# Lexington is about to vote on a modest set of reforms. One group is using them as a doorway to something much larger. **Published:** 2026-06-04T23:30:00.000Z **Source:** [The Lexington Times](https://www.wegovern.us/) **AI-generated:** yes (claude-opus-4-8) **Canonical:** https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/commentary-direct-wegovern-doorway **The Civic Assembly’s three charter changes head to a council vote June 18 with broad support. Behind the most popular civic-reform idea in years stands D.I.R.E.C.T. — a group whose own literature argues the whole exercise should end in the replacement of elected council government. It’s worth reading what they actually wrote, and what they say when you ask them about it.** On June 4, the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council gave first reading to three ordinances that read like good civics. One would cap council pay at $59,987 — Lexington’s average wage — to “broaden the type of people who can run for local office.” One would require council to publish attendance and accountability standards. One would write a recurring “Charter Review Assembly,” chosen by lottery every eight years, into the charter itself. All three came out of the city’s first Civic Assembly — 36 residents, chosen by representative lottery, who spent seven sessions in March reworking the charter and approved their recommendations with 84-to-89 percent supermajorities. On June 2, seven residents lined up at the public-comment podium to back them. The council sends them to a final vote June 18; if they pass, voters decide November 3. This is, by any measure, a popular and modest package. Which is exactly what makes the group standing just behind it worth understanding. ### The doorway and the room behind it D.I.R.E.C.T. — the Democratic Initiative for Revolutionary Education, Care and Transparency — surfaced into public view last month with a _Herald-Leader_ op-ed praising the assembly and then arguing it didn’t go nearly far enough. The 36 residents, the authors wrote, reached only “around rung four” of scholar Sherry Arnstein’s eight-rung ladder of citizen participation: “Advisory consultation, not power.” (Arnstein’s 1969 ladder is real and load-bearing here — rungs four and five, “consultation” and “placation,” sit in her middle tier of _tokenism_, below the “citizen power” rungs of partnership and citizen control.) Their near-term ask is small — put the assembly’s recommendations on the ballot, which they call “the minimum.” But the op-ed is a doorway, and the platform on WeGovern.us is the room behind it. That platform opens by describing Lexington’s representative system as “exclusionary and elitist — creating a ruling class with its own distinct interests and worldview,” a system that “emboldens a racist police state organized around white Christian nationalism and the historic concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1%.” That is not reform language. It’s a thesis of illegitimacy. And it is the first place the group’s public case and its written one come apart.  (A resident addresses the council during public comment at the June 2 work session, where seven speakers backed the Civic Assembly’s recommendations. (Screenshot: LFUCG Granicus, clip 6788)) ### What happens when you ask them to defend the strongest claim We asked D.I.R.E.C.T. directly what local evidence grounds the “racist police state… white Christian nationalism” characterization for readers who don’t already share the premise. The answer that came back retreated from nearly all of it. Gone were the police state and the white Christian nationalism; in their place, a set of concrete, arguable claims: that the council “skews heavily toward property owners, professionals with flexible schedules, and people with personal or familial wealth”; that meetings are “held at times and in formats inaccessible to shift workers, single parents, and people without childcare”; and that “neighborhoods like the East End and the West End have historically been disinvested” while “the police budget has consistently grown.” Those are claims a reporter can test, and several are at least partly true. But they are a long way from the platform’s language, and the distance is the story: invited to substantiate its most incendiary framing, the group reached instead for its most defensible one. A reader is left to decide which document is the real argument — the one written to rally, or the one written to answer a journalist. ### The vocabulary has a lineage — even where the group won’t claim it The platform’s machinery is genuinely interesting, because it isn’t improvised. D.I.R.E.C.T. proposes standing **Neighborhood Assemblies** as “the foundational unit of a free city,” coordinated through delegates to a confederated citywide assembly. Its zine spells out the operating rules: delegates carry an “imperative mandate” and “can’t speak for themselves,” subject to “recall,” chosen partly by “citizen lot (sortition),” with “rotation” and “continuous assembly” — all of it, the zine says, “to prevent the re-emergence of a ruling class.” Confederated assemblies, binding delegate mandates, sortition, recall, rotation, an explicit horror of a permanent political class: this is the precise vocabulary of **communalism**, the program Murray Bookchin called “libertarian municipalism,” the tradition that runs through the Paris Commune, council communism, the Zapatistas, and the Kurdish “democratic confederalism” experiment in Rojava — most of which the op-ed names directly. Asked whether that’s a fair read of their influences, D.I.R.E.C.T. neither confirmed nor disowned it. “Our influences are broader than any single tradition,” they wrote, calling the design “a synthesis” that “translat[es] principles of direct democracy into charter language.” It’s a careful non-answer, and a fair one to print alongside the observation it dodges: the design speaks fluent communalism whether or not the group wants to name the dialect. ### CivicLex pushes back on the central charge The op-ed’s sharpest claim is aimed at CivicLex, which designed and ran the assembly: that it was “advisory consultation, not power.” Richard Young, CivicLex’s executive director, doesn’t accept the framing. “To us, the assembly was more an exercise in co-governance — a partnership between local government and the public — than a simple advisory process,” he said, noting that Arnstein’s critique targets “attitudinal surveys and neighborhood meetings,” not a process where members were compensated, set their own voting rules, and had council formally commit to respond. Young’s more important point is about the ceiling, not the floor. “Legal limitations in the charter and in KRS limit how much decision-making power can be given to residents in the amendment drafting process,” he said — any charter change “must go on the ballot for a public referendum,” reachable only through a three-fifths council vote or a petition campaign. In other words, the assembly couldn’t have been “binding” if it tried; Kentucky law routes every charter amendment through the voters. He’s gracious about D.I.R.E.C.T. — “ambitious,” “great to set big goals” — and notes that the assembly’s own recurring-review recommendation, if adopted, “would be one of the first examples of a recurring assembly requirement in a city charter in the United States.” That last point cuts against the op-ed more than D.I.R.E.C.T. may like. Ordinance 0489-26, headed for the same November ballot, writes a lottery-chosen Charter Review Assembly into Section 14.04 of the charter every eight years. It is, in miniature, the standing-assembly idea — institutionalized not by revolution but by the very process D.I.R.E.C.T. called tokenism.  (The council chamber on June 4, when the three Civic Assembly charter amendments received their first reading. A final vote is set for June 18; if it passes, the questions go to voters on November 3. (Screenshot: LFUCG Granicus, clip 6792)) ### The Mayor’s office: interesting, and entirely a matter for the voters The administration’s response, from communications director Susan Straub, is a study in not biting. Whether the recommendations reach the ballot “will be a decision for the Council.” D.I.R.E.C.T.’s broader vision is “an interesting concept that would be worth further research” — followed immediately by the reminder that “all of these changes would require revisions of the Charter, and that requires a vote by the public.” And the philosophical question gets the gentlest possible deflection: “Direct public input is built into our government as it now stands.” It is the sound of an institution declining to treat a challenge to its legitimacy as a challenge at all. ### The part they say more quietly D.I.R.E.C.T.’s platform asks LFUCG to recognize Neighborhood Assemblies as “legal public bodies,” and to _fund and staff_ them through a new city department — to use the charter and budget to stand up a parallel governing structure. That is a textbook **dual-power** strategy: build the institutions of the world you want inside the shell of the one you have, and let authority migrate. The zine’s stated long-term goal is to “democratize the economy.” Local government is the entry point, not the destination. Asked whether it’s fair to call this a transition that eventually replaces representative government, the group again declined to either confirm or deny — but tellingly, didn’t disown it. “We aren’t the architects of the future,” they wrote. “We want to create the institutions required for true local democracy and allow the people of Lexington themselves to decide when and how any transition happens… The question isn’t whether Lexington will change; it’s whether that change will be directed by [politicians, bureaucrats, and a billionaire class] or by the people.” The endgame isn’t renounced. It’s reframed as inevitability, with the public handed the steering wheel. ### What it amounts to D.I.R.E.C.T. is, by its own design, a revolutionary project with a reformist on-ramp — and the genius of it is that the on-ramp is real and reasonable. “Put the Civic Assembly’s recommendations on the ballot” is something most residents can endorse without a second thought; the seven who spoke on June 2 did. “Replace elected representation with confederated neighborhood assemblies as a step toward democratizing the economy” is a different conversation, and the group is candid that the first is meant to make the second thinkable. Their own closing image — they compare the assembly to Alexander Fleming’s 1929 penicillin mold, ignored until war made it matter — is a tell: the small thing is interesting only because of the enormous thing it might become. The strongest case against them isn’t that their diagnosis is all wrong. Plenty of Lexingtonians do feel unheard, and the assembly’s popularity proves the appetite for participation is real. It’s that the literature never honestly reckons with the failure modes of its own model — the assembly captured by whoever has the most free time, the “binding” decision that collides with state law, the coordination problem confederations have hit everywhere they’ve been tried. Pressed on exactly those points, D.I.R.E.C.T.’s answer was that the current system fails the same way: “Most criticisms people level against direct democracy apply doubly to our current system.” Maybe. But “the status quo is also flawed” is a critique, not a design. The group asks, fairly, whether residents should “accept a life of pleading with politicians.” The question it hasn’t answered is whether neighborhood assemblies, in practice, end up pleading with each other. _D.I.R.E.C.T.’s platform and zines are at WeGovern.us; the group can be reached at directlex@proton.me. Its op-ed ran in the_ Lexington Herald-Leader _on May 26. The Civic Assembly’s three charter amendments — ordinances 0464-26 (council pay), 0488-26 (accountability) and 0489-26 (charter review) — receive a second reading and council vote on June 18; if passed, they appear on the November 3 ballot. The assembly’s March deliberations and the June 2 and June 4 council sessions are searchable in_ [the Lexington Times meeting archive](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news). ## Sources - [D.I.R.E.C.T. / WeGovern.us platform](https://www.wegovern.us/) - [CivicLex](https://civiclex.org/) - [LFUCG June 2 council work session (clip 6788)](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6788) - [LFUCG June 4 council meeting (clip 6792)](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6792) --- This commentary was drafted with AI assistance (Claude Opus 4.8) and reported and finalized for publication by The Lexington Times. It draws on D.I.R.E.C.T.’s published platform and zines (WeGovern.us), the group’s May 26 Herald-Leader op-ed, and on-the-record comment provided to The Lexington Times by D.I.R.E.C.T., CivicLex executive director Richard Young, and the Office of the Mayor. Meeting facts and quotations are grounded in LFUCG’s official June 2 and June 4 council records; photographs are screenshots from publicly available LFUCG Granicus broadcasts (clips 6788 and 6792).