INSIDE SOUNDING OFF: Residents share views on COVID-19 response. > page 6 Volume 65, Number 18 • April 30, 2020
Local vet leaves legacy of love for pets – and people Now retired after over three decades in practice, Dr. Margaret Washburn says serving Goochland community was ‘a joy’ By Roslyn Ryan Editor
F
or as long as she can remember, Goochland Animal Clinic founder Dr. Margaret Washburn wanted to be a veterinarian. She knew it as a child growing up on her parents’ farm in Charles City County, where her earliest memories involved chickens, horses and cows, and she knew it as a teenager spending her summer hours as a veterinary assistant at a clinic in Ashland. “I often think back on how lucky I was that my parents always told my siblings and I that we could be whatever we wanted to be,” Washburn says, and for her that would ultimately mean enrolling at Virginia Tech and eventually the nearby Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, from where she graduated in 1979. What would follow would be decades of hard work and long hours in a profession known to be both physically and emotionally demanding. Yet even now, just a few weeks after retiring from the practice she built alongsee Washburn > page 3
Contributed photo
Dr. Margaret Washburn, here with a young patient, says she always knew she wanted to be a veterinarian. Washburn recently retired from Goochland Animal Clinic, which she founded in 1991.
BOS adopts scaled-back FY21 budget By Roslyn Ryan Editor
Facing a projected $4.1 million revenue shortfall due to the countywide impact of the coronavirus shutdown, Goochland County supervisors voted on April 21 to adopt a $55.7 million budget for the coming fiscal year. It was a position no one wanted to be in, and a situation few could have predicted just two months ago. “Some of these cuts were extremely difficult to make,” said board chair Susan Lascolette, “but we did what we thought was best for the county. We are going to get through this, and we will come back stronger than ever.” Among the cuts to the budget were a 5 percent decrease in the operating budgets of all departments, with the exception of public safety, The county will add three deputies and three firefighters, but the County Administrator’s office will not be getting a new part time assistant this year and part time help for the county convenience centers has been similarly put on hold, as have one dispatcher position and a part time fire marshall. At the end of the day, said county finance director Barbara Horlacher, “I took a hatchet to these things, not a scalpel.” see Budget > page 3