Citizens say public land, water risked by Sturgeon Bay hotel

[Updated from 8/29] The list gets longer.

To citizen activists in Sheboygan County, Waukesha County, Milwaukee County, Adams County, Kewaunee County, Dane County, La Crosse County, Northwest Wisconsin near Lake Superior and Western Wisconsin towards the Mississippi River fighting to protect the water and their rights to it - - and where in the heck is the state DNR?, oh wait, never mind - - now add folks taking action and responsibility in Door County.

They are organizing and spending their own money, hoping to stop developers and local government from embarking on a waterfront construction project that could put public land and water, and the state's principal water protection law - - the Public Trust Doctrine - - at risk, media report:

A newly-formed group opposed to a controversial Sturgeon Bay waterfront hotel hopes to raise $80,000 to stop the project...claiming that the location of the proposed hotel is on public land.

Updates - - Some background by an environmental legal group, and also a longer story with in the Green Bay Press Gazette:

Tensions over the city of Sturgeon Bay’s west waterfront Planned Unit Development and the proposed Lindgren Hotel are rising to the point of legal action.

Different locale - - Door County - - and different players - - The Friends of the Sturgeon Bay Waterfront - - and a different obstacle - - a hotel, not an iron mine, or a 26,000-pig farm, or industrial-scale cattle feeding and aerial manure spraying, or runaway sand mining, or an insurance company vying for control of a Milwaukee downtown lake bluff park, or a golf course that would include some state park land along Lake Michigan near Sheboygan, or an expanded north-south pipeline to carry more tar sand oil  - - but the same story in regressive Wisconsin:

Government enabling corporate interests to put the public's ownership and appreciation of water at risk, leaving citizens to bear the cost of keeping open and unspoiled what they already own.

We'll keep an eye on this project, and the others, and efforts to put justice in the phrase "environmental justice" when water is part of the conversation.