Posted on Fri, May. 09, 2008

Keep Overly in 72nd House seat

Give newcomer full term of her own

The race to represent House District 72 is pitting a relative newcomer against two veteran officeholders.

Sannie Overly, the Paris lawyer who won the seat vacated after Carolyn Belcher was elected Bath County judge-executive, is running to serve a full term.

Her challengers are Jim Lovell, a Paris lawyer who held the seat from 1995 through 1998, and former Bourbon County Judge-Executive Roy Baber.

The district is made up of Bourbon, Bath and Nicholas counties as well as three precincts in Fayette County.

Overly deserves a full term to show what she can do for her district and the state.

Although Overly was a late-arriving freshman during a particularly dysfunctional session, she seems to have embraced her work in Frankfort energetically.

She served on the agriculture, transportation and state government committees. She worked to pass a bill, introduced in the Senate, to create an alert system for adults with mental impairments who are missing, similar to the Amber Alert system for children.

On the government committee, she participated in the discussions about how to deal with the shortfall in the state retirement system. She gained a reputation for listening to local elected officials in her district and for constituent service.

Lovell is Overly's stronger challenger. A former prosecutor, he specialized in criminal- justice issues during his terms in the House. He championed legislation to overhaul the juvenile-justice system and alternatives to imprisonment that could both ease prison crowding and encourage rehabilitation, and he supported the creation of family courts.

Baber touts his experience running a county (he was judge-executive for seven years beginning in 1978) and managing for-profit nursing homes. His experiences, though, didn't add up to a compelling reason to choose him over either Lovell's history in Frankfort or Overly's promise.