We weren’t shy about wagging our finger at state officials in late September when the rating agency Standard & Poor’s knocked the state’s credit rating down a notch.

So it should come as no surprise that we also take a dim view of finances in Butler City, which did the state one better this year and is on its second credit downgrade from S&P.

Butler’s latest downgrade came this week. S&P cited “weak liquidity” and a “lack of planning” as the reasons behind taking the city’s’s bond rating from BBB, which is the lowest investment-grade bond rating, to BB+. The downgrade puts the city’s bonds in the junk category, meaning that they will have to offer far higher yields to entice investors. That means the city’s cost of borrowing will go up yet again. Borrowing costs already went up once this year, when S&P downgraded the city’s bonds from an A rating to BBB in June.

This slide into fiscal distress must be stopped right now. The city is already strapped for cash and faces the need to dedicate money to various capital investments for equipment and infrastructure. It can ill-afford higher borrowing costs for those purchases.

Equally troubling are S&P’s references to lack of planning, poor fiscal management and very weak finances. In its latest downgrade the organization said it had revised its position on the city’s liquidity from weak to “very weak,” based almost entirely upon two 2015 bonds issued for the Centre City Parking Garage and S&P’s “uncertainty surrounding the timely completion and payment of the project and line of credit.”

S&P also noted that the city lacks long-term financial and capital plans, debt management or reserve policies, has ongoing structural budget imbalances, lacks an efficient way to generate more revenue, and had a fiscal reserve of only $183,000 last year — down from $1.2 million in 2014.

We could go on (S&P certainly does) but hopefully we’ve made our point. There’s a dangerous spiral happening here: Risk. Deteriorating finances. Credit downgrades. Bona fide fiscal distress.

That’s the direction in which the city is pointed at this moment. What are Butler’s elected officials prepared to do to right the ship?