New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley and officials with the Office of Recovery Management announced Thursday a joint plan to clean up some key blight in the city.

The meeting also gave the City Council a chance to clear up confusion on when the fight against blight will start.

“Now it’s time to get it done,” said Council President Arnie Fielkow. “We’ve passed new laws on blight reduction. We’ve created new processes here at the request of the administration.”

The Recovery Office says it is doing code enforcement now, and in the last two weeks has inspected more than 1,000 properties.

“Our estimate is that to do a complete overhaul and get a quality operation fully operational is going to take 10 to 12 months,” said Jeff Thomas with the Office of Recovery Management. “But that’s not the same thing as saying we’re not going out there and inspecting properties, we are on a weekly basis.”

In the next few weeks, the Recovery Office will be inspecting 60 specific properties provided Thursday by Police Chief Warren Riley.

“We're focused on properties where we know crimes have been committed,” said Riley, who added that most of those 60 properties are in the Ninth Ward. “If we eliminate places where drug dealers can shoot up drugs, where they can use these houses to sell and make exchanges of drugs, where we can eliminate these houses where they store and hide weapons, assault weapons and things like that, it eliminates, it takes something away from the criminal element to use.”

While the Recovery Office says Riley’s properties will be taken care of soon, the estimated 40,000 blighted homes in the city could take years to clean up.

“This will be a multi-year process,” said Thomas. “Ten to 15 years. What we’re hoping we’ve done here is to put a process in place to have this blight systematically eliminated.”

When fully operational the recovery office has a target goal of having 100 properties declared blighted every month. The office says of the 1,100 properties inspected the past two weeks, 400 of those were found to be in violation.