Fitzsimon File

Lottery trouble looming in the Senate. For the last several years, the assumption about the lottery in Raleigh has been that if it passed the House, it was all but guaranteed to pass the Senate. Turns out that assumption may be wrong.

The Senate hasn’t voted on the lottery since 1995 and this Senate is much like the House when it come to the lottery, with a coalition of Republicans and progressive Democrats that may have enough votes to defeat it.

Many Senators are understandably concerned about the possibility that the House bill opens the door for other forms of state-sponsored gambling like video poker and slot machines.

Senator Kay Hagan supports the lottery but said Thursday that she is worried it will make it hard to pass local education bonds, since people will believe the lottery is taking care of schools. She ought to be worried. That is exactly what has happened in other states.

Senators now also have more evidence that lottery money may not be used to build new schools or provide new money for education after all. The Superintendent of the Cumberland County Schools told his local paper that he thinks his system will get $8 million from the lottery and that the money will go to pay off a bond so county commissioners would not have to raise taxes.

Pay off a bond to avoid a tax increase? Is that why lawmakers want a lottery?.

And finally, one House Democrat warned late in the week that the Senate better not change the lottery bill. That would require another House vote that he says would be difficult to win.

The lottery may still pass the Senate, but it’s not going to be nearly as easy as folks thought in the euphoria after Wednesday’s vote in the House.

The full Senate is expected to vote on a proposal next week to toughen the state’s lobbying laws by capping at $100 the amount a lobbyist can spend on a legislator during a session and requiring lobbyists to report all the money they spend trying to influence lawmakers.

The Senate Finance Committee passed the bill Wednesday after the discussion turned into a series of hypothetical situations that became increasingly hard to follow. One Senator wanted to know how the bill would affect him if he played in a charity golf tournament with his Rotary Club and was paired with the President of the local bank. Would he have to report the round?

The answer of course is that legislators don’t report expenditures, lobbyists do and merely talking to someone also participating in a charity event hardly fits under the reporting requirements.

That was one of the simpler scenarios in the committee’s game of stump the staff. Senator David Hoyle wanted to know if he played golf with a lobbyist at the lobbyist’s country club, would the lobbyist have to report paying Hoyle’s green fees.

He was told yes. But then Hoyle was worried that some clubs require the member to pay the fees, at which point someone came up with the not too obvious answer that Hoyle could simply reimburse the lobbyist for the green fees.

Undaunted, Hoyle was still worried about the bill, and said “before I can give him the reimbursements I could be indicted.” Wonder if the lobbyist police have their own golf carts?

Here’s a quote that sounds familiar “I’m not going to dismantle this state, and I’m not going to jeopardize our bond rating and I’m not going to reduce my emphasis on education.”

That was Idaho’s Republican Governor Dirk Kempthorne, in a story in the New York Times about Republicans who have abandoned their no-new taxes pledge to push for tax increases in their state.

Wonder when the no-new-tax-pledgers in North Carolina will learn?

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2005 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.