Natchez city leaders are on the right track with plans to significantly fix a long-standing problem — unsightly billboards.

City leaders back in 1994 wisely decided billboards didn’t have a place in the historic areas of our city, so they banned them.

They offered billboard owners 10 years to earn rental revenue from existing billboards before they were to be taken down.

Now, some 22 years later, the billboards are still up only now an entirely new generation of billboards has sprung up.

One company — apparently sensing the city planned to severely limit the overhead clutter — opted to quickly erect new billboards in several locations around Natchez. The last-minute adds are easy to spot since they’re shiny and unsold.

City aldermen voted Tuesday to begin upholding the ban on billboards in the historic district, and the city’s interim city planner expects to seek approval to make the restrictions on existing billboards even more tightly regulated.

But at least one preservation commission member wants to take the ban further — declaring the primary arteries into Natchez off limits to billboards as well.

We agree for both aesthetic as well as safety reasons.

Billboards by nature intend to catch the eye of motorists. That’s unsafe because motorists should be looking at the road.

Of course, if they’re not looking at the road they could be looking at Natchez’s natural and manmade beauty, were it not for all the billboards cluttering up the view.

We applaud the city for having the guts to start enforcing their own ban, and hope they have the courage to be different than other cities and fight to preserve our city’s beauty by getting rid of the clutter.