County rakes in military money

Ranks 24th in U.S. in per capita defense funds

Friday, July 24, 2009

That's nearly $22,000 for each man, woman and child, and ranked St. Mary's 24th among the 3,141 counties in the nation in military spending per capita.

The No. 1 county for defense spending per person in the nation was sparsely populated Jeff Davis County in Texas, where defense spending was $1.8 million for each of its 2,275 residents, according to Monty Wood of the Census Bureau's public information office.

St. Mary's has a population of 101,578, and the per capita military spending was $21,935. Prince George County and Newport News, Va., posted figures similar to St. Mary's. Maryland ranked second in the country in overall federal spending per person at $13,829, behind Virginia at $15,256.

Across the country, the federal government spent $2.79 trillion in fiscal 2008, an increase of 9 percent from the year before, the Census Bureau said. Forty-eight percent of that spending was for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

St. Mary's received $2.7 billion in federal money. With its 5.6 million people, the state got $77.9 billion in fiscal '08 from the federal government.

About $1.7 billion of the $2.2 billion in defense spending in St. Mary's went to procurement contracts awarded to military contractors located in the county, said Scott Peterson, survey statistician for the Census Bureau. In FY07, per capita defense spending in St. Mary's ranked 15th in the nation at $24,902. In St. Mary's, $433.7 million of military spending was for civil servant salaries and wages.

Bob Schaller, director of the St. Mary's County Department of Economic and Community Development, said the county ranks only behind Montgomery in average weekly wages according to quarterly data from this year. Montgomery's average was $1,110 a week, while St. Mary's was $1,017. Worcester County's average was the lowest at $494 a week.

Reviewing data that he had already compiled, Schaller said, "There's a pattern here. The wealthiest counties in the state — we're in that league," he said. "We have great, quality jobs and that's this data here."

One in six people in St. Mary's works for the federal government, the highest percentage in the state, he said, and 48 percent of the workforce is in retail, trade, transportation and utilities, the lowest pool in the state.

"The pure private sector is not a big part of our economy — more reason to diversify," Schaller said. There are about 50,000 jobs in St. Mary's.

Before the Navy came to St. Mary's in 1942, the county was one of the state's poorest.

In 2008, St. Mary's County got $499 million in federal nondefense dollars. There was $5.7 million received for food stamps, $10.5 million for Section 8 housing vouchers, $11 million for highway planning and construction, $5.8 million for veterans' nursing home care and $3.7 million for temporary assistance for low-income families.

jbabcock@somdnews.com