By Joseph Gerth of The Courier-Journal
Talk to Democratic Senate candidate Jim Gray for any amount of time, and he’ll pretty quickly get around to telling you that he knows how to create jobs. Repeatedly.
He’ll tell you that he did it as mayor of Lexington, Kentucky’s second-largest city, by stripping away needless red tape to help businesses.
He’ll also tell you that he did it as a businessman, working with his family to rebuild the construction company that his father left behind when he died in 1972.
“My career has been about helping people find good paying jobs,” Gray said in an interview earlier this year. “That’s been a passion that’s only been confirmed in my role as mayor. That’s the most important thing in life. It gives purpose and meaning in life.”
Gray was raised in Glasgow, Ky., the third of six children and the son of a sometimes struggling building contractor.
Known as “Jimmy” then, to differentiate from his grandfather, Jim Gray, and his father, James Norris Gray, Gray got an early taste of politics from his grandparents, who were involved in local Democratic politics.
He went to Glasgow High School where he was the senior class president before heading off to Emory University in Atlanta. But he came home to help with the family business after his father, just 55, died. He attended Vanderbilt University during the week and returned home to help out as the 19-year-old executive vice president of Gray Construction on the weekends, said his older brother, Howard.
The company had done well from time-to-time, building hospitals and schools across the state, but with six kids to feed and the ups and downs of the industry, life was sometimes a struggle.
Howard Gray said he had to drop out of Transylvania University when his father could no longer afford it.
“Five years after he died, we were flat-ass broke,” said Howard Gray, who took the reins of the company as its 23-year-old president.
Howard Gray said that with the family working together, they sold off what they could, borrowed what they needed, and eventually built a $700 million construction business with offices in Kentucky, California, North Carolina, Alabama and Japan.
Jim Gray, who rose to become president, CEO and now chairman, was an essential part of the company’s growth, said Howard Gray.
In 1972, he was elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Miami, which nominated George McGovern for president and for years, he harbored an interest in running for office himself.
Howard recalled his brother telling him some four decades ago that he might one day want to run for Kentucky’s 2nd Congressional District Seat, which for years had been held by Democrat William Natcher.
He remained interested in running for office but, as things often do, work got in the way.
After graduating from Vandy, he headed to Lexington where he spent a short time in law school at the University of Kentucky. Howard figured that his brother, who is four years younger and with whom he had become especially close to after their father died, would never come back to the company.
But law school didn’t suit Gray and he quickly quit and opened up a branch of Gray Construction in Lexington. Soon the brothers and their mother, Lois, learned that the medium-sized Lexington was a better place to find highly skilled workers and do business than their much smaller hometown in Barren County.
The company got its first big break when it was hired to build a Toshiba America plant in Lebanon, Tenn. But the job that really put the company on the map was the Toyota manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Ky. As the Japanese supply chain grew, so did the need for Gray Construction, which parlayed its relationship with Toyota into job after job after job.
Finally, in 2002, Gray got back into politics, running for mayor of Lexington the first time.
That was a non-partisan race and he lost in a crowded primary field but it whetted his taste for more. Rumors swirled that Gray was gay, but it was an issue with which he wasn’t quite prepared to deal.
Four years later – a year after he announced that he was gay – Gray ran for the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council and won.
In 2010, he tried for the mayor’s office again. This time he won, criticizing the incumbent mayor’s handling of the office and promising transparency and a sound balance sheet.
Kevin Stinnett, a Democrat and a member of the Urban County Council, said that Gray has excelled. He’s balanced the budget and got the city’s spiraling firefighter and police pension costs under control.
He cut a deal with the unions to lower cost of living adjustments, have the employees increase their contributions to the funds and have new hires work longer and in the process, he was able to slash the pension system’s unfunded liabilities.
Bill Farmer, a Republican on the council who owns a jewelry shop along with others in his family, said he believes that Gray’s success is, in part, due to his years working in a family business.
“In a family business, you have to learn how to work with people and get along with them,” Farmer said. “At the end of the day, you still want to be talking to your mother and your brothers.”
Howard Gray said that’s exactly how their family business has always worked. “Jimmy can see black and I can see white, but at the end of the day, we both end up seeing gray,” he said.
Farmer said he plans to vote for Gray next month. “He’s my friend, he’s my mayor and he’s been a great mayor.”
One criticism Republicans have had about Gray is the slow progress on the CentrePointe project, a large development in downtown Lexington that will eventual house a hotel, condominiums, offices and retail space. It was announced in 2008, just before the nation’s economy tanked and has been slow to recover.
For a good portion of the last decade, the project was a large excavated hole that the locals called CentrePit. Some have criticized Gray and the city for not doing enough to make sure the project is completed.
Dudley Webb, the project’s developer, in a brief interview last week, declined to criticize Gray, saying the project is moving forward and the underground parking garage is set to be completed in the spring with the rest to be built by the summer of 2008. “The city has been very helpful,” he said.
The fact that Gray is gay hasn’t ham-stringed him in Lexington and hasn’t been a big issue in his Senate race, even though the state’s rural areas are strongly entrenched in the protestant Bible belt.
“What I’ve found in Lexington is that people care about performance,” said Gray. “They care about character and they care about competence and that, at the end of the day, is what I think this election will be about.”
Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, said over the summer that Gray has been generally supportive of his organization’s causes but that there haven’t been any flash-points in Lexington over gay rights since Gray took office.
The fact that Lexington enacted an anti-discrimination law in 1999 has allowed him to focus on more traditional issues like jobs and the economy.
He bolstered his credentials as a mayor, who just happens to be gay, in 2013 when he angered the Fairness Campaign by not harshly condemning a new “religious freedom” law that many saw as permission to discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation.
“We’re disappointed in Mayor Gray’s statement,” Hartman told the Lexington-Herald Leader at the time.
Gray said he understands his race is an uphill climb in a state moving more conservative against a Republican who is running as an incumbent.
His argument for turning Republican Rand Paul out of office is pretty simple. He believes Paul has pursued an extreme agenda not to help Kentucky but to help Paul ascend to his real goal – the presidency.
“Sen. Paul has far from represented voices of moderation and civility and reasonable discourse,” he said.
Martin Cothran, of the socially conservative Family Foundation of Kentucky, said Gray has done a good job of positioning himself as “the guy who can get things done” rather than as a gay candidate and he has championed more traditional issues. “I don’t think conservatives vote based on someone’s sexual orientation,” Cothran said. “It’s when they get into ideological issues, that’s where they have a problem.”
But in the end, Cothran said none of it will matter.
“That’s all made irrelevant by the pure political dominance of Rand Paul,” he said. “Rand Paul is now a national figure and he’s widely known and mostly liked and he’s an incumbent.”
