water i'm just trying to think off the top of my my head where these kids or prospective employees might be right so um we in this area there are a lot of local technical schools that are primarily with high school age kids which is a little bit of a challenge for us the other but we have found some success working with the united regional chamber of commerce they've been able to provide some good resources for us we've had some success working through the night united regional as they have a business for example that may know a restaurant for example that's shutting down they sometimes have a heads up on those types of instances and we're able to go to those businesses and say hey you know it's unfortunate that you're you know closing but we do have jobs available so we are we're making some inroads that way we have different other online recruiting platforms that we're using like i hire chefs obviously we use indeed a couple of the other online recruiting platforms with regards to local community colleges i think that that's probably one that's worth us going into a little bit more obviously not within the commonwealth that johnson and wales has been a good source for us of culinary talent both for folks who are looking for internships as well as folks who are looking for full-time jobs to to work or to work at least part time while they're going to school but we can certainly reach uh bridge water state i can tell you only uh what i've experienced on the north shore where we have a lot of uh technical schools as well and they now are partnering with our community colleges so that they can get right into uh college get the uh get the uh education they need and they get right into jobs within two years so my hope would be that that's what's happening over with your vocational schools but it's been very successful here on the north shore right can i just address that also so so um through the tri-cities chamber we have um also partnered with um a couple of the folks that are at the community colleges to share our job postings and actually get myself and call in the opportunities to speak locally so you're you're exactly right in regards to um having that relationship we're we're we're pounding the pavement i think one of the things that we're we're finding is is that um there there are a lot of opportunities right now in that world and so we're we're working not only with recruitment but with our benefits and and also um with competitive salaries to to be an employer of choice for for those students that are coming out of out of um college too and i think we can share that i think i think what i'm hearing or at least seeing is a lot of uh venues and again i can only speak for the north shore at this point because that's what i see and that's where i live is you know a lot of the banquets and a lot of the restaurants are now starting to open again and they're starting to book weddings again and i just hope that that will happen in your facility as well out in your neck of the woods so bread i'll also just share we um had a conversation with um our director of food and beverage damien um literally three days ago and um we're stepping into the arena he's entertaining uh breakfast meetings uh the control of putting out a breakfast meeting or a brunch meeting is a little bit more feasible than than doing potentially a wedding with like um five courses so he's he's fully engaged as north said so that we can um actually we actually have those jobs posted now so um hopefully in q2 we'll be able to to share some successes thank you and i'm sorry to take up your time on that no sorry's discussion other questions um if you want uh to take down the the program we can i'll see each other um but we are seeing each other right here it's a little uncomfortable quite frankly sorry look at our picture um so um commissioner is an excellent presentation from bpc do you have any follow-up questions now no well let's be um helpful uh kathy with all your efforts that uh fluties gets going because we know it's center stage um at your property and we we hope that that can get engaged it's an important amenity um thank you any any questions in terms of being there for the um opening day i think there's some races too that we'll want to get on our calendar um so we'll coordinate with dr lightbound about those races coming up we always love to be part of the excitement but we also just on a day-to-day basis appreciate the continuing work that you do with that that um uh part of your your program as well we we didn't get an update on derby day although we were quite informed uh going into it because you were going to use um the drive-through um element but i understand the weather didn't cooperate for you weather was not was not great that day madam chair um it was a little cold and windy um but there were a lot of folks inside the property looked great a lot of people had a good time that day um and you know we look forward to derby day next year yeah and it was a big race it was it was it was uh if you didn't get the the chance to watch it it was a fantastic uh race to watch there was an amazing race to watch yeah but did you end up um executing the drive-through or because of the wind did you keep it inside all all that inside we did for a limited time okay it did end up getting pretty windy um that day and made it a little bit difficult to execute um so we did pull back but yeah but you were able to use a little bit okay yes and it's on our calendar next year to make sure that we get a request in early if it's something that we would like to do i love to know those details thank you noras um and i think my fellow commissioners shared that so it was really helpful and again we thank the team for sort of the last minute playing it together lisa to inform keep us informed so thank you so much yes okay um any other questions or comments thank you north and team we appreciate it um and i guess Heidi i i feel like this was our our first virtual meeting right i think i just got word of your um your appointment through perhaps our ieb director and so congratulations and thank you for joining us today my pleasure thank you for having me thank you all right commissioners okay then um jo unless there's something else we're that completes my work for today thank you so much thank you all right and thank you again to north then we're going to move right into um because i think we only have a couple short items rather than break if you could just bear with me um we'll go right into the legal division and we've got cary on board for the new regulation yes good afternoon madam chair and commissioners uh so you have one draft regulation in your packet it is 205 cmr 116.03 um this is part of the larger 205 cmr 116 which relates to persons required to be licensed or qualified by the commission uh and 116.03 specifically gives the commission authority to grant waivers from qualification requirements for certain individuals um so we just have one small change related to institutional investors and this was flagged by the ieb as part of the reg review process i'm just going to share uh the red line with you just so you can see just the small change we're talking about here can everyone see that okay um so you'll see here in section b just this one small change 23k section 14 reads that the commission may waive the licensing requirements for institutional investors holding up to 15 percent of the stock of the applicant company etc um and the existing reg as you can see reads that the commission may waive the qualification requirements for institutional investors uh if they hold less than 15 percent of the stock um so we're just updating the reg here to bring it in line with the statute of course up to would include 15 percent and less than would not include the 15 percent so just a small change here to make the regulation consistent with the statute um so happy to answer any questions that you might have and if not we'd just be looking for a vote to um begin the promulgate promulgation process on this one commissioners questions from fairy good catch on the reg review there we go right um excellent very good yeah um so ieb that um it's a simple straightforward amendment but an important one so thank you all right do i have a motion for carry i believe that the commission approved the small business impact statement and amendment to 205 cmr 116.03 as outlined in the commissioners packet and authorized staff to take all steps necessary to begin the promulgation process second thank you um any further questions all right commissioner brian hi hi um commissioner hill hi thank commissioner skinner hi thank you and i vote yes so thank you fairy you get the process underway thank you and now on our last matter of the day um we have an update on legislative update us christa motion and then commissioner hill and um Todd grossman general counsel and anybody else who wants to join in on the subject matter christal hello i'm just a really quick update just a few items all of which you can also find in the memo i attached to the packet um for sports betting i think we're all aware but the senate did pass their version of the bill on may 4th few notable differences there from the house bill primarily the restriction on collegiate sports and much higher tax rate and some language on credit card use and gambling advertising additionally we it we saw that that bill pulled the licenses for veterans organizations out of their amended final version um the similarities were some including the occupational licenses temporary licensure which we had been looking for in other versions of bills in the past includes some of our reporting requirements funding similarities and some language regarding mbe wbe and zbe and i don't think i'll actually turn that over quickly to commissioner hill but i don't think we had anything we've seen in the last few days that has changed from our last our recent update correct that's accurate um just making sure yeah we provided this this memo early so there has been a conference committee put together uh consisting of representatives paris hella with the lets meridian and for the senate um we have uh redriga's eric lesser and senator o'connor as well um that conference committee will collaborate to report to us a final bill we don't have a date on it for the budget we had a very small just an update to our appropriations there's a little bit of an explanation in your memo from uh cfo lennon thankfully he he had his eye on this anyway and this is related the brief change is related to the local aid payments um and the racetracks so this assists moving forward in the past we haven't been able to provide full payment to the cities and towns the amendment to the budget remedies uh and in my last update we just noted that there were a couple racing bills we have our eyes on nothing has happened related to those bills we do still currently monitor them as they would have impacts for our racing division um we should probably hear something on those shortly and then of course we have also been watching what happens with the open meeting law allowing our remote meetings and uh as you guys know because i took in this and voted on it in the last meeting we have submitted a letter to the legislature um expressing our interest in being able to continue remote access beyond the deadline of july 15 so that's all i had for you guys today if you have any questions please let me commissioner hill or todd no questions questions at the stage are you sure you have no questions commissioner hill i think he's a key player here we want to probably think about putting together a matter um addressing the first racing deadline yes so uh we have had a brief internal conversation um with alex as well as todd and we will be meeting shortly to review the letter and and look to see what changes we should need from that by commissioner hill and we have planned to do that before the end of june it's a i think we i think we'll be bringing it i'll be bringing it in front of you guys as well so that you can vote on that i believe we're aiming for the june okay great and um i think we todd we've done one in the past it will probably follow very closely to what we've done i think we can view that as a helpful reminder really i think they'll appreciate that right commissioner hill um okay so that would just be on our radar for one of our our june meetings okay thank you importantly for the comments or questions all right well thank you and it's very helpful to have it in writing a very helpful memo thank you you're welcome okay any further updates from our commissioners after a long day yesterday i thought we would probably appreciate finishing before 1 30 and lunch so um again i appreciate all the work that we did yesterday and uh thank you like i think we have a a meeting tomorrow um that will be following up on yesterday's suitability work so thank you um so with that we need a motion to adjourn move to adjourn madam chair thank you all set anyone oh nothing further okay commissioner brian hi commissioner hill hi mr skinner hi and i vote yes four zero thank you so much how good rest of the day everyone thank you thank you thank you so much