Numbers game
You probably already know that the Senate put out its budget bill today. We'll have a story in tomorrow's paper that details some of the goodies in there for Guilford County.
Senate leaders hope to pass the bill this week, putting the budget ball into the House's court next week.
In addition to hiking cigarette taxes to 40-cents a pack, the Senate budget bill creates a state lottery...sort of.
By way of back-story, the House has already narrowly passed a lottery on a vote of 61-59. Backers are worried that if the Senate monkeys with the bill and the House has to vote again, lottery opponents might gain strength and kill the bill.
Budget insiders have been saying for a while that senators would include a lottery in their version of the budget in an effort to help it pass. What we didn’t know until today is exactly what they were up to.
The budget bill lays out how money for a lottery would be spent and other provisions governing how the thing would be wrong. But all that language is contingent on a lottery already being in place.
What gives?
The conventional wisdom (read: the chatter among the reporters at the capitol who are much, much smarter than I am) is that this is a way to allow senators who might not like the House version of the lottery bill to vote for it.
Confused? Yeah, I was too at first. But the game plan would look like this: The Senate could vote to pass the House version of the bill unadulterated, so the House wouldn't have to vote again. Presumably that would happen before a final version of the budget was hammered out.
With the lottery enacted, the language in the Senate's version of the budget would be triggered. Of course, the House is unlikely to include those provisions on the version of the budget it'll pass.
That's where conference committees come in. When the House and Senate pass two different versions of the same bill, they have to work out a compromise that both houses pass before sending it on to the governor. On the budget, there's virtually always a conference.
By including the lottery language in their budget, Senators shift the conference battle from being on a single piece of legislation that members might just feel free to reject to a bill that's too big and important to fail.
Sen. Tony Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat stopped by the press room to 'splain this to us reporter types. The voice you'll hear asking the most questions is not mine, it's Seth Effron, a former News & Record reporter who now is Executive Editor of State Government Radio.
You'll notice that Rand is a bit coy in answering tactical questions in this clip.