Tools & public datasets
Every tool this newsroom runs, in one place
Public records only survive when somebody bothers to keep them. These are the databases, maps, and archives The Lexington Times builds and maintains so that anyone — reader, researcher, rival newsroom, or AI agent — can check the city’s math themselves. Everything here is free. Most of it is open data.
Every itemized Kentucky campaign contribution since 2016 — about $466 million across 28 elections — searchable by donor, candidate, employer, and election, with self-funding broken out separately.
Source: KY Registry of Election Finance filings. Refreshes weekly. Open JSON + open source.
What interest groups spend lobbying Frankfort — about $223 million since 2015 — by employer, lobbyist, industry, and (from 2025) the bills they worked. 590 organizations are cross-linked to their campaign giving in KREF Watch.
Source: KY Legislative Ethics Commission disclosures. Refreshes weekly. Open JSON + open source.
Who is funding Lexington council and mayoral campaigns this cycle, donor by donor.
Source: KREF filings for LFUCG races.
The Fayette County plat ledger: a 115,301-parcel property roll distilled to the 112 biggest owners, with family and corporate rollups (the Ball family at 428 parcels, Anderson Communities at 423) and full dataset downloads.
Sources: Fayette PVA roll, LFUCG GIS, KY Secretary of State. Snapshot-dated; CC-BY data.
Thirty months of Fayette County deed records — all 18,969 transfers since January 2024 — sorted into people versus companies. The investigation into who is buying Lexington’s cheapest homes.
Source: Fayette PVA monthly sales lists + KY SOS entity records.
Precinct-level Fayette County results for the 2022 and 2024 generals and the 2026 primary — plus the county’s full 2002–2022 results archive (691 races), recovered from the Internet Archive after the clerk’s website migration erased the only public copy.
Sources: KY State Board of Elections, Fayette County Clerk (recovered), Wayback Machine.
A live 3D map of Lexington: traffic cameras, fire department calls, flood gauges, aircraft overhead, construction, school and council districts, and more, rendered on a photoreal globe.
Sources: LFUCG GIS, LFD dispatch, NWS, KYTC, ADS-B. Live.
Browsable 2D map layers for Lexington — the flat-map companion to the Situation Monitor.
Sources: LFUCG GIS and the Times maps API.
The city’s January 2026 storm-response plow tracker — 218,307 GPS pings from 43 trucks — preserved after the city’s own archive stopped being reachable. This copy later settled a public question: plow coverage did not move the mayoral primary.
Source: LFUCG live plow tracker (citizen-preserved).
Every Lexington council and committee recording we can reach — 2,700+ meetings back to 2007 — transcribed, summarized, and searchable in plain English. Under state retention rules the city may destroy these recordings 30 days after minutes are approved; this archive keeps them anyway.
Source: LFUCG Granicus video. Searchable + MCP server for AI agents.
The Lexington Times podcast — the stories running under Lexington. Episode pages carry full transcripts and source lists.
Also on Spotify. RSS available for any podcast app.
All 110 episodes (2016–2019) of the North Limestone CDC’s community radio show on WLXU, mirrored with transcripts after the show was orphaned online — neighborhood history in the neighborhood’s own voices.
Preservation copy; the recordings belong to RadioLex / NoLi CDC. Researchers: email editor@lexingtonky.news for access.
Plain-English questions over the full Lexington Times archive, answered with citations.
Also a JSON API at /api/ask.
Both the news archive and the meeting archive expose Model Context Protocol servers, llms.txt indexes, and Markdown endpoints, so AI agents and researchers can query everything above directly. The skill.md guide covers all of it.
Open CORS, no keys. Cite what you take.