Snow, housing, crime were big topics for Lexington mayoral candidates in forum
Four Lexington mayoral candidates put key points of their platform on display Tuesday evening, speaking on a handful of significant issues in the city and addressing how they’d plan to make changes if elected.
Incumbent Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton has coasted through two elections to the city’s highest seat. As she seeks a potentially historic third term, she faces six challengers on the May 19 primary ballot.
A point of scrutiny for Gorton in recent months, and a prominent topic in Tuesday’s forum, was the city’s response to winter weather in the last two years. Recent winter weather events left neighborhood streets covered for weeks, led to over 150 crashes and resulted in the resignation of a longtime city commissioner.
Gorton said at the Tuesday night candidate forum at the Lyric Theater, as she has previously, that her administration is starting work on improving winter readiness. Her proposed city budget includes $5.1 million for winter response and she is creating a work group of city officials to fully rewrite Lexington’s snow and ice plan.
“We’re going to do better through this new plan that we’re going to craft through our work group,” she said in the forum.
Some of her opponents said the failed response comes from the top.
“Our city workers work hard, but they only take direction from their higher-ups from those appointed positions,” said Darnell Tagaloa, a mayoral candidate who has run for local office before and is a sales professional. “It’s much bigger than snow and ice, and it’s completely about leadership.”
Raquel Carter, owner of Guide Realty, said tackling winter weather is “not rocket science.”
“In the early stage of a storm, a lot of times when other cities are touching neighborhood roads … you’ll treat those first, because you know that when the storm gets bad, we have to be focused on those priority roads,” Carter said about how Lexington should handle storms in the future.
Landscaper Greg O’Neal said training and inexperienced drivers were to blame, not Gorton.
“I’d invite some guys out of Michigan or Wisconsin to come down here and put on a seminar for two hours, two days, whatever, teach these guys how to plow snow,” he said. “I’m not going to blame it on the mayor. Of course not.”
Other opponents in the mayoral race — C.E. Huffman, Skip Horine and Rama Asmani — were not present at the Tuesday forum, hosted by the Lexington Urban League Young Professionals and the National Association of Real Estate Brokers.
Housing access and affordability
Lexington’s housing crisis has made headlines for much of the 2020s, like many other U.S. cities.
A 2024 study from EHI Consultants found that Lexington’s rent increased 47% from 2019 to 2024. The city is short over 22,000 housing units, causing people to look to rapidly growing neighboring counties for housing. Of those 22,000 units, 17,000 are needed for low-income residents.
That same study estimates that, barring significant policy and construction changes, the shortage will exceed 30,000 by 2030.
Gorton said the city has made progress on housing. The affordable housing fund, which subsidizes low-income housing projects for developers, has created or preserved roughly 4,000 subsidized units for low-income residents. Lexington has put over $60 million total into that fund since its creation in 2014.
Carter said that investment is still too small.
“We don’t have enough money that we’re putting into our affordable housing fund. We are not using that fund efficiently and effectively,” she argued. “If over the last 10 years we have created 4,000 affordable units, I will still say it’s not enough, because we went from 6,000 to 17,000 units of need in that same time period.”
Moderators asked candidates what they would do to increase homeownership opportunities in Lexington, which they said has a lower homeownership rate at 53.8% than the national average of 66%.
Gorton and Tagaloa said financial literacy and workforce training are key.
Gorton said the Work Lexington Resource Center, which recently reopened at the Davis Park Community Center, offers free lessons for writing resumes and preparing for job interviews, as well as connecting people to job openings in several local industries.
Carter didn’t offer a clear policy for how she would increase homeownership, although she did say “we are specifically doing things right now that constrain our availability.”
She’s used that same language in the past to describe Lexington’s urban service boundary, which limits urban development to the center of the city. Lexington for Everyone, a nonprofit she formerly served on the board of, advocated in 2023 for expansion of the boundary.
O’Neal said it takes too long for development plans to get approved in Lexington, citing a 2023 study which found it took an average of 523 days for a plan to be certified after it’s filed.
Gorton countered that claim, saying improvements to planning efficiency mean a developer can get a plan approved in 32 days, although local developers don’t fully agree.
Outside of speeding up development timelines, O’Neal said he had no other ideas on housing — particularly for Black residents, who have historically lagged far behind in homeownership due to historic redlining practices, restricted access to home loans and other discriminatory policies.
“I don’t know (I) have an answer for you as to why some people can get housing and some people can’t get housing. What I would do is I would get experts together and we figure it out,” O’Neal said.
“It bothers me to hear that because of your race, you can’t get housing. I don’t understand it.”
Public safety
O’Neal had a straightforward answer for how he would address public safety: encourage Lexington residents to have Ring doorbell cameras, give the police the resources they ask for, and do whatever ONE Lexington director Devine Carama encourages them to do.
“I would make a beeline to Devine. This dude, he knows what’s going on in this town when it comes to what we just talked about with the, you know, the African American community stuff. I’m going straight to him,” O’Neal said.
Gorton was quick to highlight her recruiting of Carama to run the youth-focused gun violence intervention arm of the government, quipping “his desk sits right next to mine.”
Gorton touted that violent crime decreased 10.8% from 2024 to 2025. Property crime went down 8.7% in that same time span. Those decreases come from the work of ONE Lexington and community policing efforts she’s helped boost throughout the police department and in high-risk neighborhoods.
“They go where the crime is. They also are community policing. They know neighborhoods. They go to neighborhood meetings. They know the business owners,” Gorton said. “And that has brought a great change to our policing, which is a good change.”
Tagaloa said the decreased crime statistics don’t tell the whole story.
“They say the numbers are down. It doesn’t feel that way out here,” he said. “So although we get numbers, they’re always the good numbers. I actually would love to see some of the negative numbers that don’t show a good reflection of our city, but we don’t get those publicly.”
Tagaloa said as mayor he would work with Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers to come up with ideas to address crime, and specifically improve mental health services.
He and Gorton both said much of Lexington’s youth violence comes from children who live in single-parent households, specifically single-mother households.
Carter, who was raised by her single mother, pushed back on those claims.
“I don’t want to look and say, these are our youth — we are crime-ridden, our homes are broken, our men are not there — because that is not always our experience,” she said. “Our black community is strong. Our youth really want to do something. We have to give them the path to be able to do it.”
Economic issues are the root cause of crime, Carter argued. Bringing in more high-paying jobs and lowering housing costs are the best ways to decrease crime in her eyes.
“You’ll hear me say it often, because everything does go back to you having somewhere safe to live that you can afford,” Carter said. “When people can go home and afford to live there and not be stressed and put food on their table, that is one of the core ingredients to ensuring that people don’t fall into the traffic of crime.”
O’Neal chalked the root of youth crime up to drug use. He said he would partner with Fayette County Public Schools for specific programming on violence prevention, aiming to have families affected by youth crime deliver their stories to Lexington students.
“I would go to a family here in Lexington who has lost a child due to gun violence. Then I would go to a family who has lost their child to the prison system because they shot somebody. And I would put those people on a stage in front of all the students of Fayette County, and let those students watch those parents cry,” O’Neal said.
Arts and culture
Three of the four mayoral candidates said supporting the arts would be important in their administration.
Gorton highlighted the success of the Art on the Town carts, which local artists can use to display and sell their art downtown during the spring and summer when the city is more active.
“We have several thousand working artists right here in Lexington. This is their job. And so this is an important economic driver of our city. And so we try to support our artists through different unique programs,” she said.
She also mentioned the Percent for Art program, which places 1% of the city’s annual bond package into a funding pool for public art projects. That fund has supported new statues in the Distillery District and the city’s jail.
The fund did not support the controversial braided “Woven Path” statue downtown, which Tagaloa specifically called out as a new installation he liked, although he did say the city should prioritize funding local artists before working with out-of-town creators such as Woven Path’s designer, Benjamin Ball.
O’Neal simply said, “Art is not on my priority at all.”
“I got a photo in my phone of the art thing downtown by the courthouse, and 20 feet away from it are three pieces of litter on the ground,” O’Neal said. “And somebody, a visitor of Lexington coming in would say ‘Yeah, nice piece of art. Why aren’t they cleaning up their city?’”
O’Neal said repeatedly throughout the night that he had three focuses as mayor: improving traffic signal timing, making city hall a good place to work and eliminating litter.
Carter said the city needs to ensure local and diverse artists are engaged for new opportunities, something Lexington organizations have faced criticism for in the past for not doing well enough.
“We have to be very intentional about including local artists. We have to be very intentional about including minority representation and artists in any of our art sculptures and any of our art exhibit and anything that we’re funding on a city level,” she said.
Carter also brought up the upcoming arts district from the University of Kentucky near South Broadway as an opportunity for the city and the university to work collaboratively in crafting a unique hub for local artists.
“To not leverage that, to not have the relationship with this project from the beginning … that would be a missed opportunity.”
This story was originally published April 15, 2026 at 8:29 AM.
