So were going to start with Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan.

This was his last appearance at the conference as the city's mayor.

Of course, he is hoping to return in the future as governor of Michigan now that he has launched his campaign for the state's top job.

The mayor delivered a keynote address about Detroit's progress.

We exited bankruptcy less than a year after my election.

Well, that was good that we got rid of the back debt.

But we still have the city with the highest homicide rate, the highest poverty rate in 47,000 abandoned houses.

Bankruptcy wasn't going to solve our problems.

We had to have an entirely different political system.

And so I'm looking at the fact that we have 20% unemployment rate and I have a lot of people with high school degrees who want to go to work.

And there's only one answer for that.

I had to bring manufacturing back to Detroit.

There was no other way that we could deal with that.

People don't have a job, nothing else gets solved.

And so when I talked about this, the experts said, never happen.

You're never going to get large manufacturing plants in Detroit.

But I looked at that and said.

Why not?

We got vacant land.

We got lots of people ready to work.

We got the workforce.

And I know how to do a lean process to give them the fastest damn permitting system anywhere in America.

Why shouldn't we win?

But of course, what were the businesses afraid of?

The crazy political system.

And here's the difference.

I sit down with city council and I said, Here's our problem.

If we don't change the system so that people feel confident investing, you and me together, Detroit has no future.

Let's talk about what you need.

And the council people said, okay, we understand that.

We know we're going to take grief if we vote for these projects, but we don't want to give cash up front to businesses.

I mean, we're just coming out of bankruptcy.

We can't be giving away cash.

But if somebody is going to build out a vacant land, we're getting no taxes for and hire thousands of people.

We'll give them a discount on the new taxes.

We could all agree on that.

And one thing, though, they've got to give preference to hiring Detroiters.

We're not going to build all this and have people come in from out of town.

And I said to the council people, each one nine at a time, okay, I'm going to start landing these deals.

You should scrutinize it and make sure they make these provisions.

But if they do this, are you prepared to take the grief and vote for them?

And I will to my last day give city council credit because they're the ones in those meetings who are taking the grief.

But here's what we did.

We said, everybody here will make our land available.

We won't give you the cash up front.

We will give you the discounts.

You are going to have the easiest permitting process anywhere in America, and we will send you a workforce.

And you got to interview our folks first.

If you do that, come here.

If you don't, don't.

Very simple.

Don't waste your time.

And so took the land, marketed it and sure enough Flex-N-Gate comes in and built the first new auto plant in 20 years.

All right.

And as soon as he did it, the national media dismissed it as rare.

Nobody thought another one was really coming.

But an interesting thing happened when he opened.

It went to hire 500 people.

16,000 applicants showed up and every manufacturing company in the Midwest said, whoa, we're having trouble filling positions where we are.

We have an opportunity here.

And we went one after another.

Lear demolished the 40 year old abandoned Hudson plant.

This is what we've been looking at for 40 years and built a new Lear plant, hired 700 people, and the Kettering High School site became a 600 employee dashboard plant.

And when Jeep went to site a 5000 employee plant, we competed against all the states in the South.

South Carolina and Georgia, all these ones have been winning them.

We won it.

We beat them out and they hired 4000 Detroiters, moved 4000 families to the middle class in one shot.

And we kept going.

The state fair had been closed since 2011.

We built out a whole park, including Amazon, employing 2400 people.

The new Huntington Bank headquarters came downtown.

Ford did the unthinkable and saved the train station, just moved in a thousand workers.

The Henry Ford is building $2 billion in construction today.

Dan Gilbert is opening this building and GM is moving this fall into the new headquarters.

And he's very soon going to open the second tallest building in the state of Michigan.

All right.

When you take good people out of a bad system, turnarounds happen a lot faster than you expect.