Fitzsimon File

The North Carolina Lottery Oversight Committee met for the first time Friday morning, almost two years after the General Assembly voted to establish it, with promises that it would ensure accountability in how lottery revenues are spent.

The Governor, Senate President Pro Tem and Speaker of the House each appoint three members of the nine-member committee. No legislators serve on the panel

Most of Friday's initial meeting was spent on presentations by legislative staff about the lottery expenses and revenues and how the money is allocated to class size reduction, More at Four, school construction and college scholarships.

It was a lottery primer, though there were a few notable omissions. Committee members trying to understand all the numbers were not told that last year's general fund budget spent $94 million to offset the expected shortfall in lottery revenues.

They did hear that while lottery revenues are up from last year, current budget projections show the lottery could fall $20 million short again, requiring more general fund dollars to make up the difference.

Several committee members asked how they are supposed to figure out if the lottery is providing new funding for education and More at Four or merely supplanting existing funding. That is one of the specific tasks for the committee according to the law that created it.

Committee member Ronald Copley asked John Pruette, who oversees More At Four, how committee members could know what the program's funding would be if the lottery didn't exist. It was funded before the lottery passed and has received non-lottery funding in addition to lottery proceeds in the last two years.

Copley tried several times to get an answer and Pruette responded with descriptions of complicated federal regulations and reassurances that every dollar was accounted for, good news surely, but not an answer to the question.

Pruette finally admitted that there is no way to know how much money lawmakers would spend on More at Four if the lottery wasn't funding it, which is the only answer possible, pointing out the problem with using lottery revenues for ongoing programs.

Not only is the General Fund on the hook when the notoriously unpredictable lottery revenues fall short of projections, no one can definitively say that lottery is not simply replacing current funding for programs. 

There did appear to be consensus among committee members and the legislative staff that the higher lottery revenues the better. That's a far cry from the original plan, to let people in North Carolina play the lottery instead of crossing the border into other states to spend their money.

Now the policy is to get more and more people to play, even if it's not in their best interest. The state is now a huckster, telling people they can get rich quick if they will only buy another ticket.  Sure makes you proud, doesn't it?

At least the much-heralded oversight committee finally met and plans to meet again in August. While committee members can never guarantee that lottery revenues are not simply replacing existing funding for education and More at Four, the more they discuss it, the better.

They will eventually realize that there is some identifiable supplanting involved with the lottery, the supplanting of raising money honestly with enticing people to buying lottery tickets. 

Pollsters and political pundits are still poring over Tuesday's election results, looking for trends and clues to help them analyze the races in the November general election.

This week brought a couple of reminders of a potential problem with Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory's campaign to be the first Republican governor since Jim Martin won reelection 20 years ago. McCrory not only seems prone to making misstatements, but bristles when confronted with them.

A News & Observer story on the state commission looking at state policy of preserving email in accordance with public records laws quotes Charlotte City Attorney Mac McCarley saying Charlotte officials avoid sending some emails because they didn't want the communication to become public. 

McCrory seems to have first challenged the newspaper's account, claiming that McCarley didn't really say that. But it was on tape. The story reports that McCrory's backup response was to call McCarley a bureaucrat before promising to preserve emails as governor.  

Not long after McCrory announced his candidacy he made two claims about immigration that didn't stand up to fact checking either. McCrory said that 20 percent of the inmates in the Mecklenburg County Jail are illegal immigrants who have committed a crime and that more than half the babies born at the Carolinas Medical Center are Latino.

Turns out that neither the Sheriff's department nor the hospital can attest to the accuracy of McCrory's claims because they don't keep those kinds of records. 

McCrory told the Observer that a hospital official, who he declined to identify, gave him the information about the births and that the former Sheriff was the source of his claim about the nationality of the inmates.

But neither place keeps those numbers, so there is no way for McCrory or anyone else to know them. McCrory said at the time that he might update his numbers and told the Observer that it's all part of the problem with the immigration issue, that "estimates are often wrong."

Friday afternoon McCrory put out a statement blasting Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue for supporting the policy of community college officials to allow undocumented students to enroll if they pay out of state tuition.

The problem is that Perdue shares McCrory' shortsighted view that the students should be denied the opportunity to continue their education, even if they are paying more in tuition than it costs the state to educate them. 

McCrory is not only wrong about the policy, he's wrong about Perdue's position on it.

The Associated Press reports that McCrory's campaign didn't return calls asking for clarification. Maybe he will say that some unidentified official told him about Perdue's position. Or he will just call her a bureaucrat and move on to the next claim.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.