Mayor Lee & Public Utilities Commission Announce Appointment of Harlan L. Kelly, Jr. as General Manager

BOMA San Francisco Members:

Mayor Ed Lee and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission announced the appointment of Harlan L. Kelly, Jr. as the new General Manager for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) to replace retiring General Manager and former City Controller Ed Harrington.

Kelly’s civil engineering career spans nearly three decades beginning as a Student Trainee and including his tenure as San Francisco’s City Engineer. At the San Francisco Department of Public Works, he also held project management positions, including Acting Director and Deputy Director of Engineering, when he directed complex capital improvement programs that included the rebuild and seismic retrofit of City Hall, Kezar Stadium, and expansions of convention, hospital, county jail, and public arts facilities. For the upgrade of the Hetch Hetchy water system, he implemented a cloud-based system to streamline and coordinate projects and enhance financial transparency and accountability, saving the City time and money.

For the past nine years, Kelly has served as the SFPUC Assistant General Manager for Infrastructure and has overseen the historic $4.6 billion voter-approved seismic upgrade of the Hetch Hetchy Water System and is currently leading the development of the upcoming multi-billion Sewer System Improvement Program. Kelly helped deliver the recently opened $191 million SFPUC 525 Golden Gate Avenue Headquarters, one of the few municipal buildings in the world built to LEED Platinum standards and one of the greenest buildings in North America. The building is projected to save ratepayers $3.7 billion over the building’s lifespan thanks to a combination of rental efficiencies, asset ownership, and environmentally sustainable building design.

Kelly has also shown a strong commitment to empowering San Francisco communities. In 1995, he started Project Pull, a summer internship program that places diverse students from throughout San Francisco with an interest in engineering, architecture, sciences, business and law into City departments for a summer. After 17 years, Project Pull is now the longest-running youth program of its kind in San Francisco. In 2012, he was honored for this work and received the Local Hero Award for Community Service from KQED and Heroes and Hearts Award from the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation.

Kelly is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and a licensed professional engineer.