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THE SILENCE OF THE COUNCILORS
I’ll see you in September is a phrase most known from an old popular song, and so how did it become the phrase that has best described the city’s inability (whether through ignorance or deliberation) to have Channel 25 come live for the audio and visual presentations of city meetings. The equipment, costing many thousands of dollars, was in place during September 2004. However, there was a forty-thousand-dollar interface that was left out. That connecting part was ordered in that month and arrived a few months later.
Spectrum, the company responsible for installing the interface and bringing it live, has somehow been unable to do that. Now, city leadership is basically saying that maybe in September, the problem can be taken care of. The public has been kicked over into streaming to watch and hear meetings. However, the streaming service, which worked well for those who knew how and had the technical and equipment capability could tune in that way, but slowly but surely that streaming service has turned totally unreliable.
The Silence of the Lambs was a successful movie and had nothing to do with what’s been happening in Lake Geneva, but its phrasing seems applicable. Why are the citizens being treated this way? The city administrator is ultimately responsible for fixing this problem, if the problem is what it is claimed to be, which is becoming doubtful.
Governmental entities have almost all had problems in having the public know what they are up to, and the media has seldom been considered as a ‘friend’ by them. Today’s national political situation serves as a great example of this modern time. There is a huge reduction in crime statistics in Washington, D.C., but the National Guard is called in to provide more safety. There is no huge crime wave on the waters around Lake Geneva, but a police boat is purchased to provide more safety. It isn’t even the money being spent doing such nonsense things, nationally or locally; it’s about how the public feels after figuring out that it’s been lied to.
Another misstatement is that the police can cite or arrest for anything they want to out on the open water of Geneva Lake. That’s also not true, and the aging city attorney in Lake Geneva is no authority. He’s merely a legal opinion, and his opinions have been plenty wrong before. It might be hoped that the over-funded search of a strategic planner might bring in someone who would call for a complete reorganization of the city’s leadership and its flawed system of operations. The city’s website could use some sound advice, as well, in that everything is there…if one has twenty or thirty minutes to navigate and find it.
It is not blatantly simple to use once one gets on it, and much of it is illogically placed, which the GSR presumes is accidental, but as with the disappearance of Channel 25 and the streaming services to allow the public to attend meetings electronically, who really knows?
