The City Council Conference of Tuesday, August 25th, 2026.

We have one item on the agenda, and it is a continued discussion regarding a residential outdoor lighting ordinance to go along with the existing commercial lighting ordinance that we already have had for a number of years.

We have a city attorney here and go ahead and all right.

And we did talk about this potential residential lighting ordinance at the oversight committee meeting, and it got a favorable sort of consensus.

So we wanted to move it forward to a council conference.

And what we're really talking about is give you a little bit of a history of sort of where we've been with this issue before.

We do have a commercial lighting ordinance that is pretty specific with regard to how those facilities have to sort of arrange their lighting to make sure that there's no light trespass on other properties and specifically those areas where commercial sort of a bunch of residential to make sure that we're not causing issues with regard to the residential use.

But in 2006, there was a proposal to amend section 10701 and 10709 to create a light emission standard and provide for light provide penalties for like trespass and light trespass is defined as the shining of light produced by a luminary beyond the boundaries of the property on which it's been located.

Pretty broad, um, probably really difficult to enforce based on that definition, but we came back in 2011.

Again, we adopted our commercial lightning lighting ordinance that's currently codified at 36 um 50549 of our Norman City Code, had a lot of success with that.

One of the things that goes through my head is I did a mediation very early on after that got approved, and it was about you remember Larry Spencer Chevrolet used to be on Main Street on the southwest corner of Maine and 24th Avenue Northwest, and they put in new lighting for their um for their uh car lot.

Um that car lot backed up to residential district in the south.

There were some residents who were having difficulties.

We had a mediation, and that um no commercial uh occupant was more than willing to do whatever it took to resolve those lighting issues.

So we've had pretty good success with regard to our adopted commercial lighting workers.

Um it came back in 2019, um a fairly vigorous sort of lighting ordinance provision for residential stock council considered it, but it did not get adopted at that time.

Um of course now we're going forward to 2026 and we're talking about this issue got raised because that is a picture at 3500 canyon Grand Canyon Drive, a residential neighborhood, and as you can see, that lighting is pretty aggressive.

Um, and this is taken from the from the window of one of their residents, and this is what they're looking at in terms of the lighting by one of their neighbors.

Um, so that's sort of what spurred this discussion going forward.

That we really don't have anything in our ordinance currently to address this issue.

Um, but as you can imagine, I mean if that's something that you were looking out out of your bedroom window, um, that's probably going to cause probably going to disturb your peace pretty significantly.

Um like in that example uh policy that would require that okay, you want those lights, will they have to face down and light it to ground or point them at your house and not at your neighbors so that type of thing potentially we pulled back out that ordinance proposal from 2019.

Um we looked at it in terms of its purpose and intent is applicability.

Applicability, um, the definition.

I did like this definition of light trespass, um, which means artificial light emoted from one property that extends beyond the property line, property boundary, and a manner that substantially interferes with the regional use and enjoyment of the neighboring property.

Um, a little more reined in than the prior example because like I said, I usually think about when I'm thinking about a lot of these things, I think about my circumstances, and I have a porch light or exterior light on the west side of my house.

It does shine over into the neighbor's front yard, but it's like a 60-watt bulb.

It doesn't shine into their bedroom, it doesn't cause any of those types of problems.

Whereas if you looked at the prior definition, you could say that was a light trespass, and none of us would go, yeah, really isn't this has really that sort of provision in there that talks about interfering with the regional use and enjoyment of your property.

Um that gives us that makes it a little bit narrower and helps in terms of enforcement um with regard to that particular definition.

We did look at performance standards.

One of the difficulties that we had had to do with how that particular provision provides for complaint investigation and it would route it through the code department.

Um, and I've got Janita here, and we've I talked with her, she's our code supervisor.

We talked about the issue of most of these events would occur at night.

We don't have a code person that currently works at night.

Um currently in 2019, when this first was proposed, we had four code officers.

In 2026, we have four code officers, and since that point in time, we've adopted a uh Airbnb ordinance that requires that those structures be um that we inspect those every year, and that falls on our code compliance officer.

So their plate is already pretty full.

And if you had to do, we talked about for inspections.

If you had to do a lighting investigation, you had to investigate a light complaint, we're gonna have to flex one of our code officers from day working during the day to working at night.

Um, usually the way that that would work is the code officer's gonna go to the location, it's gonna see whether or not there's a potential violation.

If so, they can post the property, send them a letter in the mail, giving them 30 days to fix the violation, and then they've got to go back 30 days later to see whether or not the violation has been removed.

So we'd be pulling a code officer, and I suspect we're probably only gonna get these like one at a time.

So we would effectively be pulling a code officer off of their full-time duties during the day to work at night to investigate one complaint, and just sort of talking that through with our planning department, that's just not a very good use of their time.

So we thought started talking about it from the perspective of what are some other potential alternatives that we could look at that might help some of our residents that are having these issues be able to get some relief while also making sure that we're using our resources in an appropriate manner.

Um, one of the things that we did talk about, and well, this goes back to in 2019.

This was the sort of the the complaint with the concern that was actually talked about at that time, and there's a new our newspaper article from June 9th of 2006, June 7th, 2006, um, and it was talking about the proposed lighting ordinance, and it was then city manager Brad Gamble and says, from a staff point of view, you're asking for a nighttime enforcement, which would be a problem.

Um who's ever who said evening staff is already having trouble keeping up with complaint calls from parking yards and other code violations because of the city's budget crunch.

So even back in 2006, our city manager's telling us we're gonna have difficulty with enforcement if we put this burden on our code enforcement officers because again, like I said, in 2006 we had four, we still have four, and their case load has not gone down.

The alternative that we talked about that we came up with was to just we currently have a disturbing the peace ordinance, and this one section, subsection C, uh, no person should disturb the peace by open other by playing or creating loud or unusual sounds.

Um, we have another sound ordinance, ordinance that governs sound.

It's very detailed, it's very long, and it has to do with decibel levels.

Um, and it prohibits it has different decibel levels for different use categories with residential being somewhere around 65, and then that increasing depending upon if you're an industrial or commercial.

Um I've been here 28 years.

We've literally never filed a case under that ordinance because it requires it requires sound measurement with a specific sound meter, and the measurement has to occur based on the ANSI standards for measuring noise.

But we don't have anybody trained on the ANSI standards for measuring noise.

I actually downloaded them at one point in time.

Um, and they really are more for industrial noise.

You can imagine at a plant that has a lot of noise.

Um, those standards are really meant for evaluating noise at those types of facilities to make a determination as to what type of uh ear protection your employees need, it really isn't well suited with regard to measuring noise when you have issues between neighbors.