Lake Tomahawk disbands its park commission

Lake Tomahawk residents attending the town’s annual meeting on April 16 voted to disband the town’s parks commission.

Town chairman George DeMet told The Lakeland Times the primary reason for the disbandment was “no one wants to serve.”

“It was brought up by members of the park commission themselves,” he said. “The parks commission is supposed to have seven members and they haven’t filled it for a couple years. They’ve always been short and they just felt it wasn’t worth continuing. It was their decision but we had to vote on it at the annual meeting.”

From this point forward, issues with town parks will be handled at the town level. The town board will make all decisions pertaining to parks and the public boat landing and  the members of the town road department will determine when work is to be done. 

“Basically, the town crew had been doing a lot of the work anyhow,” DeMet said. “The biggest thing was the boat landing and taking the docks out and putting them in every year.”

He said one person employed by the town on a part-time basis as a parks worker will be now be under the direction of the town’s road foreman. 

DeMet wasn’t sure how many people were on the parks commission at the time the vote was taken.

“I know it wasn’t seven people,” he said. “I might have been four or five.”

Wake ordinance

Following the annual meeting, the town board, which has been looking at adopting an enhanced wake ordinance, continued its review of a draft enhanced wake ordinance from the town of Newbold. 

“We’re still reviewing it and moving forward with our ordinance,” DeMet said, adding that he expects the wake ordinance discussion to be on the agenda for the town board’s May meeting. “We did discuss that at some point, we’ll have to have a public hearing.”

DeMet’s position on enforcement of a Lake Tomahawk enhanced wake ordinance, despite no help expected in that regard from the Oneida County sheriff’s office or even the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, is similar to that of other town chairmen, including Dan Hess of Newbold and Joe Discianno of Winchester in Vilas County. 

Essentially, DeMet feels people will do the right thing. 

“There’s a lot of things where enforcement is always a question,” DeMet said. “I think the attitude we have in Lake Tomahawk is if we create the ordinance and people are aware of it and educated, they’ll do the right thing. It’s like saying to your kids ‘These are the rules but it’s OK if you don’t get caught.’ That doesn’t work. That’s not the way you raise your kids, right? So, we’re just putting it out there we don’t think it’s the right action to be taking on our lakes and we hope everybody respects that.”

Brian Jopek may be reached via email at [email protected].