Michael R. "Mike" Nelson is an American politician from North Carolina.
A Democrat, Nelson is a former mayor of Carrboro, North Carolina and the first openly gay person to be elected as a mayor of a North Carolina city. Nelson was elected in 1995 after serving two years on the Carrboro Board of Aldermen. He served five consecutive terms as mayor from 1995 to 2005. He has since moved to Hillsborough, North Carolina.
In November 2006, Nelson was elected to serve a four year term on the Orange County Board of Commissioners. In 2007, he announced his intention to run for the North Carolina Senate in 2008, seeking to replace retiring Sen. Ellie Kinnaird in the reliably-Democratic 23rd district, which contains Orange and Person counties. When Kinnaird changed her mind and decided to run for re-election, Nelson suspended his own campaign.
Nelson worked as the Director of Governmental Relations for the Conservation Council of North Carolina, an environmental advocacy group. In May 2008, he began appearing in television commercials in which supported moving freight by train over truck travel. Currently, Nelson is working as a Field Service Coordinator with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Nelson has a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Famous quotes containing the words mike and/or nelson:
“Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?”
—Calder Willingham, screenwriter, Buck Henry, screenwriter, and Mike Nichols. Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman)
“Women’s battle for financial equality has barely been joined, much less won. Society still traditionally assigns to woman the role of money-handler rather than money-maker, and our assigned specialty is far more likely to be home economics than financial economics.”
—Paula Nelson (b. 1945)