Mayor Paul Young shook up the upper ranks at City Hall on Friday, installing a new No. 2 in the chief operating officer’s office, a new chief financial officer and an interim city engineer, The Daily Memphian reported. The moves continue a string of personnel changes since Young took office in January 2024 and land as his administration looks to speed up capital projects and tighten day-to-day operations. City Hall officials are pitching the reshuffle as a way to knit departments together more effectively and move projects from drawing board to ribbon-cutting with fewer delays.
According to The Daily Memphian, the appointments were announced June 26 and pulled from familiar faces inside the mayor’s executive circle. The brief notice flagged three operational shifts in particular: a deputy role in the COO office, a new finance chief and an interim engineering lead, but it did not publish full biographies in the public snippet.
Where the new roles sit in the org chart
City records list Antonio Adams as chief operating officer and Walter Person as chief financial officer on the administration’s executive roster, according to City of Memphis. Mayor Paul Young took office on Jan. 1, 2024, and has periodically adjusted his senior staff while advancing priorities around public safety, housing and infrastructure, per Wikipedia.
A familiar development hand
John Zeanah, who led planning work behind Memphis 3.0 and was tapped last year to coordinate development and infrastructure, has been a central player in recent City Hall reshuffles. His May 2025 move into a cross-department development role was covered by local outlets as part of Mayor Young’s push to better line up permitting, housing and capital projects, according to Action News 5.
Why the shuffle matters
Changing deputies in operations and finance can either clear or create internal bottlenecks that touch everything from how fast permits get processed to how quickly capital dollars turn into concrete, asphalt and maintenance work. The Daily Memphian framed Friday’s moves as part of a broader bid to accelerate housing and infrastructure projects and to centralize oversight of how those projects get delivered.
What comes next
The city’s FY26 adopted budget and organizational documents spell out how the mayor’s office and its chiefs plug into daily operations, and those charts will serve as the immediate roadmap as the new deputies settle in. Any formal notices, council filings or committee hearings would indicate which roles, if any, require council action. The FY26 budget and organizational chart remain the baseline for how lines of authority are currently structured, according to City of Memphis budget documents.
Observers will be watching for more detailed personnel releases from the mayor’s office and for any council paperwork that fills in names, job descriptions and potential confirmation steps tied to this latest round of moves.
