NATCHEZ — Natchez City Planner Robert Nix and his staff are getting a good look at the bad part of Natchez.

The staff has spent the past several weeks and plans to spend the next few months working to catalog nuisance properties and unsafe structures located in the city.

Nix said the staff is combining information from different sources that will assist them in identifying repeat offenders and documenting all cases of code violations.

“Bringing all of these records together in one place will ensure all of the issues are handled in the most timely manner,” Nix said.

Overgrown lots, dilapidated properties and boarded up buildings has been a hot topic with the board of aldermen in the past few months, Nix said.

“Its not unusual to have a fairly high emphasis on code enforcement from the city,” Nix said. “The issue here is there are a lot of older structures and a lot of properties that have a history of violations that haven’t been corrected or have been corrected but have been allowed to return to a state of violation.”

Nix said the staff is going ward by ward to identify and catalog properties that are in violation. So far, the staff has only completed ward one. Nix estimates it will take six to eight weeks to complete the inventory of ward two and another three to four weeks to survey ward three.

“Every ward has some problem properties,” Nix said. “Some wards are older than others and have those older structures that just have issues.”

Nix said it is important to get organized and get moving on cases because of new state legislation that helps the process move more smoothly.

New Mississippi legislation has lessened the burden cities have to bear when attempting to correct nuisance and unsafe properties.

“We now have a much more firm process than we have had in the past,” Nix said.

The new process cuts down on the time and steps cities have to take to notify property owners that a property is in violation of a city code.

The new process has eliminated the need for cities to go through three steps to find property owners and has eliminated the need to have police officers involved in the process.

“Courts are going to look to us to make a reasonable effort, and we will certainly satisfy all of the statutory requirements and do what is within our means with funding and staffing to go beyond that,” Nix said of locating property owners.

But at some point, the process just has to move along.

“This is a significant project the board has placed significant emphasis on,” Nix said. “It is apparently important to the people they represent, and it is important we resolve these issues in a manner that brings success as quickly as the law allows.”