news-record.com

This was in our legislative briefs column today:

RALEIGH — The state Senate has defeated a bill that would have prohibited check cashing stores from selling lottery tickets.

“It just strikes me as very condescending to a lot of people,” said Sen. Phil Berger, an Eden Republican and his party’s leader in the chamber.

The measure had already passed the House. It was sponsored by Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Greensboro Democrat, who said that people who use check cashing stores tend to be lower income.

“We thought it did not look good for the state to be preying on these people,” Harrison said last week.

But on the floor of the Senate Monday night, opponents like Berger said that check cashers are governed by state laws and should not be singled out.

“I think it’s anti-small business,” Sen. David Hoyle, a Dallas Democrat, said of the bill. He added that the bill as drafted could end up prohibiting some convenience stores in smaller areas from selling lottery tickets.

The vote was 20-23. You can see the tally here. Locally, Sens. Katie Dorsett and Stan Bingham voted for the bill. Sens. Phil Berger and Don Vaughan voted against.

Dorsett managed the bill on the Senate floor but she did not provide a very effective defense against attacks from some of the most powerful members of the chamber, inlcuding Sens. Tony Rand, the majority leader, and David Hoyle, a finance committee chairman.

For background: I wrote about this issue when the Lottery Commission was first informed that Ace Check Cashing was planning to apply to sell lottery tickets. Click here for that story. And a related blog post is here.

Rep. Pricey Harrison later filed a bill that would prohibit that arrangement. Click here for a blog post on that.

Her effort met its end on the Senate floor Monday.

Click here to listen to debate from the Senate floor Monday night. (It’s about nine minutes.)

Worth noting: the bill would have also prohibited advertising the lottery at high school sporting events. That’s not something the lottery does right now, but some lawmakers wanted to put the prohibition into law. That provision died with the check cashing measure.