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NEW LIFE SURGES UP IN THE TOWN OF LINN

The Town of Linn begins to awaken after a very long slumber.  At the highly paid-for comprehensive plan meetings, that welcomed all residents to fill out forms and offer opinions, the consensus of the groups was that the Town of Linn was mostly agricultural and could use more diversity in business development.  Nobody could figure out what agriculturally zoned land might be converted to such use, however.  This week, at the town meeting on Monday night a young man named Patrick Hogan made his appearance, speaking directly to all those who might have been at those meetings three years back.

Pat wants to take two acres and put in sand volleyball, pickleball (think small wiffleball tennis), and an outdoor paddleball court.  Pat already bought the convenience store, which had a full class B liquor license.  Pat’s converting that convenience store into a club for the ballplayers, if he can get approval to convert Residential to Parkland zoning.  He doesn’t want to make his park a private club/park similar to the new private club on BigFoot Beach, or even the other highfalutin private clubs around the lake. The town board met on Monday night kicked the can down the road.  The board decided that there would be no rezone of the property until an application to change the comprehensive plan to allow the rezoning takes place.  Mr. Hogan filed the application to have that changed but, since he didn’t meet the time deadline on Friday, he will have to wait until late July for the first hearing on that.  The cost for such a change alone can run to many thousands of dollars in legal and town fees.

Apparently, henceforth, the only zoning changes Town of Linn is going to approve are those that have applied for and reached acceptance in modifying the comprehensive plan.  Is there going to be any development at all in the Town of Linn?

Well, it’s not likely if such an effort requires a change to the comprehensive plan.  Regardless of the merit of putting in small sports venues to support his already approved clubhouse, Mr. Hogan is not likely to continue with his efforts.  It would be amazing if he did.  He faces the same problem that new pledges to fraternities and sororities face on college campuses across the nation.  The former pledges get into the fraternity or sorority and work tirelessly to force ever more draconian hazing activities for newer participants or applicant pledges.  This makes it harder to get into the organizations, thereby raising the value of those who already belong.  Geneva Lake property is almost all already owned.  The owners do not want new people in, unless it is to buy existing homes and keep them the way they are.  The comprehensive plan renewal process was humorous to go through because it was readily apparent when attending that there would be no changes, no development, and no new people coming in to do much of anything.  And so, the band plays on, as Town of Linn grows every older, its’ residents ever older, with things for young people to do almost totally shut out.

Patrick Hogan, the great guy that he is, will have his bar to operate and three dead parcels around him.  Fifty or sixty people showed up to make sure he got denied any opportunity to say anything.  He gets to talk to the people, of whom it is likely nobody will show, on June 17th, when he asked for the opportunity to lay out his dream.  It becomes very likely that his dream will never be allowed to come to fruition.  That’s good news to the average person who showed up at the Town of Linn meeting.  No identity papers were required to attend but it was not necessary to have them in order to gauge that, by far, the majority of the people there were at least seventy years old. Interesting.