Front Page
THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION
Approximately one year from now, the downtown area of Lake Geneva will face a form of business, tourist, and residential destruction. The colder, more remote entities of /Walworth County and the State of Wisconsin will bring in their giant trucks, cranes, and steam shovels to tear up the Aortic Artery called Main Street and replace it with a newer, supposedly upgraded form of Main Street. Main ‘Street 2.0’ will come in with applause from sources yet to be gathered together or defined. Those who are plowed up, cast aside, or ingloriously allowed to depart in the night will not be recorded or even noted, except by a very few survivors. This coming onslaught of barely controllable outside forces (county and state fully identified here as just those) is being exacerbated by the conduct of the current leadership of Lake Geneva.
Why is the City of Lake Geneva spending money like a drunken sailor? Nobody seems to be able to answer that question. A new administrative assistant for the city administrator. Really. Wonder what the salary plus many benefits will cost? How about a new full-time harbor master when the city has no harbor? It has a curved waterfront of minimal size. How about a new many-thousand-dollar police boat plus dock, fuel, and amenities to fight the crime that is not being committed right off the city’s curved waterfront? The new six-figure park director has assumed his role and income, too.
Where is the money supposed to be coming from as the city heads into 2027, when the State and Country will tear Main Street out and replace it with, well, Main Street, all over again? For a year, but maybe more. Business income on Main, Broad, and Center streets will dwindle. Parking revenue will dwindle. The country sits on the very edge of war with Iran, thinking about taking over Greenland, Canada, Venezuela (oh, sorry, already took that), and more, while the war between Ukraine and Russia not only moves into its fifth year but grows hotter and hotter as time goes by.
Lake Geneva is not building or even storing its reserves (about eleven million dollars); instead, it’s spending the reserves and depending upon its significant ability to borrow needed funds if needed and if the funding entities allow such borrowing when the city deems itself to be in such need. The tunnels, all dug and fortified with concrete walls during the years of prohibition by the mafia and other bootleggers, are still there underground. Six of those tunnels run north and south about ten feet down under Maine Street, and several more exist connecting both sides of Broad Street down where it meets and turns into Wrigley Drive.
None of the shop owners downtown, many of whom have parts of their basement properties connected to and by these tunnels, allow anyone into them except themselves and some of their employees. Not even the fire department has access to those tunnels even though some of them, like the ones built down and behind the businesses on the west side of Broad Street have fire exit signs put up at their back walls that might lead patrons fleeing fires to use them…and they all lead into a tunnel that is closed and locked at the potential exit points Are the county and state aware of the existence of these tunnels as they begin the first digging replacement of those downtown streets in the city’s history?
