The lottery gap

Portland State’s athletics department has recently run into a problem—their budget is $300,000 short. This kind of budgeting problem could, and should, have been foreseen.

Athletic Director Torre Chrisholm believes the problem stems from a decrease in lottery revenue due to the indoor smoking ban instituted last year. Lottery funds have long been an essential resource for the funding of public programs like job creation, public parks or education.

Thanks to a 1995 amendment, 67 percent of lottery profits are directed towards education, with a portion of that going to the public universities. The Oregon Lottery’s Web site even cites intercollegiate athletics as a benefactor of lottery funds.

The smoking bans can affect lottery revenues by reducing the amount of time people spend in front of the machines because they cannot sit and smoke anymore. Therefore, the amount of money those people would potentially be paying to the lottery, which would then go to fund public programs, begins to decline.

Some folks, such as the Providence Heart and Vascular Institute’s Director of the Coronary Care Unit Ty Gluckman, prefer to blame the decrease in lottery funds solely on the recent recession. Gluckman and his contemporaries have a point, to be sure, but it would be foolish to think that the recession is the only cause.

Folks with this mindset, such as Gluckman, need only turn their attention toward the Indian casinos, which are exempt from the 2010 smoking ban. The Oregon Indian Casinos, even in the face of recession, had only a 1.2 percent decline in revenue last year, whereas the Oregon Lottery’s weekly video poker revenues are down 20 percent from last year according to OPB.

Bar owners like Jim Prenty, who owns the Home Turf Sports Bar in Tigard, was quoted in a Beaverton Valley Times article as saying that “sales are down 50 percent since the smoking ban was instated.” That is not the kind of revenue decline that can simply be blamed on the recession.

Smoking is an easy target. Passing laws against the big, bad smokers seems to be no difficult task as of late. But it seems that legislators, in their fervor to scapegoat smoking, neglected to consider the wide range effects that such a ban may cause.

Budget holes were created by, among other things, Oregon’s smoking ban—that was to be expected. The problem, however, is that no one decided it was important to address how those holes would be filled, leaving PSU’s Athletics Department wanting for $300,000.

Funds for important public programs, like college athletics for example, should be coming from a reliable source. If a source becomes unreliable, a new one needs to be found. It should not have been a great surprise to anyone that picking on smoking in bars would directly affect lottery revenues.

Apparently scapegoat-ing is easier than careful planning and consideration of budgets and economic development. Lawmakers can and should have seen this coming. Perhaps they just don’t care, or they just didn’t think about it because picking on smokers was too easy.