[1/17/03]A hotel-casino-golf course development is in the works for south Vicksburg, said the developer whose racetrack-centered Big Black River project was denied.

“We’re coming to Vicksburg with another project,” Jim Belisle said this morning while traveling in his home state of Minnesota. “It will have a first-class, major-league golf course to compete with the one (at Dancing Rabbit Golf Club) in Philadelphia.”

The development will be on about 600 acres off U.S. 61 South, Belisle said. He added that he expected it to cost about $150 million to $180 million.

Mayor Laurence Leyens said he’s been meeting with Belisle, who has also been talking with other officials and regulators. Getting an additional golf course in the area has been an interest of the administration, particularly South Ward Alderman Sid Beauman.

If it proceeds, Belisle’s casino-centered project would be the first new resort built since Rainbow Casino Hotel opened in conjunction with the Funtricity complex in June 1994.

When casino development was approved by Warren County voters in 1991, several projects were announced, but only four came to fruition.

Belisle first announced a racing-centered complex near Redwood on the Yazoo River, but financing was not obtained. His 1996 proposal for a casino and NASCAR-style $150 million complex along the Big Black River near Bovina attracted Horseshoe Gaming, which operates large casinos in Tunica and Shreveport, as a partner.

Vicksburg and other entities, including existing casinos, lobbied against site approval for the Big Black, however, and, after years of litigation including civil suits that decision was fundamentally upheld by the Mississippi Supreme Court in June.

“We’re in the final stages of negotiation with a major gaming company whose principal is well-known and well-respected in Mississippi,” Belisle said today.

The developers’ plan is to draw more tourists to Vicksburg and increase the size of the city’s gaming market by about 25 percent.

“It will add to the success of the other casinos,” Belisle said, adding that he thinks the size of the market can be increased from about $220 million to $230 million in annual revenue to between $275 million and $300 million.

Belisle said he expected further details of the deal to be released in about 10 days.

The Big Black proposal created at least two high-profile legal battles that culminated with the high court’s 5-3 ruling. The court reinstated a 1996 decision by the Mississippi Gaming Commission that the proposed casino site, on Warren County’s eastern border near Interstate 20 at Bovina, was not “suitable” for gaming under the 1990 law that gave commissioners that discretion.

In a separate ruling by the Supreme Court, the nearly $4 million a Pike County jury had awarded Belisle’s side in 1999 was overturned by in 2001. Belisle claimed casino companies with local operations and a bank had conspired to defeat the Big Black proposal.

After last year’s denial of the Big Black plan by the state’s high court, Belisle lamented what he called his devastation by the state’s established powers.

“I’ve been devastated, but I will have my say,” he said at the time, noting that the decision came 10 years to the month after he first came to Mississippi.

Golfing options in Vicksburg are limited to the private Vicksburg Country Club and Warren County’s 18-hole public course at Clear Creek, near Bovina.