Countdown to the Population Count

Unfair Park was told this morning by a local government official that on Thursday, the U.S. Census Bureau will officially release its list of the most populous cities in the U.S. Some media outlets already have theirs (don't look at us), so they can prep pieces for their Thursday editions, but one site's done jumped the gun -- so we'll let them sorta, kinda tell you what most editors already know. (Update: I see the link is no longer working; somebody musta got a spankin'. Good thing I copied the most important info after the jump, just for our Friends.)

Caveat: It's an incomplete release, without tables and rankings, but this much about our fair city and its surrounding boom towns we did gather from the site:

Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio made the list of the 10 highest numerical gainers in terms of population. (And did you know that in the 1910 census, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio each had populations of less than 100,000 people? Well, now you do.) "Overall," it says, "eight Texas cities were among the 25 biggest numerical gainers to lead all states."

But this is perhaps the most fascinating revelation:

The estimates also reveal that many of the nation's fastest-growing cities are suburbs. North Las Vegas, Nev., a suburb of Las Vegas, had the nation's fastest growth rate among large cities (100,000 or more population) between July 1, 2005, and July 1, 2006. North Las Vegas' population increased 11.9 percent during the period, to 197,567. It was joined on the list of the 10 fastest-growing cities by three in the Dallas metro area: McKinney (ranking second), Grand Prairie (sixth) and Denton (ninth). In the same vicinity, Fort Worth just missed the list, ranking 11th.