News-Record.com

Good morning. A few lottery tidbits to start your week, whether you like it or not:

• From Sunday's paper, this story summarizes the fun and games from the past couple weeks. It also quotes a bunch of people saying that the lottery is going to move forward, despite the bad publicity.

• The lottery commission's vendor selection committee met this morning to talk about how they might go about finding companies to help the state run the game.

Unfortunately for the folks on that subcommittee, without an executive director on board and some other decisions that the full commission needs to make, they can't do a whole lot.

One thing that did become apparent from this morning's meeting is that the timeline for having a lottery up and running is getting longer and longer.

Immediately after the lottery bill was signed, supporters in the General Assembly said that they thought a lottery could be up and running by January or February.

But commission member Robert Farris, who heads the vendor selection subcommittee, said that he didn't think than an executive director would be in place until sometime in December.

And, he said, the state would not issue an RFP for anyone to do any work for the lottery until the executive director has had a chance to look over the RFPs. To boot, he said the shortest amount of time possible from issuing the RFP to having tickets sold would be on the order of four months.

That would put the earliest possible start of a lottery sometime in April, maybe, if everything goes really well.