Waterford City and County Council have conceded that they are not 100% satisfied with the performance of the local authority's public lighting contractor, Killaree Lighting Services.
Cllr. Declan Clune was angered at this month's meeting of the Comeragh District, where it was revealed that outages have grown in their hundreds across the past three months in particular.
Speaking to WLR, he took aim at lighting contractor Killaree Lighting Services for not fulfilling their obligations. Cllr. Clune said the response times to outages and general communication have not been up to standard.
"They might have come across as strong comments but they were absolutely deserved, because for months we've had a contractor and it's not just exclusively to my own district in the Comeragh area, I know I've seen Council colleagues across every district from Dungarvan, Lismore, to the City, to Tramore complain about the same thing and it's essentially that lights that go out for whatever reason, be it a bulb, be it electrical fault, they're simply not being repaired."
"Our Senior Executive Engineer came out with figures of how many were repaired over the last few months but specifically for my district, I did an exercise last month where I recorded every single light that was off in the Comeragh District when it was first reported and then when it was escalated on their system. Interestingly enough, those figures are almost identical, bar one or two, so there's an essentially no net change in the figures from one month to another which tells its own story."
"In addition to that some of the lights, for example up in Lemybrien, there's some lights out since 2019, in Kilmeaden Village on the main street there, there's lights out since 2021, and whatever excuse you use that's simply not acceptable. It's not good enough for the people living in those areas, it's not good enough for road users, it's not good enough for anyone that, generally is out walking or whatever the case may be, so again my concern is that this contractor may have been awarded the contract based on the lowest bid but now can't fulfill the contract. If it was just one particular area that's fine but when it's (1:49) widespread across the whole city and county there's a serious problem there."
Senior Engineer for Roads with Waterford City and County Council, Gabriel Hynes, said that communications with regards to public lighting have been poor.
He said that the local authority "hold their hands up and admit that it wasn’t what it should have been."
Mr. Hynes outlined that 215 lights were repaired in December and January, 600 lights were repaired by February, 600 lights were reported out in December, 354 were out in January and there with 700 issues with public lighting in February.
There are 16,000 public lights in Waterford and 25% of them are in need of repair annually, and a bulb blows on average once every four years.
A lot of lights are obsolete and will be replaced by LED. Some of the old lights are connected to the mains and permission has to be sought from the ESB to make alterations.
Waterford City and County Council have made an acknowledgement that the lighting contractor are fulfilling their obligations as best they can. There are issues on the end of the contractor with staffing and resourcing.
There was a commitment to get to all lighting outages by March but they did not take into account an additional 2,000 outages that came into play in the interim period, and areas with significant footfall and population are being prioritised.
Cllr. Clune says it is now time for a new contractor to be appointed.
"What KPIs are used to judge their performance, they have to be baked into the contract. Also SLA, service level agreement, so for example if a light goes out today when is it supposed to be fixed? The SLA is ten working days, two working weeks, so that's clearly not happening, so is there penalties? Again these are the questions I've been asking that we can't seem to get an answer to."
"The contract hasn't been performed, what are the penalties there, are those penalties being enforced? From what I can see there are no penalties, now I'm not saying that a penalty has to be harshly you know applied to any particular organisation, but the simple reality is this is an important public service, it's public lighting, it's safety, it's lots of different things to different people and the reality is that lights have been left out for a lot longer than 10 working days."
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