City officials are planning a meeting with Environmental Protection Agency officials to begin preparing the plans for the demolition and cleanup of the Kuhn Memorial Hospital property.

The Board of Mayor and Aldermen Monday approved a cooperative agreement with the EPA for two Brownfields grants totaling $400,000 to begin work demolishing the buildings and cleaning the property. Preliminary estimates to demolish the buildings, remove a 4,000-gallon diesel fuel tank and clean the property total about $615,000.

“This is the beginning,” community development director Victor Gray-Lewis said.

He said a kickoff meeting for the project is being planned where the city will review the agreement with EPA and discuss the cleanup plans with Jere “Trey” Hess, director of Brownfields and economic development for PPM Consultants, which was hired by the city to assist in applying for two Brownfields cleanup grants.

No date has been set when the project would go out for bids.

The city officially took title to the Kuhn property Nov.1 after reaching agreements with the four parties that had interests in the property.

The decision to acquire the property came after the board in April approved a resolution adopting and authorizing a 33-page urban renewal plan to first demolish the buildings on the property and clear it, then begin the process of finding a developer or nonprofit agency to develop it into a multipurpose residential/commercial development with recreational facilities.

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.

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 six 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 12.8-acre property under the city’s slum clearance ordinance in a move to step up its efforts to remove the complex’s main building.

The city’s efforts to do something with the property accelerated in the aftermath of the abduction and murder of Sharen Wilson, whose body was found on the property June 28, 2015.

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