Mr. Carlos Perez of Colorado Springs (unaffiliated, CD 5) is a software engineer and has been a practitioner in the field for over 35 years. Mr. Perez started his career with IBM and worked on the team that built the onboard avionics software for the NASA Space Shuttle and Space Station manned spaceflight programs. Mr. Perez’ broad industry experience includes developing software for the civil, military, financial, medical, insurance, non-profit, intellectual property, and commercial sectors.
 
In 2014, he served as an expert witness on a federal patent infringement case involving database encryption technology and has previously consulted with companies concerning intellectual property matters. He has worked with several Colorado-based technology startups including one based in Boulder that is currently developing a prototype of a non-partisan voter engagement app that spun-off from the Colorado Secretary of State’s Go Code Business Data Challenge. Today Mr. Perez is creating innovative applications that span embedded systems based on open source technology to cloud-based “full-stack” web applications.
 
Mr. Perez brings his perspective in the STEM-related fields to serve his local community. He is a member of the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority (PPRTA) Citizens Advisory Committee which advises elected officials on multimodal transportation policy and provides fiscal oversight of the designated 1% sales and use tax. He is also a member of a citizen-led neighborhood group working with the City Council to explore how to address the inequities in the property tax structure of the Briargate Special Improvement Maintenance District that maintains the neighbor trails and common areas.
 
As a council-appointed member of the Colorado Springs Districting Process Advisory Committee in 2020, he represented the fastest growing City Council district of over 81,000 people-- a population slightly larger than Loveland. His role included soliciting input on the proposed City Council boundaries, conducting the public outreach meeting, and synthesizing the comments for the committee report that was submitted to the City Clerk of Colorado Springs. He also worked with his fellow committee members and studied maps of demographic information to ensure that neighborhoods with a higher number of ethnic minorities were fairly represented in the recommendations for redistricting.
 
In his personal life, Mr. Perez is an Assistant Scoutmaster with his Boy Scout troop to continue the traditions he learned as an Eagle Scout. He is a recreational runner and in 2017 completed the Colfax Marathon to support the Blue Knights Drum and Bugle Corp based in Denver. He also rides with the local Young Life bike team to support their youth ministries. He loves all things outdoors and enjoys hiking and exploring parks. As a father of a son with a disability, he is active in Achilles Pikes Peak which is an organization that guides athletes with physical and cognitive disabilities. As an adherent of “8-80 cities” that serve people from ages 8 to 80, he serves on the executive committee with Bike Colorado Springs (a fiscally-sponsored organization of the Trails and Open Space Coalition) to make urban bicycling in the Pikes Peak region better for all ages and abilities.
 
Mr. Perez has a B.A. degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas ­at Austin and a M.S. degree in Studies of the Future from the University of Houston at Clear Lake.