The New Iberia City Council and Mayor Freddie DeCourt are still trying to figure out what to do about what DeCourt cited as the next major issue in the city.

During Tuesday’s regular meeting, Councilman Dustin Suire asked DeCourt what the administration is doing in regard to blighted properties in the city, a question DeCourt said he didn’t have an easy answer for.

DeCourt said New Iberia currently has about 500 adjudicated properties, with a few more that are being added to the list. About 160 are for sale and can be purchased on CivicSource, while another 150 are currently in “limbo,” and have to go through a mandatory five years of ownership before they can be sold.

“We have 120 of them that are mobile homes, the trailers aren’t financed the same way the land is,” DeCourt said. “Sometimes they’re financed together. It’s a mess.”

DeCourt’s administration is currently working on a map to lay out blighted properties in the city, which he said has been harder than thought due to discrepancies within some properties.

“Jeff (Simon, city attorney) is going to have to get involved because I don’t have all the answers,” DeCourt said. “Can we change the zoning, can we put them in clumps of 10, could I find developers who want to reinvest in the community and I can sell them 10 at a reduced price? There’s a bunch of ideas.”

DeCourt said in terms of other municipalities, New Iberia is ahead of the curve on demolitions of buildings, like the 13 properties recently approved by the City Council for demolition.

Despite recent successes in grants and new businesses in town, DeCourt said the issue is one that will most likely be a long-term fix.

“I don’t want to tear every one of them down because then we’ll have empty lots and guess who’s going to cut all the grass,” he said. “This is an issue we’re going to continue to research, every call one of you gets, my office gets so we’re all in this together.”

For now, DeCourt said he wants to continue selling the properties that are up for sale and focusing on demolishing the buildings that need to be taken down.

It’s a plan he called “partial” and “a work in progress.”

“Other people have tried and this is an issue that haunts every town. Every town in south Louisiana has blight,” DeCourt said. “This is a long term issue.”

Mayor Pro Tem Dan Doerle said that for the several years he’s been on the council, he’s never seen an administration be as aggressive with the problem as the current one.

“Being here all these years, I never saw an administration as aggressive as y’all are in putting money out to it,” Doerle said. “We spent more money in the last two and a half years than we have in the (previous) eight years. We’re giving up other stuff to make this happen.”

Councilwoman Sherry Guidry, who recently spoke about the issue publically in a media broadcast, said she was hoping to be a catalyst for a conversation that many residents in the area are concerned about.

“I don’t have all the answers, the mayor doesn’t, but if we work together we can come up with something,” Guidry said.

In other business, the City Council approved the substantial completion of the playground upgrades and splash pad at West End Park.

The project had been originally slated for completion earlier in the summer, but DeCourt said the influx of rain in the area had held back the project.

“We were weeks behind doing the dirt work and weeks behind pouring the slab,” DeCourt said. “Since the splash pad is mostly pouring the slab we were really behind.”

The project was funded through a matching grant that involves in-kind work from the Public Works Department, which DeCourt said is still in progress.

“It’s complete. The next step, Public Works is going to come back and do some dirt work around it and we’re also going to pour a new sidewalk to get to it. Some of the sidewalks are salvageable and some weren’t.

“Every one of these grants, we’re doing some in-kind stuff and some in actual cash. It’s a balancing act, we take our time and money and go as far as we can.”