Lake district nullifies annual meeting
By Erik Buchinger
The Pigeon Lake Protection and Rehabilitation District officially nullified its Oct. 16 annual meeting.
“Inadvertently, notice was not provided as required by statute,” said attorney Keith Steckbauer, who was hired to represent the board. “Therefore, I suggested there be a resolution made that says all actions taken at the Oct. 16, 2018 meeting as determined by the board to be a nullity.”
In addition to not properly notifying the public of the $2 million dredging project, which had been approved at that meeting, the Waupaca County map that indicates who resides in the lake district was out of date. This has since been corrected.
The board unanimously approved a resolution to nullify the Oct. 16 meeting on Nov. 28.
The election of Dennis Krueger as the lake district president and the borrowing resolutions to dredge the lake are no longer binding, Steckbauer said.
The board said there are no plans in regards to a new proposal, but one could appear on a future agenda.
The lake district will hold its annual meeting Wednesday, Dec. 19 at 6 p.m. at Clintonville’s Fox Valley Technical College.
At the Oct. 16 meeting, residents voted 85-71 to dredge Pigeon Lake.
However, the public was not properly informed of the meeting beforehand. The lake district published a Class 2 notice for the meeting in the newspaper 14 days beforehand but did not mail letters to every impacted property owner. Some residents received their letters in the mail the day of the meeting.
“Basically it’s saying if we put it in the [newspaper] and you live there, you have an obligation to see what’s in the paper and that should notify you,” Steckbauer said at a meeting on Nov. 14. “You also have to still then write letters to everyone who owns property.”
Steckbauer said he did not blame the board for misunderstanding the statute due to its uniqueness, calling it “a bizarre process.”
During the Nov. 14 meeting, Steckbauer notified the public that the county was not properly updating the records as to who is in the district.
“Basically what happened is at that meeting, there were some people invited, knew about it and saw the notices that were probably not lawfully able to vote,” Steckbauer said. “At the same token, there were probably people who should have been notified and were not.”