For the first time in 16 years, a Lexington mayor gets to enter the holidays after a city election contemplating the next four years in office rather than his or her final weeks in the Government Center.
Not since Pam Miller secured re-election to the mayor’s office in 1998 has Lexington opted for continuity in leadership. Miller decided not to seek a third full term in 2002, and since then, Lexington had showed its first-term mayors the door.
Mayor Jim Gray’s re-election went smoothly as he beat former Lexington police chief and current University of Kentucky Vice President Anthany Beatty by 30 percentage points.
“I was gratified and pleased by the vote, and it demonstrates that the people believe that we’re on the right track,” Gray said.
Despite the election results, Gray didn’t seem to be taking a victory lap. “We need to stay focused,” he said, acknowledging his first term had its ups and downs.
A push to renovate Rupp Arena and the city’s convention center as a catalyst for the vitalization of its surroundings came to an ugly end after the state failed to fund the project in its current biennial budget and UK distanced itself from the initiative.
But the funding of one of the bigger issues the city was facing, its flagging pension system, could prove to be a triumph of Gray’s tenure in office. In a mid-November report to Lexington’s Pension Board, Todd Green, a representative of Georgia-based actuarial consulting firm Cavanaugh Macdonald Consulting, told the group overseeing the city’s police and fire pension that their restructuring had proven to be the “the most effective pension reform in the country.”
“I’m very fortunate to have the talent in the administration that I have,” Gray said of his staff that led the charge on pension reform. “I’ve worked hard to do that. I’ve recruited these people personally.”
Gray, who served both as the city’s vice mayor on council and as CEO of his family’s large construction company before winning election four years ago, has cited his business experience as a key to the job.
“Government is not a business; it has different motivations and different goals and objectives. It isn’t, in a real sense, profit-driven; it is service-driven. But good business principles and practices can be translated into government, and that’s what we’ve tried to do and that’s what we’ve done,” he said.
“It was a real benefit to serve on the council before being mayor, a real benefit to see it from the council member’s side, to see the operations of government from the lens of a council member. It was an unexpected benefit of losing my first time out for mayor in 2002,” he said.
On election night and during his conversation with Business Lexington, Gray touted the new jobs, 9,000 in total, added in Lexington since he first took office, and he said he hopes to continue on that track over the next four years.
“A lot of those jobs are UK-related, and I think the growth of UK has been a real benefit for the city,” Gray said. But he doesn’t want to rest on his laurels in hopes the university, and its hospital, will be able to keep up the pace of job creation in the city. Gray hopes to further diversify the job pool and build the city’s middle class by highlighting the reasons Lexington is a great place to live and work.
“There’s a lot of organic growth in Lexington. We’re seeing the fruits of being a university city in terms of young people wanting to live here, wanting to stay here. This goes back as much as 10 years when we were working on the urban revitalization, the downtown activation, the notion of the entertainment district,” Gray said. He singled out the growth on Jefferson Street, new locations around the Fifth Third Pavilion in Cheapside Park, and town center-type hubs outside of the city’s core, like Beaumont Centre.
“You go downtown today and you’re going to see so many more people than you used to,” he said.
Two-way roads
One of the big pushes early on in Gray’s first four years was to change the city’s major roads from one-way traffic to two-way. Time has shown he may have been going against traffic in that attempt.
“Lexington’s hub-and-spoke model is arguably a greater challenge, not having the ease of flow,” he said about his continued hope to see traffic heading in both directions in downtown.
“We will work carefully to avoid increased congestion,” he said. “What we have to look at is the economic driver of a destination downtown versus the time it takes to commute through it. There’s always going to be tension there.”
Town-gown relations
One of the places there isn’t the tension the public may perceive, Gray said, was his office’s relationship with UK. The battle over Rupp cast a doubt over how Lexington stood in town-gown relations, but “that issue’s a lot more imagined than real,” the mayor said.
“We work together with the university every day. I’m going to be at [UK President Eli Capilouto’s] home tonight for an event, and this is routine,” he said. “The university’s priorities are very real, so it’s not unexpected that there would be some tension when both the university and the city are advocating for growth and opportunity and meeting aspirational goals,” he said.
But Gray said he wouldn’t let differences over Rupp spoil the two entities’ growth plans.
In his time running Gray Construction, Gray said it got redundant when attending ribbon-cuttings for his company’s newly completed facilities to hear a politician heap praise on new jobs being created. Gray said those words felt insincere and “cliché.”
“Now I’m in this role, and I realize, ‘Oh, they were serious.’ It’s a very big deal; it’s a very big deal,” he said.
“There are people with talent moving to Lexington to look for jobs. There are people with talent and skill sets who will more easily find jobs, and there are others who won’t as easily find jobs, so we’ve got to be working continuously to create job and opportunities for people,” he said.
Lexington-Louisville partnership
One of the ways Gray will try and bring jobs to Lexington is through the Bluegrass Economic Advancement Movement (BEAM), a regional partnership led by him and Louisville’s recently re-elected Mayor Greg Fischer.
Both Gray and Fischer were planning to visit Munich, Germany, in November as part of BEAM to study the apprenticeship program in place in the area that revolves around the European automotive industry and other manufacturing.
The mayor’s partnership started when Gray and Fischer were both mayors-elect, and Gray expects it to continue long after the two of them have left office.
“Greg and I working together has set an expectation that these cities will work together,” he said. While both mayors have the ability to run for at least one more term after their upcoming one, political seasons tend to bring about rumor and speculation about the intentions of elected officials.
While Fischer is oft mentioned for higher office such as governor or U.S. Senate, which he’s sought before, Gray said don’t expect to see him hang it up as Lexington’s mayor after this second term.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Gray responded when asked if he was planning to run for a third term. “If you love what you’re doing, you don’t work a day in your life.”
But when asked if he might seek higher office, he said simply: “I enjoy this job.”
Gray’s focus for at least the next four years is to keep Lexington moving toward the aspirations he’s set for it.
“The city is going to go on, the city is going to survive regardless; it’s not like a private business,” he said. “The city is going to survive; it’s going to survive any elected official. The real issue is how much does it move forward, and at what pace?”