The air conditioning units at the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Depot are not doing their job efficiently, and city officials are working with the project’s architect and mechanical engineer to determine who, or what, is at fault.

City officials are waiting for a report on the problem from the project’s mechanical engineer, said Victor Gray-Lewis, the city’s director of buildings and inspection and the project manager. City officials hope the problem will be covered under the equipment’s or the contractor’s warranty.

The engineer, he said, is reviewing a report on the units from Quiet Side, of Fort Worth, Texas, which sells the Samsung air conditioning units used at the depot.

“We’ll know how to proceed after we get his report,” he said.

The depot is home to the Old Depot Museum, the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau and Vicksburg Main Street. The museum occupies the first floor and part of the second. VCVB is on the second floor, and Main Street is on the third.

Commercial air conditioning units on the north and south ends of the depot heat and cool the building. Both units are aided by vent fans to remove hot air from around the units to help them operate efficiently.

The system’s problem was discovered in early summer, when temperatures climbed into the 90s and higher, and the units were unable to keep the building, particularly the second and third floors, cool during the day.

Cooler temperatures over the past two weeks have eased the load on the system, allowing it to better do its job.

“It comes and goes,” said Kim Hopkins, executive director of Vicksburg Main Street, which occupies the third floor. “Right now, it’s fine, but if the temperatures get back in the 90s, it could get hot again.”

“It’s day-to-day,” said Bill Seratt, executive director of the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau.

During the summer, Hopkins said, she and assistant director Alaina Lipe split their time between the depot in the morning and the Ellis Building on Walnut Street in the afternoon. Seratt said the VCVB crew worked in the depot in the morning and went home in the afternoon.

The problems also forced both agencies to move board meetings away from the depot during the summer.

On the recommendation of the project’s mechanical engineer, the city in June spent $14,000 to install the vent fans in the mechanical rooms, but the fans failed to adequately do the job, and Quiet Side sent a Samsung technician to look at the units.

The technician’s report, Gray-Lewis said, was sent to the engineer last week for review.

City Attorney Lee Thames said the city has no plans to sue over the problem.

“Under the law, the contractor has to have the opportunity to fix the problem,” he said. “If that doesn’t happen, then we’ll move to the next step.”

“I wish we could have resolved this problem a lot earlier, so our tenants in the depot would not have been so uncomfortable,” Gray-Lewis said.

Work on the depot restoration began in 2010 and was halted in the spring of 2011 when the Mississippi River dumped 4 feet of water into the building as it reached record heights in Vicksburg, cresting on May 19 at 57.1, 14.1 feet above flood stage and nine-tenths of a foot above the great flood of 1927.

The depot became the backdrop for media coverage during the flood, and its restoration resumed in June.