Protecting the magic beauty of the Bluegrass, its exquisite farms and the thoroughbred horse industry ought to be a slam dunk. These are the assets that symbolize Central Kentucky to the world.
The 21st century will see regions across the globe competing furiously to draw attention, to lure visitors and investors, to land intelligence-based corporate activity. For a region its size, the seven-county Bluegrass area starts with a big leg up -- or legs attached to thoroughbreds.
It is a huge challenge to protect Central Kentucky's legacy in the face of fast-paced, often sprawling development of subdivisions and piano-key lots, shopping centers and scattered office buildings. Traffic is getting worse; land and home prices are escalating.
The stark truth is that the Bluegrass region, while pushing hard for a better planned future, is drifting down the road toward ``generica,'' with subdivisions and commercial strips and suburban ring highways that could be America anywhere.
There is so much to lose, and many Bluegrass citizens recognize the peril. And it's not just placid rural landscapes that Bluegrass people honor. We found them eager to talk about preserving proud local identities, very livable communities from Versailles to Berea, Nicholasville to Georgetown.
But they're worried that public policy isn't keeping up with these high hopes.
Again and again, people told us horse farms are the No. 1 reason people come to Central Kentucky. But check the numbers and you find very little cash invested in horse farm tourism and market promotion.
And the worry goes beyond horses and farms. Local leaders say, ``Let's tune in to the global economy, grab our share of the fast-growing, knowledge-based industries. We want those higher incomes for the 21st century.''
But is there a systematic effort to achieve that goal? We did find efforts under way. It's encouraging to see the Kentucky Science and Technology Corp. raising $15 million for venture capital, provided that some of that is targeted for knowledge-based industries and to central Kentucky. Lexington United, the region's marketing arm, has a new executive with a reputation for savvy tech start-ups. The Greater Lexington Chamber of Commerce has played midwife to another regional organization, now called Bluegrass Partnership Initiative. This nine-county group aims to lock economic planning arms to plan for business and industrial growth.
One can only wish such efforts well. But we have to report that viewed from America's constellation of hard-competing regions, the Lexington effort is clearly catch-up -- not cutting edge. A lot of energy will have to be invested for the area to be a player in a global game that gets tougher every day.
Lexington is home to the state's flagship university, which in today's economy should be seen as a gold mine of technology, entrepreneurship and skill-building for the century ahead. But when we asked about constructive bridges between the university and the regional community, we kept stumbling into moats -- for example, resentment over the University of Kentucky's failure to provide student housing (even while nearby neighborhoods are changing zoning policies to keep the students out).
A regional challenge
Visitors to Central Kentucky hear today's popular demand to minimize government, to keep it at bay. But we wondered how all the Bluegrass communities will be able to achieve a shared vision of the future when there's such a range of ethics about local land uses. Some Bluegrass counties are using every tool they can get their hands on to protect the region's land treasures. Others are in the most primitive stages of defining the public interest in sensitive land cases. And it seems that any official who reaches across county lines is asking for a bucketful of frustration.
There's danger in that. If some counties plan and others don't, the region as a whole loses. Land use, transportation, environmental planning are underway at a heady clip; the challenge is to connect the plans so they add up to a coherent regional strategy.
Downtown, small towns
Lexington, the region's largest city, has strong potential as a regional center, with a solid core of hotels, a convention center and fine historic neighborhoods like Gratz Park and Ashland Park.
But downtown's potential as a vibrant urban center, a meeting place for the region, hasn't become the popular cause we see in vast numbers of regions across the United States today. Major streets are mostly one-way traffic speedways, noticeably hostile to pedestrians. Mayor Pam Miller says this is a false ``efficiency'' she hopes to change soon, but so far the engineers continue to have their way. Downtown Lexington streets say to most citizens: This is a place to get through, not to.
And though there are task forces working on student housing solutions, scarcely anyone mentions what a surge of downtown housing might do to change the whole feel of the place. The unmet potential is to create an 18-hour-a-day downtown, lighting up Main Street with restaurants, sparking all the urban attractions that are showing up in countless other U.S. cities.
Some of the Bluegrass' strongest assets are its smaller cities, each with intact town centers, fine architecture and a real sense of place. Just tour as we did and talk with residents of Georgetown, Winchester, Paris, Wilmore, Richmond, Berea or Versailles, and you're struck by the beauty and character of these places.
Yet the harsh truth is that under most of today's zoning codes -- pushing buildings back from street lines, requiring large amounts of parking, forbidding apartments over stores -- such compactly built towns cannot be replicated. And while nobody wants city streets clogged with big trucks just passing through, building a road to bypass the town and inviting development on it seems so clearly a self-inflicted wound.
The Bluegrass region is in danger. By failing to get serious about careful, regionwide planning, it could end up with run-of-the-mill suburbanization crawling all over the countryside, ruining the vast and irreplaceable vistas. And it could lose its urban advantages, too. Not just in Lexington, but in all the city centers and county seats.
The cruelest irony would be a Bluegrass region that ends up neither genuinely rural or urban -- when for 21st century success, it can be both.
Working it out
The good news is that citizens and leaders, in the collar counties as much as in Fayette, are beginning to see regionwide planning as a tool, not a threat. Many take heart from the resolution of the 20-year Paris Pike controversy with agreement on a road that satisfies transportation demands while preserving the historic character of the landscape.
But how can the spirit of the Paris Pike accord be applied to the region's larger dilemmas?
The missing links seem to be, first, some believable way to finance the preservation of Bluegrass-area farms, and second, a political solution that brings all the counties together, tying them formally in a serious action program.
In the accompanying articles, we make two proposals along those lines: a privately based preservation syndicate (call it Bluegrass Forever?) and a structure for sharing a portion of the region's tax base.
We don't pretend these are the best answers. But we do think they raise the right questions if coming generations are to enjoy the unique heritage of the Bluegrass.
