The Georgia Lottery, which posted record-breaking sales last year, ended the first quarter of the new budget year with a sales decline of $5 million compared with the same quarter a year ago.
Despite the slower ticket sales, lottery officials said there will be no impact on any of the educational programs underwritten by the games, such as the popular HOPE scholarship program, which pays college costs for students with above-average grades and technical school costs for others.
In fact, the state will get more money from the lottery this quarter, not less, because lottery officials also will pass along the savings they achieved by renegotiating contracts with some vendors, said lottery spokesman J.B. Landroche.
Any decrease in ticket sales is a concern, said Sen. Bill Hamrick (R-Carrollton), a key player in this year's legislative debate over how to ensure that the lottery can keep pace with the programs it funds.
"It kind of just illustrates the problem that we were trying to deal with: The lottery can't just keep having record revenue year after year," he said. "There will be some dips along the way."
The state's fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. For the quarter ending Sept. 30, the lottery took in $643.2 million from ticket sales, compared with $648.3 million during the same period a year ago.
"The first quarter typically is not the strongest quarter of the year. That may be some of it," said Margaret DeFrancisco, the lottery's president.
Sales of instant tickets were up for the quarter compared with last year, but there were mixed results for games in which drawings take place. Cash 3 was down $16.8 million, Lotto South was down $1.6 million and Quick Cash was down $1 million.
DeFrancisco said she is confident the lottery will "meet our goals" for the year and added that, despite the decline, the first-quarter report is still "the second-best in lottery history. The first quarter last year was the best first sales quarter we ever had. This is the second-best."
When the first quarter books are closed, the state will get more than $183 million from the lottery, boosting total receipts from the games to $7 billion since they were started in 1993.
Shelley Nickel, president of the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which manages HOPE scholarships, said she is not alarmed by the quarterly report.
"We've tracked the deposits quarter by quarter, and there have been instances where a prior year's quarter is less than the year before, but in general the deposits have been successfully increasing over time," she said.
Concern over the lottery's ability to keep up with the HOPE program's growing number of students and tuition increases led lawmakers this year to set higher standards beginning in 2007 for student eligibility to keep from exhausting the money.
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Georgia Lottery players would not accept a NY-style lottery with annuity-only scratch games and a lotto paying back only 40% in prizes.