Tuesday, July 04, 2000
Ohio Lottery's profits fall for fourth consecutive year
By
The Associated Press
COLUMBUS — Lottery profits fell for a fourth consecutive year, the Ohio Lottery said Monday as it prepared to roll out a new game that it hoped would end the slide permanently.
The lottery earned $686 million in the fiscal year that ended Friday. That's $10 million below last year and $63 million below the high of $749 million in 1997, according to preliminary figures released by the Ohio Lottery Commission.
By law, all lottery profits go to the Ohio Department of Education, where they account for about 6 percent of total state education spending.
Although overall sales were up slightly, declining sales of Super Lotto tickets contributed to the decline in profits almost single-handedly, lottery spokeswoman Sandra Lesko Mounts said.
The lottery on Sunday begins selling tickets to Super Lotto Plus, which has its first drawing July 15. The game offers more chances to win bigger jackpots.
“In our minds, we're charac terizing this as stabilizing the downturn,” Ms. Lesko Mounts said.
The lottery had sales of $2.150 billion in the fiscal year that ended Friday, compared with $2.145 billion the year before, representing an increase of $5 million, or 0.23 percent.
Ohio's Lottery Profit Review Commission has recommended that Ohio join a multistate game such as Powerball or the Big Game to increase sales. Gov. Bob Taft supports that idea as a way to stabilize lottery profits.
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