Asked recently about the importance of Alabama businesses’ participation in state and national politics and selecting good candidates for office, Jimmy Rane talked about his company first getting computers years ago.
The technician said they’d work well, as long as good information was entered, Rane, CEO and founder of Great Southern Wood Preserving, told a crowd at the Business Council of Alabama’s Government Affairs Conference in Point Clear.
“You put garbage in, you gonna get garbage out,” Rane said. “(That) sort of applies to politics.”
Rane was speaking on a panel of CEOs that also included Jeff Peoples of Alabama Power Company, Tim Vines of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama and John Turner of Regions Financial Corporations.
Helena Duncan, BCA’s president, had asked the men about civic and political engagement.
“To me, that is the essence of a democracy,” said Rane, an Abbeville native and the state’s only living billionaire, according to a recent Forbes’ article.
“If the citizens of a state, or a city or a county or a country are not concerned enough about their government, and the laws that their government are going to enact, to get involved and ensure that they are sending qualified, competent, honest, serious people to do the government’s work, then they deserve what they get.”

Rane repeated that message later in an interview with Alabama Public Television’s Capitol Journal.
“It’s a serious business of sending someone to run our government,” he said. “You need someone who is very committed and intelligent, somber … and do what they can to make the state and the country prosper.”
Capitol Journal will air at 7:30 tonight on APT and feature the Rane interview and others from last week’s BCA conference.
During the BCA panel discussion, the leaders talked about the needs to be addressed to help Alabama grow.
“The biggest three challenges we have in economic development are in incentives and infrastructure, workforce development and the overall state culture — who we are and who people perceive us to be,” Peoples said.
He said only about half of high school graduates in Alabama attend or complete college and more credentialed programs are needed to train people quickly for in-demand jobs.
He shared the story of a young woman who’d finished an accelerated training program sponsored by Alabama Power.
“Her challenge was that she didn’t have anyone in her life to show her how to activate employment,” Peoples said.
Now, she is 20 and on a path to making $38 to $40 an hour in three years.
While the state’s unemployment rate has been in the low 2% range in recent months, the labor participation rate is 57%, indicating a significant number of Alabama adults not entering the workforce.
“…More people want to go to work than we understand, it’s just that they don’t know how (to access opportunities),” Peoples said.
Also on the panel and on Capitol Journal, Rane discussed the need for more developed industrial sites in Alabama to compete with other southern states. His company is investing about $45 million at a new site in Texas.
“Tyler, Texas was chosen by us because they had a site ready for us to go to work,” Rane said. “They had the land, they had the infrastructure, they had power, they had the water. Boom.
“… If Alabama is going to get into the business of attracting these businesses that are coming back to the U.S., we’ve got to have site-ready places for them to go.”

In the spring, the four-bill economic development package approved by the Legislature and Gov. Kay Ivey created a program where local economic development organizations could seek financial help with site development.
Vines, of BCBS, discussed the importance of statewide broadband expansion efforts and the surge of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We support the broadband initiatives and all the investments in broadband because it’s ultimately going to help health care delivery throughout the state,” Vines said.
Meanwhile, BCBS is helping to pay for medical school for future doctors in Alabama who make a multi-year commitment to practice in rural areas of the state.
Turner, of Birmingham-based Regions, discussed a new program to assist Black-owned businesses access capital projects.
“Our business is only as good as the health of the communities that we operate in,” Turner said.