Winter Park lights up debate over street lighting costs

Winter Park wants new decorative lights in the city, but at what cost?

The Winter Park City Commission looked at options to install new decorative lighting in the city during their March 23 meeting, with the potential price tags being much higher than expected.

The discussion stemmed from residents complaining about the dim lightning along Palmer Avenue in the early hours of the morning – a potential hazard for joggers along the road as cars go by.

Electric Utility Director Jerry Warren said that installing new decorative lights along Palmer Avenue alone would cost the city $200,000 at $2,500 per light under its current standards.

The City Commission also inquired about installing lighting along its 22 collector roads – streets with low to moderate traffic that feed into the main arteries – and the total cost could be much higher, Warren said.

“At the end of the day it’s a two and a half million dollar tab to do,” Warren said. “It’s very expensive to do decorative lights.”

A low-cost strategy for Palmer Avenue would be tree trimming around the fixtures of existing lights and adding LED lights to specific poles. That would cost the city $39,000, Warren said.

A middle ground option would be to replace the existing poles along the road and use LED lighting at a total cost of $62,000.

The city’s plain streetlights cost about half of what a decorative light costs, Warren said, but City Commissioners still pushed for a cheaper, decorative alternative.

“We could still go with a decorative pole that might even be half as expensive,” City Commissioner Sarah Sprinkel said.

Warren said that Rollins College currently uses decorative poles for their lights that cost $500 a piece, compared to the $1,200 poles the city uses as its decorative light standard.

“You can see there’s the opportunity here to do something less expensive,” Warren said.

But Winter Park has a history of sometimes paying more than necessary to get the results it wants. City Commissioners voted in December to pay $990,000 to obtain the property where the Christie’s Cabaret – a gentleman’s club – stood, despite it being appraised at $830,000, said City Manager Randy Knight. It was an unnecessary use of tax dollars, Winter Park resident Steven Roberts said at the December Commission meeting.

“I don’t have any real problem with the building being there and I don’t have a problem getting rid of it,” said Roberts at the meeting. “What I have a problem with is losing money doing it.”

“That’s $160,000 for the sake of getting rid of a couple of boobs on Lee Road. That to me seems extreme.”

Warren said that funding for decorative lighting would ultimately come from the city’s undergrounding fund, a prospect that City Commissioner Carolyn Cooper was wary of.

“It’s important that we move forward with undergrounding and not deteriorate that budget too much,” Cooper said.

City Commissioner Tom McMacken noted he was among many residents who pay extra fees for decorative lighting in their neighborhoods and questioned putting them near someone’s home at no cost if they lived on a collector road.

McMacken added that it all boils down to one question: What do we want the city to look like?

“You have the concrete pole with the 1950s cobra head on it … is that our city image?” McMacken said.

The City Commission agreed to have city staff bring back more cost-effective options forward for new decorative street lighting, as well as a reduced list of collector roads.