The Commission on Local Government publishes a ranking of localities by "revenue effort."

As defined by the Commission:

The concept of revenue effort focuses on the degree to which county and city governments actually utilize the revenue-generating potential of their respective jurisdictions through the employment of locally controlled funding devices, such as taxes, service charges, and regulatory license fees. With respect to a particular locality, the revenue effort dimension operationally assumes the form of an extraction/capacity ratio, a statistical mechanism in which the sum of jurisdictional revenues across all "own source" funding categories is divided by the aggregate fiscal ability of the given county or city. Through this indicator the receipts which a specified locality derives from its various private-sector resource bases are gauged in relation to the yield that the jurisdiction could anticipate if local revenue raising simply reflected the average rates of return for the Commonwealth at large.

In short, "revenue effort" measures how hard the locality is working its citizens for revenue.

We have the data for 2004-05.  Richmond is eighth from the highest of the 134 localities (down from sixth in 2002) at 1.66.  That indicates that Richmond is working its citizens for revenue 66% harder than the Virginia average. 

The graph here shows revenue effort, with the localities ranked high to low; Richmond is the gold bar; Norfolk is red; Chesterfield, Henrico, and Hanover (from the left) are green:

We have the entire data set here.

Follow this link for a breakdown of where the taxes come from and where they go. 

Unfortunately, the payback for the high taxes we pay is high crime and lousy schools and a public housing agency that harbors crime.