One state. Every Nevada.
Three numbers the tourism authority, the airport and the Gaming Control Board each reported this week moved in three different directions, and nobody had lined them up side by side.
Nevada’s federal lawsuit centers on losing 71 percent of its paper Colorado River allocation, but two decades of conservation mean the state already draws far less than that entitlement, so the cut to water Southern Nevada actually uses works out to 56 percent, a gap no other outlet had calculated.
A comparison of the Bug, Stallion and Hawk fires’ own damage figures shows the smallest of the three by acreage destroyed homes at nearly 29 times the rate of the largest.
NV Energy filed two rate change requests with state regulators on the same Wednesday, one for each half of Nevada it serves, and both came wrapped in the same message about savings. Nobody had added the two filings together to see what a real bill in each region actually does.
The uncontained Hawk Fire has also become Washoe County’s second wildfire in nine days to top 15,000 acres, pushing this month’s cumulative burn past 3 percent of the county’s land.
An extreme heat warning holds Las Vegas through Sunday night, and the two Clark County agencies that track heat deaths are telling two different stories about how bad this summer has been, one of them 46 deaths, the other 16, and neither updated in over three weeks.
Professional and business services grew 5.9 percent over the past year, nearly five times faster than leisure and hospitality’s 1.2 percent, the industry most people still associate with the state.
A four year apartment building wave of close to 24,000 units has handed renters the leverage that a growing job market would normally take away.
Redfin data show Canadian interest in Las Vegas homes falling nearly one and a half times faster than actual Canadian tourism to the city, while the Canadian dollar, the explanation most often blamed, has barely moved in a year.
The federal government’s own water forecast shows Lake Mead approaching the elevation where Hoover Dam’s hydropower stops paying for itself, just as Las Vegas endures an Excessive Heat Warning through Friday and Nevada leans on nearly a quarter of the dam’s power.
