Could my baldness be blamed on our local government leaders?

Maybe. Decisions — and indecisions — made by some local elected officials certainly have caused more head scratching than normal.

At the moment, the City of Natchez continues its cycle of spending more than it’s collecting and is amazingly reacting more slowly than logic would indicate necessary.

This situation should surprise few. For years the city has been criticized for its lackadaisical approach to budgeting. For a few years, the city has simply opted to rubber stamp the previous year’s budget and deal with “problems” later.

City leaders’ way of dealing with the problems was to start a cycle of revolving debt — borrowing against anticipated tax collections.

But it’s not just finances that have citizens puzzled. The city sends mixed signals on such seemingly simple things as the sign ordinance with the mayor and city attorney overruling the city planner’s office in the latest political billboard spat. Talk about undercutting a department head.

Now any ruling the planner’s office makes can be informally appealed to the mayor and the city attorney. That’s not a good precedent.

Of course the county’s filled with head-scratching actions, too.

The county is going to borrow $6 million to repave roads one minute; then puts the brakes on the plan — behind closed doors — the next minute.

The public, it seems, shouldn’t be allowed to be at the table where five of its representatives decide how to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

The county is currently working on its budget for next year, spending four hours on Thursday in executive session — shutting out the public. Supervisors claimed they were discussing “personnel matters” — which is one of a handful of exclusions to the state’s open meetings laws.

It seems unlikely that supervisors were talking exclusively about personnel matters for four straight hours. Yet, we’ll never know.

Our community’s economic development authority’s future is up in the air at the moment. The future of the EDA, apparently, is being decided by a small group of people — including the mayor and the president of the board of supervisors.

Somehow, the public isn’t deemed important enough to be at that table, either.

Why is that more and more of our public decisions seem to be debated behind closed doors?

Increasingly, city and county leaders seem to be getting either bad advice from their attorneys or no advice on such matters.

Of course, when elected officials get to pick their own attorneys to represent them, it’s probably easy to find attorneys that will go along with what the group seeks.

Shouldn’t our leaders — including appointed public attorneys — be more concerned about keeping their constituency in the debate rather than shutting them out?

If you cannot stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Don’t just slam the kitchen door, flip the deadbolt and pull the shutters.

Taxpayers own that kitchen, by the way.

All of these public shenanigans are enough to make you scratch your head in puzzlement.

So can I reasonably blame my baldness on our elected officials?

I’m still scratching my head on that one, but my friend, the attorney, says it won’t be a problem.

Kevin Cooper is publisher of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3539 or kevin.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.