The Board of Mayor and Aldermen took another step toward acquiring the Kuhn Memorial Hospital property on Martin Luther King Boulevard and applying for state and federal funds to raze the three buildings on the site and clean the property.

The board Thursday approved a resolution making a finding that one or more slum or blighted areas exist in the city. The 33-page document outlines the city’s reasons for the finding, describing the property’s and the buildings’ conditions with photographs, and presents a plan to acquire the property and improve it, and develop it with a mixed residential-commercial and recreation area.

“We are starting the urban renewal process to clean that up, prior to disposing of it to a developer to do something with it,” City Attorney Nancy Thomas said. “Hopefully, it will include some residential with it and some retail/commercial out there.”

The first step, she said, was approving the resolution, which will be sent to the planning commission for review and recommendations and to ensure it fits with the comprehensive plan the board approved in the fall. “Then we’ll move forward with adoption of the plan after a public hearing,” she said.

“This is putting us out there where hopefully we can move forward,” North Ward Alderman Michael Mayfield said.

Thomas said the resolution and urban renewal plan are necessary if the board wants to continue its plans for the property and be eligible for a low-interest Brownfield CAP loan from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and a federal Brownfield grant through the Environmental Protection Agency.

“In order to apply for the cap loan, we have to own property,” she said. “We can’t own the property until we go through urban renewal, go to court to clear up the title. We’ve got a lot of steps (still) to go through.”

One of those steps is determining whether the four entities with an interest in the property would want to sell the property. Attempts to contact Community Development Director Victor Grey-Lewis, who Thomas said has been in contact with the four parties, were unsuccessful.

However, one section on acquiring the property in a report accompanying the resolution indicated the city “intends to acquire the property through eminent domain” as a way to clear the title to the land and go in and clean and clear the property so a private developer can develop it.

Once the city acquires the land, it can sell it to a private or nonprofit company to develop the property according to the guidelines spelled out in the urban renewal plan.

An artist’s rendering accompanying the urban renewal plan envisions a community with indoor and outdoor recreation facilities including tennis and racquetball courts and gymnasium, and a residential area of single-family homes, townhouses and homes for senior citizens.

A former city hospital, the city sold Kuhn to the State of Mississippi in 1956 for $5, and the state operated the facility as a charity hospital, initially known as the Vicksburg Charity Hospital, until 1989, when Gov. Ray Mabus closed the state’s charity hospitals.

The city regained the property in 1990 under an agreement with the state to turn it over to a private corporation.

In 1993, the building was considered as a possible veterans home, and in 1994, it was considered for a possible 38-bed adolescent psychiatric ward.

In 1999, the building was sold to the Lassiter-Studdard Group Inc., which planned to open a 100-bed clinic and assisted living center.

The plans fell through, and in 2000 the company donated the building to the Esther Stewart Buford Foundation.

The property has been sold four times for taxes, and city officials have been trying for at least the past 10 years to get the property owner to clean the property and demolish or renovate the buildings on the site.

The board on July 6 put the 12.5-acre property under the city’s slum clearance ordinance in a move to step up its efforts to remove the complex’s main building in the aftermath of the abduction and murder of Sharen Wilson, whose body was found on the property June 28.

Police said Wilson was killed in the back building and her body was left on the property, where ghost hunters who were on the property found it.

When the parties with an interest in the property failed to present plans to either raze or renovate the two buildings on the site in September, it cleared the way to begin the process for their demolition.