State Treasurer Kay Ivey has become the fifth person to announce she will be a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor in 2010. She launched her campaign Wednesday with a state fly-around to Huntsville, Birmingham,  Montgomery and Mobile.       

Ivey joins legislator Robert Bentley, lawyer Bradley Byrne,  Tim James and Roy Moore in the race for the GOP nomination. A 64-year-old native of Wilcox County, she has served two terms as treasurer and is prohibited by law from seeking the office in 2010.

I have known Kay since the late 1970s when a group of us, led by Secretary of the Senate McDowell Lee, formed a Montgomery lunch group we called “The Friday Club.” I have followed her career since then as assistant director of the Alabama Development Office, director of governmental affairs and communications for the Commission on Higher Education and her election as state treasurer in 2002. Before her work in state government she was a teacher, a banker and a hospital administrator.

I believe Kay did a capable job in all her state government positions and see no reason why that wouldn’t be the case if she were governor.

In recent months, she has been in the news regarding the state’s prepaid college tuition program, which the state treasurer’s office is charged with managing. The program, invested heavily in stocks, has gone the same way with most similar investments: down, way down, and there have been questions about the losses by those who have paid into the fund.

I don’t think the finger can be pointed only at Kay, but it has become an issue with which she must deal. “She didn’t mismanage it. An economic tidal wave swept over the world,” Ivey’s communications director, Mark Powell, told the AP.

Bob Martin is editor and publisher of The Montgomery Independent. E-mail him at: bob@montgomeryindependent.com.