Presentation highlights lighting issues

By ALEX STRICKLAND / Bigfork Eagle

Drew Hubatsek has a pretty good idea of what he wants to see at night: Nothing.

Hubatsek gave a presentation on responsible lighting at a special Bigfork Steering Committee meeting last Tuesday evening to inform the group and the public on easy ways to best utilize outdoor lighting.

"I'm passionate about responsible lighting and I'm passionate about Bigfork," he said.

Hubatsek said that each year in the U.S. more than $2 million in energy is wasted through inefficient lighting. That, he said, leads not only to needlessly high electricity bills, but also to large amounts of preventable light pollution.

Hubatsek talked about and showed examples of fixtures that can replace or augment existing outdoor lights to focus the light down on what needs to be lit rather than spreading the light out horizontally or up into space.

A prime example of bad lighting is the common mercury vapor lights that are often attached directly to a power pole and run all night every night. Hubatsek said those lights used to be installed for free by power companies to keep meters spinning round the clock.

Now electricity providers are helping customers make their homes and businesses more efficient, according to Ross Holter of Flathead Electric, who was on-hand at the presentation.

"The co-op is trying to discourage people from putting up dusk to dawn lighting," he said.

Some of the reasons to keep lighting pointed only where it needs to go are monetary or to be neighborly — no one likes a neighbor's floodlights in their bedroom window — but another is for the scenic value of the night sky that has been lost in lighting up towns and cities.

Mark Paulson, president of the Big Sky Astronomy Club, showed the group a slideshow of the night sky when unblemished by light pollution as well as some particularly stark contrasts of the night sky with lights on or off.

According to Paulson's map indicating which areas of the Flathead Valley were particularly good or bad for stargazing. Not surprisingly, Kalispell didn't fare well, despite a lighting ordinance being passed there almost three years ago. Bigfork wasn't optimal, but wasn't bad for those just looking with the naked eye. Anyone interested in astro-photography or deeper space observing would need to head to Kila or the upper Swan to see best.

Hubatsek said he hoped a county-wide ordinance could be passed, but George Smith from the Flathead County Planning and Zoning Office said that would be the work of the county commissioners and to even get the issue high on their priority list would take a lot of public interest.