BELLEVUE — With a unanimous vote of 6-0 tonight, the Northern Kentucky town of Bellevue, population 5,772, became the fifteenth city in the commonwealth with a Fairness Ordinance prohibiting LGBTQ discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Bellevue continues the record-breaking streak of cities passing Fairness Ordinances this year by becoming the fifth to extend LGBTQ protections in 2019. In both 1999 and 2013, three Kentucky cities passed Fairness Ordinances, which was the previous record for a single year.

Bellevue joins two other Northern Kentucky cities with LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws, Covington and Dayton.

Fourteen other Kentucky cities have adopted local Fairness Ordinances, covering more than a quarter of the state’s population—Louisville (1999), Lexington (1999), Covington (2003), Vicco (2013), Frankfort (2013), Morehead (2013), Danville (2014), Midway (2015), Paducah (2018), Maysville (2018), Henderson (2019), Dayton (2019), Georgetown (2019), and Versailles (2019).

2020 will mark the 20th anniversary of the introduction of a Statewide Fairness Law, which has only ever received two informational hearings in the Kentucky General Assembly. This year, nearly a quarter of state legislators co-sponsored the measure.

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