PORT ANGELES — Mike Healy, Port Angeles’ director of public works and utilities, will be bidding goodbye this fall to the city he fell in love with.
This will be Healy’s second retirement. In 2022, he returned to work after a recruiter called and asked him to interview for the interim public works director position in Port Angeles.
“I said, ‘Sure, I’ll go to Port Angeles for three months. It sounds like a fun little summer, fall thing to do,” Healy said.
Two years later, Healy was still here.
“I fell in love with the community,” he said.
“The people are either infectious or contagious, I can’t figure it out, but we get along great,” he said.
“If we have a water break in the middle of the night, everybody comes to it,” Healy said. “As we call out people, they just wake up with their boots on and come. They’re incredibly energized about this community. It’s hard to not want to go buy them donuts in the middle of the night, because of their love and devotion to this community.”
Healy said the city’s leadership team is also “fabulous.”
“Very professional, very friendly, always looking for out-of-the-box solutions. Why would I leave?”
He praised City Manager Nathan West, who “is probably the absolute best city manager that I have ever worked either with or for throughout my long career.”
Healy said he also fell in love with the work he was doing.
“If you do what you do for a living as a hobby, you’ll live a long and happy life,” he said. “I love what I do, so it is kind of like a hobby. I’ve never had a hard workday.”
In addition to the relationships he’s built with his colleagues, Healy said he’s proud of the projects he’s worked on — things like the downtown improvements, the Race Street construction and the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity grant he helped secure.
“Just having a few little fingerprints on all that stuff really makes me happy,” Healy said.
His favorite project is the city pier tower revitalization.
“That’s the one that pulls at my heart,” Healy said.
“One of our biggest things is people going to and from Victoria, and that’s the first thing you see of Port Angeles,” Healy said.
When he moved here, Healy said he sometimes struggled with getting community “buy in” because he was new.
“I think a lot of that was because previous public works directors were only here a couple of years and then they moved on, so I think there was always this hesitation,” Healy said.
At 71, Healy said “it’s that time” to retire.
Once the city finds a replacement, Healy will move back to the home he and his wife built on 6 acres near Yosemite, Calif.
“I’ll pack the car and take all my mementos of Port Angeles, and I will forever have a place to come visit on vacation,” Healy said.
For the past two years, Healy has been renting in Port Angeles while his wife stayed in California. To see each other, they have traveled back and forth during long weekends.
“It’s been tough,” he said. “I can’t wait to get back and wake up in the morning to see my wife for breakfast.”
Healy said he’s also excited to get back to “that tractor and my bib overalls. Put ‘em on in the morning and go play.”
During retirement, Healy plans on improving his property, taking walks with his wife, going wine tasting and going on vacations.
He’s also looking forward to spending time with his 8-year-old Anatolian Shepherd rescue, Delta.
“I so look forward to getting home, and she will come up to me and, for the next three days, any time I’m around her, she will just come up, stand next to me and lean in,” Healy said.
Healy has two kids and two grandkids. His daughter lives in Chicago and his son is a construction inspector in Petaluma, Calif., doing “all the stuff that dad taught him,” Healy said.
Healy’s career in public works started “on the back end of a garbage truck at 17 years old in the city of Chicago,” he said.
Over the next 25 years, he worked his way up to assistant airport manager for airport development at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. He then worked as the director of capital construction at the Chicago Transit Authority.
“Then I kind of got tired of just working in big bureaucracy,” Healy said.
He moved to Wisconsin, where he worked for five years as a city manager.
“I found out that being a Chicago Bears fan in Green Bay country left me very alone,” he said. “[And] the golf season was too short.”
Healy and his wife then moved to the San Diego area, where Healy did city consulting and worked as a public works director.
“It’s been a good life,” Healy said. “I enjoy every bit of the work.”
Interviews for Healy’s replacement already have begun. Healy is hoping the city appoints a new director by Sept. 1, but he said that date is “a little fluid.”
“I say this because I want them to get the right person,” he said. “This community deserves the right person in this job because of the phenomenal staff. If they have to recruit again, whatever they need, I’ll be there.”
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Reporter Emma Maple can be reached by email at emma.maple@peninsuladailynews.com.
