David Priest was born and raised in Northport. He was born at the Memorial hospital and is Leelanau through and through.
Priest’s great-grandfather came over from Germany in the late 1800s and settled on what is now Maple Valley Road, a mile east of St. Vincent church.
“We’ve been in that area for a long time,” Priest said.
He now lives at the same property where he grew up after buying the land from his dad.
Priest graduated from Northport in 1986 when it had a different dynamic than it does today.
“It’s always been a smaller school … The whole school, 340350 kids. That was the whole school and I actually had one of the larger graduating classes, which were in the low thirties,” Priest said.
When Priest graduated high school he went and became a mechanic for Robinson’s Body Shop in Traverse City.
“I wasn’t there very long and met my wife in school and we got married. She’s actually a Kohler from up on Otto road,” Priest said. “I went to work with her dad in construction and did that for four or five years.”
Priest always knew he wanted to drive semis after watching his father drive big-rigs while growing up. His father drove for Mankowski and Sons’ and had a route down to Cincinnati.
“I used to love riding with him. I always knew I wanted to drive trucks,” he said.
Priest went to the American Truck Driving School to earn a CDL and learn how to run a business.
He passed the course, got a license, and went to work for the same company as his dad in 1990.
“(Mankowski and Sons) grew a little bit, they expanded, we started hauling pies, what we hauled mostly was brine cherry’s,” he said.
Priest hauled brine cherries to Cincinnati, Covington, Kentucky, and Fenton, Missouri for five years.
“We started having kids and the wife wanted to be home a little more. In 1995 I’d gotten off the road for about a year, but I went back into construction. I worked for a company called Marco Construction based out of Maple City,” Priest said.
Priest has three kids with his wife Heidi Priest (Kohler): David, 38, Mike, 34, Brandon, 27.
Priest admits he had it easy raising the kids thanks to Heidi.
“It was a piece of cake for me. I was driving a truck,” he said. “We still do a lot of camping and I used to have all three of my boys ride dirt bikes.”
Priest ended up talking with Greg Mankowski one day, and helped him buy his first truck before Priest could buy a newer one.
“I leased on with them for a while and then ended up leasing one again. I got to the point where I really disliked pulling refrigerated vans ... Or reefer, we called ‘em. Everything was appointment times and food warehouses. Just a pain,” Priest said.
Priest wanted to get into flat bedding trucking, so he leased onto a company called Carolina National that was based out of Bear Lake.
“I worked for them for just a couple years and ended up getting my own authority,” Priest said. “I had some owner-operators working for me I want to say for eight to nine years I ran my own business.”
The business was called Priest Transportation which delivered nursery stock (lumber) and cherries. Priest Transportation did a lot of work for Cherry Bay Orchard.
Priest started with the Leelanau Road Commission in 2008 part time, which quickly turned into a full-time position. Priest winded down the transportation business in the fall of 2008.
“That was a tough time. We were still doing good, but I just saw where the trucking industry was going, they were changing the rules,” Priest said. “(For example) you might only be able to drive six, eight hours out of the day, then you have to take 10 consecutive hours off. I saw where all that was going, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
It has been an interesting 15 years for Priest in the road commission. In 2013, Priest became Superintendent.
“I don’t like sitting in the office. I like being out,” he said. “I was manager and superintendent. It’s a lot of work for one guy to try to do both roles. Dealing with the public, dealing with the men. It’s a lot of work ... I don’t like being stuck in the office all the time I like to be out patrolling andworking with the guys.”
Priest is in charge of daily operations along with foreman Mick Mack in Maple City who has a crew over there.
“In the wintertime, both him and I are out at 2:30-3 in the morning. Patrolling,” Priest said.
Having two different crews in separate parts of the county is essential to Leelanau County operations. One side of the county can be snowy and the other side can be sunny at any given moment.
“That’s why we have to get going that early in the morning. I might have a foot of snow in Northport, and I might have blue sky down on the south end, so I got to know who to call in, when to call in,” Priest said. “I actually have guys working here that live down in Interlochen, in Kingsley. It’s hard to find, you know, help in this county.”
Priest works together with the engineer and technician regarding upcoming projects and prioritizes what the road commission needs to do to maintain roads along with daily inventory of salt, sand, hiring, and firing.
Priest still remembers the heavy storms of 1978; and March 3, 2011.
“It might have been a Friday or something (March 3rd, 2011). I had left here and, at the time my wife worked over at Dick’s Pour House ... a lot of times I’d go over there and just have dinner and make her wait on me,” he said. “That was the strangest snow I’d ever seen. There was so much moisture in it, the snow was almost blue. I came in, jumped in the truck, and all I did was run 641 from 72 to Lake Leelanau ... we spent the next two or three days cleaning up snow, but then the trees that came down. We had roads that were shut down for a week because of the amount of trees.”
When Leelanau isn’t frozen over the road commission is busy at work during the seal coating summer season.
“We’ll prioritize what we want to do, primary roads, local roads. As soon as winter’s done, the first thing we do is we go out and sweep. That usually takes three to four weeks,” Priest said. “Then we’ll start prepping for either paving projects or seal coat projects, shoulder peeling, and culverts.”
Seal coat season takes up most of the road commission manpower from the middle of June to the end of August.
The road commission seal coated 52-54 miles last year which is a record for the short-handed crew.
“It’s a big operation,” Priest said. “I could honestly use four or five more people right now. Before you had people just knocking at the door trying to get in here. Even when I started we were more than staffed. Long before I came here, it was a lot of people that grew up on farms,” Priest said.
The Leelanau Road Commission has employees coming from Interlochen, Kingsley, Williamsburg, and elsewhere for work that has little interest from locals.
The road commission has started offering a program to help with the lofty cost of earning a CDL, which is the biggest hiring hurdle for the road commission that can cost upwards of $8,000.
“We have our first candidate that’s going to start here pretty soon where we’ll help train them to get their CDL,” Priest said.
The peninsula got pounded with snow over the past week and the road commission has gone through 700 tons of salt, which is a drop in the bucket of the 2,000plus tons of salt used last year. The salt mixture they use is five parts sand, and one part salt.
“When I grew up there, we always had snow packs on the roads,” he said. “We never bared the roads up. Once winter hit snow was on the roads and that’s just the way it was. It also protects the roads, having that pack on there, especially on a fresh seal coated road.”
