Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is appointing the chancellor of Texas A&M University to oversee the rebuilding of state coastal communities following Hurricane Harvey.

The selection of John Sharp, a former Texas Democratic politician, to chair the newly created Governor’s Commission to Rebuild Texas represents a bipartisan overture by Mr. Abbott, a Republican.

“This is the largest catastrophe in Texas history and the governor is going to coordinate a response as big as Texas,” said Matt Hirsch, a spokesman for Mr. Abbott.

Mr. Hirsch said that the commission would focus on rebuilding infrastructure such as roads, bridges, schools and government buildings. Part of its work would also involve looking at how to rebuild to prevent damage from hurricanes in the future.

Mr. Abbott has said he believes the federal government will need to spend between $150 billion and $180 billion to help Texas recover from Harvey, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm near Corpus Christi before slowly moving up the coast as a tropical storm, causing massive flooding in Houston and much of southeast Texas.

Mr. Sharp’s job will be to expedite the response and make sure local mayors and county officials get what they need quickly and effectively.

“We are very cognizant of the fact that this money will come from taxes paid by hardworking Americans and we will treat it with the kind of respect and accountability that they deserve and expect,” he said in a statement.

Mr. Sharp, 67, was once a rising star in the world of Texas politics, but he had the bad timing of being a moderate Democrat at a time when Republicans were ascendant in the state. He was a state senator in the 1980s, serving an area along the Texas coast that was hit hard by Harvey’s landfall.

He served as the state comptroller for eight years in the 1990s, winning praise for his audits and overseeing the state’s budget. In 1998, he narrowly lost a race for Lt. Governor against Rick Perry. Mr. Perry would ascend to the governor’s mansion a couple of years later when George W. Bush was elected president.

Mr. Sharp went to work for a tax-consulting firm until 2011, when he was appointed Chancellor of the Texas A&M University system.

In appointing a recovery czar, Mr. Abbott is following in the footsteps of predecessors. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie named attorney Marc Ferzan to be cabinet-level head of recovery and rebuilding following superstorm Sandy.

Mr. Ferzan praised the decision to name a point person for recovery in Texas and advised that Messers. Sharp and Abbott should think about preparing for the next storm as well as recovering from Harvey.

“You have to think about future hazard mitigation aggressively,” Mr. Ferzan said. “That has to be part of the recovery process.”

Write to Russell Gold at russell.gold@wsj.com