Mayor Mike Duggan has nominated Gary Brown as director of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and Palencia Mobley, P.E., as its deputy director and chief engineer.
The City Charter requires the mayor to make nominations for both positions. The Board of Water Commissioners is expected to vote on the mayor’s nominees Wednesday.
Brown, who currently serves as group executive of operations for the City of Detroit, would run the administrative side of the operation; Mobley, who is an expert on water infrastructure and environmental engineering, would take care of water matters.
“This team will bring balanced leadership and expertise to the city’s water operations,” said Duggan. “Gary is an outstanding administrator who has helped modernize many city services and generate significant cost savings. Palencia is a brilliant engineer and the type of young talent that will rebuild our water department’s infrastructure for future generations.”
The deal to regionalize the water system, splitting it into the Great Lakes Water Authority and Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, will provide the City of Detroit with a $50 million annual lease payment for the next 40 years, which will be invested in upgrading Detroit’s water distribution and sewer collection system. Brown and Mobley would be in charge of overseeing that investment.
“I have four primary goals for the water department,” Brown said. “We are going to improve customer service, support economic 
development in the city, create jobs through rebuilding infrastructure, and focus that infrastructure in areas to make them better places to live.”
Mobley, currently serving the mayor as the transition manager for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, has more than 12 years of experience as a project engineer, providing planning, design, and construction administration and management services for water and wastewater treatment facilities across metro Detroit.
She has a master’s in civil/environmental engineering and a bachelor’s in chemical engineering.
At the age of 26, Mobley was one of the youngest minority women to ever attain licensure as a professional engineer in the state of Michigan. She was the co-author of a proposal to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development that resulted in the City of Detroit receiving a special $8.9 million allocation for green infrastructure planning and implementation and storm water resiliency.
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