After several discussions and an August public hearing, the East Hampton Town Board voted last Thursday, October 3, to amend the town code with respect to tree and vegetation lighting.
Goals of the town’s Comprehensive Plan include “forceful measures to protect and restore the environment,” including the night sky.
In June, during discussions about amending the code, Kevin Cooper, the director of ordinance enforcement, described the proliferation of tree and vegetation lighting as “enormous,” particularly on properties with new construction, where “they’re lighting everything that’s green, and it’s becoming a problem.”
Foliage uplighting is being left on all night, Councilwoman Cate Rogers said at the time.
Prior to the code change, the uplighting of trees and foliage was permitted until midnight. A resident bothered by a neighbor’s uplighting would have had to wait until then to call ordinance enforcement, when, with the exception of summer weekends, officers would not be on duty.
The Town Board’s unanimous vote will amend the code to permit residential and commercial lighting only to illuminate individual trees, where a light source could previously light multiple trees.
It also reduces the total amount of light from a fixture illuminating each tree from 1,000 to 550 initial lumens, approximately one incandescent 40-watt bulb. Each light source shall not exceed 2,700 kelvin, a measurement of “color temperature” on a scale from 1,000 to 10,000 that describes the look and feel of the light produced.
A light fixture shall be as close to a specific tree as possible, must project all its light above the horizontal plane, must be aimed directly at a specific tree, and must not be visible across the property line.
Also new is an 11 p.m. cutoff to extinguish such lighting, where it was previously midnight, which remains in effect until the hour before sunset, but no earlier than 4 p.m., on the following day. The 11 p.m. cutoff until the following day also applies to lighting designed to illuminate foliage, pathways and landscape features.
The code was also amended to define “day burners” as landscape lighting and tree uplighting that is illuminated during the hours of daylight within the time period of required extinguishment. Day burners are now prohibited.
Existing prohibitions on searchlights, strobe, laser or revolving lighting, neon lights except lawfully preexisting signs, blinking, pulsating, tracing or flashing lights, utility-pole-mounted lights, fixtures that may be construed as or confused with a traffic signal or traffic control device, or any light source with a color temperature greater than 3,000 kelvin remain in the code.
The code amendments are “very reasonable,” Councilman David Lys said before the board’s vote, which he said would benefit wildlife as well as residents by quieting “unnecessary light at hours in which a majority of the residents are already asleep.”
