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Let It Flood: how a drowned Lexington street became Kentucky’s biggest food forest
The same low ground along Wolf Run that flooded out Kilrush Drive in June 1992 was bought up, demolished and left as a mowed city greenway for fifteen years — until a permaculturist asked to plant it. How a drowned Lexington street became Kentucky’s biggest food forest.
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The Red Mile’s tax payout was supposed to be off the books. Open records pried loose five years of it: $2.16 million, recalculated by the state nearly every year.
In June, a Lexington Times investigation reported that the public had no way to learn what the Red Mile’s 16-year-old tax subsidy had actually paid out — the figure lived only behind open-records law. The Kentucky Department of Revenue has now produced it: $2.16 million in state increment released from 2020 through 2024, with…
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Kentucky is cutting its income tax. For its oldest development subsidies, the state recalculates the payout as if the rate never moved.
As Kentucky ratchets its income tax down — 5 percent to 4 percent, and now 3.5 percent — a provision first written into the 2023 tax bill and quietly extended twice since recalculates the withholding inside older tax-increment-financing districts as if the rate were still 5 percent. The effect: the cut reaches ordinary taxpayers…
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Fifteen Months in Madison County
Between the summer of 1869 and the fall of 1870 — barely fifteen months — mobs in Madison County, Kentucky killed at least seven Black people. The county had a courthouse at Richmond, a college at Berea founded on the principle of racial equality, and, for that stretch, a Klan that rode more or…
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Stop Tapping the Storm Sewers: Lexington Has Been Fighting the Same Problem for 115 Years
A two-sentence notice in the spring of 1911 banned tapping Lexington’s storm sewers for sewage. The cross-connections it targeted are the same ones at the heart of the city’s $590 million EPA consent decree, entered almost to the day a century later.
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The Bard of the Turf, Revisited: Mickey Shannon’s Two-Issue Newspaper, His Trained Pig, and the Mule That Threw Him Into History
by Paul Oliva, Lexington Times Web Editor Editor’s note: In August 2023, this publication ran a remembrance of Michael Joseph “Mickey” Shannon, the Irish-born horseman who edited the original Lexington Sunday Times in 1911 — the colorful predecessor whose name we carry. Three more years of digging — through the digitized Lexington Herald and…
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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.