“Hopefully, we’ll get that down by the end of the year,” Vickie Reeck, the city’s community and economic development director, said Tuesday.

Putting up the fence around the building at 1305 N. 22nd St. will secure the area so that a contractor hired by the City Council can remove the asbestos from it.

The asbestos removal process was explained Tuesday afternoon during an informational meeting for people who live nearby.

“We are very sensitive to safety,” said Mahlon Patterson, an inspector and estimator for REW Services Corp., of Des Moines. That is the company that will be removing the asbestos containing materials.

“We’ll keep the neighborhood safe,” he added. “You won’t see anyone throwing stuff out the window or anything like that.”

The removal work will begin the week of July 10 and be completed by the end of August.

Patterson and Jon Reis, a senior project manager for Impact 7G, a Des Moines company that planned the removal process, said the work should have little impact on the surrounding neighborhood. There will be some noise from a generator that will be running whenever work is underway.

The asbestos is in the building’s floor tiles and several other places. Patterson said furniture and other items in the building will have to be moved so that the workers can get to the asbestos. He said it appears that the former owner of the care center left everything inside and locked the doors.

After the building is demolished the property will be made available for housing, according to Reeck. She said one or two houses could be built there.

The Greenleaf Care Center has been vacant since at least 2014. The city took ownership of it in April 2015 under the terms of the state’s abandoned buildings law.

It is a roughly L-shaped building containing 86 rooms. The original part was built in 1935. A one-story addition was built in 1965 and a two-story addition was constructed in 1974.

The city received a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to help pay for the asbestos removal effort.