Gisborne begins night repairs on faulty CBD streetlights

Night repairs on faulty streetlights in the CBD have started this week with work expected to be completed over the next month.

Overnight repairs on 95 faulty streetlights in the CBD started this week as the Gisborne District Council makes progress on its urban street network’s faulty LED issue.

Faulty lights have resulted in outages affecting more than 15% of the streetlights across the urban network, according to a council media release from November, when the “substantial” repair programme started.

A council spokeswoman told the Gisborne Herald that 220 lights in Gladstone Road (Derby Street roundabout to Main Rd, Makaraka), 167 lights in Ormond Rd and 116 lights in Childers Rd had been repaired.

The repairs in the CBD were expected to be completed “over the next month allowing for inclement weather”.

The “wider resolution” in other areas will take place over the calendar year in stages.

Councillor Tony Robinson, speaking at the last operations committee meeting before his resignation, asked if the cost of repairs would be borne by the manufacturer or by ratepayers.

“We’ve all driven around town seeing black holes and flickering lights,” said Robinson.

“This has been going on for, probably two years.”

Director of community lifelines Tim Barry said the council was considering its position “given the limited nature of the benefit we might receive given the expense and risk it might be to go through a legal route”.

A lot of the work was not covered by the warranty.

“There’s conjecture about why and how they failed,” he said.

“That requires expensive scientific results to act on our side, and it might not give us the results we might want.

“Do we want to drop that money in there?”

Another option was a class action lawsuit with other territorial authorities who were in the same situation.

That was the favoured approach, said Barry.

There were reportedly other districts that had suffered the same problems.

“We are talking to them.”

Robinson asked for a statement to be prepared for the council, showing the costs and options of repairing the lights.

The outages stem from faulty LED streetlights installed during the 2016 LED rollout programme.

Earlier, a New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi spokesperson told Local Democracy Reporting that the Gisborne streetlights affected were bought between 2016 and 2019 in partnership with the council.