On Aug. 30, the Healey-Driscoll administration announced $31.5 million in grants for climate resilience implementation and planning throughout Massachusetts with Ludlow and Belchertown among the recipients.

The MVP grant program provides communities with funding and technical assistance to support the climate resilience planning process and implement priority actions to adapt to climate change.

In April, Gov. Maura Healey launched MVP Planning 2.0, which serves as the next phase of the flagship program.

It supports communities in updating their climate change resiliency plans in a way that centers environmental justice and other priority populations most impacted by climate change and putting these plans into action.

Belchertown Town Planner Doug Albertson said, “This is the next round of the state’s MVP program. It is unlike the first efforts which were focused on infrastructure and hazard mitigation. This is aimed more towards social resiliency.”

The awards announced include $3 million in funding for MVP 2.0 to 28 individual municipalities.
Belchertown was awarded $95,000 in grant funding.

Albertson said Belchertown does not know its exact plans for use of the grant funding, but would first like to hire a consultant to help with outreach.

The town will be working locally with the Senior Center, Fire Department or other town departments that have direct contact with more residents.

He said, “It’s going to be doing a lot of community outreach and how to get people more socially prepared and aware. Its kind of aimed at helping people who are often overlooked in environmental justice populations.”

Some examples Albertson gave are the senior citizen population or “homebound” people who don’t have the same kind of access to emergency services or places to get cool if their heat goes out.

Albertson said that there is a process guide on the MVP website that Belchertown in their outreach efforts.

He added, “We are going be looking around to get to know the town and identify communities and how to reach them. I think this is going to help people in a couple of ways. More awareness of the issues coming with climate change and whatever our social vulnerabilities might be but also to make the people in town realize that we do have this underserved populations that are quite often hidden.”

Albertson said he would like to see the whole town come together to work on the climate change issue.

“I think it is important for us to all get to know each other better and become more of a community and then maybe we will be more willing to work together and help each other. I think we are going to need it if we keep getting rain and stuff like that like we have,” he added.

Grant awards also included $28.5 million in MVP Action Grant funding for 79 local implementation projects.

MVP Action Grant projects are focused on proactive strategies to address climate change impacts and may include actions to invest in and protect environmental justice communities and improve public health, nature-based solutions to mitigate the impacts of extreme heat and flooding, and climate resilience-focused regulatory updates.

Ludlow was awarded $135,000 for a resilient stormwater and urban heat island assessment.
Ludlow Town Administrator Marc Strange said, “The MVP program is one of my favorite programs that the state has. It encapsulates an economic development piece, climate change and climate awareness piece and there is a community engagement piece that brings everything together. We are really happy that we got the grant.”

According to Strange, there are three or four bigger projects wrapped into the full use of the grant.
The first project includes the engineering firm Weston and Sampson conducting an evaluation of all the stormwater infrastructure in Ludlow.

Strange said that it will show where Ludlow might be lacking with its stormwater infrastructure.
“That will be really helpful to have a map of where we are with our catch basins and piping underneath the ground and where we might need to expand our services,” Strange said.

There is also an urban heat island assessment piece of the grant.

An urban heat island effect is mostly seen in downtown areas where there a lot of impervious surfaces and blacktop and not many shade trees, causing it to be hotter in certain areas.

Strange added that the town has an idea of where those areas might be, and they would look at places in town that are “unusually hot” compared to the air temperature for that day.

He added, “If we can identify particularly in the downtown area, areas where it is abnormally hot and we do have gaps in our stormwater infrastructure, we can address those deficiencies with future grants and make it more welcoming. It would inform us where we might need to plant more shade trees and be more cognizant of how much impervious surface we have in those areas.”

Strange said that these two projects will lead to a green infrastructure plan and urban heat island project within the schools.

“Kind of related to that and all intertwined is looking at a green infrastructure plan. Often times when you do identify areas in towns and cities where there is an urban heat island effect, one of the things to do is implement or install green infrastructure like trees, raingardens, things of that nature that absorb not only the heat but any stormwater,” Strange explained.

Strange also realized that a lot of people may not what the urban heat island effect is, so he is looking to get a group to work with Ludlow High School students to create a video about the topic.

He said, “This is the feature that I am really excited about. There is going to eventually be a group of high school students that will put together their own video on what it an urban heat island effect. Not at lot of people know about it so it is a way we can get into the schools and really increase our community engagement.”

The grant itself is not for any current construction projects but Strange said that this grant will help with assessments to help improve areas in Ludlow.

He said, “This is more of a planning grant. You put all this together, identify stormwater infrastructure needs, where we can use green infrastructure, where we have urban heat island effects, and we can use those planning documents for future action grants that will allow us to do construction.”