Durlin Lunt Will Retire This August
Curiosity, a young heart, and a kind spirit define Mount Desert's town manager
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MOUNT DESERT—Always ready with a quote, an anecdote, and a quick story to help explain his point, Town Manager Durlin Lunt, Tuesday morning, told the staff of Mount Desert that he intends to retire this August.
“Every day a manager makes decisions that will impact the direction of their community. Three of the most difficult decisions I have made are to write, send, and request to have this letter accepted by your board. Mount Desert has always been dear to me. It is my home and hopefully will always be so,” Lunt wrote in his resignation letter that has not yet been presented to the board.
Lunt has served as town manager for fifteen years.
Durlin Lunt, Jim Willis, former Mount Desert and Bar Harbor police chief, said, has made him a better man.
“I'm sure plenty of people can list Durlin's accomplishments. There are plenty, to include implementing a CIP for the town, developing partnerships with neighboring communities to ensure critical services get delivered and many others,” Willis said. “Durlin was a great guy to work with. He recognized individuals' potential, perhaps more than the individuals understood about themselves.”
That recognition of potential helped change Willis’ life.
“Durlin prompted me to get my bachelor's degree with the town's financial assistance. It took a few years, but I did get it done. When he asked me to go to Bar Harbor to help out as acting chief, I was still taking classes and had just become president of the Maine Chiefs Association,” Willis said. “I wasn't sure I could manage it all. Durlin said he knew I could and that he'd be there to help. Durlin checked on me regularly, offered support and most of all, listened to me when I needed an ear.”
That belief in people’s potential has made a difference in many lives. Now, Lunt has a chance to believe in himself that same way as he focuses on his own next big project after retirement.
DREAM DREAMS AND WRITE THEM
“Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first,” historian and Naval officer Samuel Eliot Morison once said.
Lunt has done both and continues to do so. Maybe it’s because that quote—like many—is encouraging him to do so.
“Few will have the opportunity to help shape and influence policies and procedures that will guide their community for a generation or more. I have been blessed with this privilege for fifteen years and that it took place in my hometown makes the return to the community as a private citizen even more rewarding. Although we face severe challenges in the years ahead there is no doubt in my mind that we are on an upward trajectory,” Durlin told the Bar Harbor Story Tuesday.
His resignation letter will be presented at the next Mount Desert Selectboard meeting, February 17.
“After fighting Father Time a good battle and arriving at the fork in the road, I am prepared to take it. Therefore, I shall retire as Mount Desert Town Manager effective August 31, 2025,” he wrote.
And Lunt will be continuing to write—only it won’t be memos to the selectboard. His next project, which he’s already started, still involves Mount Desert Island. He is already thousands of words into a book about the town that raised him and that he holds dear—a social history of Northeast Harbor told in lovingly presented anecdotes that focus on the community that Lunt loves.
“For some time, I have felt it important that an informal social history of Northeast Harbor be written from the years following the Second World War through the nineteen sixties through the eyes of an ordinary person who grew up in the village. It was an extraordinary time and an extraordinary place. By the early nineteen seventies, the character of the village of Northeast Harbor had changed dramatically and forever. Every year, fewer of us alive remember those years and can record them. I want to memorialize these voices before theirs and mine fall silent,” he wrote.
Lunt himself is one of those voices. He grew up on the island, went to school here, raised his family with his wife, Jean, who also a force when it comes to community and intellect. His son, Jeremy, a filmmaker, also is a creator and collator of story.
“I've been working with the Town of Mount Desert for at least 15 years now, much of that time has been with Durlin as the town manager,” Noel Musson of the Musson Group said. “He's got a story or a quote for everything which makes him very relatable and easy to talk to. I think his innovative thinking and approaches will have a long-lasting positive effect on the Town of Mount Desert and on MDI as a whole. He has been such a great person to work with over the years and if I can take anything away from that experience it would be to have curiosity, a young heart, and a kind spirit.”
Lunt also has a keen wit. Being the chief administrator of the town he loved was a privilege, Lunt has said.
“The first day Durlin worked with us, he told each department head that he didn't know how to do our jobs and he wasn't going to try,” Willis said. “It was his view that we were hired to be the experts in our field and then he told us his specialty was politics and that when we sensed things were getting political to come get him and not to try to do his job. He delivered on that message many times over the years, he was there to help navigate things with us.”
Lunt describes himself as an ordinary person who came from working-class parents. But, he stresses, it has been his great luck to be born in an extraordinary place. He’s interacted with the internationally famous and the town famous. He’s lived through the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam War, political assassinations, Watergate, 9/11, and more. He’s watched the shifts and changes of Mount Desert Island towns, and as chair of the League of Towns is part of a movement to take care of more than Mount Desert, but the entire region’s community.
The writing project created a difficult choice for Lunt who has seen the town through the development of a mutual police department, budgets, broadband studies, and comprehensive plans, a quest to bring the working waterfront back to Otter Creek, rediscovering the lost Mount Desert Village of Sound, and much more. He believes it’s necessary to devote his time to preserving the voices that he’s heard throughout his years on Mount Desert Island.
“The scope of the project that I envision is incompatible with full-time employment, so I must choose how I intend to allocate much of my time for the next few years. I am excited to begin this process but also sad to conclude what has been a rewarding chapter of my life,” Lunt wrote.
It’s a decision Lunt has been wrestling with for a while. In every good book, the protagonist has an internal conflict. Sometimes career choices are like that, too, especially when it involves a community that is loved.
“Durlin cares so much about the Town of Mount Desert; it's hard to describe how much it means to him that the community thrives and that people are happy being there,” Willis said. “There is a paper at the library in Northeast Harbor that he wrote while in grad school about historical and political things that he knew so much about. I'm not sure anyone has ever shared so many quotes and historical lessons with me. Sometimes it would be about kings, sometimes about Nixon and almost always a reference to JFK. I recall the pictures in his office would change, one day Nixon was up there, another JFK was, he said it depended on how he was feeling about things.”
Lunt is generous with his quotes and his wisdom. Even his resignation letter begins with the words of others and a bit of Lunt’s own famous wit.
“Three of my favorite philosophers are Yogi Berra, Charles Barkley, and Grumpy Cat. Barkley said that ‘Father Time is undefeated.’ Yogi remarked, ‘When you come to a fork in the road you should take it,’ and the curmudgeonly sayings of Grumpy Cat provided me with a much-needed perspective during the preparation time leading up to the town meeting and the busy summer season that follows shortly afterward,” Lunt wrote.
“Durlin is a good man and I'm a better person because I got to work with and know him,” Willis said. “I wish him a happy and well-deserved retirement!”
Lunt also thanked the selectboards that he’s served, the town employees, and the people of Mount Desert for letting him serve as their manager.
“It has been a high honor and privilege to do so,” he wrote.
And now it will be a high honor and privilege for him to tell their stories.
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