zen, it is my responsibility to support our county’s

zen, it is my responsibility to support our county’s services.

This past year, almost all of us got a tax increase. Mine was a rude awakening and with two sons in college, it is a stretch for us. But our school board has shown over the years that they are excellent stewards of the funds they receive.

Dr. Chappell and his predecessor removed over $400,000 in expenses from the school budget over the past several years. That represents reduced staffing for administration, including an assistant superintendent; cutting the French program in half; scaling back summer school, etc. They are constantly doing “more with less,” as was requested at the public hearing.

It is a fact that for the past several decades, our representatives on the federal and state level h&ve not kept pace in bearing their fair share of providing adequately for local services, including schools, even though these services are required by law.

While we all reap the benefit of relatively low state and federal taxes, this is a clever sleight-of-hand on the part of legislators with big campaign budgets and unfortunately puts citizens in the position of annually doing battle to pay for schools and other public services.

As past School Board Chairman Wes Mills said, “Rappahannock County is facing a funding crisis.” At the public hearing, others voiced very passionately that the county cannot continue to bear the brunt of the Local Composite Index (LCI), the funding formula by which the state allocates money to localities for county government.

I applaud the Board of Supervisors’ study of this issue a few years ago. It is now time to act.

As many citizens know, due to the LCI, in Rappahannock we receive only about 26 percent of our funding from the state of Virginia. In contrast, Page County over the mountains typically receives over 70 per