KCK developer launches run for Roger Marshall’s Senate seat: ‘Kid from the Dotte’
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Erik Murray, KCK developer, launched a Democratic bid for U.S. Senate.
- His firms won major redevelopment and airport projects and use Opportunity Zones.
- Murray criticizes Sen. Roger Marshall on infrastructure; primary set Aug. 4.
Growing up in Kansas City, Kansas, Erik Murray didn’t see many new things being built.
“As a kid from the Dotte, there was a level of just scarcity that was like, yeah, we don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have a lot of investment,” said Murray, a commercial real estate developer who announced his bid for U.S. Senate earlier this month.
Murray, a Democrat, describes the projects he’s been involved in across the Kansas City metro over the past 20 years as a demonstration of his commitment to communities he believes in.
“My day job is to create a better life for people,” said Murray, 43. “That’s economic development, housing development, community development.”
His firm, Eastside Innovation Kansas, was chosen last year to lead a nearly $1 billion redevelopment project at the site of the former Indian Springs Mall in KCK. Last month, the Kansas City Aviation Department chose another of Murray’s firms to develop 20 acres of land at the downtown airport.
Murray said he believes Sen. Roger Marshall, an incumbent Republican running his first re-election campaign, is out of touch with the issues that affect everyday Kansans. For instance, crumbling infrastructure and bridge closures in Wyandotte County ahead of the World Cup.
“We have the largest economic development driver in the history of this country, perhaps, coming to our city and state, and we did not get federally funded bridges open?” Murray said. “Roger Marshall should be jumping up and down every day saying, ‘We need money for that.’”
Murray has never run for public office before. He’s the fifth Democrat to launch a challenge to Marshall, joining a primary field that already includes former Ameriprise executive Sandy Spidel Neumann, former Biden USDA official Christy Davis, immigration attorney Anne Parelkar and Michael Soetaert.
“Truth be told, I don’t love politics or most politicians,” Murray said. “But you keep saying to yourself, ‘When will good people, normal people, people with solutions, stand up and fight for us?’ And I didn’t see anybody else do it.”
Senate candidate Erik Murray
Murray attended the University of Southern California on scholarship, where he earned a degree in public health and took a job at the Orange County HIV/AIDS Planning & Prevention Unit.
“I did want to save the world,” Murray said.
But after helping to write a grant that brought federal funding to the county, Murray said he became frustrated that so much of the money was being spent on administrative costs and acute care instead of prevention efforts.
He and his wife moved back to Kansas to start a family.
“The biggest question that I usually get asked is, how did you convince a girl from Long Beach, California, to move back with you in 2005?” Murray said. “You’ll have to ask her that question.”
Murray said Kansas’ next junior senator should focus on leveraging federal policy to drive down health care prices, support farmers, invest in schools and address the acute housing shortage.
He said he sees opportunities to encourage reinvestment in Kansas communities, rural and urban, through one particular economic development program signed into law during President Donald Trump’s first term — Opportunity Zones.
The program, which Murray’s firm has used in the past and which Trump’s summer mega-spending bill made permanent, provides tax breaks for investing in low-to-moderate-income areas.
“Let’s have a debate tomorrow. I guarantee you that none of the other candidates, the incumbent, nobody knows to the extent that I do how to use federal policy, including the policies where I agree with President Trump, to really improve the lives of Kansans,” Murray said.
As for his own projects, Murray said he’s confident they will come to fruition, even if he winds up in Washington.
“The last thing that I would ever do is not finish the community impact that we started and really that I stand for,” Murray said.
“I’ve done my part to win the project, to identify the capital, to identify the policy, to rally the community and to bring the team together.”
If he’s elected, Murray said he plans to place his assets in a blind trust.
“I do not believe that senators or Congress people should be trading stocks or making investments or doing anything like that,” Murray said. “You’re there to work for the people.”
The primary election will be held Aug. 4.
