The Battleship Texas Foundation now has a clearer picture of how long it has to work out a long-term lease agreement with the Port of Galveston, and the clock is ticking. At the port board of trustees’ monthly meeting Tuesday evening, according to the Galveston County Daily News, the board voted to impose a deadline of Oct. 22.
The date is one year to the day since the port first laid out its initial terms to the foundation. One of the trustees, former Galveston mayor Jim Yarbrough, said the board’s move signaled a “sense of urgency” that the time had come to “circle the wagons.”
“Obviously we’ve not been able to come to an agreement based on the original term sheet,” he said. “As time goes on we’ve found out new items.”
The port’s proposed lease for the foundation, under which the historic ship would berth at the Landry’s-controlled Pier 21, is available on its website. Besides the previously unresolved issue of insurance against hurricanes and other catastrophic climate events, others that came up during the meeting included a 50-foot square floating chiller platform that would service the ship; and the foundation wanting access to a reserve fund that would be used for contingencies or to remove the ship were that ever needed, port CEO Rodger Rees told the Daily News.
During the meeting’s public-comment portion, other port tenants continued voicing their objections to the possible downstream effects of the battleship’s move. Derrick Gutierrez, director of operations for Katie’s Seafood House, claimed the noise created by the chiller unit could ruin Katie’s outdoor-dining experience even worse than the ship’s obstruction of its much-touted patio view of the ship channel already would.
In May, Gutierrez started a petition urging the port to steer the battleship somewhere else; it now has 2,500 signatures. “Those are going to be huge condensing units that will blow out hot air,” Gutierrez said at the meeting. “It’s just not what we signed up for.”
Johnny Williams of Williams Party Boats, which has been operating out of the harbor since 1946, expressed concerns about the amount of available parking were the ship to move.
“I don’t know how many cars this is going to attract, but we need to take that into consideration because parking down there is a premium and inadequate at best for us currently,” he told the board.
