Ninety new boat slips plus a restaurant could be on the horizon at Main Harbor Marina at the Barnett Reservoir.
Main Harbor Marina boat slip holders learned about the potential for the new slips and a restaurant in a letter they received last month from Michael Stuart, interim manager of Main Harbor Development LLC, which is the leaseholder.
No conceptual plans or location maps have been submitted for the restaurant, said John Sigman, general manager of the Pearl River Valley Water Supply District.
“There has been a restaurant in every conceptual plan, but I don’t think they are far enough along where they know if it would serve seafood or hamburgers,” he said.
The letter detailed plans to close the parking lot adjacent to “E” pier for site work from August through October. Temporary parking would be on the south side of the lot near the Smith Marine Building.
The parking lot will need to be closed as part of an almost $1 million environmental cleanup project that is expected to start some time this fall on the site where the Dock once served food in the day and drinks at night.
The remediation project has not yet started because a power line must be relocated first, said Sigman, who was unable to give a date when that will be done.
The need for remediation was discovered earlier this year when soil testing revealed gasoline, despite the removal of gasoline tanks in the late 1980s and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s declaration back then that the site was clean.
The construction of three new covered piers, one on the south side of the E pier and two on the north side, for a total of 90 new slips is being evaluated, according to the letter.
Main Harbor Development is “working towards adding a restaurant near the entrance to the E pier, which we hope will open by the spring of 2022,” according to the letter.
The letter informed slip holders that as current slip rental agreements expire, each slip holder must execute a new slip rental agreement form that may include a “slight” rental increase.
Sigman said Main Harbor Development holds the lease on the pier and can certainly raise slip rental if it so chooses. “They have a right to do that,” he said.
Slip holders who have not provided proof of insurance coverage as required by their slip rental agreements will find their rental agreements terminated and will have to vacate their slips, according to the letter. “Failure to vacate promptly will result in the vessels being removed from the harbor,” according to the letter.
Jackie Alexander, who has a houseboat in one of the slips, said she was dismayed to learn about a rent increase. She expects the insurance requirement will weed out some older boats for which it is difficult to get insurance.
Alexander said she is interested in seeing how the plans progress.
The plans outlined in the letter are modest compared to those for Harbor Walk, which was to cover 110 acres of reservoir property in Ridgeland and to include a luxury hotel, condominiums, office space, restaurants and retail. The design was to be like that of an urban harbor town, according to the website, harborwalkms.com.
The project was to have been built in four phases, with the first phase consisting of 456,000 square feet of retail, office and living space, all facing the water, to be completed by 2007. At least four restaurants were to be included.
George Bishop, a Texas billionaire, owns the lease on the property for Harbor Walk and pays more than $600,000 a year in lease fees, Sigman said.
Bishop, a Smith County native, is a 1958 Mississippi State University petroleum geology graduate who in 1981 founded GeoSouthern Energy, which grew to become one of the largest, privately held producers of oil and gas in the country. GeoSouthern sold its south Texas fields to Devon Energy for $6 billion in 2013. He received an honorary degree from MSU in 2019.
With a real time net worth of $2.1 billion as of July 15, Bishop comes in at No. 1,517 on the Forbes 2021 list of the world’s 2,755 billionaires. Jeff Bezos, founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, led the list with a real time net worth of $207.9 billion.
Bishop initially owned the lease with John Burwell, a reservoir resident with whom he became friends as a young roughneck in the oil industry. Burwell died in 2018.
