New York towns and villages are in a continuous tug of war between balancing their budgets and staying under the tax cap. One Greene County municipality is taking a hard look at turning street lights off to save money.
Like so many other sites in the Catskills, the Town of Hunter has stretches of highway where businesses once thrived. Town Councilman Dolph Semenza notes that times may have changed, but streetlights that were installed along those areas decades ago still stand. "I'm on the town board 12 years, we've been talkin' about this for 10 years. And this is actually the first time we've gotten Central Hudson to really sit down and work with is with the mapping of all these lights. We have four lighting districts. These lights have been around forever. There were days when there were a tremendous amount of hotels and rooming houses up here, and they're gone. There are stretches of highway where there once were restaurants which are gone. So a lot of the lights are sitting there."
Supervisor Daryl Legg says certain roadways through town are safer when it’s darker, because oncoming traffic can be more easily seen.
There are a total of 159 street lamps — some are needed, some aren't, and though a good number are no longer lit the town is still being billed by Central Hudson. John Maserjian is a spokesperson for Central Hudson. "The cost for a single streetlight depends on the wattage and the type of light and Central Hudson does have various options for municipalities. We also have two different types of rate structures for streetlights. One is where Central Hudson owns and maintains the light and the other is when the municipality owns and maintains the light and there's a cost difference between the two."
The utility and the town are getting together in an effort to re-think Hunter's streetlight plan. Again, Dolph Semenza. "Like all small towns we're working with a two percent tax cap, and every year it gets harder to come in with our budget at a two percent tax cap because we get a lot of mandates and a lot of things that are out of our control. So, this is just one of our ways to try to save some money without cutting services."
About $35,000 of the tentative 2015 town budget is designated to pay for streetlights. "The city of Yonkers saved over a million dollars by switching out their lights to LED's. We've hooked up with a very very good person at Central Hudson now, they're going to work at removing some of the mercury vapor lamps which are old, inefficient and costly, replace them with the high sodium light which is less expensive, and change some of the lighting fixtures actually to give it down lighting and not spread out so it will light the roadway but not the sides of the roadway so much so you can use a lower wattage bulb and get almost the same effect," noted Semenza.
If implemented, the new plan would save $20,000 annually in lighting costs. A timetable for the project has yet to be agreed upon.
