Front Page
EVERYTHING IS SHORT TERM
How many short-term rentals exist in and around Lake Geneva? Nobody knows.
The city will not pay for a company that will research and then provide reporting on the short-term rentals here but not on their existence to the city building inspection office. A good assumption might be around two hundred of these private homes turned into part-time hotels. So, what does the organization of the short-term rental ad hoc committee consist of? How about three short-term rental owners (owning many of these existing homes) and three regular citizens allegedly not owning short-term rental homes (the GSR is investigating these members to check that out).
Well, think about it for a second. That’s an equal distribution of owners and citizens, correct? But the number of private homes in Lake Geneva is right above 4700. Assuming the two hundred rentals that would be around five percent are so owned. Why then do the short-term owners possess fifty percent of the seats on that committee while owning less than five percent? There ought to be one short-term rental owner on that committee, to be fair, but government and politics are a long way from fair. How can things be objective if nobody knows what it means to be objective?
But the short-term nature of the handling of this, and several other problems, is rushing right at the potential quagmire Todd Krause, Lake Geneva’s new mayor, is being saddled with. The former leadership simply kicked these balls into the future, but the future has become, and that could be quite painful, the present. Decisions must be made. Nothing needs to be done with the Hillmoor property but that’s not true when it comes to those boards and leaders of interested and motivated parties dead set on acquiring pieces of it. Alliant Energy is simply and quietly waiting for a decision about its two-acre parcel. How can they be effectively denied or approved?
What about the YMCA that’s slammed its back door so nobody can say they have any place other than Hillmoor to build the new facility on? Then there’s the coming highway project that could change everything about the community, from businesses to all property on either side of Highway 50 through town…not to mention the property owners. Todd has to be all over this one right now, not sometime in the future. The guys who want a golf course on the Hillmoor property haven’t and aren’t going away either. One of them just happens to be about the most respected judge in the country.
The personnel committee has been revived and hopefully given teeth. The teeth are to be used on the existing city administrator who has been simply laying low during the previous leadership’s term of office. No evaluations of employees have been done in forever and the six-figure appointees, all given huge increases by the former leadership, are showing no interest in quitting or moving on. Why would they when they are the highest paid in their jobs in the whole state? Todd has his hands full and his ability to put immediacy into his decisions is becoming vital, as well as his dependency upon those who he’s appointed becomes ever more critical.
Lake Geneva is right in the middle of a short-term emergency and that emergency requires some application of ER kind of stabilization procedures. Todd seems up to performing miraculously in the application of the care and even surgery necessary to save the Lake Geneva patient.
