A newly formed fishermen’s coalition is calling on Democrat Gov. Janet Mills to support its fight against potentially harmful industry restrictions.
The North Eastern Fisherman Coalition also wants U.S. Senate-candidate Mills to pull back her support of the offshore wind turbines they see as threatening their fishing grounds.
In Mills, fisherman Ken Dunn, the coalition’s founder, sees a politician who’s all for working people as long as they like wind mills and restrictions on fishing.
While Dunn was busy organizing his new group, Mills was giving her “state-of-the-state address” Tuesday night, touring her alleged accomplishments that Dunn sees as nothing but roadblocks to Maine’s economy.
Dunn tells The Maine Wire that Maine’s fishermen have been up against Democrat politics that favor fancy-sounding talk of “environmentalism” over the thread-bare pockets of hard-working, self-employed entrepreneurs simply trying to keep their bills paid in the face of what they see as incessant, ongoing, ill-conceived fishing restrictions.
He began organizing his pushback after the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission mandated an increase a year ago in the minimum size of lobsters in response to what it claimed was a decline in juvenile lobsters.
“We are attempting to hold Janet Mills and Pat Keliher accountable for the damages they have already done to Maine’s fishing industry,” Dunn said.
That would be Pat Keliher, who was the state’s longtime commissioner of marine resources until he went postal at a fishermen’s meeting that was ostensibly called to listen to the guys and gals who actually work on the water.
Just weeks after the regulators decided Maine’s lobstermen had it too good, Mills announced Keliher’s sudden “retirement.”
Keliher’s “retirement” came just over two months after he yelled an obscenity at a lobsterman during a public meeting about, yes, “regulation changes” – the ones governing the minimum-allowed size for trapping lobsters.
The commissioner told the lobsterman “f- you” when he accused Keliher of being in bed with the good folks who take it upon themselves to decide whether fishermen prosper or starve.
Keliher ended up issuing an apology a day after the raucous public hearing that saw him in the shocking fiery public exchange with the aggrieved fisherman.
As it turns out Keliher was actually taking his marching orders from the governor.
Meanwhile, in cahoots with President Biden’s infamous push for “green energy,” Mills effectively tied fishermen’s hands in deference to wind mills, according to Dunn.
“They made more new regs like requiring every single lobsterman to report, everyday after hauling,” he says. “They want to know when you left, how long the traps soaked, what you used for bait, how deep the traps are set, when you got back, how many you caught.
“Imagine guys in their 60s and 70s trying to use a computer or a smart phone to put that all in at the end of every day.”
Dunn says he has collected more than 3,000 signatures as a show of resistance from the working class that the term-limited Mills purports to support as she runs for the U.S. Senate.
The petition is designed to get Mills to account for the decisions her administration has made limiting Maine fishermen.
Dunn is considering a lawsuit aimed at forcing the governor of Maine to explain the chronology of her push for wind mills over the needs of her alleged constituents.
