MOSES LAKE - Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna visited several Moses Lake locations while on a gubernatorial campaign stop.

On Wednesday he toured the SGL Automotive/BMW carbon fiber plant, met with Big Bend Community College administrators, visited members of the Ag Water and Power Users of Eastern Washington and held a roundtable for area business leaders.

He also sat down for a brief visit with the Columbia Basin Herald to discuss the reforms he'd instigate if he bests U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., in the race to replace Gov. Chris Gregoire this coming November.

"I think there are three main issues in this election, and those are jobs, education and state government reform," he said, relating them to the three sides of a triangle.

Job creation and better education in the state both require reforms to the way the government is currently run, he said.

"If we want to have enough people in the state that are qualified to take the jobs, you've got to reinvest in higher education and public schools," he said. "If you want to have more money to invest in education, including higher education, you need to reform state government."

McKenna noted certain portions of the state government pie have grown much larger than others, pointing to increases in health care spending that have led to the "cannibalization" of education. He suggests taking a look at existing spending and "squeezing general government" to funnel more funds toward education.

As the state budget grows, he'd also like to see an investment of "new money" into education - from pre-school to college - saying education has received a disproportionately small share of revenue over the past 20 years or so.

He clarified that his idea of investing in education doesn't include pouring more money into pockets of teachers and administrators.

"We have to innovate and we have to reform," he said.

Charter schools, all day kindergarten, tying teacher compensation to student progress and assuring administrators are spending adequate time in the classroom are all ideas he'd back if made governor.

"We should put more money into education, but into a system that produces better results," he said; adding he'd work with the legislature to nail down a new set of standards to measure the work of school districts.

"There's only one thing schools are supposed to produce, and that's educated students," he said.

He said he would like to cut red tape and "offer school districts more autonomy in exchange for strict accountability rules."

McKenna also addressed transportation, saying the state needs to look at more public/private partnerships if it's going to finish some necessary projects.

Eastern Washington transportation projects he'd like to see, if elected, include finishing US 12 into Walla Walla, wrapping up the north/south freeway in Spokane, improving Interstate 90 across Snoqualmie Pass and figuring out how to better support local governments to prevent farm-to-market roads from turning back to gravel.

"We need to remember this is an integrated system," he said. "It doesn't do any good to work on I-90 at Snoqualmie Pass if the trucks can't get there quickly enough because the first link has fallen."

The state also should remember how cities will be hit by the diversion of revenues following the recently enacted privatization of liquor sales, McKenna said.

"Since cities and counties spend more of their money on public safety than anything else this is a big threat to their ability to keep the public safe," he said. "We know the state budget's going to grow and we need to make sure the state is providing support for local governments."

Finally, McKenna addressed local water projects, once again saying public/private partnerships are key. While an intermediary step should be to address the declining Odessa aquifer, he said in the long run he'd push for completion of the East High Canal portion of the Columbia Basin Project, noting the "billions and billions of dollars" in value the end result would create.

"Given the rapid increase in the value of agricultural land in our state it seems to me there's potential for leveraging that higher value to attract capital, which in turn makes the land even more valuable," he said.

With the rising standards of living in other parts of the world, McKenna sees Washington - and the Columbia Basin in particular - as being on the cusp of an agricultural boom that could last well into the foreseeable future.

"We're in a particularly strong position to provide food to a world in which incomes are rising and people with more money want better food," he said. "We have the key ingredients, we have the expertise, we have the technology, we have the land and we have the water. The water may not be exactly where it needs to be yet, but it will be."