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Rep. Tricia Cotham answers a wide variety of questions when she comes home to her Charlotte district on weekends, but the state lottery pops up as a recurring theme: How does the lottery work? Why isn't it solving the budget problems?
“People are so upset about the teacher layoffs and think the lottery money should go to teachers,” said Cotham, a Democrat. “While I commend that idea, the lottery law requires that the money goes certain places.”
Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board member Ken Gjertsen encounters the same misunderstandings.
“People are paying attention and seeing lottery jackpots of $50 million or $100 million,” Gjertsen said. “They think we must be awash in money if we're paying out these jackpots.”
Gov. Bev Perdue's office has received 252 letters in the past 30 days about how lottery money is spent.
The confusion, both over where lottery money goes and how much there is, has lingered since the game's inception. The recession has transformed that puzzlement into frustration among some N.C. residents who are watching school systems cut teachers and hearing dire predictions of state spending cuts.
The lottery has sold $3.1 billion in tickets since its March 2006 launch. Half of the proceeds go to prizes, 7 percent goes to pay retailers who sell tickets, up to 8 percent for administration and advertising and about 35 percent goes to education.
The law, however, earmarks that money for four specific programs.
In a little more than three years, the lottery has funneled $1 billion to pay for the state's pre-kindergarten program, to hire additional elementary school teachers to lower class sizes in grades K to 3, to fund college scholarships and to help pay for school construction.
Earlier this year, Perdue redirected $37 million of the construction money to cover other school spending as the state's revenue plummeted.
