Cuomo vetoes bill allowing lotto winners to remain anonymous and nassau otb lotto players prepare to make him pay for closing the church of nassau otb when they want to play lotto and bet horses ny pml sec 109 pays big easy money. just adk counsel for dead nyc otb
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Gov. Cuomo has vetoed a bill that would have let state lottery winners remain anonymous.
Cuomo explained that publicizing the winners’ names keeps the lottery commission honest.
“Being able to publicly present a grand prize winner . . . provides accountability to members of the public who have also been playing the game,” he said.
Publicizing the name also “provides comfort that there was an actual winner’’ and ensures that the state is not “adding all the money to its own coffers,’’ he said.
Cuomo noted there’s long been a way to get around the anti-privacy rules: a winner can still create a limited liability corporation, or LLC, to collect the prize in its name.
The bill Cuomo vetoed had been popular, passing in the state Senate, 61-1, and in the Assembly, 140-3.
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