The Civic Assembly Topics

Lexington’s first Civic Assembly will dive deep into two specific topics in our Urban County Charter: council compensation and charter review. These two topics were selected after receiving over 870 surveys from Lexington residents about what they think is the most important in the charter.

Council Compensation

Currently, Councilmembers are compensated at just over $40,000. While people often say Council is a part time job because of its compensation level, there is nothing in the charter saying it is part time.

This topic has been discussed a lot lately in our community, and it is also the topic where survey respondents were the most closely divided. 43% of respondents to our survey think Council pay should be increased. 42% of respondents think it should stay the same. We selected this topic because we’re interested to see what happens to a closely divided topic in this assembly structure. Do people move in one direction or another? Or, does it reinforce their prior perspectives?

Charter Review

Currently, there is no regular review process for the charter, and it was last reviewed 1998. 73% of our respondents said that the charter should be reviewed regularly. The next highest vote was 19%, who said it should only be reviewed when necessary. We selected this topic because we’re interested to understand what happens to a fairly unanimous opinion when presented with more context and information, and when they are placed in a decision making role. Do opinions shift? Does it become slightly less unanimous? Or does it become more unanimous?

We’re excited to spend the next few months learning alongside the randomly selected assembly members!

As a reminder, CivicLex does not have a position on these items, and we will not advocate for adoption or rejection of what comes out of the assembly process. We are here to facilitate the process, not create a policy outcome.

• How did we get here?

  Lexington’s Urban County Charter is a massive document, and the assembly doesn’t have time to review it all. So we wanted the assembly to have specific parts of the charter to discuss. After a lot of research and talking with community experts, we selected 8 potential topics that would be accessible to the community and could have implications for representation, trust, & participation in our local government.

  Those topics were:

  • The number of Councilmembers and districts

  • The length of district and at-large council terms

  • Term limits for Councilmembers

  • Compensation levels for Councilmembers

  • The vacancy appointment process for Councilmembers

  • The process for redistricting Council

  • The role of public engagement in the Urban County Charter

  • And, the frequency with which the charter is reviewed

  To determine which of these topics the assembly should focus on, we released a survey to understand our community's perspectives on eight topics in the charter and what they think is the most important. This survey was available digitally, and we attended numerous in-person community events, asking people to complete the survey.

  After reviewing the 870+ survey responses, we decided to pick the topic where respondents agreed the most, and the topic that respondents were the most divided on.