Hillmoor Park Master Plan Steamrolls Forward Despite Flood Plain Warnings and a Survey Only 373 People Took

The People Who Shape These Projects Are Simply the Ones Who Show Up 

LAKE GENEVA, WIS. — February 19, 2026. A cold Thursday in the dead of a Wisconsin winter, which is fitting, because what happened in that meeting room only makes sense in a climate designed for people who have given up on sunlight. Mayor Todd Krause’s handpicked Hillmoor Commission convened and proceeded to spend nearly three hours doing what committees in this town do best: performing the elaborate theater of democratic deliberation while the train idles on the tracks, destination already punched into the ticket.

The subject was the former Hillmoor golf course, a tract of land along the White River that the city of Lake Geneva has been aching to develop into something photogenic and profitable since the moment they got their hands on it. The vehicle for this transformation was a community survey. The alibi was public input. The conclusion was reached before the curtain went up.

Three hundred and seventy-three people completed the questionnaire. In a city of thousands. This is what passes for consensus in Lake Geneva — a sample size you could fit into a wedding tent, which, as it happens, is more or less what they’re planning to build.

The Survey That Wasn’t

Let us be clinical for a moment, before the chemicals wear off.

The winning design concept — Concept A, piously titled “River of Life” — was selected by 191 people. Not 191 percent. Not 191 thousand. One hundred and ninety-one warm human bodies, self-selected, demographically unverified, geographically unaccounted for, answering a voluntary questionnaire they found either at an open house or floating somewhere in the online ether.

The consultant’s memo does not include a margin of error. It does not include a demographic breakdown. It does not confirm that respondents were Lake Geneva residents, property owners, or even people who have ever driven past the place. What it does include is a recommendation to advance Concept A as the foundation for the park’s master plan. Because 191 people said so.

Nearly half — nearly half — preferred something else. This detail moved through the room like a ghost at a dinner party. Acknowledged. Quickly forgotten.

But the deeper problem is not the sample size. It is the architecture of the questions themselves.

The survey did not ask: Should Hillmoor have an amphitheater? It did not ask: How much development should occur here? It did not ask: Should this land remain largely natural? What it asked — with the blandness of a fast food menu — was: Which amphitheater design do you prefer? Which splash pad option do you prefer? Which concept do you like best?

You were handed three fully-engineered futures and asked to pick your favorite flavor. The question of whether you wanted ice cream at all was never on the table.

The Consultant Has a Menu; The River Has No Vote

The consultant from Upland — a firm hired by Mayor Krause’s administration to guide this process toward its ordained conclusion — presented the results with the careful language of someone who has done this before. Many times.

Commissioner Paula Porubcan, to her credit, caught the contradiction that everyone else was content to leave lying on the floor.

“I found it really interesting that this overwhelming response from people about you know nature and quiet and passive you know recreation and just and trails and all this. But overwhelming request for an amphitheater which at first glance is contradictory, but I thought what? Well, what does that really mean?”

What it means, Commissioner, is that you surveyed the people most likely to show up to a city planning open house on a Tuesday and asked them to choose among options that already contained an amphitheater. The response is not a paradox. It is a product of the instrument.

The consultant’s own memo acknowledges the contradictions hiding in the numbers. Several feature votes cut directly against the winning concept. The entry arch from Concept B got the strongest support in its category. The large shelter from Concept C won its round. The dog park question was decided by four votes. Four.

What the public chose, when left to their devices, was a menu: take the arch from Column B, the shelter from Column C, the general vibe from Column A. This is not a mandate. It is a potluck. And yet the memo proposes advancing Concept A as the master plan, incorporating elements from the others — which is to say, it proposes exactly what the consultants planned to propose before a single survey was distributed.

The Flood Nobody Wants to Talk About

Now we come to the part that was acknowledged and then quietly strangled in its sleep.

This property sits in a flood plain. The White River runs through it. The White River, historically, has not been shy about reminding Hillmoor what it thinks of human infrastructure.

The consultants kept invoking the 100-year flood map, with the reassuring confidence of someone reading from a document that is decades old. The concept of room for the river — the practice of allowing rivers to expand into designated open space during heavy events, which is why planners put parks in floodplains in the first place — surfaced briefly and was left to drown.

Many cities, governed by people who have read the climate data and believe it, now use the 500-year floodplain as a practical risk boundary. Not because it is legally required. Because they understand that the 100-year standard was developed in a climate that no longer exists, and that infrastructure built to that standard is increasingly likely to find itself underwater. Literally.

But this is Lake Geneva. The power of the Benjamins rules here. It’s all for the tourists — the residents pay. And the tourists need somewhere to hold weddings and concerts for up to 120 persons, and so we shall have an amphitheater on a floodplain next to a residential neighborhood, and the White River will be consulted approximately never.

Let us be precise about what is actually being proposed for this little corner of the floodplain, because the consultants have been admirably specific even as the commissioners have been admirably vague about the implications.

This section of Hillmoor — sitting in the White River corridor, next to a residential neighborhood, on land that floods — is being designed as an event venue. Weddings. Concerts. Parties. Capacity: up to 120 persons. They want an amphitheater, shelters, bathrooms, and, naturally, a splash pad. A splash pad for the children and the adults and whoever else needs somewhere to piss and puke after the wedding reception gets rolling in the late afternoon sun.

Here is the part that should be read slowly, perhaps twice:

The splash pad will run on potable water. Continuously flowing. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, through the entirety of the summer season.

And the White River — the same White River that your correspondent’s childhood self once fished and swam in, the same White River that floods this property with a regularity that the 100-year flood map pretends is extraordinary — the White River will serve as the drainage system. The sewer. The receiving body for whatever accumulates in a splash pad serving 120 wedding guests on a Saturday afternoon in July.

This is not a design oversight. This is the design.

It should also be noted — and noted with the full weight it deserves — that this facility will be constructed immediately adjacent to the Lake Geneva Water Department. The municipal water supply. The infrastructure responsible for delivering clean drinking water to the residents of this city will share a zip code with a floodplain event venue whose drainage plan is the river. If there is a more elegant summary of how this city prioritizes tourist revenue over resident welfare, your correspondent has not yet encountered it.

One hundred and twenty persons. An amphitheater. A splash pad draining to the White River. Next to the Water Department. On a floodplain.

But the views will be lovely.

One Voice of Sanity, Quickly Outnumbered

Commissioner Happ, it should be noted, dissented from the splash pad with the quiet confidence of a man who still remembers what rivers are for.

“I would put it all in the river. Crayfish. You can have all kinds of things in shallow water, but a lot of places where the kids can just wander through the water through the, you know, 6 inches of water and just play on rocks in the water. That to me is a natural space.”

He is correct. He is also, in the context of this process, irrelevant.

Your correspondent spent childhood hours on the White River — fishing, hunting crawfish, swimming in the water holes. It was a vibrant ecosystem then. Then the City of Lake Geneva received a Knowles-Nelson grant, clearcut the banks, filled in the low ground, and used it as drainage for the Cove Hotel. They drained its wild pulse. Left the riverbed intact but stripped away its soul. Now it is an echo of itself — a glassy surface with no murmur beneath. This is the ecosystem they propose to honor with a concrete splash pad and a catered event space.

The Disc Golf Insurgency

And then there was the matter of the disc golf course.

The disc golf course has existed on Hillmoor since Jim Conner was mayor. It is free. It is heavily used. It is, by most available measures, the most actively enjoyed public recreation space in Lake Geneva’s park system. Disc golf is growing faster than ball golf in the United States, which is a fact that means nothing to people who cannot monetize it.

“know when people go and play, they don’t pay anything. So, it’s a public service that we’re providing, like tennis courts and pickleball and these sorts of things so,” observed Commissioner Mark Davis, apparently needing to say this out loud in a room where it should have required no explanation.

Commissioner Lowell Thompson reported that some survey comments demanded its removal, and that these comments were written in all caps. All caps. The lingua franca of a person who needs their opinions to be louder than their arguments.

Commissioner Thompson, along with Paula Porubcan and Alderperson Yeager, mounted a creditable defense of keeping disc golf on Hillmoor. Thompson noted the course is already paid for and ranks in the top percentile in Wisconsin. Porubcan made the demographic argument plainly:

“You know, men and women between, you know, I don’t know, 17 and 37. And I mean, you know, it’s just it’s a demographic recreationally that it’s important and they’re very active.”

Yeager added: “And it is nationwide.”

Then the consultant from Upland delivered the procedural kill shot: designing the disc golf course was not in the construction documents that Mayor Todd Krause’s administration had provided to them. So they would show only where the course begins and ends. The rest — the course itself, the thing that people actually use — was, for the purposes of this process, invisible.

By this point, every member of the public audience had gone home. The lights had been turned off.

The Familiar Reality

The Hillmoor survey does show something real. It shows that the people who engaged with the planning process had preferences among the design concepts they were shown. This is useful data. It is not community consensus. It is not a mandate. It is a snapshot of the motivated, the available, and the already-converted.

The residents of Lake Geneva — the ones who pay for the parks, who live next to the floodplain, who have been fishing the White River since before it was a drainage ditch — were mostly absent from this process. Not because they don’t care. Because the process was not designed to find them.

Participation is not representation. A voluntary questionnaire completed by fewer than 200 true believers does not constitute the community speaking. It constitutes the community’s most engaged fraction speaking, to a consultant hired to help them say what the mayor’s office already wanted heard.

In the end, the survey reveals less about public opinion than about the familiar reality of local planning:

The people most likely to shape a project are often simply the ones who show up.

And the ones who decide which questions get asked never show up on the survey at all.

— Lake Geneva Correspondent