Relocating to Leelanau County full-time has always been a dream for Jim Dyer and his wife, Jeanette, but they finally made that dream come true and found a home in 2023. Dyer also accepted the Village of Northport manager position last year and started as a full time employee in October. Since then, he’s been settling into the new home and job and embracing all that the county has to offer.
“We love being here and appreciate all the people we’ve met and the places we’ve gone to,” Dyer said. “Early in our relationship, I’d ask her (Jeanette) ‘what do you want to do this weekend?’ And she’d say ‘let’s go to Lake Michigan,’ and that was absolutely consistent. So it was always a dream to come here, to be honest, I don’t think we ever thought we would manage it full time… We also brought the kids up here a couple times (when they were younger) so we really enjoyed the area generally.”
Both Dyer and Jeanette grew up in Ann Arbor. Dyer attended Michigan State University and majored in political science, which would lead to him pursuing an almost 44 years-long career working in law. He spent a good part of his career representing municipal clients all across the state, however, for the last five years, he served as the corporation council/chief civil legal officer for Calhoun County.
“I kind of bounced around the first few years of my career and did various things to really find out what I wanted to do, but when I finally hit on representing municipal clients, I got quite lucky being hired by a firm that specialized in that,” he said. “That really clicked for me, so I’m glad that’s the course that my career took.”
Dyer’s two sons are grown up now and live outside of the county, with his eldest working at a computer company in Tel Aviv, and his youngest working as an engineer in Kalamazoo.
In 2020, the Dyer’s had the opportunity to purchase a fractional share condominium at The Homestead, and would spend 12 weeks of the year there until 2023. It was during one of their last trips to The Homestead that he became aware of the Northport village manager position. He said the friends he had in the county that knew about the kind of work he did encouraged him to apply for the job, which he was later offered after candidate interviews wrapped up.
“Everytime it was our turn (to use the condominium), we’d use it, and it had a real nice view of Sleeping Bear Bay actually,” he said. “In my (manager) contract, it requires that I live within Leelanau county. Looking for houses in 2023 in Leelanau County was very diffi cult, so we spent a lot of time doing that. In September, we got serious about this house in Suttons Bay and everything finally came together… I was a little bit concerned when I looked at the demographics of Leelanau County, how the median age was quite old, about my age actually, but it doesn’t have that sense at all. It’s a very active community, so I was glad to see that.”
Besides continuing to get to know more people in the community, Dyer said the natural beauty of his surroundings is and has always been one of his favorite parts about Leelanau. He hopes to discover more trails and different wineries in the county and to expand the scope of what he and his wife can do now that they live here full time. “We both love to be outdoors on trails,” he said. “If you want trails in an easily accessible place, you gotta be in Leelanau County, they’re everywhere and they’re all good, every one of them. The Leelanau Conservancy may be my favorite thing when you get down to it, and the National Lakeshore at Sleeping Bear — those are probably my favorite things about Leelanau.”
