Kay A. Orr

Kay Auonne Stark Orr, (born January 2, 1939), is a U.S. Republican Party politician. She served as Governor of Nebraska from 1987 to 1991. She was the first Republican woman to be elected Governor in the United States, although Republican woman Vesta M. Roy served as the unelected Acting Governor of New Hampshire from December 1982 to January 1983. She is to date the only woman to serve as governor of Nebraska.

[edit] Biography

Kay Auonne Stark was born in Burlington, Iowa and attended the University of Iowa. In 1963 she moved with her family to Lincoln, Nebraska. From 1981 to 1986 she served as Nebraska State Treasurer. She was appointed as State Treasurer to fill a midterm vacancy, and subsequently elected in her own right in 1982. In the 1986 election she defeated former Lincoln Mayor Helen Boosalis in the first U.S. gubernatorial election in which both major party candidates were women.

She was defeated for reelection as Governor in 1990 by conservative Democrat Ben Nelson. One of two election attacks by Nelson was Orr's record on supporting a proposed low-level nuclear waste dump. Under Nelson, the Nebraska state Department of Environmental Quality would deny an operating license for the nuclear waste dump, prompting a lawsuit which Nebraska settled for $145-million.

During the 2004 presidential election, she cast one of Nebraska's five electoral votes for George W. Bush. She was preceded by Bob Kerrey 1987–1991 and succeeded by Ben Nelson.

This article uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Kay_A._Orr. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with this wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the CC by-sa 3.0 License.

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