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before the full House of Delegates.
“The debate on the floor was centered around the fact that this is a zero-sum game when we're talking about school funding — there’s a finite umount of money in the commonwealth to take care of people’s needs,” he said in a phone interview.
Gilbert said Rappahannock is in a unique predicament in which the responsibility to pay for education falls disproportionately on local taxpayers. He said that he and County Administrator John McCarthy made that point in testimony before House committees, which passed forward the legislation to the House floor for a vote.
“Personally I’ve invested a lot of political capital in making sure that it got to the floor and got a vote,” Gilbert said.
Gilbert, a Republican, represents Rappahannock County.
“I think we’re doing pretty well, but at any given time, if folks start putting their heads together to start derailing this thing, they probably can do it,” he said. “We’ve had those hurdles all along the way and we’ve been able to overcome them, but you never know.”
The House bill will come before the Senate Finance Committee in the coming weeks.
“The biggest obstacle remains the fact that when you carve out an exception for one county, other counties start saying, ‘Hey, what about me?”’ Gilbert said.
And for both the House and Senate bills, much of the opposition came mainly from Northern Virginia jurisdictions also hoping to secure greater education monies.
Senators representing Fairfax, Prince William, Loudoun, Culpeper, Madison, Orange and Alexandria opposed Senate Bill 559.
Sen. Chap Ptetersen, who represents parts of Fairfax, tried to attach an amendment
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