The Lexington Times
Free, AI-powered local news for Lexington, Kentucky
The stories running under Lexington.
Town Branch is a hand-produced podcast from The Lexington Times digging into the stories running under Lexington, Kentucky — the slow-moving civic currents beneath the daily news. Hand-produced episodes, not daily.
Episodes
A Floor, Not a Ceiling
Lexington gets credit — even in Louisville's council chamber — for posting a public map of its 125 license-plate cameras. But the police department's own audits describe a much larger network: 1,067 camera feeds police can pull up live and 2,021 enrolled devices, almost none of them on any public map. Kay and Pete read the audits, listen back to the residents who have been showing up at the council podium all spring, and ask the question the paperwork doesn't answer: once the data leaves the console, where does it go?
Thirteen Seconds
Two Lexington police discipline cases wrapped up this summer in very different rooms. Officer Caleb Croney accepted a ninety-day suspension over a Waffle House confrontation, and the council voted on it in public. Officer Marcus Olmstead — whose own body camera showed him texting for roughly thirteen seconds before rear-ending a driver he then blamed — resigned days before the chief could act on a termination recommendation, and no discipline was ever imposed. Kay and Pete walk through how Lexington's police discipline system works, and what happens when a case never gets to finish.
The Residency Question
A Kentucky law says the superintendent of the state's second-largest school district has to make Kentucky home. Kay and Pete pose the simplest accountability question there is — where does the superintendent actually live — and walk through how a newsroom answers a question like that from public records anyone can pull. The full Lexington Times investigation, with every record and the district's response, publishes Monday.
Five in Eugene
Town Branch's first sports episode. Five Kentucky Wildcats reached the finals at the NCAA track and field championships at Hayward Field — an unbeaten hurdler, a sophomore who just broke the two-minute barrier, a freshman pulling double duty, a relay that grabbed the last qualifying spot, and a steeplechaser from Nakuru racing for a national title. Plus: the Will Stein football era's first preseason honors, and the most decorated high school athlete in America signing with Kentucky women's basketball.
The Record You Can't Feel
Kentucky tourism just posted its fourth straight record year — fourteen point six billion dollars in economic impact, announced with fanfare at a Frankfort hotel. Kay and Pete open the hood on the number: how much of it is modeled multipliers versus money tourists actually spent, why Lexington's slice stayed flat while the state's pie grew, what bourbon and Keeneland actually carried, and the new hotel-room fee fight worth watching.
The Letter Nobody Applied For
This week, nearly two thousand two hundred Fayette County residents are getting letters announcing that medical debt they owed is simply gone — the third wave of a city program that has now erased more than twenty-three million dollars of debt for almost twelve thousand people, at roughly a penny on the dollar. Kay and Pete explain the strange economics that make a dollar of medical debt purchasable for less than a cent, what the program fixes, and what it can't touch.
Phase One
Lexington flipped on Phase One of its Heat Plan this week as the heat index pushed toward ninety-five — cooling centers, free bus rides, trash crews starting at four-thirty in the morning. The heat broke after two days, which makes this the right moment to ask how the machine works: the three-phase ladder, why the city deliberately doesn't stand down early, who is most at risk — and the map Lexington has never made of which blocks bake hardest.
The Money's Already Moved
Governor Andy Beshear announced thirty million dollars in budget cuts one week — then moved thirty million dollars to undo about half of them the next, using the legislature's own budget language as his permission slip, and dared Frankfort to sue. Kay and Pete unpack the tug-of-war over who controls Kentucky's money once a budget passes — and why, while thirty-seven communities extended a dime-a-gallon gas tax cut, Lexington drivers went back to paying full price.
The Welcome Stranger
A long-form commentary-and-analysis episode, built on original data work. The Lexington Times ran the numbers on every Fayette County property assessment and thirty months of home sales, and found the quiet architecture of who pays for Lexington: buy a house and your assessment snaps to your purchase price; stay put for twenty years and you ride roughly thirty percent below the market; own horse country and the state assesses your land at its farm value with no clawback — while two-thirds of the city's general fund comes out of paychecks, from the first dollar. Nobody is cheating. That's the story.
Misery for Rent, Then and Now
A longer, commentary-and-analysis episode. In 2000, the Herald-Leader spent four months inside Lexington's worst rental housing and the city agency that was supposed to police it — a series called Misery for Rent. Twenty-six years later, The Lexington Times re-read every page. Kay and Pete trace what actually changed: the family empire that rented misery at three hundred dollars a month, the neighborhood where those same blocks now sell for a quarter million, the renter protection that lasted six days in Frankfort, and the question that never changes — who absorbs the risk, and who collects.
Who Keeps the Receipts
This week The Lexington Times launched two free databases putting six hundred eighty-nine million dollars of Kentucky political money — campaign contributions and Frankfort lobbying — into one searchable place. The same week, we reported that twenty-four years of Fayette County election results survived in exactly one reachable spot: a nonprofit's server in San Francisco. Kay and Pete on money, memory, and why public records only survive when somebody bothers to keep them.
What the City Bought: Lexington's New Budget
Council passed Lexington's new budget fifteen to nothing — eight hundred forty-seven million dollars, no new taxes, and a long memory of last winter. Kay and Pete decode where the money actually goes: the five point one million dollar snow plan with a beet-juice de-icer, thirteen million in paving, a brand-new pothole fund, money for the Dirt Bowl courts, and the two point seven five million the council added on its own.
Fifty-One Cents on the Dollar
In January, at a nine a.m. meeting no reporter attended, Lexington's police and fire pension board set the city's contribution at 51.24 percent of payroll — about fifty-two and a half million dollars in the budget council just adopted. Kay and Pete explain the fund in plain English: the three hundred eighty-six million dollar hole, the retirees losing ground to capped cost-of-living raises, the push to sweeten benefits anyway, and why the whole fight lands in Frankfort in twenty twenty-seven.
Two of Every Five
The Lexington Times read thirty months of Fayette County deed records — every one of the 18,969 transfers since January 2024. Companies bought one of every eight homes sold on the open market, and two of every five priced under a hundred fifty thousand dollars. Kay and Pete follow the paper trail: a cul-de-sac that sold before lunch, a Hamburg mailbox behind sixty rental homes, and a Manhattan landlord signing its mail through a New Hampshire post office box.
The Eighteen-Hour Resignation
Fayette County's superintendent emailed his board chair at 3 a.m. asking to step away, the district announced his resignation by evening, and he took it back before bedtime. Kay and Pete walk through the whiplash week at FCPS — the unanimous vote that put Demetrus Liggins on paid leave, the ninety-five million dollar loan underneath it all, and who's steering the state's second-largest school district now.