Tax, spend

Tax, spend

philosophy?

To the editor: I suggest that you consider renaming the local newspaper The Rappahannock Democrat because only Democrats (at least on the national scene) appear to favor balancing public budgets by increasing revenues through increased taxation and never by decreasing or holding down public expenditures. Certainly the Rappahannock News has recently adopted the national Democratic budgeting posture for our county.

I would like to support Supervisor Lane’s public repudiation on June 2 of the so-called “survey” by the Rappahannock-Rapidan Planning Commission which your paper headlined on May 29 “Tax hikes not great concern according to planners’ survey.” This sleazy attempt by the Planning District staff to interfere with this County’s budgeting process was suspect because of:

a) the method by which the “poll” was conducted

b) the miniscule number of people surveyed

c) the selective manner in which respondents were chosen and

d) the suspect timing of the “survey,” in the midst of the Supervisors’ budget hearings, and of your rushing into headline print to report this “non-event/’ all transparent attempts to influence the Supervisors. Why can’t you people confine your personal opinions on public affairs to the Editorial Page while we, the public, confine ours to Letters to the Editors?

Now comes this week your front page headline, “$5.3 million budget draws no comment,” with a bad sentence informing us that “not a single taxpayer spoke against the proposed $5.3 million in expenditures which require a real estate levy of 64 cents per $100 of assessed value, double the rate of 4 years ago and up 6 cents for this year.” How could they? Were the taxpayers supposed to come and wait until midnight to speak their minds?

At the Supervisors’ meeting on June 2, at which it had been announced that a public hearing on the County Budget would be held, I arrived at 10 a.m., as usual. There were only a few people in attendance and almost all of them were people