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The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a federal conservation grantmaker, announced $10.3 million in grants for environmental restoration, green infrastructure and education projects throughout Long Island Sound as part of their annual Long Island Sound Futures Fund. This year, 41 projects were funded across the sound divide.
The fund was created to meet environmental needs identified by the Long Island Sound Study, a collaboration between Connecticut and New York to improve water quality in the Sound that began in 1985.
“The goal is simple,” said Mark Tedesco, director of the EPA’s Long Island Sound office. “Bring back the urban sea, that is Long Island Sound, in abundance.”
20 Connecticut projects received just over $4.5 million. This is slightly less than half of the funds disbursed this year. Much of that money has been allocated to green infrastructure and environmental restoration projects that impact the Long Island watershed.
Some notable examples include an approximately $820,000 grant to reduce nitrogen runoff from a dairy farm in Lebanon, Connecticut, a $535,000 green stormwater grant, and a pair of stream restoration projects in Middletown and Sprague. Connecticut College was awarded $86,000 to install a living shoreline reef.
“These are some great examples of projects that help infiltrate stormwater to reduce pollution, to reduce flooding,” Tedesco said. “And that’s important to the communities and the health of Long Island Sound.”
Many of the infrastructure projects on this year’s list are described as “green infrastructure” or “nature-based”. It is part of a general trend of using constructed wetlands, hills and native plants to provide flood control, stormwater management, watershed filtering and coastal protection.
“We learned from Hurricane Sandy,” said Tracy Babbage, DEEP’s acting deputy commissioner. “We test them and they work.” We’ve been able to restore the wetlands, remove the barriers to fish passage that were causing flooding behind the dams… We’re able to put them on the ground on a better scale.”
The news comes about a week after DEEP received a $613,000 federal grant to help fill the DEEP Climate Resilience Fund, a $30 million state program that provides grants to Connecticut communities to build climate resilience projects. DEEP’s trust fund was established by executive order last year. The first round of applications closed in November 2022. New staff hired by DEEP will assist the first grantees with their projects.
More funding is also coming. Last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill allocated $50 billion in EPA funding to address water infrastructure, much of which has yet to be disbursed.
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