Her measure proposed allowing more than 50 percent of revenues to go towards prizes for the first time. The bill, introduced by Assemblymember Mary Hayashi (D-Hayward), promised to goose lottery sales by loosening rules around jackpots. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was governor at the time, was even floating the idea of privatizing the lottery. Still, voters in 2009 soundly rejected a ballot proposition to "modernize" the lottery by emphasizing jackpots and advertising. The agency was underperforming, with per-capita sales lagging far behind states in the Midwest and on the East Coast. The outlook was bleak at the California Lottery in 2010. And they will continue climbing if the California Lottery achieves its goal of becoming the largest lottery in the country. Sales at lottery retailers from San Diego to Crescent City are on an upswing. LaunderLand has grown into one of the state's biggest lottery retailers, with sales of more than $6 million over the past two years. "I just didn't know how big of an impact it would have in our lives," Connie Chung said. And I just remember it was a day of celebration for us." She framed the first dollar spent on the lottery, which remains right behind a display case boasting dozens of varieties of scratchers. "This was a much easier thing to sell," said Connie Chung, who helps her father run the store. One man even roots through a garbage can where players toss out tickets, hoping to find an overlooked jackpot. Other players snap up scratchers from the vending machine in back. That game's draws flash on-screen every four minutes. Another group of older men sits outside, keeping an eye on a TV with the latest Hot Spot numbers. Some players buy in a steady rhythm, shuttling back and forth between the clerks and the counter as they scratch off tickets. The California Lottery is a cash business, and customers sling ones, tens and even the occasional hundred across the counter at LaunderLand. The shop serves Orange County's Little Saigon, and sells a little of everything: SIM cards, Vietnamese newspapers, soda, water, alterations and more - but the biggest draw is gambling. (Your odds are better in a casino.) And those losses are felt more acutely in certain neighborhoods: KPCC/LAist reviewed store-by-store sales data from the lottery, revealing that those booming sales happen disproportionately in census tracts that are low-income and non-white.Ĭustomers stream through the door at LaunderLand on a sunny Monday morning. The strategy relies on selling more and more tickets that are, on the whole, money losers for Californians. Lifting the cap on how much the lottery pays out in prizes "has resulted in increased net revenues available to supplement funding for public education." "This strategy has worked," Lopez wrote, referring to tickets with increased jackpots. But in an email, California Lottery spokesman Russ Lopez expressed a different viewpoint. The lottery declined our request to interview an official for this story. "But the fact that education dollars have remained pretty flat tells you that more and more what the state is doing here is running a casino, rather than funding public schools." "It doesn't surprise me that, as the state has jacked up prizes that purchasing has gone up," said Zahava Stadler of the non-profit EdBuild, which studies education funding. Is that increased churn benefitting Californians? The changes have meant that, in the current fiscal year, it took an additional $2.3 billion in ticket sales to reach the same level of support for schools, $1.6 billion, that the lottery provided in FY 2006, adjusting for inflation. So despite all the additional revenue, the money for schools has crept up more slowly. These days, just 23 cents of every dollar go towards schools. The thinking went like this: the percentage of lottery dollars going towards schools would dip, but the extra ticket sales would push the dollar amount higher. Lawmakers made the change to free up the lottery to sweeten jackpots and pump up sales, which had lagged during the Great Recession. The new mandate for school funding? To "maximize" the dollar amount. That remained the law until state legislators eliminated the requirement eight years ago. When California voters approved the lottery in 1984, they required 34 cents of every dollar go towards education.
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