By John Lyon and Rob Moritz
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — Identical versions of legislation to establish Arkansas’ scholarship lottery sailed through the House and Senate on Wednesday.
The bills passed 99-0 in the House and 35-0 in the Senate. Each bill goes to the other chamber.
“You don’t get much better than a unanimous vote in the House,” House Speaker Robbie Wills, D-Conway, said after the vote. Rep. Dan Greenberg, R-Little Rock, was not present in the chamber for the vote.
Wills said he expected the legislation to go through committees Thursday and receive final passage on Monday.
“Hopefully the governor will sign it without delay after that,” he said.
The legislation would create a nine-member commission and a legislative oversight committee to oversee lottery operations. It proposes a sliding scale in which scholarship amounts would depend on the amount of revenue the lottery generates.
Students would be required to have a 2.5 grade point average or score a 19 on the ACT to be eligible for a lottery scholarship and maintain a 2.5 GPA in college to keep it.
The legislation also sets a salary for the lottery director of $141,603, which the legislative oversight panel could authorize raising to about $354,000. It also would impose a two-year “cooling-off” period before former lottery employees could lobby on lottery-related issues.
Testifying before House and Senate committees Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who led a successful drive to get the lottery amendment on the 2008 general election ballot, complained that scholarship amounts were too low, the director’s salary could go too high and ethics provisions should be expanded to include former legislators.
Still, Halter lauded legislative efforts Wednesday and said lottery scholarships would help lift Arkansas from at or near last among the states in personal income and percentage of adults with college degrees.
“For all my life and for the lives of every person in this room, Arkansas has been 48th or 49th in income. Our great hope is that we will begin to change the fact,” Halter, who presides over the Senate during legislative sessions, told senators. “Some future Senate or some future lieutenant governor will not have to say that for all their lives Arkansas was 48th or 49th in income.”
The Senate sponsor, Sen. Terry Smith, D-Hot Springs, said the legislation had been vetted by lottery experts from numerous other states that have the games.
“Is this a perfect bill? No,” Smith said, “but everybody said, ‘You all have a good bill.’”
In the House, Wills said the bill was the result of several months of work and contributions from virtually every member of the Legislature.
“We have every opportunity in the next year to examine the scholarship program, to examine what we’re doing with eligibility, and if there’s a better way to do it, this Legislature and General Assemblies in the future will have every opportunity to improve this. And in fact, if we do what other states have done, that’s exactly what we’ll do,” Wills said.
“We’ll continue to adjust and adapt to the conditions that are presented to us. But it’s a good bill,” he said.
