The owner of the long vacant Senor Tequila restaurant building said after it was declared a public nuisance in early January it would be torn down in 30 to 45 days.

Forty-five days came Monday, and Senor Tequila is still standing.

City officials have grown weary of waiting for the Jefferson Street eyesore to be cleared away.

“Nothing’s happened in four years and nothing’s happening now,” Councilman Michael Turk said at a City Council meeting last week. “I think they’re just stringing us along.”

It was March 2017 when the city issued a liquor license for a future Basinger’s Pharmacy, which is to replace the Senor Tequila building at 2219 W. Jefferson St. The store would include liquor sales along with an expanded medical supply business.

Turk’s skepticism was changed Thursday after talking with an attorney for Basinger’s Pharmacy.

Turk said he was persuaded that Basinger’s will demolish Senor Tequila. Demolition had been held up recently by plans, now scrapped, for a Joliet police training exercise in the building, he said.

“They said they will proceed with demolition,” Turk said. “The building will be coming down in the very near future.”

“Very soon,” Basinger’s owner Harish Bhatt said Thursday when asked about the demolition. “I don’t have the exact date but very soon.”

Bhatt, too, said demolition had been held up in recent weeks for possible police training.

“Finally, they said they don’t need the building,” he said.

Even so, city lawyers plan to proceed with public nuisance proceedings that could lead to a court-ordered demolition of the property if Bhatt doesn’t do it.

“I don’t disagree with Mike Turk when he says this has gone on long enough,” Assistant City Attorney Chris Regis said in reference to the councilman’s comments last week.

The public nuisance process is not fast, however.

“A quick turnaround is six months,” Regis said. “Sometimes it takes a year.”

It could also lead to the city paying for demolition, trying to recover costs from the property owner, and taking over the property if it can’t get payment.

The Basinger’s plan is quicker if Bhatt moves ahead as he says. Plus, the city would get a new store on the site.

The city in 2017 rejected a proposed liquor superstore at 2155 W. Jefferson St. in large part because Bhatt contended the revenue he would lose from competing liquor sales would kill his plans for the new Basinger’s.

A business group proposing a store called Joliet Market planned to renovate a mostly vacant building and put its store in 12,000 square feet of unused space.

“Basinger’s had the project killed. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it,” Garland Mays, a Joliet resident who located the site for a friend in the liquor business, said.

Mays said the Joliet Market group has since taken its plan to south suburban Glenwood, where it has been approved and is under construction.

The 12,000-square-foot space that would have been occupied by Joliet Market remains vacant.