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Critics question Ohio Lottery director's experience

Phil Long /Ohio Press Photo System Mike Dolan, Ohio Lottery Director since March 2007

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By Laura A. Bischoff, Staff Writer Updated 11:26 PM Saturday, July 25, 2009

CLEVELAND — The man charged with leading the effort to install 17,500 slot machines at Ohio’s seven horse racetracks isn’t a betting man. Doesn’t play poker. Didn’t even like arcades as a kid.

But Ohio Lottery Director Mike Dolan does know horses after spending weekends and summers in his childhood raising standardbreds on his father’s farm in western New York.

“I was the kid who got to jog behind the horse and break them to harness,” said Dolan, 47. “We’d train them and break them to harness and then we would give them to the Amish and (my father) would take a charitable deduction. It was his way of rearing his kids — keeping us out of trouble and keeping us busy and giving us something constructive to do ... We baled hay, shoveled manure, fixed fence. We did a lot.”

Dolan started working on political campaigns as a teen, volunteering for the John Glenn campaign for Senate. He later joined the Cleveland law department and served two full terms on the Cleveland City Council before Gov. Ted Strickland appointed him lottery director in March 2007.

Dolan runs a highly visible state agency with 333 employees and $2.4 billion in annual sales. As big as it is, it’s about to get bigger.

Strickland charged Dolan with licensing, regulating and overseeing the new multi-billion dollar slot machine industry that will be established at Ohio’s seven horse racetracks by May 2010.

The Strickland administration is counting on the slots to generate $933 million over the next two years for K-12 funding.

“I’m very impressed with how the lottery is run,” said Ohio Lottery Commission member Matt Cox, a Republican. “I generally support (Dolan.) I think he’s doing a good job.”

But some critics, particularly those in the GOP-controlled Senate, question whether Dolan is up to the job.

State Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, noted that Dolan didn’t know the location of the Lebanon Raceway during testimony before a Senate committee in July. “So, no, I don’t think he’s up to the task.”

Lottery Commission member Jon Allison, a Republican who served as Gov. Bob Taft’s chief of staff, said, “We are just entering a whole new world here. If I were in charge here and I wanted to sleep well on my pillow every night I’d be looking to beef this up and looking to someone to lead this who has experience with this in other states.”

Dolan got a black eye in March 2009 when state Inspector General Tom Charles issued a report criticizing Dolan for sending free lottery tickets to a state trooper who stopped him on Interstate 71 but didn’t issue him a ticket.

And Dolan lost credibility with some lawmakers last year when he asked the state Controlling Board for permission to purchase $11 million worth of Keno game machines from GTECH Corporation without disclosing that the Ohio Lottery was planning to drop GTECH in favor of Intralot, which would likely make the new machines incompatible with Intralot’s system.

“We expect to have honest and fair and candid responses to our questions. We haven’t had that with the lottery director,” said state Rep. Jay Hottinger, R-Newark, who is a Controlling Board member.

The state still has 1,200 Keno machines — some still in boxes — sitting in a warehouse and Dolan plans on selling them. He noted that Intralot agreed during negotiations for the lottery system to provide its own Keno machines at no extra charge.

Dolan was in charge of rolling out Keno in mid-2009 with the aim of raising $73 million in profits. But a tanking economy, difficulty getting bars and bowling alleys signed up, and trouble training wait staff to quickly process Keno orders led to only $30 million in profits, he said.

“We still cleared $30 million of new money,” Dolan said. “Would I have liked to have to cleared $73 million? You bet. But it is a projection. It is a forecast. And I don’t think any economic forecast during the last year has been right on anything.”

Dolan appears confident that bringing slot machines to Ohio and then overseeing them will be easy.

“It’s actually a much easier task than the conversion we just went through. We just finished going from the largest vendor-to-vendor conversion in the history of lottery in North America and perhaps elsewhere,” Dolan said.

The nine-member Ohio Lottery Commission met for the first time last week since the task of overseeing slot machines was dropped in its lap. But despite the governor’s wishes to get the terminals up and running as quickly as possible, commission members had little to say about the VLTs. The advisory board only discussed the matter for about 10 minutes at the tail end of the hour-long meeting. Some members said they had yet to see the legislative language or Strickland’s directive that assigns the work to the lottery.

Dolan promised to get the documents to them.

“My bad for not circulating,” Dolan told them.

Mike Dolan

Position: Ohio Lottery Director since March 2007
Age: 47
Political Experience: Democrat; assistant Cleveland law director; Cleveland City Council member.
Education: bachelor of science, Cleveland State University; law degree, Case Western Reserve University
Family: married, three children

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