The Bluegrass and Beyond

Steal $100,000 in a University of Kentucky ticket scam, as former UK basketball star Ed Davender did, and you could get eight years in prison.

Steal five times that much from Blue Grass Airport, as former Blue Grass Airport director Mike Gobb and three of his assistants did, and you could get no jail time at all.

Those recent cases left me scratching my head, and I wasn’t alone. No wonder people question the fairness of our judicial system and speculate that punishment is influenced by wealth, race, class, the skill of your attorney and the whims of your judge.

Mike Gobb, center. Photo by Matt Goins

“We have completely lost the consistency that once existed in our sentencing system,” said Robert Lawson, a UK law professor who wrote much of the foundation for the state criminal code and has spent four decades studying crime and punishment in Kentucky.

“There’s a need for a complete and total overhaul,” Lawson said.

While we are at it, he said, we should rethink punishment for non-violent criminals to make it more effective and affordable.

Kentucky’s 1974 criminal code was designed to promote rehabilitation, because most offenders return to society sooner or later. But subsequent “get tough on crime” laws and public opinion have made the system inconsistent and often unfair, Lawson said.

The problem, he said, is that “we’ve forgotten the difference between the people we’re afraid of and those we’re mad at.”

Ed Davender, left. Photo by David Perry

In the court of public opinion, most people would say that Davender, Gobb and his assistants deserved jail time — perhaps many years in prison.

“The public is angry; they don’t want to see anybody go free unless it’s a relative,” Lawson said. “They put a lot of pressure on judges who have to run for office.”

That attitude helps explain why the United States, where the incarceration rate has almost quadrupled since 1980, locks up more people per capita than any other nation, and why Kentucky incarcerates more than almost any other state. It also helps explain why governments are going broke.

Everybody wants violent criminals — the people we’re afraid of — locked away so they can’t hurt us. But Lawson said his research has found that the vast majority of felons incarcerated in Kentucky are there for drug or property crimes that didn’t involve violence.

Kentucky’s crime rate since 1970 has risen about 3 percent. But the number of incarcerated felons has grown from fewer than 3,000 then to more than 21,000, and the state’s corrections budget has grown from $10 million to more than $450 million.

Those staggering figures have caused many groups, including the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, to call for reform. That’s because paying to lock up so many people leaves Kentucky too little money for education and other priorities.

But many prosecutors “scare the public,” and many politicians are afraid of being labeled “soft on crime,” Lawson said. Ratings-driven TV news is all crime all the time, even though Kentucky’s crime rate is relatively low. “There is enormous fear out there,” he said.

There also are human costs to excessive incarceration. If offenders are simply warehoused, and not rehabilitated, they come out worse than they went in. That’s especially true of the 7,000 felons now in overcrowded local jails that were not designed to house prisoners long-term. “We’re making them meaner than hell under the circumstances we’re having them live in,” he said.

Prison is appropriate punishment for some non-violent criminals, but sentences have grown excessively long. “One year is a lot of time in prison if people would go look at them,” said Lawson.

A more appropriate and cost-effective punishment for many non-violent criminals would be community service, hefty fines and home confinement. People like Gobb and Davender, who have useful skills and pose little public safety threat, could repay taxpayers with money, work and service rather than be locked away at a cost of nearly $20,000 a year.

Fines would be easier on affluent offenders than poor ones, but amounts could be adjusted to make them more equitable. Only Gobb’s punishment included community service, but Lawson said the 500 hours required of Gobb “doesn’t sound like enough to me for what he did.”

Kentucky’s criminal code needs an overhaul. And while we are at it, we must figure out ways for more non-violent criminals to pay their debt to society without costing us all a fortune.

RUSSELLVILLE — Non-homogenized milk in returnable glass bottles supposedly went out of fashion with the Ford Model T. But don’t tell Willis and Edna Schrock.

The Schrocks and their eight children are working overtime to keep up with increasing demand for the farm-fresh milk they produce with 38 cows and a barn full of modern equipment.

“The boys bottled milk all night,” Edna said when I arrived at their 130-acre farm in Logan County. “They were going to bed about 4 this morning as Willis left to make deliveries. He probably won’t be back until tonight.”

The Schrocks deliver their JD Country Milk, which is bottled in old-fashioned returnable glass, to groceries and farmers markets in Lexington, Louisville, Nashville and many places in between. (In Lexington, it is available at Good Foods and Whole Foods markets.)

Customers are willing to pay premium prices for the non-homogenized, low-temperature-pasteurized milk for two reasons: It tastes better than regular milk, and they think it is more healthful.

A sip will confirm the first reason. Pasteurization at 145 degrees, rather than the usual 185 degrees or more, kills harmful bacteria but preserves milk’s naturally sweet taste. Forgoing homogenization preserves the distinct cream in JD Country’s whole, 2 percent and skim milk, not to mention the buttermilk and chocolate milk, which is made with real cocoa and cane sugar.

Customers like that the Schrocks’ cows eat grass and are not given hormones or antibiotics. They also think that enzymes preserved in low-temperature pasteurization make milk more healthful. Some people think homogenization of milk contributes to cardiovascular disease, but scientists are split on the issue.

The Schrocks moved to Logan County in 1998 from central Illinois, where Willis drove dairy trucks. The Mennonite family began Kentucky farm life by making and selling baked goods.

“We started going to farmers markets and realized there were people out there who wanted real milk,” Edna said. “When you buy milk in the store, especially skim milk, it doesn’t taste like anything.”

Willis’ 15 years of work around dairy plants gave him the courage to get into the business, which can be complicated because of strict health regulations and procedures. The Schrocks began processing and selling milk under the Rebekah Grace label, but they went out on their own this year, and that allowed them to reduce prices.

Willis and Edna get a lot of help from their children. Justin, 26, is in charge of delivery. Joni, 25, and Janette, 19, run the bakery. Jared, 21, works in the processing plant. Joe, 16, is in charge of bottling. Jason, 14, helps milk the cows. Jennifer, 12, and Jeffrey, 10, do what they can after school.

With weekly sales now topping 500 cases — and a new drinkable low-fat yogurt being introduced in September — JD Country Milk is about ready to take the next step of hiring outside employees and taking in milk from other small farms that share the Shrocks’ natural methods.

“We’ve just about burned our kids out on this,” Edna acknowledged. “Working for mom and dad isn’t always the most fun thing.”

Edna said Kentucky agriculture officials have been very supportive, because they see this as an important niche in a strong local food economy. In 2007, the Schrocks received nearly $500,000 in state and county agriculture development money to buy modern processing and bottling equipment.

“Our goal was to be able to help small farmers who have only 30 or 40 cows to milk,” she said. “We can buy it and give them a fair price.”

That was state officials’ goal, too, when they awarded the Schrocks what amounts to a 10-year forgivable loan from tobacco settlement funds if certain goals are met. The Schrocks already buy some milk from Kenny Mattingly, who operates Kenny’s Farmhouse Cheese in Barren County.

JD Country Milk is a rare bright spot in dairy farming these days. Many farmers are getting out of the business, complaining that the giant corporations now dominating the dairy industry pay farmers less for raw milk than it costs to produce it.

Consumers also are seeking alternatives to corporate agriculture, especially in the wake of contamination scares such as the recent egg recall. “We’re doing this at the right time,” Edna said.

The Shrocks have developed such a loyal following that many customers ask to visit their farm. They have scheduled an open house on Oct. 30, a Saturday. (For more information, go to JDCountryMilk.com.)

“We’re trying to keep it as all-natural and healthy as we can,” Edna said. “And the public really wants that, because people are paying more attention to their health.”

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As I drove away from the Headley-Whitney Museum on Old Frankfort Pike last week, I had to swerve around a minivan with Michigan plates stopped in the road. Its occupants apparently were fascinated by the young horses and their mothers standing along the fence.

Lexington residents see horses all the time, but they are a novelty for most Americans. A century ago, horses and their images were everywhere.

That’s one idea behind the Headley-Whitney’s new exhibit, The Horse in Decorative and Fine Art, which opened earlier this month and continues until December.

While planning for the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games this fall, museum executives decided they wanted to show visitors the diversity of equine art, especially pieces held in Kentucky collections.

The result is an eclectic exhibit of works that show the special relationship between man and horse. The exhibit ranges from modern paintings, sculpture and fine jewelry to a horse carved in stone more than 5,000 years ago.

Pieces were borrowed from 16 Kentucky museums and collections, 27 private collectors and seven out-of-state institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of American History, The Jockey Club in New York, and the Harness Racing Museum in Goshen, N.Y.

“There’s something here for almost everyone, from the serious collector of equine art to people who are just interested in horses and horse culture,” said Sarah Henrich, the museum’s executive director.

The exhibit’s most notable element is the largest group of paintings ever assembled by 19th-century artist Thomas J. Scott. Many were painted in Kentucky, and they show several prominent racehorses of that age. The best example is Scott’s 1857 portrait of the great sire Lexington. The portrait is on loan from the Smithsonian.

The itinerant Scott was a well-known and prolific equine artist and journalist in his day, but he was almost forgotten after his death in 1888. His legacy is being rediscovered thanks to two Kentuckians, Gordon Burnette of Lexington and Genevieve Baird Lacer of Shelbyville.

Burnette began researching Scott several years ago after finding one of his paintings on the curb in a recently deceased neighbor’s trash. He teamed up with Lacer, the biographer of Scott’s well-known teacher, Edward Troye, to find out more about Scott and track down his surviving work. They recently published a catalog of Scott’s known work. The catalog is for sale at the museum and some local bookstores.

Burnette recently found the only known photograph of Scott.

“I know there are hundreds of his paintings out there that we don’t know about, and a lot of them are probably still around Lexington,” Burnette said. “I hope this exhibit raises awareness of Scott and more come forward.”

What makes this Headley-Whitney exhibit fascinating is the range and variety of the pieces. Arranged among paintings, sculpture, jewelry and elegant silver racing trophies are a lot of surprises.

There is a horse-themed quilt made in Warren County in 1882 that is in pristine condition, and a child’s homemade hobby horse from Maysville “that was obviously well loved,” curator Amy Gundrum Greene said.

There is a Currier and Ives lithograph of a horse scene, its original pencil-sketch study, and a quiz that visitors can take to find 10 differences between the first draft and the finished work. Other printed images of horses range from a 1505 engraving by the famous German artist Albrecht Dürer to a John Wayne movie poster from the 1950s.

One display case contains carefully colored drawings of Western Indian horses by 19th-century Native American children who were taken from their families to be “civilized” in a Pennsylvania boarding school. “It was their way of working out what was going on in their lives,” Greene said.

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It is one thing to act out a play. It is quite another to come face-to-face with the reality behind the script.

When Lafayette High School students began rehearsing for their fall production of The Diary of Anne Frank, drama teacher Cindy Kewin decided she wanted to make it a lesson they would never forget.

So after rehearsal last Thursday afternoon, the students crowded into Kewin’s classroom to listen to Oscar Haber tell about his experiences as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.

Haber is one of the few people still alive who suffered Nazi persecution as an adult. As the 100-year-old man began speaking in a soft voice with a Polish accent, the room full of teenagers fell silent.

“I talk in different schools and it is always painful,” Haber said. But it is a story that must be told, he added, and it must not be forgotten. Nazi Germany may be gone, but racism, bigotry and xenophobia are never far away.

Haber was a young dentist in Krakow when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Many times over the next six years, Haber said, he and his wife narrowly escaped death.

After trying unsuccessfully to flee the German advance on foot, walking several hundred miles, Haber returned to his village near Krakow. Nazi SS troops built a labor camp there, and soon it was filled with Jews from across Poland.

Haber asked to become the camp dentist, which allowed him to continue living at home and practicing dentistry in the village. But in late 1941, Haber’s camp pass was revoked. Then the village police chief, a friend and dental patient, told him a secret.

“He was the only one in the village who spoke German, and the SS came to him and told him a lot of things,” Haber said, his voice breaking and his eyes growing damp. “He said, ‘It comes a very bitter time for you. You are all going to be killed. But I am going to help you.’”

The police chief arranged for Haber and his wife to get a Christian marriage certificate and leave the village.  “He told me, ‘You don’t look Jewish and your wife doesn’t look Jewish,’” Haber said.

But there was a hitch: the police chief could not issue the certificate without his secretary’s help. She was a friend of Haber’s, too, but feared for her family. “She said, ‘If they catch you they will not kill you until you tell them who made these papers for you,’” he said.

Haber had hidden a pistol, and he promised the secretary he would kill himself if the Germans caught him. “You know me,” he said he told her. “I am a man of honor. They will not catch me alive.”

The Habers left with the fake papers and lived for more than a year as farm workers in another part of Poland. But someone discovered their secret. Returning home one day, the Habers saw the Gestapo waiting for them, and they fled into a nearby forest.

Haber sought out a policeman he had befriended. He hid the Habers in the attic of his barn for two nights until he could arrange for them to live with his relatives in another town. “I think all through the war there was an angel with me,” Haber said.

The Habers remained in hiding until “the so-called liberation,” he said. “But we didn’t have anywhere to go. No money, no clothes, no home. Nothing.”

In 1946 the Habers created a ruse to travel from Russian-occupied Poland to Belgium, where they lived for five years before emigrating to Israel. After 28 years there, Haber moved to Lexington to be near his son.

“You are the future, and it depends on you,” Haber finally told the students, who had sat spellbound for more than an hour. “Some of you will be in power. Remember that what happens shouldn’t happen.”

The students had a few questions, and then Rowan Schaefer, 15, asked Haber if she could hug him. When class was dismissed, several other girls and boys approached Haber to thank him and offer hugs.

“I honestly don’t know how to put it into words,” Schaefer said when I asked what she thought of Haber’s talk. “I think if everyone got to hear something like that only once, there would be much less hurt in the world.”

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RICHARDSVILLE — This rural community near Bowling Green looks like a tableau of 20th-century Americana, right down to the stone-covered WPA school.

But the week after next, the 500 students and teachers of Richardsville Elementary will leave their 1930s building for a new one next door that is the latest in environmentally friendly 21st-century design. It will be the first school in Kentucky, and one of the first in the nation, to be “net-zero” — generating as much energy as it consumes.

Expect to see more like it. That’s because this 77,000-square-foot school cost about the same to build as a conventional one but will be substantially cheaper to operate.

“The important thing this school shows people is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to have a sustainable building that saves energy and money,” said the architect, Ken Stanfield of the Lexington firm Sherman Carter Barnhart.

Richardsville might seem like an unlikely place to be on the vanguard of “green.” But this school is the result of years of collaboration between Sherman Carter Barnhart and a forward-thinking Warren County school system. The fast-growing county has built and renovated many schools in recent years, and each has experimented with energy-saving materials, design and construction techniques.

Thanks to those experiments, Warren County has saved $5.3 million on its utility bills since 2003, said Jay Wilson, the school district’s energy manager. That’s enough to pay a year’s salaries and benefits to 79 teachers, he said.

Richardsville Elementary brings together all of those energy-saving lessons: It will consume only 26 percent of the energy used by a conventional school its size. The building is oriented with the sun, and windows are strategically placed, including an insulated clerestory window that runs across the center of the roof to let sunlight into the interior gymnasium and lunchroom.

Mirrored tubes reflect light from the roof into the school’s second-story classrooms and hallways. Automated systems balance natural and artificial light throughout the day, but teachers can override them when necessary.

The school’s Insulated Concrete Form walls — in which concrete is poured into polystyrene forms — were economical and efficient to build, and they produce superior insulation. And because they can withstand winds of 250 mph, “you’re looking at a safer structure for the kids to be in during a storm,” Wilson said.

Most floors are stained and polished concrete, which will save substantially on janitorial costs, Wilson said. The gymnasium floor is made of fast-growing bamboo rather than hardwood.

The geothermal heating and cooling system saves electricity, as does the lunchroom kitchen. In a typical school this size, Stanfield said, the kitchen consumes about 22 percent of the entire building’s energy. That will be dramatically reduced by using energy-efficient ovens and steam cookers. An added benefit: the cooked food will be healthier.

“We’ve been trying so many things over the years that building a net-zero school wasn’t pie in the sky,” Stanfield said. “It was the next logical step.”

That next step involved installing two kinds of solar panels to generate electricity: a thin film attached to the roof with industrial-strength Velcro and 1,200 square feet of panels in one corner of the parking lot. The school will feed excess power into the Tennessee Valley Authority’s grid on sunny days, drawing it out on cloudy ones.

State guidelines say new schools should cost no more than about $200 per square foot to build, Stanfield said. Richardsville Elementary cost $156, and the solar-panel system was an additional $39, for a total of $195 per square foot. The solar-panel system will pay for itself in 14 years but is warranted for 20 years, he said.

For all of its practicality, the school also is attractive, especially considering that “it’s really just a two-story box,” Stanfield said. The building is filled with light and space, and it has architectural elements and interior stone trim that echo the 1930s school. (The old school will be demolished, and the rubble will be recycled as fill for a new ball field.)

Richardsville Elementary is designed to be good for the environment and the school district’s bottom line, but it also will be a conservation lesson for students. The solar panels’ performance will be shown on video screens in the front hallway, and the school’s design and other systems will be incorporated into the curriculum.

“Not every school district is going to want to run out and put solar panels on the roof tomorrow, but everything else we did here is really simple,” Stanfield said. “The big thing is convincing people you don’t have to step out of your comfort zone too far. You don’t have to count on technology that isn’t tested. It’s just using everything we already know and sweating the details.”

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Jim Gray is sitting at a conference table in his family-owned construction company’s headquarters, talking me through a 36-page document that explains why he thinks Lexington voters should promote him from vice mayor to mayor.

On the wall behind him, attached to big sheets of brown paper, is a collection of documents connected by fat-marker writing and arrows. He says that is Gray Construction Co.’s strategic plan, which the company has been refining and revising since 1984 as its road map for success.

After his father’s death, Gray, his mother and brothers and their employees built the company from near collapse into a national construction giant. Gray, the chief executive officer, said creative vision, strategic planning and careful financial management have been essential to succeeding in the cyclical construction industry, where profit margins are usually less than 3 percent.

Jim Gray

Gray’s pitch is that he has the skills and experience to achieve the same results for Lexington. He said city government needs more visionary leadership, more strategic planning and better and more transparent management of taxpayer money.

The “Fresh Start Plan” Gray is talking me through is his outline for doing that. “It is a road map, but not etched in stone,” he said. “Plans are made to be intelligently changed, but they must be made and monitored.”

Since Gray challenged Mayor Jim Newberry for re-election, both candidates have spent more time criticizing each other than telling voters what they would do as mayor over the next four years. Gray’s plan gives voters something more to consider. Newberry plans to issue his own detailed plan, but campaign spokesman Lance Blanford said he did not know when.

Gray said his top priority as mayor would be creating jobs in Lexington. He says he has led Gray Construction in working with companies to create 21,989 jobs in 37 states through 831 construction and 74 site-selection projects.

“I come with a set of skills that are directly related to creating jobs,” he said. “I know what makes a community attractive for economic development; that has been my business for over 30 years.”

Gray’s plan includes creating a one-stop shop to help people starting or expanding businesses, and he would encourage entrepreneurship by creating incentives and cutting city taxes and fees for small businesses.

He also said he would recruit three new corporate headquarters to Lexington; have the city purchase from local businesses whenever possible; align the city’s economic development plan with the University of Kentucky’s Top 20 initiative; and recruit former Lexington residents and students who have been successful elsewhere to come back and launch or expand businesses here.

Gray’s plan also includes specific proposals in a dozen other areas, from open government and “running government like a business” to engaging diversity, protecting neighborhoods and the environment, promoting public safety and easing traffic congestion.

Among Gray’s ideas for making the city bureaucracy more business-like is creating an “office of project management” to improve efficiency and accountability. He would create a commissioner for “preservation, planning and economic innovation” to oversee the city’s land-use planning and development functions. “When everybody’s responsible, nobody’s responsible,” he said. “That’s the way it is now.”

The only significant new city building the construction executive proposes anytime soon is a senior citizens center to replace the small, aging facility at Nicholasville Road and Alumni Drive.

“I want to make Lexington as inviting to seniors as it is to young professionals,” Gray said, citing census figures that show the number of people 65 and older in Lexington will double in the next 20 years. He said better addressing the needs of older citizens, from services to the way neighborhoods are designed and developed, is an example of how city leaders should get ahead of the curve.

Jim Newberry

Gray’s plan — available to read or download on Jimgray.org — offers a thoughtful and realistic vision for Lexington’s future. I look forward to seeing what Newberry has to say about his specific plans for the next four years beyond the outline now on Mayornewberry2010.com.

Lexington is fortunate to have two solid, talented mayoral candidates. The more information citizens have about their visions, goals and strategies, the better job they will be able to do of deciding which one should lead Lexington for the next four years.

LOUISVILLE — Stephen Lee was explaining the intricacies of the Kentucky State Fair’s culinary competition when a judge interrupted us with an urgent matter: she suspected an apple pie of having a store-bought crust.

This would be a disqualifying offense. Lee, the fair’s culinary superintendent, needed to make a ruling.

“It doesn’t look hand-pinched, let’s put it that way,” judge Barb Veigel told him.

“Either that,” judge Dan Poset added, “or this person worked for Sara Lee.”

Lee (no relation to Sara) agreed that the edges seemed too uniform. “It does look store-bought,” he said. Then he turned the pie over in his hand, so it fell out of the tin plate, and carefully examined the bottom. Finally, he said, “I’m going to take her at her word that it’s homemade, because the bottom looks pushed together.”

The pie didn’t taste good enough to be a winner, anyway, so the judges moved on. After all, Lee’s two dozen volunteer judges had only two days to taste and decide among 4,312 entries in 328 food categories — everything from pies to pickles, cakes to candy, bread and preserves and canned vegetables.

That is because the 106th Kentucky State Fair opens Thursday in Louisville for an 11-day run that is expected to attract more than 620,000 visitors. Some of the first people through the doors will be those who entered the food, art and crafts competitions, and they can’t wait to see if they won a ribbon.

“People take this very seriously, and the emotions run high sometimes,” Lee said of the cooks, bakers and canners who enter each year. “My personal goal is to showcase Kentucky and the talents of its people, and to improve the quality of our food.”

Lee, who has supervised the culinary competition for seven years, ran a Louisville cooking school before retirement. Each year, he and chief judge Valerie Holland assemble a judging panel of food experts: home economists, chefs, dieticians, restaurateurs and caterers.

Three days before the fair opens, the freshly arrived entries are spread out on long rows of tables covered with butcher paper. With knives and forks in hand, the judges work in pairs, tasting their way from one category to the next. Labels hide the contestants’ identities until winners are chosen. Nobody is allowed in the room except judges, staff and the occasional hungry newspaper columnist.

The first day’s judging included pickles, relishes, jellies, jams and canned fruit and vegetables. I was savvy enough to attend the second day, which included candy, bread, 21 categories of cakes and 16 categories of pies. I spent a couple of hours shadowing the cake and pie judges, asking questions and shooting photos. I kept a plastic fork in my shirt pocket, figuring that once the judges’ sugar highs kicked in, they would start saying, “Wow! You should try this!”

In addition to taste, the judges were evaluating each entry on appearance and texture — the flakiness of a pie crust, the complimentary qualities of a cake icing. Did a bourbon cake taste like bourbon without being overpowering? Was a pie filling fresh and firm?

No commercially prepared ingredients, such as store-bought pie crusts, are allowed except in a category for competitors younger than 15. “The idea there is to get kids cooking, even if they have to use a box mix,” Lee said.

Women make most of the cakes and pies, but men bake most of the bread, Lee said. Canning and preserving had been on the wane, but young women are now taking up the tradition.

Lee spends time in the off-season refining the food criteria that appears in the fair’s inch-thick rule book. But people don’t read instructions or follow rules very well — and sometimes they like to cheat. “I had a man enter a sponge cake once and it still had the Kroger label on the bottom,” Lee said. “I think he was testing us.”

When winning entries are chosen, their recipes are scrutinized to make sure they followed the rules. Judges told me that picking the best in each category is often easier than choosing second- and third-place.

Each entry is then prepared for display in long rows of glass cases in the Culinary Hall of the Fairgrounds’ East Wing. Visitors can look, but not taste. “If we could sell this stuff during the fair, we would be millionaires,” Lee said. “Everybody wants a piece.”

Only about two-thirds of each pie and cake, and about four pieces of each batch of cookies, are put on display. The rest are wrapped and taken to the Cathedral of the Assumption’s soup kitchen, which serves 150 lunches to poor people every day.

“That helps everybody feel better about” so much food going uneaten, said Lee, who runs the soup kitchen when he is not on State Fair duty. The baked goods are a treat for soup kitchen clients, who usually are served a lot of bologna. But I wonder if they, too, sometimes grimace the way the culinary judges do.

“I always tell people,” Lee cautioned, “that just because a cake’s in the state fair doesn’t mean it’s good.”

If you go

Kentucky State Fair
When: Aug. 19-29
Where: Fairgrounds, I-65 at I-264, Louisville
Admission: $8, $4 for children 3-12 and seniors 55 and older. Infants free.
Parking: $8
More information: Kystatefair.org

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The best way to get to know someone is to travel together. That was the idea behind the joint trip to Pittsburgh in May by 200 members of Commerce Lexington and 100 members of Greater Louisville Inc.

Kentucky’s two big cities have always been separated by much more than 75 miles of asphalt. But these days, cities, states and regions that want to succeed economically can no longer afford to let cultural differences, petty jealousies and college basketball rivalries keep them from working together.

The trip went well. But the big question was this: Would there be any follow-up?

Commerce Lexington’s trips are sometimes criticized as junkets because the travelers come home, go on summer vacation and never get around to following up on most of the city-improvement ideas they gathered.

Lexington and Louisville officials said they are determined that that won’t happen this time. Last Thursday, summer vacation ended, and it was time to get to work. A Commerce Lexington/GLI steering committee met all day and, that evening, announced follow-up plans to the trip’s participants at a reception in Louisville’s 21C Museum Hotel. The attendees included both cities’ mayors.

The two chambers of commerce announced plans to form a joint task force to follow up on seven top priorities and to hire a full-time staff person to drive the process. Most of those priorities were identified and ranked by the 300 travelers during a session in Pittsburgh.

Top priorities include exploring the feasibility of light passenger rail between Lexington and Louisville, and creating Bidwell Training Centers in both cities. Bidwell is a remarkably successful job-training center for poor people in Pittsburgh. Founder Bill Strickland’s presentation about it during the trip had almost everyone in the room teary-eyed and cheering.

Strickland is now working with other cities to replicate Bidwell’s success. Talks began this summer about seeing whether the concept could mesh with a Fayette County Public Schools project to develop an agribusiness vocational training center on Leestown Road.

Other top priorities include the cities working together to promote Kentucky’s horse industry, and to pursue legislation that would allow the cities to have a local-option sales tax. The cities say they need the extra money to provide the infrastructure necessary for business to flourish.

Presidents Bob Quick of Commerce Lexington and Joe Reagan of GLI said afterward that such taxing authority probably would have to be done in the context of overall state tax reform, which is long overdue. “Some of these things will take some time to build the right coalitions,” Reagan said.

The two chambers and city governments already work well together, but closer ties are needed between them and Northern Kentucky, Quick and Reagan said. The so-called Golden Triangle has been Kentucky’s growth engine for a couple of decades, and it will become even more important in the future.

But, Reagan said, “The last thing we want to do is pit urban against rural. We have to look at the big picture.”

Jerry Abramson, who is retiring after 21 years as Louisville’s mayor to be Gov. Steve Beshear’s running mate next year, said the cities’ most important challenge will be convincing the rest of the state that investment in the Golden Triangle benefits the entire state. That’s because much of the tax revenue and economic development created by Lexington, Louisville and Northern Kentucky flows throughout Kentucky.

“As we develop our strategies, we must take into account how it’s going to positively affect the other citizens of the state,” Abramson said. “How does it play in Paducah? What’s in it for Hazard?”

Town Branch Trail organizers are inviting the public to come out to Trailapalooza on Sunday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The celebration will be held along the 1.8 miles of completed trail that extends from Leestown Road to Alexandria Drive west of downtown.

Trailapalooza will include live music, refreshments and a scavenger hunt. People (mainly kids) will be given a “passport” with questions about history and the environment along the new biking and walking trail. They will find answers to those questions on signs and markers along the trail. Prizes include a $200 gift certificate to Pedal Power bike shop, a $100 gift certificate to Phillip Gall’s outdoor store and memberships to Urban Active gym.

Eventually, the trail will run eight miles along Town Branch Creek from Leestown Road to Manchester Street downtown. Funding has been secured and design is under way for another 1.5-mile section of the trail. That section will connect McConnell Springs, the site where Lexington was founded, with the new Distillery District arts and entertainment area along Manchester Street near Rupp Arena.

Progress has been slower on Town Branch Trail than the 9-mile Legacy Trail, which is nearing completion between downtown’s East End and the Kentucky Horse Park. Part of the reason is that property issues are much more complicated along Town Branch, much of which has been developed property for two centuries. “Some of the industrial property inside New Circle Road is a puzzle,” Town Branch Trail President Van Meter Pettit says. “It just takes a lot of time to sort out.”

Speaking of the Legacy Trail, mark your calendar for its grand opening celebration, Sunday afternoon, Sept. 12.

Before I left for the Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, I stopped by the public library to borrow some audio books for the five-hour drive to Graves County and the five-hour drive back.

One was leadership consultant Stephen Covey lecturing on his best-selling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey has sold millions of copies of his book, and some of America’s most successful executives have said those “habits” transformed their lives and companies.

As I drove down the Western Kentucky Parkway listening to Covey, I was struck by two thoughts: The first was that the success habits he recommends for people and organizations are just common sense. The second was that American politics violates every one of them.

I would soon hear ample evidence of that, both from the politicians who spoke at the annual church picnic that kicks off Kentucky’s fall campaign season and from the thousands of partisans who cheered and jeered them.

This could help explain why, rather than being “highly effective,” government has become increasingly dysfunctional. Take, for example, the U.S. Senate, where the main warriors at this year’s Fancy Farm Picnic — Democrat Jack Conway and Republican Rand Paul — hope to serve.

Last week’s issue of The New Yorker magazine had a fascinating piece about the Senate by journalist George Packer. The article, “The Empty Chamber,” described how the legislative body that the Founding Fathers intended as a place for reasoned debate has become hobbled by the destructive behavior of Republicans and Democrats alike. Many senators seem more concerned with money, power and petty politics than with governing.

Consider Covey’s seven recommended habits in the context of today’s political environment:

■ Be proactive. Don’t wait for a crisis to react, Covey says. Politicians are the most reactive people on the planet, afraid to take a stand or make a tough decision unless public opinion, often in response to a crisis, forces them to. As a result, many complex problems just keep getting bigger.

■ Begin with the end in mind. Covey asks his audience to imagine what they would like others to say about them when they die. Given the large egos of many politicians, you would think they would want something better than “he/she was a money-grubbing tool of corporate interests.”

■ Put first things first. Peace, prosperity and justice, anyone?

■ Think “win-win.” This is a big one. In today’s political environment, even an honest change of mind is labeled “flip- flopping” or “waffling.” Compromise is called weakness. America is pretty evenly split between red and blue — in the case of the 2000 presidential election, remarkably so. Yet politics is increasingly a zero-sum game. In the Senate, whichever party is out of power wages a war of obstruction against the party in power. They simply fight to regain control, at which point the other party will do the same to them.

■ Seek to understand, then to be understood. What politician today seeks to understand the other party’s concerns? After all, that might change a mind, lead to compromise or accidently create a “win-win.”

■ Synergize. “To put it simply, synergy means ‘two heads are better than one,’” Covey says. Again, this is an alien concept in politics. Many would rather walk barefoot over broken glass than admit that someone in the other party has a good idea.

■ Sharpen the saw. This is not the same as sharpening the knife so you can stick it in your opponent’s back. Covey is talking about expanding your mind through reading, study and social interaction. In The New Yorker, Packer pointed out that bitter partisanship in the Senate has increased as social interaction between Democrats and Republicans has decreased. It is easier to call the person across the aisle Satan’s henchman if you never play golf together or share a meal.

But we can’t just blame the politicians. They often are responding to voters who marinate their minds in segments of the media that have discovered there are big profits to be made by dishing up distortion, propaganda and extremism.

America would be more successful if politicians — and the voters who elect them — applied Covey’s seven habits, which have been so successful in business and personal development, to politics and governance.

“We already know,” Covey says as I roll down the highway toward Fancy Farm, “that what is common sense is not common practice.”

The four University of Kentucky fraternity brothers didn’t know much about writing or photography or advertising or marketing or magazine publishing. And all they knew about bourbon was that they enjoyed drinking it.

Sitting around a Lexington bar one night in late 2007, the Delta Tau Delta alumni were trying to come up with ideas for a business they could start together. They kept talking about the California wine magazine where one of them had done financial work.

“Wine magazines are a dime a dozen, so we were thinking, ‘What could be our niche?’” Seth Thompson said. “How about bourbon?”

That discussion led them to start The Bourbon Review, which is both a fan magazine for Kentucky’s native spirit and a visitors’ guide to the distillery region between Lexington and Louisville, where 95 percent of the world’s bourbon is produced. The Bourbon Review will soon publish its 10th quarterly issue.

Thompson said the four scraped together enough personal savings to print 10,000 copies of the magazine’s first issue in May 2008. The business has grown steadily since then to a press run of 25,000 copies.

Most copies are given away through advertisers and at selected shops and bars, or they are sold at Liquor Barn and Joseph-Beth Booksellers. The Bourbon Review also has more than 2,000 paying subscribers in 48 states and two foreign countries, Thompson said.

The four young men have earned respect within the bourbon industry, where distillery executives have started calling them the Bourbon Boys.

“We’ve been very impressed with those guys,” said Eric Gregory, president of the Kentucky Distillers Association. “The magazine is pretty well done.”

Bill Samuels, president of Maker’s Mark distillery, said the magazine is becoming an important player in efforts to leverage Kentucky’s bourbon industry into a major tourism phenomenon.

“What The Bourbon Review did early was give a focus to that content beyond just distillery tours,” he said.

Thompson said the magazine appeals to aficionados who want to know more about bourbon, including new ways to mix, drink and cook with it. Readers also want to know more about the people who produce bourbon, and how and where they do it.

“We want somebody to look at our magazine and say, ‘Wow, this is beautiful. How do I get there?’” he said.

Thompson, 28, who grew up in Powell County, handles much of the advertising and marketing. His brother, Justin, 30, is the magazine’s chief editor. Their fellow co-publishers, Lexington natives Bob Kenney Eidson, 30, and Brad Kerrick, 26, help manage the company. All four write and take pictures, with help from several freelance contributors.

Art director Josh Rubin designs the magazine, which is printed in Shepherdsville. All but Eidson now live in Lexington and work out of their homes full-time for the magazine. Eidson lives in California, where he also does financial management for other companies.

Distilleries are the magazine’s biggest advertisers, followed by restaurants, bars and other hospitality businesses. But as the partners try to make The Bourbon Review more of a lifestyle magazine, they are appealing to other advertisers, too, including real estate agents, physicians and even firearms dealers.

The partners say they put a lot of emphasis on social responsibility. The magazine’s masthead reports that the company contributes at least 50 hours of manpower and 1 percent of profits each year to philanthropic work, and it donates advertising space to promote Kentucky land and water conservation.

Thompson sees a lot of growth potential. Bourbon is developing the kind of national and international following that wine and Scotch whisky have had for decades.

The magazine’s current cover story is about bourbon culture in San Francisco. An upcoming issue will feature bourbon bars in Chicago.

The partners are redesigning their Web site, which they hope to turn into a major e-commerce destination for bourbon-related merchandise.

“It is an interesting and scary world in publications these days,” Thompson said. So far, though, The Bourbon Review’s success has exceeded the partners’ expectations.

The three who still live in Lexington are supporting themselves with the magazine. The partners own all of their company’s equity, and, so far, Thompson said, “we haven’t had to borrow a dime from a bank.”

The Bourbon Boys know a lot more about writing, photography, advertising and marketing than they did three years ago. And they know a whole lot more about bourbon. After all, frequent sampling is now just part of the job.

Maker's Mark Master Distiller Kevin Smith, center, poses with The Bourbon Review founders (left to right) Bob Eidson, Seth Thompson, Brad Kerrick and Justin Thompson. Photo Provided

Bill Gorton’s legs were burning, his lungs were aching and his heart was pounding. He knew he was pushing his 56-year-old body to the limit — and he couldn’t have been happier.

That’s because the Lexington lawyer was realizing a dream of riding a bicycle up the Col du Galibier, L’Alpe d’Huez and other famous mountain passes through the French Alps. These steep roads have long vexed Tour de France racers — and attracted amateur cyclists, like Gorton, who are determined to show that they can climb them, too.

“It’s something I always wanted to do,” said Gorton, who practices environmental law at Stites & Harbison. “As you get older, you realize that if you’re going to do some things you have always wanted to do, you just have to do them.”

The century-old Tour de France is more than the world’s most famous bicycle race: It is a three-week rolling carnival around France. More than a million people line the routes to camp, party and cheer on the competitors. Many bring bicycles to ride the routes before or after each day’s stage of the race.

Several hundred spectators do what Gorton did: They pay several thousand dollars to a tour operator who will organize rides for them, book hotel rooms along the Tour de France route and provide logistical support.

Gorton rode beside Le Tour for five days last month with 25 other cyclists from the United States and Canada, ranging in age from 20-something to 70. They paid about $3,500 to a Nebraska-based tour company, Velo Echappe. Traveling with Gorton was his friend Joe Chappell, who is on the University of Kentucky’s plant and soil sciences faculty.

Some rides were on that day’s race route, a few hours before the racers barreled through. Others were on nearby climbs that are famous from past Tours. Each day after their ride, the cyclists would join tens of thousands of fans to watch the race’s daily finish and enjoy the party atmosphere.

Gorton said he was pleased with Velo Echappe, which he found through an advertisement in Bicycling magazine. There are many other tour operators with similar packages, some for less and many for more, depending on the quality of meals and accommodations provided. With a thorough Internet search, you can find dozens of companies offering Tour de France cycling vacations — and online reviews of what customers thought of them.

Once Gorton booked his tour, he faced months of preparation. “This was very intense,” he said. “If I hadn’t worked so hard to get in the best shape I could, I may not have survived it, much less enjoyed it.”

Gorton spent last winter in the gym, focusing on strength exercises and spinning on a stationary bicycle for two hours, three days a week. He teaches a weekly spinning class at the Beaumont YMCA. In good weather, Gorton logs about 2,500 miles a year riding country roads throughout Central Kentucky.

Gorton’s biggest training challenge was hill-climbing. Central Kentucky’s rolling landscape is filled with small hills, but there are only a few steep ones of more than a mile, along the Kentucky River.

Hill-climbing was the essential cycling skill for this trip: During the five days Gorton and Chappell rode through the Alps, they climbed more than 28,000 feet. Some hills were as long as 10 miles, with grades of 6 percent to 12 percent. “One morning, they pointed up to this little snowy spot on the mountain and said, ‘That’s where we’re going today,’” he said.

Although the climbs were tough, the descents could be terrifying: steep hills that went on for 20 miles or more. Gorton’s arms ached from long periods of gripping his bicycle’s brake levers. The narrow roads were filled with oncoming cars and dozens of other cyclists. There were long tunnels lit only by the headlights of oncoming cars reflecting off the walls. Guardrails along many steep descents were hardly up to American standards.

“If you had a misstep and went off the edge, you would be toast,” he said. “And when you would hear clanging, you had to be careful; you could come around a corner and find yourself in the middle of a herd of cows.”

Gorton loved the Tour de France’s festive international atmosphere. In one village after the day’s ride, Gorton said, he and Chappell noticed an especially attractive young Italian woman and her boyfriend. She seemed to be noticing them, too.

Finally, she walked over and said, “Are you from Lexington, Kentucky?” It turned out she had been a UK student and had worked at Pedal Power bike shop on Maxwell Street, where Gorton and Chappell are customers.

Gorton said this vacation gave him some insights that will be useful in a new role back home: He was recently elected chairman of the Kentucky Bicycle and Bikeway Commission, which advises the state Transportation Cabinet on cycling issues.

“I didn’t see a fat kid the whole time I was there, and very few overweight people,” Gorton said. “Our urban geography since World War II has been so based on the automobile, but in Europe people walk a lot, they bike a lot.”

Gorton said that, with support from Mayor Jim Newberry and several Urban County Council members, Lexington is becoming much more friendly to cyclists and pedestrians. Still, Kentucky has a long way to go. “We’re going to find ourselves having to retrofit our infrastructure for what to Europeans seems like common sense — more walking and biking,” he said.

France’s Alpine scenery was impressive, but Gorton developed new appreciation for the country roads of the Bluegrass. “We ride in one of the most beautiful places in the world,” he said, noting that in France, he met a cyclist from Boston who was planning a biking trip to Lexington. “There is no reason we shouldn’t be a premier cycling destination.”

More than anything, though, Gorton’s Tour de France adventure was about proving to himself that he could do it. He could tackle the toughest bicycle climbs in the French Alps, even if he was a lot slower than those young Tour de France racers.

“You spend a lot of time by yourself on a trip like this, just pedaling, and a lot of things go through your head,” Gorton said, mentioning a lot of cycling-as-a-metaphor-for-life stuff. “But the bottom line is this: Whatever your dream is, pick a goal and go do it.”

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Here’s a gallery of photos I took today at the 130th annual Fancy Farm Picnic in Graves County in far western Kentucky. After a lunch of barbecued mutton and pork, fresh vegetables and homemade pies, Kentucky politicians spoke while their fans cheered and detractors heckled. The main attractions were Democrat Jack Conway and Republican Rand Paul, who are running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Jim Bunning.

Lexington’s Sister Cities Commission has put together student and cultural exchanges for 53 years, but this year’s big project was a horse of a different color.

Four horses, to be exact.

As part of the Horse Mania 2010 public art project, LexArts asked the commission to help recruit an artist from each of Lexington’s four sister cities: Deauville, France; County Kildare, Ireland; Shinhidaka, Japan; and Newmarket, England. Like Lexington, each place has a strong equine heritage.

The sister cities put out a call for designs, and the winning artists were flown to Lexington and given a horse statue, art supplies and studio space. Travel costs were covered by donations and by the sponsor of all four horses, Balatro Gallery in Dudley Square.

How did it all work out?

“I think it was fantastic,” said Kay Sargent, who manages Lexington’s Sister Cities Commission. You can judge for yourself at Dudley Square, at South Mill and Maxwell streets, where all four horses are on display.

I caught up with French artist Karl Lagasse in late April as he was applying gold leaf to his horse, Normandy, in a small basement studio at ArtsPlace on Mill Street.

Lagasse, 29, said he sells his work through galleries in France, London, Hong Kong and New York. He had been to New York, Los Angeles and Miami before, but this was his first visit to Kentucky.

Through an interpreter — Betty Mills, a longtime French teacher and chairwoman of the commission’s Deauville committee — Lagasse said he covered his horse in gold leaf to represent the prosperity that the horse industry has brought to Deauville. The horse’s other element is the Normandy flag.

Although he spent much of his two weeks in Lexington working, Lagasse said he and his girlfriend went to several good restaurants, attended a ballet and saw their first American baseball game. The Lexington Legends “made a home run, but they lost,” he said with a frown.

Yoshihiro Hosokawa was in Lexington for only a week in May, so he had less time for leisure. A musician as well as an artist, he also is president of the tourist association in Shinhidaka. The design of his horse, Nihon no Haru (Spring in Japan), included Mount Fuji, swans, cherry blossoms and other images from his picturesque region.

Liza Kavanagh of County Kildare called her horse Folúil (pronounced fawl-oohl), which means Thoroughbred in the Irish language. She decorated it with a collage of photographs, race cards, tote tickets and other scraps of memorabilia collected from Irish racecourses.

“It was my first trip to Kentucky, and I have to say it was a fantastic experience,” Kavanagh said, adding that the bluegrass landscape “felt very much like home, but on a much grander scale.”

“I know that we Irish are known for our hospitality, but the people I met went well beyond the call,” she said. “I had more offers for dinner than I could squeeze into the fortnight, and people could not have been nicer.”

Paula Wilson of Newmarket and her daughter, Amy, an art student, arrived in Lexington after midnight April 6 and were taken in darkness to stay in the guest house at nearby Calumet Farm.

“The following morning, we could hardly believe our eyes when we saw the beautiful surroundings,” she said. “Outside were horses galloping around the workout track, bathed in sunshine. As the week progressed, the pink and white dogwoods blossomed.”

Wilson was the first of the sister cities artists to visit Lexington, and she was given studio space in Artists Attic in Victorian Square. (But because of the steady stream of visitors she received, the others were given studio space in ArtsPlace.)

After 180 hours of work, Wilson finished her horse, Me and My Gal, which is based on designs of racing silks used by Thoroughbred owners around Newmarket.

By then, an ash cloud from a volcano in Iceland had shut down air travel across Europe. So Calumet owner Arianne de Kwiatkowski let the Wilsons spend another week in her guest house.

Wilson found Lexington to be “one of the most hospitable, friendly places I have ever visited,” and she hopes to return to see the finished Horse Mania exhibit before the horses come off Lexington’s streets this fall.

“I’d better start saving!” she said.

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Discussion about health care reform has generated a lot more heat than light. Much of the controversy has been grounded in politics, but the new federal law can be complex and confusing.

After all, the whole subject of medical insurance and public health care policy could qualify as rocket science, if only rockets were involved.

A report published last week explains in clear, plain language how the new law will affect Kentuckians. It was put together by Kentucky Voices for Health, a coalition of nearly 100 groups including AARP Kentucky, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the Kentucky Council of Churches and the Catholic Conference of Kentucky.

The report paints a generally positive picture of how the law will affect Kentucky, the 47th-poorest state in per-capita income, at only 80 percent of the national average. And it provides an interesting group of statistics to show why reform was needed in Kentucky.

The report says that an estimated 626,000 of the state’s 4.3 million people didn’t have health insurance last year. About 80 percent of them have jobs, but many of those jobs are part-time or low-wage and don’t include health insurance. Only 41 percent of Kentucky employers with fewer than 50 workers offer health insurance.

The report cites surveys conducted by University of Kentucky researchers that show that uninsured Kentuckians are three times more likely not to go to a doctor, twice as likely to skip a medical test or doctor-recommended treatment, and twice as likely not to fill a prescription than Kentuckians who have insurance.

How will the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 help Kentuckians?

For one thing, the report said, insurers will now be barred from denying coverage to people, including 920,000 Kentuckians, with pre-existing medical conditions. That part of the law takes effect Sept. 23 for children and will include everyone by 2014.

Expansion of Medicaid eligibility for poor people will extend coverage to an estimated 261,000 Kentuckians — or about 40 percent of the state’s currently uninsured population — by 2014, the report says.

The law will allow 16,800 young adults in Kentucky, up to age 26, to remain on their parents’ insurance policies if they don’t have coverage available through their own employer.

That’s a big deal. Not only has the lagging economy made the job market tough for young adults, but more and more entry-level jobs don’t include health insurance. Nationally, about 30 percent of young adults now lack health insurance coverage, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The new law helps older people in two important ways, the report says.

There will be gradually better coverage for people who now fall into the Medicare prescription drug program’s “donut hole” of cost-sharing. The report estimates that this will apply to 129,000 Kentucky seniors next year. In addition, about 63,200 Kentuckians will benefit from a reinsurance program for early retirees who are not yet old enough for Medicare.

The report also notes that, by 2014, the law will provide tax credits to 221,000 Kentucky families and 51,500 small businesses to help cover the cost of health insurance.

You can download the report and find more health care information and resources at the coalition’s Web site, www.kyvoicesforhealth.org.

It remains to be seen how well this new law will deal with some fundamental problems, especially rising costs, in the nation’s health and insurance systems. But this big first step in what is likely to be a long, continuing process of health care reform promises to at least put care within the reach of more Kentuckians.