“I don’t want flood lights on all over town all the time. I find that really obnoxious and really unhealthy for the environment and human health.”
Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond, Jan. 8.
Reporting and Commentary by Councilperson Robert Lynch; January 28, 2025
Don’t give her words more weight than they warrant. They may hold a half-life of five minutes and no longer. Yet words carry meaning. Words stated by elected officials at public meetings carry meaning. And if taken at her word, Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond, speaking near the end of our Town Board’s January 8th monthly meeting, warns you of this: Your beloved, bright and beaming, dusk-to-dawn outdoor security light may live on borrowed time. Redmond would ban it from Enfield in the name of neighborhood comity and a PC-powered drive to keep the dark night sky just that… dark.
“So recently, at least over the last decade, there’s been a lot of discussion about light pollution and how it affects migration, how it affects breeding patterns of everything from insects to bats to anything nocturnal,” Redmond stated as she guided the Town Board into its latest chapter of a more than year-long, multi-meeting review of Enfield’s Subdivision Regulations.
“And I don’t know about you guys, but if I were to have a neighbor that had one of those giant floodlights and kept it on 24/7, I would definitely take a BB gun…” Redmond submitted, trailing off her sentence with a muted chuckle. “I don’t know that I can handle it. I would have a really hard time having, like, a massive light on all the time as my neighbor,” the Supervisor insisted.
So just that you know, Enfield’s Planning Board completed its own, initial rewrite of the Town’s 2014 Subdivision Regulations and handed it to the Town Board in September 2023. The Town Board hasn’t finished its off-and-on wander through that 38-page document quite yet.
And at the January meeting, Redmond had stumbled upon an obscure, assuredly inapt-for-Enfield paragraph that someone long ago had lifted from a law better suited for a more urbanized place and thoughtlessly buried it near the back of our town’s own document. It’s lain dormant for a decade.
That heretofore-unnoticed third paragraph of “Section 276.1” states: “Lighting facilities shall be in conformance with the lighting system of the Town.” The directive supposedly confines itself to “High Density Subdivisions,” of which Enfield, quite literally, has none. To put matters into perspective, the paragraph before it micromanages the placement of fire hydrants.
To this Councilperson’s knowledge, no one’s ever talked seriously about us having a lighting control law in Enfield. But Stephanie Redmond appears to be talking about having one now. And judging from the impromptu reaction from others at the Town Board’s table that night, she may find an ally or two.
“It’s something to think about,” Councilperson Cassandra Hinkle said. Hinkle voiced concern about light pollution along hiking trails the Town may soon construct. She noted how Finger Lakes State Parks’ officials bowed to ornithological activists last April and postponed the nighttime illumination of Taughannock Falls so as not to disrupt the nesting of Peregrine falcons.
“I’d be in favor of something that limited that,” Councilperson Jude Lemke concurred regarding some kind of light-restricting ordinance.
Redmond, Hinkle, and Lemke: That’s a majority of three; enough to adopt some kind of law.
As the January discussion continued, the Supervisor indicated she’d contact Attorney for the Town Guy Krogh to get legal guidance. He or she might also start “looking into what other towns have done” regarding light control, the Supervisor said.
The closest Enfield’s ever come in recent years to tackling light pollution happened at a Planning Board meeting last October. It became only a brief detour from the agenda. Greg Hutnik, Enfield’s Planning Board alternate and Deputy Town Supervisor, brought to planners’ attention the newly-constructed Ithaca Storage Units facility off Teeter Road. (Full disclosure; this writer-Councilperson rents space there.)
“The lighting is horrible. It’s lit all night, and it shines into the trees,” Hutnik told Planning Board colleagues. “It’s disrupting the birds and animals.”
“It’s like a small city there,” came the observation.
Planning Board member Mike Carpenter speculated that if you lived in the nearby home “with the lights off, you could read.”
“If I were owning my house, I would be raising a much bigger stink,” Hutnik, a renter some ways away, said.
Owners of Ithaca Storage Units say they installed the night-long lighting in large part to keep buildings and patrons safe.
Lighting laws, “we don’t have any,” Planning Board Chair Dan Walker took note that night. The Board carried Hutnik’s concerns no farther.
Buried in the pile of bills the New York State Legislature considers each year— but then never adopts—is one that’s on point: Downstate Senator, Brad Hoylman-Sigal has advanced legislation during the last couple of sessions to shine a beam on nighttime lighting control. Ithaca Assemblymember Anna Kelles became the measure’s co-sponsor last term in Albany’s lower house.
It was called the “Dark Skies Protection Act.” Hoylman-Sigal’s bill received fleeting attention last year as the senator tried to piggy-back it onto companion legislation after New York City’s media-idolized hoot-of-a-hero, Flaco the owl, released from the Central Park Zoo by vandals, took flight headlong into a windowed Manhattan high rise. Flaco died. Gotham cried. And the Senator pleaded for a statewide light-abatement law to spare migratory birds. Legislative records show that Hoylman-Sigal’s bill never got out of committees in either house last year. It has yet to be reintroduced this session.
But had the Legislature enacted the Dark Skies Protection Act, no outdoor light anywhere in the state could have remained illuminated between 11 PM and sunrise unless it was either shielded from the sky or controlled by a motion detector. And for that matter, the detector could not have kept the light on for longer than 15 minutes at a time. The law would have reached as far as sports arenas—that is, unless a game was actually commenced before 11 and continued beyond that hour.
The Hoylman-Sigal/Kelles measure would have affected lights at “residential, commercial, industrial, and municipal buildings and structures.” One can infer that unless there was an emergency, even fire houses and police stations would need to comply.
“Around 80 percent of migrating birds move at night. but light pollution can disrupt a bird’s natural sense of their environment, drawing them into urban areas and disorienting them, causing them to fly into buildings, windows, and other structures,” Hoylman-Sigal’s office said in a February 2024 news release. “Light pollution has also been shown to be harmful to human health and mental well-being,” the statement continued. It urged the lighting bill’s enactment. No luck.
Back to Enfield and to the Town Board’s January 8th meeting, Supervisor Redmond acknowledged she’d accept motion-detected illumination, but not lights that remained on all night.
“I don’t want flood lights on all over town all the time. I find that really obnoxious and really unhealthy for the environment and human health,” Redmond said.
Of course, at some point, this writer, Councilperson, Robert Lynch, had to enter the debate.
“But you’ve got an issue of security, too,” this Councilperson said. “A lot of people—and I’ll tell you, I’m one of them—like a big light outside because it deters crime.”
“I have a big quartz light in my driveway,” I informed the Supervisor.
Supervisor Redmond had questions. I supplied answers.
Is the light on 24/7? No, it’s illuminated only at night. All night long? Yes. And don’t you want to put a motion detector on it? Nope. Dusk-to-dawn lights don’t work that way. And the ancient ancestor to what I now have anchored to a tree predated motion technology by decades.
“Well, if I were your neighbor, I’d be taking that thing down. Sorry,” Redmond said in a playful yet censorious scold.
“That gets to a point that I want to make here,” this Councilperson answered firmly. “We are generally a libertarian town. And we like our freedom. And if it’s my land—“
I took the moment to remind Supervisor Redmond of the heated discussion we’d had at a meeting last July during which she’d defended a dog owner’s right to exempt from liability a canine’s conduct on its owner’s own property even should it kill a neighborhood cat that wandered there.
“The same principle applies, OK,” I insisted. “That it’s my land. I pay my taxes on it. And darn it, I’m not hurting anybody else. But I want to have that flood light on!”
“OK, but your neighbor also pays the taxes for their property,” Redmond responded. “And your light is infecting their property, or affecting their sleep, or affecting the animals that live on their property. And it’s a communal resource. Our space that is around us is, the air we breathe, the water we drink, all of it is a communal resource, and you cannot inflict your own views on your neighbor without having some pushback. And so, yeah, you’re not keeping your light on your own property, so that’s not appropriate.”
To some of us, Charlton Heston’s immortal words, “…when you pry it from my cold, dead hands” comes to mind. Remembered phrases hold their opportune moments for application.
Councilperson Jude Lemke intervened. She reminded everyone of the “High Density Subdivision” restriction, and that no one in Enfield lives in such a place “This is where houses are very close to one another,” Lemke said.
“And I think in that sense, it is a problem if a light is shining into someone else’s bedroom,” Lemke qualified.
“It’s awful; it’s just awful. It’s so rude,” the Supervisor reacted with over-dramatized outrage at the thought of a Phillips-branded Peeping Tom peering between her blinds.
While acknowledging the textual specificity of what’s on the books, Supervisor Redmond wouldn’t leave the law there.
“But I also think that we should consider it town-wide,” Redmond encouraged. “I don’t think it’s appropriate, especially with the education that is out there now that people should have access to, that you can inflict your own self on your neighbors inappropriately. It’s just not appropriate. It’s rude.”
“If your neighbors don’t mind, that’s fine,” the Supervisor continued. “But if they are saying, ‘Hey, this is not appropriate, I don’t like this,’ then you should be considerate of your neighbors. It’s just like if you had a neighbor that had a dog that was barking all the time, day and night, really loudly, right next to your bedroom window…”
Point missed. It’s one thing for neighbors to settle differences over the hedge fence. It’s quite another when compulsion comes through the long arm of a nanny-state law.
You may find it tough placing Stephanie Redmond’s vision of the future alongside the Enfield of yesterday or today as we who live here have grown to know it and love it. Enfield is not a Cayuga Heights with cows, nor a hyper-regulated, pretentious, picture-book place like Skaneateles or the Hamptons.
We are Enfield. And we do not dictate to our residents when to mow their lawns or what colors to paint their houses. Maybe Stephanie Redmond would prefer us to mimic those suffocating places. Sorry, we don’t live there. Based on the people I’ve met traveling this town, we cherish our freedom and defend our independence fiercely. Should Enfield have evolved, many of us have yet to feel it.
At the close of our January 8th meeting, Marcus Gingerich asked to address us. He attends many of our meetings. I wish more people followed his example.
“Where do you draw the line?” Gingerich asked, referring to our discussion of a light-limit law. “We got to do this carefully,” he observed. “Yes, we’re living in communities, but I don’t know. We’re just about killing ourselves with overregulation, too. Just a word of caution. And think carefully.”
A breath of fresh air blown in from outside of Enfield’s political bubble; it always refreshes.
“Think carefully,” he said. Our Supervisor’s out-of-nowhere idea may, indeed, hold a half-life of just five minutes.
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