Ellwood City offers LED advice

Sunday, May 18, 2008
Eric Poole, Ellwood City Ledger

ELLWOOD CITY - Whenever Liberty Township, Ohio, Trustee Jodi Stoyak needs some assistance on a project from the local business community, she rarely looks much further than across the dinner table.

Her husband, Steve, is president of the Liberty Business Association.

“It’s nice because we’re married and if I need something, I just hit him up,” said Jodi Stoyak, whose office as trustee is roughly equivalent to a township supervisor in Pennsylvania.

Ellwood City might be about to play a large role in Liberty Township’s latest example of intra-household cooperation. The Liberty Business Association has pledged to fund a pilot program for light-emitting diode streetlights.

As part of that project, the Stoyaks and several other representatives of the Liberty Business Association visited Ellwood City, which is a little further down the LED road. Earlier, Ellwood City began a project to install more than 100 LED streetlights throughout the borough.

In addition to the Stoyaks, the business association accompanied Viccari, Ellwood City electric department superintendent Bill Cunningham, and council members George Celli, Ralph Chiappetta, Anthony “Lefty” DeCarbo and Marilyn Mancini, on a tour of the borough’s new streetlights.

Appalachian Lighting officials, including Wassel, company president Dave McAnally, CFO Mike Dolan and manufacturing representative Bob Stone, also participated in the tour of the nearly 300 LED streetlights Ellwood City has installed since last year.

The lights, which throw enough light to cover a 30 by 40-foot area, provide enough light to improve vision of the street, Viccari said, and are also reducing the borough’s carbon footprint.

Viccari estimated that the replacement of 135 standard streetlights and 154 lamppost streetlights along Lawrence Avenue means Ellwood City is causing the release of almost 200 tons of carbon dioxide.

Just as important for borough taxpayers, the lights are saving Ellwood City money. Viccari said LED streetlights are costing the borough roughly $3,550 a month less than the standard streetlights they have replaced.  

And the word is spreading, thanks to events like the visit Thursday from Liberty Township’s political and business leaders.

The visitors from west of the border went away impressed, Jodi Stoyak said. Liberty Township, she said, is in the midst of an economic revitalization fueled by a concerted marketing effort.

After looking at Ellwood City’s LED lights, she said they would not only make her town more energy efficient, but more attractive.

“These kinds of lights across our business district would be so classy,” Stoyak said. “I really would like to see them on our main business thoroughfare.”

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