Ethan from Arapahoe County writes, “What’s driving you crazy? Why has the city of Aurora not upgraded its old sodium streetlights to LED? Most cities surrounding Aurora have but the city still has its mismatched, broken, and dim streetlights. This would directly help so many of the safety issues we see on Aurora roads. It’s almost 2026 and Aurora still has no plan to get this done to save money and have safer streets! What’s going on??”
When driving around Aurora you might assume the street lights are all owned and maintained by the city. That is not the case. Nearly all of the older streetlights across Aurora installed before 2018 are owned and maintained by Xcel Energy. Xcel then charges the city a monthly fee to operate and maintain each and every streetlight. I have been told that Aurora pays Xcel close to $20 per month for each of the just over 20,000 streetlights they own around Aurora. At those numbers, that comes out to about $400,000 per month paid to Xcel for streetlight operations. I reached out to Xcel asking for the exact fee amount they charge Aurora. They refused to provide that specific information, telling me they cannot share customer billing information.
For years, city leaders have been looking for ways to reduce the annual streetlight power bill. City council has been working on and off for at least 20 years to purchase the streetlights from Xcel. The Aurora Sentinel reported in January 2017 that city council started looking at this issue 10 years earlier before they voted 8-1 to approve an ordinance granting the city the right to purchase all streetlights within one year if the city did not come to an agreement with Xcel before that. A deal was never reached…