TUPPER LAKE — The town of Tupper Lake is set to receive a $600,000 grant from the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

The grant, along with a required 25%, or $150,000, matching contribution from the town, are slated to go toward constructing an enclosed salt storage facility at the town garage. That’s meant to mitigate the amount of salt runoff that occurs when rain or snow melt causes the currently uncovered pile to leech into the ground.

The town uses a 10:1 sand-to-salt mixture ratio in treating its roadways, and keeps about 5,000 tons of the mixture on hand for combined town and village use. The grant-winning proposal called for a 120- by 100-foot structure with a maximum height of 40 feet.

The town garage, located on Pine Street, is also close to a stream that flows less than half a mile directly into Raquette Pond, making it all the more imperative to take steps against salt runoff, and making for a competitive grant application, according to town Clerk Mary Kay Strack.

“It’s a pretty big salt storage shed,” she said. “We saw this knowing that it helps with the environment, and keeping our salt and sand supply out of the weather, so we thought we would just take a stab at it.”

Salt runoff has been demonstrated to have both deleterious public health, infrastructure and environmental impacts.

Strack and town Assessor and Planner Jessica Eggsware serve as grant writers for the town. Strack estimated that completing this grant in-house saved the town about $50,000 in additional costs that would have come with outsourcing such a large project to an independent professional grant writer.

The DEC’s grant is through its Water Quality Improvement Project. Strack said the grant disbursement structure isn’t finalized yet. The town and the DEC must enter into a contract to dictate it. Those usually take between three and six weeks to finalize after the awards are first announced, which was in mid-January.

“We’re definitely in the very, very early stages,” she said.

While the details still have to be ironed out, Strack said it’s a reimbursable grant — meaning the town has to front all of the money and subsequently gets the $600,000 put back in its coffers — though it’s not yet clear how the reimbursement schedule would occur. Strack said the project is estimated to take about three years.

The $600,000 is the largest award possible in that grant category, with awards beginning at $400,000.

A DEC spokesperson said that the close proximity of the town’s salt and sand pile to a body of water made it stand out in its project prioritization.

“New York state provides significant resources through WQIP to fund the construction of a structure to cover a salt or sand-salt mixture storage pile; to expand capacity of a current structure; or to construct a structure for an uncovered pile currently located near a groundwater drinking water source or surface water system used for a public water system, or within a primary, principal, or sole source aquifer,” the spokesperson wrote. “Covering salt or sand-salt piles can help minimize potential runoff to nearby waterbodies or contamination of drinking water sources, as well as prevent the loss of salt/sand-salt product and maintain the quality of the salt/sand-salt.”

It was one of three projects in Franklin County funded through this round of WQIP and a related grant fund. The largest was a $4.8 million award to the town of Malone to remove Whittlesey Dam, its penstock, and the Main Street weir and powerhouse. That project will also include stream restoration to remove fish passage barriers and reduce flood risk to commercial and private residences. Upon completion, the DEC estimates that completed flood depths in the 100-year future flow will be reduced by up to 10 feet.

The other award was given to the Franklin County Soil and Water Conservation District. The $131,000 grant is slated to fund an aquatic connectivity project to replace an undersized culvert on Collins Brook in the town of Chateaugay. Replacing this culvert will improve aquatic habitat, stream connectivity and reduce downstream erosion, according to the DEC.

Statewide, the DEC allocated about $208 million between 131 projects in this round of WQIP grant funding. Of those, 29 projects totaling $29.4 million are located in the DEC’s Region 5, which includes Franklin, Essex, Clinton, Hamilton, Warren, Saratoga, Washington and Fulton counties. The approximately 14% share of the funding was an outsized haul for the region that contains only about 3% of the state’s population.