What’s not in dispute is that the town’s 1,080 streetlights will be converted from sodium-vapor to energy- and cost-saving light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs in the next few years. Who will do it, when it’ll occur, and how much it will cost up-front are elements of the conversion plan under discussion.

First Selectman Carl Fortuna, Jr., briefly described the town’s three streetlight conversion options at a Dec. 28, 2016, Board of Selectmen (BOS) meeting.

One approach would be for the town to hire a firm to handle the lighting conversion as a turnkey project. Other towns in Connecticut have chosen this path. The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities in 2014 evaluated and pre-qualified three firms capable of performing turnkey LED streetlight lighting conversions for towns.

The second plan would be for the town’s electric utility, Eversource, to replace all of the town’s current sodium-vapor bulbs with LED bulbs on its schedule. Eversource already has replaced streetlights along Sheffield Street, Main Street, and College Street with LED bulbs as part of a pilot streetlight conversion process. Eversource recently adjusted its timetable from a five-year to a three-year plan for converting all sodium-vapor bulbs in town to LEDs.

The third streetlight LED conversion option is the one that Fortuna favors: having the town buy its 1,080 streetlights from Eversource. Under this plan, the town would directly reap the cost savings from the lower energy usage of replacement LED bulbs.

This year the town’s budget includes a line item of about $150,000 per year to pay Eversource’s charges for operation and maintenance of the town’s 1,080-unit bulb network. If the network of streetlights were owned by the town, those charges would disappear. At a Dec. 28 BOS meeting, Fortuna said the cost to buy the town’s streetlights from Eversource is about $200,000.

If the town owns the streetlights, it would also adopt the costs to replace LED bulbs that fail and the occasional costs to fix or replace any streetlight pole that does not carry a utility line. (If utility lines are attached to a pole, maintenance of the pole is the responsibility of the companies whose lines are attached to it.)

The Town of Madison recently bought nearly 800 streetlights from Eversource. Madison First Selectman Tom Banisch told Fortuna to expect significant savings by nearly eliminating the streetlight maintenance charges the town now pays to Eversource.

“Eversource makes a ton of money on streetlight maintenance,” said Fortuna.

Fortuna proposed including the $200,000 streetlight purchase price in the proposed town budget for next year. While the budget process proceeds, he would then seek quotes from firms to complete the streetlight conversion process for the town.

“When you do the RFPs, you can ask for prices to add controls on the lights to make them dimmable. [At conversion], the LED lights would be control-ready. In the future you could even add wi-fi,” Fortuna told the selectmen.

Fortuna estimates the town could save about $70,000 per year on streetlight charges by buying the lights compared to Eversource’s current annual charges, which means payback of the town’s initial capital investment would be just two or three years.