RALEIGH – For a couple of weeks now, the buzz in Raleigh political circles has been about the prospects for passing a state lottery in the North Carolina Senate. Is there a slim majority to pass the House version intact? Or will Senate leaders stuff their own version into the state budget bill to sway a few reluctant Democrats to come on board?
The chamber’s budget proposal for FY 2005-07 came out Tuesday, and the answer is: yes.
As Sen. Tony Rand of Fayetteville made clear in remarks late Tuesday, the Senate’s lottery provision is not necessarily a rejection of the House bill, previously passed 61-59 when several former lottery foes, all Democrats, switched sides in the hours before the vote. The switchers seemed to be responding to several key aspects of the House version, such as a total ban on advertising and a “non-supplant” clause to keep lottery proceeds from displacing other dollars for education.
But these provisions faced skepticism in the Senate. How could a North Carolina lottery actually meet its revenue projections without the advertising other states rely on to keep people interested? Plus, the House version appeared to let the state involve itself in all sorts of gambling, including the video-poker games that the Senate had previously voted to ban. And some senators wanted to use lottery proceeds not just to add new programs but also to alleviate the state’s structural (not temporary) budget deficit, now numbered in the hundreds of millions of dollars at least.
The problem was that if the Senate simply amended the House bill to address these issues, or enacted their own freestanding bill, and then sent it back for concurrence, leaders of both chambers feared that the slim House majority for the initial try might dissipate. A little more than a week ago, key senators telegraphed their proposed solution: they would stick a lottery into the budget, changing it in the process to allow advertising and the supplanting of revenues and to ban video poker.
Given other elements of the Senate budget plan – a cigarette-tax increase, lower-than-expected budget savings in education and human services, etc. – leadership seemed to believe that a couple of anti-lottery Democrats would come their way and pass the budget. There still remained the possibility, however, that enough House members would jump ship to defeat the unwieldy package there. Several pro-lottery Republicans, for example, will have a hard time voting for a budget that applies or reapplies $700 million in higher taxes and increases spending by about $1 billion. Meanwhile, several House Democrats are so passionately against the lottery that they might say no to this first budget, expecting (naturally) to vote yes on a subsequent one that funds key priorities without resorting to state-sponsored gambling.
So, the Senate is leaving several options open. Its in-budget lottery provisions are technically amendments to the House bill, and do not take effect unless the House bill becomes law. Assuming the Senate budget passes, the House will initially reject it, of course, to fashion its own version. The key negotiations will happen later, and involve either 1) the House accepting the Senate’s lottery revisions, paving the way for what would be called the “formality” of approving the House lottery bill on the Senate floor, 2) changing the budget language to create a lottery outright, if a Senate floor vote still looks iffy, or 3) the House maintaining its opposition to the Senate lottery version, in which the two sides might come back to the isssue next year.
Curvy pitch, now the swing.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.