Harry J. Hayes

In August 2007, Mayor Bill White and the Houston City Council unanimously confirmed Harry J. Hayes as the Director of Houston’s Solid Waste Management Department. With his confirmation, Mr. Hayes became the 7th director of the department since its creation in 1972 and would eventually become its longest serving at nearly 14 years. Prior to his appointment he served in key department leadership positions involving Operations, Human Resources, Safety, and Finance & Administration.

As leader of Houston’s solid waste operation, which provides solid waste and environmental services to 2.3 million residents comprising more than 460,000 directly served households, is the largest municipal solid waste operation in the Southern United States, Hayes led the $90+ million program through expanding services such as citywide curbside recycling, tree waste collection and expanding citizen’s convenience centers.

During Mr. Hayes’ tenure, the department responded to multiple federally declared natural disasters which crippled the city. The declared events included tropical storms, historic hurricane events (Ike and Harvey), a great drought, the COVID-19 pandemic, and multiple flood events. Houston’s disasters generated unprecedented debris fields totaling more than 12 million cubic yards and costing more than $300 million in disaster recovery dollars.

In 2014, Mayor Annise Parker tapped Mr. Hayes to serve as the city’s Chief Operating Officer, overseeing the operations of major front-line departments which included Police, Fire, Municipal Courts, Public Works, Fleet Management and Solid Waste Management. In making the appointment, Mayor Parker cited Hayes’ innovation, fiscal prudence, and exemplary management of the city’s solid waste operation. The Operations Group, which form the backbone of the city’s public safety and homeland security infrastructure, employ more than 15,000 municipal and public safety employees, with annual expenditures of approximately $3.5 billion.

Upon his taking office in January 2016, Mayor Sylvester Turner retained Mr. Hayes to continue to serve as the city’s Chief Operating Officer and its Director of Solid Waste Management, noting his steady leadership, institutional knowledge, positive community relations and sound counsel leveraging the city’s vast administrative complex in delivering critical front-line services.

A native of Magnolia, Arkansas, Mr. Hayes is a 1988 graduate of Texas Southern University, earning a BA in French funded by athletic (golf) and academic scholarships. He studied internationally in 1985 at the Universite de Bordeaux III in Talence, France, having earned a scholarship from the Alliance Francaise de Houston and a Connaissance de la France scholarship from the French Ministry of Culture. In 1986, he was awarded a Leland Congressional Scholarship and interned in the US House of Representatives, serving in the office of the Honorable Bob Edgar of Pennsylvania. Mr. Hayes served in the US Army Reserves as both an enlisted member and a commissioned officer where his work assignments included human resources, operations, and logistics.

Mr. Hayes is a widely known and well-respected figure in the municipal government, solid waste, recycling and disaster recovery industries. He has been lauded by mayors, councilmembers, and community/business leaders as a model city executive who maintained the taxpayers’ interests and trust as his guiding leadership philosophy.

Mr. Hayes is a former board member of the Texas Solid Waste Association of North America, UH’s Hobby School for Public Policy, as well a board member and former President of the Municipal Waste Management Association/US Conference of Mayors. He retired in December of 2020 after a city career of nearly 28 years.