A somewhat contradictory Quinnipiac Poll released on March 11 reported three out of four Connecticut voters oppose having more casinos but wouldn’t object to a couple of little ones along the borders as long as they weren’t in their towns.

But a different public told a different story when a bunch of special interests got together a week later at the Connecticut capitol for what they like to call a public hearing on what they like to call gaming, not gambling.

Most, though not all of the publics represented at the hearing appeared to be there to partake in a love fest on the wisdom of allowing the state’s Mashantucket and Pequot tribes to expand their monopolies by building three casino/fortresses near the borders with our former friends and neighbors in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. Massachusetts has, after all, declared economic war on the state by having the effrontery to build a competing casino in Springfield, as one statesman pit it.

The border casinettes, if you will, wouldn’t be the kind of magnificent resort casinos we’ve become accustomed to. Rather, they’d be more like a comfort station or pit stop for gamers to game in and maybe buy a simple meal. They are designed for what the trade calls “convenience players” and others would call addicts or problem gamblers but they form a lucrative segment of the gambling class and should be stopped from blowing the rent money in states other than their own.

Clyde Barrow, a gambling expert paid by the two tribes, testified that there’s a hefty segment of the gaming public that doesn’t require anything more than a few slots and a place to play games like blackjack and poker to satisfy their consumer needs. No fancy resorts for them, just the games they play and maybe a couple of vending machines for nutritional support.

But the two tribes warn that if these addicts or troubled souls or convenience gamers in the northern half of the state aren’t accommodated by a gaming comfort station off Interstate 91 around Enfield or Windsor Locks, they’ll soon be playing at the $800 million resort and casino MGM Resorts International is building in Springfield. And who knows, they may like it there.

This, of course, was bound to happen. The glitter and the gold were never guaranteed for just one state in the formerly prosperous Northeast corridor. The question is why it took so long for the others to join in. When they did, total revenues for the two casinos dropped dramatically — 39 percent in the past eight years.

And not only that. There are jobs at stake, as many as 6,000 if Connecticut doesn’t allow the border installations, the operators of the two casinos warned the legislators. The eight year revenue decline has already cost the casinos and the state about 9,000 jobs, with concurrent losses in state revenue that peaked at $430 million in 2007 and is expected to drop to about $191 million in 2018.

There was, of course, some opposition, even in the gathering of the public gambling enthusiasts. Former Congressman Robert Steele, who lives in Ledyard, the state’s gambling mecca, called expansion “a bad economic bet” and asked the unanswered question of the day, “why Connecticut would want to double down on a declining industry.”

Then there were the usual noneconomic arguments about the additional social costs of a pit stop on every border. Seems the state already has 192,000 problem gamblers in the process of destroying their families and themselves. That’s more people than any Connecticut city and growing faster.

But that’s apparently not much of an issue any longer and be assured the casinos will pay an unspecified amount to an agency offering help to its victims. It’s in the bill that got through the committee a few days after it hosted the hearing, without much debate or, apparently, deep thought.

But it really doesn’t matter. The time for a philosophical discussion of gambling is past, said the wise and witty Rep. Stephen Dargan of West Haven, the co-chairman of the legislature’s quaintly named Public Safety and Security Committee.