Matthew Sagorac is ready to walk away from what some claim is the soul of Egg Harbor.

Sagorac is the owner of a lovely piece of property right on Green Bay, upon which sits the husk of what once was one of the finest lodges in Door County.

At one time, Sagorac wanted to tear down what a local fire inspector and engineer say is now an unredeemable firetrap to make way for homes, one of them for him and his family. His request awaits a hearing before the Egg Harbor Zoning Board of Appeals.

Now, he says, he’d rather not. Whipsawed by a public outcry that has included verbal attacks on his wife and on his children, who attend school in the Gibraltar Area School District, Sagorac says he has no intention of having the people of Egg Harbor for neighbors.

“If I would have known what was going to happen, we never would have done it,” Sagorac told the Badger Institute this week. “We never expected the severity, the extremism directed at us personally and me, professionally. It’s just not worth it.”

A family’s huge bet on bettering the lives of thousands of Milwaukee children is moving a step closer to launch as St. Augustine Preparatory School starts taking names for its $104 million north campus in Glendale.

The project takes place in a time of rising parental demand for better options in Milwaukee. Even as the number of school-age children in Wisconsin fell, attendance at independent schools via the state’s parental choice program rose 6.9 percent last year.

This week, St. Marcus Lutheran School, long a mainstay on Milwaukee’s north side, opened a $25 million expansion to accommodate 200 more students.

Further north, it was just two years ago that the philanthropists behind St. Augustine, Gus Ramirez and his family foundation, announced they would buy the campus of suddenly-closed Cardinal Stritch University and convert it into a second location for Aug Prep.

School leaders are now far enough along on construction to start showing it off to prospective students with “hard hat” tours on Saturday morning and a promise to open the doors for good by August of 2026.

Among Wisconsin’s most populous counties, Dane County pays the highest interest on government debt on a per-resident basis, while St. Croix County’s government has the most debt per resident, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

The state agency latest annual report on county and municipal finances is based on data from 2023.

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State agencies have begun their rush through a regulatory back door that will almost certainly cost owners of businesses large and small in Wisconsin tens of millions of dollars.

Exhibit A: a proposal by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection to increase the fee for licensing a livestock market from $420 to $7,430.

According to the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission, July has been the most dangerous month of the year for homicides (185 victims) and non-fatal shootings (832 victims) since the project began tracking data in 2016.

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