Now, the Dallas airline executive will travel to Augusta. But this time, he’s staying. Dann Lewis begins a job on Monday as the director of the Maine Office of Tourism, the top government position in one of the state’s largest industries.

Lewis will oversee an office with an annual budget of $1.8 million and a four-person staff. His primary mission will be to market Maine as a tourism destination. Industry observers say Dann Lewis’ most challenging tasks will be to promote the state despite tight budget constraints and to unite diverse interests within the tourism industry behind those efforts.

Lewis said in a telephone interview that one of his primary goals will be to “get the government side and the private-sector side to work more harmoniously. That’s that I’ve found is very necessary and very beneficial in the other regions I’ve worked in.”

Dann Lewis has worked in many other regions during the 36-year course of his career. He’s headed tourism efforts for some big-name destination spots: the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands and New York State where he was in on the early stages of the “I Love New York” campaign.

Bern Rotman, director of communications for the New York State Department of Economic Development, said Lewis “had a pivotal role to play” in generating tourism industry support for the “I Love New York” campaign.

“Dann’s role was extremely important at a time when we started the advertising in a very big way,” Rotman said.

Lewis will have a lot less money to work with in Maine, where the tourism budget is only one-sixth the size of New York’s. But Lewis has shown himself to be creative in using scarce resources, Rotman said. One way he has done that, Rotman said, is by seeking public-private partnerships - a common theme of Governor Angus King’s administration.

Dann Lewis has spent nearly all his adult life in the travel industry. Immediately after graduating from Dartmouth College he went to the Bahamas and built a resort. “I did everything from drawing the plans to laying the blocks to doing the electrical wiring,” he said.

Lewis subsequently ran his own tourism related development company, worked for years in the public sector for tourism offices and did consulting for clients such as Six Flags Corporation, a big amusement park operator. He’s spent the last decade working for small airline companies, two of which he helped restructure following bankruptcy proceedings.

Lewis says the job of tourism director in Maine dovetails with both his personal and professional interests. For one thing, he said, he and his wife have been wanting to return to New England for the past three years. They own a summer home in Freedom, N. H. on the Maine-New Hampshire border. They have friends in Maine. And Lewis grew up in Massachusetts.

Professionally too, the job seemed to be a good fit. Lewis said he decided to apply while visiting friends in York earlier this year. While there, he read a newspaper article describing King’s belief in the importance of tourism to the Maine economy. It struck a chord.

Lewis became one of 13 applicants - and one of only two out-of-staters - interested in the tourism job. His appointment was announced in late June.

Lewis was chosen because of his broad experience and the administration’s sense that he would “be good at teamwork,” said Tom McBrierty, commissioner of the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development and Lewis’s boss.

The announcement has been greeted with relief, and curiosity, by Maine’s tourism industry. The relief comes from the fact that the post has finally been filled after a vacancy of three months. The curiosity stems from the fact that few in Maine’s tourism industry know Lewis or have even met him.

One exception is Karen Peterson, president of a York based marketing research firm, Davidson-Peterson Associates. She and Lewis have been friends for over 20 years. Also, his resume includes a five year stint as senior marketing consultant and West Coast director of her firm.

Peterson calls Lewis a “very gentle and quietly intelligent person, with a commanding knowledge of what makes tourism the world’s largest industry”. “What we need most in this industry in Maine is consensus-building” said Peterson. “He doesn’t bring any baggage. He’s not on one side or the other.”

From: Portland Press Herals/Maine Sunday Telegram - July 1995 by Kim Strosnider