Roy Coley: Directs multi-billion-dollar water and sewer improvements

With over 20 years in public works and water resources, Roy Coley has been leading the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department since May 2021. He oversees 450 projects now underway, reviews solicitations for improvements, reviews contracts, responds to requests from elected officials, supervises the quality of drinking and wastewater, and runs a department that serves more than 2.3 million residents.

His career in Florida started in 2005 with 10 years at the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority overseeing water and wastewater. “Most of my work revolved around building wastewater treatment plants throughout the Keys and areas that were not served by public wastewater services, and then also building and operating water treatment plants,” he said. 

In the Keys, he developed a drinking water quality management technique that he presented to the American Water Works Association and that resulted in water quality experts from around the nation visiting and imitating the procedure, and in the association including the technique in its manual for water quality and distribution systems.

“Miami-Dade County already does some of those techniques, and I’m working with our water quality engineers now to look at implementing more of that to see if we can do it even better here,” he said. 

In 2015 Miami Beach hired Mr. Coley for its Public Works Department, where he was tasked with responding to historic king tides, ran a program that resulted in staff obtaining state licenses and certifications, and represented the department in a group from the region that traveled to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop mitigation efforts for mosquito-transmitted disease. 

Mr. Coley now aims to complete a conversion from septic to sewer systems across the county with the funding challenges it involves, hire new staff among a general shortage of employees in the county, train the people to get a high-qualified pool of employees, and complete a multi-billion capital improvement program. 

Roy Coley spoke with Miami Today reporter Gabriela Henriquez Stoikow.

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