The Vicksburg Main Street board is thinking about a route and time change for the city’s annual Mardi Gras parade.

Board chairman Ronnie Bounds on Tuesday appointed a committee — executive director Kim Hopkins and board members Alice Hebler, Mickey Fedell, Kristen Meehan and Walter Osborne — to examine the changes.

The 11th annual parade will roll Feb. 18. No deadline was set for the group’s report.

Hopkins suggested changing the place and time in response to complaints from merchants along Washington Street, which has been the parade’s traditional route. She said merchants complained that the barricades put up for crowd safety at the last parade prevented customers from reaching stores and restaurants.

Several Washington Street merchants said Tuesday that they had no problems with the parade, but were concerned that the barricades, which were installed last year at 8 a.m. for the 4 p.m. parade, were set out too early.

Bounds said last year’s parade was the first time the barricades were used to line the route. In the past, they had been used only to block intersections along the route.

“We organized the parade to bring people downtown,” he said. “The barricades were put up for the safety of the crowd. Without the barricades, we can’t have the parade.”

In another matter, Hopkins said Vicksburg Main Street could be in its new third-floor offices at the old Levee Street depot by February, possibly March.

“They (the contractor) have begun working on the third floor,” Hopkins told the board Tuesday, adding that she and Bounds met recently with city buildings and inspection director Victor Gray-Lewis and representatives for Kenneth Thompson Jr. Builders, the depot restoration contractor. Gray-Lewis is the city’s project director for the restoration.

Main Street and the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau in 2010 each signed 20-year leases at $500 a month with the city for office space in the depot. The VCVB’s agreement included $150,000 toward the city’s $1.65 million Mississippi Department of Transportation grant to renovate the building.

The Vicksburg Board of Mayor and Aldermen on Nov. 22 approved a $105,660 change order with Kenneth R. Thompson Jr. to build the Main Street offices on the south end of the third floor.

Gray-Lewis said at the time that work on the third floor would begin early this month and was expected to take at least three months.

“The contractor said they would need about eight weeks to complete the work,” he said. “Being ready by early March would be great.”

Plans for the third floor call for two offices and work- room, and a conference room that Main Street will share with the VCVB board.

Gray-Lewis said the north side of the third floor will be used for storage, adding that side of the floor could later be modified if the city gets another tenant for the depot.

The VCVB’s offices will share a portion of the building’s second floor with the transportation museum. The Board of Mayor and Aldermen last week signed a lease with the Vicksburg Battlefield Museum Inc. for the museum, which is expected to open in July.