The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Association says it does not have information about the exact number of visitors it attracts from Utah — nor does it spend extra money advertising in Salt Lake City beyond its national ad buy.

But it does have information about how important gambling is there overall.

It said the city attracted 37.4 million visitors from around the world last year. Gambling revenues were a staggering $22.3 billion last year.

It said the average Las Vegas visitor spends $545 on gambling per trip there and stays an average of 3.6 nights (helping to fill the 131,503 hotel and motel rooms in the city).

Southern California supplies about 27 percent of the city's visitors. International tourists supply about 13 percent. The rest come from around the country.

The National Gambling Impact Study Commission noted in 1999, "Roughly 85 percent of Nevada's gambling revenues come from out-of-state tourists. Thus, Nevada receives the economic benefits of the dollars lost to gambling, while the attendant social and economic impacts of unaffordable gambling losses are visited on the families and communities in the states from which those individuals comes. Every other gambling venue in the United States is far more reliant on spending by citizens in a far more concentrated geographic area."

IDAHO BORDER TOWNS

Idaho has nearly 1,200 stores that sell lottery tickets. The top six locations are all on the Utah border in tiny towns, according to computer-assisted analysis of data obtained through public documents laws by the Deseret Morning News. The top-selling location in all of Idaho is the Kwik Stop in Malad on I-15 just north of the border. It sold $2.54 million worth of tickets in fiscal 2004. That is 27 times more than the $92,000 average for all Idaho lottery sales locations.

"About 90 percent of our business is from Utahns," estimates Bobby Green, the assistant manager of the Kwik Stop.

"You see a lot of regulars from Utah," Green says. "You see a lot of them every five weeks. That's because you can get 10 plays on one ticket," so a ticket lasts for five weeks' worth of the twice-a-week drawings held by the lottery.

The new Morning News poll shows that 33 percent of Utahns surveyed say they have played the Idaho lottery sometime in their lives — including 12 percent who played it within the past year. Another 14 percent have played lotteries in other surrounding states, including 7 percent who did so within the past year.

Green notes, "We only get 5 percent of what we sell (plus a 10 percent bonus for selling top-prize tickets). So the lottery itself isn't that lucrative. But it's a big draw. And people don't just buy a lottery ticket when they come in. They buy a drink and a candy bar — and other things that we make more money on."