Your Tax Dollars: Turning Off the Gas Lights?

Gas lights are the symbol of South Orange. There's a restaurant named for them; the town newsletter is called The Gaslight; and the familiar green lights dot our streets. And now Village officials are shedding light on an ambitious plan to equip the town's nearly 1,500 gas lights with an on/off switch that could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long term, plus tons of C02 emissions.

Some in town are worried about the cost, though.

Howard Levison, a board trustee, said soon more than a dozen gas lights in South Orange will be outfitted with this mantle burner, which has a solar sensor and would turn the light off during daylight hours and back on at night. The prototype burners will be monitored for around a year, to see if they work.

If so, he would like to see all of the town's 1,438 lamps outfitted with the burner.

The cost, he said, would be around $1.5 million. But it would save the town $150,000 each year on its gas bill, as the lamps wouldn't burn fuel unnecessarily during the day. "It's an opportunity to go a little greener and save money for the taxpayer," said Levison at a recent Board of Trustees meeting. The Trustees viewed a two-minute video about the new devices.

The best plan would be for the city to bond for the burners and own them outright, Levison said. If utility company PSE&G buys the burners and owns them, they could charge the town a nearly 20 percent capital improvements tariff, which could negate the savings from burning half the gas.

"If we do it by us bonding the money, the payment is small and incremental and we reap the benefit of $150,000 a year," Levison said. "This should be cash positive to the town, that was my objective all along."

PSE&G currently owns all the gas lamps in town. Levison's proposal would not be to buy the lamps from the utility, only to install in them a city-owned burner.

"We're not buying new lamps, we're adding a device," Levison said. "So the physical lamp will still be there, but the burner will be replaced by the new device."

Levison, who is chairman of the finance committee and liason to the environmental committee, said that his dual motivations are "saving the town bucks and being environmentally correct."

The burners are made by Knightronix, a Minnesota based company. They have been tested in high humidity, bitter cold, rain and heat and have passed all tests, Levison said. The first 15 switches installed in the city will be outside the homes of members of the environmental commission and energy committee, who have volunteered to monitor them for a year and report on how they are working. The first one went up earlier this month on Montague Street.

Arnold Knight, CEO of Knightronix, said the modes in South Orange would run on four AA batteries, which have shown to power the device for more than a year. He added that these products are used in both Minnesota and Boston, and they have been working great.

"I've had one in my backyard, one of our first models, and it's been running for more than 10 years," he said.

Tom Hall, a plumber who lives in South Orange, said he would prefer to see the town hire a man to turn all the gas lights on and off by hand.

"I know from the old timers from years gone by, a man used to walk around with a little ladder and turn those lamps on and off," he said. "The cost of these switches is a small fortune."

John Gross, the town business administrator and financial officer, said that the sheer number of gas lamps in town would make it impossible to hire one person for the job.

"The costs of labor today are phenomenal, so that would probably be the last thing we would want to do," he said. "We have more than 1,400 gas lights, to turn them all on and off is too big a job for one person."