Imagine planning a backyard party and having no idea how many people will show up. Your spouse expects 79 guests; the kids insist it will be closer to 58; and you think it will be somewhere around 70 — choosing a middle ground because it seems safer.
Amid those competing insights, how do you plan? How many chairs do you rent? How many tables do you set? How much food must be prepared? The last thing you want is to not have enough space for all the guests or to have people leave hungry. So you take your best guess and hope for the best.
That is the conundrum facing the Clark County Council as members begin the process of updating the Comprehensive Growth Plan. As the county’s website explains: “Comprehensive plans are long-range policy guides for how a jurisdiction plans to manage growth and development with respect to the natural environment and available resources.”
For populous areas operating under the state’s Growth Management Act, the required plan must be turned into state officials by June 2025. And the first step for determining where to allow for residential, commercial and industrial development is to figure out just how many people will be living here in 2045.
“Land is finite,” first-term Councilor Glen Yung said. “We only have so much of it, and we all want to keep Clark County as green as we possibly can and undisturbed as we possibly can. At the same time, we need to be able to make sure people have homes that they can live in, that there’s jobs that support people who live here and there’s a transportation system that works properly.”
That is where the backyard party analogy comes into play. The state Office of Financial Management has given three possible estimates for the county’s population in 2045: 791,809; 698,416; or 576,151. Councilors must choose a number as the guideline for developing and providing services over the next 20 years.
To that end, they are seeking input. A public hearing on the 2045 population projection is scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Public Service Center sixth-floor hearing room at 1300 Franklin St., Vancouver. Following a staff report, public comment will be accepted.
Such openness is laudable; transparency and public involvement are essential to effective government. As Yung said about seeking public engagement, “You reach out in every single way you possibly can and you do it in earnest, with meaning behind it and not just to check a box off.”
Seeking public input on something as nebulous as predicted population growth could be a futile exercise.
Unless a commenter is a demographer or economist, the odds are that they will express what they hope the population will be in 20 years, not what it likely will be based upon rational analysis.
That is OK; there likely are no drawbacks to having the public involved and to considering a variety of perspectives. And the procedure is an improvement from the last time the Comprehensive Growth Plan was considered, when a then-county councilor tried to hijack the process.
From 1980 to 2000, Clark County’s population grew 80 percent; over the next two decades, it increased another 46 percent to its current total of a little over 500,000. Both of those growth rates wildly exceeded the national rate, and the local boom shows no sign of slowing down.
All of which creates a difficult task for county councilors. We hope they have enough place settings.
