RESIDENTS in Ward 7 are encouraged to take ownership of their community by “adopting” a street light to try to speed up the repair work whenever a street light goes out.
Ward Councillor, Brendon Pegram, said that he wants to start this campaign in his ward, where residents and business owners help the municipality to identify broken street lights, which would essentially speed up the repair process.
Each resident is asked to identify a lamp post, for instance the one just outside their residence or business premises, and to keep an eye on their specific lamp post.
If the street light is out of order, the resident who adopted that specific street light, should tie a blue ribbon around it and let the councillor know, making it easier for municipal officials to spot when they arrive to fix the light.
According to Pegram, identifying the specific broken street light can be quite a challenge, even if it was reported to the municipality by residents.
“Reporting of broken street lights has become a huge issue for us because the municipality does not want to work with serial numbers that are on the poles anymore and some of them don’t have any serial numbers at all.
“The issue is that we now have to report a broken street light and give the address where the lamp post is situated but some lamp posts aren’t situated at certain addresses because they could be next to a field or a church that has no address,” Pegram explained.
“We came up with this idea that maybe if the community gets involved and ties a blue ribbon around the broken light, it’ll be helpful because the officials repair them during the day. They don’t know which lights are out of order.
“We have also checked with the municipality and they have absolutely no issue with the ribbon being tied around the lamp posts. They also agreed to remove the ribbon themselves once the light is fixed,” Pegram added.
He said that crime had increased in this area and there were a lot of street lights that were currently not working.
“Another huge problem that we have here is cable theft. It’s something that we have to monitor and look closely at.
“It’s also something that I’m always discussing with the neighbourhood watch at our meetings to make sure that there is more visibility, especially with all the dark spots in the streets,” Pegram said.
He said that this campaign was a major effort to curb vandalism and cable theft and to provide better infrastructure throughout the ward.
“We know that some street lights have bigger faults than just a fused light bulb but we would really like to reach that point where the community is so involved with the campaign that they can tie a ribbon around the pole and call me to say that it’s broken.
“We will do the rest. We will follow up and do all the necessary communication,” he said.
Pegram explained that he had a very diverse ward, stretching from Mill Park, Linkside and Kensington, all the way to Glen Hurd, Newton Park and Adcockvale Extension, among others.
“The other night I was driving through Kensington and there were 41 broken street lights. Kensington is not exceptionally big so for 41 street lights to be out is a huge concern to me,” he said.
“There are concerns for the residents’ safety. We have a lot of elderly people in our ward and they are scared.
“I am part of several neighbourhood watch groups on WhatsApp and reports are constantly coming through about people hanging around in the dark spots where street lights used to be.
“I would really like our community to come together so that we can get our ward shining bright again.”
