Front Page
IT’S ONLY MONEY
You’re going to see a chart in this issue of the Geneva Shore Report and that chart is a section of the 72 page Lake Geneva budget which is put out by finance to allow the finance commission and the city council to decide in what needs to be paid, what revenue is earned (or unearned for that matter) and all manner of other monetary amounts and conclusion. That budget final is a very important document is also a predictor of what the intent is of the people elected and appointed to run the city.
For example, the city administrator was apparently paid about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars ($150,000), or so, for the year 2025. The budget for 2026 is approximately the same amount for 2026. What does the city administrator put down as a department request for his 2026 salary? How about two hundred seventy-six thousand ($276,000). Some city council members saw no problem with this kind of game going on. Supposedly, there’s talk of a study they are going to go by, which has such high figures for Wisconsin city pay across the state.
The Geneva Shore did not support using such a secret (protected) study. Instead, last year, the GSR simply called the cities of Madison, Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha to see what those cities were paying. The information on officials in all these cities is public, so nobody failed to answer.
None of those cities pays what Lake Geneva does, either for the administrator now or the city clerk. The city clerk will have been paid about a hundred and nine thousand ($109,000) for her year this year but what is she requesting? How about a ‘department requested…read it yourself on the chart) of one hundred and ninety-one thousand ($191,000). None of these administrative creatures, none with doctorates or master’s degrees, are shy about going after the dollar in this small town that practically lives off parking fines and other charges it can come up with because Williams Bay, Fontana, and the Town of Linn have all the land that is of significantly high value.
They get the big bucks in property tax, and none of that comes back to Lake Geneva, even though all the residents and guests come to Lake Geneva for their entertainment and shopping, by and large. There used to be a TIFF tax that allowed Lake Geneva to charge these nearby cities a portion of property tax to support the burden these visitors put on infrastructure and other expenses, but no more. What should be said by the city council before a decision is made about coming up to the requests of the city clerk and her boss? How about ‘put your resumes out there and find another small town to fleece.
Oh, this article has so far not mentioned that the city clerk is overwhelmed and therefore was given an eighty-thousand-dollar-a-year ‘assistant’ to help her. There’s only a blank space where her request might have been listed on the chart. Maybe she’s just too damned embarrassed to be listed there with them. Oh, and then there’s the new assistant for whatever this current city administrator really is. That’s right. There’s a miscellaneous amount to be budgeted for the assistant of a hundred and thirty thousand ($130,000). It seems that this old guy came along to stand in when David Nord left, then ran the selection committee for the new administrator, but none of them “measured up,” so he took the job. Jobba the Hutt reigns, and if the city council does not do something about it, then the citizenry has every right to get extremely enraged.
There’s not much likelihood that the administrator, his assistant, the clerk, or her assistant has been much damaged by the stoppage of the Food Stamp program. Bell, California, comes to mind. That city began to pull some of the same stunts, but that city did it only after the newspaper there went out of business two months before. The Geneva Shore Report is right here and is staying here, and conduct like what’s being considered here must be looked at and acted upon with immediacy and accountability for all concerned.
