There have been many Facebook posts and comments lately about Clifton gaslights. As President of Clifton Town Meeting (CTM), I’d like to clarify a point of confusion. There never was a decision by CTM to retrofit the gaslights with LED’s. A rough draft of the Clifton Plan was released that listed all the recommendations made by Clifton Plan subcommittees even though none of these recommendations have yet been approved. One of the Clifton Plan subcommittees recommended retrofitting the gaslights with LED’s. Many subsequent posts and comments on this and other Facebook pages responded correctly that much more community engagement is needed before making this kind of decision. These posts and comments were absolutely correct.
In Monday’s CTM Board meeting at the Clifton Recreation Center at 7pm, CTM will discuss a motion regarding a highly democratic community engagement process for deciding what to recommend for the final Clifton Plan. The key points of the motion are:
• The first 2026 published version of the Clifton Plan should NOT include any statement whether to retrofit the gaslights with LED’s. Instead, it should include a recommended process for community engagement that is likely to take many months or even more than a year. No recommendation regarding retrofitting the gaslights would be made until this community engagement is complete. Once the engagement is complete, the Clifton Plan would be revised based on that recommendation.
• The key elements of the process would be to have the city install 1 prototype LED light in an existing gaslight so that people could look at it and decide whether it is close enough to the warmth and character of the existing gaslights to serve as an acceptable long term retrofit. If you look at the picture in this post, it shows an existing gaslight on the left and an LED designed to mimic the gaslight on the right. Nobody in Clifton has ever seen a gaslight with these kinds of LED’s so nobody really knows whether the LED might look almost as good. Once the pilot is installed, there would be a professionally designed survey to see if people would support a retrofit due to the environmental benefits of the retrofit. CTM would abide by the results of the survey when it comes to revising the Clifton Plan.
Please feel free to attend the CTM Board Meeting, December 1st, at the Clifton Recreation Center. We will have at least 40 minutes for this topic. We will follow the normal process: read the motion, second the motion, board discussion, audience comments, and vote on motion. Audience comments are limited to 2 minutes. The President calls on the audience members. Ideally, no more than 1 comment per audience member. As an option, you can fill out this form to speak but we will also call on people who have not filled out the form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc_VVPFSsJZcTA-hpyzsfyQGJBuKuhBmSekdZg59O5jwP-yTw/viewform