Through the entrance to the house by way of the kitchen, the light from the street casts itself along the kitchen wall and across the kitchen table.
The new LED street lights apply a glow to all the front windows of my home. The light permeates the heavy shades on the living room windows and all the windows along the sides of my house, front to back.
Improbably, those LED bare bulbs on the street illuminate the rear windows and make the rear yard visible at night, something whose implications are even more troubling: the sky above the village seems never dark.
Before the LEDs at night, the second-floor bathroom of my home needed a night light in anticipation of middle-of-the-night movements by my young granddaughters.
Now, with the coming of the mayor’s 4,000k LEDs, the bathroom is lit from the street, the light infiltrating through a double layer, a shade and a curtain. In the adjacent children’s bedroom, the windows glow.
On that first night, December 1, in that first appearance of light at midnight, I wondered if I sat on the swing on my front porch at 4:00 a.m. would I be able to read a book by the light from the street.
When the subject of converting our lights was new on the mayor’s agenda, I asked the mayor at a board of trustee meeting to send the village residents a postcard letting us all know he was contemplating a life-changing conversion of the lights on all our streets.
“This is a decision that will have a profound impact on every resident,” I said.
The mayor refused to send the postcard. He said residents have ample opportunity to read the local newspapers and the village website.
I reminded him that before he was elected, he himself did not read the local press and did not read the village website, so his deflection was thin indeed.
Two years earlier when he took office, this mayor also discontinued the village newsletter that had been mailed to our homes.
As for hearing from residents, the mayor controls the printed agenda for the trustees’ meetings, and that agenda has no category titled Correspondence and does not list letters written by residents, as other municipalities do.
So with no newsletter, no postcard, and no correspondence on the village meeting agenda, when this mayor claims “everyone is happy with the lights,” he is posturing.
There was no pilot program. There was no examination of the spacing between poles that were put in place somewhat randomly during much of the last century.
There was an indifference to, a disinterest in, the impact of these exterior lights on the interior lives and health of the village residents. The idea was botched from the start, handled irresponsibly.
The decision-making by the board of trustees was high-handed and insular. There was no participatory democracy.
The mayor disparaged the AMA (listen to the tapes of the meetings) and swatted aside information about the potential biological cost of high-intensity lighting at night.
The mayor shouted down a doctor, who specializes in sleep studies, in an attempt to derail the information the doctor was offering. In silence, the mayor and the other trustees tolerated the presentation of information by Grassroots Environmental Education.
In almost any other venue, the medical research would have aroused a groundswell of questions. Here, the medical consequences of the LED night lights were of no interest to the five-member board on behalf of the rest of us.
It would be fair to say this mayor has perfected the appearance of listening without intending to hear. Dr. Shine, a long-time superintendent of our Great Neck schools and an acknowledged intellect, once told me this anecdote: There was a principal of a school who was fond of saying to parents “My door is always open.”
After he’d been in his job for a while, on a day when he uttered his truism to yet another parent, the parent replied, “Yes, but what good is an open door to a closed mind.”
What we do know is the mayor contracted with a Canadian company for our village to be “a pilot program,” for our village to host the intense 4,000-kelvin bulbs with the blue-violet spectrum that promises a future price to our health.
The proper recourse is to replace the 4,000k bulbs with 2,100k, 2,300k, 2,700k, with a warmer light at less expense.
Otherwise, I myself want the cobra light in front of my house removed because were the mayor to dim the intensity of the light (from a control panel in village hall) the dimming, as residents have been told, will be only temporary.
Mayor Pedram Bral has no street light at all on the cul-de-sac where he lives, and Trustee Anne Mendelson has no street light in front of her home, but they gave these lights to the rest of us.
Here in our village, an owner of a private home should not have to entomb the interior of the residence in blackout shades as if this is World War II in London at the height of the blitz. A homeowner should not be forced to incur that expense in order to remain healthy.
My private home should not have to defend itself against the whims and depredations of local government.
The LED 4,000k are a colossal mistake and pose harm to every man, woman and child who lives in our village, the plants in our gardens and our pets.
The blue-violet spectrum is ever-present because the lights are not under our control and we cannot turn them off. So they need to be gone
Rebecca Gilliar
Great Neck
