Lexington city leaders are proposing to spend additional federal coronavirus recovery dollars to further community arts. That was the first issue to come before the committee as a whole Thursday. Council Member Kathy Plomin won support to put $5 million toward arts support on the tentative approval list. Council Member James Brown asked her if that would go beyond projects affiliated with LexArts. “Well, I think that will be the process is that they’ll be at the table. There will be a lot of folks at the table. A lot of supporters, but also folks that are stakeholders and I think that master plan will drive that participation,” said Plomin.
Council is also considering allocating $200,000 to facilitate a master plan for LexArts.
The Council agreed to boost support to address homelessness issues by $4 million. In offering support for additional funds to reduce homelessness, Brown said there seems to be a gap between emergency sheltering and affordable housing.
Chief Administrative Officer Sally Hamilton, in the mayor’s office, said the list of proposals will be vetted. “When we come back, what we will do is to give you a framework and then you can either throw this all out or say, I don’t like this, let’s do it a certain way. And this is just going to take us a while to work through,” said Hamilton.
Council will take up a number of issues placed on the tentative list in mid-January.
