SCARBOROUGH, ME- “My name is Les Otten and, with your help, I’ll be the next governor of the great state of Maine,” said the former American Skiing Company CEO and Mount Snow owner at a press conference Monday.

Touting his record as an entrepreneur, Otten said he wants to be Maine’s “job creator in chief.”

“I know how to build jobs in Maine,” he said. “At Sunday River, I started with just four employees and grew the company to over 1,200 employees.”

Otten started his career in the ski business at S-K-I Ltd.’s Killington, VT, resort. In the late 1970s, Otten was sent to run the company’s Sunday River resort in Bethel. In 1980, he bought the resort from S-K-I, and built Sunday River into one of the most successful ski areas in the Northeast.

In the mid 1990s, he formed LBO Enterprises and bought Attitash in New Hampshire, and added Sugarbush, in Vermont. In 1996, Otten purchased all of S-K-I’s resorts, including Mount Snow, Haystack, Killington, Waterville Valley, and Sugarloaf/USA, and formed the American Skiing Company. In a ruling by the U.S. Department of Justice, Otten was forced to sell two New Hampshire resorts, Waterville Valley and Mount Cranmore, because of fears of an ASC monopoly on skiing in the Northeast.

ASC went on to purchase Wolf Mountain in Utah, renamed it The Canyons and, with an investment of $30 million, developed it into the largest resort in the state. ASC also purchased Steamboat, in Colorado, and Heavenly Ski Resort on the California/Nevada state line.

For a while, Otten presided over the largest ski resort empire in North America. But ASC was heavily leveraged, having borrowed huge sums of money for its acquisitions, real estate, and resort improvements. ASC’s stock, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, plummeted. Otten was squeezed out as CEO of the company as part of an investor bailout in 2001, although he retained a seat on the company’s board of directors until 2007.

Since then, Otten has been vice chair and minority partner in the Boston Red Sox. He has also been involved in several other ventures, including Main Energy Systems, a wood pellet and pellet boiler company.

Otten, who is running as a Republican, enters an already crowded field. He’s joined by four other Republicans, seven Democrats, and two Green Independents vying for their party’s nomination, as well as six independent candidates. Maine’s current two-term governor, Democrat John Baldacci, is prohibited from serving a third consecutive term under state law.

Otten has already been targeted for criticism by some Maine Democrats, who charge that similarities between Otten’s “O” campaign logo and President Barack Obama’s campaign logo amount to “plagiarism.”

In his announcement speech, Otten vowed to oppose tax increases, audit state government to reduce waste, and make Maine the first energy independent state in the country.