OUR PLACE

The new unfilled but fully funded park manager job.
Lake Geneva decided to go along with a park manager, in order to relieve some of Tom Earle’s work over at Public Works.  The street department will no longer have to make park decisions, although they’ll still have to do the park manager’s bidding when it comes to the real work.  Ninety Thousand dollars ($90,000) per year is the base pay for this unfilled position.  That’s six figures when all the benefits are thrown in, and then some.

Has anyone in leadership stopped to consider that Lake Geneva is a city of about seven thousand residents?  Six figures to the city administrator, the comptroller, the city clerk, the head of public works, and so on, would seem to be a bit high, even in this day and age.  If this trend continues, then parking is going to ten dollars an hour one day soon and parking tickets to five hundred.  It’s not that the city doesn’t need a qualified park manager.

The real problem is that these kinds of ‘gifted’ jobs seldom go to a qualified anybody.  They tend to go to friends, relatives, family, or distant relationships of those who run the city. Their resumes are then ‘re-organized’ to meet any necessary qualifications.  Will that be the case here?  Six figures to work in this beautiful environment?  Most of the city staff and leadership do not live in the city these days.  They save money by living in Delavan, Elkhorn or even further away.  This huge windfall of money being paid to the staff of the city, mostly upper staff, is laudable.

But, what about the citizens paying for that tab? What about the businesspeople who are paying part of the cost by losing business because of it?  What about the visitors who take a hit and then play that day but never return…and the city has no way of knowing who those people are or why they’ve decided to never come back.

Person of the Week

Amy Peterburs, the owner of Bittners Bakery in Lake Geneva. What a wonderful shop owner and person.