Jerry Lockard

I care about how a city takes care of the people living in it. That's the short version, and most of what I do comes back to it one way or another.

I studied political science because I wanted to understand how decisions get made and who they land on. The classes that stuck were the unglamorous ones — public administration, public finance, how a budget gets written and what it says about priorities. Outside class, the education came from a shelter kitchen in Lexington and from elementary classrooms in Fayette County, both of which teach you faster than a textbook that public systems are made of people having a hard day.

I also build things. I taught myself to code during lockdown and I've run my own servers ever since. I bring it up because it's genuinely useful — I can build a tool instead of writing a memo asking somebody else to — not because I want to be introduced as a developer.

I live in Covington now, I'm in the Mayor's Academy, and I'd like to do this work here.

This is the start, not the whole plan. Long-term, I'm working toward the U.S. House — and eventually, the Speaker's chair. Not for the title. That's the seat where the actual language of a bill gets decided, and that language is what decides who gets help and who doesn't.