 Okay, Senate government operations, it is Tuesday, February 16th, and we will, today are going to look at, to begin with, are going to look at our preparedness bill, where it is what we're calling it. Not on notaries, but we are here to talk about NMA as well. Yes, and we see Mr. Thompson has joined us. So, let us just, I know that the whole issue that Lauren, you have, you indicated that you had been working on some language around NMA, but I think what I'll do is ask Mr. Thompson, if he would like to just express his concerns and what he, what we heard from him to kind of set the stage for us. And then we also have heard from the Vermont Association of Pediatric, some thing or others, I don't remember the title, but Anna Dr. Bell will be, will be joining us next Friday when we take this up again, that's when she was available. Okay. So, Mr. Thompson, if you, are you there, we can see your name, but I can't see you and I don't know if you're on mute or not. No, I think, here we go. Here. There you are. Okay. So, this is Senate government operations and we deal with professional regulations. Yes, ma'am. Many sorts. And so, you've never joined our committee before, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to have our committee members introduce themselves to you. And I'm Jeanette White from Wyndham County. Nice to meet you, Jeanette. I'm Anthony Collina from Washington County. Brian Collin Moore from Rutland County. Brian, nice to meet you, sir. Allison Clarkson, Windsor County District. Nice to meet you, Allison. He's Sharon from Chittenden County. Nice to meet you, Keisha. And along with, we have Lauren Layman and Lauren Hibbert and Chris Winters, who are from the Office of Professional Regulation and the Secretary of State's Office and our attorney, Amron Abedjola. I don't think I said that right, but. Aberjaley. Aberjaley. Okay. And so, if you would like to just kind of send us what your concerns were. And I know that the Office of Professional Regulation has been working on some proposed language that they will go through with us. But if you'd like to start us off. Yes, ma'am. I've actually been working with Lauren for quite a while now. She's been great. We started this actually last year with Carl Demro. And even before that, we've been trying to get this through for about 12 years now. We've never really had an issue until of lately. The MMA world has exploded. So a lot of promoters have found ways that they can make money. In Vermont, being one of those states that's unregulated, they don't have to follow any rules. So some of the first things that we saw happening, the first thing that in the whole reason I got into this was my daughter wanted to, my entire family, we've done martial arts our entire life. So my daughter wanted to make her MMA debut at 16 years old. We were kind of against it. But you know, we had a lot of experience in martial arts and stuff. So we allowed her to do it. She turned 16 on a Wednesday, Saturday, Friday morning, she had her braces off Saturday. She was fighting in front of a thousand people at the Berry Auditorium. So the first thing that started to happen that I noticed that there was, I really didn't feel comfortable with was the other girl. I got with the promoter. I said, yo, I said, my daughter fights. I mean, my daughter wrestles at, you know, 112 pounds. She's a small girl. And she goes, oh, don't worry about it. The fight's going to be at 115. Okay. Well, that's not a huge disadvantage. Then about a week before the fight, I contact the promoter. I said, hey, I said, this girl, there's no way she's a hundred. She's 115 pounds. She goes, well, I thought the fight was at 115. She's no more than 120. She ended up weighing in, I think right around 128 pounds. She was 28, 29 years old. It was, and I didn't know anything about matchups or anything like that at the time. So I just thought that they would match my daughter up according to her age, her experience. She had never been in a fight, but they didn't. It was just whoever they could get to fight is who they got to fight. So that was my first, my daughter ended up getting choked unconscious in front of all them people. I wasn't, I wasn't angry about that. I was really angry about the whole mismatch and how there was no regulations and how unsafe it was. It was the first time I had ever been behind the scenes at an MMA event in any way, shape, or form. So we ended up purchasing, the lady ended up selling the promotion and we ended up purchasing in it, not the actual name. We actually, we purchased the cage and the ring and that's when we decided things are going to be different. We're not going to do this like this. It's just so unregulated. I was so surprised somebody hadn't gotten killed. Like there was no guidance. There was nothing. I was, I remember asking the promoter, I was like, what do I have to know? What I have to, no, there is no rules. You're not regulated. Don't worry about it. I was like, oh my God. So the first fight I remember, she was helping me. She was trying to show me the ropes and everything and they had a young kid. He was 17 years old. His mother didn't want him to fight, but the promoter, she convinced him to and she goes, well, I'll call this guy from New York. He'll come right over. Another thing I didn't even know, the kid from New York came over was medically suspended because his whole face had been smashed in a bad accident. So he couldn't get approved to fight in New York. So he'd come here to Vermont to fight because we have no access to the database of suspended fighters because we're not a sanctioned state. So this was really scary to me. And then what happened, it ended up during the fight. The kid got liver kicked and the other guy did a flying knee and absolutely destroyed his nose. I mean, he had every constructive surgery. He was 17 years old. I was like, geez. So that was, so I started actually changing the rules so that because these were amateur fighters, these guys had to work on Monday. These were not professional fighters getting paid to fight, but they just weren't regulated. There was no regulation. So things took a huge turn around when our family came on. I'm not here to pat myself on the back or anything, but we were so focused on the safety aspect of it. That was our main foe. Every show we try to do things different because it was a learning curve for us. Then other promoters saw what they thought that we were making a ton of money. So they just started coming into Vermont. This is when you had a guy that came from New Hampshire. They came up, they set up a cage. They wanted me to be a judge. We went down there. The cage was too big for the building. So there was a steel bar that ran through the middle of the cage. So they wrapped it with towels and tried to have the fight anyway. I was like, we're not down with this. We're leaving. We got to go. The last, they had a fight down in Bennington, another promoter who's been banned out of New York, came over here to Vermont. They put a bunch of two by fours together, eye rings. They had a fight in the middle of the Bennington Park. Charged admission to get into it. At one point, one of the fighters from New York had a guy down. He was beating him. The fighter looks up to the ref and he goes, are you going to stop this? And the ref goes, no. He goes, he's good. He doesn't want to stop it. Well, fighters, never going to say they want to stop a fight, especially in front of a crowd. So that guy beat him for a little while longer. And finally he got up. He was like, this is ridiculous. I've never been to anything. And he walked out of the ring, just got up and left the cage. Another guy got hurt inside of the cage. They dragged him out and left him in the park at another area of the park, just left him there. He ended up with like permanent damage to his eye. So then the last, I think everybody knows about the shows in Rutland, how that went down. That was a big to do with the Vermont digger and all that. So that's them. That's theirs. Alls I can do is what we can do and, and try to make it as safe as possible for us. But once people, once money's involved, once people think that they can make money, or, you know, then all, all bets are out the window. You know, we spend a lot of money. We've probably spent about $18,000 a show between medical staff staffing. We actually bring in a sanctioning body from New York. We bring another sanctioning body in because we don't have any sanctioning bodies here in Vermont. So that they bring all their officials. They bring all of the people that check the fighters. They actually look at the cards and approve the bouts. So there's no mismatches. There's not a guy on there that's got 152 fights fighting a guy that's making his, his debut at 16 or 17 years old. The other thing that we never regulated was kids. I had to talk the other promoter out of letting these two kids beat the crap out of each other. He finally decided just to have a grappling match with them. I didn't agree with it. And I told him that I expressed that to him, but there's no regulations here. You know, alls I can do is give opinions and say, I probably wouldn't do that. You know, I told him that I don't want to get too, I'm not going to make it into like me and him going back and forth, any kind of thing whatsoever like that. I gave him my opinion on what I thought was right and what was wrong and we didn't see eye to eye on that on those. So the other thing that we're missing out on is amateur fighters. A lot of what people are seeing these days are huge impacts from CTE, brain injuries, concussions, stuff like that. We're seeing that everywhere across sports. So what a lot of people have started doing is they're now doing less sparring, full contact sparring, saving that for the actual fights. So your brain can only take so many shots. It has, say it has, your brain has 5,000 shots that it can take to the head before you're permanently injured. Now, without us having sanctioning and without Vermont fighters being able to turn professional in Vermont, what happens is they have to leave this state. And so when they leave this state, their fights are no longer recorded. Because we're not, we don't have any way to record it. We can't record it with the ABC, they're an unsanctioned fight. So no other states look at it because they won't recognize those fights because they don't know how the fight was put on. It wasn't regulated. It could have been some sort of backyard. So they don't, they don't count them. So now you have this guy that could have had 20 amateur fights, can't turn pro in Vermont, has to go over to New Hampshire, go to Maine, go to any, any of the surrounding states to turn pro. First thing they tell them is you don't have any amateur fights. He said, I just fought 20 fights. You have no amateur fights listed on the ABC website. So without that, you now have to do 10 amateur fights in New York to turn pro in New York. So Vermont fighters are at a huge disadvantage just in that aspect alone because we have no access. We have no path to turn professional, to turn this into, we have a huge wrestling community here, some great wrestlers. This MMA opened up that opportunity for them to make this a career. They can't do that here. But even without all of that, yes ma'am. I'm sorry, somebody else just popped up. No, nothing just happened. Okay. The regulations has, has never been needed as much as it has been now before we got away with it for a long time because there was only one promotion in Vermont and she tried to do it right. So people weren't complaining things. People weren't, people were getting hurt, but they weren't being permanently injured. There's a gentleman out there that has permanent brain injury. He was like, he got into a really, really bad motorcycle accident and I refused to put him on the card because he knows there's no sanctioning in Vermont. So he knows he could actually fight and I said, absolutely not. You and me both know because as doctor told him, he wouldn't clear him if he got punched, he could die. So he went and he went to another promoter and they were going to put him on the card and thank God COVID happened and all the fights got shot down because at that point that that kid and the kid finally, because he finally got on meds and got to counseling and stuff like that, realized like what he was doing. He was self-destructing. He didn't care if he lived or died. And so he would have rather died in the cage. Well, that's great and that's honorable, but that's no fun as a promoter or somebody a spectator watching that. You know, we're not going there to watch people die. We're going there to watch people express their martial arts to see which one is a superior art, which athlete is a superior athlete. And more importantly, it's that athlete testing his own skills. I train every day. I even at 47 years old, I'm going to compete in worlds for Brazilian jiu-jitsu next year. You can, you train all that time and never have an opportunity to go somewhere and test it or test your skills to see if they really work. What ends up happening is you go to a bar, you go drinking. These are different, these are outlets. This is what you end up getting assault charges. That's why we've been trying to work with the kids here in Washington that are in the drug program to get them into training, to get them into the MMAs. They are like the MMA schools around here. There's a bunch of MMA schools that opened up around here. This is a huge outlet. You see these guys that have really bad addiction problems. It's an addictive personality. So they get into drugs, but then they get caught. They get in trouble. Their punishment is they're locked down. They're locked in either their house. They have to go to a Zoom meeting and they sit there and bite their nails. There's nothing they can do. Could you imagine being 20 years old? You're locked in your house with your mother and they said, don't do anything. Don't drink. Don't smoke. Don't go out. Don't do anything. So we're trying to take that energy and put it to good use. We have so many people that were recovering addicts that have just turned their entire lives around through this. It's a great outlet for people. But does anybody have any questions for me? Just before I go to the committee members, I am going to say that we will hear a lot from people who just want to ban it to begin with because it's considered a brutal sport and maybe not even a sport. But I will say that I grew up in a very nonviolent family, but my father was the amateur boxing champion of the state of New York, I mean of North Dakota. So he and at the time he was, they didn't use gloves. Oh yeah. Yeah. There's been a big push to try to get bare knuckle fighting here in Vermont. And he and he was a nonviolent person and he survived and I so I grew up in a household where we didn't have television, but we listened to every boxing match on the radio. And so while I don't do that anymore and I'm not so sure that I think it's a great sport to be beating up on each other, I'm not going to be judgmental about other people's position. It's funny you say that because most of the martial artists, a lot of guys, even the guys I trained with have never been in a fight. But you know if they had to, they absolutely could, but they've never, it's just no reason to. They train every day. They do. There's just no reason to. Well he was, he was a little wiry guy and anyway, so I just say that because I know that there will be a general outcry from people about it being a brutal endeavor and we shouldn't even be allowing it. So with that, so I needed to say that. Senator Clarkson. Thank you Rex. I don't even know what mixed martial arts are. I mean, I know about karate. I know about jujitsu. I know about taekwondo. I know about boxing. I know about wrestling. All of those are regulated. All of those have rules about how to compete. All of those are very well organized. I have no idea what mixed martial arts are. So I wish you'd begun with it. It does seem pretty tough. I mean, you talk about fighting in cages and I mean, it just sounds. So anyway, I'd love to have you explain what it is. Okay. So first of all, mixed martial arts is a mixture. It's a mixture of ground fighting, striking. Unlike karate and stuff like karate is not, I used to do, I did taekwondo. I did taekwondo for years. So I know that circuit, they do not do full contact fighting in the state of Vermont. It is not regulated that way whatsoever. Boxing is the only thing that's regulated in the state of Vermont. Other than that, you have karate schools. So what they do is you take your, you take a guy, the way it originally started was with the Gracie's, Hoy's Gracie's. They wanted to prove that Brazilian jujitsu was the best martial arts against all other martial arts. So what mixed martial arts is supposed to represent is supposed to represent the best of those arts against another art. Plain and simple. You'll take a guy that's a wrestler and he will go and you'll see how a wrestler can do against a striker. But MMA has evolved so much these days that now everybody trains in a wide range. They'll train in Brazilian jujitsu. They'll have their dedicated art. Like they may be a karate practitioner. They may be into taekwondo. They may be a jujitsu guy. That may be their base, but then they'll train in other arts in order to compete, to make it as real life as possible. The Gracie's, when they started jujitsu, it was based on a real life self-defense art. So they created competitions to show how effective and to make sure. Because the problem that traditional martial arts have always had is when you get into a real fight, it's not effective. Because you haven't practiced it really. You have practice moves. You've practiced, but you've never done your randor. You've never done a full contact spar. So I think that's the biggest difference. MMA is more of a self-defense base showing you how these arts work in a real life fight situation. Does that make sense at all? Yeah. Thank you. It's blending all of the arts we talked about. We talked about them as art. You think of wrestling at college and boxing not so much as a university sport, but you think of some of these as university sports. They are regulated in the university setting. So some of them are regulated in wrestling, in which they're offered. Before I go to any further here, what I want to do is, Mr. Samso, did you join us about the notary issue? You're muted. My apologies. Yes, I joined in terms of the notary. Oh, great. We had a conversation. Yeah. What were you saying, Allison? No, I said, you missed our good conversation, Joe. We're sorry to, it's great to see you, but we... I picked up a little bit on the MMA. So what we're doing with notaries is because it won't come up for re-licensing or re-registering again until 2023. And any changes we make to the system is both time-consuming and costly for the Office of Professional Regulation. We have decided that we are not going to do anything about it this year because it's not going to affect anybody until 2023. So in the next session of this biennium, so starting in January of 2022, we'll then look at whether there need to be any other changes to the notary law and try to make any changes all at one time instead of just picking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. We'll do it all at once. So we're done with that topic, unfortunately. Okay. It's been something that I've been working on since 2012 and it's changed back and forth. It's changed between Department of Corrections being in ex-officio status and it's... So I'm not sure how it's changed over time, but it's certainly something that's affected the Department of Corrections. Yep. So we will take it up in January of 2022 and you certainly are welcome to stay with us to talk about mixed martial arts. Nope, that's perfectly fine and certainly I'm happy to testify. I plan to be around then, so God willing. So I'll testify then. And I'll follow up with you, Joe, because I read your email to everybody as we framed up the issue, but I'll follow up with some of the questions we have for you. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. All right. Sorry about that little interlude there, but I thought it was important to let Mr. Samson know that he didn't have to sit around and wait for something that wasn't going to happen until January of 2021 or two. Okay. I would like to bring up, because Senator Allison Clark there. So one of the things that with the amateur fighting, there's a lot of rules with the amateur fighting if you see the unlike professional fighting. So these, if you have less than three fights, you have to wear shin pads. If you have less than four fights, you are not allowed to do ground and pound on the ground to the head. There is no headshots. ABC has a set of rules. So when your state is regulated, it's a very strict set of rules that everybody has to abide by. Those are the minimum rules. Like we use USMTA, they are a bit stricter with their rules, which is fine. But there's a lot of rules out there for the fight or safety when it's regulated like that, especially for the amateur fighting. You know, there's no elbows. You can't hit anything that is bare, especially an elbow or a knee, because those can cut people. And the last thing that we're trying to do is have somebody cut in their amateur career, because that could affect their professional career. So that's a huge thing is not allowing, you know, because we even, we used to have a problem at the auditorium people would get mad. They'd be like, Oh, you stopped that fight too early. Nope, we don't. We do not stop that fight. It's very, very clear. If there's any inclination, you're not protecting yourself. The fight is stopped. This is explained to the fighters during the rules meeting so that they know we are going to stop this. Any inclination that you're in any kind of trouble, we stop it. It's an amateur. This is not out to beat the crap out of you. This is to find out who trained, who knows their, their art better. And who was the victor that day without any kind of permanent injury? Yes. Thanks, Rex. It's just helpful as we sort of frame up this universe. So do you have a notion of how many Vermonters participate in mixed martial art competitions? That's one, you know, what's the universe of people that are involved? Oh my God, it's huge right now in the state. Well, huge. Anyway, so that's my first question. And the second question is, do you have a state that you think has the ideal set of regulations in place to oversee this that we could look at? Well, before I, before we go there, I will say that Lauren has been working on this and has some draft language for us. Okay, great. So how big is the universe? Okay, so just in sent every karate studio, every Taekwondo studio, every Jiu Jitsu studio, every MMA gym in the state of Vermont has fighters that fight on our cards. Everybody, because they represent, because they represent their gyms. So when I put a fight together, that's a fight card. And so it's like a program? Yes, yes, ma'am. It lists everybody that's fighting that night. It's just a, if that's a fight card, when I put my dance card together. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I never thought of it, but yes. So every, that's a big thing that's a huge promotion for these gyms dojos, because what they do is this is another competition. They show up, they bring their best guy from that gym. The other guy, their competition brings their best guy and we have this friendly competition. Everybody thinks it's not friendly, but all of these fighters are friends with each other. We all cross train with each other. It's a really weird situation. Like most civilians don't understand, but it's that warrior culture. We all get along. We all, it's weird. What do you say it's 10,000 people that are involved in this in Vermont? And 15, you don't, you don't, can I just try and clarify that a little bit, maybe. The people who actually have participated in a, in an MMA event might be a different number than the people, because all the people who are, from what I understood, Mr. Thompson, to just say, all the people who are training in any of these arts are eligible and can end up doing an MMA event. So all of those people couldn't be considered part of the universe of people that are part of the MMA world, but the number of people who've actually participated in an MMA event may is a subset of that. Does that clarify that at all? Well, I'd say the people who choose to do the fighting are that, is that universe, not necessarily the whole gym? Well, that's the thing is most people, most people inside of a gym are training for some reason. And whether they are thinking about it now or thinking about it later, a lot of times, that's the goal inside of those gyms. So if you have 40, 50 guys in every single gym, potentially you could have, because there's different classes, everything is broke down to weight classes, age, brackets, experience. So there's like, like I said, I compete in worlds. I don't go down there and compete against 20 year old guys. I go down and I compete against other 47 year old men that are my age, my height and my skill level. So potentially, it's, but my last show, I have no problem filling out a card. I can't tell you exactly. I can get into one of my Excel spreadsheets and I have lists and lists of names and coaches of people that have inquired. I have people all the way from Canada inquiring to come down to get on cards. The last show I had, there was probably between 1500 and 1800 people inside the auditorium. So I'm going to suggest that unless we have any more specific questions for Mr. Thompson about this, that we jump to Lauren and I, and I'm glad to hear that you've been working with the office. I had not realized that before I knew that Lauren had been on. Yes, we agree. But so can we, does that make sense committee to jump to Lauren and see what she, what they've been working on and come up with in terms of regulation? I see people nodding their heads and thumbs up. Okay. And this case, Madam Chair, just to be clear, the Lauren who's awesome is Lauren Lehmann. You just both are. My having two is great because you can all get the conflict. And you come first. Okay, would you like to somebody start going, giving us some potential solutions to this issue? Certainly. So my name's not for the record. My name's Lauren Lehmann. I'm an attorney with the Office of Professional Regulation. As Rex said, we've been working with him since and former representative Demro since 2018. When we first had some fights brought to our attention, a slight correction in that MMA is technically regulated in Vermont. It is included in the definition of boxing match. And it was included there starting in 2011. Some further back history in 2001, we are the state decided to get rid of our version of the athletic commission, which was the boxing commission. And that was disbanded and the profession, the registration and licensing was transferred over to OPR at that time. So many states as you know, as often the story have an additional layer of bureaucracy than Vermont. They have an independent athletic commission that monitors overseas MMA, attends all the fights, ensures all the rules are followed, then submits results of the matches or contestant statuses to a national database. We don't have that infrastructure here. So OPR's approach is going to be some has our proposal is somewhat similar to what I've based, we've based it on other states, but we've also done an OPR licensing lens on it. So in 2016, the definition of boxing match was modified to include MMA. Unfortunately, the rest of the statute was not updated. So we still in the rest of the statutes, if you read it literally, it says that all MMA fights, all MMA fighters have to register using national boxing IDs, have to use boxing rules in the ring. All of these things are incongruous and really just its round hole square, you know, square peg round hole. So this leaves us in a sticky spot when we have some of the behaviors that Rex shared with you in misconduct that we've seen in the past two years. We can say, hey, you're engaged in unauthorized practice of this sport because you don't have a license, but also we can't tell them how to get licensed because it's really impossible. So that's just really put us in a sticky spot. This past year, we had the additional fun of, and that was sarcasm, the additional factor of COVID-19. And so we were able to use some authorities from Act 91 and Act 140 from last year to Director Hibbert sent a letter with in coordination with the Attorney General's office and cease and desist, but that was based on more of the violation of the COVID-19 regulations than of the state law. And then we are also, there's an unauthorized conduct charges pending against that individual. This is the Rutland situation. That's the Rutland situation. The flip side of that, however, is that we can't tell this individual how to get licensed. We can't tell Mr. Thompson how to get licensed and to practice in compliance with the law. So flipping back to how does OPR approach this, I've relied on RECs a lot for background information. I've also done extensive research on my own and read a lot. And I think what we would propose is that the state create an authority for OPR to establish rules and regulations for these fights and for contestants. There would be three forms of licensure in our proposal. One would be for the fighters, the contestants. One would be for the promoters like RECs who are really facilitating the fight and promoting it and getting the ticket sales, et cetera. And one would be for participants. So referees, judges, seconds, corners, all those folks who are there and are participating in the match. There would also be permits, event licenses. So before you're going to have an event, the promoter would have to notify the office, submit the proper documentation. We would have to have that on record. The rules that we would propose rather than doing a statute but adopting a rule would be a lot of what RECs is so in the know about. Conductive fights, medical examinations, who should be on scene. We can have that scaffolding in statute, but I think to really have a detailed expert take on what needs to happen in the fundamental rules in the state, we should have people like RECs at the table helping us do rules and we should have the nimbleness that rules allow. So I know there's a national body, it's an association of boxing commissions, but they also have MMA rules. They have uniform rules. Those get modified pretty regularly. Some states just defer to those rules. I'm hesitant to do just that, but that's a discussion we could have because sometimes they modify the rules in ways we don't like, but if we say we just take these rules, then we're stuck with them. I know back in 2016, they eliminated a form of foul in New Jersey, which had the first MMA rules in which I think RECs actually participated in developing. They have excellent extensive rules, comprehensive rules because they have a lot of MMA fighting, they have a lot of money coming in for it. So they didn't want to take those uniform rules because they wanted to keep the foul and that's kind of the tension that we would see if we, so we propose rather than in statute saying we take the uniform rules that in statute we say OPR will develop these rules about conduct of fights, about medical examinations, all that information. The one distinction, and I'll stop after this because I know it's too much for anybody the one distinction is that this is the OPR lens on things. When somebody, it would be unprofessional conduct in our proposal for a fighter to fight while suspended in another state. The ramifications for that are what we as OPR are established and created to do, which is ding your license, revoke your license, suspend your license. We couldn't get in the ring and say you can't fight today. That's kind of where the limits are. Nor, and I want to hear and talk to more about RECs and I think we could do that in the rulemaking or even before we send you language about how to make people eligible to work in other states without having OPR staff updating fight results after every fight because that's not really a function that we do play but other states have athletic commissions that do do that function. So, you know, kind of figuring out how to strike that balance, facilitate careers for amateurs to professionals, ensure safety, also ensure financial, no financial advantages are taken. So, another provision we have in our draft would be promoters cannot own, have a financial stake in a fighter, referees or participants in a match who referees or judges in a match or doctors can't have a stake in the fighter, a financial stake in the fighter. In that situation they're going to fudge things to get their fighter in there and so we need to add that financial protection. Medical insurance, there's another consideration that we were thinking about. So, you know, there's lots of details to be worked out and there's definitely some public safety concerns. We feel it should be regulated and we clearly need some amendments to our existing statutes in order to do that sort of comprehensive regulation. I will say that this is the first time I have ever heard anybody refer to the rulemaking process as nimble. So, it's just, I guess it's all relative compared to legislation, it might be. It is maybe it's relative. Ma'am, we have most of this stuff, we have it all written up because Chris Ballard, who's not here today, wrote the legislation for Nevada and New Jersey. So, we already have those rule sets. We have a lot of that stuff already down there. And anytime that you use a third party sanctioning, it makes no difference on if the promoter is somehow connected to a fighter in any way because promoters do manage fighters. That's a misconception. I used to manage fighters. But when you use a third party, they bring all of the officials, they have to approve the fights. They have, you know what I'm saying, it's hard to do, it would be hard to do something shady. But to take that away because when you do your, when you do promoting, one of the things I'm promoting is usually managing fighters. So, Ma'am. So, just to that point, I think, you know, if we, there's a, I think in our letter to you, I misused the term third party sanctioning body, what I had been envisioning in that, what that body doing would be doing that updating fight results and checking suspension statuses and filing any updates to those after the fight. I think they do do that. Yeah, so that's, that's great. I think where OPR might differ a little bit is we would like to set one standard set of rules for the state rather than using a third party sanctioner. Because it makes expectations very clear. It takes OPR out of the business of assessing those third party sanctioners and offering like a whole license for them to make sure they're meeting the qualifications. And also we have that we have a policy that has to underlie all of our regulations, which has to be the minimum necessary to protect the public. And so if we're using a third party that's rules are going to vary, it puts us in an absolutely right. Yeah, I'm trying to enforce that. So what you're proposing to us is that we would put in the statutes the ability for OPR to work with the appropriate parties and develop the rules. And there would be some, some guidance in the statute around the types of rules that you would be, is that what you're Yes. So Senator White, that's exactly what I'm proposing. And this is hot off the presses, because I've used Presidents Day weekend to kind of pull thoughts together. But as Rex has noted, we used model laws. I looked at New Jersey as foremost, because it's the first and the most comprehensive. Nevada does a kind of separate angle where it has those third party sanctioning bodies. So I stuck with New Jersey. And then I looked at other states that have similar populations to Vermont, North Dakota, Wyoming, Maine, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and kind of modeled took a lot of the language from those states and kind of made it Vermont specific. So the rules that we would be asking to do would be there's a whole list, you know, for medical examinations to conduct the fights to licensing requirements, etc. So So committee, Senator Polina. I'm just a little, I don't know whether it confuses the right word, but I'm not sure whether you're saying we would end up with a commission or an association or some governing body that would govern the sport or whether it would be done to OPR. I feel like I'm hearing two different things. Which one would be the case? So in our bill, it would be OPR. OPR would do it, we would appoint advisors, it would be an advisor profession. And we'd have two advisors advise us on it. And then we'd go through the rulemaking process. The way I've structured the the statute draft bill, and of course it doesn't have to be the way it is, but it would be a licensing process. We would license the participants, the fighters, the promoters, and the repercussions for violation of the rules or the law would be a license approach. You'd get suspended from your license, your license would be revoked, conditioned, fined. So it's a very OPR-centric approach to it, but that is kind of what we can offer. So that would be the kind of the role that, I mean, imagine a boxing association or sanctioning organization. That's the role that they would normally play. You're saying OPR would play that role. So the only difference, the biggest distinction is with an athletic commission, they're present at the fights. They're not present for the medical examinations in the way ends. They would then go back and submit the results of the fights. So they're really fight, they're really sports-centric. And they, that's what they do. So they're not just focused on the licensing, they're focused on being an active participant in the actual match. I think OPR has proposed inspections for the event license for each event. There would be an inspection of the ring and the facilities beforehand, but we would not, and we do that something similar with demolition derbies at the fair and with motor vehicle racing, we go and inspect. And this would be a similar thing, but we would not have an OPR person present at the fight to make sure. The mechanism of enforcement there would be complaints. And we've seen in the last year that there is good oversight in the community and people are willing to come and rex, you know, and others have come to us and said that we've seen this, this is inappropriate. And so we'd be, just as we do with all of our other professions, offer some level of trust that rules will be complied with. And if they're not, OPR will be notified. Any other questions, Senator Colomar? Thank you, Madam Chair. So Lauren, normally if we were going to add an occupation in Vermont, we would go through the sunrise procedure where there's a, you know, study and all. I'm hearing that you sort of already have done this and that you're going to move immediately to the licensing level. And I'm not taking a position on that. But I'm just curious about that. And I also have a question about the cost involved to do all this and how are we going to pay for it? Sure. So with regard to the sunrise analysis that the figuring out, we already regulate MMA in Vermont. So, you know, we kind of worked from the assumption that that determination had already been made that some sort of licensure was necessary to protect the health safety or welfare of the public in Vermont. I did think about that this weekend quite a bit, but I think both because it's already been regulated and included in the laws in 2016, it's almost as if we're taking a part of an existing law and making its own separate law. And so that determination has already been made. You know, I think if we were to do an analysis, it would be somewhat of a kick the can down the road situation because it's very clear to us from the last year that there is demonstrable public threat, a risk from not regulating this profession. And in the three elements of the profession, there really are three sub professions within it. So, you know, we would do the analysis presented to you and then you guys would make that determination ultimately, of course, but it seems to OPR at least that there is a public risk from not doing this. And and so I took, you know, what we had in place already took the scaffolding of what we had for boxing and applied the appropriate standards to the field based on New Jersey and other states. Regarding resources, I can talk I don't I'll defer to Lauren on office resources for charges. I looked at other states for fighters for everybody who's not making money here. It's 20 it would be $25 for the promoter would be $500. Those are the fees that are for boxers right now. There's also a surety bond. That's also still in the boxing statute where $10,000 surety bond to ensure that taxes are paid, medicals insurance is paid, fighters are taken, rules are complied with. And then there's a 5% gate tax is how it's referred to in the statute right now. But this is similar with other states as well, where within 72 hours after a fight a promoter would submit a report to the office with ticket sales information and gross receipts information and 5% would be sent to the office to pay for regulation. And that would be put in the professional regulation fund to pay for the regulation of the profession. So I'll ask Lauren, would would those fees be enough to cover the administrative costs? For the record, Lauren Hibbert director of the Office of Professional Regulation, I think so. The biggest cost for the office will be inspection. We will inspect the sites of fights just for some of the reasons that Mr. Thompson delineated unsafe sites for making sure that the location itself is safe. So that will be a cost, but I think that we'd be able to accommodate this without additional staff. And certainly without an additional investigator that we will have obviously some system changes and operational changes, but I think we would be able to absorb those. Thank you. Maybe any other questions or thoughts? If I could reiterate, so talking about the money, if you take 5% of the gate, that alone is over $2,000 on every single one of my shows. That's more than me going out and hiring a sanctioning body to come here and just regulate it. So I do four shows a year at the Berry Auditorium, and I'm only one promoter. So that, I mean, we'll talk about that at a later time, but when you're talking about that's a lot of money. That doesn't include, so you have two corner guys, each one of your corner guys. I don't know if we don't use a third party sanctioning. We don't have an athletic commission here. I don't know where we're going to get our officials because they have to be, because when you use a third party sanctioning, they bring all the officials. So now you have the licensing, it takes about 200 people to run a show, a legit show. So between fighters, staff, those people will be getting licenses at whatever that cost is. So there's 200 people that you're going to, if I have 20 people, 20 fights, that's 40 fighters, that's 80, that's 120 people that have to buy licenses just to come there for each show times four shows. So the money adds up quick. You're going to see a lot of small promoters aren't even going to be able to afford to do this. So the boxing, I'm sorry, the boxing, the contestant license would be good for one year. The promoter, the underlying promoter license and the participant's license would be good for two years. And then every event has to have a separate license, right? Every event license I think is 250. So that would be more reasonable. That's fair. The gate tax is actually already in law and is similar to all that for a professional fight or an amateur fight, professional. So that's that's another good it would be for a professional fight. And it's also in other states around here. No, that's fair. If it's professional fight, absolutely. It's different. It's a different animal, different things. So amateur fights, we don't draw a lot of distinctions in the draft rule. We, what I've put in so far is there's a limit. You have to be 18 to be in a professional fight. That's consistent with surrounding states. Otherwise, we it would also put to rule developing amateur standards. And I think Dr. Bell will speak more to those amateur needs next. Senator White, is that so would it be possible to have a draft by next Friday when and then we can and then if there's anybody else that we can put the word out anybody else that needs to testify? Is that fair by next Friday? Senator Markson. Thanks. Thank you, Lauren. That was very helpful to frame up what we're doing. I guess I'd like to know how many promoters are there now in Vermont? Two. Well, one has been shut down until I don't know. He's the one that got the season to sist. The other one moved out of Vermont. That's XCP. I don't know if he's coming back into Vermont or not. I'm sure once the sanctioning goes through, cage wars will probably move over here. You'll probably see three or four big promotions come into the state. Right now without fight night promotions or XCP right now. And I'm the only one that's set up ready to go. But if nobody takes up the Rutland area, that's where you'll probably see cage wars move into there. But is it a little bit like zoning for the towns that don't have zoning? If you don't have zoning, it makes it really difficult for people to know what they can do and what they can't do in certain places. And so they tend to not. And if you don't have regulation, it makes it difficult for people to know what they can do and can't do. And so the good promoters would not necessarily come. Right. I don't know why I thought of linking it to zoning, but that was a puzzling bond. It actually brought up a good point, which is, I think as part of our proposal for licensing or at least in rules, we would have some elements of crowd control in zoning from the municipality where it's going to be held. So that the select board or the aldermans are aware of it. And then in terms of coordinating by next week, we have a draft. I think we need to do some internal review of it really quickly before we start circulating it, but Rex, I told Rex I'd send him that. So we do that. I'll coordinate with him to make sure we're as close to being on the same page as we can be as well. And we're not talking about this Friday. We're talking about a week from this Friday. So I believe that's the 26th. We would be great with, I think, Lauren, and we already have a language. We just need to do internal finality and finalizing and then circulate. Now, when talking about venues, though, there's only a few places in Vermont that can house a cage and people and all that stuff. There's not very many of them. And we're signing a three-year contract with the auditorium. So we're not going anywhere out of there. We don't travel with our cage. It's strictly for the citizens of Barrie. We've been bringing it into Barrie for quite a while now, and we're not going to be moving it out of there. Senator Cormor, did you have a? I do. Thank you, Madam Chair. So Rex, I initially got the impression that this was sort of the wild west when you mentioned that we had no regulation at all. But now, hearing your testimony, you're kind of like the only guy in town. So who are we likely to hear from that's opposing this? So originally the only person that ever opposed this was the other promoter, because once you become regulated, you no longer hold the reins. You can't make lopsided matches. You can't overlook blood work. A guy may have hepatitis. This has been huge in our state. Well, I didn't bring my blood work to the weigh-in. All right, while the fight's happening, it's going on anyway. When you have sanctioning, all this stuff is handed in ahead of time. So he was the only person that ever was against the sanctioning was the other promoter. Even the promoter of XCB wanted to get sanctioning in this state. The one that did it with the bar through the cage. Even he said it. He was like, I would absolutely do this in this state if they had. That's why he went to New Hampshire. So there was only that. That's the only person that I know of. Any other questions or thoughts or concerns? Senator Clarkson? You're muted. I'm trying to be better. I'm just curious, Rex, what's the breakdown of between men and women in your contestants? Oh, that's a great question. Women have started exploding onto the scene. I actually, right before the COVID, I was trying to do an all-female card because I have so many female fighters that are coming up through now. It's no longer just a man's sport, especially with Brazilian jujitsu. So one thing I do, Brazilian jujitsu, and I advocate it for women, Brazilian jujitsu was an art that was specifically made by a frail old man so that he could protect himself against large, bigger opponents. So that's why so many females have just gravitated towards Brazilian jujitsu. And then you have the savage women that want to be Muay Thai kickboxers. And you have them too. But I could fill an entire card with nothing but female fighters right now, tomorrow. Have you had an all-female fight yet? No, ma'am. Because I invited Chelsea Tucker down. Chelsea Tucker trains out of Joe Lozon, UFC fighter Joe Lozon's gym out of Massachusetts. She came. The energy was incredible. The people went nuts over it. So I've just been, especially with my daughter being a fighter too, that's been a huge, that's one of my goals is to have an all-female card. Absolutely. Great. And my last question for you today is, has your daughter recovered from that? My daughter, so my daughter has recovered. That was a learning experience for her. She never wants to fight again. But she still does train with us, our entire family. My wife trains with me. We all train at Granite City MMA right in Montpelier. They produce a lot of champions out of there. But I do it mainly for the Brazilian jujitsu these days. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Anybody else? Okay. So we will put this on. As soon as you get this, get a draft. I mean, not as soon as you get a draft, but we'll put it on for Friday, the 26th. So it would be good to have the draft a few days before that so that if we have, and we'll post it. So I think we, can we post, we have such bizarre rules around what we can post and when we can post it. But I would like to get this out there so that people can have a chance to, to respond to it, to see it and we'll make sure that it gets on our agenda that we're taking it up as that there is a draft. And if anybody, even if we're not allowed to post it yet, because it's not a document for that day. I mean, really weird rules. The, what we'll do is if anybody contacts us and wants to see it and testify, we'll email it to them. Is that, is that okay? So I would like to have people be able to see it so that they can come and weigh in. So the Chris Ballard, if, if you could get this out to like the gyms and stuff, because they're the ones, it's their fighters that are fighting on the card. It's most important for them guys. I mean, I'm a promoter, whether you guys sanction or not, we're probably still going to have fights. We've been having them. It's really important for these gyms and the fighters. This is important for them. Is there some kind of an association? If you send it out to Chris Ballard, who wasn't able to come here today. Okay. If you send it to Chris, he'll make sure to get it out. Yes, he absolutely, he's been in here for 36 years in this. Okay. In the MMA community or the martial arts community. Good. Okay. And then Senator White, there's a question, a process question as well. We obviously have proposed language, but our letter to, we're not sure if you would like to go to the committee bill or if you'd like us to find a sponsor or how you'd like to. I think that our thought, that was a pretty stupid statement, but our thought was that, I believe that our thought was that we would attach it to the OPR bill. If that works for OPR, if, and I think it might, but I'd like to get all the testimony done. I have no idea when crossover is going to be. So if we can get some testimony and get it pretty much wrapped up, then we can do that. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thanks. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much. And we'll see you all next Friday, a week from Friday. We'll see some of you before then. We are dealing with elections on this Friday, I believe. So we will see some of you then. Thank you for having me. Thank you.