The Bluegrass and Beyond

In case you missed them, the Herald-Leader carried two excellent op-ed columns Sunday and Monday from two of Lexington’s most knowledgeable and passionate advocates for smart growth and preservation of what’s special in the Bluegrass.

Here’s the Sunday piece by Knox van Nagell, executive director of The Fayette Alliance.

Here’s the Monday piece by Hayward Wilkirson, who was a founding board member of Preserve Lexington, which last year opposed destruction of a historic block that’s now a downtown meadow.

It takes a pretty good seminar to keep me inside on a warm, sunny Saturday when I could be out biking. But Planning for Livability and Sustainability: Lessons of the Vancouver Achievement for Lexington and the Bluegrass was fascinating.

The seminar today at the University of Kentucky was organized by UK professors Ernest Yanarella and Richard Levine. It was a followup to a similar seminar at the Kentucky Horse Park in 2007.

About 40 people attended, including Vice Mayor Jim Gray, Urban County Council member Diane Lawless and David Mohney, chairman of the Downtown Development Authority. I wish some others from council, the city planning staff and Commerce Lexington whose name tags I saw on the registration table had been able to come.

Ian Smith, Vancouver’s former senior planner and now project director for the 2010 Olympic Village, gave a terrific presentation about how his city has in just the past two or three decades transformed itself by bringing many segments of the community together around the goals of making Vancouver a model for urban livability and environmental sustainability.

Early next week, I’ll write more about that, as well as about the presentation by Mark Roseland, director of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver. He talked about what that university is doing, and the role universities can play in helping a city and region improve its environment and economy.

But here was an interesting sidebar from today’s session:

Gray, who has been critical of the Downtown Development Authority for supporting the secretive development of the controversial CentrePointe project, said during a discussion that Lexington’s council members and the mayor need more help and leadership from senior planning staff members to make good policy decisions.

“We don’t have the level of competence that our city deserves in these roles,” Gray said. He added that Lexington government needs a change of political culture to allow senior staff members to feel empowered to seek out innovative ideas and help lead policymakers and the public toward good solutions.

That brought a sharp response from Mohney, who in addition to being the DDA chairman is a UK College of Design professor and former dean who has worked for years to involve students in helping Lexington do a better job of urban planning.

“It’s a tough town to make this work,” Mohney said. “It’s going to take time.” (quote corrected from initial post)

Lawless jumped in, complaining that the city’s bureaucracy is too fragmented. “It’s often like a shotgun, with each pellet being powered by a different division,” she said. “We need an urban planner who has that over-arching vision.”

Lawless said the result is a slow decision-making process where each interest group works with a different part of city government, but there’s too little coordination, leadership or vision. To help with that, she is pushing to have 16 recommendations from the lengthy Downtown Master Plan process finally adopted into  law.

Mohney noted that Lexington was at the forefront of American urban planning in 1958 when it created a growth boundary to protect Bluegrass horse farms. “The problem is we did nothing after that to redefine our growth strategy,” he said.

Lawless said this is a good time to do that, noting that the current mayor and council seem to have the political will to address tough, long-neglected growth issues. “The only way it’s going to happen is for us to roll up our sleeves and do something about it,” she said. “Now is the time.”

Soon, it was time for Roseland to begin his presentation. But the discussion continued for a few minutes on Twitter, with Gray, Mohney and Lawless — along with me and local bloggers Eric Patrick Marr and Taylor Shelton — typing away on their BlackBerrys.

Thanks to that social media platform, several hundred people could follow that conversation. It even prompted one of them — Rob Morris, owner of Lowell’s Toyota repair shop downtown and a budding blogger — to leave work and come over to listen to the rest of the seminar.

Like many journalists, I’ve always dreamed of writing the great American novel.

I have an idea for one. I even have a title: All That Glitters.

Here’s the plot: A real estate developer announces plans to build a massive tower in the center of town. He touts it as an economic boon. He calls it DazzlePointe, with the extra “e” on the end to add some class.

Some of this developer’s previous projects have been successful; others haven’t been. For various reasons, some people in town don’t trust him. But most of the city’s powers that be are, well, dazzled by his proposal.

Think of it as The Music Man without the music.

The developer has been secretly working on DazzlePointe for a couple of years. But when he unveils the renderings, they show a generic tower that looks as if it was designed in a couple of weeks.

The developer’s business plan is suspect. It’s straight out of the fast-buck days of a real estate bubble that’s getting ready to pop: A luxury hotel, nearly 100 million-dollar condos, upscale shops and restaurants.

Where’s the money for DazzlePointe coming from? It’s all cash, the developer says, but it’s coming from a foreign investor whose identity he can’t disclose.

The developer says he needs government help, in the form of tax-increment financing, to make the project truly special. Unless, that is, people want to ask too many questions; then he can build it on his own, but it will be much less special.

The money is in place, the developer says. He’s ready to go. Except for one thing: The block contains some very old buildings that his silent partner has let crumble for years while city officials looked the other way.

Many good architects say some of the old buildings are special. They say they could be incorporated into a beautiful contemporary structure that would be better for the city and still accomplish the developer’s financial goals. But the developer scoffs. The old buildings must go! City officials snap to attention, and the bulldozers roll in.

With the DazzlePointe site now cleared and ready for construction, everyone waits. And waits. Months go by. Then, city officials are told that the mysterious investor died. Months ago. Without leaving a will. But don’t worry, the developer says. Everything will be fine.

How will the novel end? I’ve thought about several possibilities.

The developer might find the money and build his tower, only to see it fail within a few years (perhaps after he has sold it and pocketed a handsome fee). The real estate bubble has burst, taking much of the economy with it. The tower’s business plan makes less and less sense with each passing day.

Another ending could be that the developer doesn’t really have the money to build DazzlePointe. But now, with the block cleared, he and his partner have more flexibility to build something else there. Except for the loss of the old buildings, things work out fine, because the new project makes more long-term sense than DazzlePointe ever did.

Of course, a third ending could be that DazzlePointe is built and is a long-term success, defying all of the skeptics — and all of the nation’s economic trends. But it has been years since I read many fairy tales, so I doubt I could write a good fairy-tale ending.

The part of this plot where I’m stuck isn’t the end; it’s the middle. I’m to the point where the DazzlePointe site is a big hole, the mysterious investor is dead and nothing seems to be happening.

How do the powers that be react? Do they continue taking everything the developer says as gospel? Or do they finally begin asking tough questions and demanding answers?

Here are some of the questions they might ask: When did the mysterious investor die? When did the developer find out? How long did he know it before telling government officials? Was it before the block was cleared? Was it before application for tax-increment financing was made or approved? Are there legal issues here that authorities should investigate?

As I said, this is the part of the novel where I’m stuck. How the powers that be react at this point could have a big effect on how the end of this story is written.

On second thought, maybe I should just stick to journalism. I probably wouldn’t make a good novelist. After all, this plot is so implausible, who would ever believe it?