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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.
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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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Follow the Money: A Donor-Network Look at Lexington’s 2026 Primary
Follow the money in Lexington’s 2026 primary Our analysis of 2,080 campaign contributions shows three donor factions, an unannounced slate, and a mayor’s race that looks less like a blowout than the headline totals suggest. By The Lexington Times · April 22, 2026 · Data analysis Raquel Carter’s campaign reports $162,744 raised — more…
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Where was this Dan Wu three years Ago?
Commentary — the vice mayor finally showed some progressive grit at Tuesday’s opioid spending debate. The bar for what counts as grit says more about the last three years than it does about him. On April 21, 2026, at a routine council work session, something unusual happened. Vice Mayor Dan Wu picked a fight…