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RADICAL SURGERY

Certain elements of the Geneva Lake area communities have decided that Hillmoor is a cancerous lesion, set deep into the vulnerable north of Lake Geneva’s soft side. It purportedly sits there as a depressed tumor, endangering the entire population with its hideous appearance and slothful lack of any kind of usable effect. Nature, left to its own, does not engender any sort of classical beauty with these elements, and therefore the Hillmoor property, the last tract of hundreds of acres undeveloped in all of Lake Geneva proper, must be excised and replaced with androidal, metallic and concrete versions of reality deemed to be much more attractive to the washed out, wiped out and anti-art visionaries of our time.

Even such a well thought of news source as the Lake Geneva Regional News, last week wrote in its opinion section words that closely resemble what you see written here. But have the opposite meaning toward Hillmoor. The blight, that newspaper feels  would be “cured” by endorsing the Lake Geneva City Council’s likelihood of amending the comprehensive plan. A Chicago firm, with no ties whatsoever to Lake Geneva, and sporting a former CEO headed for a Federal Penitentiary up in Minnesota (to be fair, he is only going to have to serve a three-year sentence for building fraudulent projects in other states), is to be allowed, if the council votes on November 13th to approve of the change, to basically build whatever it wants on the hundreds of acres.

That the townspeople have come out in numbers never seen before to attend commission and council meetings about this coming change, and to speak for hours and hours at public lecterns in the municipal building, has been set aside from the minds, hearts and good sense of the city’s leaders, and even the highly educated and vaunted editors of the Regional News. The Geneva Shore Report, though, is not so blind that it cannot see. The staff of the GSR is not so deadened by old time cronyism that it will not hear. None of the people who work for the GSR are paid to turn their heads or are working for the project because they are to receive any benefit down the road. And the people of the GSR, and the members of citizenry who’ve come out at night, time after time, to oppose this awful manifestation of radical surgery about to be perpetrated upon the soft belly of Lake Geneva, have not lost their sense of good taste, art, and consideration for the beauty of nature in all its quietude and healing gentle waves of meditation and simply elegance.

The publisher of the Geneva Shore Report stood before the plan commission and city council recently to speak to them about who they are, what they are supposed to represent and to remind them where they live and work. The elected representatives of Lake Geneva’s city government, once in office, can make whatever decisions they feel most benefit the needs, wants and desires of their constituents. The publisher reminded them that hundreds of residents were standing and speaking before them, all, without exception, being opposed to this coming change to the comprehensive plan. His last words should ring in their ears before the come together on the night of 13th of November in a vote to change the plan. The vote could easily pass in favor of the comprehensive plan change.

If that were to happen then those individual members of the council who voted for it will be reminded that they do, indeed, live in a very small town. They will be reminded that living in a very small Midwestern town can be a magically wonderful and warm experience, or it can be a cold living hell that just goes on and on into the future.

Will the city council members, following the coming vote, move into one of those two futures?

There is absolutely no question about that fact.

Cartoon of the Week

by Terry O’Neill