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HELL OF HIGHWAY 50!
The Highway 50 road construction is set to begin in February 2027. The preparation and planning for the challenges this project will bring have been ongoing. The City of Lake Geneva, Visit Lake Geneva, and the Business Improvement District are hosting public information meetings regarding the construction. The most recent meeting was this last Tuesday, June 30th.
Meetings are also scheduled for Wednesday, September 16th, and Wednesday, December 9th. The meetings are informative for those interested in knowing more about the Highway 50 project and how it will impact the city, and what steps are being taken to ease some of the inconvenience. A website devoted to the 2027-2028 Highway 50 construction is now available on the city’s webpage.
The site can be found: https://www.cityoflakegeneva.gov/349/Hwy-50-Construction.
What can Lake Geneva, particularly its businesses located along the corridor of the complete rebuild of the asphalt and concrete center section of Highway 50, expect? If the county and state are simply left to their own, then you can expect the kind of auto mayhem all citizens and visitors get to see and live through during summer construction periods conducted along and on the main roads in and around Lake Geneva. Wisconsin does not do an outstanding job in providing detour signs and information on-site and around construction sites.
The GSR staff have reported this fact many times and complained loudly to no effect. Interchange North is still under construction, and the signage is lousy, and the safety is worse. Imagine if there were loads of pedestrians waiting to always cross that busy curve of a road in the summer? Now imagine how many businesses are going to be affected by the coming two-year project and how much money the affected businesses will lose because of lost parking, inconvenience, dust, noise, and the rest. Think about that, as the number is approximately 55, by our informal count. Now, with that thought in mind, as well as probably thirty of those businesses working at rather thin profit margins in the summer and almost none in the winter, how many are going to simply pack it in?
What can be done to keep from losing about half of those soon ot be more troubled businesses? Lake Geneva leadership has to take more control in how it goes about allowing the state and county to do the work and then supervising closely to make sure that the proper use of signs is made at all times and that loud abusive machines are kept to a minimum in all of the construction area as well as out of private resident’s front yards, pulling in and out at all times. Lake Geneva is the third town, city, or village to be rebuilt in this way over the past five years.
Delavan and Paddock Lake preceded Lake Geneva, and both suffered substantial losses to their business community because of the way the construction was handled; not everyone is talking about that. The businesses that leave don’t exactly have a complaint department to turn to, and those two communities do not have nearly the volume of business Lake Geneva has to be sensitive about and careful to manage. In European cities, the construction has part of the project budget dedicated to helping the businesses impacted financially, but the U.S. has nothing like that.
