Yucca Valley discusses residential curfews, lumen limits, and enforcing their Outdoor Lighting Ordinance

The discourse on the Dark Sky/Outdoor Lighting Ordinance continued with the Yucca Valley Planning Commission going into their second review and discussion at last night’s meeting. Reporter Gabriel Hart was in attendance and has this recap. 

Vice Chair Henderson, Commissioner Vasconcelos, and Commissioner Stoker were three out of the five commissioners in attendance to discuss more diligent enforcement of Yucca Valley’s Outdoor Lighting Ordinance. After the July 28 meeting, the Commission agreed on five updates: Modernize the ordinance to account for LED technology, move towards warmer lighting, ensure standards are enforceable and implementable, provide regulation examples from other towns, and balance preservation of the night sky with safety and security lighting. 

In their current outline, the Commission is considering a nighttime curfew to extinguish or dim by 50% non-essential outdoor lighting for both residents and businesses, but not to include safety and security lighting.

Commissioner Vasconcelos voiced his concern in regard to safety and security lighting, stating that further definition is required:

“My only fear is that anyone could interpret any lighting as security and safety, so it might be beneficial to determine and outline exactly what is accepted or what the qualifications are for that,” said Vasconcelos.

The Commission is proposing a standard for residential lighting at a maximum of 1000 Lumens, which is the amount of light emitted by the source, opposed to the Lux, which is the residual light radiating from the Lumen.

The outline also stated “Existing outdoor lighting fixtures installed or constructed on developed properties which are nonconforming shall be allowed to continue use…” in which Commissioner Stoker sought leaner parameters.

“It leaves it so open to where it seems like some of these lights are never gonna change. So personally, I’d like to see a commercial ordinance with some sort of sunset of what’s existing and nonconforming, whether it’s a year or five years for places to come into conformance, that would be awesome.”

Vice Chair Henderson suggested instating an Annual Lighting Health Report, where the town would be graded on their overall compliance to the ordinance by the town staff.

“And also, the town could share success stories from this code, because sometimes we build these codes, but we don’t get feedback on how they’re doing regarding enforcement. And because technology changes rapidly, the annual report could share some of the latest technology going on, so we may have to tweak this,” said Henderson. 

The Commission voted to receive and file the report to be continued at a future meeting.