When he was 18, Leonard Lawson worked on a highway project  — his first of many — as an entry-level maintenance worker. It was good, honest work for a boy hailing from Beverly, Kentucky, a hamlet located near the Commonwealth’s poverty-stricken Eastern coal fields; perched on the southwestern cusp of the Cumberland Plateau just east of the Pennyrile, in the veritable heart of Daniel Boone National Forest.

No doubt impressed by the burgeoning spectacle of the American Interstate Highway system,  Lawson’s interest in the magical, viscous substance known as asphalt soon blossomed into a career that would shape much of the socio-economic fate of Eastern Kentucky: By 1971 he was the owner of the R. E. Gaddie Construction Company, which blossomed into a massive road conglomerate that essentially laid every  highway, byway, and overpass in the region up to the present day; if there was asphalt being laid in Kentucky, Lawson was the magnate most likely responsible.

Aside from the 1,500 workers his five companies directly employ, across four-different states, the transportation vistas ushered in by Lawson’s manifold  “Mountain Companies” created an untold plethora of subdivisions, low-density strip malls and other unsustainable growth in a region that badly needed one of its own to rise up, Alger-style, and become the tide that would lift all boats.

Until he was indicted for conspiracy, bribery, and obstruction of justice in what amounts to the Greatest Fleecing this State Has Ever Seen, the Boy from Beverly was seen as just that. In 2000, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet inducted him into their fancy Transportation Hall of Fame (where much of this questionable yet delightfully-fluffy bio material came from) for “his passion to help Eastern Kentucky improve its infrastructure and… the quality of life for its residents.” As is the usual want of wealthy people in this state, the induction meant had earned a commanding position in Kentucky’s coveted Old Boy Network, whose membership essentially guaranteed Lawson’s journey down a slippery, hubris-lined slope…

Less than ten years later, the guy is being strung up like a gutted pig awaiting the spit. His crimes? Many. His guilt? Probable. Yet as much as Lawson and his government-employed-enabler, Transportation Secretary Bill “Fuck Gas” Nighbert, are poster children for all that is wrong, dumb, and disappointing about any serious notions of progress and justice in a state hellbent on burying itself under one cliched bout of cronyism/fraud/whathaveyou after another, their fate should also signal a death knell to the laying of asphalt as we know it in the Bluegrass State.

Consider the facts. “The Mountain Companies”  were awarded nearly $418 million in road contracts in one year alone; far in excess of their so-called “competitors” as a result of probable bullying and the adept manipulation of hidden strings. And how has that, exactly, helped the denizens of Eastern Kentucky, who continue to eek out a Medieval existence? Or, for that matter, the left-behinds of Lawson’s Beverly, population 338? Little to none of the highway’s oft-touted economic-growth factors have manged to reach this place, where over a third of its citizens live below the poverty line (therefore unable to afford an automobile, ironically), annual house hold incomes average at $15,000, and education levels are far below that required of the coming Green Economy.

For that matter, little of Lawson’s manifest destiny has improved the state-at-large: Kentucky enjoys one of the worst carbon footprints in the nation (thanks, sprawl), an alarming share of vehicular accidents (thanks, dry counties), and some of the fattest people this side of, well… Kentucky. It’s also good to keep in mind that the Ohio River Bridges Project was heavily drafted and lobbied for by a certain unelected 3rd District Representative and a Muppet-esque Junior Senator — roughly around the same time that the KTC shit out a Powerpoint-drafted Hall of Fame certificate to Lawson himself.

Whether we fully understand the challenges and mindshifts required of us in order to move away from the multi-tentacled, quality-of-life constraining beast of Lawson’s Paved Paradise towards a more urban, public-transit-oriented reality, the change will not go down easy — if at all. It remains to be seen whether our Governor & Co. will fight fire with fire, or if we will all run naked and fuck in the streets like animals should light rail ever come true.

In any event, Kentucky deserves far better than she actually gets from her favorite sons.