Manteca is getting rid of a major neighborhood nuisance.

The city will pay for the demolition of the abandoned two-bedroom home at 432 N. Grant Avenue that has been the site of numerous fires and police calls due to vagrants and drug users breaking into the boarded up structure.

The latest fires happened last Friday at 3 a.m. and 10 a.m. Responding firefighters and police reported the same problem of coming out of the structure with human feces on their boots.

The City Council has authorized using $34,575 in bonus bucks collected from developers for sewer allocation certainty to build new homes to pay for the razing of the structure and removal of all concrete. The cost includes $17,225 for asbestos mitigation, $13,000 for general demolition, and $3,200 to secure the structure plus $1,150 for a state required air quality site analysis connected with the asbestos.

The costs will be placed as a lien against the property. The city over the past two and a half years has spent close to $17,000 on code enforcement issues involving police and fire in addition to fines. There is also $2,200 in uncollected past due utilities bills and trash abatement costs. The city will also place a lien against the property to recover those costs.

The current trustee has agreed to allow the city to abate the property.

The former property owners are deceased. The property was in probate during most of the code enforcement investigations that started on Nov. 17, 2011. That’s when the first citizen complaint was made about the property not being maintained based on municipal code requirements and that vagrants were living in the home.

After clearing debris and trash from inside and outside the home and securing it, the city posted it as an unsafe structure and noted it was illegal to occupy.

Then on Jan. 10, 2012 the city received another complaint that vagrants had removed much of the securing mechanisms and were occupying the building.

Follow-up inspections were made and several individuals were found to be occupying the home and were advised to get out which they did.

For the next 28 months the same scenario happened again and again. There have been at least five suspicious fires.

City Manager Karen McLaughlin noted the abatement process involving the razing of a structure is a long legal process the city had used only once before. That involved the Gordon property on Union Road that caught fire several months before the city had almost gone through all of the steps needed to raze the structures. The Gordon property also had never-ending issues with vagrants and drug users.

In the case of the North Grant Avenue property, the trustee agreeing to allow the city to proceed is speeding up the process.

The city has already received three bids to do the work.