OK. Ni hao. Jabao Jackson Nick. And... My Chinese is terrible. I try. I have a dual-lingual subscription. I've been trying. Maybe next year. So I apologize. But it's a pleasure to be here. I always love coming to China. I especially love coming to China. And it's wonderful to see you all. And today I want to talk to you about network observability with Envoy. When my clicker. OK. So I'm a developer advocate. I work at a company called HashiCorp. And I've been playing around with Service Mesh and Envoy and the whole observability sort of sphere for about 12 months. Maybe 18 months now. And I found that there are some concepts which are pretty difficult to grasp. So what I want to do today is kind of give you an introduction on what observability is and how you can use an absolute myriad of metrics which come out of Envoy. And we can also take a look at tracing. And tracing is what you're using tracing or not. It's interesting. My background I've used metrics for basic statistics for about 5 years. And tracing is a slightly different concept. And we'll take a look at that. And very very briefly I want to look at logging. And that's kind of more so why this is actually really important in addition to all the other stuff. All right. Why are we here? How have we kind of got ourselves into this situation where we need to be thinking about things like service mesh and network observability? Well, we're here because we've moved from static infrastructure to dynamic infrastructure. The whole world has changed. We've changed the way that we're running services when we're running Kubernetes, we're running multi-tenanted, we're running smaller services. And these things cause problems as well as solving problems. How do we get traffic east-west? How do we deal with things like network perimeter? And most importantly for this talk how do we understand what's actually going on inside of that environment? So the market trend has been right and I wrote a book on micro-services a couple of years ago and I'm going to publish a new edition updating that hopefully this year but one of the things that I see as a real benefit is this movement towards smaller functions of work. Smaller instances, smaller application instances, container-based services rather than huge monoliths and there's a number of reasons why that's beneficial. It's easier to deploy. You're deploying smaller instances, lower risk. It allows collaboration but it did require us to rethink pretty much completely how we manage and understand our systems. So the benefits of this as I said is that productivity thing. You know micro-services I see are a developer tool. The benefit is to us who are working on the systems and coding them more so than a business tool but there's also a business benefit in that if we can ship code quicker we can get benefits to the end users quicker but there's a cost as well because you're deploying these multiple instances of services you need like many many different load balancers and different components of infrastructure. I'm not going to go into all of that today but just in terminology before we begin just in case anybody is kind of not familiar but so I'm going to be talking about envoy and envoy is a component of a service mesh so a service mesh generally built into two main components, a centralized and distributed control plane and the data plane. So the data plane is where all of your traffic is flowing traffic doesn't flow independently from a service instance to another service instance it's all proxied in and out through the data plane where that gives us benefit is that because the traffic is flowing through the data plane we can understand better what's going on with regard to our network communications and back onto that dynamic infrastructure thing networks are not reliable they're kind of pretty unreliable so we've got to think about ways of mitigating that reliability but before we can mitigate reliability we've got to understand it you can't do reliability unless you have observability but observability it's like it's all over all the blog posts all the twitter is it just a buzz word what does anybody mean when they say the word observability so by definition object so observability comes from control theory it's an engineering term and it's kind of a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of external outputs like what well what we're trying to say is that if we measure internal inputs and outputs we can determine an overall health of a system based on those we can infer and what does it encompass so observability this is kind of the key thing for me that observability is not just about metrics or on-voice statistics observability encompasses all of this so things like your on-voice statistics application statistics Kubernetes statistics tracing logging health checks business analytics don't forget this but if you want to measure the performance of a system based on its external inputs then what about sales like if a system isn't functioning correctly you're going to see decreased sales potentially or decreased traffic or customer interaction those things are business metrics they're not necessarily system properties but observability tries to measure all of those what we're going to be looking at is just a small part of that and we're going to look at on-voice statistics and tracing mainly so again when we're thinking about observability we've got to think about internal and external instrumentation so we're going to be thinking about things like probes on Nagyos looking at disk space all of these affect the behavior of the system we're going to look at things like health checks again it's an external check but we're also going to be looking at application network statistics these are the things which are emitted from the internals of your system so metrics so when you want to understand metrics with Envoy you've really got to first understand the architecture of Envoy because if you look at the documentation Envoy it's just thousands and thousands of different metrics and where do they come from so there's ultimately these five component parts so we have things like listeners listener filters routers clusters and ultimately the control plan so let's break those down so a listener is something which is a named network location so this can be something which your downstream clients connect into but also something which you make a request outbound to and Envoy is going to expose a number of different listeners in your setup it's going to have a minimum of sort of two one for the control plan and one for the internals but this is kind of another key term and differentiating between the understanding of what is downstream and what is upstream so downstream is a response and a request which comes from an end-user client so an external so I could be a downstream source when I'm making a request to your website another service can be a downstream source whereas an upstream this is something which is made to another service and it's important to understand the difference between these two when we start getting into metrics because a failure in an upstream doesn't necessarily mean a failure response code return to your downstream service customer or user and that's because of the reliability patterns which are potentially implemented somewhere in the filters a cluster what a cluster is in terms of Envoy it's a collection of end points now that could be either automated or radically configured but a cluster contains load balances and it has a knowledge of end points for which it's going to route traffic so let's look at the configuration so Envoy matrix depending on which kind of mesh you're using or whether you're not using a mesh at all are pretty straightforward to configure there's a couple of key things which I want to kind of point out and really sort of bring your attention and the first one is the ability to add custom tags so we're going to look at this when we start looking at some of the metrics but the key thing is around observability you need to understand from where a metric or a statistic comes from right and being able to add additional bits of metadata to a metric is incredibly beneficial when you start to build up your dashboards and your alerts the other important and I think absolutely essential configuration feature is this one here which is using all default tags because if you look at the raw metrics or the raw statistics in terms of Envoy they can be incredibly long you'll have things like HTTP listener 192.168 underscore 8080. downstream underscore CX underscore blah blah blah right it becomes incredibly difficult to manage those and build up dashboards when you're sort of dealing with something as complex whereas if you use this configuration element what will happen is Envoy is going to extract things like the listener name or the cluster and it's going to put it into a tag so it makes selection of metrics much much easier where we're going to kind of go with metrics again something important to point out is that Envoy has Prometheus metrics it has the ability to expose a Prometheus endpoint metrics endpoint but there's a couple of caveats with it so you really need histograms and they are only available in Envoy 1.10 and the other key thing when I last checked the change log I don't think there's a change in 1.10 is that the Prometheus metrics are exposed on the admin endpoint now the problem with that is if you make the admin endpoint for Envoy public then not only can you get access to metrics but you can reconfigure it into a security hole there's a couple of ways around that you can sort of set an internal Envoy route just to kind of loop back and expose only that specific Prometheus metrics point but I believe that's going to be either kind of modified or the admin endpoint Envoy is going to be an authenticated endpoint at some point so using metrics so you've got a number of different ways in which you can kind of get access from Envoy the simplest is StatsD StatsD has been around for a long long time originally created by Etsy it's a push-based metrics format which uses the UDP protocol the key thing around StatsD is it doesn't support metadata and we're going to kind of look at why that's important you'll find that whichever sort of metric system you're using they tend to support these kind of four things there's gauges, timings and sets predominantly the first three are the most the most used and it kind of looks like this so the kind of the inherent problem there is because you don't support tags the entire name or any metadata has to be encoded into the name of the metric itself that can make querying, filtering incredibly cumbersome unknown problem and it's a solve problem so DataDog who've got a really really good SaaS based metrics platform introduced an extension to the StatsD protocol which is called DogStatsD and again it's that same format of push-based UDP but DogStatsD introduces tags so now what you can start doing is you can add metadata so I can start building up serviceA.myMethod.call.tags and I can start putting the service ID into the metric and that's really important because again you need to be thinking about how do you filter how do you break down information it's generally not an entire system of services which you're going to cause have problems it can be particular instances so you need to be able to think about how to filter to a particular instance of a service and tagging is essential Prometheus great open source, great CNCF project takes a slightly different approach so rather than you pushing metrics to the service with Prometheus what Prometheus will do it will pull the metrics from your application and that pull is done over HTTP and importantly it supports metadata so again those key things there, counters simple things like number of requests you want to see that break down over time gauges what is the current CPU levels, something which is kind of a fixed value and histograms, histograms really really essential for being able to deal with timing data again I don't want to be looking at averages I need to be looking at things like quartiles and percentiles inside of my data metrics format pretty simple, straightforward again here's an example of an envoy metric and you can see here with envoy HTTP connection manager prefix I've got the name of my connection manager now if I wasn't using tags that would have been part of the name so that use tags is a really really important feature so all those things when you're choosing a format you've kind of got to sort of take into all of those things into account if you're using Prometheus which I guess a lot of people do then you know you can kind of just go straight with Prometheus but think about how you're accessing those metrics and that you're accessing them in a secure way because of the admin endpoint and envoy but ultimately you know you can also send data out to dog stats data dog and things like that but you need to be thinking about metadata and metadata needs to be more than just the service instance you potentially want to be able to capture things like the Kubernetes node you want to be able to capture the pod name the deployment sort of ID as much information as you can which will help you in the event that you need it and this is the kind of the key thing you kind of got to capture a little bit more than you think you need right now because you never know what you need until you find out you don't have it right okay so listen to metrics so things like downstream connections and I've just kind of pulled out some of the key elements here that there are a huge number but these are some of the things that I like to kind of monitor and again don't forget that because I need to be able to get that metadata when I want to kind of build that up into a Prometheus query so I can look at something like the connection total so I'm going to that's a counter so I want to be able to see maybe a bar chart or a graph of the number of requests with counters I tend to like to see those rather than a rate I want to see the number of requests so I tend to use increase instead of a rate there but I'm in either way breaking it into a 30 second bucket when you start to kind of view that information you can kind of connections are they really that useful I think so the key thing you've got to remember with the connection is that internally Envoy is using connection pooling so you do not have a one-to-one relationship between a connection and a request but connections are really interesting to monitor because connections should be somewhat static because that connection pool is being maintained if you're seeing a lot of connections created and destroyed it can be an indication that potentially there is something in the system which is not allowing persistent connections persistent connections give you speed that's why we kind of use connection pooling and persistent connections there's also some some key metrics around connections which I think are really good for alerts and the kind of the key one which I've highlighted here is SSS SSL fail verify no cert so within the context of your service mesh all of your traffic should be using MTLS so it's using an encrypted transport and it's using client side certificates to manage authentication if you get a lot of errors around that then that could be a potential problem where you need to think about the configuration of your service mesh that's a kind of a good health warning so what about requests so requests you got to be thinking about layer 7 and again we're going to break up requests into downstream and upstream and remember that difference a downstream is to me back to your your end consumer the upstream is something which is happening internal in Envoy so a downstream sorry an upstream failure does not necessarily result in a downstream failure because of the retry patterns and the reliability but downstream is really important because that's what your end user sees failures on the downstream means that your end user is suffering again looking at some of those things we've got like downstream requests underscore 1xx and 2xx and 3xx it changes a lot of those things we'll take a look at that in a second when we're using stats tags what we're going to be able to do is use a metric like this so I'm using the downstream request and because I've got that enable stats tags on Envoy I've got request underscore xx is my metric name rather than this great big list right so that gives me the capability because it's extracted that response code as a tag and Envoy understands the HTTP protocol so it understands HTTP response codes and I can see there that Envoy will inject the tag response code class and it allows me to build up a differentiation so I can say well I'm only interested in errors or I'm only interested in things which are not errors because a 404 is it an error probably not a 404 could be it's not an internal error looking at those kind of things on a chart I can actually plot them and I can stack them as a bar if I want and I can kind of see the various different response codes or I can split them up but I've got that flexibility to be able to do that now request errors this kind of goes without saying but this is really really important to be monitoring request errors and you should potentially have alerts as well around request errors I know what happens but it's something which is undesirable it's your end user which is affected right especially on a downstream so for example if I'm monitoring my request errors I start a new version of my pod and all of a sudden I go from zero request errors to a whole bunch of them now I can configure an alert which is looking at a percentile increase that's giving me early warning that the new version that I've just deployed is not working as requested timing, timing is incredibly important and we want to be looking at things like timing and timing what we want to look at are things like the histograms because we want to be looking at say the 99 percentile so 1% of the users are experiencing a time of this sort of level majoritarily you're going to be kind of looking at the 50 percentile so where the majority of your users are but you want to be breaking those things down means are somewhat useful but sort of histograms and looking at histograms is so much more descriptive when you're looking at sort of the technical performance of your system but what about GRPC so GRPC is HGDP right? HGDP2 yeah but it's not well it's kinda it uses it as the transport but GRPC doesn't honor things like HGDP status codes with GRPC what you're doing is you're encoding the status code into the protobuf response so when it comes to building your metrics I could have a failed request which is an internal server error potentially in my service which is still going to get response as an HGDP200 and luckily for us Envoy understands the GRPC protocol and Envoy can actually decode both the method core and also the response code so to enable that it does have to be specifically enabled we use this feature which is an HGDP filter in Envoy and it's the HGDP1 bridge filter now if you look at the documentation the documentation is pretty clear on what this thing does but when it's easy to misunderstand so a lot of people look at the HGDP1 bridge filter and say well it's a method of translating an HGDP request into a GRPC request and it does that but it also allows Envoy to understand response codes the methods, the encoded data inside of the protobuf and to report that into your statistics so I can use things like this and again you can kind of see here I've got Envoy cluster GRPC so this is a metric statistic and then I've got GRPC response code so 0 that's the equivalent of an HGDP 200 I've got a response code 5 here this is kind of the equivalent of a 404 and GRPC status codes don't directly map to HGDP status codes but again building that up into a chart I can build something which is really really rich I can filter on that status code but I'm also seeing the method core so I can actually isolate those independent requests which is really really nice and useful to see I've just lumped them all into a single chart here but you can kind of break them up as you as you need to errors again I'm using a different metric but in the same way as I'm dealing with HGDP requests I want to deal with GRPC errors but again remember GRPC request can complete with a 200 but still be an error because of the status code so cluster matrix cluster matrix we're kind of getting into things like the upstream requests and upstream requests are internal in Envoy and we need to differentiate between upstream and downstream because as I mentioned if you're using a pattern like a retry then you could have multiple upstream failures but a downstream success you need to monitor them independently we can kind of see here that we've got some retries and we've got some errors I've applied the retry policy so I can see that Envoy again is putting my retries there now these retries wouldn't result in a downstream error but they are testing themselves as an upstream error timeouts we need to monitor timeouts so a timeout in the system is a big red flag I tend to put alerts on timeouts and whether you have that go straight through to pager duty or not that's up to you but I think a timeout is a big red flag and you need to be carefully sort of monitoring this information if you're kind of implementing those reliability patterns you've got to be thinking about like monitoring outlier ejection so what does outlier ejection do? as a pattern if Envoy receives a number of status codes from an end point which result in a failure it will remove that end point from the cluster temporarily so here I'm monitoring those end points have been ejected I might have one particular service that is a little bit sort of flaky but Envoy will remove it temporarily then you can see the gap because Envoy is going to try it again it's going to give it time to recover but then in the second block Envoy said hey I've got errors again so it's going to remove it for a longer period but again outlier ejection this is something which I think should be both monitored but also configured for alerting we'll see that kind of the authorization works so again two components authentication and authorization authentication is done through the MTLS process client side certificates authorization is a facet of the control plane so it's an additional layer I have this presented entity is it allowed to connect to me this is a metric that you really want to be monitoring inside of your control plane because you kind of got to be thinking about why would you get these failures you should never really get or see failures there's a kind of a bunch of metrics again so the total responses but ultimately I'm kind of mainly interested in errors and I'm looking at okay so why am I interested in those two things the first reason is that when I start a new pod I'm going to spawn a whole load of new connections so I should see a little spike in authorizations but they're cached if you see constant authorizations for a service then there's something not behaving itself correctly authorization is going to slow down your service so you don't want to see many authorization requests at any period of time authorization failures this is a massive red flag so you've got to be thinking about authorization failures why are you getting those there's two kind of predominant reasons the first one is that you've got misconfiguration so you haven't actually explicitly allowed service communication between two services or it could be somebody who's probing around in your system and trying to do something that they shouldn't and on to tracing so tracing is interesting I'm kind of growing my appreciation for it as I said it's something that's different to me and I just took this from the open tracing website but it's a nice description and the thing that's interesting about tracing is when you're looking at performance so the configuration of tracing in Envoy requires that you set up a cluster and you've got to set up the cluster because Envoy needs to know where it is going to send the tracing data to the spans your control plane should handle this for you but it's interesting to know I think and you also need tracing configuration because there's a number of different drivers which Envoy can use it can use a Zipkin driver which is kind of open tracing there's some new stuff in 110 which allows plug-able open tracing and it'll also support open sensors I believe you've got LightStep but when you start to look at a tracing so here's an example of a GDP post I can actually see visually the difference kind of the paths or the different sort of network hops that have gone through my service I've got internal from the downstream to an upstream listener and then I've got a GRPC service what you've kind of got to be reticent of when you're thinking about tracing is that an external call all tracings have a parent-child relationship and if this is an example for Zipkin but you've got to be thinking about forwarding the headers because if you receive a, if you make an internal call from your code you've got to forward on the span IDs and the tracing IDs for it to be registered as part of that graph it's pretty straightforward in HTTP GRPC again we've got to be thinking about things differently we're not using the HTTP protocol in the same way but what we do with GRPC is we extract those headers and I'm extracting them from an HTTP request and I'm adding them as metadata to the upstream context the open tracing and GRPC there's some great frameworks which work as middleware to help you do this but essentially that's what they're doing they're taking the parent information and they're adding it to the child span in order for that nice chart to work lastly on logging why is logging useful if you've got all of these wonderful metrics well when I was kind of putting together this presentation and working on my demo I couldn't get my tracing to work and my metrics weren't telling me anything but when I looked in my logs I could clearly see that my logs I wasn't sending the spans so you've got to think about all of those things Envoy is going to give you some great information around access logs everything it wants all of the things I want to thank you so much for listening to me today and I'm going to be around the conference if there's any questions you've got I'd be more than happy to answer them thank you so much oh yes what's your recommended way to send a tracing what's your preferred way to send a tracing directly to Jebgen or Jebgen all by some Istio mixer so what's my preferred way to send tracing is it direct or is it via the Istio mixer so I think Istio mixer and I correct me on this but I believe there's going to be some changes because when you send everything through Istio mixer one of the performance bottlenecks in Istio is with mixer and I believe that there's going to be a separation from mixer as a centralized component in an up and coming release so you can absolutely send them direct to Zipkin oh sorry you send them via a collector which acts as a proxy so I run generally a collector as a service so I've just got like a deployment with a number of instances and I think it's very much dependent on the direction of way Istio goes around using mixer right now about Jebgen yes let's show that the view is not she's Jebgen oh we'll get there so these are the sorry this is a little bit misleading I've actually named the geopc methods put get and exists because the service in question here is actually storing some data or it's retrieving yeah sorry not HTTP yeah sorry in retrospect those are terrible names but no they are actually geopc methods not HTTP methods alright thank you so much


I think what you are proposed is actually very appropriate. Thank you, Madam Chair. Commissioner Maynard. Thank you, Madam Chair. I, Joe, I agree with what Commissioner Hill just said. And we've had a conversation. You, Lily, Mary, myself. I think having the discretion to do something and doing something is two different things. And so I would like the commission to have the discretion to be able to move the money around. But it's my intention, and I'll state it here publicly on the record, to keep the monies in the region. But we don't know what Rockstar project is going to come up or come out that we could potentially do a lot of good in. And I've also said this to you, Joe, my intention would be in any future years to make, you know, to make the other region whole. If we ever did have to go down that road again, my hope is that we don't. And it sounds like we may never. But that's kind of where I'm coming at it. I like that, Commissioner Maynard. I guess it is such a shift, right, Joe? It is a shift. And I guess the question is, you know, what's the motivating factor? I like the discretion, right? Yeah, I mean, obviously, what we're doing is a is a sea change for this program. There's no question about it. And, you know, our thought was that this helps solve some of the problems within the program over a longer period of time.  But this is, you know, from my perspective, this is a better way to do it. I fully understand the issues that the folks in the regions have. I absolutely do. But we are sort of up against, you know, some stuff that we really have to deal with. So am I hearing then the consensus to sort of go ahead with the program that we've done? I mean, we still are going to get more public input. We're going to have a public hearing.  So we will certainly hear from people more about this. And look, if the commission even down the road decides that they want to pivot on this, we can do that. This is not the end. And the statute doesn't give us any guidance on that. No, the statute, this was not something, the statute does not recognize any differences between regions A, B, C category two. There's no, there's nothing in there that says that this needs to be done. This was just one of those things where we talked to our advisory committees and both of them are saying, no, we really want the money to stay within the regions and then we fully understand why. But again, these, they are advisory committees and we've always, you know, took their concerns very seriously. But, you know, sometimes the commission may have to take a position that is contrary to that. Okay, so I guess on that we will proceed. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Joe. I'm not, I'm not prepared to fully support this proposal. So I just, I want to make, I want to understand what Joe's takeaway is from this discussion. I understand that the objective is to kind of chip away at the surplus over a number of years, but I'd want to have some historical information as to what the awards have been on these program set-asides and the workforce development grants because I think there's, you know, more than one way to achieve the objective. And I would like us to be a bit more creative about how we use these funds. I like the discretionary element. So I support that component, but I do, I would like to understand, you know, what that kind of a review would look like. So I'm open to hearing more on this particular item. Well, what I think we can do is, you know, we will, we will craft the draft guidelines based on this proposal, but in parallel to that, I think we can certainly look at what some of the other options are. And then, you know, if we decide that we want to do something a little bit different, we'll have some, some things to look at and some things to, you know. Joe, I just want to make sure I'm reading the room correctly. Commissioners, do we, do we want to make sure Joe is efficient? Do we feel that we go with the proposal as crafted now, or do you want to have some of that discretionary language written in? We just going to wait that out. My hope would be that we just continue down the road. And when we, when we have more discussions with our advisory committee and others, if we see something that is over glaring that we don't like, we can, I think Joe said, pivot and either stop it in its tracks or bear in a different direction. But as of today, I think we should move forward with what has been proposed with the language that has been proposed. And let's see what people think about it. I agree with Commissioner Skinner that there are going to be some, some arguments against this and we're going to get that information because the process affords us that ability. Okay. Commissioners, you're all set with proceeding that way. Okay. Okay. So item number four is does the commission want to have targeted minimum spending amounts in each category of grants? So we have the sort of four major buckets of transportation, public safety, community planning and gambling harm reduction. We were proposing to do something like what they do with the Community Preservation Act, which says, you know, do sort of minimum spending within a couple of different areas and have some discretionary. So what we were proposing is having a minimum spending target of 15% in each of the four main categories. And, you know, for the first, which would allow them to spend 40% of the money sort of in any one of the categories or split them up among the categories. Our initial thought was we should set this up as, you know, needing a waiver to go away from that. But as we thought about it, with the first year of this program, we're recommending that we just put these in as suggested targets with no real, you know, sort of waiver requirement and see what happens in the first year. I think we want to give communities as much flexibility as possible. But we also do want to see money spent in the various categories. So I think in the guidelines we're proposing, we'll put them on notice that we want them to spread the money around, give them some suggested targets, and then we'll see what happens at the end of year one. Look, if we find communities are saying, hey, we want to put all our money in this in for transportation construction or somebody else says we want to put it off of public safety and we're finding this really kind of stratified, you know, applications, we may next year want to go back and say, let's, let's make these more firm goals and, you know, maybe require waivers or things like that. But for this year, we're not proposing that. So with that, any, any comments or, or you guys, you folks okay with that? No objections, commissioners? I have comments, but I see Commissioner Skinner. She has a question. She was there first. Yep. Thank you, Commissioner Hill. I, Joe, this kind of a structure, so is this kind of a targeted minimum typical of the block grant structure? And I have a similar question with regard to some of the other proposals you have here. Establishing minimum grant for municipalities by region. I'm just wondering to what extent these are best practices. Because what, while I am interested in seeing the program move to a block grant structure, I don't want the new rules and requirements to be more restrictive such that, you know, we're trading one problem if you will for another. And when I say one problem that I think you've acknowledged is, you know, the tie into the casino related impact, right? That is a problem that you've expressed over, over the past cycle. And I don't want to do a lot of work to eliminate that issue and concern, but then trade that for another issue, which is, you know, trying to get the communities to hit this minimum and, or stay with, you know, hit the minimum and, you know, stay within the maximum and just all sorts of new rules in place of the old ones that are just as difficult to, you know, to achieve, right? Does that make sense? Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, yes, you know, there are a number of other grants that do that. I think, you know, we talked about the Community Preservation Act. You know, in that case, you can use money for historic preservation, affordable housing, open space purchases, you know, they're very different types of things. And in that one, they do have sort of targeted minimums and, you know, you have, they have hard minimum spending in each category because they're so different. So that is very common, but here we're not saying that for year one, certainly we're just saying, this is what kind of like what we'd like to see, but you don't really have to do that in year one. We just want to, we just want you to put on notice that we don't want to see all your spending in sort of one category. So we're saying they're just suggested minimums for year one. And if later on we decide that we think we need to be firmer on that, we can always modify the guidelines and subsequent years, but we're really not talking about that today. Okay. I mean, if we're talking about chipping away at the surplus currently, again, the opposite end of that is further building. Right. That those funds, so that we'll have to be having a similar conversation five years down the line to address the surplus. Right. Right. Yeah. So right now, we're trying to give the communities as much flexibility as we can. Madam Chair. Yes. Yes, Commissioner Hill. So, so Joe, in theory, I like what you're proposing. I certainly would have to say that anything that we do in regards to these funds, we do have to have flexibility for our communities. Just for those who don't know, like you brought up the CPA, the Community Preservation Act, you know, a lot of the communities are able to fund the open space, historic preservation, easy, easy, outdoor rec, easy. But when you go and look at like the housing, the affordable housing piece, the money keeps getting high, increase, increase, increase, because there's no place to spend it. And I just worried seeing what's happened with the CPA and communities, that the same thing might be happening with what's being proposed. If we put hard target numbers on these particular funds, they're not going to be able to put monies into the pots of monies that you hope that they will do. So we, you say the first year, that's great. I'm thinking we're going to have to have that language in place for the program for years to come, because it's not going to be as easy as we all think it's going to be to spend in all the categories that we have funded in the past. That would be my worry. Yep, absolutely. And I think, Commissioner, in any case on all of these things, we would have a waiver process for that, as we have always done in the past. If someone wanted to exceed a threshold, a dollar threshold, or something like that, we realize that they may not, and the other thing we can always do is we can modify the targets as well. Part of it is what is the priority of the commission? On any given year, if the commission's priorities change, you can always change a target number for that particular category. So there's a lot of things I think that we can do. Would you envision a community coming in and saying, I want a waiver because I just can't do public safety, and they put zero money toward it? Would you envision that as being a possibility? It certainly could happen. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing, the other part of this is, and you'll see when we talk about the formula, that some of these communities are getting rather small grants and trying to literally spread them across four categories, you wouldn't get a whole lot of bang for your buck if you had these four small buckets of money. So there definitely will be instances where it doesn't make sense. And again, for year one, we're saying they're suggested. And I think going forward, we'll evaluate and see how things go. And we'll figure that one out really next year and see where we think we should be going with that. And I think just to jump in, some of the feedback that we received from our local community mitigation on this piece was they thought it would actually be a really good way to kind of force collaboration within the town. So it's not just one person applying for all of the grant money that they would have to kind of come in and say, like, okay, this department usually comes in with this grant. So how can we all work together? So it's really supposed to just more inspire collaboration than put regulation on it. Well said. Okay, so I guess we will proceed down that road with that as a suggested minimum. So the next question is regarding the workforce grants. As each year, we always ask if the commission wants to continue with the workforce grants, right now they're at $500,000 per region. And again, given the unexpended funds that we have in the program, we were suggesting that these could be increased by some amount, we were suggesting going up to $750,000 per region. Our grantees have said that they could absorb that and could expand their programs to train more folks. And we do always know that the casinos themselves have had some difficulties filling positions and providing a pipeline of folks who meet the minimum standards for the casinos would be helpful to them as well. So thoughts on that, on increasing spending?  My answer to you would be, yes, we should increase this. If anything has worked well, and they all have worked well, but what has worked very well are the workforce development grants. And we've heard that over and over in all the discussions that we've had with all the players involved in this program. So I would like to see us not only keep the program, but yes, I think I would be more than willing to see an increase from $500 to you've suggested $750, which I think is appropriate. Yeah, I mentioned to Joe, this is not that they're not all helpful and successful, but this to me is one of the most impactful areas that we've had. And I absolutely am in support of expanding it. Agreed. That's an easy one, I think, Joe. You agree, right? Commissioner Skinner? All right, very good. The next item is does the Commission want to establish minimum grants for the municipalities by region? The idea behind the block grant is that all of the eligible communities would get some money and we felt as a group that it made sense to set some kind of floor on those grants and looking at how much money is available in the various regions, we were suggesting a $200,000 minimum in region A, a $75,000 minimum in region B, and $50,000 minimum for the category two municipalities. So again, we looked at sort of the relative impacts, we looked at how much money was available to the regions, and those are the numbers that we came down on as a minimum grant for those communities with the block grant. So is everyone okay with that? Commissioner? Starting point. I think Joe's looking for just our feedback, so thanks. Okay. The next one, does the Commission want to allow some of the funds to be used for administrative purposes? This was a request of several of our grantees, especially in some of the smaller communities that have difficulty managing these programs. So right now, we do allow 7.5% of a grant to be used for administrative costs in the workforce development grants, where we are recommending that that be extended out to the other grants at the same amount, 7.5%, and we're proposing a maximum of $50,000. So if you reverse engineer that, that would be anyone who has a grant up to $667,000 would be able to use the full 7.5%, and anything over that would be capped by that $50,000 maximum. Are we good on that provision, commissioners? Yes. Great. Thanks. So this next one was, does the Commission want to allow reallocations of funds after plans have been approved? This policy that we currently have was established a while ago, where we said if any money is being proposed to be sort of repurposed that is more than 10% of the total grant or $10,000, whichever is less, needs to come back to the commission. Now, some of these with the new program that the difference between 10,000 and 10% could be, it could be a huge range. So I think we kind of need to rethink that. I think and my suggestion would be, maybe we just put a number of say $25,000 on that, that anything over $25,000, we will come back to the commission. Anything under that, we would just notify the commission that that is happening and that would be a staff level determination. And we can start with that point in the guidelines. We could talk about it more if you'd like, but I just don't want to get down to the point where we're having to come back to the commission sort of all the time, taking up your time and our time and all that on these things that are fairly small matters. And what I sort of envision is a community comes in and says they want to hire a consultant to do a certain study and then they find out that that's going to cost them $15,000 more than they thought and they said, hey, can we shift money from this bucket over to that bucket, all within sort of existing scope, the scope that they told us, but just sort of moving monies around. So any thoughts on that? Michelle, Brian? So yeah, I remember the conversation. I was kind of the one who pushed to have the percentage or the 10K when this came up the first time. And part of it probably came from procurement background that I had. And I think some of the money and the dollar cutoffs came from that. I know they've updated some of those dollar amounts. So, and Joe and I talked about this when they were briefing me on this, which is conceptually 25K is fine, but I don't want to see some sort of smaller grant worlds and they're completely pivoting. And all of a sudden that 25K is 50% of their request or something. So that's my only hesitation in not putting some percentage attached to it as well. I'm all for upping the dollar amount, given inflation and wanting to not have to come back to us in some of the smaller things, but trying to figure out a way where that percentage, if it is going to fundamentally alter, the grant would come back before us. Yeah. So I see if we had somebody out west who was getting a minimum grant of 75,000, 25 would be a third of their grants, so that might be 25. I suppose we could leave the 10% in there and say whichever is less. So on those smaller grants, that would be the controlling factor than on the large ones, 25. Right. Or say like 25 unless that exceeds, yeah, 25% of your grant. I mean, we could up the percent, but maybe have it be 25 unless that constitutes greater than x% of the total grant. Right. Well, what I can do is why don't I try to work up some language in the guidelines, and then we can maybe, and I didn't really have anything suggested here, so maybe I could do that, and when we discuss the guidelines, we'll go over what changes we made and see if that makes sense. Right. Sounds good. Okay. Number nine here, this is a new request, and this came from some of our discussions with the local community mitigation advisory committees and our subcommittee. Does the commission want to create a set aside for regional planning agencies? Now, the thought here is that we've always tried to encourage communities to work together on a regional basis on these grants, and we've had some success with that, but not a tremendous amount. And the regional planning agencies kind of pitched to us that they would be able to work with those communities on a regional basis to look at casino-related impacts as highly affects with multiple communities. And we thought that that was pretty compelling. So we're recommending setting aside $250,000 for each of the three regional planning agencies, MAPC, PVPC, and SERPED, which are the ones in each of our casino's locations.  No different than any other applicant has been for us. And obviously if they are not able to make that nexus, we wouldn't award the grants to those agencies at that time. But we did like the idea of this, and it seems sort of at a pilot kind of program to see what kinds of things we might get from those regional planning agencies. Pioneer Valley is doing a project right now from last year, looking at building up capacity for small minority women veteran businesses in the Pioneer Valley area. So that's a great project, and they do have a lot of ideas on things that they can do. So I think we are recommending doing this, at least on a pilot basis, and see how it goes for the first year. Thoughts on that? Does it make sense to consider this under the SERP plus category that you speak about in paragraph three? Exactly. I'm not suggesting that what you're proposing for the going forward doesn't make sense at all, but it would seem to me that there's certainly room to address this particular item in connection with the SERP plus that you're going to be writing up. Yeah. That's exactly right, Commissioner Skinner. This is where those funds would come from. So you're not proposing a forward-facing set aside for the regional planning agencies? Well, yeah. Any of the set asides, the source of funding is those unexpended funds from previous years. Got it. And again, if we spend those down, they'll probably get spent down over maybe somewhere between a three and a five-year period. And obviously, at that point, we would have to do some reconsideration once we've gotten the program sort of back in balance. But as with any of our programs, we can change them from year to year. If we find that this isn't successful, we can say, we gave it a shot, but it didn't really work out. And the next year, we don't have to fund it. But yes, this would come out of those unexpended funds. So just to take the opportunity while the five of us are here, one of the things that that reminded me of when Joe and I were talking, and then I would talk about this was the RTAs, which work hand-in-hand very often with the regional planning authorities. And there was a lot of work and effort going in down in Plainville, where they were talking about Adelbarrow, and they were talking about trying to figure out how to connect sort of these missing links and some of the lines for workers. And I was just looking for an update on that. I had asked if they could maybe see what the status was of any movement or what the status was on that. So just to let maybe some of you know that we're not here at the time that it was being talked about pretty extensively, that that was something that had been in the works kind of in this area, that I'd just be curious to get an update on when there's time. Yeah, yeah, I plan on following up with PPC on that and GATRA and whoever else. Okay, any other thoughts? Are we good then to go ahead and proceed with this? Yeah. Okay, great. Item 10, does the commission want to continue to place caps on the various categories? You know, right now we say that, you know, each category of grant has a, you know, public safety is 200,000, transportation planning is 250 and so on. You know, under this block grant approach, a community would get a set amount of money and we are suggesting that they spend it across the various categories. So the thought here is that, you know, the maximum amount of the grant sets a cap for the community. So our feeling is that we probably don't need those individual caps and again, that gives the community a bit more flexibility to say, hey, you know, maybe we need a little bit more money in this area than the cap allowed and otherwise it'd have to get waivers and other things and, you know, again, with the first year of this program and the interest of keeping it as flexible possible as possible, our thought is to eliminate those specific caps. Item 10, Commissioner Maynard. I support that and just for the group to hear. I did tell Joe and Lily that, you know, I would still like them to report within those categories so we could see how they were spending the money. Yep. But I'm perfectly fine with lifting those caps. I think we're going to get to it, Commissioner Delaney, Chief Delaney. But I also am thinking about policy questions attached to the categories. For instance, on public safety in the past, we've encouraged, and I mentioned this in our two by two and I've mentioned it over the last several years, the idea of training, right, not just purchasing equipment and also addressing those salt costs, which I remember Commissioner Cameron said often is that those are hard dollars to get. So is that, is that going to be like where you say things against or is that here, Joe? So, I mean, that is, you know, that has, those have been eligible costs for the last few years and would continue to be. But I think when we do develop the draft guidelines, you'll see, you know, in each category, we're going to say, here's here are the impacts that we recognize. Here are some of the things that you can do to address those impacts. So in the case of public safety, we'll be saying that, you know, one of the things that we realize is that, you know, that local police departments would likely come into contact with patrons and employees of the casino through their regular duties.  So we will set out that the goal here is to, is to give communities think these are the kinds of things that are eligible for you to do. And we'll see that when we get to the, to the draft guidelines. Okay. I guess I'm just pressing for eligibility versus encouragement. Right. Because they may say, well, if it's not required or expected, we'll go with more equipment and, you know, not worry about training this year. So I guess I don't know if you're, if you're thinking of any kind of attached conditions. We can certainly do that. I mean, if the commission chooses to do that, we can say that if you're coming in in the public safety category, you got to do some training. You know, we, we absolutely can mandate it. You know, again, it takes a little bit away from the flexibility of the community. But not, don't want to take away the flexibility, but I just wanted to be consistent with some of the values we've attached in the past, but maybe the commissioners are less concerned about, we did, you know, encourage training particularly around implicit bias. And as Jill said, so I wonder if there's a way in the guidelines even to say that to the extent you're asking for equipment, whether they also address whether there's any pertinent trainings in connection with it, you know, de-escalation training. It was like, you know, and sort of encourage them to think along those lines when they're asking for the monies, but it's not really necessarily tying their hands, but forcing them to think about it. Sure. Yeah. And that's the other reason I thought the reporting was important, because we can take a look at it next year and say, oh, they told, you know, this is totally not what we were thinking here and make adjustments once we see how they actually spent the dollars. Yep. Yeah. So as always, you know, we will require quarterly reports from all of our grantees and, you know, when we have, you know, regular meetings with them and so on. So, you know, we definitely keep good tabs on what it is that they're doing. Okay. So we're good with that one of eliminating the caps on the categories. Okay. So item 11, we were asked by a couple of our communities to reconsider the percentage that the CMF will fund on transportation construction projects. So if you recall, right now in the last couple of years, we capped the CMF contribution at one-third of the total project cost. You know, and the idea behind that was that, you know, these projects, while they are addressing casino-related impact, the benefit for the community is typically much larger than, you know, the impact that they're mitigating. So we believe as a staff that the one-third is still a generous contribution of the Community Mitigation Fund and wouldn't propose to change that. But what some other folks had asked was on some of the smaller projects that they were proposing, and I think the example that we used was Blue Bikes. I think it was in Maldon. It was fairly short dollars, and they were saying they would have been having a hard time finding a matching funds for, you know, for a project like that and asked for a waiver. And I think in the end, we ultimately gave them the waiver to pay for the entire project rather than the one-third. So we put together in the memo just an idea of the Commission paying, Community Mitigation Funds paying 100% of a project up to the first $250,000 and then 30% of the project over $250,000. So what that essentially does is it creates a sliding scale and what it would be is at, you know, at $250,000, we'd pay 100%. But if you get up to the point of a $4.5 million project, we would be back down into paying roughly that one-third of the amount. And then in between, it's kind of a sliding scale. So if you had a $500,000 project, we're probably paying, you know, 60% or 70% of that project.  And, you know, so it ends up being kind of a sliding scale where the smaller the project is, the higher percentage the Commission pays. And when we get up to that about $4.5 million project, we're back into that one-third, two-thirds kind of ratio.  We think it'll give the communities a little bit more flexibility on some of the smaller projects. We're going to have to be very careful how we've worked that in the guidelines to make sure we don't have people, you know, trying to kind of game the system a little bit. But, you know, we think it's a good idea. But on this one, we're not particularly married to it. You know, the one-third, two-thirds is a pretty simple concept. This one is a little bit more complicated. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. All right. So this is when the cynic in me comes out again. And I said this to Joe and again, procurement, where I just want to make sure nobody breaks the projects up, end a bunch of smaller $250,000 projects, and comes back and asks for a bunch. So Joe, I don't know what your thoughts were on that. I know I brought that up. Like, we just need to make sure that there's no... Yeah. Well, if we go ahead with this, we'll have to be very careful in crafting the guidelines. I think what we would probably want to do is have, if a community has multiple transportation construction projects, which, you know, most of the time that doesn't happen, usually somebody's coming in with one project because it's a big project. But if they had multiple projects, we'd probably have to have them to be additive rather than stand alone, you know, again. So we don't have someone come and say, well, I have 10, $250,000 projects. So, you know. And then I've got another one for next year, you know, like that sort of thing. Right, right. They really wanted me... I'm blanking on the phrase for in the procurement world, how they call that. We'll have to be very careful, so there aren't loopholes in there that the communities can use. So other thoughts, are we good? Are we good to go ahead with this? At least in the draft guidelines, you think? Yep. I'm not seeing any objections to. Okay, great. Great. Thank you. Now, this item, number 12, does the Commission want to allow a municipality to exceed the designated grant allocation if a particular need is identified? So in here, we... This is, I think, Commissioner Maynard kind of used this term as kind of like a safety valve or a leak valve for the program. If a community, you know, when you see... When we go through the formula, you know, you'll see what the community is designated to get. And there could be instances where a community might have a project that exceeds the allocation that they have. And what we wanted to do, at least in this first year, while we're piloting this whole thing, is give a community if they have a particular project that they've identified that would push them over the grant amount that we've identified, that we could issue a waiver to do that project. And again, any of those projects that happen would come out of those unexpended funds, you know, which would again would help us spend those down. You know, we don't know if we're going to get any of these. This is really just as a just in case, you know, that there's truly a need that's over and above what we're proposing to give a community. So thoughts on that? Mishers? Madam Chair? Yes. In theory, I like it. And the fact that, you know, it gives us some latitude to say yes or no when they come before us is something I always am fond of. So I would move... I would move forward with it. Feel comfortable with what's been proposed. Any concerns? Commissures? You know, I'm drafting the guideline this way. Okay. Let's move on, Joan. Okay. So the next one is, does the Commission want to allow operational costs and implementation costs to be eligible? We do already allow operational costs to be funded as long as the activity supplements rather than supplants existing funding. And these have typically been things like overtime for late night traffic patrols and things of that nature. We are certainly recommending continuing that, but also again with that caveat that they're not supplanting existing funding. You know, we had one application that came in last year that sort of asked us to pay for all the existing staff and their operation. And we're like, well, wait a minute, that is not the intent of this program, the intent of this program is to fund new things that would mitigate casino impacts. So, you know, we need to be very careful about that. And then in other categories, particularly the community planning category, some communities have wanted to use funds for implementing recommendations from previous planning projects. And the example that we have is, you know, with some communities have done, you know, marketing plans and tourism plans, and now want to do some implementation of those plans.  And we, our guidelines have been silent on that in the past. So I think we have funded these, but we just, and we think we should be able to fund those. But we just want to be, you know, saying positively in our guidelines that those are eligible for funding. And again, flexibility for the community is this kind of key here. Madam Chair. Yes, Mr. Shaheen. So to be clear, Joe, the question isn't a new question. It's one that's already in existence. And you're asking us if we would be willing to clarify it better? Well, I think, you know, on the implement, on the operational costs, that's, we're just sort of continuing an existing guideline. But on the community planning category, it's really just providing clarification that they can use funds for implementation of a plan and not just for the development of the plan. I mentioned to Joe that I, I could see some confusion between implementation and administrative costs. That was my very next comment is operational to me is different than what's being talked about right now. Right. So we would need to clarify that because there's a different cap on administrative. Right. Understood, Joe? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Anything else on that on commissions? Okay, great. Thanks. So the next one is, does the commission want the guidelines to identify ineligible projects or items? Again, this is in the interest of providing the clearest guidance that we can to our communities. We last year particularly, we had quite a number of items come in that we essentially deemed were ineligible things that communities should have been providing on their own that really weren't related to the casino impacts and things like that. It's our proposal is that within each category, we will have a section that talks about ineligible items within those categories. Some may have none that we've identified, but others may have several. And, you know, we'll try to have it as sort of as broad as possible, you know, to cover, you know, those things that the commission doesn't really want to see. Well, that I should not want to see, but aren't really appropriate to be funded from the community mitigation fund. Commissioner O'Brien, I'm thinking of, I'm not sure if Commissioner Hill was here then, but a public safety request for certain equipment around riot shields and our colleague Commissioner Cameron gave some good insight on that. So there are some points where we've had some triggers, right, Commissioner O'Brien? Yeah. I mean, I think going back and using some of those examples where we've spoken as a body to say, you know, let's never say never. But I think if you pull some of those, even Joe, to say these are some of the things that the commission has said historically do not qualify. Right. Right. Right. And if there's a question, they could at least visit it, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And as with anything, we always say that, you know, anything is waivable by the commission. I mean, if a community can make a really compelling reason for providing a certain piece of equipment that in the past we've said is ineligible, they can certainly make that argument and ask for waiver. But, you know, if we say right up front, you know, that, you know, the purchase of weapons is not eligible, then hopefully we don't get people asking to purchase weapons, you know, that or whatever the case may be. But you will see what all of those items are when we get to the draft guidelines and then we can certainly dig down into those if we think there should be more or fewer or whatever it might be. Madam Chair. Yes. So through you to my fellow commissioner. So for the last two years I've sat down on the subcommittee that looked at these applications and I cannot tell you how many didn't qualify or were ineligible that still sent us applications. So if we can somehow put wording in these guidelines of what is and what should be, I am all for it because I can't tell you how many came before us that I don't want to say wasted our time because our time was not wasted, but it certainly could have been put to better use looking at other applications than ones that weren't eligible. So I'm all for this. Great. Really helpful. Okay. Okay. So and the last couple should be pretty quick. So what sorts of funds should be used for the municipality around the category two facility, which is at PPC and the past we divided the funding between regions A and region B for no real particular reason. You know, I think when the original funds came out, they came from equally from region A and region B and we just kind of carry that on. But in looking a little closer at it, you know, Plainville is actually in region A and, you know, considering the disparity in the funds generated between region A and region B and the relatively small expenditure for the category two, we felt it was probably more appropriate to be funded under the category from the category A funds rather than, excuse me, the region A funds. I'm getting my regions and categories and so on mixed up here, but that it made sense to do that for PPC. Okay. Any questions on that? Okay. And then the last one is, do we want to change the program from a calendar year to a fiscal year? You know, essentially all our communities work on a fiscal, the July 1st to June 30th fiscal year, the commission works on that. Just about everybody in the state works on that except for the community mitigation fund. So we're suggesting that you're going to get any pushback here. We're suggesting that we should do that. And the only effective change that you'll see is there may not technically be a 2024 grant. It would become a fiscal year 25 grant. Mary's got that one. Right. Yep. Yep. We're all on board. So we're all good with that. So that is all of the policy questions for today. So I think we've got our marching orders on these and we'll be working to craft the guide, the draft guidelines to come back to you in October. But I'd like to move on if there's no more questions on that to the formula for the block grant. Sure. I just want to do a time check. I do need to leave today. I am happy to have the meeting continue. There's a couple of executive sessions that are needed to be addressed. Probably the latest time I can leave is 3.30. So this is an important discussion. I just also know we have important discussions going on. But I'm happy to step away and have Commissioner Ryan share the meeting for the rest of the time. Okay. So I'd like Joe to continue. Okay. Okay. So in coming up with a formula for the block grant, our first cut at this, and this is a first cut at this, it's not absolute that this is going to be the final, final version of it. We were trying to come up with a formula that we could use within any region in the state. We were trying to come up with a formula that we felt was equitable to the municipalities while also keeping it, you know, simple enough to implement. And as a group, we sat down and we came up with four factors to consider. And the first one was that minimum grant amount that we already talked about 200,000 in Region A, 75 in Region B, and 50 for the category two. The second factor was whether or not communities were designated a host or surrounding community. We do have several communities in both Region A and Region B that we're not, that are eligible for community mitigation funds, but we're not designated as a host or surrounding community. And these people, most of them applied to be a surrounding community, but were denied that as a, in their application. But it was determined some years ago that those communities would be eligible for funding. So what we're suggesting is that the host and surrounding communities should, since there are sort of recognized impacts on those communities that they should receive additional money for being designated a host or surrounding community. And we're suggesting that for a host community, they should get 200% of that minimum grant. And for a designated surrounding communities, they should receive an additional 100% of that minimum grant. Now, the third piece of this is proximity to the casino. And the idea behind this is that the further you are away geographically from a casino, the smaller the impact you're going to be. Now, this is the largest piece of each one of the grants. It totals roughly 40% of the total grant amount. And we looked at, first there's not a whole lot of studies or real data that we have that we could sort of scientifically determine what the right amount is for this proximity category. But what we did is we looked at the maps of the areas. We kind of drew concentric circles around the casinos. We looked at physical features, rivers, highways, other things. And we tried to make an assessment of how similar various communities were to one another within proximity to the casino. And we used our best judgment to do that. And I think we came up with a pretty good solution on that, which is certainly something that is subject for discussion. And then the last one were traffic impacts. We do know that traffic is one of the larger impacts. And again, about 20% of the grant went towards this. And what we did is we actually took some of the original traffic studies that were done as part of the environmental impact report process and some of the ones done afterwards. And we looked at what is the distribution of the traffic from the casinos? And most of these reports had a map that said 10% of the traffic goes in this direction, 8% goes over here, 15% in this direction. And so we took those numbers and divided them up to the communities based on the numbers that were in the report. So that was really based on how much traffic is estimated to go into each community. So with that, we then applied those formulas to Region A, Region B, and Category 2. And you have the charts in the memo that show what the proposed distribution of funds would be to all of the communities. Now, we talked this over with our local community mitigation advisory committees and honestly, we didn't get too, too much feedback on the actual numbers. We asked for feedback on sort of the factors that we considered and then a feedback on what some of the numbers look like. And most of the folks at the LCMACs were saying, well, they wanted to go back to their communities and talk with them about it and so on. So we haven't heard a whole lot of feedback, particularly on that. As far as the categories go, I think folks were very appreciative of of the things that we went through to come up with this and seem to be an agreement that those were the real factors that do need to be considered. With that said, there's no perfect formula. People can argue many different ways on many different factors and there's probably no such thing as a perfect formula that will make everyone completely happy. But with that said, I think we did sort of the best that we could do with what we have and we did institute that notion of the safety valve there of a community did have needs that were over and above what was designated here that they would have the ability to come in for that and the commission to consider that on any given community. So I guess I'll just open it up for discussion. Thanks, Joe. And this is excellent work. Thank you to Mary and Lily.  And I respect the factors. But however, the formula works. I asked Joe, which communities would be getting less than what they got before? And if I'm correct, Joe, you said it was Springfield and West Springfield. And I quite frank about that. If that's true, Joe, you know, I am when I think about casino impact, you know, you can't get much closer than MGM. I know that Springfield is wide, but between West Springfield and Springfield are big in proximity in, I'm sorry, they are not feeling well today. It's a big community. And I know the casino is on one side and West Springfield is on the other side. But I wish that that wasn't the impact for you. And I heard your caveat, your carve out that they could come back if they need more dollars. But it's about what is it like $400,000 less than what they got last year?  It depends what they applied for. So in the last couple of years, you know, I don't remember what the total was last year, but again, the previous year, they applied for, you know, a million and a half dollars for Port Street. They applied for another almost million dollars for Dwight Street. So they had some very large individual projects. You know, in some years previous to that, there were a couple of years where, you know, they were significantly less than that amount. I mean, part of the issue of a competitive grant program is it depends how many projects you come in with. And when you're doing it as a block grant program, you're saying, this is a set amount of money, but you get that every year, you know, as long as the program exists. So there's, you know, there's definitely, you know, it's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, I think. Well, I like to compare my apples to apples. I appreciate that, but I do think there could be consideration for a different formula for A versus B because of just the nature of those two regions. I just throw that out. And I understand, Joe, this is your proposal, and I know your team, and if that is it, I just wanted to be, you know, express my concern. I am very, I want to make sure that those Springfield and West Springfield are able to really activate that downtown consistent with the development project that most of us rolled out a couple of weeks ago. And so wherever, but it's hard because if we use a different formula you're taking from someone else, and I get that. But as I said, there are, it's hard when there's a loser, right? Well, yeah, I just turned throughout my career.  And so I wonder if there's a way to tweak it Well, look, you know, we suggested that at the very beginning, we could have a different formula in the East and the West, you could weight any of these things differently. You know, there's there's a number of things that you can do. But, you know, our original idea was let's come up with this formula that we can we can apply statewide. You know, we don't want it to just to be looking completely arbitrary either. You know, and, and I think one could also argue that Springfield is the big winner in this. They get they get about a third of the money. You know, they certainly get well more than any other community, they get more than double than the next community. So they may not have gotten as much money as they got last year. But they're certainly getting more money than any other community on the list. So I mean, look, there's any number of ways that we could do this. And, you know, whatever way the commission would like us to do that, we'll certainly will. Commissioner Maynard. Madam Chair, I expressed a lot of what you just said to Joe and private and, you know, was reminded when I was thinking about it. If we do adjust the formula out West, there's also going to be smaller communities out there that are quote unquote losers. Yes. Right now don't apply because they don't have the infrastructure around their municipal government to do so. And that's why we did talk about this relief valve safety valve. Because I agree with you. I don't like it either, right, the outcome of the the schematics here, but the relief valve allows for us to put some more money into Springfield and West Springfield with the monies we have existing. And I think about what we just did a few months ago on the garage where we took it back up and we voted in and put additional monies out there. So my message to Springfield and West Springfield is to Joe's point, they're going to get a higher guaranteed portion, right, when you look at the percentage than they normally would on any given year. But we can kick in and make up the difference if there's a quote Rockstar project that's going on. And I agree with you, Madam Chair, there's a lot of great projects going on out there. I just think about the impact. That's what I'm thinking. Impact, it's easier to see Region A a lot of the communities, but I am not, I don't want to be involved as Sophie's choice here. But I just wanted to note that just for me was an unfortunate impact. Madam chair. Yeah. So may I suggest that, and I agree with everything you have said, and I agree with everything Commissioner Maynard had said, and I've shared that with Joe as well. But may I suggest that we move forward with what has been proposed, because once again, this is a process where we're going to have public input from folks in Springfield and West Springfield. And I believe in my heart that they will come back to us with some ideas of how this formula can be changed to benefit everybody. This is our first attempt at it. And I do want to congratulate the team on a job well done. I could not have put this formula together by myself. I'll tell you, you guys did Yeoman's work to come up with what's before us today. But I believe during the public process that we're going to see something different. And I think it will alleviate some of the concerns that we all have in regards to Springfield and West Springfield. So my hope would be we could move forward today with what's been proposed here from the public and make changes at a time certain in the future before we would vote to accept it. Does that make sense? My surest. I see one nod from Commissioner O'Brien. Commissioner Maynard, you're all set. Yes, only to say that I wish I were at the big E today. Commissioner Skinner, I agree. And I'm glad Commissioner Hill touched on the public comment because that's something I'm very much looking forward to. And just, you know, I said on the volunteer committees, Commissioner Skinner, and there's been a lot of good information that we've gotten from those discussions. And because of the discussion, a lot of what's before you today is because of it. And I'm sure as we move forward, we'll continue to get good suggestions and good dialogue that will continue. But it's been very informative. Unfortunately, we haven't all had access to that input. And I'm not really sure what some of the communities have said and not said. So I'm just wasting my concern on the impact of what I think two communities that are significantly impacted by the existence of a casino. And I agree with you 100%. Yeah. Okay. But so we'll go forward. I'm not hearing anybody pushing back, Joe. You knew, Joe, that I was going to bring this up. So it's not anything that I did. And again, Madam Chair, you know, whatever way we want to come down on this, that's fine.  There's, you know, there's a number of different ways that you can do all this. And I think, you know, we'll hear what the public has to say. And, you know, we'll move from there. Yeah. Well, thank you. And again, yesterday, G-PAC of Public Mally did give an update on the announcement that came out of the city of Springfield a couple of weeks ago on their plans for development to continue the revitalization of the downtown and how important, you know, we're building on some significant media mitigation grants that have field really important activation efforts, including 31M, which is apparently going to open next month at like 60% occupied for market rate housing. That's really exciting, but they want to continue to activate the Main Street. We want to make sure that the casino's benefits are being felt and the community mitigation grant program is being used to further those efforts. So thank you. But it was really a special, it was a special day. So, Joan, I think yesterday, what was the amount? 8.5 million has gone. So it is in no way are we suggesting that we have not been generous to Springfield. That's for sure, right? And that was acknowledged yesterday. We certainly have been very generous to Springfield. Yeah, so yeah, that's not my message today. It's just formula going forward, you know. All right. Well, thank you very much for all of your input. Next steps. We'll be getting you draft guidelines sometime in early October. And, you know, we'll keep this train chugging forward. Madam Chair. Yes, Commissioner Hill. I just have one last question. I know the answer, but I want it to be publicly answered. We're still online to hit the dates that we need to hit to make this program a reality for this year. So far, so good. FY25, let me be clear. Right. So I think, you know, we're going to try to schedule the public, we're going to bring the draft guidelines to the commission and get input there. And we're going to try to schedule our public hearing for the week after. You know, as I said to our local community mitigation advisory committees, we usually would just put the guidelines out for public comment. And we, you know, we quite routinely get back zero comments on them. But in this case where we are completely revamping the program, we feel that it's far more important to hold a public hearing and get people's input and get all of those people who really work on these things in the room rather than, you know, the people who are writing the grants and administering the grants. And, you know, those are the folks that we really want to hear from because, you know, we're changing the whole thing. Excellent work, your whole group. And on terms of timeline, I think Mary's probably monitoring that very, very carefully with Lily. She's up on her calendar always. So thank you. Everyone, I'll set for Joe today. Okay. Thanks so much. Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Lily. Thanks, Mary. All right. So now we're turning to item number nine. And there's two items for executive session topics today. And as you know, you have to read the language into the record in the event that we decide to move on that. So with respect to item nine, the commission anticipates that it will meet an executive session in accordance with GL, Chapter 30A, Section 21A2, to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with Heather Hall for the position of interim director of the investigations and enforcement bureau. The public session of the commission meeting will not reconvene at the conclusion of the executive session should we so choose to go into one. And then with respect to the second anticipated executive session, item number 10, we have some minutes to review. Commission anticipates that it will meet an executive session to review minutes from previous executive sessions as their discussion at an open meeting may frustrate the intended purpose for which the executive sessions were convened. So to GL, Chapter 30A, Section 21A6, May 18, 2022, GL, Chapter 30A, Section 21A3, September 12, 2022, May 8, 2023, August 30, 2023, and GL, Chapter 30A, Section 21A3, with respect to contract negotiations with Todd Greslin for the position of interim executive director, July 12, 2023, July 17, 2023, public session of the commission meeting will not reconvene at the conclusion of the executive session. Madam Chair, Madam Chair, I would like to state something for the record. We are going to actually pull the August 30th and September 12, 2022 meeting minutes from that session. They need a little more work. Okay, so two and four on 10A, correct? Madam Chair, are we going to dispose of the commissioner update or any other business before we go into executive session, since we're not returning? Sure, Commissioner Brown, do you have an update? I don't. I just didn't know for just administrative purposes, we wanted to make sure before I did a motion. Oh, okay. Commissioner, thank you. In that case, I would move that the commission go into executive session on items nine and so much of what's remaining in item 10, as specified in the minutes, sorry, as specified in the agenda and for the reasons stated by the chair on the record. I'll set, commissioners, any questions for Councillor Grossman on this? All right. Hi. Commissioner O'Brien. Hi. Commissioner Hill. I'm sorry. Hi. Thank you. Commissioner Skinner. Hi. And Commissioner Maynard. Hi. There's a delay somehow. Hi, I understood Commissioner Hill's eye to be, you know, not voting in favor, but to start a statement. Oh, aye, aye, aye, aye. Sorry, Commissioner Hill. I'm so sorry. The reason my eye took a minute is because I did have something for the commissioner's update, but I think it's already been alleviated, so I don't need to bring it up, but I wanted to think in my mind, I said yes. So it's a yes, and I'm all set. Thank you. And my apologies, I thought maybe I had missed it like I did earlier. Thank you. So I have an eye from Commissioner Hill, a commissioner Skinner. I'm off on eye. Okay. And Commissioner Maynard. And I vote yes. So we'll go into executive session and we'll get transported to the proper virtual room, I suspect. Grace and... No, you all have a calendar invitation for an executive session link, so feel free to join the link that's in your inbox and just message me if you don't have it for some reason. Okay. And a reminder, we will not be returning to the public session. For those who joined us, thank you very much for your interest. And thank you to the entire team.