Nye County officials often talk about the county's ranking as the third-largest in area in the country, (at least in the lower 48 states).

Lately another prominent ranking for Nye County has raised some eyebrows: sixth-place nationally on a list of the most economically stressed counties.

The Associated Press Stress Index compiled information from more than 3,100 counties nationwide. The county's stress index of 23.30 is based on the unemployment rate, the number of foreclosures and bankruptcies. Clark County is ranked seventh, with an index of 23.19 on a scale of one to 100 with a higher score being unfavorable.

The rating, using figures from August, showed Nye County had an unemployment rate of 15.8 percent, had 7.05 percent of the household units in some stage of foreclosure and 1.99 percent of individuals filing tax returns declaring bankruptcy.

The unemployment rate in Nye County, provided by the Nevada Division of Employment Training and Rehabilitation was even higher in September, at 16.1 percent. DETR statistics were used for the index.

Bill Verbeck, director of the Pahrump Great Basin College campus, which operates Career Connections, said the figures are accurate in that they track people who are on unemployment compensation. It doesn't include people who have exhausted their benefits or are underemployed, that is, are working less than full time, he said.

"My observation is we're a commuting community," Verbeck said. There's headlights as far as you can see commuting into Las Vegas for employment. A lot of those are not only construction workers but the hospitality industry, which has gotten hit pretty hard.

"I think there's a direct correlation between Las Vegas' increase in unemployment and ours. We haven't seen that many small business go down that employ a lot," he said.

The unemployment rate in Clark County, used for the index, was 13.4 percent. Clark County, however, had 8.66 percent of its household units in foreclosure and 2.9 percent of all income tax returns reflecting bankruptcy filings.

But Verbeck said it doesn't take as many unemployed to skew the statistics in Nye County.

"You don't need a substantial figure when you're looking at a figure of 38,000 people here," Verbeck said. "We were not in that bad shape a year ago, we were in the 6 to 7 percent range. That's when everything stopped here."

The Career Connections office in Pahrump, formerly Nevada JobConnect, has seen a steady increase in people seeking unemployment benefits every month, he said.

The non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for Nye County was only 7.9 percent in April 2008. But it rose above 10 percent by July, 2008 and reached 13 percent by January 2009, according to DETR statistics.

Darren Blomquist, marketing and communications manager for Realty Trac, a California company that provides data on foreclosures, said Nye County had 1,171 "distressed properties," meaning they were in some stage of foreclosure, anything from owners being in default of their mortgage payments to properties taken over by financial institutions. In August, Realty Trac estimated one in 14 homes in Nye County was in some stage of foreclosure, with 563 of the 1,171 distressed properties now owned by the lender.

The foreclosure totals rose from 1 in 43 homes in January 2008, with 370 properties in some state of foreclosure; it topped 1,000 properties by April 2009.

Blomquist said a lot of fast-growing areas in the Inland Empire of California have also been hard hit, where residents commute to Los Angeles.

"They bought at the top of the market in a risky loan market and now the owners are underwater. The loans are more than the property is worth," Blomquist said.

In many cases, the property owner didn't have to put much money down to buy a home, he said, making it easier to walk away from the mortgage.

But Blomquist said, "Lenders will not let you buy for another seven years if you have a foreclosure on your credit history."

Many of the most distressed counties in the U.S. are in the Southwest led by Imperial County, Calif., Yuma County, Ariz., Merced County, Calif., another commuter area, Lyon County, near Reno, and the only county outside the southwestern U.S., Lauderdale County, Tenn. After Nye and Clark counties, three more California counties made the top 10: Yuba County, San Joaquin County and Riverside County.

Bill Anderson, chief economist for DETR, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal Nevada's bedroom counties relied substantially on housing expansion and today, have Nevada's highest jobless rates.

Keith Schwer, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told the newspaper people living in outlying communities are people who may not have had as many economic resources and bought lower priced homes.

"What this is really telling us is that they were more vulnerable," Schwer said.

Al Balloqui, Pahrump economic development director, said the town will be applying for a second round of economic stimulus money.

"A third of the people go to Vegas and we don't have any industry here to speak of," Balloqui said.