For Councilman Christopher Herndon, his public service career started long before the Denver City Council.

Herndon graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering. After graduation, he served nearly seven years in the U.S. Army, including deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. He was honorably discharged in 2005 with the rank of captain.

After transitioning to civilian life, Herndon looked for every opportunity to serve his community again, including an eventual City Council run.

Herndon was elected to represent District 11 in 2011, and then District 8 after a redistricting in 2015. During this time, Herndon has served two terms as City Council president from 2014 to 2016, advocated for business creation throughout the city, spearheaded the city’s redistricting process and more.

Now, after a decade of representing Denver on the City Council, Herndon sat down with The Denver Gazette to discuss his passion for serving District 8 — comprised of the Park Hill, Central Park, Montbello and East Colfax neighborhoods.

What made you want to become your district’s city council representative?

When I got out of the military I moved to Colorado and, for the first time in my life, it felt like something was missing. I couldn’t figure it out but what I did notice is I was volunteering significantly for the first time. I volunteered with my church to teach a financial literacy class, I volunteered with a local nonprofit to help Montbello High School students improve their math and language arts skills, I got on the registered neighborhood organization as a block captain and then an outreach co-chair. Then, I had this epiphany: I missed public service.

When you’re in the military, service is what you do every day and when I got out, I was naturally gravitating back towards that. When I realized that, I knew I wanted to serve again so I decided to run for the Denver City Council in 2011 and now, three terms later, I’m still here, still loving it.

In 2011, people would ask, “what is it you’re passionate about?” For me, I would just say to every door I knocked on, this job is about service. You need to have someone who understands what it means to serve, and I know that after my time in the military with two deployments. And it’s also about leadership. We’re going to have to make difficult decisions over the course of this term, and you need someone who has a history with leadership and knows what it means to lead.

How has your experience as a council member been so far?

It’s certainly always more than you imagined but in a very good way. You can have a very granular impact where you help someone by getting a stop sign at an intersection, but you can also impact a neighborhood, like how we got a park in north Park Hill. Or you can help out an agency, like how we found the building for the new 9-1-1 center for the Department of Safety. Or you can go city-wide, like when we were able to get college affordability moving forward, impacting our solid waste master plan or sending an initiative to the voters to modernize our breed-specific legislation.

I’ve also done a leadership program every summer working with our youth and that’s a way the impact is greater than our city because we’ve had youth in our program who are outside of the city and county of Denver.

That’s what’s great about this job, the difference you can make at all kinds of levels. You’re never bored, you’re always excited to get up each morning to figure out how you can better the community.

There are so many high moments — the park, Northeast Denver Leadership Week, breed-specific legislation, making the former PT’s Club into affordable housing and early childhood education. When you work really hard to get something accomplished, you have that feeling of, “wow, we really just made a positive impact.” There’s no way to describe that because that’s what we should be doing in this position, making the communities we serve a better place.

There are times where you might be on the minority vote when it comes to particular issues, but what I really appreciate, as a body, is that we’re having conversations about the topic. You’ll see at other levels of government that it’s all partisan. But we really are debating the issues and I appreciate that. There are times when you’re not on the successful end and that’s okay because that’s how our democracy works. I certainly feel that, for the most part, we’ve done really good work as a city.

As a council member, what are your priorities for the future?

The number one priority is COVID. Most people may be through with the pandemic, but the pandemic is not through with us. We need to continue to make sure as many people as possible get vaccinated and continue to serve those who have been hit hard by the pandemic.

Setting COVID aside, our number one priority is public safety and making sure all of our neighborhoods are equitably served when it comes to safety and protection.

As we continue to rebound out of this pandemic, identifying the needs of our individual neighborhoods and focusing on them is key. For example, in the East Colfax neighborhood, I’m working with Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer on legislative rezoning to allow Accessory Dwelling Units within the neighborhood because we know that the greatest way to build wealth is through housing. It’s a great wealth building opportunity and keeps people in their neighborhoods. That’s one thing that I’m proud to be focusing on.

District-wide, we still have an affordability challenge. How do we make sure there is housing for all, no matter what your socioeconomic status is, including people experiencing homelessness?

District 8 is also active in community events whether it be Northeast Denver Leadership Week, our Family Bike Parade, our toy drive — there are so many ways you can serve and meet the needs of folks beyond legislatively as elected officials. So I want to continue to do those things to help our community as well.

I just want folks to say, “Councilman Herndon served.” The same thing I want when I think back to my time in the military, “served and served well.” As folks drive through the neighborhood, they’ll see things and they may not even be aware that District 8 had a part in making it happen, whether it be a stop sign, the solid waste master plan, 9-1-1, adaptive reuse of a building, housing. But I hope they know that Councilman Herndon and his team made a positive difference in their community.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.