Heritage advocates have been waiting for a decision on the future of the old brick foundry building since the council spent $215,000 removing its asbestos-based roof early last year.
The work left the building, parts of which date back more than a century, exposed to the elements through winter and into summer.
A structural assessment had been expected late last year, but council parks and recreation acting group manager Robert West said yesterday that was yet to happen.
Mr West, who is new to his role as acting group manager, said he now hoped to progress the engineering report by Easter.
``We're aware that it's been going on for some time, and I'm keen that we move fast on it.''
The report would include potential options and costings for the building's future, and would need to be considered by the council's elected arm, he said.
Depending on the preferred option, the community might also need to be consulted, he said.
In the meantime, Mr West would visit the site and meet Port Chalmers resident Bill Brown, who has previously called for the building to be saved.
The building formed one part of a wider site used by a succession of engineering companies over the last century, including Sims Engineering and Stevenson & Cook, which has strong links to the town's maritime history.
Mr Brown, in a letter to the Otago Daily Times last year, argued the foundry had ``the potential to be a great historical asset for the future''.
It did not appear on either Heritage New Zealand's (HNZ) or the DCC's lists of heritage buildings, but HNZ Otago-Southland area manager Jonathan Howard said at the time that ``does not mean that it does not have historic heritage value''.
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I well remember being taken to this buiding one evening about 1941 by my Dad. He worked on night shift when it was a Stevenson and Cook workshop building minesweepers during WW2. It was not a foundry but it was a machine/construction workshop. The minesweepers were launched from large wheeled trollies across the road on rails down into the harbour where the container terminal now stands.