Lottery takes a chance on steady sales

Turns out, writing a budget for the lottery is a little bit like playing its games.

Commissioners approved a $1.27 billion budget Wednesday that relies on state residents to keep buying more tickets than ever, despite a slumping economy — a sort of game of budgetary chance. The final budget size reflects how much the lottery hopes to make in ticket sales. 

After debating the final number, commissioners picked $1.27 billion because that's how much they'd have to sell in order to be able to turn over $386 million to education programs. In other words, they started with how much profit they wanted to make and worked backwards from there.

Lottery executive director Tom Shaheen said Wednesday that the lottery had originally planned a much larger budget, but started scaling it back as ticket sales began to falter a bit this month. The lottery had enjoyed a 27 percent boost in sales thanks to higher prize payouts in the last five months.

The new budget, a 32 percent increase over the current year's budget banks on that trend continuing.

Commission member Max Cogburn argued for even more conservative estimates, saying that high gas and food prices will limit what people want to spend on luxuries like lottery tickets.

"At some point, people are going to go with bread and milk instead of lottery tickets," Cogburn said.