The transcript below was generated with the assistance of AI tools. Some errors may remain.
CALEB O. BROWN: This is The Shelbyville Idea. I’m Caleb Brown. I’m speaking today with Shane Suttor, a longtime member of the Shelbyville City Council who is now running for mayor. We discussed housing, development in the downtown area, the frustrations of serving on city council, and of course, pigs and chickens. One programming note: we’ve invited four mayoral candidates to join us on The Shelbyville Idea. Mr. Suttor was the first to sit down for an interview.
Shane Suttor, you are a city councilman here in Shelbyville, Kentucky. You are also a candidate for mayor.
SHANE SUTTOR: I am.
BROWN: So tell me first of all, what’s your background? What brought you to Shelbyville, and how long have you been here?
SUTTOR: I did not move to Shelbyville to run for office. I moved here when I was in third grade. My parents got divorced, and my mom and my family were from here, so I moved back here in third grade and I’ve been here ever since. I work at Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Georgetown, Kentucky. I’ve been there going on 32 years. So the Toyota Production System, standardization — it’s kind of built into my system.
BROWN: So you’ve been at Toyota since the beginning?
SUTTOR: No, no. Toyota’s been there for 40 years.
BROWN: I see. Close to the beginning. This is important to me. We have Martinrea here — sort of, but they’re on the way out.
SUTTOR: Right.
BROWN: I saw a new sign go up in front of Martinrea that says thyssenkrupp.
SUTTOR: Yes.
BROWN: Foreign direct investment is really important — having foreign firms here employing Americans. What has been your experience with Toyota being a key partner in creating wealth within Kentucky?
SUTTOR: Well, we have Nifco in Shelbyville. They build parts for Toyota. I don’t know what the number is now — we have a new model, obviously, the 2025 Camry — but on the old Camry, something like 660 parts came from Nifco. They’re all plastic clips and things like that.
BROWN: Essential but not noticeable.
SUTTOR: Correct, correct. But yeah, it’s done a lot. Obviously it’s provided wealth for people. It’s provided jobs. It’s changed a lot since I’ve been there. When I first started, I think we made more money than Ford. Now I think they make a little bit more than we do. But we’re a non-union plant and they’re a union plant, so it’s always been that way.
BROWN: It’s interesting to see the smaller organizations that have built up around Toyota, and to some extent Ford as well, because some places provide parts for both.
SUTTOR: Yeah, 100 percent. And Shelbyville is in the middle. We have the opportunity to be a good staging area for a lot of those plants.
BROWN: So you’re working there, living in Shelbyville, and serving on the city council. What has been, broadly, your experience on city council?
SUTTOR: Well, the way I got on city council was never intentional. I went to the University of Louisville, got a job at Toyota, and moved to Lexington when I first got hired on. Then I got married. I was going to raise my family, so we decided to move back to Shelbyville. We bought a lot and I built my house myself.
We had some green space behind us — that’s why we bought our lot there. Then the developer got mad at the homeowners association and decided he was going to build a bunch of houses behind us on the green space. I remember calling him up and saying, “Hey, I thought this was going to be green space.” He said, “Don’t make this a fight between you and me. This is between me and the homeowners association.” I said, “You’re making it between you and me, because I bought a lot not thinking I was going to have a bunch of houses behind me, and now you’re telling me I am.”
So I ran for president of my homeowners association, and we fought him. We won. He appealed, we went to court again, and we won again. I’m kind of the one who came up with our plan for fighting him. He’d already lost once before — when he got mad at the homeowners association, he had signed a court order saying he would not violate the deed restrictions. Our green space was one big giant lot, and under our deed restrictions you couldn’t subdivide a lot. So that was one of our big arguments: you’ve already signed this, you can’t violate our deed restrictions. That’s one of the ways we won.
After we won, it was a big deal. It was in the paper, and a few people came to me and said, “Have you ever thought about running for city council?” I said, “I have not.” It was never anything I’d thought about doing. My wife at the time said, “I think you should do it.” So I ran, and I won.
BROWN: What do people run on for city council in Shelbyville? What are the things that get voters to the polls?
SUTTOR: That’s a great question. I can tell you what I feel like it is now: it’s growth. We are growing. We’re one of the fastest-growing counties in the state.
BROWN: Top ten.
SUTTOR: Yeah. When I first got on city council, there were 9,000 people living in the city — almost 10,000, but we weren’t there yet. Now we have 18,000 people living in the city. That gives you an idea of the growth we’ve had.
I can’t say it’s all exactly what I would like, which is one of the reasons I decided to run for mayor. I don’t want more warehouses and gas stations. I don’t think that’s who we are as a community. We are the American Saddlebred Capital of the World. That’s a title no one else can hold, and we shouldn’t let that slip away. I think we should pick who we want to come here. Being one of the fastest-growing means we can be selective about who we want. We shouldn’t just take everyone who wants to be here.
BROWN: You’re talking about businesses?
SUTTOR: Yes.
BROWN: Okay. I’m a hardcore free marketeer. If you want to stop growth, you’d better be prepared to buy the lot.
SUTTOR: Right, I understand. I’m not stopping growth — we’re not going to stop growth.
BROWN: In any individual instance where growth is presenting itself.
SUTTOR: Right. We just need to put design standards in place, so that when they come in, they know what they’re getting into.
BROWN: Rails.
SUTTOR: Yes, rails. Exactly.
BROWN: I can appreciate that. So what are some of the big projects that have not come to Shelby County because it was the sense of the city council that they shouldn’t?
SUTTOR: I don’t think we’ve kept anything from coming right now. Well — we have. Our current city council, just this last year, fought a warehouse out on Logan Station Road. It got turned down by Planning and Zoning, then came to city council, and we voted it down. There was also a development off Harrington Mill Road over here. They wanted to put in a gas station, apartments, and housing, but it was just not housing that matched the surrounding area. It was very condensed, and I just don’t think it fit in with the area.
BROWN: What do you tell young people who find themselves priced out of homeownership?
SUTTOR: Well, one of my plans is that we should look at more reinvestment in the downtown area and in areas of town that have not been kept up like they should. Part of that is code enforcement. But I also feel like we should give incentives in those areas.
Let’s say you buy a house — and I’m okay with even a developer buying a house — for $150,000, fix it up, and sell it. I think we should offer some type of tax incentive — I don’t know the number of years, five to seven, maybe ten, whatever the council decides — where we lock in the property value at the price they bought it for, not what it’s actually worth, just to try to create some reinvestment downtown instead of having urban sprawl.
BROWN: I wonder about that, because given how home prices have appreciated in just the last five or six years — particularly in Shelby County, but elsewhere around the state and the country — it doesn’t strike me that there’s any lack of developers available to do the work necessary to make homeownership more possible for people, and to take distressed properties and turn them into something new and beneficial. It doesn’t seem like there’s any lack of interest among developers, because prices are so high and the opportunity for profit is so high.
The problem I’ve seen — and it’s not exclusive to Shelbyville, it’s every locality — is that every locality has, I won’t call it a cartel, but a group of local people in government who have an inordinate ability to say no. We’ve written rules that make it very difficult, very costly, and very uncertain that when you — a developer or anybody — buy a piece of property, you’ll be able to legally turn it into something interesting. To me, it’s a regulatory issue. It’s not supply and demand.
SUTTOR: Okay. Well, I guess the way I look at it is, when they do come in, that infrastructure burden should not be placed on the current citizens.
BROWN: So what do the incentives look like, if not placing a burden on current citizens?
SUTTOR: Well, infrastructure costs need to be paid for by the developer. The taxpayers here shouldn’t have to pay for that — your sewer system, your roads.
BROWN: Certainly. But isn’t that what exaction fees are for?
SUTTOR: Yes. We have some with water and sewer — the tap-on fees and those sorts of things are supposed to offset the cost of the infrastructure.
BROWN: One of the policies I would love to see adopted statewide is basically being able to be absolutely certain that a permit application you’ve submitted is going to be acted on in a timely fashion. That uncertainty adds a lot of cost for developers trying to keep their projects on schedule when dealing with local governments.
SUTTOR: Okay, can we backtrack a little bit? I think part of the problem is that our planning and zoning ordinances have not really been updated like they should have been since, I want to say, maybe 2009. Every five years we just readopt what we had in the past. I think we need to redo our comp plan so we eliminate our gray areas. But in some ways, I think some of the powers that be like having those gray areas in place, so they can argue, “So much has changed that we should be allowed to put this in this area, even though Planning and Zoning says we shouldn’t. We’ve made changes, so now it should be able to go in there.”
If we redo our comp plan the way it should be done — with workshops where people come in and give their opinion on how they want to see the city and the county grow — that will eliminate a lot of those issues. Because when you go in, you can’t make the argument that things have changed when we just redid the comp plan.
BROWN: Yeah. Related to that, there’s another policy I would love to see adopted: where there are gray areas in a planning and zoning plan or in city ordinances, the ambiguity should redound to the property owner. That is to say, where it’s unclear who has the right to say yes or no to something, by default we turn that back over to the property owner. The property owner has the default presumption of liberty when it comes to doing what they want.
SUTTOR: Give me an example of what you’re talking about.
BROWN: Let’s say you wanted to put an addition on your home, and there was some ambiguity in the city ordinance about whether you could — it’s not clear what the rule is. The presumption, as a matter of law, goes to the person who owns the property and wants to do the thing.
SUTTOR: Right, yeah. I get that.
BROWN: You mentioned planning and zoning. On a personal matter, I’ve seen this in action in only one narrow circumstance, and that is with my friend Rebecca, who wanted to start what’s called The Lot.
SUTTOR: Rebecca Mullins?
BROWN: Everybody in the downtown area — everybody I’ve talked to, anyway, self-selecting sample — thought this was a really interesting new thing. From the moment I heard about it, I thought, gosh, what an awesome idea.
SUTTOR: Yeah. Rebecca sent an email to all the council members about her idea, and as soon as she sent it to me — I think I may have even reached out the same day — I also thought it was a great idea. I encouraged her to come to city council and present it, because the problem was we had no ordinance in place for anything like that. She was starting from the ground up. We didn’t have anything in place, so we had to create an ordinance for that specific thing.
BROWN: Well, let’s take this point by point, because from the moment I heard about this, I thought it was a great idea and was very supportive. But to hear Rebecca’s version of it — and I don’t want to put words in her mouth, since she’s not here to correct me — well, let me phrase this a different way. What was missing that needed to be done to accommodate her? Because to me, as a hardcore liberty guy, if somebody wants to take their property and do something new and interesting, there should be a really compelling reason for somebody to step in and say, “No, you can’t do that.” And I don’t know what that reason was, absent some sort of law.
SUTTOR: It was basically that we had no rules for what she was asking for.
BROWN: Sounds like she could just go ahead and proceed, then. In my worldview — there are no rules? Great, I can do my thing.
SUTTOR: Right. Well, I think part of it is trying to keep a standard for everything. So we created — how do I say this — an outline, so that if anyone else also wanted to do it, this is how it would have to be done. It’s so technical. It’s things like how far apart the food trucks have to be, fire hazards, food hazards, bathrooms and facilities. Things you’d think would be common sense, but not everybody’s going to do it the way the health department thinks you should, or the way the fire department feels is safe.
BROWN: Okay, understood. If the overriding concern is health and safety —
SUTTOR: Correct.
BROWN: — fine. We can argue about whether those particular regulations actually address that issue, but the idea is that this is a health and safety issue, and we need to make sure everything is going along in a way that protects health and safety. Fair enough. But to hear her story of navigating the bureaucracy — which is not significant in terms of the number of layers —
SUTTOR: Correct. Right.
BROWN: — it seems like it was just a steady series of groups that were empowered to say no to different parts of what she wanted to do.
SUTTOR: Well, I’m not going to speak for Rebecca.
BROWN: Sure, sure.
SUTTOR: I can speak for me, and I can tell you that as a councilman, I did everything I could to help her proceed with what she was trying to do. We had lots of conversations. She would call me in the evenings; sometimes she’d call just to vent. But I was always there, and I did everything I could to help her move forward with her building.
BROWN: You say “building.”
SUTTOR: Well, not building. Her lot. It’s not a structure.
BROWN: That’s right. So you and I were both at the same meeting — not city council, planning and zoning.
SUTTOR: It would have been the Board of Adjustments and Appeals, I guess.
BROWN: Okay. See, this is how little I know about how our institutions here in Shelby County operate. She was asking for a variance?
SUTTOR: A variance — which I don’t really understand the whole concept of, because the Planning and Zoning department was included in these conversations from the very beginning. They knew exactly what her concept was. She gave all of us her visual concept when she came to council meetings, and Planning and Zoning had that too. So I don’t understand all the technicalities of it, because I’m not a planning and zoning guru. But I did go speak on behalf of myself about what I felt, as a city councilman, our vision was for her, and that was part of it.
BROWN: As far as I’m concerned, when somebody wants to take a risk like that and spend a bunch of their own money on something new and interesting in our community —
SUTTOR: Right. To make an investment.
BROWN: — broadly speaking, the institutions of our city and county ought to be as helpful as possible, to make sure there are no bureaucratic hurdles that don’t actually protect anyone from anything.
SUTTOR: Yes. The Lot is one of the types of businesses I feel Shelbyville needs. I am a big tourism advocate. I’m all about getting people to come to Shelbyville. I hate to call it free money, but people come in and spend their money, and we provide them with resources, but we don’t really provide them with any services. So they come in, they give us their money, and then they leave. That allows us to have a lower tax rate and that sort of thing.
BROWN: Right. But even setting aside whether members of our city council — forgive me — feel that something is needed: if somebody wants to do something new and interesting that everybody knows is going to fail — and I don’t think that’s the case here — your opinion, to me, is not relevant to whether institutions ought to be helpful to somebody who’s trying to do something interesting.
SUTTOR: Right. I think the big issue here is that she’s just a citizen trying to start something, just like, I would say, 95 percent of the population would be if they wanted to start something. I’m not the mayor, so I can’t control what’s on the city website. But one of the things I would like to do if I am mayor is have a step-by-step guide on the city website: if you want to start a business, these are the things you have to do, in this order.
Part of Rebecca’s problem was that there’s no guideline on the city website — I don’t know if we have it posted anywhere — of what you have to do to start a business. So she was just running from office to office, and they would say, “Hey, you’ve got to do this,” and so on. We need to have something like that. Same thing if you want to build a house.
BROWN: Rat maze.
SUTTOR: It is. It’s bureaucratic, and that’s just how it is. I’m not saying I agree with it. But if you want to build a house, you’ve got to get your site plan signed off, all those sorts of things. It’s kind of the same for a business in some ways.
BROWN: What some friends of mine and I have called the “vetocracy” — the decision points where somebody has the discretion to say no to someone who wants to do something new, even when all the objective criteria have been met — that strikes me as a problem.
SUTTOR: Right, that is a problem, and I don’t agree with that. Obviously, if you do everything you should do, it should not be an issue for you to start whatever business it is, as long as you’re meeting all the rules and regulations.
BROWN: That was a huge aside.
SUTTOR: I am still running for mayor, by the way.
BROWN: Right, you’re still running for mayor. So in your campaign, what concerns have people brought to you about the current administration?
SUTTOR: Well, I’m not here to bash anyone, but transparency has been a huge issue, I feel. City council meetings were always at 6:30 in the evening so people could attend. The new administration decided to move them to 5:30. Even for someone like me, who’s on city council — I work in Georgetown, Kentucky, so it’s hard for me to make a meeting, and I obviously have to be there. I don’t think a 5:30 p.m. meeting is beneficial to working-class people.
I also think the public should always have the opportunity to speak at a council meeting, and I’ve had issues with that. The mayor has taken public comment off the agenda in the past because it was a controversial meeting, so there was no public input. I spoke up about that. We also had an email sent out basically telling us he wants to know what we’re going to speak about during our council reports, and he’ll let us know whether we can talk about it or not. That’s just not how transparent government works.
BROWN: So I should understand, then: what are the powers of the mayor versus the city council?
SUTTOR: The way I try to explain it, your council is kind of like your board of directors. We control the budget and the ordinances. Your mayor is your CEO. He leads the meetings and is supposed to help with your direction — where you’re going.
BROWN: I’m going to take this analogy as far as I can. Board of directors and CEO. I am the CEO of an organization. I have a board of directors, and they can fire me.
SUTTOR: Well, technically the council could fire the mayor if they wanted to. It’s never happened in Shelbyville, but I know it has happened in other jurisdictions. You’d have to do something pretty illegal for the council to be able to, or even want to, fire a mayor, but they can do it, yes.
BROWN: Okay, so that analogy is holding up so far, at the very least. But the CEO directing the board on what they can and can’t talk about — that just seems like a non-starter.
SUTTOR: That is 100 percent a non-starter.
BROWN: There’s nothing written down anywhere that says the CEO gets to do this. We, the board, get to fire you if we need to. So maybe just understand that we have our lane and you have yours.
SUTTOR: Well, we’re elected, just as the mayor is. The mayor is not the boss of the city council — that’s a very easy way to explain it. We’re all our own individuals. We’re all elected, and we all have our opinions and our right to speak up at meetings. A lot of times, maybe someone’s not comfortable saying something to the current mayor, so they’ll say something to us. Or I’m at the grocery store and someone says, “Hey, I have this problem” — whatever it may be, like the grass by their house hasn’t been mowed for a month. That’s something we’ll address if we can.
BROWN: I’ve talked about this with some state lawmakers as well, and with another city council member on this very program: the issue of backyard chickens.
SUTTOR: Okay. You know what, I can give you the background on this one.
BROWN: I’ll give a little background first. At about the time Shelbyville made backyard chickens effectively illegal, as a practical matter, for almost anyone who lives within the city limits, Frankfort legalized them. So give me your background.
SUTTOR: Okay. I will say it was the most interesting and bizarre city council meeting I’ve ever attended. We’d had issues with chickens — mostly with roosters. Chickens were getting into other people’s yards, but mostly it was people having roosters, and the roosters were waking people up and crowing at night. People came to us and said, “Look, you’ve got to stop this. We’re living next to this.” And it wasn’t just one person; it was multiple people.
BROWN: Fun fact about roosters: they don’t just make noise when the sun comes up.
SUTTOR: It’s all day long, yes. So it was an issue, and people asked us to please do something about it. The lady who had the chickens actually showed up at a city council meeting with her chicken on the podium, and as she was speaking, the chicken flew across the room and did what chickens do. I was like, this is nuts. Ultimately, at that time, we decided to just ban the chickens. We also added a list of what we considered farm animals, which came up again later, because we had a woman who had pet pigs in her yard.
BROWN: Pet pigs. Okay. Are these pigs that are bred to be pets, or just pigs that she counted as pets?
SUTTOR: I think she raised them from when they were little. She told us how lovable they were and how they were family members, and I understood all that. But once again, her neighbors were not very happy about the pigs. They were in her backyard — it was over in North Country, actually, just right over here — and you could drive down the road, look over, and see into her backyard.
I felt sorry for her, because ultimately she had to move in order to keep her pigs. She said, “My neighbors don’t have a problem with it.” And I wanted to say, “Your neighbors are the ones who called and complained.” So clearly they had a problem with it. And these weren’t little pigs. They were full-grown pigs.
BROWN: So what do you see as the civil-society solution to issues like this? My view, broadly, is that we have nuisance laws on the books, and you would think those would cover legitimate nuisances like roosters crowing at all hours of the day and night. You would think they would cover any actual nuisance created by pigs in a yard.
SUTTOR: Well, part of the nuisance with pigs, and maybe with chickens as well, is the odor that comes with it.
BROWN: But that should be covered by a statute regarding nuisances. It seems to me that for my backyard chickens — my theoretical backyard chickens, because I don’t own a piece of property that spreads out in all directions where I could have coops, except maybe somewhere inside my house. That’s possible. But I don’t want my city council to be my HOA.
SUTTOR: Right, and I understand that. Personally, I don’t have an issue with someone who has chickens — especially during COVID, everyone wanted to raise their own chickens to have eggs — as long as they’re caged and not creating a noise nuisance or —
BROWN: Attracting varmints.
SUTTOR: — varmints. If they’re caged, I don’t know how many varmints are going to be able to get in, depending on your cage. I don’t have that much of an issue with chickens. I do understand the pig thing. These were animals weighing hundreds of pounds.
BROWN: Okay. So pets, not potbellied pigs.
SUTTOR: These were not potbellied pigs. Maybe they started out as potbellied pigs, but full-grown, they became large animals.
BROWN: I talked to your colleague on the city council about the downtown area, and I’ve asked everybody I’ve talked to who has any connection to government this: What can we do to make downtown more vibrant?
SUTTOR: I do have plans on this. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I proposed an entertainment destination center for downtown years ago. It’s still in the works. If we don’t get it passed, I plan on bringing it back up and passing it, because I feel like it allows citizens more freedom. We give them the opportunity to do what they want — well, not do what they want per se.
Let me back up a little bit. Our Sixth Street area is a pedestrian-only area. I brought that idea up over ten years ago, and we ended up doing it. But my big thing was, if we’re going to allow people to have open containers on Sixth Street, we’re hampering the ability of other businesses that aren’t on Sixth Street to generate revenue. I didn’t want Sixth Street businesses to have an unfair advantage over, say, Parlay or Last Stop, or even some of the Mexican restaurants downtown. I wanted to give everybody the same opportunity. The only way to do that is to make it so you can have an adult beverage outside, or walk from one business to another. We’re not making anyone participate, but if you want to, you’re more than welcome to. So we can do a sip-and-shop.
Say you’re going to a restaurant downtown and there’s a wait. You put your name on the list. Normally you’d sit inside that business and wait 30 minutes until your table’s ready. But if you have the opportunity to buy a beverage, come outside, and walk around a little, you’re going to see some of the shops you may not have known existed in downtown Shelbyville. It’s going to enhance business, and it also gives people more personal responsibility and more freedom at the same time.
BROWN: There’s a related issue — one that I think pits cities against states, and to some extent against private property owners — which is short-term rentals: people sharing part of their home, or people who purchased a piece of property specifically to be a short-term rental.
SUTTOR: Okay. Yes.
BROWN: Downtown on Main Street, there are multiple short-term rentals above businesses in Shelbyville, and I think that’s fantastic.
SUTTOR: I’m all for that.
BROWN: But do people just off the strip — let’s call it Main Street and Washington Street — have that same opportunity?
SUTTOR: Yes. As of right now, they do.
BROWN: Does Shelbyville have specific restrictions on short-term rentals in the area?
SUTTOR: What we have in place addresses safety issues. You have to have a safety plan with your rental — a fire extinguisher, exits. And we require a certain amount of off-street parking based on how many bedrooms you have, because that was the largest issue we were having with short-term rentals: people were coming and taking up all of the street parking. So you have to have off-street parking for a certain number of bedrooms.
BROWN: Okay, parking minimums.
SUTTOR: Yes, parking minimums and safety minimums.
BROWN: For homes in Shelbyville that are lived in by their owners, is there any parking minimum required in the downtown?
SUTTOR: I think they still have to have off-street parking. I feel like — not in the downtown area. Technically the downtown area is different, because there is no off-street parking for a lot of those homes. We’ve just started talking about parking tickets downtown and limiting parking time, because we’ve had issues with people leaving their car in a spot all day long. So we’re going to start enforcing some of the two-hour parking. We hired a public safety officer whose job is parking, funerals, and minor wrecks — things that don’t require a full officer.
But I have brought up that we should offer a permit for people who live downtown. You don’t have to have an Airbnb — you can just be living downtown — and you need the ability to park. You can’t say, “I’ve got to move my car every two hours.” It’s like a Seinfeld episode; that’s not how it’s going to work. I know Old Louisville does a permit — it’s like $25 or $35 for a year — that says you can park on the street. We need to do something like that.
BROWN: As you move forward with your campaign for mayor, what are some things you want voters to hear — not just from you, but from other candidates?
SUTTOR: There are a lot of things I’d like to talk about. But the first thing is, I’ve been on city council for 16 years. This is my eighth term. I could sit here and talk about all the fire trucks we’ve added, the police cars, public works, those sorts of things. But the way I look at it, that’s the baseline. It doesn’t matter who the mayor is; those are things that should be getting done regardless.
BROWN: The core functions.
SUTTOR: That’s your baseline. So I think what separates me from the other candidates is my vision for Shelbyville. And I have a voting record you can look at. I’m not just telling you things.
I don’t know how long you’ve lived here, but Seventh Street was not the greatest street to look at. It was pretty rough. The sidewalks were torn up, if they even existed, and plants were overgrown — it wasn’t very walkable or very friendly. I was on the Shelbyville-Shelby County Parks Board for eight years, and that was my first thing when I got on: we have a park you can’t walk to from downtown.
BROWN: Yeah, the sidewalks stop at a certain point.
SUTTOR: Well, that’s because that part is county. The city stops at the bridge, so anything past the bridge is county property. But the city side wasn’t in great shape either at that time. So I presented — and I brought it with me here — the Seventh Street Corridor Plan. It was my idea to do a corridor plan to revitalize Seventh Street, because I wanted us to have a park we could walk to. We did the revitalization, and now our convention center is on Seventh Street, and it’s changed our downtown. That was an initiative I fought for for years to finally get completed.
Sixth Street, like I said — I brought up the idea of making it pedestrian-only. We did that, and I feel like it’s another gem for our downtown.
Other things I’d like to fix up: we have a golf course, Weissinger Hills, which is owned by the city. I don’t know if you knew that.
BROWN: I didn’t know.
SUTTOR: The city owns Weissinger Hills Golf Course. The barn there — I may get my numbers wrong — I think was built around 1907. It’s something like the second-largest barn in the state of Kentucky. It’s very historic, and the upstairs of that barn is gorgeous. But we’re not utilizing it.
My plan would be to put an elevator on the outside of the barn going up to the second floor and make it an event space, where we can do more stay-and-play packages and host events. We’ve already kind of got a deal with some of the local hotels where they’ll give you a discount if you’re at the golf course. But we can have more of a stay-and-play package through tourism, our restaurants, and our hotels. I think it’d be a great asset for our community. It’s something we currently own that’s not being utilized like it should be.
BROWN: How should the city of Shelbyville accommodate the growth that is coming? It’s a very broad question, but growth is coming.
SUTTOR: Growth is coming. But how do I say this — you’re not only going to be known for what you build; you’ll also be known for what you don’t destroy. We have a unique character in Shelbyville. Like I said at the beginning, we’re the American Saddlebred Capital of the World. No one else has that title. We need to remain unique while growing at the same time, and it’s a fine line.
That’s going to come with design standards and redoing our comp plan, and letting the citizens decide how we grow instead of people like myself or other elected officials telling them how we’re going to grow. That’s the importance of redoing the comp plan: the citizens come in, we have workshops, and you get to decide — “I want to see this area grow; I want to see this area remain rural.” The citizens decide, and that’s how we grow. That’s the uniqueness of a comp plan.
BROWN: Shane, thank you very much for coming by and tolerating the various technical difficulties we had leading up to this recording. I really appreciate it. I want to reiterate, if I didn’t at the beginning, that we’ve invited your opponents to join us on The Shelbyville Idea to talk in the same way you have. We haven’t heard back from them just yet.
SUTTOR: Well, I’m open to debate anyone at any time, because I feel like my ideas and my experience on the council matter. I know how to get things done; I’ve proven that over the years. Anyone who wants more information on me is welcome to go to my website, ShaneForShelbyville.com. I have questions and answers posted there, and you can get involved with the campaign if you’d like. I appreciate your time, and thank you.
BROWN: I want to thank Shane Suttor for sitting down with me. If you have questions — or even better, if you have answers — you can email us directly at [email protected]. That email is also useful for suggested guests, issues you want this program to address, wild accusations, unverified rumors, and of course, feedback on the quality of this program. But before you do anything else, please visit shelbyvilleidea.com to subscribe to our newsletter.
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