MEET THE COMMISSIONER

Pat Sellars is the kind of man who paid his way through college sweating in the sun, either on a tugboat or a noisy oil rig. He once traded in a tie so that he could work with tools, and as a guy who sits in a big chair behind a big desk he has never forgotten what it’s like to be “the low man on the totem pole.”
The owner of industrial cleaning service A3M Vacuum since 1981, Sellars is an ideal candidate suited to be nominated to the Board of Commissioners, which led him to an eventual appointment by Gov. John Bel Edwards on May 23. He is now serving as a representative of St. John the Baptist Parish.
“These opportunities don’t always come along,” Sellars says. “And so far, I’ve seen the importance of the position. I’ve learned that it’s a position full of big decisions and that those decisions are made with the entire Port in mind. You want to do a good job at anything you do, and to do a good job here, you have to know what’s going on – get as much informa- tion as you can, and be sure to ask questions because it’s pretty detailed.”
After serving in the military, Sellars returned to Louisiana and attended college. To pay the bills, the young Breaux Bridge native worked as a roughneck in the unforgiving Acadiana oil  elds along with  nding laborer jobs on grain elevators and tugboats.
“Oh, it’s tedious – no ifs, ands or buts,” Sel- lars says. “You’re low man on the totem pole be- cause you do the stuff that nobody else wants to do. Same thing on an oil rig; you do what the oil man tells you to do. And so that got me to thinking: If I start a company, why not have a company that does the things nobody wants to do? Because there’s a whole lot of things when it comes to industrial cleaning that nobody wants to do. And we’ve been successful because we don’t turn anything down.”
Prior to founding A3M, Sellars was a success- ful insurance salesman. He was the top agent within the company back-to-back years. But, he wasn’t happy. Instead, Sellars longed for that feeling provided by the tough jobs he left behind long ago – to work with his hands, pile dirt beneath his  ngernails and feel like he’s doing something, Sellars explains.
That’s certainly ful lled at A3M. All they do is dirty work.
Servicing clients throughout Louisiana, A3M began humbly as a vacuum truck com- pany but has since expanded to provide trans- portation and disposal of waste material to a variety of industrial companies. Sellars provides clean-up crews for regular plant maintenance and environmental matters along with emer- gency response equipment. A3M is out tted with a diverse  eet of vacuum trucks, includ- ing those equipped with water jetting systems capable of cleaning pipes and culverts. Quite a few of the companies that solicit A3M’s ser- vices are located within the Port District, giv- ing Sellars a deep tie – both economically and emotionally – to the region.
“When you live in a community, you want to see it grow,” Sellars says. “You want to see it do better, whether it’s expanding a small airport, or attracting new jobs and work with good pay. How can you live in a community and not care about its well-being? So that’s why I got involved with this. Sometimes it’s not about money, it’s about doing good for the place you live.”