Will Murphy prides himself on mastering the basics of life and on his roles as husband, father, friend, teacher, and lawyer.
Now, Murphy, a resident of Farmingdale, is running on the Democratic ticket for New York State Assembly’s 15th District.
“It’s time that people had a person who’s just like them representing their best interests in government,” Murphy says.
Elected offices, Murphy contends, have become a total sham, where politicians spend decades getting wealthy by giving speeches, writing books, and trading stocks, all the while getting little done to improve the quality of their constituents’ lives.
“We need to put the service back into public service by sending an ordinary everyday person who’s actually going to get things done that make a meaningful impact in the day-to-day of an average family,” Murphy says.
LONG ISLAND BORN AND BRED
Born in Mineola, Murphy grew up in Farmingdale, Bethpage and Wheatley Heights, earning his undergraduate degree from New York University and J.D. from Touro University Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, where he happened to meet his future wife, Megan.
Before joining the faculty of St. John’s University 10 years ago, Murphy had a solo law practice where he focused on labor law litigation.
“I represented unions in collective bargaining negotiations and before the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board,” Murphy says.
These days, Murphy works as a professor at St. John’s, teaching in the division of criminal justice, legal studies and homeland security, and still practices labor law on behalf of small businesses.
If elected to the assembly, Murphy hopes to address everyday issues that are crucial to people and their communities.
A DIVIDED CITIZENRY
One of the biggest problems, as Murphy sees it, is the rampant division between people, even within families, over issues that get us emotionally charged and distracted from things that really matter.
“One of the priorities is to be willing to accept good, helpful ideas that are practical, regardless of what party, what ideology they came from, and looking at them and saying, ‘Does this make sense?’” he says.
Politics, and all its manifold impacts on people’s lives, should not be considered a sport: People need to get beyond the mindset that their side must always be right; the other, always wrong, he says.
“And when we’re able to do that, we’re not going to fix all the problems overnight, but we may be able to find common ground and start coming up with practical, tangible solutions one at a time that, when you add them up, start to confront and solve a lot of those bigger problems,” Murphy says.
Even one elected official with a cooperative outlook could make all the difference, Murphy asserts.
“When you see people willing to work with members of another party or who are open to ideas that aren’t necessarily in their personal best interest, but are in the best interest of the people they represent, that’s the way government is supposed to work and things actually start getting done,” he says.
ACCOUNTABILITY IN GOVERNMENT
The New York State Legislature’s recent capping of elected representatives’ outside income at $35,000 per year was a positive start to bringing accountability back to government, Murphy says.
“That’s a really good start to bringing the service back into public service,” says Murphy.
Term limits should also be considered, notes Murphy, who recommends a maximum of eight to 10 years of service.
“People should not be career politicians. People should not serve for decades and decades profiting off of it themselves,” he says.
The counterargument — that it takes decades to accomplish anything — is evidence of dysfunctional government, Murphy avers.
“If you need to be in government for 20, 30 years to get things done, the government is essentially broken beyond belief,” he says.
Often, even within the same political party, there are extremes and plenty of infighting.
“I think a government that works for the people is a government that builds as big a tent as possible, where it’s okay to disagree, where it’s okay to compromise: a government that actually exemplifies democracy,” Murphy says.
FOCUS ON SMALL BUSINESS
Over the years, the powers that be have virtually ignored Main Street.
In Nassau County, for example, anyone attempting to open a small brick and mortar business must contend with tons of red tape, unsurmountable bureaucracy, and, in many instances, work with people who are unqualified to make crucial permitting determinations.
“We regulate small business to death and what we really should be doing is looking at the industries where all of our lives are getting negatively impacted,” Murphy says.
For example, real estate companies such as Fairfield Properties, which owns many residential and commercial properties throughout the island, has an outsized impact on unwieldy rents.
“They’ve gone completely unchecked. We should be regulating the hell out of them,” he says.
Big healthcare and large insurance companies make medical care unaffordable.
“You have a situation where the patients are unhappy and not getting the services and healthcare they need.” Murphy says. “You have a situation where medical providers are essentially handcuffed by people in boardrooms and the only people that are winning are the folks in those boardrooms.”
One solution, Murphy suggests, is to create and enact a new patients’ bill of rights, along with a providers’ bill of rights.
“On a bigger level, we have to look into whether or not it’s legally or morally acceptable for an insurance company to own all these medical offices,” Murphy says.
FIGHTING FOR OUR CHILDREN
Anyone can tell you how challenging it is to keep kids safe, happy, and healthy in today’s world.
On a personal level, Murphy recounts his son, Aidan, now 9 months old, requiring special formula after life-saving stomach surgery at 2 weeks of age, which cost $18 a day because the insurance company held up its coverage.
“We’ve got to make sure that health insurance is comprehensive, but no family, just to feed their infant child, should be put into a situation where they need to make hard decisions about their household income based around $18 a day to feed an infant child,” he says.
Murphy’s older son, Connor, now 4, has benefited from early intervention and special education services.
Yet for families of the countless children who require similar services, the process is daunting, requiring laborious paperwork processed by overwhelmed caseworkers, with evaluations hard to come by, and too few therapists available to treat the children.
“What we have is a situation where there are a number of 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds out there not getting the services that we should be giving them now who are going to require a much greater cost to government and society when they are 20, 30 and 40, which could have been avoided had they received those services,” Murphy says.
To address this issue, Murphy suggests adding funding to automate the system, hiring more caseworkers and incentivizing young people to become therapists to treat the children, in addition to creating more community centers where occupational, physical and behavioral therapy services can be utilized.
Another perennial problem is unaffordable childcare, often costing more than people’s monthly mortgages.
“If you work hard, your hard work should pay off,” Murphy says. “You should be able to improve the quality of yours and your family’s life.”
Support for public schoolteachers and police officers is also key to a safe and productive society, Murphy says.
“These are people we should be putting on a pedestal,” he says.
Adds Murphy, “I am a proud parent. I fight for other parents and working-class families like my own. My opponent is a 26-year-old overgrown child himself who has no idea about the real world aspects of any of these problems, and it’s offensive that he’s trying to represent people who deal with them every day.”
Paid for by Friends of Will Murphy
