NO Lottery in Alabama.  At least, not THIS time around. 

A plan to allow the voters to decide whether or not to authorize a lottery, and casinos died Thursday with the end of the annual legislative session.

That proposed constitutional amendment fell just a SINGLE vote short in the Senate on April 30th.

There was a chance for another vote if the senator who voted “NO” had a change of heart but that didn’t happen – and the Senate adjourned to end the session at about 6:13pm Thursday.

It was the very closest that the Legislative body had come to sending that question to the ballot, since the voters had previously rejected, Governor Don Siegelman’s plan in October 1999 by a vote of 54% to 46%.

An Ad Hoc Committee, appointed by House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter, spent more than a year developing the plan.

The House passed it first back in February and the Senate then passed a scaled-back version three weeks later.  The House passed a compromise plan approved by a conference committee; that moved it within one step of final passage but the vote in the Senate was 20-15, just one vote shy of the three-fifths majority required for a constitutional amendment.

The amendment would have been on the ballot August 20th.

(www.AL.COM)