FLORENCE — Boone County Commissioner Robert Hay, a conservative Republican whose anti-abortion views often made him a lightning rod for controversy, will not seek re-election next year.

        Mr. Hay's unexpected announcement, made earlier this week during a Boone County Fiscal Court meeting, caught even top GOP leaders by surprise and gave Democrats optimism about winning the open county commissioner seat.

        “Robert has been a very good asset to the Boone County Fiscal Court and we hate to see him go,” said Jay Hall, the former chairman of the Boone County Republican Party and a member of the RepublicanState Central Committee.

        Mr. Hay, a pharmacist and the father of six children ages 3 to 16, said he is leaving politics to “devote more time to my family and my faith.”

        “I want to get my priorities straight,” Mr. Hay said Thursday. “I need to be able to give my full attention to my family and my faith. It's quite different from the way I've been looking at things and it's really a whole new paradigm.”

        Mr. Hay is a former Florence city councilman elected to the fiscal court in 1998. He said he does not expect to help the Republican Party recruit a candidate to run for the seat.

        “There are a number of outstanding candidates who can fill this seat,” Mr. Hay said. “I do hope the party finds somebody who is a pro-family conservative but who also tries to find a way to slowdown urban sprawl in Boone County.”

        Though he is probably best known in local political circles for his staunch Christian beliefs and his deep involvement in the region's strong anti-abortion movement, Mr. Hay has also become an outspoken advocate of slowing down some of Boone County's explosive residential and commercial growth.

        “We need to find a way to slow urban sprawl without overly restricting property rights,” he said. “That's a hard balance to strike.”

        Both major political parties have already begun setting strategy on winning Mr. Hay's seat, though no potential candidates have emerged.

        Democratic and Republican Party leaders are saying they will wait until new commission districts are redrawn this spring with new data from the 2000 Census.

        Republicans are confident they can hold the seat in what has become the largest Republican-controlled county in Kentucky.

        “We are going to aggressively and successfully defend that seat,” Mr. Hall said Friday. “We have one candidate in mind at this time, and I'm sure there will be other candidates that might vie for the seat.”

        But Democrats, who hold none of the four county fiscal-court seats, see an opportunity to win back an office from the GOP.

        “We've already been talking and we'll definitely have a good candidate to run,” said Howard Tankersley, vice chairman of the Boone County Democratic Party.

        “This is nothing personal against Mr. Hay, but we are going to have a candidate more interested in the citizens of Boone County than any personal agenda,” he said.

        Mr. Tankersley was referring to Mr. Hay's anti-abortion platform, which often crossed over into decisions that seemed to have little to do with abortion rights.

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