NEW MEXICO GAMING CONTROL BOARD
One-Day Regular Board Meeting
October 17, 2007
MINUTES
The Board of Directors of the New Mexico Gaming Control Board (Board) conducted a one-day Regular Board meeting at Zia Park, 3901 West Millen Drive, Hobbs, NM. Chairman David Norvell called the meeting to order at approximately 11:40 a.m., on Wednesday, October 17, 2007. Due notice was published in accordance with the Gaming Control Act and the New Mexico Gaming Control Board Open Meetings Resolution and Chairman David Norvell declared a quorum. Present were: Commissioner Don Dutton, Commissioner Carolyn Monroe (telephonically) and Chairman David Norvell. Commissioner Arnold Rael was not present. Executive Director John Monforte, Deputy Executive Director Greg Saunders and General Counsel Frank Baca were also in attendance.
· Approval of Agenda
Chairman Norvell presented the agenda for approval. Executive Director Monforte noted only one change to the agenda. B-1a Licensing – Espanola Valley Knights of Columbus, Bingo License #B518 (Espanola, NM) to be Tabled. Chairman Norvell entertained a motion to approve the agenda as amended: D. Dutton. Second: C. Monroe. Vote: 3-0. All voted in favor of the motion: D. Dutton, C. Monroe and D. Norvell.
1 Closed Executive Session. Chairman Norvell entertained a motion to go into closed executive session until noon, for the purpose of discussing tribal matters, licensing matters, issuance of finding of suitability on key and affiliated persons, pending administrative and enforcement matters, pending and threatened litigation and limited personnel matters as enumerated in detail on the agenda. (Closed pursuant to section 10-15-1(H), NMSA 1978): D. Dutton. Second: C. Monroe. Vote: 3-0. A roll call vote was taken and all voted to go into closed executive session: D. Dutton, C. Monroe and D. Norvell.
2 On Wednesday September 17, 2007 at about noon, a motion was made to go back into open session: D. Dutton. Second: C. Monroe. Vote: 3-0. A roll call vote was taken and all voted in favor of the motion: D. Dutton, C. Monroe and D. Norvell. Chairman Norvell certified the only matters that were discussed in closed executive session tribal matters, licensing matters, issuance of finding of suitability on key and affiliated persons, pending administrative and enforcement matters, pending and threatened litigation and limited personnel matters as enumerated in detail on the agenda.
3 Approval of Minutes. Chairman Norvell presented the One Day Regular Board Meeting minutes of September 19, 2007 for approval: Commissioner Dutton moved to approve the Board minutes as stated. Second: C. Monroe. Vote: 3-0. All voted in favor of the motion: D. Dutton, C. Monroe and D. Norvell.
4 Board Chairman Announcements.
· Chairman Norvell announced the following schedule for the next Board meetings:
November 14, 2007 in Albuquerque, NM
December 11, 2007 in Albuquerque, NM
5 Licensing
· Renewals of Gaming Licenses for 2007:
1. New Application:
a. Espanola Valley Knights of Columbus, Bingo License #B518 (Espanola, NM) TABLED
2. Miscellaneous Matters:
a. Approval of 50% Acquisition of Atronic Group of Companies by GTECH Corporation
There was no one present to address the Board on either the new application for Bingo License or for the approval of the partial acquisition by GTECH. Commissioner Dutton moved to approve the proposed partial acquisition of Atronic Americas, LLC as part of the Atronic Group by GTECH Corporation. Second: C. Monroe. Vote: 3-0. All voted in favor of the motion: D. Dutton, C. Monroe and D. Norvell.
3. Renewals of Gaming Licenses for 2007
Commander Duran read the renewals as follows:
a American Legion Post #90 (Los Alamos, NM)
b. B.P.O. Elks #1440 (Gallup, NM)
c. DigiDeal Corporation (Spokane, WA)
d. FamJam, L.L.C. (Albuquerque, NM)
e. Fraternal Order of Eagles #4038 (Las Cruces, NM)
f. Fraternal Order of Eagles #4101 (Alamogordo, NM) - Condition
g. Fraternal Order of Police #3 (Santa Fe, NM)
h. Sparton Technology (Albuquerque, NM)
i. Veterans of Foreign Wars #7686 (Alamogordo, NM)
There was no one present to address the Board on any of the renewals listed. Commissioner Dutton moved to approve the renewals as addressed by the Commander without conditions except as to the Fraternal Order of Eagles #4101 in that the condition placed on that previously continue: that no person removed as a trustee, officer, employee, key person or work permittee of FOE 4101 by the Fraternal Order of Eagles Grand Aerie may hold a certification of finding of suitability as a key person or work permit, or otherwise be involved in the gaming operations of this entity in any manner. Second: C. Monroe. Vote: 3-0. All voted in favor of the motion: D. Dutton, C. Monroe and D. Norvell.
· Issuance of Findings of Suitability on Key and Affiliated Persons
Commander Duran read the new applications, renewals and key person changes for issuance of findings of suitability on key and affiliated persons. All were listed with no restrictions:
1. New Application
a. William J. Cooper – Assistant Gaming Manager – American Legion Post #90 (Los Alamos, NM)
b. Anthony Ciorciari – Chief Executive Officer – DigiDeal Corporation (Spokane, WA)
c. Larry Martin – Stock Holder – DigiDeal Corporation (Spokane, WA)
d. Janice Encinias – Gaming Accountant – Veterans of Foreign Wars #1547 (Las Vegas, NM)
e. John V. Finamore – Senior Vice President of Operations – Zia Park & Racetrack (Hobbs, NM)
2. Renewal Key Persons
a. Kristine M. Jones – Gaming Accountant – Loyal Order of Moose #2016 (Alamogordo, NM)
b. Kathleen Miles-Stroud – Gaming Manager – Loyal Order of Moose #2050 (T or C, NM)
c. Maria P. Granados – Slot Manager – Sunland Park & Racetrack (Sunland Park, NM)
d. Allan W. Kuchinsky – Gaming Manager – Veterans of Foreign Wars #7686 (Alamogordo, NM)
3. Key Person Changes
a. Bradley R. Boehm – Chief Operating Officer – SunRay Gaming of NM (Farmington, NM)
b. Luis J. Gonzales – Assistant Gaming Manager – Veterans of Foreign Wars #1547 (Las Vegas, NM)
Commissioner Dutton moved to accept any and all of the findings of suitability on the new applications, the renewal key persons and the key person changes as read by Commander Duran. C. Monroe. Vote: 3-0. All voted in favor of the motion: D. Dutton, C. Monroe and D. Norvell.
6 Policy & Rulemaking Matters.
General Counsel, Frank Baca noted that on October 25th in Albuquerque there will be an informal discussion of a proposed rule change, primarily designed to move all the references of unsuitable methods of operation to one section. A letter was sent out advising the licensees of the public hearing scheduled for October 25th at 10:00 a.m. Subsequent to that we will have the formal rule making hearing.
7 Update on Central Monitoring System
Deputy Executive Director Greg Saunders:
With me today is Scott Stuart with SGI and we’re going to give you a quick update as to where we’re at with the Non-Profit migration with the system in general. I asked Scott to come down and talk with you because we do have some delays that we’re experienced in doing our new release and some of that has impacted our non-profit migration and I wanted everybody on the same page.
Our overall plan to get rid of the old system, the old AGS system and there are two things that have to happen in order for that to occur. One is full migration of the non-profits which is what we’re starting now and the other one is to remove the old AGS progressives from the old system and then shut that down. Currently at the racetracks there are still machines running on the old system for progressives, there are 72 machines out there that are actually running progressives, some in Albuquerque, some in Ruidoso and some at SunRay. Our overall plan had always been to as soon as those hit that we would not restart those progressives and then have them restart either under an EGIS progressive or a third party progressive, that’s the current plan. The real issue there is we have a couple a SunRay that are very large and it will probably take a long time for them to hit so at some point we may have to make some decisions about how to migrate that money from the old AGS system on to a third party progressive or into the EGIS progressive, it’s not as simple as it sounds. We want these systems to be secure and you can’t just take money off and put money on. Scott will fill you in on how we would achieve that for the EGIS system. I really anticipate however that they will actually be moved to a third party system as some point. There was an issue that we were having that was outstanding with I-Games, that would not come up under the new system; they had been down for some time. As of yesterday morning all of those are back on the system and working fine. The non-profits are the next issue and that’s our migration efforts to move them on to the new system. There are a couple of reasons why we’re behind right now. We had discussed a schedule that we would use to try and finish this up by February or March of next year, that effort was supposed to begin in September, it didn’t actually occur until last week with our first venue, we actually doing a second venue today and from this point on we’ll be able to get a lot of those out of the way a lot quicker than we thought, but we don’t have an updated schedule, the things that were holding us up were anticipating a new release from the SGI. The new release is a global release for the entire system and its going to fix a lot of things, it’s going to help the operators and it’s going to help IT run this system more efficiently, we had anticipated having that particular release in September, we’re just now testing it in the lab as we speak, so that was about a 4-6 week delay. The problem we had was we didn’t want to migrate a bunch of non-profits then do this upgrade and then have to go back and redo work at a lot of non-profits, so that was on one reason for the migration delay, the other delay was we didn’t have contracts signed with the distributors and SGI, the reason that that is necessary is there is in the field equipment that the distributors have to purchase from SGI in order to connect to our central monitoring system there were a lot of negotiations regarding those contracts not something that the Gaming Control Board gets involved with but we had to wait for those to be in place before the equipment could be implemented. The other point I needed to make though that will have an impact on our schedule is twofold, one is the availability the distributor’s technical staff to go out an do this work and the other one is the availability of my staff to do the work. Right now if you walk into IT there a little stressed, we have an amazing amount of machine changes, machine movements, there is a lot of work that is being done and with a limited staff it’s obviously going to impact the schedule for non-profits. We look down the line and we think that based on the work and the test that we’ve done that we’ll be able to do them quicker than we originally thought but it still will have an impact on the schedule, hopefully by the next Board meeting or hopefully by December I can give you a firm date.
Scott Stuart:
As Greg mentioned we had a slight delay with our latest software release and I’ll give you a quick overview of what happened. We developed a dial up solution that’s what calls out from the central system to the terminal; we base it on a Microsoft dialing package. We got it completed developed and tested in our lab and when we did our load testing we realized there were some limitations that we didn’t know about. We had to go back and redesign the dial out solution from the ground up. There was nothing we could do about it, Microsoft said that was a limitation of our system and instead of looking for another package we just build the dial-up package ourselves. It is now in the Gaming Control Board’s test lab, we have one of our technical staff here with the IT folks helping them test it, they’ve made a lot of progress this week and it seems to be working fairly well. We’re very confident that once we finish up this week of testing, the Gaming Control Board will continue testing for a couple of weeks, and then we’ll move this into production. Three of the five distributors have signed up, signed our purchase agreement and we’ll begin shipping our terminals to them. Our new release has some update functionality that should help expedite the roll out. On our terminal originally for configuration of the terminal you had to go in and do it manually, we’ve put some automated configurations steps in there so it should make the part that the Gaming Control Board had to do and it should expedite that. We worked on our meter collections to help the operators and the accounting staff so that the information comes more quickly and the reports run more quickly. We’ve made good progress and continue to make progress and I think we’ll get this put behind us very quickly. We’re committed to supporting Greg and the staff and the Gaming Control Board with resources to help them in any way we can to expedite the roll-out and migration. His staff has to run the system everyday and to add extra work on them to put new terminals out can take a while. We’re working on a plan with them to see where we can put resources in to help them speed this up, to see if we can’t move this along quickly. We’ll continue to support you throughout the life of the contract, whatever we need to do.
John Monforte: Does support mean people?
Scott Stuart: Yes it does. We have the ability to do it remotely so we’re going to look at a plan where we can do some remote. Configuration is a big step to put all the information from the old system into the new system can take a little bit of time, we’ve done that before, we have scripts that can do it automatically that we use on a regular basis, so we’ll have our staff come out and help, run these scripts and move that data over or do it manually, whatever we need to do to help them get it configured more quickly. Again, Greg’s team has a full time job already and trying to do this extra work can be quite a bit.
There were no questions from the Board but did thank Scott Stuart for coming.
8 Gaming Control Board Budget approval for FY-2009.
Greg Saunders noted that the Board had been presented for their review the financial summary of the Board’s 2009 budget request. Mr. Saunders stated that we were asked to do a flat budget this year and we came in with a flat budget. Mr. Saunders asked if there were any questions from the Board prior to their approval of the budget for FY2009. There were no questions from the Board.
Commissioner Dutton moved to approve the 2009 Budget as presented by Mr. Saunders. Second: C. Monroe. Vote: 3-0. All voted in favor of the motion: D. Dutton, C. Monroe and D. Norvell.
9 Public Comments. There were no public comments.
10 Adjournment. There being no other business to come before the Board, Chairman David Norvell entertained a motion to adjourn. D. Dutton. Second: C. Monroe. Vote: 3-0. All voted in favor of the motion: D. Dutton, C. Monroe D. Norvell.
/s/David Norvell, Esq. Date Approved: 11-14-07
Chairman