Lexington’s new mayor has her priorities in place. Here’s how she’s working on them.
Linda Gorton was sworn in as Lexington’s mayor on Jan. 6. In her inauguration speech, she encouraged the incoming Lexington council and the city’s citizens to “continue to dream big” and pledged to focus on jobs, economic development and to tackle the city’s opioid crisis.
Tom Martin talked to her recently about that.
Question: Let’s look at some of the issues that are important to you as you begin your first term as Lexington mayor. What’s on your shortlist of must-do items?
Answer: Workforce development and opioid addiction and recovery. Those two things are at the top of my list.
Q: First, let’s touch on opioids. It’s a scourge and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. And you bring with you the credentials and experience of being a registered nurse. Does that inform how you view this crisis and the ideas that you’re having about how best to address it?
A: It plays a part in it. I look at these things that impact health in a different way because of my professional work. And for a long time, the focus for the opioid or any drug addiction and abuse situation was through public safety. Our police and fire work really hard everyday with citizens who’ve overdosed, who are addicted. It’s one of their constant focuses. But they can’t do it alone.
So, what I’m bringing to the table is a multidisciplinary focus. I have hired (former Urban County Council Member) Andrea James and her total 100 percent focus is this addiction recovery issue. We’re looking at the data from Fayette County. We know we’re the number two county in the state for overdose, opioid use, and those kinds of things. Jefferson County is number one. This affects people being able to get jobs, to be with families and support their families. Andrea is focusing on finding out where we are now and then looking at best practices across the country.
And from that, we are going to put together a working group of people throughout the community. It will be public safety. It will be physicians, faith community, neighborhood members, family members who have lost a loved one to this, experts at UK in addiction research. All these kinds of folks need to be at the table so that we can craft a way forward. And I’m very optimistic that we can make an impact on this, but it’s got to be multidisciplinary.
Q: What are your thoughts about workforce development?
A: Lexington, Fayette County relies on jobs. The jobs provide people with a living, but they also serve, through the occupational license fee, to fund services that we provide to our community. We need to be nimble. We need to recognize that when jobs are going away such as the loss of 600 jobs at Trane this spring, those folks need to have a way that we can either use their current skills or help them learn new skills. We want to keep them here. We don’t want to lose those people. And I have met with the Secretary of Education and Workforce Development Derrick Ramsey. And we talked about apprenticeships.
Q: It’s very popular in Germany, isn’t it?
A: It is very popular. He has been to Germany to look at how they do their apprenticeship programs. The fact is, not everybody wants to go to college or necessarily needs to go to college if they can find a skill that suits them. And so, the secretary is very interested in talking with us here in Lexington about apprenticeships. It’s another route to a good, well-paying job. We’re talking about things like HVAC, plumbing, med-tech, those kinds of things that aren’t four-year degrees in college, but they lead a person onto a path where they can make a good living.
And so, I think we need to broaden the way we’re thinking about workforce development. It’s not just ‘go to college and get a job.’ That’s part of it and it’s an important part, but there’s a lot more out there that we need to talk about.
Q: Speaking of workforce development, I recall us talking last year in the hallway during the Alltech One Conference at the Lexington Center. It was about something that Dr. Pearse Lyons had begun championing just before he passed away and that was envisioning Lexington positioning as a hub for agricultural technology.
We do have some key assets: a trio of universities. University of Kentucky, Transylvania, and just right down the road, Eastern Kentucky University. We have an energized hemp community now. Even a company, Space Tango, that’s engaged in sending agricultural experiments up to the space station. Are you interested in looking at all those orbiting assets and pulling them together in some organized way?
A: I absolutely am. I have someone on my staff who coordinates our local food efforts and who is going to be the point person working with our economic development chief for high tech ag. And I’ve already had a beginning conversation with Dean Nancy Cox at the College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment at UK. I’ve had a brief conversation about this with state Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles. I’ve had a couple of brief conversations with Dr. Mark Lyons at Alltech. We have agreed we will sit down and move this forward.
This won’t happen overnight, but Lexington has positioned itself to become one of the biggest gigabit cities in the country. High speed internet is crucial to high-tech jobs and high-tech businesses because it gives them the ability to download lots of data and lots of files in a super fast way. Those lines are being put down as we speak throughout Lexington.
We have a thriving agriculture here in Fayette County. And so, as you said earlier, we have assets and we need to use those assets to take us to a different level with high-tech and particularly the high-tech ag. When you think about our farms, not only horse farms, we have big cattle operations; we have chickens, poultry, eggs, turkeys, hemp; we have a lot of ag here that’s varied. And we can build on that.
We have world-class veterinary facilities that work with equine folks. So, we need to better leverage these things to take us to a higher level with high tech ag. We’ll be working toward that in a very concerted intentional way.