No one was interested in the city’s Fisher Ferry property.
City Clerk Walter Osborne told the Board of Mayor and Aldermen Friday there were no takers on the city’s ad putting the 210-acre property once considered for a sports complex up for sale.
The board in April approved a resolution putting the property on the real estate market for 90 days, and using the average of the two appraisals as the selling price.
Mayor George Flaggs Jr. said at the time he wanted to put the property on the market for developers “to see whether or not it can be utilized, and what would be the highest and best use for the city. It’s a business call. It makes sense to me to find the highest and best use for the property and try to reduce the cost to city.”
The city in 2003 bought the property for $325,000 to develop as a sports complex.
The Fisher Ferry project was abandoned in 2009 after an additional $2.7 million had been spent for preliminary plans, engineering and dirt work. A parallel venture into building a sports complex at the site of the current Halls Ferry Park, once a city landfill, was scuttled the year before when the state raised concerns over environmental impact.
About $4.1 million from a $16.9 million 2007 bond issue was set aside to develop the property, but city officials later took $3.7 million of that allocation and moved it to pay for work on the Washington Street bridge.
Besides the money to buy and grade the property, the city spent an additional $55,343 in 2012 to replace the concrete in the drainage chutes on the site with riprap and grout under a Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality mandate. Public Works Director Garnet Van Norman said recently the city has more work to do on the chutes.