County Public Works assures us the new LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) would be “dark sky compliant,” but what does that mean? This is a massive, multi-million dollar project the County, partnering with Edison, will take years to complete — with no plans for public review offered. Few of us have any idea of the consequences.

But over a year ago, we were given an idea when several intersections were converted to LEDs in an initial rollout in Altadena. People immediately started noticing the new eyeball-piercing blue glare, which triggers a whole physiological reaction (glare doesn’t “stay” in our eyes.) One example is at Allan and New York, where nine light poles replaced three. Nancy Whalen started a group called Softlight Altadena, and contacted Heritage about starting a conversation with LA County to initiate a much-needed lighting plan for Altadena. We’ve worked successfully with our Supervisor’s office on a number of projects over the years, and agreed to team up.

Our coalition has grown to 10 local groups (listed below), and led us to a wealth of research and science on how LED conversions impact safety, human health, wildlife, night skies, and historic ambiance. We learned that done well, the goals of saving money and safely lighting streets are achievable. But over the past decade, many cities made mistakes converting to LEDs, leading to unhappy citizens and expensive re-dos and retrofits, probably because the technology has evolved so quickly. Standards keep shifting as a body of evidence grows of negative health and safety impacts of high Kelvin, blue-rich diodes. (Kelvin is a measure of “color temperature,” with higher numbers tending toward blue and lower toward yellow.) We humans learn from experience, but the combination of rapid technological change and the slower pace of civic bureaucracy, contracts, and supply chains, hasn’t generally been a recipe for success in LED conversions. There are, however, several positive examples we want to learn from!