Abden Simmons (Molly Rains photo)
State Rep. Abden S. Simmons, R-Waldoboro, said he is running for reelection to House District 45 to continue advocating for commercial fishermen statewide and to empower working Mainers.
“Personally, I think I’m more of a backstop to try and prevent frivolous laws and regulations. That’s the way I see my role, more than anything,” Simmons said.
House District 45 includes the towns of Bremen, Friendship, Louds Island, Waldoboro, and Washington. Incumbent Simmons is challenged for the seat by Jennifer Stone, D-Waldoboro.
Simmons was first elected to the Maine House of Representatives in 2016, defeating Dr. Emily Trask-Eaton, D-Waldoboro, for the seat. He lost his bid for reelection in 2018 to Jeffrey Evangelos, I-Friendship.
In 2022, Simmons ran to represent Senate District 13, which consists of all of Lincoln County except for Dresden, plus Washington and Windsor. He ultimately lost to Cameron Reny, D-Bristol.
Simmons returned to the Maine House in 2023, defeating Wendy Pieh, D-Bremen, in a June special election after the resignation of former Rep. Clinton Collamore, D-Waldoboro.
Raised in Waldoboro, Simmons was educated locally, attending the former Friendship Street School, Miller School, former A.D. Gray School, and Medomak Valley High School. In his youth, Simmons dug clams and set traps for lobsters and crabs in the Damariscotta River with his father and helped cut wood in the winters.
Though most of his family was involved in agriculture, Simmons decided to pursue a career on the water. With his wife, April, Simmons has owned and operated A & A Shellfish Inc., a clam buying operation, since 1996.
“Commercial fishing was where the money was, and that’s where I’ve been ever since,” he said. “I love being outside. You get to see things a lot of people don’t get to see.”
Waldoboro residents may also know Simmons from his time in municipal government. He previously served on the Waldoboro Planning Board for six years. In June, he was reelected to his fourth three-year term on the Waldoboro Select Board.
As a municipal official, Simmons said one accomplishment he was particularly proud of was helping establish a community navigator position. Inspired by the community navigator position at the Boothbay YMCA, Waldoboro introduced its own community navigation program in 2020.
Waldoboro’s community navigator Karen-Ann Hagar-Smith, who has since extended her services countywide in partnership with the county and Damariscotta’s Central Lincoln County YMCA, helps connect families and individuals in need with services from housing to heating assistance to child care.
“In the first year we had Karen-Ann, I think it was 116 families she helped,” Simmons said. “The thing is, a lot of these families don’t realize the programs out there that they can utilize, and I think that’s a huge issue.”
Simmons also highlighted the Waldoboro Select Board’s work with Healthy Lincoln County, a nonprofit that offers food support and nutrition education locally, to help address food insecurity among residents.
State support for communities in implementation of similar local programs statewide, from community navigation to nutrition, could help these benefits reach more Mainers, Simmons said.
A statewide lack of child care was another factor Simmons tied to current pressures on Mainers and overregulation.
“I think the workforce would be increased quite a bit if we had child care,” Simmons said.
Relaxing the regulations and requirements for child care providers would be one way to address this, he said. Simmons recalled growing up in Waldoboro, when some local families would help take care of kids in their own homes.
“There are so many regulations now that you just can’t. It’s not worth it,” he said.
According to Simmons, serving on the Waldoboro Select Board also familiarized him with the budget process, preparing him for work at the state level. When it comes to budgeting, Simmons described himself as a “realist.”
“Being in town government, I’ve learned a lot, and I think a lot of it up at the state doesn’t transfer over. There’s a lot of spending there that’s useless and wasteful, and it drives me crazy,” he said.
Simmons’ background and values have served him well in the Legislature, he said, especially his commitment to advocating for Maine fishermen.
In his work as a commercial fisherman and seafood dealer, Simmons mainly deals in clams, but said he has “harvested just about everything,” including elvers, quahogs, mussels, oysters, sea urchins, scallops, periwinkles, and, as a former sternman, lobster.
A familiarity with Maine industries from agriculture to timber to fishing, Simmons said, informs his sense of urgency when it comes to protecting the state’s commercial fishing market. Simmons believes “frivolous” regulations threaten these and other economically vital Maine industries.
“I see the way the forestry industry went, being overregulated and devastated,” he said. “…That’s a big concern. Living on the coast, that’s the biggest fear, losing your fisheries and your access to the water. Trying to protect an industry that’s between five and six million dollars is huge to me. It’s not just a small portion of the state. It’s the whole coast of Maine that needs to be protected.”
To this end, Simmons has been involved in commercial fishing organizing at both the local and state level. He has been a member of Waldoboro’s shellfish conservation committee for 25 years, “and chair for most of those,” he said.
Simmons said he wants to see the Legislature consider giving towns more control over “what goes in their rivers,” such as greater say over the awarding of aquaculture leases.
Under Simmons’ leadership, the Waldoboro shellfish committee requested a moratorium on aquaculture leases in Waldoboro’s Medomak River in 2023, which voters approved. Later that year, however, the Maine Department of Marine Resources indicated to the town that it would not recognize such a moratorium, as it considers waterways below the intertidal zone to be under state jurisdiction.
At the recommendation of Simmons and the rest of the shellfish committee, the town also commissioned a capacity study on the Medomak to assess the river’s ecosystem and provide insight into what fisheries it does – or could – support.
The capacity study will be the first of its kind in the state, according to Simmons, who hopes it will reveal whether the river can support oyster aquaculture without jeopardizing its existing clam fishery.
“We have a huge commercial clamming industry in town, and we don’t want that jeopardized by putting oysters or other species in the river that are going to compete,” he said.
Whether oysters and clams are indeed competing species has been a matter of debate in recent years in Waldoboro and beyond. Simmons says he has personally witnessed a decline in clams in the Damariscotta River over his lifetime and believes the increase in oyster aquaculture over that period could be to blame.
Simmons served on the Joint Standing Committee on Marine Resources in the 131st Legislature and is a board member of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association, which he chaired for about one year in 2015.
Simmons is proud to have advocated to keep Maine’s elver fishery open despite pushes to shut it down he said had come from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a governing body that creates management policies and strategies for fisheries in all East Coast states.
Simmons and other elver fishermen had taken important steps to keep Maine’s elver fishery sustainable and open, he said, including combating black market elver trade by implementing a swipe-card system that automatically records eel sales and requiring that elvers are not sold for cash.
“We’ve taken huge steps – the state of Maine, and myself as well – as far as putting laws in place to protect the elver fishing industry from bad actors,” he said.
Simmons said he was also proud of helping implement an elver license lottery system that generates money specifically for elver-focused research during his first term in the House. He would like to replicate self-sustaining, non-taxation-based funding models elsewhere in the state.
“My biggest goal is to find ways to create revenue without increasing taxes,” he said.
Simmons also serves on the board of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, a group that “monitors all commercial fishing on the east coast, and tries to combat regulations that are unnecessary,” he said.
Simmons identified one such regulation when discussing a recent “big win” of the association, in which a 1/16-inch lobster measure increase proposed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission was postponed.
During his time in office and on the campaign trail, Simmons said he found constituents shared his concerns about the regulation of commercial fishing. They are also concerned about the cost of fuel, heating oil, and electricity, he said.
Simmons said high fuel prices were one contributing factor to many of the day-to-day struggles of Mainers. He believes addressing fuel costs could lower the cost of building materials and home heating, improving housing access more effectively than legislation like L.D. 2003. That law, passed in 2022 to increase housing opportunities such as by allowing multiple dwellings to be placed on one lot, did not effectively address the high cost of building, Simmons said.
In regard to renewable energy, Simmons said high prices charged by producers for solar energy meant that government subsidy for solar had failed to lower Mainers’ energy bills. Maine’s forests made the state “way above carbon neutral” already, he said.
Simmons is endorsed by the National Rifle Association and National Federation of Independent Business Maine.
He has a yellow Lab named Sophie and enjoys hunting when he isn’t fishing or in a meeting.
“I work all year so that I can hunt,” he said.
For more information, find Abden Simmons for House on Facebook.
The general election will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
