OUR PLACE
It is quite likely that spring has arrived, regardless of the current weather, because Gage Marine boats are back at the Rivera docks.
The Riviera Pier Complex is once again filling up with the Gage tour boats, and everyone couldn’t be more excited. Tours have begun to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Gage Marine, the company which started in 1873. To celebrate with the community Gage will be rewarding fifteen $10,000 grants to local charities for a total of $150,000 to help improve the lives of those in Walworth County.
One of the most popular boats in the Gage Fleet is the Lady of the Lake, which was originally launched in 1873 to get people to their homes, deliver mail, food, and get visitors to hunting and fishing lodges, camping areas, and smaller municipalities around the lake. After that more boats were commissioned to help keep up with the demand of travelers and deliveries leading to 1916 when the mail delivery tradition was started.
George Goodman, the owner of a small boat livery, won the government contract to deliver mail to the lakeshore residents, starting the tradition that survives today. The following year, Wisconsin Transportation Company was formed and purchased the mail boat and contract from George Goodman. The company then purchased property in Williams Bay as a service and winter storage facility for their fleet of boats.
Then, years down the road in 1958 Russell Gage purchased the excursion fleet, including the first Walworth, Polaris, and Steam Yacht Louise, as well as other yachts from the same era. Now Gage Marine has a large fleet of ships that serve as tour boats filled with rich history and still service the community. In honor of the 150th anniversary, Gage will be hosting a Geneva Bay tour on the Lady of the Lake on Saturday, May 6th, with tickets costing only $1.50. Tickets are not available online and must be purchased at the ticket window.
Gage Marine is a great asset to the local communities, and everyone should certainly be looking forward to celebrating this big milestone event with them.
The selection of committee chairs for positions in Lake Geneva.
Mayoral appointments for the standing and non-standing committees are not the Mayor Mayor’s top concern. Last week at the Lake Geneva Re-Organizational City Council meeting the newly elected Alderpersons were sworn in, the president of that council, and vice president, were voted in by the council members, and the committee appointees were supposed to be appointed by Mayor Mayor. Those committee appointments, by the way, are to be approved by the new city council. The mayor assumed all would be approved without much thought, but that was not the case.
None of the Mayor Mayor’s appointments were approved. Not one. The new Alderpersons: Linda Frame, and Peg Esposito, sided with alderperson’s Mary Jo Fesenmaier and Cindy Yager questioned the lack of fairness evident in Mayor Mayor’s selections. Those alderpersons do not believe that all districts would have been represented evenly or even close to fairly by Mayor Mayor’s list. After a lot of back-and-forth conversation, some of it a bit heated, Mayor Mayor refused to budge on the selections. It was assumed by all that the selection issue for chairmanships would be on the coming Monday council agenda.
That did not happen. It will be extremely difficult for the council to function as a governmental body following a deadline of May 1st, when nothing financial can be decided on without committee involvement and there can be no involvement until decisions are made about who is going to chair those committees and commissions.
Person of the Week
Sheri Straube, classy and intelligent alderperson on Lake Geneva’s City Council.
