Saturday, March 1, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
Picture the Las Vegas Valley with 2 million people.
What do you see?
Some people envision an exciting, if more crowded city with a thriving economy, a world-class transit system, more cultural amenities and lots of good-paying jobs.
But others see a modern urban ghetto -- a Bladerunner Vegas -- choked with idling traffic, blanketed with toxic smog, carpeted with houses and casinos to the mountains, cursed with a hopelessly overcrowded school system, and burdened with spiraling taxes and living costs.
Whichever scenario comes to mind, get ready, because the train's coming. And the track we choose in the next few years will determine which future we'll see.
With forecasters saying that 2 million mark could be less than 10 years away, some are saying we don't have a few years to work it out. If the right choices aren't made now, it could be too late. Growth will overwhelm and destroy the quality of life that has been this community's hallmark and has provided the great attraction.
Predicting the future may not be an exact science, but if the post-World War II history of Southern Nevada has taught anything, it's that everyone always underestimates.
A 1990 county Water Quality Management Plan, for example, predicted a population of 935,000 for the year 2000 -- a number that newcomers trampled into the desert dust less than four years later.
As of July, the county had an estimated 1.1 million residents -- all but 43,000 living in the Las Vegas Valley.
State Demographer Dean Judson's official forecast has the county breaking 2 million sometime in late 2009. But Judson also does high and low alternate population projections, and his most aggressive shows 2 million in late 2006.
Judson points out that his high projection for 1996 was too low. He'll be coming out with a new set soon and it's likely the official timeline will be moving up.
Judson admits he's "fairly bullish" on Southern Nevada's future growth. He sees the aging baby boomers as a Las Vegas bonanza.
"They're reaching an age where they have more income," Judson says, "and will presumably be wanting to spend it on entertainment."
Besides, he doesn't want to be just another prognosticator aiming too low.
"Nevada," he says, "has a persistent tendency to outgrow forecasts."
The Clark County Department of Comprehensive Planning, meanwhile, is using more conservative figures generated by UNLV's Center for Business and Economic Research that show the county hitting 2 million in late 2013.
So what will 2 million people look like?
Says Judson: "Take a scene that you're familiar with, a neighborhood or a shopping mall and freeze it in your mind.
"Everywhere you see a person, you now see another person. Everywhere you see two cars, put in a third car. And everywhere you see an empty space, fill it with development."
* Official predictions notwithstanding, many folks have a hard time believing we'll grow that much.
There isn't enough water, or the air quality will turn bad, or the land will run out.
Government and utility planning officials, however, say none of those issues can be seen as limiting growth.
But even if there's no theoretical lid to growth in the valley, many people -- including Las Vegas Mayor Jan Laverty Jones and County Commission Chairwoman Yvonne Atkinson Gates -- are sure there is another limit.
The valley could destroy itself.
If the cities and county and state let Southern Nevada's public facilities get much further behind the population curve, the area's quality of life will get so bad that people will stop coming.
Including tourists.
And when tourists stop coming -- or even slow down a bit -- Las Vegans will start leaving.
The formulas for disaster go something like this:
Tourist slowdown = gaming expansion slowdown = construction industry slowdown = construction worker exodus, followed by gaming layoffs and exodus.
Also:
Tourist slowdown = gaming revenue slowdown = rising taxes = seniors exodus and business slowdown = plummeting revenue base = crumbling metropolitan area.
It's not a pretty picture, but quite a few people say it could be in the valley's future.
Jones and Gates say the valley will never reach 2 million if state and local governments don't put quality of life at the top of their priority lists.
"People won't move here," Jones says. "Growth will stop itself and people will begin to leave because it won't be a place they choose to live and raise their children."
Says Gates: "If we don't take care of these needs, we don't have to worry about 2 million people. Even if they do come, they wouldn't stay because the quality of life is going to be so dismal."
Nor will businesses move here, dooming the city and county's push for economic diversification, which Jones calls "one of the keys to a first-class community."
The city wants to lure high-paying technical and professional jobs to wean itself from dependence on gaming, Jones says, but those companies immediately start asking about the schools and recreation programs and "cultural base."
They want to be able to offer their employees good quality of life so they can recruit and keep the best. And while the county's taxes may be low, Jones says businesses "will put livability over tax environment, long-range."
Still, she's optimistic about the future. "If there is the will to create a truly first-class community, we can do it."
We're not there yet?
"No," Jones says, emphatically, "it's not a first-class city. We don't have adequate schools. We don't have adequate parks.
"I'd like to see far more restricted neighborhood planning. And I'd still like to see a downtown with a cultural base."
Nevertheless, the mayor says we can still create that first-class community and keep taxes low -- if all the politicians put their egos aside and work together.
Gates also says she's sure "everyone cares enough about the community to come up with a solution."
But Jones says the question of how to pay for all the needed public facilities -- the so-called infrastructure -- "has to be dealt with in this Legislature."
"Time's up," the mayor says. "Everybody has to come to the table, gaming, business, the development community, government, and make some hard decisions.
"Time's up!"
* To some residents, time is past.
"Quality of life is being lost as we speak," says environmentalist Jeff van Ee.
The 25-year resident says he's seen the valley's population double twice since he moved here at age 22.
The first doubling, from 250,000 to 500,000 "wasn't too bad," he says. "There were even some positive changes."
The second doubling, to 1 million, even brought a number of benefits such as better shopping and restaurants.
"But the next doubling," van Ee says, "is going to produce some changes that really concern me."
He decries the familiar list: overcrowded schools, the dearth of parks and ballfields, rising crime and vandalism, increasing pressure on nearby state and national parks.
But van Ee says he's "particularly pessimistic" about air quality and traffic.
"People are now commuting longer distances than they ever have before. The vehicle miles traveled are increasing at a greater rate."
Taxes will have to go up to pay for public improvements, he says, and many folks aren't going to like it. People will leave.
Van Ee says he's been asking his friends about the prospect of 2 million in the valley and what it will mean.
"A lot of them are saying, 'Well, that's not really what I bargained for.' For this small valley of ours, it's a lot."
Neighborhood activist Sue Brna cites many of the same problems.
Like van Ee, the former president of the Charleston Heights Neighborhood Association says she's heard of companies looking to locate here who have loved the climate and tax structure, but crossed the valley off their list after one look at the school system.
"The schools are so bad ... they say, 'Oh forget it. I can't bring my people here. I can't do that to them.'"
Brna also sees looming disaster in the air quality and traffic.
"People will be leaving their cars parked on the streets and walking to work.
"They're in a crisis now, whether they realize it or not," Brna says of the valley's leaders. "Yet they continue to invite people to come here with no promise of tomorrow."
* No doubt about it, the one quality-of-life issue that gets in everybody's face every day is traffic.
People think it's bad now. But imagine adding another million people and about a half-million cars.
Sure, there's a beltway under construction and the Spaghetti Bowl is being expanded and U.S. 95 soon will be shrugging off homes to widen its girth.
Despite all that, things aren't going to get any better.
That extra capacity will quickly be buried in the onslaught of immigrant rolling stock.
In fact, a two-year study by the Regional Transportation Commission proposes $2.2 billion in road and transit improvements just to keep congestion no worse than it is today.
Faster-than-predicted growth could doom even that goal.
Michael Naylor, head of the Clark County Health District's Air Pollution Control Division, says reaching 2 million in 10 years would be disastrous.
"We can't build the freeways fast enough or get funding for mass transit," Naylor says. "It would totally break the system."
The question is, how many vehicles would it take to cause a system meltdown?
Actually, says Lee Gibson, planning manager for the RTC, there is no engineering standard to predict when traffic will grind to a halt.
"You can sit in an intersection for six or seven cycles if you want to," Gibson says. "It depends on if you like your lifestyle or not."
Of course, Gibson, who came to town 7 1/2 years ago to put together a transit system, isn't being paid to let everybody stew in their fumes.
His job is to get people out of their cars and onto buses -- and, hopefully, a monorail. The reality is sooner or later those long waits at the intersections are going to force people onto mass transit.
A recent study of the resort corridor asked: How many roadways would we have to build by 2015 if we don't have more transit?
"It turns out," Gibson says, "you would have to build four Maryland Parkways, north-south, and three Tropicana Avenues, east-west, and you just can't do that.
"What are you going to do, go punch a hole through Treasure Island? Are you going to go take the Tropicana? It's just not going to happen."
That said, however, Gibson refuses to buy into any post-apocalyptic scenarios for the valley's future.
For one thing, Gibson's helping to build "the fastest-growing transit system in the country." Citizens Area Transit ridership has grown 34 percent a year for the last four years.
He likes to point out that last year more people, 35 million, rode CAT buses than the 30 million who came through McCarran International Airport.
That still only accounts for 1.2 percent of all the trips in the valley.
But as population density increases, Gibson says mass transit will become more cost-effective.
"We've reached critical mass," he says.
Part of the RTC's $2.2 billion plan calls for construction of a monorail system and boosting the bus fleet from 192 today to 500. Such a system would handle 8 to 10 percent of the valley's trips, Gibson says.
Gibson's optimism, however, goes beyond the dutiful plugging of his agency's system. He -- and other valley planners -- believe there are solutions that will work.
It isn't the growth Gibson worries about.
"The real threat is that the public sector, the business community and elected officials will run out of innovations. ... If we don't innovate -- yes -- we'll break down."
To Gibson, the future looks like a monorail through the resort corridor and reaching into other major residential areas. It has lots more buses and bus stops and traffic lanes dedicated to buses and car pools.
But the changes will have to run deeper, say Gibson and other officials.
People's tastes and habits will have to change. They'll not only have to use transit more, they'll have to live with closer mixtures of residential, commercial and office or industrial development so they don't have to travel as far to work and shop.
At the same time, city and county planning will have to change to make that possible. They'll have to insist on mixed uses and development of vacant land within the urban area.
If, for example, some residential development were mixed into the Union Pacific Railroad land surrounding the Clark County Government Center, Gibson says, you could add a lot more residents with very little traffic impact.
The same is true for redeveloping the downtown area, Gibson says. "It's just using what you have more efficiently."
* Local planners aren't shy about admitting that, historically, the valley's planning process hasn't done all it should.
Harris, the county's advanced planning manager, says planning was "mostly a matter of accommodating development."
John Schlegel, the city's acting planning director, characterizes the planning department's role as "trying to cope with the results of growth."
"We're betting on the come," Schlegel says. "We approve development and then try to catch up."
Too many people, he says, "don't want to recognize that we do have restrictions. We've been really good at pushing off dealing with some of these problems. But at some point, you have to pay the piper."
Nevertheless, Harris and Schlegel say things are changing and both are optimistic about the future.
Besides, growing to 2 million only takes us to the size of metropolitan areas such as Denver, Tampa and Portland -- not exactly the end of the Earth.
"I don't have the doom-and-gloom," Schlegel says. "I just think it'll be a bigger, somewhat dirtier and more expensive place to live.
"But it'll continue to be a land of opportunity and one of the most exciting places in the world."
Harris agrees.
A decaying, Bladerunner metropolis?
"That'll never happen," he says without a shred of doubt.
Even the sprawl of Orange County, where Harris grew up, won't happen here, he says.
"Part of our job is to find solutions, and I think there are solutions out there."
Harris talks about mass transit and telecommuting and putting employment centers out in areas where all the new housing is going up.
"If we're going to support that many people," Harris says, "we're going to have to do things a little differently. We're going to have to view life a little differently.
"In 20 years, I'd bet the bank not everybody is getting into their car at 7:30 and driving into the downtown area. That just can't happen."
Even van Ee, the environmentalist, hasn't lost his enthusiasm for Las Vegas.
"It's a grand experiment here," van Ee says. "I see Las Vegas becoming increasingly prominent in the world.
"But in the future, will we still be one of the jewels of the desert? Will we keep bringing people here?
"The quality of life can't be neglected much longer or our image will suffer."
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