THE BRIGHT SIDE
The downtown Lake Geneva highway makeover.
Wriggly Drive and Cook Street will be under construction this spring and the plan is to be done before Memorial Day. With all construction issues can hinder meeting the completion date goal and fingers are crossed there are no complications. Wrigley Drive is a busy roadway any time of year and during the busy season it’s always full. Construction in this area is very difficult to schedule and timing is everything. This job has been procrastinated as long as possible for this reason, but it has to be done. Five bids came in for this job. The low bidder and the one being recommended is All-Ways Contractors with a price of just over $252,000. Nothing to0 fancy, the work will include pavement and concrete removal and replacement including roadway and curb, water and sewer work, and some restoration. Another public meeting is planned to inform the public and the business owners about what is going on and when it is all going to happen.
Main Street will be redone in 2026-2027, but the center line repainting can’t wait and needs to be done from Forest to Grand Geneva.
The lines are typically redone every few years and have not been done in a while, also automatous cars do not register the lines well and the need to increase the width from 4 inches to 6 inches is necessary. Automatic cars are more and more prevalent on the roadways, and this will become the new norm. The Department of Transportation in Wisconsin is rebuilding Highway 50, indicating that the center of Lake Geneva’s downtown will be closed for almost a full year. The city leaders originally discussed the event happening in 2025, but that’s not the case. The 2026/2027 window is what the state’s handing out currently.
The City of Lake Geneva needs to get with the state and demand that the work through the city be conducted on a much faster basis than is being planned. Killing the city’s downtown cannot possibly be considered productive for the county, the state, Chicago visitors or certainly the residents, workers and businesspeople who live in and around the (currently) very busy tourist destination. The public needs to attend the coming meeting wherein this rather distant (but very much coming) project is to be implemented. The reconstruction of the road needs to be done, and that’s obvious from driving on in all seasons. But the speed that the work can be done is very much up in the air.
