Murphy's 1st Priority: More Jobs For The Region

YORKTOWN, NY — State Senator Terrence Murphy (R,C-Yorktown) is running for a third term in District 40. Murphy's family moved from Yonkers to Yorktown in 1962, when, he points out, Yorktown’s mascot, the Cornhusker, was still a common and public sight. His opponent is Democrat Peter Harckham.

Murphy cited the bipartisan alliance that defeated the Coast Guard’s proposal to turn the Hudson River into a parking lot for oil barges as one of the highlights of his work. He has tackled the heroin crisis, delivered millions in funding for clean water and infrastructure and has authored and passed legislation including:

•  Recognizing Vietnam Veterans of America as a benevolent order to provide parity with other veterans organizations and increase services for veterans;
•  A new law protecting consumers from ticket scalping and ticket bots;
•  Passing a law limiting opioid prescriptions to just 7 days, now a national model;
•  Authorizing the production and sale of mead and honey-based products to spur economic development;
•  Creating a tax-check off box to support the New York State Veterans’ Home at Montrose;
•  Protecting the Saw Mill River, Bronx River, Pocantico River and nearly two-dozen local lakes as inland waterways for the purposes of waterfront revitalization;
•  Implementing State reciprocity of Federally debarred contractors to safeguard workers;
•  Forcing State government to publish proposed rules online
•  Requiring State agencies to create webforms for Freedom of Information Law requests to foster transparency.

He has worked across the aisle to deliver the highest amount of State school funding ever, he said. In addition, he has worked to keep the region an affordable place to live by cutting income taxes and fighting
against anti-business regulations.

He opened Yorktown Health & Wellness Center in 1999, which continues to operate today, is also the owner of several successful commercial real estate investment properties and is also a trained Emergency Medical Technician.

He previously served on the Yorktown Town Board from 2010 to 2015.

Patch asked local candidates a set of five questions.

PATCH: What are the biggest issues facing the Hudson River and Hudson Valley that affect your communities?

MURPHY: I appreciate being asked about the most important issues facing the Hudson River first, because the Hudson River is the most important thing in New York State. Two-years ago I brought together numerous local officials and launched the #banthebarges initiative, which led to the formation of the Hudson River Waterfront Alliance. We drove over 10,000 comments into the public record, worked with the Pace Environmental Policy Clinic to force the Coast Guard into performing the PAWSA and eventually helped defeat the measure once and for all. This year, my office once again raised the alarm and successfully brought people together to bring pressure upon the Army Corps of Engineers, which is considering building massive offshore barriers, land-based floodwalls and a levee system that could permanently change the river with little to no public input, to hold a meeting in Westchester County. There is nothing more important than clean water, clean air, and a clean environment.

The state has so many beautiful and unique parks, preserves, forest and conservation areas in my district. Yet while the state pays local property taxes to municipalities and schools in Putnam, it does not contribute a dime in Westchester. This situation needs to be addressed statewide, which will provide massive unfunded mandate relief for local property taxpayers.

Similarly, the state should be paying its full share of Medicaid costs. As the only state that passes the burden of Medicaid costs onto counties, local property taxpayers are paying for services they do not use. We were able to have the state pick-up the cost of Medicaid growth, but that is not enough. It’s time for a full takeover, which will bring costs down and lower property taxes. By lowering taxes even further, we will continue to attract job-creating businesses and smart growth development projects.

Businesses are not built by passing laws and overregulation, they must stand on their own merit. As a lifelong small business owner, I know that better than most. I'm proud to work for New York first policies that help ordinary New Yorkers.

We want to give everyone the opportunity to succeed. Since I took office in 2015, weekly jobless claims have dropped to a 49-year low. Unemployment rates in Westchester and the Hudson Valley have fallen to their lowest levels since 2007. As of September, it is down to just 3.6% in Dutchess County from 5.4% in January 2015, 3.8% in Putnam County (down from 5%), and 4.1% in Westchester County (down from 5.3%). Until I took office, New York’s manufacturing growth was far slower than the rest of the nation, even though it accounts for 80% of our exports and 5.7% of the state’s economy. Now we are growing faster than ever before.

This was accomplished by working in a bipartisan fashion to cut income, business and manufacturing taxes to their lowest levels since the Depression Era.

There is still plenty more than can and should be done to make New York a more business-friendly state. We consume far too much and produce far too little. We need to put an end to corporate welfare once and for all, stop picking winners and losers and claw back tax incentives from politically-connected global corporations who ship jobs overseas or fail to meet job creation targets and pay a livable wage. We need to invest more in our infrastructure, apprenticeship programs and high-quality education for all so that our workforce is prepared and immune to the perils of automation. We need to keep workplaces safe and provide maximum benefits to our workforce, like we did by creating the best paid family leave program in the nation and strongest sexual harassment laws. We are not doing enough to fund addiction treatment and recovery programs, challenge insurers and the drug companies pushing opioids, although my landmark law to limit prescriptions to just 7-days has now become the national model. We need to cut back regulatory red-tape and impediments to doing business through efforts like license portability and reciprocity.

PATCH: How would you apply the adage ‘think globally, act locally’?

MURPHY: America first. Bring our troops home, bring our jobs home, in that order.

PATCH: Property taxes are an issue for all our communities. What’s your position on the Shared Services projects? How would you bring school districts into that discussion?

MURPHY: There are various cost-saving measures like consolidation that could be effectuated anytime if politicians and the special interests got their acts together. There are others which are not so cut-and-dry, for example, does Yorktown really need two school districts, with two superintendents, two bus contracts, and two of everything else? Both people who have lived here for generations, and people who moved here for the schools would likely want to keep what they pay for. We expect the best for our children, that’s what my wife and I have given our three kids who are growing up in our amazing local public schools.

It’s hard to make ends meet. I’m a small businessman, my wife is a nurse and educator. We take the kids to school. We go to community events. We meet my constituents every day, in the office, in the diner, at the pep rally. We hear their concerns and they are the same issues and challenges we face. Schools shouldn’t be consolidated – they should be expanded. There should be full-day pre-K everywhere. Yonkers should get the same 3D printers we get in Yorktown. Why is this not the case?

We spend more on education than any other state, by far, and yet our schools are still woefully underfunded. Worst of all, Westchester and the Hudson Valley send far more in state and local tax dollars between property taxes, sales taxes and income taxes than we get in return in school funding.

Mandates must be addressed. These mandates are not just unfunded, they’re unfair. Just like it is unfair to offer a free college education, healthcare, driver’s license and voting rights to someone who is in this country illegally before taking proper care of our seniors and veterans as my opponent proposes to do, the State has its priorities all out of whack. If Albany wants it, Albany must pay for it.

It’s unfair for taxpayers in Westchester and the Hudson Valley to subsidize the rest of the state.

It’s unfair there is no taxation of state land here while there is upstate. It’s unfair for us to pay half the State’s Medicaid costs on our property tax bills. It’s unfair that we have a school funding formula that intentionally penalizes Westchester.

My opponent wants to put the individuals who created the state school funding formula that shortchanged public schools statewide by billions of dollars back in the majority. While holding the majority in 2010, New York City Senators created the Gap Elimination Adjustment, or GEA, to help close the budget deficit. Under the GEA, a portion of the state's funding was divided among all school districts in the state based on a formula and each district's state aid was reduced accordingly. All told, the GEA took more than $142.7 million from schools in the 40th Senate District from 2011 to 2016.

I was the sponsor of legislation to statutorily eliminate the GEA, and I voted to reduce and eventually eliminate it, even holding up my second budget on the job in 2016 by refusing to vote for it unless it included the elimination of the GEA.

Meanwhile, after taking office in 2015, we were able to fully restore the GEA cuts and increase foundation aid annually, providing $205 million this year alone in foundation aid. In total, area schools saw funding rise to over $700 million dollars in overall school aid during my time in office.

We have to take politics out of the formula. I shepherded a bill through both houses of the legislature this year to address a section of the state education law which specifically penalizes Westchester county by lumping it into an arbitrary geographic category with Kingston and Monticello, instead of the New York City metropolitan statistical area used by the United States National Center for Education Statistics, which results in more funding for other parts of the state at Westchester's expense. I also sponsored and passed a bill in the Senate to provide school resource officers for every school to help keep our children and hardworking faculty safe.

PATCH: What would your first priorities be if elected?

MURPHY: If I am fortunate enough to be re-elected, my priority will be reshoring even more jobs to Westchester and the Hudson Valley and encouraging veteran, minority and women owned business enterprises. The Governor has done nothing to provide for a plan to replace the jobs, energy and tax revenue that will be lost by the closure of Indian Point. We also still need meaningful campaign finance, electoral and ethics reforms such as term limits. In terms of the Senate Chamber, there are bills that I have authored and passed which are yet to move through the Assembly. I will work toward encouraging the Assembly to pass my legislation to require public utilities to meet minimum benchmarks in terms of estimating restoration times, providing safe staffing levels and reimbursements, or face fines.

I will also be working with the Assembly to pass my legislation to require holders of data to enact and follow both physical and digital data security plans and protect our personal privacy data from breaches like Equifax.

My legislation to lower the 1970s-era gross sales threshold and acreage requirements for new farms down to $0 and 0 acres to encourage startup farms, urban farming, farmland preservation and conservation instead of overdevelopment would also be something I would like the Assembly to move quickly on.

PATCH: It’s a divisive election season - how would you serve all your constituents?

MURPHY: I wake up every day, kiss my wife goodbye, head off to work, and with the Grace of God do my best to live up to our unique American Republican ideal of government of, by, and for the people. Since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ran to replace Washington, everyone has always thought that the next upcoming election is the most important – and the most divisive – they’ve ever experienced. The first part of that is true – there is nothing more important that exercising your civic duty and so much is at stake this year.

The second part does not have to be true.

Nearly all of the accomplishments I have achieved in my short-time in office have had help from people on both sides of the aisles, in both houses, upstate and downstate. Nearly everything we want to get done requires that same kind of cooperation.

My opponent represents the New York City special interests that want to do away with bipartisan governance and return one-party control to Albany, which was disastrous in its last brief go-round: in addition to the GEA, 124 new taxes were approved costing New York residents an estimated $14 billion including the hated MTA Payroll Tax. That means no balances – just checks – from the politically connected into their campaign accounts and no one to hold back the tide.

I do not work for New York City and Mayor de Blasio. I do not owe my political career go Governor Cuomo like my opponent. I work for you. I answer to you.

There is no “blue wave” – with me, there will only ever always be the red, white and blue wave.

New York's 40th District includes the towns of Beekman, Pawling and the village of Pawling in Dutchess County, the towns of Carmel, Patterson and Southeast, and the village of Brewster in Putnam County, and the city of Peekskill, the towns of Cortlandt, Lewisboro, Mount Pleasant, New Castle, North Salem, Pound Ridge, Somers and Yorktown, the town/village of Mount Kisco, and the villages of Briarcliff Manor, Buchanan, Croton-on-Hudson, Pleasantville and Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County.

PHOTO, VIDEOS/ contributed

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