Days after a collision killed a pedestrian on State Street, a city councilor is seeking to pressure utility company Eversource into fixing its broken streetlights by denying its work orders until the issue is addressed.
“We pay for those lights to provide safety,” City Councilor Malo Brown said Monday. “And they’re supposed to be on. We pay for them and they’re not on.”
The utility estimates that 120 streetlights are in need of repairs out of the 14,000 it maintains across the city.
Brown held a press conference with community activist Charles Stokes near the location on State Street where a driver struck Sylvia Gladden, 58, on the evening of Dec. 5.
Stokes stood across the street from a bus stop, pointing out the streetlight above that remained dark in the deepening dusk. “That light is broke,” Stokes said. “It doesn’t even come on.”
Four years ago, Stokes said, a man was struck and killed in the same location.
Other streets in the area lack light, Stokes said: Oak Street and St. James Avenue, for instance. He said Black and Latino communities in the city are overlooked for repairs. Stokes wants the mayor’s office to study the performance of streetlights around the city.
Earlier this year the City Council voted to delay decisions on Eversource upgrades due to high utility costs. In keeping with that tactic, Brown said the city should freeze all of the utility’s work order requests until it fixes the streetlights.
“I don’t believe we should let them do any work until they live up to the obligation of the work that they promised us already,” Brown said in an interview. “It’s already become more than a safety issue.”
The City Council’s Maintenance and Development subcommittee is scheduled to discuss the topic of street lighting at its meeting Thursday. Brown said he’d like to conduct a community light count ahead of that meeting.
He said he hopes to forge a consensus uniting the mayor’s office and his colleagues on City Council. “I need us to, as a city, to put the pressure on them, fix our light. … I need everyone’s support,” he said.
Broken streetlights have long been a sore spot for city officials. Mayor Domenic J. Sarno in 2021 met with Eversource officials who said they would streamline the reporting process and devote more crews to fix streetlights. By late December of that year, Eversource made 122 repairs and planned to complete the work by January.
Sarno has said in the past that broken streetlights are “a huge ‘pet peeve’” of his, and he will report them as he travels across the city.
City councilors in an April meeting once again decried the presence of unlit streetlights dotting their drives around the city. City Councilor Lavar Click-Bruce, at the time, floated an idea of not paying for streetlights that remain dark for longer than three days.
Eversource spokesperson Olessa Stepanova said the utility has worked for years to improve the speed at which it addresses streetlight issues in Springfield, whether the offending lamp is dark, damaged or dim. Rolling out an online reporting system has helped.
This year, the utility has repaired about 1,000 streetlights and updated 12,000 with LED fixtures, which are more energy-efficient, she said.
“We are actively reviewing specific concerns raised along the State Street corridor, and our engineering and operations teams are looking into those locations now,” Stepanova said in a statement. “Public safety is important to us, and we remain committed to maintaining a reliable streetlighting system and addressing reported issues across Springfield.”
Christopher Cignoli, the city’s director of public works, said since the beginning of the year, the city’s 311 line has fielded 315 calls about Eversource’s facilities, such as wires. About half of the calls pertained to streetlights.
Sometimes, Cignoli wrote in an email, a dark streetlight is not just a simple bulb replacement. “(It) could be related to bad wiring in a pole or issues with above or below ground wiring / circuits,” Cignoli wrote, adding that such a repair could take weeks.
State Street, meanwhile, is considered a particularly hazardous road for pedestrians. Blocks away from intersection where the press conference was held, three people died after attempting to cross the stretch of road between the library and a public parking lot. The city has since installed a crossing complete with lights to stop traffic.
Many motorists exceed the posted 30 mph speed limit while navigating a stretch of road that featured poor lighting, according to a report about the crossing near the library. It took pedestrians between 13 and 15 seconds to cross the road.