LEXINGTON, Ky. — This November, voters in Lexington will choose between Council member David Kloiber who’s challenging incumbent Mayor Linda Gorton.
Kloiber is the current District 6 Council Member for the city, a seat he’s held since 2020.
He’s vying to become Lexington’s next mayor. In the May Primary, he came in second to Gorton, garnering just about 14% of the votes.
Kloiber said his priorities are affordable housing, economic development and job training, transportation and crime.
Kloiber on Crime
“So I’ve talked a lot about using a community-driven plan called GVI. This is the Group Violence Intervention plan, and it has a whole entire framework that deals with addressing violence,” Kloiber said. “But instead of getting all the details, because obviously there’s a lot of peer-reviewed reports that you can read, I like to tell people about some of the really tangible aspects like getting our officers out of their patrol cars and walking neighborhoods. It builds community and allows them to get a feel for the neighborhood, but it’s called walking the beat. It’s something that we’ve done before and we should get back to doing that again. Also, it has elements of bringing the community together with judges, with officers, with elected officials to kind of oversee and work to get these bad actors out of our community before they can re-offend. A lot of our violence spreads out like a virus. One event spawns two, three, or four more. We can really work together as a community using something like this GVI framework to prevent those second, third, and fourth occurrences,” Kloiber said.
Jobs
His vision for jobs is to provide more training and attract businesses with higher-paying jobs.
“Well, if you look at the areas of jobs where there’s a lot of vacancies, they’re generally ones that are not the most well-paying jobs,” Kloiber said. “And what we’ve seen here in Lexington is a trend where we have an increase in the highest paying jobs and an increase in the lowest-paying jobs without a whole lot of increase in between. If we want to address this and get more people back into our workforce, we need to do it two ways. First, we have to bring in more businesses with those jobs that pay living wages with those middle-income jobs. And then secondly, we need to work on jobs-training, that should be a focus that the city gets into. We’ve made some advances in that in the most recent years. But we can do more. We’ve done a lot more in the past. We need to collaborate with people in order to get them training to get them into jobs, so that they will be able to contribute going forward.”
He said all these issues are connected.
“Anytime, we’re talking about violence, homelessness, affordable housing, jobs, all of these things are connected, and we have to treat them as a whole,” Kloiber said. “And we have to have solutions for the present day and the long term and that takes a lot of community involvement. And right now, we have a lot of community members reaching out saying they want to be involved in this, just not in the same way it’s always been done. So I’m hoping to stand here as a voice to work with the community in order to push us forward on all of these issues together,” Kloiber finished.
Kloiber, a Lexington native, also leads the Kloiber Foundation.
The organization provides students and educators with technology needs to enhance learning experiences in the city.
Prior to serving as a council member, Kloiber had never served in a government role for the City of Lexington.