Michael Murphy: Candidate profile

Bio

Name: Michael Murphy

City: Mount Prospect

Office sought: Mount Prospect Park District Commissioner

Age: 52

Family: 3 Boys (20-Nolan - US Marine, 18 - Michael Jr. - Freshman at University of Alabama and 16 years old - Garrett - Junior at Prospect High School)

Occupation: Sales Manager

Education: Some College

Civic involvement: Current Commissioner MPPD, Coach Baseball High School Summer League, prior coaching in local baseball football, wrestling (Clubs and Middle School). Founder and current host of the Hersey Alumni Golf Outing started in 2010.

Previous elected offices held: Mount Prospect Park District Commissioner

Incumbent? If yes, when were you first elected? Yes, 2015

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Issue questions

What are the most important issues facing your park district and how do you intend to address them?

While this is very new, the first issue is the $15/hour minimum wage law, it will impact the park district significantly. Over the next 6 years the park district will see our part time hourly wages go up over 100% if not more when you add in the soft costs, and other costs. We had over 43,000 part time hours in 2018, with the minimum wage going up approx. $1.00/hr./year, the increase most likely will be in excess of $300,000/year (in year 2025). Program evaluation, we started a systematic approach to program evaluation, we will need to continue and further evaluate our programming and make appropriate changes.

If you are a newcomer, what prompted you to run for the park board? If you're an incumbent, list your accomplishments or key initiatives in which you played a leadership role.

Which programs aren't paying for themselves? Would you keep, eliminate or change them? How and why?

The park district completed an evaluation for Ice Hockey (had for 3 years), we created a partnership with a local ice rink and turned out not fiscally sound. As for other new programs, we created a new fee structure for fitness and gym memberships called "All In", this is a one price monthly option that allows for access to all of fitness centers, gyms and indoor pools. It is too early to tell how the program will play out as a value for our community and create the revenue we need to run theses facilities. It is very difficult with the local $10 a month gyms to compete, we are trying our best to provide a cost effective solution for people that would prefer to use a local park district facility.

Is there any additional open space the park district needs to acquire? Please describe.

We need to find open space that we can have better control of. Currently the park district has 2 large facilities (Melas and Majewski Park on the south side) it leases from the MWRD-Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, those leases do not allow us the freedom to make large scale changes so we can move along with these changing times. I would like to revisit these leases and see if/how we can change to help our community.

Are there any unmet recreational needs? If yes, what are they and how would you propose paying for them?

Add programming for seniors, paddle tennis seems to be a big hit nationally, we have been asked for a local park in the east of Lincoln neighborhood. Local competitive sports need facilities to practice, I would like to see us find a location and create a flexible indoor space (and outdoor space) to host our own programming, host local sports teams , and it must create the additional finding for the MP Park District to continue to make updates to our facilities