LITTLE GEMS

 Goats, you say?
The city of Lake Geneva (at least the mayor) plans to add goats to the city’s payroll. With the purchase of the Hillmoor property, and its two hundred and twenty-two acres to care for and maintain, the mayor wants goats to roam and take care of the overgrown grass areas. The goats can munch away at the tall grass, cutting the workload of the public works department, or maybe the goats will be quasi-employees of the public works department?  Wow, just wow.

The goats are coming to take over Hillmoor and save Lake Geneva. According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, a goat can clear an average of 0.23 acres (almost 1/4 acre) of land in a day.

The city will be looking for sponsors for each goat so that could relieve some of the payroll costs for the taxpayers. What’s going to happen after the goats are gone? Who’s going to step up when the volunteers run out?

What’s the long-term plan for Hillmoor and who’s going to take on the responsibility of maintaining that property? What about the existing parks in Lake Geneva? The existing expanding and maintaining such a large property such as Hillmoor? The children and residents of Hillmoor deserve a park system with proper playground equipment and green space. The city can’t afford to help the Never Say Never Playland but can magically come up with $6 million to purchase Hillmoor?

Gasoline and what the community can do.
On Monday, without fanfare or notice, the price of gasoline went up universally in Lake Geneva, by twenty cents a gallon.   The price processors are paying for oil did not go up one penny.  The price that was paid earlier for gasoline already inside underground gas tanks at the stations did not change by one penny a gallon. What drove up the price?  Monopoly, greed and lying drove up the price, and you, and everyone else in Lake Geneva gets hurt.  The new excuses, of stuff going on in Ukraine, the hurricane results in Florida or the Saudi’s threatening to raise crude prices are crap.  None of that is true. What is true?  The price of gas went up twenty cents a gallon and every station you travel to is enjoying the result of that increase, while saying they are not getting the money.  The State of Wisconsin needs to do what the State of California is doing.  Go after the oil companies because of their windfall profits based upon the giant lies being told to the American public.  Why shouldn’t Wisconsin share in some of that money instead of plodding alone, like an ox in the field, head down and hard at work?

The new traffic control devices (lights) are now installed on Edwards Boulevard.
That is the intersection Bloomfield Road and Edwards.  Don’t wax all enthusiastic if driving on Edwards in either direction, however.  The signals are not ‘automatic’ in any way.  That means cars must stop and wait for quite some time for the signal to change…and there’s almost no traffic moving in either direction on Bloomfield Road. Automatic systems cost about seventy-thousand dollars more per intersection, and even then, as the city has had to live with downtown, automatic signals must be constantly adjusted to work properly.   Since the companies that make the automatic systems keep their software data held as proprietary, those companies must be called to service them and that is frightfully expensive.  So, the automatic signals soon become just like the old ones.