on an untended lawn as city dwellers hasten to the suburbs. Local
governments fashioned to handle the simple affairs of a rustic soci-
ety struggle clumsily and vainly with matters they have neither the
experience nor the skill to handle—with streets, sewers, new schools,
water supply, street lighting, policing, fire protection, planning, zon-
ing. The struggle too often is lost as the tidal wave of suburban
settlers sweeps onward farther and farther into other forests and
fields.

And too often the new cities which arise on the once-beautiful
countryside without plan or purpose become as ugly and as unin-
habitable as the city that was abandoned. That, in brief, is the sad
tale of the suburban slum. Our little State lies across the path of
that urban phenomenon which social scientists, city planners and
others have called the East Coast Megalopolis, an uninterrupted
chain of cities, towns and suburbs which stretches along the Atlan-
tic Coast from Senator Kennedy's Boston to Richmond, Virginia,
and which some predict may eventually extend itself to the Gulf of
Mexico. As it extends in length, it also expands in breadth, and
there is the rub insofar as Maryland is concerned. With Baltimore
as the center, Philadelphia-Wilmington at one end and Washington
at the other in our stretch, we Marylanders may expect that our
problems of municipal government will increase in proportion to
the expansion of megalopolis.

When cities and towns fuse physically, they develop common objec-
tives and common responsibilities. They often find it practicable to
use the same facilities—a stadium, an auditorium, a concert hall, a
filtration plant, an art gallery. They interdependence makes the
strength and prosperity of one the strength and prosperity of the
other. The deterioration of the the mother city affects the surburbs,
just as blight in the suburbs spreads back to the core city around
which they are built.

One could cite many examples of this interdependence here in
Maryland, but let us just take one If the mass transportation sys-
tem of Baltimore falters or breaks down, it affects not only the city
of Baltimore but also the suburban communities of Baltimore, Anne
Arundel and Howard Counties. This fact has been recognized offi-
cially and a commission has been set up to study the problem and
makes recommendation as how it is to be resolved....

Many proposals have been made, and many others will continue
to be made, as to how we are to meet the new demands that have

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