Leelanau County hired James Dyer in late 2024 to be County Administrator, hoping to bring stability to a dysfunctional workplace. A year and half later, Dyer is the subject of multiple complaints, has been cited by several former employees as a reason for resigning, and is now on paid administrative leave.
Even before Dyer was hired, measurable signs of dysfunction could be seen in a 2024 workplace study commissioned by Leelanau County.
In that study, 85 of the 115 county employees participated and gave the county a workplace culture score of just 3.8 out of 10. In it, county employees complained of not feeling valued, public bickering between department heads, a high turnover rate, and a lack of leadership.
One especially fraught office within the county was the newly created Finance Department – which in its three years of existence had gone through five finance directors. No director had lasted for more than six months, a period of disarray that the Leelanau Ticker reported on extensively at the time.
For this reason, the Leelanau Board of Commissioners (LBOC) was explicit in its request, when it interviewed Dyer in December of 2024.
“I think at the end of the day, we’d like to not be in the paper as much,” said Commissioner Doug Rexroat. “We’d like to just be known as running the business of the county smooth [sic], efficiently, and quietly in harmony with the community.”
“That should be an easy job,” Rexroat said as the room laughed.
Earlier in the interview, when Dyer was asked to talk about his strengths in the workplace, he mentioned a story in which he resolved a “screaming” match between himself and another official.
“If I have one ability, it's the ability to mediate disputes,” said Dyer. How he does that, Dyer said, was by taking a personal interest in staff and remaining cordial.
Dyer continued: “When you have a reputation of being calm, losing it, if you will, can be very effective. It can be an exclamation point to make people understand that you’re really serious, if it’s necessary.”
Dyer was hired later that month and started in March, 2025. By fall, signs of dysfunction had resurfaced, with four Finance Department employees eventually leaving amid multiple instances of conflict with Dyer.
Troubles continue in the Finance Department
In August of 2025, then finance director Cathy Hartesvelt wrote a complaint that she “felt threatened by her supervisor (Dyer) during an executive meeting.” That was after, Hartesvelt claimed, she publicly proposed a change in the meeting without first consulting Dyer. In the complaint, she claimed that Dyer shook his finger at her and said “if you ever do that again.”
The following month, a second complaint was made by Hartesvelt and the assistant finance director Mike Birkmeier. In the complaint, the pair alleged Dyer was making “unprofessional requests that were aggressively articulated” around the production of the 2026 budget and that Birkmeier felt that he was “being ‘railroaded’ to provide illogical budget numbers in [a] very short timeframe.”
The pair told the county HR director, Jen Kain, that they believed the estimate Dyer wanted them to use “would be an inflation of property tax revenue as they had already provided the estimated budget using past practices.” They also added that Dyer “showed aggression by forcefully putting his finger on the table.”
In October, the Leelanau Ticker reported that Dyer had been exonerated of any wrongdoing after the LBOC came out of a closed session with their legal counsel.
In November, Birkmeier resigned and wrote a letter to the LBOC saying he could no longer “continue under the unprofessional environment fostered by the County Administrator,” and that “the disregard for professional standards, financial transparency, and accountability has made it increasingly difficult to perform my duties effectively or with integrity.”
Birkmeier later sent a cease and desist letter to the LBOC alleging Dyer was claiming to have “fired” him, with Birkmeier writing that he would “not tolerate false narratives being created regarding my employment history or professional reputation.”
In an interview with IPR, Birkmeier expressed his concerns about Dyer's effect on the finance department and the integrity of its work.
“If your question is, is it a dire situation for the county, I would say ‘Yes, big time,’” said Birkmeier. “You don't want to be overseen by the state of Michigan or have black marks on county budgeting and finance. That's just – it's not good. It's not good for the county, it's not good for anybody.”
In January, 2026, Hartesvelt was placed on administrative leave for undisclosed reasons – reportedly for insubordination.
By February, Hartesvelt had been terminated – leaving the account clerk Elizabeth Gray temporarily running the finance department alone.
Sean Cowan, a former finance director who himself had previously resigned, would join Gray later in the month as interim finance director, but the two would not work together for long.
In March, Gray would resign and write a letter to the LBOC that complained of a “pattern of administrative negligence and physical intimidation that poses a significant liability to the County.” Like Birkmeier, she also wrote that her departure “was the direct result of a toxic environment fostered by County Administrator James Dyer.”
Later that month, the county hired its current finance director, Rio Risbridger. She had been working for just 74 days when she wrote her own complaint to the LBOC – writing that she “repeatedly found [herself] the only safeguard ensuring the Finance Department complies with the law, generally accepted accounting standards, and county policy.”
In that same letter, written in June, Risbridger echoed past allegations of physical intimidation – writing that once when she asked Dyer for additional support and training from the County Clerk’s Office, he interrupted her, slammed his hand on the table, and said, “They are not going to f—ing train you,” before apologizing. She also alleged that Dyer described himself as an “a–hole” that staff should “call out”. She wrote that employees who did call him out faced hostility and retaliation.
Just days later, on June 9, Dyer was placed on paid administrative leave by a unanimous LBOC vote. An investigation into Risbridger’s complaint is now underway by the county’s legal counsel.
Dyer was reached by phone for comment and said he would not contest the complaint in the media and that it “would be inappropriate to influence decision makers through the media.”
IPR spoke with Leelanau County Board Chairman Steve Yoder, but he declined to comment.
