The Greater Houston Partnership held its 2011 Annual Meeting on Tuesday.

The Salvation Army Harbor Light Choir presented the National Anthem and students from Cristo Rey Jesuit College Preparatory School led the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States Flag. Listen: MP3 RealPlayer

GHP President and CEO Jeff Moseley welcomed the audience to the event and called on Pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell from the Windsor Village United Methodist Church for the blessing. 
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“The Greater Houston Partnership and our entire region have faced an economic crisis with the same attitude that we face every problem: hard work,” Moseley said in a review of the past year. “Houston was one of the very last regions in America to go into this economic crisis and may I tell you we are one of the first to come out of it.”

GHP Executive Vice President and COO Tracye McDaniel, who is leaving soon to become the

first chief executive officer of Choose New Jersey, a new non-profit corporation designed to market, promote and facilitate business attraction, expansion and retention in New Jersey, thanked the sponsors of the annual meeting and introduced outgoing GHP Chair Patrick Oxford.
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Oxford congratulated McDaniel on her new assignment, then reviewed the past year at GHP.
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“The Greater Houston Partnership is the Houston business community’s primary advocate,” Oxford said. “Our mission is two-fold. In the short term, we work to secure regional economic prosperity through job creation, by attracting more capital here and by expanding foreign trade. In the longer term we seek to secure regional economic prosperity through advocacy of good public policy."

Incoming GHP Chair Larry Kellner thanked Oxford for his year as chair and then called upon the membership to help direct the future growth of the Partnership and the Houston region.
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“We’ve changed our slogan, to ‘Member Driven. Policy Focused. Creating Prosperity.’” he said. “That’s really what GHP is about in six words.”

Kellner said the Partnership’s program of work will be focused on education, mobility and quality of life issues.

The GHP Region includes the counties of Austin, Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, Liberty, Montgomery, San Jacinto and Waller.