They tell you these things start at 6 o’clock. That’s a lie, of course — the kind of comfortable institutional lie that keeps the citizens away and the alderpersons comfortable in their chairs. The April 27th Lake Geneva City Council meeting ran three hours, which in municipal time is approximately four geological epochs, and by the end of it the city had blessed a $22 million park fantasy, handed out free parking to sticker holders, argued about who owns the trolleys, and bought 16 acres of land for a police and fire station that nobody in the neighborhood apparently knew was happening. A full Monday night in paradise.
The Minutes Were a Crime Against History
The evening opened with Alderman Joel Hoiland standing up to say what someone should have said weeks ago: that the official minutes of the April 21st council reorganization meeting were a sanitized, bloodless, bureaucratic lie.
What actually happened on April 21st was a genuine cat fight — seven rounds of voting, the council’s women turning on their own, deposing the very senior Mary Jo Fesenmaier as Council President and installing Cindy Yeager in her place. Seven rounds. A parliamentary knife fight dressed up in Robert’s Rules. The kind of thing that would make good television if this were a city that believed in transparency.
What the city clerk wrote down bore approximately the same relationship to reality as a weather forecast to a tornado.
Hoiland wanted the record to reflect what actually occurred. The clerk, to her credit, had already agreed to post the full amendments online. Whether anyone reads them is another matter entirely.
The Wine Walk, the Sidewalk Sale, and the Flag
Hoiland then attempted something sensible, which in Lake Geneva is always the first sign of trouble. He moved to streamline the permit process for private businesses holding events — send routine applications to staff for administrative review, only bring to council the events that involve public space, right-of-way, or city services.
Clean. Logical. Efficient. Doomed.
The city has an ordinance. It requires council review for anything touching a sidewalk sale or a liquor license. Which means the Wine Walk — yes, only in Wisconsin — and the Maxwell Street Sale both need to come before the full council, every time, forever, world without end.
Into this procedural tangle stepped BID director Alex Benanti to defend Lake Geneva’s first Pride event, where downtown businesses would participate through sidewalk sales. His justification was economic rather than moral, which is the language that tends to land at this particular table: “The LGBTQ plus travel market is one of the most valuable segments in tourism.”
Tourism dollars. That’s the magic words. That’s the rosary bead that gets you through any Lake Geneva committee meeting.
Alderperson Cathy Stoodley, a true believer in the faith, went further. The funds involved, she explained, “come from room tax, and there’s nothing to do with the taxpayers here.”
Room tax money. The theological construct that transforms a tax into a blessing, a public levy into a private grant, accountability into irrelevance. It is called a tax. It is collected under the authority of the state. It is administered by a municipal body accountable to the public. But once it passes through the Tourism Commission, the theology holds, it has been purified. It is no longer your money. It is Tourism Commission money, and you should be grateful they’re spending it on something nice.
The Pride event passed. The Wine Walk will proceed. The Maxwell Street Sale will be discounted accordingly.
The Budget Realignment That Was Just Routine Accounting, Nothing to See Here
Next up: authorizing the reallocation of funds in the 2025 budget for certain revenues and expenditures.
The city clerk explained that at the close of the budget year, with the audit underway, the city conducted its standard year-end budget realignment. Actual revenues and expenses became clear. Line items were adjusted. Room tax revenue had come in significantly higher than projected and was increased accordingly. This is, she emphasized, performed every year. Routine accounting housekeeping. Move along.
Alderman Brian Smith had a reasonable request: “Request maybe having a standardized budget that we could follow, it’d not only be helpful for everybody on the Council, but obviously the Community to be able to see, you know what the original budget is, everything that’s been amended or trusted and a reconciliation if that’s possible.”
The clerk agreed. “After all done with this, I will post, I will put the amendment out, I’ll post it back up on the website to all these adjustments, show what the amendment was for, the budget that I put out.”
Progress, perhaps. The kind that requires believing the next step actually happens.
Free Parking Wednesday: A Pilot That Became a Permanent Ordinance Change While Nobody Was Watching
Here is where things got genuinely instructive about how Lake Geneva operates.
The council had previously voted, at their last meeting, to create a pilot program giving free Wednesday parking to sticker holders. A pilot. Controlled. Measured. Reversible.
What appeared on the agenda on April 27th was a permanent ordinance change.
Joel Hoiland saw it immediately and moved to send it back, directing staff to:
- “Develop a structured one season pilot program for we love locals Wednesdays that does not require a permanent ordinance change.”
- “Provide a detailed fiscal impact.”
- “Outline an operational plan addressing enforcement, utilization and potential system impacts.”
- “Establish measurable performance metrics including revenue impact, parking utilization and observed economic activity.”
- “Provide a recommendation on whether a temporary administrative or resolution-based approach is more appropriate for a pilot program rather than a code amendment.”
“Understanding of financial consequences. That’s a basic fiduciary responsibility,” Hoiland said.
He was absolutely correct. He was also absolutely outvoted.
“There’s a difference between a pilot program and an ordinance change. A pilot is controlled, measured and reversible. An ordinance is none of those things. This applies to multiple sticker classes, not just residents.”
Alderperson Fesenmaier, in a moment of unusual alignment with Hoiland’s logic if not his motion, pointed out that the city’s parking department retains only three months of historical data — meaning there is no baseline against which to measure any revenue loss. “I don’t think we should change the ordinance,” she said. “I think we should do a pilot separate from this, but we have to have a baseline first.”
Then she voted against Hoiland’s motion anyway.
The city of Lake Geneva has a digital parking system. It does not collect and retain the kind of basic historical data that any private organization would use to calculate ROI. It has the infrastructure for knowledge. It has chosen not to acquire the knowledge.
Voting against Hoiland’s motion: Council Vice President Cathy Stoodley, Alderpersons JaNelle Powers, Sherri Ames, Linda Frame, Mary Jo Fesenmaier.
Voting for: Brian Smith, Joel Hoiland.
The ordinance changes then passed 5-2. Parking is now free on Wednesdays for sticker holders. City resident stickers: free, valid two years. Walworth County resident stickers: $160, valid two years.
Newly elected Council President Cindy Yeager was absent from her very first meeting.
The $22 Million Concept Plan That Nobody Priced Until Tonight
And now, the main event. The one they save for last, when the press is tired and the public has gone home.
Mayor Todd Krause wants the city council to bless a concept plan that would transform Lake Geneva’s popular disc golf course into a $22 million municipal wish list. The Hillmoor Commission — an appointed body with an apparently unlimited appetite for the public treasury — has proposed two miles of new trails, including 1.21 miles of 12-foot-wide paved path, the remainder in 6-foot widths and mowed corridors. Also on the menu: two bathrooms, a new parking lot, a splash pad, three shelters, an amphitheater, a kitchen, and the disc golf course relocated into the dense woods where casual players will never find it again.
The public was surveyed. Workshops were held. The process was open to anyone and shaped by no one. The catch — and there is always a catch — is that every option on the survey was a variation of the same buildout. There was no box to check for leave it alone. No option to keep the disc golf course where it is. No option to keep the land natural, or keep the $22 million in taxpayers’ pockets. The choice was always between more development and more development, dressed in the costume of community input.
The price tag — all $22 million of it — was not shared with the public until tonight.
At the beginning of the meeting, resident Greg Colel had stood up with the kind of observation that comes from actually having worked on the ground. “In my younger years, I spent a fair share of time golfing at Hillmoor. You remember just how soft the ground was on what we called the lower holes, better known now as zone one. In my experience working in road construction, I fully understand how challenging it is to construct any type of structure. The soft soils, not that it can’t be done, but special considerations must be taken and that usually drives up the cost. I haven’t heard the Hillmoor Commission mention the use of geotechnical soils engineers to determine the feasibility of building the structures they are planning on suspect soils.”
“The one thing, in my opinion that was left out of that questionnaire was an option for none of the above.”
Mayor Krause offered the soothing multi-year framing that elected officials deploy when they want you to stop worrying about the number: “Maybe explain that this is just a concept plan and that this is multiyear. You know as money becomes available, we would do things, it’s not we’re one and done. We’re not doing it all at one time. It really the whole objective here was to get a master plan because we do have the Knowles Nelson grant for roughly half a million that is going to be putting in some trail system, so really that was the whole objective of this concept plan, which by the way, the concept plan was also paid for by the Knowles Nelson grant that just so we’re all very clear that the funding all came from.”
So: the $500,000 Knowles-Nelson state stewardship grant is burning a hole in the city’s pocket. Half of it is a grant. The Republicans at the state level have since eliminated those grants for the future, following a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, but that is someone else’s problem. The money exists now. The plan exists now. The disc golf course exists now, but perhaps not for long.
Commission consultant Mike Kvoic — hired by Mayor Krause at $35,000 per year, formerly a volunteer on the previous ad hoc committee — offered the standard democratic justification: “This is what our residents had asked for.” He also mentioned: “We will be able to raise significant donor money to help pay for many of these amenities.”
Alderperson Linda Frame was enthusiastic: “You nailed what the residents were asking for. A bigger dog park separated a large dog, small dog, the splash pads, the amphitheater, the all of these other amenities.”
Kvoic did, in the interest of full disclosure, note that 373 persons who took the survey said they don’t want to pay for any of this.
Alderperson Fesenmaier, who has a gift for seeing around corners even when she ultimately votes the wrong direction, raised the concern that haunts every concept plan: “What happens here is a lot of times when we support a concept, then later on they come back whichever group and they’ll say, well, you supported the concept. So that means you supported each item and that’s why I’m kind of reserved about voting for the whole thing.”
Hoiland and Smith moved to defer. Hoiland’s case was methodical and damning:
“This is not a plan; it’s a concept without accountability.”
“This is a destination development concept. This concept is proposing an urban scale trail widths in a constrained, environmentally sensitive neighborhood, adjacent space.”
“The city has owned these 34 acres for over 50 years while ignoring the long term stewardship of the remaining 189 acres that the city brought for over $6M in December 2022.”
All of this is true. The 34 acres in Zone 1, where the disc golf course sits, has been city property since 2008 — since Jim Conner was mayor and the great financial crisis had just handed the city an opportunity. The 189 acres the city bought in December 2022 for over $6 million have received essentially no stewardship since.
And there is the small matter of what happened on April 16th, when an intense rainfall event overwhelmed the city’s drainage system and flooded most of the proposed project area. The water didn’t consult the survey results. It didn’t care about the concept plan. It just came, the way water comes now — harder, faster, with less warning than anyone remembers from twenty years ago.
A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor. When it finally lets go, it doesn’t drizzle. What used to be a bad storm is now a compound flooding event. The Hillmoor project area didn’t flood because of bad luck. It flooded because of physics, and physics doesn’t file for a variance.
Nobody on the Hillmoor Commission appears to have asked: if the ground couldn’t handle a spring rainstorm in 2026, what happens to the $22 million splash pad, amphitheater, and paved trail network when the next one hits?
Alderperson Stoodley was not interested in these questions. “The residents want this and the Hillmoor Commission worked so hard on this,” she said. And: “I’ve been doing fundraising for 30 years. It won’t be hard once we have a plan.” And: “I don’t feel that it is fair to insult people who have worked so hard and come up with a beautiful plan.”
Alderperson Ames, taking up the standard of the aggrieved, directed her remarks at the critics in the room: “All of you people who have been kind of insulted tonight.”
Motion to defer — failed:
Voting against deferral: Council Vice President Cathy Stoodley, Alderpersons JaNelle Powers, Sherri Ames, Linda Frame, Mary Jo Fesenmaier.
Voting for deferral: Joel Hoiland, Brian Smith.
Alderpersons Frame and Ames then moved to approve the concept plan.
Final vote on the $22 million concept plan:
Voting yes: Council Vice President Cathy Stoodley, Alderpersons JaNelle Powers, Sherri Ames, Linda Frame.
Voting no: Mary Jo Fesenmaier, Joel Hoiland, Brian Smith.
The $22 million concept plan passed, 4 to 3.
The Grant Money That Got Diverted — The Knowles-Nelson Trail Heist
Right behind the concept plan came authorization for staff to proceed with design and bidding of the trail improvements using the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant. The city has already spent approximately $60,000 on a previous concept plan with Upland Design.
Hoiland moved to pump the brakes entirely: “That the Common Council direct staff and Hillmoor Commission to immediately suspend any planned or proposed use of Knowles Nelson grant funds and associated city matching funds for Zone 1 improvements and to return those funds to the original intended purpose, ecological restoration and stewardship of the approximately 189 acres.”
The history here matters. The Geneva Lake Conservancy wrote the original grant application to the DNR at their own cost. The grant was intended for restoration of the 189 acres purchased in December 2022. Then Todd Krause was elected mayor. From April 2024 to January 2025, nothing happened at Hillmoor. Fesenmaier eventually got the council to form the Hillmoor Commission. Krause hired Kvoic at $35,000 per year. And the grant money — intended for ecological restoration of 189 acres of newly acquired wild land — began migrating toward Zone 1, where the disc golf course sits and where the city has owned land for over half a century.
“But frankly, the Knowles Nelson Grant application was for restoration of the property that was purchased by the city in December 2022. The 189 acres, like I said, the city has owned the Zone 1 property for over 50 years,” Hoiland said.
“The money was essentially diverted from the 189 acres and put over to the Zone 1 area.”
“We have been doing this backwards. We should have probably — and this goes back even to 2023 — we should have done an ecological study first to understand what the ramifications are of this property.”
Kvoic countered that the city should spend the grant this year so “we could go for another grant next year to do additional things,” adding that “it’s my understanding that the Knowles Nelson Grant does not fund ecological restoration.”
One additional constraint nobody mentioned prominently: the grant will only pay for 2,500 lineal feet of trail — 47.3% of one mile. The concept plan calls for two miles.
Fesenmaier, again reaching for the uncomfortable question, zeroed in on the Tourism Commission’s $250,000 contribution to the grant match: “So how do you go to the Tourism Commission and justify the expense and say it’s mostly for residents, but it’s not for tourists? The justification on the Tourism Commission is using money for tourists.”
Nobody had a clean answer.
Motion to defer on trail implementation — failed 5-2:
Voting against: Council Vice President Stoodley, Alderpersons Powers, Ames, Frame, Fesenmaier.
Voting for: Hoiland, Smith.
Motion to proceed with trail implementation — passed 5-2:
Voting yes: Council Vice President Stoodley, Alderpersons Powers, Ames, Frame, Fesenmaier.
Voting no: Hoiland, Smith.
The Trolley Confusion, or: Who Owns the Trolleys?
This one requires a scorecard and possibly a lie detector.
At the beginning of the meeting, a man who goes by Speedo Condos — Vice President of the BID, a title he apparently holds without irony — stepped to the public podium and announced with the confidence of someone who has never been wrong about anything: “The trolleys are being purchased by the Business Improvement District now. What is so difficult about that that the misinformation gets out?”
Later, BID executive director Alex Benanti told the council: “The city would be purchasing the trolleys outright.”
The city administrator confirmed: the BID would not be purchasing them.
So Speedo Condos, Vice President of the very organization whose director had just told the council the opposite, stood at that podium and scolded the room for spreading misinformation. This is either a catastrophic failure of internal BID communication, a philosophical disagreement about the nature of financial reality, or the most confidence a man named Speedo Condos has ever been wrong in public. Possibly all three.
Fesenmaier, in her prosecutorial mode, pressed Benanti on the operating cost commitment: “If the city doesn’t operate it, the BID is still willing to pledge 40% of that operating cost?”
Benanti: “That I’d have to take back to my board.”
Fesenmaier then moved on two fronts. First, two RFPs: one for the city providing the trolleys with a third-party doing operations; one for a turnkey operation where the operator owns the trolleys and runs the operation — and which doesn’t technically have to be a trolley at all. Second, a letter of intent to purchase the trolleys, so the seller understands the council is still serious while the city figures out what exactly it is doing.
The city administrator explained what that letter actually means in practice: “It’s a letter of intent to purchase that would so that they understand that the Council is taking a formal action, that they still wish to purchase these while they do their due diligence on a program.”
Both Fesenmaier motions passed 5-2.
Voting yes: Council Vice President Stoodley, Alderpersons Powers, Ames, Frame, Fesenmaier.
Voting no: Hoiland, Smith.
The Land Deal at the End: 16 Acres for Police and Fire
Lastly on the agenda, as the big-ticket items always are: the purchase of property at the corner of Edwards Boulevard and Bloomfield Road for a future police and fire station. Sixteen acres. Large enough for both services.
Hoiland raised the tax base question that nobody else wanted to raise: “You know, the news is out that the YMCA is under contract to buy the 17 acres north of where you are. Not a bad idea, but again the basic principle here is the fact that between the YMCA, which is a 501-C3 tax-exempt organization, and a public safety building on these properties that were intended to be future property tax revenue generation for the city.”
Alderperson Frame moved to approve the purchase. Alderperson Powers seconded.
Fesenmaier moved to continue to the next council meeting: “We haven’t heard a peep from the people that live there. It’s been very quick, you know, we live this, but I’d like the people that live there to be able to weigh in on it, much less the whole.” Hoiland seconded.
Fesenmaier then amended her motion: rather than a straight purchase, make it an option to purchase, allowing for a due diligence period.
First vote on the amendment:
Voting yes: Council Vice President Stoodley, Alderpersons Powers, Ames, Fesenmaier.
Voting no: Linda Frame, Brian Smith, Joel Hoiland.
They voted again. This time Linda Frame flipped to yes.
The motion not to go into closed session to purchase the property passed unanimously.
The council adjourned.
Three hours. Twenty-two million dollars in concept-planned park amenities. A disc golf course on borrowed time. A grant that migrated from 189 acres of wild land to a Zone 1 splash pad. Trolleys that Speedo Condos says the BID owns and Alex Benanti says the city owns and the city administrator says the BID definitely does not own. Free parking on Wednesdays, permanently, because a pilot program is too much accountability for a Wednesday afternoon. And 16 acres of future tax-exempt land purchased at the corner of Edwards and Bloomfield while the neighbors slept.
This is Lake Geneva in the spring of 2026. The water is still standing in Zone 1 from the April 16th flood. The $22 million concept plan is now officially blessed. The physics, as always, are unimpressed.
Coverage of Lake Geneva municipal government is a core mission of LakeGenevaNews.com. All quoted material is reproduced verbatim from the public record.
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