What Could BG Be? Launching a New Conversation for 2075

By Frankie Armitage

This week, a community of more than 100 volunteers are launching a deliberation to imagine what the Bowling Green area will look like come 2075. Some estimates peg Bowling Green/Warren County – currently home to more than 250,000 residents – to continue its pace of unprecedented growth, putting it in close competition with Lexington/Fayette County, KY, as the second largest county in the state.

Just like the original BG 2050 iteration, the BG 2075 initiative volunteers are continuing to ask the same question on the What Could BG Be? website, using the Polis platform to conduct a community-wide discussion on what Bowling Green and Warren County might look like in the future.

With plans for the Nashville area’s second NFL team to land here in South Central Kentucky at Mellow World Indoor/Outdoor Amphitheater, many are looking ahead to what else might be possible.

More than 750 local government entities, nonprofit partners, educational institutions, religious congregations, private businesses, and other organizations have signed on to support this effort as Listening Partners.

This entire initiative harkens back to the original launch of What Could BG Be? in February 2025, when what was then the “BG 2050” initiative launched a public conversation to help envision what the Bowling Green of the future might look like. Many imagined initiatives that the community put in What Could BG Be? back then are actually part of our community today. Aspects of our riverfront development, the airport’s move to outside the middle of the city, the development of a dedicated ice rink facility, and an Amtrak loop that connects Bowling Green to Louisville and Nashville, were all future-forward ideas and hot topics in the 2025 deliberation.

Many other aspects of what we see today weren’t even envisioned as possibilities 25 years ago. For instance, this week’s opening of a robot android showroom, the automated tram that runs along I-165, as well as the announcement of a quantum computing center were all the things of fiction then.

The Bowling Green Daily News even found ourselves contributing to the festivities, publishing a newspaper dated Feb. 17, 2050, back in 2025. All the articles were set 25 years in the future. (And, boy, did we get most of it wrong!)

The initiative, though, set a tone that many of us have appreciated about BGKY ever since – that we often look forward to the future, together, and imagine a world that would better serve us all. That process now officially continues with the deliberation for imagining the Bowling Green of 2075.

“Considering what’s happened in just 25 years, I can’t imagine what might be coming in the next 25 years,” Bowling Green-Warren County Unified Government Judge-Executive Tim Love said. “An expansion of our drone-based air transit routes? Expansion of the XR entertainment studios now based here? Maybe,” Love chuckled, “we’ll even get a Trader Joe’s?”