The leaders who run Kentucky's cities convened in Covington this week to swap ideas and talk about the challenges facing our cities.

Our Mackenzie Spink visited the Kentucky League of Cities, the convention and Expo to learn more.

Here's more from Mackenzie and our Emily Prince.

The Kentucky League of Cities, or KLC, has been around for nearly 100 years.

It serves as a kind of trade association for municipal governments, providing training, legal information and financial services to 388 out of Kentucky's 408 cities.

We've got people from Louisa to La Center, from Covington to Corbin here at this organization, and this provides an opportunity for city officials to network and see what's going on in other, like, communities and share ideas and exchange ideas.

And I think that's helped strengthen and build the organization here over the past hundred years.

The KLC convention encourages table talk between city leaders, and Chaney says the big topics this year are the issues you've probably seen in the news recently.

I, that's a that's a big topic for our city officials.

So artificial intelligence not only not only how, how that's impacting in terms of some of the data center discussions going around the state, but in particular how cities are incorporating a into their work, internal work, what efficiencies and can they create internally and running the municipal offices?

But also how can they use AI to help serve their constituents better?

And then, of course, there's a lot of discussion here about flock cameras, and the utilization of that.

And what's the appropriate space between police, what the police can use that for?

To serve the citizen.

What and where?

Privacy interest.

And and that's a vigorous, topic of discussion here.

Lots of questions and dialog about those issues.

Kelsey also represents city's interests on legislative matters.

It favors legislation that keeps local decisions local.

You know, our organization stands for the principle that local decisions are best made at the local level and legislation that runs counter to that, that kind of takes away the constituents voice and displaces it in a centralized government like Frankfort or Washington.

Those are the kinds of pieces of legislation we're going to want to preserve the ability for the people closest, closest to the people they serve, to make the decisions about housing, to make their decisions about short term rental policies, to make their decisions on any number of topics.

Road funding is one of the legislative priorities.

Kelsey would like to see movement on in the 2027 session.

We've got to get some modernization in Kentucky's road funding and have some that absolutely needs to occur.

If we don't have, streets and highways and roads that take people to places where people want to go.

Our cities, then we're going to continue to fall, will fall behind.

We won't continue the advancement that we've been making.

For Kentucky Edition.

I'm Emily Prince, with reporting by Mackenzie Spink.

It's that Kentucky Commissioner of Agriculture Jonathan Schell was at this year's KLC convention.

He announced the Kentucky Proud Certified Cities program, a new partnership between Kentucky Proud and the League of Cities to connect rural food producers with city services and vice versa.

We're really trying to highlight how our urban partners in our cities and our rural partners, our farmers and rural communities, can come together for something really special.

And so when you think about it, even most of our cities that are in the state of Kentucky are still in rural areas.

And so what this program is going to allow to do is to tap into resources at the Department of Banks or a Kentucky Brown.

It's going to allow farmers to tap into resources that are cities across the state of Kentucky for a singular purpose of trying to promote local, fresh, healthy food throughout Kentucky.

Proud program.

Getting inside of our schools, getting inside of our hospitals, getting inside of our retailers like Walmart, Kroger, etc.

even small retailers and working toward convenience stores and others to get as much locally grown and sourced material from our farms as possible inside of those opportunities.

Those Kentucky Proud certified cities will launch as a pilot program with six cities on October 1st.

Those cities are Winchester, Beaver Dam, Paducah, Monticello, Newport, and Middlesboro.