Clarkstown buys 4,161 street lights; others may follow

NEW CITY – Strolling downtown at dusk, you might soon notice things are brighter than they used to be.

Clarkstown has bought 4,161 of its street lights for $690,000 from Orange and Rockland Utilities. Town Supervisor Alex Gromack said the purchase is the first step in retrofitting the town's stock of high-pressure sodium lights with energy-efficient light-emitting diode ones.

He said Clarkstown will save $500,000 off its $1.4 million annual energy bill by owning and maintaining its own lights.

"Not a lot of towns have done it," Gromack said. "But the more research we did, the more the economics made sense. I think you're going to see more and more municipalities do it."

Gromack estimates the annual cost of keeping the lights on at $110,000. The town will hire private contractors for some or all of the maintenance.

Read more:How many Clarkstown tax dollars does it take to change a street light?

Clarkstown is the first municipality in Rockland County to buy its street lights, but probably not the last.

As cities across the state look to cut costs, energy bills are an attractive target. Officials in Orangetown and Ramapo are negotiating with O&R, which owns and operates the vast majority of the lights that line Rockland's streets and charges an annual fee for keeping them on.

"Communities have told us this is what they want to do," utility spokesman Mike Donovan said.

One cost-benefit analysis in Orangetown found the town would save $178,000 a year by owning its street lights — more than a third of its current carrying costs of $481,000. Within five years, the savings would exceed $300,000 a year.

"These are conservative estimates," town Supervisor Andy Stewart wrote in an e-mail. "The eventual conversion of the street lights to more efficient and lower maintenance cost LEDs will produce further savings. This project is good for Orangetown taxpayers and good for the environment."

Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island have passed laws requiring utilities to sell street lights to any city or town that asks.

In New York there is no such law. Only 31 percent of the state's municipalities own their own street lights, 26 percent when New York City is excluded, according to a report by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

As part of its last rate case in 2012, O&R agreed to allow municipalities to buy street lights.

Yonkers took its own energy-efficiency step in 2014, replacing 11,000 streetlights with LEDs. The Yonkers Green City initiative is expected to save the city $1.85 million annually over the next decade. The city bought its street lights from Consolidated Edison (O&R's parent) in 1957.

Twitter: @alextailored