Front Page

Making Lemonade

What the pandemic created for the City of Lake Geneva.  The Geneva Shore Report has posited several times in recent issues that the giant population of the Chicago area would find it for the first time.  They found it and liked what they found.

During the hardest times of the effects of the virus, and then the draconian solutions to handling it, many populated area residents fled to the rural areas, especially from areas like in heavily populated Illinois, where containment rules were stricter than they were in nearby Wisconsin.  That social shift exposed many people who’d never been to Lake Geneva, for one reason or another, and the exposure was mostly positive.

That is measurable because of the aftereffects.  The property values in and around the City of Lake Geneva have skyrocketed, in some places doubling in only two years.  The businesses located in the city have never been busier, and that doesn’t take interviewing of business owners (business owners notoriously report business as the same or worse, no matter what reality may be indicating) as a measuring result.  No, the influx of people has increased palpably, for anyone exposed to the city on a daily basis.

The winter has arrived, if only the change in weather is considered and not the actual date (winter officially begins on December 21st).  The streets are filled every day, and more on weekends, and that was not the case in pre-epidemic days or nights.  The people who have newly discovered Lake Geneva are not going to forget or fail to return in great numbers.  That new attention is a double-edged sword kind of a thing, as the GSR has also written about.  Revenues paid into the city treasury are up, but so are expenses.  The revenues are much easier to see and monitor, while expenses are paid out with much less clarity.  How, for example, does the city figure out the cost of supporting the Riviera weddings and galas when trying to figure out security, parking, transportation, food service, drink service, plumbing, cleaning, and more, when so much of the work is done by city personnel assigned to other tasks and having other missions?  The coming leadership of the city, in all leadership positions, is going to be vital in directing the city, and the rest of the communities around the lake, into a brighter or dimmer future.

How is it that this leadership, the elected leadership that is, can be chosen with some kind of appreciation for referenced credentials?  How can any regular, rather uneducated citizen running for office, having only a desire to help and be important, be expected to be able to read city council packets that can be as long as four hundred pages for a single session?  In order to evaluate and then provide defenses for the coming ‘hordes’ of outsiders who have now found the place, how is the City of Lake Geneva, as an entity, going to plan for greeting these hordes with intelligent preparation, rigidly enforced ordinances, and yet very friendly welcoming?

Lake Geneva is a cultural and physical mecca of great beauty and social satisfaction.  A place that the combination of Geneva Lake communities have built and come to embody is at risk.  Handling that risk will be seen by some as selfishness but that doesn’t come close to describing the truth.  The truth is all about the protection because by making certain that the Geneva Lake environment is protected, gently evolving instead of facing a brutal revolution, outsiders, visitors, residents, and owners alike all gain over time.  The wondrous beautiful and satisfying features that make up the lake experience cannot be left to be taken as low-hanging fruit.

 

Sign up for Updates