ROYALSTON — The Select Board voted at its meeting Tuesday to enroll the town in the state’s Municipality Vulnerability Preparedness program, which provides cities and towns with technical support, climate change data, and planning tools to identify environmental hazards and develop plans to effectively respond when identified threats become real disasters.
Last year the program, overseen by the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, distributed $2 million in grant monies to 82 communities across the Commonwealth. The only area town to receive funds through the MVP program thus far is Erving, which landed a grant of $20,000.
“Based on pressures from lots and lots of cities and towns and counties and states across the country,” said Royalston Emergency Management Agency Director Jim Barclay, “there’s a growing concern that the hazards we face are being made worse by climate change. For example, the Millers (River), although it’s controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers, it is higher than it was 40 or 50 years ago, and its depth moves up and down more; not by huge amounts, but enough to make our problems worse from year to year.”
Barclay said there are “two pieces” to the MVP program.
“The first is really just the planning,” he explained. “It’s revenue neutral. You (the town) hire somebody, they do this very complex study, and the cost of that is reimbursed. Once you have that plan, then you become an MVP community and you’re eligible to go back and begin to solve some problems.”
“What I would do if I were driving this,” he continued, “is I would choose (the consulting firm of) Tighe and Bond and MRPC (Montachusett Regional Planning Commission), because you have to have some very tightly facilitated public meetings; they’re more listening sessions than anything. Then you’d put together a team – I’d look at someone from the Corps and from the Millers River Watershed Association, for example.”
Barclay said once specific issues are identified locally, communities could then act as a region to determine the best ways to address them.
According to information provided by the state, technical assistance is delivered by state-certified providers (such as Tighe and Bond) using standardized measures for assessing vulnerability and developing strategies for mitigating the potential impact of a major environmental event. Included in the state “tool kit” are newly-developed climate projections and data from the Northeast Climate Science Center at UMass-Amherst. Once the threat assessment has been completed, a municipality is designated a “Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness program community,” enabling them to compete for grant monies.
“It’s very complex,” said Barclay, “very complicated. These facilitators have templates they have to follow, questions they have to ask. We have to commit to commit to as much as 120 hours of my time, but that’s 120 hours spread out over six months. It’s a very long process. There are lot issues that must be addressed, for example, related to hazard mitigation. For instance, do you have social equity? Are you considering all social strata so that you’re not wiping out your ghetto for the purpose of saving the well-to-do? So, there are a lot of issues that must be addressed in this plan.”
“It sounds like a great program,” said Select Board Chair Christine Long, “but how much do we have to fund?”
“There’s no cash match,” said Barclay, “When you do the project, you do the project and you bill the state. You’re not out anything. So, this would all be state money. We’d have to invest some sweat equity, but that’s it.”