City Hall Annex on Walnut Street has been declared unsafe, and seven of eight departments housed there are moving out.

The departments will begin moving Friday to temporary offices in other city buildings, Mayor Paul Winfield said. On Wednesday, city employees began picking up and packing in anticipation of the move from the building just north of City Hall.

“We told the department heads to start packing now,” he said. “We didn’t want them moving in the rain. We’ll start Friday with a lot of help from community services.”

Winfield said the Board of Mayor and Aldermen, which regularly meets in room near the rear of the building, will hold its meetings at the Vicksburg Convention Center starting Tuesday. The board will hold its public hearing on the budget at 7 tonight and Friday’s City Board meeting at 1 p.m. at Vicksburg Convention Center.

The only city office that will remain in the building is Vicksburg Senior Center, Winfield said.

“That part of the building is in good shape,” he said. The senior center fronts the northeast corner of Walnut and South streets.

The other departments headquartered in the building are public works and engineering, human resources, grants and planning, mapping, TV-23, police internal affairs and purchasing.

Winfield said department heads began receiving notices to move Monday, when the city received an engineering report from Structural Engineering Associates of Jackson. The company was hired by JH&H Architects of Jackson, which the city hired to examine the roof.

According to the architects’s summary of the report, the trusses and beams supporting the roof’s rafters are in very poor shape. The trusses, according to the report, are not adequately anchored to the walls or columns that support them and have deteriorated from water damage.

The report also said any roof repairs would require making major modifications to the building. It recommended demolishing it and building a new building.

“Once I saw that report, I knew we had a liability problem,” he said.

He said the board will decide the building’s fate at a later meeting, but indicated he would recommend razing the building, except for the senior center, and paving the property for a parking lot.

“We found out about it today,” interim public works director Garnet Van Norman said Wednesday afternoon as boxes of files surrounded his desk. “We’re moving to the street department building on Army Navy Drive. When I saw a copy of that report, I knew we needed to get out. It wasn’t safe to stay.”

Winfield said the city’s human resources department will move to the Ellis Building, also known as the Safety Building, across Walnut Street from the Warren County Vicksburg Public Library.

Interim human resources director Walterine Langford said she selected the site once she heard about the building’s problems on Aug. 2.

The purchasing department will move to the grants office in the southeast part of the building, and the grants office will move in with the inspection department in the old library building on South Street, Winfield said. He said the section holding the grants office was also in bad condition, but not serious as the larger part of the building.

No sites have been designated for police internal affairs, TV23 or the city’s mapping department.

The board discussed the annex’s condition at an Aug. 2 budget meeting. At that meeting, Winfield said the estimate for a new roof was $500,000, which he said may be more that the building is worth.

City officials bought the building, known then as the Neill Building, in 1995 for $250,000.