Okay, good. Good to go. Thanks, Dave. All right. Good morning. This is a convening of the master of this gaming commission. We're holding this meeting virtually. So I'll do our roll call. Good morning, Christian, Brian. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning, commissioner Hill. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning, commissioner Skinner. Good morning. I like the red that's going to help me throughout the day. Commissioner Skinner and good morning, commissioner Maynard. Good morning. All right. It started today is May 16th. We have a really full agenda today. Thank you to everybody for all the preparation and my fellow commissioners for hanging in there throughout the day. We have starting public meeting number 453. Good morning, commissioner Hill. Good morning, madam chair. I move that the commission approved the minutes from the November 29th, 2022 and December 1st, 2022 public meetings that are included in the commissioners packet subject to any necessary corrections for typographical areas or other non-material matters. Thank you. Any discussion? Everyone had a chance to review them. Okay. A couple of typos that I'll circle back with you on bread. Just at one point it says like policy instead of police, a couple of things like that. You guys probably already found them, but. Yeah. Oh, that's helpful though. Those little nits. Actually, there were a couple of boo boo's and we, we, we did identify them, but that one, I don't think we did. So I will find that one. I'll flag it for you. Thank you. Extra eyes always helpful. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Misha Hill. Hi. Misha Skinner. Hi. Misha Maynard. Hi. I vote yes. Five zero. So we're going to turn to item number three Karen. Do you have, good morning. Do you have. Dr. Rose, any updates for us? I have a couple of things for you this morning. The first thing I just wanted to let you all know is that I have a question for you. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Gully and our office. Received a notice from Bill McEvoy, who's the executive director of the supplier diversity office. Inform him, the Massachusetts gaming commission has earned the full participation in the SDO annual reporting award for FY 22. We have done a really good job this year with the supplier diversity work. See from an email from John for FY 23. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And also have spending in two categories with a bench. Marks have not even yet been established. So I just want to congratulate the whole team on that effort. There's going to be a ward. Ceremony and luncheon on Thursday, June 1st.  Of efforts for DEI. And that was a renewed effort on that. So I just wanted to compliment the finance and the whole team, because all this spending really involves the different divisions in the office. So I just want to congratulate them and let the commissioners know, because I think it's a great news. And they do a lot of good work. So just wanted to let you know. So that's, that's my first day. And Kathy, what's their comment? I think it's really exciting. And many of us know Bill personally. Bill McEvoy has done a superb job. Making Massachusetts a model in this area. And I'm thrilled for the gaming commission that we've reached our goals. And I know that we repeat it frequently. That takes a great deal of intentionality. And we thank all the members. And I know all of you have been thinking about this in your procurement. And I just would say continue the good work. It's again, requires just that continued intentionality. So excellent. That's really exciting. Yeah. Congratulations. Finance department on the lead on that. So great work there. And then the, the other item, I just have a Dr. Lightbaum here this morning, just to give an update, you know, on the horse racing, just the health and safety efforts that go into a horse racing, particularly in the Commonwealth. So I'll turn it over to Alex just to give you all an update. Good morning, commissioners. Good morning. So with the Derby, a couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of unfortunate spotlight on injuries. And we just thought it would be a good thing to talk about what we do here in Massachusetts. We have numerous veterinary positions at the track. And for the gaming commission, we have myself as the chief veterinarian.   And some of them do limited amounts. We do very similar to what we do for the post race testing. We do two horses out of every race. If we have a big race. Yesterday we had a $100,000 race appointment. We tested every horse in the race. We tested every horse in the race for blood gas. Then we also have for the commission, we have the veterinarian that does the post race testing in the, in the test barn afterwards. And again, we test two horses at least from the races, the winner. And then the judges decide who else they would like to send. If a horse is claimed, they'll send them. If a horse is claimed comes up positive, the trainer claiming the horse has the option to send the horse back. So that's important. And otherwise they can send a beaten favorite or a horse that wasn't expected to do well, that did well. Or if nothing seems out of the ordinary, just a random horse. So we do do extensive testing. And so they're going to have to do a little bit of testing. And so they do a little bit of testing. They're going to track itself, Plain Ridge employees of veterinarian referred to as the association vet. Their responsibilities are to watch the horses as they warm up and make sure they're sound and fit to race. If they notice one that's a little lame or little off. Or maybe the weight is decreasing. Anything like that. They can scratch the horse. Put them on what we call the veterinary list. And then the other time is that the association veterinarian has given them. So this, this really gives us a lot of control over what horses are racing. The association that also is responsible if there is an injury on the track for addressing that. And getting the horse off the track, doing emergency treatments and all that. In addition to that, we have a Lasix veterinarian, a private veterinarian that works for the trainers. That administers Lasix, which is the only permitted drug on race day. The plant with the standard breads, the injury rate is much lower than it is for thoroughbreds. Part of it, it's just a different breed. It's a different gate. Whole different, you know, it's a very different activity. So, you know, sometimes at Plain Ridge, we don't have any horses that expire over the years. Sometimes we may have one or two. And again, there's methods in place to take care of that. And we do autopsy, any horse that expired at the racetrack, whether it's from an injury or, you know, Infectious disease, whatever. Interestingly enough, some of the information out of Kentucky, they talked about having McPeterson, who is the person who they have reviewed their track surface. Suffolk has used him for years. And more recently, when they were doing their festival racing, the gaming commission as part of their acceptance of the application for Suffolk to race included that as a requirement to have the track evaluated before me and McPeterson was the one who his group would come down and do it. So that's something we've been doing in Massachusetts for a long time. We started that with the Suffolk. And at the time the commission said, why don't we also do that with Plain Ridge? So Plain Ridge has been doing that all along as well. They have somebody else come that, you know, they have track superintendents that are more familiar with standard bird racing that come to their tracks and evaluate if before the meet begins each year for any suggestions. Just getting back a little bit to the Derby issues. PISA, which is the new federal group that is responsible now for the rules and regulations of thoroughbred racing. Except for on the medication side, but they've already put their track safety and veterinary records and that type of thing into effect. They're going to be doing, you know, obviously a full review of all of the incidences that happened at Churchill. The horse racing commission for Kentucky obviously will also be doing that. PISA will make their findings public. They already do many of the same things that we do. You know, they'll send the horses for autopsies. They'll check any track maintenance records. They'll interview the doggies, the trainers. They'll review veterinary records. And, you know, look into all of those different things. Santa Anita did have a number of injuries. Injuries several years ago, and they put numerous practices in place. And they were able to significantly reduce the number of injuries and fatalities that they had. So I'm sure Churchill has already done a lot of this as well. And anytime this happens. Well, it's an ongoing thing. Every day there's veterinarians, it's tracks, there's judges, stewards, track management. Everybody's looking at these issues, trying to minimize any injuries to the horses. Just to note, it's, the injuries are distressing to people in the industry as well. This is not something that they take lightly. Last year, one of the horses that expired, they all have sentimental value to their owners and trainers and the people who take care of them every day. Most of them don't have the remains returned to them after the horse passes away. And one of the horses that passed away last year did have very sentimental meaning to their owners. And they wanted to try to get the remains, the ashes back, but it is expensive. And so I had talked to them, I arranged for the autopsies and, you know, the remains and all that. So I mentioned it to Steve O'Toole and right away, Steve said that Plain Ridge would cover the cost for that. And he was able to return the remains to the owner and it meant a lot to them. You know, Steve didn't want any public, public knowledge of it. He just wanted to do something behind the scenes. So I didn't mention it before, but I thought this was a good time to bring that up. Just to show how much the industry itself does care about the horses and also how track management also does too. Another, just quickly, there was some comments in the media about Forte coming up positive. He was the Derby favorite who was scratched for other reasons from the Derby. Since the Derby, he, it was announced that he had a positive finding for an anti-inflammatory drug. And there was some comments in the media about how long it took for that information to come out. I won't comment on that myself because I'm not, I don't have any personal knowledge of that. And there's different things put out there in the media. But just to talk about what we do here with our lab, we have a, by contract, a three-day turnaround on any negative findings. If a sample comes back that they might be, that they look suspicious, they have a 10-day turnaround to announce it either as a non-finding or as a adverse finding of positive. So we get our results back pretty quickly. Those are business days. So depending on where the weekends fall, it may take a little bit longer. So once we get them back, we notify the trainer right away. They have an option. If they would like to do a split sample and we give them, I forget if it's 48 or 72 hours, but they have time to decide what they want to do. If they want to have a split sample done, then I send it out to, there's eight or so accredited labs that we use. And I send the request out to all labs asking, you know, saying that the trainer has requested a split. It identifies the drug, the level of the drug, whether it was found in blood or urine. The labs would have two or three days to respond back to me with how much it will cost and what their turnaround time would be. And if they can accept the sample. Occasionally a lab is just, they're way too busy with whatever their normal testing is. And they'll just say we can't accept it at this time. But usually we get, you know, two or three, maybe four labs that will accept it. And I give that information to the trainer. They get to pick from that list. You know, they may take into account the cost, the turnaround time, and then pick it. We then send the sample out as quickly as possible. It can take four to six weeks to get that back. So the process can't, if there is a split sample request, it can take a couple of months before we finally get it here and done. But, you know, for instance, we had a positive earlier this year. And it took 16 days from the testing to the hearing and when the trainer was notified of what their penalty was. So, you know, we really try to get these things adjudicated quickly. And obviously on some of these cases, if there's going to be attorneys involved in all and the attorneys one extra time to do their own investigations and things that can add time to, to a, getting through the process. So I don't want to, minimum, I don't want to say that everybody should be able to get through the process that quickly. There's other factors that go into obviously how fast it can go. But we do try to be conscious of how, moving these things along for everybody's sake. And then we don't know, we don't make a public notification of the positive until the ruling comes out. That, that's to provide a little bit of, I guess, privacy for the trainer. There were complaints, not, not about us, but in general that if a jurisdiction gave out information that of course had a positive and then later down the road, it was found to have been contamination or the split sample didn't come back as confirmed or something like that. You know, that the trainer's reputation had already been, you know, put out on the line there. So we try to, so we don't put that information out ourselves. In practice, usually the trainer tells a lot of people right away about what happened and they talk to their own veterinarian about what happened and try to figure things out. So a lot of times within a few days, I'll hear back from other people about the positive. So it does get out there, but it doesn't come from us. Are there any questions or comments? Missures, any questions for Dr. Leipzig? I thought that it was important for us to get this helpful update. Dr. Leipzig has in the past reminded us and the public of all the safety features of our race program. All set, Missures. Commissioner Barry, are you leaving yet? Just, no, just to say thank you to Dr. Leipzig. I remember when I first got here, we had at least one that had to do with split samples and whether the sample was in fact taken properly, said we had a lot of information about the care that's taken in that. So you're understating the level of care that you and your staff put into that process. So just want everybody to know that. I just second what Commissioner O'Brien said, and thank you, Dr. Leipzig. Thank you. Thank you. Karen. That's it for the administrative update. Thank you. And thank you, Alex. Wonderful job as usual. Thank you. Really important. All right. Then we'll move that item number four. And sheet delaying. Good morning again, Joe. Good morning. Thank you, Madam chair and commissioners. So we have a few items up for you today. The first item is. The on core Boston Harbor quarterly report. And we have with us today. Jackie crumb, Juliana, Catanzari and also Tom. So with that, I will turn it over to Jackie and. You can take it away. Good morning, Madam chair and commissioners. And I'm as chief Delaney said, I'm joined today by Juliana Catanzari from the legal department and Tom copy our executive director of security. And I'll turn it over to Juliana to get started for us, please. Sure. I'm just going to share my screen. Can everybody see that? Perfect. Good morning, Madam chair commissioners. We appreciate the opportunity to present our first quarter report to you this morning. So thank you. And as Jackie mentioned, we're joined by Tom coffee today, our executive director of security investigations who will present the compliance portion of the report. So we're going to get started with gaming revenue and lottery sales. So our gross gaming revenue for table games during Q one was about $87.5 million. The gross gaming revenue for slots was about $103 million for total gross gaming revenue of about $191 million. This resulted in about $48 million paid to the Commonwealth and taxes. Here is our year over year comparison. It's really just the first quarter of 2023. Obviously that we have to compare. So for this quarter, we've also included revenues for in-person sports wagering, which are provided on this slide. If you remember, there was only one day of sports wagering in January. So that January figure just represents that one day. So the total quarterly revenue was about $1.5 million, about $217,000 in state retail taxes collected. And just to be clear, this is just the in-person sports wagering, nothing online. Here we have our lottery sales for Q one, which were in excess of a million dollars, which was about a 31.5% increase over the same quarter. Of last year. And here's a more detailed year over year comparison. But again, we only have Q one to compare. So moving on to workforce. For this report, we've also separated out employees involved in sports wagering. So there's going to be two different charts. In order to have two distinct numbers, we took out employees who work in a sports book itself or who are dedicated solely to sports wagering. And those are who we put in the sports wagering bucket. Of course there are employees who aren't solely dedicated that work on sports wagering related items. But that was the best way to sort of segregate. So this slide provides figures for employees not related to sports wagering, of which there are a total of 3,526. So 58% of that number were minorities, 2% veterans and 45% women. So can I ask again, I know you guys are consistently working on that women's number, but can we talk about the goal being a little bit shy? It's been kind of stuck there. Can you guys talk about what you're doing in that regard? Yeah, I think to move that number takes a large volume of hires. So I think what we're doing is we're focusing on retraining people who are looking to move into different positions so that we can open some of those non-traditional positions. We've continued to go down that path. We're also looking at gaming schools and trying to figure out how to specifically see if we can get some women into the gaming schools because that's not a path that we've seen traditionally. I know there was some talk early on too about the service industry and some of the amenities being the basis for the number going down as you've gotten back online. Is that, do you feel like you've maxed out that capacity? Yes and no. I mean, obviously the opening of the sports betting, sports wagering enabled us to hire additional employees. We're also opening tomorrow night an extension of Rare called Rare Lounge. So we were able to add a few employees in that venue as well. So I think definitely we're continuing to see growth, but not so much coming off of COVID, more just normal growth patterns. Okay. Thank you. Jackie, I know Juliana hasn't gotten to the sports wagering slide yet, but I do note that in the women category, you are exceeding your goal. Did you have any women coming from going from gaming into sports wagering? Sure. We actually had some of our cashiers, our cage cashiers move from the cage into sports wagering. And we, to determine whether people were going to be able to perform in a sports wagering capacity, we administered a brief sports test and a woman far exceeded our gentleman in terms of passing that test. So we were able to recruit and train a number of women for those cage windows. Thank you for highlighting that again. I remember you mentioned it a while back. So that's good. But hopefully in the non sports wagering world, you'll continue your efforts to increase women in the workforce there. Well, I'm joined by my colleague over here, Tom Coffee, who's heading up security. And so we've told him that he needs to continue his efforts to find wonderful woman security officers. Thank you, Jackie. I don't chair. Yeah. Jackie, I completely understand what you're saying to commissioner Brian. And my former life when I was tasked with something very similar, I had to make a radical decision, which was do not bring me anyone. That's not, you know, a qualified female candidate. And I literally had to say that to every director and every head in state government actually.  And if you can't bring in high volumes and numbers, you got to try to expand the pool. So I appreciate what you're doing and, and support, support you putting that pressure on. Thank you. And I can speak from experience, but that's the absolute truth with respect to the position that Jordan. Commissioner Maynard was in the past and his predecessor. And then the results did bear out. So I know it's a challenging commissioner Brian. You often ask about child care. I know to shift work is difficult. If you had to guess Jackie, what's the barrier that you and I'm feeling out of it that you face? Yeah, I think it's a little bit. Sorry. I think the barrier, the main barrier that we are seeing is some of the positions that we have. Have not traditionally had women in them. And I think when you, when you look at an organization, it's, it's always more difficult to recruit and hire into positions where the women are such a minority part of the team. So that's why we're really focusing on things like the dealer school where we know that that's an issue. We know that we're upside down in that department and try to make a concerted effort to really bring people and make them feel comfortable in those positions. Chair. Yes. I have nothing to add on this particular issue. I think my fellow commissioners have really laid out concerns and slash our priorities in regards to the minority veteran and women numbers. What I would like to ask Juliana, could you go back to the lottery page for us? Sure. So I found this to be quite impressive actually. If you haven't heard us in the past, and I'm pretty sure you have making sure that we don't hurt our lottery is something that this board really cares about. And I am seeing some very big increases over last year. And I was just wondering, are we seeing an increase in patrons in the casino, which is why we're seeing increases here. Any idea why there's such an increase? I'm happy about it, but I would like to understand it as well. You know, I don't know that we're seeing an increase in patrons. I'd have to look into that a little bit further and get back to you on that one. It could be related to some promotions we've done. It could be related to large pots available through the lottery. So some of those big jack pots, but I'll look into that more for you. And then my next question would be, do you partner with the lottery? Do you have discussions with the lottery on a regular basis to ensure that the sales continue to be as good as they are? I'm curious as to what your relationship with the lottery is. Sure. We actually have an agreement with the lottery. So a lot of this is laid out in that agreement. And I know Chair Judd Stein is smiling because she's well aware of this. And so we talk about things like where the machines are, which machines are underperforming, which are the places where we could expand. And we also, our promotions team speaks to the lottery about what we can do to partner with them to give away lottery tickets on occasion. So lots of different, different planning tools. Okay. Thank you madam chair and thank you Jackie for that update. Thank you so much. Thank you. Commissioner Hill, can I do a follow up on that please? We, you may have heard us. On core folks. At a earlier meeting indicate that. I think I indicated that I'd heard a public statement from. Mr. He had not heard. Of any of the online sports operators and given that you do have two tethered to your casino, I am hoping that they have reached out to the lottery. Exactly. I will, I will speak to them about that. That's great. Because we did ask, I think. I think we made sure, between the two of you, you covered that in every interview, some of us joined in, but to make sure that, like our commitment under 23 K, the treasure asked in person came to our meeting and asked that we work with the online sports operators to, again, protect and promote the lottery. So we're looking forward to that commitment and some creative ideas and they, many of the operators had some great, good ideas that we want to see implemented. So thank you. So we're back then to Juliana we disrupted but it's okay. So we're back on page. I think we're on slide down. This pertains to the non sports wagering related employees this is just a breakdown of supervisory and above in that non sports wagering related category. I know I'm going to start. It's going to feel like groundhog day but can you speak to again the sort of the position of women and the supervisor and above what you have in place to get that number up. So we have initiated throughout the property leadership training programs. And so, as part of that leadership training program we are, we talk about the fact that the importance of diversity, not just women but diversity within the department and the need for diversity at management levels. I think we all know that when you promote someone into a position that encourages other people to work under that person and expands the role of both women and minorities in the department. So that's definitely a focus of ours. We're working with our VP of diversity and inclusion, who is based in Las Vegas she comes out here once a quarter to make sure that we're addressing that as part of that leadership series. Is there any way that you can get either a Boston position or maybe out here a little more frequently than once a quarter. I think she'd come out more often if we asked you to. So here are the sports we drink related employees specifically. As Commissioner Skinner mentioned 52% were minorities and 52% were women. We don't have any veteran sports we drink employees at this time. And then here is the breakdown of those sports we drink employees for supervisory and above the numbers obviously very small given the total population. But we broke down the same chart record list. So moving on to operating spend. So our total discretionary spend for Q one was about $26 million of that 26 million 12% was spent with minority business enterprises 2% with veterans and 12% with women. And here's that spend broken down by local. So as you can see 58% of that 26 million was spent in Massachusetts with more than $3 million in both Everett and Boston. I want to hand it over to Tom now to present our compliance statistics. Tom Madam chair. Yes. Well the way we've been running this like, if I can ask a question on a. Yes, we should do that. Yes. Julie Hannah can you go back to the sports wagering employees and the veterans. So when I hear zero, I was a little concerned about that. So my question to you is, does on core reach out to veteran organizations, or more importantly like to the, in the state government we have a whole agency for veterans, where they do look to get veterans jobs. And I was wondering if you've reached out to them to try and get that number up a little bit. There's a lot of veterans that need help. Yes, we do partner with veteran agencies and for all of our positions. And, you know, have been pretty successful in terms of doing and doing that. A lot of these positions were people that were trained from within. I'm not sure. Not sure why there is zero veterans one of the, one of the issues we sometimes have in this department is that people don't necessarily self identify. But, but we'll continue to work with the veteran organizations that we have partnered with. Thank you. Thank you madam chair. Thank you. Does anybody want to ask any questions about the operating spend or the diversity or local. I know you don't have year over year quarter over quarter but I feel like 6.9.  Is that that's because that sounds good to me, but is it have you done that in the past showing up, you know, or is that consistent. I think that's consistent. It may actually be slightly higher than it was last quarter, but I would have to double check on that in the 20 in the mid 20s. Right. And so you haven't seen the sounds that it's consistent that it's not dependent on a one off. No. Okay, great. Thank you. This is Tom coffee. Thanks for allowing me to present today. So, as you can see the numbers on the screen. Miners intercepted in gaming or prevent from gaming told us 20. What I'd like to do instead of just going over these, this chart I'd like to sort of give you the numbers within the numbers and try to put this sort of in, in focus. So, if I could consult with casino marketing, we had about 760,000 casino visits in the first quarter of those visits, 285,498 IDs were scanned into the Verdox Verdox system, which is our technology. And of those, we discovered 49 fake IDs and four IDs that passed the Verdox system so that means that the ID defeated the technology. Excuse me. So what we do in that situation is we contact Verdox immediately. And through a representative and we are able to get these IDs to them so that so then they can sort of retool the technology to catch up it's always a cat and mouse game with the fake IDs. Those are very difficult to detect. So, I think on those it's really a technology issue that we're constantly chasing. I divided up the others into sort of categories. We had for what I'll call door pushes through alarm doors, and one of those involved a several couple involved ready, which is an alarm door which we post when it's open, and two of them involve a door up in the high limits area which we tried to address with the city of ever, but their fire department came in and insist that is a that is an emergency exit. One of those events were alarm doors that we were able to catch up to through surveillance and camera work and none of those people were able to drink or game. And there's the the category of what I'll call needs improvement. And that's on us. So we had a total of seven guests that made it onto the floor that were not identified. Now, to me, one is too many, but if you really look at the numbers. That's point 0000921 of all the guests that arrived here on call Boston Harbor to get to me once too many. So, in those cases we issue discipline to an officer if they if they make a mistake and certainly would counsel them. At least none of these of those seven. None of those folks gambled or drank. So that's good. And then I'll go to the third category and that's the fake ID that makes it onto the floor. All three and this I noticed it says for there. So that we would comply with surveillance camera property. And we always, we always check our reports to make sure they match theirs. That's really three but one gentleman came twice so we kind of full disclosure. We count that as a different day a different body. So that's for for what I would call instances where someone drank or gambled, all of those involved a fake ID. So that particular was egregious, where the gentleman was here for two or three days he came on for multiple times. I looked at the ID myself I look at all these cases personally but I looked at the ID myself. I mean maybe some of us would have caught it some of us wouldn't. But he also had a second form of ID which sort of backed that up. So those are the challenges for us. I look at it. I think we're doing a good job we can always do better. And certainly on course given me the resources to make sure that this is the top priority for our security team. So, Tom, I was good to see you. Any other questions for you. The seven that you isolated when you were talking about them was there a friend in terms of what was the method or that he used. Was there one that stuck out as most used to get on the floor and circumvent security. Those are really just awesome stakes. Commissioner Brian that's one of officers either distracted or simply just maybe has a brain cramp and, you know, and again, age as you know can be very subjective.  Those are just really human error. And as I stated in our previous meeting we, we do require 20 hours of ID training during our break in period for our new security officer so we want to make sure they are comfortable and we're not putting them in a difficult position. Again, the, the, the fake ID challenge is what it is everybody knows that the, the area where I am always looking to improve is where one of our officers just simply makes a mistake and allows somebody to walk in. Right. Oh yeah we wrote, we rotate every two hours. So they don't become stale. Yeah. So, that's my presentation. And can you talk about the five hours 38 minutes episode. Yeah. Five, the other five or 38 minutes. Yeah, that's that's the gentleman with the fake IDs, the, the, the two fake IDs. And again, I looked at it myself, you know, honestly, I don't know whether I would have caught it. I wouldn't like to think I would have. But, you know, I think it's 5050 on that one. Some people would have caught it somewhere. Eventually we did catch up to him. Someone did, did think it didn't look like him. So we just, excuse me, eventually did catch him. Let's see, just to follow up with he at the table was he a slot machine. Yeah, he was everything he was at the tables he was at slots he was he was all over the place. So, again, he was comfortable with his IDs. How was he in real life. In real life. He was there with me one second. He was 20. For any of the ones under 18 children who just went with their parents, or are there just.  I don't think with any any real ill intent, maybe taking a shortcut or I don't think he was trying to do anything illegal, but we do count all of those so that's just the public to understand that it's not 17 year olds who are necessarily coming into gamble, but it could be very time consuming. Correct. And we had we had a few of those this time. We did one of those they gentlemen pushed through security and had to use the restroom. Real quickly whether that was a ploy or not. I don't really know but we were able to wait for that job. To use the restroom and then we just squirted them out, but we count that as well. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions commissioners. I don't have a question. I do have a comment. However. Tom, I appreciate your presentation. Clearly there are some blemishes here. And I'm pleased to see that you have taken a look at this compliance issue through your lens. I don't look at compliance in a vacuum.  For commissioners to see these numbers and address them is the efforts by you and on core to mitigate them.  And I don't think we've seen that already. And I ask that that continue because the information that you've provided the transparency that you've given during your presentation today. I don't think we've seen that in connection with this compliance slide in previous meetings and so I would encourage you to continue to do that and continue to add your lens to mitigating the issue. You've stated that on core ensures that you have the resources that you need. And I applaud on core for that. So thank you once again. Thank you. Okay, other comments or questions for Tom. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I think Jackie was going to. Okay. So we wanted to share with you some of the feedback and resulting action plans we've taken as a result of focus groups that were conducted last year and how that feeds into a new round of focus groups that we started just a few days ago. So approximately 360 employees participated in our last round of focus groups both in Las Vegas and here at EPH. We have participants from pretty much every department, and both management and line level employees. The results were aggregated accordingly. So we wanted to give you just a sampling of some of the results and the action plans that we developed in response. One thing we made we made an effort to try to understand the most effective means of training and we asked employees to identify the trainings that they had received. The majority of participants recalled their online and in person trainings on the following topics, human trafficking, preventing harassment and discrimination, leadership training, addressing inappropriate guest behavior and responsible gaming. Next slide please. Giuliana can you. You want. Okay, got it. We also asked employees about the channels for reporting claims of harassment and discrimination, and employees were able to identify, pretty much all of our channels for reporting including the anonymous hotlines. Participants also identified that they felt most comfortable reporting to the immediate manager or supervisor, the person with whom they knew best on property. In 2002, participants reported that they were comfortable speaking with employee relations. However, after learning that participants felt most comfortable reporting to someone they know, we launched a campaign to make our employee relations counselors, more known around property, more approachable. A lot of them started going to pre shifts in the various departments we also put up signage get to know your ER counselor. We also included our speak up campaign, which encourages employees to report guest misconduct 89% of the respondents felt comfortable reporting inappropriate guest conduct 8% responded that they were unsure or that it was situational. One of the action plans that we developed. The purpose was to reinforce the guest behavior training with by adding a knowledge tests at the end of it. Add a guest behavior video to the annual compliance training. Do human resource compliance program quarterly communications, highlighting the different compliance policies including messages from a leadership and implement new leadership development courses to improve communication. This just came out in April from our CEO, regarding the importance of preventing harassment and discrimination. This was circulated to all of our employees by our daily we shipped tool which is reviewed during pre shipped. And there was signage and continues to be signage in our heart of house areas as well. Another important initiative that we undertook for the first time was an employee engagement survey which happened in December 2022. And we're pleased to report that we had a 71 participation rates, and overall engagement was rated at 76% at EVH, which is 3% higher than the benchmark of other hospital US hospitality companies. 86% of the participants shared I am proud to work for when and I would recommend when as a great place to work. The culture amp is the platform for the survey culture amp was founded in 2009 and provides a core and provides core engagement questions, as recommended by their data and insights team. This team consists of leaders with PhDs and masters in psychology who have extensive experience and organizational behavior, culture, and the design and analysis of surveys. They've created a series of questions focused on critical factors that consistently predict employee engagement. Culture amp was also able to provide benchmark data across multiple industries including a hospitality specific benchmark comprised of 55 different clients. Our specific focus was on four major topics, one engagement to leadership and management, three communication and for enablement enablement meaning do I have access to the training or tools that I need to do my job well. At the conclusion of the survey managers were given access to culture amp to view their aggregated anonymous results. Overall areas of improvement was shared across the property, and then department managers received or shared specific feedback with their employees through we shifts team meetings skip groups and focus groups. Each manager was then required to create an action plan based on the results that culture amp recommended, and the specific feedback that they received through these to these team member meetings. And then the department head was required to present the action plan to our CEO or CEO CEO for approval. And so I just want to give you an example of one of the action plans. And so this is for our spa, which in full disclosure I will say receive the highest engagement scores of any department at on core. The next slide shows a more typical department and these were the results that are that we saw more typically across the company. And so culture and provided each department with their schools relative to others in the company. And then the action plan required each department head to disclose the means by which they gathered information. So I think on the next slide. And so for example in this one the employee feedback was one on one interviews pretty shift small group meetings and skip line meetings. And they disclose in the action plan what they heard when they conducted the meetings. And then the action plan. Each, each department was required to come up with three different action plans to address what was gained as part of the survey, as well as what they learned during the meetings. So some examples of the action plans included developing better ways to communicate training plans and identification of tools that employees may need to better complete their jobs. And that is, I think we can move unless there are any questions on that we can move to the next category. Jackie, I don't have a question so much as a comment that I'm pleased to see that you guys are doing this, particularly the spa, you know, given sort of the historical in that area. I'm glad to see the company being proactive on this. I'm really happy to see that. We honestly the results of the spa did not come as a shock to us the, the woman who runs the spark is her names Virginia Lara and she has developed a team that communicates really well. They're able to address problems they feel comfortable coming to her with problems so it really is a testament to her leadership. And we've actually asked her for some tips on leadership that we can use potentially to bring to other departments. Thank you. And bring other women into. We're trying. Thank you for this echo my appreciation for the entire deck on that particular topic. Very, very good. Really helpful information. Thank you. So, our patrons have continued to utilize our donate your change program, raising money in Q one for custom era, which is Boston's largest provider of domestic violence awareness efforts. Last hope can I rescue clearly people love their pets. And this was our most popular nonprofit in Q one. The pan mass challenge which raises funds for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts. In Q one our employees volunteered over 1000 hours of their time for local nonprofits. We collected more than 1300 pairs of socks for residents of Pine Street in and donated over 15,000 worth of baby formula to bread of life to be distributed to residents of Malden, Medford and Everett. In conjunction with game sense we celebrated problem gaming awareness month throughout March with an extensive heart of house campaign and an in person experience near our employee dining room. We also celebrated national employee appreciation day in March with a game room for our employees. Five minute massages kindly donated by our team from the spa and an elevated menu at our employee dining room. And that is the conclusion of our presentation. We are open for questions, questions, questions, comments. Just so thank you. Great report, a very informative and very appreciative of the work that you're doing with the concerns that we have brought up in past quarterly reports. Thank you, Commissioner Hill. I'll set glaciers. All right. Thank you, Julianne and Jackie and Tom. Appreciate it. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay. Yes, we next up we have Plain Ridge Park casino with their first quarter report and, and I guess with the alternative over to North Brownsville to get started from PPC. Morning Joe good morning, Madam chair good morning commissioners Plain Ridge Park is pleased to present our q1 2023 update joining me today are Heidi Yates Akbar our vice president of finance and Kathy Lucas our vice president of human resources. So with those introductions I'm going to pass off to Heidi and she's going to walk you through the financials. Good morning Madam chair and commissioners it's good to be with you all again. As you can see for q1 we had a total of net slot revenue of 38 million state taxes of 15 race of three and total overall of 18.8. As you can see that this beats any quarter that we had in 2022, and we're really pleased that these results echo back to pre pandemic quarters for us. So, it's kind of exciting to be able to do our first report on sports wagering. Our q1 also as mentioned by our, our fellow licensee it on court that January does represent only one day, but we had 972,000 in sales will weight during revenue that represented as a payment to the state of 145,899 and lottery so and Commissioner Hill I'm going to answer a couple of the questions that you had asked before as well in that that's that you know we had 500, almost 89,000 in sales and q1 part of that was that there was that big mega millions frenzy in January around that $1.3 billion jackpot that they had going on as well. We have visitors increase as well some of that is related to the sports wagering. Going live on both the 31st and as well as online on the 10th so we do have an increase in visitors that very well could have also led to an increase in lottery sales. So our call total qualified spend for q1 is 1.5 million. A year ago in q1 2022 it was 1.2 million. You can see it's almost evenly split between the state of Massachusetts and then Mississippi Illinois Louisiana, New Jersey, Colorado and other states. So the host and surrounding communities of that 732,000 660 2,000 was spent in our host and surrounding communities being playing bill rent them north out of rural Foxboro and Mansfield that spend in q1 2022 was 76,900 and what Heidi, can I ask a question before you move on to the diversity numbers in terms of the spend. I know if you go back one more slide in terms of sort of that 5050 split. And I know that your company's presence, you've got some sort of centralization of some of the purchasing that you make but is there any way to get that Massachusetts northeast number up. Well sure, you know there's I can report on that if you'd like me to in the future I'm happy to do that would be great. Yeah, well we'll do that and we've got a great team behind us that that pulls that thing to pull those things together for us. And I'm sure we'll be able to focus on that get it for you. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. All right, so vendor diversity. So we hit our goal of 21% we exceeded it that 22% are women spend is down 1% to our goal for q1. We exceeded our minority by 1% and as well as the vendor spend. So we'll see that in the next slide that represents the dollar figures so we had 166,000 in q1 versus 175,000 in q4 this was specifically related to promotional materials that we needed in the early January that the spend happened in q4. And that is what drove that number down and it is what represents that one point percentage miss in total women, I am not concerned about our ability to hit the goal overall for the year but it is a little bit light in q1. Minority is also minority is also down 51,000 sorry north. And I just wanted to mention that that is specifically also related to a capital project into in q4 of 2022 that did not repeat in q1 2023. Great, thanks Heidi so I'll cover the compliance information here and I'm going to start my comments by drawing your attention to a new column. Going forward you will see a column shows the number of underage and minor patrons escorted from the sports wagering area. While we don't have any instances to report in that area this quarter I did want to call it out. So in q1 of 2023 ppc prevented a total of 120 guests from entering the gaming establishment of that group 14 were minors. 50 were underage and 135 had expired invalid or no, no identification. So we'd have one underage person escorted from the gaming area, we did not have any instances of underage gaming, and we did not have any instances of underage gaming underage alcohol service. So with that I will pass it to Kathy you will walk you through the employment and community relations information. I can make this chat. Commissioner Brian I just want to make sure commissioners questions. One is a comment one is a question. You guys have always been great about breaking the stats down. And you did that proactively on the sports wagering I appreciate it. And as usual your numbers are good. I do have a question on. So what was the longest period of time and the circumstances for the one who had to be escorted off the floor. I had one instance of a person on the gaming floor and that person was on for less than 10 minutes. Great. And that's the one escorted off right in February. Correct. Yes, ma'am. Okay, great. Thank you. You're welcome. Good morning, chair and commissioners. I'm sorry, Adam chair. I'm sorry Kathy good morning I don't mean to interrupt you but I did have a question I'm sorry to go backwards. But you guys are moving really quickly this morning. I have a question about the diverse spend slide. Heidi mentioned I think this is directed to Heidi, who mentioned that the decrease in diversity spend. Between quarter one and quarter four is due to the completion of a capital project and I wondered if there are any plans to offset that for upcoming quarters how do you plan to get those numbers back up to where your goal is set. All right, so as you can see, we actually hit our goal. The goal is 21 and we we hit it at 22. And the decrease on that capital was actually in the MBE spend and you can see for q1 we actually exceeded our goal by 1%. So, and we all we always take into account when we're looking at capital and those kind of things. We always make sure that as much as we are able we're working with our diverse vendors in areas that we can that's it's just represented the change from what we spent in q4 2022 to what we spent in q1 of 23 in the minority spend is where you can see it dropped on the next slide. 51 grand and that was what was related to that 58 that capital project but we definitely hit our goal. Okay, I see that now Heidi thank you. I was focused on more focused anyway on that this slide that you have up so that makes perfect sense what you explained. Thank you. Okay, so we continue to exceed our diversity goal of 15% in q1 with 20% of our team members being diverse. A lot of that is due to be referral program we've been fortunate to have team members refer other team members which is also helpful with us from a retention perspective, as well we exceeded our veterans goal of 2% in q1 with 5% of our team members identifying as veterans. We, we have our pen heroes program that allows us to recognize team members that work for us that have served. We also have a partnership with rolling thunder, which has allowed us to bring an external community program and use our internal community program to partner with them to to to actually participate with community activities to keep the awareness of cow and MIAs in on property and an off sided property that allowed us to actually have a couple of team members who didn't pass, come forward and be recognized on our wall of veterans. And finally I'll share a little bit later what we do with recruit military to help us gain more veterans that's allowed us to exceed that goal. In q1 43% of our team members were women. We continue to maintain this number and our focus has actually been on retention with fierce competition and opportunities until we're able to expand our team member roles. To keep the talent we have with that we have led with our women leading at 10 which is actually spearheaded by Aaron Chamberlain at the corporate level. And we have five of the women who went through our ELP program program that I shared with you probably two quarters ago, actually promoted into new roles. We're graduating that program. We also use our leap program which is an internship program to retrieve recruit and retain women we actually have Emily from J. Woo and the program now and then we have beta who will be entering into the program coming from Penn State. So while we're not hitting our goal in comparison to pre COVID conditions are focused really until we're able to open up more venues and allow for more hiring is to keep the women that we have and actually not to keep them but allow them to grow. We also have 33% of our team members that are local which is slightly under the goal of 35%. We also have 380 team members in Q1 which is slightly down from Q4 of that 65% are full time and 35% are full time. Do you want to go to the next slide Nora. So actually Kathy before you go to the next slide this is Commissioner Brian. I mean that that's funny that percentage at 45% women is sort of the same that he VH just gave us. And when you comment on you see not really being able to get traction until you're able to open more amenities do you mean because of the labor shortage or do you mean other reasons that are preventing you guys from reopening some of the amenities that would get that number up. I think what was spoken of earlier in regards to, you know getting that that hiring up, needing to be able to open our restaurant or our restaurant will allow us to probably add 20 to 30 more roles which we would be actively recruiting for that have been traditionally held by females. So that's a significant drop from us from 2020, since we haven't had foods. We have done some non traditional stuff in regards to what was shared earlier also in regards to recruiting women into roles that have been traditionally male driven so we have over the past two quarters. And brought into female flat technicians, which was predominantly male driven in the past. We've also seen with the opening of our sports book, our cashiers come over from cashiering into sports book in a non traditional area so again our focus is been on retaining the females that we have, and then also backfilling some roles that traditionally in the past may have not been until we're able to add mass, more opportunities or roles, more full time equivalents into position. Yeah, and if you're going to assess it addresses later let me know but is there anything that you can speak to in terms of when you see what used to be fluidies reopening. I will leave that to north. That's been kind of like a, a sliding calendar for me for the, for the last, almost year and a half. So, okay. I'll let Norris hear that. Yeah, I would say that we're not yet ready to announce a date that that area will open obviously construction is ongoing at this point and you know those timelines are always one where, you know, as you get into construction it can come up along the way we're just not ready at this point to give that but I do believe that that is progressing and will be, you know, sooner rather than later we had committed have said publicly a late summer opening and I still think that's probably what what we'll be looking at. Thank you. Thank you. Next slide. We've also added our employment numbers around sportsbook and you'll see that on the diversity we're at 17% in q1 we had zero but I would tell you that in q2 so far we've had two new employees that identify as veterans. We have 22% that are women 17% are local and then 55% are full time. And our supervisor and above category you'll see that again 14% identify as diverse 4% are veterans, and then 33% are women. In this area we continue to focus on the leadership development and also through talent acquisition and promotions, building that strength of our management team. We've done a lot of action planning to make sure that that we do have a thorough way of recruiting and promoting hires that that will help us with these numbers but also making sure we have qualified candidates to, and then the training, the training will allow them to stay in place and grow with the organization a little bit longer. Next slide. So these last two slides really speak to our initiatives and q1 around community and team member. You'll see here that we were able to support organizations that line with our commitment to meeting our local diversity and women's goals. In the right corner I believe you'll see we supported the Boston Boston Pearl Foundation, and then the North out of our animal shelter with Tito box donations. We also participated at recruitment and job there's we were at the out of our high school, Johnson and Wales University, and then the recruit military job here at Gillette. We were also seeking local culinary and veterans for our open positions, and making a difference. One of the things that we did that first quarter was to sponsor the efforts at the Adelborough Habitat for Humanity House and then we donated time and skills to build the home our team carried in all the appliances and did all the detail work during the last week of the build out making it ready for the family coming in as you can see north doing some measurement there on some of the woodwork that we're doing on the staircase from the basement up into the kitchen so really really feeling good about what we were able to do there. Next, next time I see a habitat for humanity picture I want to see north with a big sledgehammer, going into a wall and taking it down. So, we have a video of him carrying the refrigerator up the stairs where I think he built kind of like this makeshift kind of slide thing so that we can end up. So, he put in his work that day. Commissioner hill I was going to say he looks north looks very official with the pencil behind the year and all without the sledgehammer so we're hanging a handrail. And one of those things that you know and a shocking turn of events I felt like it needed to be precise. I did one habitat for humanity project in Boston and I got to take the sledgehammer and just go after a wall. Best day of my life. I did want to add also that we have been working with developing a stronger partnership with Bristol County Community College based on a comment you made to us earlier they they have a culinary program there that we are seeking to tap into we've had a couple meetings with their deans of different programs and are working on that so I hope I think those are relationships that tend to take time to develop. And we are, you know, absolutely took that feedback to heart and are working, you know, solidly to move that one forward. I'm so glad to hear that because over here in the North Shore the North Shore Community College has many relationships with many of the restaurants around here, and it's been a great pipeline for people to get jobs. So thank you for that. Yep. Thank you to update. Next slide. So we'll share some of the final things for Q one. In that top left corner you'll see that North hosted our town hall with our team members we actually do this to make sure that the team members are aligned with not only the company, the property, and then the state initiatives. But as they're, they're going about to their, their daily jobs they understand how it all connects. We also attended and sponsored the International Women's Day Breakfast in Boston. There's a picture of Mayor Wu, and then we came back to the property and hosted our own celebration that afternoon. We also enjoyed Black History Month Women's History Month Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day with plenty of activities and of course North is always involved and leading by example, with the engagement and hospitality here on property. I'll turn it back over to North. That concludes what we have to present to you today and obviously we're available for your questions. You can take down the power plate. Please. Thanks. Yes. Thank you, North. Welcome. Kathy and Heidi. So nice to see you both. Any questions for North? How'd the hand around come out more. It was good. It was good. I had a lot of coaching. I had someone kind of really help make sure that I knew what I was doing, but I learned something I feel like if I had to do on my own, I could probably do it. I might have to phone a friend, but I think I could probably do it. They were great. They were great to work with and it was a very worthwhile project and Heidi does sit on the board of that entity, the old colony habitat. Good news is, is that the contribution that you saw us make on the opening day of sports wagering is leading to their next build, which will be in the, I believe in the Norton area, correct? Heidi. Yeah, more groundbreaking is June 1. Yeah. Yeah, that was a great fundraiser that day. We're grateful to be in the backdrop for that. Thank you. Any questions. All right. I think we're all set then, Joe. North. Nice to see you. Thank you. Likewise. Thank you. Have a great day. Okay, so the next item that we have up is for a discussion of the Encore Boston Harbor East of Broadway project. Can I stop for one second? Sure. If you want a five minute break before we get into this next. Yeah, I think we could all use that. Let's do it's 1123 try to get back and 1130 ish and, and we'll start off with the, this important discussion. Sorry to cut you off, Joe. No, no, no, I could use a break myself. Excellent. That's what I thought. Thank you so much. Okay, Dave. Thank you. This is a convening of the mass chooses game. Excuse me. And because we're holding this meeting virtually, we'll do another roll call. Good morning again commissioner Brian. Good morning. I'm here. Mr. Hill. Morning, I'm here. Mr. Skinner. Morning. And Christian leaders. Good morning. I'm here. Excellent. Thank you. We'll get started again. Good morning. Thank you. Good morning. I am for C on our agenda. And again, good morning. Chief Dwayne. Morning, Madam chair and commissioners. So today what we want to do is sort of continue our discussions on the east of Broadway development and what our next steps are in this process. So we're going to take a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little approach in doing this. There's been clearly an awful lot on the commissioners plates. Since the fall, when we, when we first started this process with sports majoring at all. And. So we've been taking this in, in kind of a small steps, but what I wanted to do first is just give a brief history of how we got to where we are. And what are some of those particular goals that the commissioners and commissioners need to be. So if you recall back in February of 20 22, Encore, Boston harbour submitted some plans for the east of Broadway development that did not include gaming. And at that time, the commission determined that the project was not part of the gaming establishment, but did put some conditions on that development. Last fall in the fall of 2022, Encore refiled the plans with the commission to include a poker room and sports betting. And because of that, that would by its very nature require that to be part of the gaming establishment, which then makes it subject to the review and approval of the commission. So the very, the first step in that approval process was for the commission to determine whether or not gaming could be allowed on that expanded site. So at that time, Encore was asked to address whether that earlier June, 2013 referendum adequately covered the expansion of the gaming establishment onto the new property. So the first time the commission took this up was back on November 16th of 2022. And Encore made a presentation that argued that the original referendum was adequate to account for this project. The commission had quite a number of comments and asked for additional information and some other opinions from the city and other agencies and so on. So after we got all of that information, the commission reconvened those discussions back on February 8th of 2023. And at that meeting, the commission ultimately voted that the original referendum vote included the East of Broadway parcel and therefore gaming could be allowed at that location. Just as a four-to-one vote, Joe, that's the only thing I would add to your memo on the historical, as a forum. Exactly, yep. So after that happened, the commission held a public hearing on this, on the project back in the end of April, we got a lot of attendance at that, which was great. We heard a lot of good comments, we got a lot of good written comments on that. We also did hear from some folks that they didn't hear about that meeting. So the commission will hold an additional online public hearing just to make sure that everybody who has the opportunity to opine on the matter can do that. And I think it was a June 6th, have we set the date on that, Chair? Yes, I think it's June 6th, and I think it's confirmed for us. Or yes. Yes, June 6th. So this is our first outreach on the meeting. And it would be in the virtual, as you said, on I think 11.30 during the lunch hour. Yeah, yeah. So- Would you wanna just note that the outreach was extensive before? I wanna commend our communications team and the others who took part of that. But we did hear from many who didn't feel that they had gotten notice. So we're hoping that they'll join us for this virtual. And I think we have also more input is better than less. You know, anything that we can hear from folks, I think we wanna do that. Madam Chair. Yes. Could I have to follow up on your comments with a question actually to Joe, I guess. Will there be any outreach to the city of Everett so that they can post the occurrence of the meeting on their platforms to the extent possible? Yeah, I mean, we can certainly request that. And actually for really of all of the communities that are host and surrounding communities, everyone has some say in this, you know, of our concerns, I should say potentially. So I think what we will, you know, previously we sent it out to all of those communities into a number of people in them. I don't think we specifically asked them to post it on all of their platforms. I think we maybe assumed that they would do so. And I think maybe some did it and some didn't. But I think we could specifically ask that question or request that of them to please post it on their website and get it out to their networks specifically just so that, you know, as many people hear about it as we can get. Thank you, John. Okay, so that leaves us up here where, you know, the next thing that we really need to do is review and approve the plans that Encore submitted. And more particularly the expansion of the gaming establishment boundaries. Now what this really does here is that we'll be required to do a couple of things. One, we will have to amend the gaming license to include this property.  Now, historically we have done both of these things on a much smaller scale. You know, I think you might remember at Plain Ridge Park we added a little piece of the apron outside to their gaming establishment. And, you know, at Encore we reconfigured some of the outdoor spaces and things like that. So we've done all of these things and we have rules and regulations around them. But of course this is a much larger effort than those earlier pieces of it. So what we have done internally is we looked at all of our regulations on those things that control these amendments and so on. But we also looked at, you know, what was really the intent of the overall gaming law in the development of these facilities and felt that some of those things are certainly still appropriate for this expansion. We also looked at things and determined that, you know, some of them probably aren't appropriate for this expansion. Just one example was the requirement for a bond. On the original development a bond was required to ensure timely, you know, completion of the project. Where now a gaming license already exists, all, you know, revenues are already coming into the Commonwealth, you know, ensuring the timely opening of this new development is probably not as important as it was for the original development. So, you know, we looked at that and said, that's probably not something that we really need to need to consider. So I reviewed and Todd reviewed the regulations and we looked at some of, and also from the things that we heard at the public hearing. And what we've done is put together a little bit of a laundry list of items that we think that Encore should address as part of any submission to us for approval. And I'll just go through these things quickly. And of course, this is just, you know, my view of this, if the commission has any other strong issues that you think should be considered, we could add them to this list. Or if you think strongly that we don't need to see some of these things that I've included on this list, we could delete from that list as well. But the first item is regarding the reopening of mitigation agreements. I think at the public hearing, we heard loud and clear that many folks wanted to see the reopening of the host community agreement with Everett and a renegotiation of that due to the expansion of the Encore facility. We have also heard, the commission has also heard from the city of Boston and a couple of other communities that were interested in reopening their surrounding community agreements. So I think in this case that we should certainly ask, and we do have regulations around the reopening of these agreements, which include the host community agreements, surrounding community agreements, as well as the impacted live entertainment venue agreements. And I think as part of any application from Encore, we should certainly ask them what their intent is with respect to these agreements that they have. And as you know, the commission is not a party to these agreements. These are between Encore and the host community, surrounding communities and the ILEVs. When they were originally developed, of course, the commission was involved in looking at them and making sure we were comfortable with them, but we are not a party to those agreements. So I think that's the first thing is, we should certainly ask that question of Encore and how they intend to deal with that piece. Joe and Todd, if you got either one of you, did they have to have those executed before the license issued in the first instance? I know they had them executed before the license was issued. Was it a prerequisite, a condition precedent, or was it just? The whole process had to be resolved before the licensing decisions were made. There were a couple of arbitrations and whatnot, but that was all resolved in advance of the license. Right. Remember, it was also part of the referendum to show that the... Right. So one of the questions I have on this topic is the timing. Like I absolutely agree about asking on status. The question is clearly a leverage the city has would be prior to the issuance of any redraw of the boundary, right? Commencement and expansion of the gaming facility. And so it would seem like part of the intent was to get that leverage to the cities, municipalities at the time. So I throw out for discussion, not only the fact of asking what's going on, but whether there should be any timing considerations on the completion of those. Yeah. What I would suggest is that, what we would hear from Encore initially and any license or amendment that we would issue, we could certainly condition that to say that, let's say if Encore says, yes, we're happy to compete with all of our communities and talk about their agreements and that kind of thing. We could certainly put a time certain on that if that needs to happen. And of course, the way the regulations are written, there's a process in there. If they can't come to an agreement, there's an arbitration process and so on that would be triggered as part of this. So I think we're pretty well covered with respect to the regulations on how, what the triggering events are that would cause a reopening and so on. Because that was one of the questions that came up several times when we did the public meeting for comment was sort of just the citizenry wanting to know the process and wanting to know what the city was going to get out of it given the increased impact. Sure, sure. Brian, to your point, I had a note here. Just, you know, I know just respecting the fact that the commission isn't a party to that HCI. But I would like to see the city of Everett engage its citizens, its residents as much as practicable in its discussions with EVH around the reopening of the or renegotiation of the HCA. As Commissioner O'Brien indicated, overwhelmingly there were concerns expressed to this body that should rightfully be expressed to the city of Everett. And so hopefully we can encourage, heavy on encourage the city to engage in the way that's meaningful for folks who are impacted. Sure. Chief Delaney, Joe, can you remind me so the, for the signatures, is it the Mayor and Encore for the House Community Agreement? And then for the, then what about the surrounding community agreements? Should we take those separately or are we clumping them all together? Because we don't know, yeah, go ahead. I think, you know, I think what we're saying here is that we will ask Encore how they proposed to address those. I mean, they could propose to address them differently. I mean, for instance, they could say, we agree we need to reopen the host community agreements, but we don't think we're having an impact on the surrounding communities. And we don't want to reopen those. I mean, I'm not suggesting that that's what they're going to say, but I'm saying that they certainly could say that. I'm not saying on that at all. I mean, I'm hearing Commissioner Skinner encouraging the city to make sure to hear all its voices. And, you know, again, we were kind of reading of, I don't know how many people were at that public hearing. Do we know how many? They said that the room seated 60. And I'm going to say that we were a pretty darn close to capacity. Yeah, so, you know, there were 60. And so I'm not going to jump to any conclusions over what the entire city wants. Because I mean, minded of the original vote, but Commissioner Skinner's point, she's hoping that they hear from probably more than 60, right? Commissioner Skinner, but at least in that room, there were certainly a number of individuals who expressed a desire for reopening. So you're saying we'll wait for the lead from Encore for all three types of agreements. Is there anything that we want to message further on that, Commissioner, other than that general, well, Commissioner O'Brien? Well, so I don't know. Do we generate some sort of notice or require EVH to sort of affirmatively report back as to each one they have a prior agreement with as opposed to sort of a general give us an update? Yeah, I think what we would do is sort of the result that might come out of this is that the commission instructs staff to write a letter to Encore that asks them to address these very specific things. And we can certainly spell out each and every application or each and every agreement that exists and saying, please tell us what you're going to do with respect to each one. Or we could just break it into sort of the tranches of host community, surrounding community, I love, you know. Okay, so the second point, things that we heard about significantly in the public hearing and in some of the letters that we got was traffic, parking, transportation, demand issues. Now, you know, traffic has always been a major concern of the original development it is of this development. And the commission plays a role in that. Of course, MassDOT takes sort of the lead on this. They're the lead agency that reviews these things. But the commission has historically taken a lot of responsibility for this as well. And the way that we have done that is through our section 61 findings that are done as part of the MEPA process. So the project right now is in the MEPA process. They've submitted an environmental impact report that's being reviewed right now by MassDOT and others. And what we have done in the past is after all of the issues regarding traffic and transportation have been addressed, MassDOT is required to write a set of section 61 findings on those particular traffic items. And what the commission has done has essentially referenced all of those requirements in our own section 61 findings, which essentially just gives us an extra level of control over those things. And so we have done that in the past and we certainly expect to do that again. But what I would suggest for any application that they're submitting to us, is that they should at least give us a summary of where the MEPA process stands today, or as of the date that they are submitting the application. Supplemental draft environmental impact report is going on I think somewhere around 2,500 pages. And much of that is traffic related and it's extremely detailed. I'm not sure any of the commissioners want to try to pour through 2,500 pages of traffic minutia. I've looked at a lot of it in depth, but I think what we should at least get is an executive report of summary report of that traffic study that they've done that shows us some of the key points. What are the increases in traffic associated with this? What are the key mitigation factors that are being considered? And so what's the expected culmination duration of this process and things of that nature, just to get a good update on where traffic stands? Because I think the commission should have mass.be in the lead on this. This is what they do. It's their expertise and it's, while I have certain expertise in that area, it's certainly not as in depth as what mass.possesses. So I guess- So my memory of the license is that there were several outstanding section 61 conditions when they opened. Yeah. And so I would also like there to be an update to the body, this commission of those conditions, how many, if many are outstanding still. Yeah. And certainly with the pandemic and all, there were certain things that were backed off on on some of the original commitments. And I'm not sure- I know we're outside their control. They were trying to pay and there was a logistics question. Right, right. Yeah. So we can certainly ask that what we can ask for an update, not only on the MIVA process, but on the status of the section 61 findings. That's perfectly appropriate, I think. Right. Okay. Any other questions regarding the traffic issues? Also, commissioners, they can go on. Okay. You know, this was one of the things that we had not internally particularly identify. This is something that we heard, I think primarily through the written comments that we got on the public hearing. We did hear several comments that discussed the impact that EVH has on police and fire services. I mean, we know that there certainly is an impact and that is really part of what the host community agreement is supposed to do. There are impact fees and so on that are associated with that, as well as of course there's the community mitigation fund, which we have funded many Everett applications for both police and fire over the years. So I'm not sure, I think in this case we probably just want an update, I would say from Encore on what they anticipate doing with increased calls for service and so on and how they expect to mitigate that. You know, and that I think really is more of an agreement between the community and Encore rather than something that the commission is sort of party to. I think on the other piece of it of course is the expansion of the gaming establishment will also expand the jurisdiction of the gaming enforcement unit. So the gaming enforcement unit would be responsible for patrolling that area and whether or not that the expansion of the facility would require any changes to the gaming enforcement units. I think that's maybe something we also want to ask them is, you know, what impacts that might have, the expansion might have on the gaming enforcement unit. Madam Chair. Yes. So, Joe, something that I was a little frustrated at the hearing that we held was that we as a commission weren't able to really interact with the public as well as I would have liked in terms of getting information out to them that they were asking for in this particular issue when it came up. I wanted to be the proud commissioner to stand up and say, do you know what we have done for the police and the fire through the community mitigation grant program? And we didn't bring it up that night but I would like to see if possible us get that information together so that when we are asked again about this issue that we can point to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have gone into the police and fire of ever through that program. I don't think the people who were testifying that night, the citizens actually knew what we had done it frustrates me that the citizens of the towns where these casinos are don't know exactly what we have done and I think this would be a great opportunity for us to show them what we have done in our partnership with these communities through the last 10 years. Sure, sure. Thank you, Madam Chair. Welcome. Okay, any other questions on the police and fire aspect? Nope, okay. So the next item is sustainable development and this really goes back to the very beginnings of the entire expanded gaming act that this was always envisioned as an important aspect of the program. I don't think anyone ever intended it for the facilities to be LEED certified and then have any expansion not deal with that piece of it. So I think it certainly is within the commissions jurisdiction and purview to ask about sustainable development and LEED certification and all of those. And in fact, Encore has already committed that this is gonna be LEED gold and I think they may have even mentioned potentially being a net zero facility and so on. But I think we should certainly ask them that question about sustainability and get that whole laundry list of things that they're proposing to do with respect to that as part of their application. So the next item is talking about, we talked about labor harmony. We heard a lot about this at the hearing. We got a few letters regarding this as well. So just quoting 23K section 18, it asks, whether the applicant has included detailed plans for assuring labor harmony during all phases of the construction, reconstruction, renovation, development and operation of the gaming establishment. Now, of course, that was written in pertaining to the award of the original license, but I think the way that it's worded, it certainly carries over to an expansion of this nature. I think that it's, and again, it's certainly reasonable for the commission to ask those questions about labor harmony. And again, for an application, I think the question that we just simply wanna ask is, what are those plans? And if that includes using union labor or project labor agreement or whatever it might be, I think we wanna understand what commitments on core is making with respect to that. Any comments or questions about that in particular? Any concerns about whether it's applicable to the expansion under the, I'm in agreement with Joe's interpretation. Okay. I think it's acceptable. You think so, Commissioner O'Brien? Yeah, definitely. You're comfortable. Yeah, okay, great, thank you. So the next item is, construction and operations, diversity. So our regulations, we have a lot of regulations around this and obviously during the initial construction, diversity was a huge component of that and each of our licensees, they developed diversity plans for both construction and operation phases. We have reporting requirements. There's a lot of pieces of our regulations that seem to have contemplated this long-term rather than just for the original construction phase. So again, I think it's reasonable to ask what the proposal is for on core, particularly on construction, since that will be the first phase of this. And I think we should also ask about operations, but of course, I think my general assumption on operations would be that they would follow the plan that they have for the overall facility since this will be part of that. But I think we should certainly ask what their plans are with respect to diversity for both the construction and the operations stage. And this might be a time where it makes some sense to revisit the original plans that they submitted if they think certain things need to be changed for whatever reason. The construction plan goes back to 2015, I think, and the operations plan goes back to 2018. So they're all getting a little bit dated. So it might make sense to just sort of dust those off and take another look at them for on core to do that. And I would say for the purposes of an application I would ask them what their intent is. And if they needed to modify these, maybe that's done as a condition to the license modification, probably isn't something that has to be done for the approval. Similarly, we didn't approve their operations plan until 2018, they were well under construction. So it's something that I would suggest if they need to make major modifications to their plans that be done as maybe a condition to any approval that you would give. So Joe, this is probably covered in what you've talked about, but some of what will happen and what will be placed across the street is gonna change what's in the existing footprint. So I would like to have a discreet discussion, presentation from them to make it easier on all of us to digest on exactly what the changes are gonna be to the existing EVH. I don't foresee it being anything we would go back to the original application just make sure that they're still complying with those, but we may have thoughts in terms of what changes are gonna be at the existing structure. Right, right, absolutely. Okay, so the next item that we have is just essentially jobs. I mean, jobs has always been one of the big parts of this whole thing. I don't think that we need to really do much if anything more than ask what they are proposing for construction jobs and for operations and what impact that's gonna have on their overall job level. But I think it's certainly reasonable to ask that question. I know a lot of commenters asked particularly about jobs, how many new jobs is it gonna be? Are they gonna be good jobs? Are they gonna be, what's it gonna be? So I think we can certainly ask that question. So the next item is just sort of the monitoring of construction. Again, in reviewing our regulations, a lot of this was designed for the original construction and a number of the things in here are probably not pertinent to an expansion, but obviously we need to have sort of unfettered access to the construction site to inspect and to do all of the things that we need to do. Burke on the poker room and Bruce on the sports waging areas will need access to make sure that surveillance is all proper and all of those kinds of things. So we definitely want to have access to the site. And what I would suggest on this one is that we could come back and do a little bit of a deeper dive on those pieces that we think we really need access to and some of these other things that probably really aren't necessary. So I would suggest that something like this could just be dealt with as a condition to any approval that we have access and that we would then enumerate those particular things that we want to be able to look at and so on. And I think so the last item here, yes, okay, is again, reporting to the commission. Back during the original construction, we used to get some very detailed reports on the construction and contracts were put out and diversity statistics and a whole lot of different things on a quarterly basis. I imagine that the commission will want to still receive some reporting from the licensees or they can probably just add that on to their regular quarterly report and give a construction update. I'm not sure it needs to be quite as detailed as what we got during the original construction. But again, I think this is something that I would suggest doing this as a condition to any license amendment that for the duration of the construction report to us quarterly and that's that this quarterly report includes ABCD and that kind of thing. We haven't kind of gotten down to that point of exactly what it is that we want to see yet. But I think that's something during any review process, we can sort of finalize what those particular pieces might be. So, I like the idea of a quarterly report except I would propose that it be separated out from the quarterly reports that we get now. We might not, as you suggested, need great detail in these reports but whatever detail is provided on the extension I wouldn't want to be buried in the quarterly report. So that's my suggestion. Sure. And I think we're probably going to be hearing from a different team of folks who will probably be Chris Gordon and this team will be back talking about the construction rather than Jackie and her team talking about the operations. So that makes perfect sense. Commissioner, I just need to go ahead. Commissioner's going to do a follow up.  Okay, Commissioner O'Brien. Where in the original process, I know each of the brick and mortar licensees made commitments to building or providing affordable housing. Where in the original process was that? Oh, the only one that was to providing housing was MGM. Okay. So MGM was actually, and they were providing market rate housing, not affordable housing. Now, apparently from what we heard and I don't have this directly from Encore, but I thought some folks alluded to Encore making some commitments to affordable housing to the city of Everett as part of this expansion. Okay, that's probably what I'm keying off of. Maybe we should again ask them that question. Yes. What the commitment is. Yeah, because I know there's just, there's a lot in Boston and the surrounding areas across Commonwealth in terms of affordable housing. So if there is a component to this, particularly where people did talk about, there was some comments at the public meetings about displacement of people who had been long time residents. So I would like to know a little more on that. Yeah, that great, great comment. Great comment, yeah. Just to clarify though, Joe, with respect to this expansion, will there be any displacement of residents? No, there shouldn't be. I mean, anybody, I mean, these are parking lots now. You know, now did they buy residential properties as part of this? Absolutely.  It wasn't, it wasn't that they were, you know, it wasn't eminent domain for sure. You know, so, you know, but yes, were there some people that had to move from that area? Absolutely, but they should not be as part of this development. This affected it, right. That's what I'm wondering, but not in this part of the area. Okay. No, although some of those may have been rental units. And so while the landlord may have pulled to the property, there was comment about people being displaced from that neighborhood. So that's why EVH is talking about is doing something that important. But I think when you ask that question, my understanding is that no, that all those areas have already been cleared, but could they own a house there that they haven't torn down yet? That's certainly possible. So I think we can certainly ask that question. I'd like that clarification. Thanks so much. Okay. So, bones were... Joe, I, oh, sorry. I do have, I have a comment. It probably pertains to fire and police, whatever number that is. But I think I see that it says in addition, should the East of Boston development become part of the gaming establishment fall under the jurisdiction of the gaming enforcement unit, which is funded as part of the casino operation. So I think this is about the impact on public safety services. So maybe it's a separate category, but I think as one commissioner, I'd be very interested in working with Encore on its plans to develop this, you know, a new expansion to make sure that rare that can be state of art improvements around public safety measures that we would be able to stay apprised of those. I know that when we first looked at the expansion before it was even going to be including gaming in the early, it has been measured in long standing process, Joe, but we did, we expressed concerns about the bridge and security measures there. We expressed concerns about security measures in the garage. It's my understanding that possibly the nightclub will be shifting over to that space. There's opportunities for some of our concerns around the patrons' entrances and exits of the nightclub to come up. So I think that probably the game commission should be part of those discussions on the early side rather than having to have a reactive side. Yeah, so I think what we could certainly do is when we go out to Encore with this letter asking for this, we can ask what their plans are with respect to security, because I think a lot of this, especially with a bridge that's connecting two different facilities that's open to the general public and then you have areas that are more restricted that there are probably some nuances there that we need to understand. All right, I just think that without getting into any details, there's opportunity here for planning purposes that are integral to the construction as well. Yep, yep, absolutely. Not solely security provision. So, listeners, I don't know if you want to build on that, but I think we should just put that maybe as a separate category. Okay, so those were all of the items that I came up with and Todd has been nice and quiet here and letting me take, do most of the talking. And Todd, did you have anything to add at this point? Oh, I think the hallmark of a good lawyer is knowing when not to say anything when someone else is doing a lovely job. So no, nothing else specific unless there are questions. Well, I have a question. Sure. So I'm assuming the application requirements you've laid out in your memo are based on the phase two, phase two process as part of the initial license application review. And I wasn't part of that process. I think there are a few of us being today who were not part of that process. No, none of us were part of it. Oh, okay. Yeah, all right. That's what I mean. In other words, as old as those plans are, right? This process here. So my question is, is there anything from the RFA-2 process that you didn't include here? Because maybe you were of the mind that they might not be applicable. And I say that, I ask that because, you know, ABH, I guess through the city is relying on the fact that the HCA, which I know was born out of the RFA-2 process contemplated the expansion. And there were conditions placed during the RFA-2 process on the casino. So in my mind, I would take the position that every single requirement and condition that was relevant to the RFA-2 process might be relevant here. And that might be overbroad, but I'd like to at least get a sense of what did you, what did you leave, right? What did you leave from that RFA-2 process? What did it make it into this memo? A lot. Maybe, you know, the RFA-2 process was a lengthy process.  But, you know, as an example, one of the things we talked about was a bonding require. You know, so we required, so one of the things we required was a detailed schedule from the licensee. And they had a certain, you know, they said they were gonna open a facility at a certain time. And if they didn't do that, we could find them up to, I can't remember now if it was $50 million or $100 million, if they did not meet that deadline to open the casino. Well, the casino's open. The casino's generate, you know, part of that was to make sure it happened in a timely fashion. This case, you know, if it takes, if they tell us it's a two-year construction schedule and it takes three years to build it, do we really, I mean, we want it to be done as quickly as possible, I would imagine, but do we want to penalize them or find them for not having the place open? You know, if they said it was gonna be two years and it takes two and a half years, you know, there didn't seem to be any sort of reasonable, you know, reason for wanting to do that. You know, because part of the big part of it was getting the casinos up and running quickly. And we wanted to make sure that the timelines were as aggressive as possible. And now that is not particularly important. I mean, we already have a poker room, we already have sports wagering. This would make it a bigger poker room and a difference, you know, additional sports wagering, but we're not sort of relying on this thing being open to generate revenues for the commonwealth. The facility's already doing that. So that's just one example of a couple of the things that we looked at that we said it just doesn't really make sense at this point. Yeah, and I will come through. Sorry, go ahead, Todd. Oh, I know, my apologies. As Joe was saying, there's a whole slew of them. And another one of the big ones is the financing and capital structure of the proposal. We haven't proposed that you'd look at that. Of course, that was critical in the early stages as to whether the facility could be constructed and how they were planning on doing it. It seemed less of a concern at the moment, but you could look at the financing structure, things along those lines. How are they going to make it happen? The tourism? Todd, to that point, there'll be capital investment requirements that they have to continue to do. That would apply for that expansion, right? Certainly. Well, I think that's a really important point, Madam Chair, is that, and Joe referenced this, but just to be crystal clear, all of the principles, and this is what Commissioner Skinner was suggesting, too, that applied early on would likely apply here, too, because this will now be part of the gaming establishment. So all of the objectives and criteria that were looked at under sections 18, 19, and 21 of Chapter 23K would still be applicable here. So things like ensuring that the capital expenditure plan includes this area would be required. And all of the other plans, employment plans and vendor plans and all that would still apply here as well. Those are things, though, to your question, Commissioner Skinner, that we haven't necessarily proposed that you take a close look at here, like how will this improve tourism in the region? Things like that were important in the RFA II process that weren't really included on the list that Joe just walked through with. And that's understood. And I don't take anything away from your and Joe's recommendation. However, just even if for nothing else, but to have an educational opportunity, I'd like to understand exactly what those conditions and requirements are, those overarching principles. You just gave examples of to do my own independent assessment as to what might apply here or what I would like to see move forward as we continue to evaluate this project. Again, your recommendation, I'm sure, is found. What we did this recently, I believe, in connection with the category two proposal that we're considering is we related back to the RFA II phase, and we whittled down what might be relevant for that project today. And so I'd like to do the same with this project. And I'm happy to just set aside some time with you, Joe and Todd, to do this separately. But I think other commissioners might benefit from that exercise as well. Yeah, so 205 CMR 119 outlines the entire RFA II process. So I'd be happy to sit down with you, Commissioner, and walk through that and the particular pieces of it. And also 23K sort of mirrors what's in 119. But yeah, absolutely. But that's sort of what we went through and said, hey, let's take a look at these pieces and which ones seem to be most pertinent to this new development. But I think like another example of something that you didn't include, yes. So to follow up on what Commissioner Schanager said, though, is I think it's probably helpful for all of us. Or I know I would want to join in that conversation broadly because I've forgotten about the tourism aspect. And then when it comes to the finances, I know this particular applicant may not have any concerns. But I also want to think about this in terms of it. This is the procedure we're going to set forth for anybody going forward. We may have licensees who we don't have as full of confidence in financially, right? So is it something that, to Commissioner Schanager's point, we might want to have as we would potentially want to hear from this, we don't feel the need in the circumstance so that we're not boxing ourselves out going forward? Sure, absolutely. I think as an example, we talked about a minimum spend. Of course, that was for the original facility and not for this one. We don't have a number, particularly for this one. So again, it's one of the things we didn't include. But anyway, yeah, you're correct. If we had some questions about the ability to capitalize this project, we'd want to hear about that. And we can certainly ask those questions. I mean, if we want to know what the total value of the project is, and that kind of thing, we could certainly ask that. Again, it didn't seem, again, knowing what Encore has built and their ability to build something of this nature, it didn't feel like it was something that we needed to really delve deeply into with this particular applicant. But we could certainly do it with any other help. Joe, I just want to add one more thing. I do think that we did do a 2x2 on this somewhat earlier, and I think Commissioner O'Brien and I were paired together. And we definitely, when it comes to capital and design, yeah, we believe in when and when's ability to produce a good product. But I do remember saying that I think we both agree. We would like to see kind of what that looks like before anything is green light. Yeah. Yeah, and we will certainly get a full set of plans on the project. And that's absolutely sort of the barest minimum that we would get on that. But anyways, OK. But yeah, so Commissioner Skinner, I can have Barry or Lily reach out and set up a couple of 2x2s on this so we can walk through the particulars if you'd like to do that. We're going to add another category then. Again, that commissioners can weigh in on plans and preparation of public safety features, right? Yeah. OK. Joe, if the commissioners don't have any other questions, we probably should move on. Is that in terms of next steps, Joe, what would you like? So I guess the one question that I would ask of all the commissioners, if there's anything in particular that we didn't hit here that you would like to have more information on, we'd love to hear that. And then I guess going forward, I'm not sure we necessarily need a vote of the commission per se, but or just a sense of the commission if moving forward with drafting a letter to Encore asking for information on these things. What perhaps I could do is draft up a letter. We could have a couple of the 2x2s to go over some of this and see if there's any other areas that we think are of concern. And then we can draft up a letter to Encore and bring that in front of the commission for approval. Yeah, we can do our discussion like we did here as opposed to 2x2s because you can't really get any feedback from us in a 2x2 that way. So we're good on doing this. But commissioners, we've had this. Commissioner O'Brien, you were about to weigh in. Do you feel that it's necessary or what you'd like to do? No, and I actually think it's a little premature because we have another public meeting on this setup. And so I'd be loath to actually make representations to EBDH that that's the universe of things we want when we're not even 100% certain because we wanted another chance to hear from the public. So I think we're moving in the right direction. I like where we're going. I don't think we're quite sure. Why don't we, we'll have the public hearing. We'll have some 2x2s. And then I think what we should probably do is try to reconvene as soon after that public hearing as is available on a commission meeting and then try to finalize that list on core and get that off to them. I think obviously we want to keep the process moving forward, but I would say that the MEPA process alone is certainly won't end before the end of July and probably we'll extend some time into August, maybe to the end of August. So we have time to do this. It's not like we are holding up on core at this point in particular. And I suspect on core is listening to today's meeting. So they know they're getting some direction. And we have a consensus on all the points that were raised here. Yeah, I think we do. Certainly. Commissioners and we all in agreement that these are good priorities and look at feedback from on core and feedback from the next public hearing and see if something else comes up. And everybody will do some homework to look at the earlier commissioners priorities and the application process that preceded. And we can revisit and finalize that. But I think what I am hearing is that we are going to want to be kept a prize along the way of progress and construction. Is that fair commissioners? Yeah. Okay. Anything else, Joe? No, that does it for me. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Nice work. Okay. Now back to Dr. Lightbound. Thank you again for the comprehensive report this morning. It was really important to, I know probably many of the members of the public and certainly all commissioners to be reminded of all the good work that goes on at the track. Dr. Lightbound. So thank you. But now you're turning to, with a commissioner Maynard and commissioner Hill, a new topic. Yes. So historically certain what they call track matters were delegated from the old state racing commission to their director of racing. And then when the gaming commission took over the regulation of racing, they also approved it out of meeting on June 13th of 2013. And so it's been 10 years and it felt like this was a good time to update the document. The documents for this topic start on page 88 of your commissioners packet. To make it easier, I included the old document and redlined it. We didn't have the word version. So Grace worked her magic and gave us a PDF or converted it. But with the formatting, it didn't quite work. So there is an official memo in the commission archives from the June 13th 2013 meeting, if anybody from the public wants to see the actual document. In the packet right now, we just have the text of that document. So the major changes are including the legal division in the sending of notices and demand letters and extending the authority to violations other than just the statutory, statutory required payments. After discussing it with general counsel Grossman, I felt more comfortable with this and this is the way we felt we could go forward on that particular item. We eliminated the executing of show cause orders. We weren't exactly sure. We couldn't remember any instance where that had been done and felt that that might be something that would, if something rose to that level, it might more fall under the legal division to do that. And also it might not be an emergency type thing. It might be something that could be brought up to the commissioners. We just cleaned up the language on the changing of post times a little bit. Eliminated the approval of premium free simulcast days. As you commissioners know, that's usually included in the application for racing dates and then for subject down where they don't have to put in an application anymore. We do that near the end of the year for the following year when they submit their simulcasting requests and things like that. And that's not really a type of thing that would be that time sensitive. So I felt that that could be something that could be brought up at a commission meeting and wouldn't necessarily need to fall under this particular document. And then at the end, we added the last delegation point of approving other ministerial routine or administrative matters that require prompt attention in the judgment of the director of racing. I do recognize that the commission now is very nimble. And if an emergency arose that we really needed to bring in front of the whole commission, the commission is nimble about arranging those meetings. But this delegation just helps streamline some of these processes. Does the commission have any questions? Let me know if you're a commissioner or a manager and commissioner helps. Please, I think they work for you on this, right? Yes, they provided great comments on this and helped work through this very well. And as well as general counsel Grossman. Thank you. So commissioner mayors. Happy to madam chair. Dr. Lightbound caught the essence of the changes and I did have something written, but she said it better than I could. Essentially, this document was 10 years old. It was written at a time when I believe the director of racing was an attorney. Part of the way we were looking at this just so my fellow commissioners can hear it is, how can we write this in a way that it applies to whoever the director of racing is and whatever their background is, no matter what they've done in the past. And Dr. Lightbound pointed out a lot of places where the commission is already brought into an issue and so we could strike. There were places where obviously the legal division, I believe her and Todd worked on that very closely, should be brought in a little closer. And then at the end, and I'm sure commissioner Hill can speak to this too, what we realized was a lot of these things are happening. They're happening to the satisfaction of the commission. It was really, we wanted to expressly state that the commission should be updated on these matters in a timely fashion, just because we wanted the notification. And then of course we wanted to give Dr. Lightbound some flexibility and that's where that final piece comes in to make some routine decisions that need to be made pretty quickly and changes. So this was really about not undoing any delegation of authority, but in fact cleaning up the delegation of authority and making it match the realities on the ground 10 years later. And as Dr. Lightbound said, we have worked from home capabilities with technology that we did not have 10 years ago, right? And so the ability for us to be quote nimble and move quickly was important to us and we tried to capture it and thanks to Todd also. Christian Hill? Adam, Chair, there's not much more I could add that hasn't already been said from Dr. Lightbomb and commissioner Mayden. I think we went through a process, we looked at it and this is what we came up with. And if anybody has any questions, we'd be more than happy to entertain them but I think what's before you is a good product. I'm wondering if we should, oh, go ahead, commissioner. Thank you, Madam Chair. The only thing that gives me pause on this delegation list is the approval of racing officials. Is that, I seem to recall, we had the judges come before us for approval. And so that would be a change in the practice as I understand it, is that right, Dr. Lightbomb? So you're correct that the list of approving racing officials comes before the commissioners and it usually comes in March for planeage where they open in April and the commission gets a whole list of people to approve. What happens occasionally during the meet is maybe somebody gets sick or has a family emergency and there's not already a backup person that can do it and the track needs to bring somebody else in very quickly. And so there have been times when I've approved them to bring somebody in and then they can be brought again as Commissioner Maynard pointed out, bring this back to the commission at a future meeting to say, here's this person and this is why we need it to approve them right away. So just to follow up on that, it's pretty good. He has a lot of his people cross-trained and they're cross-qualified, so that if, and he himself is qualified to do a number of the different jobs. So a lot of times just, somebody can pop in and do it, but there are occasionally times when a perfect storm hits and numerous people are out and they need to bring somebody else in quickly. So this particular authority Dr. Lightbomb is not, it's outside of the annual process that the commission undertakes to approve these officials, right? So we would continue with that process and then on the chance that someone's on vacation or sick or something, then you would be delegated the authority to approve those. Okay. That's correct Commissioner. Okay. Would you like to clarify that in the language? Do you want to add that? I would, that would be helpful. Because it's real. No time approval. Okay, yeah. With an obligation to circle back to the commission. Yeah, I didn't get to my recommendation and part of that is that the director of racing will advise the commissioner or the commission at their next available meeting of any actions taken under this delegation of authority. And there are certain things not to extend this discussion too much, but certainly now I notify Karen and sometimes I might notify the chair if Plain Ridge is canceling a day for heat, say if other commissioners would also like me to send a quick email saying, you know, Plain Ridge is canceling today due to heat. They're going to reschedule on such and such a day under my delegation. You know, I've approved that. I can send that out right away. So you should tell us all the commissioners. Correct. So all commissioners know, you know, really quickly about it. And then again, at the next commission meeting I can bring it up. And as you might remember from last year, near the end of the season, when we were pretty much guaranteed that we wouldn't be having any more cancellations, we did bring Plain Ridge back. There was one day that they did not make up. And so that was brought back to the commission to approve that because the commission approves the number of days as part of the application. So that we did bring that back to the commission near the end of the season to say, you know, would you approve that one day not being made up? Are there questions or concerns? The second director was, if you want to, just in terms of finalizing this, what would you recommend? Yeah, so we'll have, the legal department will draft up the actual memorialization of that for the commission. And it may be you want to take a look at the actual document itself at a further meeting for, you know, a very, very quick approval, but it sounds as if we are, you know, there is a consensus here. So if you want to vote on it, we could then bring the document back. Yeah, I think I did see the other document. There were a few recitals and then this language was separate in a memo. So it would be nice for Dr. Whitebound to have a, you know, a true delegation authority document so that she can look at, Commissioner Bryan, you're nodding your head and there may include some recitals to support why this is an important delegation that the commissioners can sign off on it. And then you've got your document. Yeah, we can take care of that. Yeah, that'd be great. Commissioner, is there anything else that we need? This was a really good exercise and I appreciate the three of you getting together on this. Dr. Whitebound had mentioned it to me a while ago that there were a couple of things that she said. I'm not really sure I even want to do them. So I'm assuming now you're all set, Dr. Whitebound. Yeah, yes, thank you. And to that point, Madam Chair, I have to say that Dr. Whitebound flagged this for Commissioner Hill and I last November. But that said, we were working through some sports wagering issues and we did have multiple meetings on it, but she was always on top of it. It was never her that was on top of it. Oh, no, excellent. This is a good thing to get them to really thank you to all three and to the legal team to talk. Thank you, and we'll just finish it up and it will be a good, clear document going forward. Thanks. Anything else on that, Tricia? So now it's, I'm just looking at the time. I'm going to be turning next to a legislative update, which is going to be relatively short. I believe, do you want to do it before lunch, bringing us up maybe to one o'clock for a lunch break? That makes sense, commissioners. Thank you, Commissioner. That would be fine, yep. I got an immediate thumbs up from Commissioner Skinner. You all set, Commissioner O'Brien? Okay, and Commissioner Rader? All right, thank you. And then we'll turn to Grace Robinson and Patricia Hill. And Grace's role does include being external if there's manager for us. So when we have any kind of legislative contacts, no, our point person is great. That way the legislature and agencies, the Commonwealth know who to reach out to, and then Grace will be figuring out who she works with. And on these particular legislation, she said she's worked with Commissioner Hill and of course legal, but the two of you will take the lead today. Yeah, thank you. And just for starters, I'd like to thank Crystal, who drafted the initial memo for you all back earlier this year that we worked off of for this one. So thanks, Crystal, for getting it started. So I'll just run through quickly each of the pieces of legislation on this memo. There are two in which Commissioner Hill and I thought there might be additional discussion about any actions you all may want to take. But of course, we're happy to discuss any action on any of these items. So starting off with sign-all casting. As always, there's a few bills for extending sign-all casting. There's one that the MGC filed, as well as a bill from representative Chan and representative Mediro respectively extending sign-all casting to 2024 and 2026. So you all may want to provide comment on any of the three bills or further comment if you'd like. Fishers, this has been traditionally just one year at a time, right? So this is the departure, Commissioner Hill is that right? Yeah. I thought it might be important for the commissioners to weigh in with the letter stating that there are some issues that may come up by going year to year and by extending it out two or three years would be helpful not only to the operators, but to the commission as well. So we thought this might be something that we might want to weigh in on. Historically, we have sent letters from all of us on this matter, Commissioner O'Brien. I have a memory and maybe it's not this area where we had a statutory mandate to provide a proposed statute. Is it this arena or was it another arena? Because in addition to the disruption of the only one year at a time, there's also the broader question of simply rewriting 128a and d. So where does that... Because I'm not being outside the scope of today's discussion. This is all things that are pending. Right, but I'm saying if we're talking about chiming in, it would be, I think, helpful to redistribute what that proposal was. I mean, it predated me, I believe, but it was out there. I would think we would want to revisit that proposal. No, I do too. But I'm saying we were sexually obligated to put it out there. It was put out by a prior commission. So it might be worth adding to the agenda, getting that original one out there so that, wholly apart from commenting on this, whether we want to take another deep dive into, because I think one of these in here is sort of the proposal is to scratch the existing 128a and 128d and just redo them. So we might be asked to give comment on that sooner rather than later. So Commissioner O'Brien, it's a good point. There is a mandate that the commission provide and put on the horse racing bill overall and the past it has been filed. I don't believe any action has ever been taken on it. So I don't think it was. Yeah, no. And so it would be my recommendation that we keep that sort of big, that's a big item for us to review at a future date. And I think Commissioner Hill's got it in his scope, so does Grace. And today, this is, so that would be a filing on our part. And yes, it was a filing. I think even legal would think that it needs to be revamped. And so this is today is just on what's in front of it. Yeah, no, I know. But what I'm saying is if we comment, I wouldn't want that letter to be written in a vacuum and not acknowledging that there may be broader issues here that need to be addressed. We can add a sentence to certainly say that without attaching the other bill that was filed. Yeah, I'm not suggesting we attach it right now, I'm saying, but I do think we need to give a nod to the statutory previously submitted version and the fact that there are broader discussions to be had. That would be fine. Commissioner Bryan, what you're referencing might, you might be alluding to this, but is there a reason why we find ourselves in this predicament every single year where the extension is not for beyond a year? I guess I presume, but it would be helpful to understand that as a new commission. And the answers might lie in that legislation, Commissioner Bryan, that you just referenced. I don't think that's not the case. I'm going to keep our conversation moving. I think the legislature has chosen to do it annually. And so this time they're actually suggesting a longer period. Commissioner Hill, am I right? I think you're 100% correct. For whatever reason, the legislature has chosen to do this year after year. And I think there are some now who see that that may not be beneficial to our operators and to the commission. Yeah, to be clear, there are two bills, I guess, that we're discussing now, one extends to 2024 and then one extends through 2028. But I guess, is it as simple as that? It's just that's what the legislature has chosen to propose, that it will extend beyond the year. No substantive reason for that. OK. And in the past, we have basically in the past, we've reminded them of the annual deadline approaching so that they wouldn't let it go. And if you recall, it got signed around maybe 2 in the morning on August 1st of 2022. And look at Dr. Lightman smiling because she was staying up watching it because it does impact jobs. Commissioner Skinner, if it didn't get passed, it would affect the first community. So the more reason why it's puzzling that we can't figure this out by now. But yeah, I'll leave it at that. Thank you. And again, it's just something that the legislature has chosen to take that approach. And we've appreciated them being attentive, but now they're suggesting a longer period. So I think, Commissioner Hill, you're looking for perhaps a similar letter of support for either? Or is there a, what would you recommend? I think three years is fine, but anything is better than one year. Commissioner Rainer, are you in agreement? I totally support it. I appreciate our legislature and general court. But I would like for stability to be seen not only by our team and our staff, but also by the licensees and those whose jobs depend on stability. Yeah, Commissioner Browning, you're all set with the letter being submitted? I mean, except for this. Yeah, so what I'd love to see is the sentiments expressed by Commissioner Hill and Commissioner Maynard, but rolled into that because that would provide the opportunity to have a deeper discussion at the structure of the statutes that ideally would then allow for a more permanent solution to this year over year. I would like there to be a nod to the fact that we think there needs to be, in addition to the lack of disruption in the year to year, that it is right for a conversation that would make a permanent fix to this. Not without getting into details, that's something that we then deal with after, but I would like there to be a nod to that in the letter. Excellent. Commissioner Skinner? I agree. I certainly don't sit in the legislature. I'm sure there's infinite wisdom as to why things have shaped up the way they've shaped up over the years. So I do think if we have an opportunity to comment and influence, we should. OK, Grace. So the next two bills deal with Racing Authority. The first one would create a new state racing board to regulate horse racing in the Commonwealth. And the next bill, which I, sorry, Commissioner O'Brien. So my question on that, and is that something that would still lie within the jurisdiction of the Gaming Commission, or is this carving this out for a separate board? It would be within the Gaming Commission. And the next bill, which I believe is the one you were mentioning, Commissioner O'Brien, revises and grants extensive regulatory authority over force breeding and racing with our race and simulcasting licensees to the Gaming Commission. Then there's just a couple additional bills related to racing. The first bill here amends the Department of Agriculture's powers and duties related to thoroughbred breeding and a number of other thoroughbred regulations. The next two bills would allocate funds from the Race Horse Development Fund to the Community Preservation Fund. And the last one in racing has to do with the town of Plymouth and any conditions it will set up before they lease an application for horse racing within that time. Moving on to sports wagering, there haven't been very many, if any, bills related to sports wagering. At this point, there was one bill from Senator Keenan, which has to do with sports wagering advertising and adding it to Section 2 of Chapter 93A. On to gaming, the first one is actually an amendment in the House version of the budget. And just so everyone is up to speed, the Senate, the budget is with the Senate, their amendments were due on Friday by the end of the day. And there was not a similar amendment proposed in the Senate version of the budget. So this House amendment to the budget would grant ABCC authority to regulate and control distribution of alcohol within a gaming establishment, but not within a gaming area. So Christian and I thought you all may want to see clarification on the language of this bill. I know Loretta or someone from the IB was planning on joining as well. So hopefully they're on. If you all had any questions for them, I know Loretta had a couple of clarifying questions that she was helping to get answered. Before we turn to Loretta, commission, how did you want to add anything first? So the concern, I shouldn't even say concern. I mean, it would be a change of the way we do business in regards to alcohol over at Encore. So I thought it would be appropriate. There's some outstanding questions that the commission, I think, has or will have. So I thought we might reach out to the legislature via our staff for them to get together and go over what those concerns might be. Example, you know, I'm just trying to think like, does this mean all the restaurants within EVH? You know, what would our authority be? Things like that. So I thought it'd be appropriate for maybe our staff to first reach out to the House members and try and figure out exactly what it is they're trying to do here and then co