$308.87 Amount the average Arkansan (over the age of 18) has spent on lottery tickets since the lottery began.
of character. The lottery has filed a motion to dismiss the case. Frazier’s colorful legal writing tells the story of an organization that repeatedly failed to follow state laws, of administrators whose actions were “willful, wanton, reckless and malicious,” and of state actors who “run roughshod over [Arkansas] citizens with impunity.” Lottery officials have, of course, disagreed formally in court filings. Sept. 28 marks the two-year anniversary of lottery ticket sales. In those two years, Arkansans have spent $900,646,436 on tickets (according to the latest figures available). Because of that, students started out the 2010-2011 school year with a combined $123,024,759 in scholarship funds. But the lottery has been plagued by what former Lt. Gov. Bill Halter has charitably called “administrative hiccups” — a chief financial officer unfamiliar with generally accepted accounting principles, punitive IRS fines totaling nearly $100,000, unfavorable legislative audit findings and two attempts to oust an executive director who eventually decided to deprive lottery commissioners of the opportunity to give it a third try. Once the Arkansas Lottery has had a few years to mature, it will be easier to look back on Passailaigue’s tenure and come to a conclusion as to whether or not the decisions he made on behalf of the state were beneficial or somewhere short of that mark. One thing is for certain: two years ago things were much brighter for the lottery director. Early media scrutiny was mostly limited to his hefty salary of $324,000 a year, a sum that lured him away from the same position in South Carolina. Passailaigue was charged with getting the lottery up and running quickly, and he did — some might say with undue haste. To hear him tell it, Arkansas’s lottery enjoyed a quicker startup than any other lottery in American history. Shortly before midnight on Sept. 27, 2009, people took their place in convenience store queues to throw money down on shiny new scratch-off tickets while visions of dollar signs danced in their heads. That first day, the lottery sold an estimated $1.2 million worth of tickets and handed out over $725,000 in prizes. At a launch ceremony held at a Murphy Oil station in Little Rock, Passailaigue handed a cigar to Halter, the man who will likely go down in history as the father of the Arkansas Lottery, and said, “We just birthed the lottery.” Times were good.
THAT’S:
$161.15
PER YEAR
SPENDERS Lowest spending counties
$3
PER WEEK
$1,852,846
$1,474,359
$1,492,009
$1,361,278
$755,353
Montgomery
Newton
Calhoun
Fulton
Lafayette
Highest spending counties
Faulkner
PER DAY
Not even two months would pass before the lottery’s attorney, Frazier, was fired. She alleged she was terminated for expressing concerns about lottery personnel practices to the attorney general’s office. She claims she was denied due process in her forced termination. Officially not much was said, by either Frazier or the lottery, at the time of her departure. But it was the first indication that things might not be running so smoothly at lottery headquarters.
Taking stock
$184,475,327
$33,198,450
44¢
$35,779,829 $36,657,661
Saline
Washington
$42,625,981
Jefferson
Pulaski
“Shortly before midnight on Sept. 27, 2009, people took their place in convenience store queues to throw money down on shiny new scratch-off tickets while visions of dollar signs danced in their heads.”
The night the lottery began, Halter bought a few lottery tickets to give out as mementos and souvenirs to some of the people who helped him take the lottery from an idea, to a ballot initiative, through the legislative process and into a $460,000,000 a year enterprise. He says that since that time he’s probably only purchased a couple of tickets. “Any time that I do, I realize that win or lose, there’s a student in Arkansas that’s winning,” Halter says. Two years in, Halter says he doesn’t have any regrets and thinks the lottery has done exactly what it set out to accomplish. “Ultimately this is about improving access to higher education in Arkansas,” he says. “That was the reason that we put so much at stake here. I think we can say that that has absolutely been a success. The number of those applying to colleges has gone up dramatically as has the number of those admitted. Certainly in the first year there were over 31,000 scholarship recipients; the second year will be a comparable number. Freshman admission to the University of Arkansas is up by 53 percent over the last two years. It’s hard to argue with those numbers.” During the campaign for the ballot initiative, Halter would tell questioning crowds that the lottery would triple the amount of state-funded financial aid. And it did. For the 2009-2010 school year, Arkansas Department of Higher Education statistics show the state spent $54,217,865 on financial aid. In 2010-2011, the total was $157,000,324. It’s also important to remember another thing Halter said in 2009: The lottery is “not a silver bullet” that will cure all that ails the educational system in Arkansas. Halter says one major problem facing the state, and the nation, is the cost of higher education. CONTINUED ON PAGE 14 www.arktimes.com SEPTEMBER 21, 2011 13