Las Vegas now over 600,000

Though Las Vegas didn't grow as fast over the past year as it did in previous years, the city still managed to push past the 600,000 mark, according to an estimate the city released Tuesday.

City staff members estimated there were 602,697 people living in Las Vegas on July 1, an increase of 1.9 percent -- about 11,100 people -- over the city's estimated population for the same day of 2006.

The milestone was expected. The city's fiscal 2008 budget projected a population of 603,000.

"Within the last three or four years, Las Vegas has been among the 30 largest cities in the country," said Margo Wheeler, the city's director of planning and development. "It puts us in the company of other large cities in the country that we work with and learn from."

Keeping track of the area's booming population takes a lot of time and can be confusing for the outside observer, since the city's numbers have been diverging wildly from estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau put Las Vegas' 2006 population at 552,500 -- not enough to crack the top 25 cities by population in 2006.

"Any high-growth city tends to be undercounted," said Richard Wassmuth, a statistical analyst for Las Vegas. The discrepancy in 2006 was "about 39,000, so we're getting up around a 6 or 7 percent difference now."

Las Vegas calculated its estimate using dwelling unit statistics, an occupancy survey conducted each year by the U.S. Post Office and average household size.

The postal occupancy survey is unique to Clark County, Wassmuth said.

"We have such growth, we pay the postal service to do that every year," he said. "We have the most updated information."

Tracking the city's population takes a lot of work, but the information is used for planning and funding decisions.

"Healthy population growth numbers not only speak to the city's lure and attraction ... they also play an important role in the allocation of both state and federal revenues," said finance director Mark Vincent. "We need to ensure that the city receives its fair share."

Though the figure is only an estimate, Las Vegas' population is comparable to Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C. and El Paso, Texas.

Since 2002, Las Vegas' population has increased by about 100,000 people, an uptick of almost 20 percent. From 2002 to 2006, the population increased an average of 3.2 percent annually. Population has more than doubled since 1990, when residents numbered about 286,000.

Las Vegas has about a third of Clark County's 1.9 million residents.