Gerry Widdicombe is the Director of Economic Development at the DowntownDC BID. With the BID for 10 years, he is responsible for conducting economic research and analysis on Downtown DC, facilitating public and private partnerships and assisting in implementing the Mayor’s 2000 Downtown Action Agenda and creating the 2008 Center City Action Agenda.

Gerry has shepherded the BID's efforts to strengthen and diversify the Downtown economy to maintain Downtown’s strong competitive position in the region by producing annual State of Downtown Reports, retail reports and brochures, Leadership Papers, Quarterly Development Reports, Downtown Neighborhood Surveys and DC Office Studies, topical analyses of a variety of Downtown economic sectors and analyses of the performance of city-supported economic development investment. He also oversees biannual consulting reports on the net fiscal impact of Downtown and Downtown employment. Gerry’s extensive research and analysis has helped support programs such as the 2001 Downtown Housing Tax Abatement, the 2003 Downtown Retail TIF Program and the 2010 DC Business Retention and Attraction Program, and projects such as the Convention Center Headquarters Hotel.

Previously, he worked for the DC government in the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (where he worked with the DowntownDC BID on creating the Mayor’s 2000 Downtown Action Agenda), and in the Office of the Chief Financial Officer. In the early 1990’s Gerry worked for the federal government at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Resolution Trust Corporation. Gerry worked on Wall Street at Goldman, Sachs & Co. for the first ten years of his career.

He has a bachelor's degree in economics from Dartmouth College (1978) and a MBA from Harvard (1981). Gerry serves on the boards of the Mount Vernon Triangle CID, the National Cherry Blossom Festival, the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Septima Clark Public Charter School in Ward 8 and the Capital Fringe Festival. He received the Mount Vernon Triangle Public Service Award in 2007. Gerry has lived in DC since 1991.