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“Transparency Is a Choice”: how the Fayette school board dismissed its public, step by step, on the way to a million-dollar exit
On the night Fayette’s school board locked in four more years of Demetrus Liggins, a board member lectured skeptical parents that “sometimes transparency is a choice.” Eighteen months of receipts later, we know whose choice it was.
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The Line: houses, horses, and the money behind Lexington’s growth boundary
Lexington’s single biggest source of local political money is a horse farm. Its growth boundary — the nation’s first, drawn in 1958 — is what that money is defending. A documented, bilateral look at the homebuilders and the horse farms fighting over where to draw the line, traced dollar by dollar through the campaign-finance…
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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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Commentary: The $649,000 judges’ race nobody is watching
Two candidates for a single Kentucky Court of Appeals seat have raised about $649,000 — real money for a race with no party label and almost no coverage. Read the filings and the maxed-out checks sort into two networks: the appointed incumbent funded by the plaintiff’s bar, labor and the Beshear circle; the challenger…
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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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Commentary: Fifty-one cents on the dollar — the quiet fight over Lexington’s police and fire pension
In January, in a meeting no reporter attended, Lexington’s pension board set the city’s contribution at 51.24 percent of police and fire payroll — about $52.5 million in the budget council just adopted. The fund is $386.6 million short, stuck near 72 percent funded for eight years, retirees are losing ground to inflation under…
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Commentary: Lexington’s public record is rotting, and nobody’s job is to stop it
Twenty-four years of Fayette County election results survived this morning in exactly one reachable place: the Internet Archive. The clerk’s site migration killed the archive, council video is legally destroyable 30 days after minutes are approved, and the plow data lives on because a citizen saved it. We recovered all 37 lost elections in…
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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.