Southern Nevada winner in 2000 Census

Thursday, Oct. 21, 1999 | 11:20 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Clark County will have firmer control of the Legislature after the 2000 Census and it will likely gain another representative in Congress to be shared with some rural counties.

Northern and rural Nevada will clearly be the loser in the new population count, according to information supplied Wednesday to a legislative committee on reapportionment.

Once the count is done, officials expect Clark County to control 68 percent of the seats in the Legislature, more than two-thirds. If Southern Nevada's senators and assembly members voted as a block, they could override a veto by the governor.

New political boundaries will be drawn by the 2001 Legislature. The process, known as reapportionment, takes place at all levels of government when population surges or shifts justify a change in the number of representatives and/or a change in boundaries.

Final figures from the U.S. Census Bureau are not expected until March 2001, which will give the Legislature only about three months to draw up the new district boundaries for Congress, Legislature, state Board of Regents and the state Board of Education.

The 1990 Census set Nevada's population at 1.2 million and the population with the new count is expected to slightly exceed 2 million. Clark County, with an estimated 68.5 percent of the state's population, has experienced the fastest growth.

Clark County now has 13 of the 21 senators in the Legislature and 26 of the 42 Assembly members. If the size of the Legislature is not increased, Clark County would pick up 1 1/2 Senate seats (sharing one with a rural county) and three Assembly seats. Those would be deducted from northern and rural Nevada.

Retaining the current size of 63 members in the Legislature would mean that a senator would represent 96,858 people and an Assembly member 48,429.

The Nevada Constitution permits the Legislature to be increased to 75 members. If that was approved, the existing number of legislative districts would be maintained in rural and Northern Nevada. And Clark County would get four new Senate seats and eight new Assembly members.

Sen. Ann O'Connell, R-Las Vegas, chairman of the reapportionment committee, said the committee will discuss at its next meeting whether to recommend that the Legislature be expanded.

The state will also likely get a third representative in Congress. The state demographer's office estimates the total population will be 2,034,000 with 1,393,760 of those in Clark County.

Robert Erickson, director of research for the Legislative Counsel Bureau, says each congressional district will have a population of about 670,000. That means Clark County would have one congressman and would have to share one with some rural counties. Northern Nevada would continue to have one representative in Congress.

Nevada now has two representatives in Congress, one for Las Vegas and Henderson and one for the rest of the state.

The census will begin in mid-March when the government will mail letters to all people, notifying them that they will receive a census form in a couple of weeks.

In mid-April there will be a follow-up postcard mailed to people, reminding them to return their forms. And in late April, May and June, census workers will visit the homes of those people who don't respond.