The owners of Margaritaville have applied for a liquor permit for the resort.

According to the legal advertisement in The Vicksburg Post, the developer, through a company called 3.0 LLC, is seeking a package retailer permit for the business.

“It’s the owner of the property doing it,” Vicksburg Hotels LLC representative Greg Stewart said. “It’s (for) a restaurant, and it’s got a bar in the restaurant; it’s not a lounge.”

The resort is in the city’s leisure and recreation district, which allows people to take alcoholic beverages from one licensed business to another as long as the businesses are in the district.

The application comes as work continues on the resort, which is expected to open in April on the former Portofino Hotel property.

“Construction is still underway,” Stewart said.

Once completed, the resort will include the nine-story, 117-room hotel with suites and rooms, an indoor arcade, a restaurant and a coffee shop, fitness center and a recreation area called the “Coral Reef Water Playground.”

The lower half of the resort will contain the restaurants and the family entertainment center, which company officials said will include the latest in video and electronic games and other activities.

Company representatives filed plans for the pool with the community development department in August.

According to the plans, the pool with a waterslide will be built on the top level of the adjacent parking deck just north of the hotel, and will feature different depths of 3, 4 and 5 feet with a “splashdown” area for the slide, and a splash pad and children’s area in the center of the pool.

The waterslide takes people through a figure 8 as they move toward the pool.

Biloxi-based Vicksburg Hotel LLC bought the then-Grand Station hotel on July 28, 2013, with the intent of refurbishing it and opening a casino.

The Grand Station closed in 2012 amid bankruptcy. Vicksburg Hotels renamed the hotel the Portofino. Company officials announced in May 2017 the property would become a Margaritaville resort.

Harrah’s Casino operated at the site of the Portofino from 1993 until 2003, when it sold its Vicksburg property to Columbia Sussex.

The names on the casino and hotel changed to Horizon until the fall 2010, when Tropicana Entertainment, which was part of Columbia Sussex and operated Horizon, went bankrupt and closed the casino.

From 1993 until the Grand Station bankruptcy, the casino was located on a barge built to look like a riverboat that was moored in the Yazoo Diversion Canal next to the hotel and surrounded by a cofferdam. The former casino vessel was auctioned for scrap metal in April 2013 and hauled away.