BATON ROUGE — Following a WBRZ Investigative Unit report about a city-parish funded blight outreach program, some residents in heavily-blighted neighborhoods are questioning whether the program is a good use of taxpayer dollars. 

South Baton Rouge resident Charles Jones has been vocal about the problem for some time.

"This area here is gone undone, and nobody seems to care," Jones said.

The WBRZ Investigative Unit previously reported on a city-parish program that pays seven people $2,000 per month to document blight across different metro council districts.

That comes out to $168,000 a year for people to identify blight locations without actually removing any of it.

Jones said he had no idea the program existed. "That's crazy, but who is making these decisions, why? Why? That is really crazy," Jones said.

He thinks the money could be better spent.

"Maybe they take that $2,000 that they're giving to these guys to point out what's going on to these homeowners where they can keep the property up," Jones said.

Rachael Lambert heads the Department of Development and oversees the blight program. She says the biggest challenge is a shortage of staff who can actually remove blight.

"We try to assign a dollar figure because we are trying to bid some of the blight remediation out because we only have four people that work in my field crew," Lambert said, "so I'd say that our backlog is probably around three to four million dollars right now."

Jones acknowledged some progress has been made but said more is needed.

"They have made an attempt to do some things around here but we got a long ways to go," Jones said.

Lambert said the department is working on it.

"We're constantly working to try and improve the department as a whole," Lambert said. "We are looking at a lot of technology and new things to bring to the department to help us be more efficient and do more with less."

For now, Jones plans to keep speaking up. "I guess the more we talk about it, hopefully the better it will get," Jones said.