[12/11/04] The Vicksburg-Warren School District will retain Davis Island property that had been claimed by a company as a chancellor has ended a four-year legal battle.

The VWSD’s request that Davis Island Land Company’s claim to about 95 acres of disputed school-district property be dismissed has been granted by Judge Marie Wilson, the Greenville-based chancery court judge for the district that includes Warren County.

Wilson deferred in an eight-page decision made public Thursday to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had ruled in October 2003 that a 10-year time limit under state law had expired before the company filed its claim.

The 5th Circuit upheld a federal district court ruling dismissing the company’s claim and Wilson said that that dismissal amounted to “a final judgment on the merits.” As such, it “bars further claims … based on the same cause of action,” she wrote.

The land company had nevertheless filed such a claim in Warren County Chancery Court on June 3. The district’s Vicksburg-based chancellor, Vicki Roach Barnes, recused herself from the case.

The disputed property was about 96 acres, surrounded by about 5,200 acres on the island that the company purchased in 1971.

The dispute over the boundary of the VWSD property arose at the end of a 99-year lease that the company assumed was about to expire in the late 1980s. A joint survey was made then, but the company disagreed with its results.

Rights to cut mature timber on the disputed land had also been sold to the Anderson-Tully Company for $101,045, and Wilson’s ruling means that Anderson-Tully can proceed to harvest designated trees there. The company had asked a Warren County Circuit Court judge for a stay of timber-cutting on the then-disputed property pending Wilson’s ruling.

The company has continued to lease hunting and fishing rights on the land based on the survey it disputed. The latest of three consecutive five-year leases pays the school district $2,848 annually for 417 acres.

The school district’s land is Section 16 property. The state constitution earmarks the income from such property for public schools. Section 16 land was expected to generate $1,227,724 of the school district’s $66,416,225 in budgeted revenue for the year, about 1.9 percent.

Davis Island is part of Warren County even though it is on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River. Land there is used mainly for hunting, fishing and timber-production.