City of Natchez officials soon will craft the 2012 fiscal year budget. We encourage city leaders to take a slow, thorough approach to budgeting this year.

In the last two fiscal years, the city has made significant changes to its spending practices.

Staff reductions and efforts to privatize some city functions aimed to save tens of thousands of dollars from the city’s expenses. We need to confirm the plans worked.

We’d hope city leaders would take the budget approach of starting with zero.

By that we mean, rather than simply starting next year’s budget with last year’s actual expenditures, city leaders would be wise to simply start each budget category at zero.

Each department should be made to justify why each line item request is absolutely necessary.

Only with that level of scrutiny will city leaders truly begin to get a handle on where taxpayer dollars are going — and how to save on expenses and programs found to be unnecessary.

The city’s antiquated financial software is outdated and apparently not user friendly. Our city’s police and fire departments don’t always have the absolute best equipment, and certainly not the best pay. Until that can change, city leaders need to continue looking for areas that can be trimmed.

Starting at zero is a good place to start.