City Council Funds Program to Make Sure Camden Streetlights Doing the Job

CAMDEN – When the city’s streetlights in the Whitman Park section last year were inventoried in a pilot project, about 100 out of 250 needed replacing.

Now the city wants every streetlight in the city checked, mapped and maintained in a digital database.

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City Council on Tuesday voted to award nonprofit Hopeworks Camden – the vendor that conducted the Whitman Park pilot – $150,000 “to provide inventory of all working and non-working streetlights.”

How many is that? Hopeworks did not know, and the city could not come up with an estimate.

“The root purpose of street lighting is to assist drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists in finding their way in the dark,” according to one community organization research site, agoodcommunity.org . “Many neighborhood groups believe that extra illumination helps prevent crime, and business-district lighting also may help create a mood or a pleasant environment.”

Many urban planning and community websites echo the same advantages of urban street lighting.

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In March 2023, when announcing the outcome of the pilot program, Mayor Victor Carstarphen said the city’s streetlight project was a top priority.

"Streets and neighborhoods that are dimly lit become a haven for crime and are often perceived as unsafe," he said at the time.

Hopeworks CEO Dan Rhoton told TAPinto Camden last Friday that the key to ongoing streetlight monitoring includes an easy way for residents to report streetlight outages or other problems.

Residents can stand near the problem streetlight and, using a smartphone, send its exact coordinates to the city to check out.

Having a team of Hopeworks interns and employees walking the streets to collect the information was essential in the pilot project, Rhoton explained.

"There's no replacement for being out in the field," said Rhoton, whose nonprofit works with city youth to teach them skills while preparing them to seek living-wage incomes.

The Geographic Information System (GIS), used by Hopeworks in the pilot program, can be applied to areas other than streetlights, he said.

"Any problem that exists in the community that we can track,” such as the conditions of individual houses and presence of flooding, he added.

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