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Ave Maria Town is not going to be a Catholic town. It's going to be open to everybody. Some people have suggested that its only going to be open for Catholics. That's ridiculous, of course, because we can't control that anyhow. It's part of Collier county. It's a super-large subdivision of Collier County."

Why am I still hung-up in Ann Arbor? Is that the best place in the country to put a school? You want it to be a national school where children from all over the country and all over the world. You don't want to build it where there's cold weather. Just because its [Ann Arbor] convenient for me and my family's there, that's where my business was and where my relatives and ancestors were. You go out to the graves and see Monaghans all over the place. My network was there. I'm selfish. What's the best place for the school? What's the best place for the church? And I didn't have to think about it. It's Naples. I didn't have to do a marketing study. I"ve been doing demographics of the whole world as a hobby. I knew where the best place in the country was for a school that would attract people from all over the country and all over the world. It's the hottest part of the hottest state - southwestern Florida. And so [garbled] I called Nick Healy up, the President of the College, who was scared to death to talk about this idea - ya' know people don't like to move. And so I said to Nick who was scared "What do you think about moving the campus to Florida?" And I held my breath and he said "That's a GREAT idea!"

Meanwhile I tried to find a permanent location and I found a piece of property much bigger and better than anything I thought I'd find. It's actual where Heritage Bay is now [garbled]. It was 4 sections of land, twenty-six hundred acres and [garbled]. But I figured its a good investment to build the university and the other land around it was going to be more valuable and that'd be a nice endowment for the university and better than putting money in the bank. So we had a deal that was a little more expensive than I wanted to pay, but everything goes up in Naples until recently. A hundred twenty million dollars cold cash. And we were just about ready to put down the money, the hard money, and somebody thought they saw an eagle on the property. [crowd responds] You know about that. If there's an eagle on the property you can forget about it. An eagles nest. And so we asked for [garbled] for another week from the seller. They reluctantly gave it to us. And we went out with our environmentalist to study. And during that period of time, I got a call from Baron Collier company, Paul Marinelli. And said, "How'd ya' like some free land for your school?" I'll give you all the land you need. He told me where it was, and I thought well it's a little far out. But he wanted to build a town around it and I figured it's liable to fill-in anyhow the way things are growing. And so, after thinking about it [garbled], I accepted it. And we ended-up with an arrangement where we got 900 acres of land for the school. We have there's a total of 10,800 acres, and the other ninety-nine hundred acres we bought 50% of. So, in effect, the university owns 50% of ninety-nine hundred acres.

Update 2/2/07 :

We’re totally assured that we’re going to open (the university) on time

There’s no way someone could accuse me of being a billionaire anymore. I plan to die broke, and I’ve had thousands of people offer to help me.

By the end of Phase 1, I’m going to be pretty much tapped out for a while.

I didn’t want Ave Maria to become a degree factory, I wanted Ave Maria to become a saint factory.

When I was at Dominos we had a 30 minute guarantee. I’ve heard that 75 percent of Catholic kids stop going to Mass on Sunday when they leave home, (so) I thought about putting a guarantee on an Ave Maria education. Parents, grandparents, if you send you’re children to Ave Maria, I’ll guarantee they go to Mass on Sunday.