Patrick Keliher takes the helm at DMR

First published in the MLA Newsletter, February, 2012

Patrick Keliher, 45, was sworn in as the new Department of Marine Resources (DMR) commissioner by Governor LePage on January 26, following a unanimous vote of support by the Joint Committee on Marine Resources and confirmation by the Senate. Keliher became Acting Commissioner of the department upon the departure of former commissioner Norman Olsen in July, 2011.

Keliher is a Maine native, born in Gardiner. “I spent my childhood on the water,” he said in a recent interview. He credits his mother with introducing him to the outdoors. “She was raised on a farm during the Depression. They had to hunt and fish for food,” he said. “So we were always outside. I remember when I was 10 years old. I’d jump in a skiff and go off on the Cobbossee Stream and be gone for the whole day. She didn’t worry.”

As a high school student, Keliher ran a river herring weir and lobstered with his uncle and cousins off Cliff Island in Casco Bay. He thought highly of one of his neighbors, Dick Laney, who was a certified guide, taking clients on bear hunts and other expeditions. “’What a great way to make a living’, I thought,” he said with a chuckle.

Eventually Keliher too became a hunting guide taking customers on grouse, woodcock and sea duck hunting trips. And he started his own charter boat business, running trips for striped bass between Bath and Casco Bay. “I made a good living with the charter fishing,” Keliher recalled. “I’d work a hundred days in the summer, 3 a.m. to ten o’clock or noon.”

As a fisherman, he soon became aware of the influence that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) had on striped bass and other fisheries in the Gulf of Maine. “I ended up serving on several advisory boards, going to meetings,” Keliher said. His involvement ultimately led the Coastal Conservation Association (CCA) of Maine (a state chapter of the larger marine recreational fishing organization) to offer him the position of part-time director. “I thought that would be great because I wasn’t working in the winter,” Keliher recalled. The job quickly evolved into a full-time position.

During his five years as the Maine director, Keliher learned the fundamentals of management. He increased membership from 100 to 1,200 members, raised funds for the association, and interacted with his board and constituents. “I had worked at L.L. Bean before. That’s where the idea of customer service was ingrained in me. So that’s what I did with the funders and the board:  dealt with them as customers,” he said.

In 2001, the national CCA organization asked Keliher to become director of all the New England chapters, which he did until 2003. “Anadromous fisheries were big issues then,” he recalled. Keliher moved on to become the executive director of the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission, serving in that capacity until the commission was absorbed into the DMR in 2007. At that point Keliher became the director of the Bureau of Sea Run Fisheries and Habitat.

“All my training and skills I’ve received from on-the-job training. I never went to college,” Keliher said matter-of-factly. Among those skills is the ability to listen to people, to listen to them fully, and to understand the differences of opinion among them on a specific topic. But one can be a good listener and then never make up one’s mind. Keliher said that he has no trouble making decisions. “I’d say I’m open-minded, committed and decisive. I can make a decision and then stick with it,” he noted.

During the six months that he served as Acting Commissioner, Keliher took the time to examine the mandates and structure of DMR. He initiated a study of the agency’s functions based on the value of each individual fishery, the number of participants in it and the security of long-term funding. The study will soon be under review by agency staff.

“We have to prioritize the work we have to do and then rank those priorities as high, medium, or low,” he explained. Giving people in middle-management the ability to make decisions on their own and then be held accountable for those decisions would be one way to make the agency more efficient, Keliher said.

Such changes will occur at a time when federal funds the agency has been drawing upon for several years for everything from enforcement to whale research are beginning to dry up. “We are gearing up for a fifteen percent reduction across the board,” Keliher confirmed. “Some things will not take much of a hit. Others, such as protected resources, probably will.”

In his testimony before the Marine Resources Committee in January, Keliher said that he would focus DMR on several key items:  promotion of all Maine seafood to improve profitability across all sectors; ensuring that more of the marine resources landed in Maine are processed in Maine; addressing issues associated with the transitions into and out of Maine fisheries; and making Maine a competitive place for all fisheries to do business.

One element Keliher said he will emphasize during his tenure at DMR is improved communication with the industries the agency regulates. Transparency, an increasingly overused word in governmental circles, is real to Keliher. “Transparency means that we have to get the word out to people about what we do in a way that they understand. People must be able to participate in the process [of devising management plans and regulations]. And people must feel that they have been heard even if the end result is not in their favor,” he said.

To balance the multiple interests that operate in Maine’s marine waters, to bring the voices of Maine fishermen to the regional and national levels, and to manage a understaffed agency with a limited budget would seem to be a thankless job, yet Keliher said he is pleased to be at the helm. “There are a tremendous number of great people in this industry, both commercial and recreational,” he said. “There are all sorts of opportunities here in the department. I’ve never been afraid of change.”