Deciding how to vote for Lexington mayor? Here’s where candidates stand on key issues

Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton and Councilman David Kloiber will face off for the city’s top leadership position on Nov. 8, 2022.

Gorton, the incumbent, won all but one of the precincts in Fayette County in the primary election held in the spring. She garnered 71% of the vote while Kloiber received 14%.

Kloiber, who runs his family’s foundation that focuses on technology and education, has given a total of $587,916.97 to his campaign during the general election, according to the latest Kentucky Registry of Election Finance reports.

To help residents make a decision on who they want to vote for in the mayor’s race, the Herald-Leader asked both candidates to answer questions on crime, affordable housing and the Urban Service Boundary.

The answers are in the candidates’ own words, and have been edited only for length. Candidates were given 200 words to answer each of the following questions. Answers are listed in alphabetical order.

For more local and state election coverage, check out the Herald-Leader Voter Guide.

What, if anything, would you change about the city’s current crime prevention efforts? Do you support the use of Flock cameras to investigate crimes?

Linda Gorton: “It’s important to note that overall violent crime continues to decline in Lexington and has for years. Overall shootings are down as well. Homicides have gone up and it’s important to understand what’s in this number to drive strategies to address it and other issues surrounding it. Commitments financially and through personnel and partnerships has expanded exponentially. The historic commitments to evidence based programming supports prevention and intervention efforts across many fronts and has cut the homicides among ages 13-29 in half in one year. I support continuing to grow these efforts and include new ones as we work with cities across the country to evaluate successful models. The areas of greatest challenge right now are on the domestic violence front and addressing mental health. One-third of our homicides this year are related to domestic violence. We have great partners in the world of domestic violence prevention and we are working hard to make sure potential victims of this kind of violence know how to find this help. We have great partners in NAMI and our healthcare networks but they have seen more patients coming through their door than ever before. Violence is a public health crisis and we will continue to treat it as such.

“We began the Flock camera pilot program by talking to the Human Rights Commission, NAACP and ACLU to discuss their concerns and developed a policy overseeing the program that addressed those. In the few months that this pilot program has been operating, the successes speak for themselves:

• Total value of recovered vehicles: $1,342,675.64
• Total of success stories: 147
• NCIC Stolen vehicles: 84
• NCIC Stolen plates: 11
• NCIC warrant: 6
• NCIC missing person: 4
• Warrants/Subpoenas served: 110
• Missing persons recovered: 11
• Guns seized: 30
• #of Charges: 407
• #of persons charged: 148

“We have to address crime on all fronts. Prevention and intervention are critical to lessening crime. But we have to provide necessary resources to law enforcement to solve criminal cases once they occur as well. It’s important to the victims and to other would be perpetrators that justice is served. This is a tool utilized to great success all across the country in cities facing the same officer shortages as us by improving the efficiency of the investigative process.”

David Kloiber: “We must address the record-setting violence our city is experiencing, and admit that what we are doing is not working. Our officers have a strained relationship with many residents, which is not being improved by the current administration’s insistence that increased surveillance and public safety salaries will promote overall safety. We have heard repeatedly from public safety experts that our crime prevention needs to be collaborative with the community for it to be effective. Violent crimes cannot be prevented unless officers are viewed as trusted partners in the neighborhoods they protect. To that end, I have proposed bringing in the G.V.I (Group Violence Intervention) framework, because it has a thirty year track record of success addressing root causes of violence through community involvement. We need a program that gets our officers out of their patrol cars and walking through the neighborhoods. We need to bring community leaders, judges, elected officials, and the police together in committee to identify and interrupt violent offenders. What we need is a proven plan to make our city safe, and as your next Mayor I am committed to bringing Lexington the most highly praised and effective community policing policy in our country’s history.

“Surveillance cameras do not prevent crime, and anyone with a history in public safety will speak to this truth. The Mayor and her administration like to talk about the crimes these cameras have helped to solve, but seldom do they focus on the opportunities lost because of them. How many of these crimes would have been solved even without the cameras? How many cases of violent crime are going unsolved because our resources and personnel are investigating leads on stolen cars and missing persons? What if the money being allocated to this program was being used to give our officers more resources to prevent the violence? These cameras do nothing to prevent crime in our city, and run the real risk of being placed in historically over-policed communities to target minority and underserved populations. Not to mention the fact that the FLOCK camera program is actually owned and operated privately, and all the data collected by these cameras is proprietary and requires an annual licensing fee for the city to access. A continued cost that redirects our limited public safety resources towards investigation instead of prevention is not where the city should be focusing its efforts and taxpayer dollars.“

Explain why or why not the city’s urban service boundary should be expanded.

Linda Gorton: “The question isn’t whether it should be expanded or not but when that should take place. Our boundary has ensured this city focused on intentional and well planned growth and avoided the sprawl and blight that many other cities have seen. When the time comes to expand, it needs to be for the right reasons. When we expanded in 1996 we did not see a growth in affordable housing development. LBAR’s study conducted through UK in 2017 said that expansion would not have a long term positive effect on home prices. Expansion should be considered when we no longer have properly zoned land inside the boundary to meet the needs of growth.”

David Kloiber: “For the last decade our city has grown 1% annually, and appears poised to continue that trend moving forward. If we continue to keep the USB as a static boundary, this growth can only manifest in a small number of ways. The first is as higher density infill, which means that the character of our current neighborhoods would need to change to accommodate more people. Addressing our growth solely through infill will eventually see the day where high rise apartments overlook all our greenspaces like the Arboretum and Ashland. The second is by pushing our population into the surrounding counties and forcing our sprawl to accumulate at the county line. This is exactly what happened between Jessamine and Fayette county as more people moved to Nicholasville. Following this trend, our already overtaxed infrastructure will eventually recreate the congestion of Nicholasville road on all of our arterial corridors. The issues you do not address become the problems you cannot control. My view of city planning is about balance and priorities. We need to be intentional about protecting the aspects of our city that mean the most to our residents, and we should use every tool at our disposal to do so.“

What new programs would you pursue to increase affordable housing?

Linda Gorton: “While we’ve made historic levels of financial commitments to affordable housing during my time in office, outside market forces continue to drive prices up. My administration recently proposed funding and is in the process of establishing the Lexington neighborhood investment initiative to provide financial assistance toward renovations of abandoned and blighted properties so they can then be returned to our affordable housing stock instead of going to predatory developers. This program helps neighborhoods fight back against gentrification. While the creation of a land bank is a little further into the future, it is another option we are seriously considering that may help in the same way. My administration has also created and expanded the role of our housing advocate who works directly with people in need to connect them to housing when it matters most. This kind of education and assistance is critical to keeping people housed. Many cities across the country have tenant anti-discrimination policies that prevent landlords from refusing certain types of payment. Some are effective and some aren’t. My team has been exploring this for quite some time to see if there is a proposal that is good for Lexington.”

David Kloiber: “Lexington has seen a dramatic increase in its housing costs over the last year, and if we are going to reverse this trend we need to take an intentional and multi-pronged approach to reducing these costs across the board. To begin, we need to create a dedicated funding source for the development of new affordable housing. The availability of these units decreases the cost of living to everyone in the community, but the commitment to being a housing-first city requires a continued financial commitment. As Mayor, I will work with the community to place a referendum on the ballot in 2023 asking the public to support this initiative. Additionally, we need to incentivize development of more housing to increase the supply of available homes. Current zoning and development policy slowed the construction of new homes long before the recent supply chain issues took a toll on the entire housing sector. As Mayor, I will reevaluate our planning procedures and place an emphasis on streamlining the process for housing construction and redevelopment. Lexington can reverse the trends we are seeing, but It will take a multiyear commitment from our community towards becoming a true housing-first city.“