Mayoral candidates to picture future of downtown in Friday forum

A roller rink, a homeless shelter, a soccer field, an arcade, a bargain clothing store, a music amphitheater, a grocery store, “the pink wall” for artists, a charging station for iPhones and computers, oh, I know, an NBA team — let’s bring back the Kentucky Colonels!

The time is now to picture the future of downtown Lexington, and the two mayoral candidates are drawing their own pictures of what’s to come.

They’re on deadline for the Great 8th Grade Challenge: A Mayoral Forum on the Future of Downtown Lexington.

Join us Friday morning for a pre-game show with candidates across the ballot (8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m.), then the main mayoral event (10 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.) at Memorial Hall on the University of Kentucky’s campus.

Let’s see if former police chief Ronnie Bastin and former Vice Mayor Linda Gorton can match the imagination of an eighth-grade class whose parents drop them off each school day downtown.

A high-school student, Natalia Smith, working on a history project with her English teacher at the STEAM Academy, tells me Lexington is about to elect its 53rd mayor since Charlton Hunt in 1832.

Hunt needed a nurse like Gorton, as he died of scarlet fever at 35 years, old two years after his mayoral term ended.

Lexington has elected newspaper editors, lawyers, judges and magistrates, a librarian, a cigar factory owner, an Indian agent in the Arizona territory, a paper hanger, bankers and doctors as mayors. But Gorton might just be the first nurse-in-chief.

If elected, Bastin would follow in the footsteps of another former public-safety commissioner elected mayor in 1920, Thomas Clark Bradley, who instituted Lexington’s first citywide zoning laws after his old family home was torn down for a parking lot.

Downtown Lexington has come a long way over the 19th and 20th centuries, but it’s still not up to snuff for the 12- and 13-year-olds in Lisa Holmes’ eighth-grade social studies class at Saints Peter and Paul Regional Catholic School.

Lexington’s first “talking movies” were shown downtown in the school’s ornate theater, where the big show these days is the middle-school play.

More and varied downtown entertainment venues are clearly on the minds of these too-young-to-vote citizens, but if the next mayor is re-elected, they will be 20- and 21-year-olds in eight years. Please, mayor, don’t leave them wondering where all the fun is downtown.

What downtown Lexington really needs is a Spalding’s donut shop, one eighth-grader beamed: “They’re the best in the world. There’s only one location now, and the lines are always out the door.”

Translation: How will you as the next mayor help small businesses to grow and expand?

That’s how the Q&A will work Friday morning. Please join me and my Journalism 101 students, who organized two Constitution Day forums in September with voter registration and now are trying to get young voters fired up for the Nov. 6 election.

Come with your own slam-dunk ideas for the future of downtown Lexington and meet the candidates who can help make them happen. Cheers.