# In 2014, Lexington voted 15-0 to bond CentrePointe's garage with zero city liability. The bonds were never issued. The tax diversion happened anyway. **Published:** 2026-07-16T15:08:35.000Z **Source:** [The Lexington Times](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/red-mile-tif-ten-year-ledger) **AI-generated:** yes (claude-fable-5) **Canonical:** https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/centrepointe-bonds-that-never-were **License:** [CC BY-ND 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/) — You may republish this article, in full and unaltered, for free — including commercially — with credit to The Lexington Times and a link to the original. _The Lexington Times recently completed searchable machine transcripts of Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government council and committee meetings from 2007 through 2026, browsable at [meetings.lexingtonky.news](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news). This article is part of a new series drawing on that archive — alongside official minutes and other primary records — to document the significant issues in Lexington’s civic history: how they were argued, how they were decided, and what happened after. This installment was produced by the Times’ AI newsroom — an editor agent coordinating three research agents (records verification, wider context, and internal data), with every load-bearing claim rebuilt from primary documents and the finished draft put through three rounds of adversarial fact-checking. Full disclosure at the end of the article._ At 3:00 p.m. on September 16, 2014, Lexington’s Urban County Council convened a special session with one item on the docket: rescuing the financing for the parking garage under CentrePointe, the development whose demolished block had sat at the center of downtown — first as a fenced field, then as an open pit — for six years. Near the end of the discussion, at-large Council Member Steve Kay asked the question the whole room had been circling. It is hard for ordinary citizens to follow complex financing deals, he said, but there is one thing they always want to know: “should the project not be successful, who then is responsible for paying off the bonds?” Roger Peterman, the Dinsmore & Shohl bond attorney at the table, walked him through it. The bonds would be secured only by the development district’s pledged tax-increment revenues. Kay restated it to be sure: “should that risk turn out to be a bad idea, it’s the bondholders themselves who will suffer a loss.” “Correct,” Peterman said.  (At-large Council Member Steve Kay asks who pays if the project fails, September 16, 2014. Bond counsel’s answer: the bondholders. (LexTV via Granicus, clip 3459)) Temple Juett, general counsel of the Kentucky League of Cities, had already made the same promise from the podium, pointing the council to the resolution’s own text: “it’s very clear in Section 5 of the resolution … It does not place any financial liability on the city of Lexington for the repayment of these bonds.” The council passed both items — an ordinance amending the development-area agreements, and a resolution authorizing a brand-new entity called the Kentucky Bond Development Corporation to issue bonds “payable from TIF Revenue” for the garage — by identical 15-0 roll calls. The meeting adjourned at 3:38 p.m. Council members were told an offering statement could be ready within a week and the bonds sold by mid-October. Twelve years later, The Lexington Times went looking for what happened to those bonds. The answer, confirmed by the developer’s own statements and by the federal repository of every municipal security in America: **they were never issued.** No offering was ever brought to market. A search of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s EMMA database returns no Kentucky security with “CentrePointe” or “Phoenix Park” in its description — nothing for the garage, ever. The garage got built anyway, with private money. The twist is what survived: the tax-increment district created to repay those never-issued bonds is alive today, one of nine active TIFs in Lexington — and under the deal’s master development agreement, the new tax revenue generated on the block flows not to bondholders, who do not exist, but to the developer’s own parking company.  (The special council meeting of September 16, 2014, during the roll call. Both CentrePointe bonding items passed 15-0. (LexTV via Granicus, clip 3459)) ## “A flawed process from the very beginning” The block bounded by Main, Vine, Upper and Limestone was demolished in the summer of 2008 — Morton’s Row, the music venue The Dame and the rest of a scruffy, beloved stretch of old downtown — on the strength of a March 2008 announcement by Dudley Webb of the Webb Companies: a $250 million, 35-story tower, the tallest in Lexington, with a luxury hotel and 77 condominiums. The public-money machinery started the same year. On September 18, 2008, with the developer’s attorney Darby Turner and Law Commissioner Logan Askew fielding questions, the council voted to direct preparation of a development plan for the “Phoenix Park/Courthouse Development Area” — the tax-increment district wrapped around the project. The vote was 10-5, and the names in the Nay column read strangely today: they include Jim Gray, then vice mayor, and Linda Gorton, then an at-large council member — the same two officials who, as mayor and vice mayor six years later, would preside over and move the approval of the 2014 bonding rescue.  (From the official minutes of September 18, 2008: the resolution directing preparation of the Phoenix Park/Courthouse development plan passes 10-5 — with future mayor Jim Gray and future vice mayor Linda Gorton among the five noes. (LFUCG council minutes)) Council Member Blues, one of the five, explained his vote on the floor that night in words that would get quoted for a decade: “My opposition to this TIF is that it’s a flawed process from the very beginning,” he said, and that the project was “antithetical … to the public amenities and to the downtown atmosphere that we want to create.” The district was established that fall by Ordinance No. 265-2008. Then the money vanished. In 2009 the Webbs disclosed that their financing had died with a never-named investor. At a May 5, 2009 work session, Dudley Webb stood at the public-comment podium for a prepared statement that ran long and hot: the Herald-Leader had targeted the project “for major stories some 292 times,” he said, and “blatant fabrications, four-letter words, and personal insults became the order of the day.” He insisted “we still believe a viable financing plan is in place.”  (Developer Dudley Webb reads a prepared statement to the council, May 5, 2009. (LexTV via Granicus, clip 895)) One line from that 2009 statement is worth holding up to the light of everything that followed: “this is a private business venture or privately owned property and there’s been no request for public dollars to be a part of this project.” The previous September, the council — with his own attorney at the lectern — had voted 10-5 to start building the TIF district around his block. The years in between belong to Lexington folklore: the fenced field of grass, the Jeanne Gang redesign hired in 2011 and gone by that October, the pit. Blasting for the foundation finally began in March 2014, roughly six years after demolition. By then the council had quietly executed the deal architecture — in December 2013 it approved, 14-0 with Ed Lane absent, a “conditional restoration agreement” with three developer entities whose names map the deal’s anatomy: Centrepointe Vertical, LLC; Fayette Land Co., LLC; and Centrepointe Parking Co., LLC. News reports at the time described its teeth: if garage work stopped for 60 straight days, the developers would have to restore the block to its pre-excavation state at their own expense, up to $4.4 million, secured by a mortgage on the land. ## Five weeks in 2014 The garage — three stories, roughly 700 spaces, underground — was the piece public money was supposed to build, through roughly $30 million in bonds repaid by the district’s tax increment. The original plan was for the state to issue them. On August 14, 2014, Cabinet for Economic Development Secretary Larry Hayes told Mayor Gray no, in a letter reported the same day: the city was the more appropriate issuer, and the state was not interested in “assuming costly obligations that it does not generally assume.” That evening’s council meeting had a resolution on the docket formally requesting the state issue the bonds. The council removed it from the docket, 13-1, Bill Farmer Jr. voting no and Shevawn Akers abstaining. The whole state-issuance plan was dead on arrival of one letter. Two weeks later, on August 28, Farmer asked the administration a remarkable question for year seven of a public-private partnership: had the developer actually filed a TIF application with the city? Finance Commissioner Bill O’Mara answered that it had been filed, and that staff had met the day before “to have the assumptions and some of the numbers … explained to us.” Farmer’s follow-up: the Herald-Leader had already filed an open-records request for it. “I think it would be preferable for the council to see that rather than read about it in the paper.” The rescue arrived on September 16 in the form of the Kentucky League of Cities, which proposed creating the Kentucky Bond Development Corporation — a nonprofit conduit issuer formed under Kentucky’s Interlocal Cooperation Act, which requires at least two cities. Lexington was one. The other was Midway, population about 1,700, whose council had scheduled a special 8 a.m. Friday meeting to consider it. KLC’s Juett was candid about the trigger: when the Herald-Leader reported the state’s refusal, “that immediately sparked a conversation in our office about how we might be able to help.”  (Kentucky League of Cities general counsel Temple Juett tells the council the bonds place no financial liability on the city, September 16, 2014. (LexTV via Granicus, clip 3459)) The transcript of that 38-minute meeting rewards a close read. Peterman told the council investors would demand projected revenues of “160 to 180 percent of anticipated debt service” before buying. He said the underwriter intended to underwrite the bonds — buy and resell them — rather than merely place them, “a much stronger commitment.” Asked by Vice Mayor Gorton whether anything could go awry, he answered: “I’ve been doing this too long to make any predictions about that.” Council members were told no state revenue would flow “until the $150 million has been expended” — the deal’s minimum-investment gate. Ed Lane thanked KLC for averting a crisis: construction was on hold in the middle of downtown, he said, and tenants “might not even be able to hang around any longer with any substantial delay.”  (From the official minutes of September 16, 2014: the resolution authorizing the Kentucky Bond Development Corporation to issue bonds “payable from TIF Revenue” for the CentrePointe garage passes 15-0. No such bond was ever issued. (LFUCG special-meeting minutes)) ## The bonds that never were The mid-October sale never happened. Neither did a November sale, or any sale. There was a contemporaneous observer who said the math never worked: Rob Morris, a Lexington business owner who tracked the project for years on his CivilMechanics blog, published an analysis in May 2015 arguing that under the developers’ own revenue projections a garage-bond buyer was “practically guaranteed to lose about half of their money.” Whatever the underwriter’s confidence in September, no offering statement ever surfaced. In August 2015 the city’s outside counsel, Mason Miller, announced an “agreement in principle” with an unnamed third party to develop the project; Webb, asked to elaborate, said, “We’re still in confidentiality agreements.” By spring 2016, with the block again idle, Webb’s company issued a statement blaming the city: the 2008 agreements, he said, obligated Lexington to issue the bonds itself — “the City would issue those bonds, but not guarantee them” — and after the city refused, “our consultants looked for a new party to issue the TIF bonds. That effort proved to be untimely.” The project’s financing, he said that May, was now “coming from private equity, private investors and private banks,” and the project was private “with no government money.” Private money finished it. Lexington’s Greer Companies joined the project in October 2017; the garage was completed that year; the development was renamed City Center in April 2018; Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse opened in April 2019 and the dual Marriott and Residence Inn hotels in January 2020. What opened is a fraction of what was promised in 2008 — a 12-story tower instead of 35 stories, roughly $200 million instead of $250 million announced (and far below the $393.9 million peak plan of 2013). The signature tower was never built. ## “No government money,” except the tax stream Here is where the 2014 meeting’s central promise deserves its audit. Was the city ever on the hook for the bonds? No — trivially no, because the bonds never existed. Nobody lost a dollar on CentrePointe garage bonds; there was never a bondholder to protect. On its own terms, Section 5 held. But the TIF district did not die with the bond plan. The Phoenix Park/Centrepointe district appears today on LFUCG’s official list of nine active TIFs. The amended master development agreement the council approved in that same 15-0 meeting governs where the district’s increment goes — and with no bond trustee in the chain, the new local and state tax revenue generated inside the district is paid to the developer’s garage entity, Centrepointe Parking Co., LLC, as pay-as-you-go reimbursement for the garage the developer says was built with private money. That entity did not die with the bond plan either: state and county records show it was renamed City Center Parking, LLC after the project’s rebrand — same organization number, registered agent Ralph D. Webb — and remains active and in good standing, its annual report current to last month. Danny Mayer, a Lexington writer who analyzed the deal documents in 2024, put the arrangement plainly: “nearly all local and state taxes generated within the CentrePointe TIF zone get paid to CentrePointe Parking Company, LLC.” By his accounting the project crossed its $150 million investment threshold in 2018, activating the stream, and the increment has run into the millions of dollars a year since. The increment’s engine is easy to see in the property rolls. Fayette PVA records pulled for this article show the block divided into five air-rights parcels — the garage, the offices, each hotel, and the penthouse condominiums — all held by project-affiliated City Center LLCs. Four of the five carry a combined $72.15 million in taxable value today (the condo parcel is assessed unit by unit on top of that), on a block whose baseline was set when it was a demolished field. The garage parcel’s deed history records a $35 million transaction in November 2017, as the private financing came together — typed by the PVA as a “real estate exchange,” with the parking company on both sides of the deed, rather than an arm’s-length sale.  (The CentrePointe TIF district as mapped by LFUCG’s GIS section in 2016: the single block bounded by Main, Vine, Upper and Limestone. (LFUCG)) What the public record does not show is the ledger — the year-by-year dollar amounts LFUCG has actually diverted to the parking company since 2018. Kentucky law does not require those payments to be published, the same gap this newspaper documented in the Red Mile TIF, whose [complete ten-year state ledger](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/red-mile-tif-ten-year-ledger) we obtained this month through the Open Records Act after two agency productions. The CentrePointe ledger is obtainable the same way, and it is the natural next installment of this series. ## The conduit outlived its cause One more irony closes the loop. The Kentucky Bond Development Corporation — the entity invented in a two-week scramble so CentrePointe’s garage could be bonded — never issued a dollar for CentrePointe. But it did not dissolve. In 2018 it issued roughly $208 million — $110.8 million in convention-facilities revenue bonds and about $97 million in transient-room-tax bonds — to finance the renovation of Rupp Arena and the Lexington Convention Center, now Central Bank Center. The bond machine built for the garage that went private ended up financing the city’s biggest civic construction project of the decade. Blues did not persuade his colleagues in 2008, and the 15 members of the 2014 council were unanimous where the 2008 council split 10-5. But eighteen years after the block came down, the scorecard reads: the tower never built, the bonds never issued, roughly sixteen project LLCs on the Secretary of State’s register — ten Centrepointe-branded shells now dark, the survivors renamed City Center — and the “no public dollars” project collecting the block’s tax increment through a parking company, under agreements most residents have never seen. “A flawed process from the very beginning” was one council member’s judgment in September 2008. The record since has not been kind to the other side of that vote. _The primary documents for this story — the official LFUCG council minutes of September 18, 2008, December 10, 2013, August 14, 2014 and the September 16, 2014 special meeting, plus the official TIF district map — are [posted with this article](/media/lfucg-meeting-archive/centrepointe/docs/), with a [download-everything zip](/media/lfucg-meeting-archive/centrepointe/docs/centrepointe-records.zip). Council quotes come from the meeting videos in our [LFUCG meeting archive](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news) (auto-transcribed; checked against the official minutes) — the September 16, 2014 special meeting is [clip 3459](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/3459). During verification we found at least four archive clips carrying incorrect dates in our own system; every council-meeting date in this article comes from the official minutes, and the archive bug has been flagged for correction._ ## Sources - [LFUCG official minutes — Special Council Meeting, Sept. 16, 2014 (both CentrePointe bonding items, 15-0 roll calls; hosted with this article)](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/media/lfucg-meeting-archive/centrepointe/docs/lfucg-special-meeting-minutes-2014-09-16.pdf) - [LFUCG official minutes — Council Meeting, Sept. 18, 2008 (resolution directing preparation of the Phoenix Park/Courthouse development plan, 10-5; hosted with this article)](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/media/lfucg-meeting-archive/centrepointe/docs/lfucg-council-minutes-2008-09-18.pdf) - [LFUCG official minutes — Council Meeting, Aug. 14, 2014 (KEDFA bond-request resolution removed from docket 13-1) and Council Meeting, Dec. 10, 2013 (Conditional Restoration Agreement, 14-0; hosted with this article)](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/media/lfucg-meeting-archive/centrepointe/docs/) - [Urban County Council Special Meeting, Sept. 16, 2014 — full video and transcript (LFUCG meeting archive, clip 3459; Juett, Peterman, Kay, Gorton, Lane and Beard quotes)](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/3459) - [Urban County Council Work Session, May 5, 2009 — Dudley Webb statement (LFUCG meeting archive, clip 895)](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/895) - [Urban County Council Meeting, Aug. 28, 2014 — Farmer/O'Mara exchange on the TIF application (LFUCG meeting archive, clip 3445)](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/3445) - [MSRB EMMA municipal-securities database — issue-description searches for "CentrePointe" and "Phoenix Park" in Kentucky return no results (searched July 16, 2026)](https://emma.msrb.org/) - [Fayette County PVA (qPublic) — parcel records for the five CentrePointe air-rights lots (PVANUMs 38273230/240/250/260/270): owners, 2026 taxable values totaling $72.15M on the four valued lots, Nov. 20, 2017 $35M recorded exchange, and the Centrepointe→City Center entity renames (pulled July 16, 2026)](https://qpublic.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?App=FayetteCountyKY) - [Lane Report — "State says no to CentrePointe parking garage bond request" (Aug. 14, 2014; Sec. Larry Hayes letter to Mayor Gray)](https://www.lanereport.com/37321/2014/08/state-says-no-to-centrepointe-parking-garage-bond-request/) - [WTVQ — Webb Companies statement on CentrePointe financing (2016; "written agreement… that the City would issue those bonds")](https://www.wtvq.com/94684-2/) - [Smiley Pete Publishing — "Webb defends CentrePointe work" (May 2016; "private equity, private investors and private banks") and "Agreement in principle reached" (Aug. 2015)](https://smileypete.com/business/2016-05-05-webb-defends-centrepointe-work-says-everybody-takes-pot-shots/) - [CivilMechanics (Rob Morris) — "CentrePointe is Still in Trouble" and "The Great CentrePointe Parking Garage Mystery" (May 2015; contemporaneous analysis of the garage-bond economics)](http://civilmechanics.com/2015/05/centrepointe-is-still-in-trouble/) - [WUKY — "Centrespective: A Look Back At The CentrePointe Project" (April 2015; 2008 announcement, demolition, investor death, redesigns)](https://www.wuky.org/wuky-in-depth/2015-04-30/centrespective-a-look-back-at-the-centrepointe-project) - [Danny Mayer — "The Project and the Zone" (July 3, 2024; master development agreement analysis, $150M threshold, increment flow to Centrepointe Parking Co., LLC)](https://dannymayer.substack.com/p/the-project-and-the-zone) - [LFUCG — Tax Increment Financing (nine active TIF districts, incl. Phoenix Park/Centrepointe) and official CentrePointe TIF district map (2016)](https://www.lexingtonky.gov/economic-development/tax-increment-financing-tif) - [The Bond Buyer — Lexington convention center financing via Kentucky Bond Development Corporation (2018, ~$208M; the conduit's actual first major use)](https://www.bondbuyer.com/news/lexington-kentucky-deal-uses-scoop-and-toss) - [WKYT — Greer Companies joins CentrePointe project (Oct. 11, 2017)](https://www.wkyt.com/content/news/New-investor-joins-Lexingtons-CentrePointe-project--450447683.html) - [The Lexington Times — the Red Mile TIF ledger series (the companion investigation in this series)](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/red-mile-tif-ten-year-ledger) --- This article was researched and written by The Lexington Times' AI newsroom (Claude Fable 5) and is grounded in primary records: the official LFUCG council minutes of Sept. 18, 2008, Dec. 10, 2013, Aug. 14, 2014 and Sept. 16, 2014 (hosted with this article), the Granicus meeting videos as auto-transcribed in our LFUCG meeting archive, the MSRB's EMMA municipal-securities database, and contemporaneous reporting cited inline. Council quotes are from auto-generated transcripts checked against the official minutes; vote counts and names come from the minutes themselves. During verification we found and flagged incorrect dates on at least four clips in our own meeting archive; no claim in this article relies on those dates. The piece was produced by a four-agent AI newsroom (a lead editor plus records-verifier, wider-lens, and data-marshal research agents, all Claude Fable 5); the finished draft went through three rounds of adversarial verification, which caught and corrected nine factual errors before publication.