Negotiations continued Wednesday between Warren County and an unnamed industrial prospect looking to purchase property officials have said is publicly owned.

A half-hour closed session of the Board of Supervisors ended without a formal action on the matter. The board convened the executive session using the exception in Mississippi Open Meetings law pertaining to proposed land sales.

Though county officials were tight-lipped on the record last week when the meeting was announced, the presence of port officials suggests the property is either at the Port of Vicksburg or Ceres Research and Industrial Interplex in Flowers.

Wayne Mansfield, executive director of the Warren County Port Commission, met with four of five supervisors in the closed-door talks, along with commissioners Johnny Moss and Robert Morrison III. District 3 Supervisor Charles Selmon was absent and was not formally excused from the impromptu special meeting of the board. No formal motions followed when the session reopened briefly before adjournment and officials broke off into private, whispery conversations.

Three pieces of property are either bare or vacant at Ceres. One, the former Simpson Dura-Vent building at 88 Armory Road, has sat vacant since the home venting systems maker left in 2008. The building, however, is still owned by the company. A 10-acre tract on which the “spec building” sits is also vacant. The 64,000 square-foot shell has a dirt floor and has been unoccupied since it was erected in 1995.

A third tract along the northeast quadrant of the Flowers interchange off Interstate 20 — the former grounds of the Ceres Plantation house — is also empty. The house was demolished in 2012 for future development purposes.

Warren County owns several large tracts of undeveloped land between industries at Ceres, including a 503-acre section stretching west from Simpson and Tyson Foods to a boundary line northwest of the Mississippi National Guard Armory.

Any deal for a new business at either the Port of Vicksburg or Ceres industrial park in Flowers would be the third major employer announced this year by county officials.

ISA TanTec expects to open a leather tannery inside the former Calsonic auto parts supply plant at Ceres by Jan. 1. The county, company and the building’s now-former owners agreed on a $1.5 million deal last week to purchase the 140,000 square-foot building for the company using a state-guided loan. The German-invested company pledged to hire 366 people in the first five years for what would be their first U.S. plant.

In May, CAM2, a specialty oil products blender, opened a facility at the port inside a 93,000 square-foot factory formerly home to the Shell Lubricants. The plant employs about 30 people initially, with plans to hire 60 within five years.

In July, one business at the port announced the potential availability of its building. Polyvulc USA said it sought to sell its plastics and rubber recycling business in Vicksburg and subsidiaries in Jackson and Winnsboro, La. by mid-September.