The Bluegrass and Beyond

Organizers of the Legacy Trail, a 9-mile bike and walking path being developed from Lexington’s East End to the Kentucky Horse Park, are seeking your help in choosing a logo.

The public is being asked to vote among three logos. Register and cast your vote at www.mylegacytrail.com. Or you can text your chosen logo’s name (see chart below) to (859) 797-4900.

Those who register will be included in drawings for a $500 gift certificate from Pedal the Planet bike shop, a $250 gift certificate from John’s Run Walk Shop and a $100 gift certificate from J&H Outfitters.

Voting began yesterday evening at Thursday Night Live at Cheapside downtown and will continue through Aug. 13. The winning logo will be announced at Thursday Night Live on Aug. 20.

Plans to build the nine-mile Legacy Trail for cyclists and pedestrians between downtown Lexington and the Kentucky Horse Park have hit a roadblock.

The city’s Board of Adjustment failed to approve a land swap between Vulcan Materials Co. and the University of Kentucky that trail organizers say is essential.

Vulcan wants to swap the university some land surface next to UK’s farm complex north of I-75 between Newtown and Georgetown roads, in return for the right to mine limestone under some of the university land in the future.

Although Vulcan operates a quarry nearby, there are no immediate plans to mine underground. The surface area UK would get from Vulcan is where the trail would go.

Without that land swap, the Legacy Trail can’t be built — at least not before the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, said Steve Austin of the Bluegrass Community Foundation’s Legacy Center.

The seven-member Board of Adjustment voted 2-2 on Oct. 31 to reject the land swap, with one member abstaining and two absent. The two board members who voted against it were concerned that underground mining could endanger the Royal Springs Aquifer, the water supply for Georgetown.

Because of the tie vote, the issue will be brought up again at the board’s meeting at 1 p.m. Dec. 12 in the council chambers.

But officials charged with protecting the aquifer see no problem with the land swap, so long as they have the right to review and object to any specific plans for underground mining.

“Our biggest concern … is where they make their entry point” for mining, said Billy Jenkins, general manager of Georgetown Municipal Water and Sewer Service and chairman of the Royal Springs Water Supply Protection Committee. “I told the committee that, with the plans we’ve seen, we’re OK right now, but we don’t want to give up our rights.”

In fact, Jenkins said, he hopes the Legacy Trail will be built and that some of the educational signs planned for trail side will explain the Royal Springs Aquifer. “We don’t get enough information out to the public about their water supply,” he said.

Urban County Councilman Jay McChord, one of the Legacy Trail’s organizers, is urging citizens who support it to attend the board’s Dec. 12 meeting to make their feelings known. “If the board says no, they will have killed the trail,” he said.

Lexington faith leaders meet to plan emergency response

In what might be the first meeting of its kind in Lexington, every religious leader in town has been invited to a gathering at 11 a.m. Thursday at Second Presbyterian Church on Main Street.

One purpose of the meeting is to discuss creating a clergy communications network that could be ready to respond to a local emergency. Joanne Hale of the Church World Service in Florida will be there to offer disaster-preparedness training.

Beyond that, said the Rev. Christopher Skidmore of the Kentucky Council of Churches, “We’re not going into it with any kind of agenda. Whatever the religious leaders want to come out of it will come out of it.”

Skidmore said only 40 of the 400 religious leaders who were invited have confirmed they will attend, but he is hoping many more will come. So far, it’s a diverse group. “Our first respondents were from the Muslim community,” he said.

Time has been set aside for private midday prayers, and the lunch caterer will adhere to kosher and halal dietary requirements.

The meeting was prompted by remarks Mayor Jim Newberry made several months ago to the Downtown Christian Unity Task Force. “He made mention of some of the desires he has for a community that is more united and connected,” Skidmore said.

For example, if Lexington were to experience another disaster such as the 2006 crash of Comair Flight 5191, it would be helpful for the city to have a single point of contact to alert the faith community, and for members of the clergy of all faiths to be trained in disaster counseling.

“We are just creating the space in which they can do whatever they wish to do together,” Skidmore said. “I think we’ll find that we agree on far more than we disagree on.”

Saturday morning was cold and gray, but more than 40 people came to Cheapside before 8 a.m. for a five-mile bicycle ride on the first section of the proposed Legacy Trail from downtown to the Kentucky Horse Park.

The group rode five miles out to Coldstream Park, where another 50 or so people came out to comment and offer suggestions to developers of the nine-mile bicycle and pedestrian trail.

“You go to these things and you always see the bikers and walkers, but we’re getting support from everybody,” said Keith Lovan, a city engineer who is project manager for the trail. “They all see something in it for them.”

The city is building the trail almost as a linear park to provide recreation and education about Lexington’s history and culture. The Bluegrass Community Foundation’s Legacy Center is supporting the effort as one of two things it hopes will be tangible legacies to Lexington from the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.

More than $3 million has been raised to build the basic trail from Newtown Pike at Citation Boulevard through Coldstream and Maine Chance farms to the Horse Park before the equestrian games. A site plan will be completed by January and construction will begin next summer. In later years, the trail will be completed in and around existing streets downtown to Cheapside.  For more information about the trail, go to: http://legacycenter.ning.com

(Click on photos to enlarge and see captions.)

Something exciting is about to happen along the Newtown Pike corridor between downtown and the Kentucky Horse Park.

It will happen in nearby fields and just over the hills. Along Cane Run Creek. Up through the Lexmark campus and Coldstream Park, across the University of Kentucky’s Maine Chance Farm and past the Vulcan limestone quarry and Spindletop Farm.

In the 700 days left before the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, the city of Lexington will build a basic version of the Legacy Trail, a nine-mile bicycle and pedestrian path that is a key piece of the city’s Greenway Master Plan.

What will the Legacy Trail be? Planners see it as a human connection between urban and rural Lexington, a place for recreation, art and education. But they really want to know what you want the trail to be.

This week, a series of public meetings are being held with “stakeholders” — more than 300 nearby property owners, neighborhood groups, community and arts organizations.

Beginning at 8:45 a.m. Saturday, there will be a public event called “Party on the Trail” at Coldstream Park to start publicizing the route and to ask for suggestions about what amenities should be developed around it.

“It has got to be more than a ribbon of asphalt,” said Steve Austin, director of the Bluegrass Community Foundation’s Legacy Center. “It’s got to be a story about who we were, and what this place was and is. It’s a story about where we’re going to go and who we’re going to become in the 21st century.”

The idea of a trail from downtown to the Horse Park has been batted around for years. David Mohney, a UK architecture professor, had noted that much of the property between the two was in very few hands. The major landholders are Eastern State Hospital (soon to become the Bluegrass Community and Technical College campus), Lexmark, the University of Kentucky and Vulcan Materials.

Commerce Lexington’s 2007 trip to Boulder, Colo., showed local leaders how important bicycle and pedestrian trails could be to improving a community’s health and quality of life. Mayor Jim Newberry made the Legacy Trail a priority. Activist Marnie Holoubek, Urban County Councilman Jay McChord, UK Agriculture Dean Scott Smith and others started making things happen.

Keith Lovan of the city engineering department is overseeing the project. And its unofficial cheerleader is the Legacy Center, which is using money from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and other sources to see that the trail and an East End neighborhood revitalization project are accomplished as legacies of the 2010 Equestrian Games.

So far, more than $3 million has been raised to begin trail construction between the Horse Park and the intersection of Citation Boulevard and Newtown Pike. Initially, at least, much of the rest of the trail into town will run on existing pavement.

Austin took me on a tour of the route earlier this week. Several of us plan to ride it on bicycles before the party Saturday morning — if it isn’t raining too hard.

The Legacy Trail would begin downtown at Cheapside Park, go west on Second Street to Jefferson Street and north through what is now the Eastern State property to the Northside YMCA on Loudon Avenue.

Austin said planners are working with Lexmark on a formal agreement to have the trail go through its campus. “Lexmark has been a good partner so far,” he said.

Lexmark’s property holds one of two keys to the trail’s success: a private bridge that crosses New Circle Road. After crossing the bridge, the trail would run through Lexmark property along Cane Run Creek and other property near Newtown Pike to the intersection with Citation Boulevard.

Eventually, planners hope to build a bridge across Newtown Pike so the trail can continue seamlessly through the Coldstream campus and city park, which would have additional trail loops.

Once the trail leaves Coldstream Park and goes onto Maine Chance Farm, it meets another obscure piece of infrastructure that has been a godsend to trail planners: a small box tunnel under Interstate 75 that connects to the north end of the farm and the Spindletop property. The trail would probably enter the Horse Park at the campground.

Eventually, planners hope to connect the Legacy Trail to other trails and to the proposed Isaac Murphy Park in the East End neighborhood. McChord would like to see it go south from downtown, all the way through Jessamine County to the Kentucky River. To the west of downtown, Van Meter Pettit is planning the Town Branch Trail through the proposed Lexington Distillery District, another potential connection.

Linking Lexington’s urban and rural neighborhoods in ways that don’t require motor vehicles would be good for our health and sense of community. It also could help us and our visitors learn more about Lexington — and not just the usual history lessons from the 18th and 19th centuries.

More than 1,000 years ago, Fayette County was home to the Adena people, who left behind a huge mound of earth not far from the Horse Park. “Could we tell the story through landscape architecture and earthwork?” Austin wondered. “Could we tell the story of the pre-settlement environment — what trees and grasses were here?”

Austin also would like the trail to have kiosks explaining more recent history, such as how Lexmark’s forerunner, IBM, led an economic shift toward manufacturing in Lexington in the 1950s at the campus that gave the world Courier typeface and the Selectric typewriter ball.

Who knows what you might be able to learn about your city someday, simply by lacing up your shoes or climbing on a bicycle.

If you live in Lexington, you don’t need to wait until the Nov. 4 election to have your say about the future.  There are several opportunities this week to comment on three development projects that could have a big effect on our city’s future.

On Tuesday, in the Urban County Council chambers, there will be public hearings on proposals to use tax-increment financing (TIF) to support two private developments.

At 6 p.m., the public is invited to comment on plans by a group that wants to turn a long-neglected section of Manchester Street into the Lexington Distillery District, a multi-use and entertainment area.

I think the Distillery District is a visionary project that has a lot of potential to improve downtown.  It is a great example of what the state’s TIF law was designed to do. You can read some of what I have written about the project by clicking here and here.  See the project’s own Web site here.

At 7 p.m., the public is invited to comment on TIF projects related to the Webb Companies’ proposed CentrePointe development on the block bounded by Main, Vine, Upper and Limestone streets.

If you follow this blog and my column in the Herald-Leader, you know I don’t think much of CentrePointe or the TIF projects attached to it.  If you want to know why, click “CentrePointe” in the categories list at right. Click here to see CentrePointe’s Web site.

A different kind of project with a lot of potential to improve Lexington is the Legacy Trail, a nine-mile pedestrian and bicycle trail from downtown to the Kentucky Horse Park.

Organizers plan a series of information and listening sessions Thursday and Friday with area “stakeholders” and a party Saturday morning at Coldstream Park to gather comments and suggestions from the general public.  There also will be an information booth at Thursday Night Live at Cheapside.

I’ll be writing more about the Legacy Trail project later this week.  Click here for the Legacy Trail’s Web site, which has more information about the public event Saturday.