GET OUT AND VOTE

by Steve Panten

It’s election time! During the ABATE Annual Meeting of the Membership, elections were held for the Board of Directors. I would like to thank everyone that voted for me to represent them on the Board, but I would also like to thank everyone that stepped up and ran for their positions. Most important, thank you to everyone that voted.

I think about what if motorcyclists voted just motorcycling and did not pay attention to all the other issues, what would Madison and Washington DC look like? Just imagine, there are roughly 525,000 people in the state of Wisconsin with a motorcycle endorsement, what would it look like if everyone voted? You hear about how groups can affect elections; 525,000 motorcyclists could do that. What would that do to the push for the ban of combustion engines, or the lack of control over driverless technology?

I feel as though whenever it’s election time I say how important this election is, well, this election is important. We need to understand that there is push for higher ethanol percentages in our fuel supply and that’s fine, we don’t have a problem if people want to use E15, E20 or even E85, go ahead. Our concern is to make sure that E10 or less is still going to be equally available for the over 285,000 registered motorcycles in the state along with all the off-road bikes, atv/utv’s, boats, snowmobiles, small engines and drift bikes (been a few months since I mentioned that I have an awesome drift bike). There is no doubt that motorcyclists vote but are they truly educated on the issues important to them? Everyone needs to do their homework and decide what is most important for themselves, but just imagine if all 525,000 motorcyclists got together and voted on who would be best for motorcycling in the State of Wisconsin? I do vote motorcycling, and that means that I do not necessarily vote for just one party (yep, you can do that in this election).

I know that I just wrote 345 words and did not even talk about what happened at the second most important day for motorcyclists in the state. At the Annual Meeting last month, the Legislative Committee set the agenda for what we are going to work on in 2023. It’s important to understand that the agenda is very fluid, and we can add or remove anything as needed.

Before I go into what we are going to take to Lobby Day let me tell you about the guest speaker that we had at the banquet on Saturday night. Elizabeth Van Holt is from the American Petroleum Institute (from here on out I am calling it API so remember that) and she gave a very information presentation on what is happening to the fuel supply and how we can help ourselves. API is going to be a strong partner for us moving forward because she had great ideas about creating partnerships through coalitions, and she can help us put it together. If we can get the motorcyclists in this state together with the ATV/UTV clubs, snowmobilers, boat groups, car clubs, gas station owners, loggers, landscape contractors, heavy truck operators and others, we would have a much stronger voice in Madison. Who knows, the combined voice could also possibly be heard in Washington DC and other areas that might need to hear it. I am looking forward to working with her and everyone from API in the future.

Now back to our Legislative Agenda. Our focus is on protecting motorcycling and educating the legislators on the fact that we are the “motorcycle issue experts” in the state of Wisconsin. We need to protect the only fuel that is legal and safe to use in every motorcycle. We do not yet have a final direction on how we are going to proceed with that because we need to see how the November election shakes out, but we are prepared for whomever is elected as Governor, Assembly member or State Senator. We need to address driverless technologies and we need to protect the sale of aftermarket parts. We need to continue to make sure that we are sitting at the table when the DOT is developing plans for how best to regulate traffic in the state.

Along with protecting motorcycling in Wisconsin, we also need to make sure that we are free to ride motorcycles on whatever roads we choose. This is a twofold topic; first we need to make sure that we have equal access and equal rights to all the roads. With the development of autonomous technology and the failure of the technology not recognizing motorcycles, we need to make sure that they do not follow other countries and ban motorcycles from heavily traveled highways that are best for this type of technology. This is tough for some people to understand that it could really happen but let’s just start with the need to get out in front of it now.

The other part of this topic is to make sure that we can operate without being unfairly stopped because of what we choose to ride or what we choose to wear. Our goal is to address what is happening in some parts of the state and learn if we are being profiled by one individual or if a department has developed an initiative to learn what motorcycle groups are traveling in a certain area and why. We can only address profiling if people are willing to step up and help by letting us know where and when it is happening. On our website is a form that individuals or groups can fill out that gives us the much-needed information. We know it’s happening, and we know the areas most affected because we hear from people that it is happening to, but we need proof. We need to develop a pattern of evidence before we can address it fully. We have had meetings with law-enforcement departments before when profiling was very blatant and obvious and were successful in stopping it, but we also know that it is still happening in other areas. If you are stopped for no reason, or for a minor offense and were detained for an unreasonable period of time, ABATE needs to know about it. If you were asked questions that have nothing to do with the stop or were asked to have your motorcycle searched or had the dogs called to search it, ABATE needs to know about it. And not just by a Facebook post, we need these forms filled out. It can be anonymous, but we encourage people to include their names and contact info because if we need someone to join us in a meeting with a legislator, we need to know how to get a hold of them.

That’s enough for this month. The Annual Meeting weekend was awesome. The members from that region put on a great event and it was followed up by an informative Legislative Committee meeting on Sunday with great discussions.

November 8th is election day, get out and vote.

That’s it.

Steve