Rail, road, resource officers at Republican Women meeting

MOSES LAKE — “We’re still working on it.”

That was the answer Rep. Tom Dent, R-Moses Lake, gave to a group of Republican Party activists on Tuesday when asked when the rail and road connections to the Port of Moses Lake would be improved to allow the airport to handle more air cargo.

Dent said the state legislature is looking at ways to deal with the lack of new capacity for passengers and air cargo at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac).

“We want to utilize Moses Lake to take some pressure off Western highways,” Dent said.

Dent spoke on Tuesday evening to a meeting of the Grant County Republican Women.

Several members of the audience noted that would require improving road and rail access to the Port of Moses Lake, which would require more money from the state and/or the federal government.

The Port of Moses Lake is currently working on a roughly $30 million project to expand rail access, though a readjustment of the new line along Wheeler Rd. has added to the costs, Dent said.

The representative was also asked about the recent failure of a $30 million measure to have the state provide a school resource officers for each school in the state.

“It’s a lot of money, but in a total (general fund) budget of $43.8 billion, it’s not very much,” Dent said.

Despite a long history of “building relationships” with Democrats across the aisle and even calling himself “the Democrats’ favorite Republican,” he still had no idea why the measure failed.

“It was a budget amendment, and it’s common sense, but I can’t tell you why it failed,” Dent said. “It was a struggle, and maybe it was who sponsored the amendment.”

Even with careful building and tending of relationships, Dent said you can never entirely know “where the rub might come.”

Dent, a two-term legislator, is running for a third two-year stint representing the state’s 13th Legislative District. A rancher and a pilot, Dent serves as the senior Republican on the Washington State House of Representatives’ Early Learning and Human Services Committee as well as the second ranking member of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.