After more than 40 years in Vero Beach, retired four-term County Commissioner Peter O’Bryan is moving to the mountains of northeastern Tennessee.
The reason?
O’Bryan said last week he and his wife, Susan, want to be within closer driving distance of their grandchildren – in Albany, New York, and Columbia, Missouri – and get away from Florida’s summer heat and Vero’s busy-season traffic.
The sale of the O’Bryans’ house here is scheduled to close on Feb. 25, and they’ve got a contract to buy a home in Mountain City next month.
“We’ll stay in our camper until we close on the house up there,” O’Bryan said of the move to Mountain City, a small Tennessee town located 40 minutes north of Boone, North Carolina.
The former commissioner, now 67, said he and his wife decided to move to Mountain City, which has a population of about 2,500, after stopping for a visit on their trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula last August.
“We were on our way to northern Michigan, pulling our camper, and we spent a week there, just to see what was there,” O’Bryan said in a phone conversation Friday. “We wanted to be in the mountains, and we had heard quite a bit about Mountain City.
“It was pretty much dead-center between the grandkids,” he added. “North Carolina has a state income tax; Tennessee doesn’t. So, it all added up to making a stop to look around a bit.
“And we liked what we saw.”
They must have: A Florida native, O’Bryan has never lived outside the state, growing up in Fort Lauderdale and attending the University of Miami, where he earned a degree in marine science with a minor in economics.
O’Bryan moved to Vero Beach in 1984, where he began work as a biologist in conjunction with the Harbor Branch Foundation before moving on to the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory and, later, the Indian River Mosquito Control District, where he spent 14 years.
Prior to being elected in 2006, O’Bryan also worked as a financial advisor. He served on the commission for 16 years, opting to retire rather than seek a fifth term in 2022.
“We’ve been thinking about moving for about a year now,” said O’Bryan, who has been married since 1989 and, with his wife, raised three sons here. “The pull of grandkids is strong for us, and we really need to get closer to them.”
O’Bryan said he wasn’t planning to put his home on the market until January, but a neighbor’s family member was looking to move here.
He said he’ll miss Vero.
“This is a wonderful community, and we’ve loved living here,” O’Bryan said. “Fortunately, we have a lot of friends who’ve invited us to stay with them when we want to come back for visits.”
As for Mountain City …
“I keep threatening to run for mayor, but my wife would probably divorce me,” O’Bryan said. “We’ll do some volunteer work up there, but mostly we’ll just be enjoying our retirement.”