to do with people dying of thirst than our metropolis’ growth approaching the national average. That’s right. We’re normalizing, maybe even maturing. And like a grown-up 151-year-old state should, Nevada requires that 20 percent of its energy comes from renewable sources (and not less than 6 percent of that energy must be solar-powered).
2016
At Symphony Park, residences begin opening and will continue to do so through 2021. The new urbanites will appreciate the value of Intake No. 3 at Lake Mead, installed by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to ensure that Las Vegas has water when lake levels fall low enough to put Intake No. 1 out of service. Meantime, to generate electricity at its Renewable Resources Campus, the city of Henderson begins harnessing the power of reclaimed water that runs downhill through pipes. But the $20 million facility’s main renewable-energy feature is solar power, enough to produce four megawatts. Las Vegas expects the return of the U.S. Bowling Congress Open Championship, which was a hit here in 2009, having brought in 213,000 visitors and $120 million.6 And Greg Maddux, who had an amazing 23-year roll in the majors, becomes the first Las Vegan to be enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
2014
Is this the year Vegas bounces back? It’s the earliest that McCarran International Airport will start getting back up to speed, an aviation expert says,7 and yet the total enplanements will still fall short of the total six years ago. Maybe the brand-new DesertXpress will pick up the tourism slack. The $4 billion train, hitting speeds of up to 150 miles per hour, will get visitors from Victorville, California, to Las Vegas in 80 minutes.
Here’s some needed economic confidence: The Nevada Workforce Informer8 expects there to be 41 percent more construction workers than 10 years ago. They’ll be building houses for all the new hospitality industry workers, whose numbers are up 42 percent. If you like birthdays, Nevada has a big one on October 31: It’s the date the state joined the union 150 years ago. You’ll be able to celebrate the sesquicentennial with dinner at super-chef Charlie Palmer’s new boutique hotel downtown. (Roasted mountain bluebird, anyone?) Not to spoil the party, but researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography give Vegas a 1-in-10 chance of running out of water by now.9
2015
Given that last projection, maybe a blogger named Miles10 was right: “By 2015 the city itself will have been reclaimed by the desert.” Coincidently, this is the year Carrot Top’s time expires at Luxor. Undaunted, the Southern Nevada Water Authority begins importing 134,000 acre-feet per year of groundwater from White Pine County. And our growth rate—2.6 percent, down from 3.4 in 2009—continues to decline, but the county demographer says it has less
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Let’s hope the Legislature is mature enough to replenish the Millennium Scholarship fund, which is expected to run dry this year. Perhaps some of our next generation’s graduates will be agriculture majors: It was suggested during an architecture workshop on “a post-peak oil Las Vegas”11 that, by now, strip malls could be converted “into open spaces for agriculture for biofueling.” Too bad Los Angeles didn’t get to host the 2016 Olympic Games, because in its proposal the city indicated that Las Vegas’ 200,000 hotel rooms would come in handy. It would have been interesting to see where those rooms would have come from (there were 141,000 rooms as of mid-2009) and how many Olympic-goers would have commuted by high-speed train.