How many more deputies will St. Mary’s County need if it grows the way its 2050 plan allows? A commissioner put that question to county planners at the Sept. 15 work session on the draft St. Mary’s 2050 Comprehensive Plan, and the answer was that the plan does not say. Staff said that is by design.
The plan “isn’t trying to reach a particular target where other things sort of fall into place,” a staff member said, adding that the Sheriff’s Office is a review agency and has been actively engaged in drafting. A comprehensive plan, staff said, is “more of a 30,000-foot view, rather than boots on the ground.” A second staff member added that deputy staffing is usually driven by calls for service and recent trends, generally on a roughly five-year horizon. Looking out to 2050, the staff member said, what a county might need in new employees “gets way murkier.” The Sheriff’s Office also sits on the county’s technical evaluation committee, staff noted, so it is notified of projects in the pipeline.
The commissioner did not stop at the number. Reading from action 1.4.3 on page 157, which calls for adequate new stations and office space in growth areas and coverage for remote parts of the county, the commissioner asked whether the plan gives the county any way to delay or condition development if emergency response capacity falls short. Staff said it does not. That check, they said, happens at concept or major site plan approval, when agencies weigh the adequacy of public facilities, and the mechanism is the county’s comprehensive zoning ordinance. The commissioner said they were not asking for a specific figure but wanted the plan to reference such a mechanism. Staff agreed to sit down with the agencies and “beef up the language.”
The theme returned later in the session, when commissioners reached an action to develop and monitor key performance indicators for law enforcement, including response times and clearance rates. A commissioner tied it to the idea of a deputy-to-resident ratio and said they had texted the sheriff, who had not yet replied with the ratio he would want. Near the end of the meeting, a commissioner reported back that the ideal ratio is 1.5 deputies per 1,000 residents, which the commissioner said is where Calvert County is now. Asked where the figure came from, the commissioner said they had contacted a subject matter expert. The recording does not make clear whose standard it is, and it does not appear in the plan.
The ratio is easy to turn into arithmetic, though it is only that. Applied to the 116,692 residents the state estimated for July 1, 2025, a ratio of 1.5 per 1,000 works out to about 175 deputies. Applied to the 145,220 residents the state projects for 2045, it works out to about 218, or roughly 43 more. Those are the Chronicle’s calculations from the population figures in its Thursday report on the plan’s growth numbers, not county or Sheriff’s Office estimates, and the lower forecast could change them.
Another measuring question went unanswered at the session. In the hazards and resiliency chapter, a commissioner pointed to a line on page 164 saying progress will be tracked through a “concise performance dashboard” and asked what that is. Staff said it is still to be defined, “something as simple as a spreadsheet,” and that the county has not drilled down to that level of detail. The plan’s implementation chapter lists 282 action items, and staff said roughly 2% lack projected resources, a figure the staffer said seemed low and would be rechecked. Staff said they will report back to commissioners at least every three years, while the planning commission’s annual report will carry yearly updates.
Commissioners had already line-edited the draft chapter by chapter at the same session, and the public safety language is one more place where they asked for firmer wording rather than numbers. The board’s Oct. 6 hearing has passed, and written comments are accepted through 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 13. The commissioners’ Oct. 20 agenda calls for a decision on the plan. Whether a staffing standard, a response-time target or only a promise to track them makes it into the final text is still open, and the comment window gives residents who want one a few days to say so.
