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ONE Lexington's survivor-led grant drew five applications and produced no award. The procurement file shows the solicitation went out over the city's standard vendor list — reaching Tetra Tech, Grainger and out-of-state consultancies — and the contract required $1 million liability policies, workers' compensation and uncapped indemnification before a dollar reached a family.
Devine Carama called the seven unrelated shootings that wounded nine people over four days unprecedented for Lexington — but said ONE Lexington won't abandon a strategy that has driven gun violence down four years running.
An Afghan refugee who drove for Lyft spent seven days in jail and ten months under felony indictment — including a kidnapping count carrying up to 20 years — for an assault that Lyft’s own records showed he could not have committed, according to a federal civil-rights lawsuit filed July 20 against Lexington police Detective Franklin Epley and the urban county government. The criminal case was quietly dismissed a year ago. The arrest made television news; the dismissal and the lawsuit never did, until now.
For 107 years Lexington's thoroughbreds ran at the Kentucky Association course on Race Street — the ground that launched Isaac Murphy and gave America its oldest stakes race. Then the Depression killed it, a housing project rose on its grave, and a handful of horsemen gambled everything on a non-profit called Keeneland.
In about 48 hours, federal agents in Lexington charged three men with drug trafficking in separate cases — headlined by roughly 51 pounds of methamphetamine, a kilo press and an AR-style rifle seized from Tararey Taylor. The other two: a man found asleep at the wheel with meth and fentanyl at New Circle Road, and a cocaine load shipped from the Texas border in a Lego box. All three were charged by complaint; none has been convicted.
Jonathan Grady Vago pleaded guilty Wednesday to falsifying a report about the June 2025 beating of an inmate at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington — the second guard convicted in the cover-up. The officer who threw the punches, Ryan Carnahan, pleaded guilty in May. A third officer who entered the cell has not been charged.
Told that Frankfort had refused to issue $30 million for CentrePointe's parking garage, Lexington's council stood up a brand-new bonding conduit with the Kentucky League of Cities and the city of Midway — and approved it 15-0, after bond counsel promised the city would bear no repayment risk. The Lexington Times pulled the official minutes, the Granicus video and the municipal-bond record: no CentrePointe bond was ever sold. The garage was built with private money. But the TIF that was supposed to repay bondholders lives on, routing the district's tax increment to the developer's parking company instead. The complete minutes file is posted with this article.
The Kentucky Department of Revenue has produced the last five missing years of the Red Mile TIF's state ledger — on the exact day it promised. The decade's total is public for the first time: $3,197,344 paid from 2015 through 2024, after state auditors spent ten years correcting Lexington's math, striking gamblers' income taxes from the subsidy request, and fielding hurry-up inquiries from the state's own economic-development cabinet on the track's behalf. The complete three-production records file is posted with this article.
The Urban County Council approved a 90-day unpaid suspension for Officer Caleb Croney over a confrontation with a Waffle House security guard — his third formal complaint since 2020 — along with written reprimands for a second police officer and a fire captain, at its June 18 meeting.
Lexington is praised as the transparent one on police surveillance — it posts a map of its 125 license-plate readers. But the department's own audits show a network of more than 2,000 enrolled cameras it can reach, and the audits never check who outside LPD taps in.
A Lexington officer told a driver he rear-ended that she 'stopped so quick.' His body camera showed him texting through the impact. He resigned May 18 — days before the chief could act on a termination recommendation.
On the night Fayette’s school board locked in four more years of Demetrus Liggins, a board member lectured skeptical parents that “sometimes transparency is a choice.” Eighteen months of receipts later, we know whose choice it was.
Lexington’s single biggest source of local political money is a horse farm. Its growth boundary — the nation’s first, drawn in 1958 — is what that money is defending. A documented, bilateral look at the homebuilders and the horse farms fighting over where to draw the line, traced dollar by dollar through the campaign-finance reports.
The same low ground along Wolf Run that flooded out Kilrush Drive in June 1992 was bought up, demolished and left as a mowed city greenway for fifteen years — until a permaculturist asked to plant it. How a drowned Lexington street became Kentucky’s biggest food forest.
In June, a Lexington Times investigation reported that the public had no way to learn what the Red Mile's 16-year-old tax subsidy had actually paid out — the figure lived only behind open-records law. The Kentucky Department of Revenue has now produced it: $2.16 million in state increment released from 2020 through 2024, with the state rejecting the city's requested amount in nearly every year, and two agencies still declining to answer the question that decides what the whole deal is worth.
As Kentucky ratchets its income tax down — 5 percent to 4 percent, and now 3.5 percent — a provision first written into the 2023 tax bill and quietly extended twice since recalculates the withholding inside older tax-increment-financing districts as if the rate were still 5 percent. The effect: the cut reaches ordinary taxpayers but not the subsidized projects. The Red Mile's own state increment letters show the adjustment adding more than $120,000 in a single year — enough to push the state's check above what the city even asked for.
The Lexington Times launches KREF Watch (krefwatch.com) and KLEC Watch (klecwatch.com): free, searchable databases covering $466M in Kentucky campaign contributions since 2016 and $223M in Frankfort lobbying since 2015 — cross-linked, open-source, and refreshed weekly.
Lexington spent a week in January sure the snow response would be on the May ballot. We joined the city’s plow GPS log to precinct returns from 2022, 2024 and 2026 to test it. The plows have an alibi — and the precinct map shows what actually moved: the most Democratic, most heavily Black precincts broke hardest from Gorton toward Raquel Carter, who would be the first Black woman to hold the office.
The Lexington Times analyzed all 18,969 residential transfers recorded in Fayette County since January 2024. LLCs took one of every eight homes sold on the open market and two of every five under $150,000 — plus 509 more in unreported bulk deals worth $96.7 million. Behind the shells: Ball Homes’ 214-home rental arm, a two-man partnership operating from a Hamburg mailbox, and a Manhattan sale-leaseback company buying through a New Hampshire PO box.
In 24 hours, Lexington’s council passed a $546 million budget and froze data-center development with surprise walk-on motions — the mayor’s endorsement arrived after the vote — while the school board and Superintendent Demetrus Liggins issued contradicting statements about whether he resigned. Commentary on what the speed says about civic process.
Eastern Kentucky's federal court logged zero immigration-detention habeas cases in 2024. It has seen 147 in the first five months of 2026 — nearly all from one Covington jail. Two 2025 legal changes explain the surge, and the constitutional stakes trace back to Abraham Lincoln.
On a silent 15-0 vote, the Urban County Council dissolved the citizen commission that vetted how Lexington spends ~$30 million in opioid-settlement money — six days after the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy urged counties to create exactly such bodies. The job now falls to a mayoral committee that answers to no ordinance, with ~$21 million still to come.
On a nine-day clock to beat a July 1 state deadline, the Urban County Council unanimously expanded a 16-year-old tax subsidy for the historic harness track — with no debate and no resident at the microphone. A look at what is really in the deal, and what the law keeps hidden.
The Civic Assembly’s three charter changes head to a June 18 council vote with broad support. Behind them stands D.I.R.E.C.T., a group whose own literature argues the exercise should end in replacing elected council government — and whose answers, asked directly, are revealing.
The Glaze on Walt Gaffield, the volunteer Fayette County Neighborhood Council president whose years at the LFUCG podium run from the 2008 sewer cleanup to the fight over Frankfort's House Bill 443.
As a data-center gold rush sweeps Kentucky through NDA-shrouded deals and packed town halls, Lexington-Fayette is drafting one of the state’s most restrictive rules — a countywide ban on the largest data centers and a 1,000-foot buffer to keep the rest away from horse farms.
A council member opened Lexington’s new AI policy warning about data centers “across the commonwealth.” Nine days later the city’s own draft ban on them had a hearing — and the committee chair was the one who said so.
A 7-story, 260-bed proposal would raze six Woodland Triangle storefronts near UK — one of five student-housing projects remaking a near-campus mile. The real question is whether Lexington has any plan for the tide.
A developer answered a two-day-old zone change at the old Ramsey's corner with a 46-page book arguing the city “gave” them the building. Off-Beat reads the booklet against the file.
Lexington's draft data-center zoning got tighter at the May 21 Planning Commission work session, with a new 1,000-foot buffer between data centers and rural agricultural land outside the urban service area. The hearing has been pushed to June 11.
The Third Street Staff Union has had a written demands list since January 27, 2026 — four months before Pat Gerhard announced she was closing the shop. The Lexington Times is hosting the document. Its contents sort into four categories: existing labor law the employer hadn't been following, standard collective-bargaining asks, ambitious worker-cooperative-shaped governance, and two cultural demands that gave everyone an off-ramp.
An r/lexington post this week claimed a 'clown cemetery' lurks east of town, marking a circus the locals slaughtered in a cave after a rainstorm. The thread's own consensus: nobody from Lexington has ever heard of it. The Lexington Times archive, the LFUCG meeting record, the Kentucky Folklife Program index, the LFUCG historic-cemeteries inventory, and the KHS marker database all confirm: the cemetery isn't in the record. What is in the record — free, on Chronicling America, scanned a decade ago and rarely read — is the 1882 Sells Brothers circus wreck at Paint Lick, thirty miles down the rail line: three dead, a tiger loose in the dark, brakes blamed by the New York Times on the operator and by the county physician on the equipment.
An editor's notebook column from Lexington Times web editor Paul Oliva, in friendly reply to Kentucky Lantern editor-in-chief Linda Blackford's May 15 piece on AI in journalism — distinguishing the fabrication AI Blackford rightly fears from the data-wrangling AI her own policy endorses, and arguing that in Lexington in 2026 the choice is not AI summary or staff reporter, it is AI summary or nothing.
At the FY27 budget public-comment mic on May 14, the shop manager of Broke Spoke Community Bike Shop — wearing his employer's logo'd hoodie but identifying only as a District 10 resident — asked the Urban County Council to cut a $278,000 allocation to CASA of Lexington. His caseload-vs-assets math actually checks out. We read the 990s on both sides.
An editor's notebook column from Lexington Times web editor Paul Oliva on a story the Lexington Herald-Leader has the precedent, the source list, and the institutional knowledge to write — the $15,200 Goodman family bundle to Mayor Gorton on her 15-day pre-primary report — and so far has not.
Long before the tree canopy committee, the Kilrush Food Forest, or any city contracts, Nachie Braga showed up to the Water Quality Fees Board on his own time. The Glaze on Geomancer's founder.
Mayor Linda Gorton received $17,200 from a single May 4 deposit anchored by eight Goodman and Rosenstein family checks — more than she had raised in any month before April. Vice Mayor Dan Wu, whom the same family backed in 2022, got nothing from the Goodmans this cycle, with his $7,450 in new money instead coming from a Walker Properties max-out and developer-and-builder names. Carter still leads the mayoral money race two-to-one.
How a closed Mercantile in City Center, a stranded liquor license, and one word in Article 8-1 became a unanimous recommendation at the May 7 LFUCG Planning Commission Zoning Subcommittee — and the structural objection nobody on the dais took up.
The Glaze profiles Bruce Simpson, a 38-year Lexington land-use attorney who turns his procedural toolkit toward neighborhoods and stigmatized uses — culminating in a Board of Adjustment hearing where he disclosed his own involuntary commitment at Eastern State Hospital.
The Glaze profiles Charlie Martin, the career LFUCG civil engineer who has quietly executed the EPA sanitary sewer consent decree for eighteen years — 117 projects, $19.6M Mint Lane vote, federal deadline extended to 2030, and the city's streets unmarked by sewage the whole way through.
The Department of War's first PURSUE drop posts 161 declassified UAP records: 50+ active-military mission reports from CENTCOM and INDOPACOM, 24 FBI photo evidence frames from the western U.S., a marquee slide deck called Western US Event in which seven federal law enforcement agents describe an Eye-of-Sauron orb and a spotlight beam that briefly stopped 50 yards out on nothing, plus repackaged Apollo transcripts and old State Department cables. We read the files.
The Glaze, a new Lexington Times column on quiet civic workhorses, opens with CivicLex founder Richard Young, whose three-year campaign for participatory democracy culminated in Lexington's first Civic Assembly and three proposed charter amendments now headed for the November ballot.