Ledbetter previews Alabama's 2023

“Sometimes you wonder whether you are making an impact,” Ledbetter admitted, “but we have moved the needle, and Alabama is growing at a pace we’ve never seen. We are going to continue down the road of creating jobs for our people and better jobs.”

On the agenda for 2023 is renewing the jobs act to continue that explosive growth and connecting incentives to making tangible impacts inside the state.

Focus will be increasing the ability of the Port of Mobile to handle more goods.

“Alabama is No. 2 in the country when it comes to producing automobiles. Do you know how many cars are shipped out of Mobile? Zero. Everything goes out of Savannah. Georgia outsmarted us. They have inland ports. We are not taking advantage of our rivers upstate to encourage more shipping out of the Port of Mobile, which will benefit economic development across the whole state,” Ledbetter said.

He recalled how difficult it was to get the Rebuild Alabama bill passed to re-invest in the state’s roads and bridges, but said “I’d do it again because we are seeing orange barrels and repairing highways that were way overdue to fix. That’s not federal money doing that. We’ll have newly paved roads all the way from Etowah County to the Georgia state line.”

Another big focus will be improving the state’s public schools. The key is accountable leadership like what Fort Payne has in someone like Superintendent Brian Jett, he said, and if someone cannot improve a school after three years, they need replaced.

Legislators will also seek more direct feedback from the educators who actually know what’s going on in classrooms.

He recalled how former Superintendent Jim Cunningham and social worker Kayla Magbie started momentum for addressing mental health in the schools.

“It matters that it’s an idea that came from Fort Payne. Three years ago, we had zero mental health counselors in Alabama’s schools, but we have one in every school system now. I attended a program in another state and realized we were already doing the solutions they proposed. It matters that we are no longer followers but the leaders. That’s a big deal.”

When he first went to Montgomery, he visited a county school that had only one computer and that one was used by a teacher.

“Now every student has a computer and they use them daily,” Ledbetter said.

“Our schools are important. If we help kids while they are in school, we’ll need fewer prisons on the back end. We’ll also improve their lives by encouraging more vocational education at an earlier age. The economic development center at Northeast Alabama Community College is going to be a game-changer and move the dial.”

Those lives are threatened, however, by the surge of deadly drugs like fentanyl.

“You don’t have to use it for it to kill you. You just have to touch it. The assistant police chief in Birmingham told me that drug deaths there have increased 400%. There’s enough coming into the country to kill every man, woman and child.”

He is proud of the progress made and excited about bringing people together to address the challenges, but Ledbetter gave the praise to God and voters for putting him in a position to do something to improve the lives of people in the state.

“I’m excited about this new role and thank you all for your help,” he said.