Front Page
IN LABOR
The communities that surround Geneva Lake took Labor Day in stride, as is the custom and practice. The tourists, mostly from the Chicago area, come in droves during the weekends all summer long, unless the weather is bad. The communities around the lake are not the same, even though five of the communities touch the shoreline itself.
Lake Geneva, Town of Linn, Williams Bay, Fontana, and Town of Walworth all have property that reaches to the water, although Town of Walworth’s property is only a tiny slice of land. Still, for the past hundred years, and more, these communities have stuck together to manage the lake as best it can be managed, given the arcane structure of riparian water laws and rights in the State of Wisconsin when it comes to enclosed bodies of water.
The recent decision by the Lake Geneva City Council to bail out of its longstanding agreement to share the expenses of having an active police body on the Lake to do the best it could to fight infractions and the minor crimes that tend to come with drinking, boating, and generally celebrating out on the water. The city council decided to get its own boat and then not pay 75 thousand a year for the other police protection. Either the city leaders felt that paying the money was a bad financial solution (incomprehensibly explained by a very uncomfortable mayor at the meeting, wherein the move of Lake Geneva out of the agreement and paying the money was discussed), or there are other reasons for this bold move that are not being discussed.
The police and fire commission’s position that this single boat, to be kept in the non-existent Lake Geneva Harbor, would provide better response time was almost received as high humor when that argument was presented. Response time from where to where and when to when? The already fully manned police boats out on the water are very fast. Nothing on the lake is more than eight to nine miles from a full-on response. Lake Geneva, the city, is not prepared to fully staff and man such a boat during the warmer months, not full-time and not likely part-time either. Not for 75 thousand dollars a year and not including a quarter of a million for the boat, while asking for $172,000 a year to operate and staff the boat.
This does not take a police-experienced or fire-experienced veteran to stand back and look at. It’s simply math and logic. Lake Geneva, over the past ten years, has averaged only 9 violent crimes per year and 131 property crimes per year. The ‘crime wave’ taking place is similar to the national situation today. While statistics show crime plummeting all over the nation the leadership keeps trumpeting that crime is streaking upward. Nobody is even bothering to make up high crime data; the news media, for the most part, and the leadership just keep supporting nonsense. To have a better response time, the police boat would have to have the crimes to respond to, and the biggest offenses out on the water aren’t even drinking and boating offenses. The two leaders from the current police organization show that eighty percent of all citations out on the Geneva Lake waters are given out for speed and for making too rough a wake in no-wake areas.
The Geneva Shore Report has taken heat for not supporting the department or commission on this issue, but that’s okay. The GSR goes after what it can prove, the real numbers, and then hunts for what’s many times behind small-town governmental decisions. The police department is a great one, but they, like the GSR itself, don’t always get it right.
