Front Page
FIRE BURN AND CAULDRON BUBBLE
The first meeting of the ‘new’ city council in the City of Lake Geneva went down on Monday night. It was a raucous, although fairly quiet, get together, wherein the newly sworn in alderpersons tried to figure out where they fit into the operations of a city council they’d never sat on or considered sitting on before. Mayor Mayor was there in full, but nearly silent display, with the city attorney, Dan Draper, one of her most supportive and caring cronies, at her side.
The forces as they currently exist in nearly unanimous opposition seem made up of the new council president; Mary Jo Fesenmaier, the vice president; Cindy Yager, and the two new council members; Peg Esposito and Linda Frame. The opposing, or axis powers are made up of alderpersons Ken Howell, Tim Dunn, and Joan Yunker.
The eighth and last member of the council is Sheri Straube. Sheri is in either the very enviable or not so enviable position of being a key tie-breaking vote if the four women on the allied force vote in kind on something or other. Mayor Mayor is truly the ultimate tie-breaking voter, but the council would have to be tied in a four-by-four situation before she would get to vote. Mayor Mayor does not appear to be very happy with this current arrangement, as she has hunkered down and refused to appoint any committee chairs for the time being. Running on the advice of her loyal city attorney, Mayor Mayor can pretty much run most of the governmental affairs of the city without the need to appoint any committee members or chairs.
How long this can go on before the simple weight of detailed analysis and investigation of a myriad assortment of projects and programs the city must deal with and make decisions on before the workload becomes simply too much is anybody’s guess. Mayor Mayor is mad and she’s likely to stay that way for some time, since the newly appointed and elected members of the council, in the last council session, voted down every chair position Mayor Mayor tried to fill. The parking fine issue, that Sheri Straube put on the agenda, the last on Monday night’s agenda, demonstrated that there is little coordination in the loosely held-together forces of both the ‘axis’ and ‘allied’ forces.
No decision could be made about the request Sheri presented to have the fifty dollars fine for parking reduced back to twenty dollars. The public’s anger about paying fifty dollars for being a few minutes late in getting back to a meter is becoming apparent and probably has something to do with the police and fire commission recommending that parking attendants be issued body cameras because of the potential increasing hazard of performing their jobs. That recommendation passed so the remaining money in the body camera grant will be spent getting body cameras for the parking people. Nobody on the council or police and fire commission is discussing aloud the potential of these unarmed, unequipped, and untrained part-time attendants being exposed to the real dangers of confronting angry ‘conceal-carry’ members of the public when they are writing a parking ticket that so anger everyone. That part of the job will probably not be placed anywhere in ads that are designed to attract such employees. The city council Meeting of the Whole has been scheduled, however, as Mary Jo Fesenmaier comes through to again allow the public to have a voice, on a regular basis, in letting the city leadership know verbally how they are doing.
