Linda Blackford and Greg Kocher of the Lexington Herald-Leader have produced an outstanding series on Kentucky’s drive to renovate and refurbish its county courthouses. First, some background:
Kentucky possesses 120 counties, the third largest total in the nation (behind Texas and Georgia). This subdivision is the result of two nineteenth century policies. The first mandated that everyone in Kentucky should be able to make a round trip to the county seat in a single day. The second provided for extremely loose restrictions on the secession of new counties from existing counties. As a result, the 37th largest state by area and the 26th largest by population has a huge number of tiny subdivisions.
Moreover, these counties have a more significant cultural meaning in Kentucky than in most other states; it's not unusual for Kentuckians to identify themselves by county, rather than by city. Like many states, Kentucky is divided between relatively wealthy urban areas (Louisville, Lexington, and the Cincinnati suburbs) and extremely poor rural areas (everywhere else, but especially the Appalachian eastern half of the state). Lexington, home of the University of Kentucky, boasts the 10th highest percentage of bachelors degrees of any urban area in the nation, while the state as a whole ranks in the high 40s among US states in college degrees.
In 1998, the chief justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court launched a program to refurbish and rebuild Kentucky's county courthouses. This involved a remarkable amount of construction, as many of the courthouses dated from the 19th century. Thus far, roughly $900 million of state and local money has been poured into the construction of sixty-five courthouses across the state. The rest of the story is predictable; construction, because it involves the prediction of uncertain and hard-to-evaluate costs, is one of the industries most susceptible to corruption. And while it would be wrong to categorically declare that Kentucky state government mainly consists of two-party competition to loot the state treasury, that's pretty much what Kentucky state government consists of. Accordingly, the courthouse construction program has proceeded to hand out no bid contracts to politically well connected firms, with minimal transparency regarding decision-making, and little oversight on costs.
And so tiny, impoverished Kentucky counties are now receiving huge, new courthouses, paid for by significant infusions of both state and local money. Local politicians love it, because the program provides jobs and cash. Older courthouses and other historical buildings have been altered or destroyed, with minimal input from local residents. While there's little doubt that many areas in Kentucky can use new judicial facilities, the combination of local administrative structure with state political culture has produced a situation in which enormous amounts of money are being spent, in a poor state, on buildings that frankly aren't necessary.
—Robert Farley
