NATCHEZ &045; Natchez Pilgrimage Tours will be located in the Natchez Visitor Reception Center as of June, thanks to a Tuesday vote by the Board of Aldermen.

Few details of the contract were offered during the aldermen meeting, and City Attorney Walter Brown said the amount of rent and minor details were still being worked out.

But Mayor Phillip West said after the meeting the rent figure that has been discussed is $10 per square foot for about 300 square feet, or $3,000 per month. The lease would be for five years with an option to renew for another five years.

John Saleeby, marketing director for NPT, confirmed the company’s lease at its current location at Pearl and State streets expires May 31.

In October, aldermen approved an agreement allowing NPT simply to sell Pilgrimage house tour tickets at the Visitor Center starting this year.

But Saleeby said NPT’s hope from the start was to move the whole operation to the Visitor Center if negotiations worked out, although several potential locations were considered. The company’s current lease requires it to sell tickets only at the current location.

Also in Tuesday’s meeting, aldermen voted to establish a 40-member advisory board of stakeholders throughout the tourism industry &045; but it would function very differently from what a tourism consultant had envisioned.

The new board, referred to by aldermen as the &uot;superboard,&uot; will only advise the city on tourism matters, said Alderman Bob Pollard, the Board of Aldermen’s liaison to the tourism industry.

The new board, he said, won’t be authorized to make policy &045; only the city’s existing Convention Promotion Commission and the Board of Aldermen itself will do that.

Members of the Convention Promotion Commission will also serve as an executive committee of the superboard. Others from tourism-related organizations and businesses will also be asked by the city in the coming weeks to serve on the superboard, which Pollard said will probably meet in the next four to six weeks.

Creating such a board was chief among tourism recommendations New Orleans-based tourism consultant Stu Barash made last fall to a Chamber of Commerce committee. But the superboard, as Barash envisioned it, would have replaced the current six-member Convention Promotion Commission.

Pollard said he believes establishing the new board will work to bring factions of the Natchez tourism industry together. &uot;Individual agendas &045; we won’t have them any more,&uot; he said. &uot;We want to exhibit a positive attitude about tourism.&uot;