Real estate developer David Nicklies has filed a lawsuit challenging the Louisville-Jefferson County merger of 2003 as a violation of the Kentucky Constitution and is seeking to have it dissolved.
Nicklies, a prominent Louisville businessman, Republican donor and longtime critic of Jefferson County Public Schools leadership, filed the complaint in Jefferson Circuit Court on Monday.
In 2000, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a law allowing city-county mergers in “first class” cities, of which Louisville was and remains the only one in the state. Jefferson County voted to approve the merger later that year, with it going into effect in 2003.
The complaint of Nicklies argues the 2000 law allowing the merger constituted “special legislation” that is prohibited by Section 59 and 60 of the Kentucky Constitution, as it is “applicable only to a particular locale.” He is asking the judge to declare it unconstitutional and order a permanent injunction “directing the de-consolidation of Louisville and Jefferson County.”
The attempt to void a law because it allegedly constitutes special legislation targeting Louisville bears a resemblance to a lawsuit now before the Kentucky Supreme Court, which pits the Jefferson County Board of Education against Frankfort Republicans.
The Jefferson County Board of Education sued to block a 2022 law limiting the power of its elected board, arguing it was special legislation targeting only the district. The law was initially struck down by circuit and appeals courts, before the Supreme Court upheld the law by a 4-3 vote this past December.
However, the high court then granted the school board’s petition to rehear the case in April, as a new justice taking office this year swung the balance to a 4-3 vote in their favor. Oral arguments in the case before the Supreme Court take place Wednesday morning.
The timing of Nicklies’ lawsuit is notable. It was filed the same day that the Courier Journal published an op-ed by GOP state Rep. Jason Nemes of Louisville, in which he warned that a potential lawsuit challenging the Louisville merger could be the consequence of the school board’s ongoing litigation.
Nemes — an attorney and member of the GOP House majority leadership — warned that the JCPS board “should tread lightly with this suit.” He wrote that if the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, the justices could also strike down the Louisville-Jefferson County merger and other laws specific to the county.
“Does that sound far-fetched?” Nemes asked. “With more than 750,000 Jefferson County residents eligible to file suit, it should not.”
Nemes added that such a ruling in the JCPS case could also undo the Lexington-Fayette County merger, as the legislation allowing that merger applied only to “second class cities,” of which Lexington is the only one. He suggested this could also jeopardize the ability of Jefferson and Fayette counties to levy a higher occupational tax than other counties to fund their schools, as well as specific tax increment financing districts in Louisville.
“If the Kentucky Supreme Court rules that the Kentucky General Assembly cannot enact a law impacting just one or two counties, the ruling’s effect will be far-reaching — not just in terms of what future court decisions might hold, but also in what it requires lawmakers to do and undo,” Nemes wrote.
Nicklies’ lawsuit also challenges two other laws passed in 2002 and 2024 that only related to Louisville, both of which dealt with tax rates and services in the county’s urban service district — compromising the former city boundaries — that differed with the rest of Jefferson County.
The complaint argues the three laws “harmed residents of Jefferson County who live outside the former boundaries of the City of Louisville,” as residents like Nicklies “pay for and subsidize services provided only to the Urban Service Tax District.”
Wednesday morning, Nicklies issued a press release announcing the lawsuit. Like Nemes, he said the lawsuit of the JCPS board and the Supreme Court’s possible reversal of the case “opens the door to broader consequences, and his filing calls the entire legal foundation of merged governments into question.”
“What’s at stake isn’t just one policy. It’s the legal foundation of how Kentucky’s largest cities operate,” said Nicklies.
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who is defending the state and the law passed by the General Assembly in the JCPS board lawsuit before the Supreme Court, also issued a press release Wednesday morning referencing Nicklies’ lawsuit. He indicated he would defend both the law relating to JCPS, as well as the law allowing the Louisville-Jefferson County merger.
“If SB 1’s opponents are successful in overturning the JCPS law, the next logical step could be to declare the Jefferson County / Louisville merger unconstitutional,” the AG’s press release stated. “Attorney General Coleman strongly opposes that move as both a matter of law and for its practical realities for everything from policing to trash collection.”
Nicklies a longtime critic of JCPS board, teachers union
Nicklies has been one of the most vocal Louisville critics of JCPS leadership over the past dozen years, mostly targeting the school board and the Jefferson County Teachers Association (JCTA). The teachers union has long had an outsized influence on school board elections, but Nickles created two different groups to try to counter that power.
The Bluegrass Fund PAC spent $732,000 backing six school board candidates between 2012 and 2016, mostly attempting to defeat candidates supported by the JCTA. Nicklies created the PAC, which he and his companies contributed $145,000 to, though it was only able to help defeat one school board candidate backed by the teachers union.
Nicklies also founded Kids FIrst Louisville, which aired radio ads during the 2013 contract negotiations of JCPS that claimed teachers’ “union bosses” put their own needs ahead of students.
Kentuckians for Progress, a nonprofit run by Nicklies, also contributed $100,000 to a political committee in 2024 that spent nearly $3 million on ads in support of a constitutional amendment on the ballot to allow public funds to go toward private education.
Nicklies has contributed more than $40,000 to other political candidates and committees over the past decade, with nearly all of that going to Republicans.
The Jefferson County School Board is currently attempting to strike down Senate Bill 1 from the 2022 session, a broad education bill that had several provisions specific to JCPS. These included limiting its elected board to one meeting every four weeks and shifting certain powers from the board to the superintendent. The law increased the vote threshold for the board to overrule any superintendent’s action and took away the board’s ability to limit superintendent purchases that are below $250,000.
Both the Jefferson Circuit and Court of Appeals sided with the school board, ruling that the law this amounted to constitutionally prohibited “special legislation” targeting one district.
The majority opinion of Justice Christopher Shea Nickell in December 2024 countered that while the law had provisions applying only to “a county school district with a consolidated local government” — JCPS being the only one to meet that definition in Kentucky — other school districts could fit that category in the future.
The deciding factor in the court’s shift to rehear the case this spring was Justice Pamela Goodwine, who was elected last November to replace retiring Chief Justice Laurance VanMeter. Goodwine sided with the majority to grant the petition for a rehearing, whereas VanMeter concurred with the majority in the December ruling to uphold the law.
Goodwine was elected in November with the help of two independent political action committees that collectively spent nearly $1 million on advertisements supporting her. One of those groups received $200,000 in contributions from the PAC of the JCTA, while the Goodwine PACs received a combined $510,000 from two groups affiliated with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.
Republican House Speaker David Osborne called the decision to rehear the case “troubling,” stating that “judicial outcomes seem increasingly driven by partisan politics.”
Nicklies’ press release on Wednesday refers to Goodwine benefiting from PACs funded by teachers unions, stating that “one of her first moves on the Court was voting to rehear SB 1, putting the concept of Urban County government in her hometown of Lexington in question.”
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
