The demolition of the Oak Street Apartments could begin this week, the city’s community development director said Wednesday.

“We will be doing the demolition in-house,” Community Development Director Victor Gray-Lewis said. “We had the determination of asbestos and that has been removed. We’re ready to go.”

City street department superintendent Skipper Whittington, whose crew will raze the building, said he was waiting for paperwork from community development officials. “Once I can get that, we can start,” he said.

The apartment building is one of three vacant buildings the city has been dealing with for more than a year. The other two are the former El Rio Mexican Restaurant at 1415 Washington St., which was heavily damaged by fire, and Kuhn Memorial Hospital, 1422 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., which has been abandoned since 1989, when the State of Mississippi closed it as a charity hospital.

Two of the buildings — apartments and the restaurant — are being handled under the city’s slum clearance ordinance, which allows city officials to raze or make improvements to a building and sell it to recover its costs. City officials are taking a different approach to Kuhn Memorial, seeking a Brownfields Site grant in hopes the building could one day be renovated and put to use.

The city condemned the two-story Oak Street Apartments on Oct. 14, 2013, after water and gas service was cut off to the building because the owner did not pay the utility bills.

“At one time an investor indicated an interest in buying the building, but the owner wouldn’t talk to him,” Gray-Lewis said. The Board of Mayor and Aldermen in April approved razing the building.

El Rio was damaged in March 2013 when a fire in a second floor apartment of the building spread to the restaurant, which was on the first floor. The blaze also damaged two adjacent businesses, Michel’s Records on the south side of the building and On Time Fashions on the north. Both businesses have reopened.

The building was later bought by a bank at a foreclosure sale, and then sold to Premier Properties of Delaware, which has since cleaned the first floor of the building, Gray-Lewis said. He said a local investor is negotiating with Premier to buy the building, but would not name the investor.

“What I’m getting ready to do is send Premier’s attorney an email saying that the city will hire an architect to design a roof for the building to make it water tight,” he said. “Hopefully, the property owner will do something to protect the building and make it water tight.”

If the city does the work, he said, it will recover its money from Premier.

He added a future problem with the building could be whether to city will have to raze it if no buyer can be found. “That will require some discussion,” he said.

Since it was closed in 1989, the Kuhn Memorial Hospital has been mentioned as the site for a psychiatric hospital, juvenile facility and an assisted living facility. None of those projects materialized.

Gray-Lewis hopes the 12.8-acre property can again be put to use if the right investor can be located.

The city is applying for an Environmental Protection Agency Brownfields Site grant, which will allow the city to hire a contractor to assess the property for hazardous materials.

According to the EPA, a brownfields site is property where expansion, development or reuse may be affected by the presence or potential presence of hazardous materials or pollutants. The grant allows the city to learn what type of materials may be in the building and how much.

“We’ll make the application in December, and we’ll find out if we are awarded a grant in May or June,” he said.

Gray-Lewis said he has been contacted by a church-based program in Northern Florida that was interested in Kuhn as a site for a facility to rehabilitate veterans who have had drug or alcohol problems or been in jail. Judy Miller, finance manager for the Esther Stewart Buford Foundation in Yazoo City, which owns the hospital property, said they have not been contacted by anyone about the property.

Kuhn Memorial Hospital was built on the site of city hospital that had been in operation since 1847. The city deeded the property to the state in 1956, and the hospital became a state-run charity hospital in 1959. It was closed in 1989 under the administration of former Gov. Ray Mabus, when state officials decided to close its three charity hospitals in favor of an expanded Medicaid program.