It’s been said that the hardest part about being an elected official is sitting at your desk day after day as an endless parade of people representing worthy causes troop by needing — and often demanding — public support.

This morning it’s public safety, this afternoon it’s education and tomorrow it’s more money for research into a deadly disease.

And the advocates for each are passionate in their belief that no other cause in the world is more deserving of funding.

Then, too, there’s the most passionate and vocal of all special interests — taxpayers convinced they’re already being gouged enough and demanding they be allowed to pay less. Or better yet, that someone else pay their share.

As individuals, it frequently annoys us when our leaders start writing checks as though the money they were spreading around was theirs rather than ours, but too often we forget that the sense of entitlement isn’t limited to the politicians — who at least have to face the voters at some point and explain their largesse.

We were reminded of that fact last week when reading the Independent’s preview of a town hall meeting held this past weekend to discuss the future of the Givens Senior Center.

“The county recently stopped providing support for the center because it moved the employee in charge to the (Kitsap County) Fairgrounds,” said South Kitsap Commissioner candidate Tim Matthes. “They aren’t getting any help with getting the necessary grants and have lost their support structure.”

Which explains the meeting, during which both Matthes and North Kitsap commissioner candidate Sandra LaCelle listened to the concerns of Senior Center officials and clients with an eye toward providing some sort of assistance.

The problem is, from the tone of some of the comments in the story, it isn’t entirely clear Senior Center officials were asking for assistance — or that they were asking at all.

“We’ve all voted and paid our taxes for years,” Senior Center President Joan Kaul said. “We deserve better than what we’re getting.

“It’s all about where you set your priorities,” she continued. “We’re always being told there is no money, but other things get funded. We think it’s important that seniors have some support.”

Everyone does, and in a perfect world there would be adequate funding for such laudable efforts as the Senior Center.

And parks. And road maintenance. And police and fire service. And the food banks. And healthcare. And the environment. And stray dogs and cats. And…

Well, you get the idea.

The problem is, the support in question comes from the pockets of taxpayers already struggling to pay their own bills, let alone find a little extra to help out someone else.

So either we ask them to pay even more — which means taking on that largest and crankiest of special-interest groups mentioned above — or, as Kaul suggests, we set priorities for the dollars we already collect.

It’s pretty obvious she and others who provide and use the Senior Center’s services are passionate about where they rank on the list of essential services that must be funded by the city, county or some other public agency.

And that passion is admirable. We’re just not entirely sure we agree — any more than we agree or disagree when the advocates for any one of dozens of worthy and well-intentioned causes elbow their way to the front of the line.

At the end of the day, there are limits to how much help even the worthiest causes should expect. And when we set our inevitable priorities, we have to make hard choices.

The thing is, the choices aren’t just going to be hard for those making them. They’ll also be hard for those who wind up not getting as much as they asked for — or demanded.