The Bluegrass and Beyond

What went wrong with American downtowns during the last half of the 20th century?

A lot, actually. But one big thing was that they were redesigned to work better for cars than for people. It’s no wonder people abandoned them.

Lexington escaped the worst of it. Unlike many cities, Lexington didn’t have an expressway routed through the middle of it. Interstate highways made America’s small towns and rural areas more accessible, but they devastated many cities — cutting up neighborhoods and making downtowns less walkable, welcoming and safe.

Downtown Lexington’s legacy from 20th century traffic engineering efficiency is its one-way street pairs — primarily the east-west corridors of Short and Second, High and Maxwell, Main and Vine and the north-south corridor of Limestone and Upper.

It was all done in the early 1970s with the best of intentions: Make it easier for shoppers to get to and from downtown so the stores won’t move to the suburbs.

It didn’t work. Worse yet, those one-way streets have hampered public and private efforts to reinvent and revitalize downtown Lexington ever since.

Here’s the problem: Cars go faster on one-way streets, especially when lanes are wide. That makes traffic more dangerous, especially for pedestrians, and more noisy. One-way streets hurt business and confuse tourists.

Fortunately, after years of struggle, efforts to revive downtown Lexington are taking hold, thanks to some good planning and more than $300 million in private investment. Mayor Jim Newberry unveiled a new “streetscape” plan Thursday that could make downtown even better.

The plan, developed by Covington-based KKG Studios, would make downtown a more people-friendly place to live, work and play. It would add bicycle lanes and 170 additional street parking spaces during non-peak hours. Wider sidewalks would allow for easier walking and more outdoor dining.

A water feature would be built along Vine Street, following the path of Town Branch Creek, which was buried beneath the street generations ago. A European-style glass pavilion would be built on Cheapside, Lexington’s historic marketplace, as a home for the Lexington Farmers Market and community events.

It’s a terrific plan that could help downtown achieve its potential for contributing to Lexington’s economy and quality of life. It also assumes the conversion of most, if not all, of the one-way streets back to two-way traffic. That follows the recommendation of Lexington’s 2006 downtown master plan.

Plans call for Short and Second streets to return to two-way traffic within 12 months, said Harold Tate, president of the Downtown Development Authority. Limestone and Upper Streets would be made two-way within two or three years. But Tate said further studies are needed before setting a timetable for returning two-way traffic to High, Maxwell, Main and Vine streets.

At Thursday’s news conference, Newberry was pessimistic about returning two-way traffic to downtown’s biggest drag strips — Main and Vine streets. “It’s very complicated,” he said, citing likely pushback from state traffic engineers and others. Newberry said he didn’t expect to see it happen “in my lifetime.”

That makes no sense.

After all, Main Street is two-way in each direction until it reaches downtown. That means traffic speeds up just when it should be slowing down.

“We’ve had a failed 40-year experiment with one-way streets downtown,” said Phil Holoubek, a downtown developer whose projects include Main & Rose and the Nunn Building Lofts.

Once other one-way streets are converted and the Newtown Pike extension is completed in 2014 to route through-traffic around downtown, there’s no reason not to return Main and Vine to two-way, he said.

Van Meter Pettit, a downtown resident who is developing the Town Branch Trail, agrees. “Otherwise, we’re saying that commuter traffic is a higher priority than urban redevelopment, when our master planning is telling us just the opposite,” he said.

Successful cities across America are converting their one-way streets back to two-way and looking for other ways to make their downtowns work better for people than cars. In perhaps the boldest move yet, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans Friday to convert Times Square into a pedestrian mall by May.

Lexington’s city officials and their consultants have invested a lot of time, effort and money in solid plans for revitalizing downtown. They shouldn’t let nay-saying by state traffic engineers or others jeopardize those efforts.

If downtown Lexington is to achieve its potential, it must become a place people want to drive to — not drive through.

This seems to be Kentucky month on the small screen. If you didn’t like Diane Sawyer’s view, KET has something completely different.

Our Kentucky, an hour-long video valentine to the state’s scenic beauty, debuts on KET1 Saturday at 8 p.m. as part of the network’s annual on-air fundraiser. In tone and content, it couldn’t be more different from Sawyer’s report on systemic poverty in Appalachia for ABC’s news magazine 20/20.

It’s coincidence that these TV programs came out within two weeks of each other. In many ways, they represent the two sides of Kentucky’s coin — both begging us to scratch below the surface.

In Our Kentucky, KET’s videographers visited Kentucky’s most beautiful places, bathed in golden sunlight and rendered in high-definition splendor. We see panorama after panorama, set to majestic music and evocative narration by Nick Clooney.

There are fawns grazing in mountain meadows at sunrise, geese flying in formation framed by the setting sun, egrets swimming in misty cypress swamps. The camera lingers on such places as Chained Rock in Bell County, Natural Bridge in Powell County and Pennyrile State Forest in Christian County.

We see historic homes, foals romping across manicured Bluegrass pastures and the awe-inspiring cathedrals of Covington. There’s the 21st century skyline of Louisville, the 19th century skyline of Augusta and distilleries as noted for their quaint charm as for their fine bourbon.

It’s an idyllic view of Kentucky — true, as far as it goes.

Sawyer’s documentary, A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains, follows the lives of several poor children and young people in Eastern Kentucky. They’re shown trying to survive in a seemingly hopeless environment of poverty, drug abuse and a lack of enough good food, healthcare, education and economic opportunity. The report is true, as far as it goes.

The documentary attracted 10.9 million viewers nationwide when it aired Feb. 13 — the biggest 20/20 audience in more than four years. As expected, it drew fire from some Kentuckians who saw it as nothing more than a rehash of old stereotypes. After all, Sawyer could have found plenty of poor people on the cab ride out of New York to catch her plane.

Some complained that the program and a brief ABC News followup didn’t do enough to highlight progress and the efforts Kentuckians have made to help their less-fortunate neighbors.

Others, however, have responded with introspection, asking what more Kentuckians could do. Some of the most thoughtful reaction I have seen has been on WYMT-TV in Hazard, which could teach many big-city stations a thing or two about public-service broadcasting.

Appalachian scholar Ron Eller of the University of Kentucky, who appeared briefly in the documentary, wishes Sawyer, a Kentucky native, had focused more on the root causes of Eastern Kentucky’s problems and why so many efforts to solve them have failed.

“On the other hand, I think the program was quite successful at drawing attention to the persistence of poverty and social inequity in the Commonwealth,” he said.

National attention is helpful, Eller said. Ultimately, though, Kentuckians must create the modern economy, honest government and adequate infrastructure needed to lift Appalachia.

I missed Sawyer’s documentary when it first aired, so I watched it online Monday evening, immediately after viewing a preview DVD of Our Kentucky. In an odd way, watching them together made both more thought-provoking.

You won’t see any strip mines in Our Kentucky, no scalped mountaintops, factory hog farms or polluted streams. The Bluegrass meadows aren’t bordered by strip malls, big-box stores, McMansion cul-de-sacs or sprawling developments of cookie-cutter homes.

“The aspects of pride we have in who we are and where we live are often at odds with the way of life we have chosen for ourselves,” Eller noted. “But out of that strong sense of place could come actions to protect that land and the quality of life.”

Neither Sawyer’s documentary nor Our Kentucky tell the whole story. It would be asking too much to expect them to. But they’re both worth watching, because together they show Kentuckians what needs fixing — and why it’s worth the effort.

BYBEE — You can buy more elegant dishes, more perfectly shaped dishes and certainly more expensive dishes. But only here can you buy stoneware that has been made by the same family in the same log shed and in about the same way since 1809.

Bybee Pottery is the last of perhaps 50 small potteries that sprang up during Kentucky’s pioneer days near the rich clay deposits of southern Madison County. Yet, as the Cornelison family celebrates its business’s bicentennial, family members fight persistent rumors that it is closing — and they wonder how much longer it can survive.

“All my life, there has been the annual going-out-of-business rumor,” said Buzz Cornelison, 60, who with his brother and sister represent the sixth or seventh generation to run the business, depending on who’s counting. “All my life, we have laughed about it. But in the last few years it has become more acute.”

Bybee Pottery faced its first big threat during the Civil War, when Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s raiders burned many potteries in the area because of their owners’ Union sympathies. Cornelison family legend has it that Bybee was spared because it employed an immigrant potter known for his outspoken support of the South.

In the early 1900s, as demand for utilitarian crocks and churns diminished, most of the remaining potteries went under. But the Cornelisons adapted, shifting their production to tableware glazed with bright, custom-made colors that are now a company trademark.

Most Cornelisons over the years weren’t potters; they hired potters. That was until Buzz’s father, Walter Lee Cornelison, took over the business and spent decades at the wheel, producing hundreds of thousands of pieces now prized for their quality.

“My great-grandfather made a kick wheel for my father when he was a little boy, and he said he had his own corner … his own clay,” Buzz Cornelison said. “Every once in a while, somebody would walk by and say, ‘Try it this way’ and show him something. That’s the way he learned to throw.”

Business got a boost when Phyllis George, a sportscaster and former Miss America from Texas who married John Y. Brown Jr., became Kentucky’s first lady in 1979. She made the international promotion of Kentucky crafts her personal mission. She even persuaded Bloomingdale’s department store in New York to set up a boutique to sell them.

Bybee was a big beneficiary of her efforts. For the next two decades, people would line up outside Bybee’s rustic workshop off Ky. 52 at 8 a.m. each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, waiting for a new batch to be pulled from the big kiln.

Business has slowed with the economy, and Kentucky crafts aren’t as popular as they once were. Perhaps Bybee Pottery’s biggest blow came in November 2007, when Walter Cornelison suffered a stroke. Although he recovered, Cornelison, who turned 80 this month, can no longer make pottery that meets his exacting standards.

Now the wheel is manned by Buzz Cornelison’s brother, Jim, who also works as Madison County’s coroner; and by Harvey Conner, who started working here 44 years ago when he graduated from high school. The Cornelisons’ sister, Paula Gabbard, and two longtime employees, Brenda Cole and Rick Hall, help with other chores.

“We have had generations of families work here, and not just ourselves,” Buzz Cornelison said. “Most of the people we have hired over the years are neighbors.”

A Cornelison cousin, Ron Stambaugh, owns Little Bit of Bybee, which sells the pottery and some of his own pieces at a shop in the Louisville suburb of Middletown.

Without Walter Cornelison’s prolific work, the shop has cut back from three kiln-loads a week to two. On a recent Wednesday, the Cornelison brothers and Conner finished the hourlong process of unloading the kiln as the sun rose and the bells of Bybee United Methodist Church chimed 8 o’clock. The shop door was unlocked, but nobody was waiting outside.

Still, business isn’t bad. A handful of customers wanders in each day from all over the country to see the pottery being made and to stock up on colorful pitchers, pie plates, mugs and bowls.

“I have a cousin who put me on to Bybee Pottery; she has a whole kitchen full of it,” said Paula Dodd of Crane Hill, Ala., who stopped by while driving through Kentucky with her husband, Ed. The Dodds bought two big boxes full of pieces for their 36-year-old twin daughters. “The whole family has a lot of this stuff,” he said.

Visitors walk through the shop, past the kiln and groaning shelves of cups and bowls waiting to be fired, until they get back to the log workshop, where Conner is at the wheel. Everything is covered with a thick layer of yellow clay dust, including the floor, which has gained a few inches over the past two centuries. Tall people must frequently duck to avoid hitting the log beams that hold up the ceiling.

Conner, a skilled potter, seems to enjoy explaining the process as much as doing it. “I’d like to have a dime for every piece I’ve made since I’ve been here,” he tells a visiting couple from Louisville. “I’d retire.”

An electric motor turns the potter’s wheel, and the kiln is fired by natural gas. Clay is dug from a nearby farm with a bulldozer and backhoe. After removal of the 100 tons of clay that the pottery will use in a year, the hole is filled in and marked for the next year’s dig.

Otherwise, Bybee Pottery’s methods have changed little.

Fresh clay is run through a pug mill, which is like a big sausage grinder, to remove any pebbles or impurities. It is then formed into “logs” and stacked in burlap in a stone cellar. The only thing ever added to the clay is a little water.

After each piece is formed on the potter’s wheel, it is dried, painted with colorful glaze and fired for 16 hours in the kiln, which reaches 2,200 degrees. After cooling for 24 hours, pieces are unloaded from the kiln onto the shop’s shelves. Prices here are lower than at other Kentucky shops that sell Bybee Pottery.

Buzz Cornelison doesn’t know what the future holds for his family’s business. “There is no next generation for us to take over, unless things change,” he said.

But then, Cornelison wouldn’t necessarily have seen himself here a few years ago. An accomplished musician, he was a keyboard player with the local rock band Exile, which scored a No. 1 hit in 1978 with Kiss You All Over.

After 18 years on the road with Exile, he returned to the pottery shop where he had worked as a boy, and in his spare time, he earned a master’s degree in English literature from nearby Eastern Kentucky University. He remains active in local theater.

“There is a next gener ation,” Cornelison said. “One’s a lawyer in Chicago, and she’s not about to come back. And the other two are girls who are in high school now. They haven’t focused on what they’re going to do, but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of interest from them (in running the pottery). And I don’t blame them.”

But don’t say bye-bye to Bybee Pottery just yet. The Cornelisons beat the normal odds of family business survival several generations ago. Their little shop seems to have luck — or at least inertia — on its side.

“As it stands right now, at this point in time, we have no plans to close,” Buzz Cornelison said. “I hope that doesn’t change.”

Kentucky legislators always say they like to improve education and protect freedom. A bill before the House of Representatives would let them do both, and it was inspired by a 20-year-old college sophomore.

House Bill 43 would restore rights that high school students lost in 1988 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that freedom of the press doesn’t apply to them. Since then, school administrators have been able to censor student media for any reason. They also can punish student journalists who write things they don’t like, as well as teachers who let it happen.

Rep. Brent Yonts, a Greenville Democrat, is sponsoring the bill, which is now before the House Education Committee. Seven other states have passed similar laws, and bills are pending in Connecticut and Washington.

Yonts filed the bill at the request of a constituent, Josh Moore of Greenville, who is studying journalism at Western Kentucky University. Moore has created a Web site to promote it: www.kystudentpress.org.

Moore said he had a good relationship with the principal when he was editor of the student newspaper at Muhlenberg South High School. But he knew others elsewhere weren’t so lucky. He also knew that student journalists didn’t pursue some good stories because they had no rights and their teachers had no protection.

It’s a big problem nationally, said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va. His group gets 500 calls a year about high school media censorship, and he thinks many more cases are never reported because students and teachers have little recourse.

“Many principals want the student newspaper to really be a public relations arm of the school or school district,” said David Greer of the Kentucky Press Association, which strongly supports the bill. “They don’t want any serious reporting. They don’t want anything that might be controversial.”

Moore stresses that his bill wouldn’t prevent principals from reviewing student media before publication. It also wouldn’t stop them from censoring content that is libelous, disruptive, encourages disobeying the law or school rules or amounts to an unwarranted invasion of privacy.

The bill would require schools to adopt written policies governing student expression, and it would keep school officials from being held legally liable for student media content. It also would protect teachers from being “terminated, transferred, removed or otherwise disciplined for refusing to suppress the protected expression of student journalists.”

LoMonte said one of the biggest objections school administrators raise to giving student journalists more freedom — the fear of lawsuits — is unfounded.

“There are exactly zero published court decisions in the history of the United States in which a K-12 public school has been held financially liable for injury inflicted by a student publication — zero,” he said. “Athletic teams are by far a greater source of litigation, and yet no one proposes to switch to two-hand touch football because football injuries provoke lawsuits.”

The Supreme Court’s 1988 ruling reversed a 1969 decision that gave high school students the same freedoms and responsibilities as other journalists.

That was the law in 1975-76, when I was editor of the Lafayette Times at Lexington’s Lafayette High School. We had a pretty feisty newspaper, and I’m sure the principal didn’t like some of the things we wrote. But he never tried to censor us — or even complained.

To see if my memory was correct, I called him Thursday.

“I don’t recall anything coming out that caused any trouble,” said Dwight Price, who retired in 1987 after 15 years as Lafayette’s principal. “I think students need freedom and they need creativity. … Most kids today are level-headed.”

Price said the key to good, responsible student journalism is appointing good teachers with some journalism training to oversee it. That’s certainly what he had in my high school newspaper’s adviser, Julie Dodd, who later earned a Ph.D. and has taught journalism at the University of Florida for many years.

“Time and time again you see teachers without any journalism training … They don’t know what their rights and responsibilities are,” said Greer, who administers the Kentucky High School Journalism Association, which the press association started a dozen years ago and has 103 member schools.

Moore thinks that giving more freedom and protection to students and teachers would create a framework for improving journalism education in high schools. “This is a way of putting it in a structured environment where they could teach students what is right and what is wrong,” he said. “It helps the educational process.”

The educational process is what it’s about.

High school media doesn’t exist to train future journalists so much as to train future citizens. In a world awash in information, citizens need to know how to tell good journalism from bad, truth from propaganda, substance from fluff. That requires training — and freedom. And it’s an area where Kentucky can lead the way.

As I drove to Frankfort early Tuesday, punching the buttons on my car radio, I came across one of those feel-good spots from the Kentucky coal industry. It ended with this line: “Never underestimate the power of coal.”

That’s been good advice in this state for more than a century. And never more true than inside the marble walls of the building where I was headed.

I came to the state Capitol on this sunny day to witness a different kind of power — the growing public sentiment against coal-mining methods that blast away mountains and fill headwater streams with the debris.

More than 500 Kentuckians — from toddlers on their parents’ shoulders to seniors in their 80s — marched up Capitol Avenue and gathered on the Capitol steps for the annual I Love Mountains Rally. The citizens group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth organized the rally to push for legislation that would ban the burying of headwater streams with mining waste.

The marchers carried signs proclaiming “topless mountains are obscene” and urging “not one more mile” of streams be destroyed. They lacked the coal industry’s economic or political power. Instead, they sought to harness moral power.

Ashley Judd added glamour to the event. The Kentucky actress, famous for reciting other people’s words in movies, gave a 20-minute speech of her own that was passionate and eloquent. It was no celebrity puff piece, but a sharp critique of mountaintop-removal mining, the coal industry and the endless cycle of poverty she said coal has brought to Appalachia.

“There is no doubt that there is a crisis in Eastern Kentucky,” Judd said. “The crises are systemic, and the system at the root of our 100-year-long crisis is the unchecked power of the coal companies.

“They assured us that each reform … would be the end, the death of the coal industry,” Judd said. “Well, by golly, what do you know. Here the coal companies still are — bigger, and badder and richer than ever. … Make no mistake about it: The coal companies are thriving. Even in this bleak economy, they are thriving. What is dying is our mountains. And they are dying so fast, my friends, so shockingly fast.”

U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville pledged to fight mountaintop-removal mining through federal clean-water legislation. That may be necessary. The state “stream saver” bill, sponsored by Sen. Kathy Stein of Lexington and Rep. Don Pasley of Winchester, is getting the usual cold shoulder from legislative leaders with close ties to the coal industry.

Silas House, a best-selling author from Eastern Kentucky, said he was disappointed Gov. Steve Beshear declined to attend the rally, even though it was just a few steps from his office.

“I think Gov. Beshear is a good man and I don’t understand why he won’t come out and listen to us,” House said, noting that many of his neighbors also are afraid to cross King Coal. “We’ve had a hundred years of being told not to speak out against the coal industry. It’s hard to break out of that culture. We’ve been taught to feel powerless.”

Mickey McCoy, a high school teacher from Inez in coal-rich Martin County, agreed: “It’s a terrible thing when you can’t get a single senator or representative from the coalfield counties to represent anything but the coal industry.”

Beshear’s spokesman, Jay Blanton, said the governor was in an important economic development meeting that had been scheduled weeks earlier, but left it to meet with Judd and a small group of KFTC members after the rally. Blanton said Judd spent Monday night at the governor’s mansion where she and Beshear “talked at some length about these issues.”

KFTC said nearly 500 Kentucky mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining. It cited figures from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that more than 1,400 miles of headwater streams in the state have been buried or damaged by mining since 1981.

The coal industry, which says it provides 17,000 jobs in Kentucky, argues that the “stream saver” legislation would virtually halt surface mining in Eastern Kentucky. And it notes that coal provides more than 90 percent of Kentucky’s electricity at some of the nation’s cheapest prices.

There’s no doubt Kentucky needs coal — at least until we can develop alternative energy sources, hopefully before all of the coal runs out. But that doesn’t mean coal must be mined by the most environmentally destructive methods. Electricity is cheap only if you don’t include all of the hidden costs to Kentucky’s land, water and people.

In the short run, economic arguments always seem to trump moral arguments, even when people know in their hearts what is right. In the long run, though, moral arguments usually prevail.

A few decades ago, it was blasphemy to speak out against the health dangers of smoking, because tobacco was so important to Kentucky’s economy. A century and a half ago, many people argued that the economy couldn’t survive without slavery.

“The environment is not a place where we go hiking; it’s a place where we live,” said Sam Avery, who came to the rally from Hart County, where he lives in a solar-powered home.

“When you grind up a mountain just for the coal, you destroy the trees, the animals, the insects, the water supply. The living world is that much smaller,” Avery said. “From a Biblical perspective, it’s an abomination to the creator.”

Click on photos below to enlarge

Where were you in 1968, if you were around at all?

I was 10 years old. I knew big events were happening from the stories in the Lexington Herald and flickering black-and-white images on the evening news. But I was busy discovering the fields, woods and creeks near my home in rural Fayette County.

For many people a few years older than me, though, 1968 was the year that shaped the rest of their lives.

Watching television news last fall, Doris Wilkinson, a University of Kentucky sociology professor, heard then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rebuking Russian officials about their invasion of Georgia by saying, “This is not 1968.” Suddenly, Wilkinson started thinking about how, in so many ways, 1968 changed everything.

That year marked the height of the civil rights and anti-war movements, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the beginnings of the women’s movement and a top-to-bottom questioning of America’s status quo. Overseas, there was the Prague Spring, when Czech students challenged their communist rulers in that country’s first step toward freedom.

“Change was an ingredient in the air without having to utter the word,” Wilkinson said.

Wilkinson’s thinking about 1968 led her to organize a symposium Monday at UK’s W.T. Young Libarary with help from the Kentucky Humanities Council. She and seven other UK faculty members spoke about that year and how it changed them — and America.

Thomas Janoski, a sociology professor, noted that 1968 produced much that was healthy, such as an awareness of civil rights for minorities and women and the rise of participatory democracy. But there were bad things as well: The rise of drug abuse that shattered lives and filled prisons and a media culture that glamorized violence, celebrity and shock value.

Two of the most interesting stories of personal change came from history professor Ron Eller and political science professor Ernest Yanarella.

Eller described being the first member of his West Virginia family to go to college, thanks to a scholarship. His political consciousness was shaped by the assassinations and the culture of violence that caused them. And he became aware of the negative — and erroneous — views mainstream America held about his native Appalachian culture.

Appalachian culture wasn’t the problem, he realized. “It was their economy, the political system that created poverty for their communities,” he said. He spent the next 40 years studying Appalachia — “How the system works and how it doesn’t work. For whom the system works and for whom it doesn’t work.”

Yanarella attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 as a Eugene McCarthy supporter and student journalist. The violence that erupted there, which he mostly blamed on Chicago police, made an indelible impression.

It was a defining moment for his generation, Yanarella said, just as Barak Obama’s election may be seen as a defining moment for the generation of students who were sitting in the audience Monday afternoon.

“There is a basis for hope,” he said, as he clicked to the final slide of his PowerPoint presentation. It showed an election-day celebration last November in Chicago, and a smiling police officer autographing a young woman’s Obama T-shirt.

The late Sen. Russell B. Long of Louisiana famously described the politics of tax reform this way: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.”

Kentucky needs real tax reform, because what Long described is the way we have funded government for years.

We have known for more than a decade that Kentucky’s tax system is broken, because each year comes with another big deficit. (Government spending has increased, too, but Kentucky’s per-capita state and local spending is almost 20 percent less than the national average, according to the Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center.)

Economists say annual deficits, even in good times, show that Kentucky needs a tax structure that reflects the modern economy — and one that is fair, equitable, efficient and sufficient to meet the state’s needs.

Recent governors and legislatures have settled for a series of politically expedient quick fixes, usually hashed out behind closed doors and pushed quickly through the General Assembly. And they do it knowing that another crisis is just around the corner.

Think this year’s $456 million shortfall was bad? State officials say it’s nothing compared to what we’re likely to see in the next two years.

Gov. Steve Beshear’s proposal for the current deficit was another quick fix, but at least it made some long-term sense. Beshear proposed raising Kentucky’s incredibly low cigarette tax by 70 cents, to $1 a pack. In addition to raising revenue, he hoped to save millions, if not billions, in future healthcare costs by reducing the high number of Kentuckians who smoke.

Raising the cigarette tax closer to the national average attracted support from a broad coalition of business, health and education groups. But they underestimated the devotion to cheap smokes. A compromised rammed through the General Assembly and quickly signed by the governor Friday raised the cigarette tax by only 30 cents, and made up the difference by adding more tax to alcohol.

The liquor industry cried foul, saying that while Kentucky’s tobacco taxes are among the nation’s lowest, alcohol taxes are among the highest. While the abuse of alcohol certainly has health and social costs, they’re much smaller than those caused by the use of tobacco.

Was the additional alcohol tax fair? Probably not, but it was politically expedient. Nobody could argue that it would be better to slash money for education, healthcare and social services than to raise taxes on alcohol, a discretionary product that many Kentuckians consider evil.

Liquor is always an easy target. Forty-nine of Kentucky’s 120 counties don’t allow alcohol sales, and another 41 place restrictions on it. Rep. Steve Riggs, a Louisville Democrat, suggested that only “wet” counties should receive the benefits of future alcohol taxes. Of course, that idea went nowhere.

Riggs’ proposal was similar to the logic, if not the reality, of the coal-severance tax. Speaking of which, Kentucky’s severance tax rate has been 4.5 percent since the 1970s, smaller than in other major coal-producing states. The tax is 5 percent in West Virginia and 7 percent in Wyoming. Raising Kentucky’s severance tax would seem to be a good idea. But don’t expect it to happen, given many legislators’ allegiance to King Coal.

There have been several studies over the years suggesting ways to improve Kentucky’s tax system. Two legislators have made comprehensive tax reform proposals at opposite ends of the political spectrum that could serve as conversation-starters.

Rep. Jim Wayne, a Louisville Democrat, has proposed making the state income tax more like the federal one by more directly linking tax levels to income levels. He would raise the tax on people earning more than $75,000, while providing a 15 percent earned income tax credit for low- and middle-income people.

Rep. Bill Farmer, a Lexington Republican, has suggested eliminating sales tax exemptions. He says that would simplify the system and bring in enough additional revenue to reduce the 6 percent sales tax to 5 percent and eliminate the income tax, too. Farmer’s plan needs to be analyzed to see if the numbers work, and if it would be fair to poor people.

Both plans would tax some services, something economists say is necessary to keep tax revenues growing with the economy.

With Kentucky’s perpetual budget crisis bandaged up for a few more months, what will our leaders do now? Will they hope for a windfall from the federal economic stimulus? Will they decide that slot machines can make state government richer without making Kentuckians poorer?

What they should do is quit looking for quick fixes and easy answers. Otherwise, they’ll just have to keep dipping into reserve funds, hacking away at vital social services and putting off investments in education and infrastructure that are Kentucky’s only hope for a bright future.

We must get serious about real tax reform. We must create a modern tax system that is fair, equitable, efficient and sufficient. Because even if there is a fellow behind the tree, he’s a Kentuckian.

FRANKFORT — Gov. Steve Beshear, Senate President David Williams and House Speaker Greg Stumbo paused a few moments from trying to solve today’s problems to mark Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday Thursday by laying a wreath at the feet of his bronze statue in the center of the state capitol rotunda.

Then, like thousands of tourists before them, they rubbed Lincoln’s shiny left toe for good luck.

The early-afternoon ceremony was delayed so Beshear could get back to Frankfort from Hodgenville, where he participated in festivities in Lincoln’s hometown.

The capitol ceremony included musical performances by gospel singer Kenny Bishop and the Kentucky State University Concert Choir Ensemble. Actor Greg Hardison recited some of Lincoln’s famous second inaugural address, and Kentucky Poet Laureate Jane Gentry Vance read her poem about Lincoln, based on the famous 1863 portrait of the Civil War president by Alexander Gardner.

Kent Whitworth, executive director of the Kentucky Historical Society, noted that 100,000 Kentucky fourth- and fifth-graders were spending the day in a joint study of Kentucky’s most famous native son.  Historian John Kleber of the University of Louisville reminded the gathering that Lincoln always loved his native state, although most of its residents during his lifetime had little regard for him.

“In no ‘northern’ state was he so vilified and hated,” Kleber said, adding, “He belonged to us, the people of Kentucky, because no claim shall come before the mother.”

I’ll have more to say about the Lincoln-Kentucky paradox here later today, and in Friday’s Herald-Leader.

Here’s a question: What development over the next year or two will have the biggest impact on Lexington’s future?

The 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games? The Newtown Pike corridor? Redevelopment around the University of Kentucky campus? Whatever does — or doesn’t — rise out of the CentrePointe crater?

Any of those projects would be a good guess. But a decade or two from now, I think they will pale in comparison to the redevelopment of the Eastern State Hospital property into a new campus for Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

In a brilliant land swap announced a year ago, BCTC will move to the 65-acre Eastern State property north of downtown. Eastern State will get a badly needed new hospital on UK’s Coldstream property, and UK will get BCTC’s current Cooper Drive campus for future expansion.

Why is a new BCTC campus such a big deal? Two reasons. The first is what it will do for the college, and what it will allow the college to do for Kentucky.

“It’s almost unheard of today for a community and technical college to have the opportunity to build a brand new urban campus,” said BCTC President Augusta Julian.

The college is making long-range plans to determine how its program offerings should change to support the 21st-century economy. Julian thinks it is possible that the college, which has 12,000 students at several campuses, could double enrollment within 10 years.

BCTC has 800 nursing students, so health-related fields are a natural growth area. Julian expects a large need for lab technicians. Other opportunities could include training people for Kentucky’s hospitality and tourism industries, and teaching BCTC trade school graduates the business skills they need to start their own companies. Julian thinks the need for retraining older workers of all kinds will be huge.

The second reason this is such a big deal is what redevelopment of those 65 acres of prime real estate could do for Lexington — if it is done right.

How could it be done wrong? Easy: Throw up a poorly planned, automobile-centric campus of nondescript, suburban-style buildings and lots of surface parking. In other words, build the higher education equivalent of Hamburg Pavilion. And then give little thought to how it affects the surrounding neighborhoods or the city as a whole.

Or, officials could take this unique opportunity to use good design, architecture and urban planning to create a world-class campus that will spark quality redevelopment throughout Lexington’s north side.

The initial signs are encouraging. BCTC has assembled a talented team of architects and planners who combine deep local knowledge with international vision and experience.

EOP Architects is overseeing the campus master plan along with M2D Design Group, a landscape architecture firm. Ross-Tarrant Architects is designing the first major building, for which $22 million was set aside long ago. The three Lexington-based firms are working with Perkins + Will, an international company based in Minneapolis that has extensive campus-planning experience.

In an especially smart move, Urban Collage, an acclaimed urban design firm, has been hired to look at how the campus can be used to create good mixed-use redevelopment around it — housing, shopping and restaurants.

“It will be a tremendous economic anchor,” said Stan Harvey, a partner in Atlanta-based Urban Collage who lives in Lexington. “We just need to work through all the puzzle pieces.”

Construction of the new campus could take two decades, Julian said. Even when it is finished, BCTC will probably still have several locations in Lexington, in addition to its satellite campuses in surrounding towns.

The planning schedule is aggressive: Officials hope to finish a campus master plan late this year. Within a few months, there will be opportunities for surrounding neighborhoods and citizens to review and comment on those plans, Julian promised.

“We have to fit into the neighborhood,” she said. “We really want to do it right in terms of being visible, transparent, getting a lot of people involved.”

Julian said her vision is for an urban-style campus of multi-story buildings. The campus’ style and look could depend on whether consultants think any of Eastern State’s old buildings are worth reusing. The Kentucky Heritage Commission The Kentucky Archaeological Survey — a partnership between the Kentucky Heritage Council and the UK Department of Anthropology — is looking at that, along with investigating burial sites known to be on the property, which has been a mental hospital since 1816.

Julian is especially interested in looking at mass transit possibilities. That’s because BCTC students will still need to go back and forth between there and the UK campus, and because she doesn’t want to have thousands of cars passing through the surrounding area each day. The Newtown Pike extension could offer some creative opportunities for that kind of mass transit.

This project has the potential to transform Lexington. The first steps look promising, but the devil is always in the details. It should be everyone’s responsibility to make sure it’s done right.

When was the last time you pondered the concept of the rule of law?

I never thought about it much, either — until Friday. That’s when I joined 130 other Kentuckians from the fields of law, business, education and government who participated in the Rule of Law Symposium in Frankfort.

The Kentucky Bar Association organized the day-long program because its leaders thought the concept needed to be better understood.

“The rule of law is not for lawyers,” said Charles Ricketts, a Louisville attorney who helped organize the symposium. “It’s for all of us.”

What is the rule of law? To colonial pamphleteer Thomas Paine, it was the idea that the law should be king, rather than the king be the law. John Adams saw it as “a government of laws and not men.” Abraham Lincoln explained it as government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

It doesn’t just mean that people should obey the law. It also means that the law should obey the people’s right to fairness and justice.

Kentucky State University President Mary Evans Sias, who hosted the symposium, underscored that point by explaining why she had never learned to swim. When she was growing up in Mississippi, local officials responded to challenges of the state’s segregation laws by filling public swimming pools with concrete rather than allowing black and white children to swim together.

The concept of the rule of law, which emerged during The Enlightenment of the 1700s, was a founding principle of the United States. In recent years, it has been actively promoted abroad to spread economic prosperity, protect the interests of multinational corporations and secure human rights.

“We are becoming a small, global neighborhood,” said the keynote speaker, Elizabeth Andersen, executive director of the American Society of International Law in Washington, D.C. Spreading the rule of law worldwide is increasingly important, she said, because geography no longer insulates Americans from terrorism in Afghanistan or toxic manufacturing in China.

Both at home and abroad, the rule of law can be easier to describe than to create, because there are often conflicting interests, values and interpretations. For example, judges are supposed to be fair and impartial, not bend to public opinion or special interests. Do elections and campaign contributions undermine that goal, or does electing judges make them more accountable to the public?

Such conflicts quickly became apparent in six small-group discussions on specific topics, each led by a justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court. I sat in on two sessions: One was about business, labor and the workplace; the other about civil rights and social justice.

Jim Chen, dean of the University of Louisville law school, said digital technology has made it easier for citizens to hold their leaders accountable as they make and enforce laws. But Heather Mahoney of the citizens’ group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth said the rule of law is often compromised because wealthy corporations and individuals have more influence over lawmakers and regulators than other citizens do.

Bill Londrigan of the Kentucky AFL-CIO said labor laws in the 1930s helped create a balance of power between workers and management, all but eliminating the violent strikes and riots of earlier decades. But he complained that since 1980, labor law enforcement has favored management, leading to the decline of unions and the American middle class they helped create.

He said it’s vital that the rule of law not only restore workers’ rights in this country, but protect workers abroad from exploitation. Otherwise, we will have a “race to the bottom” that will lower all workers’ standard of living.

“The rule of law is absolutely essential for us to have a global economy that benefits workers and not just the owners of the capital,” Londrigan said.

Not surprisingly, Mike Ridenour of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce had a different point of view. Businesses must make a profit, and consumers want the highest quality at the lowest price.

“So we’re caught with a values conflict even within ourselves,” he said. “All things have a price. We don’t always want to pay the price.”

Merl Hackbart of the University of Kentucky School of Management said cultural differences are a major challenge to expanding the rule of law globally. Laws are effective only when a culture values them, he noted, which explains why Prohibition in the 1920s was a miserable failure.

Ron Crouch, a sociologist who heads the Kentucky State Data Center at the University of Louisville, said the rule of law is essential to keeping the marketplace free and fair.

Crouch blamed much of the current economic mess on government deregulation.

“We used to hire police to keep people from robbing banks,” he said. “Now we need to hire police to keep banks from robbing people.”

The biggest threat to the rule of law is corruption, said Andersen of the American Society of International Law. And you don’t have to go to Third World countries to find it; it’s often as close as your county courthouse.

The way to fight corruption, Andersen said, is for citizens to become more involved in how laws are made and enforced. It’s the only way to make the rule of law a reality and not just an ideal — and to create culture of responsibility, accountability and justice.

History books tell us what happened, and what historians think it all meant. But to know the small details of community life — what people were doing, thinking and talking about long ago — you must read old newspapers.

For example, the Lexington Public Library’s copy of the Kentucky Gazette of April 13, 1793, tells me that Hawkins Kearby found a dun-colored mare on Clear Creek in what was then Fayette County. It’s not much, but it’s one of the few things I know about my great, great, great, great, great grandfather.

I own six Lexington newspapers published before the Civil War, the oldest from 1819. They chronicle events large and small and provide a candid — and often unintentionally humorous — snapshot of what life was like in places now familiar.

I don’t know which seems stranger in those old newspapers: Articles that refer to Henry Clay in the present tense, or advertisements showing that, even then, your loved one could be buried by a Milward.

A reader in Versailles, Sue Hart Littral, recently mailed me a fragile, folded copy of The Lexington Daily Press of July 1, 1877. This ancestor of the Herald-Leader is still a great read.

There wasn’t much big news reported that day, although one “telegraph” article reported on “Indian troubles” in California. There were lists of commodity prices from Chicago and New York, racing news from Monmouth Park in New Jersey and reports of local horse sales.

A colt by the famous stud Lexington sold at Woodburn Farm for the princely sum of $3,100. A man from New York said he would have bid $800 more, but he arrived too late because his carriage driver didn’t know the way.

There are notices of upcoming events: A picnic at Woodland Park to benefit St. Joseph Hospital, a Sunday school mass meeting and a show to be put on by the young ladies of Lexington to benefit the Home of the Friendless.

There are essays sternly warning of such dangers as eating between meals and buying on credit:

“The credit system is one of the most pernicious evils which afflict a community. … A man or woman will buy more and will pay better prices under the credit system than if they were obliged to pay cash. And here is where the difficulty lies; people contract debts without knowing it, and if they pay them they bankrupt themselves, and when they do not they bankrupt the trader. In any event, the system has a tendency to make everybody poorer.”

And to think, this was a century before anyone had a Visa or MasterCard.

There are advertisements, and a few articles shamelessly touting the newspaper’s advertisers: “We would call the attention of our readers to the advertisement of D. Honaker … One very important feature about the matter is that when he promises to have your boots or shoes ready, he will not disappoint.”

It’s easy to guess the best-read stories that day: There are several tales of illicit sex and lurid crime, written in the most purple of prose.

A story headlined “Scandal in Georgetown” tells of a prominent Baptist preacher who, at age 55, left his family and took up with a young lady “said to be endowed with many personal charms and to be possessed of singular beauty.”

Another story, headlined “A Crime Most Foul,” doesn’t mince words: “A peaceful little home at Lexington was entered by one Ed. Roberts, a brakeman on the Big Sandy railroad, who persuaded a bright little girl, thirteen years old, to submit to his hellish passions. … The man who would deliberately lay his plans and accomplish the ruin of a child in this manner is capable of any crime in the catalogue, and the devils in hell will hold high carnival when they claim him for their own.”

And then there is an item about a young man in the Frankfort jail, who was to hang later that month for killing his father-in-law. He’s described at the beginning of the paragraph as “one of the most cruel and blood thirsty murderers in the annals of history” and at the end as “only twenty-eight years old and has altogether a very pleasing countenance.”

As I follow the economic challenges of today’s news business, and see the chronicling of community news shift from ink on paper to electronic bits online, I wonder what people a century or two from now will know about the details of our lives — what we were doing and thinking and talking about.

Will future generations be able to search Ancient Google for our small news? Or will it, like us, just disappear into the ether?

FRANKFORT — Kentucky legislators began their annual session Tuesday in a snowstorm, and that was the least of their worries.

Much of Kentucky is still reeling from last week’s ice storm, which many are calling the biggest and most costly natural disaster in modern state history.

Worse still, the nation’s biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression has helped blow a $456 million hole in the state budget that must be filled by June 30.

To paraphrase our new president, Kentucky’s financial challenges are serious, they are many and they are real. As I stopped to chat with legislator after legislator, many just shook their heads and said there are no easy answers.

“It’s going to be ugly,” said Rep. Reginald Meeks, a Louisville Democrat. “But I look at it as an opportunity for us to show some leadership. The question is, are we going to continue to play politics as usual or do the heavy lifting it takes to improve the lives of Kentuckians in the future? We play politics at our peril.”

Kentucky’s part-time legislators are just like the rest of us: They’re reluctant to do anything unpleasant today that can be put off until tomorrow. But options for further procrastination are quickly disappearing.

Lawmakers face two big challenges. First, they must plug the hole in this fiscal year’s budget, because the constitution requires the budget to be balanced. That’s likely to require a lot of painful cuts to education and social services, as well as some higher taxes, most likely on cigarettes and alcohol.

Gov. Steve Beshear faces an uphill battle on his proposal to raise the state cigarette tax by 70 cents, to $1 a pack, which would raise $81.5 million this year and $144 million next year. The proposal has broad support among the public, education leaders, health advocates and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.

Studies consistently show that higher cigarette taxes lead to fewer smokers, which leads to a healthier population and lower long-term health care costs. It’s an economic no-brainer.

Still, some lawmakers are nervous, especially now that congressional Democrats are talking about raising the federal cigarette tax. They fear that poor people addicted to cigarettes will buy them anyway, no matter what the tax is, and that will hurt families.

But at some point Kentucky lawmakers must decide what they value: Education and health or cheap smokes.

Once the immediate crisis has passed, lawmakers must find a long-term fix for a tax system that doesn’t work in a 21st-century economy. They’ve known it doesn’t work since at least 2001, when an independent economist predicted the rising budget deficits the state has seen since the mid-1990s.

What’s the long-term fix? There are two competing visions, neither of which is likely to get much of a hearing until the 2010 regular session or a special session on tax reform.

One is being pushed by Rep. Bill Farmer, a Lexington Republican, who also thinks state spending needs to be scaled back.

Farmer has proposed removing virtually all sales tax exemptions, except on food, and taxing services used by individuals (as opposed to businesses), with the exception of medical care. He thinks that would raise enough revenue to allow the sales tax to be cut from 6 percent to 5 percent — and allow the state income tax to be eliminated.

Critics of Farmer’s approach say a system based on sales taxes would be too “regressive,” meaning it would hit poor people harder than those with higher incomes.

“We don’t have a progressive income tax system,” Farmer counters, noting that Kentucky’s 1950s-era income tax rate is capped at 6 percent for people making more than $8,000 a year, which is virtually everyone.

Jim Wayne, a Louisville Democrat, has a different approach. For the fourth year in a row, he filed a bill Tuesday that would make the state income tax more progressive — and more like the federal income tax system.

Wayne’s plan would raise taxes slightly on people earning more than $75,000 a year and provide a 15 percent earned income tax credit for low-income people. It also would restore the tax on estates worth more than $1 million and add sales tax to services used by wealthy people, such as limousine rides, charter air flights and country club fees.

“This is not a dramatic shift in income tax rates,” Wayne said. But even after the earned income tax credit returned about $90 million to the “working poor” it would increase state revenues by $250 million a year, he said.

No matter what approach lawmakers take, it’s clear they need to do something — and soon. Any change will involve political risk. But, as Wayne said, “The riskiest position is to not fix the system.”

Lexington, like most American cities, created a complex system of zoning regulations a generation or two ago to make its bustling downtown more neat and orderly.

In recent years, like most American cities, Lexington has been trying to figure out how to make its dull and dying downtown bustle again.

That’s because people are attracted to vibrant downtowns — especially the young, creative people who are the engines of the 21st-century economy.

The issues are complex, but one thing many planners, developers and citizens have come to agree upon is that those strict rules — and the bureaucratic systems and adversarial cultures that have grown up around them — can be a big part of the problem.

It’s a Catch 22: The rules, regulations and government processes designed to improve a city as it grows can sometimes have the opposite effect. That’s because developers and regulators sometimes don’t have enough flexibility to use common sense or foster excellence.

“There’s certainly a feeling that we can do better,” said Chris King, Lexington’s chief planner.

Lexington simplified downtown zoning three decades ago, and that has helped. The city’s Infill and Redevelopment Task Force and several public and private organizations continue to study the issues, look at what other cities are doing and recommend changes.

Last week, the Downtown Lexington Corp. hosted a delegation from Columbus, Ohio, whose members talked about what happened when that city tore up the downtown rule book and took a different approach. The result, they said, has been a more vibrant, attractive downtown with more than $1 billion in new private investment and a steady increase in residents.

It all began in 1996, when Columbus formed a 22-member committee to study downtown development issues. The group, which represented the various stakeholders and interest groups, wrote an ordinance that scrapped many of the city center’s old zoning rules.

The ordinance set out a vision for downtown as “every one’s neighborhood” — a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly place where people would want to live, work and play. And it created the Downtown Commission, a nine-member board appointed by the mayor with enormous power and flexibility.

By law, the commission must be made up of people who live or work downtown and include a variety of interests — a developer or Realtor, an architect, a landscape architect or urban planner, a historic-preservation professional and a land-use lawyer.

The commission was charged with finding ways to make new development work — and to make it well-designed and compatible with its surroundings. “It’s totally subjective,” said Harrison Smith, an 80-something real estate lawyer who has headed the commission since its creation.

Developers like the system because they can go one place for approval — rather than a host of city agencies with narrow interests — and get decisions quickly. Rather than rejecting developers’ plans, the commission and its staff work with them to improve plans and make them acceptable. It shifts the conversation from, “You can’t do this, because … ” to, “You can do this, if … ”

Commission meetings are open to the public, and anyone can speak — no time limits. Decisions can be appealed to the City Council. But in more than 10 years, only two developers’ applications have been rejected and none has been appealed, Smith said.

“We do in 60 days what it would typically take a year to do,” said Kenneth Cookson, a Columbus attorney and downtown activist. “And, boy, have we spawned competition in the design community. They have had to take it up a notch or two.”

Want to tear down an old building to make a parking lot? It won’t be approved. Want to do a big, creative sign on your building that some people might consider public art? It will be approved — if the commission thinks it makes downtown look better and not worse.

“The key — and it’s a risk — are the people (on the commission),” Smith said. “It doesn’t work unless you get pros.”

King, the Lexington planner, was intrigued by Columbus’ approach and thought some elements of it might work in Lexington. “It would take a lot of vetting,” he said.

Vice Mayor Jim Gray was impressed and said he might appoint a task force to “examine it and see what makes sense here.” But he echoed Smith’s caution that such a powerful, flexible commission is only as good as its members and their mandate.

“They seem to have created a framework that encourages good, sympathetic and compatible development, and it’s market-driven,” Gray said. “It’s good for the developers and good for the city.”