Lexington has — count 'em — 70 boards and commissions.
"The airport has a board. The library has a board. There's a board just for trees in Lexington," says Kit Anderson with local nonprofit CivicLex.
The organization performed a deep dive into the network of local volunteer representatives serving on those boards and found a number of areas ripe for improvement, from public outreach to training new members to representation.
"We found both demographically and in terms of how people feel about the city, there are some really serious mismatches," she explains. "The board and commission members tend to be older. They tend to be wealthier. They're almost all homeowners. Less than 5% of boards and commission members are renters. They're more highly educated than Lexington."
And Vice Mayor Dan Wu says for some of the board and commission members currently in those roles, there's been a disconnect.
"Some of the challenges and the criticism that we've had in the past is people join boards and commissions, and then they don't really know what are they supposed to be doing, or they want to be doing things, but they don't feel as connected to decision makers or lawmakers, and they don't feel impactful," he says.
Wu will be co-chairing a new subcommittee tasked with remedying those problems in the coming months.
The vice mayor says the boards and commissions are a great way for residents to get in on the ground floor of local government, but the process needs to be accessible and goals clear if they're going to be effective.