CivicLex convened the assembly last weekend in a conference room at Transylvania University, where the 36 assembly members introduced each other with ice breakers.
“We're kind of just all coming together and learning new things, said Kirsten Singer, a member of the assembly. “I feel like something I really like is that there's not a ton of judgment. Like you can either be super well rounded and know a lot about politics and government and local government, or you can be super new to it.”
Singer is in her early 20s and relatively new to Lexington.The pod of 36 members is meant to represent different demographics across the city, including age, race, education, income and geographic location.
“It's a novel group of people that have never met and have, for the most part, never been involved in any sort of government process,” said Richard Young, executive director of CivicLex. “And so I think I'm excited to just see what happens when you put all of these folks together in a room and give them some real decision-making power over what happens in our community.”
Citizen assemblies have been used abroad to shape how governments tackle important issues. In Ireland, they’ve been used to discuss topics like abortion and climate change.
The idea for an assembly in Lexington was brought to the urban county government in 2023 as a way to review the city’s charter, which is similar to a local constitution.
Because any proposed changes to the charter are voted on by residents, Vice Mayor Dan Wu viewed the assembly as a way to better engage them.
“Once we kind of set up what the framework of potentially how it was going to go, we as council members basically stepped back from it to let it be more of an organic democratic process that wasn't influenced by council members,” Wu said.
This assembly will be tackling two topics: councilmember pay and how often the city’s charter will be reviewed.
Lexington council members earn around $40,000 annually, and multiple members have mentioned the low pay as a reason they’re leaving office. Meanwhile, there’s no codified language for how often the city’s charter actually gets reviewed. City officials last reviewed Lexington’s charter in 1998.
“We knew we wanted to pursue a review of the charter, but we knew we weren't going to be doing it ourselves, especially because we couldn't enact any major changes without a ballot initiative, and we really wanted to engage the public with it,” Wu said.
The first half of the month-long assembly involves sessions educating its members on how Lexington’s local government works. Kit Anderson, the deputy director for CivicLex, is organizing the discussions.
“After the education sessions, we'll kind of switch gears, and that's when we go into deliberation,” she said. “Which is the part that's unique to assemblies, where we're actually working with the group to brainstorm, ‘How do we think these issues should maybe change? What proposals do we have to change them, and can we as a group agree on what we want to move forward?”
Anderson said the group is also functioning as a sort of pilot program. She hopes the assembly format can both be used to tackle other local issues and also be a model for similar cities.
“I think assemblies in the United States are getting more and more popular, where people are starting to look at, what are our options for bringing people into government or into big decision making processes in a new way,” she said.
If the assembly comes to a consensus by the end of the month, the group will present their recommendations to Lexington’s city council for consideration.
If the council agrees to those recommendations, they will be put on the ballot for residents to vote on.
