Mary Benton, Houston\u2019s chief communications officer and a senior adviser to Mayor John\u00a0Whitmire, will depart city government for a new role at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of Harris County.<\/p>\n
Whitmire announced the move during Wednesday\u2019s city council meeting, saying he looked forward to collaborating even more closely with the transit agency moving forward.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt sure will be a benefit for the city of Houston,\u201d Whitmire said. \u201cMary was heavily recruited because of some of the challenges that we face in our transportation system.\u201d<\/p>\n
Benton said in a brief interview that she is \u201cvery excited\u201d for the new role. The city will hold a reception honoring her service Wednesday afternoon.<\/p>\n
A Harlingen native and graduate of the University of Texas-Austin, Benton worked for decades as a television reporter at KPRC (Channel 2) before moving into local government, serving as spokesperson for the Harris County Toll Road Authority, former interim Harris County Commissioner Gene Locke and the county public health department.<\/p>\n
She joined the late Sylvester Turner\u2019s mayoral administration as press secretary in 2018 and rose to communications director two years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mary Benton, Houston\u2019s chief communications officer and a senior adviser to Mayor John\u00a0Whitmire, will depart city government for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-449199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}