Clark County leads nation by wide margin in business creation

Monday, July 24, 2000 | 11:30 a.m.

The booming Las Vegas-area economy led the nation in the creation of business establishments in 1998, the U.S. Census Bureau reported.

The agency said there were 26,691 business establishments in Clark County in 1998, up 6.7 percent from 1997. This compared to the national increase of .7 percent and the increase by No. 2 Maricopa County (Phoenix), Ariz., of 1.9 percent.

Sam Males, director of the Nevada Small Business Development Center at the University of Nevada, Reno, said he's seen no slowdown of the booming Clark County economy since the 1998 numbers were collected.

The UNR agency counseled 1,600 new and expanding Nevada businesses in 1999 -- about half from the Las Vegas area. It's on track to surpass that number in 2000, having counseled 901 businesses in the first half of this year, he said.

"I keep asking the same question -- 'Can the growth in Clark County continue?' Currently, the answer is 'yes,"' Males said.

Males said the expanding tourism industry is driving the growth of business creation in Las Vegas. Existing firms are expanding, new competitors are moving to town and entrepreneurs are creating enterprises to serve the visitors drawn to town by the city's new mega-resorts.

And in an economic domino effect, non-tourism businesses are expanding rapidly in Clark County to serve the growing tourist-driven economy.

The Census Bureau also said the 26,691 businesses in Clark County in 1998 employed 549,000 people, up 4.9 percent from 1997. The total payroll in the county of $14.997 billion was up 11 percent for an average salary of $27,315.

For all of Nevada, 800,861 people were employed, up 4.2 percent; and the number of business establishments increased 5.4 percent to 44,613.