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ties of individual landowners.
As we discuss these issues, let us keep in mind two fundamentals:
1) To build more sewers, we’ll have to spend our money. When the Sperryville sewage system was built, we relied for most of the financing on one of the nation’s last 85 percent sewage treatment construction grants. It was provided under Federal policy designed to assist in cleaning up the backlog of existing pollution problems (Sperryville was Number 5 on Virginia’s health hazard list), leaving communities basic responsibility only for preventing new pollution. The sewers being discussed today are primarily for wastes that don’t yet exist. A county that has voted quite consistently for lower state and federal taxes, Rappahannock shouldn’t even begin to hope for new grant-in-aid policies. New sewers will be built with our money. And it will be big money — millions of dollars, overall, maybe several thousand per family.
2) Much of that money will likely have to come from the rea| property tax. It is my guess that no group of new sewer users in Rappahannock could possibly afford to build a system all by themselves. Too few people would be involved. Users of today’s Sperryville system find it burdensome just to pay operating costs. And state law gives Rappahannock no major general revenue source other than the real property tax.
That’s why I ask the county to • •pend a bit of our tax money now, before we arrive at any slippery slope. It ought to employ a competent engineering firm — for probably somewhere in the five-figure range — to assess our wastewater future, and to give us an advance general understanding of the options we may have to confront. Is it economically realistic even to consider sewer systems dis
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