Where the money goes

The statutory split: After prizes, retailer commissions and expenses, the Hoosier Lottery's surplus is divided by law. Two shares are fixed and famous: $30 million a year to the Indiana Teachers' Retirement Fund — paid through the Pension Stabilization Fund — and $30 million a year to local police and firefighters' pensions, the Pension Relief Fund, a share the 1989 Lottery Act first set at $10 million and Public Law 273-1999 raised to $30 million, distributed among Indiana's cities and towns, Mishawaka among them, in accordance with actuarial principles while the old-plan pensions remained a municipal charge, and carried by the state after it assumed those payments from January 1, 2009. The balance — the great bulk of the surplus — goes to the Build Indiana Fund, created by the 1989 Lottery Act and now accounted as the Lottery Surplus Fund, most of it into the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax Replacement Account, which offsets up to about half the excise tax Hoosiers pay to plate a vehicle and is distributed proportionately to every county in Indiana, St. Joseph County among them, for the county to spend at its own discretion. Lottery money therefore reaches Mishawaka by three documented channels — police and fire pension relief for a city that employs police officers and firefighters, teachers' retirement money for a state whose teachers include Mishawaka's, and excise-tax relief paid by every Mishawaka household that registers a car — and by no lump-sum channel the Lottery publishes.

The documented size, dated: The Lottery's Fiscal Year 2025 annual report returns $340.6 million to the State of Indiana for that year, for the Teachers' Retirement Fund, local police and firefighter pensions and the Lottery Surplus Fund, “benefiting Hoosiers in all 92 counties.” Its giving-back account, through June 30, 2025, totals the whole course since October 1989: $8.1 billion transferred to the state, composed of $6.1 billion to the Lottery Surplus Fund, $880 million to police and firefighters' pensions and $1.0 billion to the Teachers' Retirement Fund. The Lottery maintains a county-by-county breakdown of its giving on its own site, St. Joseph County included in the frame; what it does not publish in any source reached for this section is a Mishawaka city figure — no city-level total of pension relief received, excise relief received or surplus money spent in Mishawaka appears in the Lottery's reports, the State Budget Agency's distribution report (whose fiscal-2016 edition tabulates Build Indiana and pension shares by county, not by city), or the city's own documents reached. That is the named gap, printed whole: what is missing is a documented Mishawaka total; searches run were the Lottery's annual reports and giving-back pages and the State Budget Agency's Distribution of Lottery and Gaming Revenues and the Build Indiana Fund; the settling source would be the Indiana Public Retirement System's pension-relief distribution schedules and the State Auditor's excise-replacement distributions, read for the City of Mishawaka year by year — a compilation no published source reached has made, and this section does not estimate it.

Sources:

1. Hoosier Lottery, Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report — $340.6 million returned to the state in FY2025; the Teachers' Retirement Fund, police and firefighter pension and Surplus Fund destinations.
2. Hoosier Lottery, “Giving Back” account (through June 30, 2025) — $8.1 billion total transfers since 1989: $6.1 billion Lottery Surplus Fund, $880 million police and firefighters' pensions, $1.0 billion Teachers' Retirement Fund; $30 million annually to each pension destination.
3. Indiana State Budget Agency, Distribution of Lottery and Gaming Revenues and the Build Indiana Fund, Fiscal Year 2016 (revised March 8, 2017) — the Build Indiana Fund established by the 1989 Lottery Act; the $30 million Pension Stabilization transfer; police and fire pensions from $10 million under the 1989 Act to $30 million under P.L. 273-1999, distributed to communities on actuarial principles, and the state's assumption of old-plan payments from January 1, 2009.
4. Hoosier Lottery and State Budget Agency reports, searched as stated — no Mishawaka city-level total published in the sources reached.