ORD-2003-004 Amend Article 6 to establish Outdoor Lighting Standard

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down. Then you have two options for a sign, either from above or these internally lit signs that work really well. Then there are the bad fixtures and there are many of them. "You can get the totally ugly effect, which you can get by driving straight back towards Chapel Hill, just as you come up over the hill. So, in the summation page, light pollution is a problem in most places in this country where they do not have a comprehensive Ordinance and that includes Orange County. "So we have got a good start on the Ordinance. For this to actually be a success this is kind of like air pollution the light knows no boundaries, so getting the same things happening in other jurisdictions in the towns and at the university would be something I would want to motivate. So to the degree that we could get an ad hoc countywide working group for a little while working on this and try and get some uniformity on these things that would be great. "One thing just occurred to me, it is possible to even light ball fields and things that you would think would just have to create this big ball of light. With the right shielding you can make even ball fields and big facilities like that pretty tolerable in the neighborhood. So we can actually bring back the stars in town and that has been done in a lot of bigger cities where astronomers were being put out of business. And I know it takes a while for Ordinances and the lifecycle of these fixtures to go through, but as far as the state -of- the -art fixtures and light pollution approaches in all county facilities goes, I think that is something that can just be done by the people that are planning the facilities. "And I would really encourage that and the last thing that I want to ask for is that we get a referral on this Ordinance so that we can take a look at it officially for the Commission for the Environment. "And on a completely different topic, I was the recipient of an Orange County Arts Commission grant last year and there is a pile of these CDs over there that were a result of that (five or six) and they are for you all. Thank you very much." Bill Walser. "Hi, I am Bill Walser, a resident of Orange County. I am a lifetime member of the International Dark Sky Association, which basically made the presentation. I am an amateur astronomer and I have a private observatory just off Dodson's Cross Roads where I do deep space imaging. It's a university quality facility and there are a number of other amateur astronomers in the area, who until just recently have enjoyed very dark skies. "As the staff said, the last five years have been brutal on the sky. I came in tonight to encourage you to see this Ordinance through to completion. It is very important right now in Orange County as the rural buffer zone is being heavily developed. It is such a simple problem to solve as Mark said. "The idea is simply to have people buy fixtures that light what they want lit. You look at these domes of light that half of the light is going up into space, that is just energy that is wasted. "The first night that Carrboro turned on their new Municipal home, I thought Carrboro was burning down from my little property, which is about 12 miles away because of the huge dome that it put up that was not there the night before. So I drove down the next day and immediately recognized what the problem was, at least Carrboro didn't burn down. "But that's why this is so important; it just takes a few lights with excess energy being wasted with this tremendous wattage going up into the air. This is particularly true during the summer season, where humidity is high in the air and you tend to trap all that light and the moisture and it produces these light domes which are as polluting as if you had put chemicals in