CHAMPAIGN – Officials are looking to strengthen their authority over the city's vacant buildings, which they say are the source of much blight in the community.

There were 205 vacant buildings and 17 "underutilized" buildings in the city during a November 2009 survey, the most recent data. Of those, 155 were found to have at least one violation of city codes.

But some property owners are not always available or willing to work with the city on correcting those violations, environmental inspector Leslie Mitchell said. And when that happens, the attractiveness and sometimes the safety of the surrounding neighborhood is hurt.

"Once places become where they're not lived in, they start to fall apart," Mitchell said.

Broken windows are boarded up, grass and weeds grow higher than the city allows, and garbage begins to pile up in front yards.

Fire becomes a risk: a 1987 arson, which originated in a vacant structure, destroyed an entire block of buildings that sat on what is now One Main.

Only a small number of vacant property owners do not cooperate with the city, but it's enough to get officials to write a vacant building ordinance. The ordinance would give officials a way to deal with vacant properties, and the city council is set to discuss it in April.

Right now, it is a matter of "asking politely to please take care of your property," Mitchell said.

A home at 56 E. Garwood St. has stood vacant since 1996, and Doris Russell, the owner and resident of a day care across the street, said she is hoping the building is torn down soon.

"That thing should have been gone a long time ago," Russell said.

The city is accepting bids to demolish the structure, property maintenance inspector Cliff Peete said. To do so, the city had to go through the court process, something that happens only one to three times per year.

"Basically the property was open to intrusion, people breaking in, causing some problems that way, stealing copper out of the property," Peete said.

And the property owner was not cooperative with inspectors.

Russell said she would not mind just having a vacant lot across her street.

"Anything would be better than that sitting over there," she said. "It makes the neighborhood look worse than it already is."

Another home at 903 N. Walnut St. has caused some problems for the city. A fire sparked inside the home in November.

"I guess some homeless people had broke inside of it and, well, it caught fire," Peete said. "Since then, we have been working with the property owner."

If the city council were to follow through, a vacant-building ordinance would give officials a specific code under which they can enforce vacant-building regulations.

That would include a registry keeping track of all the city's nuisance properties – properties that are vacant and have uncorrected code violations or instances of crime – and distinct fees to a property owner who does not cooperate with city property inspectors.

A building would remain on that nuisance list until the building is at least 50 percent occupied, all the property code violations are corrected and the owner is current on fees.

"It does give us a way of dealing with these nuisance properties instead of going to court," Assistant City Attorney Laura Hall said.

Remediation of vacant properties through the legal system is "expensive, it's time-consuming and it's adversarial," Hall said.

Instead, the new ordinance provides the city with an alternative means of working with property owners. And the ordinance focuses only on the properties that are "not responsive to the ordinary process," Neighborhood Services Director Kevin Jackson said.

There are some cases "where people just need a stronger signal or prodding along," Jackson said.

But the idea is to get property owners to cooperate with city officials before it gets to that point, Mitchell said.

"It can be depressing after a while," Mitchell said.