Vicksburg Bridge Commissioner Hugh “Winky” Freeman has resigned his seat as District 4’s appointee on the paid management board, ending weeks of speculation.

Freeman said the state Ethics Commission’s firm position on potential conflicts of interest by his continued service on the board weighed heavily in his decision. In a letter forwarded to commission chairman Robert Moss, Freeman said he wanted to “eliminate any perception of impropriety on behalf of the Warren County Board of Supervisors, the Vicksburg Bridge Commission and myself.”

When reached, Moss described Freeman as an asset to the commission and said his knowledge of the railroad industry will be missed.

“I’m real disappointed,” Moss said. “I think he’s been an honest, independent commissioner.”

Freeman, 56, is a risk management official with Canadian National Railway. He had served on the five-member commission responsible for maintaining the old U.S. 80 bridge across the Mississippi River since 1999.

His employer, the parent company of Illinois Central Railway, frequently interchanges rail cars with the bridge’s contract rail customer, Kansas City Southern Railway. State ethics officials said his ties to the industry could eventually violate state law forbidding public officials from having an interest in active contracts, such as the commission’s per-car tolls billed to KCS.

Freeman said there was no pressure from CNR to step down. “(CNR) had absolutely nothing to do with it,” he said.

A majority of supervisors and commissioners had no problem with Freeman’s service on the board, which comes with a five-year appointment by supervisors and a monthly stipend of $391.62, plus insurance and pension benefits. After receiving the opinion, supervisors demurred, deciding not to take any action on the state panel’s finding there was a potential conflict of interest.

Earlier this month, District 4 Supervisor Carl Flanders submitted, on his own, a reconstituted request to ethics officials which asked the commission to reconsider its opinion because tolls charged by Warren County for crossing the bridge are collected from KCS and not other companies with which they do business. A motion to send a request on behalf of the full board failed 3-2.

Flanders said Monday he would put off a decision on filling the seat until after the Nov. 6 general election.

“It is the prudent thing to do,” Flanders said.

The term on the District 4 appointee expires in 2009.

Ethics Commission officials were asked to examine Freeman’s role on the board by District 3 Supervisor Charles Selmon in response to a letter from a citizen. When reached Monday, the citizen, Henry L. Hunter, said he works in janitorial services and had absorbed details on the issue from acquaintances in the railroad industry.

Selmon, who had appointed Freeman to an earlier stint in the commission but did not renominate him, said Monday he would renominate commissioner Ray Wade to the board before the end of the year. Wade, a rail industry retiree, is in the final year of his appointment.

Supervisors take turns making appointments to the five-member commission. Other members are District 5 appointee Moss, whose term is up in 2011, District 2 appointee O.A. Williams, whose term is up in 2008 and District 1 appointee Tom Hill, whose term is up in 2010.

For most of its history, the panel’s role has been low-key in administering the U.S. 80 bridge the county purchased from the private investment company that built it in 1930.

In recent years, however, the bridge commission has had to deal with matters such as greater maintenance and stability challenges of the aging bridge, fractious negotiations with KCS, which funds most of the bridge’s budget and competing demands to either reopen the bridge’s former roadway to vehicular traffic or convert it into a pedestrian park.