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Last night, the Ann Arbor City Council voted to install the brighter 58W streetlights throughout the city.? One mitigating factor that only emerged at the 11th hour is that they can actually be implemented as 48W lights, which is what was verbally agreed upon.? Council Member Briggs offered an amendment to enforce the 48W implementation, but the City Administrator said it was not necessary.? This will now require holding their feet to the fire.

A HUGE thank-you to everyone who helped fight for the right thing.? Although we didn't fully succeed, you were heard, and you made waves, and we made some significant gains.? Special thanks to Jim Sheerin, Rita Turmer-Sheerin, Leslie Mason, and Heidi Trudell for drumming up public support, and to John Mirsky, Rita Mitchell, and Steve Brown for continued work with the city commissions and elsewhere.? Huge thanks to everyone who spoke at the Council meetings and wrote emails to Council.

What became clear at last night's meeting is that the city staff had no interest in looking at other options, and effectively stonewalled Council's requests to explore alternatives.? In response to the original charge from the July 15 meeting to explore options with DTE, the formal response was a Staff Memo?that provided false reasoning* to stick with the original plan.? In response to additional Council questions that were read out at last night's meeting, staff provided no substantive answers.? In particular, they failed to provide any details for why they claim 1.5 FTE are needed to maintain the 2-fixture solution (i.e., how many people does it take to screw in 2 light bulbs), and they claimed that the amount of money saved by that solution was "nominal" according to a vague statement by DTE in 2023.? This is unlikely to be true, since the wattage saved by the 2-fixture solution is about 33% more, and DTEs rates are set by the Michigan Public Services Commission.? The money saved is probably substantial, and must be the driving reason why DTE has fought tooth and nail, through our City Staff, to prevent the 2-fixture solution. ?

In response to the final question, staff stated that they believed the 29W lights were too dim to be appropriate -- a baseless statement that directly contradicts the ANSI standards, which they avoided mentioning.? Why would our city staff believe that? ?despite the large amount of information that our group and others have provided?? Because, as they stated during the meeting, they've had "near daily" meetings with DTE.

The lack of staff responsiveness to Council's charge and requests for information prevented Council from their stated intention to explore alternatives -- on behalf of what you, the taxpayers, had loudly requested, and which was based on solid science. ?

To end on a positive note, the new LEDs, if implemented at 48W, will be only 200 - 300% brighter than ANSI standards in residential neighborhoods, and they'll be a good color temperature of 2700 K and shielded.? Lighting along arteries should be generally dark-sky compliant.? We can thank staff for obtaining these partial wins.? We especially owe a huge thanks to Council Members Erica Briggs (Ward 5) and Dharma Akmon (Ward 4). ?Both of them?fully engaged with this issue at a technical level, and did a great deal of work behind the scenes to try to shift course.? Had staff worked with them in good faith, Council might have had a viable alternative to consider.? Please consider sending them a note (EBriggs@..., DAkmon@...).

Thanks again to all.