Ranch girl runs Sturgis rally

By Bill Harlan, Journal Staff Writer | Saturday, August 05, 2006

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STURGIS — A former Meade County ranch girl, now a mother of four, runs perhaps the biggest motorcycle rally in the world. Lisa Weyer rides a Harley-Davidson Sportster, too. “That was my present from my husband two birthdays ago,” she said.

Weyer, 34, heads the Rally Department for the city of Sturgis.

It’s a big job. The Sturgis motorcycle rally, which officially begins Monday, routinely attracts more than half a million motorcyclists. Whether Sturgis is bigger than Daytona Bike Week in Florida depends on how the bikers are counted and who is doing the counting, but there is no doubt that the Sturgis rally is the biggest event in South Dakota and in the northern Great Plains.

The Sturgis rally is so big, in fact, that it’s a bit of a stretch to say any one person “runs” it, but Weyer could lay claim to a very large chunk of the job.

The city of Sturgis formed its own Rally Department in 2002, after a dispute with a company that had been handling rally duties for the city and the Sturgis Chamber of Commerce.

Now, the city’s Rally Department, with an annual budget of $300,000, works directly with the chamber of commerce and the Jackpine Gypsies motorcycle

club — the founding organization that still runs races and other events.

The city Rally Department, from a suite of offices at city hall, also handles scheduling, marketing and rally inquiries, which pour in year-round. The department also produces a magazine and runs a Web site that now gets about 10 million hits a month. (www.sturgismotorcyclerally.com/)

Weyer works with a private agent to set up corporate sponsorships. (Her department is using a dozen rally-only cell phones, for example, courtesy of rally sponsor Verizon.)

She also attends the Daytona motorcycle rally every spring, at least one major trade show and, usually, another rally.

Weyer and her full-time, year-round staff of three also lease space to 100 or so vendors on various city-owned properties.

During the rally, Weyer adds a couple dozen employees to the department. They manage information centers and the media center at Sturgis Community Center.

They also help run the annual Mayor’s Ride, held on the official opening Monday of the rally. The ride, led by Harley-Davidson-riding Mayor Mark Zeigler, has become a major event, often attracting celebrities and other officials. Gov. Mike Rounds is a regular. This year’s ride also will feature President Bush’s chief of staff, Josh Bolten, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and other notables. (The ride is sold out.)

“The Mayor’s Ride is a stressful time,” the mostly unflappable Weyer said.

In short, Weyer heads a somewhat unusual city department. Its part visitors bureau, part convention bureau, part corporate player. Weyer admits she is probably the only city official in the state of South Dakota with three bottles of Jack Daniels on display over her desk. (Jack Daniels is a corporate sponsor.)

The Rally Department also remains a city department subject to scrutiny by an elected city council. “We definitely get more of the politics than other rallies,” Weyer said, without a trace of exasperation. “Growing up here, I definitely knew what I was getting into.”

Weyer graduated from Sturgis Brown High School in 1990, the year of the monster 50th rally, when attendance soared to more than half a million. She attended Black Hills State University but didn’t earn a degree. Instead, she and her husband, Justin Weyer, started a family. He works at Fort Meade V.A. Medical Center, but during the rally, he is a reserve police office. Last year, he was among officers who patrolled downtown on a mountain bike.)

Weyer has worked for the city of Sturgis for 13 years — first as a clerk in the city-owned liquor store (yes, Sturgis is an unusual municipality), then in the city finance office.

At the start-up of the Rally Department four years ago, she was assistant director, but the original director left within months. Weyer, with a long track record of city employment, was in the right place at the right time.

The keys to doing her job, she said, are common sense and a certain kind of personality. She calls herself “a cheerleader type” — she was one — but there is more to it than that. “Nothing really bothers me,” she said. “I’m a go-with-the-flow, easygoing person.”

Her parents, Clayton and Janice Casteel, still ranch 13 miles east of Sturgis, where Weyer grew up. She declines to call herself a “ranch girl,” saying her four brothers “spoiled” her by taking over most of the chores. But the ranch remains important in her life. In fact, that is where her kids spend the rally. The Weyers have a 14-year-old son, 8-year-old twin boys, and a 5-year-old daughter — which also suggests multitasking is not foreign to Lisa Weyer’s nature.

In a sense, Weyer’s job requires a split personality. “You’ve got to be small town most of the year and big business for two weeks in August,” she said.

After five years of managing the Sturgis Rally Department, Weyer has acquired some unique sought-after skills in event planning — not that she is looking for another job. Though planning for Sturgis 2007 begins a week from Monday, she said there’s no place she’d rather work and live. “I’m hoping I can keep doing it as long as I’m still smiling,” she said.

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com