– County planners put it on a slide themselves. When the Commissioners of St. Mary’s County held a work session on the draft 2050 comprehensive plan on Sept. 15, a staff member told them the state originally projected the county would grow 34% and that “those numbers were adjusted in 2025,” down. The commissioners then voted to send the plan to a public hearing anyway, with a decision now expected Oct. 20. The question for anyone reading the document is which version of the number is still holding it up.
The 34% appears on page 3 of the Public Hearing Draft, dated May 11, which says the county is “projected” to grow by that share from 2020 to 2045. It traces to the county’s Trends and Projections Report, dated July 22, 2025, whose population chart cites the Maryland Department of Planning’s December 2020 projections. That series put the county at 115,150 people in 2020 and 153,900 in 2045, a gain of 38,750.
The state has since moved. A preliminary projection issued in December 2022 already had 152,070 residents in 2045. A March 2025 preliminary release, and the department’s November 2025 table, put St. Mary’s at 116,730 people in 2025, 145,220 in 2045 and 152,330 in 2050. Measured from the 2020 Census count of 113,777, that is growth of 31,443 people, or about 28%, by 2045. By 2050 it is 38,553, or about 34%, so the state has not abandoned the 34% so much as pushed it five years down the road. Compared with the December 2022 series, every five-year mark is lower by roughly 4.5%; by 2050 the gap is 7,190 people. (The 28% and 4.5% figures are the Chronicle’s arithmetic on the state’s published tables.)
Reality has tracked the lower line. The Maryland Department of Planning’s March 2026 estimates table, built on Census Bureau data, shows 116,692 residents on July 1, 2025, a gain of about 2.6% since April 2020 and within 40 people of the state’s revised 2025 projection. The 2022 projection had expected 122,230 by then.
Even the lower forecast is a stretch, though. To reach 145,220 by 2045, the county has to add about 28,500 people in 20 years, roughly 1,400 a year. From 2020 to 2025 the estimates show about 560 a year. The state’s own household projections call for 12,195 more households between 2020 and 2045, up from 41,845 to 54,040.
At the work session, staff told commissioners the plan’s development capacity appendix still carries the original projection, 38,750 new residents, which equates to almost 15,000 new homes at the county’s household size. That figure has “since been modified and reduced,” staff said, and the housing number would drop with it. The 38,750 matches the 2020-to-2045 gap in the older series; staff described it as running through 2050, a point the Chronicle could not resolve because the appendix text was not available online. The staff member said they suspected the county would not see the growth the state projects, in part because developers, not existing taxpayers, are expected to pay for the infrastructure that new neighborhoods need.
County staff did not describe the projection as a promise. One staff member told commissioners the 2050 number “isn’t perceived as a target” but as the state’s forecast, and that the question is whether the plan’s growth areas can accommodate it. If the forecast falls, staff said, “you don’t have any issues,” because the county can handle less growth than planned. If growth runs well above it, they recommended checking in sooner than the usual 10 years. The state requires a review every five years; this plan proposes every three, with a briefing to the Planning Commission and commissioners.
That framing explains why much else the commissioners asked about was not quantified. Staff said no analysis has estimated the taxpayer cost of the growth the plan contemplates, calling a 25-year cost number unreliable and saying fiscal studies are normally done project by project. They said the plan does not project how many deputies the growth would require, or additional students by school level through 2050; the school system’s facilities master plan looks about six years out. A commissioner also said the state planning department had noted the draft lacked an analysis of water and sewer capacity against projected demand. Staff replied that capacity is evaluated project by project and pointed to action 1.1.3 and updated water and sewer maps as the follow-up.
Not everyone on the dais sees the numbers as the heart of the matter. At the Oct. 6 business meeting, a commissioner called the comprehensive plan “the 30,000 foot view,” adding that the real decisions on what goes where will come in the comprehensive zoning ordinance, which would take another couple of years. Another said the board would hold the public hearing that evening, and a county news release says written comments are accepted through 5 p.m. Oct. 13. The commissioners’ Oct. 20 agenda calls for a decision on the plan.
For residents the stakes are practical. The plan sets where roads, water and sewer, school sites and new housing are supposed to concentrate through 2050. A smaller forecast means less pressure on those systems on paper, but it also means any local pressure, such as crowding in the Leonardtown schools that one commissioner described, comes from where growth lands rather than from how much of it there is. And if the revised forecast turns out too low, as it has not so far, the three-year review would be the first checkpoint, in late 2029 or later, depending on when the plan is adopted.
Earlier Chronicle coverage tracked how the draft reached this point: the Aug. 18 briefing, the Sept. 15 work session and the hearing notice.
