The Kenai City Council met Wednesday night to discuss increasing revenues to provide additional funding for repairing street lights within the area.
The ordinance (3394-2024) would take appropriations from the general fund to provide additional funding to the maintenance operation budget. In turn, this would aid in repairing any damaged street lights within the City of Kenai.
The current purchase order (126999) is $56,330 and has received invoices of $55,569.12 through December 2023.
Because of this, an additional $50,000 will be needed to carry through the remainder of the fiscal year.
In a memo from Public Works Director Scott Curtain, he notes how the Public Works Department has an annual contract with Kachemak Electric to provide street lighting, with still allowing utility to locate, repair, and do maintenance services.
Curtain says how he has seen an increase in construction activity within the past year, with greater than anticipated ‘utility locate requests’ coming into the Department. The City pays a little over $100/each for 811 utility locate requests.
Additionally, six new Sternberg light fixtures were installed to replace missing and damaged fixtures. Through December the Department has expended 98% of its current budget
for street light repairs and locates.
The purchase of new light fixtures would equate to $14,000.
The Department is requesting an additional $50,000 to allow utility locates to continue uninterrupted into the spring and summer construction season through June 30th, 2024. They also intend to repair some street lighting breaks in the springtime, when the ground thaws out.
“This is essentially supplementing our existing service contract through Kachemak Electric. As we’ve discussed at previous council meetings, our ongoing issues with the street lights. This contract also includes St. Lighting Locate services which cost about roughly $100 every time they go out to do those. This past summer we’ve had more of those than we would normally just with the increased activity that we’ve had in the area. So we haven’t used up all of our money yet as of today, but I do expect to be running out here in the next three to four weeks would be my guess. So this is gonna allow them to continue to support those operations and as the weather improves allow us to continue to make a couple of other street light repairs that we didn’t get to at time last fall,” said Curtain.
After a vote, the ordinance was enacted with all seven council members in favor.