Jane Murray: Promises, Promises (Part 1)

THE LEXINGTON CULTURAL CENTER SCANDAL

Jane Murray has repeatedly promised that she will make Portsmouth "a regional cultural center" and that she will implement a "cultural master plan" for Portsmouth, just like she has done in other cities. This master plan will include museums, and parks, and historical centers, as a part of her plan to "restructure" our entire city.

On her website, Murray lists the following achievements in her statement of qualifications:

* Lexington Cultural Master Plan – project director for planning, coordinating, and implementing final plan which included more public monies for the arts, an arts & culture district, a children’s museum, and a new cultural center * Lexington Children’s Museum – project director for design/build and grand opening of KY’s first children’s museum; worked with a public committee and design team on planning and design * Lexington Cultural Center – director for project planning, design, and operations; headed team of museum planners, theatre consultants, architects, engineers, community members * University of Kentucky Basketball Museum – director for feasibility study; organized and directed professional consulting team, all meetings, functions, reports

At first glance it is an impressive list. However, as we reported a few days ago, there is much more to the story. Murray's responsibility for the UK Basketball Museum failure was a true financial fiasco for the City of Lexington and the University of Kentucky, which remains as $100,000 a year burden to the University to this day. We are amazed that she would even include the Museum on her resume. The only sense in which the museum was ever a success was the amount of money that Murray earned from her services in connection with the now-bankrupt museum.

Jane Murray's bankrupt UK Basketball Museum (now defunct)

We believe that the protracted, embarrassing failure of the Basketball Museum, after a string of failures in government and business, was the real reason Jane Murray dropped her married name, Jane Vimont, in favor of her maiden name, and returned to Portsmouth.

But the museum story merely opens the door on a much larger story of broken promises, failure, and scandal for the City of Lexington, the State of Kentucky, and Murray herself.

The basketball museum failure had its beginning several years prior with an even bigger fiasco and financial loss for the City of Lexington: the Ben Snyder Block scandal.

As you follow the story below please note the words in BOLD text and how they are interconnected. (Anyone who believes the Marting's project was a dastardly scheme should really be shocked by the Lexington "Art & Culture District" scandal.)

All information from Lexington Herald-Leader stories is indicated in parentheses. (LHL, date of article.) All Lexington Herald-Leader articles are available on-line for a fee.

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY/LEXINGTON

After graduating from Ohio State University in 1975, Jane Murray studied sociology at the University of Kentucky where she got her Masters in 1977. While at UK, Jane Murray met and later married Richard E. Vimont, a Lexington attorney, who had received his Law Degree from UK in 1960. Vimont was an influential lawyer in Lexington which connections in the Mayor's office. Vimont went on to form the influential Lexington lobbying firm of Vimont & Wills. (Vimont still practices law at age 73, specializing in "corporate law, animal law, and equine law." He has also worked part-time in the Fayette County Attorney's office since 2006, when he sold his law firm Vimont & Wills. He and his current wife, a UK professor, have a successful horse farm outside of Lexington and are major donors to Democrat candidates.)

Vimont was a good last name to have in Lexington. It helped Jane Murray-Vimont to get several quasi-government jobs in Lexington and Frankfort starting in 1977. In 1986, Jane's husband, Richard was working in the mayor's office, representing Lexington on several issues. That was the year that Jane Murray-Vimont was hired as Lexington Mayor Scotty Baesler's Legislative Liaison, a position created especially for her. (LHL, 8/12/86). One of the issues that Richard Vimont would later work on for the City was the negotiation for the lease of property to build a children's museum. (LHL, 8/16/89).

BEN SNYDER BLOCK PROPERTY ACQUISITIONS

As Baesler's legislative liaison, Jane Murray-Vimont was responsible for development of a "Cultural Master Plan" for Lexington to help revitalize the downtown area. Her responsibility included extensive travel to other cities and meeting with major lobbying and consulting firms.

(NOTE: In her press conference Wednesday, Jane Murray slyly claimed that she did not go on "any of the trips mentioned in the [1996 Lexington Herald-Leader] article except for one." If true, this is a very sneaky denial. Murray's travel in and out of the US as Legislative Liason was extensive, as other news article from the period show.)

Another of Jane Murray-Vimont's responsibilities was the acquisition of Downtown property, in an area that came to be called the Art & Culture District. (This district never materialized. The "cultural site" is now occupied by the Fayette County Courthouse. More on that later.) This process of property acquisition was helped along by Jane's attorney husband, Richard. (LHL 7/18/94.) The major portion of the property was located in the "Ben Snyder Block," the site of the old Snyder downtown department store,a former City landmark. Jane Murray's involvement in the City's acquisition of this property has ramifications that continue to this day.

In 1989, two years after Jane Murray-Vimont joined Baesler's staff and served as his liaison for the planned cultural center, Baesler convinced the State of Kentucky to buy the Ben Snyder block at cost of $9 million dollars. In return Baesler committed the city to build a number of projects on the site, totalling $60 million, or else the City would have to pay the state back the entire $9 million purchase cost. This caused quite a stir in Lexington, due to the enormity of the commitment, which included:

• A $60 million World Trade/Cultural Center with high-rise office tower
• A large parking garage
• 34,000-square foot museum "to celebrate the science and technology of Kentucky"
• A UK Basketball Museum
• Renovation of the Lyric Threater, a traditional Black Theater in downtown Lexington with a historic legacy, and
• Two new theaters, among other improvements

This is the Lexington Cultural Master Plan that Murray takes credit for in her statement of qualifications and on her website, and mentions frequently at public events:

Lexington Cultural Master Plan – project director for planning, coordinating, and implementing final plan which included more public monies for the arts, an arts & culture district, a children’s museum, and a new cultural center (from Murray's website)

As we will see, Murray's Cultural Master Plan was quite a failure.

For over three years, Murray-Vimont led the City's efforts to recruit developers to build the improvements the City had committed would be built on the Ben Snyder Block in accordance with the Cultural Master Plan. During this time, no developers could be recruited. None of them believed the City's Master Plan figures and projections were accurate (HLH, "Finances May Spell 'Curtains' for Cultural Center," 7/75/92). Murray-Vimont and Baesler went back to the state with scaled-down plans. The state ultimately accepted the new less ambitious plans, but still required certain things to be built as originally agreed.

• Rather than building the proposed "World Trade Center High-Rise," they allowed the City to substitute the expansion of the nearby Lexington Center. (The World Trade group that was supposed to be housed in the new high-rise relocated much of their staff to Louisville when the new building was scrapped.)
• The state allowed the city to buy an older parking garage nearby as a substitute for a new one on the site paid for by the state.
• They accepted Baesler's commitment to build the basketball museum at UK rather that the cultural center site.
• They accepted the new children's museum as a substitute for the science and technology museum.
• They allowed to City to acquire two historical buildings (Embry's and Lowenthal's) which would be renovated and substituted for the two theaters.
• The historic Lyric Theater still had to be restored.

FEET TO THE FIRE But despite all of the substitutions, the State still required Lexington to at least build a $14 million cultural center there, or pay back the $9 million the State paid for the site. And by 1992, Mayor Baesler was already preparing to run for Congress. He put the responsibility for getting the scaled-back cultural center built squarely on Jane Murray-Vimont's shoulders, the woman who was responsible for the "Master Plan" in the first place and had pushed for the use of state funds. She led an uphill, and ultimately fruitless, battle to convince the City Council to borrow over $14 million from the State of Kentucky to build the downtown cultural center. In promoting her ideas, she gave the Columbus City Center Mall as an example of what was needed in Lexington. (The Columbus City Center is now defunct.) But Council was reluctant. As the Herald Leader said: "Over the last five years, Lexington has debated what a cultural center should contain and whether the city can afford to pick up the tab." One councilman said, "a $14 million project is such a dead weight right now that it scares me." Even Baesler's Vice Mayor (who became mayor after Baesler)Pam Miller was hesitant. She worried about the cost and said that a cultural center "is not going to be the turning point" in the City's economic problems. (LHL, 7/5/92, page A4)

Two more years of fund-raising and lobbying by the City and Jane Murray-Vimont failed. The cultural center project was dead. As the deadline of 12/31/1994 approached, the City could not afford to repay the $9 million dollars. But Baesler had been elected to congress and he and Jane Murray-Vimont were already in Washington, DC. The new mayor Pam Miller ultimately ignored the state's demands.

Instead of Jane Murray-Vimont's "cultural center," Lexington's leaders built a County Courthouse on the controversial site. It's called the Robert F. Stephens Courthouse. By coincidence (?), that's where Jane murray's ex-husband Richard still practices today. He has a nice office. They have great post cards.

But it is NOT a cultural center.

The state finally tired of the City's shenanigans, and filed a suit against Lexington for "misappropriation of funds." Eventually a settlement was reached that involved the City paying back only part of the money. Other terms of the settlement included the completion of several commitments that Jane Murray-Vimont had made on behalf of the Mayor, which still remained unfinished-or un-started. As Baesler's former liaison, Jane Murray-Vimont was involved in the negotiation of the settlement. The terms of the agreement were finalized in a now-infamous "Memorandum of Understanding" or MOU.

OUTRAGE OVER "SECRET" MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING The secret memorandum was agreed to in Feb. 1995. Jane Murray-Vimont (the champion of openness and transparency in Portsmouth government) was part of the closed-door meeting where the MOU was signed, as Baesler's representative. However, the group refused to release the MOU or the meeting minutes to the public. Local arts groups were outraged! They filed a Freedom of Information request which the City ignored. The arts groups took the City to court. The full MOU was finally released in 2005. (Note that the MOU was not released until six years after the opening of the UK Basketball Museum in 1999.) The decision in the memorandum controversy is now incorporated into Kentucky's Open Meetings Act or OMA.

"The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government violated the OMA when it met in closed session to discuss its dispute with the state concerning the "Ben Snyder Block." 95-OMD-57. Even if the discussion concerned a sale or acquisition of property, a public discussion "would have no effect on the prices of the property" which had previously been agreed upon." Ky. Rev. Statute 61.81.810 (1)(b).

(No wonder Murray is such as an expert on the Sunshine Law.) BACK TO THE BASKETBALL MUSEUM To some extent, most of the scaled-down projects that Baesler and Murray had previously committed to, in order to try to pacify the state over the failure of the Cultural Center Complex, had been completed by the time of the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding. Only two major projects remained that had yet to be started. 1) Renovation of the Lyric Theater, a historically Black theater that the City had acquired through eminent domain under Baesler and Murray-Vimont. It was to have been made into an African American cultural center as part of Jane Murray-Vimont's original "Cultural Center Master Plan." This how it looked when Jane Murray-Vimont developed the Cultural Master Plan, in 1988 and how it looked when she left Baesler's office in 1995. It's also the way it looked until a few months ago. The 1995 Memorandum of Understanding agreed to penalties to the city of $500 per day if the renovation of the Lyric was not complete by 1/27/2010. But the museum sat abandoned until July of this year, when community leaders broke ground on the project, with penalties looming. (When we visited the site, it looked like not much had been done. A time extension may be needed.)

2) The other major outstanding project that the state was still demanding in 1995 was the construction of the UK Basketball Museum.

In 1995 after years of various scandals and leaked stories to the press that she was leaving Baesler's staff (LHL 7/3/93, LHL 9/18/94, LHL 9/25/95), Jane Murray-Vimont finally severed her long-term professional relationship with Congressman Baesler. She announced that she was taking a position with Lord Cultural Resources of Toronto, Canada, a major consulting firm that develops master plans for museums and cultural centers. Murray-Vimont represented Lord in 1996. Whether she is still connected to Lord Cultural Resources is not known. (http://www.lord.ca/)

But according to the Seretary of State's Office of Kentucky, Jane Murray-Vimont started Jane Vimont and Associates (aka JVA) in 1993. And JVA's first client and its major client was the UK Basketball Museum. And our story begins to come full-circle.