Independent Louisville Metro Council Member Paula McCraney, left, and her opponent, Cat Timmerman, right.(Photos provided by the candidates)Louisville Metro Council Member Paula McCraney has faced a Republican challenger in every race she’s run. This year is no different.An Independent who represe nts District 7 in the East End, McCraney is one of three incumbents targeted by local Republicans in the upcoming election. Conservatives are also looking to unseat two Democrats: District 17’s Markus Winkler in the Anchorage area and District 21’s Betsy Ruhe, in south-central Jefferson County.Their parties won’t appear on ballots, due to a recent change in state law making Louisville Metro Council and mayoral elections nonpartisan. But the outcomes of these races could affect which party controls the council.In 2019, McCraney became the first Democrat and the first Black woman elected to represent District 7. She switched her party affiliation last year, distancing herself from Democratic infighting.She recently said overcoming a challenge has never been a problem for her.“At the time, it was a 92% white district,” McCraney said during an interview with LPM News. “When I would tell people that I was running, they'd say, ‘Oh, bless your heart,’ because to them there was just absolutely no way that I would win that race.”McCraney is now running for a third term. She’s facing Cat Timmerman, a public school teacher endorsed by the Jefferson County Republican Party, as well as the local and state police unions.There wasn’t a primary race in District 7 because McCraney and Timmerman are the only candidates who filed to run. Still, Timmerman said she’s been knocking on doors and attending community events since March.“I have lost probably 10 pounds while we're out campaigning because we’re walking miles and miles and miles a week,” she said. “We go to every event.”Timmerman teaches English as a Second Language at Sanders Elementary School. She also runs a small baking business, Cat’s Cookies.She said she decided to run for Metro Council because she’s coming up on retirement and she felt like the district isn’t well-represented.“I started asking around my neighbors, people in this area,” she said. “Nobody knew who the Metro Council member was.”Timmerman has been making that case on the campaign trail, promising to be more responsive to residents’ concerns.She’s also worked to garner the support of local leaders of the small, home-rule cities in the area. District 7 has the highest concentration of independent cities in Jefferson County.Timmerman tells people that her number one priority, if she’s elected, will be public safety.“Public safety is our police officers being able to do just that: protect us,” Timmerman said. “For them to have the tools, the training, the technology, the public support.”Timmerman has also criticized the Civilian Review and Accountability Board, which was created in the wake of the police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020 to provide more oversight of policing. She argues some of the people who have been appointed to the board “are anti-police,” pointing to their comments on social media.McCraney, who was the architect of the review board, sees things much differently.She said public safety is paramount to her, too, but she thinks accountability is also important.“I would tell the police officers, ‘Look, this is for you, too, because we've got to get the community to start trusting you again,’ McCraney said. “I do believe, and I'm going to die believing, that the accountability board brought some credibility to our efforts to mend the relationships between the police officers and the community.”McCraney also pushed back on the narrative that she’s been absent from her district. She said voters have given her two terms, electing her in contested races, because she’s measured and effective.“You can ride in the district and see my work is everywhere,” she said. “We have beautiful sidewalks. You're going to see paving done. You won't hardly find an abandoned home.”Still, Republicans see an opportunity in District 7 to help them on the path to their first-ever majority.In recent years, Republicans have picked up five seats, mostly in the South End.Don Fitzpatrick, chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Party, said he’s feeling optimistic in the lead-up to the Nov. 3 election.“We feel good,” he said. “I say that because our candidates have been focused and they have been out on the trail since the beginning of the year.”Right now, Metro Council’s Republican Caucus has 12 seats, while Democrats control 13. If Republicans can take District 7, that would leave the council split evenly. Flipping a Democrat-held seat, like in District 17 or 21, would give them the majority.Asked what a Republican majority Metro Council would look like, Fitzpatrick said the biggest thing would be keeping “stupid stuff” from consuming the council’s time. He pointed specifically to an ordinance that would have banned immigration officers, as well as local and state police, from wearing masks. It was narrowly voted down in late 2025.“If that hadn’t been stopped … I think it would have hurt us reputation-wise with the average American and I think it also would have sent a negative message to business,” he said.In addition to endorsing Timmerman, the Jefferson County Republican party has helped her with organization and fundraising. She raised about $4,000 at an August fundraiser headlined by U.S. Rep. James Comer.However, with days until the General Election, McCraney holds the fundraising advantage.According to the most recent filings with the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance, McCraney has raised roughly $37,000, almost double what Timmerman has.LPM News asked both candidates for their thoughts on some of the biggest issues facing Louisville. Their answers, edited for length and clarity, are below:How do you feel about data center construction in Louisville? Is there anything in the regulations proposed by Mayor Craig Greenberg’s administration that you want to change?Paula McCraney: I want to commend [the administration] for working their way through it. I don't think the regulations are finished yet. They are not exactly where we need it to be, but it certainly is a far cry better than where it was.I am a big ‘No’ on data centers. I say that because I don't believe the entire council knows enough. I don't think we get along enough to even talk about it. We've not had that adult conversation as a whole to even understand what people's truths are about data centers. We've not researched enough about how it's going to affect us environmentally or with the cost of electricity and water. We've just not had that conversation broadly enough for me to support them.Do we have to have one? Do we absolutely have to have two? I say not. That's where I am with it: Prove to me that we absolutely need them.Cat Timmerman: Louisville already has some data centers. What I think people are opposed to is these hyperscale data centers. I know that there is a moratorium on constructing them right now, which I think is the right thing to do until we know for sure that they are not going to be draining our utilities, it's not going to drive up costs for electricity and water. Those bills are high enough as they are.I'm not going to say I'm completely opposed to data centers, but I think we need to figure out what's going to be involved with cooling them, what's going to be involved with the construction, because these are not going to bring jobs to Louisville. There will be construction jobs, but there will not be many jobs being brought to Louisville. So, I think until we have answers to those questions — and those three questions are big enough as it is — we need to pause everything, have conversations and just make sure that we really, really, really know what we are getting into.When you look at mid-sized cities that are growing, they are expanding public transportation, not cutting it. Here in Louisville, TARC has been cut to a bare-bones system in order to address a looming fiscal cliff. What responsibility do you think Louisville Metro has for public transit in this city?CT: I teach in the South End. Getting off the Watterson Expressway, driving down Dixie Highway, I never see a full TARC bus. Driving down Shelbyville Road here in the East End, I never see a full TARC bus. So, is TARC the best thing for the city? Do we maybe need to explore light rail? Are there other methods of transportation?I understand that for some people, TARC is their lifeline. So, we need to be very judicious before we start slicing, slicing, slicing, and taking it away completely. If you don't have a car, that's going to be your method of transportation.But is it time to explore other methods of transportation? Discussions about light rail have been very cyclical, it gets mentioned, and then it goes by the wayside, it gets mentioned, it goes by the wayside. Is it time to look at something like that? Would that be a better use of our financial resources than an empty TARC bus? Because an empty TARC bus is not taking cars off the road. I don't want to completely take it away, but I think that we need to look at what the other options are.PM: Louisville Metro does not have enough authority over TARC to turn this problem around. It’s a semi-public agency. I think TARC should come under Metro control and we can have our own transportation department that deals with the federal mandates and funding. Just revamping the TARC board is not enough. We need to figure out why it’s so dysfunctional as far as finances are concerned. I think nobody is digging deep enough into that.It has to be a whole lot more than a line item in the budget. TARC has to be a whole department of government under the leadership of the mayor.The consent decree that would have brought federal oversight of policing in Louisville is now off the table. The mayor and the police chief have chosen to make a voluntary commitment to implementing many of those reforms anyway. Do you support the effort before Metro Council to codify those reforms into law? PM: I think that the police department is doing one heck of a job of trying their best to bring civility to the relationships between the community and officers. I believe that they are doing a lot of the things that the mayor and the chief agreed upon in the consent decree. Having it codified, though, would just put people’s minds at ease.If I had to ask them to do anything further, I would say: I would love to see more community policing. I want to see more boots on the ground. I want to see the officers walking around, knocking on doors, just in the community. In our area, they do a lot of community things like the Trunk or Treat and they have community meetings and things like that. But people don't tend to gravitate to you. You got to go to them. So, if I had any change that I could implement, I would say I’d like to see them out of their cars more and just walking around in the community more.CT: Consent decrees tie the hands of police officers, so I'm not in favor of it. The reality of the situation is, when all hell is breaking loose, there is a group of people who are running towards that.I think that we need to make sure that our officers have the tools, the training and the technology that they need to do their job safely, to do their job efficiently and to be there as what's standing between the citizenry and the chaos. Consent decrees do not make that happen.Now, that doesn't mean that they get carte blanche, but I think any time officers act in good faith, we need to give them the benefit of the doubt until we know otherwise. It's very easy to sit there and be the Monday morning quarterback when we weren't there in that situation.Louisville has a huge need for affordable housing, particularly housing that is affordable for some of our lowest-income residents. How do you think Metro Council can better address the affordable housing need? CT: One of the biggest issues facing Louisville is affordability. It is driven by a shortage of properties that people can afford.I think that we need to increase housing supply at every price point by reducing unnecessary regulations, speeding up permitting and making the most of abandoned properties around Louisville. We need private investment, as well as offering targeted assistance to people who really do need that help.PM: We can continue to put monies into the [Affordable Housing Trust Fund]. More than that, I think we need to ask the mayor to please concentrate efforts on these abandoned homes. That would not only beautify the districts, but it will make for some good affordable housing. We have too many boarded-up homes and I think local laws should be kind of lenient when it comes to people purchasing abandoned homes. Just give houses away. Figure something out.We need to look at more creative ways to get more housing.Both you and your opponent say public safety is a top priority. What does public safety mean to you?PM: People want to feel safe in their homes. They want to feel like crime is not like on the California, New York or Memphis level.Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that crime is out of control right now. When we have a mayor who's saying it is not out of control, it's the best it's been, who do you believe? You see, you can't say, “Don't trust your lying eyes” because when one person is affected, then [people think] the whole community is horrible.In my district, I can honestly applaud the Lyndon and St. Matthews Police. You can see them coming through the communities at night. That's reassuring to us. We need to see more of that out in the city. We need the Louisville Metro Police Department to be seen.CT: Public safety for me is people not being afraid to walk down the street, people not being afraid to go out in public and not being afraid to go to big festivals, because violence is is under control.One of the other prongs of public safety is that our young people are not dying by gun violence. We have to figure out where the disconnect is and what is leading children, 15-year-olds, to think that it is OK to just murder somebody.So, public safety to me is where our kids are safe, where we don't have babies killing babies and where one part of the city is not safer than another part of the city. The reality of the situation is that if the West End falls, eventually the East End is going to fall. We need to be working collaboratively to make sure that we have all of the stakeholders who really are committed to making our streets safer. ...read more read less