We completed a first draft of a revised outdoor lighting ordinance today that meets the requirements of the International Dark Sky Association (IDA) and distributed the draft to the Mayor and City staff for their review and comment.
In addition to recommending changes to comply with IDA requirements, we identified issues where we believe the City should do some research before committing to certain changes. Here are two examples:
(1) IDA requires communities to set a limit on the total amount of lumens generated by outdoor lighting on a property. IDA does not set what that limit should be. We listed limits other communities have adopted. However, we recommended researching a sample of existing properties in the City to find out their total lumen output and use that as a guide for setting limits.
(2) IDA requires that city-owned lighting be brought into compliance with its new regulations within five years. For some time now, Ivins has had a plan of replacing poor city-owned outdoor lighting. However, we recommended continuing the research we began this past week, the City-Owned Street Lighting Study: Part 1, where we inventoried all existing outdoor city-owned lighting. The next step should be to determine which lights would need to be replaced or retrofitted to meet IDA requirements and determine the cost for that work. That way, the City will be able to determine if it can realistically budget for those changes within the 5-year limit.
During December we completed a review of ordinances from nine communities that meet the requirements of the IDA. The ordinances contained a number of good ideas, separate from IDA requirements, that we recommend the City consider including in its ordinance as well. However, that should be “step 2.” Step 1 is reaching conclusions on the IDA requirements that were incorporated into the draft ordinance submitted today.