Left Face
Join Adam Gillard and Dick Wilkinson while they talk politics and community engagement in Pikes Peak region.
Left Face
Public Service and Patriotism: Mike Pierson's Story
What does it take for a veteran to transition from military service to the political arena? Today, we are thrilled to be joined by Mike Pierson, a seasoned veteran who's running for House District 22 in Colorado. Mike sheds light on his unique journey, sharing his rich background in political science, journalism, and public affairs during his Air Force career. We also delve into the inner workings of the Colorado House of Representatives, revealing their session schedules and legislative processes.
Feeling the squeeze on Powers Boulevard? You're not alone. Our conversation takes a critical turn as we discuss the urgent need for infrastructure improvements on this key arterial road. Mike passionately advocates for prioritizing enhancements beyond current projects to alleviate severe congestion. On a broader scale, we tackle the pressing issue of housing affordability, arguing for simplified state regulations that could ease the bureaucratic burden on residents and businesses. This is your chance to understand the intricacies of local development and why it matters to you.
Ever thought about how urban planning and transportation intersect with affordable housing? As Colorado Springs evolves, Mike discusses the necessity of economic incentives for builders to create affordable homes for essential workers like teachers and truck drivers. He emphasizes the importance of efficient public transit systems and higher density in urban planning, drawing insightful comparisons to cities like Washington DC and Frankfurt, Germany. We wrap up by reflecting on patriotism and public service, sharing Mike's military experiences and his vision for a safer, more inclusive world. Don't miss his heartfelt thoughts on upcoming Memorial Day and September 11th Memorial Park events.
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Hello everybody and welcome to the Veterans, military Families and All Things VA podcast. This is Dick Wilkinson. I am the co-host with Adam Gillard and this is my first day doing the intro, so I butchered it, but we're not going to fix it, we're going to leave it like it is. Adam, how's it going? How are you? I'm doing? Well, today we're joined with a guest. We have Mr Mike Pearson, who is running for House District 22 in Colorado, and we're going to be speaking with him about his choice to be a veteran running for office and what his campaign is all about. Adam, did we have any other issues we wanted to cover or any updates before we jump into the conversation?
Speaker 2:Right now, the big push that we're having is the gala coming up on the 7th. There's still some tickets out there, so if your plans changed last minute, try to grab a ticket for the gala, and then after that we'll be looking at our Veterans Day breakfast on the 9th of November up at Persephone Grade. So start looking for those volunteer opportunities too.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, and the gala is the El Paso County Democrats Party Gala. It's a fundraiser that'll be happening this weekend. The veterans have a table there. So if you listen to the podcast and you want to stop by and say hi to us, we'll be there. Well, thanks for that update, adam, and we'll go ahead and shift over to our guests. Good morning, mike. Nice to meet you, nice to have you on the podcast.
Speaker 3:Well, dick and Adam, it's great to be here. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't want to waste too much time, we just want to jump right into it, and I want to start with what leads you as a veteran, what inspires you to want to dabble in politics and move towards seeking office? The reason I asked that question and I'll ask it of any veteran candidate is culturally. We were told that politics is not for us when we're in the military, and so I'm always curious about the mental shift that is required for someone to go from military experience to the complete other end of that spectrum and say I want to not just be politically active, I want to be a candidate. So tell us about that mental shift for you and your journey to get there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've. You know my history goes back a ways as far as politics goes. Growing up in Ohio, my dad was a union employee, worked for the city, and I remember him taking me to union events. I got to meet John Glenn when he was a senator and listen to him speak, and I thought this is kind of cool. When I was in college, I had a degree in political science from the University of Cincinnati with a a journalism background, and some of the stuff that I covered as a student was Jesse Jackson's political campaign when he came to Cincinnati and spoke, and those things were pretty thrilling.
Speaker 3:What I ended up doing in the Air Force was public affairs, so with PR, basically for the military, and a big part of that job is connecting the military usually the base that I was on with the local community and local and state civic leaders and elected officials, so I've been kind of plugged into the political environment for three decades now. When I got here, I got motivated, really, by Barack Obama's campaign, got involved with the Democratic Party in 2016 and held a number of roles. This year, though, we did not have a candidate in my district, so I was asked by the folks before the caucus to hey, would you be interested in putting your name on the ballot? So I looked at the race and who I was opposing and I said, yes, I you be interested in putting your name on the ballot. So I looked at the race and who I was opposing and I said yes, I'm going to run a hard campaign.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll say congratulations to making that decision, regardless of how the campaign goes or anything else. There's a victory in making that choice of saying this is the type of engagement I want to do with the political process. So congratulations for that. How long have you been retired?
Speaker 3:So I retired from active duty in 2009. I went back as a civilian in 2010, and I retired from civil service in 2022. So altogether 32 years serving from the public, serving at the national level, I guess and you know that feeling of service. You know the two years that I had off. That was the. I've been trying to volunteer here in the local area and I volunteer at Care and Share and at the Space Foundation. But you know that feeling of service was still there. So when the opportunity popped up, I thought, yeah, I'm going to take a shot at this and see what it's like.
Speaker 1:I want to ask some questions, maybe on behalf of our listeners. If you could educate us a little bit on the functions of the Colorado House of Representatives, as far as just the basics how often do they have sessions every year, how long are the sessions and how do you as a representative, interact with that process?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the way I describe it to people, if they're not familiar with the government process here in Colorado, is it's like Congress for Colorado, right? So we've got a House and a Senate, but they only meet for about four months a year, usually January through May, and they get all their business done in those, in those four short months, and then people go back to their lives and go back to their districts and represent, you know, keep up their businesses and their jobs, but the state legislature makes laws for the state that then go on to the governor to sign or veto, and they impact all of our lives. Really, we're talking roads and education, health care, public safety, just environment. There's just a number of issues that the state takes up. We're just not a year-round legislature.
Speaker 1:In those four months. Is there any special session? That's the financial session and then there's the general purpose session. Is it broken down at all or is it all one?
Speaker 3:It's pretty much one big general session, although a couple of weeks ago the governor called them back into a special session, which he can do, to take up property taxes, and after a lot of debate up there over about a week they came to a property tax cut for all of us here in Colorado, which is awesome, and the governor, I think, just signed that yesterday, so we're going to see a cut in our property taxes, so that's always a good thing.
Speaker 2:I always like to see how the taxes get paid on the back end and I think you know the plans that the governor was giving out last year and things like that that got shot down. Was it H or HH?
Speaker 3:HH, something yes.
Speaker 2:They did a really good job backfilling where money would go from and flow to and things like that. If we're losing tax money this year, or, you know, property tax money, we're not paying as much. Where's that money going to come from? What's going to be hurt by that, though?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean it's like a family budget and literally the legislature is restricted. They have to balance the budget, so the money coming in is the only money that can go out. It's not like the federal government that can basically print money. So the question is, if you do have less money coming in from property taxes or whatever else, then you got to cut somewhere. And that's what the legislature does. I mean people get together, they throw their priorities on the table, they try to help the people in their district as much as possible. But you know, just like you know taking care of your kids and your family and your parents you've only got so much money to go around, so you got to make the hard choices.
Speaker 1:I moved here right as the property tax like debacle happened, I guess, and I was buying a house right at that time and I definitely I was a bit immune to it, I guess, because I wasn't, it didn't matter to me, like there was no change to me, it was just the taxes, the tax, you know.
Speaker 1:But coming from a different state and seeing how it was executed here was very eye opening. And I think my comment on you know, I don't know that there's any less money. I think this reaction and having a special session is because there was a dramatic surplus in that pool of money because taxes went up so much, property values went up at way beyond projected values, and so the hit to the pocket of the homeowner was an unexpected hit and so there was actually a surplus of cash. That was detrimental to the taxpayers. And so this adjustment is not, there's not a need to account for less money because there's not less money. There was too much money in that one piece of the pipe, if you will, and this is a dialing back of back to expectations of what was projected.
Speaker 2:That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:It's actually like to think out front like that and actually get back to the communities without you could just say, hey, the law is the law and we're going to fill the coffers and we'll do good things with this money. Right, you can do that Right. But I think for I think it's to have a 60 plus percent blue representation. Get together and cut taxes, right, people want to, people want to see that Right. And that's from the party perspective of like, what do you mean? Democrats? Cut taxes, tax and spend Democrats that's what they do, right. Well, not if it's hurting the taxpayer and the base, right, like we're voters and we're taxpayers too.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, we're feeling the crunch right now. So, yeah, it's a smart, smart move.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think we have to understand that we're in a strange time. You know, covid rocked this country and our economy and the world, just like World War II did. And if you go back and you look at what happened after World War II, we went through this same stuff. We went through massive changes in the economy, we went through huge bouts of inflation and it happens every now and then the oil embargo. Back in the 70s I paid 14% interest for my first student loan. I paid 11% interest for my first mortgage because of that, those rocks in the economy just happened at bad times in my life. So I completely understand when people are trying to get a mortgage or a car or a business loan and they're looking at these rates of 6% and it's blowing their mind because money's always been 2% right. Well, not always.
Speaker 3:We've been living high really since the 90s For a while, for a long time, but we're going to have these shocks and I think we're coming out of it, which is good, and I think that's the point we all have to remember here is things are stabilizing and we're getting back to normal, but you know, 2020 was just just four years ago yeah, right, even leading up to 2020, we still had, like the most, the longest bear run market like historically ever.
Speaker 2:So like there was something coming in, something gonna break, yeah, yeah 2020 happened that? Now we've bounced back, but like, I think we're still. We're still waiting for something big to happen here. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, these things all happen on, you know, almost 10 year timelines, really, right? I mean, it takes a long time to realize the effect of some of this stuff. Well, that affects obviously everybody in Colorado. So let me ask you this outside of just the tax shift and why we had that special session. You this outside of just the tax shift and why we had that special session you've probably got your sights set on some specific legislation or some opportunities to bring something to the table. If you get elected into this first term, what's on your plate that you'd like to bring?
Speaker 3:to the House. Well, I mean, initially, what got me into this race was the intent to be a better representative than my opponent, who is our current representative up there, who in two years has managed to only pass one bill. He's really not getting much done for us up there. But I'm out talking to people, going door to door, going to high school football games and asking people what's important to them, and I'm trying to align that with what is possible from a state legislature's point of view, because some of the money is federal, some is local, so I Can't do a lot to fix potholes, sure, which everybody wants to.
Speaker 1:Can you fix the potholes? Partisan pothole man.
Speaker 3:And I am on that team. I want potholes fixed. But one of the infrastructure things that I keep hearing about is how bad traffic on Powers is getting. Well, the state does own that property, does own that road and is responsible for Colorado 21, as it's called, powers Boulevard, and so I looked at the plan that CDOT has for Powers and the only thing on the plan right now are the two projects that are going on. So the airport overpass, which is like 18 years in the making. I remember going to meetings when I first got here with the Air Force about trying to get that fixed. So that's a timeline we're talking about it's 10 to 20 years sometimes to get a road project done and then connecting powers to 25, which again is needed to be done for 20 years.
Speaker 3:But there's nothing else in the plan. Sure, what about Constitution? What about Dublin? I mean you sit there at the light even at noon three, four cycles, and with the growth of Colorado Springs out to the east, that main artery is just getting clogged, and it's just a quality of life issue, it's a safety issue. We've got a hospital up there. It's hard for the ambulances to even get to it.
Speaker 3:So I'm going to take that on. I'm going to lean on CDOT. I'm going to take advantage of the budget process that comes up every year and say okay, if you want money for projects around the state, we need to have some future plans for what's going on with powers. Even if we're not turning dirt tomorrow, I want you guys to at least sketch it out. So that's my number one thing I think I can do directly for the people in my district who are asking about that.
Speaker 3:Second of all, I think we need to look at some ways to make the cost of living in Colorado. There's some things we can do about housing prices, about insurance prices and things like that. So I'm looking around for specific ideas and specific legislation that I can get involved with. To just, you know, the paycheck issues here, the pocketbook issues are really top of mind for everybody here, and then there's a bunch of other you know things out there that I think need to be squared away. I'm all about simplifying. I think people's lives are complicated enough. You shouldn't have to hire a lawyer to get business done in this state. If we regulate one thing, we should regulate a similar thing the other way. So simplifying the laws that are out there.
Speaker 1:Is there any national issue that you see coming to a head in Colorado where the state legislature is going to have a voice Like? Well, you know, an example and this isn't a great example was that Colorado led the country as far as trying to keep a certain candidate off of the presidential ballot and that turned into something that grabbed national attention from the Colorado perspective, as the voice of some of the voters here and the wishes of some of the folks here. Do you see any other big national campaign that has some impact to Colorado that you think the House is focused on?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the biggest issue that I'm hearing about, the biggest issue that seems to affect every level of government right now and you're hearing from the Harris campaign, harris-waltz campaign is housing affordability. Waltz campaign um is is housing affordability and I I really think that we can do more across the nation at all levels of government to look at the way that we uh permit, the way that we regulate, the way that we ensure um and that's that's not just property owners, it's builders too. I mean we need we need to look at being fair to everybody in this, in this process, because it's a free market economy. You can't force builders to build. You've got to give them an economic incentive to build that. But if you've got some power over zoning and you've got power over safety or whatever, I'm not going to compromise on safety, but the sort of things you have to put in a house that are in regulations, if you can offer them that back and say, okay, look, we'll relax some of this, but you need to build more affordable housing. If you're building 7,000 units and you're telling us that we're going to have 8% of our units, a couple hundred houses be affordable Okay, that's nice, but we obviously need houses for teachers and truck drivers and mechanics and people who aren't making $100,000 to $300,000 a year, or we're just not going to have a service economy anymore.
Speaker 3:We're going to be doing everything on our apps and getting deliveries from Amazon Because the restaurants are going to close. The service places are going to close because they can't afford to pay their employees what their employees need to live here and the employees are only going to accept Nobody's going to live in poverty if they can get a better job somewhere else, sure. So we need to make sure that Colorado's growing. That's a great thing, and I remember I think it was Mayor Southers back then, on a conversation about growth, said if you're not growing, you're dying. So he was okay with growth and I'm okay with growth, but I think we need to be smart about it.
Speaker 1:Is there any? I know Colorado Springs we talk about the population is growing a lot and we talked about the roads where some people say, oh, now we've got just more cars than there is room. I think another piece of that puzzle too is transportation. Costs are just really expensive and you know, if we look at major cities, transportation there's a bubble point where you can't ignore it anymore. There's a bubble point where you can't ignore it anymore when you get to a certain size where you've got enough of your population that is not buying cars can't afford cars or choose not to, and they need other ways, like you just said, to get to work. I haven't ridden the bus around here, I don't know how effective it is, but when I hear about housing, I hear hand in hand that you're going to build new houses. If those people are going to not work right in that neighborhood, how are they going to get in and out of that neighborhood? That's got to be a part of it. So is there any kind of look towards what Colorado Springs needs for that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, I've lived all over the country and all over the world. Probably the best example of you know, a major dense city that I've lived in was Washington DC and then probably even more developed transportation system, definitely more developed to live in Frankfurt, germany. And I tell you what the Europeans just because the way they live they look much more densely and they always have because there's only so much land a farm on right. So if you want to grow corn, you can't live on the cornfield, you gotta live in a tight city. So much land to farm on right. So if you want to grow corn, you can't live on the cornfield, you've got to live in a tight city, so you want to maximize that. So I've seen a good public transportation network in both of those places and really I think what I've seen in Colorado Springs I got here in late 2005, is the city psychologically is still making that transition from big town to small city and really now we're not even small city.
Speaker 2:We're medium sized city. I think we've jumped past that.
Speaker 3:So there are still people who you know they long for the day when Colorado Springs was a big town. You know and I can see the appeal to that.
Speaker 1:I've heard that sentiment. That's what I'm here, you know I've lived in big towns.
Speaker 3:I live in small towns, um, if you want employees to get all the way up to the north side of town to shields but they live on the south side of town and fountain uh, they only have three options, right, besides Lyft and Uber. They either have to have a car. So, at some point, though, the traffic gets so bad just the pollution in the town gets so bad, and people would like to have other options. Now, I'm not saying we have to connect those two areas today, but I think we have some really heavy corridors, and if we look at traffic patterns, we could do a better job. Some of that is going to be, I think, incentivizing. What I saw in DC is there was an incentive for white collar workers to use the bus and the train, and that's when you get your tipping point. I think we saw that in Denver when we first got here. The train went in, and they had to find ways to incentivize white collar workers to get on those trains.
Speaker 1:To skip the car that they already own and don't think about paying for and say don't use it to get back and forth to work, Use it for other things.
Speaker 3:I knew people in DC who only had one car for their family. In Germany there were plenty of families who had no cars because the transportation system was so good you could walk, you could bike, there were a hundred ways to get to and from where you needed to go and everything was really dense and close. I'm not saying we need to get to that level of density, but I think as we grow we need to accept density a little bit more.
Speaker 1:We have a limit here. There's a mountain on one side of town, that's true, and then there's a river not far from that, so you've got some limits on where your density can happen.
Speaker 3:You look at river cities, you look at mountain cities and it happens I mean you just have to accept that more into our neighborhoods and even look at open parcels of property.
Speaker 3:I went to an event that El Pamar put on about housing and Jill Gabler, who used to be on city council here, brought up this fabulous idea and she called it yes, in God's Backyard, which is working with churches that have big chunks of property. I've seen that just in my district About. Hey, can you sell us, or sell to a developer a few acres of this big lot you have right in the middle of the suburbs so we can put affordable housing in here? Um, wanted to be right next to your church, so you got. You got parishioners who can walk right over, so it's good for y'all too, um. So I think there are options that I'd like to see put in place, especially along our front range cities, to a little bit denser housing, more acceptance of it by the neighbors, and then you can connect it with transportation options, and the benefit to that is the utilities doesn't have to keep building pipelines and electric and we don't have to keep building firehouses and schools all the way out of the plant.
Speaker 1:For the sprawl right.
Speaker 3:Yeah there's going to be some of that, but it doesn't have to be all sprawl, no-transcript memory of the folks we lost on 9-11. And remember that you know we spent a lot of national treasure, A lot of lives were affected. A lot of lives were lost in fighting two wars since 9-11, and this community was very affected by it and, I think, still feels those echoes. We still have units that are deploying out today. So life changed in 2001, and I think those of us who lived through it should show up and remember what happened on that day and what's happened since. So I'll be there to help commemorate that.
Speaker 3:On the 30th of September at the East Library at 6 to 7 pm, the League of Women Voters is holding a candidate forum. So the candidates that are competing in the HD22 race, me included, will be speaking. It's just an hour-long question-and-answer session. So you can look that up on the League of Women Voters site or I think you can just show up at the East Library. I don't believe they're asking for RSVPs for that. So that will be a good chance to do that. And you can always look at my website at Pearson4COcom. That's P-I-E-R-S-O-N, the number four CO dot com, my website, and I list on there events that I have coming up where I can be appearing, but you can always reach out to me on that site and I will respond immediately.
Speaker 2:We'll try to put that into the show notes too, into your website. There you talk about being in the military for you know, or in the service. 30 years. You know civil service and military. So I put you you know in the service right at 9-11. Where were you on that day?
Speaker 3:So I was left in charge of AFN Europe. So for the folks who've been deployed, you know AFN oh yeah, I love your commercials of AFN Europe. So for the folks who've been deployed, you know AFN oh yeah, I love your commercials, yeah right.
Speaker 3:It isn't automatic. So and I mean left in charge, because I was the third ranking person in the organization and we literally drew straws at a staff meeting who was going to stay behind while everybody else went to a boondoggle down in Munich. It was this big ceremony down there, so I was feeling grumpy looking at the TV at 3 o'clock in the afternoon in central Germany watching the first tower burn. That was the news coverage and it was only on one or two channels. So I went into the control room and we were about to switch over from, I think the morning news programs in the US came on at about that time. We switched over to cartoons with kids coming home from school.
Speaker 3:At that point I was concerned that this was a bigger story than we thought. So, as we were talking to the folks in DC about, you know what we were allowed to do the second plane hit and we knew immediately that this is a crisis going on. So you know, we locked down the building. We've got a network of broadcasting stations throughout Europe contacting them, make sure everybody was safe, trying to get the word out. So it was a really hectic day. I ended up going down to European Command headquarters for the next seven days to help be the liaison with European Command down there. I just remember at the end of that week I was at a ceremony where they were raising the American flag from half staff to full staff and it was pouring down rain like it is outside as we're recording this today. As we're recording this today, and right before they raised the flag up, the rain stopped and the sun came out and pulled the flag up into the sunlight and to this day makes me cry. But I just remember the chaplain at that point and the prayer for that ceremony saying at this point we all want to hate but we can't let ourselves hate, because if we hate then the terrorists have won.
Speaker 3:And I think, as these decades have gone since then, I've tried to approach my job with the military with that sense. I mean I was involved in executing a war the air war when I was in Qatar. When I was in Iraq, I was directly involved with trying to rebuild that country. But it wasn't about revenge, it was about making the world a better place so that this stuff doesn't happen again. And that's kind of that attitude that I've tried to take about public service. It's not about getting a leg up on somebody or knocking somebody down. It's about making the world a better place and I think, if the tide lifts all boats, that if we make everybody's life easier and everybody's life more safe than these nasty, tragic things that happen all around us every day, you know, start to start to go down. I hope that's my hope, right? I?
Speaker 1:think we agree.
Speaker 2:We agree with that, for sure, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, well, I look forward to seeing you at the Memorial Day or at the Memorial Park event on September 11th. I'll be there myself as well. It's not part of the podcast, but I'll be there. So, yeah, we'll be out in observance around town taking part in those ceremonies. So thank you, mr Pearson, or Mike, or what was your, what's your retired rank? Lieutenant Colonel? Lieutenant Colonel Pearson? All right, see, we're on the Veterans Podcast, so you know we got to say it. So thanks for your service and thanks for your time today.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me and good luck with your campaign. Thanks.
