with a state seal that is embossed. Reducing materials for the new certificates was expected to save $5,000 annually for the state; the substantial savings was for excluding the labor formerly needed to apply the gold seal and ribbon by hand. The Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels offered to pay $5,000 a year to keep the traditional certificates but the office of the Secretary of State decided to proceed due to the labor savings. Col. Russ Marlowe, a 70-year-old Bardstown resident, estimated that he had personally nominated about 500 recipients (mostly military veterans) and that none of his nominations had ever been turned down. John Carbone, a man from Philadelphia who later became a humorist in Kentucky, said that shortly after moving to the state in 1995, he struck up a casual conversation with a stranger while standing in line at a muffin shop, and was soon surprised to receive a Kentucky colonel certificate in the mail, as the man he had spoken with had been a member of the governor's staff and had submitted his name for the award. In a 2008 news article on the subject, a reporter wrote of preparing for writing it by asking some friends and family if they knew anyone who was a Kentucky colonel and being surprised to find that at least a dozen were colonels themselves, and then quipped to the reader, "You’re not a Kentucky Colonel? Actually, neither am I. But sometimes it seems like everybody else is. ...". About one third of all Kentucky colonels nominated in 2008 were Kentuckians. Recent controversy among colonels In 2016, Governor Matt Bevin briefly suspended the program to conduct a review of the requirements for receiving the title and then changed the nomination process so that "only active members of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels" were allowed to make recommendations for the honor. Up to that point in time, the longstanding practice had been that recommendations could be submitted by anyone who already was a Kentucky colonel, without any requirement for donations or membership in any particular organization, and at least 85,000 people had received the title. In 2019, the unincorporated fraternal membership organization Kentucky Colonels International raised concerns and harsh criticism over the changes instituted by Governor Bevin, saying that the commission is a lifetime appointment as an honorary award and should not require colonels to donate annually to a particular organization