City seeks streetlight maintenance contractor

By Randy Bell    

When the City of Clinton decided to stop paying rent on its streetlights and to buy them from Entergy Mississippi, it knew that maintaining the lights would become a City responsibility.  The Board of Aldermen, at its meeting July 21, voted to advertise a Request for Proposals (RFP) for professional support services to repair or replace the lights and poles as needed.

“That’s what this RFP would be for, to solicit a contractor to provide maintenance, should it be necessary, and correct outages as they occur and things of that nature,” says Mayor Will Purdie.

The City is using money from a $12 million bond issue to purchase the lights for $1.7 million, with the expectation of a significant cost savings over time.

“We estimate $350,000 to $500,000 a year,” Purdie explains.   

With the City no longer having to pay Entergy a rental fee, the savings would be enough to cover the purchase price in four or five years.  After that, the money saved could be applied to other budget needs.

While the City will own the streetlight fixtures, ownership of the poles to which the lights are attached is a bit more complicated.

Here’s the explanation from Entergy:

“Some streetlight fixtures may be on a distribution pole that delivers electricity to the streetlight as well as other customers. In that case, Entergy owns the pole, and the City will be responsible for paying an attachment fee for the light to be affixed to the pole. If the pole the fixture is on is a streetlight-only pole, then the City will assume ownership of the pole.”

The City will incur some monthly costs as the owner of the streetlights, because it still has to pay for the electricity.  But that power bill could be smaller than it was in the past.

Entergy says, “This service is subject to the municipally owned and maintained streetlighting rate schedule approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission, which includes the energy charge per kilowatt hour and a small flat usage fee for each Entergy-owned pole to which a municipal-owned streetlight is attached.  The rate schedule accommodates for the fact that the municipality will bear the costs for streetlight maintenance and upkeep that is no longer included in their Entergy bill.”

The bond issue being used to finance the streetlight purchase has also paid for the new LED lights on the athletic fields at Traceway Park and the new decorative lamp posts along Pinehaven Drive.   After paying off a previous bond issue, the City repurposed that debt service for the new bond issue, so no tax increase was necessary.