"When it comes to what's public and what's private, Lexington sometimes gets it completely backward.
Take the Yellow Bike program. Eighty new bicycles were located throughout downtown early this summer and anyone willing to invest $10 got a key to their bike locks. You didn't own the bike, but you were free to use it for a few minutes, and then leave it behind for another person to use. It would get people out of their cars, promote more life on the street, and make the city more attractive. But after three months, it looks like a number of private individuals have largely appropriated what was intended as a public amenity for their own private convenience. Most of the bikes are gone.
What's just as notable as the missing bikes themselves has been the relatively scant sense of outrage about this. One wonders where the sense of public accountability is, why people who know a neighbor has a bike locked up on their private porch don't raise a stink about it with that person and shame them into returning the bike into public view and public service. Instead, the reaction seems to be pure cynicism: well, what did you expect? And it's an indication that a sense of public engagement, of accountability to each other, of building social capital through shared endeavors, has not been a priority among the citizens of the Bluegrass.
Since I moved to Lexington 14 years ago, I've been fascinated with the Bluegrass landscape, and just as much by people's reactions to it. Lexingtonians love the landscape. They recognize how distinct it is, how unique in both its appearance and its use, and how it ties us to a sense of cultural history that goes back to the settlement of the Bluegrass itself over two centuries ago. We value the agrarian culture, particularly that of the horse, that has grown up on that land. The selection of Lexington for the 2010 World Equestrian Games merely confirms what so many of us already know: it's a world-class landscape, and it makes us a world-class place.
We take our unique sense of identity from that landscape and what occurs on it. The evidence is all around us. Think of the images of horse farms greeting new arrivals at Bluegrass Airport. Consider the major public events, from Picnic at the Pops to the Southern Lights display at Christmas to the weekly Rotary Club meetings, that all take place at venues located in this agrarian landscape, not in the city itself. The Bluegrass landscape is how we see ourselves and how we present ourselves to others.
There is a big paradox in making this association though: we're taking our public identity from private land. It's land that is maintained beautifully, but maintained almost exclusively by private interests. The public doesn't have any economic investment in this agrarian land, only a personal sense of attachment to it as a key to defining our own identity. Visionary horseman John Gaines used to argue that the Thoroughbred breeding industry was based on the stallions held for stud, and if a small convoy of horse vans arrived one morning to move the stallions out of Central Kentucky, the Thoroughbred industry would vanish from the Bluegrass too. For Mr. Gaines, his vignette was an omen for just how fragile the entire community was, not just the horse business. If that agrarian landscape went away, our identity would go too. There really wouldn't be much to distinguish us from like-sized towns throughout the center of America. And then who would we be?
The hidden drama of the public/private paradox is that by appropriating private land as our public identity, the public hasn't had to pay anything to maintain that identity throughout our history. Private individuals and companies have done it for us. That's had more than a little to do with the lingering sense of a landed gentry making all the key decisions affecting the future of the town. They were taking care of things for us and we got to enjoy the results, but only from the sidelines. Finally that may be changing.
So most Lexingtonians have had something of a free ride in promoting their civic self-image. Public investments, like the purchase of development rights (PDR) program, are still miniscule components in the economics of this community's future and may be more important right now as incubators of how to develop an attitude about public investment in the Bluegrass community than in the land that has been reserved for agrarian uses in perpetuity. But we don't seem to think enough about investing ourselves in our future: it's startling that the opportunity to leverage the 2010 World Equestrian Games as a tool of economic engagement and revitalization for Lexington is only now rising to public consciousness, nearly a year after the selection was made. It simply means there is less time to prepare for our starring role on a major world stage.
The willingness of the public to invest in our future — and not leave it up to private interests to do it for them — clearly needs to be addressed. We need to develop a stronger sense of social capital, of being willing to invest in the future of Lexington. The good news is that this kind of investment can extend well beyond purely financial instruments. It involves citizen awareness and participation in discussions about the future. It involves political leadership that listens broadly to its citizens and then acts efficiently on those areas where consensus is reached. And it can result in improvements not only in the physical environment of the Bluegrass, but in the social engagement of its citizens in making it happen.
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