NATCHEZ — After meeting behind closed doors for approximately an hour Monday, city officials say they have a redistricting plan they think could settle a federal lawsuit over the matter.

The Natchez Board of Aldermen met in executive session to review a proposed redistricting plan the city will submit to a judge Wednesday in response to a federal lawsuit filed against the city in May.

The lawsuit, filed by former Natchez Mayor Phillip West, former Justice Court Judge Mary Lee Toles, the Rev. Clifton Marvel and Jacqueline Marsaw of the NAACP, alleges that the current lines for aldermen districts — based on the 2000 census — are drawn in a way that “fractures geographically concentrated African-American population and dilutes African-American voting strength.”

City Attorney Hyde Carby said the board reviewed the new plan and maps in executive session under the litigation exception of the open meetings law.

Chad Mask of Jackson-based Carroll Warren & Parker provided outside legal counsel for the board during the executive session while Mike Slaughter of Slaughter and Associates in Oxford provided insight for the new proposed districts.

No plan will be adopted, Carby said, without the city hosting a public hearing and gathering public comments.

Ward 1 Alderwoman Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis and Ward 2 Alderman Rickey Gray said they both believe the plan the city will submit to the court is one on which both sides can agree. The proposed plan is based on 2010 Census figures.

“As long as it is consistent with ‘one man, one vote,’ I don’t really have a problem with it,” Arceneaux-Mathis said. “I think (the plan) looks a lot better than it did before.”

Arceneaux-Mathis and Gray declined to comment on whether they believed the lawsuit was an attempt to ensure the election of a fourth black alderman to the board.

Blacks hold the majority in Wards 1, 2 and 4, as well as a slight majority in Ward 5 — with a 52 percent black voting age population — under the current ward lines.

The city submitted a redistricting plan to the U.S. Department of Justice in December 2011 for pre-clearance. Federal preclearance was a requirement for Mississippi and a number of other states when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted. A 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down the preclearance requirement.

By March 2012, just weeks ahead of city elections, city leaders had received no answer from the DOJ on whether its plan had been approved or not.

On advice of the Mississippi Attorney General’s office the city proceeded with elections. On Election Day, May 1, 2012, the DOJ finally responded, rejecting the city’s redistricting plan, at that point the election was already under way and the election results stood.

The DOJ contended that the rejected plan reduced the voting age black population in Ward 5 to 46 percent and that the city appeared to have drawn the lines that way because blacks were on the verge of winning a fourth seat on the six-member board of aldermen.

Ward 5 Alderman Mark Fortenbery, a white alderman, ran unopposed in 2012.

The city’s three black aldermen, Arceneaux-Mathis, Gray and Tony Fields of Ward 4, voted against the plan in 2011.

West said Monday evening it is his hope the plan the city presents would allow the two sides to settle the lawsuit.

“I’m hopeful that (we can come to an agreement),” West said.