Introduction: Part II - The Louisville Metro Area

Along the Ohio River bank, opposite Indiana, is Kentucky's largest populous area: the sprawling Metropolitan of Louisville. Through any lens, Louisville is a visually fascinating town. It has a brick-and-stack industrial flavor to its architectural landscape. This is moderated by an intangible refinement, most likely lent by the influence of the monster whiskey and tobacco interests based thereabouts. Louisville has made great efforts to catch momentum from the technology surge of the last fifteen years, though getting a late start, and is becoming a good place to be “wired.” In fact, Louisville is one of the pioneering metro areas for at least one rapid-growth industry in health care:

The Louisville Medical Center, a 20-block area in Downtown Louisville, houses some of the world's most pioneering doctors and is a thriving business park. But, outside the center, the industry still plays a large role in the community. Two Fortune 500 health-related companies are headquartered locally. And Greater Louisville is home to 15 hospitals and thousands of quality medical professionals. About 72,000 employees work for the more than 2,000 health-related companies - which include health care providers, medical supply companies, insurers and claims processors. The employees earn more than $2.4 billion annually. [1]

Through a microscope, as it were, the political science student finds a veritable archaeological dig in Louisville. Scratching, gently chiseling and brushing through layer after layer of collected influences that no longer hold such sway in other such metropolises, our political scientist will find himself dealing with a much more sophisticated politick than first let on by Kentucky’s façade of red-necked simplicity. The scene of several local and state government campaign contribution fraud and laundering scandals, Louisville could also be the poster-child region of the poll-watching controversies of the last few election cycles nationally.

Additionally, Louisville is the home of one of the most newsworthy policy innovations in American local government. It recently merged its constantly chafing Louisville city and Jefferson County government bodies, dissolving their structures and replacing them with one Louisville Metropolitan Area authority. The merger was controversial,[2] but it was chosen by area voters and has been largely successful, leading other metropolitan areas such as Pittsburgh to suggest that the same solution might work for them.[3]

In the same matrix of innovation, growth and change, there can be found some of the oldest lingering scars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of American politics. The city is still divided into recognizably different, ethnically distinguished subsections, separating the sequestered Black communities from the starkly contrasting poor and rich white neighborhoods. The lingeringly apologetic Civil War politics of greater Kentucky fall heavily on the shoulders of the otherwise forward-straining Louisville area: it is the home of the 43rd District of the Kentucky Commonwealth’s House of Representatives, which has been designated by the majority Democrat party as a racially-designated Black district. Where many other states do not even remember the ghost pains of Civil War wounds, Louisville is discontent to merely enjoy its hard-won diversity; it rather painstakingly mandates and maintains it.

[1] Greater Louisville, Incorporated: The Metro Chamber Of Commerce, “Health Enterprises.” GLI Website, available at URL: http://www.greaterlouisville.com/content/community/health.asp. Accessed 5 May, 2005.

[2] Shafer, Sheldon S., “Louisville Gladly Becomes Model for Merger.” The Louisville Courier-Journal, 2 January 2004. Available at URL: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:KR2Ns21_sIUJ:vh80015.vh8.infi.net/localnews/2004/01/02ky/met-front-bandwagon0102-6766.html+%22Courier+Journal%22+darryl+owens&hl=en

[3] Bill Toland, “Louisville becomes lean, less mean after city/county merger.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7 September 2003. Available at URL: http://www.post-gazette.com/localnews/20030907louisville0907p3.asp. Accessed 5 May, 2005