Nightclubs that operate in Warren County far outside the city limits of Vicksburg — often tucked away in trailer parks off the beaten path of major thoroughfares — became a unique pivot point Monday in an effort to encourage zoning and building codes outside the city.

A mobile home at 1614 Greenhill Road, off U.S. 80, and a house at 4757 Lee Road are two places Warren County Sheriff Martin Pace said are known to operate as nightclubs. All that’s needed to do so in nonmunicipal Warren County is a license in hand from the state Department of Revenue. Pace told supervisors Vicksburg Warren E-911 has taken 56 calls in the past year to report various disturbances of the peace at the Greenhill Road establishment, often in the wee hours of weekend mornings.

“When the places in the city close, there’s this parade of people into the county at 2 o’clock in the morning,” Pace said. “With limited staff, my guys need to be patrolling subdivisions for car burglaries and businesses for business burglaries. I’ll have everyone on duty tied up on one nightclub disturbance at 3 o’clock in the morning when everyone needs to be asleep.”

Pace recommended the county consider an ordinance that would close nightclubs outside city limits by 1 a.m. Inside the city, businesses which serve alcohol must close by 2 a.m. unless the building in which they’re housed has resort status from the Mississippi Department of Revenue. The designation allows alcohol to be served 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Pace and supervisors left the issue in the realm of research to check with contemporaries in the state to find out what works.

Supervisors voted 3-2 to opt out of a statewide building code that had exempted mobile homes and certain other structures from having to conform to International Building Code and other construction standards. As with building codes, Board President Bill Lauderdale again said he didn’t have a problem with “looking at” stringent rules, but indicated to Pace he favored going through the chancery court system to declare any building where disturbance calls pile up to be declared a public nuisance and shut down.

“If there was a new one, I’d shut him down, too,” Lauderdale said, referring to nightclubs with a high number of 911 calls attached to it. If law enforcement is having to go out there 50 times, you need to do something to those folks.”

Pace’s reply was tied to the recent vote on building codes, which carried with it a tacit delay of any zoning of land usage in the county.

“If you feel that strongly about it, let’s talk about a restrictive zoning ordinance that would establish an entertainment zone and have zoning for Warren County,” Pace told Lauderdale.

Supervisors Charles Selmon and Richard George favored crafting a “closing ordinance” for nightclubs in principle.

“We just need a time when the joint must be closed,” George said. “Else, go party in the back of the truck somewhere.”

“You can’t just target one place,” Selmon. “You have to target the whole county.”

“You can when you’re disturbing the peace,” Lauderdale said in response. “It’s just like if I was to go out there and put boomboxes all around my house and disturb my whole neighborhood.”

Twice in 2013, shootings were reported at the Lee Road bar, dubbed the Starlight Lounge. A trial is set for March 9, 2015 for a Vicksburg man and two women accused of murder in the second incident that year, one authorities said stemmed from an argument in the parking lot and involves a son of one of the bar’s owners.