Town Misses Out on State Tree Grant

By Adam Swift

The town missed out on a recent $100,000 Cool Corridors grant from the state’s Division of Conservation Services and Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

According to Hilary Dimino, the state office’s manager of the tree planting program, Winthrop ranked eight out of 18 applicants for the grant, but did not receive it because the town is not in compliance with the MBTA 3A Communities Act.

In a letter to Assistant Town Manager Cheryl McCormick, Dimino stated the town likely would have received the grant if it was in compliance with the state law.

“If you would like to re-apply for the Cooling Corridors grant program in the coming fiscal year, please ensure that your community is in compliance with MBTA Communities Law,” Dimino stated in the letter.

The Healey-Driscoll administration recently announced  $632,000 in grants from the Cooling Corridors program, which focuses on planting trees in identified hotspots, along popular walking routes, and in Environmental Justice neighborhoods across Massachusetts.

Winthrop Tree Warden Tom Derderian said he is disappointed in Winthrop losing out on the grant.

“The grant would have allowed the town to purchase a much needed mobile watering tank to help our young trees survive summer dry spells and of course many, many more young trees,” Derderian said.

The tree warden explained that there is no money left for a spring planting, so the town will have to look at other ways to raise money. He said the “Cool Corridors” grant is meant to help communities grow trees to provide shade in an ever hotter environment to cool areas frequented by people vulnerable to heat radiating off hot, black asphalt.

 In addition to this public health benefit trees moderate rain runoff during sudden storms and take up ground water with their roots and evaporate it into the air through their leaves easing the stress on the town’s drainage systems, Derderian said.

“Trees are also beautiful and thus enhance property values in the town as well as contributing to a higher quality of life,” he stated. “The town has been losing total tree cover for many years as big, old trees with large shading canopies reach the end of their lives and have to be removed. A tree with a 36” diameter is replaced by one with an inch and a half diameter.

“In sixty years it will match the tree it replaced,” Derderian continued. “But every little tree planted will not necessarily live to be fully developed so many more trees need to be planted than are removed. Winthrop has many magnificent century-old trees.”

Derderian said street trees are now living in a harsher world than the one that the big old trees grew up in.

“The trees planted 100 years ago did not face such hot, dry summers, so much pavement, so much air pollution (there was no airport then) as well as road salt, and damage from the hugely increased auto and truck traffic,” he said. “Many of our trees suffer from motor vehicle strikes to their trunks and large trucks hitting their limbs on the street side. Our trees will require a great deal of tender care.”