OCALA, FL (352today.com) – Ask a commuter on State Road 200 in Ocala how traffic is, and you will likely not get a polite answer. The roads feel worse now because the numbers finally match the commute.
On Tuesday, Marion County Commissioner Craig Curry put the latest population figures on the table and made what he called a plea to the public: The growth is real, it is already at 2030 levels, and to just “shut it down” will not fix the roads.
“I was just up in North Carolina,” Curry said. “I have a little place up around Sapphire, about an hour from Asheville. I won’t even go up there now, Labor Day, Fourth of July, because it’s just too jam-packed, full of people, and all that happened after 2020, after the pandemic, and that’s what’s happened to us. And if you go back before 2020, you go back 10 years to the Great Recession, where we were really kind of in negative numbers, and go to 2020, 2021 to where we are now. I’m crying out like everybody else.”
Pointing to Growth Services data on agenda item 7.3.1, Curry called the totals “astounding.” Before 2020, he said, the county grew between a half-percent and 1 percent a year, which he said was doable. “You can take that amount of people and integrate it into the community and services and so forth,” Curry said.
The pace since then is not so doable.
From 2024 to 2025, unincorporated Marion added 12,538 people (3.37 percent), and the county as a whole added 14,022 (3.39 percent). The newest year he cited was larger still: 16,941 people, or about 4.8 percent, in the unincorporated area, and 19,197 people, or 4.49 percent, countywide.
Those jumps sit on a longer post-census surge. The University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research (BEBR) April 1, 2026, preliminary estimates, circulated to local governments in an August 17, 2026, letter from Richard L. Doty, put Marion County at 447,170 residents, including inmates, up 71,262 from the 2020 Census count of 375,908. Strip out the inmate population, and the revenue-sharing figure is 441,672. Unincorporated Marion alone is estimated at 365,261, including inmates (360,021 less inmates), up 61,197 from 304,064 in 2020. Curry boiled it down this way: “In 2020 we were like 375. Now we’re at 447.”
He said the county was not supposed to be here yet. “We were anticipating our growth at this level to be in 2030, and here we are in 2026.”
Curry’s plea was not that growth is painless. “The traffic’s horrible. There’s no doubt about it,” he said, “but we have a lot of projects. We’ve got over 30 projects with FDOT alone. Each year, we average over 30 with them. It may be an intersection improvement, it may be repaving, it may be a new road, but FDOT is a great partner. There, this is kind of like just dumping everything on the table for a moment,” Curry said.
Growth Services, he added, is “slammed” and “hammered” with more than 5,000 to 6,000 permits a year.
“We can’t put a barrier up on I-75 and tell people they can’t come to Marion County, but we are grasping and wrestling with this stuff every day, and kudos to our growth services people. I mean, they are just slammed,” Curry said.
“You can’t shut down the state, and you can’t shut down the county. So I want to thank the community because they’ve been a really solid partner in regard to, for example, the sales tax, allowing us more money on a 20-year basis to now be able to bond projects to get things in the ground faster,” he said. “I mean, we’re trying to provide services, but the growth is an onslaught, and it’s just not Marion County. It is the entire state of Florida.”
What he rejected was a total building freeze as what he called a ‘convenience-store’ answer. When residents say ‘stop growth until infrastructure catches up,’ he said, they skip the timeline. “If it takes five, six, seven, eight years to improve or build a road, probably closer to eight years… What level of recession do you want us to try and create? Because if you take the building industry and you put it on its heels, like it was in the Great Recession, where we had 14, 15 percent unemployment, that analogy doesn’t work.”
“We can’t shut down the state, and we can’t shut down the county,” he said. “So you know it’s not just Marion County. I mean, if you look at the state, the last numbers I saw, we were at 23 and a half million.” A moratorium on building “only makes for more problems.”
Commissioner Michelle Stone backed the scale of it. “Those numbers are extremely high,” she said. Separate data show the county needs about 16,000 more jobs by 2030, according to Stone. “We are building for the future. We can’t just look for today.” The nation added nearly 13 million to 14 million people in six years, she said.
“It’s not just Marion County, and quite frankly, Marion County is an exceptional place to live. We’re right in the middle of the state. We’re as protected as much as possible when it comes to the hurricanes,” Stone said. “We do have a wonderful quality of life in Marion County, and I look forward to continuing to maintain that level and make it even better as we look to the future.”