Natchez city leaders are feverishly working to create a workable budget in hopes of making their state-mandated deadline this year.

Last year’s budget was late.

Last year’s audit was extremely late.

This year’s audit will be too as the information the city is required to provide to the outside auditors wasn’t finalized until after the audit deadline had passed.

Clearly the city continues to have trouble with its records keeping and financial reporting abilities.

The problems are so bad that often neither the right hand nor the left hand of city government knows what the other is doing.

Last week, aldermen became agitated and confused by a large increase in health care benefit costs until they were reminded that approximately half of the increase was tied to more than a dozen new city employees.

Several aldermen claim they were unaware of at least some of the hires. If that’s the case, the city needs to check its own policies and ensure the system of checks and balances is working correctly.

If it’s not being provided already, aldermen and the public should regularly see — perhaps quarterly — a mini-report showing where the city’s finances are compared to budget and last year’s actuals along with some basic statistics on the city’s employee roles.

Having that would at least eliminate the excuse of, “We didn’t know,” down the road — perhaps when next year’s budget is coming down to the wire and city leaders are panicking a bit.