For years, growth in the Denver Metro area has been dominated by suburban counties such as Weld and Douglas.

• The new growth leader

But for 2009, as the Denver Post's Burt Hubbard reports this morning, the surprise leader on the large county growth board is Denver, jumping 2.9 percent from July 1, 2008, to July 1, 2009, reaching 610,345 people.

That's almost 6,000 more people than the 2009 estimate for El Paso County, the state's second most populous. In the same period, El Paso grew 1.5 percent to 604,542 people.

Incidentally, San Juan County, the state's least populous, grew by 1.6 percent. That equates to 9 people, which brought the county to a population of 574.