Mayor Gorton Was Right to Protect Lexington’s Unique Identity
By T. J. Litafik
There are decisions in local government that deal with the immediate question before us, and there are decisions that determine what kind of community we will leave behind. Mayor Linda Gorton’s recent veto of Lexington’s large-scale solar ordinance belongs in the second category. The debate should not be reduced to whether someone supports solar energy.
Lexington already does.
The Gorton administration has supported solar installations on public facilities, Solarize Lexington, and the major project converting the former Haley Pike landfill into a productive solar site. The city has invested nearly $2.7 million in solar projects during her administration.
The real question raised by the veto is where industrial-scale development belongs—and what precedent Lexington is willing to establish for its agricultural land.
That question goes back nearly seventy years. In 1958, Lexington did something extraordinary. Long before “smart growth” became a term tossed around at planning conferences, this community established what is recognized as the nation’s first urban service boundary. The concept was remarkably simple and remarkably forward-thinking: urban development and urban services would be concentrated within a defined area while the countryside beyond it would remain predominantly rural and agricultural. Such a herculean effort to protect prime agricultural land and internationally known horse farms was revolutionary in the late 1950s.
Back then, across America, cities began decades of outward expansion. Farmland became subdivisions. Subdivisions became shopping centers. Shopping centers produced new highways and still more development. Lexington chose another path. That choice is one reason Lexington does not look like practically every other growing American city. You can leave downtown, drive only a few miles and suddenly find yourself surrounded by stone fences, horses, cattle, and some of the most productive agricultural land anywhere. That landscape is not simply scenery. It represents farms, businesses, jobs, tourism, the equine industry and an enormous part of Lexington’s identity.
Once it is gone, it is gone. Lexington has certainly grown, and its urban service boundary has changed over the decades. In 2023, the Council approved another expansion, ultimately involving roughly 2,800 acres. The boundary has never meant freezing Lexington in amber. It has meant making deliberate decisions about where urban growth should occur rather than allowing development to proceed indiscriminately across Fayette County. That distinction matters in the solar debate.
The Council ordinance would have permitted intermediate- and large-scale solar facilities in agricultural zones subject to restrictions, including conditional-use review and an overall limit of approximately one percent of Fayette County’s acreage. Supporters saw that as a carefully regulated compromise that could accommodate renewable energy while maintaining agricultural activity through practices such as agrivoltaics.
Mayor Gorton saw a different danger: for the first time, Lexington would formally open agricultural land to a large-scale industrial use. Her veto therefore fits a broader governing philosophy she has articulated repeatedly—growth, development, and renewable energy can all have a place, but location matters. That is also why the Haley Pike project is important. A former landfill becoming a major solar-producing property demonstrates that environmental progress and farmland preservation do not necessarily have to be competing goals.
Lexington inherited something exceedingly rare from the leaders who drew that boundary in 1958. They could have taken the easy road. Instead, they thought about people they would never meet and a Lexington they would never see. Every generation since has inherited the same responsibility.
The urban service boundary is not merely a planning device. It is one of the fundamental choices that makes Lexington unique. Whatever side one takes in the current solar debate, that inheritance deserves to be treated as precious—and decisions that may alter it deserve exactly the seriousness Mayor Gorton’s veto has forced Lexington to give them.
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T. J. Litafik is a Lexington resident and is owner/principal of Solon Strategies, LLC, a political strategy and government relations firm.
