Maryland pioneered the first state sediment-control legislation

Evidence

The influence of the Geological Survey was especially evident in Maryland, the first state to put the erosion issue on the policy agenda. In the early 1960s, the state’s policymakers defined sediment as a water pollutant. In 1965, Montgomery County established the nation’s first suburban erosion-control program as part of a campaign to clean up Rock Creek. The first state law dealing with sediment in urban areas – which applied to only one watershed – was an addition to Maryland’s water-quality act. In 1970, when the Maryland legislature passed the nation’s first statewide sedimentcontrol bill, the Department of Water Resources was chosen to administer the legislation. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 833

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete policy-origin data for the legal-systems course—first erosion-control law, its administrative home, and its watershed-scale incrementalism. — connects to: Scientific framing of sediment as pollution drove the definitional shift leading to regulation — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 822

Broader Connections

• Scientific framing of sediment as pollution drove the definitional shift leading to regulation #expands (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 822