“The county couldn’t buy the property because the county didn’t have that much money, so we structured it so the documents would allow Adams County to control who got what through the transaction,” Latham said.

“The contract was between IP and Adams County, but under the terms of the contract the county had the right to dictate to IP where to deed the tract.”

As part of the negotiations, the county negotiated a selling price with IP and a purchase price with Rentech, netting a substantial amount of money, Latham said.

Stalled plans

Construction of the coal-to-liquid fuel facility on the Natchez site never started, however.

Russ said the company is still looking at developing the Natchez site, but what the company will do ultimately will likely be much smaller than the original proposal.

“The original project was highly capital intensive, and it had a coal component in it, and with the current environment for coal and things like that, the project was not able to attract that type of capital,” Russ said. “(Rentech had) started changing that, tried to look at options other than coal for the refining process and still were not able to attract capital to get that project off the ground.”

The company is looking for less capital-intensive projects and partners to try to utilize the site, Russ said.

“They feel like they will have a presence of some sort at that site, but I think it is unclear what that will look like.”

The land

But that leaves a glaring question: If Rentech isn’t going to develop all 480 acres of its Natchez property into the massive alternative fuels facility, what is going to happen to the land, which was sold with the intention of reviving the area’s flagging industrial base?

“We view that property as a valuable and much-needed asset in our industrial mix — it has a tremendous amount of infrastructure,” Russ said. “It is a nice tract of land, the part that Rentech owns has been remediated. It has a lot of things that are important for us to be able to move that property.”

Board of Supervisor’s President Darryl Grennell, who also served as president during the time the deal with Rentech was being negotiated, said that aside from being large, the site has many industrial benefits, including being next to the Mississippi River, having already-developed infrastructure, rail lines and water wells.

“Several smaller industrial developments can go onto that property,” Grennell said.