New Bedford is the leading fishing port in the country, and fishing is a principal engine of commerce today for the Massachusetts city once known for lighting the world with oil from its whaling industry.

If someone in Ohio today orders clams, mussels or scallops in a restaurant, Ian Abreu, manager of business development for the New Bedford Chamber of Commerce, told me this week that those shellfish probably came off a New Bedford boat.

Indeed, the fishing industry — from hundreds of trawlers to sprawling fish-processing plants and ship provisioners — dominates the city's extensive waterfront.

And yet the post-recession unemployment rate in this tough little South Coast city still hovers at 7.4 percent. Plans to create a staging manufacturing industry for offshore wind development have recently begun to unravel.

Next up on the drawing boards is a proposal for a $650 million casino being proposed by a New York developer. The Mashantucket Pequots would manage it.

On Tuesday, city voters will be asked to vote yes or no on the casino plan. A yes vote would send the proposal on to the next step of competition for a southeastern Massachusetts commercial casino license.

The only other project still in the running is a proposed casino for Brockton.

I headed to New Bedford this week because I am curious to see how the casino election will play out. After all, here in eastern Connecticut we never got to vote on what made us, for a while anyway, the casino capital of the Northeast.

I am inclined to root for a yes vote next week in New Bedford. One way or another, there is going to be a casino in that region competing with the Pequots' Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun.

Getting some management fees from Massachusetts gambling might at least help the Pequots keep the lights lit back home, as Connecticut gambling revenue declines.

I also like New Bedford, maybe because it feels a little like a sister to New London, our own whaling city. New Bedford's preserved historic district — a national park which features blocks of handsome 19th century architecture and cobblestone streets surrounding a fine whaling museum — better showcases the wealth and broad influence of the whaling industry than New London's downtown.

Indeed, I ran into some this week who worry that a casino near the historic district will ruin what progress the city has made in showcasing its history.

"Twenty years ago, a woman couldn't even come down here," Ruth E. Niemczyk told me, adding she plans to vote no because she fears the damage it might do to the historic district.

Like many other nay voters I encountered, Niemczyk predicted the measure would pass.

People in the fishing industry are generally characterized around town as anti-casino, in part because they feel the project will muscle them out of the waterfront. There are also worries about traffic and congestion.

Laurie Botelho runs a shop, The Landing, along the edge of the historic district, facing the waterfront. She sells some tourism merchandise and also equipment to fishermen.

Botelho said she originally was in favor of the casino, thinking it could help tourism. But she said she has changed her mind out of a loyalty to the fishermen who don't like the idea.

"They've been good to me," she said.

And yet you don't have to wander far to find casino supporters.

"Gambling's here already," said Melanie Dessert, a waitress at the Royal II Restaurant in the shadow of the abandoned power plant that would become the casino site. Dessert waved up at the keno terminals in her restaurant.

She is also an occasional Foxwoods visitor, she added.

Joe Luiz, owner of Paddy's Hot Dog Shop, told me there are too many positives for downtown business owners to vote no, including the prospect of lower taxes.

"Why not?" he said.

The city's popular mayor, Jon Mitchell, a lawyer who comes from a New Bedford fishing family, hammered out a tough municipal host deal with the developer.

Its terms, including an upfront payment to the city of $4.5 million, annual payments of $12.5 million, hiring preference for city residents, local procurement promises, a $50 million environmental cleanup of the waterfront site, development of a convention center, creation of a waterfront public walk, design standards for the new development and a limit on hotel rooms in the project, are being cited in the developer's vote yes campaign.

Opponents like to remind people that casinos are built to take people's money, and the many poor residents of New Bedford would be vulnerable to the lure of nearby gambling.

Meanwhile, some voting, with absentee ballots, has begun.

Since New Bedford is going to have a casino nearby, whatever happens, it seems the city, if it has a chance, ought to try to have some of the good with the bad.

I like the idea that eastern Connecticut, which last year sent the restored Charles W. Morgan to the city where it was homeported for so long, may soon send New Bedford the Pequots. It's sort of full circle, since Pequots once served on New Bedford whalers.

Still, the New Bedford fishermen seem to be a tough group to convince.

"It's a working waterfront," John Wright told me, as he worked a painting project this week on the trawler Fearless. "I don't think it's a good idea."

This is the opinion of David Collins

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct

d.collins@theday.com