State Scratching For Lottery Money-Grab
The red ink has barely dried on Mecklenburg County’s recently approved budget but commissioners might soon find themselves back at the chopping block looking for more places to cut, if a proposal being floated by state legislators comes to pass.
In a shell game of grand proportions, the N.C. General Assembly is looking to withhold millions of dollars in lottery revenue due to counties, and use the proceeds instead to plug shortfalls in the state’s budget.
Senate and House budget conferees have targeted $63.5 million in lottery proceeds to be withheld from the state’s 100 counties, according to an e-mail distributed earlier this week by David Thompson, executive director of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners (NCACC).
Based on anticipated lottery sales for next year, the counties should receive about $176.5 million. Under the General Assembly’s proposed action that would be reduced to $113.5 million flowing to counties, which would then be allocated on a per-pupil basis.
The bottom line for Mecklenburg County: instead of receiving $20.2 million of lottery proceeds, it would only receive $10.7 million, for a loss of $9.4 million. That’s $9.4 million commissioners will have to scramble to fill, to rebalance their recently approved budget, if the proposal being pitched by state officials is approved.
“They’re robbing us blind,” said Mecklenburg Commissioner Bill James, a Republican. “It’s a new low for state government, which has already hit plenty of record lows.”
Legislators want to use the lottery loot taken from counties, he said, to fund teacher positions that are slated for elimination as part of the state budget.
“I don’t have a problem with them saving teachers’ jobs, but they ought to find a way to do it without stealing money that, by law, was promised to counties,” James said. “They’re a gang of cutthroat train robbers trying to come off looking like Robin Hood.”
Meanwhile counties across the state would be left short tens of millions of dollars, forcing difficult budget decisions on the local level.
“More than half of the counties have already adopted their budgets for 2010-11, and many included the full lottery share in their budgets to pay for existing debt service,” Thompson, of the NCACC, explained. “Losing any lottery revenue will create a hole in these counties’ budgets that will have to be filled by either savings from elsewhere in the budget or the use of reserve funds.”
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