Local groups join to provide vital information on Lexington city council races
Local leaders, like Urban County Councilmembers, make decisions that impact each of our lives in immediate ways. They make decisions about recycling and trash pick-up, traffic, sidewalks, housing, growth and economic development. These decisions, some big and some small, ultimately shape our day to day lives and the ways in which we experience our city. Casting an informed vote for local elected leaders is critical to Lexington-Fayette County’s future and collective success.
Since 1958, the Pew Research Center has tracked Americans’ trust in the Federal Government. In 1964, 77% of Americans reported trusting the federal government — in 2019, that number was down to 17%. Much can be said about how local government is well-positioned to rebuild this trust. The political leaders we are voting for locally in just a few short weeks are people we can see and interact with. We run into them at grocery stores, pharmacies, and coffee shops - even if they are hard to recognize in their masks.
Despite this level of accessibility, many Fayette County voters choose not to vote in their Urban County Council races. In 2018, less than 70% of Lexingtonians that voted in the Kentucky 6th district congressional race voted for a councilmember. That means that only 1 out of every 3 registered Fayette County voters cast a vote for council. The numbers are similar or worse in all elections of the past decade.
With two competitive city council races this month, our organizations — CivicLex and Fayette Alliance — merged our years of voter education efforts into a coalition with ten other civic organizations: Commerce Lexington, Fayette County Neighborhood Council, Fayette County Farm Bureau, Lexington Herald-Leader, League of Women Voters, Lexington Community Land Trust, Lexington Forum, RadioLex, Smiley Pete Publishing, and WUKY-FM.
We came together across ideology, focus area, and program priority to build LexVote, a centralized resource to help residents cast an informed vote in the Fayette County primary election on June 23rd. While we may often have different perspectives on the issues that face our community, our coalition believes that finding places for partnership like this strengthens Lexington as a whole.
LexVote, which can be found at https://lex.vote, has three key parts:
an informational guide to absentee voting;
an eleven-question candidate questionnaire distributed to the primary LFUCG Council candidates (3rd and 9th districts), and;
a ballot tool which generates a full sample ballot based on your address.
LexVote’s guide to absentee voting will help voters understand when and where to vote safely, and our questionnaire and ballot tool will help voters understand not only who is on their ballot, but their visions and priorities for how Lexington will grow and change as we move forward.
Our candidate questionnaire was drafted collectively by our coalition organizations and asks candidates to address major challenges and opportunities in Lexington that can be impacted by the Council. They include public safety, city revenue and budget, affordable housing, infill and redevelopment, economic development, infrastructure, agriculture and local food systems, and business recovery after COVID-19. Even if you won’t be voting for the 3rd or 9th District Candidates in this primary, understanding their positions on these issues helps all of us to understand their role in shaping the city’s response to them in the future.
The strength of this effort is in the strength of our focus on community partnership. Our coalition believes that voting locally is key to building trust in our community, and our hope is that this effort can only grow in the General Election. If your organization would like to join us, please reach out to Brittany Roethemeier at brittany@fayettealliance.com and Richard Young at richard@civiclex.org.
Brittany Roethemeier is the Executive Director of Fayette Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to achieving sustainable growth in Lexington-Fayette County through advocacy, research, and education. Richard Young is the Executive Director of CivicLex, a non-profit civic education organization working to bring daylight to the issues, policies, and procedures that impact Fayette County.
This story was originally published June 11, 2020 at 10:32 AM.