The Bluegrass and Beyond

We learned a lot about Madison, but we also learned a lot about Lexington, each other and maybe ourselves.

About 260 Central Kentuckians spent three days last week on Commerce Lexington’s 70th annual Leadership Visit. Like many others I spoke with, I left Wisconsin’s capital city thinking the same thing I did last May when we left Austin, Texas.

Metro Lexington is a more beautiful place, with better year-round weather, than either of those cities. So why do they rank higher on national surveys of quality of life and economic vitality?

It’s not about the place so much as the attitudes of the people who live there.

Rebecca Ryan, a Madison-based consultant hired by Commerce Lexington to speak, succinctly described the challenge for any city that wants to succeed in the future: “How do we build a place that the next generation will be homesick for?”

Madison, like Austin, is a national magnet for next-generation talent. Lexington, by comparison, attracts less of it — and often has trouble keeping home-grown talent.

Lexington is a great place, and it is doing a lot of things right. As many people pointed out, it has made enormous progress, especially in the past few years.

But this is the real question: Are the cities Lexington competes with for talent making more progress?

Lexingtonians like to avoid controversy, and they can be polite to a fault. But those who went to Madison had some frank discussions about the civic traits that often can get in the way of progress in Lexington.

Like other Kentuckians, we are quick to criticize, find fault and run ourselves down. We often don’t recognize the good things about Lexington, or take personal responsibility for helping to solve problems. We like to talk and study but are slow to act. We don’t like change. We listen to outsiders, but ignore innovative people among us.

We don’t integrate our universities into the rest of the community as well as Madison and Austin do. We don’t value education — or educated people — as much as those cities do. We won’t embrace and celebrate our creative entrepreneurs as much as those cities do.

For example, while the Commerce Lexington group was in Madison, Alltech had 1,200 people from more than 70 countries in Lexington for a symposium on sustainable agriculture. Alltech is one of Kentucky’s most innovative companies, yet the only things most people here know about it are that it makes Kentucky Ale and is sponsoring the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.

Next year’s Commerce Lexington trip will be a first: a visit to Pittsburgh in conjunction with Greater Louisville Inc. The trip’s focus will be regional cooperation.

While everyone agreed that is a great idea, many also thought another approach is needed.

“It’s time to take a trip to Lexington to see all the things that we are doing,” said Urban County Councilman Jay McChord.

He also said different segments of the community should mix it up more: “We should create salad bowls, rather than salad bars where everything is kept separate.”

Some suggested retreats to regional assets such as Berea and Centre colleges, or a meeting in Lexington to follow up on ideas from past city visits and measure progress. Others suggested that Commerce Lexington promote local speaking opportunities for Lexington’s brightest minds in business and academia.

During the visit, Madison leaders spoke about their city’s environmental leadership and emerging technology companies. They talked about strong neighborhoods and citizen engagement. They discussed the value people there place on education and high-level academic research that will create the jobs of the future.

“This community is focused on solving problems,” said Police Chief Noble Wray.

One message came through loud and clear: It’s not about the place so much as the attitudes of the people who live there.

Lexington must do more to leverage its “social capital.” All of it.

Cities such as Madison and Austin are more open to people who are different. They value diversity and strive for inclusion. They are, the consultant Ryan said, places where “what’s your idea is more important than who’s your daddy.”

It was a point that had many of the Lexingtonians shaking their heads in agreement — especially the 20- and 30-somethings who kept saying, in so many words: Give us more reasons to stay in Lexington. Please.

Despite significant improvement in recent years, Lexington remains divided by race and class. Too many aspects of community life are as starkly black or white as the plank fences that surround our horse farms.

For example, many Lexingtonians do not welcome Latinos, even though the local economy would collapse without them. Gays and lesbians often feel shunned. Young people of all races complain they are not valued — or listened to.

How many white people attend the annual Roots & Heritage Festival? How many blacks and whites attend Festival Latino?

Dr. Michael Karpf, who came from Los Angeles in 2003 to become the University of Kentucky’s executive vice president for health affairs, said Lexington is more diverse than many people realize, but it doesn’t celebrate its diversity.

Karpf spends as much time as anyone trying to attract top talent to Lexington. He said the city must work harder to overcome stereotypes many outsiders have about Kentucky.

“We’ve got a bad history when it comes to diversity,” Mayor Jim Newberry said in his speech at the end of the trip. “It’s better. But I full well appreciate the fact we’ve got a lot of work that remains to be done.”

It is valuable to look to other successful cities for ideas and inspiration. But if Lexingtonians really want to compete for top talent, we also must look in the mirror.

Commerce Lexington will partner with Greater Louisville Inc. to do a joint leadership visit next year to Pittsburgh, officials announced Wednesday at the end of the trip to Madison.

They said it would be a big step toward greater regional cooperation between Kentucky’s two largest cities.

It will be the first time in the 70-year history of Lexington’s leadership visit that the city has done a joint trip with Louisville.

Pittsburgh is a great destination for such a visit, because the city has a great recent history of regional cooperation, with 30 counties in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio working closely together on common issues, Commerce Lexington officials said.

“If they can do that, we certainly ought to bridge the divide between Louisville and Lexington,” said Kim Menke of Toyota. “As we come up with things that are good for the commonwealth we can speak with one voice.”

Menke, who will be Commerce Lexington’s 2010 chair, made the announcement along with this year’s chair, Woodford Webb.

The Madison trip attracted 260 people from central Kentucky. Greater Louisville Inc.’s annual leadership visit has about 125 people attendees, so next year’s trip could have a big group. Menke said UK and the University of Louisville will be important partners with the two chambers of commerce in making the trip succeed.

After the announcement was made, Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson made some remarks via video.

“Not only can we learn about Pittsburgh, but more importantly we can learn from each other,” Abramson said. “We have more in common than what separates us.”

Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry joked: “For the first time, I can say ‘I love Louisville.’”

On the second night of each year’s Commerce Lexington trip, central Kentucky banks sponsor a big dinner.

This year’s event was held Tuesday night at the new  Overture Center for the Arts, an impressive $205 million downtown facility that was a gift to the city from Madison businessman W. Jerome Frautsch.

The center includes performance space, a contemporary art museum and this fabulous room where the Lexington visitors dined.

Click each photo to enlarge.

Madison is a “green” city, and for any of the Commerce Lexington visitors who didn’t believe it, there was a pair of green-colored glasses and a copy of the booklet Green Living for Dummies at their seat.

Seriously, Madison, WI, has long been a pioneer among American cities in looking for ways to improve environmental sustainability. It was among the first cities with curbside recycling, and energy conservation has always been big — thanks to high power costs and below-zero winters.

Other cities and businesses are following Madison’s examples, not just because it’s a good thing to do, but because it makes economic sense and will make even more sense in the future as energy prices rise and the world grapples with increasingly complex environmental issues and depletion of fossil fuels.

“The environmental movement is not a trend,” said Sonya Newenhouse, president of Madison Environmental Group. “It’s like the civil rights movement or the women’s movement.”

Newenhouse was an interesting example not only of Madison’s focus on sustainability, but how its quality of life attracts and retains talented people who build its economic future.

There’s an often-told joke here that Madison’s cab drivers all have PhDs because they came here to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, didn’t want to leave but couldn’t find jobs.

When Newenhouse finished her PhD at the university and couldn’t find a job doing what she wanted to do — environmental sustainability consulting — she started her own firm. It has grown substantially, and now she has started a second company, too.

“I was one of those PhD students who never left,” she said. “I got into the transportation business, although not cab-driving.”

Newenhouse’s firm helps companies become more environmentally friendly and energy efficient — and save money. Among its many services is developing parking and commuting plans.

Her firm also helps companies that are demolishing buildings figure out how to minimize waste. In Madison, 40 percent of landfill waste is from construction and demolition, and the city has laws that require as much as possible to be recycled so the landfills don’t fill up so fast.

A second company she started, Community Car, rents cars by the hour to people who occasionally need a car but don’t want the cost — or environmental impact — of driving one more than they really need.

Jeanne Hoffman, Madison’s sustainability coordinator, said many of the city’s environmental efforts are done in partnership with local companies. “The business community cooperates greatly with the city and with non-profits,” she said.

Among the initiatives are incentives to build environmentally friendly LEED-certified buildings and use sustainable energy. The city’s fire stations have solar thermal systems. There’s a growing interest here in developing wind power.

There are many rebates and tax incentives for installing solar panels to generate power, which people and companies can sell back to the local electric utility for a higher price than electricity they buy.

“It’s a wildly popular program,” Hoffman said. “Businesses had better start thinking about this because it’s going to affect their bottom line.”

Click on images to enlarge.

The Commerce Lexington trip began with several optional tours — Arts & Culture, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recreation, “green” Madison and downtown development.

I took the downtown development tour, which focused on an impressive new mixed-use project called University Square. It is a $180 million public-private partnership between a developer and the university that is built beside campus on a 3.4-acre site that had been a 1970s-era shopping center.

The most striking thing about University Square, which has won some design awards, is the clean, open contemporary architecture. One interesting feature is a roof garden on the fourth floor, with patio areas for residents and students and green plantings in trays around the roof.

About one-fourth of the space is planned for retail, although the poor economy has slowed that piece of the project. The university has one-fourth of the space, which is used for student services offices and space for student activities.

Half the building is a private development of upscale student apartments — 356 units that can hold 800 students. The apartments are quite nice — and not cheap. They rent for $1,000 per bedroom (units have one, two or three bedrooms).  Many students rent two-to-a-bedroom to save money.

At 1.1 million square feet, it is the largest mixed-use project ever done in Madison.

About $3 million in tax-increment financing was used for the enclosed parking areas, and the university invested about $57 million. The rest is private money, said Susan Springman, who works for the developer, Executive Management Inc.

The developer approached the university about the project in 1996. Construction began in 2006 and the building has been opening in phases over the past nine months. Springman said one thing that made the project possible was a close working relationship with the city.

This is one of the nicer of many new student housing apartment projects. Local officials say it has helped move students out of older homes in the neighborhoods surrounding the university, allowing families to start moving back into those and making the neighborhoods more stable.

About 260 Lexington area business, civic and government leaders were boarding two chartered jets early this morning for Commerce Lexington’s 70th annual leadership visit. This year’s destination: Madison, Wis.

The chamber of commerce visits a different city each year to see what progressive things it is doing and how some of those ideas might be used to improve Lexington. It’s also a great three-day networking opportunity for leaders in many spheres of Lexington life who might not otherwise get to know each other.

This year’s trip includes the mayors of Lexington, Richmond and Versailles, as well as Lexington’s vice mayor and several Urban County Council members, the police chief and school superintendent.

This is Commerce Lexington’s second visit to Madison; the first was in 1997. Last year, the trip went to Austin, Texas, and the year before, Boulder, Colo.

I’ll try to post updates here several times a day Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Then, I’ll follow up with a column in Friday’s Herald-Leader about lessons learned from the trip.

If you’re on Twitter, I’ll also be posting items at www.twitter.com/tomeblen.  Also check out Commerce Lexington’s Web site.

Commerce Lexington’s 70th annual Leadership Visit next year will be to Madison, Wis.

Woodford Webb, Commerce Lexington’s chair-elect for 2009, said Madison has changed a lot since the chamber trip there 11 years ago.

Madison has may things Lexington would like to have. It has 160 biotech companies, a dynamic downtown, low business taxes, good environmental protection efforts and a highly educated population. The city ranks high on national lists of places to live and raise a family.