backfired<\/a>. It \u201cangered\u201d voters, says Gorton, who won the race handily and is making plans for a reelection bid next year.<\/p>\nDuring a recent afternoon, Gorton talked about how she has navigated the pandemic, faced a racial reckoning after the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in nearby Louisville, and juggled development of a midsize city surrounded by agriculture.<\/p>\n
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
As a registered nurse, you were putting hand sanitizer on conference room tables before people were even talking about Covid-19. How did your background help you manage the pandemic?<\/p>\n
I knew what scientific data was saying about the spread. There were people who thought I was doing things too early. But in this case, there isn\u2019t ever \u201ca too early.\u201d I knew the question wasn\u2019t going to be, \u201cWill we be immune to a pandemic.\u201d It had already hit China and the West Coast. It was coming. And so you take all those things into account and you say what can we do next to do the best we can do for our people here. And so we did that. <\/p>\n
Before our first case, I closed our senior center. Our senior citizens center is where hundreds of seniors gather. It\u2019s a daytime center that\u2019s fairly new, and it\u2019s popular. \u2026 We also closed our jail to visitors. We didn\u2019t want that population getting an immediate spread because it was still open. And we closed nursing homes after the governor made his executive order.<\/p>\n
… This is kind of corny, but I saw the city as a large patient. There were signs of wellness and signs of things that weren\u2019t so well during the pandemic, and we had to shift around. The team was everything. It\u2019s the same way with health care.<\/p>\n
Has enforcing the mask mandate been difficult, and how did you manage the needs of your residents here vs. what the governor was mandating?<\/p>\n
We\u2019re a midsize city, a city of 325,000 people, and so my priorities became keeping people safe and healthy first, keeping the general basic services operating \u2014 making sure garbage got picked up, the streetlights worked, the potholes got filled, that sort of thing. We had all the basic services that we had to keep churning out and we knew we\u2019d have to layer on top of that all the things needed to be done for the pandemic.<\/p>\n
… There was pushback, mostly from the late-night bar crowd, younger people who thought they were invincible and didn\u2019t think it would affect them. There was a lot of coordination and a lot of gray area of how far we are willing to go in a staring contest. In the end, the pushback was sort of tamped down, helped by businesses starting their own mask requirements.<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s vaccination rate is 72 percent and at least 60 percent are fully vaccinated. How have you achieved that?<\/p>\n
We are a highly educated city. I think 42 percent of our population has a bachelor\u2019s degree. And it helps that the University of Kentucky HealthCare is a huge health care hub for all of western Kentucky. They set up a vaccine clinic and they vaccinated 250,000 people. <\/p>\n
We also went door to door canvassing in the areas where we had a lot of non-English speakers, mostly Spanish speakers. We were going to areas that had low vaccine numbers. Before that we had set up a neighborhood Covid clinic testing model that got the attention of the White House.<\/p>\n
At the height of the pandemic, Lexington, like cities across the country, was dealing with racial unrest in the wake of George Floyd\u2019s murder, and you were seeing that compounded with the death of Breonna Taylor. How did your administration handle it?<\/p>\n
For me, it was a defining moment. We had 59 straight days of protests. On a couple nights we had up to a thousand people on the streets. It was a lot of young people. But there were others who joined in. Black people. White people. Ministers. … There were two protests at my house. That just ramped it up for me because that is getting more personal. One of those protests was in the daytime. One was at night. They blocked my driveway. And \u2014 I didn\u2019t engage the protesters at my house. But I marched with them through town a few times. <\/p>\n
The protests were difficult because I think it\u2019s a little bit of an uncertainty of what will happen. Will they become violent? Will we have places burning? Will we have what other cities saw? That was a little unsettling. We saw our police force \u2014 who are highly trained professionals, who are community policing oriented \u2014 we saw them endure some really hateful stuff. Violent crime increased here just as it did across the country. \u2026 They were working in 98 degree heat. Night after night, people in your face screaming. We worried that one slip-up and everything we were trying to achieve could break down.<\/p>\n
The protesters’ concerns centered on police accountability and ending systemic racism. How has that played out?<\/p>\n
Something really good happened from our protests. For me, it was as clear as day \u2014 a cry for help. I established my commission on Racial Justice and Equality and they went to work. It was 70 residents of Fayette county, mostly African American and looking at issues such as health care, health disparities, education and law enforcement, that\u2019s the big one. They worked all summer long until October and they issued a report with 54 recommendations. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s never been done here to that extent and to that level of seriousness. People thought I\u2019d put it on the shelf. But we tackled about half of the recommendations right off the bat. And we\u2019ve created a position in our office to oversee it. It\u2019s also what most cities would recognize as an equity officer. We haven\u2019t had one here before.<\/p>\n
[Addressing law enforcement issues] was the hardest. We have outfitted every one of our officers with a body-cam. And we went a step further and got one that automatically turns on when an officer reaches out and pulls out their taser or weapon. So they don\u2019t have to make that split-second decision about getting the body-cam camera going or pull out my gun first. They don\u2019t have to worry about it. When they pull their taser or firearm, it starts.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re POLITICO so of course we want to know your take on politics, and you have an interesting story there. You are a Republican, but you\u2019re pretty moderate on social issues. How do you describe yourself?<\/p>\n
I am a registered Republican.<\/p>\n
Did you vote for Trump?<\/p>\n
I have voted for both Democrats and Republicans.<\/p>\n
But did you vote for Trump?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t talk about who I voted for in anything, really. And I don\u2019t endorse candidates because I am a nonpartisan. For 16 years, I served on the council and was vice mayor for four years. And people never knew how I was registered. I have never been involved in partisan politics. And I have had a discussion with my husband about being a public servant and not a politician because it has a bad connotation. And, of course, he told me to get over it. He says, \u201cLinda, you\u2019re an elected official so you\u2019re a politician.\u201d But I do not see myself in partisan terms \u2014 ever.<\/p>\n
So no comment on Trump?<\/p>\n
[Shakes head.]<\/p>\n
My focus is not on who I voted for last year. This is local government. We operate where the rubber meets the road. Sewers and potholes and roads and garbage and public safety aren\u2019t Democratic or Republican. Yesterday, I was out on a street corner negotiating curbside with our electric utility to get it to stop clear-cutting trees under transmission lines in our neighborhoods. The neighbors didn\u2019t care about my politics. They cared about my commitment to helping them protect their neighborhood and their trees.<\/p>\n
You advocated for a few development projects while you served on the City Council, but you haven\u2019t pushed for a big project since you became mayor, often citing Lexington\u2019s growth boundary (which keeps construction within the business district and out of agriculture country). Can you talk about that?<\/p>\n
I think the development community sees green space and thinks that\u2019s easier and less expensive to develop than coming inside for development and redevelopment. And a lot of people over the years … look outside our boundary and say, \u201cIt\u2019s pretty green space.\u201d But it\u2019s working farms. It has a huge economic impact. So I\u2019m a proponent of planned, intentional growth. I\u2019m not anti-growth. I\u2019m not pro-growth. I\u2019m for intentional planned growth. <\/p>\n
So what Lexington has done consistently over decades is to grow very regularly. We grow about 30,000 people a decade. This last time 9 percent growth. We\u2019re able to keep up with that in terms of infrastructure, in terms of services, whether it\u2019s homelessness or affordable housing, we\u2019re able to keep up with that in an intentional way because that growth is planned and intentional. <\/p>\n
The cities that have out of control growth are having difficulty keeping up with the infrastructure: the roads, the sewers, storm drains. And you see public safety numbers up for police. Cities can\u2019t stop growing because that leads to its own problems.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s your advice to new mayors?<\/p>\n
Build relationships. Before the pandemic, I was serving on a 17-county Bluegrass Development District. Relationships with different cities and counties have sometimes been acrimonious, contentious, because we\u2019re seen as the biggest player.<\/p>\n
So I started reaching out to the county executives, meeting them for coffee, getting to know them and talking about our common challenges. It\u2019s hard work. It\u2019s easier to not worry about that. <\/p>\n
… But when the pandemic hit, I could pick up a phone and call Franklin County and say, \u201cAre you hearing this? What are you doing about that? What are you closing down?\u201d We had lots of conversations about vaccines. It really paid off. You can\u2019t just make the relationship when there\u2019s a problem. It\u2019s like a neighborhood. Neighborhoods work best when the association is already formed, and the problem comes and they can work on it.<\/p>\n
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