By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — Ticket sales on the first day of Arkansas’ new state-run lottery totaled more than $1.2 million, the lottery’s director said today.
Lottery Director Ernie Passailaigue estimated that the lottery sold between $1.2 million and $1.3 million worth of scratch-off tickets on Monday, the first day the tickets went on sale.
“One day doesn’t make a lottery, so we’ll see, but we feel good about where we are and the day we had yesterday,” he said.
Today, the lottery had taken in $966,531 by 5:30 p.m., lottery officials said.
About $720,000 in prizes were validated on the first day, officials said. Officials confirmed 140 prizes of $1,000 and one prize of $20,000, won by a player in Searcy.
Passailaigue said today that lottery officials had also been contacted by a player in Van Buren who claimed to have won a $20,000 prize, but he said the prize had not yet been confirmed.
The lottery has nearly 1,500 retail locations, some of which started selling tickets just after midnight Monday. On the first day retailers earned an estimated $60,000 in commissions on ticket sales, in addition to commissions on prizes.
Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who proposed the constitutional amendment voters approved last year to create the lottery, estimated Tuesday that the lottery raised about $300,000 to fund college scholarships for Arkansas students. It was “a terrific start,” Halter said.
Passailaigue has predicted the lottery will take in $400 million a year in gross ticket sales and net $100 million a year for scholarships. The state Legislature will set the amounts of the scholarships during the 2010 fiscal session, which convenes in February.
One of the arguments that proponents of the lottery advanced last year was that the games would allow the state to retain money that Arkansans were spending on lotteries in neighboring states. Passailaigue said Tuesday it may take some time for that to happen.
Four states neighboring Arkansas sell Powerball tickets, and the jackpot for the multi-state game is now at $170 million, Passailaigue said. Arkansas is scheduled to join Powerball on Oct. 31.
“We’ll start having a level playing field with those states come Oct. 31, but right now there is probably a challenge to retain all that business that we should be retaining,” he said.
He also said some Arkansans will be reluctant to change their ticket-buying habits because “players tend to be somewhat superstitious.”
Workers at several retail locations in eastern Oklahoma told the Arkansas News Bureau today they had seen no drop-off in sales of scratch-off lottery tickets since sales began in Arkansas — and customers from Arkansas were continuing to come in.
“They said they were going to keep coming back. This was their lucky spot,” said Edna Miller, a cashier at Freddy’s One Stop in Roland, Okla., just over the state line from Fort Smith.
Kelli Smith, a manager at J-Sac’s in Arkoma, Okla., said her Arkansas customers were continuing to come in and buy tickets. She said some customers told her, “We’re not going over there (to buy tickets in Arkansas) because we don’t like how they’re spending their money. … We don’t like that they’re paying their top guy so much money.”
This summer the Arkansas Lottery Commission hired Passailaigue, former director of South Carolina’s lottery, at an annual salary of $324,000, making him the third-highest-paid lottery director in the country. Oklahoma’s lottery director makes $184,485.
