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INTERESTING TIMES!
Updates and improvements have been made at Hillmoor, thanks to the public works department. The old cart path wooden bridge over a drainage swale in the disc golf area was recently replaced. People can now walk safely across the swale. A new paved path was installed around the main gate along the Highway 50 entrance to allow easier access for people with mobility challenges. Public Works continues to make progress clearing overgrown brush and removing invasive plants in the southeastern corner of the property along Highway 50 frontage.
This fall and winter, the Hillmoor Commission will begin working with professional landscape architects and land planners to develop a park plan for Zone 1 of the Hillmoor property. Zone 1, named as the White River Corridor, is adjacent to the City’s skate park, behind the Utility Commission offices on Main St., and behind Eastview Elementary School. It is currently used as a dog park and a disc golf course.
Everyone wants the Hillmoor property, from the YMCA board of directors to almost every developer east of the Mississippi. The latest scamming attempt to allow the acquisition of any part of the property comes in the form of a movement to declare certain patches of property within the Lake Geneva city limits as ‘surplus’ and therefore not subject to the usual considerations for sales or potential use.
The latest effort was put forth to the city council last Monday night. It was decided to table that new effort; in fact, the city administrator withdrew it so he could reintroduce the motion at a later time. The reason for that withdrawal remains shrouded in the same sort of wide-open secrecy the current leadership has created. Or rather, improved upon, as he had some real masters who preceded him. He works in an office seldom visited by his ‘serfs’, and they all work behind a counter protected by thick glass and a nearby alert police presence. Nobody remembers that when the municipal building was first conceived and then built, the idea of most citizens at the time was that the center would open and bring together all the departments and elements of the city’s leadership and workers.
Like the invention of the cell phone, originally thought to be a device that would bring humans closer together, just the opposite has been the result. City leadership remains one of business conducted mostly behind closed and locked doors. In fact, the city mayor, Todd Krause, is likely the most open and available leader among all of them. Public works created and built a ‘prison complex’ for its headquarters, while the city leaders outside of that remain inside the municipal ‘bunker’, exhibiting all the character traits of bunker people.
What is to be done with Hillmoor? The committee, with its paid committee head, has arrived at making no decision at all about what to do with the wonderful piece of ground. The deciding vote that allowed the city to purchase the property was actually made years ago by a female city council person who was a hair stylist by trade. So much for advanced education being any kind of necessary credential to serve fellow citizens. Sometimes people can astound us.
