During Monday’s meeting of the Warren County Board of Supervisors, Chancery Clerk Donna Hardy announced that the majority of properties with delinquent taxes from Fiscal Year 2018 have been settled.

The supervisors voted to certify the Tax-Forfeited Land Certificate, which stated 88 properties in Warren County were forfeited to the state of Mississippi on the last Monday in August due to delinquent 2018 property taxes.

“I don’t want you to think that’s all that was forfeited,” Hardy said. “That’s just all that was forfeited to the state of Mississippi.”

Another 157 properties were forfeited to individuals or investment groups. A total of 245 properties were forfeited altogether.

This is considered a win, Hardy said, as she spent the 10 days prior to the Aug. 26 deadline making a special effort to contact those who owed property taxes from 2018.

“We managed to carve it down from 500 (delinquent properties) to this 245,” she said. “I want to thank everybody who participated in that, the supervisors who called people, and The Vicksburg Post, which ran a special.

“When they put that on their (Facebook) feed, we were bombarded for the next couple of days.”

She said in the end, there were only 20 or 25 more forfeited properties than in Fiscal Year 2017. A big obstacle, she said, was issues with the postal service. In August, Hardy told The Post that “40 to 50 percent” of the certified mail sent by her office was being returned to sender.

“This is not just a Warren County problem. This is a state problem and obviously, a national problem. We waited a substantially longer amount of time for postmarked material to come in. We gave an extra week, just in case. It’s a problem. I don’t know how to fix it, but we’re going to start pitching ideas at the state level to see what we can do to fix this.”