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.
Transcript
PeteKay, I want to start with a question that sounds almost too simple. The person who runs the second-largest school system in Kentucky — does that person have to live in Kentucky?
KayUnder state law, yes. Once you take the superintendent's job, you have to make Kentucky your home. The courts have upheld that. It is a condition of the job.
PeteAnd has anyone actually checked whether that's true here?
Kay[pause] That's the question we spent this week on. And what the records show, we publish Monday.
KayFrom The Lexington Times, this is Town Branch — the stories running under Lexington. I'm Kay.
PeteAnd I'm Pete. Today we're not handing you a verdict. We're doing something a little different — showing you the question underneath a story all of Lexington is already talking about, and how a newsroom even goes about answering it.
KayThe story everyone knows: the Fayette County superintendent, Demetrus Liggins, is on paid leave while the school board reviews his employment. We walked through that whiplash week in an earlier episode.
PeteThe part nobody has talked about is simpler, and honestly more basic. Where does he actually live.
KaySo let's be careful and precise, because this matters. There is a Kentucky law — it has been on the books a long time, and a Kentucky court upheld it back in two thousand nine — that says, following appointment, the superintendent shall establish residency in Kentucky.
PeteResidency in the state. Not necessarily inside the district. But the commonwealth has to be home.
KayAnd that is not a small thing for this job. We are talking about the person responsible for more than forty thousand Kentucky children, paid almost four hundred thousand dollars a year — the highest-paid superintendent in the state.
PeteSo the question isn't a gotcha. It's the most basic accountability question there is. Does the person we hired, and pay, meet the plain requirement the law sets for the job.
PeteAnd here's the part I love, Kay. You don't need a source inside the building to answer a question like this. You need public records.
KayThat's right. Where a person lives leaves a paper trail anybody can pull. County property rolls, which list who owns a home and where. Appraisal records, which note the tax breaks you only get on the home you actually live in. Voter registration. Deed books.
PeteAnd those records are open. You can sit at a kitchen table with a library card and read most of them.
KaySo we pulled them. We read the property records connected to the superintendent, and the rolls here in Fayette County, and we held them up against that residency law.
Pete[warm] That's the discipline of it. You don't start with an answer. You start with a question, you read the record, and you let the record talk.
KayAnd then you do the other half of the job, which is just as important. You take what the records show to the people involved, and you give them a real chance to answer before you print a word.
PeteWhich we did this week. We put our questions to the school district, to the board chair, and to the superintendent's attorney, and we asked for a response by Monday.
KaySo here's what happens next. Monday, at The Lexington Times, we publish the full investigation — the records, with the account numbers, so you can check our work yourself. And whatever the district and the superintendent tell us, in full.
PeteWe're going to show our work. That's the whole idea. Not trust us. Check us.
KayAnd the bigger point outlasts any one superintendent. Most of the accountability that matters in a city is sitting in public records that nobody reads. Who owns what. Who paid for what. Where the people we elect and hire actually live.
PeteThe deed books are public. Somebody just has to keep reading them. That's a fair bit of what this show is.
KaySo watch for the full story Monday. We'll have the records, the law, and the response, and we'll lay it all out so you can decide for yourself.
PeteThat's Town Branch for today. The sources for everything we said, and Monday's full investigation when it lands, will be in the show notes.
KayTown Branch is produced by The Lexington Times. Our voices are synthetic, and our scripts are drafted with AI from Lexington Times reporting and the public record, then fact-checked before air. Read the sources for every episode at feeds dot lexington k y dot news slash podcast. [warm] We'll see you down the creek.
Town Branch is produced by The Lexington Times. The hosts are synthetic voices (ElevenLabs); episode scripts are drafted with Claude (Anthropic) from Lexington Times reporting and the public record, then fact-checked by the newsroom before publication. Every factual claim links to a source in the episode notes.