The Bluegrass and Beyond

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WVa. Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press.

Americans heard something on the U.S. Senate floor last Wednesday that they haven’t heard for nearly three years: a coal-state senator and longtime supporter of the coal industry speak eloquent truth to power.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s 16-minute speech was remarkable for its wisdom and candor. It echoed a similar address in 2009 by another West Virginia Democrat and longtime coal-industry champion, the late Sen. Robert Byrd.

They both sounded like old friends trying to warn an alcoholic that his behavior had become unacceptably destructive, both to himself and to others.

The occasion for Rockefeller’s speech was a resolution before the Senate to disapprove of new Environmental Protection Agency rules reducing coal-fired power plants’ emissions of mercury and other toxic pollution.

The resolution was sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and climate-change denier, and endorsed by coal industry lapdogs including Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader from Kentucky.

“Coal has played an important part in our past and can play an important role in our future, but it will only happen if we face reality,” Rockefeller began. (To watch the video, go to Youtu.be/ErN9v3e7zro)

“The reality is that many who run the coal industry today would rather attack false enemies and deny real problems than find solutions,” he said. “Scare tactics are a cynical waste of time, money and, worst of all, coal miners’ hopes.”

Rockefeller then outlined some inconvenient truths that coal industry leaders gloss over when they attack environmental-protection laws and government regulation.

“First, our coal reserves are finite and many coal-fired power plants are aging,” he said. “The cheap, easy coal seams are diminishing, and production is falling — especially in the Central Appalachian Basin in Southern West Virginia. Production is shifting to lower-cost areas like the Illinois and Powder River Basins.

“Second, natural gas use is on the rise. Power companies are switching to natural gas because of lower prices, cheaper construction costs, lower emissions and vast, steady supplies,” he said.

“Third, the shift to a lower-carbon economy is not going away, and it’s a disservice to coal miners and their families to pretend that it is,” Rockefeller said. “Coal company operators deny that we need to do anything to address climate change despite the established scientific consensus and mounting national desire for a cleaner, healthier environment.”

Rockefeller, who was West Virginia’s governor from 1977 to 1985 and has been a senator ever since, said that in 2010, he proposed a two-year suspension of EPA carbon rules to try to help the coal industry adapt. Instead, the industry has fought all attempts at compromise. “This foolish action wastes time and money that could have been invested in the future of coal,” he said.

Rockefeller said the EPA’s actions are in the best interest of his state’s citizens.

“The annual health benefits of the rule are enormous,” he said. “EPA has relied on thousands of studies that established the serious and long-term impact of these pollutants on premature deaths, heart attacks, hospitalizations, pregnant women, babies and children.”

If coal is to have a future, it must solve its environmental challenges rather than keep trying to avoid them, Rockefeller said.

“It’s not too late for the coal industry to step up and lead by embracing the realities of today and creating a sustainable future,” he said. “Discard the scare tactics. Stop denying science. Listen to what markets are saying about greenhouse gases and other environmental concerns, to what West Virginians are saying about their water and air, their health, and the cost of caring for seniors and children who are most susceptible to pollution.

“And unless this industry aggressively leans into the future, coal miners will lose the most,” he said. “We have the chance here to not just grudgingly accept the future, but to boldly embrace it.”

I’m sure Rockefeller’s speech angered the coal barons, just as Byrd’s speech did in December 2009. Coal industry leaders don’t seem interested in listening to reason, even from politicians who have supported them for decades. They’re probably already raising money to try to defeat Rockefeller in his next election. After all, there’s no shortage of politicians willing to take the coal industry’s money and do its bidding, in Kentucky and in West Virginia.

If Rockefeller’s words have any impact, it is likely to be with the coal industry’s declining work force, and with coal-state citizens who are getting fed up with poisonous air, polluted water and higher incidences of sickness and disease. Coal will never have a bright future as long as its leaders cling to a dirty past.

Watch Rockefeller’s speech here:

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule this week on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law that is often called “Obamacare” but just as easily could be called “Romneycare.”

America’s health care system — if you can even call it a system — is a convoluted mess. Studies show that Americans pay more for health care and get less overall quality than citizens of most other industrialized nations.

Nobody understands our current health care system, and just thinking about it makes a head hurt. Year after year, you pay more for insurance that covers less. You spend more time fighting insurance companies, and you pay more money out of pocket.

We hate the system we have, but we are afraid of change.

It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court decides, especially if the verdict splits 5-4 along ideological lines. The court’s public approval ratings have been falling amid a series of rulings by the court’s activist conservative majority. A New York Times/CBS poll this month found that 75 percent of Americans think Supreme Court justices’ personal politics influence their legal decisions.

It will be more important to watch how elected leaders of both parties respond to whatever the court decides. Health care, more than any other issue, illustrates today’s poisonous politics. Special-interest money, political ideology and unwillingness to compromise seem to have left that concept we used to call “the public good” in the dust.

The main issue before the Supreme Court is the law’s “individual mandate.” It requires people to buy health insurance from a private company if they can afford to, or pay a penalty to the government to help cover the costs of uninsured people.

Without an individual mandate, almost everyone agrees, a for-profit universal health insurance system won’t work. But few people like the mandate, for various reasons. President Barack Obama was against it before he was for it. His Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, was for it before he was against it.

The conservative Heritage Foundation first proposed the individual mandate in 1989 as a way to create a free- market alternative to government health insurance. An individual mandate was part of the state insurance law Romney signed as governor of Massachusetts.

Now, though, conservatives call the individual mandate “socialism.” Liberals don’t like it, either, because they think it simply props up a fundamentally flawed private insurance system. Many of them would prefer a government-run “single-payer” system, which they say would provide universal coverage with much lower overhead costs and less paperwork.

One way to create a single-payer system would be to open Medicare to everyone. That federal health insurance program, created in 1965, now covers 48 million Americans, most of whom are elderly.

The corporations at the heart of our current health care industrial complex hate the idea of a single-payer system because its efficiencies would cut into their profits — or put them out of business. Republicans and even many Democrats don’t like it, either, because they get huge amounts of campaign cash from those corporations.

Thanks largely to health care industry lobbying, single-payer proposals have gone nowhere in recent years. Instead, congressional Democrats passed the controversial law now before the Supreme Court over the solid Republican objections.

The Affordable Care Act will greatly expand affordable coverage and curb some of the insurance industry’s worst abuses, such as canceling coverage when people get sick or denying it for pre-existing conditions. But nobody is completely satisfied with the reform law.

In addition to hating the individual mandate, conservatives complain that the law is too complex and won’t do enough to contain rising costs. But they have offered no credible alternatives that would provide universal coverage.

Liberals complain that Obama and congressional Democrats made too many concessions to the drug and insurance companies. They say the law amounts to a huge taxpayer subsidy for industry.

But after years of political posturing, Americans need solutions. More than 750,000 Kentuckians have no health insurance, and the coverage most of the rest of us have loses value every year.

Whatever the Supreme Court decides, this is the question each Kentuckian should ask his or her representative and senators: How will you work with members of the other party to create a system that gives all Americans access to good, affordable health care? How will you provide us with access to insurance coverage as good as what the government provides for you?

Jay McChord's drawing of a photo that inspired his proposed book, which will collect the love stories of military veterans.

Jennifer Bryant was 16 when her grandmother died in 1991. As she helped her grandfather choose family photographs for the funeral visitation, she noticed a stack of small pictures and letters on the top of his dresser.

Kenneth and Dale Johnson were married for 46 years and raised three children in Webster County, where he worked as an underground coal miner.

The small stack of correspondence represented much of their first two years of marriage, which they spent apart. He was an Army machine-gunner during World War II and fought on the front lines in Europe, including the Battle of the Bulge.

One picture caught Bryant’s eye. It showed her grandparents on their wedding day, kissing along a roadside. Two days later, he left for the Army.

“He told me to just put that picture back in the stack; we weren’t going to use any of those at the funeral home and I didn’t need to mess with them,” she said. “Then he turned around and walked out of the room, and I put that picture in the back pocket of my jeans.”

A couple of days after Dale Johnson’s funeral, her husband burned all of those letters and pictures. The war and separation had been painful for them, he told Bryant later, “and those memories don’t need to be in this house anymore.”

Johnson never knew that Bryant saved the one photo. For most of the two decades since then, it has stood framed in a curio cabinet that had belonged to her grandmother.

When Bryant showed the picture to her friend Jay McChord last year and told him the story behind it, he got an idea: why not collect veterans’ love stories and pictures from across the generations and publish them in an inspirational book?

McChord and Bryant have launched a fund-raising campaign at Kickstarter.com to publish A Veteran’s Legacy … in Love. Their goal is to raise $30,013 by July 19 on the crowd-funding Web site to create an online platform for people to submit their stories and photos, and to produce the book. Unless they reach the goal, they won’t receive any of the Kickstarter pledges.

“I think this project and book can preserve some powerful stories and offer encouragement for what sacrifice and commitment look like,” McChord said. He envisions the book as a combination of inspirational love stories and a place where veterans may record their love stories for posterity.

Bryant and McChord already have the art for their book’s cover: McChord, a former University of Kentucky art major, made a drawing of the picture of Bryant’s grandparents kissing on their wedding day.

Much of McChord’s artistic work in recent years has focused on veterans. Most pieces are drawings of snapshots that soldiers took of themselves and friends while in service.

McChord, who is stepping down this year after eight years as the 9th District representative on Lexington’s Urban County Council, wasn’t in the military, and his family doesn’t have a strong military tradition.

But McChord said he has always loved military history, and he is inspired by veterans’ service and stories, especially those who fought in World War II. He just returned from a “Victory in Europe” trip organized by the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, which included tours of sites in London, Paris and the beaches of Normandy. An 86-year-old American who fought in Normandy was their guide there.

In 2010, McChord published a book, A Veteran’s Legacy: Field Kit Journal (Gracie Mae Publications, $15). Illustrated with his drawings, the book helps veterans record the stories of their military service based on questions McChord developed from the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project.

McChord sees these book projects as a way to honor those who served, preserve their stories so future generations can learn from them and offer a measure of healing, he said.

Bryant said it would be a shame if more stories of love, commitment and persistence disappeared in time, as her grandparents’ story did.

“Our children are not going to know the true stories of these veterans unless we tell them,” she said. “These people are here now, and we need to capture these stories.”

As a journalist, I have always been fascinated by the sociology of leadership, the way communities and institutions work, and how things really get done.

The official channels of power in government and business are easy to map. Likewise, it isn’t hard to trace, or at least speculate upon, the influence of money and the people who control it.

Beyond that, though, why are some companies, governments, non-profit organizations and even neighborhoods better at creative problem-solving than others? What are the best ways to make good ideas happen?

Karen Stephenson, an anthropologist and corporate consultant who has taught at Harvard and UCLA, thinks a lot of it comes down to “connectors.” They are people who, in different ways, are adept at connecting with others to form trusted working relationships. They also are great at connecting others to form similar relationships.

As part of her volunteer work, Stephenson has led efforts to identify key connectors in four cities: Philadelphia; Louisville; Tucson. Ariz.; and Portland, Ore. She just finished her first regional project, in the 10-county Lexington metro area, called the Bluegrass Community Connectors (Bluegrasscommunityconnectors.weebly.com).

Working with United Way of the Bluegrass, AARP and several corporate sponsors, the project tried to identify and learn more about key connectors in Fayette and nine surrounding counties: Anderson, Bourbon, Clark, Franklin, Jessamine, Madison, Montgomery, Scott and Woodford.

To identify those connectors, organizers said they sent 70,000 emails to people on the distribution lists of various business and community organizations. They got back 5,000 nominations, which were narrowed to 144 people. That was based mostly on how many votes each person got (factoring out any obvious efforts to stuff the ballot box.)

Six of those people wanted to remain anonymous; the other 138 were invited to a morning workshop and luncheon at the Marriott Griffin Gate hotel last Tuesday.

More than half of those identified in the balloting were familiar names: government leaders, business executives, heads of non-profit organizations and well-known community leaders. Others were not well known outside their communities or circles of influence. One goal of putting their names on a list like this was to raise their profile and give them some credibility among the traditional leaders, perhaps opening new opportunities for partnerships.

The project and its attempt to connect connectors got decidedly mixed reviews.

Several lesser-known grass-roots leaders said they liked getting to meet new people like themselves, some of whom were working on similar issues in other communities. A few said they found the 45-minute breakout session in which connectors discussed an assigned general topic, such as education or neighborhoods, to be so stimulating that they want to continue those discussions.

But many of the most effective local connectors I talked with later were disappointed. They thought the project lacked depth, vision or enough purpose to justify the effort. They described the session as superficial, repetitious, “old school” and not a good use of their time.

These leaders wanted more unstructured time to get to know the connectors they hadn’t met before and to share mutual interests and ideas. They wanted bios and full contact information for their fellow connectors right then so they could connect on their own. They also wondered why more young, emerging leaders weren’t on the list.

Bill Farmer, the United Way’s president, said he isn’t sure where the project will go from here. One idea is to get the Lexington and Louisville connectors together to build relationships and foster cooperation between Kentucky’s two largest cities. Mostly, though, where the project goes will be up to the connectors, Farmer said.

A lot of time, money and effort was put into this project, and I hope some lasting good can come from it. Although the initial meeting was something of a missed opportunity, there is value in helping connect grass-roots leaders to one another and to people in traditional power and leadership positions.

But some of the most valuable lessons could be for the project’s organizers. Grass-roots leaders get things done by listening to others, being more inclusive, embracing innovation, taking risks and by not trying to do everything themselves. Organizations that want to remain relevant in their communities could learn a lot from them.

When I was little and we visited my grandparents in rural Fulton County, Granddaddy Kearby would take me out to the henhouse each morning to collect eggs. For a city boy, this little treasure hunt was big fun.

At some point, though, I noticed that the chickens who had been there on my first few visits had disappeared. It took a while for me to figure out that Granddaddy was now going out each morning before me, hiding store-bought eggs for me to find.

Grandfathers have been on my mind lately, because, in another month or so, I will become one. My older daughter and her husband are having a boy in late July, and I could not be happier.

I will have one advantage that my grandfathers, and my daughters’ grandfathers, did not have. Rather than living a day’s drive from my grandson, I will be a five-minute walk around the block. I want to make the most of the opportunity.

As Father’s Day approached, I was thinking about the role of grandfathers and the relationships that I had with mine.

Researchers point to all kinds of health and emotional benefits derived from strong relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. Grandparents can have more relaxed relationships with children than parents can. That is because they are not the primary caregivers and disciplinarians, with all the stress that comes with those roles.

A grandparent can be a less-intimidating teacher, mentor and sounding board for a child. They often have less energy than parents, but a little more free time. They can pass along wisdom and experience and provide a personal connection with the past.

My grandfathers were kind-hearted men with very different personalities. They had adapted in their own ways to their long marriages to strong-willed women.

Granddaddy Kearby was outgoing and curious. A retired railway postal worker, he was a New Deal Democrat who loved to meet new people, talk politics, tell jokes and read newspapers. He enjoyed playing with his grandchildren because he was basically a kid at heart.

He had grown up along the Mississippi River. His father, as Fulton County judge, built the old courthouse that is still the most impressive building in Hickman. He told us about swimming across the wide river as a boy, and of seeing Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

My grandfather Eblen, whom we all called “Pa,” didn’t talk as much, but when he did, you listened. After working more than four decades for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad in Eastern Kentucky and Lexington, he moved back to the Henderson County farm where he had grown up.

Pa loved to fish, and he built a big pond to indulge his passion and pass it along to his grandchildren. He and my father were crack shots, and they taught my brothers and me how to shoot and respect firearms. I learned a lot about patience by being around Pa, whether it was fishing or enjoying a blazing fire on a winter evening.

When I could get him to tell stories, he had some great ones, especially about working on an Army railroad during World War I, shuttling men and munitions to the front lines in France.

People learn a lot from role models. I think that a big reason my wife and I have been good parents is that we had good parents. We will be good grandparents because we had good grandparents. Still, I know I must temper my expectations.

Granddaddy Kearby and I had another egg-hunting game when I was little. When he came to visit one Easter, I convinced him to hide my plastic eggs in the back yard so I could hunt for them — over and over and over and over.

Finally, as he sat in a lawn chair reading his newspaper, I searched my back yard for a long time without finding a single egg. Eventually, I discovered that my weary grandfather had hidden my eggs below the fake grass in the basket I was carrying.

The moral to that story? Grandfathers don’t need to have unlimited patience, but a good sense of humor is mandatory.

Thomas Beebe Ripy completed this Queen Anne-style mansion in 1888.

LAWRENCEBURG — When cousins Tom Ripy and George Geoghegan were boys in the 1940s, their great-grandmother’s home on Main Street was the center of activity for their large extended family.

Sallie Ripy was then a spry woman in her 90s, and she shared her 11,000-square-foot mansion with several of her 11 children and their spouses.

On Christmas Day, the great-uncles would give each child in the family a silver dollar. One great-aunt kept a drawer full of candy and taught all of the children how to blow bubble gum, “much to our parents’ disgust,” Tom Ripy recalled.

The biggest treat of all was climbing up into the house’s four-story tower, which offered a commanding view.

“It was a very happy place,” Ripy said. “We all felt at home there.”

So it was with great alarm that Ripy and Geoghegan watched in recent years as the house, which was sold out of the family in 1965, fell into extreme disrepair. In 2010, the cousins, both retired government lawyers, pooled their resources and bought it at foreclosure.

“There were rumors that somebody would buy it and sell it for salvage,” said Ripy, who lives in Arlington, Va. “So I left my wife in Virginia and brought her checkbook.”

“That’s literally true,” confirmed his wife, Minnie Sue Ripy.

Minnie Sue Ripy, Tom Ripy and George Geoghegan

The bank gave them a good price — $186,000 — because the Thomas Beebe Ripy mansion wasn’t just any house. Completed in 1888 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, the Queen Anne-style house might be the grandest of a string of mansions that bourbon barons built along Main Street when this was a center of Kentucky’s whiskey industry.

T.B. Ripy (1847-1902) bought, sold and ran several distilleries, including the one on the Kentucky River at Tyrone where Wild Turkey is now made.

“He was a wheeler-dealer, alternately well off and broke,” Ripy, his great- grandson, said. “Frankly, I’m not sure I would have wanted to do business with him.”

Ripy, 73, and Geoghegan, 69, bought the family homeplace with the hope of finding someone with the resources to restore it and put it to good use. “We certainly didn’t buy it to live in,” Geoghegan said.

Until they find a suitable buyer, they are trying their best to clean up the place, which has been quite a chore.

They hired a crew to clear five acres of brush and trees that had almost swallowed the house.

“I was going to recommend it for the next Jurassic Park movie,” Geoghegan said. “It was that bad.”

They hauled out tons of junk. They replaced roofing and gutters that had let rain flow into the house. Mildew was everywhere, but, fortunately, the thick brick and plaster walls had kept out mold, Geoghegan said.

The cousins brought in a bee keeper to remove an active hive, 8 feet wide and 2 feet thick, in the grand second-floor hallway. They continue to battle bats, which fly in from the attic through holes in ceiling plaster.

With cleanup almost complete, the next step is a costly restoration. There is a lot to work with: sumptuous woodwork of mahogany, walnut and cherry, and amazing stained-glass windows. The main floor has 14-foot ceilings and a grand mahogany staircase.

“At this point, we’re doing it with our own money, but retired government lawyers are not exactly members of the 1 percent,” Ripy said. “Before I die, I would like to see this place restored as an asset for the community.”

The most likely scenario is for someone to buy the mansion for a commercial use, which would make the property eligible for federal and state tax credits to help with restoration costs.

Lawrenceburg is now an important stop on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, a successful effort by the Kentucky Distillers Association to attract tourists to distilleries. Association members will discuss the Ripy mansion’s potential at their June 26 meeting, said Eric Gregory, the executive director.

“It’s a treasure,” said Gregory, who has restored several old houses. “As fast as our industry is growing, there is always a need for event space. Mansions like this with ties to the bourbon industry don’t come around very often.”

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The Bluegrass Community Connectors project named 138 “connectors” Tuesday in an effort to create new networks of local activists, and to better link traditional and grassroots leadership in the region.

The connectors were chosen from among 5,000 nominations received from the public in online balloting since last August.  Most of the 138 connectors met for a morning session and lunch at the Marriott Griffin Gate hotel to get to know each other and discuss regional issues.

Counties included in the project were: Anderson, Bourbon, Clark, Fayette, Franklin, Jessamine, Madison, Montgomery, Scott and Woodford.  The project was led by the United Way of the Bluegrass. (See a list of the connectors below.)

At least half of the connectors who emerged from the balloting were well-known, traditional leaders — mayors, city council members, business leaders and heads of non-profit organizations in the 10-county Lexington metro area.

“But about half of them are not the usual suspects, and that’s the big takeaway,” said Karen Stephenson, a cultural anthropologist who has taught at Harvard and UCLA and donated her time to organize this project and previous ones in four other cities.

The main purpose of the project was to identify grassroots leaders who may not know each other or many of the traditional leaders. Introducing them to each other will create new networks of people already active in their communities who can then hook up for future projects.

Stephenson said that if she were a traditional leader, she would look at this list and say, “Who do I not know, and why? Then I would make a beeline to them and figure out what they’re doing and how I can get them connected to some of the more well-known connectors.”

Stephenson said she was impressed that the most-nominated people represented a range of ages and races. Fayette County had the most connectors, and the most connections among them, based on a follow-up survey the connectors completed.

That was to be expected, she said, given Fayette County’s dominant role in the region.

Interestingly, the three counties with the least connected relationships were Anderson, Clark and Bourbon. What that pointed out, Stephenson said, was an opportunity to integrate those counties more into regional discussions.

How the connectors make use of this new visibility will be up to them.

Deborah Knittel, a community activist in Versailles, said the session gave her fresh ideas and renewed enthusiasm for tackling some issues in her community.

“This does not need to stop here,” said Kent Lewis, a young technology executive who has organized the TEDxLex idea-sharing conference in Lexington for the past two years. “I can send anyone an email and say I am a connector, too, do you have a minute or time for a coffee to discuss something?  They question of credibility is not there, because this project did that already.”

Bluegrass Community Connectors

Denise Adams

Lisa Adkins

Karen Anderson

E. Joy Arnold

Steve Austin

Angela Baldridge

Robbi Barber

Teresa Barton

Cathy Boone

Ron Borkowski

Ed Burtner

Maria F. Bush

Bonnie Clark

Nancy Calix

Sandra Noble Canon

Chief David Charles

Opal Clark

Beverly Clemons

Carmen Combs

Jack Conner

David Coomer

John Cooper

Kip Cornett

David Cozart

Judy Crowe

Marilyn Daniel

Ms. Terry Davidson

Kenny Davis Jr.

Luther Deaton

Jessica Dodgen

Diana Wells Doggett

Richard Eads

Jim Embry

Bill Farmer

James Ferrell

Tommy Floyd

Eric Geary

Marion Gibson

Yvonne Giles

Lisa Gilliam

Emanuel Gilpin

Linda Gorton

Jim Gray

Lauren Greathouse Burlile

Dean C. Hammond Jr.

Lyle S. Hanna

Tom Harris

Debra A. Hensley

Christy Hiler

Lynn Hisle

Mike Hockensmith

Liza Holland

Janet Holloway

Phil Holoubek

Grant Horner

Jim Host

Lori Rowland Houlihan

Erin Michelle Howard

Andrea James

Mark Johnson

Carol Jones

Steve Kay

Kris Kimel

David Kitchen

Deborah Moore Knittel

Jodie Koch

Greg Lakes

Bud Lane

Cay Lane

Gina Lang

Bill Lear

Kent S. Lewis

Pearse Lyons

Sherry Maddock

Bruce T. Manley

Tom Martin

Ronda May

Jay McChord

Everett McCorvey

Kim Menke

Griffin Van Meter

David Montgomery

Dianna Moore

Ms. Robbie Morgan

Aaron Mosley

Knox Van Nagell

Laura Nagle

Jim Newberry

LaFleesha Patton

Tracy Pearce

Rebecca Peck

PG Peeples

Van Meter Pettit

Graham Pohl

Becky Priest

Brian Privett

Ryan Quarles

Bob Quick, CCE

Ginny Ramsey

JoEllen Reed

John Rennels

Pam Rice

Harry Richart

Rona Roberts

Warren Rogers

Dan Roller

Robert Ryan

Ben Self

Pauline Shackleford

Stu Silberman

Austin Simms

Mike Sparks

David Sperow

Alan Stein

Nancy Stone

Kim Sweazy

Harold Tate

Fran Taylor

Isabel Gereda Taylor

Pam Thomas

Randy Thomas

Lee Todd

Tanya Torp

Darby Turner

Tim Turner

Rev. Dr. Keith Tyler

Gabe Uebel

Brian Walton

Theodore Ware, Jr.

Therese Warrick

Kevin Weaver

Dudley Webb

Woodford Webb

Jon Weece

Dan Wills

Anthony Wright

Lu Young

Jacqueline L. Zeller

Here is a problem with Lexington: It has always been such a good place to live that residents and their leaders have rarely felt much urgency to strive to make it great.

I was reminded of that again last week, when I accompanied 184 other Kentuckians to San Antonio on Commerce Lexington‘s 73rd annual Leadership Visit.

Like the other four cities I have visited with Commerce Lexington since 2008, San Antonio has fewer natural assets and more inherent problems than Lexington does. Yet, leaders in those cities have accomplished some significant civic and economic improvements.

The lessons of San Antonio were not only what civic leaders have done, but how they did it. Texas is a conservative state, but San Antonio voters have approved bond issues and tax increases for infrastructure improvements because leaders convinced them it would spark private economic development and create jobs.

The key, officials said, has been strong public and private leadership, a can-do attitude, a willingness to take risks and the ability to develop a shared vision and action plans that don’t fizzle out each time political leadership changes.

“Almost every project we have done … has relied on partners,” said Nelson Wolff, a former legislator and two-term mayor who now leads the government of surrounding Bexar County. “It’s all about partners; it’s all about building personal relationships.”

“We have that can-do attitude,” added San Antonio real estate developer Marty Wender. “There’s always going to be naysayers, but Texans make things happen. When people tell me something can’t be done, I love it, because it means I can do it and they won’t try.”

What could that kind of leadership look like in Lexington? For one thing, it could mean dusting off all of the visioning documents and master plans this city has done in recent years, identifying common elements and developing a plan to make them happen. A good place to start would be to complete the Destination 2040 process with an action plan.

It could mean that Lexington’s business and political leaders create a united front to lobby the General Assembly to give the city control over its public safety pension system. The current system’s unfunded liability and outrageous disability rules pose a financial threat that only will get worse until the problems are solved.

Business and government leaders must figure out creative ways to finance the urban infrastructure Lexington needs to attract investment, development and jobs.

The streetscape and Cheapside improvements completed in 2010 have brought new life and economic activity downtown. The next challenge will be continuing infrastructure investment to support that, as well as the organic growth happening in areas such as Jefferson Street, National Avenue and the Distillery District.

It will take a lot of money to fund Lexington’s infrastructure needs, which include the storm water and sewer improvements we must make because past leaders didn’t face up to the true cost of suburban sprawl.

San Antonio leaders are now pushing for a 1⁄8 cent sales tax increase to improve public schools. Lexington needs that kind of local-option sales tax authority for its infrastructure needs. Business and political leaders must find the courage to convince Kentucky’s rural-dominated General Assembly to allow it.

Lexington has made a lot of progress recently in bringing more public participation and transparency to growth and development issues. The challenge going forward will be for leaders to listen to citizens offering different ideas, but not be distracted by naysayers with no ideas to offer.

This is a good time to be having these kind of strategic discussions. The recent Arena, Arts and Entertainment District Task Force process was one of the most effective in Lexington’s history. It brought together a broad group of stakeholders whose research and discussions led to a shared vision that departed from previous conventional wisdom.

Now, the challenge with the Arena District and other downtown improvements is to develop specific action and financial plans. We also must keep the momentum going even though these projects will require decades to complete.

Darryl Byrd, the leader of San Antonio’s SA2020 long-term planning process, summed up the challenge by quoting Edward Whitacre, who was chairman and CEO of AT&T when the company was based in San Antonio.

“It’s all about knowing what you want,” he said, “and getting there on purpose.”

Like many people in Lexington who never went on the annual trips Commerce Lexington has been taking to other cities for 73 years, I used to think they were booster junkets of little value.

Last week’s trip to San Antonio was my fifth in a row, and it reminded me of how wrong I had been.

There is no better way to get to know other people than to travel with them. The personal relationships developed on these trips are invaluable, especially as Lexington’s leadership grows more diverse. Progress requires teamwork, and it is easier to work with people you know.

This is also networking with a focus. Each year’s program is designed to get everyone looking at the other city’s strengths and weaknesses through the lens of Lexington. What can we learn to improve our own community and economy?

The shortcoming of these trips is that there is often too little follow-up to capture the learning and turn it into action, although Commerce Lexington is starting to put more emphasis on that.

While there is always something to be learned from these other cities, they are hardly perfect. They do some things better than Lexington does; Lexington does other things better than they do. San Antonio was no different.

Like other cities in low-tax, “business-friendly” states that Commerce Lexington has visited in recent years, San Antonio has experienced strong population and job growth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the prosperity trickles down. Lexington has higher per-capita income ($28,345 versus $21,812) and college attainment (39 percent versus 23.7 percent) than San Antonio, and a lower poverty rate (17.4 percent versus 18.9 percent).

San Antonio showed the value of creating infrastructure downtown that will attract people and private investment.

San Antonio seemed especially adept at capitalizing on its assets. Nowhere was that more true than at the River Walk, an oasis that has given sprawling San Antonio a beautiful focal point for activity and economic development.

As part of Lexington’s recent Arena, Arts and Entertainment District Task Force process, master planner Gary Bates proposed resurfacing Town Branch Creek, which has been buried under downtown streets for a century, to create a water feature and public commons through downtown.

Many Lexingtonians have doubted that is practical, or even possible. San Antonio changed that perception. River Walk is a totally manufactured amenity that apparently has no more natural water flow than Town Branch Creek.

River Walk, the central section of which was developed by a WPA project in the 1930s, has been so successful at attracting private investment around it that San Antonio has spent $350 million during the past decade to expand it.

Those extensions are creating 13 more miles of linear park linking museums and entertainment districts to the north and the historic Spanish missions to the south.

Since the north section opened in 2009, it has attracted $256 million in private investment.

After seeing what San Antonio started with and what it has now, the Commerce Lexington visitors realized Bates’ idea isn’t so crazy Lexington needs to commission a design and engineering study soon to assess Town Branch’s development potential and what it might cost.

San Antonio showed the benefits of a downtown improvement district, where property owners vote to pay an annual assessment for extra landscaping, upkeep and security. Lexington has talked about creating one for years and might get the effort going later this year.

Lexington could learn a few things from San Antonio about building more parking facilities downtown and providing good signage so drivers can find them. Many of San Antonio’s formerly ugly surface parking lots have been redeveloped as buildings or turned into attractive pocket parks.

San Antonio offered some good lessons in adaptive reuse of old buildings, both downtown and at the successful Pearl Brewery development, which showed the Commerce Lexington group what the Lexington Distillery District could become.

The biggest lessons for San Antonio were not the projects themselves but how civic leaders created them. Those lessons were about public-private partnerships, risk-taking and leadership. I will write more about that in Monday’s column.

The Alamo in downtown San Antonio is Texas’ most popular tourist attraction. Nearly 200 pioneers, including a group of Kentuckians with knife designer Jim Bowie among them, perished in the 13-day battle with Mexican forces in 1836. Photos by Tom Eblen

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — On Monday, the 185 Kentuckians visiting San Antonio with Commerce Lexington heard about what this city is doing to transform itself. On Tuesday, they heard more about how it is being done.

The bottom line: public-private partnerships that can bring together expertise, consensus and money from a variety of sources to the table. Those partnerships also include the public, which has approved several bond issues and tax increases to fund new public infrastructure necessary for private enterprise to take root and grow.

“It’s all about partners,” said Nelson Wolff, a former legislator and San Antonio mayor who now leads the government of surrounding Bexar County. “It’s all about building personal relationships.”

A morning panel discussion included Ben Brewer, president of Centro San Antonio, an umbrella group that coordinates downtown improvement efforts; Darryl Byrd, CEO of SA2020, the city’s long-term visioning process; and Felix Padrón, director of the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs.

With them on the panel were three Lexingtonians — Mayor Jim Gray, Lexarts President Jim Clark and Jeff Fugate, president of the Downtown Development Authority — to help relate San Antonio’s experiences to what is happening in Lexington.

Byrd said San Antonio’s long-term planning process has been about setting ambitious goals for world-class excellence, developing strategies and partnerships to accomplish them and continuously measuring progress and results. “We try to divorce ourselves from things that keep us thinking small,” he said.

Brewer said Centro keeps that long-term vision in mind as it coordinates a variety of downtown improvement efforts. One key piece is a downtown improvement district, created by property owners in 1999 to fund extra landscaping, cleaning crews and a staff of 50 tourism ambassadors in the center city. Those commercial property owners pay annual assessments totaling about $2 million to fund the efforts to make downtown welcoming and looking its best.

Padrón discussed the role arts now play in improving the economy and quality of life in San Antonio, including a significant investment in public art. “It’s not art for art’s sake, but art for economic development,” he said.

After the morning session, the Commerce Lexington delegation broke up into groups to tour the Blue Star Contemporary Arts Center; Café College, a resource center to help local middle and high school students pursue college educations; the new Mission Reach of the River Walk; a nearby Toyota plant; and downtown attractions and improvement efforts under way beyond them.

I took the downtown walking tour, during which Brewer showed the group longtime attractions such as the Alamo, the River Walk and the circa 1731 San Fernando Cathedral.

Brewer also highlighted such efforts as the “amigos” hired through the downtown improvement district who answer visitors’ questions and help them find their way; adaptive reuse of old buildings to enhance the city’s unique character; improvements in public transportation, including a bicycle sharing program; and conversion of some former surface parking lots into small public parks.

The Commerce Lexington group returns to Kentucky on Wednesday after a morning session focused on applying lessons learned in San Antonio to improvement projects and programs already under way in Lexington.

Follow the trip

Tom Eblen will post updates and photos from the trip’s final day Wednesday at Twitter.com/tomeblen

The skyline near San Antonio’s Alamo shrine is filled with hotels and the Tower of the America’s, built for the world’s fair Hemisfair ’68. City officials say San Antonio attracts 22 million tourists each year, 75 percent of whom are leisure travelers rather than people attending conventions.

San Antonio’s BCycle bicycle rental system has 19 locations throughout the city’s downtown area. The bikes are designed for short trips in the city, but the system’s popularity falls when temperatures rise into the 90s, as they were Tuesday during Commerce Lexington’s visit.

The circa 1731 San Fernando Cathedral, the oldest continuously functioning religious community in Texas, was among the stops on a downtown walking tour that people on the Commerce Lexington trip took Tuesday in San Antonio.

The Commerce Lexington delegation began its three-day visit to San Antonio with a boat tour of the River Walk. Photos by Tom Eblen

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — A century ago, when this was the biggest city in Texas, the San Antonio River, which runs through the middle of town, was one of its biggest problems.

When rains came, the river could inundate the city. A 1921 flood killed more than 50 people. When rains didn’t come, the river could slow to a trickle. Once managed by a public official called the Ditch Commissioner, the river became so polluted and overgrown that civic leaders considered trying to bury it.

The river “really was a drainage ditch,” said Richard Perez, president of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce. “And a very unsightly drainage ditch at that.

Then, with some creativity and New Deal “stimulus” money, the ditch was transformed in the 1930s into River Walk, now the second-biggest tourist attraction in Texas behind the nearby Alamo.

A 185-member delegation from Commerce Lexington began its 73^rd annual Leadership Visit on Monday with a boat tour of the River Walk, which is in the midst of a $358 million expansion on its north and south ends.

“This river project has been an amazing jewel for our community,” said Lori Houston, an official with the San Antonio River Improvements Project, which is helping oversee the public-private effort.

The downtown section of the River Walk has been a tourist destination since the 1950s. It was lengthened to more than three miles for the 1968 world’s fair, called Hemisfair ’68.

During the past decade, the River Walk has been extended both north and south. These sections, though, are designed more to attract local residents than tourists.

The four-mile northern section, called the Museum Reach, connects several local museums and ends at the old Pearl Brewery, a former beer factory that has been transformed into a successful mixed-use commercial development. The Museum Reach has attracted $256 million in private investment to the area since its completion in 2009, Houston said.

The project included $10 million worth of public art, funded with private donations, installed mostly beneath bridges crossing the river. “This is how we turn an ugly underpass into a work of art,” Houston said.

The eight-mile southern section, called the Mission Reach, will connect the Alamo to other Spanish colonial missions in the area. When completed, it will be more of a natural park, with hiking and biking trails. Much of the work involves restoring the river eco-system that was destroyed during years of “modern” water-management efforts.

San Antonio officials said the River Walk is a great example of how local, state and federal government have worked together with private business to create the infrastructure necessary for private commerce to flourish.

Commerce Lexington’s annual Leadership Visit is designed to get Central Kentucky leaders away for three days to network with each other and gather ideas for improving Lexington. Over the years, the trips have sparked initiatives such as bike trails, Thursday Night Live at Cheapside, a small-business loan program and facilities improvement funding for Fayette County Public Schools.

This year’s trip began at Pearl Brewery, where Perez and San Antonio’s city manager, Sheryl Sculley, discussed a dizzying array of local initiatives that include street improvements, recreational trails, libraries, museums and a new performing arts center. Many of those initiatives are being funded with $1 billion in recent bond issues approved by local voters to provide the public infrastructure for business growth.

Despite the borrowing, Sculley said, San Antonio is the only one of the nation’s 10-largest cities that has a triple-A bond rating from all three financial rating agencies.

Sculley said much of San Antonio’s infrastructure focus recently has been on improving public schools and the “liveability” of downtown. That includes a goal of adding 7,500 new housing units in the center city by 2020. “We all know that great cities have great downtowns,” she said.

Before returning to Lexington late Wednesday, the Commerce Lexington visitors will be looking at San Antonio’s accomplishments and strategies and trying to scale them to their own city, which is only one-fourth the size. The trip is funded by several Lexington banks and other companies and the people on the trip, who paid almost $2,000 each to attend.

Follow the trip

Follow Tom Eblen’s updates from San Antonio at Twitter.com/tomeblen

Rivercenter Mall is one of many private developments that have grown up along San Antonio’s River Walk.

River Walk beautified a section of the San Antonio River that was once a drainage ditch.

Vernal Kennedy of Bluegrass Community and Technical College used her iPad to photograph dam locks as her River Walk tour boat passed through them.

More than 180 Central Kentucky business and civic leaders will board a chartered jet Monday morning for Commerce Lexington’s 73rd annual Leadership Visit — three days of networking, gathering ideas and discussing strategies to improve Lexington.

This year’s destination: San Antonio.

Huh? At first glance, a metropolitan area of 2.2 million people in the vastly different landscape of South Central Texas would seem an unlikely comparison for Lexington.

San Antonio is about the size of Pittsburgh, where Commerce Lexington made its first joint visit with Greater Louisville Inc. in 2010. And it is considerably larger than last year’s destination, Greenville, S.C., and several other recent ones: Austin, Texas (2008), Madison, Wis. (2009) and Boulder, Colo. (2007).

But when it comes to some aspects of urban development, Lexington and San Antonio have striking similarities. And San Antonio leaders have been especially adept at creating public-private partnerships to get things done, according to the Commerce Lexington officials who organized this trip.

“San Antonio is a city that’s got confidence and strong leadership, public and private,” said Bob Quick, Commerce Lexington’s president.

Mayor Jim Gray and six of the Urban County Council’s 15 members will be on the trip, as will be Fayette County Public Schools’ top two leaders; two legislators; and a host of planning and development officials, business executives and leaders of non-profit organizations.

Rather than gathering ideas for new initiatives, the trip’s agenda is focused on what attendees can learn to help accomplish projects already under way in Lexington.

“How do we apply what we see and learn to move along some of the things we’re already working on?” said Lynda Bebrowsky, Commerce Lexington’s senior vice president of marketing. “What are some of those processes that we can apply here?”

Two areas of focus will be the River Walk, San Antonio’s second-biggest tourist attraction after the Alamo, and Pearl Brewery, a 22-acre mixed-use development in a once-abandoned beer factory at the end of a recent northern extension of the River Walk.

They offer striking similarities to budding Lexington initiatives: the Arena, Arts and Entertainment District; the Lexington Distillery District, and restoration of Town Branch Creek.

The Lexington group also will tour several other areas and hear from a variety of San Antonio officials, including former mayors Henry Cisneros and Nelson Wolff, who now leads the government of surrounding Bexar County.

As I was preparing to cover this trip, I called a former colleague, Audrey Lee, for her perspective. A longtime Herald-Leader reporter, editor and editorial writer, she left Lexington in 2004 for the San Antonio Express-News, where she is now the enterprise editor.

She said San Antonio’s political leaders are particularly strong at marshaling local, state and federal resources to create the infrastructure needed for private investment to thrive. There is less anti-government sentiment there than in most other parts of Texas — military bases have long been a backbone of the local economy — and leaders are not afraid to push for tax increases when they can demonstrate a future payoff.

River Walk, in particular, offers an excellent example for what Lexington can accomplish. “It’s exactly what Town Branch could be,” Lee said.

San Antonio, like Lexington, was founded along a stream whose flow varied greatly with rainfall and, by the turn of the last century, had become a troublesome stormwater sewer through town. Lexington buried much of Town Branch Creek; San Antonio officials considered doing the same thing.

Then, thanks to a Works Progress Administration project during the Great Depression, a downtown section of the San Antonio River was restored, and the River Walk was created. The beautification effort has grown steadily since the 1950s, creating a magnet for tourists and private development.

In recent years, a northern reach of the river has been restored near museums and the Pearl Brewery, a popular development that makes Lee think of what the Lexington Distillery District could become. A southern reach is now being restored with a more natural feel near the region’s old Spanish missions.

Lee said San Antonio and Lexington each have some advantages over the other. San Antonio could be even more successful, she said, if it had Lexington’s merged city-county government, because Texas law makes it difficult for county governments to deal with urban growth.

San Antonio, on the other hand, has the advantage of municipally owned water, electrical and gas utilities, giving the public a greater voice in long-term strategy, Lee said.

Public utility ownership has resulted in more conservation easements to protect San Antonio’s aquifer, as opposed to costly industrial water-supply solutions. Also, there has been considerable emphasis on energy conservation and investments in wind, solar and cleaner-coal technology that will allow an older, dirtier coal-fired power plant to be retired ahead of schedule.