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STAYING THE COURSE
This quiet, unassuming mayor, city council, and appointed committees pulled the City of Lake Geneva through a very difficult time, and they did it with diffidence and panache and dogged determination…and they did it with a quiet fortitude while paying close attention to what the local public wanted. The Hillmoor property issue is not over, but this team is not folding its tent in the face of a totally phony and fear-induced attempt by a Chicago developer to intimidate. Hillmoor is still safe from ridiculously placing development plans of it into the hands of such a sadly formed and driven company like White Water.
Wrigley has not been closed, made into a pedestrian walkway park awaiting development into a closed resort complex (secretly planned by Keefe and Wolf). The city pier has not been moved to the Maytag Lagoon in order to justify turning that wonderful area into a marina and closing off and getting rid of the South Lake Shore Drive (Paradise Highway) that offers everyone the best view of the lake in passing and costs the public nothing.
These kinds of perfectly wonderful decisions of stasis, holding the community to a common standard that does attract tourists as well as satisfies the local residents. These people have guided the city through a pandemic, which is not over, but that pandemic also increased not only the interest of the Chicago population (so they are coming back now, never having visited and unaware of what was really here) so that they now regularly populate the places around the lake as never before. These are not the wealthy coming. These visitors are from the middle class, and they are also buying homes here. Some homes have doubled in price in only a couple of years, especially if they are small and have a Lake Geneva address.
Charlene Klein is running for office, opposed by two other candidates (Dennis Loeser is the only one who’s filed the necessary papers, however, at this point). Mary Jo Fessenmaier is running for the alderperson’s seat she already holds, as is Jonnie and Tim Dunn. Cindy Flower is standing down, thereby causing meetings in the future, any meeting she attended, much shorter. Her leaving also lessens the tension created when her husband took a top job on the employee side of running the city.
The Riviera Complex was renovated and the weddings orders, very well advertised and sold by Stephanie Copsey, the specialist working to increase the frequency of those, are pouring in. Parking revenue was way up this year, higher than ever before. Beach revenues were up, as well. The Business Improvement District leadership changed, and that body of business owners and operators exploded with lower spending but wonderfully put together events and decorations. Things are going very well in Lake Geneva. New businesses like Dunkin Donuts have come to town, along with a host of others. Kwik-Trip is expanding to add a shop and station over on Wells. There are very few empty stores in the city, and those that are open are having record sales for years.
The idea is to continue this kind of behavior that leads to this kind of results, and it’s vitally important that such results be seen for what they really are. Charlene lives in the downtown city area, not only in her home over on Wisconsin Street, a short skip and jump to Broad Street but she spends gobs of time in her office over at the municipal building, available to everyone. No mayor has been that available in quite some time in this city. When she’s not in her office in that building, greeting, and talking to anyone who wants to talk to her with the door always open, but she also goes over to an office in the Riviera where she spends time planning and putting stuff together, like the grand galas that have been so popular recently (the next one is the New Year’s Eve gala. At seventy-five bucks it’s the best buy in town). We need to thank this team of hard-working, poorly paid, and brilliantly selfless people, and we need to do so by re-electing them, one and all.
