How They Voted: 2017

When the Upstate business community committed to our 2017 Legislative Agenda, we wrote an ambitious agenda that would drive our region into the future.

Better roads. An expanded workforce. Support for fast-growing, innovative companies. Fixing our broken public pension system.

Then the calendar flipped over to May 11, the General Assembly adjourned, and the business community saw one of the strongest pro-business sessions in recent memory.

Find out how your legislators voted on these pro-business successes in this report.

The small businesses we represent are busy meeting Friday’s payroll, and we know you don’t have the time to see how your legislators voted. That’s why we began issuing this report last year. Your local Chamber is your voice in the General Assembly, at city hall, and in Congress. Your investment in the Greenville Chamber ensures your company enjoys a political climate that promotes accelerated business growth.

Our successes are directly because of the power of the 11 Chambers in the Upstate Chamber Coalition, the tens of thousands of businesses we represent, and their hundreds of thousands of employees. You took to the phone lines, email inboxes, and social media this year to make an impact.

Two full-time lobbyists will never have the same impact as a few hundred phone calls from individual business owners. In the past 12 months:

• we unveiled our first legislative reports,
• we revamped our agenda process to better reflect the voice of all businesses, and
• we introduced new software that makes it easier than ever for you to impact the legislative process.

And as I’ve said for the past several years: The best is yet to come. We hope you will take the time to look at how your legislators and Senators voted on the issues that you, as business leaders, told us mattered. To download a copy, click here.

Stay tuned. Thank you for your support.