Discussion was tabled on a new burn ordinance after several unanswered questions were brought up in the Tuesday Board of Alderman meeting in Wesson.

In the current ordinance, a permit is required and a burn must be out before dark, supervised by an adult and it cannot be left unattended. But Mayor Alton Shaw said in an interview that an incident caused the ordinance to come up for review.

“A guy had a house that was dilapidated,” Shaw said. “He had to get rid of it. He had a dozer over there, knocked the house down and lit it on fire.”

Shaw said the resident did ask the fire department if he could burn planks.

“They said ‘Sure. We’re not under a burn ban. No problem,’” Shaw said. “No one had any idea he was burning the entire house. That’s what we’re trying to prevent.”

In the proposal, the Wesson Volunteer Fire Department would need to discuss what was being burned and any safety precautions before a permit would be granted. No charge would be required for the permit.

It was suggested in the meeting that the burn ordinance was overly broad, and would require a permit for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over a fire pit.

“We may need to figure out a way to delineate those,” Shaw said in the meeting.

“I think it should be,” City Attorney Jeff Varas replied. “It has to do with a situation where somebody set a house on fire.”

Shaw and Varas suggested that the ordinance could take the size of the fire into consideration, but Wesson Police Chief Chad O’Quinn objected.

“We can talk about it all night, but we’ll be the ones responding to it,” O’Quinn said. “Let’s get a little more simplistic. If we want to allow fire pits, let’s allow fire pits.”

O’Quinn said the police use common sense when enforcing the burn ordinance.

“If somebody’s got a huge brush fire out at 7 o’clock at night, we deal with that,” he said. “If someone’s roasting weenies, we don’t call the fire department over it.”

Shaw said he would review burn ordinances from other municipalities, and another proposal would be brought up in a future meeting.

In other business, Wesson aldermen opened bids for a paving project in the town. Shaw said that because the board meeting was postponed a week, by law the bidding process must continue beyond the date for the next meeting. A second meeting will likely be held in August after the regular meeting to award the bids.