“The Downtown Lake Geneva Shakedown”

How Two Publicly Funded Organizations Convinced City Hall to Hire a Third One

March 5,2026 Lake Geneva, Wisconsin

Here we go again, you poor bastards.

Todd Krause’s administration — that perpetually sunburned junta of municipal mediocrity — has once again attempted to perform the oldest trick in the civic playbook: pick the pockets of the residents while the downtown darlings watch from their boutique windows, sipping something artisanal and pretending they didn’t just reach elbow-deep into the public cookie jar.

The downtown darlings, forever cushioned by civic pillow forts, habitually stretching their hands into the public purse as if it were their own personal cookie jar.

Let’s be absolutely clear about the existing arrangement, because clarity is the first casualty in any Lake Geneva budget discussion. The Business Improvement District (BID) — that gleaming monument to commercial self-interest dressed in the drag of civic virtue — already feeds at the public trough via a special assessment on all downtown real estate. They pulled in $231,086 in 2020 alone. Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce, operating under its tourist-friendly alias “Visit Lake Geneva,” received $819,213 in 2024 from the Lake Geneva Tourism Commission — a body that hoovers up room tax revenue like a Dyson on wall-to-wall carpet — against total revenues of $3,403,418.

These people are not starving. These people are not suffering. These people are the last entities on the surface of this spinning rock that require additional taxpayer subsidy.

And yet — and yet — here comes the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s Highway 50 reconstruction project, slated to claw up the downtown pavement for two full years in 2027 and 2028, and you would think from the collective hysteria emanating from the BID and Visit that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had just reserved a parking spot on Broad Street. Hard hat is viewed as an omen of economic apocalypse.

They’re practically breaking out in theatrical conniptions, fretting that the downtown facelift might smudge their delicate commercial complexions.

Enter Tom Keefe, commercial property owner, Williams Bay resident, and apparently the designated human vessel for the anxieties of Deanna Goodwin from Visit Lake Geneva and Alex Benanti from the BID — two people apparently so stricken by the approaching construction that they couldn’t attend the meeting themselves and sent this poor man to do their hand-wringing for them. Tom pointed out that “they basically wanted me to express that they feel that it is important to hire this firm to help with this project while they are communication experts in their respective areas. They are not communication experts when it comes to doing a road project.”

Fair enough, Tom. Nobody’s asking them to operate a jackhammer.

But what they ARE asking — what they are absolutely, shamelessly, magnificently asking — is for the residents of Lake Geneva to spend $92,790 from the city’s general fund on a consulting firm called g.moxie, which will “develop a comprehensive single voice communication plan focused on visitors, businesses, and residents. The plan will emphasize clarity, consistency, and ‘Open for Business’ messaging.”

Ninety-two thousand, seven hundred and ninety dollars.

For a communications plan.

In a city that has Google Maps.

The scope of this beautiful grift, which g.moxie apparently composed in a fever dream of consulting-firm jargon, involves: a Construction Impact Assessment, an Access Solutions & Mitigation Strategies package, temporary access routes, detour strategies, pedestrian and vehicular wayfinding recommendations, strategies to maintain business visibility, coordination of events and peak visitor periods, and — I swear to you this is real — “Vibe and trolley usage.”

Vibe. They put vibe in a municipal contract.

City Administrator David De Angelis — a man apparently constitutionally incapable of understatement — was good enough to point out that more money than the $92K may be required, but the council would have to approve with an amendment. The meter, in other words, has not yet been installed. This is merely the opening bid.

The council, to its occasional credit, was not entirely asleep at the wheel. Alderperson Linda Frame stared into the abyss of this proposal and said what needed saying: “I’m concerned about this one in the fact that we have had one, two, three meetings, city meetings already, or public meetings rather, with the mayor, administrator, police, fire, I’m having a hard time understanding why we, well, in the fact that we do need communication for the Highway 50, which we’re getting, why we need to pay another yet another consulting firm to do the communication for the city of Lake Geneva when we’ve got the city of Lake Geneva administration doing it very well for us right now. So I am not for this at all, spending another $92,000, $93,000 for a consulting group.”

Frame then added, apparently for clarification, that “this came out of the group that I’ve worked with for the last year and a half for Highway 50.”

Alderman Joel Hoiland, treading more carefully in that diplomatic swamp that aldermen favor when they want to object to something without fully committing to the objection, requested that “city staff be directed to prepare and present a communications execution strategy to accompany the GMOXI Wisconsin 50 public engagement proposal, clearly identifying execution responsibilities between consultant, city staff, and partner organizations.”

Translation: Who exactly is doing what for ninety-two thousand dollars? A fair question. A maddeningly necessary question. The kind of question that should not need to be asked but must be asked because we have apparently entered a dimension where the BID and Visit — two organizations whose entire reason for existing is marketing — are outsourcing their marketing panic to a third firm and billing the residents.

The administration frames this as helping residents know where to go during construction. But isn’t that — and I ask this with genuine philosophical curiosity — isn’t that precisely what the BID and Visit are for? When it comes to city hall and the downtown business scene, even the tiniest crack in the sidewalk is treated like a tectonic shift. They’ve got this knack for inflating every minor disruption into an impending cataclysm.

It is also worth noting — and this is crucial demographic intelligence that the downtown establishment would prefer you forget — that 80% of Lake Geneva residents do not shop downtown. They shop in the shopping centers along Edwards Blvd. and Sheridan Springs Rd. You want proof? Watch where the Simple Food Group is moving. It is not moving toward the lake.

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And now — because no dispatch from this strange municipal theater would be complete without a moment of genuine grace — let us turn to the Lake Geneva Tourism Commission meeting of October 13th, 2025.

Luke Gygax, president and founder of GaryCon, son of the immortal Gary Gygax who gave the world Dungeons & Dragons, came hat in hand requesting $12,000 for shuttle buses. The logistics were elegant in their simplicity: Grand Geneva Resort, which sits outside the city limits and contributes precisely zero to the Tourism Commission’s revenue pool, hosts GaryCon, but many attendees stay in Lake Geneva hotels. The shuttle would connect them to the festivities while sparing them the ordeal of downtown traffic and shopping downtown. The commission awarded the full amount, unanimously. GaryCon runs March 19th through the 22nd.

I had the opportunity to participate in a couple of D&D sessions with Dungeon Master Gary himself in the 1970s. It was a shared mental journey — expanding imagination, embracing alternate identities, building worlds. It was a time of pushing boundaries with a roll of the dice. A real local celebrity. Too bad it is now not held in Lake Geneva.

There is something almost unbearably poignant about that. The man who taught a generation to conjure entire universes from imagination and a handful of polyhedral dice — his legacy now requiring shuttle buses because the city that claims him can’t quite hold the thing he built.

Meanwhile, downtown Lake Geneva debates vibes.

Roll for wisdom. The DC is high.

LakeGenevaNews.com — Local News for Lake Geneva, Wisconsin