The Bluegrass and Beyond

Joe Riley is an evangelist for historic preservation, good urban design and proven strategies for making cities more livable and economically successful.

He founded the national Mayors’ Institute for City Design. The Joseph P. Riley Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Studies at the College of Charleston is named for him. But Riley’s best credential is his day job: since 1975, for an unprecedented nine terms, he has been the mayor of Charleston, S.C.

People who know Charleston often remark on what a great city it is — the beautiful waterfront, the Spoleto arts festival and the colorfully painted historic homes. Those old enough to remember what the city used to be like talk about how much it has improved.

During Riley’s tenure, Charleston’s annual tourist trade has increased from 1.7 million to 4.4 million visitors. At the same time, the city has often made lists of the best places to live and do business.

Riley was in Lexington last Wednesday to speak to an overflow crowd at the Downtown Public Library. Many civic leaders were there, as well as all four candidates for mayor.

With a rapid-fire PowerPoint presentation that lasted for more than an hour, Riley flashed slide after slide showing Charleston’s transformation from the time when “our downtown almost died.”

The pictures showed dozens of dilapidated buildings restored to elegance and commercial success; modest but well-designed public housing so attractive that expensive condos were later built across the street; neighborhoods and commercial streets rescued from neglect by city leaders who demanded and got high-quality private development; an elegant public park on what was once a waterfront eyesore.

“A big challenge was this vacant lot right in the middle of downtown,” Riley said at one point, prompting the crowd to erupt in laughter. “Oh, you have one of those, too?”

A key factor in Charleston’s success has been historic preservation. “We work hard to keep the bulldozers out,” he said.

Historic preservation hasn’t been so much about preserving the past — “we’re not a movie set or a theme park,” Riley said — but about creating an authentic, irreplaceable and human-scaled environment where people naturally want to be. The city also insists that new development be well-designed, well-built and, well, worthy of being in Charleston.

That means having effective laws and regulations, but also the kind of professional architectural review processes Lexington lacks. Such a process helps ensure that new development is appropriate, well-designed and in the best interests of the entire city and not just an individual developer or property owner.

“Try not to plop things down,” Riley said of new development. “Make it work. Make it fit.”

Excellence is often achieved with that last 5 percent of effort, the mayor noted. He repeatedly gave examples of using his political skills to make sure old buildings were saved, money was found to restore them and proposed new construction added to rather than detracted from the rest of the city. Riley said he once called then-President Bill Clinton to insist that a new federal building respect Charleston’s downtown esthetic.

“There’s never an excuse to build anything that doesn’t add to the beauty of a city,” Riley said, acknowledging that “the political land mines are all over the place.”

Successful cities put a lot of emphasis on beautiful public space that attracts people. “The things of value are increasingly the things we own together,” he said. “When you build a great public realm, the private money and development will follow.”

Riley’s strong leadership is controversial; he has always had a re-election opponent, and last time he had three. But Riley’s approach has clearly worked for Charleston and most of its citizens. He was re-elected for an eighth time in 2007 with 64 percent of the vote.

City-building is a complicated stew, but the principles Riley outlined are simple: vision, leadership, and a commitment to long-term value for the entire city rather than just short-term profit for individuals.

When Lexington has followed those principles, it has enjoyed some of its greatest success: creating the Urban Services Boundary in 1958; restricting rural lot sizes in 1964 and 1999; starting the Purchase of Development Rights program in 2000; and creating historic districts over the past 50 years (often, though, after significant damage was already done.)

Lexington has failed when it ignored those principles and allowed tacky, vinyl-box housing, commercial sprawl, haphazard architecture and, since the 1950s, the destruction of classic downtown buildings to make way for parking lots, drab concrete boxes and ego-driven glass towers.

“Our success as a culture, economic and otherwise, will depend on our cities,” Riley said. “We must treat them as precious heirlooms that we inherit and hold in trust for future generations.”

The Rev. London Ferrill spent much of his life serving as a bridge between Lexington’s black and white communities. Now, almost 156 years after his death, he is doing it again.

Ferrill may have been the most famous man in Lexington you’ve probably never heard of. Born into slavery in Virginia in 1789 and later freed, he was an influential preacher in the black community here. His funeral procession of nearly 5,000 people was the second-largest the city had ever seen, after Henry Clay’s two years earlier.

The Episcopal Church has invited First African Baptist Church to services Saturday honoring the memory of Ferrill, the only black man buried in the Old Episcopal Burying Ground on East Third Street.

The Most Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the national Episcopal Church, will be among the speakers at the 1:30 p.m. service at Christ Church Cathedral on Market Street.

Choirs from local Episcopal churches and First African Baptist will perform, and the program will include a new composition that John Linker, Good Shepherd Episcopal Church’s organist and choirmaster, wrote to accompany the text of a prayer attributed to Ferrill.

Ministers will dedicate the plaque for a monument honoring Ferrill that will be placed in the cemetery later this year. And Ferrill’s broken tombstone formally will be given to First African Baptist, where it has been on display for two decades.

These and other efforts to commemorate Ferrill are an attempt at reconciliation, said Robert Voll, a member of Christ Church who oversees the cemetery.

“I commend the Episcopal Church for doing this,” said the Rev. Nathl Moore, pastor of First African Baptist. “Whenever we can build bridges, it’s a positive thing.”

When he was 9, the woman who owned Ferrill died and he was sold to Col. Samuel Overton for $600. At age 11, Ferrill (sometimes spelled Ferrell) almost drowned in a river, and that was said to have led to a religious conversion. He gained his freedom after Overton’s death and moved with his wife Rodah in about 1815 to Lexington, where Overton had relatives.

Ferrill was trained as a carpenter and, despite little formal education, developed a reputation as a fine preacher. He assisted and later succeeded Peter Durrett, known as “Old Captain,” who in 1790 had started the first African church west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Shortly before Durrett died in 1823, Lexington’s city trustees appointed Ferrill as the official preacher to the black community. Soon afterward, the Elkhorn Baptist Association, a group of Southern Baptist churches in central Kentucky, admitted First African Church into its fold.

White leaders were nervous about Lexington’s growing black population, most of whom were slaves, and they apparently saw Ferrill as someone they could trust. When a rival black preacher tried to force him out of state under a law that prohibited free blacks born outside Kentucky from staying here for more than 30 days, Lexington leaders persuaded the General Assembly to give Ferrill an exemption.

In June 1833, a few months after the Episcopal cemetery was created, a cholera epidemic swept Lexington. The disease killed 500 of the city’s 7,000 residents, including Ferrill’s wife. He was one of three ministers who stayed in town to bury the dead and comfort survivors, black and white.

After the epidemic, Ferrill’s stature in Lexington grew with his church. First African Baptist was the largest church in Kentucky by 1850, with more than 1,800 members. From 1833 until it moved to Price Road in 1987, the church occupied a sanctuary that still stands at the corner of Short and Dewees streets.

Ferrill is said to have baptized 5,000 people and performed hundreds of marriages, using the vows “until death or distance do us part” in the case of slaves who might be separated by sale.

Ferrill died of a heart attack in 1854 and was buried in the all-white Episcopal cemetery.

The Rev. L.H. McIntyre, retired pastor of First African Baptist, said he has done a lot of research on Ferrill and suspects that his father was white, which could help explain his acceptance by white leaders. No images or descriptions of him are known to exist.

“London Ferrill was a force for unity, a force for connecting the black and white communities of Lexington,” Voll said. But amid the intense racism that swept Kentucky in the decades after the Civil War, his role was largely forgotten.

After The Lexington Cemetery was established in 1849, the Old Episcopal Burying Ground with its Victorian groundskeeper’s cottage was neglected. The cemetery became an island, separated from the predominantly black neighborhood that surrounded it by a tall iron fence and locked gates.

Nobody knows exactly where in the cemetery Ferrill was buried. His grave and headstone were separated by the time a portion of the cemetery thought to have been unused was sold to the city in the 1980s for the widening and extension of Rose Street, now Elm Tree Lane.

McIntyre said a groundskeeper let him take Ferrill’s tombstone from a pile of broken, misplaced stones. “I wasn’t trying to steal it, just keep it from being lost,” he said. Christ Church didn’t seek the tombstone’s return.

“They’ve taken better care of it than we ever have,” Voll said.

Voll, a retired Ashland Inc. human resources executive, began overseeing the old cemetery four years ago. One of his goals has been to improve the church’s relationship with both the neighborhood and the African American community.

That led to the planned monument to Ferrill as well as a state historic marker for the cemetery.

It also led Christ Church to allow adjacent land it acquired in 2000 to become a community vegetable garden in 2008.

Moore, the pastor of First African Baptist, said his congregation appreciates the Episcopal Church’s initiative. And he is even more impressed by the church allowing its land to become the London Ferrill Community Garden.

“It’s good we can worship together,” Moore said. “But the community needs us to do more than worship together. It needs us to work together.”

It never fails: Gerald Smith goes to a community to speak about the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia project, and he leaves having learned something unexpected.

People bring old photographs, documents and newspaper clippings to show him. They tell him tales about local history. They even drive him to hidden slave cemeteries and show him little museums, public library archives and memorabilia collections he never knew existed.

“There is a tremendous amount of interest and enthusiasm for this project,” said Smith, below right, a University of Kentucky history professor and one of the encyclopedia’s three general editors.

Along with famous people such as Muhammad Ali and many African-American firsts, the encyclopedia will document fascinating lives that few people know about.

For example, Margaret Garner, a slave born in Boone County in 1833, was the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. And Joe Simons, a Fleming County slave, was known for his ability to read the Bible upside down. (The woman who owned him read the Bible aloud while he stood at her feet fanning flies; that’s how he taught himself to read.)

Although slavery and the civil rights movement have been well documented, little has been written about many aspects of the parallel universe of black life in Kentucky before integration.

Owensboro’s black citizens organized the Negro Chautauqua in 1907 to provide intellectual stimulation and religious education. There were black newspapers such as the Baptist Monitor, and baseball teams such as the Owingsville Giants of the 1920s and Lawrenceburg Athletic Club of the 1950s.

“African-Americans had their own world,” Smith said. “There were people, places and events of distinction that shaped not only their lives, but the history of Kentucky.”

The encyclopedia is an effort to verify and record much of that history — and to serve as a springboard for further research and writing that will lead to greater cultural understanding.

But like many worthwhile projects in this economic downturn, the encyclopedia is threatened by lack of funding. As Black History Month began, the encyclopedia’s publication date was pushed from 2011 to 2013, and “if we don’t have $30,000 by Aug. 1, it’s pretty much over,” Smith said.

Since the project began two years ago, it has received strong support from University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. and smaller contributions from several other Kentucky colleges, universities and foundations, said Stephen Wrinn, director of University Press of Kentucky, which is publishing the encyclopedia. Smith said that, after giving speeches about the project, he often receives small donations from people in the audience.

Like the Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky, published last year, this book will cost about $700,000 in cash and in-kind support to produce. Only about half of that has been raised.

Wrinn said the project needs a private individual or two to step up and champion a fund-raising campaign, as Mike Hammons and Alice Sparks did for the Northern Kentucky book.

“Gerald and the others have done a good job of getting it up and running,” Wrinn said, and the fund-raising is being co ordinated by the press’s Thomas D. Clark Foundation. “I’m confident we’re going to do it.”

Wrinn said he isn’t aware of an African-American encyclopedia for any other state. The Kentucky Encyclopedia, published in 1992, was a pioneer, too; many states have since done their own. “This is an opportunity for Kentucky to again be a leader,” he said.

So far, 1,271 entries have been chosen for the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia, and 242 have been completed. Several hundred more have been assigned, and Smith is looking for volunteers to join the approximately 80 writers on the project. For more information, go to www.uky.edu/kaae.

Editing the book with Smith are history professors Karen C. McDaniel of Eastern Kentucky University and John A. Hardin of Western Kentucky University. They and other historians are writing 14 topical essays on issues including civil rights, education, religion and women.

Graduate students in history are doing much of the research and verification, and most of the project’s funds go to pay them.

“It will fill many of the gaps in Kentucky history, and in the history of the South as well,” Smith said of the encyclopedia. “I have met some of the nicest people around the state. One thing I’ve learned about Kentuckians is that they love and appreciate their history.”

It’s hard to imagine our nation’s early presidents as real people. We know them only as images of stern-faced men in funny clothes, staring back at us from history books, paintings, money - and newspaper ads for President’s Day sales.

But to Horace Holley, they were friends and pen pals. Holley was himself a president, of Transylvania University, from 1818 until a few months before his death in 1827.

I didn’t know much about Holley until recently, when I got an excited call from my older daughter, Mollie, who works in Transylvania’s public relations office.

“I held letters today written by John Adams and James Monroe!” she said.

She had been in Transylvania’s Special Collections department, doing research for a university Web site feature she writes called Transy Trivia. It sounded so interesting, I went over and spent an afternoon looking through Holley’s papers.

The carefully preserved documents reveal what a well-connected man Holley was, and they offer revealing glimpses of some early American presidents and their wives - warts and all.

Holley came to Lexington from Boston, where he knew Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams. His wife, Mary Austin Holley, was a cousin of Stephen F. Austin, a Transy alum for whom Austin, Texas, was later named. Holley was a Unitarian minister and admired educator who helped burnish Lexington’s image as the “Athens of the West.”

There are faded letters from the second president, hard to read except for the end: “… and real affection, your friend and humble servant, John Adams.”

Adams gave Holley a glowing letter of introduction to the third president, Thomas Jefferson. In September, 1824, Holley spent two days visiting Jefferson at his Monticello estate near Charlottesville, Va.

“Mr. Jefferson is a plain looking old gentleman, draped in a blue coat with yellow buttons, a buff jacket, a pair of snuff colored corduroy pantaloons, blue and white cotton stockings and black slippers up at the heels,” Holley wrote to his wife.

“He is grey, tall, square shouldered, takes long steps, and has not now a clear voice. His muscles are not vigorous, but his hand trembles little, and is not observed to tremble at all as he uses at table. He rides on horseback daily in fair weather, but walks out seldom. … He talked easily still, though 82, and preserves the faculties of his mind in vigorous operation. His memory fails of course in regard to names and more recent events, but his judgment is unimpaired.”

Holley wrote a Kentucky friend that Jefferson questioned him closely about Transylvania. At the time, Jefferson was lobbying Virginian officials for support of the new University of Virginia. He argued that if Virginia didn’t invest in a first-class university, the state’s brightest young men would leave for either Transylvania or Harvard. Of the two, Jefferson said, he preferred Transylvania.

That may have been because Jefferson had high expectations for Kentucky’s future. “The time is not distant … when we shall be but a secondary people to them,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in May 1818.

Holley’s papers include several letters from James Monroe. Holley wrote to his wife from Washington in April 1818, describing visits to Monroe’s White House, which only recently had been rebuilt after British troops burned it during the War of 1812.

Holley bragged that Monroe wrote him a letter of introduction to the governor of Virginia: “He voluntarily gave it, and the offer of it took me by surprise.” But he devoted most of the letter to detailed descriptions of what Mrs. Monroe and other ladies were like and were wearing.

“Mrs. Monroe … appeared so much handsomer to me in full dress than she did the evening before in common dress and a cap that was not becoming,” he wrote. “She is … 52 years old, and I never saw a woman of that age appear so young.”

Monroe and Andrew Jackson visited Lexington on July 4, 1819, and heard Holley preach. In 1823, the Holleys went to Nashville, Tenn., where they spent several days at The Hermitage as guests of future President Jackson and his controversial wife, Rachel.

In a letter to his father, Holley described Jackson as “one of the most hospitable men” in Tennessee. “The general gave me many anecdotes of his wars with the Indians. … He is a prompt, practical man with very correct moral feelings.”

Holley added: “Mrs. Jackson is not a woman of cultivation, but has seen a great many people, has fine spirits, entertains well and is benevolent. She is short in her person and quite fat.”

At the end of several such letters, Holley asks that his observations be treated with discretion. Nearly two centuries later, the letters are more enlightening than embarrassing. They show that American icons were people, too.

I don’t usually go out to the Lexington Cemetery this time of year; it’s much nicer in the spring or fall.

But I thought Henry might want to talk.

Henry Clay is remembered as one of America’s greatest statesmen. During the first half of the 19th century, he was a powerful speaker of the House, a senator of great influence, secretary of state and a frequent candidate for president.

As leader of what became the Republican party, he could be as partisan as anybody. But time after time, when the nation was in a jam, he put ideology and partisanship aside and convinced other politicians to do what was best for the country.

Clay became a model for diplomacy, conciliation and conflict resolution. He negotiated an end to the War of 1812, which he helped start, and brokered compromises over taxes and slavery that delayed the Civil War three times.

Clay died in 1852. His tomb is at the Lexington Cemetery, and a marble statue of him stands atop a 120-foot column overlooking the city.

Whenever I drive by, I wonder what Clay would think of the institution he once led — a Congress that seems gridlocked by partisanship and perverted by special-interest money.

So I decided to stop and ask him.

“I have a pretty good view from up here,” Clay said when I asked if he follows current affairs. “And I catch wind of a lot of things.”

He didn’t want to discuss individuals, such as his successor, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “After all,” Clay said, “he’s the leader of my party, and he has sat at my old desk in the Senate chamber.”

Clay blamed both Republicans and Democrats for the sorry state of American governance. He also complained about ideologues who pressure the reasonable people on both sides, making it almost impossible for them to find middle ground.

“There are few principles so important that there can be no compromise,” Clay said. “For example, preservation of the Union.”

What about slavery?

“OK, you got me on that one,” he said. “In hindsight, I should have had the courage of cousin Cassius. Alas, every man is a product of his time.

“But my point is this,” he said, quickly changing the subject, “I always said we should govern with the spirit of brothers. Brothers will disagree, even fight. But when the family is threatened, they band together.

“I was right about a lot of things, such as trade protection to strengthen American industry and federal spending to build roads,” he said. “But I wasn’t right about everything. Nobody is. Leadership isn’t about always winning; it’s about figuring out what’s best for the nation. If the nation isn’t strong, none of the rest matters.”

That may be good leadership, but is it good politics?

“Of course not,” Clay said. “I famously said that I would rather be right than president. Well, I ran for president five times and was never elected. I’ll tell you this, though: I’m more highly regarded now than some of the men who defeated me.”

I asked Clay what he thought of McConnell’s strategy of filibustering almost everything Democrats try to do in the Senate, and of House Democrats’ strategy of pushing through major legislation without even consulting Republicans.

“I told you I don’t want to discuss individuals,” he said. “But it’s no wonder that public opinion of both parties in Congress could hardly be lower. From a purely political standpoint, what will happen when the shoe is on the other foot? What will happen when the other party is in power? Or in the minority? Will revenge and pettiness never end?”

I asked Clay about all of the millions of dollars that corporations and other special interests spend on campaign contributions, attack ads and lobbying Congress. Does he think it perverts government?

“What do you think?” he replied. “Campaigns weren’t so expensive in my day. There was no television or talk radio. We just had newspapers, and they were vile enough.

“But it seems obvious,” he continued. “If wealthy and powerful interests are spending millions of dollars to make you wealthy and powerful, are you going to do what’s best for their interests or what’s best for the public interest? In my day we called it bribery.”

So you don’t think money is simply free speech?

“I told you,” Clay replied with a cold, marble stare, “I don’t want to discuss individuals.”

Reading Wendell Berry is like having a conversation with a friend — an old friend whose wisdom makes you want to do nothing more than hush and listen.

That’s how I felt, snowbound last weekend, reading Berry’s new collection of essays, Imagination in Place. Berry reflects on writers he has known or admired and the role that a sense of place played in their lives and work.

Place has special significance to Berry, as he explains in the book. After sojourns on each coast, Berry and his wife, Tanya, and their two children returned to his native Henry County in 1964. They bought a farm along the Kentucky River near Port Royal, which became the Port William of his fiction.

“I believe I can say properly that my fiction originates in part in actual experience of an actual place: its topography, weather, plants, and animals; its language, voice and stories,” Berry writes.

He has farmed and written in that place for 45 years. Along the way, he has become perhaps the nation’s most eloquent advocate for time-honored agrarian values that are attracting new appreciation in the 21st century after being dismissed during much of the 20th.

These 15 essays, written from 1993 to 2009, have been published previously, most in The Sewanee Review. Berry fans might appreciate them most for the insights they offer into his own development as a writer.

Berry writes about being a graduate student at Stanford under Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 30 books, most of which were set in the American West.

“The fact is that at the time I did not understand him as an influence, and the reason was that at the time I did not know what kind of influence I was going to need,” he writes. “At the time I wanted only to be a writer; beyond that, I had little self- knowledge, and not an inkling of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to do it.”

In other essays, Berry writes of Donald Hall and his New England; of James Still and Gurney Norman and their Eastern Kentucky; and of Hayden Carruth, whose poetry was rooted in Vermont, where he lived for many years.

There are essays of literary criticism, and remembrances of departed literary friends, including James Baker Hall, a classmate of Berry at the University of Kentucky and later a colleague when they both taught English there.

These pieces include the flashes of wisdom that Berry’s fans cherish, such as this description of his first visit to an Eastern Kentucky strip mine in 1964 with Norman, who was then a newspaper reporter in Hazard: “It had never occurred to me that people could destroy land with an indifference that perfectly matched the capability of their technology.”

And then there is this wonderful critique of literary “realism” that focuses only on the dark side of life: “Why should one read a book that is programmatically more depressing than the news?”

Although much in these essays celebrates the warmth and humanness of life, Berry also does some of what he does best: hold up a mirror to modern society and make observations of blinding moral clarity.

“We have pretty much made a virtue of selfishness as the mainstay of our economy, and we have provided an abundance of good excuses for dishonesty,” he writes. “Most of us give no thought to the state of nature as the context of our lives, because we conventionally disbelieve in natural limits.”

Imagination in Place is the latest example of why Wendell Berry is not only a Kentucky treasure, but an American treasure.

Jamie Millard, president of the Lexington History Museum, had a video camera running as workers moved the statue of former Vice President John Cabell Breckinridge across Cheapside to make way for construction of the new market house. Pretty cool. (Note Herald-Leader chief photographer Charles Bertram shooting photos the whole time.)

By the way, the museum today opened a new exhibit, which looks at the Lexington of 1810. It includes historic documents and a map showing Lexington’s surviving 200-year-old structures. The display is within the permanent exhibit, Lexington: Athens of the West.

Located in the old Fayette County Courthouse, 215 W. Main St., The Lexington History Museum is open Friday through Monday, Noon to 4 p.m, and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call (859) 254-0530, or visit www.LexingtonHistoryMuseum.org.

Last year, economists thought America needed economic stimulus.

Debra Hensley thought Lexington needed social stimulus.

So the former three-term Urban County Council member sent an invitation to everyone on her e-mail list, set up tables and chairs in the front yard of her insurance agency across from Commonwealth Stadium, and fired up the grill.

A diverse crowd showed up for lunch that Friday in June. An even bigger crowd came in July. “Then I thought, ‘Step back. What are you really trying to do?’” Hensley said.

That’s when she created Debra’s Social $timulus, a project dedicated to “people, planet, purpose.” She took her project on the road — and online with a Web site (www.debrassocialstimulus.com) and a Facebook page.

Since last fall, Hensley has organized increasingly larger events in three Lexington neighborhoods. A fourth event is planned Friday, from 5 to 8 p.m., in a barrel house on the grounds of the former Old Pepper Distillery, 1200 Manchester Street. As always, everyone is welcome.

“When we’re in difficult times, it’s especially important that we stay connected,” Hensley said. “But it’s more than that.

“I want people to see parts of the community they might not know much about and learn about our history and culture. I want them to meet and interact with people they might not otherwise. And I want them to help the local economy.”

Debra’s Social $timulus went to South Limestone in August. The city had closed and begun rebuilding the street between downtown and the University of Kentucky campus — a project that continues — and merchants were complaining that their businesses had suffered.

Hensley booked the Sound Bar, hired Hanna’s On Lime next door to provide food, and encouraged people to come over — and keep coming back to spend money on South Limestone.

In September, she organized an event that drew more than 100 people to Morris Book Shop on Southland Drive to meet authors Gurney Norman and Neil Chethik and to enjoy food from several neighborhood businesses: Slone’s Signature Market, Good Foods Market and Butt Rubb BBQ.

When an old British bus from Commonwealth Double Deckers and the March Madness community marching band showed up, things really got stimulating.

Hensley’s October event attracted even more people to the Old Episcopal Burying Ground on East Third Street. That gathering showed off the neighboring London Ferrell Community Garden, the Seedleaf community food organization and the YMCA drum choir.

This week’s event will showcase the Lexington Distillery District project and surrounding neighbor hoods of Irishtown and Davis Bottom. The area has long been one of Lexington’s poorest, but it is being transformed by construction of Newtown Pike Extension.

“How many people drive by and never go into these neighborhoods?” Hensley wondered. “It’s an interesting part of our city with a rich history and culture.”

She plans to show several videos that were made recently in the area. They include interviews with residents and a volunteer nurse at Nathaniel Mission, a United Methodist church that Hensley calls “the glue that has always held the neighborhood together.”

Food will include chili from C&P Market, which Paul Holland has operated in the neighborhood since the 1970s. Dancers from Mecca Live Studio on Chair Avenue will entertain. Mecca is best known for the annual Halloween Thriller parade down Main Street, which has become a sensation in Lexington and on Internet videos.

“I want people to not only see the talent there, but know they can hire them to enliven any kind of gathering,” Hensley said of Mecca’s dancers.

What started as a cookout has become almost an obsession and a second career for Hensley, who in her spare time lately has been raising money for Haiti relief.

What is stimulating her to do all of this?

Hensley said she has no plans to get back into politics, although this is a good way to market her business as community-oriented. More than helping her insurance agency, though, she hopes Debra’s Social $timulus will help build a stronger, more inclusive Lexington.

“I feel like I’m reinvesting in the community,” Hensley said. “It’s really hard to explain what all of this is about. But it is fun.”

• If you go

  Debra’s Social $timulus

  What: “Barrel of Fun” event.

  When: 5-8 p.m. Feb. 5.

  Where: Former Old Pepper Distillery barrel house, 1200 Manchester St.

  Admission: Free.

I recently bought a CSA share, but I won’t get a weekly basket of fresh vegetables. I’ll get a monthly limited-edition art print by Alex Brooks of Press 817.

This isn’t community-supported agriculture; it’s community-supported art.

Brooks adopted the CSA business model for the same reason many small farmers have: It gives him a reliable stream of income so he can focus on his passion.

He earns much of his living as a letterpress printer, book binder and maker of archival storage boxes. Brooks works for many local clients, as well as several New York customers. He also creates art for prints, cards, books and posters.

Brooks said he wants to spend less time printing other people’s wedding invitations and business cards and more time creating art with the antique printing equipment that fills the two front rooms of his small home and shop (www.press817.com).

“I think of it as a way to preserve that spot on time,” said Brooks, who since launching his CSA in mid-December has sold more than 80 of the 100 shares for $60 each — $4 per print, plus postage.

Brooks figures the CSA income will free him one week a month to focus on those pieces of art, his writing and other creative endeavors.

“A lot of artists I know want to steal the idea, and that’s great,” he said.

The 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville, which tries to support the region’s contemporary artists, bought two CSA shares.

“That’s a little intimidating,” Brooks said, because the pressure is on to create outstanding work.

Brooks, 29, was a math, science and technology major at Louisville’s duPont Manual High School when a favorite teacher exposed him to creative writing. He came to the University of Kentucky as a math and English major and was selected for a Gaines Fellowship in the Humanities.

His writing led him to book binding, which led him to volunteer at UK’s King Library Press, where director Paul Holbrook taught him letterpress printing.

“I would have never guessed I would be doing this,” Brooks said. “Setting type by hand is almost meditative. It’s like reading really, really slowly.”

Lexington has a rich heritage of letterpress printing, thanks to Victor Hammer and his disciples. The Austrian printer and type designer came here in 1948 as an artist in residence at Transylvania University. His wife, Carolyn Hammer, helped found the King Library Press.

Brooks, the first in his family to graduate from college, thinks he inherited craft skills from his father, a woodworker, and mother, who knits and spins wool.

“There’s something about making things with your hands and doing it as well as you can and knowing that a book I make will last 100 years,” he said.

Press 817 was named for the address of Brooks’ former apartment. Five years ago, he bought a century-old house on North Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and set up shop there because he couldn’t find affordable downtown commercial space to rent.

Letterpress printing experienced an artistic renaissance in the 1960s, when it was replaced commercially by offset printing. Unfortunately, though, some of the best old presses ended up in scrap yards.

Brooks said a lot of old metal type is bought by gun enthusiasts, who melt it down for bullets. “I have to beat them to it,” he said.

Brooks’ equipment includes a platen press from 1887, a guillotine paper cutter from 1897 and a standing press from about 1900 that is used to form books. His newest press was made in 1961. Most of the equipment was given to him or found at estate and garage sales.

“I like old stuff,” said Brooks, who built computers as a kid. “I like that it’s not in a museum. It all works, and I use it.”

The more he got into printing, the more he wanted to explore visual arts through such techniques as woodcuts and linoleum cuts. He’s still thinking about what he wants to create for me and his other CSA customers over the next 12 months.

“I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” Brooks said. “That’s part of the fun. Everybody will find out when they get it in the mail. Hopefully, that will be exciting.”

Brooks was taught how to make conservation boxes by a woman who learned the craft at the Library of Congress. He has applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study book conservation in England.

“But I’ll be a little conflicted if I get to go,” he admitted. Brooks wants to travel, see new places and try new things. But he has found a community with a powerful hold on him.

“I love this neighborhood; it’s the first place I’ve lived where I know all my neighbors,” he said. “A lot of my neighbors have bought my art. I like to think they like my art, but it’s also probably out of a sense of neighborliness.”

Brooks said the concept of community-supported art seemed like a natural idea. He said he tries to patronize local businesses whenever he can, such as Pat Gerhard’s Third Street Stuff Café and Steve and Kristy Matherly’s Sunrise Bakery on Main Street.

“When you think about it,” Brooks said, “there’s not much difference between me making art and Steve making bread.”

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Urban County Councilman George Myers wrote a commentary in the Herald-Leader recently. He recalled wasteful spending by the Lexington Public Library’s director, who was subsequently fired, and criticized a state law that guarantees library funding.

Myers, who with other elected officials is scrambling to maintain services in a tough economy, questioned the wisdom of requiring that 5 cents of every $100 in Fayette County property valuation go to support libraries.

It’s a legitimate question, and I understand why Myers is raising it. But, like many issues, this one requires a longer view than today’s crisis. We must look back three or four decades and ahead to what kind of city we want Lexington to be.

For a look back, I went to visit Joe Hayse, 72, a retired state map maker, Scoutmaster and father of four who lives with his wife, Heidi, in a modest home on Clay’s Mill Road.

You won’t find Hayse’s name on a plaque in Lexington’s handsome Central Library or any of the five modern branch libraries around town. Without him, though, they probably wouldn’t exist.

After moving here from Louisville in 1971, Hayse became a frequent patron of the old main library at Gratz Park and its Southland branch, which was then housed in a cramped building that later became a bicycle shop.

The main library — now the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning — had a leaky roof, outdated wiring, crumbling plaster and peeling paint. A wet basement threatened irreplaceable records of Lexington’s early history. Art treasures that had been donated to the library were being sold off to meet operating expenses. Building inspectors finally closed the second floor because they were afraid it might collapse.

Hayse said he became so frustrated that one day he left the library and walked to the office of his high school classmate, lawyer William Jacobs.

“Lexington is a rich city, but we have a library you can’t even use,” Hayse recalled telling Jacobs. “Surely this city can afford to do better than this.”

Lexington could afford to do better — and was required to by state law. City officials were simply ignoring the law, as they had for years, because they didn’t want to raise taxes.

Library board members, who were appointed by the mayor, had agreed to accept only about half the funding they were entitled to receive. Hayse and Jacobs thought the law was clear, and when the library board refused to demand the law be enforced, they filed suit in 1979.

The city fought the lawsuit for nearly five years, but the courts sided with Hayse and Jacobs. Finally, Lexington was required to properly fund the library — plus make back payments owed since the lawsuit was filed. That paved the way for construction of the Central Library on Main Street.

Since then, the Lexington Public Library system has become a model instead of an embarrassment. Its modern buildings, resources and services have made Lexington a more literate community whose citizens are better able to compete in a knowledge economy.

Since the final Court of Appeals decision 25 years ago, the percentage of Lexington residents with library cards has risen from 30 percent to 46 percent. Last fiscal year, nearly 2.75 million items were checked out from public libraries — an average of 10 per Fayette County resident, up from four per resident in 1984.

Computer literacy is now essential for people to keep up and get ahead, and Lexington’s libraries last year provided computer-skills classes for 4,192 people. Libraries contain 237 public-access Internet computers that were used 482,710 times last year.

Sure, the former library director wasted taxpayer money on travel and fancy meals. Taxpayers are cheated by wasteful government spending, just as stockholders are cheated by wasteful corporate spending. The way to solve those problems is through better management, oversight, transparency and accountability.

Nobody likes paying higher taxes — or any taxes at all. It doesn’t matter whether the economy is good or bad. Appealing to personal selfishness has always been good politics. But that’s the difference between politics and leadership.

At a recent symposium in Frankfort, several economists pointed out that Kentucky taxes property less than most states do. They also noted that Kentucky law gives cities and counties few ways to raise revenue to meet their special needs and make long-term investments in their communities.

Rather than seeking state permission to turn an excellent public library system into a mediocre one, Urban County Council members and Mayor Jim Newberry should take another approach.

They should keep pushing for better management, more transparency and greater accountability of taxpayer-supported agencies to make sure money is being spent wisely.

They also should lobby the General Assembly for more local taxing authority — and not be afraid to use it to fund important public services and investments that will make Lexington a more just, prosperous and pleasant place to live.

FRANKFORT — A century ago in June, Kentucky’s magnificent Capitol building was finished. Well, not exactly finished.

It’s still not finished, but it’s getting there.

Before festivities scheduled for June 4 and 5, murals will be installed high in the Capitol rotunda, on four pendentives, the corner spaces just below the dome.

Murals have always been planned there, but the artist originally consulted for the work, Frank Millet, went down with the Titanic in 1912. The project didn’t get going again until last year.

That’s when Marion and Terry Forcht of Corbin donated $225,000 to create and install the murals. They own Forcht Bank and Forcht Group of Kentucky in Corbin and Lexington, which has 95 different companies with more than 2,100 employees.

“We’re very much looking forward to seeing (the murals) in place,” said Marion Forcht, a member of the state Historic Properties Advisory Commission.

After hearing at commission meetings that murals were intended for the pendentives, she talked with her husband, and they decided to donate them.

“Obviously, at this time in our economy, the state couldn’t spend money on something like this,” she said. “It’s just something we wanted to do. We’ve been very blessed in our lives, and we thought this would be a nice thing that people could enjoy forever.”

The murals, which are still being designed, will be allegorical representations of agriculture, industry, civilization and integrity. They will be created and installed by Evergreene Architectural Arts of New York.

The Forchts’ gift to the Kentucky Executive Mansions Foundation, a non-profit organization that helps preserve and maintain state-owned historic properties, is the largest ever for the Capitol.

The murals will highlight a $460,000 state-financed restoration of the dome and rotunda. That money was appropriated in 2006, before the recession put a squeeze on the state budget, said David Buchta, the state curator.

“It will give people a chance to see what can be done with the rest of the building eventually, as resources allow,” he said.

A contractor had to brace and pad the rotunda’s marble floors to erect 175 feet of scaffolding, weighing 115,000 pounds, so workers could clean the marble walls and paint the corners and dome for the first time in about 40 years. The work was completed a little more than a week ago.

While they were at it, workers replaced the dome’s original incandescent light fixtures with energy-efficient LED lighting, the color of which can be changed for special events.

It’s hard to tell how much electricity the new LEDs will save, though, because much of the dome’s lighting hasn’t worked in decades, Buchta said. Bulbs in the lower dome have been replaced with compact fluorescents while he searches for LED lights that will work there.

Kentucky’s Capitol is a legacy from the turn of the last century, when state government was briefly flush with cash, thanks to $1 million in federal payments for Civil War reparations and Spanish-American War reimbursements.

The state already had a beautiful Capitol — a Greek Revival gem designed in 1827 by Lexington architect Gideon Shryock. But it became too small for a growing state, and there was no room to expand. So, in 1905, the General Assembly voted to buy 30 acres across the Kentucky River and start over.

Ohio architect Frank Andrews’ design for the Capitol borrowed heavily from imperial France. The dome was copied from the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, where Napoleon is buried. The State Reception Room, like the governor’s mansion next door, was modeled on the palaces at Versailles. Staircases evoke the Grand Opera House in Paris.

The building is covered in Indiana limestone and filled with columns, porticos and hallways of Vermont granite, and marble from Georgia, Tennessee and Italy.

The Capitol was renovated 1955 and 1996. To mark its centennial, Buchta is publishing a book of old photographs of the Capitol, with all profits going to the foundation.

The new murals will join two famous ones in the “lunettes,” half-circle spaces over the entrances to the House and Senate chambers.

One mural depicts Daniel Boone and his companions viewing the Bluegrass for the first time from Powell County’s Pilot Knob; the other shows Boone and Transylvania Company officials negotiating to buy Kentucky land from the Cherokee.

Two more lunette spaces, above the governor’s office and the elegant State Reception Room, remain blank.

Eventually, Buchta hopes, other generous Kentuckians will step forward to pay for murals there. If you’re interested, give him a call. No need to wait a century.

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I can only imagine what the late Martin Luther King Jr. must think, gazing down on our 25th celebration of the national holiday that honors him and the civil rights movement he led.

America still too often falls short when it comes to peace, justice and racial harmony. But we keep inching closer to realizing some of our nation’s highest ideals.

In Lexington - where one of the South’s busiest slave auction blocks once stood, and where some lunch counters of my childhood were still segregated - the downtown streets were packed Monday with marchers of every age, color, creed and cause.

Hundreds of people stretched the length of downtown as they marched in a big oval, down Vine Street and back up Main.

This annual celebratory march is a symbolic reminder of those tense and sometimes violent civil rights protests of the 1960s. There are no police to fear now; they’re marching, too. Lexington’s top leaders in government and education lead the parade.

I’ve attended many of these marches over the past dozen years, and Monday’s crowd was the biggest I’ve ever seen. It may have been because the weather was unusually nice, with sunshine and temperatures rising well into the 30s. But I like to think social progress had something to do with it, too.

After a quarter-century, this finally seems to be shedding its image as a “black” holiday and becoming simply an American holiday.

One of my barometers is the fact that I see more white children marching each year, some with black and Latino friends. Many come in groups from churches and schools, which have the day off.

Jill Montgomery, a 15-year-old sophomore at Mercer County High School, came with a youth group from Burgin Christian Church. They had attended the Sunday night service honoring King at Lexington’s Central Christian Church, followed by a “lock-in” program about King’s legacy.

“It made me realize the struggle that people went through to get equality,” she said. “We learned how our country has evolved.”

About 35 students and parents from The Lexington School were enthusiastic marchers. Last week, the private school held a special program about King featuring pre-school students, said Headmaster Charles Baldecchi, who was marching Monday with his wife, Erin, and their three young children.

“Our school really emphasizes the importance of everyone getting along, and how important it is to accept others,” said pre-school teacher Shelly Rogers.

In addition to the school and church groups, many families came on their own. Some said it was their first march. Others march every year and have been since the kids were infants in strollers.

“I just want them to know about racial harmony and how important it is for our country,” said Stacey Kimmerer, who was there with children Allison, 6, Greg, 9, and Will, 12.

As a white family living in the historically black East End neighborhood, Sherry Maddock said she thinks it’s especially important for her son, Isaac, 6, to appreciate the values this holiday represents.

“We’re teaching our children that this is really a day of blessing,” said Rabbi Marc Kline of Temple Adath Israel, who was there with his daughter Rachel, 10. “We keep getting stuck in 1963, but these kids have to make it real in the 21st century.”

Van Knowles and Susan Pollack bring their daughters Katie, 12, and Lucy, 8, each year for similar reasons.

“More’s still ahead for justice for everyone of all colors, and immigration statuses and sexual orientations … none of these things is finished,” Pollack said. “Marching alone is not enough. There’s a lot of work to do.”

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Bourbon is one of Kentucky’s oldest products, and distillers have always cloaked themselves in nostalgia.

Even a century ago, distillers promoted their whiskey with images of log cabins and white-suited “colonels.” Brands included Old Crow and Old Barbee, which was made by a long-gone Woodford County distillery run by my wife’s great-grandfather.

Today’s brands include Old Forester, Old Fitzgerald and Old Weller. A glass of Pappy Van Winkle is about as good as bourbon gets.

But beneath this antique image is an innovative and growing industry.

The Kentucky Distillers Association last week released its first-ever economic impact study, prepared by University of Louisville economist Paul Coomes. Its findings may surprise some Kentuckians.

While other Kentucky manufacturers cut 20 percent of their jobs over the past decade, distilling employment grew by 6 percent.

The 19 distilleries in eight Kentucky counties employ 3,200 people with an annual payroll of $244 million, plus benefits. They represent 43 percent of all distilling workers in the United States.

Each distilling job creates more than twice as many spin-off jobs as other Kentucky “signature” industries such as horse breeding, tobacco farming and coal mining.

More than $1.5 billion worth of bourbon is produced in Kentucky each year. It accounts for 26 percent of the value of all distilled spirits produced in the United States. Kentucky bourbon is exported to 126 countries.

Kentucky now makes 95 percent of all bourbon, although it is seeing new competition from micro-distilleries elsewhere.

Bourbon’s fortunes have improved considerably since the 1970s, when “brown” spirits declined in popularity and many young adults saw bourbon as an “old people’s” drink.

Innovations such as super-premium brands in the 1980s and fresh marketing made bourbon popular again and fueled an international following that has caused exports to soar.

In the past decade, distilleries have invested millions to turn their factories into successful tourist destinations on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. Distilleries have recorded more than 1.5 million tourist visits during the past five years.

“The best thing we can do is bring a tourist to Kentucky and give them a pleasant experience,” said Louisville hospitality consultant Peggy Noe Stevens, who comes from a famous bourbon family and worked 17 years in branding for Brown-Forman. “We create, in essence, ambassadors for Kentucky.”

The economic impact study was commissioned last year after the bourbon industry was slapped with yet another tax in the General Assembly’s scramble to balance the state budget.

The study notes that Kentucky spirits production and consumption produce $125 million each year in state and local taxes.

Kentucky has the highest distilled spirit taxes of any open-market state except Alaska. About 60 percent of the price of a bottle of bourbon bought in Kentucky is some form of state, federal or local tax.

“With the legislature actively talking about comprehensive tax reform, we would like to have a seat at the table,” said Eric Gregory, president of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. “We think we’ve earned a seat at the table.”

Well, well, well! Tommy, Tommy! Climb right up in the big brown chair!

When I was little, that’s how my annual eye exam always began, with a loud, friendly greeting from Dr. Claude Trapp, all 6-feet-4 of him.

I knew he would put those awful drops in my eyes. But before things went blurry, his dimly lit office was a sight to behold: fine furniture and Asian art everywhere.

Even as a child, I sensed that Dr. Trapp was one of Lexington’s great characters. I didn’t know the half of it.

Trapp, a longtime Lexington ophthalmologist, died Sunday at age 87 after a long illness. When I called his brother, David, it didn’t take long for him to begin chuckling at the memories.

“He was a character,” Trapp said. “He was a real renaissance person, outgoing and interested in just about anything anybody could mention. And one of his favorite pastimes was giving unusual and riotous parties.”

Trapp’s lavish, themed parties were legendary. They included a Roman toga party and a black-tie James Bond 007 affair that filled the downtown Hyatt Regency. then-new Radisson Hotel, now the Lexington Hilton.

His brother remembers when a famous New York restaurant closed for a time and Trapp rented all of its furnishings and had them shipped to Lexington as party props. “The whole thing was unbelievable,” he said.

Claude Wilkes Trapp Jr. was born Sept. 13, 1922, to an old and prominent Kentucky family. He was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and graduated from Cornell University Medical College in 1950.

It was at Cornell that he met his wife, Dr. Joan “Jody” Rider Trapp, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native who was a Lexington pediatrician for 45 years before her death in 2007.

Trapp was honored in 1987 with a Brotherhood Award by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. It recognized his 26 years of providing free treatment to poor people through the Lions clubs of Central Kentucky.

A fixture in Lexington’s high society, Trapp was best known for his non-medical passions: photography, art, astronomy, literature, rare books, classic cars, historic architecture — and fun.

As a Naval officer during World War II, Trapp served on the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga and as an aide to Gen. Chaing Kai-shek, China’s pre-communist ruler. While in China, Trapp became fascinated by jade, and over the years he assembled an impressive collection.

Trapp had more than 50 pieces of carved Jade, some more than 3,500 years old. It was exhibited locally and at museums across the country. As his health declined in recent years, he sold the collection, his brother said.

Trapp and his wife restored a circa 1816 home on Gratz Park next door to Vice Mayor Jim Gray. “He was a great neighbor, an uplifting spirit, a real character,” Gray said. “Every time I saw him he would greet me with, ‘Cheers, Cheers!’”

Trapp was involved with Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, the Headley Whitney Museum, the Iroquois Hunt Club, the Lexington Cricket Club, the Lexington Medical Society and the UK Art Museum, among others. His booming voice earned him several appearances as master of ceremonies for the Blue Grass Charity Ball.

The Trapps loved exotic travel. He once leased a helicopter for a year as a gift to his wife, so she could go anywhere on short notice.

“They knew how to have a good time,” said Trapp’s nephew, David Trapp II, a Lexington aviation executive. “He did a lot of crazy, cool things. There are not many guys like him left anymore. He was one of a kind.”

Gov. Steve Beshear says this isn’t a good time for comprehensive tax reform.

It wasn’t a good time in 2002, when economist William Fox’s report to the General Assembly showed how Kentucky’s tax structure was no longer keeping pace with changes in the economy or the state’s needs. And it hasn’t been a good time in any year since then.

Politically, it never will be a good time for comprehensive tax reform. But with Beshear’s slots campaign coming up lemons and the General Assembly facing one of the worst slash-and-burn budgets in memory, it’s at least time to begin discussing it seriously.

Reps. Bill Farmer, R- Lexington, and Jim Wayne, D-Louisville, have offered visions for what comprehensive tax reform could look like from different ends of the ideological spectrum. They were promised a hearing between legislative sessions. It didn’t happen.

Farmer would eliminate the state income tax and lower the sales tax slightly by taxing services as well as goods. Wayne would tax some services, mostly those used by wealthy people, and make the income tax system more progressive, like the federal system, taxing the rich more than the poor.

My guess is lawmakers eventually will look at some hybrid of the two. But such a plan can’t be “revenue neutral,” at least in the long run.

While public money can always be spent more wisely, the reality is Kentucky needs to invest more in education, infrastructure and social services to move up from the bottom of national rankings of income and quality of life.

Broadening the sales tax to services could make a big difference because of growth in the service economy. Kentucky also should clean up its hodgepodge of special-interest sales tax exemptions. For example: There’s a sales tax on horse feed but not cattle feed.

For state spending to remain at current levels through June 2012, lawmakers would have to find $1.9 billion in revenue or cuts. The state can cover some of that shortfall with $485 million in one-time federal stimulus money. That still leaves a $705 million gap, which means cuts are coming.

But before lawmakers bring out their axes, they should use scalpels.

The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce issued a report recently called The Leaky Bucket that highlights three areas where state spending has gotten out of whack in the past decade.

By far the biggest of those areas is public employee health care, where state spending is up 174 percent compared with an overall state budget increase of 33 percent. The state now pays $1.2 billion a year to insure active state employees, retirees and teachers — 12 percent of the total state general fund.

The Chamber thinks the state could better manage its costs with more emphasis on wellness and disease prevention. “Reasonable changes” could free almost $200 million for the 2010-12 state budgets, it says.

Those changes include having state employees pay a portion of their health insurance premium — say $50 a month — as most private sector workers must do. That would save the state $94 million a year.

The other two “leaky bucket” targets were prisons and Medicaid, the federal-state program that pays for health care for more than 745,000 low-income Kentuckians.

Corrections spending rose 44 percent in the past decade as Kentucky had the nation’s fastest-growing prison population. The Chamber outlines several ways that spending could be cut without lawmakers being accused of being “soft on crime.”

Kentucky’s Medicaid spending has grown twice as fast as total state spending, and the Chamber recommended looking to other states for “best practices” and shifting more spending to wellness programs.

When lawmakers return to Frankfort in January, they must plug some holes in the leaky bucket . But they also need to get serious about creating a new bucket, one big enough to meet Kentucky’s needs.

Vice Mayor Jim Gray’s decision last week to enter the Lexington mayoral race means the field is likely set for next year’s election.

Campaigns tend to take on lives of their own. So before the jockeying begins in earnest, here’s an assessment of the candidates’ records, strengths and weaknesses.

What do I know? I constantly talk to people all over Lexington who have worked with the three major candidates for years, in a variety of situations. So these observations are not just my own.

In addition to Gray, Mayor Jim Newberry faces challenges from the mayor he easily unseated three years ago, Teresa Isaac, and political novice Eric Patrick Marr.

Newberry

Newberry and his hard-working staff have done a good job of managing the city in a tough economy. He has had the courage to tackle difficult issues he inherited, such as the police and firefighters’ pension shortfall and decades-old storm water and sewer problems.

Newberry is solid and pragmatic, a detail-oriented manager who isn’t afraid of heavy lifting. He is a clear public speaker, if not a very exciting one. But Urban County Council members and community leaders often complain about his skills at interpersonal communication. He can be stubborn, abrasive and thin-skinned.

Before becoming mayor, Newberry managed a law firm and, like a corporate lawyer, he can be cautious to a fault. He sometimes misses leadership moments, such as his slow response to the Blue Grass Airport scandal.

Newberry is decisive, but his decision-making process often lacks the kind of inclusiveness that encourages buy-in and allows the best ideas to come forward. For example, more inclusive planning and communication could have made the South Limestone Street project less costly and disruptive.

Gray

Newberry says the right things about urban redevelopment, but doesn’t always seem to understand it. He has been a key champion of the Lyric Theatre restoration, recognizing what a catalyst it can be for the East End. But he has otherwise been hostile to historic preservation, not realizing that it can be a driver of economic development rather than an obstacle.

He has been a strong supporter of trails and making Lexington more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly. But he has dragged his feet on two-way streets and opposes design guidelines like other cities use to promote good downtown development.

Perhaps Newberry’s biggest misstep was his facilitation of the now-stalled CentrePointe development. And the less popular CentrePointe became, the more he seemed to embrace it.

Meanwhile, Newberry has given lukewarm support to the Distillery District project, which many people think has far more potential for economic development than CentrePointe ever did.

While Newberry talks a lot about the 21st century economy and attracting the “creative class,” Gray seems to have better instincts about how to do it.

Gray was squeezed out of a three-way mayoral primary in 2002 by Isaac and lawyer Scott Crosbie, who has endorsed Gray in this race. Gray was elected to council in 2006, becoming vice mayor by receiving more votes than any other at-large council candidate.

Gray is an idea man who is less intellectually rigid than Newberry. While more inclusive than Newberry, he is less decisive. Gray can suffer from a short attention span and a lack of follow-through.

Isaac

While good at using his bully pulpit as vice mayor, Gray hasn’t been as skilled at building coalitions to pass legislation. He can be a dynamic public speaker when he’s prepared. When he tries to wing it, though, he can quickly turn esoteric.

Gray is most articulate about development issues, because that’s his business. He is trained in architecture and is chairman and chief executive of his family’s highly regarded construction company.

If CentrePointe was Newberry’s biggest mistake, it was Gray’s shining moment. His critiques of the project have proven remarkably prophetic. However, in the year since CentrePointe stalled, council has yet to revise development laws to prevent that kind of debacle from happening again.

People often remark that if we could combine the two Jims from Barren County we would have a great mayor. Each has important skills, traits and sensibilities the other lacks.

Good management is important during times of economic transition. But so is vision and making the right strategic decisions and investments for the future.

In many ways, the voters’ choice could come down to this question: Is it more likely that Newberry will become willing to listen to people more visionary than he is, or that Gray will hire good detail people who can help him get things done?

Marr

Then there is Isaac, who was turned out of office by a wide margin three years ago.

Isaac got good marks for her leadership during the 2003 ice storm. Otherwise, she was largely a disaster as mayor. She loved the job, but lacked many of the skills to do it. She didn’t communicate well, she couldn’t work with people and she sometimes seemed reckless.

Isaac is a good campaigner and still has pockets of support. But most community leaders think her time has come and gone.

Marr says he entered the race because he doesn’t think Lexington is doing enough to develop a 21st century economy. He cares a lot about Lexington, but there’s no evidence he has the skills to be mayor.

The Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation has released its annual list of the most endangered historic properties in Central Kentucky, as well as a list of those that recently have been saved and preserved for the future.

Click here to go to the Trust’s Web site and download a PDF with photos and information about the properties. You also can read about what the Trust is doing to preserve this region’s unique architectural legacy.

As world leaders gather Monday in Copenhagen to rewrite energy policies to reduce future carbon emissions, Lexington business leaders have rewritten their energy policy to try to help the coal industry cling to the past.

Commerce Lexington announced a policy revision last week. that dropped a reference to “encourage the production and use of reliable and less carbon-intensive energy fuels, like natural gas” and replaced it with “maintain the production of affordable, reliable energy.” Several direct coal industry endorsements were added, including:

” … the most immediate threat to Kentucky’s business climate is the pending energy legislation and regulatory obstacles that place an undue burden on states like Kentucky that rely heavily on coal-fired generation plants for electricity. … Commerce Lexington opposes any legislation and regulations that would have a significant negative impact” on coal-industry jobs.

Robert Quick, Commerce Lexington’s president, said the business advocacy group has always supported coal and wanted to make that support more explicit. “It’s hypocritical if we advocate for low-cost energy without supporting coal,” he said.

Quick said the rewrite was prompted by a two-day bus tour of Eastern Kentucky by nearly 70 Commerce Lexington members that “opened our eyes.” The trip included tours of showcase coal projects and presentations by industry representatives and coal-friendly public officials, but nothing from coal’s critics in the region.

Quick said the bus tour on Oct. 12-13 wasn’t a coal-industry junket. He emphasized that Commerce Lexington doesn’t deny climate change or the need to transition away from coal as Kentucky’s reserves are depleted.

“We know that there’s climate change,” Quick said. “We have to be looking for alternative fuels. It’s going to be a transition. Change is coming.”

Quick said the policy rewrite was simply intended to acknowledge coal’s role in Kentucky’s economy and to “make a connection” with mountain leaders.

“Nobody from the coal industry or our membership got to us,” he said. “Nobody got us in a head lock.”

Some people may see it that way.

Others will see it this way: The rewrite echoes a publicity campaign being waged for the coal industry by Phil Osborne, a public relations executive who serves on Commerce Lexington’s Executive Committee and played a big role in the bus tour.

Others also will see the policy rewrite as an attempt to pacify powerful pro-coal people in Eastern Kentucky, some of whom have been calling for a boycott of Lexington businesses because all of our public officials and media don’t toe the coal industry line the way theirs do.

Yes, the coal industry produces some good-paying jobs in Eastern Kentucky, although many fewer than in the past. That’s because of controversial, mechanized surface-mining methods that are radically altering the mountain landscape.

While it’s good that Commerce Lexington members spent time in Eastern Kentucky, they could have gotten a more well-rounded education on coal by traveling to the University of Kentucky campus Nov. 5 for the College of Engineering’s excellent coal conference.

In addition to hearing the coal industry’s perspectives, Commerce Lexington members would have heard from Eastern Kentuckians who have had their property, communities, water supplies and health damaged by coal mining. And they would have gotten a more complete — and less rosy — picture of coal’s impact on Kentucky’s economy.

King Coal’s campaign against change reminds me of Big Tobacco’s lobbying efforts three decades ago. Long after others were acknowledging the inevitable, Kentucky leaders kept trying to deny tobacco’s harm.

Coal will be much harder to quit than tobacco. Coal produces half the nation’s electricity and 92 percent of Kentucky’s. Nobody denies the valuable contributions that hard-working coal miners have made. Without coal we wouldn’t have our modern lifestyle.

Coal will continue to be essential to our nation for many years. But the longer we keep mining and burning coal the way we do now, the more dangerous it will be for our economy and our planet.

Coal companies have a long history of fighting change, from mine safety reforms to surface owners’ rights to surface-mine reclamation. They always claim that any new regulation will kill the coal industry. Regulation has never killed the coal industry; but the industry has never changed without regulation.

One startling indicator of change came last week in a commentary written by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who has been one of coal’s strongest allies in Congress for more than five decades.

Byrd wrote bluntly that if the coal industry wants to be a player in helping set future energy policy it must stop scapegoating, stoking fear among its workers, resisting environmental regulation and denying climate change.

Commerce Lexington’s rewritten energy policy may appease some powerful people in Eastern Kentucky, but Lexington business leaders should think about what kind of message it sends to the rest of the nation and world.

Is it smart to go down tobacco road again, to help the coal industry wage a losing battle to cling to the past?

Or would it be smarter to position Lexington as the place where researchers and entrepreneurs should come to solve coal’s problems?

The future will belong to those cities, states and nations that figure out how to mine and use coal in more environmentally responsible ways and develop the energy technologies that must someday replace coal.

To paraphrase the old Harlan County coal camp song, Commerce Lexington should think about which side of inevitable change it wants to be on.

There’s more energy in two long-neglected corners of downtown Lexington than there has been in decades, and Monday night will be a good chance to glimpse some of it.

The East End Holiday Celebration is from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Isaac Murphy Park on the corner of East Third Street and Midland Avenue. Everyone is welcome to help decorate a community Christmas tree and enjoy hot cider, hot chocolate and caroling.

That same evening, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on the opposite side of downtown, supporters of the Lexington Distillery District are gathering at Buster’s, a popular nightclub in a recently restored 140-year-old bourbon warehouse that is part of the district along Manchester Street.

The economic downturn has forced the Urban County Council to whittle down its list of bonded capital projects to avoid hurting the city’s credit rating. The cutting will commence Dec. 3 at 4 p.m. at the Budget and Finance Committee meeting in City Hall.

Monday’s gathering at Buster’s is part of a grass-roots effort to urge council members not to cut $3.2 million allocated for initial infrastructure improvements in the Distillery District. The Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation and other community groups last week launched an e-mail and petition campaign.

Although most council members have voiced support for the Distillery District, tough choices must be made. It is competing with about $61 million in other capital bonding requests, such as street-resurfacing projects and maintenance items for city buildings.

Barry McNees, the Distillery District’s lead developer, has made a compelling case for city investment, which would be used for street and sidewalk improvements and work on the Town Branch Trail through the area.

McNees said the timing of council support is critical. That’s because a former vice president of one of Kentucky’s major distillers has formed a new company that wants to invest about $11 million initially and perhaps $25 million eventually in a boutique distillery, bottling plant and restaurant in part of the long-abandoned Pepper Distillery complex.

Before the company commits to the investment, it wants to make sure the city will provide the public infrastructure needed to support it, McNees said. Because much of that area was largely abandoned for decades, it lacks modern infrastructure.

The distillery’s initial investment, combined with $11 million in other private money already invested in the development, would qualify the Distillery District for state-approved tax-increment financing. That means tax revenues generated from new development in the area would repay the city for up to $45.8 million in infrastructure improvements.

Several council members I talked with last week said they think the Distillery District is a smart investment for creating new jobs and tax revenues and rehabilitating a shabby part of town.

“Once we can start investing in the public part — curbs, gutters, burying utility lines, etc. — the businesses will follow more quickly,” Council member Linda Gorton said. “And then the revenues will come in.”

Like the Distillery District, the East End is coming back to life after decades of decline. If you haven’t driven around there lately, come down to the Christmas tree lighting and take a tour; you won’t recognize the place.

New housing developments are nearing completion, the Lyric Theatre is being restored, and an art garden is planned for Isaac Murphy Park, which will soon be the end of the 9-mile Legacy Trail to the Kentucky Horse Park.

Monday night’s holiday event is being sponsored by the city, the Blue Grass Community Foundation’s Legacy Center, the Isaac Murphy Art Garden board, the Living Arts and Science Center and the William Wells Brown and Martin Luther King neighborhood associations.

The East End and Distillery District are dramatic bookends for the revitalization that downtown Lexington has been experiencing for several years, and Vice Mayor Jim Gray sees a pattern.

Both are projects that focus first on improving the economy and quality of life for Lexington residents; attracting visitors is a secondary goal. And both are authentic reflections of Lexington’s history and culture — the rich African-American heritage of the East End and the bourbon-making legacy of the Distillery District.

“They’re both recognizing the value and inspiration of history,” Gray said. “But they’re not being stuck in history; they’re building on it and moving us forward.”