Lexington’s Civic Assembly worked. Now make It govern | Opinion

CivicLex built something genuinely new in Lexington, but we can and should take this model even further. Thirty-six randomly selected residents, meeting for 36 hours across seven sessions, studied the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government charter and issued recommendations on how to improve representation, trust and participation in local government. The 54-year-old charter acts as a constitution, laying out the branches of our city-county government and their powers.

The assembly participants worked hard and in good faith. They wrestled with complexity. They produced three clear recommendations: raise council pay to the average wage, review the charter every eight years via a resident body selected by lottery, and mandate attendance tracking for elected officials. They left the final session dancing.

The Urban County Council will now decide what, if anything, to do.

This is the prescribed limit of representative democracy. In scholar Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation model, rung one is manipulation, and rung eight is full citizen control. This assembly landed around rung four. Advisory consultation, not power.

James Madison argued in the Federalist Papers that government should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Our institutions were designed to filter popular will through the interests of a small, ruling elite. An advisory assembly fits comfortably within that tradition. It asks the people to speak, then sends them home while the politicians decide.

There are other models. In Chiapas, Mexico, indigenous Zapatista communities have governed themselves for three decades through continuous face-to-face assemblies. These assemblies are governing institutions composed of everyday people who debate and make binding decisions together. When coordination across regions is needed, assemblies send delegates with strict instructions they cannot override. If a delegate drifts, they are recalled immediately. Power flows from the neighborhood up — not from the council down.

Closer to home, Americans have our own precedents. Early New England colonists adapted Iroquois democratic practices into their own town meetings, which, for centuries, have let communities debate and directly allocate their government’s budget. More recently, D.I.R.E.C.T., a group of Lexington residents studying direct democracy, gathered people in March to practice what a decision-making assembly might look like. Participants worked through a neighborhood snow emergency scenario (sound familiar?) and discovered something simple: no one knows everything, but together we know a lot.

The CivicLex assembly proved the same thing. People are ready and capable of governance. Assembly participants showed up, learned complex material, and reached thoughtful conclusions. The only thing they could not do was make those conclusions stick.

Council should place the assembly’s recommendations on the November ballot. That is the minimum. But the deeper question Lexington faces is whether future assemblies will have real authority or remain elaborate listening sessions. Advisory processes, however well-designed, are not self-governance. They tokenize participation without granting citizen control. The alternative is what people from the Iroquois Confederacy to Classical Athens, and from the New England town halls to the Paris Commune have practiced: a governing assembly—one where participation is not a periodic invitation but a living tradition, and where there is no separate class of politicians and bureaucrats to filter the people’s will.

Even if governing assemblies feel distant, assemblies can still build power and community outside City Hall—in neighborhoods, unions, workplaces, and mutual aid networks. Today, D.I.R.E.C.T is working in Lexington to shape assemblies in these avenues. And so, when the opportunity to review LFUCG’s charter comes around again, direct democracy can be a well-practiced feature of Lexington’s civic culture.

The 36 residents who danced out of that final session caught a glimpse of what self-governance could look like. But, their recommendations will only make a difference if Council allows. That is permission, not self-governance. The question is whether we accept a life of pleading with politicians to do the right thing, or whether we the people, assembled, can govern ourselves. To learn more, visit D.I.R.E.C.T.’s website at WeGovern.us.

Idris Irihamye, Nick Lyell, and Max Puchalsky are members of D.I.R.E.C.T., a group of residents in Lexington, KY, organizing for a future in which we can make decisions in and for our own communities.