Front Page
THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL
Monsieur Pollard. Oh, this is not France. and none of the nobility here needs to be saved from the guillotine, but what disguise is this man, making believing he’s a developer for old people, running around wearing? His home development, called Symphony Bay, has homes already built that are too close together to meet coding requirements, at least by the allegedly actual steel tape measurements given to the Geneva Shore Report.
He donates $500 dollars to a charity upon the sale of each residence. That’s got to be heading into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He negotiated Lake Geneva’s naive mayor of the time (Conners) into a deal where his impact fees were all forgiven (except for utilities) and what had been paid so far, before the ‘deal,’ was refunded to him. He ‘key-holed’ the many hundred home development into a situation where he was allowed to build a clubhouse at BigFoot Beach, and then have every home buyer gain access to the lake with piers and boats.
Nobody has been able to pull off such a ‘hat trick’ in the time since. The Pimpernel has almost convinced Visit Lake Geneva to throw in with him as one of the premier businesses in all of the Geneva Lake area, although that organization is all about putting ‘heads in beds,’ (instead of baskets) or so they advertise at every Business Improvement District meeting. It would appear that the only heads the Pimpernel is putting in beds, however, is in those residing in the bedrooms of the homes he’s sold, and the remaining ones he’s still selling.
This ‘caped crusader,’ whom the Geneva Shore Report has decided to name The Scarlet Pimpernel, has a distinguished family, a history-filled past around the lake (he lives, of course, in one of those very wealthy homes on the water’s edge…not unlike the fabled and fictitious Pimpernel of old), and he’s highly educated, classy and very deft and clever in dealing with property, construction, money, and (quite obviously) with a local government that’s no match for him.
The Pimpernel deserted the residents who banked on his keeping his word up on his Stone Ridge development. There’s not even a road to nowhere there. There’s no road at all! Then he sold out. The people living in the homes they’ve purchased from him in Symphony Bay have, allegedly from our sources, future title problems because of improper encroachment of their very nearby neighbors. “Old people don’t need any services because they don’t need them,” was the mantra that the Pimpernel used to convince the naïve mayor Conners of the time, and Todd Krause along with him (an alderperson at the time who, upon interview, could not remember whether he had voted to allow a diminishment of the impact fees or not when it came up) to not require further infrastructure money for things like traffic lights and much much more.
Old people don’t need those things. But. the times they are a-changing, at least they are if Mayor Charlene Klein has her way and impact fees are brought front and center to be applied again. She’s called a special city council session, Thursday, March 17, 2022, that will convene on the night following the publishing of this week’s GSR issue. Be there or read all about it in our next issue.
