By Tony Brown
Maryville Daily Forum
During its annual round of budget writing later thus summer, the Maryville City Council is expected to seek illumination on a proposal to equip municipal buildings with highly efficient LED lighting fixtures.
Municipal staff recently received the results of a multi-building lighting audit conducted by Brightergy, a Kansas City-based energy management firm.
The audit included three city facilities — City Hall at 415 N. Market Street, the street maintenance garage at Third and Newton and the Maryville Pubic Safety police and fire station at 222 E. Third Street — in addition to the New Nodaway Humane Society animal shelter on South Depot.
Though the shelter is owned and run by the not-for-profit society, its operations are subsidized with $82,000 a year in municipal funds, and its staff provides the city with animal control services.
Noting this relationship, City Manager Greg McDanel said it is in the city’s best interest to help the no-kill shelter keep expenses down.
“If we can assist them in being more efficient moving forward, that is certainly something we would want to do,” he said.
According to Brightergy, replacing fluorescent and incandescent bulbs with LEDs at the three municipally owned structures would save the city approximately $123,000 in electricity costs over ten years. Adding the animal shelter into the mix, the company claims, would boost those savings to $145,000
While investing in that kind of efficiency might seem like a no-brainer, McDanel said the council will have some variables to consider as it reviews the Brightergy proposal during upcoming budget study sessions.
First of all, the initial investment in LEDs would cost Maryville taxpayers around $12,000 per building, an expense that will take about three years to recoup through energy savings. At the animal shelter, where offices and other facilities are only open part time, the payback period is estimated at five years.
Secondly, the city has commissioned a pair of feasibility studies that address the possibility of constructing a new fire/police headquarters and City Hall. If the council decides to proceed with either one of those projects in the fairly near future, it would likely balk at putting money into existing buildings about to be taken out of service.
McDanel said the most urgent candidate for an LED retrofit is the street maintenance garage, where truck bays, the repair shop and other areas are lit by a variety of aging fixtures, including high-wattage halogen lamps.
More than money, McDanel said, a switch to LEDs at the garage would provide significantly brighter illumination, making for a safer workplace in a facility where city employees operate power tools and work on heavy machinery with a lot of moving parts.
Maryville has already switched to LED fixtures at its water treatment plant, where McDanel said the new lights have “created a much safer work environment, literally a night and day difference.”
Installing LEDs at the water plant late last year required a $4,650 investment by the city with an anticipated payback period of 2.6 years and a 10-year savings of $15,000.
According to the Brightergy audit, replacing fixtures at the street maintenance garage would cost taxpayers $12,600 up front, carry a 2.3-year payback period and yield 10-year savings of $52,000.
Following a similar Brightergy audit last year, the Nodaway County Commission made the decision to have LEDs installed at all four of its buildings: the courthouse, County Administration Center, jail and road and bridge maintenance garage.
Installation cost for all four facilities totaled around $100,000, which the county expects recoup in energy savings over the next decade.
As would be the case with the proposed municipal switch to LEDs, a portion of the county’s installation costs were subsidized by Kansas City Power & Light.
The acronym LED is short for “light-emitting diode,” a device that releases energy in the form of photons and creates an effect known as electroluminescence.
Early LEDs were often used as indicator lamps for electronic devices, but recent technological developments mean clusters of LED bulbs are now capable of providing environmental and task lighting in homes, offices and workshops.
LEDs offer a number of advantages over incandescent and fluorescent light sources, including lower energy consumption, longer life and faster switching. However, LEDs powerful enough for room lighting are still relatively expensive and require more precise current and heat management than compact fluorescent lamps of comparable output.
According to the Brightergy audit, LEDs are up to 84 percent more efficient than comparable incandescent fixtures.
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