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County gains 3,500 people during 1998 Newest estimates track local boom Staff and wire reports Nine Oregon rural counties lost population last year, reflecting a trend that the economies of many sparsely populated areas are falling further behind the fast-growing Willamette Valley. However, Jackson County continues its booming ways, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates of county populations. Statewide, the declines ranged from 358 people in Coos County to seven in Clatsop County. Other declines were in a third coastal county -- Lincoln -- and six counties east of the Cascades: Lake, Sherman, Union, Wallowa, Wasco and Wheeler. It was the second year in a row that five of the counties -- Coos, Lake, Sherman, Union and Wheeler -- were on the declining population list. Jackson County, which had 169,300 people in 1997, jumped to 172,800 residents in 1998, said a spokeswoman for the Center for Population Research and Census at Portland State University. That's a jump from the 146,389 people living in the county during the last census taken in 1990. In neighboring Josephine County, growth has slowed substantially in recent years with roughly 73,000 people living in that county in 1997 as well as 1998, she said. But that figure was a steep jump from the 62,649 people listed in Josephine County in the 1990 census. Growth in Klamath County has also slowed with 61,600 people living there in 1997, compared to 62,000 the following year. The 1990 census found 57,702 people living in that county. Among counties with the fastest growing populations in 1998, Washington led the pack with a gain of 8,706 residents, followed by Clackamas, 4,343 and Deschutes, 4,037. In percentage terms, Deschutes was the fastest-growing Oregon county with a 4 percent increase. Others included: Washington, 2.2 percent; Clackamas, 1.3 percent; and Multnomah, 0.4 percent. But Multnomah remained the biggest county with 631,082 residents. "The metropolitan-area counties are growing faster than the state average," said Kanhaiya Vaidya, a state demographer at PSU. In 1990, he said, 70 percent of all Oregonians lived in the Willamette Valley. In the past eight years, 74 percent of the state's newcomers have moved to the valley. The state's overall population increased by 1.2 percent, or 38,702, to 3,281,974. The Census Bureau figures are for the 12 months ended in July of last year. The trend of slower growth in Oregon's rural counties was underscored by Gov. John Kitzhaber's recent growth task force report, which reported uneven population and jobs growth between urban and rural areas. The report said growth in the Willamette Valley has exceeded the rest of the state in every decade except the 1980s. However, PSU analyst George Hough was skeptical that so many coastal counties have actually lost population. He said that in recent years, there has been a decline in natural growth in some coastal counties, with more deaths than births, but that it has been offset by in-migration. The Census Bureau estimate for statewide growth of 1.2 percent was less than the 1.6 percent estimate by the PSU center. But the Census figures give Oregon about 14,000 more people than PSU's estimate of 3,268,000. PSU's estimate showed five Oregon counties with a decline in population last year: Benton, Curry, Malheur, Union and Wallowa. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA