JOB ROULETTE

Of all the questions surrounding the proposed casino in southern Maine, the easiest to answer is whether Maine will have enough people to staff the estimated 10,000 direct and indirect jobs it is supposed to create. If the jobs pay well enough, people – Maine residents or people moving here – will fill them, and just as in other crowded parts of the country, they will find places to live. Gov. John Baldacci spun a mini tempest not long ago when he worried what that would mean for the rest of the state.

His concern is far from a definitive reason for deciding on the casino question, but it is a fair point. The governor said northern and eastern Maine already suffer from its young people leaving these regions for lack of work. A draw such as a casino before his administration is able to attract new manufacturing and high-tech businesses to the economically weakest parts of Maine would make its job harder, he said. It would mean fewer people in places that have too few people already.

Southern Maine, of course, should be encouraged to develop all the good, sustainable jobs it can. The governor’s observations were more about the cost of those jobs to elsewhere in the state, a particularly important point given the new statistics showing higher-than-expected poverty levels in Maine. Those struggling parts of Maine are accustomed to being ignored until crisis arrives so it is understandable for residents to doubt this governor’s Pine Tree Economic Zones will be any different from the Plus One piffle of the previous administration or the Job Opportunity Zones failure of the one before that. Why should anyone wait around a dying town when a decent, if not spectacular, job awaits at a casino to the south?

Certainly the kinds of jobs he describes, in research and development, in manufacturing and biotechnology, sound a lot better than the service jobs seen as the usual option for those laid off in towns across Maine. The governor’s challenge is to make a case that his plans for creating these jobs are realistic and will have positive results in the short term. Governors around the nation go to sleep dreaming of finding the combination of incentives to produce these jobs; Gov. Baldacci will have to demonstrate that he has found it.

The popularity of the proposed casino is evidence of the weakness of Maine’s economy. The debate over the casino this fall will also in part become a referendum on whether voters trust the administration to provide a better alternative.