Fifteen Mon Valley municipalities, from Braddock and Homestead down to Clairton, are getting rain gardens, bioswales, and their own climate plans through a $930,411 federal grant administered by the Allegheny County Health Department.
A three year Environmental Justice Government-to-Government grant is funding six new green infrastructure installations and the upkeep of six existing ones across 15 flood prone Mon Valley communities, with the University of Pittsburgh designing the projects and the nonprofit Landforce building and maintaining them. As of late October the grant remains active.
What the grant builds
The money funds the unglamorous, effective end of stormwater work: rain gardens, bioswales, and permeable pavement that catch water where it falls instead of sending it down the hill into somebody’s basement. The University of Pittsburgh’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation receives $93,110 to design small scale installations tailored to each community, six new projects in all, alongside maintenance of six that already exist. Landforce, a workforce development nonprofit, trains and employs adults facing barriers to work and handles installation and upkeep, so the grant doubles as a jobs program.
The quieter deliverable may matter most in the long run: help for each of the 15 municipalities to develop its own municipal climate plan. Small boroughs rarely have staff to write one, and a plan on file is often the ticket required to compete for the next round of infrastructure funding.
Mon Valley municipalities covered by the grant, including Braddock, Homestead, Wilkinsburg, Wilmerding, Duquesne, Clairton, and Hays.
Fifteen towns, one soggy problem
The Mon Valley’s steep hillsides, aging combined sewers, and creek hugging street grids were laid out for a drier century than the one we are in. The region is working through some of its wettest decades on record, and the communities named in this grant are the ones that feel it first, where a hard summer storm means flooded underpasses and sewage in the street. Green infrastructure will not solve that alone, but every gallon a rain garden holds back is a gallon that does not meet a combined sewer overflow.
The grant’s survival is itself notable. It is funded through the Inflation Reduction Act and was awarded during the previous administration, and plenty of environmental justice grants from that era have been frozen or clawed back. This one, per local reporting, remains active, with the health department’s Stephen Strotmeyer managing the funds.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Watershed groups spend a lot of energy arguing that stormwater, equity, and jobs belong in the same sentence, and this grant is that argument with a dollar figure attached. It is also a working model for the partnership structure, a county agency administering, a university designing, and a nonprofit workforce crew building. If your group has been eyeing a rain garden project and lacks one of those three legs, the Mon Valley just showed what the full stool looks like. And if you work near one of the 15 towns, the new climate plans will need public input, which is an open door.
Based on reporting by Hoodline Pittsburgh, October 21, 2026. Current as of October 23, 2026.
