The Sewerage & Water Board has a new director. See how he’s approaching the job.
By Ben Myers
Source: The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com
October 12, 2025
Randy Hayman, who took the helm of the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board more than two months ago, has a lot on his plate. He’s got dilapidated infrastructure to fix, monumental funding challenges to solve and political relationships to cultivate.
None of it fazes him, he said in a recent interview.
A lawyer by trade, the 62-year-old Missouri native has helped lead municipal water systems around the country, as general counsel in St. Louis and Washington, D.C., and most recently as the Philadelphia Water Department’s top executive. New Orleans’ complex challenges, he said, aren’t so different from those he’s encountered elsewhere.
“I wanted to come here because there are problems,” Hayman said. “I’m a problem solver.”
Problem-solving is part of the job description for leading a utility tasked with keeping streets dry and drinking water safe in a climate-vulnerable city like New Orleans, where generations of city leaders have failed to keep the infrastructure in top working condition.
There are aging lead pipes to replace, thousands of storm drains to clear and the annual threat of saltwater intrusion into the drinking water system to contend with. There are sewer rehabilitation projects to complete under a federal consent decree that is nearly three decades old. And there’s $1 billion in deferred maintenance to the drainage system, according to S&WB estimates.
Before he can get to any of that, however, Hayman said he needs to learn the agency from the ground up. He’s spent much of the last two months talking to employees, residents and local officials.
“I’m very comfortable developing very long to-do lists. A big part of my to-do list at this point is to stop and listen,” Hayman said. “It’s imperative that I do that.”
Hayman said his transition from representing water utilities as a lawyer to running them was influenced by an early job working in his godfather’s pharmacy in St. Louis.
“When you work in a pharmacy, you’re dealing with the health and the safety of individuals, so you have to get it right. And so he taught me to be exact,” Hayman said.
Hearts and minds
Hayman said New Orleans is like Philadelphia and other cities where critical infrastructure is underfunded because it is “underground, out of sight and out of mind.”
He noted a $2.5 billion water revitalization plan that the Philadelphia Water Department has kicked off under his leadership. The plan entails more than 400 projects over 25 years, a quarter of which have already been completed, according to a dashboard.
Water rate hikes approved by an independent board are a key funding source for the Philadelphia revitalization plan, illustrating one way New Orleans is different from that city. Here, the City Council evaluates S&WB rate hike requests, and council members have refused to hear any requests in recent years, citing public outrage over inaccurate bills and spiking home insurance rates.
State lawmakers also control the water board’s purse strings, particularly through the state capital budget. For three years running, allocations have come up well short of what the S&WB requested. Lawmakers and other state officials have blamed poor coordination by the S&WB and political squabbles with Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
“He’s got a lot of constituencies to work through that would be a little bit different than other positions you might have in a utility in other areas of the country,” said Paul Rainwater, a lobbyist who represents the city and the S&WB.
The S&WB has been a hot topic in Baton Rouge in recent years, as Republican Gov. Jeff Landry demands improvements to the agency and lawmakers pass bills affecting how it operates. A 2024 state law forced the S&WB to take over long-neglected storm drains from City Hall without a clear funding source, for example.
Other recent proposals aimed to replace the mayor-controlled board with a new model giving state authorities more control. Those bills fizzled, but more could be coming this spring, Rainwater said.
“We are still in that moment of truth. People want to prove out if the Sewerage and Water Board can continue on the current governance structure, can it be successful. That’s still a question out there,” Rainwater said.
Hayman’s predecessor, Ghassan Korban, earned praise — including from critics — for initiating long-overdue projects to modernize power sources for drainage pumps and improve billing. But Korban, an engineer, showed less inclination to build relationships within the community and in political circles, said Councilmember Joe Giarrusso, who works closely on S&WB issues.
Giarrusso said he’s impressed with Hayman’s temperament, and that the S&WB staff he’s spoken with “like that he calmly and decisively and sort of incrementally addresses” problems as they arise.
“Ghassan cared more about nuts and bolts than the soft side. Randy understands hearts and minds,” Giarrusso said.
Hayman was not the consensus choice of the agency’s governing board, which approved him by an unusual 4-3 vote after meeting in private to discuss two finalists for the job. Meanwhile, Hayman’s annual salary of $427,000 has raised some eyebrows, since it is about $60,000 more than what Korban made.
Board members who voted against Hayman did not publicly disclose their reasons. Two of the nay votes, Robin Barnes and Poco Sloss, have since stepped down from the board. The third, Janet Howard, declined to discuss her reasons for voting against Hayman’s appointment, but she said she met with Hayman and came away with an impression similar to Giarrusso.
Korban made critical infrastructure and engineering upgrades, things that should have happened decades ago, but Hayman — with a keen listening ability — seems to have a deft skill in working with people, Howard said.
“Now we have someone who has a set of talents that will help the Sewerage and Water Board better deal with the political situation in the city and the state,” Howard said.
Asked if the split vote creates a challenge in gaining the board’s confidence, Hayman replied that he has just one challenge.
“That’s to be the best executive director that I can be,” he said.
Improving the S&WB’s responsiveness, transparency and accountability are among Hayman’s top goals for the year, he said. He’s planning two initiatives to help, though details are scarce. One is a quality-of-life training program to ensure contractors clean up after construction projects. Another is neighborhood-level “strike teams” to respond to residents’ concerns.
Residents “are very clear about what they want and what their expectations are,” Hayman said. “We have to do more than simply say ‘We’re looking at it; We’re investigating it.’ They want us to have things they can see and touch.”
A pressing matter
With the S&WB’s tarnished public image in mind, officials are nervously eyeing the 2026 election cycle, which will include a property tax renewal for one of three drainage millages. The millage garners more than $20 million annually, roughly a quarter of the S&WB’s annual drainage budget.
Utility officials say the existing drainage revenue is already inadequate, and losing a substantial portion of it would be devastating. Even if voters renew the millage, the S&WB is also scrambling to come up with an additional $20 million every year to maintain the storm drains it took over from City Hall.
For more than two years, the S&WB has been working with a consultant to craft a stormwater fee to complement — or replace — the millages. At the very least, the idea is to get tax-exempt property owners to kick in for drainage, since they hold about one-third of the city’s combined real estate value, according to the Orleans Parish Assessor’s Office.
But legal and practical questions haven’t been worked out, including the fee structure, whether all property owners would pay and how to ensure it’s not a double tax.
If it wants a new fee in place by next year, the S&WB needs to issue a proposal soon and undertake “a massive education campaign,” said Rebecca Mowbray, executive director of the Bureau of Governmental Research, which supports the fee.
“A lot of people really don’t quite know how to think about it. They’re potentially open to supporting it, but they really need to know what the proposal is going to look like. How is it going to affect people? What’s it going to cost?” Mowbray said.
Hayman was circumspect when asked if a fee proposal is on the horizon, saying only that “we are evaluating stormwater management funding, we’re looking at the millages, and we will make a determination.”
“In the time I’ve been here so far, there have been some complicated, demanding issues that have crossed my desk,” Hayman said. “But none of them have come with the idea that I have never seen it before.”