Tourism and Gaming Working Group

Aloha and welcome to the tourism and gaming working group. Today's Thursday, 03/12/2026. This is our 1PM agenda, and we are in Conference Room 2 To 9. This informational briefing is being streamed live on YouTube. Please note that there is no testimony that will be accepted at this time as this is an info briefing.

Let me start off with having the working group introduce themselves. I am Senator DeCoite, Chair of the Economic Development and Tourism Committee. Sitting on my right hand side, Rick, if you wanna introduce yourself. Sure.

Representative Gregory Ilagon, co Chair.

Okay. Let's go around the room.

Brandon Makaʻawaʻawa, Vice President, Nation of Hawaii.

I'm Kent Caputo, the Chief Strategy Officer with the Marnell Companies.

Tyler Iokepa Gomes. I'm the chief administrator for Kilohana Veterans Division of Hawaii Council.

Paul Anderson with Boyd Gaming.

Jimmy Tokioka, director of DBEDT.

Art Tolentino, unions.

Stanford card Stanford card development.

Gary Suganuma for Department of Taxation.

Let's go to Zoom. Who who we have on Zoom?

Hi. This is Darrin Sato, social worker of mental health.

K. Alan Alan, you're on you're on mute.

I'm Jim Dillon, Department of Health, adult mental health. And I my video isn't working, but you can at least see where I would like to be.

I'm Alan Feldman with the International Gaming Institute at UNLV.

Aloha. I'm Lui Hokoana. I'm the Interim Vice President for the community colleges.

I'm Joe Roos with DBEDT. I'm observer only.

I'm Oscar Carvallo, DBEDT from DBEDT supporting team.

Hi, everyone. This is Bo Bernhard from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Good to see everyone.

Attorney general. You wanna

Good afternoon. Michelle Puu from the Attorney General's office.

Is there anybody else on Zoom?

Jennifer Anderson with Fanduel. And I'm I just I apologize. I'm gonna have to leave a little early tonight, but I won't interrupt you. I'll just hop off, but I'll be here for the first hour.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you guys all for joining us. Oh, Steven. Just done. Can you pull up one chair for Steven? Thank you. Steven, just go ahead and introduce yourself, please.

I'm Steven from.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you guys all for being here. I know the weather. Everybody's trying to get home as fast as they can. So let's start off. The first presentation is our tribal gaming. It's a unique perspective and model for gaming in Hawaii. Joining us today

let me do this really quick.

So in case anybody forgot, the reason why we meet on this gaming working group. Is basically we are being tasked with reviewing gaming legislation that has been considered by the legislature to determine if any proposal has the potential to be implemented in the state.

It's to develop a comprehensive tourism gaming policy and framework that would serve as a catalyst for economic growth, job creation, capital investment, and a significant source of tax revenue for the state.

Is to examine the potential for gaming activities at the Nuualoa Stadium Entertainment District and examine how gaming activities may support the work conducted by the Department of Business Economic Development and Tourism and the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

So the first group that we have joining us on Zoom are Terry Gobin, Chair of the Tulalip Tribes, Glenn Gobin, member of the board of directors and council treasurer, and Ryan Miller, council member.

So let me give you a brief background on Terry Gorban. Terry Gorban is the Chair with a powerful and thoughtful style of leadership.

Chairwoman Terry Gobin leads the Tulalip Tribes Board of Directors with a focus on building community, improving health outcomes, supporting economic prosperity, and strengthening tribal sovereignty. Terry is proud to carry on the legacy of her late father, Stan Jones Senior, who served on the board for 44 years with 26 of those years as Chairman.

Terry has spent the past four decades influencing economic development, employment and treaty rights for Indian country. For most of her career, Terry passionately led as a director of the Tulalips Tribal Employment Rights Office Department and contributed greatly to the development of a nationally recognized trade school.

Terry is deeply rooted in her culture. She participates in teaching the youth traditional songs and cultural ceremonies that have been passed on for generations. Previously, Terry owned and operated a commercial fishing boat for many years, which gives her expertise to relate to her fellow coast, Salish people who rely on the waterways and salmon for sustenance.

Glenn Gobin treasure is a member of the Tula tribes and has served on the Tulalip tribal council for over eighteen years, including seventeen years as chair of the business committee. He sits on the Quill sita village council, overseeing business development and government operations and operated a successful construction business for over twenty years.

Also joining them will be Ryan Miller, council member who brings over twenty years of experience in natural resources, environmental policy, and government affairs.

He led the treaty rights office coordinating technical and policy teams to defend Tulalip's treaty protective resources and represents the community in government to government consultation.

He holds a degree in native environmental science from Northwest Indian College, focusing on sovereignty treaty rights and the government trust relationship. With that being said, let's go ahead and have you folks do your presentation on.

Well, thank you for the wonderful introduction. Unfortunately, it's just gonna be me, Ryan Miller here today. I'm the chairwoman and the and the treasurer. My esteemed elders have asked if if I could handle this since they're in the middle of we're in the middle of our election season right now, and they're they're busy at a candidate's forum tonight. I wanna start by just saying, mahalo.

Thank you for, for the opportunity to speak in in front of this work group, and I wanna say a special hello to Brandon who I see there. It's good to see you, bud. I really enjoyed really enjoyed you guys' visit, and, you know, part of the reason why I think I'm here speaking to this speaking to this work group today is because of the the panel that I was on when when the conference was here in October. And, what a special special time that was to be able to share our cultures and to see each other and and, share that relationship and continue to build that relationship that we have. So, I'm really, really appreciative of that.

You know, I think, on that panel, I talked a little bit about what gaming has brought to, to tribes, and I think that's sort of the story that I wanna that I wanna tell today. And, you know, I'm not just gonna I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, and I'm not gonna only talk about the good things. There are some challenges as well, and I'll be honest with you all about those. But I wanna start by maybe just explaining a little bit about who the Tulalip tribes are. So I'll introduce myself in the in the traditional way.

Hello, honorable friends and relatives. My name is Ryan Miller. I'm a Snohomish and Snoqualmie Indian, and I'm a member of the Tulalip Tribes. I am lucky enough to serve on the Tribal Council for Tulalip. I'm newly elected.

Just happened well, I'm I'm coming up on the one year anniversary, but I did spend many years before that, working in natural resources and government affairs for the Tribe. I know I I know I don't look it, but I have been employed for the tribe for over twenty years. And I've really enjoyed that time. And and one of those years I did spend this is part that they left out of my intro. One of those years I did spend as a dealer at our casino.

So that's I'm bringing that experience with me today when I share these share these stories with you. Tulalip is a really beautiful and unique place, and we're a confederacy of of a bunch of different tribes who all signed the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855 and settled on the Tulalip Reservation. And we began with a bingo operation in in 1983. And around that time, I I was born in 1987. So I remember the very early nineties on the reservation, and what I can tell you is that our unemployment rates were as high as 70%, and poverty was rampant across the reservation.

We had very few services at all. You know, dental services, you were you were months out from an appointment. Same with medical services. We had one trailer where we had a doctor who occasionally came and a dentist who would come sometimes and say, ah, you got a problem with your tooth. I think we're gonna have to pull it.

That that was the treatment that we got depending on the Federal Government to take care of us even though they have this trust responsibility. And then, IGRA passed and we began tribal gaming. And Tulalip was actually the first tribe in the state of Washington to have a a gaming compact with the state, and we opened our first facilities in 1992, you know, our first full casino in 1992. And so we've got over 35 years of experience, and we opened our our Tulalip Resort Casino in in 2001, and that has become an economic driver not just for Tulalip, but for the whole region. And it has changed completely the structure of the way our government operates.

We're able to provide services to our people from birth to death. We used to have to, pass a hat around and pitch in, to send our people to college or to pay for a funeral. And now we're able to provide services that we never would have before. And we're also able to, share that wealth in the community. Part of what we do is, you know, contributing a lot to 501 c threes and other charitable charitable opportunities that are that are a part of what we do.

And so those kinds of things would not be possible if it wasn't for gaming. So have been able to provide employment not only to travel members, but to the greater community. So our gaming operations employ over 2,300 people right now, and we also have about a thousand people employed at our government. All of those jobs are essentially paid for by either grants or gaming revenue. So these are the kinds of opportunities that you can have.

We have lifted not only our community out of poverty, but we've we've shared that economic development across with other cities and jurisdictions that surround us. The city of Marysville is right across Interstate 5 from us, and, you know, it is one of the one of the largest economic drivers in North Snohomish County. Snohomish County is one of the fastest growing counties in the nation, and part of that is driven by this economic growth that's been created by tribal gaming. Now I know that, we're not talking about tribal gaming for the state of Hawaii. We're talking about state run gaming, but I do think that there are some lessons that can be learned from tribal gaming.

And one of those is that I think part of the reason why we've been so successful and other tribes have, have also been successful in the state of Washington is that we've remained true to who we are. We've led with our culture and our way of life and our heritage and our our values and our teachings of service and respect.

And we've been able to share that culture through our gaming operations and through our hotel operations with the greater community. And, you know, we have a history of, we have a history of gaming. You know, our people used to play as what we call bone games or stick games or salal in in Lushootseed.

And, that went on for a long time. It's a part of not only that, but also the potlatch culture that is that is a part of who we are. Right?

We as as as co salish people, we spend our whole lives accumulating resources so that we could give them away at potlatches to show other people how strong we were, how powerful we were, that we were able to give away everything we owned.

That was the goal of a co salish person, to gather resources so that they could give them away to other people, to gain status in their in their life and in their community.

So those are the those are the kind of main things that I think have helped have helped drive, Tulalip's gaming and economic development in the future.

And then, you know, that that gaming revenue has been used to get into other things as well. I mean, we've been able to lease land for for mall operations, for all kinds of retail sales tax, all all these other things have all all of that work, the political work that we've done, many of the other things have all come out of of Indian gaming.

So the history of that growth over these many years, it really has brought us to the to the to the place that we are today.

And, you know, just to speak briefly about the regulatory aspects, I think something that is, you know, has create has created some some tension around around tribal gaming is is the fact that we're kind of triple regulated. Right?

We're regulated by the Federal Government. We're regulated by the the state government because through EGRA, it says, alright. You have the opportunity to game within the state, but you've got to do it through compact and these rules that the state is gonna they're gonna regulate, and then the tribes regulate.

So this, you know, the state of Hawaii won't have all those same hoops to jump through, and, you know, it is possible certainly to to regulate this appropriately without having three levels of regulation. I think one of the things we heard a lot, and there was there was, you know, not not necessarily in our community, but in at the federal level.

There there was a lot of worry that unsavory types of people would be promoted by the institution of tribal gaming on reservations, and we've shown, over the last 35 years that that just as long as you do things the right way, that that just doesn't happen.

So we're very proud of that, and I think I think that when I think that if you do it right in the beginning, there's no need to have many different layers of regulatory problems that that in the end hamstring you.

So I guess my my number one thing to leave with here is although, you know, this can create a tremendous opportunity, it needs to be done the right way the first time. And I think creating a group of people, native Hawaiians and others, who will help keep the culture at the at the forefront of this.

And then also help designate where the revenue goes, Not only will continue to promote Hawaii's brand, this sustainable cultural ecotourism brand that Hawaii has that is so wonderful and that brings so many people there, but that it will ensure that in the long term, the success of the gaming operations in the state are shared among all the people.

Thank you. I'm so I'm gonna move to the committee from left to right. If you guys wanna start with questions. Any questions? Staff?

Yes. Thank you, Chair. Thank you very much for sharing with us today. Were there any unintended consequences or repercussions as they started the gaming?

Yeah. Well, I think, some of the things that we're certainly concerned about is that, you know, generally, you can see sometimes other vices are also tied to, you what some people might consider the vice of gambling.

So we worried about we worried about increases in in alcoholism and drug addiction and things like that. And while I I'll say I don't think we saw that one positive thing that came out of this is those those kinds of social problems, they existed in our community before gaming came.

And now gaming gave us the revenue to be able to help people who are in those situations. So we're able to set up a lot of services that just didn't exist before. As I said, we could barely get medical care, let alone, you know, services for you know, addiction services and things like that.

I will say that I think it's really important to set up a system that helps people with problem gambling because as we all know, that that can be an issue. And, you know, you need to make sure that the revenue you know, some portion of the revenue is supporting the community who may suffer from, you know, issues related to problem gambling.

And I think I think that was something that maybe was an unintended consequence that we had to address.

Thank you very much.

Yeah. Aloha, Ryan. Thank you. Appreciate your presentation, and please give my aloha to your ohana and everybody. You know, we had the chance to spend some time learning about Tulalip recently, and one thing that, you know, really stood out was how intentional the tribe was about governance early on, you know, like you just spoke about. Looking back at that period, what were the key decisions that helped ensure the gaming enterprise stayed aligned with the tribe's long term priorities?

Brandon.

Yeah. It's a great question. So two ways I wanna answer it. One, I wanna take back the big picture look, and I think this is really important. It was unique to tribal gaming, but the tribes collectively in the state stayed together.

We we spoke with one voice when we when we negotiated with the state and when we worked on these issues, and that meant that our our relatives from other tribes who were not near large population centers, they shared in that. So we have a system where class three gaming, there's only a certain number of machines that you can have. Each each each tribe gets an allocation. And so those tribes that didn't have their own casinos, they leased their allocation of machines to other tribes that did have casinos. And so they shared in that revenue.

So that was one way where I we stayed we, you know, that helped us stay true to who we are to our values and our teachings. And the other way is that, we didn't partner with anybody else. We didn't bring in a developer or an existing casino to to run it for us and to take a big chunk of the money from us. Right? We did it ourselves.

Yeah. We got help. We we talked to other tribes. We went to we went to other tribes in other states, and we talked with them about how they've been successful, and we've continued to do that. We did it when the state approved sports gay sports wagering for tribes.

We went to other tribes in other states where they already had sports wagering. We worked with them, to understand how this worked. But that that was the key because there were a lot of opportunities. We had we had other we had lots of casinos. We had Vegas casinos.

You know, we had all kinds of different groups coming to us that wanted to partner. And and I think if we had gone that direction, we would've would have lost a little bit of control, but we also would have lost the ability to keep our teachings and our history and our culture at the forefront and keep make sure that the priorities for where the revenue went were our priorities and not somebody else's.

Yeah. Go ahead.

I have one last question. Right? And for that. You know, beyond the financial side, many communities are also thinking about how those revenues translate into essential community services. Yeah. From Tulalip's experience, how have gaming revenues supported things like education, health care, and other services that directly strengthen the community?

I mean, it's the core of of what we've done. Right? And I think from many different levels. So as I said, you know, we've got a government now that has about a thousand employees in it. The significant majority of the of the funding for that government comes from these gaming revenues.

And it also means that it also means that individuals in our tribe get get, you know, some what we call general welfare payments each month, which means, you know, they they each each member gets a certain amount of money that's that comes from that gaming revenue. So I mean, there there's all kinds of different models for that across Indian country, but I mean, we've been able to you know, if you're a Toledo travel member and you wanna go to Stanford to become a doctor, we pay for it. You know, if you wanna if you if you get accepted to Yale and you wanna get an economics degree, we pay for it. These are these are things that we never could have done never could have done before. We have a state of the art health care facility.

We're in the process right now of buying a public school from the Marysville School District to create our own K through 12 school for our people to teach them in our way. There's so many different things. I mean, we're able to provide activity funding to our youth. Each youth in our tribe gets $4,000 a year that they can use towards music lessons, sports, whatever activities, extracurricular activities, learning opportunities are outside of school, they can do that. If you wanna send your kid to a private school, we'll give you $10,000 a year to send your kid to a private school.

I mean, these are the kinds of things that we, honestly, we never dreamed of when I was a kid that we would have these opportunities. And and thankfully, because of the growth of of not just the gaming operations, but the other economic development that's come from gaming, we've been able to provide that for our people.

Thank you, Ryan.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Brent. Yeah.

First, Ryan, thank you so much for informing this panel. I think as as the decision makers, the policy makers take all of this into account on the fundamental question of whether to have gaming at all, you know, what that is, what that looks like. One thing I'm very intrigued by is helping people understand the distinction between Tulalip and other tribal operations around the country. How, to the point you made earlier, really reflecting that cultural foundation, it doesn't look and feel like perhaps a Las Vegas Strip casino. And I wonder if you could talk just a bit about how important that is as you inform this group and how important it was to Tulayla to design from just what it looks like, what it feels like differently.

Yeah. You know, it's gone through multiple iterations because we didn't, you know, we didn't have the experience originally. And so when we were especially when we were building our our Tulalip Resort and Casino, we spent a lot of time, trying to work through the design elements and how do we wanna do all this. And and kind of what we landed on was, well, we're gonna have these these kind of soft themes throughout the throughout the gaming floor. So you'll see if you come to our facility, which I hope I hope you all have the opportunity to come on a on a visit, and we'd love to love to bring you here and and show you around.

You know, you can see the salmon. You can see in the carpet it looks like a river. You know, there's these kind of subtle themes that that are tribal. And then on our hotel side, we really wanted to showcase the culture and the art. And so we have our welcome poles.

We have spindle whirls on the outside of the building. I mean, you know, from the visual perspective, right, we we made sure to incorporate all of these things that kind of separate us from the corporate Vegas style casino thing. And then there and and and I guess also in our restaurants. So those kinds of offerings, like, all of our restaurants are they have native names. I mean, Salish Sun Burgers.

You know what I mean? Like, those kinds of things. So so we're able to reflect it in in the visual, in what actually in what actually occurs on the gaming floor. But then I also think just in the way we operate. Right?

We treat these we treat it more like a community, more like a family environment. And, we try to you know, our our staff that are there, they do an amazing job of making the guests feel, like they're like they're at home at Tulalip.

And I think that's something that that continues to draw people here. And and I think they know, right, that the they may they may not be happy to lose their money. I don't think anybody is, But I think they know that if they do lose some money, at least it's going to a really good cause.

Right? It's going to not only help fund the tribe, but that the tribe's also gonna give back to the greater community.

Thanks, Ryan.

Thank you. Hi, Ryan.

Nice to see you again.

Yeah. Nice to see you.

Okay. I have two questions. The first, I don't expect you to have the answer, but I'm curious if you can maybe provide it after. So the science associated with the societal ills that are a huge worry in terms of association with gaming, the science shows that if you dedicate portions of the revenue to address it, you can preemptively mitigate and minimize those risks. And I'm curious if the tribe has any background information on how you determine how much money to put towards problem gaming, how much money you decided to put towards community policing.

I think, you know, the the specter of crime and addiction are very effective bogeymen in this discussion. But you folks have firsthand experience in mitigating that. And so if you don't have it today, I'm wondering if you'd be able to provide us any idea about what the discussions were like in determining how much do you put towards those to make sure that they don't become problems?

That's a great question. On the on the problem gaming one, it's actually addressed in the compacts with the state. So there's a specific portion that that's set aside through the compacts to a requirement. I don't remember what the number is off the top of my head, but we can definitely get that to you. I know that on the police and court side, we we're we're negotiating that.

It's it's a really interesting thing. Right? Because we're we're the owner of the gaming operation where the economic development are, but we're also the government. So in some ways, we're kind of handing a check from one from one entity over to the other entity, but one entity is paying the other entity for the court services, let's say. So we have a certain number of, what we call it, gaming violations or fine fines from that or whatever that go over to the court.

Well, we have a we basically have an agreement between Quilcita Village, which is where our our facility is located, and the Toledo Tribal Court. And every year, they cut a check to the Toledo tribal court for for their their good work of handling these judicial services. Same thing with the police. So there's there's it's evolving all the time. But I think originally, there was a lot of effort put into we were also making a lot of effort around that time to try to deal with these social ills in the anyway.

You know, in the very beginning when, when our unemployment rates were very high and, you know, we had a lot of struggles in the community, we had a lot of these, social ills that were really a problem. Alcoholism, you know, is the one that comes to mind for me because, you know, I saw a lot of it in my childhood from a lot of our community members. So we were pushing really hard and that be that was I mean, that was the first place where the money went. The very first place where the money went was to those things. And, it wasn't until later when we had enough, that we started kind of spreading the money out more and started working to more different economic development and things like that.

So those were the first places where the money went.

Cool. And then my second question is in terms of tribal regulation, can you talk a little bit about how your tribal, gaming commission is organized and whether or not it's independent or quasi independent of, the rest of your legislative body in terms of protecting the integrity of the gaming operation in general?

Yeah. So our gaming committee is quasi independent. All of our committees and commissions at Tulalip report up to the board of directors. So in some ways, we have oversight of them, but, you know, oversight very loose oversight over them. Right?

They have control over the over the regulatory piece. And then there's also there's kind of two regulatory sort of bodies within within our structure. So you have you have the, Tulalip Gaming Authority with TGA who manages kind of the on the ground parts of it. So, the day to day security and managing the cameras and all of that part of it. And then you have the gaming commission.

So it's it's quasi independent and you have these two pieces that essentially are the regulatory body for almost all of what we do here. I mean at this point the the state has very little regulatory authority except to very slowly approve class three slot machines which has been the bane of our existence for a long time because and it's something that hopefully the state you know the state of Hawaii won't have to deal with because as new games come available part of our part of the way the the compact is structured is the state has to approve these games these class three slot machines before they can go on our floor and sometimes at this point they're taking a year or more to approve games and why you'll, you know, you'll see games in other places like Vegas and you don't see them here. It's because they're they're quite slow at it. And again, this is a product of that kind of triple layer of regulation that can be quite cumbersome. So, yeah, I hope that helps answer your questions.

It does. Thank you, Jerry.

Thank you, Paul. Scott, you have any questions? You have any questions for our speakers?

Thank you, Ryan, for your for your presentation and sharing insights from from Tulalip. You talked a lot about the the cost and benefits within your own community, the travel community, but can you tell us a bit more about the wider costs also outside of the tribal community to the, say, for the people who live on the other side of the freeway? And further afield from travel community, but not necessarily outside visitors. Just the the local region.

Well, you know, I think it's interesting. There's certainly a perception that or there was a perception that gaming would have a significant negative impact on the community, the greater community around tribes. And I I have to be honest. I I don't I haven't seen I don't think any of us have really seen where that has come to fruition. There, in my opinion, has been much more of a positive impact on these surrounding communities.

You know part of our compact was required us to contribute money to law enforcement in the outside jurisdictions, adjacent jurisdictions to our gaming operations. They also had to show that there was an impact And as time went on and they were required to show that there was an impact from the gaming, it they basically couldn't. And so I think, you know, for groups of people who are not only looking they're looking for impact because it meant more money for them. They they really struggled to find where where it was having an impact. Part of that is because as a tribe got more money, we became we were able to handle our own police services, our own court services, all those kinds of things where we had originally started with, you know, interlocal agreements and things like that where, you know, like the local sheriff's department would come out and do more work on the

reservation. But as far as impact, I think a lot of it has been honestly really positive. You know, there's so much, economic development that's taken root. I mean, I I can there's there's a a hotel directly across the freeway from one of our facilities. We have, we have three facilities.

We have two casinos and one bingo hall still. There's there's a hotel that was built directly across the freeway from our casino, and the only reason it exists there is to catch the overflow from our casino. It that is 100% what sustains it. So the impact that the greater community has received from these gaming operations I think has been overwhelmingly positive.

Thank you. Let's go to Zoom. Can you see everybody on on Zoom? Anybody's hand up?

Michelle, can you look up?

Yeah. Michelle, I saw him, but she put him back on. Michelle, you have a question?

Mine was kinda related to what Tyler had already asked. I was concerned about crime. Guess we're on the same wavelength, which Ryan kind of commented about. That would be our concern for our department is impact on crime. I'm not really sure how that would work in our state given we don't have a a tribal unit or anything like that or tribal courts. So I'm guessing that will fall on some state law enforcement entity. I'm not sure. So he's probably not the right person to

ask that anyway. Okay. Thank you. Ryan, I got a question for you. Yeah. Before you guys built the casino, what kind of community support or opposition did you guys encounter?

Within our own community, we had a a lot of conversations, you know, I think especially very early on. So we've gone through multiple iterations. You know, we built we had our our our bingo operations first in 1983. And then after Edgar passed, we built our built our first casino on that same site in 1992. And there was certainly some concern, both within our community, and I think we heard a lot of concern in the the adjacent jurisdictions.

You know, some of it, I think, was you know, this is the eighties. Some of it was rooted in racism. Right? You know, we can just be honest about it. They they didn't want I mean, they didn't believe that Indian people were smart enough to handle this thing ourselves.

They didn't they didn't believe we're gonna do the right thing. They thought all these unsavory people and all this crime was gonna flood not just our community, but their communities. So we heard a lot of that and that's again, it's part of the reason why these community impact funds were created through the through the compacts with the state. The problem is that a lot of that just didn't come to fruition. And then within our own community, people were definitely concerned.

But once they once the casino opened and some and some of our members were able to begin working there, and and, you know, it opened up this door to to jobs and and economic development. It it happened pretty quickly that everybody saw that this was gonna be a wonderful opportunity for us to provide for our people in a way that we just couldn't do before.

Thank you. Oh, Director Tokioka.

Ryan, as, the DBEDT Director and, how it impacts the visitor industry in Hawaii. In your casino, what percentage of the people that go there are locals versus visitors? I know you talked a little bit about your the locals being there, but what percentage is that versus the visitors that come? And are these convention visitors? Are they just people traveling up and down the coast? What's the demographic of your clients?

Yeah. So of our three facilities, they they all kinda play different roles. So the the but I think two are very similar. So we have one casino that's called the Cool Cedar Creek Casino and then our bingo hall. And those two kind of are together.

They're very locals oriented places. Probably 80% of the of the people live within a 30 mile radius of of Toledo. It it's and it and it's oriented towards that. It it's the whole place was built. The vibe, everything that happens there, the way we operate it is all geared towards a more local clientele.

The Tulalip Resort Casino is has that local element, but it's a regional attraction now. I mean, we're the only four star four diamond resort in Western Washington. And so we get visitors I mean I would I would say probably only maybe 30% of that is is local. A lot more of it is is people from a more regional area. We used to get a lot more tourism particularly from Canada because we're very close to the border.

You know, we're less than, we're less than a 100 miles from the Canadian border. That's well, that's slowed down quite a bit since the since the Federal Government's changes in our in their attitude towards our neighbors to the north. So that's been unfortunate for us. There is a pretty significant kind of convention group of people, but it's also people coming to get that to get away to you know, we have a a beautiful hotel and spa, so get the resort feel, get away from home, that kind of thing. We also we also offer a lot of, we have a summer concert series, so we have an amphitheater that's just outside adjacent to our facility, so and we do concerts there during the summer.

We get a lot more kind of regional people from from all around during that time. And then we also have a concert venue inside the casino inside of our convention area that can hold about 3,000 people. So those all those things kind of combine to to to bring people in as a regional attraction.

Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you, sir. Ryan, I have a I have a few questions. But I just wanna first point out that, you know, I feel that, you were involved in the infancy straight stage of the, growth of the, cultural casino. And and just to let you know, I've been to many of them.

And I think you're right. You know, when you walk through the front door, you get a sense of culture. And, when you walk up to the tables, you, you see the culture. So that was very refreshing. But more refreshingly, what, you had, stated today that, you provided, health care.

You provided, college tuitions, private schools, and, you know, things of that nature. And, I'm assuming they were all tribal members. My quest my question is, what is the tribal's relationship with the state city? And what percent of revenue, if there's an agreement between the tribal and the state or city? And did that result in roads, bridges, infrastructure, and education for the exterior, if you can understand what I'm trying to say.

Yeah. So great question. Our our compact doesn't require a sharing of revenue. There there are these community offsets that I talked about that are a percentage of gaming revenue, but they're in the millions of dollars a year that go to the local communities around us. But what I will say is that, you know, we have a we have a group called the Washington Indian Gaming Association that represents all of the gaming tribes here in the state of Washington, and they've done an economic analysis that shows that, tribal gaming in the state of Washington contributes billions of dollars a year to the state's economy.

And so the state and the local municipalities are all sharing not only from overflow from, you know, of economic opportunity from these gaming facilities, but, tax revenue, all these other things that, you know, it it has promoted it has promoted those areas around casinos a lot. And the state is getting benefit in that from sales tax revenue, excuse me, sales tax revenue and other type of tax revenues that come from those businesses that exist because of the gaming operations. So there's there's multiple levels of revenue that's coming back to local municipalities and the state that that have provided for many of those things. Now on the on the tribal side, the answer is yes. I mean, we've put $35,000,000 of tribal hard dollars that came from casino gaming into redesigning and a freeway overpass on ramp and and exit on both sides of Interstate 5.

That all came from us. So, you know, and and there are many different examples across the state of these types of infrastructure projects that have come from tribes. I mean, we we used gaming revenue to, to do a water pipeline project that brought clean, safe drinking water from another local municipality. We partner with the city of Everett who's just south of us to bring this from Spado Lake to our reservation and and to the adjacent jurisdictions there. So there have been many different examples of of, infrastructure projects that have been funded both directly and indirectly by Tribal Gaming Review.

Thank you, Ryan.

Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. Let's let's move on because I know, you know, time constraint. Next stop.

So so next up sorry.

Next up we have Jeremy Aguero with Applied Analysis. For more than two decades, has been a driving force behind Nevada's remarkable growth. Known for

his ability to bridge public and private sector initiatives with a reputation for trust, integrity, and collaboration. His work has shaped key projects and policies that continue to fill the state's prosperity. Aguerro's contribution span industries from serving as lead staff to the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee, which secured $750,000,000 in public funding for Legion Stadium and brought the Las Vegas Raiders to Las Vegas to playing key roles in private sector initiatives, such as the Tesla Gigafactory expansion and the A Stadium development. Its impact also includes significant policy work, such as developing Nevada's pupil centered funding plan, which paved the way in the largest increase in K to 12 funding in state history and helping craft a campus for hope legislation. An innovative public private partnership aimed at addressing homelessness.

Aguerro has worked on policy initiatives with Nevada's last six governors, Republicans and Democrats alike, underscoring his focus on policy over politics. His ability to navigate complex challenges with data driven insights has made him a trusted advisor across both public and private sectors. In addition to his professional achievement, he serves on the boards of nonprofits of Opportunity Village, United Way, Nevada Child Seekers and R and R Foundation. It's been recognized with numerous honors including the Good Government Award from the Nevada Taxpayers Association and Alumnus of the Year from UNLV reflecting a career defined by service and a commitment to Nevada's prosperity. Thank you for being here.

Madam Chair, thank you very much. I'm honored, to be sitting before you. I am also mindful of your time, and the weather as you mentioned before. I'm gonna go through my presentation. Madam chair, if I go through it either too quickly or too slowly, please, you let me know, the pace that we need to keep.

I appreciate the kind introduction. In your original comments, you mentioned a couple of things about the purpose of this working group, comprehensive economic development. You talked about workforce development. You talked about yielding community benefit. What I'd like to talk to you a little bit about today is a few lessons that were learned by Las Vegas is we had similar goals in trying to do exactly the same thing.

My presentation is is in front of you. Forgive me if I flow through a few of the slides relatively quickly. Again, you can always stop me and I and I and I'll go through that. We're gonna use Allegiant Stadium in terms of making it a reality as a way of talking about how, from a comprehensive standpoint, a tourism based economy can utilize gaming, gambling related activity in order to leverage a benefit, not only to grow that industry, but also to create benefits for the community as well. I think we created a a model, used a model that's been used by other areas.

Some things are very similar to the work that you all are doing here today. We've certainly benefited, and I think we all hope that you will benefit equally. What was the process by which Allegiant Stadium was made possible? Right? It is it is in some ways, it feels like a very long time ago, but it went relatively quickly.

It was in July 2015 that then Governor Sandoval came and created something called the Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee. It was very similar to the work that you all are doing today, and it started without any idea that we would only we would actually build something like Allegiant Stadium. It was late 2025 early 2026 that the Raiders came. Mark Davis comes to Las Vegas and said, hey. We'd like to move the Raiders there.

You think we can find a deal and figure out how to make it work? Right? After that, late 2015 early 2016 the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee completes its work, submits a set of recommendations, ultimately submits submits legislation, a draft legislation to the legislature that says, if you are willing to do this, if you think it's something that would be a good idea, we believe we can create a pathway that is fiscally responsible and would ultimately be economically beneficial. In 2016, just over a year after this entire process began, the legislature convenes a special session to consent it to consider Senate Bill one, which creates an outline. The provisions of the Senate bill have been used by other jurisdictions in terms of the creation of similar tourism benefiting or tourism leveraging assets in those communities as well.

I'd be remiss, and and I didn't include it here, mountain chair, but I probably should have, that Senate Bill One wasn't the only piece of legislation that was contemplated during that special session. There was also something called Assembly Bill One that was also included. And what it did was created specialized funding for police protection, including police protection along the strip, often in Southern Nevada, in Nevada as a whole, referred to as more cops, putting more police officers on the street and really bolstering our police. I think all the way through this process, there was an understanding that it needed to drive benefit for the community. Leveraging our tourism based economy, ensuring that things like safety were a foundational cornerstone of how that would ultimately work.

We move forward in terms of December 2016. Stadium Authority Board has its first meeting. We move forward and continue through this process. Oops. I'm sorry. The NFL in I'm clicking too many times. In March 2017, approves the Raiders move. And by all accounts, this is lightning like speed. I'm an analyst. I do this from time to time now almost I can't believe I'm gonna say this, thirty years.

What I've learned is that time kills all deals. The fact that it was able to gain some momentum and move forward, not that we didn't have things that we had to fight through, but it moved relatively quickly. The construction begins in November 2017. Final project agreements, including development agreements, lease agreements, all of those type of things which were necessary in terms of ensuring that the public got what it bargained for because Allegiant Stadium goes up and it's synonymous with the Raiders, but it's the public that owns Allegiant Stadium. It also included a cooperative agreement for the University of Nevada Las Vegas to ensure that their football team could also play there and have, you know, a world class venue to pay dividends for us as a football program.

You know, better recruits, better facilities, all of those type of things. Stadium construction surpasses 1,000,000 work hours. Say what you will about Allegiant Stadium, set up a one, any of those type of things. We'll talk a lot about the benefits to the community of doing it. But at the outset, it was a jobs bill.

It created jobs. Thousands of them in terms of people working on that $2 billion facility that was ultimately completed in July 2020, and host its first game at a point in which the Raiders won a game against the Saints in September 2020. I hear those laughter. Yes. That's not fair.

They're coming back this year. This is this is our year, I'm sure. The you know, there was a lot of conversation about the public investment, making it work. And we're gonna talk a lot about public private partnerships because I believe in today's world, no one can do it alone. It's very difficult.

You have to find ways to partner overall. And in 2016, we are going through this process. There was an expected economic impact associated with that project. 1,9 million attendees, and we anticipated at that point in time that 451,000 of them, call it about 2025 percent, would be what we refer to as incremental visitors. A critical element from an economic impact standpoint because Las Vegas, like Hawaii, wants to to to offset, offload its tax burden to feed people that come to the community and are able to spend their money here.

It's a benefit. We all know what we that's what we use. We expect an economic output of $620 million. We expected about 5,900, let's call it 6,000 jobs, and about $35 million in tax revenue that would be able to offset the bond payments that were necessary for the construction of the stadium overall. Madam Chair, you asked a question earlier about opposition.

Right? We heard it all the time. Frankly, I took a fair amount of it, and I'll just put a few of the quotes that we had relative to this project. Exactly what is it about the Las Vegas Stadium that's unlike other stadiums? Why would they go with this phony baloney stuff where 23% of the people that were gonna be there were gonna come from out of town?

The only question is how badly are the numbers going to miss their targets. One analyst actually said it was the worst deal ever for a city. The probability that it could happen isn't zero, but it's pretty close to zero. Frankly, I think we as a community took that personally a little bit. The idea that we couldn't do it.

And I think we share something, and oftentimes people want to believe that we can't or we won't or that it's not possible. And we wanted to demonstrate that it absolutely was. $750 million was a lot of public money. The most, I think, at the time of any major facility ever constructed in The United States. Now we get to the third step, you know, and we think about what actually happened on the back end of that overall.

The actual attendance was 4.4 million not 1.9, in in in visitors have been 2.6 million and incremental visitors combined, now 2022 through 2024 of 2.3 million visitors. It wasn't 23%. It was approaching 50% of the people that were attending events at Allegiant Stadium were coming from out of town. That was a huge benefit for us overall. We look at those visitors and those incremental visitors based on what we projected, the little gray bar versus what actually happened, all of the other bars in 2022-2023 and 2024.

We're all now compiling the data for 2025. It will be very similar. And, ultimately, visitors as a percentage of the total in every case, we're able to to outpace what was expected. And so why was Las Vegas able to do this? It's because we have a lot of hotel rooms.

It's because we have a lot of leisure and hospitality workers. It is because our community, not unlike this community, has been built up in many ways to host people. We're good at doing that. People want to come to Las Vegas. Obviously, they come here.

I like to come here. Right? And we have the opportunity to do things while we're there, and it drove incremental value overall. Those impacts were much more than what we anticipated. The overall economic impacts were $5.6 billion in economic output, $2.1 billion in wages, and 33,000 jobs during that period overall, the economic output.

And if we look at jobs or we look at wages and salaries, every single one of them outpaced expectations. As a matter of fact, as we sit here today, maybe we got lucky. Maybe it was right project, right time. But Allegiant Stadium is the second highest grossing stadium anywhere in the world. Number one is a stadium in Mexico, and the only reason that they're outpacing us is stand like 700 Shakira concerts, all of which drove incremental value to what's there.

Nonetheless, they said people wouldn't show up. They said the asset wasn't going to generate. And as a matter of fact, it did exactly the opposite of that. It created more jobs, more people staying in hotel rooms, more people eating in restaurants than even we thought during the time to justify it to the legislature in October 2026. That's been good value for us.

And with some instability in our tourism economy, I wonder where we'd be today without some of those special events. In addition to that, we talk about the fiscal implications associated with it. Right? Economics, jobs, wages and salaries, economic output. We think about tax revenue.

The best one for me to be able to demonstrate it is a source of revenue that we have in the state of Nevada called live entertainment tax. Right? This is essentially a ticket tax, if you will. And this shows what happened before and after the opening of Allegiant Stadium. And what you'll see here is that during that period, we had a tremendous increase overall.

Live entertainment tax, which is divided between entertainment that happens inside a casino and entertainment that happens outside of a casino. During the period since Allegiant Stadium opened, the entertainment that's happening.

Outside of a casino, excuse me, inside of a casino a casino continue to grow. It's up by 20%. That's pretty good. We like that. That's a that's a positive.

Outside of the casino in terms of non gaming revenue, which is Allegiant and other major venues that we have is up 404% during that same pre period from the the pre Covid period to where we are today. That is a tremendous amount of revenue. And as a matter of fact, ladies and gentlemen, it is the single fastest growing source of revenue that we have that goes to our state's general fund. That funds education, public safety, higher education as well as well as health care within the state of Nevada. It's been tremendous.

In addition to that, it helped rebalance our tourism based economy. And I do think this is really important. And I'm sure I could spend all day on this chart. I will not. I know I have to continue and go relatively quickly.

But when Southern Nevada, and I suppose other markets around The United States, built a convention center, They do it for a very specific reason. We want to increase mid week occupancy in order to get it done. When we build these other pieces, we also know that there are times when we have a lot of visitors and there's times we have fewer visitors And balancing that out is good too because it generates revenue, it utilizes capacity, and it stabilizes employment to make sure that people don't have to maybe work a little less in some months. And I just want to show you this is all of the Las Vegas visitation in terms of monthly share of visitation. So essentially, take all the visitation, we divide it by 12.

If a percentage is higher, that's shown in the darker blue color. If it's lower, I show it in the lighter blue color. I just want to compare a period for here. But I I want you to look at what it looks like. I'm gonna go back for a second.

Maybe it's a little easier to see. If we look here, let's go just those 2000 through 2024 period. You see March and April and May and June are the higher numbers. You see September and October and November and December are the lower numbers. Now let's go to the the after these assets were completed, and what you see is that that is shifted.

It is rebalanced relative to that. And what we've seen is a period in which we have football games and other concerts, and things that have taken place have actually moved that up. The period that used to be among our weakest is now among the best weekends that we have. Driving volume, driving value, creating jobs, and creating wages and salaries within our economy overall. Arguably, as important as any of this is the fact that it has also changed the mix of consumers.

If you look at the left hand side of what's there, this is the average budget of someone that takes a trip from Las Vegas. They get in a car, they get in a plane, they come to Las Vegas, they spend on average $1,300 per person per trip. If they're a sports related visitor, and this could also go to entertainment related visitor, they come for a very specific reason. They're excited about the fact that they're gonna come and watch their team play or go to that concert that maybe they can't see somewhere else, and they spend more by going through and doing that. First time visitors are nearly 19%, which I think Las Vegas and other markets could use a lot of.

They stay a little longer 3.7 nights. And they they, the average visit is slightly higher than what we've seen before. They come, they like it, and they come back because of what is available to them in terms of what's there. The Super Bowl F1 desert battle for global supremacy. Las Vegas likes to tout itself as not only the entertainment, but sports capital of the world.

There was not that long ago that people said we'd never be able to survive hockey in the desert, 2 billion for a stadium that was never going to work. Again, I would not like to imagine where we would be as an economy today if it wasn't for the investments that we made overall. If we go forward and we think about how this translates to Hawaii and what it it means here and, again, I offer this with respect. I'm certainly not an expert on this overall, but I offer it in terms of what some of the lessons are that we've learned, where some maybe some of the parallels are. Our economies are so similar in really important ways.

This is gross domestic product as a share of overall domestic product. Number one and number two in The United States is Nevada and Hawaii. Right? The nation overall, 4.8%. We're both in double digits, and no one else is even close.

Leisure and hospitality employment overall, 24% here, 26% in Las Vegas. We are more dependent on those jobs than anywhere else. And if we think about it in terms of the way our economies are shifting is we used to be a goods based economy. We are now a services based economy. People are traveling for experiences.

And I will tell you, I think the islands provide a greater experience than probably anywhere else on planet Earth, but people are always looking for the next thing and what they can do and what that will ultimately look like. We always think about it in terms of return on investment, but it's also return on experience overall. And I'd love show this chart. My grandmother would love this chart. God bless her so much.

She was still alive looking at how we used to spend our money and how we spend it now. In 1960, we spent about half of our money on services and half of our men money on goods, things that we would buy. This is what it looks like today. A 165% increase, and we all know it. We all have the subscriptions.

We all go out, and we have services, and we do those things, but it's a very, very different world than it was before. And if we ask travelers what is important to them, 125% of the trillion dollar travel economy are people that are want to pay for experiences. 68% are willing to pay a premium. We've seen it. You've seen it.

We cannot ignore the fact that baby boomers today are the single wealthiest generation in the history of mankind. They represent 23% of the population and over 50% of all household income in The United States. They are living longer. They are living better. And they wanna search out experiences that are there.

And 74% of respondents indicate that in order to stay relevant, right, you have to expand your services base to get there. It has worked for Las Vegas. And this is an analogy. I'm not suggesting that it would be one to one, but the Super Bowl, Taylor Swift concerts, Canelo, the Canelo fight that we just recently had were remarkable economic benefits for our community. The the the revenue that we generated, not because people didn't show up, but because they did.

Because when we gave them an opportunity and we created something for them, they said, yeah. We're gonna show up and do that overall. Again, you have a tremendous asset. I would argue that the ability of thinking about it, what could happen next? What could you drive with that value?

Because there are times when one plus one can equal three. Those type of investments certainly have for us, and I would suggest they could for you too. If we go forward and we think about it in terms of the community perspective on tourism, I was I was I I was pleasantly surprised, maybe not so surprised to see the respondents of folks, residents of this state were not that dissimilar from residents that we've seen in other states. Right? How recognizing how important that tourism based economy is overall.

Recognizing the the investments that it is a public private partnership. That if we're not investing that sounds very presumptive, madam chair. If Hawaii is not investing in that infrastructure, that the ability for it to thrive independent would be very difficult. Right? This is not something the private sector can do on its own.

It's not something the public sector can do on its own. But the ability to invest and expand and grow has proven itself overall. Hawaii help Hawaii's economy increase tax revenue, local benefits to businesses, minimize environmental impacts by attracting higher caliber tourists that frankly spend more money, overall and are looking for exactly that type of experience. We think about it in terms of gaming's expansion and its economic potential. What does it mean if you allow this to happen?

And we're gonna talk about the investment overall in a moment. The economic impacts are are, you know, they're not gonna be, you know, something that's gonna change the trajectory of the state, but what they will do is create a before economic impact that does not exist today. In just the construction related activity alone of a $400,000,000 investment, $273,000,000 in economic impact that ripples through the economy. A $100,000,000 in wages and salary and $1,200 excuse me. 1,200 person years of employment defined as one person employed for one year. If we think about it in terms of the recurring operating effects, because of course, you construct something once, you don't construct it all the time.

The economic impact is is expected to be roughly 36 million a year, $106,000,000 in wages and salaries, and approximately 1,400 jobs, including direct, indirect, supplier purchases, and then the ripple effect throughout the economy. Perhaps it's arguably as important as anything as what the tax benefits would be. Gaming tax, general excise tax, property tax, corporate taxes are estimated to be $1,300,000,000 over the construction and first seven years of operation of the facility itself overall. Those are material. They are significant.

And certainly, the benefits in terms of their investment and reinvestment is what is so important. Maximizing community benefit. I'm sort of I perhaps borrowed your terminology from earlier on. This has been central to almost all of the dialogue that we have. As a matter of fact, community benefits agreements are now, almost synonymous with major investment related activities that are taking place.

As part of the Raiders deal, Senate Bill one, they were required to create a community benefits program both during construction and operations to reinvest that. It included the preponderance of employees had to be either minorities, small businesses, veterans, all had to be included, and they exceeded every one of those expectations during the construction together. It's construction period. Right? The creation of an independent oversight committee, the requirement for local small business, women and minority owned businesses, community engagement initiatives, workforce requirement, mentoring, technical assistance for small businesses that need a big business to shepherd them through so that they can actually work on projects of this size.

Maximizing those benefits has been critical to ensuring that those dollars come back to the community that they stay here. It's not just about being able to see a concert or go to a football game. It's the dollars inuring to the benefit overall. As I mentioned previously, these were also jobs bills, and the labor implications have been significant overall in terms of the workforce. Forgive me.

I know that this slide is gonna freeze for whatever reason. But when you think about building a hotel casino, everybody thinks about the jobs that come in. Somebody that works at the front desk or somebody that's a dealer, something like that. But it is so much more than that overall. If we start just with the foundation, where it starts, all of the jobs in terms of building and design, builders, electricians, plumbers, all of those type of things are necessary in order to make that work.

These are jobs that that that are intrinsically required to be here. Then you just talk about the core operations associated with it. It's executive leadership. It's brand. It's media. It's operations. It's legal. It's accountants. It's all of those things that take place. If you extend it even beyond that, come on. Let's see. I don't know. I think it'll kick in here in just a second. At least it did when we were looking at it before. There we go.

If you look at all the direct services, who provides services to Xena? Who provides security? Who provides the goods, the food that they generate? Who does that? It flows through.

And the economic impact flowing through the totality of the economy. Leisure and hospitality, including gaming, touches every single sector of the economy in remarkably important ways. If we just wrap up with a couple of sort of final sections, and I will go through this relatively quickly, I do wanna make sure that I at least touch on the future here and the positioning relative to some of the numbers that we are looking at overall. This is visitor volume for air to Hawaii, obviously, in terms of what's there. Peaks come down.

It's not quite gotten back to the peaks that were in the pre Covid period overall. Oh god. If we look at that share and the distribution between those domestic versus international, and some discussion here today about some of the instability in terms of some of that national visitation and the ability to actually drive that forward. Again, same chart, just looking at it in a different way overall. But if we look at those selected markets and we look at Japan and China and Korea, the growth is actually increasing and giving these folks the ability to have a reason to come.

What we see is that there's some areas of growth, but some areas that are still showing signs of weakness. What is going to drive that visitation? Because those visitors in terms of their average spend per trip, some are higher, some are lower, but they're all saying the same thing we hear across the board, value, opportunity. What are the reasons to come? For those that indicated that they were unlikely to revisit Hawaii over the next five years, there were lots of reasons that people gave relative to that, and we can sort of go through each one of these.

And some of the sample size is are are too low, but oftentimes, poor value. Right? I'm not getting that return on that experience. No reason. There's nothing new driving me here.

Or five years is simply too soon. Creating the opportunity to do that is critically important in terms of finding a reason to bring people back to return on that experience. And I will close here, Madam Chair, members of the workforce, with asking the simple question, what was the smartest thing that we did in Southern Nevada? And I think it's that we ultimately start from a default position of, yes, we wanna get there responsibly. But we think about it in terms of a public and a private and a partnership and finding ways to bring it together so that we can benefit the community, so that we can drive our economy forward, and so that we can truly benefit from leveraging the remarkable tourism economy that we have.

Madam Chair, thank you for your indulgence. I'm happy to answer any questions. But again, I am so remarkably honored to be here. And again, if there are questions now or after, I'm more than happy to serve this working group in any way that would be helpful.

Jeremy, thank you for that speed race practice presentation I've ever seen. Put some money on this, but then you're gonna do it in an intense game. But, you know, thank you for appreciating that.

And I know we have questions. I'm gonna start again from my left side and work our way over, tax department. Any questions?

This slide right here.

Yes, sir.

So the this is an estimation of the model tax revenue. So gaining tax at $1 billion. what what were the assumptions there? Like, what was the rate?

Sure. 19% is what we used for the rate that was there. Again, I have all of the rates and the schedule, which I'm more than happy to send over to you so you can kind of take a look at how they add together. I believe we worked with your office to make sure that we were using, the proper rates. We used what we were applied.

We were happy to share that schedule with you, which might be an easier way for you to take a look at. Yes, sir. Happy to do it.

Thank you, Chair. Jeremy, I just wanna say thank you for the comprehensive report. I have no questions. It's very comprehensive. Thank you very much.

Thank you, sir. Really appreciate it.

Jerry, again, you did a remarkable job. You went right through there. I I thought we were, like, in a, like, a dating session. Speeding speeding. I think

you would do really good at that. You know, and handsome Butler sitting kind of close to me. He's going to be building a stadium and you have heard your presentation around the stadium. And you said a lot of great things and positive things that we could host bigger and better events. I I just have one question.

Do you think in your mind that it might be possible to host the Super Bowl in Hawaii? I'll well, I I just gotta give a shout out to our, our college football team, which I I think they're they're great, and they're very competitive. And I think they provide a lot of entertainment for this constituency here, but to my bigger question.

I appreciate the question, sir. Okay. You know, is it physically possible? I suppose so. Is it probable?

Probably not in in the near term. Look, I don't speak for the NFL, but if we look at their history and, I have worked on a few of those projects relative to what they require to make that happen, I don't that feels like a a stretch, to me. But I would like to believe that anything is possible, and this is a remarkable state. And you've certainly proven that in any number of different ways.

Thank you very much. Yes. This is nice.

Thank you, Art. Yeah. So I I will say this. You know, I've had my eyes on Allegiant for a long time. I think the build of Allegiant was just amazing during Covid.

I mean, talk about public private partnerships and and putting up. My first question has been, be that, Las Vegas considered the 9th Island, and as Art graciously said of our UH football team, why not the alliance of, as we would call it, Hanae, the UH, ringbows under Allegiant, and the Raiders, which would probably help your record a little. But in this case, let's get to you note that Hawaii and Nevada are the top two tourism dependent states. Do you think that the Nuala Stadium can serve Hawaii in the same way it has served Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas?

Yes, senator. First of all, thank you for the question. I don't just believe that's possible. I think I know that that is possible. I think that, that asset, this community, what you all do, I believe that you will do the same thing that we did, and that is leverage the existing economy that you have and the momentum that you have to drive that forward. I don't have any doubt that that is possible here. Thank you, Jeremy. Yes, ma'am.

And I'll move over. Sure. Brandon.

Hey. Thank you, Jeremy. Oh, wow. It was exhilarating. We needed you at the auto working group last month.

I just got one question, Jeremy. You know, one thing we often talk about in Hawaii is how many residents travel to places like Las Vegas when they want to participate in gaming. Based on the research you've seen, how much activity is currently leaving the state each year and how much of that might realistically be recaptured locally?

Yes, sir. Thank you for the question and the comment. I appreciate it. I don't know that I have a direct answer to that in terms of the value. If this committee would like it, I'm happy to do a little bit of go back and happy to do a little bit of go back and come back to you with an answer.

I look. I'm an analyst. I'm not an advocate, so I like to make sure that the math pencils out before I answer something. The fundamental underpinning of your question is Las Vegas benefits tremendously, from dollars that are leaving the state of Hawaii, and come to Las Vegas that are spent. Do I believe that a substantial of those would be recaptured here?

Yes, sir. I do. Exactly how much that is, I'd have to do a little bit of work to give you a sense. I've seen some reports that I think were done by the state of Hawaii, that that provided, you know, some brackets around that. I don't know that I've seen the assumptions that drive that.

So I wanna be a little bit careful there, but I'm happy to look into it. I'm happy to follow-up with you. But I think your the answer to your question is, those dollars, fewer of them would be exported as a result of that. Yes, sir.

And, Chair sorry. I have one last question. You know, Las Vegas and Hawaii operate under very different conditions. You know, I mean, similar tourism and all that, but, Hawaii doesn't have 130,000 hotel rooms. We don't have a drive in population, and our airport doesn't bring in 55,000,000 passengers a year. Given those structural differences, how

applicable are stadium driven gaming models to Hawaii?

Again, excellent question. Thank you. The answer is you're right. It is going to be different. And you're right that the models are going to be somewhat ace they're not gonna it's not gonna be a one to one in terms of what's there.

When we think about tourism based economies, there are times that I like to think about it in terms of, you know, the the the visitors as a percentage of the population, the full time equivalency population, if you will. You think about, no, you're not always going to have that. But two things I think are going to happen. Number one, it's going to drive incremental investment. Right?

That is to say that reinvestment in the infrastructure that's already here in order to maximize the value and the volume associated with that traffic. I remember when we were in the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee, and there was the argument that came up about whether Las Vegas even wanted the Super Bowl. Why why why do we want the Super Bowl? I I think you had just been at, I don't know, Minnesota or something like that at the time, and they could put out a report that said there was a 170,000 people in Minnesota for the Super Bowl. And I remember someone saying, hey.

Wait a minute. Las Vegas during the exact same weekend had 300,000 people in town, and we didn't even have the Super Bowl. Right? And it was kind of an amazing thing. But then they started talking about the fact that the rising tide lifts all the boats.

And you think about the value, how much people spend, and you think about the level of investment that comes with that. And you think about what it means to be a city that has a tremendous event. And we've seen those type of effects happen when concerts like BTS came to Las Vegas. I'd be honest with you. I didn't even know who BTS was, but I have a daughter, and she let me know tremendously exactly they were.

It drove a little bit more, and it brought a new audience that was here, and they came and spent money. Sir, I do not wanna leave you with the impression that it's anyway analogous to one to one. But you have an asset that works for this state that drives value for you here, and you work to the ways that you can program it to leverage the assets that you do have. I think it will drive both volume and value, both sides of the equation for the state.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Bernie. Kent, you have a question.

Thank you, Jeremy. I just wanna say thank you. That was a really useful report. I think we'll be able to build a lot more q and a over time from that. So thanks again.

Thank you. Tyler.

Thanks, Jeremy. Couple questions just on the, like, the assumptions you would have to make for your projections. The first is, did you is the location of a potential facility or mix of facilities dependent on or are your projections dependent on the location, say, Waikiki versus Ko'olina versus in Us mixed Use Stadium District?

Yeah. Thank you for asking the question. The answer is no. It's entirely agnostic. What we did was took a hotel casino and just plotted it in Hawaii and then used all of the economics around that. Certainly models that would be higher, certainly models that would be lower. But no. It was just to try to get a sense of what that magnitude would be.

Awesome. And then very similar question. What was the assumed I'm I don't wanna say floor size, but, like, resort size to generate revenue of this nature, particularly on the gaming tax?

You know, I'm not gonna recall exactly what the mix of units was, but I have it. I just don't have it sitting in front of me, so we'll submit it to you. And that way you can just kinda get a sense. And I'm gonna tell you, all we did was take the relative ratios and average them out. So nothing magical, but I'll make sure I get that those specifics to you.

Thank you very much.

Yes, sir.

Jerry, if you can send it to us, and then we'll just discuss it with the with the committee.

I will make sure

that

we do, madam chair. Paul.

Thank you. Jeremy, great presentation. Thank you for being here today. Sorry it's raining. You don't get any sunshine while you're here. But, so there's a couple notations on some of these slides that reference a three to seven year period or up to the first seven years. And I think that's where that billion dollar revenue, driver from the tax side comes from. I could be wrong, but just wanted to clarify that. And then could you talk about why seven years? Is there a ramp up?

Is there Oh, sure. What what is it that drives some of that?

Thank you. Appreciate the question, and I'm sorry if I didn't provide clarity. I wanted to try and make the slide as simple and as straightforward as possible. And so then to do that, I included both the construction phase as well as the stabilization phase associated with that. So that's how we got those two pieces.

We're looking at it over multiple years with sort of a ramp up until you get to that stabilization. So we can break it out if the committee would like to see that, if the working group would like to see that, in terms of construction versus operations, all those type of things. Obviously, as we were talking about before, the taxes are gonna be a little bit different. But anytime we analyze something, we always wanna analyze it to a point of stabilization during that period. And frankly, that period allows us to do exactly that.

And to for the record, I love the rain. I'm from Las Vegas. Let it come down. I didn't even know what it was when I walked outside.

Thank you, Jeremy. Scott, you have any questions? Steven. I mean.

Thank you very much for your presentations. I I particularly like that you draw attention to the need for infrastructure and how that supports all industries, but particularly also tourism because there's lots of fragmented components of the tourism industry, which makes it hard for them themselves to invest in the in the right infrastructure. I think the question here is more around what is the right infrastructure for Hawaii to invest in to lift sort of spending. You mentioned, you know, in Hawaii, they spent 200. You took about your spending per day and so on.

In Hawaii, I think the average trip is 2,200 you showed. But in 1989, that number in real terms was 4,000. Right? And there was more, and newer infrastructure for tourists at that time than there is now, but there was still no, casino at that time either. So my question is more around, yeah, how do you decide did you compare this to what to other types of infrastructures that Las Vegas could have built?

The stadium in Las Vegas' case is the piece of infrastructure, But in this case, we're talking about building a casino as the piece of infrastructure. I mean, we're also talking about a stadium, but the casinos are already there in Hawaii in in Las Vegas, whereas the casinos aren't here too aren't here yet. So that requires an additional infrastructure investment. But if we were to put, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars into new resorts, that would also generate a whole bunch extra visitors here as well that would, you know, without gambling. Right?

So depending on which type of infrastructure we invest in, we're gonna get additional spending in any case, no matter what that sort of infrastructure is, whether it's a stadium, a casino, or a or a big new flash resort.

Yeah. First of all, thank you for the question. I appreciate it. When when you started your question, I thought you were along the lines of all of the infrastructure, you know, water, roads, those type of things that are necessary in order for a community to thrive including a hotel. I just to pause on that piece for a moment, you know, we've done a fair amount of research, certainly not here around those lines.

The maintenance of infrastructure and the investment of infrastructure pays off differently than almost any other dollar that you put in to a state because it lasts for some extended period of time. You pay for it one year. For the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, you're able to benefit from that. So to the first part of your question, at least as I understood it, there's all of that infrastructure. The second part of your question, which is, hey, there's substitute goods here.

There's trade offs that we can have. We can invest in this type of infrastructure. We can invest in that type of infrastructure. As we talk about sort of gaming related activity, or as we talk about tourism leveraging assets, like a stadium, or an arena, or a ballpark, or something like that, that can host concerts as well as athletic events. I think that what the the the importance of that is is the fundamental question of whether that gives someone a new incentive to get on that plane and land here.

And so do do do obviously, I think to your question, if there is an eroding infrastructure that's taking place, that's a negative that's going to be there. Those type of investments and making sure that when someone comes that they get that return on that experience, I think is critically important in all cases. And so I acknowledge that. I would respectfully submit that the ability to think about new dimensions of infrastructure will ultimately be additive. And I take this from experience, not just in Las Vegas and other places, but Las Vegas spent the better part of two decades building more hotel rooms, building more hotel rooms, building more hotel rooms.

And then they spent about a decade building reasons for people to fill those hotel rooms. The combination of those two things are really paying dividends for us today.

Yeah. To clarify what I what I meant by infrastructure was not just the the classic things we think of as infrastructure, but also the the other things that facilitate everything that a tourist does, including all those hotel rooms. So you mentioned all those hotel rooms. Those hotel rooms are infrastructure for the people that are visiting the stadium. And without those hotel rooms, all of the events that occur at the stadium wouldn't have occurred wouldn't generate the the same number of visitors either. Right? So

A 100% agree with you, sir.

Yeah. I'm just thinking about what's the right sort of infrastructure for Hawaii to be able to and increase visitor spending and whether or not that's a stadium or a casino or something else, I think, is the the key question that we're gonna think about.

Well, thank you for that. I think, you know, the result pretty much depicts, which is why we've had Jeremy here, was to look at the diversity within Hawaii and looking at other alternatives, which is what we're trying to, narrow this report down to. I will go to, Zoom. Those on Zoom, and I know we we are going over, in the upper house, we're allowed to extend out time. So is there anybody on Zoom that has a question that wants to ask Jeremy?

Since we have Jeremy here for hopefully the next few hours, but I know it's been a few minutes. Anybody on Zoom? Anybody else have questions for Jeremy? Okay. I wanted to thank everybody. Of course, Jeremy, thank you. Tulalip , Ryan, guys, thank you so much. And if we do have questions, please send it in, and then we'll forward it over. But with that, I thank all of you. For those on the committee, chair, we'll be having the next meeting.

So if you guys have the schedule with you or if you don't, we can send it out and the next meeting will come abroad. We just don't want this to kind of die off. We wanna stay on this as we wanna deliver a fair report back to the legislature come next year. So thank you very much. Everybody stay dry except for Jimmy. Enjoy the rain out there. With that, we are adjourned.