More path lights coming soon to Arrow Drive
After complaints from the public, the City of Clinton found a way to tone down the bollard lights along the Arrow Drive pathway. Now, it’s preparing to add more of those lights to complete the project.
At its January 21 meeting, the Board of Aldermen agreed to pay a Jackson company $482,375 to install one hundred forty-two fixtures, starting at the western edge of the Clinton High School (CHS) campus and ending at Traceway Park. The National Park Service has refused to allow lights on its right of way, so the bollards that would have been used where the path crosses under the Natchez Trace will be installed instead on a walking path at Traceway Park near Cynthia Road.
A Meridian company received a contract in 2023 to place the first sixty-eight lights along the Arrow Drive path from Pinehaven Drive to CHS, but McInnis Systems, Inc. submitted a lower bid for the second phase. The work is expected to begin in the spring and take about three months to complete.
The new bollards shouldn’t produce the kind of complaints that the first ones did. Some people insisted that the lights were too bright, blinding and confusing motorists who mistook them for the headlights of oncoming cars as they pulled out onto the street from Arrow Drive neighborhoods.
After a proposal to add louvered fixtures to direct the light downward was dismissed as too expensive, the City installed a relatively cheap dimming device on each light to reduce the glare while still illuminating the path. The new lights will come equipped with the dimmers.
Consulting City Engineer Bill Owen says the money for the project is coming from MDOT’s Transportation Alternative Program.
“We’ll put the package together to send to MDOT,” he says. “It’ll go before the [Transportation] Commission. They’ll issue a notice that we can award the project. Then we’ll tell the contractor to get their contract documents ready, and we’ll sit down and have a notice to proceed.”
The City’s share of the funding is twenty per cent.
