By Natalie M. ZeiglerCity Manager
Projects and programs of city government are at times eye-catching, headline-making affairs. The Piratesville Splash Pad opening this summer has caught the attention of many children and families. Our beautiful new City Hall in the refurbished Bank of Hartsville building has had many interested residents come through for tours.
Many of our operations come as ongoing services, however, taking place quietly in the background of our residents' lives. Consider, for example, the crews which collect trash and recyclables every day, or the water and sewer service provided to homes and businesses, and the streetlights which light up Hartsville every night.
The City of Hartsville provides illumination throughout our city limits with 1,911 streetlights. As with many services, streetlights give us an opportunity for ongoing improvements. In March, South Fourth Street became the site of attractive new metal light poles from South Marquis Highway to the railroad tracks passing the end of Hartsville Mall. Coming as a replacement for wooden light poles, these lights serve as one way in which that growing retail district and highly visible Hartsville gateway may be improved.
Now, streetlight work is coming downtown, where 89 lights shine in our historic business district. Most of these are high-pressure sodium lights, a type which has seen widespread use in recent decades but which produces an amber glow. In the near future, they will be replaced by metal halide streetlights, which give off not a yellow-orange color but instead a white appearance, one much closer in spectrum to natural daylight. Because of this, metal halide lights seem brighter to the human eye. We always want to keep downtown as attractive and brightly lit as possible, and the new lights will really help with that.
The streetlights of Hartsville are paid for by the City, and that holds true whether or not they are actually operating. We keep a close eye on them ourselves to ensure we’re getting the light we’re paying for, but we also encourage anyone seeing a broken light to report it. Duke Energy offers an online form for outage reports at www.duke-energy.com under the "Residents" tab, and then under "Outage and Storm Information." The City of Hartsville also maintains an online system for reporting many types of issues around the community known as SeeClickFix. This free app, available online at www.seeclickfix.com/hartsville, or on mobile devices, allows users to send in photos, descriptions and locations of anything from needed garbage pickups to graffiti, water leaks, sewage overflows, abandoned cars, unsafe buildings and more. We also use it to forward reports to relevant service providers. You can report a broken streetlight through it and we will get the word to Duke Energy. Streetlights shine on every street every night, and this invaluable service can be easy to take for granted. Drop us a line if you see a darkened post, though, and help keep Hartsville illuminated.
