'Build that relationship' Warnick, Dent talk to students about keys to success

MOSES LAKE — Most of the hard work of politics is building and sustaining relationships with people.

Especially people you disagree with.

That’s what state legislators Sen. Judy Warnick, R-Moses Lake, and Rep. Tom Dent, R-Moses Lake told a group of students at Moses Lake High School on Wednesday.

“Building relationships is politics,” Dent told students in the Jobs for America’s Graduates (JAG) program at MLHS. “It’s everything we do today.”

Warnick said that while part of her job is representing the interests of her Eastern Washington constituents, another part of her job involved educating her colleagues in the legislator about what it’s like to live and do business here.

“People in Seattle don’t know what it’s like to be farmers,” she said. “Part of that relationship is getting to know people in the other party, and work out legislation that is good for everybody.”

Both Dent and Warnick were invited by Gaynor Edwards, a JAG teacher at MLHS, to talk to students about their work, their lives and their experiences in high school.

“When I was in high school, I lived on a farm. I grew up in Deer Park,” said Warnick, who graduated from high school in 1968. “There were 68 kids in my senior class.”

“I pretty much knew everybody in the school,” she said.

Growing up on a dairy farm taught her how to work, Warnick said, and spending time working and raising children before ever considering running for office helped her be a better legislator when she was first elected at the age of 57.

“It helped me understand what the real world is all about,” Warnick said. “It’s never too late to start a new job.”

Dent told students that he grew up in Othello when it didn’t have any paved streets, and that he wasn’t terribly focused in high school until a political science teacher managed to get and keep his interest in things.

“I was a young man with a lot of other ideas,” Dent said.

He took an early interest in ranching, truck driving, and rodeo riding before deciding to become a pilot — something he’s done for the last 40 years.

“I met a lot of really cool people,” Dent said. “But I decided I ought to have a profession. So I learned to fly airplanes.”

“I got to sit in the pilot seat of an airplane and make a living,” he said. “It was a real treat.”

Both Dent and Warnick told the students, some of whom have worked out a proposal to reroute traffic in and out of the MLHS parking lot and proposed it to both the school board and the city council, to keep at it, because it takes time and hard work and a lot of persistence to get some things done.

“Don’t ever give up,” Dent said.

Dent also told the students that despite political differences, we’re still Americans, we live in the same community and we have a lot in common.

“We still have more in common than we don’t, and that’s what builds relationships,” he said. “The folks that don’t do that aren’t very successful.”

“Build that relationship. Base it on success. And nothing will stop you,” Dent added.