Davis seeks third term as magistrate

Fifth District Magistrate Chris Davis is run­ning for a third term on the Clark County Fiscal Court, and he believes the com­mu­ni­ty is on the edge of major transformation.

“We’re so ide­al­ly locat­ed for growth that I think you could see Clark County explode in the next ten years,” he said in a recent interview.

Winchester sits on I‑64 near I‑75 to the west and Mountain Parkway to the east, and there are plans to widen U.S. 60 from Winchester to Lexington and extend the east­ern bypass from Ky. 89 to Ky. 627.

The coun­ty is also served by R.J. Corman Railroad Group and the Kentucky River, which pro­vides its water supply. 

There are projects under­way to expand san­i­tary sew­er ser­vice and broad­band inter­net access in the county.

Davis, who has been involved in those projects, wants to serve the coun­ty for anoth­er four years to see them through to com­ple­tion and to be part of deci­sions to expand eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment and afford­able housing.

The incum­bent is being chal­lenged by Winchester’s inter­im city man­ag­er, Mike Flynn, in the Republican pri­ma­ry. No Democrat is run­ning in the gen­er­al elec­tion, so who­ev­er wins the May 19 GOP pri­ma­ry will like­ly rep­re­sent the district.

Davis was first elect­ed in 2018 when he defeat­ed incum­bent Democrat Sheila McCord, and then defeat­ed Democrat Leonard Shortridge in 2022.

“I think it’s a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to be involved in local gov­ern­ment,” Davis said when asked why he wants to serve again. “I think what coun­ty gov­ern­ment … does is very impor­tant to people’s every­day lives.”

County and city gov­ern­ments deal with pub­lic safe­ty infra­struc­ture, eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment, hous­ing, and oth­er basic needs.

“Local gov­ern­ment is where all of that takes place,” he said.

Davis, 50, has lived in Clark County for most of his life and has worked here his entire career.

A grad­u­ate of George Rogers Clark High School, he earned his bachelor’s degree in eco­nom­ics from Centre College in 1997 and his law degree from the University of Kentucky in 2000. For the next eight years, he was an assis­tant coun­ty attor­ney and also worked for a local law firm. For more than a decade, he has been a con­trac­tor and land agent for the nat­ur­al gas indus­try while main­tain­ing a lim­it­ed law practice.

He and his wife, Heather, a para­le­gal, have two teenage chil­dren, Holden and Leighton. He has been involved in Republican Party pol­i­tics for more than 20 years and served on the party’s coun­ty exec­u­tive committee.

“I’d say I’m a tra­di­tion­al, Reagan-style con­ser­v­a­tive,” he said when asked to describe his polit­i­cal philosophy.

Davis is a fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive who sees no need to raise tax­es despite the county’s cur­rent finan­cial sit­u­a­tion, which he con­sid­ers the biggest chal­lenge in the next term.

“We haven’t raised the rates. In fact, at least five of the years I’ve been on the court, we did small decreas­es in the coun­ty prop­er­ty tax rates. However, we have seen an increase in rev­enue on prop­er­ty tax­es because the assess­ments on prop­er­ty have gone up so much,” he said.

He said the coun­ty has also done a bet­ter job in the last two or three years of col­lect­ing net prof­it tax­es on local busi­ness­es, and insur­ance pre­mi­um and occu­pa­tion­al tax rev­enue have increased because of bet­ter collection.

“I don’t think it’s been a rev­enue prob­lem,” he said.

Part of the prob­lem has been infla­tion, which has affect­ed local gov­ern­ments just as it has fam­i­lies and busi­ness­es. But also part of the prob­lem, he said, was poor plan­ning by the for­mer coun­ty judge-exec­u­tive, Les Yates.

Davis said that under Kentucky’s coun­ty gov­ern­ment sys­tem, the coun­ty judge-exec­u­tive is the chief admin­is­tra­tor of the coun­ty. Magistrates are part-time leg­is­la­tors who have no author­i­ty out­side of meet­ings of the fis­cal court.

However, there were meet­ings where the judge-exec­u­tive would present the mag­is­trates with invoic­es, pur­chase orders, and bill lists that had already been approved, and the mag­is­trates would have to fig­ure out how to pay them.

“We would have to turn to the trea­sur­er and ask, ‘Do we have enough cash on hand to pay these bills?’ And the mag­is­trates were left to sit there in a meet­ing and go through the bills list and fig­ure out what must be paid and what could wait. And basi­cal­ly, Mr. Yates had no par­tic­i­pa­tion in those dis­cus­sions,” he said.

Yates, who is run­ning for state rep­re­sen­ta­tive, resigned ear­li­er this year, and Magistrate Steve Craycraft was named inter­im judge-exec­u­tive until last month, when Gov. Andy Beshear appoint­ed for­mer state Senate Minority Leader R.J. Palmer of Winchester to fill the vacan­cy until after the November gen­er­al election.

Among the projects Davis has worked on and wants to com­plete, expand­ing san­i­tary sew­er ser­vice in west­ern Clark County is one that inter­ests him most.

Yorktowne Mobile Home Estates on Rockwell Road had a 50-year-old sewage pack­age treat­ment plant at risk of fail­ure, and Verna Hills on Lexington Road also had an old plant that need­ed replac­ing. So, using grant mon­ey, the coun­ty is extend­ing city san­i­tary sew­er lines to those areas.

“You’re talk­ing about infra­struc­ture that costs mil­lions of dol­lars,” and it’s imprac­ti­cal to expect home­own­ers asso­ci­a­tions to come up with that kind of mon­ey, Davis said. The coun­ty got involved also because it’s a poten­tial water qual­i­ty and pub­lic health prob­lem, he noted.

Davis said that fix­ing the prob­lem was a pledge he made in his last cam­paign. The oth­er pledge, he said, was to pro­vide the coun­ty with a third fire sta­tion, which the fis­cal court did when it pur­chased prop­er­ty on Tierney Drive that is now the Clark County Fire Department’s headquarters.

“We’re real­ly proud of that,” he said.

The coun­ty has also pur­chased a new fire truck and raised fire­fight­ers’ wages.

“We have the best paid and best equipped fire depart­ment that we’ve ever had,” Davis said.

He said he hopes to have at least one EMS ambu­lance at the new fire sta­tion. Money for the fire sta­tion and truck came from grant funds the coun­ty received under the near­ly $2 tril­lion COVID-era American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

“We didn’t want to use ARPA mon­ey to pay bills,” Davis said, “we want­ed to … invest in the community.”

Some of that mon­ey has also been used for the broad­band project and oth­er needs.

One of the finan­cial bur­dens the coun­ty has — that all coun­ties have — is the cost of run­ning a jail. For sev­er­al years, coun­ties have tried to get the state to pay for more of the cost of coun­ties hous­ing state inmates, but that leg­is­la­tion has nev­er passed, and this year, HB 577 was still in com­mit­tee when reg­u­lar busi­ness end­ed in the General Assembly.

Davis wants to see U.S. 60 widened, some­thing Clark County’s state leg­is­la­tors have been work­ing on. That and the expan­sion of the san­i­tary sew­er should result in more growth in that part of the coun­ty, he said.

He also wants to expand the Winchester Industrial Park, which is almost out of land to sell to businesses.

“I think there’s a lot of eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty for Clark County, espe­cial­ly when it’s so very hard to get new devel­op­ment approved and com­plet­ed in Fayette County. It’s a long process over there,” he said.

And new employ­ment requires new res­i­den­tial development.

“We have to rec­og­nize that there’s a pro­found need for afford­able hous­ing, and I want Clark County to be a place where young peo­ple want to come back to if they want to stay here,” he said. “That’s my biggest con­cern … and num­ber two, that we’re grow­ing enough that we can sus­tain pub­lic services.”

If a com­mu­ni­ty isn’t grow­ing, he said, it’s dif­fi­cult to pro­vide fund­ing for gov­ern­ment with­out requir­ing tax­pay­ers to pay more.

When asked to address con­cerns about rapid growth, sprawl, and the loss of farm­land, Davis said the coun­ty has a com­pre­hen­sive plan and land-use map to con­trol growth.

“I don’t think there’s a chance of us becom­ing anoth­er Richmond,” he said, but Winchester and Clark County do need to grow.