Fitzsimon File

Lotto fever. Hold on, here comes the massive blitz from lottery supporters. Monday night House Speaker Jim Black will announce a special legislative committee to consider the lottery and promises a floor vote, raising the question of why bother with a committee?

Reportedly, longtime Democratic consultant Gary Pearce has been hired by pro lottery forces and will work with a Washington consulting firm to try to get the lottery through the house.

Black says the vote will come in the next two weeks and he will only support the lottery if all the proceeds are spent on education. At a Thursday press conference, Black mentioned several initiatives that may get some of the lottery money, class size reduction, More-at-Four, school construction, and the Leandro decision about disadvantaged schools.

Black is clearly uncomfortable with lottery advertising, saying that he wants restrictions on advertising and doesn’t want the state to send the message that lottery tickets are a good investment instead of just discretionary spending.

Virginia lawmakers had the same concerns and prohibited advertising when they established a lottery. A few years later the advertising ban was removed because the novelty of the lottery had worn off and lottery sales slowed down.

It is difficult to imagine a lottery in North Carolina without aggressive advertising to keep revenue coming in. Black says he knows that revenue will decrease and doesn’t care. But others will and the appeal of bringing in more lottery dollars with manipulative advertising will be impossible to resist, just like in Virginia.

Speaking of discretionary spending, the lottery buzz is pushing the controversy about the $20 million controlled by legislative leaders off the front pages. The issue is certainly not going away because of any public relations genius from Black and his Co-Speaker last session, Republican Richard Morgan. Morgan, Black and Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight have said that the projects funded from the discretionary are worthy of financial support. That’s true.

The problem is the process. The money appears in some cases to have been directed to legislators’ districts to help their campaigns, like the reelection effort of Rep. Julia Howard’s, a strong Morgan supporter. Morgan’s response was “I don’t shy away from the politics of any thing we do here. The legislature is political. If it helped Rep. Howard, so what? “

So why should taxpayer money be used to influence an election, that’s what.

Lobbying reform efforts got a boost this week. Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight told the N.C. Professional Lobbyists Association Wednesday that he thinks lobbyists should be prohibited from buying legislators dinner.

That weeping you heard was from the owners of Raleigh’s most expensive restaurants. House Speaker Jim Black was less specific but said he thought some type of lobbying reform would pass this session.

Sen. Fred Smith, a likely candidate for Governor in 2008, ought to check the way his email is set up. If you email Sen. Smith, you generally get back an automated response that thanks you and then says, “I agree with you and sponsored a bill yesterday entitled Taxpayers’ Protection Act…”

Judging from the bills he has introduced. The Fitzsimon File doubts that Senator Smith agrees with many of the views expressed here, for example that the Taxpayer’s Protection Act is terrible public policy and would devastate North Carolina. Wonder if that will prompt another email from Sen. Smith agreeing.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2005 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.