Schools likely to get less from Florida Lottery in coming year

By Gary Fineout

A new forecast is projecting that the Florida Lottery will produce less money than anticipated for schools next year.

The lottery -- which has been hit by the recession -- has seen its overall sales drop from a high of $4.2 billion back in 2008. Lottery officials have turned to Powerball and a bevy of new scratch-off games in an effort to keep sales relatively steady.

State economists met on Friday and drew up a new set of forecasts that show that the overall sales are expected to be $3.92 billion in the current budget year and $3.96 billion in the 2011 budget year.

But the total amount going to education is expected to be $1.180 billion during the budget year that ends next June -- and $1.186 billion the following year. That’s a growth rate of less than one half of one percent and about $24.5 million less than what economists had projected this past summer.

The new forecasts show that scratch-off games, Cash 3 and a new online game called Lucky Lines were all expected to grow in the coming year. But projections for both Lotto and Powerball show a significant decline. A 10 percent decline in Lotto sales is forecast over the next two years, while Powerball sales are projected to go down by more than 7 percent by 2012.
Florida Lottery Secretary Leo DiBenigno said on Monday that the “small impact” to school funding is because the state winds up paying more to those who play scratch-off games than those who play Lotto or Powerball.

“What I always remind people about these revenue estimates is that the Lottery or the Legislature can’t control which lottery games players choose," DiBenigno said. “For the most part, and this may be obvious, players don’t play the lottery for the purely altruistic reason of funding public education programs. That is certainly an ancillary positive benefit. People play the lottery predominately to win prizes, and on average there are more prizes in our scratch-off tickets.”

Florida voters first approved the Florida Lottery back in 1986. Sales remained just above about $2 billion for the '90s but the Lottery grew and expanded under former Gov. Jeb Bush growing from $2.11 billion during his first year in office to nearly $4 million when he left.

Originally published in the Florida Current - exclusively distributed via Lobbytools - Florida's Premiere Legislative and Media Monitoring Service.

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