US funds to aid cleanup of South Shore waters

Funded by federal stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the projects are meant to improve water quality in Kingston Bay off Duxbury, help clean up Marshfield’s South River, enable Pembroke to fight the spread of weeds in two town ponds, and allow Sharon, Stoughton, and Walpole to develop plans to reduce pollution in a shared watershed.

Spending stimulus money on these projects illustrates the current state and federal thinking on the connection between the environment and the economy.

“Our watersheds and salt marshes are not only critical to the environment but to the local economy,’’ said US Representative William Delahunt, whose district includes some of the communities. In announcing the award, Governor Deval Patrick cited the importance of “a strong water supply infrastructure’’ in creating jobs and protecting local resources.

The connection is clear in Duxbury, where the economic value of coastal waters is directly dependent on water quality. Duxbury’s 35 small aquaculture businesses grow oysters offshore and harvest them for market, said Duxbury’s conservation administrator, Joe Grady. Other shellfishermen rake the sands at low tide for quahogs.

His town will use its $54,000 grant in an effort to reduce pollution from Bay Road, a 1 1/2-mile roadway near the shore, where drains built in the 1960s have no systems for mitigating pollution. Because of high bacteria counts, nearby shellfish beds and the town’s Landing Road beach have been shut down in recent years.

In Marshfield, economic prosperity, including high property values, depends on clean water, said Samantha Woods, director of the North and South Rivers Watershed Association. “Nobody wants to live where there’s polluted water,’’ she said.

Marshfield will use its $50,000 grant to help restore shellfish beds along the South River. Woods’s nonprofit group helped the town write a grant to identify problem areas and formulate plans to address three spots, most likely in downtown Marshfield.

Plans to treat storm water before it goes into the South River may include “green’’ technologies such as rain gardens, which use plants grown above filtering materials to remove pollutants. Polluted storm water may also affect the quality of the town’s drinking water, Woods said.

In the Neponset River watershed, Sharon, Stoughton, and Walpole will share $83,000 to survey targeted areas in the watershed where retrofitting old drains with filtering technologies will remove bacteria and other pollutants before they get into the rivers and streams. Specifically, the money will fund engineering plans to attack nine storm-water pollution sites and draw up cost estimates for work on 21 more sites.

“Storm-water pollution from the streets is the leading cause of water pollution,’’ said Grady, the Duxbury conservation official.

Pembroke’s $47,000 award will support the town’s continuing battle to save two important ponds, Oldham and Furnace. Oldham Pond, the site of the town’s swimming beach and some private summer camps, hosted a wakeboard tournament last summer - bringing visitors and business into the town.

But polluted storm water turns clean water into weeds. “We’ve had problems with algae blooms and nuisance plants,’’ said Town Administrator Edwin Thorne.

A study conducted 10 years ago pointed to an excess of phosphorus - culprits include waterfowl waste, road surface runoff, and excess chemical fertilizer from lawns - which stimulated the growth of algae and weeds in the ponds, especially Furnace.

“It’s more muck than water. That pond is going to die,’’ Thorne said.

To forestall that fate, the town has installed new storm-water catch basins and educated the public on the need to switch to organic fertilizers. A grant purchased a street sweeper that does nothing but clean the streets around the ponds, removing sources of storm-water pollution. The new grant will help the town continue to analyze the sources of pollution and draw up plans for solutions.

For Pembroke and the other communities, the federal stimulus money will enable towns to step up efforts that have been underway for several years and will lead in turn to future pollution-control projects - most of them dependent on some form of state aid.

“This year we had more than twice as much money to give them,’’ said Ed Coletta, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox2@gmail.com.