UK ROTC must stop using public park for military training, Lexington says
Lexington city government will end its relationship with University of Kentucky ROTC at the end of this year.
Since 2016, ROTC has had a contract with Lexington Parks and Recreation to use Hisle Farm Park for tactical training, which includes large groups of cadets in camouflage carrying rubber guns. The props don’t fire any ammunition but are visually indistinguishable from real guns, residents said.
Citizens called the exercises “jarring” and “wholly incompatible” with the park environment at a city council meeting in June.
The contract between ROTC and Lexington Parks and Recreation, called a memorandum of understanding, was up for renewal this year.
On Thursday, in response to the complaints, the Lexington Fayette Urban County Council voted to stop allowing ROTC to use the park effective Dec. 31.
“Cadets move like soldiers, sometimes with rubber rifles or airsoft gear. To many onlookers, even simulation rifles or camo gear can blur the line between safe practice and imminent danger. For survivors of gun violence like myself, that blur triggers a visceral reaction,” resident Deana Mullins said at Thursday’s city council meeting.
Lt. Col. Alan Overmyer, a professor of military science at UK who is in charge of the ROTC training at Hisle Farm, told the Herald-Leader his students played paintball in the park one time in 2023 as an end-of-year celebration, and it is not a common practice.
Vice Mayor Dan Wu said letting UK use the park until December gives ROTC enough time to make different arrangements for training in the spring, but doesn’t put them in a lurch for the fall semester, which starts next month.
“Do we want military training in our public parks? It’s really a one-sentence question, and for me, that answer is no,” Wu said.
Overmyer told the Herald-Leader earlier this year the training his cadets do at the park is imperative to their education.
“It’s like a chemistry lab. You learn about covalent and ionic bonds, then you do an experiment in a chemistry lab,” he said. “It’s similar to military tactics. If you learn land navigation in class, then we go out to Hisle Farm Park, and we can actually practice what they’ve learned.”
Overmyer did not attend Thursday’s city council meeting, but Lexington’s Commissioner of General Services Chris Ford said UK ROTC is in contact with the Bluegrass Station and is in negotiations to train on their property.
Bluegrass Station is a military-industrial-business park managed by the Kentucky Department of Military Affairs located between Lexington and Winchester.
This story was originally published July 7, 2025 at 5:00 AM.