Legislators were so eager to take up the administration’s lottery leasing proposal (and in the process reaffirm their opposition to it) that three committees have scheduled testimony on it this week.
Trouble is, the administration isn’t ready to make the rounds of committees to testify on the lottery. Committees have been told that will have to wait until after the governor’s proposed budget is done. Gov. Jim Douglas delivers his budget address Tuesday.
Two committees nonetheless went forward with testimony from other people on the topic today.
I would suggest that in the second committee, particularly, it strongly would have behooved the members to wait, but three factors prevented that:
1) Legislators resent that the administration isn’t available when they want them to be, and don’t cotton to being told to wait, especially to hear an administration proposal.
2) Legislators, particularly those in the Democratic majority but Republicans too, fairly strongly oppose this proposal and are eager to discredit it. One doesn’t need testimony from supporters of the proposal to accomplish that.
3) If the administration is going to count on $50 million in upfront money from leasing the lottery in its budget proposal, legislators need to start thinking about that.
Not all committees are created equal, though, and here is the evidence of that:
Testimony started early Wednesday in the House Ways & Means Committee – 8:30 a.m. and this is one committees that starts on time. The committee heard from Treasurer Jeb Spaulding, Vermont Council on Problem Gambling Director Joy Mitchell, a representative of the Tax Foundation and the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office.
Committee members had read the Lehman Bros. report that pitches the proposal to Vermont. Though they had not heard direct testimony from the administration, they were familiar with the proposal, which has been out for more than two months. They fairly efficiently collected facts that they can pair later with testimony from the administration.
Downstairs, the Senate Government Operations Committee heard from Spaulding, Lottery Commission Chairwoman Martha O’Connor and Lottery Director Alan Yandow. Yandow was reluctant to say anything about the proposal, as he described it as too vague. The committee made no attempt to take advantage of the fact that Mitchell was already in the building to hear from her. In fact, committee members seemed not to know that she or her gambling council exists.
More alarmingly, they hadn’t read the Lehman Bros. report and some didn’t seem to know there was a report. That suggests that though they also don’t read the newspaper or listen to the radio, where this report has been talked about. What that lack of preparation meant was that they spent a fair amount of their time bantering about misinformation and seeking information from people who weren’t in a position to know it.
- Terri Hallenbeck
