By DAVID ROYER

The Brunswick News

Seven years after developers first promised a theme park would open in northern Glynn County, Steamboat City is running late again.

Financing problems have pushed back the proposed park's opening date to 2007 at the earliest, said Will Pitts, president of W.G. Pitts Co., the project's general contractor and a managing partner with landowner Wildlife Realty Associates.

"2006 would be very tough right now," Pitts said, referring to the May 2006 opening date publicized by the company last year. "It looks like this project has slipped minimum into 2007."

The "slip" is just the latest turn in the roller coaster ride taken by Steamboat City, the wildlife park turned history-themed amusement park sandwiched in the crux between Interstate 95 and U.S. Highway 341.

Since 1998, when animal expert Jim Fowler announced he would build a wildlife park with free-roaming exotic animals on 2,056 acres near Brunswick, the project has been renamed, retooled, sold off and pared down.

Last week, county commissioners approved a rezoning request that will open up 1,284 acres, or about half of the land that was to house the former "Life in the Wild" park, to the development of 1,750 residential units.

Pitts confirmed that about 1,000 acres of the land on the west side of Ga. Highway 99 around Canal Road is currently under contract to another developer. The sale of that land is expected to close by April, he said.

Steamboat City, the theme park's current incarnation, and a recreational vehicle park will occupy a separate parcel on the other side of the highway.

The conversion of such a large portion of the property from an amusement park to residential units, as well as the repeated delays in the park's opening, caused a ripple of concern among some county commissioners, according to Vernon Martin, executive director of the Coastal Georgia Regional Development Center.

In 1999, the regional development center facilitated a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Economic Development Authority that, along with another $1 million from Glynn County, helped extend water and sewer lines into the property.

The grant was contingent on the park creating some 1,700 area jobs and specified that the infrastructure would not serve purely residential development.

Martin said the county, worried that the economic development authority might rescind its grant or bar the county from receiving a pending $2 million grant in light of the project's transformation, wanted assurance that Steamboat City would deliver the jobs as promised.

"There was concern on the part of some commissioners worrying whether Glynn County would be looked at in a dim light because of the lack of success to date on that project," Martin said.

On the same day that the residential rezoning was approved, commissioners entered into an agreement with Steamboat City developers that would hold the county harmless if the economic development authority decided to call in its 1999 grant.

But despite the agreement, commissioners this week confidently asserted that they had no reason to doubt the progress on Steamboat City or the park's job creation projections.

"We have no problem with Steamboat City or anybody else," said Glynn County Commissioner Howard Lynn.

County commission chair Cap Fendig called the agreement a housekeeping matter.

"The commission is convinced that the developers of the theme park are working to present a world-class project, not a low-grade, cheap drop-in, and (we) are working to support the developers as they change the dynamics of the property to achieve that goal," he said.

Lola Smith, acting regional director for the economic development authority, said the agency issued the grant with no strings attached and will not hold the developers accountable for any set goal of jobs created.

"We have approved, built and closed out that project," Smith said.

As far as her agency is concerned, Glynn County has fulfilled its commitment, she said.

Pitts said that commercial development adjacent to Steamboat City, which is now served by county water and sewer, would satisfy the county's goals for job creation.

"At the end of the day, there's numerous other landowners that have benefited," Pitts said.

The plans may have changed, but by 2007 — or maybe later — Glynn County will be proud of the money and effort it put into the Steamboat City project, he said.