Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette used her late arrival at Business Over Breakfast to identify with the audience.

“If you live here, you’re probably not surprised that we hit every piece of traffic on every road we turned on,” she said, starting her Nov. 9 remarks at the Lexington Chamber event at Radius Church. “That’s just the way early mornings start.”

Throughout about 30 minutes with the mic, she touted her record working with Gov. Henry McMaster. She said that as the first lieutenant governor in South Carolina to be elected on the same ticket with a governor, she works with him “like the president and vice president.”

“I have the extreme privilege of being able to travel around the state,” Evette said, “talk to people, sit down with business owners, find out what we’re doing well find out what they need help on and kind of be that liaison to the governor’s office and all of our cabinets to get them the help they need and get their message back to Columbia.”

She touched on the governor’s efforts to keep businesses in South Carolina open during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“2020, It was a different year, right?” Evette asked the sell-out crowd. “2019 went by in a blur. We were going through the state. The governor had big plans on tax cuts and teacher pay increases and changing what schools look like. And then 2020 happened and everything kind of slowed down. South Carolina was the last state east of the Mississippi to tap on the brakes. We were the first state to open up. We were very focused on business, trying to make sure that we did as little as possible to adversely affect business. We never closed down manufacturing here in South Carolina.”

She also highlighted the governor’s accelerateSC committee, which the administration started in the hopes of generating ideas to help the state bounce back from the pandemic, touting in particular an emphasis to expand broadband access across the state.

“We figured out where every nook of our state is that didn’t get broadband,” Evette said. “And those sometimes were not rural areas. They were little niches outside of a big city. I can tell you that firsthand from Greenville. You just go 13 minutes out of the city and you come to a dead zone.”

She touted McMaster’s efforts to get people back to work amid ongoing worker shortages, mentioning that he was one of the first governors to cease participating in COVID-19 unemployment benefit programs from the federal government. Last month, the state Supreme Court sided with McMaster and state Department of Employment and Workforce Director Dan Ellzey in a lawsuit contesting their right to make such an order.

Evette also zeroed in on McMaster’s efforts with technical colleges. Earlier this month, the governor announced a $17 million allocation of discretionary emergency education funds to pay for scholarships at these schools. He has asked the General Assembly to add $124 million from federal American Rescue Plan dollars to continue the program for two years.

“Over 100,000 jobs here in South Carolina need to be filled today” Evette said. “And it’s not so much just because people aren’t reengaging, it’s because the world has figured out that South Carolina is the best place to work and live and raise your kids and start your business. We’re seeing growth in our companies that are existing and seeing such a look at South Carolina from people not just here in our country, but across the globe.”

When the lieutenant governor took a few audience ques tions at the end of her presentation, one person questioned if McMaster is still determined to fight the Biden administration on vaccine mandates “to the gates of hell,” as he promised in a September tweet.

Evette affirmed his commitment to this stance, citing his participation in a lawsuit with seven other governors to contest the requirement that workers at federal contractors get vaccinated, fighting the mandate “the way it needs to be fought, in the courts.”

“He will fight at every turn to protect the businesses and the people of South Carolina to make sure that their constitutional rights are not trampled on,” she said. “He’ll fight it