I was the Lexington Herald-Leader’s Lexington Government Reporter from November 2025 to September 2026, when I was laid off alongside 12 other staff members.

Leaving CivicLex, where I worked four years prior to joining the paper, was an immensely hard decision. But I had heard from many CivicLex Weekly newsletter readers that they found insights into policy and Lexington as a whole that they felt was lacking at the Herald-Leader. I decided it could be a worthwhile gamble to take the job at the paper to see if I could address many of the criticisms I had heard over the years.

I am proud to say I think I achieved that goal. I heard resounding praise for my work during my ten months covering city hall and Lexington broadly. My dailies gave more context and analysis over the policies Lexington’s Council had discussed. My community stories both reflected the Lexington that readers call home and also challenged some assumptions they had made about their city. I broke a major story about an out-of-state landlord letting their apartments in a neglected neighborhood fall apart – a story no other outlets had caught.

Here’s a brief overview of some of what I accomplished at the Herald-Leader.

The Deep Dive Stories

Cardinal Valley landlords rack up $425K in code violations. They’re in no hurry to make fixes

Lexington’s Cardinal Valley neighborhood is comprised of largely Hispanic, low-income residents. Much of the housing in the neighborhood is in rough sape, as the population is easy to exploit for landlords.

I looked into a company called The DeRosa Group that owns nearly 700 apartments in the neighborhood. From 2023 to July 2026, the company had earned over $425,000 worth of code enforcement violations at its apartments. I looked at hundreds of pages of code enforcement citations and condemnation notices and spreadsheets of complaints from residents for a story focused on how these deteriorating units have impacted residents.

No other media outlet had covered the housing situation in the neighborhood before this story.

Officials with The DeRosa Group did not respond to my requests for comment. But I found a YouTube channel from the group where officials shared insights into their properties, mangement and investments styles, and, crucially, how they handle code enforcement in different cities. I was able to use quotes from that story to outline how their public facing image as a successful multifamily investment company conflicted with the reality for residents in moldy, crumbling apartments.

$3.5M went to Lexington’s snow plan after 2025 storm. Why was the result the same?

A major winter storm – Winter Storm Fern – hit Lexington in late January 2026. A complicated mix of snow and ice blanketed the city. Thanks to two consecutive weeks of temperatures below freezing, that blanket stuck around. It was the second year such a storm hit Lexington, and the second year the city government struggled to clear the roads. The aftermath of the failed storm response remains one of the major issues of the 2026 mayoral election.

After Winter Storm Blair in 2025 stultified the city’s winter response teams, Mayor Linda Gorton and the city Council added $3.5 million in that year’s budget to address winter weather. When Fern hit one year later, there was no tangible evidence the $3.5 million made a major difference.

But I didn’t want to take that for granted, and I didn’t want to simply assume incompetence among responders like so many on social media were doing. I wrote a longer-story interviewing then-Commissioner of Environmental Quality and Public Works to see what exactly why the new investments didn’t help the response.

In short: the investments the city made in 2025 were into vehicles, equipment and strategies the city had used in the past to tackle intense snow storms. Those investments turned out to be a fundamental mismatch for the 2025 and 2026 storms, which were as much ice storms as they were snow storms.

General Government Stories

Latest delay to getting Lexington solar project off the ground? A model airplane club

For both CivicLex and the Lexington Herald-Leader, I have covered the years-long debate over whether or not large-scale solar panel installations should be built on Fayette County farmland. Some of those stories have focused on whether or not some city meetings discussing proposed regulations should have been public.

Opponents of rural solar farms pointed to a proposal from Edelen Renewables to build a solar project on an abandoned landfill – met a large-scale energy need without compromising vital soils, so they argued, and it was a good compromise. It was not without its critics, though.

But at the last minute before the Council was expected to approve a contract with Edelen Renewables, a model airplane club derailed the vote. The Bluegrass Model Airplane Club had leased land on the former landfill for over 20 years and did not have any ideas where to relocate.

This story looks at how hard it is to find an FAA approved site to run a model airplane club, whether or not the city did its due dilligence in working with the club, and, frankly, the funniest quotes I have ever been given for a story.

Community Stories

An all-ages venue opened under Lexington doughnut shop. Then the city closed it down

For a few short months in the 2025/2026 winter, a DIY, all-ages punk venue opened in the basement shop of Frank’s Donut’s in downtown Lexington. Appropriately enough, the venue was called The Lexington Donut Dungeon. Two friends, Sean and Frank, wanted to have a sober space so that young people – especially high schoolers – had places to engage with Lexington’s music scene.

The city’s fire department shut the venue down in January 2026 for very reasonable safety concerns. But that closure left the venue with no immediate options, and it took an exciting and vital community space away from Lexington teens.

My look at the short life of The Donut Dungeon dives into the importance of having all-ages art spaces, why the city has so few of them, and the tension between having important underground venues while still maintaining safety regulations.

Why over a dozen central Kentucky churches support the Lexington Pride Festival

I was lucky to be assigned as the reporter covering the annual Lexington Pride Festival in 2026. I wrote three stories from that event, but the one I am most proud of is this look at the growing number of queer-affirming churches that have sponsored the festival.

Lexington, being a southern city, has an awful lot of churches. While many Christian churches are known for being against gay marriage, mainline churches – especially those in urban centers – are often supportive of the queer community. Affirming churches, and queer Christians, do not get a lot of coverage, so I thought it would be a unique story to tell.