Vicksburg Main Street is not returning to its offices at the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Depot on Levee Street and will remain at the City Hall Annex on Walnut Street, the Board of Mayor and Aldermen learned Monday.

Kim Hopkins, Main Street director, told the board during discussion on a request by officials with the Old Depot Museum to reduce the museum’s rent by $100 month because the elevator in the building is inoperable, making it difficult for visitors to tour the museum’s exhibits on the second floor.

Main Street is presently housed in the former city purchasing office at the Annex. It is the second organization to leave the depot since the December/January flood.

The Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau asked to be let out of lease with the city in June.

Both organizations left the depot in December 2015 and evacuated to the Annex as a precaution against flooding by the Mississippi River, which reached about 50 feet in January.

The VCVB in July moved to a new location at 1619 Walnut St., across from the Warren County-Vicksburg Public Library.

After the meeting, Hopkins listed several reasons for the decision to stay.

“The museum wants to expand, and if we move back there, it will be a temporary fix if a flood ever came,” she said, adding she looked at other locations, but Main Street’s budget does not have enough money to pay rent.

“This (the Annex) is our only option,” she said. “Hopefully in the future, something may work out, but building maintenance is supposed to come look at the area and hopefully spruce it up. We hope we can have an entrance on Walnut Street.” She said she wants to keep Main Street’s former third floor office space in the depot for storage.

VCVB and Vicksburg Main Street both signed 20-year leases in 2012, with the VCVB occupying the building’s second floor and Main Street the third. The museum occupied the first floor and the southern section of the second floor.

Museum officials plan to occupy the entire second floor, but problems with the building’s elevator forced state building officials to order it closed until it could be repaired, and restricted movement upstairs to the building’s staircase.