Friday was the end of the road for the idea of introducing a statewide lottery in Alabama, after a bill proposed by Governor Robert Bentley failed to clear its final hurdle – the Alabama Senate. The Senators voted 24-7 against a motion by the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jim McClendon to back changes that were made by the House and turn the bill into law. The bill had previously cleared both legislative chambers but required the support of at least 21 senators in its final lap.
“The lottery bill for the 2016 special session is dead,” said McClendon in a press release after the vote this weekend. “The people of Alabama have been denied the right to vote on a lottery. The people of Alabama made it clear that’s what they would like the opportunity to do. After the bill passed out of the House with a favorable vote, the Senate ultimately, killed that opportunity.”
The bill died because the Democrats withdrew their support at the last moment as they wanted the bill to include language which would allow electronic machines at state dog tracks. They said that the bill’s current language gave the Poarch Band of Creek Indians a monopoly on state gambling. The fragile coalition then fell apart after some of the Republican senators defected from the bill, thus causing a domino effect and the end of the Alabama lottery bill for 2016.
The failure to advance Alabama’s lottery bill places a giant question mark over Alabama’s struggling Medicaid program which serves at least one million citizens. The new lottery was meant to feed the Medicaid fund.
Governor Bentley said on Friday that “the vote today was not a vote against my bill; it was not a vote against me.
“It was a vote against those children, those half a million children out there that are in poverty today because their health insurance is being jeopardized by the fact the Legislature did not take up this bill and let the people of Alabama solve this decades-old problem,” he said.
If the lottery bill had been approved by voters in November, it would have seen 90% of net lottery revenue directed to the state General Fund, with the first $100 million going to Medicaid, and the other 10% directed to education.
Bentley said that he could not believe that the Legislature would not allow the people of Alabama to vote on the issue. “I just believe that the Legislature needs to trust the people more,” he said.
