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December 8th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
The Lexington mayor isn’t the only one in town with purist ideals about nonpartisan politics. Gorton was elected in 2018 after her opponent, a former Lexington police chief and public safety commissioner, sent mailers to voters boasting he was “the only Democrat running for mayor.”
But the mailer, which also highlighted Gorton’s “Republican roots,” backfired. It “angered” voters, says Gorton, who won the race handily and is making plans for a reelection bid next year.
During a recent afternoon, Gorton talked about how she has navigated the pandemic, faced a racial reckoning after the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in nearby Louisville, and juggled development of a midsize city surrounded by agriculture.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
As a registered nurse, you were putting hand sanitizer on conference room tables before people were even talking about Covid-19. How did your background help you manage the pandemic?
I knew what scientific data was saying about the spread. There were people who thought I was doing things too early. But in this case, there isn’t ever “a too early.” I knew the question wasn’t going to be, “Will we be immune to a pandemic.” It had already hit China and the West Coast. It was coming. And so you take all those things into account and you say what can we do next to do the best we can do for our people here. And so we did that.
Before our first case, I closed our senior center. Our senior citizens center is where hundreds of seniors gather. It’s a daytime center that’s fairly new, and it’s popular. … We also closed our jail to visitors. We didn’t want that population getting an immediate spread because it was still open. And we closed nursing homes after the governor made his executive order.
… This is kind of corny, but I saw the city as a large patient. There were signs of wellness and signs of things that weren’t so well during the pandemic, and we had to shift around. The team was everything. It’s the same way with health care.
Has enforcing the mask mandate been difficult, and how did you manage the needs of your residents here vs. what the governor was mandating?
We’re a midsize city, a city of 325,000 people, and so my priorities became keeping people safe and healthy first, keeping the general basic services operating — making sure garbage got picked up, the streetlights worked, the potholes got filled, that sort of thing. We had all the basic services that we had to keep churning out and we knew we’d have to layer on top of that all the things needed to be done for the pandemic.
… There was pushback, mostly from the late-night bar crowd, younger people who thought they were invincible and didn’t think it would affect them. There was a lot of coordination and a lot of gray area of how far we are willing to go in a staring contest. In the end, the pushback was sort of tamped down, helped by businesses starting their own mask requirements.
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