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Woman of the Year Nominee: The Lottery's Sure Bet
Margaret DeFrancisco knows better than most that the odds are long against winning a state lottery game.
April 11, 2007
M
argaret DeFrancisco knows better than most that the odds are long against winning a state
lottery game. But whenever she visits family in Rochester, New York, she stops at Wegmans Pharmacy
to pick up a couple of New York state lottery scratch-off tickets. And the motivation isn’t solely
to check out what her former employer is up to.
“Part of it is to see what they are doing, but part of it is to see if I win,” DeFrancisco
says. For the record, DeFrancisco is in the lottery business, not the pharmacy business. But a look
at the wide variety of experience on her résumé makes it a solid bet she’d be good at running drug
stores too — if she ever wants to do that.
Before she was hired to run the
Georgia Lottery in December 2003, DeFrancisco taught school, ran a commercial printing business,
was elected a county clerk and was second in command at the New York State Department of Motor
Vehicles. In May 1999, former New York Governor George Pataki named her director of the state’s
lottery.
The one common thread throughout her life was New York, where she worked, married and reared
two sons. Oh, and she was consistently good at what she did, including breathing new life into New
York’s mature lottery.
In 2003, Rebecca Paul Hargrove, the Georgia Lottery’s first director, took over Tennessee’s
startup lottery for a salary worth up to $752,000 with incentives. One of the reasons Tennessee
ponied up so much money to lure Hargrove away was the double-digit percentage increase in ticket
sales in all but one year during her tenure. Which meant that not only did Georgia officials have
to replace someone that Tennessee Lottery supporters touted as the Michael Jordan of state
lotteries, but they also had to bring in someone ready to take on a Georgia lottery program
reaching maturity and worries about slowing growth. The Georgia Lottery’s founding chairman David
Garrett says replacing Hargrove was just part of the challenge.
“The other thing we had to deal with is a number of people went to Tennessee with Rebecca,”
Garrett says. “So it was critical we have someone with a network to bring in a team. There were a
number of months when I was concerned we would have a drop off and not be able to recover.” Enter
DeFrancisco.
“When I came here there was concern it was reaching adolescence,” DeFrancisco says. “And
like an adolescent, it really needed a new approach to kickstart it.” In fact, soon after
DeFrancisco moved with her husband Joseph woman of the year nominee to Georgia in late 2003, the
Georgia General Assembly noisily debated cuts to the programs the lottery is designed to fund —
primarily the HOPE Scholarship and prekindergarten. Some of the benefits were cut, with lawmakers
predicting that the lottery would begin eating into its reserves by 2007.
The lottery has not only avoided dipping into reserves, but during DeFrancisco’s tenure it
continues to break new sales records. A sampling of Atlanta Journal-Constitution headlines shows
how things are going at the Georgia Lottery:
• “Lottery rakes in mega $$$,” July 2004
• “Lottery sales are on a roll,” April 2006
• “6-month lottery sales hit record $1.56 billion,” January 2007
In the first half of fiscal 2007, the Georgia Lottery sold $1.56 billion worth of tickets,
with $400 million going to education. Profits rose $20 million from 2005 to 2006.
DeFrancisco cites a couple of reasons for the continued growth in the face of dire
predictions. Soon after she joined the Georgia Lottery, she helped expand the Mega Millions
multi-state lottery into California, adding a potential new market of more than 36 million people.
She introduced a slew of new games across the state, some with connections to holidays and others
with local connections, like the Gold Rush game with a grand launch in Dahlonega, Georgia.
Garrett mentions the $300 million Gold Rush game as one of the innovations DeFrancisco
helped usher in to boost revenues. Traditionally the lottery had offered smaller prizes that could
be won with $1 tickets. It costs $10 for a chance at the $300 million Gold Rush prize.
“We found people were willing to pay more for the opportunity to win a bigger prize,”
Garrett says.
DeFrancisco also pushed to recruit more retailers to offer games. That focus resulted in new
lottery outlets opening at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport this year. Her
experience with public bureaucracies no doubt helped her navigate the various public agencies
involved in approving a retail lottery operation at an airport that has federal, state and city
agencies overseeing its operations.
“We need to be where the people are,” DeFrancisco says. “But it was definitely a process
with a capital P.”
Dealing with government process was familiar turf.
“I came through county government and then state government at the [Department of Motor
Vehicles],” she says. “I loved the work we were doing at the DMV because we were trying to turn
