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WATER WATER EVERYWHERE

The brand spanking new Lake Geneva Water Alliance has arrived.  This is a bunch of citizens, property owners, on the lake property owners, who’ve decided that the entire body of the Geneva Lake area needs their kind of mild-mannered informal control. Who are those people, anyway?  Do any of these declared-unorganized, amateur, caring, loving, clean, bright, and monied members of this mess of non-members really exist?

Mr. Chuck Colmen is kind of the titular non-head of this non-outfit.  He’s the guy who ran the Lake Geneva Conservancy and had the property next to his lake house purchased by that conservancy, thereby assuring nobody would build nearby and thereby skyrocketing the worth of his own property.  The Coleman who’s married to the Coleman who basically took over the Yerkes Observatory, using a non-profit shell, and then has made certain that nothing happens at that wondrous edifice?   It once was known for Einstein’s visits, but now it’s known for Colman’s visits.

The Water Alliance is practicing an old power gathering routine well illustrated by the aged monk character in the old television show called Kung Fu.  The Water Alliance gathers together (they were all at the quasi unofficial, nearly non-existent meeting on Wednesday night of last week) the GLEA, the GL Association, Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, the Geneva Lake Conservancy, the DNR, and Walworth County officials, and then overwhelm them with love.

“Take the pebbles from my hand, grasshopper,” the aged monk used to intone to the young acolyte.  It would seem that this quasi-organization is working furiously to resemble that monk when it comes to running the lake.  Brief comments were made about the ‘responsibility of the lakefront homeowners.’

Really.  What responsibility would that be?  It’s not their lake. It’s the lake of the people who live, work, play, and frolic on and in it.  The presentation about the Starry Stonewort infestation of the lake one of the guest speakers make had no mention of the only solution that works, and that’s dredging.  Nobody, certainly not these non-members of this non-club want to pay the huge costs of dredging that stretch of the lake inside Trinke Lagoon and then just outside in the lake proper, and that’s for certain.  Dredging is expensive.

Nobody talked about the fertilizer runoff problem either, as that might rile up the ruling farm families whose farms drain into the lake when the rains come.  That presenter kept referring to fertilizer as a ‘nutrient,’ by the way.  What a much nicer word, this nutrient instead of fertilizer.  Too many nutrients in the lake.  Really.

Nobody wanted to talk about the boat cleaning machines that have been proven to not work at all.  There was no public attendance at the meeting.  The public was invited but nobody showed.  The laid-back people who rant this meeting threw the meeting open to questions, but there were none because there was nobody present to ask them.

The Geneva Shore Report attended the meeting, as did a reporter for the Lake Geneva Regional News.  The Regional News was deeply thanked for printing the stories these people send to it about the water in the lake all the time.  Nobody thanked the GSR for anything, which is the kind of atmosphere the GSR staff is used to living and reveling in.  When people do very occasionally thank members of the staff, we all look at one another and wonder what’s mentally wrong with them.  To report the things that the GSR reports about what’s really going on around the lake, the only organization that will likely have anything to do with the paper is called the Friends of the Friendless, from I Love Lucy lore.