Carol Grant, chief of operations for the City of Providence, will leave her post July 1.

PROVIDENCE — The city’s highly regarded chief of operations, Carol J. Grant, will leave Providence this summer after four years in Mayor David N. Cicilline’s inner circle, she acknowledged yesterday.

“It seems like it’s the right time,” she said.

Grant, the first chairwoman of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation and a former executive at Textron and at NYNEX in Rhode Island, doesn’t know what her next move will be — but said it will almost certainly be in the private sector.

“It will probably involve some big challenge,” she said, laughing.

Grant will leave July 1.

Her replacement, Deborah Brayton, is one of two recent Cicilline hires that are fueling speculation that the mayor is considering a run at higher office in 2010. Brayton was most recently legislative director for former U.S. Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, and before that was director of Amos House. She has also been a staffer for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Myrth York. She will join the mayor May 1 as deputy chief of staff for operations, making $90,000 annually in a hybrid job that includes Grant’s and several other responsibilities.

In the last few months, Cicilline also hired Ani Haroian, who was until recently a top aide to Attorney General Patrick Lynch, as the $75,000-a-year director of project management in the Office of Neighborhood Services. Haroian served as Sheldon Whitehouse’s deputy campaign manager in his run for governor and served on former Mayor Joseph R. Paolino Jr.’s campaigns.

Cicilline said these are simply good hires and not indicative of any push for higher office.

It was considered a coup when Cicilline lured Grant, 53, to be the city’s first chief of operations after he took office in 2003.

“She’s one of the most important people in my administration. I feel very lucky to have had her here,” he said, describing her as part of his trusted inner circle.

Grant had no city government experience at the time, but said she was excited at the idea of trying something new.

“The real reason I came here is because the mayor was setting out on an audacious path of changing city government,” she said.

Cicilline wanted Grant to make city operations such as snow plowing, parks cleanup and garbage pickup run more efficiently with fewer staff for the same amount of money. She had no expertise in these things — but she said she knew how to tap people who did.

“My job wasn’t really to know everything about it — it was to build a team to know everything about it.”

As she tried to assess how well city employees and city offices did their jobs, she ran into a roadblock: there was little to no information available on how city departments operated. So she set about building them.

“What was really stunning was how little data there was and how few systems there were to work with,” she said. “It wasn’t about improving the systems — it was often about creating them.”

But it was the little things about running a city that gave her the steepest learning curve — such as the purchase of equipment. In the private sector, that might entail a simple purchase order. In the public sector, things are more complicated.

“If we need [to buy] a new snowplow, how does it work?” she said she found herself wondering.

Grant said she takes pride in seeing the little improvements in Providence since she joined the city administration.

“The parks get cleaned much more frequently than they did when we got here. The trash gets picked up more regularly. The traffic lights are working better.”

Grant also said she was proud of the teams she helped build to tackle problems and the way that the Cicilline administration has involved the public in government decision-making.

Grant was born in Missouri. After law school at the University of Michigan and legal practice in Minnesota, she moved to the Northeast in 1981 with her husband, Charles Otto. In 1983, she was recruited to the legal team for New England Telephone as it became NYNEX.

In 1990, she was named operations manager for NYNEX in Rhode Island. In 1993, Gov. Bruce Sundlun tapped her to lead the newly formed Rhode Island Airport Corporation board and she oversaw the opening of the airport’s new terminal in 1996. In 1997, she joined Textron as vice president of human resources. She left there in 1999 for a four-year semi-retirement before joining Cicilline in January 2003.

Grant has two children, ages 19 and 16, and lives in Providence with her husband.

dbarbari@projo.com