City IEDC conference hailed as the most successful ever.

The International Economic Development Council (IEDC) 2006 Annual Conference last week brought 1,616 professionals from all corners of the world to Manhattan.

Attendees represented economic development corporations, local development corporations, business improvement districts, urban planning firms, real estate firms and government agencies from at 50 US states and 19 different countries.

The main events of the four-day conference took place at the Marriot Marquis where Mayor Michael Bloomberg topped a list of speakers that included James H. Lambright, chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States; Tom Ramsey, general manager of Global Government Industry for IBM Corporation; Anthoney J. DiMaso, vice president of corporate strategy & development of Verizon and Dan Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding.

"New York City has remained a vibrant place for business when people thought that everybody was going to leave," Bloomberg told the conference. "Most people in New York City think the best days for New York are yet to come.

"I'm not here to tell any other city how to run their city, but honesty and openness and accountability and investment and making the hard choices and doing what's right are what I think is right in business. It's the way I ran my business."

The conference began with a walking tour of Lower Manhattan amd ended with a "Defining Issues Luncheon," where restaurateur Danny Meyer and David Neeleman, CEO of the JetBlue Airways Corporation delivered keynote speeches.

"It's not about location, location, location, it's about contexts, contexts, contexts," said Meyer, president of the Union Square Hospitality Group whose restaurants includes Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, Blue Smoke, Jazz Standard and Terrance 5 at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

"The product must be authentic. You have to make it feel right, right where you put it ... and it's about how you make people feel while delivering a service," said Meyer.

Neeleman shared Meyer's sentiment on hospitality, telling the conference, "It wasn't very hard being the number one airline, because what I wanted was to be the best customer service company."

The four-day weekend consisted of four other tours; the Harlem Renaissance tour, the Times Square story tour, open space and urban revitalization tour, and the preserving the manufacturing and industrial sector tour, and the seminars covered an array of topics from "Partnering to Launch and Attract," to "Making Use of a Powerful Board Development Tool."

"It was an honor to host the 2006 IEDC Annual Conference," said New York City Department of Small Business Services Commissioner, Robert W. Walsh.

"There is no place better in the world to discuss economic development than New York City, and this was clearly evident by the fact that this year's conference was the largest in IEDC's history.

"Throughout the event, people were particularly interested in hearing from the likes of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, deputy mayor Daniel Doctoroff, James Kuhn, Carl Weisbrod and others, who all did a great job highlighting all of the creative development happening in every corner of New York City."