BERNE — Berne’s long-awaited LED streetlights are finally being installed throughout the town, but — now in the figurative full light of day — some residents are wishing that the town stuck with the calmer, yellower high-pressure sodium lights the LEDs are replacing. 

“It just shines right in our windows,” one woman said at the March 8 town board meeting, adding that a “little tiny screen was put up” to try and block the light, “but it doesn’t stop it from going all the way down the street and into the woods. It’s really abrasive.”

“It interferes with the habitats of animals, people, and people who like to enjoy the night sky,” another woman said. 

A man noted that it has a “significant impact on the quality of life” of his neighborhood, and that he was speaking on behalf of other residents who were “too shy” to attend the meeting. 

The town board members appeared sympathetic, and said they would work with National Grid, which owns the lights, to remedy these issues. Before the residents spoke, Town Clerk Kristin de Oliveira read aloud an email from the town’s contact at National Grid, Joe Palone, who was responding to an inquiry she had made after the town had received comments about the lights prior to the meeting. 

According to de Oliveira, Palone wrote that the lights are “not brighter. What it is, though, is a whiter light than they are probably used to. The old, high-pressure sodium lights had an orange glow to them. The new LED lights are more pronounced … so that is probably the majority of what they’re seeing.”

“It’s funny,” Palone went on, “because when we look back to the ’80s, when the lights were changed from the mercury vapor to the high-pressure sodium, everyone hated it when it went from white to orange. So, I think it’s really more about what our eyes are used to seeing.”

He added that most of the lights installed in the town have been 25 watts, the lowest the company offers, so there’s no possibility of reducing the wattage. Instead, the company can install shields that prevent the light from illuminating too wide of an area. 

Palone had asked de Oliveira whether the town was getting “a lot of complaints,” and she replied that she would report back to him after the March 8 meeting. 

Supervisor Dennis Palow appeared sympathetic to the residents’ concerns and said that he would contact National Grid to discuss the options available. 

National Grid spokesperson David Bertola told The Enterprise this week that the company will install the shields as needed “based on customer feedback,” which in this case is the town. Any changes residents would like to see should therefore be brought up with the town, he said. 

The town board had voted in 2019, when it was under Democratic control, to undertake a conversion to light-emitting diodes, known as LEDs, through the New York Power Authority, with then-Supervisor Sean Lyons, a Republican, questioning whether the initial investment when partnering with National Grid would have a lower upfront cost. 

Lyons ultimately voted in favor while Palow, who was then a deputy supervisor, voted against it. 

When the GOP took control of the board in 2020, the original plan was sidelined and the town got involved instead with National Grid, choosing to essentially rent the lights instead of own them outright. 

Former councilman Joel Willsey, who was one of the Democrats on the board at the time of the 2019 vote and criticized the board for going with National Grid in 2020, suggested this week that owning the lights would have allowed the town more freedom in choosing the color and intensity of the LEDs, in addition to being cheaper in the long run. 

Benefits and controversies

LED lights are becoming more common as households and communities strive for greater energy-efficiency, whether for cost-savings, environmental concerns, or both. Bertola told The Enterprise that “a dozen or so communities in the Albany area have installed LED lights.”

And since they’re perceived as brighter, this makes them more effective as street lights, which are meant to make roadways more visible and therefore safer, according to an article that Bertola referenced that goes over the pros and cons of LEDs. 

However, the Berne residents are not alone in feeling like the benefits of the LEDs don’t outweigh the impacts they’re feeling right now. 

Light affects the human body in ways that are not always as obvious as the experience of harsh brightness, according to science writer Jessa Gamble in an article from University of Toronto Magazine. 

Gamble explains that, although modern society operates on a schedule that — Daylight Saving aside — doesn’t account for the ever-changing schedule of the sun, light-levels are what cue our bodies for certain activities, creating what’s known as our circadian rhythm. 

The topline effect of light is stimulation, while darkness acts as a sedative, as each prompts the body to release certain neurochemicals that induce wakefulness or sleepiness. 

But there are also more subtle effects, with circadian rhythm helping to govern the functions of various systems in the human body such as the brain, heart, and lungs — Gamble says that athletes are more likely to break world records in the evening, because lung function is generally at its best then.

Even cancer treatment is affected the body’s internal rhythms, according to oncologist Georg Bjarnason of the Odette Cancer Center in Toronto, whose research showed that some cancer treatments were more or less toxic depending on the time of day they were administered, and that “cancer patients on therapy who have an abnormal sleep pattern have poorer survival.”

Industrialization and artificial light has upended many people’s circadian rhythms, however, as the interweaving of far-flung communities became more and more intricate and crucial to society’s functioning. 

Because the effects of lightness and darkness are biological as much as they are psychological, it’s virtually impossible to overcome these things, and as a result people are possibly experiencing health effects like cardiovascular disease, obesity, and even cognitive impairment typically associated with aging that have been seen in animal studies, according to psychologist Martin Ralph, who has conducted such studies. 

In northern Canada, where sunlight is omnipresent in the summer, and nearly absent in the winter, indigenous societies lived lifestyles that followed this seasonal ebb and flow of light, as opposed to the more daily fluctuation experienced by most people in the world, Ralph says.

When the indigenous population in the north became tethered to the southern territories, they were forced to adopt a schedule that was based on the rhythms of those people who experienced a traditional 24-hour night/day cycle, and Ralph said he thinks that the override of the circadian rhythm may explain in part why northern indigenous communities suffer from higher rates of mental and physical disease than other Canadian populations. 

Where LEDs fit into all this is that, like the sun, they emit what’s known as blue light, which is more stimulating than warmer light colors like those emitted by high-pressure sodium lamps. Although National Grid’s LEDs officially emit white light, all white light contains blue light, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Harvard Health notes that a study found that people who were exposed to blue light had their melatonin levels suppressed twice as much and for twice as long as people who were exposed to a green light that was of similar brightness for the same amount of time. 

Although the jury is still out on whether these things actually have health impacts on people, the effects are perceptible enough that the color temperature of light — colors are generally perceived “cooler” as the temperature gets higher — is an aspect considered by interior designers, who will use cooler lights in spaces like hospitals and factories where visibility and alertness are key, and warmer lights in areas meant to be relaxing. 

Bertola told The Enterprise this week that National Grid’s LED streetlights have a color temperature of 4,000 Kelvin, about the same as the upper limit of the temperature range attributed to sunrise and sunset, which spans 3,000K to 4,000K, according to University College London. 

The former high-pressure sodium lights in Berne were 2,200K, Bertola said. This sits between the upper limit for candlelight (2,000K) and the lower limit for a household tungsten bulb (2,500K). 

The Enterprise noted the impacts of artificial light in an editorial from 2011, with a focus on the effects on wildlife, which are more solidly concluded than its effects on people. 

“The sky glow in urban areas is brighter than a natural twilight and in some cases brighter than a full moon,” it says. “This affects migration patterns, reproductive cycles, and foraging. In short, it upsets the natural order.

“One familiar example of the effects of light, used for decades, is that hens can be stimulated to lay more eggs in the winter by putting lights in their coop. Since these are domestic birds, their survival is not at stake. But what if the bird is in the wild?”

While it’s true that all artificial light would have some level of impact on animal behavior, LEDs are all the more potent, as evidenced by a 2021 study in the Science Advances journal on moth caterpillar behaviors in various areas in the southern United Kingdom with and without artificial light at night. 

The study found that lit areas generally had fewer caterpillars (nearly 50 percent fewer in hedgerows and about 33 percent fewer in grass margins) with greater mass, and that the effect of the latter was most significant in areas lit by LEDs as opposed to high-pressure sodium lights. 

The researchers note that higher mass correlates with increased developmental rates, which in turn is believed to result from stress. 

Dark skies

The 2011 Enterprise editorial was written in response to Berne’s neighbor, Knox, adopting a zoning ordinance that prioritized the preservation of dark skies, making it one of several communities that had joined a movement organized by the International Dark Sky Association (though a later administration, led by Vasilios Lefkaditis, neutralized the ordinance). 

Although Berne does not appear to have a Dark Skies ordinance per se, it does, as one resident noted at the March 8 meeting, require that “all external light sources shall be designed to direct glare away from adjacent streets and properties and use fully shielded designs to direct light downwards rather than sideways.”

Longtime planning board member Mike Vincent said at the March 8 meeting that, although he didn’t believe there was “anything on the books,” the board would typically make sure that lights from projects were not disruptive, and make developers “aware of the Dark Skies initiative.”

Berne had become interested in the Dark Skies initiative and dark-sky tourism when the Helderberg Earth and Sky Observatory intended to have the town-owned Switzkill Farm, registered as a silver-ranked certified dark-sky park. HESO later dropped its plan to build an astronomical observatory at Switzkill Farm.

Planning Board Chairman Joe Martin added, at the March 8 meeting, that light pollution is addressed in the town’s comprehensive plan.