During her eight-month stint as Petersburg’s interim city manager, Dironna Moore Belton had a simple solution to handling the bills the city had no money to pay.

Rather than mail payments, she would line up the bills and payment checks neatly in two desk drawers in hopes that, one day, there would be enough money in the city’s bank account to pay them, according to the Robert Bobb Group.

Officials from the consulting company found the checks after the Petersburg City Council put the consultants in charge and sent Ms. Belton back to her former role as chief executive officer of the Petersburg Area Transit Co.

Since the 2016-17 fiscal year began July 1, more than $6 million in unissued checks have piled up, a financial document the Washington-based consulting group provided last week to City Council shows.

According to the group, Ms. Belton was using new revenue that was supposed to pay current bills to cover some of the debts the city had built up in previous fiscal years.

Still, the group that Robert C. Bobb, a former Richmond city manager, leads has indicated it does not have a magic wand to address Petersburg’s financial difficulties.

Essentially, the city must get a short-term loan of about $6.5 million to pay off the current obligations by June, according to the group’s report.

The group has stated that such a loan must be obtained by the end of the month to maintain operations. However, the Bobb Group is making no promises that it can find a lender from which the city can borrow. During her tenure, Ms. Belton also had noted the city would need a short-term loan to keep its operations going.

Separately, the Bobb Group, which the council has promised to pay $375,000 for five months of help in getting its finances back on track, is developing a plan to enable the city to pay off its accumulated deficit, which, according to an October report from Ms. Belton, totals at least $11 million.

Meanwhile, the city is struggling to keep its operations going with a shrinking workforce.

Nearly 150 workers have been laid off or have quit since August, when Petersburg cut pay for virtually all employees by 10 percent, the Bobb Group noted in last week’s report.

The loss of employees only adds stress on the remaining workforce that already had been reduced, according to the city’s most recent annual financial report for 2014-15, which ended June 30, 2015.

That year, the city reported 953 full- time employees, including police officers, firefighters and sheriff’s deputies, or 16 percent fewer than the 1,129 full-time employees the city reported in the fiscal year that end June 30, 2014.

The 953 employees represented the smallest workforce in a decade, according to city data.

That number shrank to 879 full-time employees in the 2015-16 fiscal year as a result of City Council’s decision to close the Petersburg jail and lay off 74 Sheriff’s Department employees.

The additional loss of 146 employees at the start of the current fiscal year would further reduce the number of Petersburg’s full-time public employees to 733. That’s 17 percent fewer than the fiscal year that ended June 30 and 23 percent fewer than fiscal 2015.

The city often has filled in with part-time employees, but the number of such employees also has dropped. According to the city’s data, Petersburg employed 229 part-time employees in fiscal 2015, also the smallest number employed in a decade.