For the third year, I attended the Kentucky Chamber Business Summit this week.  While we participate in numerous conferences each year, most are focused on environmental, health and safety or energy issues – all important to our business and our clients.  The Business Summit is a different kind of conference.  The ideas and issues addressed are those that impact all of us in Kentucky.

•We learned about the difficulties of the public employee and teachers’ pension programs and listened to explanations of how deep the fiscal hole is, how we got there, and some ideas on how to get back to full funding.
•We learned more about the increasing rigor expected in our public education, talked about common core standards with those who work with them and helped create them and avoided the “sound bite” or political aspects which seem to permeate public discussion about these changes.
•We talked extensively about workforce development, agreed on the kinds of preparation we want in employees entering the workforce, and sometimes disagreed on how to achieve those levels of preparedness.
•We heard the stories of two interesting and successful businesses in Kentucky: Houchens Industries and Kentucky BioProcessing.
•We talked about a vision for Kentucky in the future and the need to develop and maintain strong foundations in sustainable government, jobs and workforce to fill them, and infrastructure.</li>
•Finally, we listened to an issue-filled discussion with the two candidate for Governor – Matt Bevin and Jack Conway.

These topics are not specific to our business, but they help me be a better citizen of the state, underscore the importance of making sure we have a good place to work and we participate in the solutions we need, not add to the issues.