SANFORD – No matter where you were in this town Saturday, whether inside a vacant textile mill or on a busy downtown street corner, the talk was all about jobs – 4,740 of them to be exact.

It is the prospect of those jobs, promised by supporters of a proposed Indian casino, that has divided this struggling industrial town and the state, for that matter, as voters ready for the Nov. 4 referendum on whether to allow Maine’s two largest Indian tribes to open a $650 million casino resort, with Sanford its most likely destination.

In this blue-collar town, where unemployment is twice that of surrounding York County – Maine’s most affluent county – residents are in the midst of a debate about whether the jobs will bring a much-needed infusion of wealth to the town or an abrupt end to any chance it has to rebuild its crumbled economic base.

Holly Sapiel has only lived in town for about a year.

The 35-year-old paralegal, who like her husband travels to New Hampshire every day to work, was one of several hundred people throughout the day who went from display to display inside the vacant Emery Street mill, the site of “Job Opportunity Days” sponsored by the pro-casino political action committee Think About It.

“It’s not easy finding something around here,” said Sapiel, who, like many at the weekend job fair, clutched a folded up piece of paper explaining what would be the casino’s “first class” benefits package. The benefits are a major selling point, said supporters, who were quick to spout off details of dental coverage and paid vacations.

This Saturday, Sapiel had her eye on a job in human resources management, a field in which she just started her degree program at Southern New Hampshire University. Her current job at a small law office in Rochester, N.H., she explained, offered little room for advancement, no health benefits and less than $25,000 a year in pay.

While the human resources job, with an average annual salary of $30,000, sounded promising to Sapiel, her 37-year-old husband just shrugged his shoulders after talking to a presenter about a maintenance job at the casino, where the average annual pay would be about $31,000, according to supporters’ estimates.

“They don’t pay enough for me,” Kevin Sapiel stopped to tell his wife before heading off to another presentation on security jobs at the casino. He said he currently makes as much as $1,100 a week collecting trash.

Promises and predictions

Although the Sapiels focused on administrative and maintenance positions, the vast majority of the jobs at the casino would be in the gaming and food service departments, which would comprise two-thirds of the resort’s $124 million payroll, according to supporters’ estimates.

Promises of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in payroll have not impressed casino critics, who offered their own considerably less rosy predictions of labor shortages, crime spikes and traffic tangles should a casino come to town.

One didn’t have to travel far or even leave the Emery Street mill to find those wary of the jobs, which critics say will strain the already tight southern Maine labor market and put local employers out of business as the casino gobbles up the tourism industry’s labor pool with fleeting promises of good pay amid the casino’s bright lights.

“But that’s what we’re offering … jobs,” said presenter Marie Makinson when a casino opponent at her table asked her if she knew what unemployment was like in southern Maine.

“If you want to give us jobs, why don’t you put them up in Bangor or Washington County, where they need them?” countered David Rivard, a 43-year-old computer technician from neighboring Wells.

“It was then I just thought to myself, ‘Oh, you just don’t want it in your back yard,'” Makinson later reflected as the crowd thinned during the early afternoon.

Across town, Lee Burnett, a local leader of the anti-casino group Casinos No!, was frank that his opposition to the project was based in part on its likely location in his hometown. But, more so, he said, he objected to the casino because it would dissuade better jobs from coming to the area and ruin the state’s lucrative reputation among tourists as an unspoiled outdoor destination.

“Those are going to be the last jobs Sanford sees, because no one else is going to come here after a casino,” Burnett said inside the Casinos No! headquarters on Washington Street, where the group held its competing “Con-job fair” Saturday.

That fair included applications to the fictitious “Pete’s Pawnbrokers,” just one of the wrong types of businesses and the ill effects a casino would attract to the area, opponents say.

“You can’t have a casino and project yourself as having a high quality of life,” Burnett continued. “Would you buy, say, bottled water if it was bottled in Atlantic City?”

Officials with L.L. Bean, the state’s venerable outdoor outfitter in Freeport, have expressed similar concerns in their opposition to the project, arguing in an e-mail to employees that a casino presents a “clear threat to [the Bean] brand,” which would be tainted by casino advertising “portraying roulette wheels, dancing girls and popping champagne corks.”

Casino competition

Casino supporters are quick to take exception to Bean’s opposition, and even more so, that of credit card giant MBNA, which advertises for customer marketing account managers at its Belfast headquarters offering an annual salary of between $24,000 and $32,000.

Those companies, casino backers say, are fearful of competing with the competitive wages offered at the resort.

“It’s nothing that’s strange or foreign to us, dealing with the need for additional employees in the Maine labor market,” countered L.L. Bean spokesman Richard Donaldson, adding that the company has had no trouble holding onto workers. L.L. Bean’s turnover rate of employees is in the single digits – unlike the 30 percent to 50 percent turnover at some casinos, he added. “We find a big factor is employees looking at the environment in which they’re working.”

MBNA officials, who have declined to publicly address the labor issue, did not return calls last week seeking comment.

The silence has spoken volumes to casino backers including Tom Tureen, the Portland attorney driving the referendum.

“You don’t see the paper mills or Bath Iron Works opposing this,” Tureen said outside Saturday’s job fair, a second of which will be held today in Lewiston. “That’s because they pay well.”

In contrast, Maine’s tourism industry has made no bones about its reluctance to compete for workers with the casino, which they say will have an unfair advantage because of its monopoly on gambling and the casino’s self-contained nature that, by design, discourages customers from leaving.

That means little or no spin-off for local businesses, which besides losing employees to the casino would likely lose customers, according to Dick Groton of the Maine Restaurant Association.

“Let me have slot machines and I’ll compete, no problem,” Groton said, explaining the stance of his association, one of several tourism-oriented groups that announced their opposition last week.

State economist Laurie Lachance generally agreed with Groton’s assertions, noting that the state’s tourism industry already has to import about 5,000 student and foreign workers each summer to fill the void in the work force.

Nevertheless, Lachance, in a Friday telephone interview, conceded that the need for new jobs in the state was difficult to dispute.

“You look at the short-term economics and it looks favorable. It’s just that there are other concerns,” said Lachance, who predicted daunting long-term costs associated with the casino for both the state and for communities near Sanford forced to bear the financial brunt of another 20,000 cars per day to the area. “It’s a tough call.”