Charlotte City Council Shines Streetlights On Class Warfare
The Charlotte City Council approved spending $541,000 this week to install decorative streetlights in two urban neighborhoods, but not before lighting up accusations of class warfare and reopening a contentious debate on the tens of thousands of dollars the city continues to pay every month for streetlights that don’t work.
The city has an annual contract with Duke Energy that covers the installation, maintenance and energy costs of public streetlights throughout Charlotte. As part of the contract, city officials can choose at their discretion and the taxpayers expense to upgrade from basic, wooden light poles to decorative ones.
Such was the case for the Bryant Park and Belmont neighborhoods, where councilmembers were being asked to approve the installation of decorative streetlights. The cost: a staggering $6,283 per streetlight for 67 fixtures in Bryant Park and $5,477 per streetlight for 22 in Belmont.
That lit up a red flag for Councilmember Andy Dulin, a Republican whose district includes parts of south Charlotte.
“I’d like to see how Bryant Park and Belmont deserve $6,200 light poles, or $5,400 ones, when we’re sticking wooden poles in the ground in other parts of the city,” Dulin said. “Can everybody that gets a light pole in the city of Charlotte now expect the city to spend $6,200 on it? I know folks in south Charlotte would like to have $6,200 poles instead of something just stuck in the ground.”
Any neighborhood can have decorative streetlights, explained City Manager Curt Walton, but typically residents are responsible for covering the costs of upgrades. The two cases at hand were an exception, he said, because the decorative streetlights were part of a city project based on a council-approved neighborhood improvement plan.
That type of neighborhood development is a way to keep the city’s visual esthetics balanced with its economic diversity, argued Councilmember Patrick Cannon, a Democrat. By way of example, he noted that some neighborhoods in south Charlotte sport fancy streetlights that cost “in excess of $250,000 that were paid for by people who live in the area.”
“The question then becomes do you want to allow citizens who live in areas where you know they don’t have the capital to do that [install decorative streetlights] to be able to harness that same thing,” Cannon said. “That’s where we [the city] come back to see what we can do to help these communities out to enjoy some of the finer things that they would never necessarily be accustomed to, that other people happen to get throughout this community.”
But as councilmembers prepare to debate a budget that includes a 9-percent property tax increase, Dulin said it was their responsibility to look for ways to save money and be efficient with existing funds.
“I’m all for lighting up neighborhoods. Lit neighborhoods make safe neighborhoods,” Dulin said. “But I would like to do more streets at an affordable price.”
That didn’t sit well with Councilmember David Howard, a Democrat, who argued that neighborhood development was key to the whole city’s prosperity.
“A lot more goes along with what we’re talking about,” Howard said. “When we can make a neighborhood look better, we can get a higher tax base from it because now people want to live there.
“Just be careful about this ‘us against them,’ because that’s not what this community is about,” he scolded Dulin. “It’s about us pulling everybody up … But when you say ‘south Charlotte would love to have it,’ that’s the part I’d rather not hear.”
Dulin bristled at the accusation he was starting a streetlight war to pit one segment of the city against another.
“This is not ‘us against them,’” he said. “This is about trying to light up as many neighborhoods as we can for the most cost-efficient manner we can.”
The council eventually approved the $541,000 streetlight contract, with Dulin in dissent, but the cost efficiency of the city’s overall lighting program remains a bone of contention.
Councilmembers raised concerns last October when they learned that the city was paying nearly $1 million a year for streetlights that don’t work. Last month, councilmembers were told that the city is still shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for broken streetlights.
Under Charlotte’s $18 million-a-year contract with Duke Energy, the city is responsible for paying a monthly charge of $9.90 per light, whether it works or not. The city pays for about 70,000 streetlights, said Phil Reiger, assistant director of Charlotte Department of Transportation. Since October, the city has identified 3,5000 broken streetlights and reported them to Duke Energy for repair. In the meantime, the city continues to pay for them – to the tune of about $35,000 a month.
Tim Gause, Duke’s director of government and community affairs, told councilmembers that Duke is on schedule to have the streetlights repaired and that about 97 percent of broken lights are fixed in five days or less.
“Our repair record is excellent once we know the lights need to be maintained,” said Gause.
Duke isn’t responsible, however, for tracking or reporting broken lights. That responsibility, Gause said, falls on the customer. Duke has self-reporting technology available, Gause said, but it comes with a price; in Charlotte’s case, an additional cost of $2.50 per light to the base rate, or about $2.1 million extra per year.
Dulin was less than impressed.
“I think it’s Duke that ought to be putting that technology up there to serve their customers, not shafting the customer for $2.1 million across the city,” he said.
Councilmember Claire Fallon, a Democrat, agreed.
“It is your fixture and it should be your responsibility, not the taxpayer or the citizens of Charlotte,” she told Duke Energy’s Gause.
If the problem with broken streetlights hadn’t surfaced last October, Dulin said, Duke would’ve had no urgency to address the issue because “the city was, la-de-da, just paying the bill for lights that weren’t working, month after month after month.”
If it could be estimated that 3,500 lights are going to be out each month, he argued they should be removed from the city’s bill.
“We have a $630,000 monthly light bill,” Dulin said, “and I don’t want to pay for one single [streetlight] pole that isn’t working.”
The city, though, doesn’t have much of a choice. The streetlights aren’t metered and the city pays a flat tariff rate that’s approved by the N.C. Utilities Commission. In an effort to mitigate costs, Reiger said, the city has launched a public information campaign that includes a new video to encourage residents to report broken streetlights.
“My concern is having to rely on neighbors to report outages,” said Democrat Councilmember Beth Pickering. “I just think it’s unrealistic to expect our neighbors to report all these lights that are out.”
Dulin suggested a strategy to help residents more easily report broken streetlights.
“At the very least, the poles should be numbered,” he told city staff and Duke Energy, “so that little couple in your video doesn’t have to go on a nightly walk with their dog, with a role of yellow tape to wrap around your pole.”
What video, what couple, and what dog, you ask?
Be vigilant, citizen; be very vigilant. And in the meantime, continue paying for broken streetlights.
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