Ogden officials discuss streetlight conundrum and attempts to solve it
-
- Streetlights sit on 22nd street in Ogden on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025.
-
- Justin Anderson, Director of the Ogden City Public Services Department, speaks to the editorial board at the Standard-Examiner in Ogden on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025.
-
- A streetlight sits on 25th street in Ogden on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three stories following a Standard-Examiner editorial board interview with Ogden City Director of Public Services Justin Anderson on a wide range of topics, including streetlights, politicization of infrastructure, sidewalks, street repair and more. Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski also joined the interview.
OGDEN — Streetlights are a deceptively simple piece of urban infrastructure.
It gets dark out and they illuminate streets, sidewalks and other areas. Daylight returns in abundance and they turn off.
But what happens when responsibility for these streetlights is unevenly split between two entities that have inconsistently placed lights over the years and are applying vastly different levels of service to them?
In Ogden, it’s meant complications and frustration.
“There are about 6,000 streetlights in Ogden‚ and these don’t include signalized lights at the intersections,” Ogden City Director of Public Services Justin Anderson said. “The city owns about one-third of those lights that we control. The other two-thirds are actually owned by Rocky Mountain Power, and we’ve been working with Rocky Mountain Power to upgrade their lights.”
He said the city upgraded its streetlights within the past decade as part of a wider energy-savings upgrade project.
“Ours are the new LEDs,” he said. “It’s a very bright light. A lot of the older lights are owned by Rocky Mountain Power. They’re kind of the dungy more yellow-ish haze lighting. … Some of these lights are 1950s-1960s lights. They’re not energy-efficient, so they use a lot of energy.”
Anderson said the upgrades gave the city a chance to formulate a database of its streetlights and how they’re functioning — a practice not replicated by Rocky Mountain Power.
“With those lights, Rocky Mountain Power for whatever reason doesn’t have a good database of the lights and the functionality of the lights,” he said. “They know where the lights are. When we went through and did our energy savings audit and upgraded the city-owned lights we did it in such a way that now, we can run a report — every day if we wanted — to say, ‘How are the lights functioning? Is there any that are not functioning correctly?'”
Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski had a more blunt assessment of the difference between Rocky Mountain Power’s streetlights and the city’s.
“If you’re driving around the city and see lights that are working well, they’re generally city-owned,” he said. “If you see lights that are not, they’re generally Rocky Mountain Power-owned.”
Anderson said the city has been in discussions with Rocky Mountain Power about purchasing the remainder of the streetlights.
“The power company has come back and said, ‘No, we really don’t want to sell you those lights,'” he said.
As a matter of recourse, the city has taken the initiative that, during major street projects, the city will put up new lighting of its own along the project. Anderson said the city has also been gathering data on lights that are working versus those that aren’t to present to Rocky Mountain Power in future talks, reporting that around 500 of Rocky Mountain Power-owned streetlights flicker or do not come on at all.
Nadolski said he believes a purchase of the lights would quickly pay for itself.
“We’ve got a really good relationship with local Rocky Mountain Power officials, he said. “This is a corporate-level — the western region — type of a decision. When we talked about purchasing them, we felt like the fees we’re paying for low level of service and quality, we could purchase the lights and upgrade them for the same or less and then we could achieve, in those upgrades, savings in energy.”
Anderson said, in many cases, streetlights from the two entities are mixed along stretches of roadway.
“I don’t know how we ended up like this over the years as a city,” he said. “You’ll have some where Rocky Mountain Power owns a couple of the lights, then Ogden City owns a light so they’re kind of inter-mixed.”
He said that Rocky Mountain Power has sold other cities their lights in the past but have grown reluctant to do so in recent years.
“We are working to resolve this and get proposals in,” he said. “We’ve been in discussions with Rocky Mountain Power.”
However, Anderson said it hasn’t been the fastest process, but there is hope for progress in the near future.
“I’ve been dealing with this for almost three years now,” he said. “We’ll be discussing things before the end of this calendar year. We’ve been pushing this for a while now. I’m not expecting miraculous things to happen by the end of the year, but we’re going to be meeting and talking.”
