Local restaurant owner David Day was approved Monday to fill a seat on the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau vacant since July.

The appointment by District 4 Supervisor Carl Flanders was approved on a 4-1 vote of supervisors.

Day, 48, an Indiana native and the operator of Horseface Harry’s on Halls Ferry Road and Klondyke on North Washington Street, told supervisors he was energetic about the appointment despite the board’s recent, fractious past.

&#8220I’m very positive about Vicksburg,” Day said. &#8220The real goal we should all be striving to attain is an increase in tourist count.”

Figures from the tourism promotion board showed 50,469 visitors to Vicksburg in 2006, down 12 percent from 2005.

The seat became vacant when attorney Bobby Bailess declined another term upon his becoming president of the Mississippi Bar Association in July. Flanders originally presented Duff Green Mansion owner Harry Sharp as his choice, but questions over his financial arrangement with the VCVB that involved the state Ethics Commission in its resolution quashed his interest in the position. Sharp withdrew his name from consideration earlier this month.

The matter concerned downtown office space Sharp had leased to the VCVB staff following the January 2006 collapse of the former Thomas Furniture building on Clay Street, located in the same block as VCVB offices.

Sharp was being paid at 15 percent of the market value for a five-month period, then, according to Sharp, terms were to be renegotiated. An advisory opinion from the state ethics panel, however, affirmed in January it would be unethical for Sharp to receive any payment from VCVB funds.

The lone dissenter was District 2 Supervisor William Banks, who immediately offered up the name of former city appointee Bobbie Bingham Morrow to fill his appointment on the VCVB, vacant since August.

It was the third time Banks has tried to nominate Morrow, who was not re-nominated by the City of Vicksburg at the end of her term in 2006. For the third time, it failed on a 3-2 vote, with only District 3 Supervisor Charles Selmon supporting Banks’ choice.

Soon after the first vote by the county board on Morrow failed, an adviser opinion from the Attorney General’s Office upheld any choice by supervisors on the VCVB must be approved by a full majority of the board and not be a directive by an individual supervisor.

Since then, Banks has steadfastly refused to nominate another candidate.