okay we are at the top of the hour welcome everyone to the Colorado Plateau dark sky quarterly connections with the support of my colleagues through the cooperative and The Institute of outdoor recreation and tourism at Utah State University I'm excited to introduce three outstanding speakers today on the topic of outdoor lighting with a special focus on advancements in technology planning and design today represents part one on this subject in June we will reconvene for part two when we focus o
n the policies and implementations of outdoor lighting the goal of this educational series is to build a community to Foster connections and broaden a collective understanding of matters related to The Dark Knight sky and its management we hope with this forum we can all learn support from one another and ultimately be more effective in our unique roles and Mission my name is Lisa Stoner and I am the coordinator for the Colorado Plateau dark sky Cooperative John barentine also a member of The Co
operative is my host today who will be facilitating our questions and answers following the presentations some quick Logistics we record all quarterly connections and post the links on our website today we have something new this meeting is being offered connection with the Utah chapter of the American Planning Association so for any live attendees who are interested in receiving continuing education credits I will drop a code for you in the chat at the end of this meeting and you can submit to
apa Utah later for all of our guests today it would be great to know who is with us if you would like to drop your name and where you are from in the chat that would be great and it is also helpful if your name and your affiliation are showing in your Zoom profile and for questions that come up during the presentation please put those in the chat as we go John will be monitor rating the questions throughout and we will do our best to get to those after the presentations on to the show we have an
outstanding lineup of presenters today first we'll be hearing from Nancy Clanton Nancy is the founder and CEO of Centon and Associates she is a professor Prof engineer who specializes in sustainable outdoor lighting design she is a fellow of numerous organizations including the illuminating engineering Society the International Association of lighting designers and the US Green Building council's lead program she also serves as co-chair for the dark sky Internationals technical committee and sh
e is joining us from Colorado next is Ashley Pipkin Ashley is an outdoor Recreation planner for the National Park Service and for many years has working with the national sounds and night skies division many of you know her in Prior role as the coordinator of the Basin and Range dark sky Cooperative a group she started and led from 2019 to 2023 she joins us today from Boulder City Nevada and finally Rick uting is an outdoor lighting specialist and design engineer who also works for Clanton and a
ssoci he's based in Michigan Rick is an independent consultant for dark sky International he also serves as Vice chair in The Illuminating engineering society's outdoor nighttime environment committee you will find more information about our presenters if you check out their bios that's provided on our website finally the moment we've been waiting for we're going to start our presentations thank you to our speakers for this opportunity to hear from you we will open the conversation first with Na
ncy Nancy please go ahead and take it away well thank you wow I feel very very honored to be part of this and uh putting it all together um I'm going to be discussing Kind of Night and and day and what we know and how light really affects our environment because so many times this is forgotten they go into oh well we just need light for people and safety and all that but I like to dig into especially for those of you who are here who are Landscape Architects to go what are we doing with our ligh
t at night how can we do everything and have a win-win situation what we do know is that life needs daylight absolutely and the amount of Daylight's going to vary of course where you are in this world next but boy does life need healthy darkness and if you look at it notice the color of the sun as it's setting remember that keep that in your mind as we go into different types of lighting next I made these up um a few years ago when I was working the University of Minnesota on how light affects m
ostly the plants and we came up with the three PS plants pollinators and people and I'm going to delve into each of these briefly just to show you on the differences that each of us have next we're going to start with plants and this just blew me away um and delving into all of the the research that goes into it and Ian ashtown bless his soul he's no longer with us helped me he gave me two full pages of papers to read about this and I read every single one and what surprised me is the effect of
light on Plants look at the tree on the right which is by the the street light and how the leaves hang on for at least a couple more weeks because of the light from the street light um which really can affect the tree it can like if a a storm came up or something it could tip the tree over um now so this is just kind of getting my excitement about this to learn more next it was actually the Virginia Tech um Research Institute that delved into for the Department of Illinois and the effect of road
way Lighting on soybean crops and Dr Gibbons actually took all the data and related it back to what line designers could use as far as the amount of light and all that all my yellow arrows there are pointing to a roadway light and if you notice it's directly related to green spots of the soybeans next and here is their data and if you look at the chart on the right you notice that the higher the lighting level you go the less soybean production we have and it can go down you know to 40% or even
30% in some situations wow for a States for Farmers for everything that is so concerned about production and agriculture this is huge you know we keep thinking that light pollution oh we can't see the stars but look at the effects of what we've got on plants and the data is there and I'd be happy to give you all of Ian's resources and papers to read on this if you're interested next slide now let's go to the pollinators and this all again really affected me to look at how the MS get trapped in t
he light and they're wasting all this valuable time you know they're not out pollinating and looking for mates they're just kind of going around and around and around all the different lights next slide this is actually um some real sad data if you look at in 1950 one trap one night they caught over 50,000 mobs let's go to 2000 the year 2000 19 traps over the ENT entire summer and they only caught 6,200 Ms that's like below 5% of the MZ and these pollinators are so important for the nighttime MZ
there about 20 20 times the amount of MZ versus bees to pollinate our plants and of course what they're attracted to is white and so H our lights our LEDs everything it's white they get trapped and then the bats come and eat them so we've got a real problem next slide and then to the people oh we need we need that warmth of light looking at how our eyes work and if you get into the mechanism of our eyes and our retina we need on the the daylight the blue light that comes down on the bottom part
of our retina and that's what really adjusts our uh serotonin and but at night we need melatonin production and the light needs to come from the bottom and hit the top part of our retina I Dr Samson with Mayo Clinic confirmed all that with me and I went wow we didn't know that that we grew up with this fire light with this warmth coming below or remember the sunset dipping it's that kind of light that needs to be done next slide so here's my quiz for you all what are the three PS have in common
next slide think about that let's get rid of the blue light they all are affected by blue light and that's a big problem um what my dream is I hope EPA actually looks at light pollution as real pollution and I think with all of your help maybe the more pressure we can put on that it's affecting our plants it's affecting the birds it's affecting everything at night and it's huge and what we've got this problem and of course the wildlife I think you're very very intuned into you know the turtle h
atching all of that and how it affects it um Travis lanor who's with UCLA actually sent me another page of papers to look at and he has mapped over 600 species and what they have so here's another question what color of light do animals big huge animals really don't see well the answer is like an orange or a red that's why Hunters can go out and red because they're completely dark and so this is what we've got and um they're usually bicono and we are trional next slide one of the great great thi
ngs that have happened is that the illuminating engineering society and the now it's called dark sky International used to be Ida International dark sky but everyone get used to dark sky International they put together collectively which is amazing the environmentalists along with the lighting Engineers who are coming up with the criteria they put together all of these by principles for responsible outdoor lighting the great news is all of the IES criteria now has to follow these five principles
and I'm going to go through each one with an example Le of what it means next first one light better be useful you shouldn't just be spraying light somewhere that's not useful notice the slot I mean the picture on the left where we've got stairs you can see the stairs and where they are it's kind of like wave finding lighting and on the slide on the right you light maybe on a path where you've got um conflict zones you know a bicyc is going to conflict with a pedestrian that's what you light an
d you don't have to spray light everywhere else next slide and it should only be directed only where needed it should be targeted um the slide on the left is a project we did that's going over a creek where fish and wildlife said no absolutely no light can go into the water so we integrated light and look at it's beautiful wave finding lighting across this bridge in fact I've been working with the low visibility community and they have said the closer you are to where the railing is and about 12
inches from the railing that's what they need they don't necessarily need down the middle because they're not going to be there and so we're just looking how can we light and not intrude the picture on the the right shows an underpath so notice how all the light is aimed inwards and not to the river the only light that's reflected in the river is coming from lighting way way Downstream next SL next slide but please when you're doing your designs calculate the light levels and model 3D with the
landscape so a we're not getting light into the landscape we've got everything Direct directed where it's needed and we're providing good wave finding lighting next slide light should be no brighter than necessary o this is amazing because everyone goes oh we need more light one of my another dream I have is that right now our lighting levels are a linear basis but in foot candles if you eat triple you almost have to go 10 times the lighting level before anyone notices a difference think of our
ears our hearing is in decibels and that's logarithmic my dream is that we go to logarithmic scale scale with lighting and we can see we've done this at Grand Canyon National Park we lit a lot of The Visitor Center at two moonlights and brought the the public through and they had no problem seeing it all next slide and if no one's in the area let's turn it off let's dim it down let's do everything um I do understand the beauty of landscape lighting a good friend of mine Carol Franklin I once ask
ed her I said Carol what do you think of landscape lighting and she said oh Nancy everyone loves to be in the spotlight but not while we sleep and I'd never have forgotten that and so please use controls that will not hurt the plants or the pollinators and start turning things off next slide and then the final um principle is use warmer color light where possible just like that beautiful sun setting or the fire light and have it low we can see just fine next slide so here are kind of my simple r
ules to follow I didn't talk a what about what a bug is but it's basically how we rate luminary's backlight uplight and glare use as low of a rating as you can do do warm light which is like 1600 Kelvin to at the top 3,000 Kelvin and that's very easy all luminares are going to have that system of color temperature related to them and then controls controls controls my dream is phones smartphones will do the controls just in time lighting that we know if someone's out there okay the lights could
slowly dim up or not but I think that that is really the future and I'm hoping that that's exactly what happens next slide now it's over to Ashley thank you so hi everyone we got a little introduction in the beginning but I'm going to just do a brief one um I work for the natural sounds of night sky division my name is Ashley Pipkin I have worked for the national park services natural signs and night skies division for about 10 years now and when I started my job um one of the best parts of it o
f course is the field work being able to collect information on night sky quality in some of the most spectacular places in the country our national Parks pretty quickly you realize that if national parks or any dark or bright places are going to try to make improvements they will need to work with communities that use and install artificial light and from my point of view Partnerships were the way to address this challenge um as Lisa said we started the Basin arrange dark sky Cooperative in 201
9 I helped coordinate that for the first five years and being a part of that group was amazing I was finding myself really constantly inspired by all the amazing work other people were doing um I think collaboration really became easier when we heard from other other people's projects other work that's going on in um this I'll I'll show the in this part of the Basin arrange dark sky Cooperative but also in the Colorado Plateau dark sky Cooperative just hearing all of the amazing work and I had t
alk um at length about um these projects uh many of the projects in The Cooperative but I will choose to focus on one of them today and that one project that I'm going to talk about is based out of Boulder City Nevada um Boulder City Nevada this is a satellite image um of Boulder City in the red box and it's is um at the edge of one of the brightest Parts in the whole Cooperative in Las Vegas Nevada and I really do want to emphasize that working with places that use light is an incredibly import
ant way to improve night skies many people also think that because Boulder City is so close to Las Vegas that um you know our sky is already ruined but I want you to notice that in the satellite image while the Western sky um you know if you cut through Boulder City while the Western sky is really impacted by Las Vegas um what we have an Eastern sky is nearly pristine it's one of the last places you can go to grab a meal or stay in a hotel before you go to the night skies in a via National Monum
ent or lake me National Recreation Area or on your way to Grand Canyon National Park over here and I wanted to celebrate that and have Boulder City really be a part of the solution and not um you know just a part of the problem so team from Boulder City Chamber of Commerce and Boulder City staff supported an application for us to uh for me to be an American Geo physical Union agu fellow uh to make Boulder City more night sky friendly our community science Brian Binger is leading the effort on th
e lighting management plan while the community leads work on implementation of that plan through retrofits to night sky friendly lighting with scientists and Community Support we move to gain an even broader Coalition of support and you can do this in a lot of different ways but one way I engaged in this process was by presenting to city council and I tried to meet city council where they were to build trust and address what they were concerned with this is a slide directly from my city council
presentation um there are so many reasons to care about the night sky um but instead of focusing on you know what my interests are as a National Park Service employee somebody who cares about natural nocturnal environments a great deal I did try to focus on how I could appeal to the community and how um listen to them about what they think that they could do to make lighting better in their community and what would appeal um in a positive light so what would make improvements and also listen to
their concerns about um what they thought night sky friendly lighting could do there there were a lot of concerns in the community that if we installed night sky friendly lighting it could potentially make it too dark to see um and so to address that problem headon one of the things we did in our community was a dimming experiment um for a little bit of background uh the community had a lot of these warm high pressure sodium lights as those lights were slowly dying out they would replace them wi
th these 4,000 K LEDs this is a light from the community they're incredibly bright and these lights required a person to go there in a bucket truck go to the top of the light and dim it if they were going to dim the light so that is not the easiest way to dim a light but they were kind enough to do it they dimmed one of the lights to 25% and another one of the lights to 50% and I was really shocked to see that while my aluminates meter that I took out to measure the light detected the change the
reduction in brightness my eyes could not tell the difference um Nancy kind of hit on this earlier the human eye is amazing and we we will still be able to see and having the community members and um folks in public works and city council see that we were using so much light that we could dim it by 50% and not even notice was really a game Cher and convincing them that we could use less light in our community they finally understood that using less light would not actually make it too dark to s
ee so after gaining support from Boulder City Council and Community leaders I went back to Partnerships built in that Cooperative setting and the Nevada division of outdoor recreation has just been an amazing partner and they were the lead applicant for Boulder City to the economic development Administration and we applied to retrofit the lights in Boulder City to make them night sky friendly and yay we were awarded the grant um which is excellent news our next step though was to get work um pla
nning the project and what we would do in the community when we got the grant we wanted to be sure to share this information with the community um not just the city council but we sent a mailer to every single person in the community describing what dark skies were and asking them to fill out a survey and in from that survey we found that we had broad support to move ahead so what does what did moving ahead look like for Boulder City well first we had to establish goals and one of our major goal
s for the project was to reduce Sky glow um you know I I showed you in the beginning of the presentation that I measured Sky glow for the national park for many many years and this is an image um that we took of of uh of this the Boulder City and you can see there's Las Vegas over here and this little square over here is Boulder City so we will take many many measurements um this is a sky glow measure that we've taken and we will continue to monitor skylow in this section another one of the goal
s of the project was to reduce light trespass in the community um and one of the things that we did whenever we were working with folks selling us lights is we asked them to provide photometric plans so that we could evaluate our light and there's many different programs a popular one is Agi 32 but there are many different kinds of programs that you can use to get these photometric measurements um to make sure that when you're choosing a light that you are hitting the mark for the right brightne
ss and the right distribution for that light the Cobra headlight that we chose for Boulder City looks like this and um Nancy talked a little bit about the bug rating so backlight uplight glare all of uh our lights have zero uplight it has a 2700k color temperature so it's below that 3,000 it's between that 3,000 and 1,600 that Nancy mentioned All of the Lights have dimming C capability with remote control dimming so it's not going to require a specialist in a bucket truck to get up there to chan
ge the brightness um and there is also improved distribution depending on if that light was a double pole mounted light if it's in a a single pole mounted light in a neighborhood or in an intersection we are still picking our posttop light out we haven't finalized this decision yet but I'll share some um I'll share some of our experience in Boulder City which is in this process we have shopped around we have installed so many different lights and we have used our five principles to guide us thro
ughout this process um and in addition to the considerations about brightness uplight color distribution that we all have to think about as night sky Advocates there are other things to consider that I'm learning so much about too from the community perspective you know what the polls can handle we're just installing lights on polls that we already have so we have to pick out lights that are appropriate for our polls we have to pick out lights that are affordable um and that feel like the aesthe
tic of the community um we need to consider if we choose one light or the other would we need a houseside shield and is that an extra cost and what the controls um are for each available light as well so there are so many things to consider when picking the appropriate light for your community and I think this is a a big one and a big lesson learned for me throughout this process um I'm G to you know share I think one of the biggest challenges that we're seeing with outdoor lighting and changing
technology um this is this is an image here of Boulder City before the grant before night sky friendly lighting um was even brought to city council and you can see you know in the community there's sort of a hodgepodge of lighting if you're not familiar with lighting this is kind of the 4,000k LED along this road um these are the older high pressure sodium lights and you know there's a hodg podge you know high pressure sodium and led over here and I would just say that this transition is very t
ypical um in communities across the country LED lighting is going to change how we light our communities and this new technology is more energy efficient and as the and the cost per Lumen how bright it is that the cost to to light is getting less and less expensive and I believe it's one of the biggest concerns facing the night sky is the risk of using more light because it costs less and I see this kind of over and over again in communities cheaper light means that more light is being used but
it does not have to be it doesn't have to be that way you know if a community wants to see improvements in the night sky we as a community of practitioners need to make sure that we are giving the appropriate guidance um on how to use this uh new technology so that this LED lighting technology is improving night skies instead of adding more light to the environment overall so Nancy kind of went through what the five principles are I just have um a little dot beside each one based on how hard or
easy I think it was um in Boulder City for us to implement and like I said um choosing the appropriate lighting level I think is one of the hardest things and I think it's one of the biggest challenges for for non experts I think in the sales world uh there's could be a big incentive to upsell lights because they're bigger and brighter and more expensive um and that's why we need to measure measure measure um and I think communities really struggle with this one and I think it's one of the most
important reasons to hire a lighting designer or an engineer to help you with your project if you know funding allows for that I think that is the one of the biggest things they can help with um light being targeted in Boulder City we used that bug rating we made sure we had uplight of zero and played around with the brightness to get lower backlight and lower glare we looked at photometric measurements um to make sure we were choosing the right distribution that takes some expertise but um I th
ink it's a little bit easier than the low light levels for this useful one I put this one kind of in the middle of the road you would think that would be the most easiest one um but I think when working with communities uh I think if you can convince them to not put a lighting pull up that's your best bet and reducing nonuseful light um but I think when uh infrastructure is placed in a community I think it's just a part of our culture sometimes that we have a hard time removing it once it's ther
e I'd be interested to hear if others have had success in that realm um controlled this is becoming easier and easier with new technology and I think as one of the biggest benefits of LED lighting is that it's much easier to control in Boulder City we have you know these remote control dimmers um on on our lights uh our posttop light is maybe it's going to be a little bit maybe more cost prohibitive to have a lot of controls on that light so that might not be something we choose for the posttop
but it's getting more and more affordable to control lighting and I think choosing a colors is the easiest um as Nancy said you got to choose a warm color and you can kind of choose that across the board for your community so this is my last slide um with you know just a few Lessons Learned here I think um I I'll go through some of the things I think really helped us and some of the things if anybody else is trying to do a project like this that I hope I can um help with but I think one of the m
ost important lessons that I learned is to include designers in the cost we did not Cho choose to do that initially to do um to include lighting designers and lighting engineers in the cost and I really regret that I wish we would have done it um I think when you work with those lighting Engineers lighting designers that it's really important for them to have um clear goals and we do have some clear goals in this project um for us we wanted to reduce light trespass and Sky glow and uh if you wan
t to make sure you are Meeting those goals you cannot measure too much I didn't get into measurement too much in this um discussion today just didn't have time to do it but we have been measuring this and will continue to measure um our results um throughout the life of this project and I understand that not everyone here has the experience to measure but if you don't have that experience I think there's lots of people that are interested in making those measurements so please reach out um you h
ave to show the community that night sky friendly lighting is is not scary and that dimming experiment really helped me with that and I made sure to always share information that appealed to my audience not only what appealed to me um building relationships takes time to um do and it takes more time to maintain them but it's really important for getting community support and um working you know to provide that guidance far into the future so um that is the of my presentation I will hand it over
to Rick thanks everyone thank you it's great to be here uh speaking with you today and I've been working in outdoor space now for just over 20 years and I've learned so much from people like Nancy and Ashley that um it keeps every day very exciting so one of the things that I want to talk to you about today uh my present is called The Climb and the reason it's called The Climb is because I'm going to present to you some real world statistics and facts that are facing us as headwinds um so we act
ually have kind of three mountains to climb and so um I will get to a point in the presentation where I talk about some new Tools in our toolbox and and what we can all do uh to improve our chances of making it to the top of the mountain so um this first slide is just projecting uh reality um I'm not trying to give my age away but I can tell you that when I was born the world population was three and a half billion people and as of today the world population is uh at 8 billion so just in my life
time alone the world population has more than doubled and how does that relate to lighting well if you think about you know the fact that uh artificial light is for human uses and we have more than twice as many people is it not inherently uh intuitive to think we have twice as much light as we perhaps did in 1966 well that's a that's that's a thought and the reality is uh population will continue to climb for about another 40 years before it starts to taper off and so that that is before us tha
t's reality before us is that population is growing it's going to continue to grow and people are going to ask for and uh expect more lighting and thus urbanization continues to happen worldwide uh look in the United States we have um about 85% of us um live in urban environments and uh in Japan and India it's a global Trend that uh there there's a l lower population now in Darker rural environment so most of us cannot see uh the milk way where we live and so the reality is we're talking to peop
le we're talking to 85% of the population who really have no idea what a dark environment looks like or the fact um that they could potentially actually see in that type of environment so urbanization is really this process of you know sure you can remodel but there's vacant land there's vacant dark land that is getting developed and when things get veloped um lights get added and so um the reality is that there's a population shift there's actually competition between um cities for population u
h some people move to the South for warmer climates other people try and you know move to you know for jobs but there's this population that moves and the reality is in the competition for that population is you have to provide amenity well one thing that cities are realizing is that people are enjoying to get Outdoors this is a preco thing this has been going on now for 25 30 years but uh Co did sort of accelerate it a little bit people love to get Outdoors connect with nature and uh they're mo
bile we're mobile so uh um because of that in the development world the 100% corner is born well what is the 100% Corner in any City USA there's an intersection where the rentable space is at the highest value and 100% fill and that's the 100% corner and that is controlled by developers and landlords and and people who make money off of that business model so if you think about it here's this population influx you're a developer you know love people love to get outside there is a tremendous fina
ncial advantage to developing beautiful outdoor space amenity where people will want to be because then the uh commercial environment will rent any available space in that environment to be part of it so an active vibrant 100% corner will typically be worth uh 20 25% more money so if you live around Central Park in New York City or the Highline fabulous outdoor spaces with the amenity your property values will be worth more and so this is sort of the second uh Mountain that we need to climb one
is population's growing urbanization is happening and now secondly I just told you there's a financial advantage to actually uh developing these spaces um you know for populations that are moving the third Mountain that we're facing is that light sources are now coming from everywhere if you look at this photo you help me out but you can let's start counting them I see light poles very traditional light source I see lighting coming from architecture I see lighting within signs I see lighting wit
hin handrails I see lighting within stairs and I'm probably missing a couple but the point is LEDs have made it very easy to incorporate Lighting in the outdoor space you can go to the Home Depot or Amazon and people do it every day they buy outdoor lights and they put them up it's very easy they're energy efficient it's not a huge barrier to do this so this is the third Mountain that we're up against so this is that point where we call to arms right can we light the future responsibly how are w
e going to do this what tools do we have in our tool box so the first one that I'm excited about um I do a lot of work for The Illuminating engineering society and the outdoor nighttime environment committee now is at last count I think it's up to about 80 uh members and one of the things we're hoping to have wrapped up by December of this year is that we're going to be combining and merging three outdoor um standards into one and this is significant because um one barrier that cities have um ci
ted for using lighting standard ards is cost and if you bought these three individual standards you would spend $450 to buy these and you have three standards to consider by merging them into one standard we reduced the cost by a factor of three so now the city only has to spend $150 and they only have to keep their eyes on one document and maintain that one document so the three documents were lighting design for outdoor space uh environmental considerations for outdoor lighting and uh outdoor
applications for people okay so very I mean this is wonderful this is a great news this is a tool that we're going to be able to um leverage uh it'll be known as RP 43 and like I said uh hoping to have this uh published by December now it's not just combining the three standards I mean it's also dust you know knocking off the rust and fixing a few things up one of those is lighting zones lighting Zone definitions do live and exist within the current uh IES environmental um standard okay well we'
ve noticed that there were some gaps in lighting Zone definitions making it difficult for people to use including the National Park Service it was D very difficult in lighting Zone zero to say no no light allowed but if you're going to use light here's what you got to do I mean that was very confusing and very difficult so one of the things we're doing with the new lighting Zone definitions is we're adding a Zone we're adding a Zone that's called the natural dark Zone and this will allow Park an
d protected spaces to have absolutely no artificial light where there should be no artificial light and it then opens up lighting Zone zero as a place where we can use extremely responsible lighting uh very low light levels very warm color temperature very low glare and all all the things that Nancy and Ashley explained will be able to do that in lighting Zone zero and now if you are in a residential environment you don't have to be lighting Zone one you can actually make a residential neighborh
ood a lighting Zone zero because light is allowed there and so we're pushing light levels lower um inherently by this design if you look at my uh four red circles there's I mean there's a there's four pages of narrative that explain lighting zones but we know it's easier to just go to the Chart so here's the chart so the chart does include a purpose why we do lighting zones it includes instructions on how you do it it includes an expansive list of land use examples so that communities can evalua
te or lighting designers can evaluate and accept the most appropriate lighting zone for the applications so this will be included in the new combined RP 43 we're very excited about um what this might do and then dark sky International uh they are absolutely um busy busy busy and I can tell you in the next four months um a couple things that they're working on that we will be excited to see uh number one in terms of the dark sky destination program we're happy to see that the uh dark sky lodging
program was kicked off uh that has been uh phone's been ringing off the hook with lots of places wanting to take advantage of that uh in March the the approved the new and improved Lumin air program will be released uh and then in May or June this is a big one dark sky will be releasing uh State legislation language for states to consider in their um houses or senates and Municipal ordinance template that counties and municipalities can leverage and use for their own communities and the two of c
ourse work together so very excited about that as a tool in the toolbox and so um those are a couple things that that um are being worked on to counter uh all of those Hills that we have to climb so with that we wanted to open the floor up for questions right John that is correct and thank you Rick thank you Nancy thank you Ashley for all your presentations there's a tremendous amount of good material presented today I learned things and that's saying something so we're very glad to have you her
e and to present this to us we have a little bit less than 10 minutes to do some um Q&A based on what I have been seeing in the chat uh will'll throw a as many of these questions to the presenters as possible and for those that were not able to answer live um I've been noting who is asking which questions and we will try to get some answers for you um afterward um directly from the presenters so let's move directly to it um for Nancy from Amber Hayes she asks is there a case study document or so
mething about lighting uh their Park Visitor Center to two moonlights so twice the intensity of moonlight with no complaint she says that would really be useful for talking to clients who think that more is better I will have to pull that together um it is kind of the property of Grand Canyon National Park so probably getting their information which I bet ashle could help me out with but we did we did um experiments with Community um questionnaires and it was amazing and we kept bearing the ligh
ting level and everything again it was not published it was just a paper I mean kind of results that we handed to National Park Service but we have done it in other places like with ski areas stuff like that so two moonlights yeah I mean we all can walk in two moonlights try it yourself go out skiing in the you know anyway I'll be quiet thank you n um here's one that would go to Ashley and it was about the um the Eda Grant process and this is from Brian cashen he asks how long did it take to dev
elop your Grant application for Boulder City and as a follow-up how long after submission until it was granted yeah that's a good question and I will answer to the best of my ability right now so we applied for that Grant um in 20 19 I think we applied for it maybe in January of 2020 end of uh 2019 it was around the holidays I think we finalized it in January 2020 um it took a lot of time I I it's hard to say because it's so many people working together but it was primarily the Nevada division o
f outdoor recreation myself and Boulder City you know putting together those that Grant package and that material I'm happy to share the language of that Within anybody Brian if you want like to see the language in there I would love for your someone else to use it because it did take a lot of focused effort you know there was the the final session was like seven hours in my office to to get to get it finalized and where it needed to be um so time maybe 15 hours cumulatively or something if you
did a direct um period uh and then so we applied for it in January we were expecting to hear something in June or July and I know the exact day um that we heard about the grant it was um September 20th of 2020 um because I went into labor the next day and I had a baby so remember remember the exact timeline of that so um it took about nine months and we have about five years to spend the money so we're coming up on those deadlines right now um yeah that's hope that answered the question and I'd
be happy to share Grant language with anybody on this CL great thank you Ashley there's a question that I think would be great for Rick this is from Richard Tenny he asks are there any public lighting manufactur addressing this obvious problem or challenge that would fix existing bad lights without outright replacement and that would not break City budgets do you have any thoughts on that Rick um I do do so I think I'm I think I'm at Liberty to dive into some secret details here um it is the int
ent of the new dark sky approved Lumin a program and it is the intent to have support of the IES and I that luminares will now have to be cut off to 80° and and the reason that's significant is because it is relatively efficient to add a 10° Shield to existing lights uh if if you ask a lighting manufacturer if they have a solution for 80° cut off most of them will pull out of their back pocket a design ready Shield the reason we think that that is a big ticket item is because if you add that 10
degree Shield you will bring every light down to less than a G2 rating so when Nancy was talking about the bug rating and the letter G being glare we can eliminate uh false adaptation significantly and that will make um quality of light go up very good and we've got probably time for one more that we can get completely through and this is really for anybody but my guess is that either Nancy or Rick would be most qualified to uh to discuss it this is a question from Bob Grossman who asks has ther
e been any research on a minimum height for uh Street lighting so this is a good follow on to that issue of glare he says as you know the higher the mounting height the more light can be considered trespass because you can't shade the downward light is there anything either you can say about that yes what what we're looking at and it's really exciting are new luminares that you could actually change the light distribution um either elongated or not to go in somebody's yard with LEDs with solid s
tate lighting that's our advantage that we can actually use light waves and do everything so we could get to a lower mounting height but have the light very elongated just along the sidewalk much further than our standard type three and type four distributions we need to move away from Legacy light source distributions into this huge new world of going distributions that will match the application so I know I didn't answer it exactly but just look to Lumin a manufacturers that are offering those
options Rick do you have anything to say about that I'm thinking in particular about uh as kind of a follow question how in the future something like that might be integrated into either the lighting standards or things like the model policies yep so the municipal ordinance template will include light TR trespass levels okay uh the reason we put it there is because of Code Enforcement we know that at a state level there is no way um something like that will be enforced but at a local level it c
an be enforced and it can really solve neighborhood conflicts between properties having said that elevation change is real and so we can't quite guarantee uh that 80° cut off or positioning the pole uh for times pole height from the property line is going to guarantee no light trespass because elevation might change and so for that reason we're adding uh Lux illuminance level criteria as a trespass criteria for cities to consider great thank you so much and that is going to wrap up Q&A I'm going
to throw it back at to Lisa to take us out and we are going to get you all out of here on time today wow thank you thank you John for moderating those questions we have several left we will work on that to get back to you as a group so so much great information today um I was totally blown away it's been an absolute pleasure to work with each of you our distinguished guests for today's presentation so thank you so much and John thank you for being my colleague and for handling and and helping t
his today thank you to our audience and to my colleagues and to the Utah chapter of American Planning Association we are happy to work with you today um I am about to drop three things into the chat starting with here we go uh the code for the APA Utah continuing education credit drop that in right now and I do want as a reminder um our next meeting when we focus on the policies and implementation of night friendly outdoor lighting so I'm going to drop in our website link here um as well as if y
ou'd like to follow our email um we have newsletters that come out once a month and lastly we'd love to hear your comments and suggestions about the quarterly connections going to drop that in now we really want your feedback um suggestions anything that you feel would be um improve this forum things that might be more impactful for you and your work I did get a few today thank you for sharing your thoughts um please fill out our Fe feedback survey and um once again thanks for everyone here toda
y we hope to see you again soon and please do take care
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