U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy was a guest Monday on “Valley Navel Gazing,” the Valley Indy’s weekly radio show.
Murphy called in to talk with Eugene Driscoll and Ethan Fry about a number of topics affecting the lower Naugatuck Valley, specifically transportation, redeveloping old industrial properties, and the opioid epidemic.
Click the play button below to listen.
The interview with Murphy begins about 17 minutes into the show.
During the first half of the show, we chatted about the most popular stories on ValleyIndy.org, and featured a Communist-themed “This Week in History.”
We then chatted with the senator about the Valley’s stock of industrial properties and how best to go about getting them cleaned up.
“You’ve got all of these old brownfield sites that need to be taken down, that need to be remediated so that we can have space for new companies to come in,” Murphy said.
“So long as you have all of these lingering cleanups, you’re going to have a hard time trying to turn the corner here,” the senator noted.
To that end, Murphy wants to reintroduce a tax incentive that expired in 2012 to help developers clean up such sites.
Around the 25-minute mark, we asked the senator to talk about the Waterbury branch of the Metro North Railroad’s New Haven line, and a recent campaign he began to solicit feedback from commuters.
The senator noted that the Waterbury line doesn’t offer much to passengers in the way of frequently scheduled trains.
“We’re running trains on there to say that we have a rail line, but it’s pretty ineffective for most people,” Murphy said.
The senator said he wants people to share their stories on his website so that he can lobby his fellow lawmakers for more money.
“I can’t tell you it’s going to directly lead to another $100 million coming to the branch line,” the senator said, adding that more people raising the issue will help focus attention on it.
Next, we asked Murphy to discuss the recent spate of heroin overdoses in the Valley, two of which resulted in deaths, and how government is reacting to what health professionals have called an epidemic.
Beginning around the 31:30 mark, Murphy discusses a bill he’s introduced with 15 fellow senators in an effort to tackle the problem.
“This is my passion right now. I’m trying to get a big mental health and substance abuse bill passed through the senate this year,” Murphy said, noting that many heroin addicts first became addicted to painkillers for which they had valid prescriptions.
While noting the Senate can be dysfunctional at times, Murphy said there’s broad bipartisan consensus about the need to confront the opioid epidemic.
As a follow-up to the issue of dysfunction in the Senate, we asked Murphy around the 42:30 mark to talk about the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia, and Republican efforts to delay a replacement until 2017.
The last topic Murphy discussed was foreign policy, in response to a question about a speech he gave last month on the U.S.’s Middle East policy at the Council of Foreign Relations. That discussion begins about 44:30.
