LITTLE GEMS
The ‘automatic’ signals up and down Main Street, Broad and Center are basically useless, except for turning left.
The irritation seems minor, unless you’re sitting at a signal at some odd hour and no traffic is coming the other way, or, in fact, there’s no other traffic at all, and the signal won’t change from red to green and allow your vehicle to pass. The signals on Broad Street and the downtown portion of Main Street are all supposedly ‘automatic.’ The problem is that the company chosen to install the signals made the system for adjusting the lights proprietary.
That means that the company being paid an annual service fee to take care of the system comes when it feels like it, which is never. Go figure. They are in Chicago and Lake Geneva is a few thousand miles away in Wisconsin! The public works department has done nothing about this problem and neither has the city’s administration. Sit there and stew, like the rest of the local population. Maybe this problem will be solved by the new council leadership. It can only be hoped.
Now that there seems to be an ‘agreeable’ city council, why can’t truckloads of sand be brought and dumped all over Big Foot Beach?
Wisconsin produces approximately 20 million tons of sand a year. It is the highest producing sand mining source for suppling the entire U.S. fracking industry. At fifty to a hundred dollars a ton for this alluvial sand of high quality (generated millions of years ago by the rubbing of rocks against one another during the glacial period), that’s a whole lot of money, and while the price of oil and gas has fluctuated widely, the price of sand has remained as solid, as well, a rock.
What about some discounted tons of sand to be trucked and dumped at Big Foot Beach each and every year? With forty or fifty two-hundred metric ton dump truck loads, the beach at Big Foot would stretch two hundred feet out into the shallow waters there, and then extend up and down the eastern shore for a quarter mile. There’d still be plenty of room for the man ‘potty’ boats along the more rock-strewn northern part of the stretch. The sand that was pulled away from the shore would end up on the bottom of the lake, and wouldn’t that be a welcome relief to the undergrowth that’s down there now?
Work will resume along Highway 12 in Walworth County.
Beginning April 17th, construction will start once again between Elkhorn and Lake Geneva. As the project progresses into its second year of construction, motorists need to be aware of what they can expect to help keep them, other motorists, and work crews safe. US 12 will remain open but will be down to single lanes with closures and various ramps and access roads closed or rerouted. The project includes resurfacing nine miles of US 12 between WIS 50 and WIS 67, along with structure rehabilitation at several bridges and culverts. New guard rails, signage and pavement marking will also be part of the project. To help minimize traffic impacts during Memorial Day weekend, both lanes of traffic will, however, be open.
