Column: Las Vegas the next Nevada capital?

I let out a hearty chuckle the other day as I read a chapter from the book, "Stories from the Sagebrush: Celebrating Northern Nevada at the Millennium," written by Don Cox and published in 1999 by the Nevada Humanities Committee.

The book was given to me recently by a close friend. Little did I know that I would find something inside of it that genuinely tickled my funny bone.

There is a chapter about Carson City toward the back of the book, and within that is mentioned a bona fide fear that Las Vegas might one day replace the town Abe Curry built as capital of the Silver State.

I laughed. Kind of loudly, too.

Mind you, I'm not laughing at Carson City, my endearing home town for the past decade. I'm laughing about the notion that an historic state capital — along with more than 150 years of infrastructure — would be moved 400 miles south just because Las Vegas is the population center of Nevada and tends to bellyache the loudest.

Plenty of states feature capital cities that are far from the largest in population or activity.

Take Albany, New York, as an example. Not even a blip on the population radar compared with New York City — the largest municipality in the United States since the census began around 1790 — and yet Albany, founded 170 years after the Big Apple, has remained the seat of government for New York State since 1797.

Chicago is the largest city in all of Midwestern America, and yet Springfield has served as the Illinois state capital since 1839 when former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln lived there as a practicing frontier lawyer.

I was born in Salem, Oregon, 90 minutes south of Portland, overwhelmingly the Beaver State's largest city and clear population center. Moving the Oregon state capital 100 miles north would have been much easier than Nevada moving its capital a full day's drive south.

But it didn't and it hasn't.

Either has Sacramento lost its capital city status despite being dwarfed in population size by Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, which easily consume the greatest amount of state resources.

That the largest population centers in a state tend to sap the most funds from state government seems only logical. But just because most of the money goes there doesn't mean the seat of government belongs there.

I see Carson City as a stabilizing influence to the boom-or-bust reputation of Las Vegas, now with a population of two million people. During the last recession, Sin City suffered the most economically by far than anywhere else in Nevada. Losses there alone gave our state the dubious distinction of being the hardest hit throughout the country.

Washoe County, Carson City and the rural counties suffered, too, but to a much lesser extent. Clark County instead looked to Carson City for stabilization, because it had none of its own.

When the book "Stories of the Sagebrush" was printed 19 years ago, Carson City's population was mentioned to be around 50,000. Today, almost two decades later, it's about 55,000.

Both Washoe and Clark counties have gone through substantial growing pains in that time, including soaring population increases, housing crises, as well as signficant job gains and losses; the severity of which Carson City hasn't felt, because it is more steady, moving at a slower pace, and inching along instead of trying to bound ahead.

This serves Carson City well. We've had our good times and our hard times here. Those will come and go. But Carson City and its steady feel remain.

Similar to Sacramento and Salem, Carson City has served as a pivotal political center for more than a century and a half; first as a territorial capital and later as the seat of state government upon Nevada achieving its statehood on Oct. 31, 1864.

There is so much history in Carson City, among its infrastructure as much as its architecture, that to move state government operations somewhere else — and especially some place several hundred miles away — seemed so absurd to me at the time that I couldn't help but laugh.

I know the topic is a sore spot for native and long-time Nevadans, so I beg your pardon if you feel I am making light of the subject.

But the prospect of such a move would be so costly and messy for the state that it's unrealistic.

The price tag alone would break Nevada's budget, already tight enough to begin with each biennium. Imagine having to construct all of the headquarters for each state department and its subsidiary divisions, not to mention build a new governor's mansion, a new Capitol and/or legislative building, Nevada POST Academy, pick up and relocate all of the historical monuments, so on and so forth.

Then there's the cost of moving people, furnishings and supplies from existing headquarters in Carson City to a point way south of here; one that has already been experiencing a major water shortage crisis because of demand from a sprawling population and limited supply.

Moving even more people down there would put a further strain on that region's already evaporating water resources.

Speaking candidly, a plan to relocate the Nevada state capital would likely turn into a logistical and financial catastrophe; something I doubt either the state or Las Vegas are prepared to deal with or pay for considering Southern Nevada's economic and natural resource vulnerabilities.

That's not to say it can't or won't happen, of course. State capitals — even the nation's seat of government — have been moved before.

But the last state to do so was Oklahoma more than a century ago, according to an article published by the Nevada Independent last year. And that occurred less than three years after statehood was granted to the territory, so everything was still very new.

Carson City, on the other hand, has existed a half-century longer than Las Vegas. Roots have taken here, deep ones not so easily displaced.

The Nevada Independent article from January 2017 also contained polling data, showing that an overwhelming majority of Nevada residents — including a supermajority in Las Vegas — favored keeping the state capital where it's at and where it has always been: at the base of the Carson Range of the mighty Sierra Nevada, where Abraham Curry helped found a community.

Sixty percent of residents polled in Clark County favored keeping Nevada's state capital in Carson City, compared with only 21 percent open to relocating it. In Reno the difference was even greater at 91-4 percent, respectively. Across rural Nevada, the score was 88-7 in favor of keeping the capital where it's at.

Nevadans have spoken, rather categorically, on the issue. And I don't think anything can legitimately happen anyway without consent of Nevadans, either.

Conspiracy theories are interesting to banter back and forth about, even our worst fears that Carson City will be replaced by Las Vegas as the Nevada state capital.

Don't bet on it.

Odds remain in Carson City's favor, now and well into the foreseeable future, because Nevadans value the historic significance of Carson City much more than they do the convenience of putting a state capital where most of the people live.

Carson City tells the story of an entire state; not merely as a government seat, but having been at the very center of Nevada's growth and development from the earliest years of territorial settlement through statehood and beyond.

Carson City truly exists in the hearts of Nevadans, and that's something residents of this community can take comfort in.