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Twenty-four hours of whiplash: a moratorium sprint, a $546 million budget, and a resignation that wasn’t
In 24 hours, Lexington’s council passed a $546 million budget and froze data-center development with surprise walk-on motions — the mayor’s endorsement arrived after the vote — while the school board and Superintendent Demetrus Liggins issued contradicting statements about whether he resigned. Commentary on what the speed says about civic process.
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The Great Writ comes to Covington: why immigration detainees are flooding Kentucky’s federal court with habeas petitions
Eastern Kentucky’s federal court logged zero immigration-detention habeas cases in 2024. It has seen 147 in the first five months of 2026 — nearly all from one Covington jail. Two 2025 legal changes explain the surge, and the constitutional stakes trace back to Abraham Lincoln.
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Days after Kentucky’s policy center urged cities to build opioid-money watchdogs, Lexington quietly abolished its own
On a silent 15-0 vote, the Urban County Council dissolved the citizen commission that vetted how Lexington spends ~$30 million in opioid-settlement money — six days after the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy urged counties to create exactly such bodies. The job now falls to a mayoral committee that answers to no ordinance, with…
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Lexington just made the Red Mile’s tax deal bigger. It’s worth half what the public’s been told — and what it’s actually paid out is sealed by law.
On a nine-day clock to beat a July 1 state deadline, the Urban County Council unanimously expanded a 16-year-old tax subsidy for the historic harness track — with no debate and no resident at the microphone. A look at what is really in the deal, and what the law keeps hidden.
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Lexington is about to vote on a modest set of reforms. One group is using them as a doorway to something much larger.
The Civic Assembly’s three charter changes head to a June 18 council vote with broad support. Behind them stands D.I.R.E.C.T., a group whose own literature argues the exercise should end in replacing elected council government — and whose answers, asked directly, are revealing.
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Commentary: I build with AI every day. In Lexington, it’s already doing more good than harm.
A council member called AI a far greater force for collective harm than good. After four years building free, open civic tools for Lexington with it, our founder makes the opposite case.
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Setting the Record Straight: The 2021 Alaska Landmine Article
In November 2021, the Alaska Landmine published a piece about me that left out the central fact: the Alaska Democratic Party had hired me, taken my work, and refused to pay. Five years later, here is the actual record.
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Chevy Chase Showed Its True Colors Monday. It Wasn’t Pretty.
This is not advocacy. This is stigma dressed in scrubs. Let’s be honest about what happened Monday in the Council Chambers. More than 260 residents of one of Lexington’s wealthiest, most comfortable neighborhoods showed up to fight tooth and nail against a mental health facility moving in down the street. They brought attorneys. They…
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George Rogers Clark honored with parade after first boys-girls state title sweep since 1928
WINCHESTER — George Rogers Clark High School celebrated a feat nearly a century in the making Sunday, as hundreds lined the streets for a parade honoring the Cardinals boys and girls basketball teams — the first Kentucky school since Ashland in 1928 to win both state titles in the same year. The double championship…
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One Firm, Many Hats: McBrayer’s James Frazier at the Center of Lexington’s Legal Web
A Lexington bank’s request to disqualify a Fayette Circuit judge has pulled back the curtain on a pattern of overlapping roles that has placed one man — and one law firm — at an unusual intersection of judicial, civic, and legal power in Lexington. James H. Frazier III is the CEO of McBrayer PLLC,…