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THE LAKE GENEVA BEACH ASSAULT

“They are not coming through a hole in the air, from those nights in Tiananmen Square, but it may be that they are coming from the feel that this ain’t exactly real or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.”

Paraphrasing Leonard Cohen from the song lyrics to his famous Democracy tune helps in thinking about what the City of Lake Geneva is doing about the beach in downtown Lake Geneva. You know that beach, and if you live here, you’ve been to that beach. You might be old enough to remember when going there was free. Lifeguards were provided by the city as a service, and the beach cleaned by the same workers. That beach, down in front of Library Park, is now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because of a system of collecting tolls to use it. It is no stranger than paying for luggage storage aboard an airliner, or free tap water invariably poured into plastic bottles and sold for more than beer or soda. All of life is not kind, fair or even logical.

It’s more about some human’s ability to get money out of other humans, no matter what the pretext or context.   This new beach project is all about the money appropriated to do the build in. What build in? The city leaders in Lake Geneva have been encouraged to blow a third of a million dollars to get digging and pull about twenty yards of the park’s grassy bank knoll down. That bank is a beautiful gently sloping hillside many people relax on, as well as enjoy just for its comforting appearance. The big old trees provide shade and also add elegance to that ambiance.   All of that money, and all of that effort, is supposed to accomplish what? To add a minuscule sandy rectangle of beach area where most people are not going to want to go, anyway.

So, what’s really going on? Another one of Lake Geneva’s pet contractor projects comes to mind. Like the hugely overpriced parking lot that never got built, and the hugely overpriced pagoda that did get built. How overpriced is this project, and how much of the money the city ends up paying is going to go straight into the contractor’s pockets? Trying to find out how much these city contractors really make in profits can be very difficult. The city makes no effort. How much are the contractor’s paying for materials, and how much are they charging the city? How much are the contractor’s paying in wages? How much time is the project going to take?

These are the questions the Geneva Shore Report loves to ask, and then pursue getting answers to. Whatever gouging that is going on, and this project is another perfect model for how those things get bid on, and then performed, and finally paid for, the Geneva Shore Report is going to be working on finding out. Whatever happens with the project, if it gets built, the city taxpayers and regular citizens are going to have to live with it. When it comes to screwing with the appearance of the beach area and Library Park every citizen should get involved. In small communities across the USA where these kinds of projects are undertaken and funded with little thought to who is profiting, and for how much. And many of these projects, like this one, do much to detract from the city’s appearance, but don’t get discovered until they are already built or performed. The Geneva Shore Report is not going to let that happen; not now with this project; not now with the Riviera project; or with any other area of community spending where citizen’s money is being used to supposedly “improve” the cultural and physical flavor of the area.