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and why do you in today's editorial urge citizens to attend the March 5 School Board meeting to bring their input and put pressure on the School Board to recommend a larger school budget and higher teachers’ salaries?
We either believe in democracy and inajority rule on principle and all of the time or we believe in it only some of the time--when we perceive that it suits our own interests and personal prejudices to do so.
You have reported that Andy Guest said he had a “face-off’ with the House committee over our requested advisory referendum bill-Andy wanting an advisory, non-binding referendum and the committee insisting that the referendum had to be binding or nothing. A simple telephone call from Richmond to Rappahannock County would have settled that impasse for Mr. Guest: a binding referendum it would have to be, as in the School Board case, so that the referendum would “have meaning”, in the committee’s terminology.
If the Planning Commission recommends and the Supervisors enact a new zoning ordinance which is substantially the same as the commission’s proposal, I predict that Andy Guest will receive a mass-signed petition, and directly, requesting him to submit in the next session of the General Assembly a bill for a referendum which is not advisory but binding this time. After all. this is the only problem which the committee members claimed they had with the previous bill.
Faced with that “input”, the Supervisors will have no alternative but to find out exactly what lcind of zoning ordinance would be acceptable to the county electorate and enact changes accordingly. That, or have no zoning ordinance at all.
The Planning Commission and the Supervisors now know with certainty that a majority of our citizenry are opposed to the draft ordinance in its present form. We shall see shortly whether they will continue to ignore the majority will or accede to it gracefully. It is for the latter that the majority elected the Supervisors in the first place, under our system of representative democracy.
ROBERT W. EASTHAM
Flint Hill. Va.
82.9%