If you live in the City of Buffalo, you might have noticed parts of your neighborhood are darker than they should be at night — because Buffalo has over 500 downed street lights throughout the city.
Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan committed Thursday to having National Grid replace all downed street lights, which could take up to two years. The “City of Light” initiative will move ownership of replaced street lights going forward to National Grid.
Ryan said the backlog built up due to disinvestment and disputes over whose responsibility it was — the city’s or National Grid’s — to replace the poles.
“It is ironic that [the] City of Buffalo had the first lit grid in all of the world, but now we have all these down poles,” Ryan said. “So, we might have been doing it better 100 years ago than we're doing it today. We're replacing the poles, turning the lights back on, and continuing the work to fix the basics.”
Until now, the majority of the poles themselves have been owned by the city while the wiring and light itself was owned by National Grid. This meant that if a pole went down, the city would have to replace the pole before National Grid could make it operational.
Under the new agreement, the City of Buffalo will not purchase or own the new street light poles. National Grid will purchase and replace the entirety of a street light, and then charge the city $30-$50 per month per pole to operate and maintain them. National Grid has already begun replacing some poles.
The city says the downed street lights currently represent less than 2% of Buffalo’s more than 40,000 streetlights. Going forward, the city will continue to care for street lights it owns, unless it asks National Grid to replace or take over a street light completely under the new agreement.
Ryan said decades of disinvestment have also left the city without the infrastructure to remedy a problem this size on its own.
“We were left with one person [to repair street lights], and that one person generally would go on subcontract to work out. But year after year, ignoring a poll — 10, 20, 30, you add that up for a generation. Now we're left with 500 polls down,” Ryan said. “It took a generation to get here. It's going to take us some time to get out.”
So far, 14 poles have been replaced along Memorial Drive near the Buffalo Central Terminal. National Grid plans to ramp up the majority of the work in April after the winter.
