Stonington Earns STEAP Grant for Boathouse Park

Since 2016 residents have shared their views about the many positive impacts a public park, with a community rowing center, along the Mystic River would offer the community, both now and for generations to come. 

The Town of Stonington and our partners have been working to create a vibrant public park along the Mystic River since that time, and have achieved many key milestones over the past year. Today is another important day for the project. We are so happy to share that we have been awarded a $500,000 STEAP grant from the State of CT. The STEAP program awards funds for capital projects that are shovel-ready. We were up against many other worthwhile projects around the State, and we are so grateful that our state partners saw the many merits of this project. This funding will help get the project another step closer to completion.

First Selectman Chesebrough put forward a grant application this summer, which highlighted the range of positive benefits the park would bring and noted the many key partners that have and will make this vision a reality. The Stonington team is grateful to everyone who has been and continues to partner on this project. Stonington has not been selected to receive a STEAP grant since 2010, and believe this award speaks to the many merits of the project.

As many of you know, the property adjoins the nationally recognized Mystic Seaport Museum and will open one of the most picturesque stretches along the river to public access by establishing a welcoming new greenway. 

The park will be a town-owned and maintained location offering public access to the river through both the park grounds and a public dock for kayaks, canoes, and rowing. It will also be home to a nonprofit- the Stonington Community Rowing Center- that will provide rowing opportunities to people of all ages and abilities. In addition to showing the future possibilities of a reclaimed brownfield site, the park will create an educational opportunity to showcase how green infrastructure can enhance coastal resiliency.  

The living shoreline has been carefully designed to incorporate naturally occurring native shellfish in a design that will help to maintain the park, while breaking the wave action and scour by the addition of large boulders, logs, and a mostly hidden sill along with a living mix of carefully selected spartina plants and native mussels. Most of Mystic is at lower elevations and can experience flooding now, during both storms and extreme tides. Looking to the future, with a changing climate and sea-level rise, the Town has identified a unique opportunity for the park itself to also be an educational took for resilience and green infrastructure solutions. Through the creation of a living shoreline, along with partnerships with local nonprofits like the Denison Pequot Nature Center, the Mystic Aquarium and Mystic Seaport Museum, the Town plans to utilize this project to enhance successful outcomes for future public and private resiliency projects not only in Stonington, but across the region.

In addition, there is an economic benefit for our community. The Trust for Public Land conducts studies and produces reports that help make the economic case for land conservation. One of their studies, for example, found that in Long Island the state's parks and open space provide a $2.74 billion annual economic benefit to local governments and taxpayers.

We are once again grateful to our partners at the state level who continue to support investments in Stonington, and we look forward to continuing to work together on this and other projects across our community.