The Texas Senate unanimously passed legislation that would kill the Texas Lottery Commission but keep lottery gaming alive, at least for the time being.
Late last week, the Senate voted 31-0 in favor of Sen. Bob Hall’s Senate Bill 3070, which will reallocate control of the lottery vertical to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) and make several changes to how the lottery is governed.
The House has already started working on the legislation, referring it to committee for a fast-tracked discussion in advance of the end of the legislative session on June 2. The Texas legislature only meets in odd-numbered years, so if the bill is not sent to Gov. Greg Abbott before that deadline, the bill cannot be taken up again for at least two years.
Hall introduced that bill last week as something of a compromise measure. Another bill of his, SB 1988, proposed the more radical measure of abolishing lottery games altogether.
Lottery gaming would undergo major changes
In addition to putting a new group in charge of the lottery, the measure would also prohibit and criminalize online play and purchasing more than 100 tickets in one go by consumers. The bill also expressly prohibits lottery couriers. It would also limit the total number of ticket-printing lottery terminals licensed retailers can have.
Those provisions come amid continued scrutiny over a syndicate’s $95 million jackpot win in 2023, which came after the group spent $25 million to buy 99% of ticket combinations. The incident has been the eye of both a media and legislative storm as the state debates who is to blame for the jackpot manipulation.
The Senate adopted four amendments for the bill, app proposed by Hall, before approving the measure. The amendments concerned things such as further limits on how people can buy tickets, as well as auditing and transparent sharing of information.
Lottery vertical on two-year trial, could be scrapped altogether in 2027
The commission’s future was already highly in doubt, and the future of the state’s lottery vertical itself could still be short-lived.
Like all government agencies, the commission is scheduled for a sunset review, meaning that it would cease to exist unless lawmakers specifically took action to continue it.
Under Hall’s SB 3070, a limited sunset review would be conducted by Aug. 31, 2027, in what Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said is a two-year trial. If the program were not reauthorized, the state lottery itself would be abandoned. If that happened, the state would lose out in roughly $2 billion in proceeds the Texas Lottery generates for the state each year.
“We’re going to give the extension to the game to the TDLR…” said Patrick in a video posted on social media. “They will oversee it with a brand-new leadership team and new guardrails … We can ban it in two years if the TDLR does not operate it as we instruct them to.”
Lt. Gov. Patrick would get to play ‘lottery inspector’
Another notable provision would give senior figures like the governor, the lieutenant governor and the attorney general to physically inspect licensed lottery retail stores.
Patrick filmed himself earlier this year scrutinizing Winner’s Corner, the Jackpocket-owned retailer that sold an $83.5 million winning ticket. He alleged that he was not given the access he requested to investigate the win and the store’s operations.
“Now, I’ll be a lottery inspector, and I can drop in and go anywhere I want to make sure everything is on the up and up,” Patrick said in the video.
Patrick stated that the difficulties he felt he encountered in investigating Winner’s Corner “began this saga of really discovering the alleged corruption in the lottery commission.”
“I promised you that if we couldn’t guarantee the lottery commission was an operation we could trust, we would eliminate it,” he said in the video. “That’s what we did today.”
