New Town about to BOOM
Population up 50% from 2010, could double again
By Jerry W. Kram
Anyone who has tried to rent a place to live in New Town the last few years can tell you that there are more people in New Town than there are places to put them. A new study presented to the New Town City Council last week documents how much the city’s population has increased and estimates how many more people will move here over the next two decades.
The council authorized the $5,000 study conducted by the first of Ondracek and Bertsch at its February meeting. City Engineer Steve Ike presented the studies conclusions – New Town has grown 50 percent in the last four years and that population will double again by 2030.
"This will obviously have a lot of implications for how the council will have to plan both for growth and the impact on city services," Ike said. "The good news is that a lot of the steps we are taking now should help us handle most of this growth."
Since New Town was founded in the 1950s after several towns were flooded by the inundation of Lake Sakakwea, the city’s population had peaked at 1,568 in 1960 and remained under 1,400 from 1980-2000. With the coming of the Bakken Oil boom in the latter part of the last decade, census figures show the city grew to 1,925 in 2010. A Census Bureau estimate put New Town’s population at 2,249 in 2012.
