FRANKFORT — Hardly a meeting of the Richmond City Commission goes by without an annexation item on the agenda. In the past year alone, nearly 2,000 acres have been pulled into the city limits, which now encompass 15,000 acres.

        Most of it has been farmland, but with growth patterns in the Madison County community, it could soon turn into apartment complexes, strip shopping centers or subdivisions.

        “We have such a good city, everybody wants to get in,” Richmond City Manager David Evans said only half-jokingly.

        Enough people have moved or been taken in during the last decade to add a third to Richmond's population, according to 1999 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau released Friday.

        “We're really trying to get ahead of the hounds a little bit,” Mayor Ann Durham said.

        Richmond is among the fastest-growing cities in Kentucky, where cities generally are not really growing all that much. Some of them are shrinking as residents flee to suburbs.

        Of the 10 largest cities in Kentucky, the census found four that actually lost population from 1990 to 1999 and two others that had growth of less than 1 percent.

        Ron Crouch, Kentucky's demographer at the Urban Studies Center at the University of Louisville, said through 1998, fully 90 percent of population growth in Kentucky during the decade had been outside city limits.

        In the case of Lexington, Kentucky's only merged city-county government, both factors came into play.

        The rural areas of Fayette County are disappearing under subdivision tracts. The population grew from 225,366 in 1990 to an estimated 243,785 in 1999, an 8.2 percent jump.

        “Nobody here, I think, wants to be the biggest city in the state,” said Lexington Mayor Pam Miller.

        Louisville, on the other hand, does want to keep its position as the state's largest city. But unless something happens, it seems destined to give up the spot.

        Louisville lost 6.2 percent of its population in the decade and is now estimated to have 253,128 people, not many more than Lexington.

        The number is somewhat misleading because Jefferson County remains a huge growth area. Louisville is landlocked by the hundreds of other incorporated cities in the county, but a merger proposal on the ballot on Nov. 7 could reverse the trend.

        Many cities in Campbell and Kenton counties, considered part of the burgeoning Northern Kentucky suburbs, are also losing population with the real growth in Boone County.

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