Several dozen Louisvillians gathered at the Middletown Public Library on Saturday for the first weekly Cafe Louie town hall of the year, which are every Saturday from Jan. 10 to March 27 at local libraries around Louisville. A separate discussion happened at the Fairdale library with different representatives.
Six elected officials were on the panel, representing both Democrats and Republicans. Metro Councilors Marcus Winkler, Anthony Piagentini and Kevin Kramer spoke, along with Representatives John Hodgson (R–36), Jason Nemes (R–33) and Pamela Stevenson (D–43), a retired Air Force captain whom her colleagues affectionately called “the colonel.”
The morning was mostly cordial, though the first question concerned House Bill 186, which would ban naturalized citizens from holding office in Kentucky, and the debate became an argument.
“In other places in the country, we are seeing people from foreign nations come in that are hostile to the values and culture of America and achieve public office and start making radical changes,” Hodgson said. “New York City is an example.” Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, has lived in the United States since he was 7. He is the democratic-socialist mayor of New York City.
Hodgson said that he would amend the bill to allow for people who have lived in the United States for a certain number of years to run, though he did not say how many years that would be.
“The Supreme Court has been clear that you cannot create separate classes of citizenship. When you are a citizen, you are a citizen,” Winkler said. “This bill is absurd. I’m really disappointed that Representative Hodgson has co-sponsored this bill.”
After Hodgson, Winkler and Stevenson argued about the bill for several minutes, Nemes said, “Don’t think this is what we’re spending our time on in Frankfort.”
After a brief discussion on diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI), whose proponents and opponents split along party lines, Piagentini responded to a question about Louisville’s authority to ban Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from investigating and deporting undocumented immigrants in Louisville.
“Who here believes that LMPD is going to execute an arrest of that ICE agent in the middle of their operation?” he asked.
He said that there is no evidence of ICE agents operating in Louisville on the scale seen in other cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, where an agent recently shot and killed a U.S. citizen.
“We have that right,” someone in the audience said, and other viewers agreed. The moderator reprimanded him, an infrequent response to the countless audience members who heckled, against Cafe Louie rules. Outbursts are, from personal observation and organizer accounts, fairly common.
Nemes said that Mayor Craig Greenberg’s efforts to get Louisville off of a “sanctuary city” list, which involved reporting undocumented immigrants who commit any crime to ICE, kept the Trump administration from deploying more agents.
“We’ve got to be the ones to say, ‘not on my watch will you snatch my citizens,’” Stevenson said. ICE has detained U.S. citizens.
Stevenson also scorned ICE agents wearing face masks and not identifying themselves. “Police [should] operate the way they normally operate. If someone rolled up on me with a mask on, we’re fighting! And then I’m going to be in trouble because they’re going to say it’s a federal person.”
Two back-to-back questions opened a discussion of housing and city-provided services like buses.
“We have a mass exodus out of the West End and a mass influx into the South End,” Piagentini said. “So my district, District 19, had a 40% growth in [the last decade]; Donna Purvis’s district, who’s in the West End, District 5, she had a 35% reduction in her population.”
Stevenson held that West Enders lack grocery stores and effective transportation, and that they have to move despite their desire to stay. Piagentini said that crime, especially theft, drives out new businesses. Nemes landed in the middle.
“Yes, we’ve got too much crime in some places. We have one murder, that’s too many,” Nemes said. “But we are getting much better on the crime aspect in Louisville. And I just want to be clear to the people that I represent, let’s not be fearful to go to our core of our city.”
Nemes, in an interview, talked about Cafe Louie informing his work.
“I’m not a free agent, I’m a representative of the people, so I need to know what their views are, what they think about things,” he said. “And it’s also important they hear from me and my positions, what’s going on and so forth.”
Stevenson argued for a government that focuses on working people.
“I’ve served 27 years in the Air Force. I’ve lived in 11 countries. I have negotiated with foreign governments, the United Nations,” she said in an interview. “We as humans want the same things. We want our children to do better, we want our families to thrive, and we want our lives to matter.”
This idea, she said, grounds her political philosophy and is the way to get people engaged
“So we’ve got to give them the basics, food, clothing, shelter, water,” she said. “And then, I believe, people will turn their attention to the system that allows this country to exist.”
She talked about the 600,000 Kentuckians on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
“We’ve got to look at our systems and say, is it in the best interest of the person we’re serving? Or is it in the best interest of multi-million-dollar corporations?” she said.
The full schedule for Cafe Louies is here. The panels next Saturday will be at Crescent Hill Public Library and the Fern Creek Chamber of Commerce.
