‘City needs better leadership.’ Lexington councilman kicks off mayoral campaign
Saying the city needs to do more to address affordable housing and crime, Lexington councilman David Kloiber officially kicked off his campaign for mayor Wednesday night.
“I’m doing this because I feel like the city needs better leadership,” Kloiber said at a campaign event at ArtsPlace in downtown Lexington. “To me, better leadership means identifying problems before they become a problem.”
Kloiber, who has served on the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government for one year, said “over and over again we are failing to identify problems early enough and we are failing to get out there and make real change possible.”
Kloiber will face incumbent Mayor Linda Gorton in next year’s mayoral race. Gorton announced in August she would seek a second term, citing her steady leadership during the coronavirus pandemic and civil and racial unrest in 2020. Other candidates that have filed paperwork to begin raising money for the 2022 race include William Weyman, who ran unsuccessfully for the position in 2019, and Razamani Asmani, a first-time candidate.
Weyman is the only candidate to file with the Fayette County Clerk’s office.
Kloiber said Wednesday Lexington should be a place where everyone can live, work and play.
That’s not the case right now, Kloiber said.
“We have a housing crisis,” he said. “There’s not enough affordable housing and there is not enough housing affordability. We need to look at new ways to address that problem so people who want to live here can actually live here.”
The city also needs to up its focus on jobs, particularly jobs that keep local college graduates in Lexington, he said.
On Wednesday the city hit a grim milestone -- 35 people have been homicide victims so far this calendar year, an all-time record. Other cities across the country, including Louisville, are also seeing gun-related homicides spike.
To reverse that trend, Lexington needs to up its programming for youth, Kloiber said. Many youth have been victims of homicide or have been charged in relation to those homicides.
Kloiber said Gorton has put more emphasis behind One Lexington, a youth violence prevention program run by Devine Carama. But more money and funding needs to go to prevention efforts.
“We also need to partner with the school system to create more after-school programs to keep youth engaged,” Kloiber said. “Community engagement can really make a difference.”
A long-standing and often thorny Lexington issue is whether and how to open the urban service boundary, the city’s growth boundary. The city’s boundary has not been expanded since 1996. The city is currently debating a new metric that would look at objective data to determine if and when the growth boundary should be opened.
Kloiber stopped short of saying whether he would support opening the boundary.
“I think what it says is that the we have a problem with housing,” Kloiber said of the sustainable growth matrix. “The boundary has served us very well. We need to figure out how best ot use it. I’m not the person to say what the best way to plan out our city is. We are going to reach out to the community to see what their priorities are but we need to make sure we need to use any and all tools available to try to address this housing issue.”
The race for mayor is nonpartisan.
Gorton is a registered Republican, the first Republican to be elected to the city’s highest office since the merged government began in 1974. Kloiber is a Democrat.
Kloiber attended Lexington Catholic High School and graduated from the University of Kentucky. He returned to Lexington ten years ago. He is the president of his family’s foundation, the Kloiber Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on education and technology. He was elected to council in November 2020. He had no opposition in that race. He is married and has two children.
Kloiber said Wednesday he has had diverse life and work experiences and is qualified to run the city, despite having only spent one year on council.
“I have had a wide range of experience in both the business world and my nonprofit experience. I have worked with local leaders to try to accomplish things in our community.”
Gorton, a registered nurse, spent 16 years on council, including four years as vice mayor. In her 2019 mayoral election, she handily defeated former Lexington Police Chief Ronnie Bastin, a first-time candidate, receiving 63 percent of the vote.
This story was originally published December 9, 2021 at 8:31 AM.
