Pat McGowan has resigned as Commissioner of Conservation and will be formally announcing his gubernatorial candidacy later today in stops in Fort Kent, Bangor and Portland. Deputy Commissioner Elizabeth Townsend will be sworn in as Acting Commissioner and nominated as his replacement. McGowan joins a crowded Democratic field with at least six other active candidates.
With the entrance of McGowan into the gubernatorial race, the final piece of the Democratic primary puzzle has fallen into place. No other Democrats are likely to enter the race – at least, no major candidates. McGowan enters an already-crowded field with several well-known candidates.  Although he shares a similar background with some of them, he stands out in a number of ways, and will be a serious candidate.
Before taking the post at the Department of Conservation in 2003, McGowan served as Baldacci’s finance director during the 2002 gubernatorial campaign. He helped with the network that would prove vital to Baldacci’s re-election campaign in 2006, when he was able to vastly outspend the publicly-financed Chandler Woodcock. Yet interestingly, McGowan has filed as a Clean Election candidate, meaning that he will join Libby Mitchell, John Richardson and Peter Mills in seeking public financing.
McGowan has also served as the New England Regional Administrator of the Small Business Administration, a presidential appointment that often goes to once-and-future candidates. Charlie Summers held that post under George W. Bush, for example. In McGowan’s case, he was appointed to the position by Bill Clinton following two failed campaigns against then-Congresswoman Olympia Snowe, in 1990 & 1992. Both elections were the closest of Snowe’s long electoral career; in 1992 McGowan may have defeated her were it not for the candidacy of Green Independent Jonathan Carter. The closeness of these campaigns reflects McGowan’s competence at retail politics: shaking hands, doing events, meeting people, speaking.
It also reflects McGowan’s deep ties within the Second Congressional District, which the other Democratic candidates should not underestimate. His brief whistle-stop announcement tour very purposefully emphasizes this as well. It has been almost thirty years since a Democrat was elected statewide from the First Congressional District, when Joe Brennan of Portland was elected Governor overwhelmingly in 1982. Since then, a whole slew of First District Democrats have run for statewide office unsuccessfully. Congressman Tom Allen’s unsuccessful challenge of Susan Collins only added to this roster.
None of the other current Democratic gubernatorial candidates come from the centrist, northern wing of the Maine Democratic Party that has produced such successful candidates as John Baldacci and Mike Michaud. The next northernmost Democrat is Libby Mitchell, from Vassalboro, in the northern reaches of the First CD. There are not only a lot of general election votes in the Second, there are a huge number of moderate Democratic primary voters in such diverse locales as Lewiston-Auburn, Bangor, and the St. John Valley.
McGowan may appeal to a whole demographic that has no other candidate to call its own in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. He could well be a formidable candidate in both the Democratic primary and – if he wins the nomination – in November, as well.
UPDATE: McGowan has launched his website (www.mcgowanformaine.com), a Twitter feed (@mcgowanformaine) and a Facebook page.
""…and environmentalists will be pleased with this record as well."
As an environmentalist McGowan is a fraud. Anyone who has closely followed his doings over the past three or four years with respect to Sears Island would know that. Here we have the largest totally wild island remaining in public hands on the East Coast and McGowan wants to sell it out. Sears Island is the kind of irreplaceable natural resource any sensible kind of state government would do its utmost to preserve, the kind of easily accessible treasure that brings people to Maine. Whether tourists, well heeled retirees or participants in that creative economy Gov. Baldacci sings the praises of but sadly pays little more than lip service to, these are the people who really count in the Maine economy.
But the best the bureaucrats and other policymakers in Augusta — people like McGowan — seem to be able to do with Sears Island is pimp it out for a pie-in-the-sky industrial makeover whose chief and probably only beneficiary would be a few speculators at Chicago-based RailWorld. These are the bottom-feeder profiteers who in 2002 purchased dime-on-the-dollar through the federal bankruptcy court the rusted assets of the failed Bangor and Aroostook Railroad. Since then they have only managed to do two things: one, try to abandon more than half their track in Maine including that serving all of Aroostook County, and, two, stand around a lot with their hands out begging for the kind of absurd corporate welfare that Maine legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike, seem only too eager to hand out. By the admission of their own executives, a miraculous $200 million investment in other people's money to rape Sears Island for an economically foolish container port is their only chance at the illusion of profitability and hence a quick turnaround sale for the investors. There is not a whit of intelligence, imagination or integrity about this deal and McGowan has been in the thick of it.
When even the land trust aristocracy and timid mainline environmental groups like the de-clawed Maine Sierra (Hiking) Club balked four years ago at the prospect the thugs at Maine Department of Transportation would run a public planning process to chart the future of Sears Island, the governor asked his conservation commissioner to take charge of the proceedings instead. But McGowan allowed his department to preside over a public process that systematically excluded the public. A public that at the initial sessions expressed passionate and unequivocal support for total island preservation was over the many months that followed replaced by land trust employees and mainline environmental group incompetents more in tune with the corporate agenda. In the end, these quislings were more than willing to concede that clearcutting and leveling a third of the island for a container port that, fortunately for all of us, no developer on earth is currently interested in building might be regrettable but — and this is the critical word in a much ballyhooed "consensus" agreement to which they put their signatures — "appropriate." That's right, these supposedly stalwart defenders of the environment crossed their fingers and hoped it wouldn't happen but they actually said it was "appropriate" to destroy outright a third of this unspoiled island.
In exchange for this shameful concession in an agreement providing a green cover for what amounts to a fraudulent deal, Gov. Baldacci signed an executive order last year about this time placing Maine Coast Heritage Trust in charge of the remaining portion of the island not slated for clearcutting and leveling. In signing over to MCHT 601 acres of rare and unspoiled coastal island wildlands belonging to the people of Maine, the governor spelled out in a conservation easement the details permitting this private non-profit in Brunswick to oversee development of a sprawling "education center" campus of buildings, parking lots and related infrastructure on the supposedly conserved portion of the island. This includes building office space for government agencies specifically intended to generate rental income.
The critical language of this hypocritical quid pro quo the so-called environmentalists signed onto was worked out at a series of secret meetings in December 2006 at Department of Conservation headquarters in Augusta. I know because as a newspaper reporter at the time I crashed one of those meetings and I also interviewed confidential sources who attended others. As far as I'm concerned, McGowan knowingly allowed unlawful activity to take place under Department of Conservation sponsorship.
I doubt very much that anyone in a position of power and authority is willing to pursue whether McGowan is a criminal but certainly no one should mistake him for an environmentalist.
Peter Taber
Publisher
Wild Maine Times
Searsport