KENTUCKY — Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton is in the middle of serving her second four-year term as mayor of Kentucky’s second largest city that is a merged Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, which became Kentucky’s first urban county government on Jan. 1, 1974.
In early 2025, Gorton presented her proposed $539 million budget for Fiscal Year 2026, which covers the period from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026. Lexington’s Urban County Council unanimously passed a $540.2 million spending plan June 12, including an $8 million-plus investment in the Affordable Housing Fund and New Encampment Coordinator for Office of Homelessness Prevention and Intervention.
“Across the country, all housing is going up,” Gorton said. “It’s been going up for years. And the latest look at Lexington, where we were rated as a very, very high community on cost of living … they said that the average household was lower than the nation. It doesn’t help people who are here to know that we score lower and better, but we put 1% of our previous year’s revenues every year into our affordable housing fund, which, this year, it’s almost $5 million in our budget.”…