LEXINGTON, Ky. — Voters in Fayette County will choose between incumbent Mayor Linda Gorton and her challenger council member David Kloiber.

The November election will decide Lexington’s mayor for the next four years.

In May’s Primary, Gorton took a commanding lead early and finished first with nearly 33,000 votes, more than 71% of the total ballots cast.

Since 2018, Gorton said her first priority has been and continues to be focused on people. Her focuses are on affordable housing, homelessness, jobs and economic outlook, and public safety, within that, continuing to address crime.

"My first priority is always to focus on people. I've had that as my priority since day one as mayor, and we have a lot of efforts going on right now that I'll continue. Of course, every single day, we're focused on crime. We believe that if you don't have a safe city, you can't be a great city. And so many of our numbers there are going down as compared with the rest of the country. It's an interesting dynamic, crime's very complex, and it's many different things. And the whole the whole grouping of violent crime in Lexington is down, it's on a downward trend that includes rape assault, murder, those kinds of things. Our homicides we're now even with last year," Gorton said.

Since this interview, Lexington has recorded its 38th homicide of the year, topping the 2021 record.

Gorton said crime is something she works with the chief of police daily.

She said the city’s made progress in affordable housing even navigating through the limited number of developers willing to work on affordable housing.

"Since I was on the council as Vice Mayor in 2014 when we formed the Affordable Housing Fund, we have built or rehabbed almost 3,000 units with the money that we put in the budget every year. And this year I recommended to the council and they accepted $10 million more dollars into affordable housing," Gorton said.

Tackling homelessness, Gorton said data from 2014 shows the homeless population went from 12,000 to 15,000 to now 700.

"We still are aware there are many people who need resources for mental health issues, for substance use disorder issues, those kinds of things that push them onto the street. And the difficult thing that a lot of folks don't understand is we don't have the authority to force people into housing, even if it's temporary or emergency," Gorton said.

They’ve created a network to house people, through the help of nonprofits and church organizations.

"My goal with that is to get to where we've gotten with the veterans. We've essentially ended veteran homelessness here. When we find a veteran on the street, we immediately have housing we can put them into with the resources that follow. And a lot of that is dependent on the federal resources, like VA and things like," Gorton said.

In July 2021, she helped unveil a new workforce development center, an example of focus on job growth.

"Because we know that our community can't thrive without people being able to find jobs and work. And now one of the big challenges that we're working with our businesses on is finding people to work, it's an interesting dichotomy there to what it used to be," Gorton said.

Gorton says she has the experience for the job, leading the city through a pandemic, racial protest, and a turbulent economy, coming out of it all.

Gorton spent 16 years serving as a council member and 4 years as Vice Mayor before her first term as Mayor.

She is a registered nurse and a graduate of the University of Kentucky.

​​If elected, it would be Gorton's second term.

Spectrum News 1 is also speaking to her challenger, David Kloiber.