Lake Geneva Council Overrides Krause Administration, Wins Agenda Rights — Mayor Retaliates

Council Wrests Back the Agenda — And Krause Kills the Future

LAKE GENEVA — The Todd Krause administration has a problem with democracy. Not the big sweeping kind they put on bumper stickers, but the granular, procedural, unglamorous kind — the kind where an elected alderperson can walk up to a committee chair and say put this on the agenda and actually have it happen.

That’s the battlefield at City Hall on March 23, 2026, where Council President Mary Jo Fesenmier brought forward an ordinance change giving any two alderpersons the power to place items on standing committees, boards and commissions. A simple mechanical fix to a simple mechanical problem. In a functioning government, this wouldn’t even require a vote.

But Lake Geneva is not a functioning government. It is a Todd Krause production.

The backstory is ugly and instructive. Alderperson Sherri Ames — then chair of the Finance, License and Regulation Committee, now mercifully repealed — simply refused. A proposed ordinance came before the Committee of the Whole, one that would have required all committees and boards to record and stream their meetings for the public. Ames wouldn’t put it on her committee’s agenda. Full stop. No vote. No debate. One person with a gavel and an ideological loyalty to the fourth floor just swallowed it whole.

The bitter irony is that Mayor Todd Krause, before and after his election, stated on multiple occasions that he supported recording and streaming public meetings. Then he won. Then he stopped recording the Tourism Commission, the Police and Fire Commission, and the Park Board. The campaign Krause and the governing Krause appear to be different organisms entirely, operating on different firmware.

So here we are. Fesenmier’s fix is on the table and the Krause administration has dispatched a memo to kill it. The memo argues, with the smooth confidence of someone who has never been politically sandbagged in a committee hearing, that council members already have all the tools they need. They can bring items to the full council for referral. They have the Committee of the Whole. Everything is fine. Go home.

Alderman Joel Hoiland read the memo and believed it, which is either touching or alarming depending on your tolerance for political naivety.

“I’m opposed, and I would concur with the city administrator’s comments in the memo where it says the members of the council already have the ability to place items on the council for referral to committees,” Hoiland announced, sounding like a man who has never watched a committee chair simply refuse to schedule something.

He continued: “If there is not the ability to get it placed on the committee agendas by the chair of the committee the committee of the whole offers an additional opportunity to have any item forward to any committee of city of the city including those items brought up during public comment so there are plenty of opportunities to present and get on agendas and you know I think it’s best that it go through a process and so that’s why I oppose it.”

Plenty of opportunities. The man said plenty of opportunities in a room full of people who watched Cheri Ames eat an entire ordinance with a fork and knife.

Hoiland then offered his vision of how a concerned council member should handle the situation: bring it to “the city administrator, the mayor, and the city clerk. They review it to see if it’s ready for prime time.” Read that again slowly. An elected alderperson, representing constituents with a legitimate policy concern, should first submit it to the executive branch for screening. The administration should function as a filter on what the legislative body is permitted to discuss. Joel Hoiland said this out loud at a public meeting and did not appear to notice what he had said.

Alderperson Cathy Stoody, who navigates most Krause-era votes with the aerodynamics of a weather vane in a strong prevailing wind, offered a softer objection. “We want to address the issues, but I think we should again do it in committee of the whole where we’re all here to all hear it at the same time.” Which sounds reasonable until you remember that, as co-sponsor Alderperson Cindy Yeager pointed out, issues come up “at COW first but COW can’t take any action.” The Committee of the Whole is a talking room. It is a place to discuss. It cannot act, amend, or advance. Directing every concern there is not a solution. It is a waiting room with no doctor.

Fesenmier, who has developed the seasoned patience of someone who has been governing alongside this administration for a while now, laid out the reality with surgical plainness.

“And sometimes in the past, we, as alders, have had trouble scheduling items on the standing committees. Which we have a right to do, but also on the citizen committees. So, we should not cede our responsibility to not elected committee chairs.”

She pressed further: “We have a responsibility to represent our residents, and when they have concerns, we should be able to take it directly to the committee that it concerns.”

And then, addressing the administration’s fantasy of cooperative, good-faith governance: “And I understand in an ideal world that if a council member goes up to a committee chair whether it’s a standing committee, whether it’s the administrator, the mayor, or a citizen committee, logic would tell you that person would be open to scheduling an item on.”

“And that is not our experience. Unfortunately, it’s not an ideal world.”

She is talking about Sherri Ames and the buried ordinance. She is talking about meetings that stopped being recorded the moment Krause took his oath. She is describing, in the careful diction of a council president who still has to work with these people on Monday, a systematic pattern of democratic obstruction dressed up in parliamentary procedure.

The ordinance passes 5 to 2. Voting yes: Fesenmier, Yeager, Ames, Linda Frame, JaNelle Powers. Voting no: Hoiland and Stoody. Brian Smith was absent.

The council has won the vote. The administration has taken note.

In what can only be described as an institutional middle finger delivered via agenda template, the Krause administration has since removed the standard line item from all committee and commission agendas — the one that invited members to recommend Future Agenda Items. The slot that existed precisely to allow committees to shape their own future work. Gone. Quietly deleted from the template.

The council just passed an ordinance guaranteeing alderpersons the right to get items onto agendas. The administration responded by removing the agenda slot those items would go into.

This is how it works in Lake Geneva. You win the vote. They change the form.

Lake Geneva News covers municipal government and civic affairs in Lake Geneva and Walworth County.