WASHINGTON--Adams County is not growing as fast as it thought it would.

Census Bureau data released Thursday for 2006 says Adams County reached 101,105 people, up 1.36 percent from 2005.

The Adams County Office of Planning and Development predicted in 2005 that the county’s population would reach 115,050 by 2010, an average growth rate per year of 3.3 percent.

The lag comes as no surprise to Richard Schmoyer, director of the county’s planning and development office, who said Thursday that a sluggish housing market may keep Adams County from growing at the agency’s predicted rate.

“It’s not that the construction has stopped,” Schmoyer said.  “It’s just not happening as fast as we thought two years ago.”

Despite the housing slump, the planning office expects Adams County to hit the 115,000 mark a few years after 2010 as southern Pennsylvania continues to be attractive to a few key groups: pensioners and Maryland commuters among them.

A pensioner’s paradise

“Pennsylvania does not tax pension income, so that’s an incentive for people with pensions,” Schmoyer said.  “We are looking at a huge transitioning era here for the Baby Boomer generation.”

Because Pennsylvania is so attractive to an older group, the school system shouldn’t be significantly affected by an upsurge in population, said William Hall, Superintendent of the Gettysburg Area School District.

“I’ve been seeing enrollment decline almost every place,” Hall said Wednesday.  “The growth in the school system does not correspond to the number of people who are moving here, particularly from Maryland.”

An emerging “micropolis”

A growing workforce in northern Maryland has led to the spread of Maryland workers into York and Adams counties over the past few years, with some commuters traveling as far as Baltimore to work each day, Schmoyer said. That makes York and Adams a “micropolitan fringe” of Baltimore and even Washington, D.C.

A “micropolis” is a population center that can include as many as four counties removed from a metropolitan center, Schmoyer explained.

And the real estate market has been particularly sensitive to this trend.

“Eighty percent of my clients in the last five years have been from Maryland,” said Sheila Luntz, a realtor with Century 21 Realty Inc. in Gettysburg.

But the biggest group moving to Adams County isn’t from Maryland.  It’s from York County, said a 2005 relocation report on Adams County by the National Association of Realtors.

Shanna Wiest, Government Affairs Director of the Realtors Association of York and Adams Counties Inc., said 649 of the new households in Adams County in 2005 arrived from York County.

The next largest group came from Carroll County, Md., Wiest said—291.

But housing prices are higher in Adams than in York, Wiest continued, which may explain why York County is seeing a higher rate of population growth than Adams.

York County on the whole grew almost 2 percent between 2005 and 2006, to 416,322, with some municipalities like Hallam growing as much as 11 percent.

Adams County’s biggest grower was Hamiltonban Township, which showed a growth of 2.61 percent, to 2,670.

So could Adams County ever go from being a “micropolis” to a metropolis?

“Growth is inevitable,” said Pennsylvania State Rep. Dan Moul, R-Adams and Franklin counties. “We probably have one of the most beautiful areas in the country right here in south central Pennsylvania.”