11/13/07 Candidate Rossi addresses Farm Bureau

Washington Ag November 13, 2007 Recently announced gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi got a warm welcome at a state Farm Bureau breakfast in Spokane Monday. Rossi pointed out that some of the Farm Bureau members in the room had faith and were with him from the start in his run for governor in 2004, which he narrowly lost, and that during his seven years in the state Senate he had a 100 percent Farm Bureau voting record. This campaign he'll be talking about Governor Gregoire's record. Rossi: "In education can anybody in this room say we are better off today, and our children better prepared to deal with what they are going to find when they graduate, especially when it comes to math and science. And are really going to be able to compete with India and China? You look at transportation. It takes some of you as long to get your goods to Issaquah as it does to get from Issaquah to the port. Are we doing any better when it comes to congestion relief and transportation? I'd say probably not. Well, in the fiscal sanity piece, my goodness the budget that Christine Gregoire just signed represents a 33% increase over when she took office. Now that is 5.7 million dollars a day in new spending." Rossi said an October poll showed him and Gregoire in essentially a dead heat. He said he raised 500-thousand dollars in the first nine days of this campaign. I'm Bob Hoff.