Chris Nicholson
Regional Transportation District Board of Directors District A
Tenure
Term ends
Years in position
Predecessor
Elections and appointments
Personal
Contact
Chris Nicholson is a member of the Regional Transportation District Board of Directors in Colorado, representing District A. He assumed office on January 7, 2025. His current term ends on December 31, 2028.
Nicholson ran for election to the Regional Transportation District Board of Directors to represent District A in Colorado. He won in the general election on November 5, 2024.
Nicholson completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2024. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Chris Nicholson was born in Los Altos, California. He graduated from Los Altos High School. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California in 2009. His career experience includes working as a political consultant, in software development at Infinicept, and as co-founder and operations lead at Global EIR. He has been affiliated with YIMBY Denver, Greater Denver Transit, and the Upper Downtown Registered Neighborhood Organization.[1]
Elections
2024
See also: City elections in Denver, Colorado (2024)
General election
Endorsements
To view Nicholson's endorsements as published by their campaign, click here. Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for Nicholson in this election.
2024
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Chris Nicholson completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2024. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Nicholson's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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I am a full-time transit rider, the only one running for the RTD Board this year. I am a political technologist active in local and state politics since high school. I learned to code as a teenager and starting in college I got involved, using technology to help good candidates win elections. I built my professional career in public policy, technology, and professional politics.
I've spent my adult life fighting for change, first by electing great people, and next, helping craft policy solutions for immigrant entrepreneurs navigating our broken immigration system as a co-founder of Global EIR. I've developed software for open source projects and private companies.
Outside of work, I'm active in LGBT and Jewish life, a strong advocate for more housing as a leader of YIMBY Denver, a member of Upper Downtown's Registered Neighborhood Organization, Greater Denver Transit, and a proud and busy Democrat. - RTD must change. Together seven of us running for the RTD Board have proposed a joint plan, A Commitment to Riders, to address RTD's core challenges within it's existing budget. You can read the plan at FixRTD.com.
First, To deliver truly great service, RTD has to start from the customer experience and work backward to its operations. Customers do not care if RTD gets it 90% right; a failure of any part of the customer experience is enough to drive them away from transit permanently. Here’s what RTD can do:
- Measure every aspect of the customer experience
- Offer first-rate comfort
- Deliver quality for everyone
- Dramatically improve wayfinding
- Run better routes
- Improve Working Conditions
Learn more at https://FixRTD.com - RTD must be safe. Yet beyond actual safety, the perception of safety is critical to rider satisfaction. Proving to potential customers that they will feel safe on RTD and then delivering on that feeling is critical to the customer experience. Here’s what RTD can do:
- Hire transit ambassadors for stations and problem routes
- Expect RTD leadership to use RTD
- Upgrade safety technology
- Increase transit access and decrease fare evasion
- Modernize fare collection
Safety You Can Feel is a key component of our joint Commitment to Riders. Read the full plan at https://FixRTD.com
- A schedule is a promise and RTD should keep its promises. Every transit system has bad days and every transit system has late service some of the time. But routine, serious failures and the inability to give riders accurate information has created a cavernous trust gap. The solution is better communication, internally and externally, and improvements in technology to ensure that the expectations RTD sets for customers always match reality. Here’s what RTD can do:
- Actively measure and monitor ridership, hiring, headcount, maintenance, capital infrastructure, and on-time performance at the top of - every meeting
- Reduce dropped runs
- Offer accurate real-time data
- Be open about what's not working
Read the full plan at FixRTD.com
Housing and transit. Lack of attainable housing is why far too many Colorado cities are unaffordable for the working people who serve as the backbone of our economy. Lack of reliable transit means millions of Coloradans are forced into long commutes wasting hours every day behind the wheel. A great transit system reduces cost, increases mobility, and improves quality of life for everyone. When combined with thoughtful land use planning it creates safe walkable communities available to people at all income levels.
I'm excited about the creativity, artistry and economic dynamism we can unlock by fixing housing and transit in Denver.
RTD is vital to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Denver metro residents yet historically politically neglected. With a $1.1 billion operating budget and over a thousand employees, the agency can do a great deal of good with effective, ambitious leadership.
My grandfather Fred. Grandpa was a television journalist who helped inform the country about the major issues of his day: mistreatment of migrant farmworkers, pollution, hunger in America, the KKK.
He risked his career to take on Joe McCarthy at a time when the Senator was at his most powerful. He insisted on broadcasting the full Vietnam War hearings in the Senate and resigned when the network chose to run I Love Lucy instead.
He had an incredibly firm sense of civic responsibility and a deep commitment to the truth. He deeply respected honest disagreement but had no patience for people who acted in bad faith.
He died in 1998 and my grandmother still lives in their home. Above the sink are two plaques. One says THINK. The other says Give A Damn. I aspire to live up to both, and to make choices he would respect. The film Good Night and Good Luck.
Honesty, Drive, Effectiveness, Empathy. Honesty is the foundation of trust, the core responsibility of any officeholder. The work of an elected official is incredibly hard when done well, so only individuals who are extremely driven will be able to deliver results. The more effective an elected official is, the more they'll be able to accomplish and the faster things will get done. And most fundamentally, the job of an elected official is to care about other people and work to make their lives better. The best people I've ever met in public life are driven by the fundamental belief that "I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper." They care about the lives of people who can offer them nothing. That dedication to true servant leadership is what I look for in an elected official. It's why I give out my phone number regularly, so people know they can reach out if they need help. It's 303-335-9728.
I’m effective at building consensus, I enjoy understanding the details when I make a decision, and I like helping strangers.
Being on the RTD board is fundamentally about being part of a team; it takes eight votes to get anything done and people strive for consensus.
Harry Truman said it’s amazing what you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit. I want to make important change happen. If it helps people, and I can tell my mom about it, that’s what matters to me.
Well before I decided to run for the RTD board, I got involved in transit advocacy because I like transit. I enjoy digging in to understand why the system works the way it does. I enjoy learning from experts and engaging with political leaders to help inform better decisions. I’m a fundamentally curious person and I find transit policy deeply interesting as well as critically important. The core responsibility of the RTD board is to deliver high quality transit using the money given to them by the voters. The board has four primary functions that empower them to do so: hire and manage the GM/CEO, approve the budget, set policy for the organization, and serve as fiduciary for the public's monies.
I want people to say I took on the difficult fights and made useful and lasting change. I want RTD to be broadly trusted by the public once again. I want more people to regularly use transit. I want to have helped RTD grow into a transit agency worthy of Denver.
I have vague memories of going to the polls with my mom in 1992 and filling out the “kids ballot” they gave out. (I voted for George Washington). But the first major moment that I have a clear contemporaneous memory of is the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial. I was 10 years old. My teacher told us the event was important and turned on the classroom television set.
I hadn’t followed the trial closely; I didn’t know about the context of Rodney King or the riots that had happened just before. So it wasn’t until years later that I could really process the significance of the moment. But I will never forget how important it was to my teacher that we watch.
I worked at the plant nursery around the corner from my house when I was in eighth grade. I carried bags of dirt, cleaned the greenhouse, labeled and priced items, helped out at the register, carried purchases for customers who needed help, and assisted with a variety of other chores. I did the job for about a year part time.
And the Band Played On. It's a compelling early look at the AIDS crisis and the failure of government and society to effectively respond to the crisis. I first read it just after coming out at 15 and it taught me a great deal about how major social change happens and the importance of personal relationships.
Superman. Extraordinary powers, level-headed, dedicated to helping others, surrounded by good people in his personal life.
Ease on Down The Road from The Wiz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7d8aBIQP_I) It's coming to Denver next year!
Coming out. In 1999, I was fourteen, a freshman in high school when I realized I was gay. After telling my mom, I knew I wanted to meet other people like me but at my high school there was no LGBT student organization and no out gay students. I slowly told my close friends and then was outed to the entire school shortly before the end of the school year. I walked home each day and students yelled slurs from passing cars. I decided to form the Gay-Straight Alliance a few months later and slowly things got better.
The board takes a far more conservative view of its own powers than the RTD Act itself does. The board has broad powers "To prescribe a system of business administration, to create necessary offices, and to establish the powers, duties, and compensation of all officers, agents, and employees and other persons contracting with the district." (C.R.S. 32-9-114) It creates and administers the structure of the agency. As a result it can significantly influence the direction of the agency through its actions and oversight. And as such, it is also very much responsible for the agency's failure to act.
Absolutely. This role requires frequent political engagement with elected and appointed officials across Colorado. Land use planning, municipal and state transportation policy, transit funding, pedestrian safety, and numerous other issues are decided by political processes. RTD will be at its best if it is able to engage in that system as effectively as possible; if directors have strong relationships with other officials with whom they can work closely together. I am running in part because I believe having directors with extensive political experience and strong political relationships will make the board more effective.
Service on the board of a large private company focusing on logistics. Service on the board of a high performing NGO. Experience managing the budget of a large organization. Financial management and budgeting for government agencies and large organizations. Auditing.
RTD moves over a hundred thousand people every month on city streets throughout the metro area. Its effectiveness in doing so has major implications for traffic, safety, walkability, and quality of life. The RTD Board is responsible for the operation and oversight of the agency.
A salesman knocks on the door of a house and a little kid in a bathrobe with a cigar in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other answers the door.
The salesman says “hey son, are your parents around?”
The kid says “what the fuck do you think?” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, RTD Transit Workers of ATU Local 1001, SEIU Local 105, Colorado Black Women for Political Action, Greater Denver Transit, YIMBY Denver. Denver City Councilmembers Chris Hinds, Sarah Parady, Flor Alvidrez, Darrell Watson. State Senators Chris Hansen, Nick Hinrichsen, Kyle Mullica. State Representatives Steve Woodrow, Alex Valdez, Javier Mabrey, Tim Hernández, Judy Amabile, Shannon Bird, Brianna Titone, Manny Rutinel, David Ortiz. RTD Directors Lynn Guissinger, Paul Rosenthal, Michael Guzman. CU Regents Lesley Smith & Callie Rennison. Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett. Former Speaker Terrance Carroll. Ean Thomas Tafoya. Elliott Hood. Laura Mitzner. Steve Paletz.
I believe firmly in government's responsibility to allow the public as much transparency and accountability as possible. Elected officials must be willing to regularly answer questions, to open up most documents to public view, and to facilitate collaborative feedback from the public into government operations. I have been clear on the campaign and in other surveys that I will be a firm champion for open government if elected to the board. I want for the average voter the same openness I asked for for many years as an activist.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
External links
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on October 7, 2024
