Lottery Won’t Have His Help, Deukmejian Says

Gov. George Deukmejian, who publicly opposed last November’s successful lottery initiative, said Tuesday that once the lottery is started he will neither help promote it nor urge people to buy lottery tickets.

Deukmejian said he does not consider it “good for the state or good public policy” to push people to gamble, even though “the experience has shown in other states that after perhaps the first year or so, the initial glamour wears off” and heavy promotion has been required to sustain public interest.

“That’s one of the main reasons why I was opposed to it,” he said.

The governor, who already has missed by more than a month the deadline for naming a five-member commission to run the lottery, confirmed that he has made his choices but said that the names will not be announced until background checks have been completed.

He also said it is “safe to say” that the legally mandated March 21 deadline for starting lottery ticket sales will not be met.

“I don’t know how quickly the commission and the director (who will be hired by the commission) can staff up and can be ready,” he said. “All I know is I’m sure that they will try their best just to do it as fast as they can.”

Deukmejian opened a wide-ranging, 45-minute Capitol press conference by draping a San Francisco 49er pennant over the governor’s seal on the podium in front of him and revealing that he had made “a friendly little wager” with Florida Gov. Robert Graham on Sunday’s Super Bowl football game between the 49ers and the Miami Dolphins--25 pounds of California cheese and a case of California wine against 50 pounds of Florida stone crab.

“I’m looking forward to enjoying a marvelous crab dinner in the near future,” he said.

Asked if he had given Graham any points on the game, the governor, who enjoys his reputation as a tight-fisted fiscal conservative, said, “Of course not. I don’t give away too much.”

On more serious issues of state, Deukmejian said he will “certainly consider” any legislation that would automatically trigger an election-year rebate to taxpayers if state revenues grow above specified levels next year. But he emphasized that “we certainly do not anticipate” any excess revenue above the $33 billion projected in the 1985-86 budget proposal he unveiled last week.

He also indicated that any tax cut proposal would have to compete with other state and local government “infrastructure” needs such as repair of roads, bridges, buildings and sewer and water systems.

“There actually is going on right now a reduction in the amount of tax being paid by California taxpayers, especially with the implementation of indexing of the income tax,” he said. “As a result of the use of indexing, California taxpayers will probably be paying about $5 billion less than they would have been paying otherwise, and there is a decline in the amount of personal income tax that they are paying for every $100 of income earned.

“And also, California, which used to be, I believe, second or third in the nation in terms of the amount of state and local taxes paid by the taxpayers, is now no longer second or third in the nation. I think we’ve dropped down to somewhere around seventh or eighth. . . .

“So I think that the legislators, if they are going to consider this kind of legislation, will look at that and they will also look at some of these other needs, such as the need to bolster the infrastructure in California.”

On another subject, Deukmejian said he will continue to press the California Coastal Commission to complete its work on local coastal plans and go out of business, as originally intended in the initiative measure that created it in 1972. Toward that end, he has proposed a 25% cut in the commission’s 1985-86 budget.

“They have been very, very slow in completing their responsibility under the law and they have been given a long time to do it,” he said.

He also said he sees little chance of enacting any plan in the Legislature for moving more Northern California water to the south unless there is a water emergency that spurs more public support for it. He said that after the lawmakers last year turned down his proposal for a water transfer facility through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, he challenged them to come up with a plan, “and that’s still my position.”

Despite talk of another reapportionment initiative drive by Assemblyman Don A. Sebastiani (R-Sonoma) to overturn Democratic-drawn legislative and congressional district boundaries, Deukmejian said he does not believe that such an effort “would be the wisest use of resources of the Republican Party as a whole.”

The governor, who sponsored an unsuccessful reapportionment initiative in last November’s election after an earlier Sebastiani measure was declared unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court before it reached the ballot, said he has held meetings with both Democratic and GOP legislative leaders to suggest a legislative solution to the reapportionment controversy.

“I have asked that the Legislature consider some reform legislation so that when the reapportionment is done after the next census (in 1990), that it would be done with some specific criteria involved . . . whether it’s done by the Legislature or by an independent commission,” he said. “. . . Then I think we would be able to avoid the kind of gerrymandering that’s gone on in the past.”