State Offers Tribe Legal Assistance

Attorney General Al Lance says he has been in touch with the lawyer hired to help remove any legal roadblocks to the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s proposed national lottery.

And Lance indicated on Tuesday that depending on how the tribe wants to handle any legal problems the state could offer assistance.

“To the extent their requests do not conflict with Idaho state law,” Lance said, “we stand ready to help them out.”

While attending the National Association of Attorneys General meeting in Washington, D.C., Lance said he talked with Andrew Miller, the former Virginia attorney general who has been hired by the company that is expected to manage the lottery when it opens this fall.

“He indicated he will be corresponding with me,” Lance said.

The lottery would be operated in all 36 states which currently have lotteries and the District of Columbia with tickets sold by either telephone or mail.

But several states, led by Minnesota and Connecticut, are pressuring telephone companies not to carry national lottery calls to their residents. They claim those calls would violate state laws against gambling by telephone or credit card.

Lance, however, said that during the meeting in Washington, Connecticut’s attorney general was much more candid. He said Attorney General Richard Blumenthal admitted the legal issues were secondary.

“He said this could result in the loss of $50 million to the state of Connecticut,” Lance quoted Blumenthal as saying. “He readily acknowledged that it was an economic analysis, not a legal one.”

Although Gov. Phil Batt and other state officials have sought alternatives to gaming to help bolster the depressed economies of Idaho’s Indian reservations, they have refused to stand in the way of the tribe’s efforts to get the national lottery off the ground.

In fact, Idaho was the only state to oppose the resolution at the national meeting of attorneys general against the Indian lottery.

Miller, who served as Virginia’s attorney general from 1970 through 1977, has already produced a legal analysis that finds the tribe has complied with “all the legal hurdles.”