VIDALIA — Residents who don’t answer certified letters mailed by the Concordia Parish Police Jury have Juror Willie Dunbar wondering what legal actions the board can take.

Dunbar informed the board during its regular monthly meeting Monday evening that he believes residents are purposely ignoring letters that were mailed regarding overgrown grass or other needed maintenance on their property.

“If they look at it and see it’s from the police jury, they won’t accept it,” Dunbar said. “Then they just say they never received the letter.”

The police jury sends one letter as a courtesy to residents, before sending in work crews and charging the resident for the work completed.

Letters are sent out for uncut grass, limbs left in the roadway, trash or litter on property and other violations that are reported.

District Attorney Brad Burget said that a blanket solution can’t be applied to residents ignoring their mail.

“Every situation is going to be different,” Burget said. “If they’re violating the parish ordinance, it’s different, and some legal action could be taken, but each situation is going to be a little different in regards to how to handle it.”

A violation of the parish’s ordinance could be a misdemeanor offense, Burget said.

Board President Melvin Ferrington said the district attorney’s office had given each juror a copy of the ordinance and an explanation of the possible consequences for violations.

Ferrington suggested hand-delivering the letters to his residents instead of mailing the letters.

“How are you going to talk to them, if they don’t want to listen to you?” Dunbar said.

After Dunbar questioned the possibility of the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office getting involved to deliver the letters or possibly issuing citations, First Assistant District Attorney Ann Siddall said if a juror had evidence that a resident was continually violating the parish ordinance that those matters could be dealt with by sheriff deputies.

“You’d need to give the sheriff’s office all the specifics and some detailed evidence,” Siddall said.

Dunbar said he would gather evidence on several residents and deliver it to the CPSO if problems continued arising.

In other news from the meeting:

Myles Hopkins of Silas Simmons, a certified public accounting and consulting firm in Natchez, presented the police jury with an audit of its 2011 budget.

Hopkins said the audit was a “clean audit” and that the only issue was that the audit was turned in 13 days past the deadline.

A voting precinct, 5-5, near Acme was combined with a voting precinct at the CPSO substation, 5-7, in Monterey.

The two precincts were combined into one polling place for all future elections.

The board will have a special meeting at 6 p.m. on Monday to discuss drainage issues for the entire parish.

Ferrington said members of the drainage committee will be present to discuss the outcome of the Black River Lake drainage project, which was allocated $3.5 million in capital outlay funds. Those funds, however, won’t be issued until an organization agrees to provide upkeep and maintenance after construction.

“If we lose this money, that’s it for this project, so we have to figure this thing out,” Ferrington said.

The structure would be two 10-foot box drainage tanks, with cutoff gates that would be installed with 3-foot intervals to control water levels in the Black River Lake area.