Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 13, 1992                   TAG: 9203130529
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

JOB SECURITY FOR LADY LUCK

No, indeed. A wave of her wand in the lottery's TV commercials is worth a wad of dough for state government. No messin' round with this cream puff, says the General Assembly. Lady Luck should have job security.

So it was that the two-year budget given final approval by the legislature last Saturday was stripped of an amendment, passed earlier by the House of Delegates, that would have cut the lottery department's advertising budget by $44 million.

The amendment, sponsored by Del. Tommy Baker, R-Dublin, caused quite a stir. It represented the first time in decades that delegates significantly altered on the House floor a budget proposed by their hoity-toity Appropriations Committee. It was something of a participatory-government breakthrough.

Obscured by the procedural precedent, though, were good reasons for reducing the lottery's ad budget.

Virginia's advertisement of its lottery, according to the Appropriations Committee, has become a $56 million behemoth. That's a heap of money, especially in times when state services have been cut, state employees have gone without pay raises and some are losing their jobs.

The lottery department's overall budget is based on a straight percentage of lottery revenues. The more that people play the lottery, the more it can spend on advertising. The money it now spends buys not an occasional TV spot, but two, three or more on the tube every evening. Plus radio plugs every day and big spreads in newspapers.

Indeed, lottery advertisement comes awfully close to, if it hasn't already overstepped, the legal line between informing the public and inducing people to gamble. The latter is prohibited by state law - but Lady Luck, fruitcake-cutie though she may be, is sounding the siren's call.

The final budget for 1992-1994 does trim the sails of the lottery department - but only by about $6 million. That will hardly bring tears to Lady Luck's eyes.

Lawmakers apparently were reluctant to cut further, in part because the state is now hooked on lottery revenue. When fiscal shortfalls landed on Virginia's doorstep three years ago, former Gov. Gerald Baliles' sensible plan - to use lottery proceeds as a bonus, for capital projects - went out the window. Baliles warned against relying on the whims of game-players to finance the state's general fund.

Which is exactly what the legislature now does. With the lottery a major undergirding of the general-fund budget, lawmakers fear a fall-off in funds if they cut advertising.

Their mistake is to believe they need so much advertising to keep the proceeds coming. They don't. Meantime, the money is badly needed for other uses.

Never mind, for the moment, schools, child-health services and the like. Consider just advertising.

While lottery advertising may soar above $50 million in the next biennium, the assembly agreed to spend $1 million a year to advertise for industrial development. A whole million.

Well, that's better than zero - which is what the state spent in the past two years on industrial-development advertising. But such promotion used to be considered an important inducement for revenue growth.

Now we leave economic development, like general-fund revenues, to Lady Luck.