Or this way, sports fans: On July 20, 1976, one day after then-county attorney Dusty Deschamps hired Sehestedt, Hank Aaron hit the last of his 755 home runs.
At the end of the business day Friday, Sehestedt will carry the final boxes filled with his belongings from his fourth-floor office to his car.
Sehestedt, 60, is heading out to a new job in Helena, doing much the same kind of work he's been doing all these years. Now it'll be for the Montana Association of Counties, defending counties that are part of MACO's insurance trust. He might do a little lobbying at the state Legislature as well.
His new duties start on Halloween.
“I'll come dressed as a lawyer and scare the heck out of the whole staff,” he cracked.
Sehestedt and wife Kathy, a human resources specialist for the county, will keep their home in Missoula. He'll be working Mondays through Fridays in Helena for the foreseeable future.
“I've been doing this job for 32 years. I kind of decided it was time to change, and when this new opportunity came along, I took it,” he said.
Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg is carefully looking both inside and outside his office for Sehestedt's replacement.
“This is a very important decision and one that I'm not going to get rushed into,” Van Valkenburg said. “I can handle the responsibilities myself until we can get the right person for the job.”
Missoula County will miss Sehestedt's experience, his dry wit and a lot more.
“I think it's going to be a big loss,” said Jean Curtiss, one of 15 county commissioners Sehestedt has worked with over the years. “His institutional memory and just his way of bringing people together to try to find solutions rather than putting people one side against the other side has been a great asset to the county.”
“We lose a tremendous asset, somebody who is a walking encyclopedia with respect to both local government law and a history of what Missoula County has been through for the last 32 years,” Van Valkenburg said.
Sehestedt worked criminal cases in his early years with the county, dividing the trial load with Ed McLean and often butting heads with Van Valkenburg and his partners in private practice.
“We'd fang and claw a lot and go have a beer together while we waited for the jury,” Sehestedt recalled.
As the civil end picked up, Sehestedt shouldered more of that load.
“I found a place and grew roots in it,” said Sehestedt, whom former commissioner Barbara Evans used to joke should write a book entitled “The Perfect Analogy.”
“Trying to do criminal and civil are like trying to harness a trotter and a Clydesdale into a team,” he said. “They go at different paces. It just doesn't work very well.”
Sehestedt became the man in charge of loosening the legal and/or financial knots that arise in virtually every county consideration.
“They tell me where they want to go and I try to find a way to get there within the law,” he said.
“Michael was always a common-sense kind of guy, and he had a tremendous amount of legal knowledge in his head,” said Evans, who retired last year after 28 years as commissioner.
“That doesn't mean he didn't go get the book, because he did go get the book. But I don't recall a time that he was wrong.”
Much of Sehestedt's workload in the early days was counseling the county school districts, until the workload for both the county and the schools grew beyond that arrangement.
Three projects loom especially large in Sehestedt's rearview mirror. He helped get Larchmont Golf Course off the ground in the early 1980s after a series of setbacks.
“I thought it was going to finish me off a few times, but it actually has turned out to be a moneymaker and, I think, a real asset to the community,” he said.
He's glad the county pushed its development park, 450 acres west of Missoula, “beyond mere real estate development to the idea of looking for quality jobs and quality job creation.”
That landed an obvious plum, DirectTV, a couple of years ago.
“But all the businesses out there are pushed to the same sort of standard,” Sehestedt said.
Working in a partnership with a state agency, the Department of Corrections, resulted in construction of the Missoula County Detention Facility, completed in 1999. There's room on county land for expansion, perhaps a new Emergency Operations Center, which will be on the ballot as a $16 million bond issue next month.
“I think the major talent that Michael had was always trying to help the public,” said Evans.
He will always occupy a soft spot in Evans' heart for his ability to set everything else aside and help her help a citizen in need.
“That was a wonderful thing to have, because if your lawyer says, ‘Sorry, don't care, can't do it,' then it's, ‘Sorry I can't help you' for me. Michael was always there to try and find a way to help them,” said Evans. “So there are a lot of people who ought to be very grateful to him for his help over 32 years.”
A 1973 graduate of the University of Montana law school, Sehestedt worked in Helena as a chief counsel for the state before heading home to Missoula.
“One of the really deciding things when Dusty offered me a job was, at that time, I believed Missoula County had the best county attorney's office and Missoula County had the best county government in the state, based on what I'd known,” he said. “It was true then, and I certainly hope it's true now. And I think it is.”
Nearly a third of a century later, Sehestedt's work in Missoula County is through. At the close of the commissioners' weekly public meeting Wednesday afternoon, he bid adieu.
“I told them it was going to be a big change for me,” he said, “because for 32 years I knew where I'd be every Wednesday afternoon at 1:30.”
“I'm glad to know where he's going,” said Curtiss. “I think he'll be an asset for the Montana Association of Counties, and I can understand why he'd be ready to take on a new adventure. He's been here a long time.”
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Cordell Brown wrote on Oct 17, 2008 10:31 AM: