City streetlights ready to go dark

SOUTH PORTLAND — The lights are about to go out in South Portland, literally.

At a workshop meeting Monday, the City Council accepted the final recommendation of a 13-member ad hoc committee calling for 184 streetlights to be permanently doused in the Loveitt’s Field, Meeting House Hill, Pleasantdale and Stanwood Park neighborhoods.

Although the committee has reviewed 179 separate appeals concerning 77 individual lights slated for removal, the City Council will conduct a public hearing at its Dec. 5 meeting before taking final action.

“I’m sure you’ll be inundated with requests [to keep lights on],” said Code Enforcement Officer Pat Doucette, who acted as committee spokesman.

According to Doucette, shutting 184 lights will save the city $22,360 a year. South Portland has 1,933 streetlights, for which it budgets $333,000 annually.

“Our streetlight bill is going up and up and up,” said Doucette. “There’s no way to get around this increase except to eliminate some of our streetlights, looking as sections of the city that are overlit.”

“Streetlights is probably one of the top three largest budgetary items that we have,” said City Manager Jim Gailey, when “Phase II” of the street light review was launched in June.

During this year’s project, letters were sent to every homeowner living within 100 feet of a light targeted for removal. Each pole was placarded with an Aug. 31 deadline for appeal. The original goal was to shut 235 lights, but the first draft tally came to 202 lights on 101 streets. During the appeal process, Doucette said, the committee adopted a “common industry standard,” allowing one streetlight every 680 feet where the speed limit is 25 mph. That lowered the finally recommendation to 184 lights to be shut, she said. Regardless of distances, lights were retained at the end of all dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs.

The city will make a one-time $25 donation to any affected homeowner who would like to purchase a floodlight, if he or she does not already have one attached to the home, or posted in a yard. 

Last year, the city had Central Maine Power remove 107 streetlights, expecting to save $20,000 off its light bill. However, a 2.54 percent rate increase (to 6.54 cents per kilowatt hour) meant the city ended up paying about $5,000 more than the previous year, even with fewer lights.

A similar fate may be in store this year, as well. According to Doucette, CMP will once again raise its “unit” rates – the fee for fixtures and other hardware – on streetlights. “We have a call in to them requesting details,” she said. “We have been paying on those units, in some cases, for 40 or 50 years.”

“One of the key areas where we logically should have some inroads, legislatively, is to say, look, we’ve paid for your equipment many times over,” said City Planner Tex Haeuser. “At this point, we should now we have a right to put up our own light on that space.”

South Portland would like to replace CMP’s “inefficient and expensive“ cobra-style lights with city-owned, or leased, LED lights.

To that end, Councilor Tom Coward worked last spring with the Maine Municipal Association to draft a bill (LD 493), sponsored by Rep. Lance Harvill, R-Farmington, that would have let each town place its own lights on existing utility poles.

That bill died April 7 when the Legislature’s committee on energy, utilities and technology gave it a unanimous “ought not to pass.”

“We might try again next year with this,” said Coward, at the time. “MMA was very supportive of it, but apparently CMP has more oomph with the Legislature than the municipalities.”

“We need to start stockpiling funds,” Gaily told the council on Monday, suggesting the creation of a reserve fund for eventual purchase and installation of LED lighting in the city.

“[LED lighting] is exactly the direction we ought to be going,” said Mayor Rosemarie De Angelis, “which is exactly why CMP is not interested in going there, because it’s a cost savings.”

CMP spokesman John Carroll has called Coward’s effort “a poorly written bill,” adding that while his company considered an LED alternative, most towns lose their enthusiasm when they hear the installation cost, which runs three times the average for standard street lighting.  "People find that you can't make the capital costs back on energy savings," he said.

Carroll also refutes any intimation that rate increases are a tit-for-tat result of South Portland shutting lights. CMP is in the middle of a five-year plan with the Maine Public Utilities Commission, he said. Rates may be raised or lowered each year, but CMP cannot cite an external factor, like fluctuations in the number of streetlights it feeds, even if it wanted to, he added.

Gailey said South Portland will continue its review of street lighting next summer, with an eye to shutting more lights.