A set of grants awarded Thursday is aimed at helping two clusters of area towns work together to boost resiliency against increasingly severe storm events and to fight mosquito-borne illnesses through improved control of the insects.
The Community Compact Program grants, encouraging collaboration to meet specific objectives, includes an undertaking led by the Franklin Regional Council of Governments to help Ashfield, Bernardston, Buckland, Charlemont, Colrain, Conway, Deerfield, Greenfield, Hawley, Heath, Leyden, Monroe, Rowe, Shelburne to help with climate resiliency planning.
Using the grant, the COG will help use the state’s 2011 Climate Adaptation report as a template to take stock of how climate change could affect the communities’ natural resources and habitat, local economy and government, infrastructure like energy, wastewater and stormwater, dams, railroad, water supply as well as human health and welfare, such as sanitation, agriculture and food systems.
“The purpose of the project is to help our towns develop the strategies, and to start implementing them, to make them more resilient to more frequent and severe storms and other things we’re seeing, too,” said Kimberly Noke MacPhee, the COG’s land use and natural resource program manager. “Changes in our agricultural year, or growing season, or changes in how the forests are responding. We’re focusing on very specific situations, like the drought, that have very direct impacts on our communities. We know that droughts, severe storm, shortened or lengthened or weird growing seasons are having an impact already.”
MacPhee added, “We’re very excited about having funding to do that. Often times, there’s a gap, because the towns have limited staff and resources, and you’re talking about volunteer boards. “We plan to hit the ground running as soon as we get the contract.”
The grant will also help the towns establish a detailed database of culverts that can help communities seek federal reimbursements in the aftermath of a severe storm event like Tropical Storm Irene.
In addition to helping individual towns come up with strategies they can implement to prepare for the effects of climate disruption, she said, “many of these strategies will be similar enough as they’re applied across the whole watershed, so that you’re getting benefits for the entire watershed. Looking at the entire Deerfield River watershed to coordinate our efforts is a really important angle that we’re taking with this plan.”
In another grant, Deerfield, Greenfield, Montague, Palmer, South Hadley, Southampton and East Longmeadow will partner to form a Pioneer Valley mosquito-control district.
The grant would allow the district — to include 11 other communities up and down the Connecticut River — to gather information with help from the University of Massachusetts on the 70 mosquito varieties that are prevalent, and which are susceptible to carrying Eastern equine encephalitis or West Nile virus.
Unlike mosquito-control programs paid for through towns’ “cherry sheet” state aid deductions or targeting adult mosquito populations through spraying, which is inefficient, “environmentally questionable and should be done only as a last resort,” in the words of Deerfield Selectboard member Carolyn Shores Ness, the voluntary-payment district being created would be focused on “larvacide habitat.” This will including gathering data on which mosquito species, potentially carrying disease, are in which habitat that can lead to using biological controls like discs.
“The whole purpose of this is to be pro-active, monitor and know what’s happening in our communities before any EEE or West Nile gets to be a threat to our community,” Ness said.
Another grant will help Athol and Gardner consolidate their police and fire dispatch in a regional emergency communication center in the new Gardner police station. The towns made an intermunicipal agreement in March 2015, with plans for the center to “go live” in January 2018.
The state’s Community Compact Cabinet, formed in February 2015 and chaired by Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, “champions municipal interests across all executive secretariats and agencies, and develops, in consultation with cities and towns, mutual standards and best practices for both the state and municipalities.”