How do you fight COVID? Lexington mayor used her nursing skills, preparation
Mayor Linda Gorton started her workday on Monday — the one-year anniversary of the first Fayette County resident to test positive for the virus — by recording a video thank you to the city’s nearly 3,000 employees.
“We could not have done any of this without them,” Gorton said. “What we have accomplished in 365 days is truly unbelievable.”
It’s been one of the most difficult years in the city’s history, Gorton said. To date, 237 Fayette County residents have died and more than 32,600 have been infected with the highly contagious respiratory virus.
“These are our neighbors, our family, our friends,” Gorton said. “This has been a huge challenge. It has challenged our health care community in a big way. It has challenged our economy. It has challenged the Fayette County Public Schools. It has challenged the hospitality industry. It has affected all of us and it has not left anybody out.”
It has also presented tremendous challenges to the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government.
The to-do list since early March 2020 has been long:
- Set up COVID-19 testing sites around the city, including in minority neighborhoods where the virus has had a disproportionate impact.
- Acquire once-scarce personal protection equipment first for the city’s police, fire, corrections and sanitation workers and later for all employees.
- Prop up struggling restaurants and small businesses by expanding outdoor dining, suspending liquor license fees and distributing more than $2.3 million in grants to Fayette County businesses.
- Get federal coronavirus money to people who lost work due to the virus through rental assistance and feeding programs.
- Set up, staff and manage multiple vaccination sites and a multi-media campaign to encourage vaccinations.
Just as the virus upended public life, it also upended the city’s finances.
Spring coronavirus business-related shutdowns sent unemployment figures skyrocketing and the city’s revenues plummeting. The $378 million city budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 was sparse and balanced on $12 million in cuts.
The numbers show the city’s finances are rebounding.
Thanks in large part to $44.6 million in federal coronavirus stimulus money, the city currently has a surplus of $20 million and may not have to tap an estimated $30 million in one-time money from city savings accounts that were used to balance the current-year budget.
November 2020 employment figures show roughly 2,000 more people working than in March 2020.
“We have a very diverse economy,” Gorton said, which has helped the city come back from record-high unemployment of nearly 14 percent in April. During the past year, Central Baptist Lexington announced a new Hamburg campus with 600 new jobs. Amazon has also announced a second Lexington location that will also add up to 500 jobs.
“Our city continues to make progress,” Gorton said.
‘People are excited to get the vaccine’
Another reason to be optimistic — the effort to vaccinate Fayette County residents has been picking up speed.
As of Monday, more than 153,183 vaccinations have been given in Fayette County, but not all are residents. The Kentucky Horse Park and the University of Kentucky Kroger Field sites are regional and have vaccinated surrounding county residents.
On Saturday, Gorton was at a pop-up vaccination site at Shiloh Baptist Church, a program to get more vaccines to minority communities.
“I’m so excited that people are excited and are getting their vaccines,” Gorton said. “That site, on average, was doing 100 people per hour.”
The mobile vaccination sites are part of a partnership with UK. Partnerships between the health care system, private businesses, the state, the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department and dozens of nonprofits helped the city weather the pandemic, Gorton said.
“Those partnerships are what has made all of this work in terms of attacking how we protect our citizens from COVID,” Gorton said.
Gorton said the effort to vaccinate as many people as possible is limited by the number of vaccines allotted to Kentucky and Fayette County. The number of vaccines coming to Fayette County continues to increase each week. Gorton said she hopes the majority of Fayette County residents will be vaccinated by summer.
“I’m very optimistic for this summer,” Gorton said.
‘We can handle anything’
Gorton, a registered nurse, said she has leaned on her medical background to help guide her decisions over the past year.
“People made fun of me at the time, but I said, ‘We are going to be in this for a long time,” Gorton said. This is not an epidemic. It’s a pandemic, a global health care crisis. “This was a new virus and we didn’t understand it,” she said.
Her medical background also made it easier to see what was coming and the steps the city had to take to protect citizens and safely restart the economy, she said.
“As a nurse, I got this immediately,” she said. “You don’t panic, you prepare.”
But the past year has weighed heavily on Gorton too.
“I miss people,” Gorton said. “I miss that personal interaction.”
One of the most difficult days was Easter Sunday dinner 2020. It was just Gorton and her husband, Charlie. She couldn’t visit her children and her grandchildren. It was the pandemic’s early days. It was the middle of lockdown.
“I realized our budget was going to be very difficult,” Gorton said. “We were in the middle of everything closed down. I think that was a low point. I think that was hard on everybody.”
Once the city figured out its budget and businesses began to slowly reopen, Gorton said she realized how resilient the city and its people are.
“We can handle anything,” Gorton said.
This story was originally published March 9, 2021 at 12:14 PM.
