When will construction start on Lexington’s new city hall? Latest timeline
A controversial proposal for a new Lexington city hall is moving ahead, but still could be several months from seeing construction begin.
In an update to the Urban County Council on June 16, general services commissioner Chris Ford told the council the city has made progress in finalizing the purchase and lease agreements with the Lexington Opportunity Fund and in creating a schematic design for the new facility.
“Today’s government center is a cost burden to taxpayers and has diminishing value for accessibility and functionality,” Ford said. “However, the new government center project provides an opportunity for a viable solution to a lingering and well-documented problem.”
Lexington has been on a hunt for a new building to house the government for over 40 years.
In December 2025, the Urban County Council voted 8-7 to enter a contract with the Lexington Opportunity Fund — a company owned and operated by the Webb and Greer Companies — to renovate and acquire the BB&T Bank building at 200 West Vine St.
The city will purchase the property from the Lexington Opportunity Fund for $30 million. The Webb and Greer Companies will then renovate the existing 90,000-square-foot building, as well as construct an additional 10,000 square feet along Vine Street to house a new meeting chamber for the council. The government hopes to move into the new building in 2029.
After construction is complete, the city will move into the building and lease it from the Webbs for 35 years at an annual payment of $3.5 million. After the lease term ends, the city will fully own both the building and the land.
The project could cost as much as $152 million by the end of the 35-year lease term.
While the current building, which was originally the Lafayette Hotel, has required millions of dollars in ongoing maintenance — not including the estimated $55 million in deferred maintenance that hasn’t been addressed — several council members said before the December vote the project was not as pressing as other local needs.
But since the proposal was narrowly approved, Ford said movement on the project is on schedule for an early 2027 groundbreaking.
There are still a few milestones that need to be hit before then.
Champlin EOP, an architecture and interior design firm, recently completed a schematic design that functionally assigns where current city departments will be housed in the new center. The company’s design calls for 160 offices and 190 open work stations to house the roughly 350 employees who work daily in the current government center and adjacent Switow Building.
“This is going to be a modern, efficient, (but) not fancy, not luxurious building,” Ford said.
With that design completed, Lexington will negotiate a “guaranteed maximum price” for the construction and development of the city hall building.
According to Ford, the guaranteed maximum price will fully define the scope of work for DW Wilburn, a contracting company, which will perform the construction at the Vine Street building, and lock in the government’s financial obligation to the developers. The city currently estimates construction costs to be around $54.6 million.
Any increases to that price after construction begins would have to come back to the council for approval.
If the partners come back with an expected price notably higher than the current estimate, Ford told the council there would be opportunity to negotiate ways to bring the costs back down.
If no viable options exist, though, the city does have the right to exit the agreement.
“Our intent is to move this long-anticipated product forward,” Ford said. “But I say for the insurance of the council and the general public that we have some guardrails financially and economically, if need be.”
The city will launch public engagement opportunities late this summer, after agreeing on a guaranteed maximum price, to take input on what the new council chambers and other public-facing spaces should look like.
As well as the chambers, the first and second floors of the new government center will house divisions that residents more regularly interact with, such as revenue and planning, as well as community and meeting rooms that can be reserved by residents.
So far, the city has spent just over $839,000 for design fees and a purchase deposit for the property. Ford said the city should acquire the property by the end of 2026.
Why is the project controversial?
In the December meeting where the council narrowly approved the proposal, members of the public said the city was putting its staff comfort ahead of the needs of local Lexingtonians — especially those needs regarding housing and homelessness.
“(The current city hall) is old, things probably leak and the occasional mold probably creeps in,” Blake Taylor, with KY Tenants, an advocacy group, told the council in the meeting. “Many people in … Lexington feel the same way about their own homes.”
Emma Curtis, who represents the city’s 4th District, said federal funding cuts for social services should be the government’s first priority.
“I’m not comfortable committing this amount of money right now without having tangible commitments to filling those gaps,” Curtis said.
Other council members said maintaining the current building would take more money away from those types of services in the long run, and it would be better to move into a new building already in good shape.
Ninth District Councilmember Whitney Baxter made a motion in the same meeting to reserve $2.8 million to fund recommendations from a still-meeting city task force focused on addressing homelessness.
The annual lease payment for the new city hall represents roughly 0.6% of the current fiscal year’s general fund for the city, compared to the 0.3% of the general fund revenue reserved each year to support Lexington’s Office of Homelessness Prevention and Intervention. That comes out to over $1.65 million in the fiscal year 2027 budget.
The council did make an additional $2.2 million investment for recommendations from the homelessness task force using opioid settlement funds in April 2026.
Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton was silent on the issue in the December meeting.
Gorton has rarely spoken publicly about the project since the proposal was revealed. She did not mention it in her 2026 State of the City address as one of the achievements of her administration in the last year.
A campaign card printed for her primary reelection bid listed 21 accomplishments in her two terms as mayor. Getting the new city hall agreement approved was not one of them.
However, the agreement is listed on her campaign website as an accomplishment.
A mayoral debate hosted by WKYT and the League of Women Voters in May saw three of Gorton’s challengers for the primary — including Raquel Carter, who will face Gorton in the November general election —- criticize the project. Then-challenger C.E. Huffman called the agreement “the worst government boondoggle I’ve ever seen in my life,”
Gorton retorted to her opponents, “I think it’s easy to criticize this when you don’t work in our government building every day.”
