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Street lights: Lathrop looks to save $6M over 20 years
lathrop light
Lathrop is looking at going with the same type of energy-efficient LED fixtures throughout the city, replacing all of the aging or faulty streetlights.

The City of Lathrop is looking to replace its existing High-Pressure Sodium streetlights to that of an energy-efficient light emitting diode or LED fixtures.

City Engineer Brad Taylor recently noted that the HPS streetlights throughout town are “aging out” after 25 years.

HPS streetlights are nearing the end of their service life, resulting in frequent outages, resident complaints, and public safety concerns.

 The Lathrop City Council, in an effort to address these issues, just adopted a resolution to create the Citywide Streetlight LED Conversion CIP and approved bringing on Tanko Streetlighting, Inc., to conduct a study at a cost of $15,750.

The study, according to staff, will assess baseline energy use, current and future operations along with maintenance costs, and calculate the projected savings.

The City has 2,500 light fixtures of which 1,650 are HPS. The estimated cost to replace them with LEDs is $900,000 with a payback period of two years and $6 million in savings and maintenance and energy costs over the next 20 years.

Staff also observed a notable increase in work orders by residents in reporting dim or non-functioning streetlights. Taylor said the proposed city-wide LED fixtures will “be brighter.”

During this past year alone, Lathrop reported a total of 72 work orders for streetlight issues, specifically, the HPS fixtures.

The City is currently replacing an average of six HPS streetlights with LED cobra head streetlights, which, staff said, has proved cumbersome given the typical turnaround time of 0about three months from the purchase to delivery time.

This delay has been compounded by limited manufacturer availability as these are not standard “off-the-shelf” LED fixtures and are subject to backorders.

The newly formed Citywide Streetlight Conversion coupled with the service agreement with Tanko lighting to conduct the study would solve those issues.

In order to make that happen, elected leaders, at their December monthly session, also approved a budget amendment transfer of $1 million from the Measure C fund – contingent on review from the Measure C Oversight Committee – to the general CIP fund.