Halter offers lottery principles
Posted on Thursday, December 18, 2008
Halter
Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who proposed and led the campaign to adopt a lottery amendment in Arkansas, unveiled Wednesday nine principles he said should govern the development of the state's lotteries, including launching the lottery scholarships next fall with funds now on hand as surplus scholarship funds.
Gov. Mike Beebe said later he didn't like the idea of using existing scholarship funds to get the lottery scholarship program rolling and wasn't ready to go along with "reinventing the wheel" on state scholarships.
Beebe's opposition is not something Arkansas political figures take lightly. With two decades of experience in the state Senate and four years as attorney general, Beebe, governor the past two years, has proved to be popular with legislators and the public. He has a wealth of knowledge about state government and savvy about political hot potatoes.
He's also looking at the prospect of an economic downturn that has already prompted him to take a cautious approach toward shaping the state budget for the next two fiscal years, even proposing reliance on surplus funds to finance general ongoing operations for such things as the Medicaid program and prisons.
Under Halter's suggestion, part of the existing surplus scholarship funds would be used to launch the lottery scholarships in August for students entering Arkansas' colleges for the 2009-2010 school year before the state's lottery even begins selling tickets.
"We have a sense of urgency about this" because the state ranks 48th in the nation in the percentage of adults with college degrees, Halter said in an interview. "The voters have voted overwhelmingly to address this problem."
The state has more than $50 million in unspent scholarship funds and part of that could be used, Halter said.
The governor strongly opposes using those dollars for lottery scholarships because he remembers that in 2002, when he was in the Senate, the state fell short of funding part of the existing program, the Academic Challenge scholarships, Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said.
Beebe respects Halter's work but "we do not agree with his proposed principles for the lottery," DeCample said. The governor feels that the state should take the existing programs and find ways to enhance and improve them with lottery revenue, DeCample said.
The governor supports using lottery revenue to increase the amounts and expand the eligibility for existing need-based grant and merit-based scholarship programs and for scholarships in fields of study such as science, engineering, math and nursing.
"By taking the current structure we have and improving and expanding it, we can address the scholarship needs that we have to ensure that they get to the Arkansas students who need them and earn them," DeCample said.
Beebe "is strongly against new scholarship programs that would tap [surplus scholarship money] before we had any lottery revenue," DeCample said.
In January 2006 Halter announced his bid against Beebe for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination before switching in March 2006 to run for lieutenant governor.
Incoming House Speaker Robbie Wills, D-Conway, said he's discussed with Halter the possibility of starting to hand out the lottery scholarships next fall.
"The concept I think is appealing," he said. "We certainly want to provide opportunities as quickly as we can. The question is how do we go about paying for that. We'll have a pretty healthy General Improvement Fund [which gets state surplus money] balance during this session that could be used to loan money to the lottery that will be paid back once lottery tickets are sold."
Incoming Senate President Pro Tempore Bob Johnson, DBigelow, said the ideas of Halter and others will be considered by the Legislature in crafting Arkansas' lotteries.
Halter said the lottery could begin selling tickets in October, November or December of next year or January 2010 at the latest.
"This is a process that is going to evolve, so rather than put out draft legislation at this point when I am still meeting with individual members of the Legislature, I felt like it was important to put this out because [there] will be almost no time between now and actually entering the legislative session," Halter said.
He said he's always respectful that the Legislature has to put together the legislation creating the lotteries.
But Sen. Mary Anne Salmon, D-North Little Rock, one of several senators researching state lotteries, said she "would rather take our time and get it right rather than hurry it up just for the sake of getting some scholarships out there and messing it up.
"There is not much [Halter] can do until we do something because he is not part of the Legislature."
One of the principles laid out by Halter was that graduating high school seniors who achieve a certain minimum grade-point average below 3.0 be automatically eligible for a scholarship of an undetermined amount if they enroll at a certified two-year or four-year college in Arkansas.
There probably would be different criteria for nontraditional students, such as adults returning to college for retraining, he said.
Halter also came up with a term for the awards - Hope scholarships. He led the campaign for the lottery amendment through a committee he dubbed the Hope for Arkansas committee.
Other proposals Halter summarized:
A state-owned Arkansas Lottery Corp. governed by an independent board of directors could manage daily operations of the lottery without the taint of politics. An efficient nonpolitical structure is necessary to achieve maximum scholarship levels, he said.
The corporation should be selffunded and self-sustaining and have allowance for start-up debt and terms of repayment, he said.
A two-year ban on lottery-related lobbying should be established for former lottery corporation employees and board members, and no gifts, not even a cup of coffee, should be allowed to be given from any lottery vendor to any lottery corporation employee or board member.
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