Comment on Iowa Lottery looks to record-smashing year

DES MOINES — Iowa lottery players apparently have taken former Hawkeye football coach Hayden Fry’s “scratch-where-it-itches” mantra to heart in a big way.The state’s lottery enterprise is on track to break its all-time yearly records for sales, proceeds to state causes, prizes paid to players and commissions to its retailers when it closes the current fiscal year on June 30 — with gamblers’ zeal for instant scratch tickets outpacing those who feverishly chase the mega-lotto jackpots.The first product offered when the Iowa Lottery set up shop in 1985 was a scratch game, and lottery officials say scratch tickets have been their leading category ever since with year-to-date sales through May totaling $230 million — by far the state-run gambling enterprise’s largest sales category.With those robust sales fueled by a rotating crop of new games and ongoing promotions at the about 2,400 retail outlets offering lottery products, officials say they are on track to smash the record $370.96 million in sales they posted last fiscal year and top the $88 million in proceeds they deposited in the state treasury three years ago.”At this point it appears that we are on track to have a record year in all of the lottery’s major categories,’ said Mary Neubauer, the lottery’s vice president for external relations.