Trying to maintain an essential service below cost doesn’t work long term.

Virginians are loath to raise taxes of any kind for any reason, so much so that politicians have built careers on the aversion. And the task gets only more distasteful the closer it hits to home, where friends and neighbors can turn out for meetings and buttonhole elected officials in the grocery check-out line.

But the duty gets more difficult to ignore, too, where the line between cause and effect can be brightly drawn: between inadequate revenue and inadequate service.

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