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Government Affairs Executive Chris Simmons
Like many folks in vanpooling, I've come to the industry by an odd path. I think of myself as a "recovering attorney", having practiced for a few years in St. Louis after graduating law school. However, that foundational start to my career allowed me to get to where I am today. I became involved in an EPA project while practicing that dealt with issues of the built environment and its effect on how we live. My fundamental discovery, not that it's really news, is that our individual decisions can have a profound effect on government regulations and services that, in turn, affect us.
Because of this experience, I was able to leave practicing law and joined the staff of the City of Kent, Washington in 2004, where I was in charge of the Commute Trip Reduction Program. There, I learned how to interact with the different issues raised by employers, employees, transit agencies, and the community in ways that can create solutions that work for everyone.
In 2006, I joined the Washington State Department of Transportation, where I started off responsible for a construction mitigation program for I-405 and ended up responsible for WSDOT's efforts in carpooling and vanpooling. Doing this, while also chairing the Association for Commuter Transportation's (ACT) 2007 annual conference in Seattle, only reinforced my belief in the need for good facilitators in all walks of life.
I decided that I wanted to get back to my Midwestern roots, and joined VPSI at the end of 2008 as a Government Relations Executive. Here, I get to use the facilitation lessons that I've learned over time to help our staff work with local and state governments as well as to move forward the agenda of ACT as the chair of the Next Authorization Task Force. I have quite a bit of faith in what vanpooling can offer as a solution for individual commuters, and I believe that those thousands of individual solutions can allow for a better structure in transportation financing and system planning.
