 All right, more on Community Matters. I'm Jay Fiedel in Think Tech. And today we're going to talk to Derek Turbin on Community Matters. He is running for office. We want to see people running for office. Welcome to the show, Derek. Nice to have you on. Good to see you, Jay. Thanks for having me. So what district are you running for? This is a state house, District 20. What is that? Correct, yeah, District 20. So it breaks down to Palo Alto Valley in the middle. And then you have Willamina Rise, Montalani Heights on one side. Other side, you have St. Louis Heights. And then you have Kainaki, everything, Malca of the H1 Freeway. That's a big district or at least it has a lot of neighborhoods in it anyway. Yeah, yeah, it's fun. Big Hills, Big Valley and a lot of good restaurants and good places to eat. Which used to be open. And what about walking? Can you walk and you say hi? Can you knock on doors or is that out of bounds now? Yeah, I suspended that about three or four weeks ago. Yeah, so right now it's kind of a digital campaign. Social media, emails, sending out a few mailers, making phone calls, but fortunately can't go door to door and due to the shelter in place, can't sign ways either. I was doing that for a while. So give us a little idea about your background. Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing in your regular life? Your normal life, so to speak? Tell us who you are there. So yeah, I'm born and raised here, grew up down the street from my district in the Wailaikahala area. Went to Punahoe, graduated after I graduated from Punahoe, went to college at Occidental. Where our President Obama went for two years before transferring. Was an athlete at Occidental, played football and ran track there. Following Occidental came back, taught at St. Louis for a little bit, St. Louis High School, and then proceeded to coach track at Occidental, then moved on to law school and practiced law in LA for about five years before moving home. And now I've been practicing here in Hawaii for about two years. That's a good period of time to have to get it under your belt, see what it's like. So you come from a family of lawyers. Can you talk about that? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, yeah. So both my parents, Rich Turbin is an attorney. So is Ray Sanchu. I feel like probably both of them have been on the show a few times. And I didn't say, if I said that they didn't somewhat inspire me to go into law, I'd be lying because I do recall growing up at the dinner table, both parents talking about their cases, talking about law, which kind of planted the seed, planted the seed in my head at a pretty young age. Mm, okay, very important. We wanna see young people run for office. But before we go any further, I wanna see your images, your graphics. So can we spin through them? Can the maestro please put some on the screen for us? There it is, that's your logo, eh? Yes, yes, that's my logo. What else we got? That's it? No other graphics, okay. So let's talk about how you perform a campaign, how you organize a campaign. You have to have staff, you have to have code shares and all kinds of people that help you and advise you and make you wise on the issues and difficulties of running for office in this day. Protect you against hit pieces and all those things. So what have you done to establish your brain trust? Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great question. So starting around, is around January when really kind of it came up in my heart that I wanna run, run for this seat. And first thing I did is talk to my family and talk to my friends. And the funny thing is I think I was doing a lot of having a lot of those conversations reaching out to these people to really get that support I needed, that moral support, that encouragement that I needed to know that this is something that I wanted to do. So reached out to a few of my closest friends either from Punahou or just kind of growing up here. And those close friends kind of formed my team of co-chairs, just kind of go through them. My good friend, Rossi Sokane, he's my chair. And then I have another, one of my other best friends from Punahou named Jay Hanamura. He's also on my team. There's Todd Yacovelli, Kat Tashner and my sister, Laurel May Sink. Those are my co-chairs who kind of really give me that encouragement, that moral support I can also bounce ideas off of. And then I formed a team of honorary chairs. Those are people from kind of the older generation, more my parents' generation who provide me with the wisdom, the insight and almost like a sense of calm as I continue to push forward through this campaign. One of my honorary co-chairs is I think your good friend, Carol Mon-Lee. She's an auntie to me. We're not related by blood, but it just grew up as one of my aunts. On top of that, Walter Cheney. We've got to take care of her, Derek. She's really on the line to think back, okay. Be nice to her, will you? Thank you. Okay, absolutely. No, she's awesome, but yeah. She's actually the one who's really taking care of me. Like when I get stressed out, I call her and she gives me that nice and calm. Then another very sage-wise person, Walter Kiromitsu, former president of St. Louis and judge. He actually, he hired me to teach at St. Louis, which was my first job out of college. Again, just a great mentor, great sense of calm. Then, you know, J.D. Nielsen. He's going to be on our show this week on Thursday, on the 16th. He's going to be on our show and he's going to talk about the independent judiciary in our country. I'm sure you'll appreciate that. Try to come around and watch that one, yeah. Okay, absolutely. No, I'd love to watch it. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, he was a judge and president of St. Louis, so yeah, great guy. Yeah, and great community member, great leader in the legal community, which makes him such a great asset to my campaign. And then J.D. Nielsen, another very wise, experienced person in the political community worked on a lot of campaigns, so really great to have her on my team. And then my last honorary chair is Dr. Tom Kosasa, another very wise, solid community member to have. That's great. So with all these people and all these advisors calming you and sort of helping you understand the issues of our time in our state, I want to ask you about your platform. And the first question is, in general, Derek, what do you want to do? Yes, you want to run, but why you want to run? Do you want to, how do you want to change things in Hawaii? How do you want to participate in the political process? Yeah, another great question. Well, initially kind of stepping in, one of the reasons why I wanted to run was really to just bring kind of practical solutions to the state. I spent a little bit of time looking at Bill's last session and I had some ideas on ways to get things passed. A lot of hot button bills that have, I think got a little bit stumped recently. One of them was the minimum wage bill and I followed that bill kind of going through the legislature and I still, I see it get stumped because the small businesses are taking a big hit. So I had some ideas on how to raise minimum wage but also protect small businesses through some form of tax credits, taking some type of union approach to that process. But now with obviously what we're dealing with with COVID-19, my ideas and my message have changed. If I have the opportunity to serve and get in, I know that at the top of my priorities is how we're gonna get our economy to recover post COVID-19. And some of the ideas that I had is we take a local approach to this federal bailout package which involves giving people who have been laid off a monthly stipend, providing statewide very low interest loans, even grants to some of these small businesses that have been hit hard. So that's gonna be, if I have the opportunity to serve a big priority, figuring out how we're gonna help our economy recover. And on top of that, really most importantly, how we're gonna help the people in our state who have been hit hardest by the shelter in place and by COVID-19. Yeah, you bet big issues. You're stepping into a whirlwind of planning activity and it's not clear what we need to do yet. So if you're elected, you're gonna have to face that because that's gonna come up right after you take office and it's gonna be a burden on everyone in the legislature. So let me ask you about other issues, okay? COVID, of course, is very important. But what about the standard issues that people in office always have to wrestle with? What about homelessness? You got a feeling about that? Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, I've talked to a few people about the homeless issue and my policy and my way of addressing that is through mental health care. I think one of the big issues that we see with the homeless issue is, the sweeps are happening, the homeless individuals are being asked to move. Oftentimes they get cited for reasons we all understand they don't show up to court, they don't pay their fines. So they just move down the street and it turns into a giant game of kick the can. So what a lot of people have been talking about, which I'm certainly behind, is putting them through a mental health care route. I've worked with some of the homeless people in Thomas Square and through other charity groups. And what we need to do is a lot of the times when they get cited for these loitering violations is we assess where they are with regards to mental health care and put them through that mental health care process, whether it's drug addiction, alcohol addiction, or just general mental health, and then from there, transition them to jobs in our community so we can kind of transition them off the streets into a lot of these shelters, into a lot of these homes through that mental health care process. Yeah, jobs, you say jobs right now, there are more people than there are jobs for sure. And when we start doing our recovery, we're gonna really have to think hard about jobs. And it all sounds like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal where we have to do public works, you know, the WPA and the like. I mean, where will the jobs come from? Do you have an idea about that? Because I totally agree that we have to take them homeless and put them in jobs. That's job number one, not a pun or what. And so, you know, where do we find the jobs, especially in the duress of the coronavirus crisis? Yeah, well, yeah, and that's another great question. You know, one thing is that I've noticed through a lot of studies and talking to a lot of people is frankly, our state offices are understaffed. Just for example, I hear that the DLNR is understaffed. Department of Human Services is understaffed. And a lot of these other statewide departments are understaffed. So I think kind of creating synergy there and really working with the universities, the colleges here, finding ways to kind of funnel recent grads into those positions, I think would be a really good way to utilize these open positions and find jobs for a lot of the people who are unemployed. We can also work with a lot of the Veterans Associations, the Army Veterans Associations, because there's always a struggle for finding jobs for them as well. So working with just creating more synergy between the state and our departments, our job course to funnel those workers into there. Yeah, well, you raise a number of questions spinning in my head right now. I'll try to remember all the questions you made me think about. Okay, so we have youths. We have new entries into the state employment system. There are problems about having too many employees in the state employment system and not enough money in the employment retirement system to cover their retirements as their retirements are presently constituted. These have been tug-of-war issues for decades. So how do you insinuate the new, youthful, vital members of state government into that at the same time, minimize bureaucracy because with increased state employee numbers comes increased bureaucracy and you and I both know that Hawaii has an incredible amount of bureaucracy and as a member of the state legislature, one of your missions would be, has to be, should be dealing with that bureaucracy and making it work better. So how do you do that? And how do you do that within the fiscal means of the state where we have to balance the budget by way of the Constitution? How do you fix all those factors and vectors all swimming, all swimming in your first term of office? Yeah, no, and that's a great question. And I don't think there's not necessarily an overnight fix. We're not gonna be able to, we're not gonna be able to snap our fingers and fix this overnight. One thing I'll say is, it's almost like a twofold process when you talk to a lot of these state departments within the state of Hawaii because the other issue that they have is they have an issue not only hiring employees but retaining employees. So one of my solutions to that would be obviously kind of funneling a lot of these young graduates looking for work into these departments in the state of Hawaii to give them a job and to fill these positions and then my next solution for retaining them is almost taking that union approach that I previously discussed to minimum wage where you have an entry level minimum wage which I understand right now it's I believe $13.25 but then you kind of raise the minimum wage for these entry level workers after each year that they work. So make the minimum wage for an individual with one year of experience $15. So there's that incentive for these young employees to stay there for a year because they're gonna get paid more. And then once you reach that two to three year mark make their minimum wage the $17 an hour which is what we're shooting for. So I think that definitely solves one issue well really two issues filling the positions and retaining the employees. Let me ask you one thing about that when you have that incremental increase over time seniority is that seniority in the workforce or is that seniority in the company? In other words, do I get a raise and does that stick when I change jobs, change companies? I think you'd have that in the company because that gives them the employee the incentive to stay in the company and work in the company for a long period of time and it saves the company money because they don't have to do these job searches and retrain employees over and over again. It really is a win-win because they are in fact saving money by not doing these constant job searches and job trainings. Yeah, but now one other thing is we live in a world which is migrating we find the whole thing about coronavirus and the lockdown and it makes us look at our society differently. It makes us look maybe more carefully at the way we actually operate. And I guess politics and political metrics that makes us look more carefully also. And one of the things that's come clear is that we have a nation largely composed our workforce is largely composed of gig workers who move from job to job, who hold two, three jobs or more at the same time. We have that in Hawaii too. How would you deal with the minimal wage issue for gig workers? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I do think that like the union approach to minimal wage would be the solution. I think, yeah, I guess I understand that they're gig workers but if we could give both the worker an incentive for consistency to stay with an employer for a long period of time and also give these employers the, I guess the ability to hang on to the worker for a longer period of time, that would hopefully solve some of the problems that we're dealing with with gig workers. I think the other thing that I'd like to bring up is I think there should be an investment in STEM schools. I don't think we see enough STEM programs here in Hawaii and that involves educating our high school students on jobs like tech jobs as well as data analytics jobs because there's a huge demand for tech and data analytic jobs even in Hawaii and a lot of these companies are reaching out to the mainland to fill these positions. So if we can train our local students or local youth for these tech and data analysis jobs we'll see a lot more stability in the workforce here and a lot more opportunities for young people here to make a good living off of skilled labor. Yeah, that's an excellent point and an excellent position as far as I'm concerned. The state has been trying for generations and many administrations to diversify the economy. So we're not stuck with a mono economy in tourism which is that's what's gonna hurt us more than anything in the COVID crisis. We've tried to turn it on again. We're dealing really with one single mono economy tourism. So we've got to diversify into tech and so we've had lots of discussions and statutes that have come and gone allowing tax credits for tech and I wonder what your thoughts are because this is a very important point going forward. Government has the power to incentivize the development of industries or the reverse. What would you do? What is your feeling about a credit, a tax credit, some kind of tax incentive to encourage the development of that tech industry that you're talking about? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think if it's a local company, if it's a local company here in Hawaii investing in tech then I'm all for the tax credit. I'm hesitant to offer the tax credit to a major mainland corporation. Like I'll just bring up, there's the Amazon Whole Foods, there's Facebook, there's Google, they all have somewhat of a presence here in Hawaii. So I'd be hesitant to offer the tax credits to them but absolutely offering the tax credit to these local companies to invest in tech here I think is a great idea. And one idea that I've seen at the legislature that I've seen come up quite a bit for tech in Hawaii is investing in green energy and ocean cleanup. There have been proposals for this, trying to explain it and try to think of how the best way to explain it but kind of an ocean cleanup where they really kind of pick up trash, pick up disposable waste in the ocean and create that into energy. And I think that that could be a phenomenal idea to invest in here because strategically, Hawaii being in the middle of the Pacific Ocean there is that it's very likely to be able to create energy off of the ocean waste that we see around Hawaii. So that's one kind of green tech energy that I could see people wanting to invest in here in Hawaii. Yeah, and you would see tax credits as a way to incentivize that investment and that entrepreneurship. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think there are companies with money that would want to invest in something like that because it's a win-win. It creates energy, it's kind of a great way to combat one of the biggest threats of my generation which is climate change. So I think that is something that we can invest in. Let me ask you about a topic that's not often discussed but think that has followed it over the years and that's the integration of the islands. In other words, going from a state of islands to an island state or maybe I should reverse that an island state to a state of... The islands seem to be floating away from each other call it insular drift. I mean, we've fought over putting a cable for electric power from Linai to Oahu where one has the energy and the other one needs the energy. And then in Oahu we have this NIMBY process where nobody wants to see wind in their backyard or all that. And so we really don't think as a state that is connected. We have one airline that flies but nobody else. We don't have a ferry which is really an extraordinary deficit for us not to have a ferry. And we somehow encourage the neighbor islands to develop their own personality and be separate if not isolated from Oahu. Don't you think there are things we can do? I mean, what's your view of this? Can't we bring the islands closer together and make everybody work on the same page all the islands as one unified state? Do you have any thoughts about that? No, absolutely. I think that's a great point. And I actually do think that what you brought up bringing back some form of the super ferry would be a great way to bring a little bit of unity to the islands. As opposed to paying $150 to $200 for a round trip to go from here to Maui and back, here to the big island and back. Let's make it simple and accessible and make it something that you don't have to spend $200 on and plan weeks in advance. So I think what you brought up the idea of the super ferry going from island to island making it easier to go back and forth is a great start. And I think that is a great solution. I work in the legal industry. I do workers comp have done a little bit of personal injury law too. And I know another gigantic issue that we see between inner island issue is access to quality medical care quality doctors. I think some type of program that they do with some dentists. I have a friend who's a dentist who actually worked as a dentist with the Air Force. Now he spends two days a week practicing on Maui and the rest of his time practicing on Oahu. And I think creating a program like that for medical workers, especially medical residents would be a great way to solve some of this problem. I have some of the medical resident program spending three days on Oahu and two days on an outer island would really be a great way to kind of give to the outer islands and prove their medical healthcare create a little more synergy there through healthcare which is obviously a huge issue as well. So a couple of ideas those are a couple of ideas I have to create the Yeah, good for you. Good for you. I'm very impressed with having young people come into government with new ideas and all that. So, okay, you're gonna run, you are running. You're gonna be in the election in November. There'll be a lot that happens between now and then for sure here in Hawaii and the world. You're gonna have the slings and arrows of being in an election in Hawaii. Nobody ever said it was easy but I wanna offer you the opportunity in closing to tell the people out there, okay? Why you should be elected? What message you wanna leave with them? Why you should be elected over anyone who runs against you? What makes you special Derek, tell us. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I guess it's a two-fold answer to your question. I'm really passionate about the community about the area that I live in. I grew up playing basketball and kind of key gym. After basketball games, I'd walk up the street to Big City Diner, you know, kimchi stew, a lot of those restaurants up Wai Lai and they just, they have a special place in my heart which will just bring me to one of the points I wanna bring up. I have this little mailer I did with a lot of the local restaurants encouraging people to support them like Big City Diner, kimchi stew, brood, coffee talk, pipeline, hosays, champs, the curb, happy days, Chinese food, gorsher grinds on the surfing pig, wanted to give all of them a shout out because they've stayed open during this shelter in place. They're serving takeout, they're feeding the community, feeding us and I just wanna encourage people to continue to support them if you have the opportunity and you live around District 20, near Wai Lai Avenue, order takeout, support these small community restaurants, local restaurants that have stayed open during this time feeding us during this stressful time. So that's my first point. I'm really passionate about District 20 and the small local establishments in District 20 and I'm gonna continue to support District 20 if I have the opportunity to get into office. The next thing I wanna bring up is just the analytical skills that I've developed throughout my years of practicing law here in Hawaii and in Southern California. I've had the opportunity to talk to Jay about some of the ideas I have, some of the ways I wanna think outside the box to really improve the state and I wanna bring that to the legislature. I wanna bring those analytical ideas and skills, my ability to solve problems and think outside the box to the ledge to make Hawaii a better place. All right, that's good, we're out of time. Derek Turbin running for office, running for the State House, District 20. Take a look at his website, DerekTurbin.com, is it? Yes, yeah, DerekTurbin.com. All right, familiarize yourself with Derek. Thank you so much, Derek Aloha. Great, thank you, Jay. Have a great day and stay safe.