To avoid another $13 million discrepancy in the Warren County budget next year, it’s imperative the Board of Supervisors start reading things like property adjustment requests a bit more carefully, the board’s president said Thursday.

“We just got to trusting folks (in the assessor’s office) through the years with it,” said Bill Lauderdale during an address to the Port City Kiwanis. “We’ll just have to do better.”

A fee-in-lieu of property taxes created in 2010 for Ergon Refining was inadvertently assessed twice, then adjusted late last year. It ended up being in last year’s budget, adopted in September 2011, then taken off the rolls by board action in December. Taxes paid on the personal property account went to the city.

Supervisors have said they’ll review stacks of property adjustment documents more carefully in the future.

The accounting slip-up created a $204,549 deficit in the county’s current version of a fiscal 2013 budget. Recent talks on how to fill the gap center on leaving vacant positions open for the coming year and charging higher building permit fees.

An extra $25.60 in property taxes for every $100,000 assessed on homes, businesses and farmland has also figured prominently in budget meetings this summer.

Expenses for the Kings Point Ferry, subject of a recently settled lawsuit by landowners on Kings Point Island, are expected to reach $310,870 in fiscal 2013, down nearly 10 percent since 2008 when three pilots were on staff. A case brought in chancery court by M&M Property and other landowning groups was dismissed in July.

Two U.S. Coast Guard-certified pilots paid about $16 an hour and a contract backup paid $25 an hour when needed have steered the ferry since 2010.

“It takes the same license to run (the ferry) across the Yazoo as it does to run tows up the Mississippi — which I think is ridiculous, but that’s what the Coast Guard wants,” Lauderdale said.

Lauderdale, 65, first elected in 1988, won a sixth, nonconsecutive term last year.