IT’S GOOD that city officials are becoming more creative in finding the missing owners of derelict or unkempt buildings and property and making them do what’s right by their neighborhoods.

But if creativity doesn’t work, City Hall should ramp it up and get more aggressive.

Call it protecting the public’s purse while also preventing neighborhoods from going down the tubes.

When private owners can’t or won’t do the bare minimum to maintain property, and the city is forced to step in to do basic maintenance at taxpayer expense, it’s in the public’s interest to take forceful steps. Otherwise everyone loses – especially people who live next door or across the street from an empty and open building that’s used as a flophouse for street people or as a crack house.

The city’s latest action enlists the public’s help. For a month, the city has been airing a program, “Whose Property Is It Anyway?” on SGTV Channel 8, the local city government channel. The first program features 13 properties owned by people the city apparently cannot locate. And if they can’t find them, they can’t send them citations ordering them to follow the rules.

Let’s hope the public relations effort pays off. But if it doesn’t, city officials should consult their own Revenue Department officials, or, walk over to the Chatham County Courthouse and see the Chatham County Tax Commissioner.

Find out if city and county taxes are being paid on these derelict buildings. Look at where the tax bills are being sent. If it’s an address in Chatham County, send a city marshal out to pay a visit – and, if the city has already paid to board up a house or cut the grass at public expense, demand some sort of payment.

Some owners, especially those who are elderly or on fixed income, may not have the resources. But it’s unlikely that all of them are broke.

For absentee owners who live outside the county or the state, the city should consider filing a lien against the property to help taxpayers recoup expenses.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

A perfect example is the city’s parking services office. The city’s meter maids are among the most efficient public employees in terms of writing citations. Getting some people to pay up is always a problem, but the city has adopted a fairly effective tool that it uses when possible – a boot that city employees lock onto a vehicle’s wheel. It immobilizes the vehicle until the owner settles up.

The problem with vehicles with a backlog of unpaid citations is that you have to find the vehicle to use the boot. But buildings don’t move.

You can’t “boot” the property of an owner a derelict structure. But you can file legal documents that encumber this property to force the owner to pay up.