Complex Bill Filed May Fix Lottery Woes

There is always a “prize” for the member of the Arkansas General Assembly filing the biggest and most complex bill every session of the Legislature.

Forget about winning, all you social do- gooders and abortion- rights wanna- be bill filers. All you can hope for, with your own bill filings, is a second place finish during the 90th General Assembly.

One of your members, state Senator Jimmy Hickey, you see, has already won the prize. And he did so just two weeks away from the session’s shotgun start.

Actually, the “prize” for such a complex filing is usually absolute, stoic, silent disdain from fellow members of the House or Senate.

Many of these locally elected officials pride themselves, at least back home, on reading “most” of every bill.

But few, if any, solons will plow all the way through State Sen. Jimmy Hickey’s 89- page re- write of the state’s lottery laws.

This past week, senator Hickey, a sharp critic of the state’s lottery operations, filed this behemoth of paper. An urban senator, Hickey runs both construction and rental operations, and can’t be directly accused of promoting the state’s timber industry. But with such a prolific number of paper pages in his bill he may be suspect of doing so inadvertently.

The bill is nearly as long, if not actually longer, than the enabling legislation establishing the state scholarship lottery nearly a decade ago.

The paperwork purporting these needed changes is not nearly as long as the lengthy scholarship application and subsequent paper trail for acceptance. Thank goodness for on-line forms and data bases on these scholarships.

But at the core of the man straddling the Miller County Arkansas and Bowie County, Texas, line is this overriding question: What are our neighbors doing?

Yes, we are talking about those folks living to the southwest called Texans.

That’s the same Texans, represented by the mascot of Longhorns, our own beloved Razorbacks took to the football bowl woodshed down in Houston recently. A new trophy sits in the Fayetteville school’s locker room called The Texas Bowl Champions. Imagine that.

Sen. Hickey, like others, we are told, thinks those Texans, very simply run a better lottery.

The Texas lottery, many think, is just better run than Arkansas’ Scholarship Lottery.

Others refute these baseless claims.

There is no doubt according to a consultant’s recent findings that lots of miss-steps have been made at the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery.

First off, Arkansans hired a former South Carolina state Senator for a big whopping salary. He and that big payday are gone.

Next, the study said, the enabling legislation and constitutional amendment passed by the voters, set up a large board of citizens to “oversee” the lottery’s operation by passing the legislature, was not so good.

And lastly, the consultant’s report said the Arkansas Governor’s office needs more clout in the lottery’s operations. The governor, the report said, needs more leverage perhaps by appointing the director to directly appointing the operational board’s membership. Currently, the Governor, state Senator Pro Tempore and state House Speaker all name lottery commissioners.

This consultant, by the way, is akin to the same inter-global outfit that runs the Texas lottery.

Arkansas has its own inter-global firm of another name to advise Arkies how to sell scratchers and other cash games for our young’uns college scholarships.

What to think? Only one thing I can see.

Not everything is bigger or better down in Texas.

Just look at the 2014 Texas Bowl score as proof of that.

Woo Pig Sooie.