Lexington Builds Common Ground on Growth
By Pat Ford
Pew Center
When Pete Baniak began covering development for the Lexington Herald-Leader, he never thought it would lead to a second career in pizza delivery. But that’s what happened when he tried to find the common ground in the divisive public debate over growth in “the Bluegrass,” the area around Lexington.
The eight-part series, “Common Ground, Deciding how the Bluegrass Should Grow,” took an extensive look at the history of development in the region, ideas for limiting growth and the pros and cons of a plan to allow local government to purchase development rights for farmland.
As one part of a careful effort to keep the series from dwelling on — and further alienating — the two extremes in the debate, the paper invited ordinary readers to share their opinions with friends and neighbors over pizza provided by the Herald-Leader.
Baniak and his editor John Voskuhl got the idea from Seattle’s Front Porch Forum civic journalism effort and it found an enthusiastic response in Lexington.
“A lot of the groups that called in said, ‘You don’t have to buy us pizza. We’re just happy you asked what we thought’,” says Baniak. “But I bought the pizza and delivered it myself. It allowed us to get a real diversity of opinion. We talked to people in rural areas, downtown, neighborhoods; those who wanted to develop, those not happy with development and some in the midst of fights over development.”
Baniak’s accounts of the pizza nights ran as sidebars, offering the kitchen-table perspective on the big issues explored in the main stories. For instance, with a story about how successful Lexington’s urban growth boundary has been at checking sprawl, the pizza sidebar featured a group of farmers just beyond the boundary. The group both opposed the development encroaching on them andresented not having the option to develop their own farms if they wished. It was a made-to-order example of the complexities involved in the issue of growth.
Ahead of the Curve
While growth and sprawl have moved to the forefront of public concerns nationally, they have been major issues in the region around Lexington for many years.
“Topic A” is what Herald-Leader editor and vice-president Pam Luecke calls it. “We’re ringed by these beautiful horse farms and more and more they are becoming shopping centers and housing developments,” she explains.
“If we don’t do anything, we’ll look like everyplace else. That would be tragic. It’s the one thing that makes us special. So this was not an academic exercise. People really care about it.”
The paper made development a beat in the mid-90’s and Baniak wrote regularly about it for the daily paper. But, Luecke says, “We felt we needed to step back and put it in context. We also wanted there to be some freshness to the context. We didn’t want to just reiterate ‘some people are in favor of growth and some are against it.’ “
Luecke, as well as Baniak and Voskuhl, recognized the potential problem with such a series. “Growth can be a pretty dry subject,” says Baniak.
Voskul calls it the “set-aside” problem, as in “This looks important. I better set it aside.” To avoid that, says Voskul, “We wanted to reach out to folks who might turn off a development story and just say ‘that makes my head hurt.’ ”
So Baniak and Voskuhl worked very hard on writing leads that would propel readers past the jump. They used the front page lead as a kind of billboard that, in a short space, both encapsulated the subject and showed the depth of the reporting. And often they ended with an intriguing question or an engaging invitation. Take, for example, the lead on part one, about the widely held perception that horse farms are endangered by growth:
Think about growth in a different way. Think about a billion-dollar industry that consumes vast acres of land. It snatches up rolling fields, lays miles of roads and erects buildings that all look very much the same.Think about a business aimed at manufacturing a product and selling it for hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more.
Now take a step back.
You’ve been thinking about horse farms in the Bluegrass.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Horses, like suburban houses, need land. Lots of land.
In the simplest sense, that’s what the current debate about protecting Fayette County’s rural area is all about. Two industries — horses and houses — competing for an increasingly scarce resource: soil.
That’s the competition and you probably think you know which side is losing. You’re probably wrong…
Check out the issues, the facts and the attitudes… beginning on Page A-12.
But check your preconceptions at the door.
The story went on to show, through an analysis done by Linda Johnson of the paper’s computer-assisted reporting staff, that horse farms are flourishing even amid Lexington’s urban growth. In later segments, Johnson’s analysis also showed that, contrary to popular belief, the city’s urban service boundary has been reasonably successful at containing growth. She also was able to show, by analyzing such unconventional indicators as septic system applications, where the areas most vulnerable to development are.
While the series added new information to the debate, the reporters and editors assiduously avoided drawing conclusions or making judgments. As a result, they believe, they contributed to the building of an admittedly fragile coalition of builders and preservationists who are pursuing farmland-protection strategies that both can support.
Both the chairman of the Developer’s Council and the president of the preservation group, Bluegrass Tomorrow, praised the series as fair and thorough. “I think it’s positive that our region’s newspaper was willing to commit that much time and effort to exploring the issue,” says Bluegrass Tomorrow president Steve Austin. “It puts us ahead of a lot of other folks.”
The series won first prize for investigative reporting from the Kentucky Press Association and was a finalist for the Pew Center’s Batten Award.
Beyond that, Voskul says the paper achieved the goal it set for itself. “We wanted to get past pat phrases and ideological camps. We wanted to get to the folks in the middle and those who’d joined the debate late and needed to know what was at stake.”