 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. I welcome to another edition of Hawaii Uniform, I'm your host Calvin Griffin. And here on the program we talk about a lot of different things that concern the veterans and military community and in the past, as I mentioned, we have a lot of unsung heroes over here who are affiliated with the military, either active or in a veteran's status. We have one group that has been around for quite a while and most of their members or majority of their members, I believe, are veterans or associated with the military. And today we want to go ahead and introduce to the program Mr. Ray Pagan, who is with the Street Fighters Hawaii, and Mr. Brian Page, I'm sorry, I'll get it right one day anyhow. And also Jeremy Gouin, who is a veteran's activist anyhow. As I mentioned here on the program, we try to get a lot of information out and again there's a lot of different groups over here that do a lot of good things that many of you may not be aware of. So we're helping them to get the word out because I do believe it's really important that people see how the military active reserve status and also dependence are an integral part of the Hawaii community over here. Ray, if you don't mind to start off with you, may I call you Ray? Sure, please. Good. I know that when was the organization formed about the 19th? 1972, when it first started, yeah, a group of bikers got together and they wanted to. One of the first things was on their mind is we didn't want to wear a helmet when we ride. So that was the first thing that they started, you know, to go into it. And again, we're not about helmets, it's a freedom of choice that we want, you know, that's what it's all about. So it started there. And a few years later, then we started the Toys for Thought, the Pura, Toy Run, Pura, Toys for the Kids, that's a big thing. How many organizations or clubs are involved with Street Bikers of the United? We have roughly about 75 bike clubs and then we have many, many individuals that don't belong to any clubs, but they're associated with us, yeah, as far as that goes. So a lot of people would think that with bikers, it would be mainly a male-dominated type of activity. But I understand there's a lot of female. Oh, yes. We have a few female clubs, let alone a lot of the bike clubs themselves, they do have ladies in there. Yeah. And I have to be, once in a while they have to tell me, really, not only men, we have ladies here too, and it's accordingly. Yeah. It's some hardcore ladies. Yeah. Oh, yes. If I don't want to, they'll beat me up here. Bruce, what is your position and how long have you been with the organization? I'm the State Director and I've been State Director for about four years. I was with SBU before that. I'm originally from Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. My wife is local from Pearl City, and so we always came back to visit her parents and whatnot. And over the years, and I got a motorcycle here, started riding, found out about SBU and joined as a member of SBU, and then when we moved here, 2011, I started regularly attending meetings, and somehow Ray taught me into getting involved in the executive, and so I became the State Director. Yeah. I used to be part of a bike club, 10 speed, but, you know, swim, couldn't find a treasure in you. Well, you know, it's whatever, on two wheels, it's all good. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. Oh, Jeremy, I want to introduce you real quick also, but tell a little bit about yourself also. I know you're not part of the Street Parkers United and we're going to get into your segment, but a little bit about yourself? Well, my name is Jeremy Ewan, I've been on the show a couple of times now. Mainly, I'm just a veteran's advocate, activist, work a lot within the community with different organizations, bringing about some legislative issues to the forefront, not just for veterans, but for a lot of other individuals, minorities, and some of the other organizations that I work with. Yeah. I know that we were on the talk course, talking about some of the things that's coming up with the Street Parkers United, but I know that quite a few of the members of the different clubs out there are veterans or active military. We have, you have policemen, you have all kind of individuals who are currently involved. And I see that one of the things that we have in common, again, you know, when you take off the uniform, whether you're in or out of the uniform, do we always remember the mission as far as upholding what the country stands for? And I know that you gentlemen get involved with legislative issues. Bruce, I heard rumors that you're an attorney. I am. Okay. I'm both a lawyer in British Columbia and also I'm a U.S. attorney licensed in Hawaii as well. Yeah. So do you go before the legislature? I think Ray, you do that also, right? Both Ray and I do. I draft legislation and I do most of the submissions and whatnot because of my professional training. So Ray and I discuss most issues and we do a lot of working with the legislators as well and we don't necessarily call ourselves lobbyists because we work for a non-profit organization but we fulfill that basic function in terms of promoting legislation that advances biker's rights. Yeah. Okay. I think that you mentioned biker's rights because there's some of the things that came up that not only affect biker's but even individuals who are not club members. So as far as some of the freedoms or some of the things that a lot of people are not aware of that impacts their life. You guys are addressing I guess. Ashley, I wanted to mention when initially you were asking about clubs and whatnot and Ray, I think indicated there was around 70 clubs but he said there was a lot of independence as well. Sometimes people think that the clubs are dominant and even though the clubs because they have quite often fairly large memberships and so when you see them on the road it's quite impressive actually SBU probably has about 25% members and of clubs and probably 75 or 70, 30 or 25, 75 non-members so independence in other words. So the independence actually are a larger group than the members of SBU. Yeah. Okay. So I guess with your organization one of the things is stress, bike safety, things of that nature anyhow. Is there any programs that you guys are involved in that enlighten potential riders about what they can and what they have access to as far as training or information? What do you want to do with that? Well, SBU of course is an advocate for motorcycle rights but it's an umbrella organization that essentially represents all motorcyclists in Hawaii even if they're not specifically SBU members so what we're concerned with is issues, yes legislative issues so bikers rights in a formal sense but we're also interested in safety issues any issues that may affect the physical well-being of motorcyclists are primary for us so if they were road construction issues or layouts at intersection issues or enforcement issues in terms of law enforcement how motorcycles are treated relative to other vehicles on the road those are all be things that SBU would be interested in and anything that relates to improving motorcycle safety and improving motorcycle skills to because one of the things that SBU is interested in is making sure that motorcycles can motorcyclists can protect themselves from other vehicular traffic because when motorcycles and vehicles get into accidents motorcycles always lose so the the best way to protect motorcyclists to start with is to have them proactive and have them trained and skilled so that they can avoid accidents before they happen all right well speaking of it seems like excuse me for clearing my throat being out there on the being in the elements and closest to the road than most people are in cars the feedback that you can give to the law enforcement or as far as with information about safety either certain road conditions things that nature you guys you feed it back to certain entities like say that can make the changes that improve the driving conditions for all riders I mean all drivers here in Hawaii that's a really good question and the answer is yes and I'll give you an example of something that SBU was working on last year which was some legislation that would allow the use of either lane filtering which is traveling between stop traffic or alternatively or as well as shoulder use and eventually we weren't Ray and I worked with the legislature and we we developed a bill which after it worked its way through both the Senate and the House of Representatives it went to the governor and this bill was worked on constantly by both houses and in cooperation with SBU and consulting the police and the DOT the HPD and the DOT actively and got involved with this legislation and was really helpful in crafting this legislation so we got it to the point where it was restricted to shoulder use the object of the legislation was to a safety based legislation to avoid rear end accents motorcycles sitting in traffic especially on the freeway when you've got high congestion or gridlock they're more or less sitting ducks for rear end accents so one of the issues was get the motorcyclists out of stop traffic the second issue was motorcycles mostly travel they mostly stay cooled by air cooling there are water cooled liquid cool motorcycles but most of them are still air cool so as they're moving they're they're cooled unlike a car with a radiator that has a fan that cools it motorcycles need to move to stay cool so they when when motorcycles are in gridlock they overheat the overheating is dangerous first of all the motorcycles can get burned but even more serious the motorcycle stalls and then you have a motorcyclist with a stalled motorcycle who can't start it pushing it around in traffic so again getting the motorcycle out of stop traffic was really important to us and of course if the motorcycle does stall and is in stop traffic now you have the motorcyclist probably standing with their passenger on the on the shoulder of the highway on the shoulder of the road now they're sitting not only for the moving traffic but if emergency vehicles come along and they need to use the shoulders now the motorcyclists and the passengers are an obstruction to safety vehicles so for all these reasons both like I said both the house and the senate and DOT all agreed that this shoulder use legislation was good for safety good for traffic management and for some reason which SBU still doesn't understand nor any of the other constituents that work so hard on this legislation the governor crushed this legislation there's one thing I heard a rumor you can confirm it or deny it or just ignore it all together that one of the pushbacks was because it's jealousy on the part of actually people going cars because when you see somebody zipping past you on a bike you know and it's like okay well it's just certain things that kick in you know so that's one of the things I heard it was you know as far as the so-called jealousy factor where you know they're doing it why can't I you know but the way you explain it as far as safety reasons and the way it you know the lack of impediment as far as you know the traffic it makes sense you know well let me let me respond to that because that's a really good point Kelvin the thing is that this legislation was designed to be used when traffic was stopped in gridlock and mostly primarily on the freeways or or maybe busy highways it was statewide but it was mostly focused on a wahoo and the thing is the the time that this would be implemented is when every when the traffic is stopped and the legislation and the legislator specifically ensured that the motorcyclists were only allowed to travel at under 10 miles an hour so there was no zipping by it would be crawling by for one thing and the other thing is every time you take a motorcycle out of that traffic every vehicle in that lane is moved you know one step forward and especially if they're stalled motorcycles now the vehicles are stopped actually in the traffic because the motorcycle is stalled so all those concerns really were not valid concerns against the legislation that's the reason why the legislators passed it and that's the reason why we don't understand why the governor would veto it it's just why the governor would put a motorcyclist in harm's way by vetoing this legislation is unbelievable right well is there is going to be going to be revisited or is it dead it's really interesting the legislators were so supportive of this legislator this legislation that they came back to sbu after the governor vetoed it and said we don't understand why the governor vetoed it and we don't agree with what he did and we want you to please bring it on again this year and we'll support it again and we'll take another run because we know it's for motorcycle safety okay we're going to continue the conversation after we take the break any up because there's so many things we can cover and I think that people need to really be fully aware put more pressure on the governor or whatever because it's in her best interest we're going to take a short break and when we come back we'll continue our conversation stay tuned to Hawaii in uniform this is think tech Hawaii raising public awareness greetings i'm martin dispang the longtime host of human humane architecture here on think tech Hawaii think it's important to our community because think about how awesome our natural environment here is here in hawaii and we need to make our built environment equally awesome uh exotically and inclusively so because of that for the first time think tech hawaii is participating in an online web-based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000 if thanks to think tech will run only during the month of november and you can help please donate what you can so that think tech hawaii can continue to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming like mine i've already made my donation and look forward to yours please send in your tax deductible contribution by going to this website thanks for think tech dot cause vox dot com on behalf of the think tech community enriched by think tech hawaii 30 plus weekly shows thank you so much for your generosity okay you're back with hawaii uniform again i'm calvin i think i got to check my ID card but anyhow got some great guests here today from street bikers united and also um jeremy uh he's joining us again also but i want to continue like say before we um took the break all right again the legislative issue anyhow is there going to be a campaign i mean i know it's going to be revisited as far as bringing this up again if the public is more aware of what's going on and all the you know because sometimes we have filtered news it's being directed you know to the way certain entities in in the political arena want to spin it you know but is there a campaign that's going to be um set up where the you can present the facts and then they hopefully there'll be a grassroots movement or something where the average rider out there you know but you know traveler like say you can you know give their feedback in the house so again if there's any veto by whatever political entity out there well it was the governor okay the governor all right you know you know is there going to be a campaign that's going to be done by you guys by your organization or by any of the other legislators well we're going to re uh institute the the legislation itself and this is i guess the kickoff of our campaign because you've been so good as to allow us to bring this issue up on your show and hopefully it'll have wide coverage in the public and i think that uh with ray because ray actually does the spu media um i think with ray's cooperation i think we might have some spots that we might put out there for information and when we talk to the dot the dot was actually um and this is going back to your original question do we work with um the government uh agencies and entities the dot believe that this legislation was going to get through before the governor vetoed it and they said um look we want to work with spu and we want to actually inform the public of the benefits of this legislation and we'll even phase it in so we'll set up signage and we'll inform the public and we'll carefully scrutinize it so there was a real good working relationship so we you know there may be a couple of different um ways that we might be able to bring this um to the public's knowledge but this is a good start okay well i'll tell you what we can do here on the program we uh since you brought it to the public's attention and i know you've been promoted in an around about way i'd like to contact the governor's office and get an official response from him as to why you know certain you know he vetoed it you know so i want to be fair and balanced you know using that term you know but at least like say we'll have a dialogue going on and like say we'll do what we can here like say to make sure that there's a you know wider dissemination of the information because it definitely is in the public interest like say for this type of legislation to go through that'd be great okay great is i know that you guys are doing a lot of good things and we want to touch on some of the things that's coming up in the future and also you know some of your past activities there is a event that's coming up uh the toy parade that's happening it's a schedule for uh december okay you can see december 3rd which is the first sunday of the month we're doing the toys for talk ride and it's a uh street biker genre toy parade and we're gathering at um the magic island we'll be there from 7 to 12 we will have entertainment we have the um marine band is going to be playing for us and i will have marine trucks collecting toys there we're going to have entertainment we're going to have food vendors and you're going to see all these beautiful motorcycles that comes out once a year just for this ride you know and a beautiful and in a parade we'll start at 12 o'clock we leave magic island and we're going down to and at Waikiki Shell right that's where we drop off toys there also and then you know we've been having um complaints from the people in Waikiki about the bike making a lot of noise so i'm i'm trying to we're talking to the bikers especially when going to Waikiki please keep the noise down help the people out there you know i mean although when the parade is going through we have the tourists making like this for the bikers make they want us to make noise you know i mean but after it's over the residents are complaining so i'm urging all bikers that come to this parade and do this parade please pass the word on is don't rave in your bike as much as possible and after you drop off your toys at Waikiki Shell please avoid using alawai pull of art because trade up months of it and go on a freeway get out of town don't go down once um alawai and making noise because all the residents live there and that's the people we have to deal with they don't want selling us your bikers make too much noise one way getting around that what you do is your male ear plugs to all those people on that route i was told so i talked to Bruce we are going to order 30,000 earplugs we're going to Waikiki and i'm giving out no charge i'm gonna charge them for the earplugs yeah i was gonna fly but yeah you know just suggesting what so we do go to the neighborhood board yeah and uh and you know and they actually explain to them what's happening and they at the neighborhood board oh you guys do not care right it said more pain is making all the noise not you folks yeah but after i walk away i don't know they're talking behind my back i don't know you know i mean but that's what it is but we'll be going to the meeting in january to see how we can improve or what happened you know so we try to improve it anyway yeah we want to keep the parade in Waikiki as much as possible because they're telling us think of rerouting yeah i said it's for tourists you know for kids well it's for the tourists and in terms of its i think got real genuine entertainment value but it's also for the locals this has been around for 43 years and it's for the keiki and the keiki's family's in need for in terms of the presence so it's for a lot of different constituent groups but one of our concerns is that we we understood that the hotel association their checkout and check-in is at 11 o'clock so originally we used to have it earlier i think it was at 10 when i first started and the neighborhood the Waikiki neighborhood board said well you know that's early could you maybe make it a little later you know because the noise does wake people up so we actually moved it to 11 in response to that it also used to end up at the KCC and the HPD said that intersection at the KCC is not a safe intersection can you reroute the traffic down through Maserat and end it at the shell and we said sure we can do that so it got to the present route by in a sense recommendations that we followed from the HPD and then secondly it got set at 11 because it was moved back because the Waikiki tenants association didn't want it as early this year when they indicated to us uh and we did have a meeting as Ray said last uh november or yeah i think it was last november and at that meeting um that we usually get up and stand up and do a presentation at that meeting they actually said to me um mr page you don't need to present this year you we know that you worked with the zoo last year sb you worked with the zoo to keep the noise down we know that you're doing everything that you can to bring the the issues of consideration to the residents to the biker's attention and so you know you we're concerned with the moped noise um you sbu is fine so that on that basis we went there then we found out this year they still were concerned so we basically said well let's move it back even farther we'll move it that to 12 or one so the hotel association was happy about that the um apparently the Waikiki association likes the idea that it's a little bit later in the day as well so sbu is doing everything that we can to make this presentation um meet as many of the constituents concerns and objectives as we possibly can and if we can maybe we could even have it at one o'clock next year because then you know being in the afternoon we don't have any issues of morning traffic or noise and as Ray said one of the things we were told about is the alloy canal after the after it ends at the band shell on maserat some of the motorcyclists were going down the alloy and the people again in the Waikiki association were saying we don't really want them going down the alloy so this year we're even taking steps to avoid that so as Ray pointed out we've done an awful lot to try to work with the community concerns and interests okay we're getting down to the wire we have about three minutes left anyhow but one thing i want to give jerry a minute chance to say something but one other thing i want to bring up real quick we got veterans day coming up tomorrow rolling thunder real quick about that then they don't well we um the veterans day thing they have they have quite a few different bikers doing different things and all day so one group is having a fundraiser on their party one other group is doing a run down to the arrow um to the aquarium yeah so different people are doing everything editorial so yeah so i let i've been letting people know i've been sending out flyers to a lot of people that they're welcome to join this event okay yeah we've got a lot of good things going on they went into participation jeremy i know you had some information that you uh believe that is important like say to the veterans or yeah um actually i just wanted to come in i appreciate you having me on your show again it's great to meet you gentlemen um i really enjoy everything that that you've talked about today about getting out into the community of some of the organizations i'm with like the Shriners Hospital for Children that i'm with uh we really do appreciate it and if anybody can get out into the communities the more the married and we need all of what we got right here is uh we got a program doing on tomorrow and sunday so uh dr effie chow is one of the foremost um energy healers acupuncturists in the world actually and uh she's a grandmaster within the um chow qigong uh system she started our own yep uh the chow uh integrated healing system chow medical qigong um and we're going to be offering um tomorrow saturday and sunday it's going to be free for veterans okay and if they want to bring their family members that's also good they're going to be free um children free y'all can come in um and it's it's a derivative of of martial arts um it's more geared toward especially for vets um ptsd um physical therapy um so it's it's more of a tai chi type based um it's going to be done at the shinsu mission uh 1631 south britain uh it's going to be starting at 9 a.m it's going to be going to 6 p.m so saturday and sunday so we're welcome to come okay uh any chance to speed the street bike is united members can give these people a ride up there anyhow okay we're down to one minute anyhow closing thoughts anyhow uh jeremy any numbers you want to give out real quick um yes uh if you want to contact uh dr chow um point of contact her name is nancy the number is uh 808 2568848 um the the toy parade has a entrance fee of 10 dollars but you automatically become an sbu member by paying the entrance fee so you get all the benefits for that great great okay and then just to let people know this toy run is not free it costs sbu anywhere from 12 to 15 thousand dollars to put on his parade so we're taking any donations okay real quick any numbers we're going to have to think about 10 seconds numbers well okay we're not there later anyhow we're winding down so i guess that um at this point we want to go ahead and say you know thank you i appreciate all the efforts that you guys do out there in the community and we're going to follow up and like say anything we can do here at think tech i'm quite sure that you know the management would be happy to be more than happy to appreciate it all right at this point i want to say thank you again to you again to my guests and also for the individuals out there that tune into the program stay tuned like say we're going to try to bring you some more good stuff in the future thank you god bless and until that time