Mayor Todd Krause’s Lake Geneva City Hall Bullshit!

Authoritarian-in-the-Making Mayor Todd Krause

Somewhere between the lakefront cocktails and the closed-door committee meetings, the City of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin has begun watching a familiar civic horror show unfold: a two-bit power freak morphing into a full-blown authoritarian beast, tightening the reins like a half-crazed sheriff in a one-horse town, dead set on running the whole show from a smoke-filled back room. This is how the good ol’ boys feed at the public trough in Lake Geneva, and Mayor Todd Krause has taken to it like muscle memory.

When Todd Krause was elected mayor in 2023, he promised complete transparency. Record and live-stream ALL public meetings. He said it repeatedly, loudly, and with the confidence of a man who assumed nobody would bother writing it down.

Then he took office and did the exact opposite.

The first official act of the Krause administration was to stop recording and live-streaming the meetings he didn’t want the public to see. Before Krause, every meeting was recorded and streamed. That policy was put in place by former Mayor Charlene Kline during the pandemic and, crucially, she kept it after the pandemic ended. Charlene Kline was not one of the good ol’ boys.

At the May 27, 2025 City Council meeting, rookie Alderperson Joel Hoiland swallowed the Krause administration’s bullshit whole, slipping into an altered state of civic reality like a spawning sucker fish drifting happily upstream.

This mattered because the City of Lake Geneva has recordings of meetings going back to 2013, along with agendas and minutes dating to 2010. The question before the council was not whether to record meetings, but how many of those recordings should be retained and moved to the city’s new CMA CivicPlus website, and how many current meetings should remain available to the public.

Mayor Krause wanted only City Council and Plan Commission meetings preserved. Everything else could quietly vanish into the municipal oubliette.

City Clerk Lacy Reynolds, hired by Todd Krause, claimed, “we only have the capabilities to do what’s on the dashboard here, which is what’s in the code, Committee of the Whole, FLR, Council, Piers, Harbors, and Lakefront, Utility Commission, Plan Commission, Public Works, and Hillmoor” She later added, “Those are the only ones that we’ll be continuing to do at this point.”

That is Krause administration policy. And it’s bullshit. The city can record all meetings.

Alderman Joel Hoiland backed the Mayor, arguing that only City Council and Plan Commission meetings need to be retained and falsely claiming that state statute supports that view. In Hoiland’s universe, minutes alone are apparently sufficient for public oversight.

He doubled down by asserting, “all the others, there’s no action that takes place at the other committees other than city council and plan commission.”

That statement collapses under the lightest scrutiny. The Police and Fire Commission, Tourism Commission, and BID all have authority to spend money and enter contracts without City Council approval. Conveniently, those were the first meetings to stop being recorded after Krause took office. Recordings of Park Board meetings were also halted, just as Krause began maneuvering to sell off public park land to his good ol’ boys, a move that looks less like civic planning and more like private equity stripping a company for parts.

City Attorney Dan Draper reminded the council that the city “has public retention policy that states any record not covered by this or any regulation or law shall be retained for seven years. We have an ordinance that says it’s got to be 7 years.”

Enter City Council President Mary Jo Fesenmaier, who moved to archive up to seven years of recordings, back to May 28, 2018. She, along with Alderperson Cindy Yager, pointed out “that sometimes the minutes are very abbreviated across the board, and it will say referred to packet or something, you know, whatever.” They explained the recordings are necessary to determine what was “actually passed.”

The motion passed. Voting in favor were Council President Mary Jo Fesenmaier, Council Vice President Cindy Yager, and Alderpersons Sherri Ames, Linda Frame, JaNelle Powers, and Cathy Stoodley. Voting no were Brian Smith and Joel Hoiland.

When asked to comment on this article, Alderman Hoiland said, “The issue before the Common Council that evening was which existing meeting videos from prior years should be archived and made accessible as the City transitioned to a new video and archival vendor, and what level of cost the City should incur for that transition. It was fundamentally a cost-benefit and records-management decision, not a decision about whether meetings should be open or transparent.”

That defense wilts fast. The cost to move 750 or more videos was roughly $3,000. Annual hosting through CivicPlus was quoted at $5,000. The city’s general fund revenues exceed $19 million. Meanwhile, data storage costs continue to fall by 20 percent or more per year.

Alderman Hoiland is new to Wisconsin municipal government, and it shows. He appears to have accepted the Krause administration’s talking points wholesale, courtesy of City Hall’s well-oiled bullshit machine.

Among the things the turd machine has convinced him of:

1. “Several bodies, such as the Police and Fire Commission and Utility Commission, are governed by state statute and traditionally rely on minutes rather than recorded video, in part due to the nature of their work.”
   Hoiland sits on the Police and Fire Commission, which controls the largest portion of the city budget. The “nature of their work” does not exempt them from transparency.
   Here is a link to the Madison Police and Fire Commission meetings.
2. “As is standard municipal practice, appraisals are typically treated as confidential during active negotiation phases based on legal guidance.”
   That may be standard in Lake Geneva, but it is neither universal nor mandatory.
3. The city is recording all meetings.
   This has been repeatedly stated by Mayor Todd Krause over the past two years. It is not true.
4. The sale of any public land at Hillmoor Nature Park will be open and transparent.
   This was stated by Mayor Todd Krause at the Hillmoor Commission. History suggests skepticism is warranted.

A new politician should stay sharp and question everything, lest they find themselves doing the mayor’s dirty work. The same goes for city staff. As sources inside City Hall have bluntly stated: “Todd Krause is a liar.”

And looming over all of this is a larger fear gripping the good ol’ boys like a cold sweat at last call. Large language models are coming, and they make it dangerously easy to exhume old minutes, buried deals, and forgotten votes.

The past is getting searchable.
And the boys who built their power in the dark are suddenly terrified of the light.

Footnote: In March of 2024 City Council President Fesenmaier, proposed a ordinance to require all city hall meetings to be recorded, streamed, and made public. Alderperson Sherri Aimes the chairman of the Finance and Judaical Committee buried the ordinance. Sources at city hall report she is constantly in Mayor Krause’s office. She is up for reelection in April 2025. How much you want to bet Krause double crosses her and runs a good ol boy against her