The Connecticut Lottery is beginning a search for a new chief executive in a time of tumult: A new point-of-sales system has wrongly invalidated a few winning tickets, its sports-betting vendor is quitting in the second year of a 10-year deal and an iLottery promised years ago has yet to launch.

Greg Smith, who has been seen as a stabilizing presence since being hired as the lottery’s president in 2018 -- when the quasi-public agency was struggling with turnover, staff dissension and other issues that damaged its credibility at the state Capitol -- intends to retire in 2024.

Board members say they have been aware of Smith’s plans for months, and “Discussion of Executive Compensation and Succession Planning” was added to their public agenda in June. But neither Smith nor the board appears to have made his plans public.

The omission, combined with the ticket-verification problem and other issues, invited speculation Thursday after the lottery’s board voted with little explanation to formally begin a search by assigning the task to its executive committee.

“The lottery obviously had a very difficult few years going back a little bit. And I have to say that things seemed to stabilize for a while,” said House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford. Now, he said, the confluence of issues prompts a question: “Was it really as stable as we thought?”

Rob Simmelkjaer, the chairman of the board, clarified in a brief interview after the meeting Thursday that Smith remains the CEO and the vote did not signal an imminent departure.

“He’s going to retire at the end of 2024. It’s a planned retirement,” Simmelkjaer said Thursday. On Friday, Simmelkjaer said he had not seen a need for further public explanation at the meeting. “It was a technical thing. We had to make the executive committee be the search committee.”

Ritter said he intends to ask a legislative committee to seek further information about the ticket verification issue, but he was happy to hear that Smith is not departing immediately.

“It makes me feel better if it’s a planned transition than sort of an abrupt resignation or something like that,” Ritter said. “Yes, we need to understand what happened with this terminal thing, and it’s not good. But I give Greg credit. I think he’s done a pretty good job here the last couple of years.”

Smith declined comment, and Simmelkjaer referred further questions to Chris Davis, the former state representative who is the lottery’s government affairs director and acts as its spokesman. Davis said the vote Thursday might have seemed abrupt but came as no surprise to staff.

“It’s been a few months in the making,” Davis said. “So at this point, the board has been in discussions about the potential retirement of Greg Smith, and he did notify the board a few months ago of his intention to do so.”

The lottery recently acknowledged that a few tickets, perhaps as few as 18 out of millions sold, had been incorrectly read as invalid by the point-of-sale terminal system launched on May 21 by its new vendor, IGT. The vendor bills itself as “trusted partner to the world’s most successful lotteries.”

On July 31, the lottery wrote the first of two public notices — it would not be posted until the next day on the lottery’s website – to gamblers about potential problems validating winning tickets:

“The Connecticut Lottery Corporation (CLC) is advising players that there is an issue with the lottery terminal response when Retailers are manually validating scratch tickets by keying in the ticket number. The lottery terminal response may say the ticket has been Previously Paid.”

On Aug. 2, the warning was broadened, advising players to doublecheck if they believe an uncashed winning lottery ticket in any game might have been invalidated as paid. Retailers manually validate tickets when the scanner cannot read them, Davis said.

Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, whose district is home to both of the state’s tribal casinos and closely monitors gambling issues, said Davis assured her the problem was limited.

“Relative to the tickets that were not read correctly, out of 18 million, there were 18 that were not read correctly, is my understanding,” Osten said.

That ticket snafu came two months after the lottery’s split with its sports-betting vendor.

Rush Street Interactive, the Illinois company chosen to operate the lottery’s online sport book, PlaySugarHouse.com, and the Connecticut Lottery jointly announced an end to their partnership on March 27, offering little reason for the split.

In an earnings call in May, the Hartford Business Journal reported that the company said it was not seeing “appropriate return on investment.”

To read the entire story, go to https://ctmirror.org/2023/08/11/ct-lottery-begins-ceo-search-at-a-crucial-juncture/