Local legislators help House pass lottery 61-59


The state House took a dramatic step Wednesday toward launching a North Carolina lottery when lawmakers voted 61-59 in favor of legislation that also could solve Vance County’s school construction problems.

It was the first time the House approved a lottery bill, and it put the issue in the hands of the Senate, which has long been seen as supportive of the state-run numbers game.

Both of Vance County’s representatives in the House, Democrats Jim Crawford of Oxford and Michael Wray of Northampton County, voted with the majority on the bill, which a special committee crafted Wednesday morning and quickly moved to the House floor.

If the Senate approves the House bill, the lottery could start selling tickets in September, Wray said.

He said lawmakers didn’t have time to study the details of the legislation before voting on it, but he trusted the committee and Speaker Jim Black, who pushed the bill to a vote after opposing a lottery for years.

Wray said the Democratic caucus met from 8 to 9:30 in the morning Wednesday, and the lobbying of members on the fence continued until the vote. The key point, Wray said, was the need to keep lottery dollars in North Carolina, which is the only East Coast state without a lottery. North Carolinians spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on lottery tickets in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina.

“We got people all around us making that money,“ Wray said. “We need to spend it here and keep it in our economy.”

The legislation would leave the North Carolina game at a competitive disadvantage in border counties such as Vance in one respect: advertising. North Carolina’s game wouldn’t have any, except for signs where tickets are sold.

Wray said he couldn’t comment on such details of the legislation because he had so little time to read it, but he trusted that the 14-person select House lottery committee crafted the best bill possible.

Wednesday’s vote — the House quickly followed the 61-59 roll-call vote with a voice vote on the required final reading of the bill to send it to the Senate — was particularly sweet for Wray, who announced his support for a lottery last week. The victory came on Wray’s birthday, which also is his wife’s birthday.

“We stood behind our leadership, and we’re going to help our schools,” an elated Wray said. “Schools are our future.”

Without the lottery, Wray said, lawmakers will have to come up with that much more money to fill a projected state budget hole of more than $1 billion in the fiscal year that starts July 1.

The bill devotes all lottery profits to education. A quarter would go into a need-based college scholarship fund that would give students up to $4,000 each per year, and a quarter would create the Educational Enhancement Fund, which “shall be used to further the goal of providing enhanced educational opportunities so that all students in the public schools can achieve their full potential.”

That enhancement money could go, for instance, to lottery advocate Gov. Mike Easley’s More at Four pre-kindergarten program, Smart Start’s school-readiness efforts or low-wealth school districts such as Vance County to fulfill court orders in the Leandro case.

A clearer fate awaits the other half of the lottery profit: It would go into a state trust fund to be spent on school construction. That was a big factor for many lawmakers, including Wray. North Carolina schools have billions of dollars of school building needs, including a $28.1 million facility-needs proposal the Vance County Board of Education sent to the county commissioners in December.

Lottery supporters predict annual profits of $450 million.

The legislation calls for half of the lottery money to be paid out in prizes and for up to 16 percent to be spent on expenses. That leaves 34 percent of lottery revenue to go into the three specified education trust funds. What all of that means is that people would have to buy more than $1.3 billion worth of lottery tickets each year to produce the projected $450 million profit.

That profit would yield $225 million for school construction. How the public school trust fund distributes that money is not specified in the lottery legislation, and the possibility exists that the reality will mimic the experience with the highway trust fund, under which the big, politically powerful counties are dominant.

“That’s something we’re just going to have to work through,” Wray said.

The legislation indicates that the intent is for the lottery money to supplement, not replace, local spending on school construction.

“A county must continue to spend for public school capital outlay purposes the same amount of money it would have spent for those purposes if it had not received the monies appropriated under this subdivision,” the bill reads.

Vance Schools Superintendent Norm Shearin held out hope for the lottery as a solution to his facility problems during an interview last month. The school system originally wanted a county bond referendum, but that plan crashed into County Manager Jerry Ayscue’s projection that a $28.1 million bond would force the property tax rate to rise by 15 cents or more per $100 of valuation.

On Monday night, the Board of Commissioners unanimously endorsed a variation on a school board request for a 1-cent increase in the sales tax rate in Vance County, to a total of 8 cents per dollar, to finance the school district’s capital needs.

Wray said he has talked to Ayscue, Crawford and Vance County’s state senator, freshman Democrat Doug Berger of Franklin County, about the local-option sales tax this week. Wray said he’s due to hold a sales tax strategy session today with Crawford, who was in St. Louis until Tuesday to cheer the University of North Carolina men’s basketball team to the national championship.

Wray said he thinks the lottery bill solves the problem the sales tax increase is meant to address — revenue for school construction — but “I’ll support what the county wants to do. They’d like to go ahead with it.”diab mp3 3amraddie vedar mp3lj addig mp3125 freedom loanpanasonic gu ringtone 87mp3 2unlimited mp3 facesringtone 120t sendmp3 3araby jamed Map