Halls Ferry Station, the unfinished strip mall behind Walgreens at Halls Ferry and South Frontage roads, might soon be coming to life.

“We’ve been making progress,” said A.G. Helton, chief executive officer of Action Properties LLC of Yazoo City, which purchased the foreclosed property in May. “We’ve got some prospective tenants and some good leads.”

He said equipment is expected to be working in two to three weeks on the site that has been dormant since 2007.

Action, a company that specializes in redeveloping retail properties, purchased the partially developed site from Regions Bank.

Regions bought Halls Ferry Station in 2007 for $2.65 million at the property’s foreclosure sale. At the time, Action Properties submitted a competing bid of $1 million for the five-acre site.

He said Action Properties also has a prospective buyer for a nearby unused .9-acre parcel.

Helton said he plans to use as much of the existing structure as possible, depending on its condition and the needs of the tenants.

“I’ve had architects working on the project, and I had a civil engineer visit the site on the weekend to look at the property and the structure,” he said.

Halls Ferry Station sits where Halls Ferry Elementary School was demolished in 2002. Traffic surveys have shown it is Vicksburg’s busiest intersection.

The strip mall, part of a series of retail developments in the Halls Ferry/South Frontage Road area, was intended to be the second phase of a large retail development planned by Ergon Properties of Jackson that began in 2003 with the Home Depot. The site work was partially funded by tax increment financing by the City of Vicksburg.

Walgreens was built nearby in 2004.

Ergon began construction of the 30,000-square-foot strip mall in 2005, but financial problems forced the company to stop work, and the property was sold to Frazier Development LLC.

The strip mall’s prefabricated concrete walls were the last installations at the site.

Other developments in the area included Cypress Centre Marketplace, a $25 million retail project that was to include a three-story Wingate Hotel and a Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant, at the intersection of South Frontage and Bazinsky roads. The hotel was built and this year was transformed into a Holiday Inn; the restaurant was never built.

The development also received tax increment funding from the city and Warren County to finance roads and drainage.

Under tax increment funding, projected increases in property value are used to repay the bonds. The property owners pay full taxes, but for a fixed period of time the money goes to pay off the bonds, not into the general fund.

The repayment period on Cypress Centre’s bonds is 10 years.

The 1.85-acre tract containing the Wingate, an adjacent cemetery and the incompleted Cypress Centre, was owned by Tate Street Development LLC.

Part of the property was sold to Pacifica Loan Four for $375,000, and the other to State Bank & Trust for $318,500, at foreclosure in January 2010. Tate Street was owned by Vicksburg developer James Hamilton, who died in 2009.