$92K Consultant. One Dead Committee. Zero Recordings.
Lake Geneva City Council · March 9, 2026 · LakeGenevaNews.com
By the time the meeting came to order, City Hall had taken on the atmosphere of a municipal soup kitchen for the well-heeled. Business groups drifted through the chamber doors in orderly procession, caps metaphorically in hand, eyes fixed on the taxpayer’s wallet as if it were another public utility waiting to be metered and billed.
The usual downtown delegation assembled at the public begging bowl: Tom Keefe, commercial property owner; Anthony Sylvester, downtown business owner currently running against Sherri Ames for a council seat in April; representatives from the Lake Geneva Business Improvement District; Alexandria Benanti, the well-compensated executive director of said BID; and Nancy Douglas, general manager of WLKG local radio.
Their pitch was almost admirably simple: they want taxpayers to hand over $92,000 for a communications consultant to shepherd downtown merchants through the supposedly catastrophic ordeal of Highway 50 being resurfaced through the old downtown.
The detail worth savoring is the timing. The project doesn’t begin until 2027–2028. But panic, like summer tourism, is a year-round industry in Lake Geneva. The pitch boiled down to funding a message-coordinator who could keep the various tourism and business groups singing from the same hymnal.
As Keefe framed it, the consultant would help communicate:
“With a common voice so information could be pushed down to all of our local groups, whether it’s Visit or BID or some of the other groups, so that they can put their spin on.”
Spin, of course, requires lubrication. Ninety-two thousand dollars of it, apparently.
The Committee That Vanished
Meanwhile, in a maneuver that would make a Vegas card shark blink, the Krause administration eliminated the Finance, Licensing and Regulation Committee (FLR) as a functioning municipal body.
They moved fast. The council bypassed the traditional slow crawl of government procedure and leapfrogged straight from first reading to second and final reading in the same session. The vote passed with only Aldermen Joel Hoiland and Brian Smith dissenting.
The justification was two-pronged: the city’s strategic plan remains unfinished, and council members receive agenda materials so late there’s no realistic way to review them before being asked to vote.
“It is on Friday at about 5:00. We get the agenda. And we have until now 6:00 on Monday. So, City Hall is closed on Saturday and Sunday, so there’s no staff that we can speak with if we have questions about any of the agenda items.”
The peril of governing by deadline was acknowledged plainly:
“That’s a dangerous position because things can happen quick when in fact, you know, it probably should have taken some time.”
This is more than a scheduling nuisance. By law, agendas must be posted 24 hours before meetings. In practice, they materialize at 5 PM on Friday — precisely when City Hall locks its doors for the weekend. Council President Mary Jo Fesenmaier captured the logistical theater of it:
“When the agendas are published on Friday at 5:00 PM, there’s no one around to ask — if I’m working on Monday, which a lot of you are, then when do I call the staff to ask a question?”
Those concerns duly noted, the council voted to eliminate the committee in one clean motion.
Voting Yes: Mary Jo Fesenmaier, Cindy Yager, Sherri Ames, Linda Frame, JaNelle Powers, Cathy Stoodley
Voting No: Joel Hoiland, Brian Smith
The $92,000 Question
Local nonprofit tourism and business groups — already heavily subsidized through room-tax funding — were asking taxpayers to finance a communications coordinator for the Highway 50 construction period.
Alderman Hoiland articulated the obvious:
“The residents are not happy about the fact that they’re having to pick up, I think, $92,000 or whatever that number is over a three-year period.”
He also pressed a larger point about the city’s tourism economy. Lake Geneva collects roughly $2.5 million annually in room tax:
- 70% flows to tourism promotion
- 51% of that goes directly to the Lake Geneva Chamber of Commerce (operating as Visit Lake Geneva)
- The remainder distributes through the Tourism Commission’s grant programs
- Only 30% stays with the city — theoretically to offset the costs industrial-scale tourism imposes on residents
Alderperson Powers cut to the bone:
“Why are we the only ones paying?”
City Administrator David Nord offered a defense, albeit a tepid one:
“There is an argument that can be made for that because if they can’t get here and they don’t know how to get here, we can’t put their head in the bed.”
That logic pointed toward the Tourism Commission’s roughly $1 million annual pool as a potential funding source. Which is when things got interesting.
The Gatekeeper of the Tourism Treasury
This is where Council President Fesenmaier — the acknowledged oracle of tourism cash, the gatekeeper of every grant, the de facto Tourism Cash Princess of Lake Geneva — put her foot down. She was not interested in the Tourism Commission’s pot of money going anywhere near this. She suggested the Wisconsin Department of Transportation should pay, and recommended everyone write their state representative. Then she argued that the city’s 30 percent share of room tax revenue — the modest slice retained to offset the costs of industrial-scale tourism on city infrastructure and services — already counted as a contribution. “The tourism money is already in there helping pay,” she said.
“We already have 30% mixed in. So the tourism money is already in there helping pay.”
The administration noted the city has already budgeted Highway 50-related expenses and may need to borrow additional funds in 2027 and 2028. The council voted yes anyway.
Voting Yes: Mary Jo Fesenmaier, Cindy Yager, Sherri Ames, Linda Frame, JaNelle Powers, Cathy Stoodley
Voting No: Joel Hoiland, Brian Smith
Firefighters Go Union
The Lake Geneva Firefighters Union requested council authorization to affiliate with the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), itself affiliated with the AFL-CIO — the largest federation of labor unions in the country.
The council approved. Unanimously.
Who Gets to Put Things on the Agenda?
A third front opened over whether two alderpersons should be able to place items directly on a committee agenda without routing them through the mayor’s office first. The proposal came from Alderpersons Yager and Fesenmaier, who identified a mismatch between what the ordinance actually says and what the official request form requires.
“There’s a discrepancy between what’s in the ordinance, which requires two alder signatures, and the form.”
Their argument: sending proposals straight to committees would increase public participation, since residents could address the relevant committee members directly rather than watching proposals disappear into administrative pre-screening.
City Clerk Lana, given floor time by Mayor Todd Krause, pushed back — her position being that all concerns should be filtered through city staff first.
“You just have to bring it to staff to get it on the council agenda.”
Alderperson Ames backed the clerk.
The Streaming Ordinance That Died Quietly
That debate carried echoes of a transparency fight from last year. In 2025, Alderperson Fesenmaier brought forward a draft ordinance that would have required all city meetings to be live-streamed, recorded, and posted to the city website. The proposal moved from the Committee of the Whole to the Finance Committee.
The context matters. After Mayor Todd Krause took office, the city stopped recording and streaming all meetings — a reversal from the practices of former Mayor Charlene Kline, under whom recordings were routine. This shift occurred despite Krause’s repeated pre- and post-election assurances that “all meetings would be recorded.”
When the transparency ordinance landed in the Finance Committee, it went nowhere. Committee chair Sherri Ames declined to place it on the agenda. Without a hearing or a vote, the measure quietly expired. Fesenmaier later noted, with understated precision:
“I haven’t seen too many times where a committee doesn’t recommend something. Sometimes FLR will do that.”
Hoiland argued for a clearer path for council members to bring proposals forward:
“Anybody should be able to put forward a proposal to do something, whatever it might be. And I agree it should take two council members as sponsors. That’s not a novel idea. You know, in legislatures, be it Wisconsin or any other state.”
What Happens Next
Rather than resolve the ordinance question, the council voted to send the matter to the city attorney for review. It will return at the March 23 city council meeting.
And so the machinery of Lake Geneva government grinds forward. Consultants line up. Committees vanish. Tourism money flows like spring runoff. Meetings go unrecorded. Ordinances expire in committee without a vote.
And the taxpayer remains the quiet figure in the back row — watching the whole spectacle unspool beneath the fluorescent lights of City Hall, paying for spin they were never asked to approve, and transparency they were never offered.
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