By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Burnt by Unlearnt
“We learn from history that we don’t learn from history,” German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote in 1837. Less than a century later Adolf Hitler was führer there.
We learned the same nothing here last year too, but 2025 will be different. Right?
For instance:
- Saugatuck City Council members who bewail divisiveness will act in perfect harmony from hereon
- North Shores of Saugatuck and Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance leaders will while lawyers from each file for bankruptcy.
- The Allegan County Road Commission, urged to “get off their carcasses” and remove dead deer from beside Blue Star Highway, will say, “Of course that’s our job. We’ll get on it right away!”
- Native wildlife will arrange a harvest to reduce the invasive human population.
- Now SDABA’s dead, tri-community merchants will set aside differences and form a unified chamber of commerce in its place.
- Douglas will complete cleaning up the old Haworth site and sell it for a profit to a developer planning “affordable housing” there.
- No Saugatuck City Manager who goes AWOL for three weeks without explanation will be handed a $100,000 departure bonus. Nor will rumors spread in local or Lansing bars about where he went.
- Former Saugatuck mayors will bless the city council majority for its due diligence. No more grown-up fights over kids’ playgrounds will ensue.
- Want to donate $130,000 to build public trails on 170 acres Saugatuck owns but has rarely used for 88 years? Who could object to that?
- Longtime mainstays like Saugatuck city treasurer Peter Stanislawski, Laketown Township manager Al Meshkin, Button Gallery owner Arthur Frederick and the Cook Park willow will remain forever.
- Douglas can count on Ferry Street infrastructure to hold up too. If it doesn’t, neighbor Saugatuck — which has many homes and tourist attractions reached by Ferry — will be offer no end of financial help.
- Consolidate local governments? Forget it! We need the added costs of administrative redundancy. Look how combining public schools, the library, Interurban, fire department and so on have not worked out.
- The Kalamazoo Lake Harbor Authority will continue being a gamechanger here.
- “Short-term rental caps? We’re all for them!” Saugatuck City Council members will unanimously agree.
- Tri-Community wildlife will form a committee to cull the invasive human population.
- What do you mean staging interviews for a new Saugatuck city manager or replacement council member are a dog-and-pony show if a council majority has predetermined who they’ll pick?
- When was the last time the Saugatuck school board named its high school principal the district’s next superintendent? The last time, you say?
- Oval Beach users will heed Lake Michigan E. Coli warnings no matter how hot it gets outside.
- Saugatuck will bring back Venetian Fest laser light shows by popular demand.
- The annual Saugatuck-Douglas Labor Day Bridge Walk is too important to let heightened safety standards stand in its way.
- Past years’ Douglas land purchases — such as the former Haworth site, Point Pleasant Marina and two projected public works sites later rejected by the public — will sell for enough to fund moving city hall and the police station into the newly-bought old hospital at 415 Wiley Road.
- Residents will welcome moving out of the old, mid-1800s built downtown hall plus pay millions to buy and renovate it for high-tech purposes.
- Laketown Township’s new board majority won’t repeat mistakes its Ottawa Impact forebears made.
- Political rivals will never file state election law complaints against former Saugatuck mayor Garnet Lewis. Nor will they fail to throw out the bums they complain about come November.
- What? You think not everyone thinks that way?
