State population 2 mil. and counting

Tuesday, July 25, 2000 | 11:11 a.m.

The breakneck speed of growth in Clark County and Nevada will continue through the next decade, the State Demographer's Office said in a report released Monday.

Jeff Hardcastle, who left a job in the Clark County Planning Department to become the Nevada State Demographer earlier this year, said the new numbers don't provide any stunning revelations, but confirm growth patterns that have been observed over the last decade.

"There's going to continue to be growth in Southern Nevada," Hardcastle said.

The latest annual estimates from the Demographer's Office push today's state population, for the first time, over 2 million. The projections call on the state to have a growth rate of 2.6 percent per year through 2010, for a total population of more than 2.6 million.

Clark County will account for most of that 600,000-person increase, with about 484,000 people moving to Southern Nevada in the next decade, the office estimated. The county's population in 2010 should be over 1.8 million, about the population for the entire state now.

In percentage terms, however, Clark County will not lead the state. Clark will have a 2.8 percent rise per year over the decade, about triple the national average, but Nye County, Clark's neighbor to the north and west, will have a growth rate of 5.2 percent per year.

That would bring Nye County to a total population of about 58,500, up from 25,000 in 1999.

Nye County includes the town of Pahrump on the Nye-Clark county line. Pahrump, within an hour's commute of the Las Vegas urban area, has seen some of the fastest growth in the state.

Northwestern Nevada counties such as Lyon, Pershing, Washoe, Churchill and Carson City also will see about a 3 percent increase, Hardcastle said.

The counties around Reno and Carson City are likely to benefit from increased economic diversification and commuters to nearby jobs, he said. That includes recent investment by high-tech, "dot.com" businesses.

"The rural counties are being forced to diversify," he said. "Up north, there's appearances of light industry in one county and people commuting from another."

Most of the increase in Southern Nevada will likely be because of casino-industry investment, Hardcastle said.

Development of Steve Wynn's new Desert Inn and at the former Frontier and El Rancho sites will likely swell the number of hotel rooms by about 6,000 in two to three years, Hardcastle said.

Several counties dependent on the moribund mining industry will likely see a population drop, Hardcastle said. White Pine County in northeastern Nevada will see a drop of 2.6 percent of its population, or about 2,800 people, Hardcastle predicted.

John Schlegel, director of the Clark County Planning Department, described the latest state numbers as "more of the same, keeping us on our toes for another 10 years or so. We've got a lot of work to do."

For the county and the other local governments in Southern Nevada, that means answering the demand for all kinds of services -- police and environmental protection, schools and teachers and everything else.

"We'll continue to have to deal with all the challenges that we've been dealing with for the last 10 years -- water quality, water supply, air quality," he said.

The population growth also will affect politics locally and in Washington, D.C., Schlegel said. Nevada already is expected to gain another seat in the U.S. House of Representatives after the Census 2000 results are formally issued in December.

Similar growth could mean that the state wins another seat in the House after the 2010 Census, he said.