$5.84 billion in tickets sold, setting a record for fourth year
Sales of New York state lottery tickets totaled $5.84 billion in the fiscal year that ended March 31, officials said this week. Thats up 8.2 percent from $5.39 billion the previous year.
New York remains the most successful state lottery in North America in terms of sales. The next highest was in Massachusetts, with $4.19 billion in sales.
Its the fourth year in a row that New York broke a record. This past years sales alone were more than the first 10 years of sales combined when the New York lottery started in 1976.
Nancy Mancuso of Gates helped contribute to those record sales. She likes to play the lottery once or twice a week. While she has yet to be a big winner, she keeps playing, and hoping.
I like the scratch-offs, she said. Its more exciting.
About 57 percent of the money taken in is returned to players in prizes. Six percent goes to retailers who sell the tickets, and 4 percent of sales are used in administrative costs and other expenses. The remaining 33 percent about $1.89 billion is profit, and put in the states general fund. Using a complex formula, the Legislature and governor determine what aid each school district receives. The lottery profits are then included as part of that total aid; lottery sales in geographic areas are irrelevant to the amount of aid each district receives.
More than $91.8 million designated as lottery profits was given to Monroe County schools in state aid in 2002-03.
I look at this very simply. Whether you like gaming or not or chose to do it, the lottery has been around for three decades. It generates over $1.5 billion that goes directly to K-12 education, said state Sen. Joseph Robach, R-Greece.
Robach said New York spends more than $15 billion a year on school districts; lottery profits amount to more than 10 percent of that figure.
If we did not have that money from the lottery, there would be more of a local demand from the taxpayers or less resources to go to programming and operations in our schools, Robach said. Im not discussing whether gaming is good or bad. It provides that revenue. Its a fact.
Lottery officials would not comment for this story, saying final sales figures from the fiscal year ending more than six weeks earlier were not yet official.
They previously credited their marketing strategy for their success. They offer a variety of games to suit any gamblers taste. There are dozens of instant games available at grocery stores and gas stations everywhere as well as draw games that offer jackpots in tens of millions of dollars and Quick Draw, a new game every four minutes for those with short attention spans.
Ray Scott, program director of the Health Associations Problem Gamblers Treatment Program, said despite more opportunity for gambling with the increase of casinos, lottery tickets are still blamed for some peoples gambling addictions.
More and more people are coming in as a result of scratch-offs, Scott said. It has to do with the immediacy that the scratch-offs provide that the other forms do not provide. People will buy a whole bunch of scratch-off tickets and just spend their afternoon scratching them off. The lottery is still a source of anxiety for a lot of people.
The NY Lottery began in 1967, but was suspended in the mid-1970s.
why was it suspended? were there old statutes involved?