AMHERST – A competitive clean energy grant will help fund an electric vehicle charging station, new boilers and LED lighting retrofits, among other projects, in town spaces.

Amherst will receive $175,971 from the Green Communities Grant, awarded by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. It’s one of 47 municipalities statewide winning grants totaling $9,580,467.

The grants go to cities and towns earning designation as Green Communities, and while 155 cities and towns in the commonwealth meet the designation, Amherst is the only Hampshire County town receiving a grant in 2016, the grant program’s fifth year.

Most of the projects – like ventilation improvements in Town Hall or more efficient boilers in the Police Station – won’t stand out like a previous project refitting street lamps with LED lights did, Amherst Sustainability Coordinator Stephanie Ciccarello said, but they’ll still benefit the town.

“A number of the projects, they’re not things people will see, but they’ll help the town be more efficient,” she said. “That’s the goal: everything will be operating more efficiently.”

The town had already committed to at least one of the projects, a new electric vehicle, before receiving the grant money, Ciccarello said, but the funding will help make buying it more affordable.

In other cases, she said, projects would have been difficult or impossible without grant money.

That was the case when the town received more than $300,000 in 2013 for the streetlamp project – an undertaking Ciccarello said may have never happened without the grant – and with this year’s boiler replacements and ventilation unit improvements.

“The really wonderful thing about the Green Communities program is it allows for the opportunity to do projects we otherwise couldn’t afford to get done,” she said.

Plans like these to reduce energy use are part of the criteria for Green Community designation, Ciccarello said. When Amherst applied for the designation, the town had to develop a five-year energy plan to cut its baseline yearly energy usage by 20 percent.

No single project will fulfill that goal, she said, but, “incrementally, this all adds up.”

Ciccarello said timelines for completion vary project to project, but most will take at least a year, possibly two.

The timelines also affect when Amherst can apply for the grant again – towns have to have completed all projects proposed for a grant before they can apply for another year’s round.