Senator David Frockt is the Capital Budget Writer for the Senate Democrats. He also sits on the Law & Justice Committee and the Human Services Committee. He joins us as a “Wire Insider” to talk about the 2017 capital budget, which did not get passed in 2017.

We’re updating a lot of state buildings. We’re updating our university system. We’re updating our schools around our districts around the state who have already invested in a partnership with the state to have new schools and remodels and so forth built. So, this is actually extremely important and not just for, you know, it gets a lot of notoriety for the so-called community projects and so forth. But really those projects, even though members can request them and we get requests from our districts, those only constitute about two to three percent of the overall funding in this capital construction budget. That’s why it’s historically had such bipartisan broad-based support. It’s very rare that we have a problem in doing this or that there’s another bill that’s tied to it. So, it funds all sorts of public investments as well as, for example community mental health beds. That’s something that we have sixty-five million dollars in this budget to help with our mental health crisis in communities around the state from Bellingham to Eastern Washington to Seattle.

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