Southaven Towne Center begins construction

CBL & Associates Properties Inc. of Chattanooga, Tenn., recently announced the development of Southaven Towne Center, an open-air shopping center located in Southaven, Miss., about six miles south of Memphis.

The retail development will be located in the southeast quadrant of Interstate 55 and Goodman Road. One of the nation's largest department store chains, Dillard's, will join JCPenney to anchor the shopping center development.

Construction on the 196-acre Southaven Towne Center began last summer. Phase one of the shopping center, with JCPenney and other small shop retailers is scheduled to open in the fall of 2005. Dillard's will join the second phase of Southaven Towne Center and open in the spring of 2006.

The 625,000-sq.-ft. Southaven Towne Center will feature an open-air pedestrian environment with extensive landscaping, a variety of architectural elements, two department stores, four large specialty retailers, more than 100,000 sq. ft. of small shop retailers and restaurants.

There will four entrances into the shopping center, three of which will have signalized intersections. The shopping center will also have more than 2,500 parking spaces that will border the retail buildings.

Former Gov. Fordice dies at 70

Kirk Fordice, a Mississippi contractor who rose to become the state's first Republican governor since Reconstruction, died Sept. 7 of leukemia. He was 70.

Fordice also was national president of the Associated General Contractors of America. As president of Fordice Construction Co., a Vicksburg-based heavy contractor, Fordice was one of the first to challenge contracting "set-asides" for "socially and economically disadvantaged" firms on federal projects.

His 1981 lawsuit, which bounced around several courts, was upheld by the U.S. district court in Jackson, Miss., in 1990, against 100 percent set-asides on certain Army Corps of Engineers projects involving Mississippi River flooding.

Fordice earned both a civil engineering degree and master's in industrial management from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind. He was a retired Army Reserve colonel, AGC president from 1990 to 1992 and governor from 1992 to 2000. The fiscal conservative was Mississippi's first governor to serve two consecutive terms.