Republican leaders convened in Augusta on Tuesday to hear area business concerns in a state tinted by the shadow of contentious midterm elections.
Business, industry and civic leaders gathered downtown at the Pinnacle Club for the ninth stop of the 18-city Build Georgia roundtable tour, sharing feedback with U.S. Rep. Rick Allen and Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon in a gathering closed to media.
"It's been a really good conversation, just like today, and a lot of recurring themes," McKoon said after the meeting. How do employers find more employees? How can students emerge from high school workforce-ready?
He pointed out programs approved recently by the
Georgia General Assembly such as House Bill 1193, which would put a full-time literacy coach in every Georgia public school for kindergarteners through third-graders.
"Some of it is talking about public policy that's already in place, but some of it is definitely saying, 'Hey, where do we need to be doing better?' Help us identify the issues that we need to go back to your elected officials and say, 'This is what people in Augusta, Richmond and Columbia counties are concerned about,' so that we're focusing on what those next solutions look like."
Problems facing Georgia and the United States can be solved, Allen said. "The problems we can't solve are the problems with the rest of the world," he added. "And they've got big problems."
Conflicts in the Middle East and sweeping tariff policies have helped stoke U.S. inflation and spike energy prices. Allen said diesel fuel prices particularly have been volatile between Iran pinching the global flow of crude oil and Ukraine's repeated attacks on Russian petroleum refineries. Political bad actors want fuel prices to continue to rise because they want Republicans to lose the midterms, he said.
"Our adversaries are purposely doing this to us on the world stage," Allen said. "We could solve all these problems. We just need the other side to work with us a little bit, but there's so much opposition to what we're trying to do."
The idea of the statewide roundtables is for constructive feedback to continue beyond the Nov. 3 election.
"Obviously we've got the election in 35 days," McKoon said. "Our goal is to take a lot of the input we're receiving over these next four weeks and then, as we transition to having our new folks in office, to share these perspectives with them and then continue that conversation with those elected officials."
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Augusta business leaders share concerns with GOP officials
