The latest round of census estimates shows that Baldwin County’s accelerating population growth has pushed it into Alabama’s Top Five.
Growth in Baldwin County is a familiar theme, but even so the latest figures are eye-opening. Baldwin saw the fastest one-year growth in both raw numbers (5,403 to Madison’s 4,854) and percentage (2.5% to Limestone County’s 2.2%). That’s according to 2018 Census estimates released today for all U.S. counties.
“Yahoo! Now we’ve got to deal with it,” said Chris Elliott of the move into fifth place, as Baldwin passed Shelby County near Birmingham. Elliott is a former chairman of the Baldwin County Commission who last fall was elected to the Alabama Senate Dist. 32 seat representing south Baldwin County.
Next door, Mobile County continues to hold steady as Alabama’s second most populous county, showing a very slight decline over the latest federal count. Mobile lost an estimated 758 people from 2017 to 2018, or 0.18 percent of its population. That offsets some previous small gains, but not entirely: The estimated change since the 2010 Census is a gain of 765 people.
Elliott said that while population growth has been the single biggest issue facing Baldwin for years, “the rate of change surprises me.” Its impacts over the course of the decade will be profound, he said.
"We are adding more in a decennial census than most counties' total populations," he said.
That isn't hyperbole: Since the last full census in 2010, Baldwin has added an estimated 35,757 people. Roughly half the state's 67 counties have estimated population totals lower than that number.
That translates to 20% growth over eight years, bringing Baldwin County’s estimated total population for 2018 to 218,022.
A year ago Baldwin County ranked sixth among Alabama counties. Now, the new estimates put it fewer than 8,000 people behind fourth-place Montgomery County. Baldwin’s growth, combined with the fact that Montgomery County’s population has been declining, puts Baldwin on track to move into fourth place within the next two years. (Montgomery lost an estimated 1,316 people from 2017 to 2018.)
In order to keep the county from becoming "a victim of our own success," Elliott said, "we're going to have to be proactive."
Elliott said transportation infrastructure will continue to be a top concern, and said he'd been working to get assignments to relevant committees since taking state office.
"If it's got asphalt, I'm involved," he said.
One source of help: A massive round of projects funded by the RESTORE Act, which directs penalty money from the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, includes $56 million for major road expansion projects in Baldwin County.
But he said the fundamental key to Baldwin's growth is something else. It's driven by quality of life, he said, and that's driven by the quality of the county school system. "We've got to preserve that," he said.
To that end, he has sponsored a bill that, if passed, would require developers of large-scale subdivisions and other large residential project in Baldwin County to submit information to the county or Gulf Shores school superintendents.
"It basically requires planning commissions to listen to what the school board is saying about capacity," he said. "It's a step."
While the U.S. Census Bureau only conducts a count every 10 years, it releases annual estimates of population changes. The latest round of data is county-based and shows population estimates for 2018. It also shows metropolitan areas but defines them in terms of how many counties they cover -- so the figures for metro Mobile are identical to those for Mobile County, while the figures for Metro Birmingham include the entire population of several counties.
Alabama's biggest counties based on estimated 2018 populations:
1. Jefferson, 659,300
2. Mobile, 413,757
3. Madison 366,519
4. Montgomery, 225,763
5. Baldwin, 218,022
6. Shelby, 215,707
7. Tuscaloosa, 208,911
8. Lee, 163,941
9. Morgan, 119,089
10. Calhoun, 114,277
Baldwin’s growth also made the Daphne-Fairhope-Foley Metropolitan Area the state’s fastest growing metro, though it didn’t move it from seventh place in that ranking. Birmingham-Hoover topped the list, followed by Huntsville, Mobile, Montgomery, Columbus Ga. (which includes Russell County, Ala.), Tuscaloosa, Daphne-Fairhope-Foley, Auburn-Opelika, Decatur and Dothan.
The Metropolitan Area population estimates are different from the Census Bureau’s rankings of city populations. Estimates for 2018 city populations are due out later this spring. The 2017 city estimates showed Mobile slipping to fourth place as fast-growing Huntsville rose to third behind Birmingham and Montgomery.
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