Outdoor LED plan gets the green light

An ambitious plan to convert 85 percent of Chicago’s outdoor lights to LED technology got the green light Thursday amid concern about how it would be financed.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel once hoped to use his slow- starting Infrastructure Trust to attract private investors to bankroll the costly conversion of 270,000 outdoor lights along the lakefront and in streets, alleys, viaducts and pathways.

Since the LED lights will replace an outdated infrastructure that has higher built- in energy costs, the overhaul was supposed to save enough money to cover conversion costs and still give those investors an attractive enough return on their money.

Why, then, is the $ 160 million “smart” lighting project approved by the City Council’s Budget Committee Thursday being financed the old- fashioned way: by city general obligation bond issues over four years and tax- increment financing?

“It would have been a lot more expensive to use private financing,” said Leslie Darling, executive direc- tor of the Infrastructure Trust.

Private financing would have meant “significant reductions to critical elements,” Darling added. “Private investors were very interested. But the city was not interested in privatizing a critical public safety asset.”

Transportation Commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld said the estimated, $ 10 million in annual energy savings would be “leveraged to pay for this capital investment,” reducing the cost to taxpayers. The rest will come from the city’s “general capital program,” she said.

That didn’t satisfy Ald. Scott Waguespack ( 32nd).

“I’m finding it hard to believe that we sat there with all of these people in the Infrastructure Trust, and no one can give us a specific breakdown of TIF, bonded out dollars and other resources that are specifically going to be pegged to this contract for the next four or five years so that we know how to budget for it and it’s not sort of, let’s play it by ear and see what happens next year depending on either the savings or how many light fixtures we put up,” Waguespack said.