If you've arrived at this page after reading your way through this edition then you may have taken stock of the challenges we face in making sure that our city doesn't run afoul of the EPA's unforgiving edict telling Lexington - - in no uncertain terms - - to bring its management of storm-water runoff into the 21st century.
How can there be anything good to say about this situation?
Fortunately for all of us, we have the brainpower to figure out how to meet the EPA's requirements and become a better city in the bargain. Not only is Lexington home to a thriving community of professional landscape designers and architects, one of the city's institutions of higher learning is producing some of the industry's most promising future talents.
DesignIntelligence, a bi-monthly publication promoting quality design education, has ranked the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture's undergraduate landscape architecture program number 15 nationally among 54 schools in its ninth edition of "America's Best Architecture and Design Schools."
Under department chair Horst Schach, UK's landscape architecture program has for years quietly provided a broad-based education combined with an intensive, professional curriculum that is designed to encourage creative problem solving, critical thinking and the aesthetic sensitivities associated with the design profession. Graduates are sent out into the world having been required to understand natural and social systems in order to plan, design and manage the natural and human environments essential to enhancing the quality of life.
It's a safe bet that this has not mattered all that much to most residents of Lexington.
Until now.
Now, with non-residential property owners facing the certainty of a new bill in the mail, calculated on the basis of how much rainwater their hardened surfaces shed into the city's storm sewers, it matters big time.
"What needs to happen next here in Lexington is that in some cases our ordinances have not kept up with the technology," noted Schach. "For example, in most cases if I were to go out and do a parking lot and instead of your normal storm sewer system I want to do a series of bioswales, the existing ordinances might very well force me to do that plus the standard system. Well, you know your clientele is not going to want a double-backup system like that. But the present ordinances have not been adequately updated to accommodate some of these new technologies. So that's one thing that all of us in our profession are looking forward to happening."
Over the years, Schach and his colleagues have brought their considerable body of knowledge to bear in community discussions over such issues as the Purchase of Development Rights program - - a great example of the advantages of being a college town. But with a new countywide economic incentive coming into the picture in the form of a new fee for the right to contribute to local flooding their expertise suddenly becomes all the more relevant to day-to-day commerce in Fayette County.
"It certainly speaks well for what our graduates will be able to do out in the professional practice world," said Schach. "Once all the ordinances and policies are updated I think it will give them a greater opportunity to do creative things in the community."
So, the next time you're driving along University Drive next to Commonwealth Stadium notice the faintly out-of-place structure just across the street. Looks like a barn. It's anything but.
What goes on inside E.S. Good Barn could play an important role in your margin of success. The renovated barn houses the array of design studios and the updated computer lab that produce the new ideas that become solutions to the sorts of challenges presented to Lexington by this EPA imperative to actually live up to the high quality of life our chamber of commerce loves to tout.
It's comforting to know that despite these difficult and expensive obstacles, the talent that it will take to overcome them is being nurtured right here in our city.