Business Growth

Lawmakers will be back at the South Carolina State House on Jan. 14, as the 2025 session begins.Republican lawmakers say they’ll be focusing on tax reform and education reform. “If it’s school choice, if it’s tort reform, if it’s energy reform and tax cuts, the South Carolina Senate Republican Caucus is working on a conservative agenda that will move South Carolina forward,” said Greenville Sen. Jason Elliott. According to Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto from Orangeburg, Democrats want to increase the health care workforce and offer housing for public employees.”We’ve got some infrastructure challenges as it relates to our roads, but we also have workforce development needs. We got to make sure that we’ve got people trained in the right careers. We know right now we have deficits in health care, law enforcement,” Hutto said. “I have a bill now that would incentivize doctors who want to go back and work in rural areas to have their medical school tuition repaid to them.”This year, passing Democratic policies could be a bigger challenge, due to the Republican Party’s supermajority in both chambers. “If you have a majority of Republicans, you want to move a particular bill, and you get all the Republicans on board with it, they’re able to move it and not worry about Democrat opposition,” said SCGOP Chairman Drew McKissick.One thing both parties say they hope to focus on is providing more ways to generate power in the growing state. “We don’t need to have ten years to get a new, clean natural gas plant up and running. So, we need regulatory reform. We need to protect the public, but we also to make sure that we have enough energy for everyone,” Elliott said. “A natural gas-fired plant is probably in our future. It will take some special legislation, probably, to allow those plants to be developed,” Hutto said.Elliott said he also wants to see improvements made to the state’s liquor liability insurance costs.”I hear about all the time in Greenville and around South Carolina, especially with alcohol liability,” he said. “We have to get a situation where the businesses can operate the way they need to. Restaurants operate on small margins. Right now in South Carolina, we have fewer and fewer carriers providing alcohol liability, so the result of that is that businesses are getting squeezed, and premiums are going through the roof.” Upstate lawmakers are also hoping to pass gun legislation, including a law that would charge an adult if a child obtains an unsecured firearm.”I want to try to convince my colleagues that the timing is now so that we don’t have to read another headline and find ourselves saying again, we could have prevented this,” said Greenville Democratic Rep. Wendell K. Jones.State House leaders say the goal is the same: make South Carolina’s lives better.”Districts are different. They’re rural and urban areas, Upstate and Lowstate, there’s Republican and Democrat. But no matter where we come from, people send us to Columbia to get things done,” Hutto said.