COLUMBIA — From President-elect Obama on down, everyone’s been warned to get ready for a wild economic ride in 2009.

In fact, Obama has come under heavy criticism for publicly stating that Americans should expect the economy to get worse before it gets better.

The South Carolina business community stretching from the Lowcountry to the Upstate is taking the warning seriously.

Since the fall, the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce has huddled with local chambers of commerce in regional meetings throughout the state to come up with a strategy they hope will ensure a healthy business climate in the Palmetto state amid a free-falling national economy.

Out of those meetings, which surveyed more than 7,000 people from small business owners to CEOs of major corporations and just about every voice in between, the state Chamber fashioned its 2009 Competitiveness Agenda.

The working document is the organization’s platform of ideas business leaders hope will shape priorities in the General Assembly. It includes proposals addressing workforce development such as funding for training and education, initiatives to maintain and enhance the state’s infrastructure, ways to help small and medium-sized businesses provide health insurance for employees, and spurring economic development by reforming workers’ compensation, setting aside seed money to encourage investment in emerging companies and dedicating recurring funding to adequately market tourism.

Budget woes

In a recent interview with the Daily Journal/Messenger, South Carolina Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Otis B. Rawl said he realizes that most of the proposals the business community is pushing call for additional dollars, which could be a tough sell during a tanking economy and more than $1 billion in state budget cuts since the original $7 billion budget was approved by the General Assembly in June 2008.

For the record, Rawl said he disagrees with Gov. Mark Sanford’s very public anti-bailout stand, which was outlined in a Wall Street Journal commentary piece published last month. Sanford insists that adding debt on more debt to dig out of the current economic mess is not the answer. He even suggested that South Carolina would be opposed to another stimulus package President-elect Obama has promised to sign once he’s in office.

Rawl, who held key positions within the Department of Revenue in a career that stretched from 1978 until his retirement in 2001, doesn’t think South Carolina is in any position to be rejecting money.

“If we don’t take money from the federal government, we’re going to be left behind,” Rawl said. “We believe that the stimulus bill has a shot to jumpstart the economy.

“A lot of the jobs lost in the state have been in construction and that has hurt the state economy,” Rawl added. “If we can get people back to work and help them get their jobs back, it’s going to help our economy. We encourage the governor to take the dollars.”

Calling the current recession as deep or deeper than anything seen in the United States since the Great Depression days of the 1930s, Rawl said government has to take a different approach to tackling its problems.

“Taking the dollars will help us,” he said.

Setting priorities

Amid the growing crisis and given the state’s fiscal challenges, Rawl said the top two priorities the business community should focus on in 2009 are tax reform and energy.

Rawl said the state needs to stop approaching tax reform in a piecemeal fashion and from depending too much on consumption taxes. He said 80 percent of more than 8,000 business people that responded to a recent Chamber survey said they support a comprehensive review of the state’s tax system.

According to Rawl, the tax system should reflect the state’s more diversified economy by having a broader-based tax and lower rates. Although such a comprehensive approach could take 12 to 18 months, Rawl said that in the short term state lawmakers should revisit Act 388, which shifted funding of schools from owner-occupied property tax to sales-tax revenues now tied to a tanking economy.

Other short-term fixes proposed include a hard cap on local governments for school operating millage, which currently could be exceeded by two-thirds vote by a local government. Another recommendation is giving residents the option of creating a “School Enhancement Fund” by referendum to allow localities the option of setting aside additional funds for school operations.

The Chamber also is calling on state government to use the previous year’s revenue to make projections for spending.

“We need to find a way to bring dependable budget forecasting without fear of having to make cuts,” Rawl said. “If we budget on what we collected last year, we know that we’ll appropriate correctly.”

On the energy front, Rawl said the Chamber would like to see a greater emphasis on promoting nuclear power plants in the state, as well as hydrogen and other energy possibilities to meet population growth demands in the coming years.

“In 2007, we came close to having rolling blackouts during a heat wave,” Rawl said, adding that when power supply is so low businesses are first to shut down. “ I hope we don’t have any long-term heat or cold because we could have power demands that may not be able to be met.”

Rawl said depleted utility reserves could place South Carolina in a position of economic disadvantage by 2014, unless the state is able to tap predictable and sustainable energy sources.

Rawl said the Chamber wants to play a key role in helping to turn the state’s economic fortunes around. He said the key to that is getting people back to work.

“Our mission is to create wealth,” Rawl said. “We want to get people feeling good about themselves by making money and saving money.”