Six priorities. One job.
Affordability. Energy costs. Water and agriculture. Public safety. Education and parental rights. Standing up to Olympia. These are the priorities I'm fighting for in the 15th Legislative District.
— Chris Corry
Central Washington has values, communities, and a way of life worth defending. My job in Olympia is to defend it.Chris Corry · Deputy Minority Leader, Washington State House Republicans
Affordability for Working Families
Central Washington families are stretched thin. Groceries cost more. Rent costs more. Gas, utilities, insurance, child care — it has all gone up while paychecks have not. And too often, the response from Olympia has been to make the problem worse.
We have seen it on housing, where Seattle politicians passed a watered-down rent control bill that does nothing to build more homes and everything to discourage the people who do. We have seen it on taxes, where every legislative session brings new proposals to take more out of working families' paychecks. And we have seen it on spending, where Olympia keeps writing checks the budget cannot cash — which always, eventually, means more taxes on the people who can least afford them.
I will keep fighting for the simple proposition that families know how to spend their own money better than the state does.
- No state income tax. I will oppose every effort, in every form, to bring an income tax to Washington.
- Tax relief, not tax hikes. Property tax limits, sales tax exemptions on essentials, and an end to the new fee creep coming out of every legislative session.
- Build more housing, not more red tape. Real housing supply, not failed rent control. Streamline permitting, respect local control, and let builders build.
- Spending discipline. Olympia's budget grew by tens of billions in the last decade. Working families' wages did not. Time to live within our means.
Energy & the Cost of Living
The Climate Commitment Act was sold to Washingtonians as a modest fee on big polluters. What it has actually delivered is some of the highest gas prices in the country, rising electricity costs, and a hidden tax on every household that drives a car, heats a home, or runs a small business.
Central Washington pays this bill twice: once at the pump, and again at the farm gate, where every gallon of diesel and every kilowatt-hour gets passed down the supply chain. The promised rebates have not arrived. The promised emissions reductions have not materialized. The only thing that has gone up is what families and growers are paying to keep the lights on.
An energy policy worth having protects affordability first. Olympia's current path does not.
- Repeal or fundamentally reform the Climate Commitment Act. The current program is regressive and unaccountable. Working families and small farms are paying the price.
- Honest accounting. Every energy mandate should publish its real cost to consumers, in plain English, before it passes.
- Protect agricultural and rural exemptions. Farm fuel, irrigation power, and rural transportation cannot be treated as luxury emissions.
- All-of-the-above energy. Hydropower, natural gas, nuclear, and emerging clean technology — kept affordable, kept reliable, kept on.
Water & Agriculture
The Yakima Valley produces 71% of the nation's hops, 63% of its apples, and a significant share of the cherries, pears, and wine grapes that move through American grocery stores. None of that happens without water — and right now, in our third consecutive drought year, our water infrastructure is showing its age.
Miles of irrigation canal in the Yakima Basin are leaking, crumbling, and well past their designed lifespan. Drought-year deliveries are being cut. Pest and disease pressure is rising on the orchards. The growers, packers, and farmworkers who feed this country deserve a partner in Olympia, not an obstacle.
This is the work I have spent four terms doing — and the work I will keep doing.
In the 2025–26 biennium, I helped secure $3.87M for the Roza Canal Floor, $600K for Roza Canal Sealing, and $2.18M for the WSDA Plant Services Lab — the disease-testing facility that protects the orchards behind the apples, pears, and potatoes Central Washington ships to the country.
- Continued irrigation infrastructure investment. The Yakima Basin Integrated Plan is decades of work. Olympia must stay the course.
- Drought-resilient water rights. Protect senior water rights and modernize the system so the next drought year hits Central Washington less hard than the last one.
- Stand up for our growers. Federal labor and trade policy hits Central Washington's agricultural economy hard. Olympia should be a partner, not another problem.
- Plant disease and pest management. Sustained funding for WSDA and WSU Extension — the science behind a $10 billion industry.
Public Safety
For years, Olympia ran an experiment on the rest of us. Pursuit restrictions that let suspects flee. Drug-possession laws that handed prosecutors no real tools. Constant signals to law enforcement that the legislature did not have their backs. The results were predictable: more crime, more open drug use, more communities feeling unsafe in their own neighborhoods.
Some of that has been corrected. Much of it has not. Fentanyl is still moving through Central Washington's communities at a rate that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Our deputies and police officers are still recruiting against burnout and policy whiplash. And our neighbors — especially in rural communities where help can be twenty minutes away — are still asking for the basic guarantee of safety that government owes them.
Public safety is not a political abstraction. It is whether your kids can play in the yard, whether your business gets broken into, whether help comes when you call for it.
- Back the badge. Stable funding, modern training, and policy stability for the deputies and police officers protecting our communities.
- Get fentanyl out of our communities. Stronger penalties for traffickers, real treatment access for those caught in addiction, and accountability for both.
- Enforce the laws on the books. Pursuit, possession, repeat-offender, and probation laws should give prosecutors the tools they need.
- Rural response gaps. Rural Yakima, Klickitat, and Benton County deserve the same response times urban Washington takes for granted.
Education & Parental Rights
Parents are the first and most important teachers their kids will ever have. They deserve a school system that respects that — that tells them the truth about what their children are learning, what is happening at school, and how their kids are doing. That is not a controversial position. That is common sense.
Selah School District just made its largest staff reductions in more than a decade. Other Central Washington districts are struggling under the same pressures: rising costs, falling enrollment in some areas, and McCleary funding that never quite arrives in the form it was promised. Meanwhile, Olympia has spent years passing curriculum and policy mandates with one hand while declining to fund them with the other.
The answer is not less local control. The answer is more.
- Parental rights, in plain language. Parents have the right to know what is being taught, what is in the library, and what their kids are doing at school.
- Real McCleary funding. The state's paramount duty is funding basic education. Stop using local levies to backfill what Olympia owes.
- Local control of local schools. School boards, not the legislature, should be making most curriculum and policy decisions for our communities.
- Workforce and career pathways. Not every kid is going to a four-year university. Trades, apprenticeships, and CTE deserve real investment.
Standing Up to Olympia
Central Washington is not Seattle, and it should not be governed like it is. We have different roads, different industries, different communities, and different values — and the one-size-fits-all policy machine in Olympia keeps pretending otherwise.
For the last several legislative sessions, the policies coming out of the State Capitol have read like they were drafted with downtown Seattle in mind and the rest of us as an afterthought. Long-term care payroll taxes that hit working families hardest. Capital gains taxes that the State Supreme Court rewrote to allow. Mandates on housing, on energy, on schools, on small business — all of them designed for one Washington and applied to another.
As Deputy Minority Leader, my job is to push back. Not with theater. With votes, with amendments, with the patient work of making sure Central Washington's voice is in the room when those decisions get made.
- Local control over Olympia mandates. Cities, counties, and school districts know their communities better than the legislature does.
- Respect the will of the people. When voters pass an initiative, the legislature should not spend the next three sessions trying to undo it.
- Rural representation in every conversation. Energy, housing, transportation, and education policy should not be drafted only for the I-5 corridor.
- A steady, principled voice. Not theater. Not Twitter. The work — bill by bill, amendment by amendment, session by session.
Agree with these priorities? Help re-elect Chris.
Every dollar, every door knocked, every yard sign matters. Re-electing a steady voice for the 15th District takes a coalition.