 I'm standing in front of the Silvio Conti National Polymer Research Center here at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and this is an example of just one of the new buildings that's been built over the last 25 years as a result of three bond bills that I've been able to help usher through the legislature and this one has an interesting story this bond bill because as a freshman state representative I was getting resistance from the budget committee to undertaking any consideration of a bond bill for higher education and I had pointed out that it had been many years since there had been any money coming to these institutions of public higher education for renewing their physical facilities and in particular if you looked at UMass the average age of a laboratory on the UMass Amherst campus was about 40 years and that they just desperately needed to modernize their labs and their facilities so that they could provide quality education and really keep up with their fields and so there was enormous resistance at the Ways and Means Committee and finally I decided under the rules to collect signatures from my colleagues requesting that the committee release the bill and it took 107 signatures to force the committee to release the bill I chose to stop at 105 members of the House of Representatives and then submitted it to the Ways and Means chair by doing that I basically provide the opportunity for the chair to recognize that there was a very large majority only 81 takes creates a majority in the house and I had 105 who wanted to have this bill move out of committee and so he knew that there was enough interest in the bill that he really didn't have much choice by stopping at the 105 we got the message across but we also didn't force the committee to send the bill out the happy result of this is that a few weeks later the committee decided to release the bill and it produced 188 million dollars in new projects a substantial portion roughly half of that money were for projects on this campus and then about 10 years later I helped get another capital bill through and then right after Governor Patrick came into office I went in to see him and showed him a piece of legislation I had just filed for about 4.4 billion dollars of new construction necessary on our campuses and that would be new construction and renovations and improvements of physical plant and that's because the board of higher education and the UMass system had done a study which demonstrated that they needed to do that much maintenance and repair of the campuses and to build that many new facilities in order to meet the educational needs of the Commonwealth and so now if you go all across this campus you see new integrated science building under construction another one finished you see a renovated building which is the new nursing building nursing program building this polymer science center you see the moral science center and the graduate research center have been significantly improved and renewed you've seen improvements at the fine arts center and a brand new studio arts building the entire telecommunications system all of that networking and all of the wires and for computers and telephones were replaced and renewed and so this campus is now looking more and more like the flagship campus that it really is and this is this is the the one thing that I would have to say is over these 25 years has been the sign of progress around our interest in public higher ed because with each recession funding for public higher education in the state budget has been reduced and after each recession even though the budgets went up and student charges were able to be lowered we were not able to get up to the full amount of funding for the campus required by the formulas so we're going to continue to push for more funding for an affordable quality accessible public higher education here in massachusetts and these new buildings are going to be part of what's going to attract the best faculty best graduate students and the best undergraduates in massachusetts and beyond and those people 80% of those people who attend this school will stay work live raise a family here in massachusetts and contribute to our economy