Bids for Delta Queen include guiding it back onto Mississippi River

WASHINGTON — The Dallas-based broker for the sale of the historic Delta Queen said "more than a handful"of people with intense interest in the boat met last Friday's bidding deadline.

"The audience that knows this boat is very, very deep — even deeper than we could have ever thought," broker Hank Wolpert said Friday. "There's a lot of both vision and passion."

The 84-year-old National Historic Landmark is currently moored in Chattanooga, Tenn., leased by Leah Ann and Randy Ingram and used as a floating hotel. The Ingrams, who say their "long-term goal" is to return it to American waterways, are among the bidders.

Seattle-based owners Ambassadors International are asking $4.75 million.

Wolpert said groups seeking to keep it a hotel, others wanting to make it into a museum and cultural center and still others wanting to make it a restaurant or lounge have made serious inquiries.

But a group associated with efforts to get the boat back on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers as a cruising overnight-passenger ship announced last week that it, too, will be among the bidders.

"We want to put this boat back in operation,"said Vicki Webster of the Cincinnati-based Save the Delta Queen 2010. Webster took her first cruise on the Delta Queen in March of 1970 — from Memphis to New Orleans.

The group's effort is backed by Robert Rintz, a former Louisiana state tourism director and a former vice president for marketing of the Delta Queen Steamboat Co. A former captain and pilot of the boat, Clark "Doc" Hawley, also supports making it an operating ship again. Recently, the Delta Grassroots Caucus, a coalition of leaders from the eight states of the Mississippi Delta, endorsed the Save the Delta Queen 2010 initiative, as did former state Sen. Kevin Smith of Helena, Ark., which is along the Mississippi River.

"It literally provides a platform for the rest of the world to come to Helena," Smith said. "The heartland of the country has been hurting and these boats mean a lot to our economy."

Smith said it has been years since any of the paddleboats that used to make routine stops at ports along the river stopped at Helena.

The Delta Queen stopped operations on the Mississippi over a provision in the 1966 federal Safety of Life at Sea Act that prohibits wooden ships from carrying more than 49 passengers overnight. Intended for ships at sea, the Delta Queen owners got an exemption from the law in 1968 and each time it sought it until 2007.

That's when politics and a labor dispute intervened and efforts to get the exemption through a reauthorization of the U.S. Coast Guard failed. Other legislation to provide the exemption introduced by then-Ohio Congressman Steve Chabot (who lost his seat in 2008 and regained it earlier this month) and co-sponsored by U.S. Reps. John Tanner and Steve Cohen, both D-Tenn., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., also failed.

The exemption ended Nov. 1, 2008, and passengers who disembarked at Memphis were its last overnight passengers. It sailed south to New Orleans with just its crew.

As it sat tied to the Perry Street Wharf just before Christmas that year, a group of congressman, including Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, made a last-ditch effort to get President Bush to create another exemption by executive order. It didn't happen.

Eventually, the Chattanooga group signed a lease and brought it up from Louisiana. Webster says Save the Delta Queen 2010 has a two-part plan to get the 174-passenger boat back in operation and then comply with existing law and take just 49 overnight guests. It would stop at river cities each night for additional passengers to stay in hotels.