Surprising Stuff
Ho-hum, it’s only money.
Most Lake Geneva residents find the city’s budgets uninteresting, so they might consider the following “interesting facts about the city’s proposed budget” some really boring. But interesting or boring, here are some interesting facts:
1.) The city’s police and fire safety budget is almost 6 Million dollars. At $5,956,157, it is over ½ of the city’s ten-million-dollar budget, and it is even greater than the city’s total property tax, which totaled at $5,446,108 in 2019. All of the city property tax collected, combined, is not enough to pay for this police and fire protection.
2.) The city’s proposed borrowing of almost $10 million will increase the debt levy tax payment 72%, as it will go from $1,063,693 in 2021 to $1,827,666 in 2022, which will then cause an increase to the city’s portion of assessed property tax by about 10%.
3.) On the small end of expenses, is the pay of the nine members of the elected city council (8 alderpersons and 1 mayor), whose total combined salaries are way less than many other individual workers working for the city. An individual alderperson gets paid less than $11 dollars per day and the mayor gets less than $19 per day, even though they are responsible and liable for approving all of the city’s financial transactions. The total of all these people is less than $30,000 a year.
For all the responsibility that the city council members have, and the immense number of hours they work, the small salaries that they are paid are part of a problem that has been sadly overlooked through the years. How to get good people? Pay them.
The defenseless geese of Babe Mann Park.
Elkhorn is really not that far away from Geneva Lake and the communities that surround it. A short ten-minute drive on Highway 12, going north from Lake Geneva, lands you at Babe Mann Park in fifteen minutes. There are about four hundred geese living on a small, but pure and beautiful, small lake set inside the confines of the city park. There is no hunting allowed in the park, but there is hunting going on. For the past several weeks dead geese, all shot through, have been found in the dumpsters around the lake. Their bodies have been eviscerated and their livers removed. Fresh goose liver, sometimes called foie gras when specially created and prepared at fancy restaurants, in a full-grown goose can weigh as much as two and a half pounds, and that liver can sell for up to seventy dollars a pound.
The five geese the GSR investigators found in one park dumpster alone, with their livers missing, were worth about nine hundred dollars to whoever killed and butchered them.
What’s the problem here? First of all, it’s illegal to fire a firearm within the city limits of Elkhorn. Second, it is illegal to hunt in Elkhorn parks, or any state, or any national parks. Third, it becomes likely, if this continues, that some innocent workers or bystanders around the populated areas surrounding the park will get shot by a stray round. The geese are identified by illegal hunters, probably early in the morning just after dawn, and then the geese are shot, and then plucked out of the lake water. People living and working around this park must become sensitized to the sound of guns going off near that lake. The Elkhorn police are on this, as well as the DNR. Dial 911 if you hear shots fired around there or 262-723-2210 for non-emergency if you are shy. Don’t get shot, and save these beautiful geese, fattening up to fly south, and then come back to visit us all over again. Keep your head down and be very alert when visiting or working near that lake.
Place of the Week
Elizabeth’s Cafe in Delavan is a local favorite. Great food at great prices. Stop in you won’t be disappointed.
