Front Page
RUNNING AGAINST THE WIND
The results are in from the April 2nd election:
Todd Krause received a huge mandate in his triumph over the incumbent Charlene Klein with 1636 votes to her 600 votes. Sherri Ames in the District One alderman position got 325 votes to incumbent Joni Yunker’s 221, while Mary Joe Fesenmaier kept her seat with 401 votes to her opponent’s 225. Finally, Pam Wilkinson lost to Joel Holland with a vote of 227 to his 337. There’s a new sheriff in town to be sure. This new slate of leadership brings a refreshing change, not just in personnel but in the upbeat and aggressively intelligent approach to running such a bifurcated tourist mecca of a city like Lake Geneva. The results were surprising, not in the ultimate results but in the magnitude of them. The public got the message of inaction and mean-spiritedness that had permeated the governmental offices, and that public came out in a big way.
Wisconsin is not a state alone, among the fifty that exist today. It’s right in the middle of the pack when it comes to local elections being almost abandoned by the public. Sixty-six percent of all occupied board, council, and county elective positions are filled with people who only run unopposed. Twenty percent of those seats up for election have no one running to be seated in them at all. That’s about the average for most states in the U.S. Only a few years ago those kinds of non-democratic results would have been considered frightening and a sign of trouble for the present and the future of leadership across the breadth of the country, but no anymore today. This situation isn’t even considered important enough to deserve coverage by the national media.
The good news, if there can be much of any when it comes to this situation in Lake Geneva, is that it doesn’t exist as a current or even past problem. The major’s seat and those of four of the eight district alderpersons have been contested. It isn’t so much that the candidates for office are so much more qualitative than might be available in other areas of the state. It’s because the people who live, work, and own property in Lake Geneva are being informed, thinking about things, and then being motivated enough to go to the polls and express opinions about what kind of leaders should be selected to carry the city on into a successful ambient future.
The Geneva Shore Report approached the election by writing about the process and not necessarily about the problems the now-past leadership was having. These are good people who were defeated but they lost their way when it came to the direction the public wants the city to move toward. The job of the public is now to not only welcome the new leaders but to become critics once again and make sure the people they elected do the job and they do it with a spirit of how it needs to be done. Enthusiastic expressiveness and good cheer coupled with analytical study, research, and then leadership in proceeding with new and existing programs to make this lake-end community continue to be the wonder of all of Southern Wisconsin.
We celebrate, with the voting public, that came out in numbers in rain and sleet to do the voting and make this kind of great set of decisions.
Glad to see the changes the residents of Lake Geneva have put in place. Complacency and stifling and ignoring input from the citizens and their wishes for KEEPING the green space of the former golf course green; may have inspired the voters. I am against the YMCA being given any of the golf course property. Residents tolerate the overrunning of our city by all the visitors and deserve to have their space. I suggest that an entrance to that green space be AWAY from highway 50. The visitors congregate by the lake, and that is beneficial to the downtown business community. Our residents need access to the park and respite from the visitors. A fee structure for nonresidents should be high enough to deter them from accessing the green space.
Hoping that the voter turnout will be even greater this fall to preserve our Democracy and prevent a dictatorship.