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Lights Out I-Team Investigation

Lights Out I-Team Investigation - Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 5:45PM EST

Luzerne and Lackawanna counties - two counties with similar problems: money. Both counties have laid off dozens of people to save money.
The I-Team has discovered a way Lackawanna county might be able to save thousands of dollars. It could be as easy as turning off a light switch.

At 4:30 in the morning, the Luzerne County Courthouse is nearly dark. But some of the lights are burning bright at the Lacakawanna County Courthouse.

There's opinions, like Len Crawford’s. He owns Crawford Technical services, an energy company serving several northeast states. "For some reason it's been neglected in this case," says Crawford.

Then there’s explanations like Lynne Shedlocks. She’s the Lackawanna County Communications Director. Shedlock says, "I can't speak for Luzerne County, I can only speak for Lackawanna County."

We'll get to more comments from both later. First, the I-Team shows you how your tax dollars are being spent for electricity at both courthouses.

From February 2008 to March 2009, Lackawanna County spent about $74,000 for courthouse electricity. Luzerne County spent more than $420,000.

In January, Luzerne County directed all of it's workers to turn off lights and computers when leaving the courthouse. The result is a dark courthouse.

We visited the Lackawanna County Courthouse in Scranton three times: February 24th, April 7th and April 14th. All three dates, lights left on throughout the courthouse, in the middle of the night.

Crawford says, according to his calculations, the lights left on in the Lackawanna County Courthouse cost about $130 dollars per light per year to operate. Turning them off 12 hours a day could equal a 65 dollar savings, per light.

Over the course of a year, that could equal thousands of dollars of savings. Crawford says, "In today's age with the economic activity that we see, I think everyone should take a look and say what else can we do to save energy."

The I-Team asked Lackawanna county about the lights. Shedlock says, "Those lights are part of our emergency light system which also doubles as our night light system which we leave on for security reasons."

Shedlock says the county has to meet emergency light code requirements, and leave all these lights on at night. She says recent renovations here might require they meet different code requirements than Luzerne County.

But during our investigation, Lackawanna County told us it plans to remove up to 50 lights from that emergency system. "Where we have too many lights, for the emergency purposes, we will be removing some of the those and putting them on a different system," says Shedlock.

Due to the lights out directive in January, Luzerne County says it's projecting a savings of $200,000 this year. Lackawanna County isn't ruling out the possibility of using our findings to determine which emergency lights will be moved off it’s current system.

Officials do tell us they're on the right track, installing energy efficient lights with their new renovations. Because of those renovations Lackawanna County says it's saved thousands in electricity costs compared to this time last year.
 


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