Rebuilding Washington: Common-Sense Infrastructure for Working Families

The Squeeze on Working Families

You feel it every time you sit down at the kitchen table to look at your bills. You feel it when you try to fill up your gas tank for under fifty dollars. The price of gas is up. The cost of groceries is up. And the taxes you pay to the state just keep climbing.

You work hard. You do everything right. Yet, it feels like you are getting less and less for every dollar you send to Olympia. We are paying more, but getting less. And we see the results of this broken system every single day on our morning commutes.

A Legacy of Failure

The majority party has been in charge for the last 35 years. In that time, they have forgotten how to do the basics. They want to raise taxes to fund massive mega-projects, but they refuse to fix the roads we already drive on.

We see it in the potholes that wreck our tires. We see it in the traffic jams that steal precious time away from our kids. We pay billions in taxes, but our roads and bridges are falling apart. This is not just frustrating. It is a massive failure of leadership.

“We pay billions in taxes, but our roads and bridges are falling apart. This is not just frustrating. It is a massive failure of leadership.”

No matter what you do in Washington state, you cannot point to the work we are doing and say we are doing it better than anyone else. We are failing backwards.

The Human Impact in the 31st District

This failure hits home right here in the 31st District. I look at the 155,000 people I represent, and I see the real cost of bad policy. We have a bridge on Highway 167 that is falling apart. We have another bridge between South Prairie and Buckley that already fell down.

When a bridge fails, it hurts working families. It hurts our local businesses. It stops our farmers from moving goods to market. It delays our emergency responders when every second counts.

There is a massive environmental cost, too. The fact that we have people sitting in traffic while our infrastructure falls apart actually increases climate impacts. When cars sit idling because the road is broken, we waste fuel and we waste time. This inefficiency hurts our wallets and our environment at the exact same time.

A Maintenance-First Solution

We do not need more spending. We need better management. We need to focus on the basics.

The solution is a common-sense, maintenance-first approach. Before we ask taxpayers for another dime, we must fix the bridges that are already broken and the roads that are already cracked. We must stop throwing money away on studies and start putting money into the concrete.

In the legislature, I fought for strict accountability. I demanded that every cent spent on our roads actually goes into the ground, not into the pockets of consultants. We must hold the state responsible for maintaining the assets we already own. If government cannot do the basics, it has no business asking you for more money.

“Before we ask taxpayers for another dime, we must fix the bridges that are already broken and the roads that are already cracked.”

Bringing Adult Leadership Back

We can do better than this. We can build a Washington where the roads are safe, the taxes are fair, and the government actually works for you. We can create a system where our infrastructure supports our growth instead of slowing it down.

But to get there, we need to change how we do business. We must stop the waste. We must get back to the basics. It is time to bring adult, competent leadership back to Olympia.