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LAKE GENEVA MUST ACT!

It’s time to draw the strings tight on the top of the Lake Geneva bag of tricks, attractions, and publicly advertised ambiance:

1. The parking rates need to go up to three dollars an hour immediately.
2. Residents of Lake Geneva with passes should get four hours free per day.
3. Residents of the towns around Lake Geneva should be able to buy cost-effective stickers and get an hour or two of free parking.
4. All the bars and night spots need to be closed by ordinance by midnight.  Thumbs Up, Fat Cats, Champs, Hogs and Kisses, and even the Grand Geneva nightclub do not need to be littering the streets with drunks, cigarettes, and trouble in the early morning hours, weeknights, or weekends.
5. All the businesses in Lake Geneva should be encouraged to have local discounts (like the Kamaina discounts so effectively applied in Hawaii for locals).
6. Parking violations for every offense, not parking late after the meter has expired, should be raised to very high levels.  Parking by visitors in Lake Geneva during the summer months is close to out of control.  A very high penalty would encourage the local police because it would be worth their time to write the tickets, as well as the time of parking attendants.

It is high time that the city stops being held hostage by late-night eateries and servers of alcohol.  Nobody is buying squat from the retail businesses at one a.m. on any morning.

It does not take a genius to circulate daily around the perimeter and through the beating heart of downtown Lake Geneva.  That perimeter expands during the summer season and that beating heart comes now near the speed that cardiac doctors call tachycardia.  The heartbeat is beginning to beat too fast.  How does the city slow down that beating heart?  The heart beats in the day with synchrony to the throbbing of cars, trucks, and cycles all crowding into space not meant to hold all of it at one time.  The roads are like clogging arteries, reducing the life flow of nutrients to the body of Lake Geneva.

The parking is akin to playing a game of Russian roulette but without a gun or bullets. Step out onto Main Street or Broad Street at high noon on a Saturday or Sunday during the summer and the game of ‘automobile roulette’ can become very real and just as deadly as the Russian version.

The reporters and other staff of the Geneva Shore Report are out in the community, as well as the other communities around Geneva Lake, on a daily and nightly basis.  Some of us have been scraped or hit but not hit hard enough to cause serious damage.  How does a community like Lake Geneva, with several organizations and large budgets dedicated to only one thing, and that’s the uncontrolled growth of an ever-enlarging tourist population, survive?

It’s near impossible for locals (residents, voters, business employees, and managers) to come to Lake Geneva unless it is required of them to get or keep a job.  It is this population, that no longer, in summers, wants to come into the downtown, that must be catered to and cajoled back.  There is only one thing to be done, and that’s to start bringing hours of business, parking, beach, and circulation rules into play.  The organizations trying to bring even more tourists have to be brought under some sort of city control, and the money they collect from taxes and give to causes bringing in more people can be spent on more internally qualitative endeavors.