Hawaii is losing a guardian of its beaches and other invaluable conservation property.

Sam Lemmo, longtime administrator of the Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands within the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, is ending a 30-year career in local public service Friday.

Lemmo is largely credited with establishing the office two decades ago and helping lead stronger efforts to conserve beaches, address sea-level rise and generally protect much of the state’s public trust resources that make Hawaii so desirable to many residents and visitors.

Patricia Tummons, founder and editor of the nonprofit publication Environment Hawaii, called Lemmo a forward-thinking leader on issues including coastal erosion and development. She said he will be missed in his position.

“He’s done a bang-up good job,” Tummons said. “He has been really conscientious.”

OCCL oversees about 2 million acres of private and public land restricted to conservation uses under a form of state-level zoning. The DLNR division also is responsible for beaches and submerged land owned by the state.

Lemmo, 60, said he decided to retire after months of recovery from a bad motorcycle accident this summer and years of intense pressure in a job that includes enforcing state conservation land laws against private landowners and assessing permit applications to use state-owned conservation land.

A few of many high-profile cases involving OCCL include a rejected Hawaiian Electric plan to string high-voltage power lines along Waahila Ridge between Manoa and Palolo valleys on Oahu; the still-pending plan for the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea on Hawaii island; and collecting $8 million from late rancher and former car dealer James Pflueger for illegally grading land on Kauai that polluted a beach and precious reef after a rainstorm.

Suzanne Case, DLNR’s director and chairperson of the agency’s board that often rules on cases involving OCCL, described Lemmo as a pioneer and visionary who made some of the hardest decisions within DLNR by a longshot.

“You’re pretty irreplaceable,” she said during a Dec. 10 Board of Land and Natural Resources meeting where Lemmo announced his retirement. “You carry a big load. … Your ability to carry us all into this new world (amid climate change) has been just foundational for the Department of Land and Natural Resources, and we all are deeply, deeply appreciative of all that you’ve done.”

Added board member Chris Yuen: “You have been a great public servant over the years. … I probably voted with your recommendation like 96% of the time, and a few times I didn’t but I always respected what you and your staff came up with.”

Lemmo, who was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and grew up in Southern California, served a couple of years in the Peace Corps doing agroforestry work in a destabilized area of the Philippines during the mid-1980s after earning a degree in environmental studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“I got the public service bug from being in the Peace Corps,” he said in an interview.

After moving to Hawaii and earning a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Hawaii, Lemmo joined DLNR in 1991 as a planner whose grit was tested a few years later.

As he reminisced during the recent board meeting, Lemmo recounted how he was pressured nearly 30 years ago to recommend approval of a permit sought by a wealthy Maui homeowner, Judith Carlsberg, who wanted to extend her home’s landscaping onto nearly an acre of beachfront state land in Makena.

Some community members feared the landscaping would reduce, particularly over time, public use of the state property that Carlsberg had previously filled without permission, according to an accounting of the case published by Tummons in 1994. But Lemmo said his boss and a board member encouraged him, as the staff planner on the case, to recommend permit approval.

Instead, Lemmo submitted a report recommending denial.

According to the review by Tummons of the board’s meeting that Lemmo did not attend, Lemmo’s boss at the time, Roger Evans, recommended approval while one board member, Herbert Apaka, referred to Lemmo as an inexperienced “dummy” who should be informed by Evans that the board was not happy with Lemmo’s work.

The permit was approved, though later revoked, and Lemmo said the experience helped him form a career-­lasting resolve to weigh issues fairly and do what one believes is correct even under difficult circumstances.

Lemmo became an administrator several years later after encouraging the formation of a new DLNR division to improve governance of coastal areas.

“There was no one overseeing our beaches like parks and forests,” he said.

Lemmo led the new OCCL division, which essentially expanded the work of the former Office of Conservation and Environmental Affairs that had been folded into DLNR’s land division in the 1990s.

Chip Fletcher, associate dean for academic affairs at UH’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology helped Lemmo use scientific research to underpin OCCL’s work protecting beaches and other public coastal resources over the past two decades.

“That office is his legacy,” Fletcher said. “He is going to be very missed.”

Lemmo told DLNR’s board that his work, to be carried on by a staff that includes five planners and contributions from UH Sea Grant College Program staff, has been the most gratifying experience in his life.

“It’s been an honor to be a public servant of the state of Hawaii, and an honor to be an employee and a manager at the Department of Land and Natural Resources,” he said.