Hill Strategic Advisors

Essential news and analysis from Kentucky’s state and local governments on housing, planning, and economic development.

Welcome to At the Hall & Hill for May 3, 2026, the free newsletter from Hill Strategic Advisors, LLC.

City County Connector

After two marathon hearings full of public comment in favor of competing plans, Lexington’s Urban County Council voted to move forward with renovation of the Mint Lane Pump Station located at Dunbar High School, opting not to pursue constructing a completely new pump station on land currently part of Mill Ridge Farm located nearby. Repair or replacement of the existing pump station is required under Lexington’s 2011 EPA Consent Decree due to intermittent release of untreated sewage. Opponents of the Mill Ridge Farm site included Fayette Alliance and rural preservationists who framed the alternative site as a de facto expansion of the Urban Services Boundary (“USB”) despite that parcel’s exclusion from the 2023 USB expansion. The motion to reinvest in the Mint Lane site carried the day on a 10-5 Council vote, with Mayor Linda Gorton expressing opposition to the Mill Ridge Farm site during her Communications from the Mayor portion of the meeting.

The same rural preservation coalition then failed to defeat the latest large-scale solar farm Zoning Ordinance Text Amendment (“ZOTA”). The Council voted to refer the latest ZOTA to send the solar ordinance to the Planning Commission for review, stakeholder input, and public comment before sending a recommendation on the proposal back to the full Council. The draft ordinance from the Solar Working Group would make large scale solar farms in the A-R (“Agricultural Rural) and A-U (Agricultural Urban) zones available with a Conditional Use Permit, with any such permit conditioned on a detailed plan that includes compliance with the LFUCG Stormwater Manual, maintaining continuous agricultural production on site, a community benefits plan, and decommissioning requirements.

In Richmond, the Madison County Fiscal Court announced additional upcoming opportunities for public input on its Comprehensive Plan update. Dubbed the Defining Directive 2030, the County has received nearly 700 survey responses thus far from citizens asking for input on issues ranging from future development and infrastructure planning to increased internet access. The survey will be held open for an additional month and a second public meeting for citizen input is planned for this summer.

Rotunda Roundup

The 2026 Kentucky General Assembly adjourned for good on April 15. The session, which produced a biennial budget for the Commonwealth’s government, saw almost 1,300 bills filed between the House and Senate, plus an additional 446 resolutions introduced. Legislators will be on an official break until the Interim Session begins on June 1, 2026. During the Interim Session, joint, interim, and special committees are scheduled to meet once per month, with meetings occurring Tuesdays through Thursdays for the remainder of the calendar year.

A brief postmortem on Senate Bill 9, colloquially known as “the housing bill” during the 2026 Session, that failed to pass out of conference after the veto period. The bill, the original version of which would’ve allowed local municipalities to establish Residential Infrastructure Development Districts and Housing Development Districts, both designed to give communities new weapons to address Kentucky’s housing supply crisis. The bill sailed through the Senate without opposition, but became the subject of numerous floor and committee amendments in the House, transforming the bill from a housing bill into a much broader property rights bill. In the end, House leadership allowed the proposal to become the “Christmas tree” onto which various’ interests unconnected to housing construction became the price for passage in that chamber. The final death blow to SB9 was language that would’ve changed state law to preempt any local regulation of short-term rentals (“STRs”), a direct assault on existing regulations in Lexington and Louisville, and various pending proposals across the state, a provision that proved dead-on-arrival in the Senate.

Last month, Governor Beshear announced that the Strengthen Kentucky Homes (SKH) Program launched its public-facing website at skh.ky.gov. The SKH program allows qualified Kentucky homeowners to apply for grants of up to $10,000 to upgrade their roofs to standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, creating safer and more storm-ready homes across the Commonwealth.

According to Plan

In Lexington, the LFUCG approved a one-year, $250,000 contract with Tunnel, Spangler, Walsh & Associates (“TSW”) for the development of a Unified Development Code. The goal of the proposal is for TSW to analyze and combine existing zoning ordinances, land subdivision regulations, and other development documents into a more easily accessible and understandable form, including creation of a guidebook for developers and the community.

The Richmond City Commission voted to annex several tracts of land from Ramsey Farms, LLC, in the area of Duncannon Lane. The properties are located in close proximity to the 189-acre Richmond Industrial Park IV site on Duncannon Lane. The tracts will remain zoned agricultural for the time being, but will allow Richmond tremendous development flexibility as that area of the city continues to grow.

In Nicholasville, the Jessamine County Planning & Zoning Commission denied an application for a 744-acre cluster development on Keene Road. Concerns over the underlying geology, which is a karst limestone basin, and groundwater systems. The so-called Atlas Farm development also raised concerns that the proposed increased traffic flow from the development was a particular hazard given the area’s terrain and existing road infrastructure.

Developing Situations

The 2025 Kentucky Drug Overdose Fatality Report was released last week by Kentucky’s Office of Drug Control Policy. Governor Beshear announced that overdose deaths in Kentucky dropped 23% in 2025 from 2024. It was the lowest number of overdose deaths in the state since 2014, representing not only a huge success on a humanitarian level, but also as a win for the proposition that increased access to addiction treatment has the potential for drastic, positive impacts on Kentucky’s work force.

The Kentucky Product Development Initiative announced a new round of economic development investments across 11 counties supporting speed-to-market and site development projects. This most recent round of funding totals nearly $13 million, including $2 million for water and sewer infrastructure design and construction at the Bluegrass Innovation Gateway Megasite in Mercer County.

Applications remain open through May 29 for the Lead Where You Live initiative, a new candidate training program for central Kentucky citizens interested public service. Launched with support from Bluegrass REALTORS®, Building Industry Association of Central Kentucky, Commerce Lexington, and Lexington For Everyone, the two-day program will take place August 27 & 28 in Lexington, and will prepare business and community leaders with the knowledge, skills, and insights needed to run an effective campaign for local office and make a meaningful impact through public service. The nonpartisan program is designed for individuals who are considering running for local offices, as well as those interested in serving on local boards and commissions.

Thought Bubbles

Rise of the technocrats and House Bill 443

The fallout and unintended consequences from 2024’s Kentucky House Bill 443 continue to create confusion and apprehension in ways likely never intended by Majority Floor Leader Steven Rudy or the bipartisan coalition of 15 co-sponsors who champion this seemingly benign land use regulation. What began as a mandate for quicker approvals of development and subdivision plans has become a nightmare for developers and planning commissions across the Commonwealth.

House Bill 443 began as a work around for the development community, a way to deploy the preemptive quality of state statute to find relief from the local planning codes and public input requirement that commonly resulted in a painfully slow, burdensome, and highly politicized development process. In Lexington in particular, the process of complying with the incredibly complex labyrinth of the land subdivision regulations and requirements of the latest Comprehensive Plan and all of its initiatives made greenfield development an almost futile enterprise. Combine those elements with an almost guaranteed NIMBY opposition campaign slowed most infill and redevelopment projects in Lexington’s urban core to a crawl, at best.

House Bill 443, which is now codified at Kentucky Revised Statutes 100.275, reads as follows in its entirety:

The provision eliminates a local governments discretionary approval power for projects that meet the “objective standards” for subdivision plats and development plans, requiring mandatory approval for such conforming plans. It was a triumph of state preemption over local control.

Predictably, however, the response in Lexington was to expand the technical requirements that any development project or subdivision plan must meet in order to obtain “certification,” which became a pre-condition before any plan could get through the LFUCG Planning and Zoning Commission. Additionally, Lexington made sure that public hearing and opportunities for community input remained for projects not yet eligible for ministerial approval. This year alone, the LFUCG Planning and Preservation department has added new technical manuals to the development process, representing untold new additional certifications that must be satisfied before a new project garners approval.

It was a brilliant counterpunch by those not so keen on new development in Lexington. Ask any LFUCG Councilmember what is in one of those technical manuals, who drafted the provisions, and what is the process for amending and approving their contents, and I suspect there will be a quick deferral to the planning staff, which has just been handed additional power over the development process.

Unfortunately, as interesting as the consequences of House Bill 443 are proving at City Hall in Lexington, its provisions apply equally to the rest of the Commonwealth. It is creating confusion and uncertainty for local bodies far less sophisticated and professional than Lexington’s planning staff. Last month, the Danville – Boyle County Planning and Zoning Commission suffered the uncertainty of appropriate next steps when evaluating a subdivision proposal of a 5.5-acre parcel into seven lots.

According to reporting in the Advocate-Messenger, commission members voted to postpone a hearing on the proposal because they could not agree if the subdivision plan actually met the standards for mandatory ministerial approval. Instead, the proposal was returned to the technical review committee for further evaluation, even though such a delaying vote raised the specter of legal liability for the board for their possible failure to comply with the mandate of House Bill 443. Additionally, the fate of the project now lays completely at the feet of the engineers, planning staff, and technical review committee, with no guarantee that it will ever again be before the local elected officials tasked with the ultimate decision-making authority.

Developers now find themselves in the situation where their ability to argue the merits of their projects to the elected decision-making authorities is pre-empted by the thumbs-up or thumbs-down assessment of meeting the “objective standards” of their community’s land use regulations. Commissions and councils now have no ability to exercise independent judgment and evaluate a project by local, subjective community standards, their authority usurped by the judgment of the professional class of urban planners and civil engineers, whom no one elected.

And the stately quadrille of state preemption and local control danced on.