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By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON
Rappahannock New* Staff Writer
Community Service is big business: 237 on the payroll and 600 volunteers; 21,000 hours annually of outpatient care; 42,400 congregate meals served and 23,000 meals delivered to the homebound every year; 20 service sites including family guidance clinics, a group home for the mentally retarded, a senior citizens center, an alcohol and drug abuse treatment center and a psycho-social center for the mentally ill; a caseload of more than 3,000 annually, which in the 20-some years since the agency was established totals about 10 percent of the Rappahannock-Rapidan Planning District’s population.
It’s also an economically run business, costing the taxpayers of the five counties just $2.22 per capita in local tax dollars, less than half of the $5.58 average for Virginia’s 40 Community Service Boards. _ Sometimes it’s hard to tell what gives Jo Gorman, the executive director, the greatest satisfaction. She’s proud that this Community Service Center logs almost twice as many outpatient hours as its closest competitor in the Commonwealth. She’s proud of the professionalism and skills of her paid staff and the dedication of hundreds of volunteers.
And while she rails at the cuts in federal and state support for mental health, mental retardation, substance abuse and aging services, she’s proud that the five local governments pay the same seven percent share of the budget as they did in 1980.
But despite the wide range of services and their economical delivery, she worries that local officials and local taxpayers see the agency only as some amorphous entity that sends half-empty vans puttering up and down back country roads. “So very few of the people out there understand anything about what we’re doing,” she said, in a recent interview in her cramped office on the top floor of the old Lord Culpeper Hotel on Culpeper’s Main Street.
She’s been trying to close that information gap. In the corner stands the big flip chart that she lugs around to meetings of Lions Clubs, Ruritans, Rotary and PTAs. On a comer of her desk are piles of brochures that outline the programs the center provides. Stacked in the bathtub (the tiny bathroom for her office serves as storage and records room) are leaflets that give the schedules of the Community Services...Center's transportation network.
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