GAMBLING NOT PANACEA FOR THE REVENUE PICTURE

Michael Morris, director of the Missouri Lottery, announced Tuesday he will leave his state position at the end of the year. Morris has been a highly visible, sometimes controversial figure in state government, attributable in part to the "hot-seat" nature of his job. The jury is out on his stewardship of that agency. What seems inescapable though is that Missouri has not seen its games embraced in the same way as its counterpart contests in Illinois. Some lessons might be taken from this as Missouri considers other ways to turn gambling into state revenue.

True, the Illinois lottery, which began in 1974, had a 12-year head start on Missouri. This compounds Missouri's problems because the more successful neighboring lottery has had a dozen extra years to create a steadfast following and generate high-stakes (and high-publicity) prizes. (In April 1989, an Illinois Lotto prize reached almost $70 million; that's the kind of game that gets national headlines.) Though it is an apples-and-oranges relationship in this way, Missouri always comes out on the unfavorable side of state lottery comparisons.

The raw numbers tell of this gap. In Illinois, the lottery generated almost $1.57 billion in revenue for the fiscal year that ended June 30. That is in a state with a population of 11.5 million; the revenue generated per capita is $136. In Missouri, revenue generated by the lottery in the last fiscal year was $216 million, down about $7 million from the year before that. Missouri has a population of 5.1 million, making the revenue generated per capita $42.

Is there a lesson in all this? Maybe it is one we'd rather not suggest: the last shall not be first. Trailing the neighboring state in developing a lottery is costing Missouri dearly, the argument might go. No doubt there will be those who make this case when gambling boats are drawing people across the Mississippi River to Illinois, while Missourians fidget in their deliberations on whether to legalize such an activity.

Our contention might be of a different timbre. With Missouri's lottery showing itself to be mercurial in nature, state officials might reconsider any views of gambling (moving like wildfire across the plains) as a reliable and unmessy answer to revenue concerns. It is no fiscal panacea. Some more imagination might be called for in trying to solve budget problems; rolling the dice with revenue gamesmanship doesn't always work.