nothin UI: Street Lights Not For Sale | New Haven Independent

UI: Street Lights Not For Sale

Sam Gurwitt Photo

The lights on Goodrich Street.

Hamden is seeking to buy its streetlights from United Illuminating, potentially saving the town up to $650,000 each year. But there’s a snag: UI doesn’t want to sell.

Hamden Mayor Curt Leng told the Independent that at a recent meeting with UI, he made it clear that the town would like to purchase its streetlights. He said that he will soon send a letter to UI soon formalizing the request that UI negotiate with the town on a sale.

At present, UI owns Hamden’s 6975 streetlights and leases them to the town.

Hamden is one of the 17 towns in the UI network. Eversource, which provides electricity to most towns in the state, is legally obligated to allow towns to purchase their streetlights because of a 2001 court case in Torrington. No such legal obligation exists for UI; New Haven is the only community in its network to own it streetlights (and it is saving energy as a result).

Leng’s stand followed organizing by local environmentalists who see not just cost savings, but greener lighting.

You could finance the purchase and own and maintain those lights… with even less budget than we’re paying now to lease those lights,” said Christina Crowder, vice chair of the town’s Energy Use and Climate Change Commission and an active participant in the issue.

Contributed Photo

Whitney Avenue at night.

The town currently pays a little over $1 million to UI for its streetlights each year. Hamden is the last town in the system that UI has not switched over to LED bulbs. The delay has occurred because of a disagreement about the type of bulbs that UI was willing to install.

If the town were able to purchase its streetlights and install the LEDs that it wants, just the new bulbs alone could save an annual $400,000, according to proponents. On top of that, Leng said, the town could save an extra quarter of a million by controlling the lights.

UI’s streetlights are not for sale,” said UI spokesman Ed Crowder, and there’s no regulatory decision that would permit us to sell them.” He said the utility would need permission from the Public Utilities Regulatory Agency (PURA) to sell the lights. They just simply don’t have any regulation saying that we can,” he said.

Leng said that if the town was unable to negotiate a purchase agreement with UI, he has two alternative paths.

He might try to get PURA to issue a mandate that UI offer its lights for purchase to the town.

Our argument would be that if that municipal gain is something that is available to other towns, then that should be available to towns that live in the UI territory,” he said.

He also sees a legislative path, he said. Hamden State Rep. Mike D’Agostino has introduced legislation that would require utilities to offer streetlights to municipalities for purchase. The bill was the subject ofa public hearing on Feb. 21 where Leng, Christina Crowder, and other Hamden citizens spoke in its favor. So far the bill has failed to advance out of the Joint Committee on Energy and Technology.

Light Shined On Streetlight Problems

Hamden Mayor Curt Leng.

Christina Crowder noted that that in the summer of 2016, the American Medical Association came out with the report recommending that streetlights not exceed 3000-kelvin color temperature. At the time, UI was in the process of switching out the streetlights in its network for LEDs, but they were only offering 4000-kelvin bulbs.

The kelvin rating, explained Crowder, determines how much blue light a bulb emits. Blue light at night is harmful both for human and wildlife health because it signals to the brain that it’s day. When 4000-kelvin lights illuminate the streets, the lights disrupt the critical cycles of wildlife. They also make it hard for people to sleep.

If we’re going to light a low-income neighborhood 24 hours a day as if it was daylight … are we providing blackout curtains to every family that has adults and children that are sleeping in rooms that are lit by those lights?” she asked.

UI had originally scheduled to install new 4000-kelvin lights in Hamden in the spring of 2017, replacing the high-pressure sodium lights that are currently in place. In early 2017, Crowder met Bob Pattison, another Hamden resident, who was also worried about the new lights. Together, they founded the Connecticut Low‑K LED Alliance and began to raise awareness about the issue. In February 2017, they requested a meeting with the mayor, a few other town officials, and UI representatives.

At the meeting, they asked UI if it was possible to get a 3000-kelvin option. Eversource, Leng explained to the Independent, offered both 4000- and 3000-kelvin bulbs to the towns in its network. But UI replied that it was unable to offer a 3000-kelvin option.

What we get from the United Illuminating installation is kind of a one size fits all solution, and it’s the size that fits United Illuminating’s need,” Crowder said during an interview last week on WNHH FM’s Dateline Hamden” Program. UI, she said, would provide bulbs only with long warrantees that would cost them less.

After that meeting, Leng decided to put the LED transition on hold until UI could find a 3000-kelvin option.

Meanwhile, Crowder and others had begun to look into the potential savings from purchasing the lights. By the time UI came back to the table in the fall of 2017 with a 3000-kelvin option, Crowder was set on buying the streetlights.

The town of Hamden could save so much money if we owned our own lights. That’s why they won’t sell them to us,” she said.

New Haven Did It

Thomas Breen Photo

Giovanni Zinn.

Hamden is the last town in the UI system that has not had new LEDs installed to replace the old street lights. If the town were to purchase the lights after UI had already installed its LEDs, said Leng, not only would the town not get its first choice of lights; the purchase would also be considerably more expensive. That means that if the town is going to buy its street lights, it must do so soon. 

Of the 17 towns in UI’ss network, New Haven is the only one that owns its streetlights. The purchase was the result of a one-off agreement between the city and the utility in the 1980s.

According to New Haven City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, UI was in a tough financial position at the time and needed some extra cash. He said that the agreement was one of mutual benefit. The city wanted to buy, and the utility wanted to sell.

Now, UI stands to lose revenue if it sells the streetlights.

Leo Smith, who lives in Suffield and is a member of the Roadway Lighting Committee of the Illuminating Engineering Society, said that the town of Torrington won a court case in 2001 that forced Eversource to offer its streetlights for sale to all of the towns within its network. That decision, said Smith, applied only to Eversource. He added that it would be difficult for any court or legislators to say that the decision does not also apply to UI, but as of yet, no one has tried to make that legal case.

Hamden, Smith said, could try to go to PURA to get a declaratory ruling that would require UI to offer its lights for sale under the same terms and conditions that apply to Eversource.

Hamden, Smith said, actually has too many streetlights. The town would be smart to conduct a survey of its streetlights before it purchases them and ask that the unnecessary ones be removed.

80 percent of the streetlights statewide are totally and completely worthless, just looking at it from the standpoint of public safety,” he said.

Savings, Dimming, And More

Christina Crowder.

If Hamden were able to own its streetlights, said Christina Crowder, it could unlock a whole world of possibilities.

Good LED streetlights, she said, can create the same number of lumens on the street using a third of the wattage it takes to generate the same number of lumens using high-pressure sodium. A part of the difference is the sodium bulbs don’t aim light in any particular direction, while LEDs do. That means that all of the light can be aimed at the street, and none is wasted lighting up areas that the streetlights are not supposed to light.

Zinn told the Independent that when New Haven switched from high-pressure sodium to LEDs a few years ago, it cut the amount of energy the city uses for streetlights in half.

Streetlights can also serve a number of other purposes beyond just lighting the streets. You can deliver municipal wifi through a streetlight. You can do parking meters through streetlights,” Crowder said.

If the town owned its own streetlights it could also control them, dimming them at midnight both to save energy and slow traffic. If for some reason an area needed more light because of a crime or a fire, she said, the town could raise the light level there while the problem got resolved.

That will never happen if UI owns the lights,” Crowder said. And it may not happen today or tomorrow if Hamden owns the lights, but it could happen five years from now.”

Before any of that can happen, Hamden must figure out how it will get UI to sell the lights.


Click on the video below to watch Christina Crowder discuss the streetlight/environmental issue, on an episode of WNHH FM’s Dateline Hamden.” That discussion begins at the 23-minute mark.

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