Sonny Perdue, Chancellor of the University System of Georgia, delivered the keynote address at the Columbia County Chamber of Commerce’s annual Legislative Breakfast Thursday morning.
Perdue has worn many hats over his career. Veterinarian, served in the Georgia State Senate, two terms as Georgia Governor and Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He said serving as Chancellor is the most impactful job he has ever had.
“We have over 350,000 lives a year in our university system, learners that are looking for life changes,” he said. “And that’s the business that we’re in. It’s literally changing the trajectory of someone’s life, not just individually, but their whole family tree going forward.”
Perdue said the way businesses select locations to establish new operations has changed since he was in office. For many years, companies asked what incentives, what tax breaks were available, and how Georgia would sweeten the pot to incentivize the company’s relocation.
Now, he said, the first question has become, “Where will we get our workforce?”
“That’s the good news, that’s our business. That’s what we do, and that’s why it’s so important to have a university system that’s on the cutting edge of listening, just like this Chamber is here listening,” he said. “To help guide and advocate to our legislators going to Atlanta over your desires as a community. That’s the essence of what we want to hear in communities and employers around the state. How can this university system be tailored to what you need in the next year, the next two years, and the next 10 years? Because that’s the critical part.”
He said education and economic development are like flywheels, one feeding the other. Education provides the workforce that creates economic development. In return, economic development creates resources to fund education.
Perdue said access to quality healthcare is also high on the list of priorities that businesses require before moving to the Peach State.
He said Georgia has consistently been ranked as the number one state in which to do business. It is a different story for healthcare, where Georgia is in the bottom quarter in the number of doctors per 1,000 people and the number of nurses per 1,000 people.
“We can do better than that, and that’s what our goal is at the University System of Georgia,” he explained. “To do better in producing that and this community is a huge part of that effort. In order to increase those efforts, whether it’s nursing, whether it’s ancillary health care, whether it’s physicians, dentists, or others, we’re depending on this area to help us produce a workforce that matters in health care. Because health care matters in our communities across Georgia.”
The event was also the Chamber’s opportunity to outline its goals for the upcoming legislative session. There are five priorities: military and veterans affairs, business climate health, workforce, technology and education, quality healthcare, and infrastructure.
Stan Shepherd, Georgia/South Carolina Regional Director at AT&T and a member of the Chamber’s Board of Directors, said the importance of infrastructure has never been clearer in the Augusta area.
“As we woke to the morning of September 27, and we took that gut punch, I will tell you that our infrastructure was not immune to the destruction that this community saw,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in a 36-year telecom career between BellSouth and AT&T and I worked alongside our restoration experts that tell me that they had never seen anything like this.”
Infrastructure damage forced the Chamber to find a new location for this year’s breakfast. Doubletree Augusta served as host while repairs were made to the Chamber’s usual venue, the Savannah Rapids Pavilion.
