Your RTD board is directly elected.
The Colorado legislature is moving to end that.
A new bill introduced this legislative session would eliminate most of the elected seats on the RTD board and replace them with political appointees — without a public vote.
We believe voters should have the final say.
What's proposed
This new bill would shrink RTD's 15-member elected board to a 9-member hybrid body. The bill was introduced following the January 2026 report of the RTD Accountability Committee, which was itself created by SB25-161.
Two of the four appointed seats would be chosen from a list of nominees provided by the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG). All four appointed seats require Senate confirmation. Neither mechanism substitutes for a direct public vote.
Who sits on transit boards?
Across ~535 voting seats at 48 major U.S. transit agencies, most board members are locally elected officials or citizens they appoint. Only 3 agencies elect directors specifically for transit governance — RTD is one of them.
See full board composition data for all 50 agencies →Our position
All voting members of the RTD Board must be elected.
Any change to the structure of the RTD Board must be approved by voters.
RTD is a public agency with major responsibility for mobility, access, economic opportunity, and quality of life across the Denver region. An agency with that much public importance should remain directly accountable to the people it serves.
Our concerns with the proposal
Many of the problems are not problems of election
The committee identified real issues — board size, weak candidate pipelines, limited expertise, low public visibility. But the report groups these together and treats them as pointing toward appointed seats. A large board is a board-size problem. Weakly contested elections are a recruitment problem. Limited expertise is a training and support problem. None of these inherently require reducing elected representation. The committee itself recommended stronger training, better compensation, clearer roles, and improved board staffing — reforms that don't require appointees.
If the concern is board size, the board can be smaller and still fully elected
A board could be reduced in size while remaining fully elected. Districts could be consolidated, committee structures tightened, and the chair role strengthened. Those steps would address the concern about nimbleness without reducing voters' direct role. Once board size and election are analytically separated, the structural case for appointees becomes much narrower.
Weak elections call for better elections, not fewer elected seats
If RTD Board races are low-visibility and weakly contested, the answer is to strengthen those elections — better candidate training, higher compensation, more public awareness. The committee recommends all of these. They point toward a more constructive first step: strengthen the pipeline and visibility of RTD Board elections before concluding that the electorate should have a smaller role.
A hybrid board may blur accountability rather than sharpen it
Under a fully elected board, voters know who governs RTD — every voting member is directly answerable to the public. Under the proposed structure, responsibility splits among elected members, gubernatorial appointees, the Governor, and the Senate. If performance remains poor, responsibility becomes easier to diffuse. In a period of fiscal strain, clear accountability matters.
A change this significant should go to voters
The committee recommends that structural reforms be adopted through statute rather than ballot referral. But this proposal does not merely adjust procedural details — it changes the core relationship between RTD and the electorate. A decision this consequential deserves real deliberation and a direct public vote.
The bill makes it harder to run for the seats that remain
While cutting elected directors from 15 to 5, the bill simultaneously quadruples the number of voter signatures required to get on the ballot — from 250 to 1,000. In a district now covering 645,000 residents, that's a significant new barrier for ordinary candidates. The bill claims to strengthen elections while making them harder to access.
The case for reform is strong.
The case for reducing elected representation is not.
Explore the issue
Tell the legislature voters should decide.
Your right to vote for the RTD Board is under threat. Add your name to show that the people of the Denver region want to keep their voice.
Sign the petition