Front Page
SUCKED DOWN A SHORT TERM SLOW-OPENING HOLE
The staff of the Geneva Shore Report, including the publisher, were wrong!
Jason, the man serving as the city’s inspector under Fred (the building inspector who’s not with the city anymore) was and if not Fred’s best friend, and his credentials are impeccable. Everyone speaks highly of him, and he’s been approached by other communities to leave Lake Geneva and go to one of them. He has not departed and Todd Krause and Dave, interim city administrator, don’t want him to. The GSR staff are getting aboard that ‘ship.’ The city should not necessarily follow the advice handed out erroneously in the front-page article last week.
This is a form of a written front-page retraction that everyone on the paper’s board and staff is behind and supporting. We have come to believe after a lot of interviewing and looking into Jason’s work life that the city would be well served if it was decided to hire him to replace Fred as the building inspector.
Meanwhile, the plan commission is going ahead with the deeply flawed and badly damaged rules for short-term rental housing owners. It reads exactly as if it is for those owners too and not the nearby residents of homes affected by this flawed practice that has been kicked out of being allowed in so many places. There are no limits on how many people can stay in these short-term rentals (oh, they must have ‘sleepers’’ given so many cubic feet of air in a room…what stand-up comedy is that?). There are no limits on how many cars can be parked at the residence although they can’t have cars or RVs parked on grass and stuff. These STRs are all being constructed with huge, expanded driveways. The supposed manager of the STR must live within 25 miles and supposedly be available twenty-four hours a day when the STR is rented.
In your dreams. That’s a manager or management company that could be in Kenosha, Racine, Eagle, or Mukwonago. Please. The punishment for the manager not being able to be contacted is nothing. The fire department is not allowed to do fire inspections either. Who came up with that one? How about the idiot pamphlets to be handed out to both resident homes nearby and the renters of the STRs?
One tells the residents to be accepting and understanding while the other one for the STR renters tells them to be nice. This whole mess is laced with dialogue that might make it into a skit on Saturday Night Life. Oh, the city inspector will not be allowed on the premises of these places without a warrant. Yes, a warrant. He or she could go to the residence and ask to inspect or look around, but the renters/owner/manager does not have to let the inspector in. There will be no list of residents inside the STR. The log will list only the named person or persons renting the place…if they show up. There’s no rule that the renter has to be there at all after signing in on acceptance of the house under contract.
This ought to be called the Swiss Cheese Agreement. The whole STR experience is a clone of how Uber took off by going right around all the rules that made taxi services so secure and safe. Those taxi medallions cost so much because of all the inspections, insurance, driving records, and so on. These STDs are going right around the public protections that have been put in place over the years because so many people were taken or hurt. Just like what is happening now with the STR thing.
As a last comment, you should know that if the police go out because of a complaint they don’t have to file a report if they don’t want to. No written complaint and response, no ‘minor’ violation…and your name and address are now known to the STR owner. Be careful out there. The software program to make sure cheaters are automatically caught was kicked down the road until next year.
The package now goes to the city council, lousy as it is.
