Commentary — the vice mayor finally showed some progressive grit at Monday’s opioid spending debate. The bar for what counts as grit says more about the last three years than it does about him. On April 21, 2026, at a routine council work session, something unusual happened. Vice Mayor Da n Wu picked a fight with his own administration’s plan. Commissioner Kacy Allen-Bryant had just walked the council through Mayor Linda Gorton’s recommendations for how to spend the city’s $8.9 million in opioid settlement funds — the money the Opioid Abatement Commission had been deliberating for three-plus years without ever sending a dime out the door. The plan’s Priority #1 was to lock $3 million away in an interest-bearing quasi-endowment so the interest could fund grants in perpetuity. Wu said no. Not “let’s tweak it.” Not “let’s take this to committee.” No. “Right now opioids for our community is a crisis and we need to act like it. We should not have been sitting on this money for three years.” He kept going. If the council was fighting a fire, “we’re saving our money for a longer hose or a fire hydrant or some other preventative things.” He wanted most of the money out the door, now. He proposed a back-of-the-napkin reallocation — 10 percent to the endowment, the rest to grants, homelessness, community corrections, and SUDI. He said he was willing to spend the entire $9 million down to zero and start over when the next settlement check arrived. It worked, partly. He got the grant allocation boosted from $2 million to $3 million. He got the homelessness allocation held at $2.2 million. The $3 million endowment motion died — withdrawn before a vote — because he and Councilmember Brown couldn’t find the middle. He sounded, for the first time in a while, like the candidate who won the most votes in the 2022 at-large race. What the 2022 Wu Promised Wu’s 2022 campaign ran on the standard progressive-urbanist package: affordable housing, “missing middle” zoning reform, protecting long-time homeowners from displacement, boosting the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, environmental sustainability, a more equitable city. He topped the at-large ticket. He became the city’s first Asian American vice mayor. He brought national-media attention to a local government that rarely gets it. He had a mandate. The Fayette Alliance questionnaire he filled out is the clearest articulation of what he said he’d do. “Gentrification displacement do not have to be inevitable results of redevelopment.” Property-tax freezes for long-time residents in redeveloping areas. Code enforcement targeted at slumlords, not disadvantaged homeowners. Opposing Urban Service Boundary expansion until infill was exhausted. Strong stuff. Now look at what actually landed. The Gaza Statement That Disclaimed Its Own Authority In March 2024, after months of public comment from Lexington for Palestine at nearly every council meeting, Wu read a statement on behalf of a majority of council. It mourned the dead on all sides. It called for hostage releases, humanitarian aid into Gaza, and “a permanent end to the violence.” It condemned both Islamophobia and antisemitism. It also explicitly said this: “As a practice, this council, your local legislative body, does not take positions on matters of national and international policy.” Set aside, for a moment, whether a Lexington ceasefire resolution would have changed anything in Gaza. The advocates knew it wouldn’t. They said so. What they were asking for was on-the-record moral solidarity from their elected officials — the thing Louisville did, the thing dozens of other US city councils did in the same window. Wu’s statement was a half-measure that disclaimed the full measure in its own text. Shakira Syed, one of the public commenters who came back to thank him, said the statement “fell short.” She was right. From the March 2024 statement forward, advocates kept showing up to public comment. December 2023, February 2024, March 2024, October 2024, September 2025 — they were still there. No resolution ever came. By October 2024, Wu’s council reports at the same meetings that hosted Palestine public comment were about the Transportation Expo and the Rural Urban Exchange. “I genuinely don’t understand why it’s so difficult,” Alyssa Rigney told the council in October 2024. The progressive answer to “why is it so difficult” is that it isn’t, and the reason the vice mayor didn’t push harder is that he chose not to. The Tenants’ Bill of Rights That Wasn’t Kentucky Tenants has been circulating a Lexington Tenants’ Bill of Rights for years. Four demands: universal right to counsel in eviction court, antidiscrimination protections covering source of income and criminal history, guaranteed tenant seats on housing-related boards, and a mandatory landlord registry. Wu did vote for the source-of-income ordinance in February 2024. It passed 13-2. He was in the majority — good. Six days later, the Kentucky legislature overrode Governor Beshear’s veto of HB 18 and preempted the whole thing. That’s not Wu’s fault. But: the rest of the TBoR agenda hasn’t moved. Right to counsel in eviction court is not preempted by HB 18. A landlord registry is not preempted by HB 18. Guaranteed tenant seats on the Affordable Housing Trust Fund’s governing board are not preempted by HB 18. These are things a Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council majority could do. The vice mayor who ran on displacement prevention has not made them his fight. Meanwhile, Lexington’s rent has risen faster than almost any comparable city in the country — 17.9 percent in one twelve-month stretch during 2021-2022, according to the organizing materials. The eviction docket keeps humming. The displacement Wu said didn’t have to be inevitable is, empirically, happening. Why Monday Looked Different What made April 21 feel different is that Wu did something he hadn’t done on Gaza or tenants: he named the problem in plain language, he named his own administration’s foot-dragging in plain language, and he proposed concrete alternatives in real time. “We should not have been sitting on this money for three years” is a sentence that carries an implied subject — we, this council, which includes him. He was calling out a body he’s second-in-command of. The fire-and-fire-hose metaphor was sharper than anything he’s said on tenants’ protections in two and a half years. He lost the biggest piece of it — the endowment motion was withdrawn, not voted down, which means the administration’s Priority #1 will probably come back in a budget amendment next week with most of its numbers intact. Councilmember Morton was correct when he pointed out that the council was, in his words, “legislating on the fly,” and that a structured Council of the Whole conversation would likely produce a more coherent outcome. But the Dan Wu of three years ago didn’t do on-the-fly. He did statements. He did “as a practice, this council does not take positions.” He did measured. Measured has a cost. The opioid settlement commission sat on $8.9 million for three years because nobody forced the conversation. The ceasefire resolution never came because nobody forced the conversation. The rest of the tenants’ bill of rights hasn’t come because nobody is forcing the conversation. The Re-election Frame Wu launched his re-election campaign in December 2025. Several incumbents are stepping down. The 2026 at-large race will produce a very different council. Whatever he’s willing to fight for between now and November is what he’ll be asking voters to re-elect him on. “What really is going to affect your lives day to day, in your backyard, and in your wallet is local policy,” he told WUKY. Correct. Eviction court rulings affect people’s lives. A tenant registry affects people’s lives. $8.9 million in settlement money, spent or unspent, affects people’s lives. The question is whether the vice mayor who finally found his voice in an opioid-abatement debate will use it in the other places where he promised he would. What Comes Next The opioid money conversation isn’t over. $3.7 million is still unassigned. The endowment question is still open. SUDI — the city’s own Substance Use Disorder Intervention program, the one whose leader Carmen Combs Marks told the same council eight months earlier that “the most significant barrier to access in Narcan is the stigma” — is still unfunded by this plan. Councilmember Morton, who opened Monday’s meeting by saying he was “disappointed that money wasn’t allotted for a position in the SUTI office,” is the one who keeps pushing for a formal council process to set priorities before allocations go out. That’s a version of what Wu was saying about the commission — three years to produce recommendations, and the real decisions still haven’t been made. If Wu’s April 21 performance is the new baseline — pick the fight, name the problem, propose the alternative, take the loss publicly if it comes — there’s a version of the next two work sessions where the rest of that $3.7 million actually goes somewhere, the SUDI position gets funded, and the council finally treats this as the crisis the vice mayor said it was. If it was a one-off, then the question that ran through his first term will run through his second: where was this Dan Wu on the other things you said you’d fight for? The voters who put him at the top of the ticket in 2022 will decide whether to ask that question in November. This is a commentary piece, not investigative reporting. Quotes from the April 21, 2026 meeting are drawn from the full transcript on the LFUCG Meeting Archive (Clip 6750). The March 7, 2024 Gaza statement is quoted from the official council minutes (Clip 6063). Public comment from Lexington for Palestine is drawn from the October 24, 2024 council meeting transcript (Clip 6258). Campaign positions are from the 2022 Fayette Alliance candidate questionnaire. Housing organizing context is from Kentucky Tenants’ Lexington Tenants’ Bill of Rights petition. The source-of-income ordinance timeline is from WKYT and CivicLex. Re-election context is from WUKY. The post Where was this Dan Wu three years Ago? appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less