A referendum for a proposed 4 percent meals tax will be on the Nov. 4 ballot in Mathews, and county administrator Mindy Moran wants to make sure residents know about the issues involved before they go to the polls.

Moran said that the county’s budget is overly dependent on the real estate tax, and she projects that the levy will have to increase in the future to pick up the burden of financing costly mandates from the state and federal governments, as well as to deal with the continuing decline in state and federal funding to localities.

Because Virginia is a Dillon Rule state that limits local authority to only those powers granted by the General Assembly, localities are only allowed to assess certain taxes. In Mathews, real estate and personal property taxes bring in the largest amount of revenue to fund government services, said Moran.

While some localities additionally receive significant funding from sales tax revenue collected by the state and shared with the locality on...