MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A long-time legislator thinks voters have even more reason to send her back to Charleston — the nearly unassailable Republican majority in the House of Delegates.
Cindy Frich, a long-time Delegate and one-time State Senate candidate, said the difference between the work she’s been able to do since Republicans took control of the chamber in 2014 is stark.
“My mission statement from the start — and continues to be — is that I want to make West Virginia a place where our children can receive a good education and have the opportunities available to them to remain in the state, provide for the families, and retire in a healthy-faced community,” Frich said Monday on WAJR’s Morgantown AM.
“When I first was elected to the House of Delegates, we were facing many crises. And I had to deal with sins of the past. We reformed worker’s comp, medical malpractice with insurance reform. We paid down billions of dollars of teacher retirement — the worst unfunded liability in the nation.”
Touting her fiscal conservatism, Frich is seeking her fourth straight term in the House of Delegates in the 51st District.
“I’m proud to say this past session, for the first time that most people can remember, we passed a balanced budget within a 60-day session,” Frich said. “We didn’t have to have the regular one-week extended session for the budget. It was a very sustainable budget not depending on one-time money.”
If Frich is victorious this November, it will be her sixth term overall, this her tenth run for the House of Delegates since 1998.
She criticized Democrats for not being supportive enough of teacher pay raises during the 2017 session, but said she’s not ready to fully commit to the Governor’s sequel to the 2018 pay raises.
“I can not promise though, and it would be irresponsible to make such a promise,” she said. “And I did not see any finance committee members at the Governor’s press conference.”
On opioids, Frich said Monongalia County organizations need to step up and begin taking resources from Gov. Jim Justice’s office that could be of potential use. Simply continuing as things are, she said, is not an option.
“You can save someone’s life,” she said. “The problem is that they go into withdrawal and they go out and get more and do more drugs. We need to get them into treatment.”
Her pitch to voters is simple — the state is in better shape now than it was before she returned to Charleston in 2012.
“We have to be fiscally responsible, and we have to have a sustainable budget,” she said. “Or, as I said when I started, I’ve worked on reform because of all these crises that were created by sins of the past. I do not want to be the legislator that creates a sin of the past for other legislators to clean up.”