Successes continue to arrive for the increasingly leftist South Carolina Chamber of Commerce – who has seen his position of influence in the state government suffer considerable erosion in recent months due to weak leadership and political miscalculation by the former president Ted Pitts.
As we noted in a recent post, this once proud organization continues to struggle as it pushes its decidedly non-commercial agenda ahead of the 2021 session – which is scheduled to start next Tuesday.
In mid-December, the chamber announced that it was provisionally replacing Pitts with Swati Patel – its vice president of public policies. Although this news outlet has nothing against Patel, her choice has been criticized by legislative leaders who believe she is part of the problem in this previously influential entity.
Even more problematic for the chamber, Patel was part of the search committee that analyzed applications to replace Pitts – including applications from candidates representing other “economic development” groups in the SC State Chamber.
The Chamber already had problems with these groups before its search for leadership, but according to our sources, its “contaminated” interview process planted additional seeds of distrust.
“Bad blood is boiling now,” one of our sources told us last month, speculating that the lawsuit was rigged from the start.
This week, the chamber received additional bad news when its main fundraiser Sunny Philips announced his departure from the organization. Not only is Philips leaving the camera, it is joining the SC Manufacturers Alliance (SCMA) – a rival pro-business group that has seen its stock soar in the legislature in recent months, thanks to the ongoing implosion of the chamber.
“I am excited to share that I have accepted the position of vice president of member relations for the South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance,” wrote Philips on his Facebook page this week.
Philips added that she was “happy” with her new position and excited about “the opportunity to work with such a large organization, a tremendous team and world-class associate companies”.
Is this a big deal? In a world, yea …
Philips noted in his post that “one of the coolest parts of my job was traveling to South Carolina to visit all the manufacturers that are developing some really cool products here.”
In other words, in the past five years, Philips has built a huge network within the business community – which goes beyond the network it built earlier as one of the largest fundraisers for Republican politics in the state of Palmetto.
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“It is a blow to manufacturers,” a business lobbyist told this media. “Your rolodex is an absolute blow to them.”
Another source told us that Philips’s departure from the chamber would be deeply felt because “she was the only one there who knew how to raise money”.
According to our sources, Philips was among the candidates whose name was withheld in the search process before Patel took office as the group’s interim leader.
In addition to losing Philips, the Chamber also enters 2021 without its main administrative director – former vice president of finance and administrative services Susan O’Neal. O’Neal left the group after a decade to assume the most important financial position at Columbia, SC Mental Health Recovery Center.
“A lot of institutional knowledge coming out the door,” a source familiar with the two exits told us last month.
Who is to blame for the exodus? And the continuing erosion of legislative support?
Continuing to deal cards in the chamber is Lou Kennedy of Nephron Pharmaceuticals, a longtime ally of the former governor of SC Nikki Haley who reportedly led an unsuccessful effort to get Patel installed full-time immediately after Pitts’s resignation announcement last October.
Kennedy installed a number of former Haley members in key positions within the organization – including Pitts, Patel and the former Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey, who also works at Nephron and is a member of the council’s board of directors.
Obviously, Haley’s team is struggling …
As noted in our previous coverage, the chamber’s most recent internal problems arise when South Carolina is being forced to reevaluate its historic approach to recruiting jobs and businesses – which consisted almost exclusively of forcing taxpayers and small businesses to subsidize donations for major manufacturers.
As we have repeatedly documented over the years, this approach has Never managed to expand employment and raise income levels in the state of Palmetto – and it is even less likely to do so in the Covid-19 era.
In a column last month announcing the importance of lowering individuals’ income tax (the opposite of what the Chamber advocates), we noted that a new approach to seeking prosperity was needed. This is especially necessary considering the continued exodus from large crime-infested cities – and the rise of the “work from home” movement. And last week, when evaluating the latest employment data for South Carolina, we observed that “adopting broad-based tax cuts instead of failed capitalist freebies should be the number one priority” for lawmakers in 2021.
Obviously, this is not the main priority of the camera … nor will it ever be.
-FITSNews
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