Martin Brown wrote:

You need to express it clearly in terms of wasted tax dollars lighting
up the sky. You can save money and have the same amount of light on the
ground by using the right fixtures. That might interest the general
populus. Everyone knows astronomers are wierd scary people of the night.


But be sure to have a handle on how many tax dollars are actually being
wasted on steetlights before pursuing that argument. Last year, I
looked into the budget numbers for my town of Tempe, Arizona. Our
population amounts to about 200,000 of the 3 million people in the
continuous suburbia of Phoenix.

http://www.tempe.gov/budget/FY%2005-...ine%20Item.pdf

On Page 16 of 418(!) are the electric bill numbers. They show $4.2M,
and $900K of that is for street lighting. The entire City of Tempe
budget is $288M.

So lighting represents roughly 20% of the city's electric bill, and
0.3% of the total budget. Most of the lights are already full-cutoff
in Tempe, so perhaps it's a couple tenths of a percent higher for other
cities without lighting ordinances. You can see why it's a tough sell
to pitch a wholesale change in streetlighting using an argument based
on budget alone. Pitching a proposal to change lighting fixtures to
save a tenth of a percent of a city's budget will likely be quickly
dismissed by the city council, especially when it's weighed against the
cost of the change.

Tom