Inside Lexington’s unusual experiment in citizen-led governance

This story was produced as part of a joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship for Rural-Urban Issues between CivicLex and Next City.

Public trust in government is near historic lows. But Americans’ trust in their local government far outweighs trust in the federal government. It’s been this way since the mid-2000s, when the State of the Nation Project began keeping track.

Standing on the sidelines of Kentucky’s first civic assembly – and one of the first carried out anywhere in the country – the palpable excitement I saw in that conference room was a far cry from the profound polarization, distrust, skepticism, and fatigue driving American political disengagement.

For the past month, 36 randomly-selected residents of Lexington have been meeting regularly at Transylvania University to develop and deliberate over policy recommendations for revising Lexington’s charter to produce healthier and more effective local governance.

“There's a lot of attention at the federal level, but there's also a sense of lack of control,” Marjan Ehsassi, executive director of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy (FIDE) in North America.

She says local co-governance models like these are part of the solution to rebuilding American democracy from the ground up: “People are feeling like, ‘I can control my local [government]. I can control what's happening locally.’”

The assembly was coordinated by CivicLex, a local nonprofit working to boost civic health and engagement in Kentucky’s second-largest city. Full disclosure: I am a reporting fellow with CivicLex, but I was not involved in developing or coordinating the assembly.

Across seven sessions, the assembly members learned about the people and systems that keep Lexington’s roads paved and city hall lights on. They heard from subject matter experts and members of the public. They built mutual trust, changed their minds, and came to difficult compromises.

And when the assembly issued its final recommendations on March 29, members ultimately decided to trust their council representatives enough to recommend a large pay bump, in addition to pushing for increased attendance and accountability requirements.

The slow rise of civic assemblies in America

Civic assemblies aren’t anything new. Athenian democracy has guided participatory government for centuries. Modern versions of these deliberative forums have been used around the world for the past three decades, especially in Europe. 

They’ve been slower to catch on in the United States, though a handful of local initiatives have been convened, such as an assembly on youth homelessness in Oregon and one on childcare in Colorado. FIDE-North America is one among a number of organizations, including Colorado State University’s Center for Public Deliberation and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, that is working to facilitate the movement’s spread here.

Ehsassi says that across North America, proving the efficacy of co-governance to local governments has been an uphill battle.

“When I first started with FIDE, it was hard to sell assemblies. It was hard to make the case for why traditional ways of engagement weren’t sufficient,” says Ehsassi, whose organization works with cities — including Lexington — to conduct independent assembly reviews to ensure the processes are equitable and the final recommendations would receive a fair shot in front of council and voters. 

“Now, I feel like most are acknowledging that. There was a recognition that the traditional ways of engaging with constituents is just not working anymore.”

In 2024, when city councilmembers in Fort Collins, Colorado, needed to decide on how to use the land beneath a demolished football stadium, they voted to convene a civic assembly. Assembly members’ recommendations to develop a multi-use site, featuring a bike park, a wildlife rehabilitation center, outdoor community spaces and Indigenous cultural representation, successfully passed last year.

“People are hungry for new ways to engage, and I think it's really clear that the status quo is not working,” says Hollie Russon Gilman, a senior fellow at New America who researches civic engagement and co-governance. 

“It's not about replacing representative democracy, but it's about augmenting it and creating richer, more additive, civic experiences, where people feel seen and heard in their day-to-day lives.”

Building Lexington’s civic assembly

Back in Kentucky, the state’s civic assembly process began three years ago here in CivicLex’s offices. The nonprofit believes its assembly is the first in the country to have been organized locally.

In 2023, members of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council approached the CivicLex team about how to effectively revise its charter, a massive document that has served as the local government’s constitution since the urban and county governments merged in the 1970s. The council committed to publicly and formally responding to recommendations produced by a local civic assembly.

Gilman says the exclusive focus on charter review reform makes Lexington’s assembly novel.

“We've seen assemblies that are usually more bound around one specific topic, so this one was really exciting in the way it was setting an agenda for the charter review process,” she explains. “You look at other assemblies, they've been more contained to a single issue. Many of them have to do with land use issues, which makes sense.”

As it planned an assembly, researching previous charter review processes as well as best practices for civic assemblies, CivicLex put out a survey to find out what residents thought was most important when it came to revising Lexington’s charter. 

Two main concerns stood out to staff: the frequency of charter review, and how much council members are paid. 

Lexington’s charter has not been amended since 1998, and there is no schedule or mandate in place requiring the charter to be reviewed. About 72% of survey respondents said the charter should be reviewed regularly, citing changes in the 27 years since its last review and the need for more public engagement. But almost a quarter opposed the idea, arguing the current system retains stability and protects from political meddling. 

Per the charter, the minimum obligations for a council member is attending meetings, though even that isn’t legally mandated by the charter. Many do much more, and hours can add up quickly between public appearances, meeting with constituents, and council work sessions. 

But, per the charter, all members (except the vice-mayor) receive the same annual salary regardless of attendance or work hours. That amount is set at about $41,000 (with annual adjustments) making the job more of a part-time role.

Survey respondents were split nearly 50-50 on whether council should retain its current pay structure, or if hours or pay should be raised. Proponents argued that it would make the role accessible to more people and allow council members to focus on public service; critics argued this would incentivize people to only run for office with money in mind.

To build its assembly, CivicLex held a trial assembly to learn about best practices. Once it had its mandate and process in place, the team commenced its civic lottery process. Staff mailed 11,500 letters to addresses across Lexington, asking residents to consider applying. Using anonymized applicant data, the team randomly selected 36 participants that were representative of the city’s demographics, including age, race, gender, income, council district and affiliation to CivicLex. 

To ensure accessibility and engagement, members of Lexington’s Civic Assembly were also compensated. Each received $1,200, plus transportation and childcare stipends as needed.

Despite the divided survey results — and the fact that the group of randomly-selected individuals had been strangers when the sessions began last month — all 36 assembly members worked together to help create a more productive, accountable government. 

It was only a matter of deciding how.

Deliberation and disagreement

“You all disagreed, and it was okay,” facilitator Tanya Torp said to the assembly members as they kicked off their second-to-last day. “And we’ll disagree again today.”

In one of eight small groups that had drafted up a proposal, the three residents bounced ideas off of each other like they’d been working together for months. They wanted to build an accountability mechanism into the pay system by tying council members’ annual pay cap changes to Lexington’s median income, rather than the Consumer Price Index.

If council members did their duty and increased job security and wages, one participant explained, then the city’s median income should go up — and so should the council’s own pay. If not, it should stay stagnant or even go down, they argued.

“If people want accountability, we have to change the way they’re connected at all,” one member said.

Every group’s idea was a little different. Some proposed keeping the increase as CPI. Proposed salaries ranged from $50,0000 to $68,000, reflecting the individual or household median wage, average salary, and anything in between. Another group suggested removing councilmember pay from the charter completely, putting their compensation solely in the hands of voters. 

These groups were combined based on their similarities, and the process repeated.

Those three people encountered more friction when moving into a larger group to combine their drafts into one. The debate mostly focused on convincing the rest of the public to vote for these raises, not whether city representatives should receive a higher wage. It wasn’t smooth sailing, and the merged group barely finished a recommendation in time. 

Again and again, the conversation followed the same steps: deliberate, draft, have your ideas challenged, compromise, propose. 

For Ehsassi, a healthy and productive civic assembly can be described through FIDE’s three-part theory of change.

“At the individual level, what kind of change are we hoping to see at the end of an assembly?” she says. “At the societal level, what changes do we see amongst people in the ways that they interact with each other in terms of social division, polarization, and changing of opinions? And then, at the institutional level, what are some of the changes that we see in terms of people's trust in government – and also, frankly, government's trust in people?”

Throughout the sessions, members of the civic assembly repeatedly returned to the issue of accountability and trust. 

If council members were being paid more as a reflection of their commitment to serving their community, how — besides elections — could constituents hold them to that standard? If the assembly was recommending more frequent charter review, how could residents ensure these standards weren’t being neglected? 

So the group passed one more recommendation, with an 88% supermajority: that the charter be revised “to mandate that Council creates publicly viewable attendance and accountability expectations for the Urban County Council.”

Despite their disagreements about how to best uphold these standards, it was clear each assembly member wanted their local government to do well. In a fragile political climate, these conclusions were reached with a somewhat cautious optimism. 

“Despite our varied walks of life, we were all united by a shared desire and acknowledged responsibility for the improvement of our community,” one high school student participating in the assembly wrote. “Exemplifying this was where we were asked if we hoped that our work would result in change; everyone stepped forward.”

Now, the ball is back in councilmembers’ court. They will receive a presentation from CivicLex and some assembly members at the end of April, and councilmembers will vote throughout the rest of spring to put these measures on the ballot. 

Assuming the council agrees, those measures will go on the ballot during the general assembly in November. Voters can pass any number of these recommendations, or none of them. Any recommendations that are passed will be implemented in 2030.