The Bluegrass and Beyond

While discussing the spending scandal at Blue Grass Airport in my column Wednesday, I suggested that someone should offer training for board members who oversee local government and non-profit organizations.

I’m pleased to report that at least two groups already do that — and they expect to see a lot more interest as the airport investigation keeps making headlines.

“I’ve gotten two e-mails today wanting sample expense policies,” said Danielle Clore, director at the Nonprofit Leadership Initiative, an arm of the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture’s extension service. “When there’s a crisis, we get the call. But normally, people just pretend everything’s going to be fine.”

The initiative, which started in 2002, works with non-profit organizations throughout the state to train board members and develop governance policies.

Clore said the group conducts about 50 training sessions a year and plans to offer a Webinar beginning in March. Many non-profit organizations ask incoming board members to attend the session. Some companies, such as Toyota, sponsor the training for employees who serve on boards. The initiative also offers advanced training in specific areas.

“We’ve had some high-profile people attend and say later they had no idea what they were doing,” Clore said. “Where else would you learn that?”

The next general session of Nonprofit Boards 101 will be Friday, Feb. 6, from 1 to 3:30 p.m. at UK’s E.S. Good Barn. The registration deadline is Thursday at noon. The session is free to Nonprofit Network members and $30 for others. For more information, go to the initiative’s Web site, www.kynonprofits.org, or call (859) 257-2542.

Another resource is the United Way of the Bluegrass’s Get On Board program. More than 200 people have gone through the program since it was created in 2004 to encourage more diversity in board membership. The program, which meets one Saturday and then one evening a week for nine weeks, is conducted twice a year.

“It covers things like, ‘what does it mean to be a board member?’” said David Kitchen of the United Way. “What are the legal ramifications? What is expected of me? Down to how to read financial statements and understanding Robert’s Rules of Order.”

Applications for the next Get On Board class are due Feb. 27. The program is free, but admission is competitive. For more information, go to www.uwbg.org and look under the “our programs” tab, call (859) 233-4460, or e-mail getonboard@uwbg.org.

What must good board members know?

“Number one is that they are legally responsible,” Clore said. “The buck stops with the board. They have all the power and authority, but they also have the accountability. A lot of people don’t realize that.”

Board members can be sued, and they should make sure the organization has insurance to cover legal expenses, she said.

Before joining a board, members should ask about the time commitment and responsibilities, such as fund-raising. Once you’re on a board, it’s important to attend all meetings, review paperwork thoroughly beforehand and ask tough questions.

Clore said it’s vital for boards to make sure that organizations have good policies and procedures in place, especially when it comes to money — and that they are strictly followed. Conflicts of interest also should be covered by formal policies.

Sensitive duties, such as handling money, should be spread out among several people. It protects the organization and it protects individuals if problems arise. It’s also a good idea for most organizations to get outside financial audits, and to change auditors periodically.

“Some of these organizations say we’ve worked with this auditor for years and it would be expensive to change,” Clore said. “But the whole goal of an audit is a fresh set of eyes, and if you’ve had an auditor for 10 years, that’s not a fresh set of eyes.”

Two keys to a strong organization are a great board and a great executive director. But that relationship can be difficult to manage.

“It is not the board’s job to be friends with and admire the executive director — it’s their job to supervise this person, eyes wide open,” Clore said. “So many boards get too comfortable in good times, and it can be easy to forget your legal and ethical responsibilities, which I would argue require a dose of skepticism to be cautious.

“Boards must also take a look at who is ‘driving the bus,’” she said. “If the executive director is the one out front and really running the board from behind the scenes, this can be a major cause for concern and a symptom of bigger issues. I’m amazed at organizations that continue to put their faith in one person or a handful of people.”

The Blue Grass Airport spending scandal has been a talker.

The main reason, of course, is the scandal itself. The airport’s handsomely paid executives spent tens of thousands of public dollars on perks for themselves: Wii games, shotguns, lavish travel, scalped Hannah Montana tickets, a $5,000 strip club visit and much more.

Another reason is that many business and civic leaders are shocked and embarrassed by the whole affair, and initial reaction to it. Lexington is, after all, a big small town. After the Herald-Leader broke the story, many instinctively wanted to shoot the messenger.

Mike Gobb, the airport’s executive director, was well-known and well-liked. Gobb made a lot of improvements to the airport. But the state audit and criminal investigation are likely to confirm a dark side few in the community suspected.

The airport’s unpaid board of directors includes many well-liked and respected citizens. While average people are asking, “Why didn’t the board uncover this?” many Lexington leaders are thinking, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

A good city needs good citizens, people willing to donate their time, talent and energy to serve in government and on community boards, commissions and task forces. Lexington is blessed with many such citizens.

Tom Martin, the editor of Business Lexington magazine, worried in a column last week that the airport scandal might make good citizens think twice before volunteering for public service, lest they become “local talk radio’s latest ‘public enemy number one,’ as well as a casualty of the politically ambitious.’”

Like Martin, I hope this scandal won’t scare good people away from public service. But it is certainly a wakeup call, and an opportunity for Lexington to strengthen oversight of its public institutions.

Auditors should be changed periodically, and audits should look deeper than the overall health of an institution. Impropriety is common enough in both public and private organizations that it’s always a good idea to look for it.

For citizens interested in serving on community boards, this scandal shouldn’t be a deterrent. But it should be a reminder that such service requires time, attention and diligence. Board members have a responsibility to look deeply into an organization, ask tough questions and demand accountability on the public’s behalf.

Perhaps Commerce Lexington or another organization could come up with some “best practices” guidelines for community boards, and offer training for people who serve on them. It’s important work, and it must be done well.

Best and worst of times

Mayor Jim Newberry has been criticized for acting more like a lawyer than a leader in response to the airport scandal. But in his annual State of the Merged Government Address, Newberry sounded like a leader — a smart and inspired one, at that.

Speaking Tuesday to the Lexington Forum, Newberry built his speech around the famous “best of times, worse of times” opening line of Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities. While acknowledging the economic crisis, Newberry outlined a progressive vision for Lexington, emphasizing that the next two years could be the most productive and important in the city’s history.

The Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games in late 2010 will be an economic boost, and, more important, an event that will shape the world’s image of Lexington for decades to come. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan has the potential to give Lexington unprecedented resources to improve its infrastructure and build for a prosperous future.

Newberry has submitted $556 million in worthy projects as candidates for federal stimulus funding. They include such things as renovations of schools and the old Fayette County Courthouse that houses the Lexington History Museum to new streets and sewers for the long-neglected neighborhood that developers hope to transform into the Distillery District. The mayor also outlined plans for making sure that money is spent wisely, and with transparency and public accountability.

The stimulus plan will have no shortage of critics. But they should remember how America benefitted from the New Deal infrastructure projects of the 1930s. In many ways, that investment made possible the economic prosperity in the decades that followed.

It’s also notable that Newberry’s vision for Lexington investment extends beyond the traditional. He talked about the need for bike lanes and trails to make us more healthy and arts programs to improve our quality of life and long-term competitiveness.

Kentucky has no shortage of organizations trying to lift the state up from the bottom of various national rankings of social and economic progress.

So I thought I would report on one of the first and most successful of these groups, the Committee for Kentucky, and what today’s do-gooders — and public officials — might learn from it.

I hadn’t heard of the Committee for Kentucky until last month, when I was rummaging through the shelves of the used-book store in the basement of Lexington’s Central Library.

I came across a tattered copy of Kentucky on the March, which was published in 1949 to tout the committee’s work. The book had endorsement blurbs from Vice President Alben Barkley and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The cover illustration cracked me up: A Kentucky colonel, lit cigar in hand, purposely striding toward “progress.”

The Committee for Kentucky was formed in 1944 and headed by Harry Schacter, the book’s author and president of the now-defunct Louisville department store Kaufman-Straus. Even without the sanctimonious tone of writing so popular in that era, the book makes clear why the committee was formed: Kentucky was a mess.

One in four native Kentuckians had left the state in the early 1940s for jobs elsewhere. One in three Kentucky children received no education; seven of eight never graduated from high school. Kentucky had the nation’s second-highest rate of illiteracy. Poverty and ill-health were rampant.

The committee’s founders, hardened by the Great Depression and energized by World War II, began by engaging the state’s academic community in studying how Kentucky had gotten in such sorry shape.

The conclusion was that Kentucky in the early 1900s hadn’t invested in education or in developing a modern economy and infrastructure. Like most other Southern states except North Carolina, Kentucky had looked backward rather than forward. There was a “clannish family society” and a lack of diversity in the work force.

The committee concluded that among the biggest issues facing Kentucky were these: Health, education, economic development, the use of natural resources, a hopelessly outdated constitution and a visceral aversion to taxes.

And there was this observation: “Somehow Kentuckians diverted to politics the social energy which should have gone into improving business, developing industry, and extending educational and welfare services. Because of our tremendous preoccupation with politics, we seem to have earned the slogan that ‘politics are the damndest in Kentucky.’”

Sixty years later, does any of this sound familiar?

The committee then set out to create what it called a “moral climate” for change, using weekly newspaper columns, radio programs, school essay contests and community meetings and projects.

Schacter wrote that some powerful business interests didn’t support the committee’s work. “Those who were the beneficiaries of the status quo were not at all interested in any change,” he wrote. “Those who were victims of the status quo were too apathetic to be much concerned about change.”

The committee also faced opposition because it included representatives of organized labor and the African American community, an especially radical move in the 1940s.

Still, the committee sparked civic engagement across the state, contributed to the creation of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and spearheaded a bipartisan effort that led to tax increases for better roads, schools and social services. The committee’s efforts lay the groundwork for several progressive governors who followed. (But we’re still stuck with that hopelessly outdated constitution.)

In the book, Schacter cites several keys to the committee’s success:

It didn’t sugar-coat Kentucky’s problems. Evidence was gathered and problems publicized. Real, practical solutions were proposed and fought for.

The committee avoided taking sides politically, always emphasizing that its only agenda was improving the lives of Kentuckians. “This was important because the people of Kentucky take their politics so seriously that they have a tendency to read political bias into every important public activity,” Schacter wrote.

The committee operated on little money and refused state appropriations to maintain its independence.

After almost six years of work and accomplishment, the committee voted itself out of existence in 1950. It wanted to avoid the temptation to become a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.

Kentucky has made a lot of progress since the 1940s, but other states have made more. We remain near the bottom of many national rankings of social and economic progress, despite six decades of good work of many public-interest groups.

At the moment, we seem to have our hands full trying to survive the current economic slump. But once this crisis has passed, what’s the next step, and the next?

What will it take to create the “moral climate” in Kentucky to really invest for success in the 21st Century and beyond?

One of the silliest things I’ve heard people say since the Lexington airport scandal began is that it’s a good thing the city didn’t take over the water company. After all, they say, business can always do a better job of running things than government can.

Apparently they haven’t been paying attention lately.

The mismanagement and malfeasance at Blue Grass Airport pale in comparison to the mess we’ve seen across corporate America. Most recently, some of our biggest banks and corporations have been running to the government seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts.

Many jobs are done best by private enterprise, but some should be left to government. Both can succeed, and neither has a monopoly on inefficiency, mismanagement, short-sighted leadership, greed or dishonesty.

The real issue is that both government and business must be held accountable for their actions where the public interest is concerned. That’s why we must return to sensible government regulation of business and the markets, and more transparency and accountability in government.

President Barack Obama set the right tone with several executive orders Wednesday, his first full day in office. He ordered stricter ethical standards for administration officials to try to curb the pay-to-play system that has corrupted Washington. And, more important, he reversed Bush administration policies that favored government secrecy.

Obama said that when citizens request information about government activities under the federal Freedom of Information Act, it should be released unless there’s a good reason to keep it secret. That’s the way it was before the Bush administration effectively reversed the rule to favor a presumption of secrecy.

President George Bush’s excuse was that terrorists might gain access to sensitive information. There was never any evidence of that, but excessive secrecy helped hide his administration’s waste, mismanagement and abuse of power. Some of it came to light anyway, and who knows how much more we’ll find out about now that the veil has been lifted.

Obama called the Freedom of Information Act “perhaps the most powerful instrument we have for making our government accountable and also transparent.” He’s right about that. The old saying is true: Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant.

Believe it or not, Kentucky is a national leader in freedom of information and government accountability. Under laws dating back to the 1960s, government meetings in Kentucky are open to the public, and closed sessions are allowed in very limited circumstances. Remedies for violation of the law are swift and significant.

State and local government information is assumed to be public unless officials can state a legal reason for keeping it secret. They must act on a citizen’s request within three working days. If information is withheld, citizens can appeal to the state attorney general, whose opinion carries the force of law, although government can appeal to the courts. The Kentucky attorney general’s office has a long, distinguished record of favoring openness.

These laws aren’t just for news organizations trying to be watchdogs. Citizens can, and often do, use these laws to hold public officials accountable. (For more information about Kentucky’s open records and meetings laws, visit the Kentucky Press Association’s Web site.)

Were it not for journalists’ active use of Kentucky’s “sunshine” laws, the public wouldn’t know about the abuses at Blue Grass Airport and many, many other cases of illegality, impropriety and questionable ethics in government throughout the Commonwealth.

Kentuckians should oppose efforts to curtail these laws, and urge their legislators to close some loopholes.

The Administrative Office of the Courts, which runs the state judiciary, is exempt from the Open Records law. That should change, especially in light of Herald-Leader reporting last year about the wasteful $880 million courthouse building spree the AOC has conducted with little oversight or accountability.

At the least, the AOC should allow the public access to electronic court records now available online only to lawyers and police agencies. Federal courts have done this for years. There’s no reason to make people go to courthouses to see records that already are public documents.

Another loophole that needs closing involves juvenile court records. Although there are legitimate privacy issues to consider, there’s a much bigger concern that keeping these records secret allows abuse by state agencies and the courts.

Some Kentucky officials are using the Internet to make government more transparent. Among the best examples are the new “Open Door” Web site, created by Gov. Steve Beshear and a bipartisan task force, and Secretary of State Trey Grayson’s “Online Checkbook” site.

Obama said that “transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones” of his administration. Those are bold words, and we must hold him to them. We also must demand the same of our state and local leaders — all of them.

It has almost become a cliché these past few weeks: African Americans, especially older ones, say they never expected to see this day come. They never expected to see a black president of the United States.

After all, this country has from its beginning been divided, obsessed and limited by race. Now that perhaps the most symbolic of glass ceilings has been shattered, what does it mean for the future?

That was much on the minds of 100 or so people who gathered Monday at the Urban League offices in Louisville’s West  End to watch a big television screen as Barack Obama took his oath of office.

They were black and white, old, young and everything in between. They cheered, they cried – and they hoped.

“I never dreamed I would ever see this,” said Georgia Powers, the first woman and first African American to be elected to the Kentucky Senate. “The blacks who helped build the White House were slaves. And just to think that there’s an African American who’s the leader in the White House is just amazing.  It’s just almost unbelievable.”

Powers, 85, is a civil rights legend.  She had been sick recently, and she had planned to stay home and watch the inauguration alone. She was afraid she might cry.

As a state senator in the 1960s, Powers was the driving force behind Kentucky’s passage of some of the South’s first civil rights laws, banning discrimination in housing and public accommodation. She and Martin Luther King Jr. were close associates and, as she later revealed in her autobiography, lovers.  When he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, she was among those there with him.

Powers sees the work she and countless others did as paving the way for Obama and a new generation of people of all races to be able to work together to tackle society’s problems.

“I  just love these young people, because they don’t see color the way the older people did,” she said. “It makes a big difference. It’s waking up the older generation, too. These younger people are teaching the older generation some things.”

Powers’ thoughts and emotions were shared by many others, such as Leonard Lyles, who in the mid-1950s became the first black scholarship football player at the University of Louisville. “I’m just really pleased, really happy,” he said. “I hope I don’t cry.”

Walter Hutchins, 78, who was an activist with the Congress of Racial Equality in Philadelphia in the 1960s, summed up Obama’s election this way: “Evidence of possibility.”

Champagne glasses of grape juice were passed out, and as Obama finished his oath, there were cheers and toasts.  As Obama’s inaugural address was shown on the big screen, the crowd sat spellbound amid occasional mumors of “yes” and “amen.” Many wiped away tears.

“We have begun to cross that great divide in our country,” said Benjamin Richmond, the Urban League’s president. “We still have got a lot of problems to work on.  Racism is still high. But we’re getting there. We are getting there by leaps and bounds.”

Many said Obama’s inauguration meant not so much that African Americans have arrived, but that they are now able to join this nation’s great journey as an equal partner.

“It felt like the whole world stood still for a moment, and something had changed,” said D’Shawn Johnson, an Urban League officer. “If America was a stock, I would go out and buy some.”

I’m not usually an early riser, so it’s never easy to get out of bed when the alarm rings before dawn on that Monday in mid January. It is a holiday, after all, and almost always bitterly cold.

I get up because the Unity Breakfast and downtown march that begin Lexington’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. holiday commemoration are among my favorite events each year.

In addition to plenty of coffee, the breakfast includes awards for outstanding citizens, speeches about the ideals King preached and musical performances. One performer is always a child – an amazingly talented child.

When Alpa Phi Alpha fraternity started hosting the breakfast 15 years ago, it was a small affair and there wasn’t much unity – few whites attended. “Where are the rest of the white people?” retired Herald-Leader columnist Don Edward wrote after the second breakfast in 1996.

More than 1,300 people filled Heritage Hall for the breakfast Monday. Lexington’s leading citizens of all races were there, as were representatives of central Kentucky’s major institutions and corporations. The crowd was smaller than in recent years, because many people were in Washington for a much bigger celebration.

After the breakfast, more than 1,000 people walked a cold, windy circle around downtown.  As usual, it was a throwback to the Civil Rights marches of the early 1960s, with lots of banners and the singing of spirituals and protest songs such as “We Shall Overcome.”

The march is now about brotherhood and unity, rather than protest and defiance. It is Lexington at its best, with everyone showing what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

City officials and university presidents marched beside businessmen, workers, and groups from churches, schools and civic organizations. Asbury Theological Seminary was represented, as was the American Civil Liberties Union. Lexington Fairness, which crusades against discrimination based on sexual orientation, was there, marching right behind The Lexington School. Many parents brought their children for a civics and history lesson.

Jennifer Caravello, a teacher at Leestown Middle School, brought her son Dylan, 6. As they walked, she explained to him that the march was to remind people that everyone has equal rights. “I didn’t want him to leave thinking we had just walked around in a circle,” she said.

A generation ago, police in some Southern cities beat and turned hoses on civil rights marchers. Now, they block traffic for them. Lexington Police Chief Ronnie Bastin and his senior officers marched. Bastin said 56 Lexington officers were in Washington, helping with crowd control for the inauguration. “We had more who wanted to go than could go,” he said.

The marchers began outside Heritage Hall, just east of the home where Mary Todd Lincoln grew up. They walked east on Vine Street, then crossed on Rose Street and went west on Main Street. They passed Cheapside, once one of the South’s biggest slave auction blocks. They passed the former site of Woolworth’s, where black students staged sit-ins to demand service at the lunch counter in the early 1960s. And they passed the former site of the Phoenix Hotel, where trumpeter Louis Armstrong once played – but wasn’t allowed to spend the night.

Tuesday’s inauguration of Barack Obama added magic to the festivities. Many blacks said that, for the first time, they see hope that King’s dream of true equality may be possible.

“This is Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream right now – Obama becoming the first African American president,” said Michelle Brown, who marched with a big smile and an Obama-Biden yard sign. “This is a very special day.”

“I can’t wait for tomorrow,” said Robin Bond of Lexington. “There’s a change in the way people are feeling. They’re excited to see an African American president.”

Bond carried a homemade sign that summed up the thoughts of many marchers, black and white. On one side it said: “Pray for Obama. It’s no longer a dream.” On the other side: “Dr. King, thank you for sharing your dream.”

The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of the grandest experiments of the New Deal.

It was conceived as a federal corporation that could use the power of government and the flexibility of business to improve life in a seven-state region that included parts of Kentucky. TVA also was to be a “living laboratory” for progress.

Soon after its creation in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked how he would describe TVA to skeptics. “I’ll tell them it is neither fish nor fowl,” he replied. “But whatever it is will taste awful good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.”

That was often true. But many times, when TVA ignored its original mission and focused only on providing cheap electricity, the taste could be quite bitter.

Kingston plant ash pond spill. TVA photo

The most recent example is last month’s failure of a huge coal ash holding pond at the Kingston power plant, 50 miles west of Knoxville. More than a billion gallons of toxic sludge destroyed homes, covered hundreds of acres and fouled the Emory River.

Last week, members of Congress grilled TVA officials about the environmental disaster, which could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up. But it is hardly the first, or worst, time TVA has gone astray.

I spent much of the 1980s covering TVA as a Knoxville-based reporter for The Associated Press and, later, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It is a fascinating agency. Over the past 75 years, it has shown government at both its worst and best.

TVA demonstrates fertilizers, 1930s. TVA photo

“People have forgotten all the things TVA taught the rest of the nation in the early years,” former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman told me last week. “We taught the rest of the nation about flood plain management. We had a civil service system before the (rest of the) federal government had one. TVA was the fertilizer research center for the whole world, and we developed all kinds of fertilizers. We taught soil conservation to the farmers.

“The power part of the system was the tail,” Freeman said. “I think what happened over the years was the tail became the dog.”

It started in the early 1950s, when TVA built seven of the world’s biggest coal-burning power plants because its hydroelectric dams were no longer enough to supply the region’s electricity. TVA dominated the eastern coal market and demanded low prices. The result was strip-mining that devastated Appalachia’s land and water.

In the 1960s, TVA began building the nation’s largest system of nuclear power plants. It still operates four of them; several others were started, then scrapped in the 1980s at huge expense. Some reactors were hastily built, then idled for years for costly repairs because TVA couldn’t prove they were safe.

S. David Freeman

President Jimmy Carter appointed Freeman as TVA’s chairman in 1977 with a mandate for change. The agency that had replenished the Tennessee Valley’s crop-worn land during the 1930s had become an environmental outlaw.

“I tried real hard to make TVA more environmentally sensitive,” said Freeman, who wasn’t reappointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. “But I’ll be frank with you: I felt like I was a heart transplant that got rejected about the time I left. The organization itself never got over its low-cost power mission as the overriding mission.”

Freeman has had a long career as a public utility executive and advocate for “green” power. He is the author of two books, Energy: The New Era (1974) and Winning Our Energy Independence (2007). At 82, he remains active as president of the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners.

Freeman recalled that one of his first jobs as a young TVA civil engineer was to design the basement floor and turbine foundation at the Kingston plant. Last year, he testified against TVA in a lawsuit brought by the state of North Carolina, which was trying to force the federal utility to obey federal air pollution laws. Freeman told the court that the Kingston plant should have been replaced with newer technology long ago.

Kingston plant under construction. TVA photo

“The truth of the matter is that nobody dreamed when we designed that plant in 1950 that the sucker would still be running in 2009,” Freeman said last week. “I’m reasonably certain that that holding pond was designed for maybe a 30-year life, 35, maybe 40. Nobody dreamed they would be piling up that crap for 58 years.”

Since the mid-1980s, under pressure from conservatives in the White House and Congress, TVA has given up most of its non-power duties. “TVA had a good 50-year run and then it became just another utility,” Freeman said.

We now find ourselves with the worst economy since the one that led to TVA’s creation. President-elect Barack Obama talks about the need for bold, creative government action to tackle big problems the way TVA and Roosevelt’s other “alphabet soup” agencies did in the 1930s.

Rather than creating new bureaucracies, maybe Obama and Congress should give existing agencies such as TVA new missions. What if TVA were tasked with developing renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, or demonstrating new technologies to solve environmental problems? If such a thing as “clean coal” technology really exists, why not have TVA show how it could work?

After all, Freeman said, “There’s no excuse for the federal government owning the power system in the Tennessee Valley if it’s not going to provide some other benefits, not just to the local people but to the nation.”

Where’s CentrePointe?

Developer Dudley Webb said late last fall that construction would begin in December on the $250 million tower in the middle of downtown Lexington. It’s now January, and the site is a big gravel pit waiting for something to happen.

To make way for CentrePointe, Webb bulldozed the block bounded by Main, Vine, Limestone and Upper streets. He took out 14 structures, including 182-year-old Morton’s Row, the second-oldest commercial building downtown. The National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of America’s biggest losses of 2008.

City officials have asked the state for permission to use incremental tax revenues generated by CentrePointe over the next 30 years to pay for some of the project’s “public” infrastructure, as well as other downtown improvements.

So where’s CentrePointe?

“Everything’s still on track,” Darby Turner, Webb’s attorney, said Thursday. “It’s a little slower process than we had hoped. … We’re still moving right along.”

Turner said engineering and permitting work is under way and construction could begin later this month.

Harold Tate, executive director of the Downtown Development Authority, said it has taken longer than expected for CentrePointe to get state permits to close lanes on some surrounding streets, but that should happen soon.

Webb’s plans call for the 35-story tower to house a four-star J.W. Marriott hotel, luxury condos, shops, offices, restaurants and an entertainment venue.

If CentrePointe is still on track, it would be unusual. Market conditions have changed dramatically since last fall, and similar developments in other cities have been halted or delayed. Financing is hard to come by. But Webb has always insisted that CentrePointe won’t be affected by the credit crunch, because foreign investors he won’t identify have put up cash for construction.

Count me among the skeptics. I wouldn’t be surprised if Webb were to announce that he’s putting CentrePointe on hold. In fact, it could be the best thing.

The worst outcome for Lexington would be a half-built CentrePointe — or one that’s built and then fails in an economy less hospitable to luxury hotels and condos. That’s what Councilman Don Blevins Jr. meant a few months ago when he worried aloud that CentrePointe could become “a vertical Lexington Mall.”

If CentrePointe were put on hold, it could eventually become a better project — one that’s smaller, better designed and more economically viable in the long term. (But still, unfortunately, one without some of Lexington’s irreplaceable historic fabric.)

Delaying CentrePointe would cause a short-term problem. With the countdown clock ticking on the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, nobody wants to be left with a big hole like the one that occupied the next block over in the early 1980s. But that problem could be solved with enough dirt and sod to create a temporary CentrePointe Park.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe CentrePointe construction will begin soon. Maybe CentrePointe will be finished and won’t look as generic and out of place as I fear. Maybe its condos will sell and its hotel will be filled for many years. Maybe the project will generate enough new tax revenues to pay for some wonderful downtown improvements, such as restoration of the old Fayette County Courthouse.

But I’ll believe it when I see it.

A public memorial service is planned at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Hindman Funeral Home for Verna Mae Slone, the well-known Knott County author, quilter and dollmaker who died Monday at age 94.

Mike Mullins, director of the Hindman Settlement School and a close friend of Mrs. Slone, said the program will include music, remembrances and time for people in the community to share their memories of her. The service also will include a message from her longtime pastor and friend, Lawrence Baldridge. Visitation begins at 5 p.m.

The funeral is planned Thursday at 11 a.m. at the funeral home chapel, with Old Regular Baptist ministers officiating, Mullins said. Burial will take place in the Slone Cemetery at Garner. Following the burial, a meal will be provided for the family and friends at the Hindman Settlement School’s May Stone Building.

Despite steady rain, more than 200 people attended a family service for Mrs. Slone on Tuesday night, Mullins said. She is survived by five sons, 17 grandchildren, 40 great-grandchildren and 9 great-great grandchildren.  Slone was photographed (above) in 1993 by Barbara Beirne.

At a point in life when most people slow down, Verna Mae Slone found her voice.

She was a quilter, a dollmaker and the mother of five sons. But after Slone found her voice, she also became the author of six books, the best known of which was her first, What My Heart Wants to Tell.

In simple language, Slone wrote about life and the importance of family, community and the fast-disappearing culture of her beloved Eastern Kentucky mountains.

On Monday, her voice fell silent. She was 94 and had lived almost all of her life in the Knott County community of Pippa Passes.

“I often referred to her as the Grandma Moses of the mountains,” said Mike Mullins, longtime director of the Hindman Settlement School. “She loved to expound on the virtues and values of people from the hills in a very positive light.”

“She had a great sense of tradition and family … and a natural, wonderful way of expressing herself,” said Loyal Jones, retired director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College.

“Verna Mae Slone was a gracious, dignified, intelligent woman,” said New Jersey photographer Barbara Beirne, whose 1993 portrait of Slone became the centerpiece of her exhibit Women of Appalachia at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

“What I especially remember about Verna Mae is her pride in being Appalachian,” Beirne said Monday. “Everyone who views her photograph seems aware that they have been introduced to a very special person.”

Slone was born Oct. 9, 1914, in Knott County. Her mother died when she was 6 weeks old and she was raised by her father, Isom “Kitten Eye” Slone.

She married Willie Slone and had five sons, whom she cared for alone during the week while her husband was off supporting the family. He drove a bulldozer all over Appalachia, carving roads through the mountains to lay natural gas pipelines. He died in 1989.

Their oldest son, Milburn, said his mother completed eighth grade but didn’t move on to high school until he was old enough to go. They were in the same class until she became pregnant with his youngest brother, who was 13 years behind the other four.

Slone, 71, said his mother had a photographic memory and a lifelong love of reading she passed on to her children. Her hands were always busy, making thousands of cloth dolls she gave away and more than 1,800 quilts, many of her own design. Fifteen of those quilts decorate the walls of the main hall at Hindman Settlement School.

“Making a quilt is a lot like living,” Slone once wrote. “When we are born we are given a bundle of scraps; the way we put them together is left up to us.”

Mullins said he met Slone in 1972 when he was directing an oral history project at Alice Lloyd College in Pippa Passes. “It seemed like every time we had a topic, she would give us an unbelievable interview,” he said.

As the interviews were transcribed, Mullins gave Slone copies. Those interviews sparked her interest in writing, and she wove them into a book about her father and the joys and hardships of old-time mountain life. She had 100 copies printed to give away to family members.

Somehow, Mullins said, a copy of the book found its way to a writer, who read excerpts on National Public Radio. New Republic Books published the book in 1979 under the title What My Heart Wants to Tell, and it has sold widely ever since.

Milburn Slone said his mother received fan letters from around the world about that book, but the one that meant the most to her came from a leper colony on an island off the coast of Africa. A copy of the book had made it there. “They said that book, second to the Bible, gave them a reason to live,” he said. “It told how you could survive under any circumstances.”

Slone went on to write five other books, including the novel Rennie’s Way and a book about Appalachian language called How We Talked. For many years, she wrote a column called Now and Then for a local newspaper, the Troublesome Creek Times.

Mullins said Slone’s home was a regular stop for visitors seeking to learn about mountain culture: “There were literally thousands of people who sat at the feet of Verna Mae and listened to her talk about life in these hills.”

Slone’s health began declining after a fall six months ago, but she was alert until 15 minutes before she died, her son said.

Mullins last visited Slone on Dec. 23. She was in bed, breathing with the help of an oxygen tank, but she recited a long poem she had written.

“She encompassed love of family, love of the hills, love of the values and traditions, and she had the ability to translate that through her crafts and her writing,” Mullins said. “Just to look into her eyes and have her look at you with that smile on her face was one of the most inspiring things.”

I had eight vacation days to use or lose, so I was off for the past two weeks.  I had great Christmas and New Year’s celebrations with my family, ate too much, took a cold bike ride, hiked at Raven Run nature preserve and made a start on the big stack of books I bought at the Kentucky Book Fair in November.

The best thing I read during my break was Uneven Ground, by Ron Eller, a University of Kentucky history professor.

Eller has been researching and writing about his native Appalachia for three decades, and Uneven Ground is an outstanding analysis of the region’s history since 1945.  Eller covers a lot in 260 pages of well-chosen words. It is highly readable and often profound.

Appalachia’s lack of progress has sometimes been blamed on its inhabitants’ cultural differences or fear of change. But Eller thinks it has a lot more to do with money and power. For most of the past century, Appalachia has been run like a colony, with outside interests owning most of the wealth, reaping most of the profits and leaving behind an impoverished population and a wasted landscape.

This paragraph on page 223 offers a concise summary of why a half-century of focus on improving Appalachia has made limited progress:

The Appalachian economy, for example, had always been tied to national markets, despite popular images of the region as isolated and underdeveloped. The postwar effort to modernize the mountains came at a time of rapid transition in the national economy, but politics and misperceptions of the region’s history limited the actions of planners and policy makers to playing games of economic catch-up rather than to designing a sustainable, place-based economy for a changing world. During the 1970s and 1980s, as promoters of Appalachian development were building industrial parks, supporting the expansion of coal mining and chasing runaway branch plants, the United States was undergoing a fundamental change from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. At a time when Appalachian leaders were struggling to recruit labor-intensive, low-wage manufacturing plants to an underdeveloped region, technology and globalization were moving these older forms of industrial growth abroad. Traditional industrial recruitment strategies not only perpetuated the long pattern of wealth flowing out of the mountains, but failed to provide a sustainable economic foundation or to protect the region’s sensitive environmental resources. Branch plant economies provided jobs but created little permanent wealth in the communities where they operated. As the rest of the nation invested in expanding higher education, improving environmental quality, and ecouraging creativity for a higher-tech and more service-based world, the core communities of Appalachia remained tied to the old, extractive economy.

Uneven Ground should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the region that includes so much of Kentucky.