Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke and the city council went down a dark alley last week in pulling back from a contract extension with Global Green Lighting for smart streetlights.
What once was touted as a money-saving and energy-saving plan to replace the city’s inefficient streetlights with networked cutting-edge LED smart lights has now flickered out because the city, company and EPB can’t get on the same page.
This is truly a shame, and a great loss for Chattanooga taxpayers. The lights would save nearly 70 percent of the electricity now used, and shrink maintenance costs. A third of the new lights are already are installed (Coolidge Park was the earliest pilot) and paid for. The entire replacement system for the city’s 26,551 streetlights would have paid for itself in just 13 years.
What other city service or capital expenditure pays for itself — ever?
But now this opportunity — one that would have required a $12 million capital expenditure this year — is gone, thanks to EPB’s flawed record-keeping, city staffers’ apparent inability to sit groups in a room and reach consensus, the mayor’s apparent inability to grasp the concept of system change for anything other than City Hall housecleaning, the council’s inability to stick to its guns in the face of mayoral lobbying, and Global Green Lighting CEO Don Lepard’s somewhat understandable intolerance of delay after he had to lay off 50 workers when the city began slow-walking the second phase of the lighting installation.