I was just reading this morning new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and guess what was the fastest growing county in the entire country last year?
It was Mighty Maricopa!
Yes, Maricopa County in Arizona, which is dominated by the Metro Phoenix area, was the fasted growing county in the United States in the past year.
It added something over 50,000 people to it's population, which is now at about 4 and a half million people.
So then I did some more Googling around and found that the population of my little "town", Prescott Valley, is now estimated to be over 49 thousand souls and the "little city" to the southwest of us, Prescott, is estimated to have about 15 hundred fewer people.
I can still remember the first time I laid eyes on Prescott Valley, in 1972 when we moved to Phoenix from Indianapolis, Indiana.
We drove through it on a reconaissance tour of a small part of our new state one weekend.
The standing joke though mostly reality was that Prescott Valley was just street signs and crooked land speculators.
Those guys were getting rich convincing folks back in our country's hinterlands that Prescott Valley was a retirement paradise.
It took a few decades for the place which still officially calls itself a "town" to take off but now it's growing at a rate of nearly 2 percent a year.
The county I live in, Yavapai, now has an estimated population of just below 244 thousand.
Which should answer SWMBO's frequent questions when we are out in the community "Where are all these people coming from and where are they going?"
