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Tommorow’s here
“Don’t put off until tommorrow what you can do today,” the old adage goes.
The wisdom of those words can be applied to the Rappahannock supervisors and some long-festering problems that might become serious wounds.
Ten years ago, former board Chairman E.P. Luke pressed his peers to appropriate money for a landfill site. Mr. Luke received little support, and today the county faces a crisis because the private dump it uses will soon expire. No solution seems to be forthcoming.
Similary, efforts to provide an animal shelter in the county have received little more than lip service. And that problem is back to haunt the county.
The list goes on: Rappahannock was the last county in Virginia to abandon the expensive policy of paying law enforcement officials mileage reimbursements to drive their own cars; it for years ignored the state requirement to have a building inspector; it sent prisoners to the Fauquier Jail instead of improving its own facility, until finally Fauquier said “no more”; it took years to install a fie escape from the second floor of the courthouse and to make other changes to comply with regulations after being cited for violatios by the state fire marshal.
The zoning ordinance has been going through badly needed revision for six or seven years. It’s been on a shelf gathering dust for a year or so now.
Rappahannock may be the last county in Virginia without a county administrator, although there are - whisperingS’that the supervisors may include funds for the position in the 1986-87 budget. That should help the board organize itself to seriously confront some of the dire needs.
In fairness to this board and its predecessors, keeping the tax rate low usually has been the priority. In a vacuum, that’s a noble cause. But, the constant pattern of delaying reassessment and avoiding small tax increases will hurt the taxpayer in the long run when he is asked to pay suddenly larger sums in a frantic effort to catch up with state mandates and common-sense needs.
It’s time to break the pattern. But will it happen?
In the resolution they passed unanimously a couple weeks ago, directing the School Board to cut its proposed budget, the supervisors blamed Gramm-Rudmann and declining federal and state funds for the fiscal crunch. But, the supervisors’ own short-sightedness deserves much of the blame.
We can’t continue to ignore needs which won’t go away tomorrow.
In many cases, tommorrow is here.
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