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VENI VIDI VICI
They turned out and came to a meeting of the city council. They being the local owners of short-term rentals. One after the other, they stood to talk to the city leaders and the people of Lake Geneva (even though the council had not seen fit to connect the new video system to Channel 25 so most citizens might hear and see their pleas).
‘They came, they saw, and they conquered’ to paraphrase in translation Caesar’s famous communication. They begged, cajoled, and then made their case for just how woebegone they were and hurt by the community’s feelings and attempted actions against what they were doing. There is no hope, however, their protests and complaints notwithstanding, that the council in its current form, the local community in its current form, and then the state as well, are going to deny the short-term rental owners what they want. Those times have passed as the hardness of business begins to pervade the entire culture, local as well as state and national.
What of the local property owners in the neighborhoods where the short-term owners are striking like buzzards to chew up and spit out carrion? Tough. Will vigilante operations begin wherein the local neighborhoods get together and break out the windows of the short-term rental homes when no one is living in the houses and there’s nobody around to protect them as has happened in other communities around the nation? It can only be hoped, especially by these short-term owners, that this will not happen in a place that has been as straight, legal, and caring as the Lake Geneva community area.
The provocation is coming, however, and the state of emotions running back and forth across the country like a catabatic Antarctic wind is not something that can be predicted or determined. The Geneva Shore Report has opposed these rentals for some time, not the ones in Lake Geneva so far, but because of the national experience with them. Cities and states across the U.S. have come to ban them because of the kinds of trouble their creation has brought, but that’s not stopping Wisconsin or the towns and cities inside this state. The owners of short-term rentals in Wisconsin are dead set on pursuing this form of phony hotel/motel/bed and breakfast lodging.
How will social resistance help rid the community of this kind of divisive and property-value-damaging blight remains unknown. Political action in other states has been successful but due to certain recent and coming changes in Wisconsin, that solution does not seem viable right now. Quite possibly, barring vigilante action on the part of nearby residents, the locals, the real locals not the well-heeled carpetbaggers, are going to have to bear down and take it. Sometimes bad news can only be lived through, with the grief process for the loss of loved ones. In this case, the grief process has already begun for the passing of great, neat, and peaceful neighborhoods in Lake Geneva, and the other communities afflicted around the Geneva Lake areas.
The city council should at the very least, as it passes this obnoxious and damaging ordinance require the establishment of a small fund to pay for many gallons of Preparation H to be distributed to nearby neighbors of these edifices of misfortune and discomfort. The tide comes in, but never forget that eventually, it goes out again. Do not resort to violence, although it may be coming at you and us all from other areas today. Many people believe that true freedom is coming. Never forget that under such a pure freedom situation you have the freedom to starve, the freedom to be alone, the freedom to be abandoned, as well as the rest
