Budget conference: House, Senate disagree over $5M for Department of Lottery promotion

With the budget conference committee process underway, the House and Senate are $5 million apart on a potential boost for the Department of Lottery’s paid advertising and promotions.

This spending item comes from a conference between the House State Administration Budget Subcommittee and the Senate Appropriations Committee on Agriculture, Environment, and General Government.

The Senate budget includes a $5 million allocation on line 127 to increase the Department of Lottery’s ad budget. So far, there’s been no movement toward the Senate position, as the House’s first offer provides no money for that purpose.

That’s the most significant single disagreement between chambers regarding the Department of Lottery allocations, but it’s not the only one.

The House offer contains several cuts in jobs and expenses. The biggest of these is a proposed cut of $350,000 by reducing positions that have been vacant for more than 90 days. The first House offer would also save nearly $47,000 by reducing “other personal services,” and cut another $3,500 through reducing other expenses.

The Senate, meanwhile, is going in the opposite direction by also proposing more than $133,000 to increase operating costs for the Department.

The Senate proviso also allows the Department to have up to 4,000 full-service vending machines for ticket sales. The House proviso only contemplates 3,000 such machines.

The conference committee met briefly on Tuesday afternoon. The committee is chaired by Republican Sen. Jason Brodeur, with Republican Rep. Vicki Lopez serving as Vice Chair.

In short remarks, Lopez introduced the House offer and signaled that progress is coming on unresolved items.

“I hope that you will find that the House has attempted to close out a number of issues. There should be a lot of issues grayed out by the next time that we meet,” said Lopez, a Miami Republican.

So far, the next meeting between chambers on this budget silo has not been scheduled. But lawmakers have been able to break through weeks of roadblocks by agreeing to start the Conference Committee process to finalize a budget within the next two weeks.