Any new developer of 480 acres of former Vicksburg Chemical property off Warrenton Road will have to pay delinquent taxes as Warren County supervisors are no longer in a forgiving mood.

Including late fees, taxes owed to the City of Vicksburg and Warren County total $62,809.95 for 2007.

Vicksburg officials agreed Friday to purchase the land associated with the Mississippi Bluffs casino project, on hold since principal developer Paul Bunge died in December in Colorado. As part of its 2005 agreement with the development, the city has a year to land a private developer to pick up where Bunge left off or build and finance a golf course with public money.

Mayor Laurence Leyens expressed confidence Tuesday a development group will present the city with a proposal to either build the casino or the golf course, downplaying the outstanding taxes and a forced sale for taxes owed if the amount due isn’t paid.

“I’m not real concerned about it,” Leyens said. “We should have a proposal shortly.”

Until just weeks before his death, Bunge was in extensive talks with Las Vegas-based American Gaming Enterprises about investing into the gaming side of the $190 million project to include an 18-hole golf course planned by golf legend Hale Irwin’s design firm as well as retail and residential development. AGE, however, dropped out of the bid and formed a joint venture with Lane Company to build a riverfront casino in Natchez.

‘I’m not real concerned about it. We should have a proposal shortly.’LAURENCE LEYENSMAYORIn January 2007, the project had its site approved to build a facility atop pilings on the Mississippi River. Its next step toward licensing would have been approval of its financing by the Mississippi Gaming Commission to become either the sixth or seventh casino in Vicksburg.

The land is south of the river bridges on both sides of Warrenton Road. It’s hills and hollows long served as a bufffer for chemical plant operations that started on a portion of the tract in the 1950s. Ownership changes started when the plant’s corporate parent at the time went bankrupt in 2002 and as part of the breakup deeded the land to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. The state agency then deeded the land to Mississippi Bluffs LLC in 2006 with the condition developers would clean up about 20 acres of contaminated property separate from the casino site on which the chemical plant operated. Bunge had planned a retail strip in that section.

A hitch in the state transfer was $200,000 in taxes owed to local governments, including Warren County, which also collects the school levy. During that time, legal counsel for Harcros Chemicals Inc. had lobbied the board, including Trudy Fisher, a partner with Jackson law firm Brunini, Grantham, Grower & Hewes, to abandon the tax claim. Kansas City-based Harcros established a Vicksburg location on the site in September 2006.

Fisher was appointed executive director of MDEQ in January 2007 and the law firm has handled the casino development’s legal matters since Bunge’s death.

In March 2006, supervisors OK’d such an arrangement citing state law allowing the board to go back one year to void an assessed value. Board President Richard George, who joined a unanimous vote to forgive the $200,000, said Tuesday the basis for the action was because state environmental regulators had not presented a protest showing updated information because the plant was no longer there.

“We just bowed out of the court fight,” George said, referencing the bankruptcy court action that commenced in 2004. Taxes assessed for 2000 to 2003 were forgiven when the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York allowed the company to abandon the site to the ownership of the state environmental agency.

George doubted any new action by supervisors to forgive taxes to assist a casino or a golf course project. “You’d be hard-pressed to find people who are out working and paying taxes who’d favor that,” George said.

If developed, a casino project would be nearest the Riverwalk hotel, restaurant and casino complex under construction and expected to open in November as the city’s fifth casino. Riverwalk is immediately north of the Rainbow complex, which opened in 1994 as the last of the four original casino developments.

Lakes Entertainment also has a development plan on the drawing board. It would be the city’s southernmost, located on the Mississippi River below the Baxter-Wilson Steam Electric Plant.