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Coleman Erickson
Residence: Northglenn
Profession: Business Administration
Education: Associates in Business Administration from the Community College of Denver
Experience: Content creation regarding Public Transit since 2016, member of Greater Denver Transit since 2023, Co-Founder of Transform RTD, Campaign involvement in 2024 RTD races.
What are your top three priorities, if elected?
I am dedicated to finding the right person to lead the agency through our current and future financial challenges, someone with the right attitude to collaborate with the board on solving problems creatively. Balancing RTD’s budget is crucial for the agency going into 2027, and I will prioritize limiting service cuts while finding new avenues of revenue. An important part of solving these problems is creating a culture of collaboration within the agency and between our regional partners to accomplish our shared goals of increasing transit access and making bus an rail a more viable choice for our communities.
RTD is facing significant budget shortfalls, with varying calls for cuts to fixed-route service, fare increases and a ballot measure asking voters for a sales tax increase. What ideas do you support, and why?
Without enough money to continue to operate the level of service we currently have, which to be clear is already a deficit of where it was and should be, the most important thing is to begin exploring creative ways to increase revenue. I understand before this we will likely need to right size the budged in the short term, of which I am focused on a balanced approach of increasing service on routes with the highest impact and reducing service to redundant routes. Fare increases will likely never save our budget without significant investment in enforcement.
What concerns do you hear from RTD riders, and what would you do to address them?
In my district, transit is a choice rarely made by those with alternative means. When I speak with these folks, the reliability and frequency of our busses is top of mind. I’m focused on increasing frequency on more busses to solve this. Frequently, Safety is brought up to me as a reason people in my district don’t ride. I am focused on attacking this two ways: Cleaner stations and vehicles with a visible security presence, and enforcing fare evasion in a way that makes sense and encourages compliance instead of punishing being poor.
