Front Page
TODD
The election is coming next Tuesday for city positions, and the prime position being contested is for mayor. Even though Lake Geneva has a ”weak mayor” position to be filled, either with the current mayor running again, or a city council member vying for the spot, the position is representative of the city’s leadership and its worth as a quality social environment known in Southern Wisconsin and in many places around the world.
The Geneva Shore Report has large followings in many distant places, primarily made up of people who’ve visited the city, the lake, and the nearby communities and want to ‘tune back in’ to see the place they love from time to time. London is the GSR’s third-largest audience, following Milwaukee and Chicago. The city’s ‘city administrator’ is considered the real source of power in Lake Geneva, balanced, of course, with a city council elected by the citizens.
The mayor’s position is not nearly as important for making decisive decisions as it is in representing the community to the outside world. The question of ‘why Todd Krause’ comes up at this time because the city voters have a distinctive choice. Todd is principled in operating his flooring business, his very successful family, and has moderated over the functions of all governmental and societal functions, while his challenger has no such credentials. Todd has experience of serving in the position credibly and with a preponderance of public support, unlike many of his predecessors.
The GSR is not intending to disparage Mr. Hoiland, but to indicate and reveal why it is that, although not a bad man, he’s simply not nearly qualified to serve as the city’s representative to the public and the world at large. It is interesting to note that when Mr. Hoiland won election to the city council, Todd Krause, the mayor, heard that Mr. Hoiland did not care for the publisher of the GSR or the newspaper itself, and that the feeling of both of those entities was mutual. Todd felt, by calling the publisher, that he needed to have a summit meeting with both the publisher and the new council member in order to start out anew, now that Mr. Hoiland was an elected representative.
Todd Krause had nothing to gain from this meeting except that he wanted the newly reformed council to be as effective as possible, and with any rancor to initiate the restart of city governance the election called for. The meeting was held, and the publisher, Mr. Hoiland, and Todd met in the mayor’s office. The publisher wanted to reassure Todd that the paper would be as objective as possible in dealing with the new council member.
Mr. Hoiland would have none of that, however, and spent the meeting being recalcitrant and negative, which made the publisher feel bad for Todd Krause but not himself. Mr. Hoiland had already made his feelings known through social media and then at the meeting itself. Aside from the “three strikes” the GSR called against Mr. Hoiland for bad conduct a few weeks before the election, his behavior was predictive in setting up his run for mayor against the very man who was trying to help him.
Even so, the GSR made every effort to be objective because of Todd Krause, not Mr. Hoiland’s conduct, who also kept his identity as hidden as he could on social media as he viciously criticized both Todd, the publisher, and the GSR itself. Mr. Hoiland is the kind of man the city voters must deeply consider to represent them, to replace a man who’s done a fine job serving his first term. The GSR recommendation is evident in the tenor of this article. The GSR does not always get things right, although it admits and apologizes when it’s wrong, on the front page. A lot of work and study went into coming to this recommendation.
