The Board of Selectmen on Tuesday approved a pair of contracts to replace 25 lampposts in Waveny, the first of two installation phases in the popular park.
The new lampposts will be larger than those currently installed in Waveny, more similar to those in the downtown, according to Bill Oestmann, buildings superintendent in the New Canaan Department of Public Works.
“They stopped making them,” Oestmann told the selectmen during their regular meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. “They’re very old. We’re going to basically redo the whole thing, new footings and everything, and put LED lights in them so it’d be more efficient. And we have new astronomical timers we’re installing, getting rid of the old mechanical ones. So they’ll work on latitude and longitude instead of constantly going back, changing the time on them and what have you.”
First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted in favor of $64,000 in total contracts with DiFulvio Construction and Darien Electric.
The selectmen asked when the installation work will start (likely early May), how long it will take (unclear but maybe one installation per day), how much is budgeted for the overall project ($280,000 for each phase) and whether the lights are motion-activated (no).
Carlson said, “I would like them to go in over the summer.”
The town in September approved $225,000 to purchase 40 lampposts. Oestmann said they came in last week, adding that it’s not clear just how much work it will take to install each one because of some unknowns.
The lampposts now in place “were done over time and different people installed them.”
“We’re trying to discover if it’s buried cable or if it’s in conduits,” he said. “There are unknowns there, that are in the ground. So it’s a little bit of a learning curve, the first few. And then hopefully once he [the contractor] gets into the rhythm, boom boom boom, it’ll be more systematic. So to answer your question: I’ll know it’ll be better in a couple of days once we get it going.”
Asked where the first phase lampposts will be installed, Oestmann said, “We’re going to start down at the Carriage Barn. We’ll get to more safety sensitive areas. So we want to start there, work up the stairwells and walkways in their parking lot and around the castle first. And then the second phase, we’ll expand out to more of the parking lots and work our way down over by Lapham Community Center.”
I hope they’ll put a some new lighting in the Center Street Parking lot.