Lexington Herald Leader Endorses "Jim Gray For Mayor", And We Can't Quibble With The Pick.

Jim Gray for mayor
Challenger brings vision, skills Lexington needs to prosper

Good things have happened with Jim Newberry as mayor and Jim Gray as vice mayor. There also have been mistakes, some of which will haunt Lexington for decades.

Choosing between these able, experienced candidates is tough. We stand by our endorsement of Newberry four years ago.

For the next four years, though, Lexington would be better served by Jim Gray's ideas, experience and leadership.

As an executive in his family's business, Gray has steeped himself in the culture of accountability, open decision-making and continuous improvement.

As vice mayor, he has wrapped his mind around the nitty-gritty of governing. And during this campaign he has reached beyond his downtown base and following of young professionals to make connections from outer suburbs to inner city and with all ages.

We give Newberry lots of credit. He tackled some intractable problems, managed through an economic crash, pulled off preparations for the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games and made Lexington a greener city.

Newberry facilitated the complicated deal that's moving Eastern State Hospital into a modern new home and allowing Bluegrass Community and Technical College to build on the North Lexington campus that will become vacant.

Given all that, Newberry's mistakes might be overlooked — if they didn't arise from an insular leadership style that shuts out dissent.

Newberry's closed door has strained relations with some on the council and helped Gray win the endorsement of all four city employee groups, including police, corrections, fire and civil service.

This bunker mentality also helps explain how a council member's questioning — about whether a city employee was losing his job because he had criticized the administration — mushroomed into a needless controversy and state audit.

Newberry trumpets the audit's finding of no fraud. He has said less about the disarray in the city's procurement processes and lack of a whistle-blower policy that the audit also uncovered.

Newberry knew CentrePointe was in the works for three months before alerting anyone. It's possible that an earlier airing and more public input could have produced a better outcome than bulldozing 180-year-old buildings for a skyscraper that has yet to gain financing but has punched a big blank space in the city center.

If Newberry learned anything, he's not saying. The uproar over CentrePointe remains a mystery to him, he says. He still insists that as long as a development is legal and on private property, the mayor has no standing to challenge or shape it — an odd notion for the leader of a city of 300,000 people.

As far as paying for Kentucky American Water's $164 million pipeline and treatment plant, Newberry has yet to acknowledge that Lexington could have researched and advanced its own proposals and negotiated a better deal, as the Public Service Commission urged.

But he would have had to butt heads with the water company, whose executives and contractors give money to his campaigns. Newberry can protest water rates all he wants. The fact remains: His inaction guaranteed that his constituents would get stuck paying for a needlessly expensive project, one tailored to maximize the transfer of wealth from Lexington to a New Jersey corporation.

When the Blue Grass Airport scandal broke, Newberry took another passive stance, insisting the airport board should be left alone to clean up the misspending and mismanagement that it had enabled.

Gray, on the other hand, called for an independent audit, without which shocking corruption and waste would have gone undiscovered and unpunished.

Gray and some council members asked the right questions and showed better judgment than Newberry on CentrePointe and water, but, with no support from the executive branch, were unable to alter bad decisions.

On one critical issue both Jims are right: They oppose expansion of the Urban Service Boundary when the comprehensive plan comes up for review next year. The boundary protects Lexington's signature landscape. Holding the line against even a small expansion keeps investment and energy focused on the 12,000-plus acres available for development inside the boundary.

This kind of building, alongside established neighborhoods and businesses, demands better planning than we've had and a mayor who'll dive into getting it right.

We know this is not Newberry's strong suit from his performance on CentrePointe and the skepticism he has voiced about design guidelines, which other cities use to ensure new development complements what's already there.

This challenge suits Gray to a T. Except for a year he took off to study urban planning as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Gray's work for almost four decades has been competing for and selecting sites for big developments and managing their construction. Gray Construction has built auto plants and warehouses. It also managed construction of 21c, the conversion of old buildings in downtown Louisville into a hotel and art museum.

Planning is far from the only skill we need in the next mayor, however. Jobs creation has to top the list — jobs to retain our university graduates and jobs for older workers and others who lack education.

It's hard to gauge Newberry's record because of the dive the national economy took midway through his term. Newberry closed the Mayor's Training Center for entry-level and unskilled workers, saying it duplicated existing services. He also outsourced economic development to a partnership of Commerce Lexington and the University of Kentucky, which he credits with creating more than 2,300 jobs.

Gray promises to take a more hands-on approach. He sees economic development, planning and preservation as pieces of a whole and would elevate them to cabinet status under a new commissioner.

Gray is a dynamo of ideas. The biggest rap against him is that he gets bored by details. He has addressed that by promising to hire a chief administrative officer qualified to run day-to-day operations, freeing him to serve as visionary-in-chief and Lexington's No. 1 salesman.

For the next four years, Lexington needs a leader with the vision and skills to grow the city and its economy without trampling on what's already here.

Jim Gray fits the bill.

Read more: http://www.kentucky.com/2010/10/24/1493143_p2/jim-gray-for-mayor.html#ixzz13Id8ybv7