Remember the transformation the new state-of-the-art LED lights made in Coolidge Park in 2011 shortly after a flash mob shooting shocked the city and residents here?
The new, brighter lights brought almost instant safety to the city’s premier park. They also could be dimmed or brightened from a police car, plus they were energy efficient and saved money. After the success of that pilot effort, the Littlefield administration and then-City Council contracted with the light maker, Don Lepard, to replace all 27,000 of the city’s streetlights with his advanced lights, which include a meter and can be controlled and monitored remotely.
But trouble began when Lepard, owner of Global Green Lighting, used EPB’s published list of existing lights to calculate the city’s future savings, then found (as new lights went up) that the old lights didn’t match the list. That finding didn’t just mean that the savings figure was miscalculated, however. It also meant that EPB had been overbilling the city — perhaps as much as $5.9 million — for high-wattage lights when actually lower-wattage lights were on the poles.
After Lepard brought the problems to the attention of EPB and city, city officials opted not to make good on a pledge to replace all the city streetlights with the new lights that even the city auditor in one preliminary audit had found would pay for themselves in savings within 13 to 15 years.
Now Lepard has filed a whistleblower lawsuit on behalf of the city and state. The lawsuit, filed on July 3 but sealed until Friday, claims that EPB violated Tennessee’s False Claims Act by knowingly submitting inflated bills for its streetlights, overbilling Chattanooga taxpayers for an amount that remains in dispute. The suit seeks more than $10 million in damages for what Lepard says is an average 27 percent rate of overbilling among EPB’s 46,000 lights, including nearly 27,000 that belong to the city. Chattanooga may not be the only city overbilled. The city (or cities) could be the beneficiary of most of the damages. Lepard could receive about 25 percent.