The Bluegrass and Beyond

GEORGETOWN — There are two kinds of community leaders. The first is obvious: mayors, county judge-executives and the heads of companies, civic groups and non-profits. Then there are the “connectors.”

Connectors are people who bring others together for the common good but often don’t attract much public attention. They are grass-roots dreamers and organizers who know how to engage the right people, gather the right information, connect the dots — and get things done.

You will soon hear a lot more about connectors because United Way of the Bluegrass is coordinating the Bluegrass Connectors project to identify them in the area.

The project’s goal is to identify the key 100 or so connectors in the region, based on analysis of nominations from the public. Those connectors will then be connected with each other, which should naturally increase communication and cooperation across city limits and county lines.

The project also could help empower a new, more diverse group of people to join the ranks of that first group of community leaders. That would be good, because leadership initiatives in Central Kentucky too often resemble the old movie Casablanca — we just “round up the usual suspects.”

This social-networking project grew out of a meeting last week at Toyota. Nearly 100 of the region’s first group of leaders were invited by Lyle Hanna, a local human-resources executive, to listen to Karen Stephenson, a cultural anthropologist who has taught in the design and management schools of Harvard and UCLA.

Over the past three decades, Stephenson has developed a lucrative international consulting practice, working with organizations to improve performance by identifying their internal networks of communication and trust. After 9/11, she even helped the Pentagon try to figure out the al-Qaida terrorist network.

Stephenson achieved a degree of fame after Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, wrote an article in the December 2000 issue of The New Yorker magazine about her work with furniture manufacturer Steelcase to design more productive offices.

Since then, Stephenson has donated time to several cities, including Louisville and Philadelphia, to apply to communities the “connector” research that she has done for more than 500 companies.

“In every community, there are these people who work hard for the greater good, but they don’t always have the time to connect with everyone else,” she said. By asking the public to identify and recognize these citizens, she said, “It gives people an opportunity to think differently and find those people who have been overlooked.”

Louisville’s connectors project was organized in 2008 by Leadership Louisville. “We have never done anything like this before that has had so much impact on us and the community,” said Chris Johnson, who has been president of Leadership Louisville for two decades.

The Louisville project chose 128 key connectors from among more than 5,500 nominations. Many were executive-level leaders with recognizable names — including former Mayor Jerry Abramson and new Mayor Greg Fischer. But others included small-business owners, educators, a librarian and an administrative assistant. (People can’t nominate themselves, and Stephenson’s computer analysis tries to weed out “ballot stuffing.”)

“Word has really gotten out across the community that connectors are resources,” Johnson said. “We’re trying to dig deeper and ask them about issues they care about, issues that are under the radar.”

The nine-county United Way of the Bluegrass, with help from the Blue Grass Community Foundation, is facilitating the Bluegrass Connectors project so it won’t be viewed as Lexington-driven. Some previous efforts at regionalism have failed because leaders in counties surrounding Lexington resent Bigfoot.

Hanna, United Way president Bill Farmer and others who arranged for Stephenson’s help don’t know exactly what will result from the Bluegrass Connectors project, but they have high hopes.

“There are a substantial group of people who are getting things done in our communities who we don’t notice because we are often focused on the executive level,” Farmer said. “Because of the economic reset, we recognize that things have to be different if we are to maximize our potential.”

To watch some video clips from the session, click here.

As I was watching President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on TV Tuesday night, I got a text message on my cell phone from Mayor Jim Gray: “Geez I think the prez is gonna start talking abt Henry Clay next!”

Obama had just been saying that, while huge deficits require some cuts in federal spending, the nation must renew its commitment to investing in the research and infrastructure needed to ensure long-term economic prosperity.

The president did not mention Clay, the U.S. senator, House Speaker and four-time presidential candidate from Lexington who lived from 1777 to 1852. But Gray had referred to him repeatedly a few hours earlier when he delivered a similar message in his first State of the Merged Government speech.

Gray said that while Lexington government must stop spending more than it takes in, the city still must find ways to make smart investments for the future.

“In order to make our city a center of economic innovation, we must keep growing our quality-of-life infrastructure,” Gray said, noting the city’s recent investments in downtown streets and sidewalks, rural land preservation, the arts and recreational trails.

He also called for a privately financed study to assess the costs and benefits of renovating and expanding Rupp Arena and the adjacent downtown convention center. Those facilities are important drivers of Lexington’s economy, and they must remain competitive, he said.

“Business men and women recognize there are times when we have to spend money to make money by investing in the brand,” Gray said.

Nobody embodied that economic truth more than Henry Clay.

Clay is best remembered as “the great compromiser” for his ability to cut deals with opposing political factions. But perhaps his greatest legacy was what he called the “American System.” That involved federal investment in roads, canals and other infrastructure to promote both economic development and national security.

Clay argued that public infrastructure was essential for American industry to compete with foreign imports, which then came from Britain rather than China. Then, as now, free-market extremists objected. Clay’s nemesis was Andrew Jackson, who if he were alive today would probably be trying to lead the Tea Party.

Their big showdown came when President Jackson vetoed federal funding for the road between Lexington and the Ohio River at Maysville — essentially what we now know as U.S. Highway 68. Clay said the road was important for interstate commerce in the growing West, but Jackson thought federal funding for it was unconstitutional. Over time, Clay’s beliefs prevailed. Had they not, the union would not likely have survived the Civil War.

In their zeal to slash most “government spending,” Tea Partiers also want to stop decades of public investment in infrastructure, education, social welfare, health care, the arts and quality of life. But where would American free enterprise be today without that investment?

How could businesses have prospered without roads, bridges, airports and public education — not to mention all of the federally funded basic medical research and that government project now known as the Internet?

Free markets are good. But if everything were left up to the ebb and flow of the marketplace, Americans would be less healthy, less educated and have far less economic opportunity.

The strong cities and nations of the future won’t get that way by private investment and individual effort alone. That is why, for example, China and other nations are investing billions in clean energy research and technology while many American companies prefer to fund political and public relations campaigns to deny both climate change and inevitable change.

Government taxing and spending is a delicate balance that must constantly be debated and adjusted. But just as excessive public debt and wasteful spending are bad for the economy, so is a failure to make sufficient public investments in the future.

People who call for simplistic solutions to complex problems put America’s economic future and national security at risk, as Clay recognized nearly two centuries ago.

History may not repeat itself, as the saying goes, but it sure does echo.

I’ve never been to an opera before where I wanted to applaud for engineers almost as much as singers and musicians.

Friday was opening night for University of Kentucky Opera Theatre’s production of the classic George and Ira Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. The show was professional-level outstanding, as UK Opera’s productions usually are. The large, all-African American cast drew from UK’s students and faculty, as well as those from Kentucky State University in Frankfort. They were backed by UK’s terrific orchestra.

What makes this production unique, though, are high-tech stage sets developed by UK’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments. Brent Seales, the center’s director, worked with Atlanta-based set designer Richard Kagey to create something theaters have been trying to do for years: image-projection sets good enough to enhance a show rather than distract from it. Click here to read a column I recently wrote about the project.

After watching the opening-night show, I was pleased (and relieved) to see that the sets were as good as promised. After UK’s production ends, the sets will be rented by The Atlanta Opera, and other opera companies also are interested. More importantly, UK hopes to commercialize the technology for other applications in theater and beyond.

In the photo above, the cast took a bow Friday night. After the show, below, Kagey gave a backstage tour to show UK Opera supporters how the system works.  The video images shown in the last photo helped make for a realistic hurricane scene.

If You Go

‘Porgy and Bess’

When: 7:30 p.m. Jan. 29, Feb. 3, 4 and 5; 2 p.m. Feb. 6

Where: Singletary Center for the Arts, 405 Rose St.

Tickets: $45 general public, $40 seniors, faculty and staff, $15 students; $10 ages 12 and younger; available at the Singletary Center ticket office, by calling (859) 257-4929 or at singletarytickets.com.

Click on each thumbnail to see complete photo:

The Feb. 1 deadline is approaching for the Lexington Film League’s second annual Doers Contest, which asks local filmmakers to profile organizations, people and businesses that are doing positive things in the community.

More than $800 in prize money is being offered. Submissions will be screened March 8 in late February at Natasha’s. For rules and more information, click here.

Last year’s initial contest attracted more than 30 submissions. Click on these links to watch last year’s winners:

Best Overall: “A Place to Call Home,” by Angela Shoemaker.

People’s Choice: “CKRE – Sharing the Vision,” by Leif Rigney on Central Kentucky Radio Eye

Best Student Submission: “The Unpaid Shoveler,” by Griffin F. Sims on Walker Miller

Pedal Power Bike Shop, Lexington. Photo by Tom Eblen

The tone of American political discourse has been a little less nasty since a federal judge and five other people were shot and killed earlier this month during an assassination attempt on an Arizona congresswoman.

In a symbolic gesture of bipartisanship, some Democrats and Republicans in Congress planned to sit together during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday, rather than scowl and hiss across the aisle.

This new civility might not last long. Still, the people behind the Henry Clay Center for Statesmanship think it is an opportune time to promote the ideals Clay modeled nearly two centuries ago: diplomacy, civil debate and beneficial compromise.

“The time is right — long overdue, really — to have a more conciliatory dialogue,” said Robert Clay, the center’s co-chairman and owner of Three Chimneys Farm.

Clay also is a distant relative of the U.S. senator, House speaker and four-time presidential candidate from Lexington who was one of America’s most influential leaders in the first half of the 19th century. Henry Clay was known as “the great compromiser,” and his diplomacy helped to delay the Civil War for four decades.

The non-partisan Henry Clay Center was founded four years ago with a big-name board and an advisory committee that includes retired U.S. Supreme Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

The center’s main accomplishment has been sponsoring three sessions of the Henry Clay Center Student Congress, a weeklong seminar in Lexington each June for 51 rising college seniors chosen from each state and the District of Columbia.

Bigger initiatives are planned, and the center’s board has hired a new executive director: Shaye Rabold, who spent four years as former Mayor Jim Newberry’s chief of staff after managing his campaign. Rabold, a Democrat, succeeds Carol Barr, whose husband, Andy, was U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler’s Republican challenger last November. The Barrs are expecting their first child.

“This mission is something I strongly believe in,” said Rabold, 32, a Bowling Green native with degrees in political science from Birmingham Southern College and public administration from the University of Kentucky.

“I think there is an opportunity for the Henry Clay Center to grow and expand its impact because these ideals can and should be translated into many aspects of life,” Rabold said. “People can look to Henry Clay as a model for leadership in politics, business and communities.”

Rabold’s first few months on the job will focus on organizing the annual Student Congress. The seminar is taught by nationally known speakers and professors at UK and Transylvania University under the direction of Carey Cavanaugh, a former ambassador who now heads UK’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.

Clay and Rabold said the center hopes to expand its reach beyond the Student Congress by developing a high school curriculum and by partnering with like-minded foundations around the country. Long-range possibilities include hosting conferences in Lexington that bring together national leaders to constructively debate controversial public-policy issues.

Those ambitions will require a lot of work — and money. Fund-raising will be an important part of Rabold’s job, but she thinks people are ready to buy into the center’s mission.

“It’s about getting people to realize that we’re all more or less trying to get to the same place, even though we often disagree about how to get there,” she said. “A lot of people are in public service for the right reasons. It’s not just about ‘gotcha’ politics.”

Rabold said she still is recovering from a bruising re-election campaign, which saw Newberry turned out of office by the former vice mayor, Jim Gray. But she said she remains committed to public service and “making a difference, as cliché as that sounds.”

Rabold now works from the tiny brick cottage on North Mill Street that was Henry Clay’s law office from 1803 to 1810. The more she studies Clay, she said, the more she realizes how much people can learn from his career and his ideals.

She is reading David and Jeanne Heidler’s excellent new biography, Henry Clay: The Essential American. She said Gray gave it to her when they met recently to talk over coffee. “It was almost in the spirit of Henry Clay,” she said of the gift.

One of the smartest things Jim Gray did after being elected mayor was create diverse transition teams of local citizens to study and make recommendations on key issues facing Lexington.

The team reports, which started coming out late last week, offer the new mayor a great source of free advice. They also could help generate buy-in for initiatives Gray chooses to pursue.

The first reports I wanted to read dealt with economic development and job creation. Those are two of the biggest issues facing Lexington, and they were central themes of Gray’s campaign.

Gray appointed two groups to study economic development. Both were diverse, ranging from economic development professionals and corporate executives to small-business owners and interested citizens.

“I deliberately tried to create an environment where different points of view would be expressed,” Gray said.

After a healthy amount of debate and dissension, the two groups produced very different reports. But there were many common themes. Both said Lexington needs:

■ Better coordination among local economic development groups, and better measurement of results.

■ More effective marketing of Central Kentucky as a place for entrepreneurs.

■ Closer relationships between Lexington and surrounding communities, Louisville and Northern Kentucky, as well as between the city and University of Kentucky.

■ Streamlined bureaucracy to make it easier for businesses to get permits, approvals and information.

The strongest common theme, though, was a call for Gray to focus much of his personal time and attention on economic development.

“The mayor should initiate and drive Lexington’s economic development strategy and execution,” one report said, adding that he should be the “face” of Lexington to the world.

That makes sense. As an executive of family-owned Gray Construction Co., Gray spent more than 30 years working with companies on site selection and business development.

“That’s my DNA — selling and marketing,” Gray said Friday, adding he had spent much of that day meeting with executives from a company, which he declined to name, that is considering moving to Lexington.

One economic development transition team was led by Kim Menke, a Toyota executive and former Commerce Lexington chairman. Its report recommended many traditional strategies, such as a professional marketing campaign and economic incentives.

It suggested the mayor create a small but diverse business advisory board, as well as roundtables of chief executives from small and large local companies to give him advice. Gray said he was already planning such a CEO roundtable and will have an announcement soon.

The other team was led by Alan Hawse, vice president of information technology for California-based Cypress Semiconductor. Its report suggested many less conventional — and less costly — approaches, such as targeted recruitment of successful Kentucky natives and UK graduates elsewhere who might want to move back to Lexington to work, create or expand companies.

That group’s report emphasized the growth potential of several development-related initiatives Gray already supports. Those include full implementation of the Downtown Master Plan, funding infrastructure for the Lexington Distillery District and creation of a “land bank” to encourage redevelopment of blighted urban property.

(It is worth noting, though, that while some members of that team wanted to give the city condemnation power as part of land bank legislation, the mayor is against that. “There are creative paths that don’t require eminent domain,” Gray said.)

That team put especially strong emphasis on Gray using his personal skills to promote economic development: setting vision and strategy, building relationships, cheerleading local entrepreneurs and selling Lexington elsewhere.

“A lot of the things that need to be done are leadership things that Jim could be really good at,” Hawse said.

As mayor, that is perhaps Gray’s biggest opportunity — and challenge.

The reports

Click here to download report from Team 1 (Hawse)

Click here to download report from Team 2 (Menke)

When the curtain goes up on University of Kentucky Opera Theatre’s Porgy and Bess later this week, audiences might be seeing more than a grand production of George and Ira Gershwin’s classic American opera.

They might be seeing the future of theatrical stage design.

Behind the 70-piece orchestra and 75 cast members on the Singletary Center stage will be giant backdrops showing historic Charleston and coastal South Carolina. But these won’t be typical paint-on-canvas sets. Lights will twinkle. Leaves will flutter. Water will ripple.

These backdrops will be created with digitally enhanced photographs and video of the actual places. They will be projected from behind onto two giant screens by a high-tech system developed by UK’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, also known as the VisCenter.

“The kind of special effects you have seen in films can now be used in a live theater context, which hasn’t happened before,” said Brent Seales, a UK computer science professor and director of the VisCenter.

Theater companies have been experiment ing with projected “virtual” sets for years. I saw a famous attempt on Broadway five years ago in the short-lived Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Woman in White. The images were ghostly and distracting.

“If you were in the balcony, it didn’t work at all,” said Richard Kagey, an Atlanta-based director and theatrical designer who also saw it. Kagey has worked with UK Opera and the VisCenter to create the Porgy and Bess sets, and he said the effect is completely different.

“I think people are going to be stunned when they see how vivid and clear it is, even when you put stage lighting in front of it,” said Everett McCorvey, director of UK Opera Theatre.

To create this set, two 24-foot-tall screens were made from a new material that allows images projected from behind to be viewed clearly from many angles. One screen is 15 feet wide, with 18 projectors, and the other is 32 feet wide, backed by 36 projectors. The screen assemblies are on casters and can be moved around the stage easily.

Each projector throws a piece of a high-resolution picture or video onto the screen from a distance of only 5 feet. The heart of the system is “calibration” software the VisCenter developed that blend all of the pieces into a seamless image.

As with movie special effects, the key is to make the scenery believable — not distracting — so the audience is swept up by the music, acting and story. “Nobody wants to be upstaged by a display screen,” Seales said.

The stage will still have physical sets, such as Porgy’s shack and the balcony on Catfish Row. “But we won’t have those huge pieces that we’ve had to build before to make it believable,” McCorvey said.

Three-year collaboration

McCorvey and Seales both came to UK in 1991. Since then, McCorvey has built one of the nation’s top training programs for opera singers. Seales has led the VisCenter in working throughout the university to develop and commercialize audio-visual technology.

But Seales and McCorvey didn’t meet until three years ago, when they both were making presentations to Women & Philanthropy, an organization started by Patsy Todd, wife of UK President Lee T. Todd Jr.

“As I listened to Brent I was just so intrigued with all they were doing,” said McCorvey, who soon arranged to tour the VisCenter. “As I looked at it I saw all the possible applications for theater.”

McCorvey quickly contacted Kagey, who has been working with the VisCenter staff ever since to develop the technology. Once it was ready, McCorvey knew how he wanted to use it first: Porgy and Bess.

“It’s a work near and dear to my heart,” McCorvey said. That is partly because McCorvey met his wife, singer Alicia Helm, when they both were in the chorus of the New York Metropolitan Opera’s first production of Porgy and Bess in 1985.

McCorvey said facilities have always limited his ability to produce operas with large casts and elaborate sets. The Singletary Center has a big stage and orchestra pit but little space around the stage to accommodate traditional sets. The Lexington Opera House’s stage can handle sets but not a large cast or orchestra.

McCorvey’s problem is common, which is why a half-dozen opera companies from around the country are sending representatives to see UK’s Porgy and Bess.

After UK’s last performance Feb. 6, the sets will be rented to The Atlanta Opera for its production of Porgy and Bess a month later. And that could be just the beginning, because this technology could provide cost-saving backdrops for almost any show.

UK expects to more than recoup its $350,000 in development costs by renting this set, licensing the technology and perhaps even creating a spinoff company to produce projection content for other shows.

“Getting this kind of technology into the marketplace is a lot of what this VisCenter is all about,” Seales said.

While McCorvey is focused on future artistic possibilities of the technology, he understands why people such as Seales and Leonard Heller, UK’s vice president for commercialization and economic development, are equally excited about it.

“I will never forget walking into the warehouse where they put it together and seeing it work for the first time,” McCorvey said. “Len Heller looked at it and said to me, ‘This is going to be really big.’”

Michelle Jackson was so excited about the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games that she signed up to volunteer. Then, a week before the Games began last September, the fifth-grade teacher thought: How can I share this experience with my students?

After quickly consulting colleagues at Sts. Peter and Paul Regional Catholic School in Lexington, Jackson came up with a plan.

She asked students in her classes and in the school’s other fifth-grade class, taught by Peyton Nunley, to write letters welcoming WEG visitors to Lexington and telling them something about Kentucky.

Jackson, 24, a Centre College graduate, carried some of the 50 or so letters with her while she worked with journalists, athletes and spectators in media zones at the Kentucky Horse Park competition venues. Whenever she encountered people from other states or countries who she thought might appreciate a letter, she gave them one.

She didn’t have any idea how much the letters were appreciated until a few weeks later, when people started writing back from as far away as New York, Scotland and Australia.

A photojournalist from Australia sent the class a postcard with a picture of a koala. The mother of a para-dressage competitor from Scotland sent a letter and a big envelope full of brochures about Scottish parks and nature areas.

A sixth-grader wrote the class a detailed letter about what her life is like in Richfield Springs, N.Y., and she included several drawings of horses.

Jackson gave one letter to an Alabama family that included a fourth-grade girl. The girl took it to school to show her teacher, and one thing led to another.

On Friday, Jackson’s students will use Skype software to have a video conference with Amanda Gibson’s class at Liberty Park Elementary School in Vestavia Hills, Ala., a suburb of Birmingham.

Both classes have prepared for the computer-assisted meeting by sending questions back and forth, drawing posters and gathering maps and flags. “We’ve talked a lot about how we’ll have to take turns and that everyone can’t talk at once,” Jackson said.

The Alabama students want to know about Kentucky’s state bird, fruit, flower and fish, as well as the nearest amusement parks. They are curious about what burgoo is and what Sts. Peter and Paul School is like. They want to know whether any of the Kentucky kids own or ride horses, and whether they had been to the Kentucky Derby.

Because Sts. Peter and Paul is a regional school, several students do live on farms with horses. And the whole class will be able to tell the Alabama kids about WEG, because they were among more than 62,000 Kentucky students who got to attend, thanks to donations that Alltech raised from its suppliers.

Jackson’s students are interested in Alabama’s state bird, flower, tree and animal. But they also want to know about Alabama football and the space center in Huntsville.

“I asked what their favorite historical figure was, and I told them mine was Henry Clay,” Victoria Parrish said. Why Henry Clay? She said she lives near and has visited his Ashland Estate.

The fifth-graders are curious about the Alabama students’ favorite foods and plan to talk about theirs. Max Sparkman wants to tell them about Ale-8-One — “it’s my favorite soda ever” — which led several students to suggest that they send a case of the Winchester-made soft drink to Alabama. “I told them we’ll see about that,” Jackson said, making no promises.

Thanks to this letter-writing assignment, Jackson’s students said they learned a lot about other places and people — and know a lot more than they did before about Kentucky and their hometown.

“I thought it was interesting that one piece of paper we wrote on went to the other side of the world,” Mason McCollum said.

“Yeah, and I didn’t think any of them would write back,” Elli Spanier said.

All of which makes their teacher smile.

“I wanted them to learn that the world is very accessible to them,” Jackson said, “that adults in Australia and Scotland thought it was important to write back to 11-year-olds in Kentucky.”

Spend a few moments today watching this video of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech. It is an eloquent call for brotherhood and justice. We have come so far in 47 years, but we still have far to go.

If you have time, also listen to this fascinating NPR interview with Clarence Jones, a King aide who helped draft the speech. He tells about it in a new book.

A tearful Cindy Kewin is given flowers Sunday at the end of the last performance of her final production. Photo by Tom Eblen

You may remember a column I wrote earlier this month about Cindy Kewin, who was staging her last production after 27 years as the drama teacher at Lafayette High School in Lexington. She will retire in June. Also calling it quits are her production team for the past 20 years: musical director Debby Owen and choreographer Luanne Franklin.

The last performance of their last musical, Bye Bye Birdie, was Sunday afternoon. Their productions have developed a reputation for exceptional quality over the years, and this one certainly lived up to the standard. Bravo!

Cindy Kewin, left, Debby Owen, center, and Luanne Franklin join students to sing a few bars Sunday near the end of their last show. Photo by Tom Eblen

Tired of cabin fever? Want to get out of the house, meet people and learn something new? There are some great opportunities to do that in Lexington at the beginning and end of this week.

The annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration begins downtown Sunday with a nondenominational service  at 6 p.m. at Central Christian Church. There are a full morning of activities downtown Monday  — a breakfast, a program, a march and service opportunities. Click here for details.

On Friday evening, Debra’s Social Stimulus kicks off 2011 with a gathering on Delaware Avenue to highlight an east Lexington neighborhood many people don’t even know is there. The festivities, which are free and open to the public, are from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Barnhill Chimney Co., 1123 Delaware Ave. The street runs between Winchester Road and Henry Clay Boulevard. Here’s a map.

Debra Hensley, an insurance agent and former Urban County Council member, started these gatherings in 2009 to help people in Lexington get to know each other and become more involved in their city. If you haven’t been to one, you are really missing something. I try never to miss. Click here for information.

One of the most remarkable people I got to know as a young reporter in the 1980s was Myles Horton, whom Rosa Parks called “the first white man I ever trusted.”

Horton helped start the Highlander Center in Tennessee, which became a cradle of the civil rights movement. He was a confidant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he told me he first met when King was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

As Horton and I sat outside his hilltop cabin at Highlander one afternoon, enjoying a view of the Great Smoky Mountains in the distance, he talked about King and his legacy.

In focusing on King’s work for racial justice, Horton said, many people ignore the fact that he was equally passionate about economic justice. “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter,” Horton quoted King as saying, “if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and cup of coffee?

Economic justice was at the heart of King’s career as an activist, from the Montgomery bus boycott that thrust him into the national spotlight in 1955 to the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike where he was assassinated in 1968.

Conservative extremists last year called President Barack Obama a “socialist” for pushing through what had been a Republican plan for healthcare reform. But some of the things King advocated five decades ago, such as a government-guaranteed minimum income, really did approach socialism.

The public was scared of communism in King’s day, so his enemies often called him a “communist” for challenging America’s status quo. A photograph of King with Horton at Highlander was posted on billboards around the South with the headline, “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School.”

“I’m not talking about communism,” King later replied. “Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis.”

Many of King’s proposals for achieving economic justice seem quaint, even far-fetched, today. He was a minister, not an economist. A half-century of history since then has underscored the power of entrepreneurial capitalism to improve society. But it also has shown the pitfalls of corrupt, monopolistic capitalism and unchecked corporate power.

This is a good time to review some of King’s thoughts about economic justice. The King holiday Monday comes at a time when Wall Street has recovered from the Great Recession, but Main Street still has a long way to go. Meanwhile, politicians talk about making drastic cuts in America’s social safety net.

“The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst,” King said in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. “The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. … In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent.”

In a 1967 speech, King said: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

Because King was a Christian minister, his words often echoed those of the Biblical savior worshipped by both liberals and conservatives. In a speech only days before he was murdered, King had this to say: “One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.

“It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, ‘That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.’ That’s the question facing America today.”

While much has changed since King’s time, much else has not. That is why his words remain so powerful and relevant. King had a gift for bringing America’s strengths and weaknesses into sharp focus and inspiring us to do better than we have.

A little more than a week ago, Ted Williams was a homeless panhandler in Columbus, Ohio. Now, he is famous around the world.

A newspaperman’s video of Williams standing at an off-ramp begging for money and a chance to use his “God-given gift of voice” ricocheted around the Internet. Millions have seen the video, and Oprah Winfrey and the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team have been among those offering Williams a job.

It is hard to say what made Williams’ video such a sensation. Perhaps it was the irony of hearing such a beautiful voice coming from such a disheveled-looking man. He also spoke with sincerity about wanting to get back to productive work after ruining his life with alcohol and drugs.

Williams’ story is extraordinary. But Ruth Mark knows there are many more people like him — homeless men and women with God-given talents who, with help and encouragement, can realize their dreams of getting off the street and finding work again.

Mark has seen these people every week for the past five years as director of Pyramid Professional Resources. The non-profit organization is housed at Christ Church Cathedral and receives support from several local businesses and six other churches: Southland Christian, Second Presbyterian, Church of the Good Shepherd, Faith Lutheran, Imani Baptist and St. Martha’s Episcopal.

PPR is open three mornings a week for the 20 or so homeless people accepted into its program at any given time. They get a place to shower, do laundry, store belongings and receive mentoring to overcome self-defeating habits, find a job and keep it. PPR’s offices have newspapers, Internet computers, LexTran passes, donated clothing, voice-mail and mailboxes for them to use while job-hunting.

“We do not provide jobs for them, but we provide amenities they need to get jobs,” said Mark, a nurse who also helps clients find treatment for medical problems. PPR operates on an annual budget of only about $15,000; every staff member except the office manager is a volunteer, Mark said.

Williams’ vocal talent might be unusual, Mark said, but his fall from a middle-class lifestyle into homelessness is not. Substance abuse, criminal convictions, health and family problems cost many people their jobs and homes. The slow economic recovery has made it that much harder for them to get back on their feet.

About half of PPR’s 250 clients each year — the vast majority of whom are men — get full-time jobs, although some end up out of work again. Mark estimates that, over the long term, about one-fourth of clients manage to break out of homelessness and support themselves.

“I think this serves a unique subset of people who are genuinely motivated,” volunteer Clay Dorsett said. “So many of them have skills and talents they have effectively used before, but they have fallen on hard times. They just want to get back to using them.”

Jesse Curran, 44, said that describes him. The PPR client from Pennsylvania said he has two associate’s degrees in mechanical engineering and used to do and supervise computer-aided design work at a factory in Versailles. But a few years ago, the work was sent overseas, and Curran lost his job.

“I started drinking a lot,” he said. “I was always an alcoholic, but I finally admitted to the fact.”

Since living for a time at the Hope Center and getting sober, Curran said he has had a lot of part-time and temporary work in everything from fast food to construction, but he can’t find a full-time job.

It doesn’t help that he has a misdemeanor conviction on his record.

“With so many people looking for jobs, (employers) can wait for Mother Teresa,” he said.

Curran earned money shoveling snow earlier this winter, but his feet became frostbitten, and he can’t work much until they heal, he said. He is living temporarily at St. Agnes’ House, an Episcopal mission that provides shelter for sick people.

Like the man in the Internet video, Curran said he has been successful before and is determined to be successful again. He carries around his annual Social Security statement to remind himself how much money he used to earn.

“If you want it bad enough, you can get it,” he said. “I know I just have to keep trying.”

A new think tank has been created to study Kentucky issues and analyze the public policies being developed to address them.

The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy is a project of the Berea-based Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, which has a long track record of producing quality research on issues affecting Eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia. The center’s Web site is at: www.kypolicy.org.

The center’s first report looks at how $3.4 billion in federal stimulus money shored up Kentucky’s budget — and how the state will be affected now that stimulus spending is coming to an end.

“Kentucky relied heavily on Recovery Act dollars to plug holes in the 2009-2010 state budget and to craft a balanced budget in 2011-2012,” the center’s director, Jason Bailey, said in a news release about the report.  “Those funds dry up this year, however, at a time when the economy remains in a deep hole.”

Click here to download the report. You can sign up to receive future updates at the Center’s Web site.

Expect the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy to provide some progressive balance to the conservative Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, based in Bowling Green.

When researching my column today, I missed an important change in the state tax reform proposal that  Rep. Bill Farmer, a Lexington Republican, has made for each of the past several years.

Previously, Farmer said that by eliminating the state’s personal and corporate income taxes and extending the sales tax to most services, enough revenue could be generated to lower Kentucky’s 6 percent sales tax rate, perhaps to 5 percent or 5.5 percent.

Rep. Bill Farmer

But the version of the bill Farmer filed for this legislative session calls instead for raising the sales tax rate to 7 percent. Why the change?

“The economists missed badly last year” when estimating the tax revenues that would be produced by the changes he was proposing, Farmer said. How badly? About $1 billion.

Farmer said he still isn’t sure the changes would require an increase in the overall sales tax rate at a time when lawmakers would be taxing more services and removing exemptions in order to eliminate income taxes, but he is trying to be conservative. “It’s easier to start a little high and go low than to start low and have to raise it at some point,” he said.

Not that it is likely to matter. Farmer said he has little hope that any meaningful tax reform will happen this year — his plan or anyone else’s. And he is skeptical that Kentucky politicians will ever be willing to eliminate income taxes.

As I wrote in my column today, many business leaders and politicians like Tennessee’s tax system because they say that taxing consumption rather than income is more attractive to businesses and high-income workers.

But the tradeoff for Tennessee has been some of the nation’s highest sales taxes. That leaves poor and middle-class people paying a bigger share of their income in taxes than higher-income folks. The last commission Tennessee lawmakers appointed in 2002 to study that state’s tax system proposed fixing that problem by — you guessed it — creating a state income tax.

When discussing state tax reform, Kentucky executives and politicians often cite Tennessee as a model. But many people south of the state line would beg to differ.

What some tax reform advocates like about Tennessee is that it has no state income tax, which gives it a competitive advantage in attracting businesses and high-income workers. But Tennessee makes up for it with sky-high sales taxes.

While Kentuckians pay a 6 percent sales tax on most goods — and nothing on food — Tennesseans pay an average 9.35 percent in state and local sales tax on non-food items, the nation’s highest rate. Food is taxed at an average of 7.9 percent, the nation’s third-highest rate.

Taxing consumption more than income to spur economic growth makes sense philosophically. But things get complicated in the real world.

Tennessee’s tax system puts a greater share of the overall burden on poor and middle-class residents. High sales taxes also hurt small businesses and retailers, because Tennesseans often cross state lines or buy online.

Both Tennessee and Kentucky suffer from chronic budget shortfalls. They also spend less on health and social services than most other states do, which could help explain why both are in the bottom tier of state rankings of income, educational attainment and health.

The Tennessee General Assembly was concerned enough about the situation in 2002 to appoint the Tax Structure Study Commission. After two years of study, it recommended changing Tennessee’s tax system to be more like, well, Kentucky’s.

The commission recommended creating an income tax that would make it possible to lower Tennessee’s total sales tax rate to 6 percent, with food taxes falling to 4 percent. The income tax would have four tiers ranging from 3.5 percent to 6 percent, and families would not hit the top bracket until they made $100,000. (Kentucky’s income tax structure, a relic from the 1950s, tops out at 6 percent for people making more than $8,000 a year, which is virtually everyone.)

Like various tax reform plans in Kentucky, the Tennessee commission’s recommendations and similar proposals since then have gone nowhere politically. But they are worth keeping in mind, especially since Kentucky Senate President David Williams, who is running for governor against incumbent Steve Beshear, has Tennessee-style tax reform on his agenda.

Two state representatives — Democrat Jim Wayne of Louisville and Republican Bill Farmer of Lexington — have long proposed competing visions for Kentucky tax reform.

Wayne would recalibrate income tax brackets to reflect modern incomes. He also would tax some services used mostly by wealthy people. Farmer would eliminate most sales tax exemptions — except for food — and add taxes on most services.

He thinks that would generate enough revenue to lower the sales tax rate below 6 percent and eliminate the income tax. While in previous years Farmer estimated that could generate enough revenue to eliminate income taxes and lower the sales tax rate below 6 percent, the version of the bill he filed for this legislative session calls for raising the sales tax rate to 7 percent. (See followup blog post.)

The solution probably lies with some combination of those proposals, especially the ideas about taxing services, eliminating many exemptions and updating income tax brackets.

What Kentucky needs is an equitable, “business friendly” tax structure that promotes economic growth without shifting too much of the tax burden to poor and middle-income people; and one that provides enough tax revenue to meet Kentucky’s needs, even as the economy evolves. The devil, of course, is in the details.

As lawmakers consider tax reform, here are a few other things to think about:

■ Economists say Kentucky, compared to other states, under-taxes real estate. Low property taxes are a legacy of political pressure from property owners and 1979 legislation that capped annual property tax increases at 4 percent, despite the fact that property values have often risen much more than that.

■ Kentucky’s coal severance tax, which has been 4.5 percent for more than 30 years, is the lowest among major coal states. The tax is 5 percent in West Virginia and 7 percent in Wyoming. In addition, the citizens group Kentuckians For The Commonwealth estimates that Kentucky taxpayers provide more than $97 million in annual subsidies to the politically powerful coal industry.

■ Lawmakers have in recent years raised cigarette taxes from ridiculously low levels. But Kentucky’s 60-cent per pack tax is still less than half the national average of $1.45.

■ Kentucky’s tax code is riddled with exemptions, few of which have been analyzed to see if they provide any overall economic benefit to the state. A comprehensive analysis is long overdue.

Last week’s newspapers were filled with vows from leaders of the new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives to eliminate “job-killing” government regulation.

But there also were several reports showing why regulation is needed — in Kentucky and elsewhere — and how a lack of effective regulation helped create many of our nation’s problems.

A favorite target of the anti-regulation crowd is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has become more interested in doing its job since Barack Obama became president.

A news story last week reported the formal end of a four-year legal case in which the EPA forced Lexington to fix problems with its sanitary and storm sewers. For years, those problems caused streams to be polluted and sewage to flow from manholes during heavy rains.

Because Lexington’s sewer problems were ignored for so long, the fix will be expensive: as much as $300 million over 10 years, plus a $425,000 fine for the city’s persistent violation of the Clean Water Act.

City officials had long ignored the problems. Then, in 2006, a group of local citizens threatened to sue the city unless the EPA stepped in. That prompted the EPA to file a lawsuit that forced the Urban County Council and Mayor Jim Newberry to act.

Were it not for the EPA, would Lexington be fixing its sewers now? “The answer is no,” said Scott White, an attorney for the citizens group. “The EPA had the juice and the resources to make it happen.”

Other news stories told of renewed battles between the EPA and the coal industry, whose frequent violations of the Clean Water Act are part of a long history of environmental damage that coal mining has inflicted on Appalachia.

Mine safety regulators also are getting tough following accidents last year that killed 48 miners, including six in Kentucky. That was the highest number of mine deaths in any year since 1992, and it included 26 miners killed at a West Virginia mine owned by Massey Energy.

Other news reports chronicled an out-of-court settlement that gives the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration new power to crack down on safety violations at a Massey mine in Pike County. The case is likely to give regulators more clout in dealing with other mine operators who persistently violate safety rules.

Beyond Kentucky, headlines last week told of the initial findings of a presidential commission investigating BP’s Deepwater Horizon well disaster, which killed 11 men and spilled nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The commission said BP and contractors Transocean and Halliburton exercised poor management and cut corners to save time and money. Commission co-chairman Bob Graham also faulted regulators, saying they “lacked the authority, the necessary resources and the technical expertise to prevent” the disaster.

Critics can always find examples of government over-regulation that make good anecdotes. But the consequences of under-regulation are often more severe. And don’t forget that Wall Street deregulation was a major cause of the economic crisis from which we are still trying to recover.

Expect to hear more calls for less government regulation, especially from politicians who fill their pockets with corporate campaign contributions. Some will cleverly say they are not against sensible regulation, they just think it should be handled at the state or local level, where they know it can easily be neutered by economic and political pressures.

If you want to see what happens when industry is free from regulation, look at China’s coal industry, where mine fatalities occur at an average rate of 200 a month, or the oil industry’s wells in Nigeria, where decades of frequent spills have turned vast sections of the country into wasteland.

Balancing economic interests with human safety and the environment is never easy. But ask yourself what kind of country you want to live in and pass down to future generations. Regulation actually may “kill” a job now and then, but the lack of it can be much more deadly.