The West Is Fastest-Growing Region in the Nation--and It’s Filling Up : Population: It had a 22% growth rate in the 1980s, twice the U.S. average. And with the people come the problems: crowded schools, crime, clogged roads.

It did not take a lot of charts and figures to convince Butch Barker that the wide-open West is filling up.

He saw the light--literally--two years ago, when the little Northern California town of Burney got its first traffic signal.

When Barker moved to Burney in 1981 for its clean air and country living, driving through town was clear sailing, as free as the mountains all around. Now it’s stop, go, stop, go--and life isn’t quite the same.

“It’s a symbolic thing,” Barker said. “Especially at first, you’d stop and immediately think of why the light was there and how it came to be.”

How it came to be, for Burney and a thousand other towns in the American West, can be answered with one simple statistic: The West is by far the nation’s fastest-growing region, with a 22% population jump in the 1980s, more than twice the national rate.

Newcomers are lured by the same qualities that beckoned early pioneers--open space, economic opportunity, a chance to start anew. But as more people chase the American Dream into the West, cherished notions of the boundless frontier collide with limits in an ever more crowded land.

Pastures vanish under asphalt, home prices soar, classrooms overflow, crime increases, highways clog, and pollution taints the air.

“We can’t continue to take the explosive growth of the last decade,” said Andrew Grose, president of Westrends, a project of the Western Office of the Council of State Governments. “Government is playing catch-up with all the problems.”

Nevada, up 50% in population, was the West’s fastest-growing state during the 1980s, followed by Alaska, Arizona, California, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, Hawaii, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Wyoming, down 4%, was the only Western state to lose population during the decade.

More recently, the nationwide recession has slowed but not stalled the region’s growth. From April, 1990, through last July, the West grew at an annual rate of 1.9%, compared to a 1.1% national rate, the Census Bureau reported.

Some Western growing pains:

* Crowded schools. The West has the nation’s highest birthrate and the highest percentage of residents under 18. Public school enrollment is expected to increase 1% by 2000, faster than any other region, according to a recent Westrends report.

* More crime. Westrends predicts that the West this decade will need about 360 new prisons costing $13 billion, more than any other region. The region’s crime rate, highest in the nation, is explained partly by a lack of community ties, Grose said. Half of all Westerners were born somewhere else, and once here they tend to move more often than other Americans.

* Culture shock. About 38% of all U.S. immigrants during the 1980s settled in the West, more than in any other region. Many immigrants speak little English; many work minimum-wage jobs or not at all, straining welfare and other services. Schools struggle with language barriers, and racism erupts as immigrants change the face of once predominantly white communities.

* Clogged highways. On the average, Westerners drive more miles each year than Americans in any other region, and the decade’s unparalleled growth has put more cars on the road, aggravating a serious backlog of highway construction and repair, Westrends said.

* Urban sprawl. Half a million new houses popped up in Southern California during the 1980s, half of them within 80 miles of downtown Los Angeles. South of Seattle, the Green River Valley once was known as the Head Lettuce Capital of the World. Now its fertile soil is buried under parking lots and industrial warehouses.

Growth is not all bad, of course. It has helped forge a prosperity allowing the West to weather the current recession better than much of the nation.

Fast-growing Western cities such as San Diego, up 27% in population between 1980 and 1990, or Boise, up 23%, are the envy of shrinking Eastern cities such as Pittsburgh, down 13%, or Chicago, down 7%.

Even within the region, some depressed areas would not mind a few growth-related problems. Western cities are sucking up most of the new arrivals, while many once-vital rural areas based on logging, farming or mining are withering away.

The uneven growth has intensified longstanding rivalries. In Oregon and Washington, fast-growing urban areas west of the Cascade Range are gaining economic and political clout at the expense of rural areas east of the mountains. Booming Las Vegas has thrown Nevada’s traditional north-south political balance out of whack.

And California, the nation’s most populous state with 30 million residents, has gained the enmity of neighboring states, where residents lump all the evils of unbridled growth under one easy label: Californication.

They look at the sprawling Los Angeles Basin--where commuters spend up to four hours a day crawling along clogged highways--and fear that their own communities may be headed down the same road.

To control growth, Washington state legislators last year completed a package of growth-management laws creating planning guidelines for the state’s fastest-growing areas. Belatedly, California officials are starting to forge their own statewide plan.

“You have even a super-boom town like Las Vegas saying, hold on, we have to slow down and take a look at long-term growth,” Grose said.

It is all part of what Charlie Hales calls the drawbridge syndrome.

“You get people moving here from some other area who think they’ve found a piece of heaven,” said Hales, of the Home Builders Assn. in Portland. “It’s only human to say: ‘Well, I’ve got mine, now let’s pull up the drawbridge and make sure those other suckers don’t get in.’ ”

Planning for growth forces cooperation among cities, counties and states that are more accustomed to competing. And while planners stake their hopes on regional coordination, it is hard enough even at the state or local level to find agreement on what the West’s future should be.

Consider Oregon, where legislators in 1974 enacted a statewide growth-management plan that is still the most comprehensive--and controversial--in the West. It sets urban-growth boundaries for each of the state’s 241 cities.

A land-use reform group called 1,000 Friends of Oregon hopes to fine-tune that law to create its image of the ideal society: high-density cities with vibrant downtowns, surrounded by farms and forests unmarred by suburban sprawl.

“It’s a return to an older concept, a village concept,” said Mary Kyle McCurdy, attorney for the group.

“It’s a feudal system,” retorted Bill Moshofsky, an attorney with a group called Oregonians in Action. He said there is no need to change the West’s unconfined, automobile-based culture. Energy worries are overstated, and packed-in living has no appeal, he said.

“People like to putter. People like to have some land,” Moshofsky said. “It’s part of the American Dream.”

The debate no doubt will continue. Western population growth is expected to slow slightly this decade but remain far above the national rate well into the next century. Managing that growth will present a special challenge for independent-minded, sky’s-the-limit Westerners.

The West still has vast tracts of open land, making it appear that there is plenty of room to grow. But most of that land is inhospitable desert, or federally owned and reserved for wilderness, grazing or timber production. The Census Bureau says 86% of all Westerners are crammed into urban areas, compared to a national average of 75%.

“The frontier has closed, but the myth of it being the frontier is still here,” Grose said.

He believes Westerners are slowly rethinking their unbounded boosterism of the past, realizing there’s not another empty valley over the horizon if they mess up where they are.

“Across the West in this decade, we’re going to see a whole lot more interest in preserving the quality of life and less about economic growth,” Grose said. “There are real limits for the West’s ability to sustain more and more population.”