Lambourn and Eastbury are looking to upgrade their streetlights from sodium to LED. The upgrade is being undertaken as a single project to take advantage of purchasing economies of scale, to reduce expensive maintenance costs as well as the environmental benefits.
Over the past 6 months, Eastbury Parish Councillor Steve Mead has been busy contacting Eastbury residents to obtain their feedback on how many streetlights residents would like in Eastbury. The quest for feedback was undertaken via an on-line survey, a public consultation held late last year and more recently a comprehensive streetlighting survey that was sent to every Eastbury household in March this year. The results of which were presented to the May Full Council meeting for Lambourn Parish Councillors’ feedback and a vote for a final decision.
Steve made a presentation to the Councillors and confirmed that the results from the paper survey were:
- 52% of the 128 voting sheets distributed were returned by Eastbury residents
- 61% (the overwhelming majority) expressed a wish to see reduced streetlighting from the current 21 streetlights down to 6 strategically placed streetlights
- 13% of the voters wanted darks skies – no streetlights
- 26% of the voters wanted to keep the existing streetlights
The proposal put to the Councillors was to keep 6 strategically placed streetlights, this was based on the Eastbury residents’ feedback. Councillors unanimously agreed to approve the Eastbury Streetlighting project for 6 streetlights to be upgrade to LED with the remaining 15 being decommissioned. Steve was thanked for all his hard work on the project.
Lambourn has 46 streetlights that need to be upgraded to LED lighting. These can be easily identified as they have an orange coloured light and/or a concrete column rather than a metal one. Councillors also unanimously agreed to go ahead and replace these lights.
The Eastbury and Lambourn streetlighting project upgrade will cost over £30,000. We have partially budgeted for this through the precept as well as Councillor Howard Woollaston approaching West Berkshire Council on our behalf and obtaining matched funding to help us with the upgrade.
Because the project will be over £30,000 we have to undertake an official Government tender process to request quotes through the Government portal “Contracts Finder”. This makes it a bit more complicated, but we plan to complete the upgrade over the summer.
image by Vector Pocket on Freepik
