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Seattle City Light is using a new approach to keep the more than eighty four thousand
street lights it operates burning bright instead of burning out. Because of state
law
street lights must be funded from the City's general fund which means when budgets get tight
street light maintenance competes with other services like police fire and social programs
Sometimes streetlights take a back seat
Early in two thousand nine the city council allocated more money for repairing street
lights
and the backlog of bad lights was reduced
city light is also changing the way it maintains the lights.
in the past lights were repaired as they failed just as you might replace a light bulb in your home when it burns
out.
now light bulbs or lamps,
are going to be replaced en masse
on a predictable four-year cycle. "Because of our re-lamping program we have seen a dramatic reduction in service calls for the southern half of the city." 0:00:59.000,0:01:00.680 half of our service area
we have seen a dramatic decrease in
outage reports for the southern and of our service area
in March all the lamps
the light bulb part of the street light
will be replaced north of Denny Way to north eighty-fifth street
the final section north of eighty-fifth after that in two thousand eleven
then the whole process starts over again
city lights is also changing the way it deals with reports of bad lights.
the old system depended heavily on people reporting lights out
that has now changed
The old system evolved over many years. Basically a customer would make a report and that would generate a trouble ticket.
But the customer4 never knew whether we had done anything at all. 0:02:13.179,0:02:15.769 That has now changed
we now keep the customer informed at every milestone.
that information is passed back to our customer care division and they
contact the customer back to let them know we were there.
%uh one when ferry would be %uh a record show that like been repaired these little that's
not the case
another might be that the repair of is this a little more involved than they thought
and %uh now we project that it will be repaired and another with primary
city lights goal is to respond to a every report port of street light problem within 10 working days. \ 0:02:53.540,0:02:56.499 to report a streetlight problem
call or go to City web page.
we need to know the address and a number on the pole to make sure that we replace the right
light.
this is Peter clarke reporting for your seattle city light.