Front Page
“ALL AHEAD STOP, TOGETHER!”
The residents, business owners, employees, taxpayers, and even visitors to the City of Lake Geneva may be able to conduct business and play, or simply hang out and do nothing, while within the confines of the social order as we all know it. But the leadership of Lake Geneva has to be much more circumspect about what is happening at the levels above and beside the city that will affect everyone in the city and this responsibility, the responsibility to know or find out and then know cannot be avoided unless cataclysm is the kind of result that leadership might be looking for.
With what is going on nationally, as laid out plaintively and fearfully in this week’s opinion editorial article, the things that are occurring at upper levels are going to have catastrophic or near-catastrophic effects on the city and the people who consider it their home. Today the publisher visited the parking manager who has not been well treated by the editorial staff of this newspaper. Yes, it was a make-up meeting. The woman is very analytical and not one to emit much in the way of expressive emotion, but she is competent and knows the numbers back and forward, as she was the parking clerk for five years before becoming the manager.
The newspaper and the town need her and the money she oversees bringing in. The publisher met with the new city clerk, the highly touted woman who took the job for a very highly touted salary and benefits plan. She too was welcomed to the city and then interviewed to discover that she’s extremely competent and can likely perform at doing the job as well as she can talk about the job. Todd Krause was in his office, as he often is, at the municipal building and he was interviewed as well. The city is going to need this team and more to make it through potentially difficult and threatening times. What is needed as this team is brought together?
It needs to stop spending on almost everything and begin holding the kind of financial reserves it has never held before. It has never needed to hold before because it has such an excellent credit rating with about seventy-five million dollars it can borrow at any time. That kind of dependency is based on the leaders being willing to lend. If real trouble comes to the city when businesses begin to close because twenty-five percent increases in prices have to be asked for, or more and the customers begin to shy away, and materials, from cars to tractors, to salt, to gasoline, oil and much more start to skyrocket in price then only on hand reserves might be there to keep the ship sailing true.
“All ahead stop, together” is an old-fashioned nautical term when captains on the bridge of a ship called down to the engine room using long pipes to communicate. That command meant for the engineers in the engine rook to stop absolutely everything and wait for further instructions. The city is budgeting right now to dredge the lagoon, to set aside money for the coming Highway 40 rejuvenation project, for traffic signals, highway fixes and more. A new look needs to be taken at all those things and everything else, including pay scales for everyone being paid anything. When other countries are drafting citizens to serve in their military forces because they fear what the U.S. might do, when they are considering closing their borders and no longer marketing American products and retaliating to punishing tariffs with even more punishing tariffs of their own, then these are signs of trouble coming.
The national leadership may state that these are temporary measures causing minor pain to the public, but a wise leadership team is going to plan for a long ‘temporary’ period and the pain is much more significant than to those not bearing that pain. The wonderful men and women who Lake Geneva is graced with having as leaders right now need to begin drawing in their collective breaths and then drawing the finances together against the potential ‘fall of night’ about us for some time. The Chinese would call these “interesting times,’” but they would mention that phrase as a curse, not a compliment or something one might want to pursue.
