Sunday, May 18, 1997

Lottery won't solve school funding woes

Assigning all lottery profits to public education might make some Texans feel better, but it won't do a thing to improve school financing.

The lottery doesn't begin to generate enough revenue to fund schools by itself. And the bill passed by the state Senate and sent to the House last week will actually make paying for public schools more problematic.

Supposedly, the rationale behind the Senate bill is that Texans thought lottery profits would go to fund schools when they approved the statewide gambling game in 1991. The truth is, that is exactly where the majority of lottery cash has been going all along.

Lottery profits go into the state's general revenue fund. About 60 percent of that general fund is used to finance public schools. That means 60 percent of lottery profits have always been going to education.

Dedicating all lottery revenue to schools would cover only about 3 percent of public education costs. The other 97-odd percent would have to come from elsewhere - out of the general fund.

Restricting lottery money to schools is a mistake because the amount taken in via the lottery fluctuates from week to week, month to month, year to year. In contrast, school budgets remain fixed over a long period of time.

Tying institutions with fixed budgets to an uncertain income source would create a major nightmare for school budget planners, who would never know exactly how much additional general fund money would be required from budget period to budget period.

If the state spent 100 percent of its lottery income on schools, then it would simply have to shift money from other sources to pay for other bills. Designating lottery money for schools would be only a superficial, cosmetic alteration. The financial bottom line wouldn't move, except that more paperwork headaches would be generated to figure the whole mess out.

The lottery isn't a magic solution to our financial problems. It won't fund schools or lower property taxes, and changing how we record lottery profits on the state books won't add a single penny to how much we spend on education. We shouldn't make our schools dependent on such an unstable revenue source.