Tennessee lottery head Rebecca Paul said Monday the corporation may award contracts to gaming vendors, which will be charged with laying the infrastructure for ticket sales, two days sooner than had been anticipated.
The Tennessee Education Lottery Corporation (TELC) must award gaming contracts by the day before Thanksgiving, says Paul, to reach the goal of the first scratch off ticket sales by Feb. 10. Paul now says, however, the contracts could be awarded two days sooner by Nov. 24.
Paul stands to gain up to $400,000 in incentives on top of her base salary of $350,000 if she meets the most challenging goals set by the TELC board.
Weve come light years in drafting two RFPs (requests for proposals) for our major gaming services, said Paul. Hopefully we can have that done in very short order. So we can get it to the review board as necessary. And if we can get that to our review board sooner than originally anticipated we [may] move the dates up a couple of days on everything.
The contract proposals, which Paul hopes to submit today, will go to the Board of Standards made up of the state finance commissioner, general services commissioner and state comptroller under lottery legislation. The board will have five to 10 days to approve the proposals.
The board has been briefed on the proposals and could approve them quickly, said Paul.
The TELC board added to the contract proposals five district offices, which will be located in Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville and the Tri-Cities area. The five offices should be in place prior to first ticket sales and would make possible an approximately two-hour drive or less for any citizen to collect on winnings.
Not only will Paul, who was recruited from the successful Georgia Lottery Corporation three weeks ago, benefit from corporation success but incentives will be added to each employees job based on achievement goals.
TELC board Chairman Denny Bottorff said Paul had suggested the corporation provide incentives to employees while she was still president of the Georgia lottery.
Every single person contributes to our ability to raise dollars for scholarships, said Paul. If youre in the mail room and a retailer application sits there for 10 days & thats 10 days that retailer doesnt sell tickets. So each and every person contributes to the success of the organization.
The board, at Pauls suggestion, temporarily adopted the Georgia Lottery Corporation pay scale. The board will examine the scale going forward to see whether adjustments should be made due to market differences.
We discussed a fast solution, said TELC board member Deborah Story. We needed to hire people but didnt have a pay scale.
Net proceeds garnered by the lottery will go toward college scholarships first with any excess funding K-12 capital projects and early learning and after-school programs. Officials hope to fund college scholarships beginning in the fall of 2004.
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