Eight properties should soon be in city hands for demolition more than two years after being ruined by mudslides caused by heavy rains.

The Vicksburg Mayor and Aldermen approved the receipt Tuesday of $329,400 in federal funds through the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency to buy and demolish the damaged properties. From local funds, the city must match with 25 percent of the cost, $109,800.

The landslides occurred in April 2003, but the city’s application for funds wasn’t sent until November 2004, said city planner Wayne Mansfield. MEMA approved the application in April and sent it to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where it was reviewed and returned to MEMA, which administered the funds.

&#8220For whatever reason, it got held up in FEMA” since April, Mansfield said. The original year and a half delay in submitting the application following the mudslides was due to bureaucratic holdups involving the language of the grant program and making changes to qualify the damaged houses, he said.

Many of the homes damaged had been vacated or condemned.

At 229 Meadowvale St. near Sky Farm Avenue, for example, the home remains uninhabitable because the mud from the hill in the back yard slid to form a new back yard, now thick with overgrowth, through the house’s back wall and into its kitchen. Others, such as one at 1521 Marcus St., where part of the foundation gave way and the house slid until part of it dangled off the steep decline behind it, still have occupants who must find new homes.

&#8220Some of them are vacant because people couldn’t move back in them. Some of them are patched up,” said the city Planning Department’s Beatrice Moore.

The next step is to determine values of the properties. The city will send appraisers to the properties — 217, 227, 229, 303 and 305 Meadowvale St., 2420 Pearl St., 2427 Letitia St. and 1521 Marcus St., all damaged by separate soil-sliding incidents due to the same substantial rainfall.

&#8220The city will appraise each property as is, and that’s what we will offer the home owner,” said Moore.

All of the residents living in damaged homes have agreed to move, Mansfield said, so the city will not initiate eminent domain proceedings to force them off of the property.

Once the city has bought each property, it will tear down the houses and maintain the grounds. There are no further plans for any of the properties.

&#8220It’s not really being purchased to sell,” said Moore. &#8220It’s being purchased to get people out of harm’s way.”

The federal buyout plan is similar to one used about 10 years ago to purchase properties in flood-prone Hamilton Heights, where Hatcher Bayou flooded often for years after the subdivision off Halls Ferry Road was built in the 1960s.