ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 22, 1997 TAG: 9704220087
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: ALEXANDRIA
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
MEMO: NOTE: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.
The Virginia Lottery brought in $332 million in profits for the state last year.
Two candidates for the Republican nomination for attorney general surprised their two opponents and state officials by saying they would like to scrap the state lottery.
Former public safety secretary Jerry Kilgore said the state broke its promise made when the lottery was approved 10 years ago to return profits to localities. State Sen. Mark Earley says the gambling is just plain immoral.
By attacking the lottery, both candidates stand to gain points with the state's most conservative voters, a cadre of committed GOP activists who could wield considerable clout in the party's four-way June 10 primary, one expert says.
Religious conservatives tend to oppose the lottery. They also tend to show up at the polls for primary elections, when turnout is expected to be very low, said Mark Rozell, an American University political science professor.
``These candidates are playing to a relatively small core of Republican activists in the electorate,'' said Rozell, author of a book about the Christian conservative movement in Virginia.
``These voters tend to be much more socially conservative than the general voting population,'' Rozell said Monday. ``This proposal would be a loser in a general election but it has the potential to mobilize large numbers of social conservatives in a Republican primary.''
Kilgore said recently that the state should re-examine whether to keep the lottery. ``If they're not willing to bring the money back, we have to do away with it.''
Earley, from Chesapeake, said: ``I do think we have too much state-sponsored gambling.''
The other candidates, Sen. Kenneth Stolle of Virginia Beach, and Fairfax lawyer Gil Davis, said Friday during a Roanoke forum sponsored by the Virginia Federation of Republican Women that they would not push to repeal the lottery.
The winning GOP candidate will face Democrat William Dolan in November.
Kilgore and Earley brushed off suggestions that their proposals were an overture toward the Republican right.
``I'm talking about what good public policy should be,'' Earley said.
The lottery sold $924 million in tickets last year. Lotto, the scratch-off ticket games and the other Virginia Lottery offerings brought in $332 million in profits for the state last year.
``Our job is to bring in money, and we feel like we're doing a good job,'' said Penelope Kyle, lottery executive director. ``I can't imagine that the general public or the majority of the General Assembly are ready to turn their backs on this kind of impact.''
Neither Earley nor Kilgore suggested a way to make up that money.
``It is truly alarming that we would have a candidate for statewide office advocating something that would cost at least a quarter-billion dollars a year,'' state Sen. Joseph Gartlan Jr., D-Fairfax said.
Gartlan helped fashion the final lottery bill in the General Assembly in 1987. The lottery was then approved by voters during a referendum that year.
Gartlan said the legislature always intended the money to go into the general fund.
Kyle said neither Kilgore nor Earley told her they opposed the lottery, or said they planned to make it a campaign issue. Until Monday, Kyle said, she had never considered how the lottery might be scrapped.
A hurried, informal opinion from the attorney general's office Monday said abolishing the games would require a law passed by the General Assembly and signed by the governor, Kyle said. Voters could be consulted via a referendum, but that would not be required, she said.
If elected, neither Kilgore nor Earley could move against the lottery alone. Earley has not proposed legislation abolishing it during his tenure in the Senate.
No state has repealed a lottery since the first modern state lottery began in New Hampshire in 1964, according to a lottery trade group.
``There have always been opponents to lotteries as well as other forms of gambling, but I don't believe it's even come up as a proposal to repeal a lottery once it's in place,'' said David Gale, executive director of the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries.
Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia sponsor lotteries, Gale said.
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS ATTORNEY GENERALby CNB