The Trolley, the Trough, and the Monday Night Circus: How Lake Geneva’s City Council Spent Your Money Without Reading the Fine Print
The bats were already circling City Hall by the time the April 13th council meeting gaveled to order, and somewhere in the fluorescent haze of that municipal chamber the fix was already in. You could smell it — the sweet rot of insider dealing dressed up in PowerPoint slides and parliamentary procedure, the faint cologne of a restaurant owner who parks his ass in a no-parking zone and runs the Business Improvement District like it’s his personal fiefdom. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, jewel of the Midwest tourist economy, a postcard town where the locals can’t afford a sandwich on Main Street and the city council was about to spend ninety-three thousand of their dollars to help the downtown cry-babies survive the trauma of getting new roads.
This is what democracy looks like at the municipal level, folks. Buckle up.
The Pigsty and the Ledger
First, you need to understand the geological fault line running through this council chamber. On one side: Aldermen Joel Hoiland and Brian Smith, two men who apparently chain-smoke balance sheets and wash them down with shots of ROI, who see every agenda item as a ledger entry, risk versus reward, the city as a whole organism with arteries extending far beyond the boutique storefronts of Geneva Street.
On the other side: six female alderpersons and a mayor who constitute the ruling majority — and who on this particular evening distinguished themselves by approving, one after another, a series of expensive gifts to the downtown Business Improvement District without a cost analysis, a competing bid, or what you might charitably call a plan.
The BID, for the uninitiated, is a special assessment district — meaning the downtown property owners already pay a tax earmarked for their own promotional benefit. They have their own budget. Their own staff. Their own paid representative, one Alex, who was notably out of town on the evening her financial research was most urgently needed. And yet, here they were again, belly to the public trough, snuffling for more.
The Trolley That Ate the Treasury
The main event of the evening was the trolley question, and it arrived at the council like a dog’s breakfast — half-baked, poorly documented, and already slightly rancid.
The backstory: the Wisconsin Department of Transportation is scheduled to tear up downtown Lake Geneva in 2027 and 2028 for significant infrastructure improvements. The BID’s proposed solution to this admittedly inconvenient but ultimately beneficial project was for the city to purchase two used trolleys for roughly one hundred thousand dollars and outsource their operation to Dousman Transport Company, at a total projected burden to taxpayers of somewhere north of six hundred thousand dollars.
There was an alternative on the table. Resident Fred Gail had come before the council with a private-sector proposal — he’d carry the ownership risk himself. As Gail explained it: “What he’s seen so far from Jones transportation or from this other transportation company. Basically, as we interpret it, is going to come to about a burden of little over $600,000. On the city of Lake Geneva, what we’re proposing, the cost to do what we’re doing, operating, owning and everything else would be about half of that.”
Half the cost. Zero municipal liability. A private operator absorbing the risk.
The Krause Administration buried it. When Hoiland asked why Gail’s proposal wasn’t on the agenda, the answer was somewhere in the fog — something about the BID wanting to control the trolleys after construction wrapped. Which told you everything you needed to know about the real game being played.
And then there was the memo. The administration had prepared what it apparently considered a financial analysis to support the trolley purchase. Hoiland read it. Then read it again. Then said what everyone in the room was thinking:
“I don’t know how we can even read this thing. This is not a. This is not a pro forma. It’s not a physical impact statement, it’s a. It’s a word salad. And as far as I’m concerned and so.”
He continued: “I don’t know how to say this. It’s really unimpressive. What we received here and you’re asking us to make a decision based on the numbers that you presented that we can’t even figure out.”
The liability question came next. Hoiland noted that these trolleys carried passengers without seatbelts. “You’ve got people that are not going to be seat belted. Because I’ve looked at these pictures and I’ve seen there’s no seat belts on them. If you have an accident with somebody stands up, falls down, you’ve got liability.” He reminded his colleagues that Lake Geneva holds the all-time record for the largest single payout ever made by the Municipal League Insurance Company — a distinction earned during a previous administration, one Tom Hartz, and one the city has no pressing need to surpass.
Then came the moment that would have been comedy if it weren’t taxpayer money on the line. Where were the grant opportunities that might offset costs? Nobody knew for certain — Alex had that information, and Alex was out of town. BID President Speedo, given the floor, confirmed: “Alex has looked into 3 or 4 right now. She’s not here this evening. She’s out of town. But that was her project. She’s been working on.”
You are being asked, ladies and gentlemen of Lake Geneva, to commit to a six-hundred-thousand-dollar program tonight. The person with the grant research is at the airport. Carry on.
Hoiland finally called the question with the clarity it deserved: “One of the things we don’t have is solid information on paper that we can look at to make a decision. You’re asking us to discuss and act tonight. I don’t know how we can do that. So I’m going to move continuation. Until we have a complete financial model. A validated demand assumptions, defined ownership, exit plan, alternate options comparison. And clear cost sharing framework with BID.”
Meanwhile, Alderperson Yeager wanted to buy the trolleys now and figure out who operates them later. Alderperson Frame, to her credit, expressed genuine shock at having received the packet over the weekend with no prior consultation: “How are we going to still be able to have a say and suggestions on what’s going on? I had no idea this was happening until I saw the packet. It appears to me that there’s a committee going on and that’s met several times. But they haven’t consulted with us. And I’m. I’m floored.”
Frame then dropped the information the administration had somehow neglected to feature in its word salad: “And (to operate them for) only two years, the business owners have been asking for indefinitely because of the parking issue, and this was going to be the relief for the parking structure that we said that we can’t afford yet. We can afford trolleys.”
There it was. The trolley wasn’t a construction mitigation measure. It was a permanent parking solution — for the downtown — paid for in perpetuity by every taxpayer in Lake Geneva, from the Walmart on the outskirts to the manufacturing corridor on Edwards and Highway 120.
The council voted to continue the item and demand real numbers. For once, sanity prevailed. But the pressure will be back.
Ninety-Three Thousand Dollars for the Downtown Therapy Bill
While the trolley question at least survived to fight another day, the council’s next act went straight to the finish line. The consulting firm g.Moxie has been contracted — at $92,790, not including production costs — to help downtown businesses cope with the emotional and economic disruption of having their streets improved by the State of Wisconsin.
Read that again: ninety-three thousand dollars, plus, to help a self-funding improvement district get through the experience of receiving infrastructure upgrades they have not paid for.
Hoiland made the obvious point with the patience of a man who has made it several times before: “Again, I’ve said this before, I think it needs to be shared that the city and the residents shouldn’t have to pay all of this $93,000 because it’s 93, you know, plus plus because there’s, you know, you know, other factors. You know, if they have, you know. Anyway, so it’s plus plus. So we’re talking about encumbering the city.”
He laid out the geography of Lake Geneva’s actual economy with precision: “It’s the businesses who are not part of BID. And I would suggest that in the third district you already — the majority of the businesses in the city are located there. The majority of the jobs, the majority of the property taxes, the majority of the employment. The majority of the sales tax revenue is in the third district. All the grocery stores are there. All the manufacturing is there on an interchange down Edwards and 120. You’ve got entertainment, you’ve got hotels. So the BID is important, it’s an economic driver for the visitor economy in our city, it is not the economic driver for the city overall, that is the manufacturing the retail and the service businesses that are in other parts of the city. So we need to factor in that there is more than just downtown BID.”
Alderman Smith asked why someone else couldn’t bear the cost. Alderman Fesenmaier acknowledged that BID should probably write a check — “one would think that they would write a check without being asked” — but that the city needed to act anyway. Alderperson Yeager acknowledged the council couldn’t actually require BID to contribute. Powers and Stoodley fell in line. Ames noted there was money in the budget already.
Hoiland held his ground: “I’m opposed to just having this encumbered by the city.”
The vote: Fesenmaier, Yager, Ames, Frame, Powers, and Stoodley — yes. Hoiland and Smith — no. The downtown gets its therapy consultant on the public dime.
Free Parking Wednesday: A Gift to the Squeaky Wheel
The BID wasn’t done. The evening’s final act was a proposal to extend sticker-holder parking from three hours to all-day on Wednesdays — branded, with the particular shamelessness of resort-town boosterism, as “We Love Locals Wednesdays.” The people who will love it most are probably the employees of downtown businesses, who will now be able to park indefinitely, one day a week, without feeding the meters that fund city services.
The parking manager was honest to a fault about what she didn’t know: “I cannot honestly, definitively give you a number of how much revenue this is going to impact because I don’t know how many residents are going to take advantage of this.” She noted the last comprehensive parking study was conducted over a decade ago. She also noted — and this detail deserves its own paragraph — that the city’s parking is only at full capacity seven weekends per year, running at thirty to fifty percent utilization across the forty-one weeks the city charges for parking.
The parking manager had another data point from her social media monitoring that deserved a headline of its own: “Nobody parks downtown. You can go online and it’s ‘don’t shop downtown. Don’t go downtown, don’t eat downtown.'”
Alderperson Stoodley articulated something close to the actual problem: “The residents don’t feel that we’re doing as much for them. And I am one. My neighbors will always tell me I never go downtown. They don’t want my business downtown.” Alderperson Frame was blunter: residents feel shut out — “there’s nothing down there for me. It’s way too expensive.”
If the problem is that residents don’t go downtown because it’s too expensive, the solution is presumably not free parking. It’s affordable businesses. But that’s a conversation for another evening.
Hoiland saw the move clearly: “It is a financial decision. We are being asked to approve a program where staff explicitly — and you just did — states they cannot evaluate the financial impact. That alone should stop us. We manage a $2.7 million parking system that funds city services. We do not give away revenue without understanding the cost.”
He moved to continue for a proper cost-benefit analysis. The motion failed. Frame moved a one-year trial. It passed on the same six-to-two split that had governed the entire evening.
The Ghost of the Finance Committee
If there is a structural villain in this story — beyond the usual cast of insiders, cronies, and eager spenders — it is the Finance and License Regulation Committee, which Mayor Todd Krause successfully moved to eliminate at the last council meeting before the spring election. The FLR Committee was the body that would have reviewed the trolley proposal, the consultant contract, and the parking giveaway before they hit the full council agenda.
Without it, packets land Friday afternoon with two hours before city hall closes for the weekend, leaving alderpersons — and the public — scrambling to analyze complex financial commitments before Monday night. Hoiland noted it at least three times during the evening, the wound still fresh: “There’s no Finance Committee to review it. There’s no financial implication this involved. We have no idea what the financial implication is going to be for this.”
Frame confirmed the whiplash: “It just came out in the packet over the weekend and I have this. Thank you. But it just came out. And so we didn’t know what was going on.”
The committee that would have caught all of this — gone. The consultant that benefits from the missing oversight — hired. The trolleys that were never properly bid out — incoming. The parking revenue being given away — approved.
One last question hangs in the Lake Geneva night air like cigarette smoke at a campaign event held in a friendly restaurant: if the downtown Business Improvement District and Visit Lake Geneva — the Chamber of Commerce — exist to promote and sustain the visitor economy, why is it the people of Lake Geneva who keep picking up the tab?
Joel Hoiland has been asking. So far, the answer has been six votes to two.
Lake Geneva News covers Lake Geneva municipal government and Walworth County civic affairs. All quoted material is drawn from the public record of the April 13, 2026 Common Council meeting.
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