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TOWN OF LINN LIVES AND BREATHES
There was trouble in the Town of Linn, and disaster lay just ahead, back in 2020, when some unprincipled, and downright nasty individuals, decided to use the effects of the virus (people were staying home and things were not being televised much) to make a run for control of the whole town. Their plan was simple, attend the single annual town meeting, where those who show up can vote to change almost anything. They wanted to dissolve the town to the point where they could take over. That worked for a few minutes, but cooler heads stood up and stopped them (try one named Jim Weiss). Their brutal effort was stopped when a special meeting was called by Jim Weiss and the remainder of the board members who had not sold out. The town was saved by hundreds showing up at that meeting to vote.
But, what lay just ahead was another dangerous trial. The elections of 2021 were just ahead, like an unavoidable waterfall in the distance. The elections were held yesterday. The results came in Tuesday night. The same four hundred citizens who showed up that dark stormy night last year showed up again at the polls. Jim Weiss was re-elected. Maureen Zimmerman beat Chris Jones handily, thereby removing the main character of rebellion and deceit from her board position of power. The vote was overwhelming (420 to 205). Tom Leonard, Chris Jones’s main cohort and fellow traveler, went down in flames (400 to 208), and Chris Jones’ pick for City Clerk was crushed in the same way (428 to 184) by Alyson Morris. Jim Livingston trounced Leonard (who’d conducted the dirtiest, most low-down, and integrity empty campaign in Town of Linn’s history).
The Town of Linn lives and breathes again. The number of people who came to the Weiss-called special meeting in 2020 was almost exactly the same as the number who showed up to make sure that the ‘landed but foreign’ bad actors were defeated. On Tuesday the vote went 400 to almost zero against Jones, Leonard, and Rohn. Note the election result number similarity. That this was a huge issue, keeping Town of Linn the wonderful jewel of all of Wisconsin’s townships, and it’s obvious when you consider that, for a small-town election, the total number of votes cast was almost 30 percent of the total number of all residents, which includes children and many who are not full-time enough residents to vote (although they are still counted as residents).
What lays just up ahead? The next annual town meeting is to be held on April 20th at 7:00 p.m. These bad actors will be back. They own significant tracts of land. They feel that they are the true owners of the town (they own 85% of the township’s property but only pay 15% of the revenue). Meanwhile, the residents of developed plots of land (for living on instead of farming) are 85% of the population. This arrangement is not untypical of other townships throughout the state, with the exception that Geneva Lake, in which much of the best shoreline is in the Town of Linn, attracts tons of tourists, and has some of the most expensive waterfront real estate in the world. The people who came to take the Town of Linn, actually live there too, and that plum of well-financed and maintained real estate (the totality of the Linn Township) they crave remains a chunk of low-hanging fruit waiting for them to come back to grab.
The meeting coming up is vital. Anyone who’s a resident and attends the meeting can submit requests to do about anything. The people who attend vote, and that’s it. We must have the people who put Zimmerman, Weiss, Livingston, and Morris in office show up to fight for the town again. It might do well after that to make sure the town files for Wisconsin status as a village so that annual town meetings will become a thing of the past.
Congratulations, citizens of the Town of Linn. You came, you voted, you saved the town, and you did it the truly American way.
The Marvel Comics’ ability to build emotion and expression is huge. In reality, however, the democratic process, when applied, is more powerful.
