Melrose Wins Grant For Malden River Stormwater Work

MELROSE, MA — City efforts to improve stormwater management got a boost this month when Melrose won a more than $100,000 grant from the state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

Mayor Paul Brodeur detailed the grant and its planned uses in a filing with the City Council this week.

Won via a partnership with the Mystic River Watershed Association, the $100,868 grant will help pay for 15 new stormwater street trenches in Melrose.

The trenches will augment a larger effort to build hundreds of “distributed small-scale green infrastructure installations” across the Mystic River watershed, which spans more than 20 communities from Boston to Reading.

New stormwater management will aim to reduce runoff pollution into the Malden River, which serves as a tributary of the Mystic River.

While centered on the Malden River, Brodeur said the work will also benefit Melrose’s Ell Pond, which has seen a number of issues prompting city and community cleanup work in recent years.

“This award goes a long way to support the city’s efforts to reduce runoff pollutants and increase the water quality to Ell Pond and to the Mystic River,” Brodeur wrote.

A project timeline available through this week's City Council agenda packet estimates that work on grant-funded trenches will take place around May of next year.

This batch of state dollars follows a larger $615,000 state grant earlier this year to help relocate a deteriorating culvert under Melrose’s Caruso Building at the intersection of West Emerson Street and Main Street.

While hailed as step forward in redeveloping the Caruso building, officials said last month that the culvert project would also strengthen stormwater management in the area around Ell Pond.

Outside of state funding, action on stormwater management this week follows a recent move by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to add new stormwater requirements for private commercial and industrial properties in the Mystic River Watershed.

Writing in an announcement last week, EPA officials said the new rules would shift some stormwater mitigation burden off of municipalities and onto property owners with large plots of impervious surfaces, such as parking lots, that contribute to runoff issues.