EDMONTON – Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith suggests a revamped version of a lottery game could help fund the proposed downtown arena project.
Smith said the province can help fund the proposed downtown Edmonton arena by introducing a rebranded Keno lottery game.
She added the game has been successful in raising money in British Columbia and is already available in Alberta, it would just need to be expanded here.
“We believe this could be a solution that makes sense for everybody involved,” she said in a statement Thursday.
“The City of Edmonton would get a magnificent downtown facility, the Edmonton Oilers would get a new home and Alberta taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for any of it.”
Smith said Keno is a digital gaming program that raised just over $3.1 million in Alberta last year and she believes it could generate $196 million annually if it is expanded.
In B.C., the game is played in about 4,000 locations – including bars and pubs – and generated nearly $235 million in 2012.
“If applied here in Alberta, on the same scale that it is in British Columbia, we believe that Keno could generate that missing $100 million for the Edmonton arena project, and that it could do so within five years,” she said.
“After administration costs, and after winner payouts,” Smith added, “that would leave $49 million per year leftover for charitable purposes as well as for arena funding.”
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Finance Minister Doug Horner says a lottery or gaming option for arena funding is plausible. However, he says the government’s version would work differently.
“The Keno idea is an interesting idea but, when you compare the gaming model that we have in Alberta to the gaming model in British Columbia, I think there’s significant doubt that you would actually raise, on a consistent level, the kind of dollars that they’re suggesting it would raise, because we’ve looked at that as well.”
“We’re looking at differences in Sports Select, that is currently in the senate right now, where you would be able to bet on the Oilers, as an example. We might be able to pool some of those dollars together and have those dollars as a new, separate form. We may be able to, as dollars in gaming rise, we may be able to take some of those gaming revenues and put them into that pool.”
Horner says the idea is very preliminary right now, but says the government has been looking at a lottery type solution for the past six or seven months.
“We’ve looked at a lot of the options. We’ve looked at keno, we’ve looked at the bingos… There’s a lot of things going on there.”
While it’s not a done deal, Horner says the option of a gaming type solution is possible. He says more information will be released come budget time, at the beginning of February.
“Hopefully we’re going to have some of the outline of it for the budget, we’ll see. But, I have not hidden the fact that we’ve been working on other programs that would not utilize tax dollars.”
The Wildrose proposal suggests the province would re-evaluate the lottery arrangement at the end of the five year period, and decide whether or not to maintain it as an ongoing source of revenue for the municipalities.
The plan has sparked some criticism.
“We don’t go out and have a charitable gaming model for Walmart or Starbucks,” says Scott Hennig with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, “why would we have it for another private business?”
The Wildrose says the proposed model will raise funds without costing taxpayers, but Hennig is not convinced.
“There’s only so big of a pie that you have with charitable gaming process. If you’re going to put these into places that have VLTs (Video Lottery Terminals), someone’s going to choose to not play the VLT and go play the Keno instead, and that’s money that’s going out of the pockets of the lottery fund, which goes to fund various charities, as well as the bottom line of the government. It goes to fund every single department, some of these charitable gaming dollars, some of these lottery fund dollars. So, if you’re going to take money out of the lottery fund, you’re taking money out of charities, you’re taking it away from general revenues, and that’s going to have to be made up somewhere.”
With files from the Edmonton Journal
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