The city of Franklin recently upgraded the lighting on 102 street lights in downtown. The Franklin Street Department installed LED’s prior to the Main Street Festival on all the decorative street lamps from 1st Avenue to Five Points.
“Right now, we are up on bucket trucks pretty often replacing and servicing these street lights so the LEDs will help us cut back on maintenance and also lower our electric bills” said William Fox Traffic Signalization and Maintenance Electrician for the City.
The city spends approximately $800,000 on street lighting electricity cost and this serves as the city’s second largest expense after the wastewater treatment plant. The city owns 600 of the 5,500 public street lights in Franklin and hopes to reduce their cost of maintaining these with this move.
“We’re always looking at ways to reduce costs and energy usage and transitioning to LED street lights is a great way” said Dr. Ken Moore, Mayor of Franklin. This upgrade cost more to start but the new lights are 75 percent more energy efficient and last longer reducing cost. An estimate of 2 years was quoted as return on this investment.
