Ongoing infrastructure work makes for challenges for attending to streetlight issues

A call for more attention towards burned out and non working streetlights in the city on Monday evening gained a bit of a tutorial for City Council on some of the challenges facing the city's operations department at the moment.

The topic came up during the Council commentary period, with Councillor Terri Forster noting of concerns she has heard about the volume of non working streetlights and how residents are reporting them but not finding much in the way of resolution to the issue. 

"I recognize that when you go to fill out that a light burned out, you're supposed to phone not fill out form.

But I think that there has been some confusion in the past. 

Once somebody has either phones of fills out the form, how long should they be patient before they fill it out again"

Originally directed to the City Manager,  Dr. Buchan redirected the enquiry to the Operations Director Richard Pucci.

He provided a Cole's Notes update on operational themes and the status of streetlight repair police at the moment.

"I think that first, is that our lights are not regular incandescent lights anymore HPS lights, they're LED's, so when they're shown out, they're not burnt out and you just change a lightbulb. 

What needs to happen is that you have either a reset or there is something more imminent that has happened like a failure in wiring, or something else.

So, the first thing we do is we try and reset them and secondly we look at other faults. 

Our staff are obviously extremely busy right now with all the breaks, so we are trying our best to get them back on as much as possible, as soon as possible. 

But we're unable to keep up with them and some of them require full overhauls. 

So we are listing them and trying to get them back on as soon as possible. 

But there isn't really a time frame that we can give the public because  it's not as easy as changing a light bulb as it used to be"

Towards better information for the public on such advisories, Mayor Pond offered up a few thoughts towards improved communication options.

"I would love for us to explore, some kind of ... I don't know what it would look like ... but some kind of system that gives feedback to people, so they can see that we looked at it,

 And everybody could go on line and look at it and you know it's bee reported twice already, there's got to be systems out there that are available"

The Question from the Councillor, response from the Director and follow up notes from Mayor Pond can all be reviewed through the City's Video archive of Monday's session starting at the 10:30 minute mark.

Towards the current reporting process for the community, the City's Service Request page notes that for Streetlight Repair reporting the number to call is 250-627-0988

More on Monday's Council Session can be reviewed here.

Items of note from the Operations Department can be explored here.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review.