SC Lawmakers Announce Plan to Create Jobs

South Carolina has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation at 6.2 percent, compared to the national rate of 5.5 percent. More than 28,000 people have received unemployment benefits since Congress extended benefits recently.

Now, state lawmakers say they have a plan to create new, high-paying jobs. "South Carolina has held the title of one of the worst unemployment rates in the nation for far too long," said Rep. Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives, at a news conference Tuesday in Columbia.

Harrell announced the plan, along with Rep. Dan Cooper, R-Piedmont, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Sen. Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. They were joined by business and industry leaders, along with Dr. Harris Pastides, new president of the University of South Carolina.

One of the first steps of the plan is for the South Carolina Research Authority to create a new "Knowledge Sector Council". It will be a public/private informal group that's supposed to bring public and private agencies together to help turn research projects being done at state universities into jobs.

Rep. Harrell says one of the problems now is that there are different groups working independently to try to attract business and jobs. The Department of Commerce is trying to recruit new industry, while the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism is trying to boost tourism and Clemson, USC and MUSC are using research to try to start new high-tech businesses.

"Our goal is to try to bring those groups together, get everybody on the same sheet of music, implement the legislation we've passed over the last 8 years, bring new jobs into South Carolina and raise the average income," Rep. Harrell says.

The news conference was held outside the Columbia office of the Employment Security Commission. Inside, Philana James was looking for a job. She has one already, but she would like to find a better-paying one. Since that's what lawmakers were talking about outside, she was intrigued, but she's worried the high-paying jobs they were talking about will require college degrees or advanced training.

"You have a single mother who's working, who's trying to take care of all the bills in the home and, not only just that, probably taking care of their parents also, how much time is she going to have or he going to have to go to school to get that degree that they're asking for?" she says.

Harrell says, "It isn't just high-paying jobs that would come, although that's what we really, particularly want to make sure happens. This will cause jobs of all levels to occur."

Harrell, Cooper and Leatherman say Gov. Mark Sanford is to blame for the state's high unemployment rate. "After observing the actual results over the past several years, it has become painfully clear to me that this administration simply does not care about creating jobs for our people, and I think that's obvious to everyone," Sen. Leatherman said.

He said he attended an annual Southeast US/Japan trade meeting last fall, but the governor and Commerce secretary Joe Taylor were not there. "Absolutely unheard of when you go to Japan and the executive of our state is not there. And they kept saying to me, 'Senator, where is your governor?'" Leatherman says.

Rep. Dan Cooper says, "Being here when Carroll Campbell was governor and we brought in the BMW plant, was an excitement in the state about bringing business to the state. We had a great business climate for the state at that time. I don't hear that these days from the people in the local sector."

Gov. Sanford's spokesman, Joel Sawyer, says, "The legislative leaders' criticism is bizarre, and most likely an effort to try and distract from the issue of spending growth in our state over the past few years. The legislature's failure to prioritize has resulted in them actually cutting the Department of Commerce's budget this year, which doesn't make sense if they're serious about growing jobs in our state. The bottom line though is that we believe the technology and jobs of tomorrow are going to be determined by the work of entrepreneurs and innovators in the private sector, not some elitist group of wisemen in Columbia."