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THEY WANT YOUR MONEY

Sitting right in front of them were a few more than a hundred people.  Some were crouched on the floor and others standing along the walls.  The Lake Geneva City Council chambers were stuffed with a population not seen since Hillmoor days.  In the near thirteen years of the Geneva Shore Report, spent attending city council meetings. only five of those meetings have gone near or over a hundred citizens present.  The past four were all about Hillmoor, but not this one.

Monday night’s Lake Geneva City Council meeting was all about the new four dollar an hour parking and the fifty-buck fine for being one minute, or less, late to get to the meter.  There were no Chicago tourists at the council meeting on Monday night, but there were plenty of local citizens, residents, business owners and employees.  The many speakers, limited to five minutes each, spoke for over two hours, almost all of them talking about the brutality of having to pay such exorbitant parking rates on the weekends and then somehow endure the fifty-dollar fine for arriving a few minutes late in getting back to the meter.  During the Winterfest carnival the parking revenue headed for a record over the weekend, but nothing was even close to the emotional reaction of skyrocketing angry voters who have become seriously angry over the parking and fine rate increases.

The city comptroller, Laura, gave the public a piece of her mind, basically telling the assembled people before her, the people who pay her the now six-figure salary, that they should be ashamed of themselves for not being able to properly understand the most excellent budget she has been responsible for creating, and how that budget requires the parking hikes.  For all intents and purposes, not quoting her exactly as there was far more she had to say, she called the people who spoke one after another against the parking increases, everything short of stupid.  She sat like Jabba the Hutt, pouting through the lengthy litany of angry citizen comments and business owner complaints, seemingly and silently expressing not only her disagreement but also her rather evident distaste.   Her boss, David Nord, the city administrator, sat directly across the chamber from Laura as she spoke.  His features, wisely, showed no expression whatever.

The parking increases, both rate and fines, were sustained by a contentious four to four tie votes, the final nail in the people’s coffin being driven in by the mayor herself.  Those five city leaders want that money and there is no force on earth that appears likely to change their mind, short of a recall movement that can succeed with just about the same number of votes that were in the room. The four council members were Howell, Hedlund, Dunn and Yunker.  Everyone already knows the mayor’s name which is soon (very likely) to be changed to Mud.

There’s trouble coming from this outrage (what the Geneva Shore Staff refer to the parking rate and fine increases as) and it’s going to be fairly quick in making itself apparent.  The mayor spoke of already receiving threats and foul language calls, so the police were present for the meeting.  Nobody at the meeting threatened anyone, however, and physical violence is not likely to be a result of this council’s (and the mayor’s) poor decision.  There will no doubt be a whole load of foul language, however.  Receiving a fifty-dollar ticket for failing to get back to the meter in time is not something that anyone will smile over.  The people from Illinois don’t have to pay the fine as they can simply go home, tear up the ticket and not come back (Illinois has no reciprocity agreement with Wisconsin for such infractions).

It is probably not the council’s intention to put the fine burden on the locals, but that is what they’ve done, not to mention driving away tourists from Illinois who simply decide to save their money by not coming back to Lake Geneva.