Pat Keliher has served as commissioner for the Maine Department of Marine Resources for 14 years, the longest anyone has held that position.
AUGUSTA, Maine — Managing Maine’s diverse world of commercial fisheries is a demanding job. Pat Keliher has been doing it longer than anyone before him and has learned a few things.
“I’ve had people tell me this is the hardest job [in state government]—this and DHHS commissioner are the two hardest jobs,” Keliher said Feb. 14 during an interview.
After doing that job for 14 years, Keliher said he’s ready to retire.
“I’ve loved it,” he insisted.
However, he promised himself he’d retire by the time he reached 60 and before the Mills administration’s end. Keliher said he came to his decision over the Christmas holiday.
“Because every decision I make impacts someone’s life. I’ve done it for 14 years, I’ve loved every minute of it, but I’ve realized after doing it for so long you need to maintain a high level of energy, and I came to realize I wasn’t where I was two to three years ago.”
He said there is also some emotional strain that comes with the job.
“When I make decisions— One of the hardest. I oversee law enforcement, so one of the issues is dealing with lost fishermen. We just lost two fishermen in Down East, Maine. That starts to weigh on me,” he said.
Keliher learned about lobstering when he was young, helping an uncle who was a lobsterman. He had worked in conservation groups and managed Maine’s Atlantic Salmon program before being chosen as DMR Commissioner by former Republican Gov. Paul LePage. When Democrat Janet Mills was elected governor in 2018, fishermen asked her to keep Keliher on the job.
In the often-contentious world of fisheries regulation, DMR commissioners have had to make decisions the fishermen don’t like, but Keliher said he’s made an effort to understand both the issues and the fishermen themselves.
“I have kitchen table conversations, literally. I don’t know how many times I’ve ended up at a counter in a coffee shop or someone’s kitchen table [talking] about what the future of the fishery is gonna be,” he explained.
Particularly with Maine’s all-important lobster industry, those have become difficult conversations as the issues grow more complex.
“This fishery has gone from a 20-million-pound fishery in the ‘70s and ‘80s to a peak of 132 million pounds of landings,” he said. “We’ve now dropped 46 million pounds from that high. So we are in a situation now where the resources are starting to change.”
“Now, I don’t want to give the impression the resource is in trouble,” the Commissioner quickly added. “The resource is very healthy if you look at it historically, but we’re also at a very different time in the marine environment.”
That, he added, means the time of climate change and its impact on the ocean and species such as lobster, researchers have said that warmer waters helped fuel the huge growth in the lobster catch of recent decades, but as temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have continued to climb, lobsters have appeared to be migrating toward cooler, deeper water farther from shore.
Fishermen angrily resisted a federal agency plan, which Keliher supported, to increase the legal minimum size of lobsters, as a conservation measure. The Commissioner ultimately decided Maine would not go along with that change and the federal agency then dropped it.
But he said future steps will be needed.
“They need to come up with ideas to make sure the fishery is resilient. In the face of climate change, in the face of whale regulations, and in the face of profitability. Those are the three things facing the lobster industry,” he said. “The Commissioner of Marine Resources cannot manage this fishery for profitability, that has to come from the lobster industry.”
The commissioner has been playing a key role in opposing proposed federal restrictions to protect endangered right whales.
Federal agencies and some conservation groups have advocated for the lobster industry to eliminate “vertical lines,” which are the ropes that connect floating buoys to traps on the bottom. That step, fishermen and the DMR say, would be disastrous for the Maine lobster fishery.
Keliher, the governor, and fisheries leaders took that message to Congress in 2022, which agreed to postpone the deadline for new whale regulations until 2028 to allow time for more detailed research and development of a workable plan.
That decision, Keliher said, also brought millions of dollars for research in the Gulf of Maine, which the DMR is leading.
“We have 30 people doing research on where and when right whales are in the Gulf of Maine in the footprint of the lobster industry, so we can look at, ‘Where are the fishermen? Where are the whales?'” he explained.
Keliher said that research is already showing positive results, using airplane spotting flights and underwater acoustic monitors to search for right whales. The hope is that having specific data will help Maine’s lobster industry make the cask to federal agencies regulations that will let fishermen adapt but keep fishing.
Keliher said that, despite the breathing room for research and more acceptable regulations, the whale issue will still be a dominant concern for Maine’s biggest fishery.
“I think if you look at lobster and whales, where the population of lobster is going and the whale issue, it’s the biggest thing facing the industry and the agency,” he added.
Keliher plans to leave the DMR in March but will still be on the job for the annual Maine Fishermen’s Forum, the one time each year all segments of the fishing industry come together.
His successor hasn’t been selected by the governor yet, but after 14 years on the job, Keliher has some advice for how to do it.
“Listen. When you go into a meeting, listen. Don’t walk into a meeting with your mind made up. …. And nine out of 10 times, I would change my mind about the approach we were going to take based on the input from the industry. And you can only do that if you’re listening,” Keliher said.
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