The Bluegrass and Beyond

What kind of city should Lexington become?

That’s the big question each year when Commerce Lexington gathers local leaders and takes them to another city in search of ideas.

“Lexington is at a pivotal point — economically, culturally and physically,” Mayor Jim Newberry told the 275 people on this year’s trip as they gathered last Wednesday in Austin Music Hall in the capital city of Texas.

Everyone agreed. They also knew that economic success in the 21st century will belong to those cities and regions that embrace knowledge and technology.

So what was there to learn in Austin? Lexington is a prettier place and has much better weather. Yet, Austin is booming and seems wired for a bright future.

That’s because, over the past three decades, Austin has made smart, strategic decisions about creating an economic and social climate where technology companies flourish and the people who work for them can enjoy a high quality of life. Spinoffs from that climate include a rich live music scene.

Austin has worked hard to preserve its history, protect its environment and embrace creativity.

Creative people can be different — sometimes very different.

Austin’s unofficial motto is “Keep Austin Weird.” The motto might as well be official, because every government and business leader who spoke to the visitors from Lexington touted the notion.

“We have created, maybe you think, a monster,” said Pike Powers, an attorney and former Austin Chamber of Commerce chairman. “But what keeps us on the map is our young people, our creative people. They are the draw for technology companies and bright researchers.”

Some Lexington leaders joked that we should print T-shirts saying, “Make Lexington Weird.”

Others, who know our city better, pointed out that buttoned-down Lexington has always had a weird streak. Many people just don’t want to admit it, much less embrace it.

Someone offered a better T-shirt motto: “Lexington: Show Your True Colors.”

What does embracing creativity really mean? For one thing, it means tolerance.

“The ‘Keep Austin Weird’ thing has become a rallying point for championing diversity, for truly embracing that which is different,” said Ed Bailey, vice president of brand development for Austin City Limits, the successful Public Broadcasting System music show. “In Cleveland, where I come from, that’s not really valued. Here, it is.”

It also means encouraging citizens to become involved in decision-making.

“In Austin, civic engagement is a contact sport,” said Robena Jackson, a consultant who was once the Austin chamber’s “vice president for quality of life.”

Austin residents won’t allow a few elites to make big decisions about their city behind closed doors. There are dozens of groups, such as the Austin Area Research Organization, where issues are studied and debated.

The Austin City Council meets each Thursday, and the marathon sessions can last up to 15 hours. All who want to speak can have their say; no three-minute limits like in Lexington. Oh, and the meeting takes a break at 5:30 p.m. so everyone can listen to a local musician.

“People in Austin demand a voice,” Jackson said. “And leaders in Austin know they have to listen to them to get things done.”

Austin is often seen as a liberal island in conservative Texas. But Austin’s current mayor and two former ones said local government doesn’t try to be the solution to problems so much as a facilitator. Government seeks to help entrepreneurs succeed, not get in their way.

Locally owned businesses are valued. Entrepreneurship is celebrated. The city, state and University of Texas work closely together to develop the economy. Progress is tracked, results are measured. There’s a bias toward action.

Austin leaders were quick to say that their city is far from perfect. Housing is too expensive, air quality is often poor, traffic can be a mess. But they said leaders haven’t been afraid to try things and fail, and they’ve learned from their mistakes.

“We made a lot of this up on the fly,” Powers said. “Sometimes things work wonderfully for us, and sometimes we fall flat on our face.”

Creativity. Tolerance. Entrepreneurship. Early and meaningful public involvement in decision-making.

Some people in Lexington already believe in those ideas. What if many more did?

Lexington might come to see controversy as an opportunity for discussion, rather than an embarrassment to avoid. We might take more risks. We might try to be great instead of just good enough, knowing full well that somebody will always complain if things don’t turn out perfectly. Or even if they do.

That’s what I learned in Austin.

Steve Austin, who directs the new Center for Community Legacy Initiatives at the Blue Grass Community Foundation, formerly headed the “smart growth” group Bluegrass Tomorrow. He is one of those people who tries to think like a hockey player. You know, focus on where the puck is going, not where it is now.

While in Austin, Texas, on the Commerce Lexington trip, he noticed an interview in Austin Monthly magazine with Guy Forsyth, a singer and songwriter. Down in the article, Forsyth was quoted as saying home prices have tripled since he moved to Austin in 1990, pricing him out of many neighborhoods, despite his success.

A generation ago, musicians began coming to Austin because they were being priced out of California. “Austin has peaked, but they don’t know it,” Austin said. “Being the next hot thing has passed for them.”

If young musicians can no longer afford to live in Austin, will they stop going there? Where will they go instead? “Why couldn’t it be Lexington?” he wondered.

Here is a guest post from Billy Hylton, a 1998 University of Kentucky graduate who then lived in Austin for six years before moving to Chapel Hill, N.C., where he is a Web designer. He contacted me today after reading my posts from the Commerce Lexington trip to Austin.

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CentrePointe Tower has been ridiculed as bland, uninspired, and elitist. It could be worse. Austin’s glass-skinned Frost Bank Tower was once described as “an enormous set of nose hair trimmers.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones even claimed that Frost was built at the direction of the secretive Bohemian Club. Something about it resembling an owl.

What did Austin’s vaunted creative class think? They wanted to keep the city weird and the “world-class tower” was the antithesis of funky, vibrant Austin. Build it in Houston, they said. But an interesting thing happened after the tower pierced the sky in 2003. Frost was voted “Best New Building” by readers of the influential progressive weekly Austin Chronicle for a whopping five years in a row. Huh?

The Frost Tower story offers a lesson for CentrePointe advocates and detractors. From a visual standpoint, Frost is certainly an impressive addition to the skyline. But what earned the building props in the Chron has more to do with what’s happening at the street level. There are no quasi-public plazas or landscape features set back from the road. Similarly, marble-walled fountains are missing too. Frost is pure urbanism, with retail and restaurants pushed right to the sidewalk. Standing in front of the building’s Congress Avenue entrance, you don’t appreciate the massive scale of a 33-story skyscraper looming above. Traditional urban form and shimmering post-modernism make the tower a success with high-minded architectural critics and the folks alike.

What can be learned from the success of this project? Good architectural design and aesthetics are often debatable, but what everyone in Lexington should agree on is that all four sides of the tower engage and energize the city around it. Here’s what that means:

• Entrances to the hotel, restaurants, and retail should be easily accessible on all sides from the sidewalk.
• Restaurants and cafes should be encouraged to include sidewalk tables.
• No poorly conceived garage parking, surface parking, or blank walls.
• No parks or plazas set back twenty feet, even if packaged as “greenspace.”
• Local businesses should be included in retail plans.

These simple considerations will go a long way to ensuring that this project is an asset to downtown Lexington. In fact, if CentrePointe is properly executed, Lexington’s creative citizens and downtown aficionados may recognize that losing the Dame, Mia’s, and other buildings on the block was ultimately worth the trade-off — just as Austinites now love Frost Tower.

Many of the record 275 people who went on Commerce Lexington’s 69th annual Leadership Visit go year, after year after year. They get ideas for improving Lexington. They make and develop contacts for improving their businesses and careers. And they get a lot of work done.

This week’s trip to Austin, Texas, was the sixth Commerce Lexington trip for Barry Brauch, the CFO of American Founders Bank. He said there’s often an expectation that the group will come back with some big idea that quickly transform Lexington, but it just doesn’t happen that way. What happens is small ideas are planted, germinate and bloom sometimes years later with a distinct Lexington twist.

“It’s like making a mosaic that, over time, gives a picture of what Lexington can be,” Brauch said as the group headed back to Lexington on Friday afternoon.

The best way for people to get to know each other is to travel together. There’s a lot of value in gathering together the mayor, all 15 Urban County Council members, the school superintendent, many of the city’s top bankers and business leaders, a local legislator and the speaker of the state House of Representatives, who lives in Bowling Green and may not otherwise spend a lot of time thinking about what’s good for Lexington and how what happens in Lexington is good for Kentucky.

“I can’t imagine, without this trip, how much more fragmented Lexington would be,” Brauch said. “Some people think Lexington is divided. I think they’ve just never lived somewhere that’s really divided.”

For business people, who often are focused on minding their own business, it’s a time to step back and think about what’s good for the entire city. “You feel plugged in, and when things come up back home later, you know how it fits into the overall things people are trying to accomplish,” Brauch said.

Brauch cited a small example: When artists, performers and creative entrepreneurs come seeking loans, bankers often look askance. They don’t understand the business models, and they worry when the collateral is more intellectual than concrete. But politicians and bankers in Austin explained to that such loans, when done carefully and intentionally, are good for business and good for a city.

Linda Gorton, an Urban County Council member, says these trips teach Lexington leaders as much what to avoid as to emulate. For example, last year’s trip showed that Boulder, Colo., has become such an expensive place to live that many police officers, firefighters, teachers and service workers must live in neighboring towns. “We sure don’t want that to happen in Lexington,” she said.

Lexington leaders whose success often depends on collaborating with other Lexington leaders found the trip invaluable. Fire Chief Robert Hendricks was able to discuss several issues, such as home sprinklers, with a variety of interested parties.

“In order to get a meeting with some of these people in Lexington, it can normally take a month,” said Stu Silberman, the Fayette County Schools superintendent. “Here, you can get those people together in 15 minutes and get the meeting done quickly.”

Susan Rayer, director of career development at Transylvania University, lined up internships for four students. “And that was all done before dinner last night,” she said on the second day of the three-day trip.

“For me, this trip is worth its weight in gold. I’ve gotten so much done,” said Wanda Bertram, executive director of LexLinc, a non-profit that helps poor neighborhoods solve problems. “We didn’t have the money in the budget, but my board chair said, ‘You’re going on this trip.’”

Not far below Austin’s celebrated “weirdness” is a quirky streak of entrepreneurship and a passion for locally owned businesses.

You can see a lot of it in south Austin, where old buildings are constantly being repurposed by entrepreneurs with their own creative vision of the American dream. For example, a restaurant in an old gas station that still looks a lot like a gas station.

Along one big street is a billboard with a picture of Thomas Edison that says, “On the 10,000th time, there was light.”

Some of the quirkiest businesses are along South Congress Avenue. It’s a broad street with a commanding view of the state capitol dome in the distance. On each side of this avenue on a hill, there’s a funky collection of businesses, many in storefronts from the 1950s.

Where else can you see an old Airstream trailer rehabbed as a cupcake stand? A Japanese fast food restaurant next to an ice cream stand down the street from a Western wear store, jewelry boutiques and a psychodelic costume shop called “Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds.” And then there’s the Magnolia Cafe, whose sign proudly proclaims: “Sorry we’re open.” On the first Thursday of each month, South Congress merchants stay open late and have special events for their customers. It’s not just a shopping district: It’s an experience.

Photos/Tom Eblen

You hear a lot of talk in Lexington about how encouraging more live music and entertainment venues downtown would be good for the economy, and that’s true.

It would improve Lexington’s quality of life and attract and retain the creative, young workers of the future and the companies that want to hire them.

But what the 275 Lexington leaders on the Commerce Lexington trip to Austin, Texas, are learning this week is that music and entertainment can develop into a significant industry itself, with the right planning and encouragement from local government, banks and other business interests.

And you don’t have to be a Nashville, Los Angeles or Austin to make it happen.

Austin’s music scene goes back to the 1930s, when Kenneth Threadgill hired local bands to play at his Gulf station at night and started selling more beer than gas. Things really took off when the cowboys and hippies collided in the late 1960s, with University of Texas students providing a ready-made audience.

Now, music employs 11,200 people in Austin, generates $11 million in taxes and has an annual economic impact of $616 million. And it’s only a piece of what Austin calls its creative industry sector, which also includes art, film production, digital music and visual media - otherwise known as creating video games.

“Fun is an important part of the economy,” said Jim Butler, a city employee whose job it is to nurture creative businesses. “We take it very seriously.”

Here’s a not-so-small but telling example:

Austin City Limits is one of the most successful and longest-running shows on public television. It showcases both top talent and up-and-comers for a worldwide audience. The show began in 1975, when Austin public television station KLRU convinced Willie Nelson to shoot a pilot to kick off a series of shows featuring Texas musicians.

“We started out just wanting to put a lens on what was happening in Austin at the time,” said Ed Bailey, the show’s vice president for brand development.

When Austin City Limits was still going three years later, producers decided to upgrade the set. They came up with the backdrop that shows Austin’s skyline, which three decades later has become the show’s trademark and has helped make Austin famous.

“It wasn’t part of a business plan to promote Austin,” Bailey said. “It happened because a few creative individuals got together and made a judgment call.”

Then, seven years ago, the show’s producers decided they could use their contacts in the music industry to create a festival as a fundraiser for KLRU. After all, some of the nation’s biggest entertainers had gotten their start on Austin City Limits and returned regularly.

The three-day festival now attracts 130 bands on eight stages and 75,000 fans a day to Austin’s Zilker Park each September. Over the past six years, the festival has generated $100 million in economic impact for Austin.

It was a success story that got several Lexington people thinking: Why not us?

After all, Kentucky has produced some of the nation’s most successful musicians, and there’s a whole genre of music called bluegrass. Lexington already has successful niche festivals, such as Festival of the Bluegrass at the Kentucky Horse Park and Ichthus near Wilmore.

Lexington has its own home-grown live music success story: Michael Johnathan’s “Woodsongs Old-Time Radio Hour,” which is beamed each week from the Kentucky Theatre to 491 radio stations worldwide, XM Satellite Radio, a number of public TV stations and streams live online. It will record its 500th show on Sept. 15.

More than a little brand equity there. Great contacts in the music industry.

So, could Lexington boost its economy and image - not to mention the show’s - with a festival?

Austin’s experiences also sparked ideas for Lexington on a smaller scale.

Lexington has some great large venues for shows - Rupp Arena, the Opera House, UK’s Singletary Center for the Arts. But what the city lacks is smaller venues like the Dame, which is looking for a new home since being displaced from Main Street by the proposed CentrePointe development. Those are the venues where musicians get their starts and a local music scene takes root and grows.

The most popular activity for the Lexington visitors Wednesday night was a “pub crawl” to four of the bars in downtown Austin. Many people later wandered over to some live performances at other clubs, such as Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, where Kentuckian Loretta Lynn will be singing June 13.

Wednesday night’s acts were less famous, but still popular.

“There were probably 1,000 people at that one show on a Wednesday night,” Lexington architect Clive Pohl said. “And we passed dozens of clubs on the way there and they were all packed.”

Craig Robertson, a young attorney, dreams of an outdoor concert venue in downtown Lexington, perhaps in the Cox Street parking lot beside Rupp Arena, and lots of small, downtown music clubs. “Where can you go now in Lexington to see the people who aren’t big headliners?” he said.

Vice Mayor Jim Gray appointed a downtown entertainment task force in October 2007 that will soon issue a report and some recommendations. And a few more recommendations are likely to be added when this group returns from Austin.

Council member Linda Gorton said little things Austin is doing to encourage clubs and entertainment venues could easily be done in Lexington - relaxing some ordinances, for example, or providing loading zones on streets for entertainers to use at night.

“We could remove some small obstacles and make it happen,” Gorton said.

Here we are in the city named for Stephen F. Austin, the “father of Texas” and Transylvania University alumnus (class of 1810).

Commerce Lexington chartered two large jets for the 275 people making its 69th annual Leadership Visit. When those jets touched down at Austin’s new airport, we were taken to Austin Music Hall to hear from local leaders about this city’s successes and failures and how they might apply to Central Kentucky.

The music hall itself is a symbol of one of those successes. A former warehouse and chili factory, it was reopened seven months ago after essentially being rebuilt as a privately developed concert venue.

It’s not a fancy building — concrete floors, exposed beams and air ducts — and that is by design. Owner Tim O’Connor said the “dressed down” decor offers ultimate flexibility for whatever the function and whomever is appearing on stage — whether it’s Bill Gates, Barrack Obama or B.B. King. All have “performed” there.

It’s also an environmentally friendly building, with such things as automatic light switches and computer-controlled climate systems. The water-chilled air conditioning system uses no freon, and it worked quite well today as the afternoon temperature hit 100 degrees.

“The most important thing a developer can do is know the community and the needs of people in that community,” O’Connor said.

Austin’s transformation began in 1983 when it was chosen as the site for Microelectronics & Computer Technology Corp., a research consortium financed by a dozen technology companies. The consortium and the companies spun off from it made Austin a high-tech center.

But all that technology focus hasn’t made the city nerdy. Just the opposite. Austin has developed a live music scene and funky culture that attracts creative young people. Austin now has the youngest net in-migration of any city in America.

Growth has always been a constant in Austin. The metro area’s population has doubled every 20 years for the past 115 years. There are currently about 775,000 residents in the city and 1.6 million in the metro area.

Former Mayor Lee Cook said the keys to Austin’s success have been its willingness to take risks and focus on quality of life. Austin invested in water and sewer improvements, even during economic downturns, and made environmental protection a priority. Leaders have worked to improve schools and integrate the University of Texas and other local universities into the local economy.

But Austin still struggles with transportation and sprawl. Highway traffic is bad, although the city’s first limited light rail system will open later this year.

“Growth is the opportunity, and it is the challenge,” said current Mayor Will Wynn, who has a name any politician would envy.

Wynn came into office in 2003 from the commercial real estate industry, and he had a strong background in environmental protection and historic preservation. He stressed the need for quality, high-density, mixed-use urbane development that makes wise use of land and adds vitality to the city.

In just the past few years, the number of people living in downtown Austin has grown from 500 to 5,800. And another 7,000 or so will be joining them once 4,000 downtown housing units now under construction are finished.

A former mayor who now represents Austin in the state Senate, Kirk Watson, said cities like Austin and Lexington could be positioned well to succeed in the new economy.

Strong economies were once about being an empire, then a superpower, Watson said. Now, with digital technology, they’re about being a successful region. Wealth was once about having land, then industrial capacity. Now, it’s about having intellectual capacity and creative people.

So, Watson said, the places that will be winners in the 21st Century global economy will be those cities and surrounding regions that can attract the brightest people and the companies that want to hire them. “Places that never before could be economic powers can be now,” he said.

He cited these factors for Austin’s success: Improving education, attracting high-tech companies, preserving the local environment and investing in the arts and culture as a way to improve the quality of life and attract smart, dynamic people.

Watson noted that the city’s most popular bumper sticker says, “Keep Austin Weird.”

He noted that innovative companies such as Dell Computer and Whole Foods were started in Austin by people with “weird” ideas. “To attract and cultivate that creative mindset, you have to allow those weird ideas … that often become visionary 10 years later,” he said.

Most of the 275 people going to Austin, Texas, for Commerce Lexington’s 69th annual Leadership Visit have gathered in a big hall at Blue Grass Airport, waiting to board two chartered jets.

Ed Brand, a retired Fayette County middle school principal who now works at the airport, herded the folks through security and into a room for breakfast and lots of talking.

“We learn a lot from the cities we visit,” said P.G. Peoples, president of the Urban League. “But we also learn a lot from each other.”:

Have to go. My plane is boarding….

Legend has it that when many Kentuckians went west in search of a better life more than a century ago, they wrote “GTT” on their cabin doors - Gone to Texas.

About 275 of Lexington’s movers and shakers left similar messages on their voice mail Wednesday.

They’ve gone to Austin, Texas, for Commerce Lexington’s 69th annual Leadership Visit. Unlike their ancestors, though, they’ll return Friday night with lots of ideas for making life better in Kentucky.

Commerce Lexington’s annual trip is one of the nation’s oldest and largest of its kind. Past trips have been to such cities as Nashville; Providence, R.I.; Raleigh, N.C.; Boulder, Colo.; and Portland, Ore. And they have produced a variety of ideas for Lexington, ranging from the Fayette Education Foundation to city recycling programs.

This year’s attendees include Mayor Jim Newberry and all 15 members of the Urban County Council, as well as community leaders in business, education and the arts.

These trips are an invaluable chance for the people who run Lexington to see what is working and not working in other cities, to pick up new ideas, to discuss them and to network with each other, said Commerce Lexington President Robert Quick.

“It’s easy for us to look at any community we go to … and just think they’ve always had their act together,” he said. “A lot of these areas started 25, 30, 50 years ago, and the key is that they built the right infrastructure for change.”

Quick said that no matter where the trip goes, there’s always an interesting realization: “We have a lot more going for us than we give ourselves credit for, but we can’t see it because we’re so involved in our day-to-day lives.”

This year’s group of 275 is the largest ever. The three-day trip was sold out late last year, and 38 people on the waiting list had to stay home. Quick said special emphasis was put on including young professionals; there are 57 leaders on the trip younger than 30.

Austin was chosen for this year’s trip because since the early 1980s it has transformed itself into a diverse, energetic city that attracts high-tech businesses and young professionals. Austin’s live-music scene is a model for ambitious efforts to improve our city’s entertainment infrastructure - one of the keys to making Lexington an exciting place for both residents and visitors. Plus, Austin has had some success in regional planning and cooperation, a big issue in the Bluegrass.

The Lexington delegation will hear from Austin Mayor Will Wynn and other local officials. Group meetings will be at the Austin Music Hall, a state-of-the-art performance venue that was recently doubled in size.

Attendees will get to sample Austin night life Wednesday. On Thursday afternoon, groups can tour Austin’s city hall, airport and revitalization efforts downtown and in an historic African-American neighborhood.

“We learn a lot from other communities’ successes, and from their failures,” Quick said.

“Seeds get planted, even though it may take us years to follow through. By having everyone at the table - the policy-makers and the people at the street level - you have a group that can come back and get things done.”