By RUSS OLIVO

WOONSOCKET — Responding to a cash crunch unlikely to go away anytime soon, the City Council has unanimously approved a plan to turn off up to a third of its 4,200 street lights to cut utility costs.

Public Works Director Michael A. Annarummo said the city projects saving up to $120,000 in next fiscal year's budget, a spending plan that will surely top this year's $113.6  million package.
The city will begin switching off the lights during the current fiscal year, but Annarummo said there will be little, if any, initial savings because National Grid is charging the city a shutoff fee of $25 per fixture.
The public works director said the plan is to reduce costs by darkening every other light on secondary streets, increasing the average distance between street lights from about 150 to 300 feet. Primary streets and certain “sensitive areas,” such as four-way-stop intersections where reduced lighting could heighten public safety concerns, will see few changes.
“Every secondary street that has lights has been affected and some primary streets have been tweaked, but not significantly,” said the public works director. Reeling from the recession, Woonsocket is among a growing list of Ocean State communities trying to make up for crippling cuts in state aid and plummeting revenues with piecemeal rollbacks in services once considered sacred.
North Smithfield began phasing in a 10 percent shutoff of its 1,500 streetlights in January, aiming to cut utility costs by $15,000, according to Town Administrator Paulette Hamilton. The Scituate Town Council recently voted to turn off more than half the town's 840 streetlights next fiscal year to save $33,882 in a budget projected to exceed $32 million.
Tiverton eliminated street lights in areas of low traffic flow over a year ago to cut costs.
“I'm not surprised at all,” said Dan Beardsley, executive director of the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns. “I think it's going to become even more commonplace for cities and towns rubbing nickels and dimes together to produce a ten-dollar bill. It might seem like a drop in a bucket but one drop, then another drop, then another is eventually going to add up to some real savings.”
The downside is that in order to survive in the prevailing climate of diminishing resources is that communities will have to have to cut services that citizens have come to take for granted.
Annarummo agrees, predicting that the city will be looking for an amalgam of similar cuts in the future to help bridge its way across multi-million-dollar deficits and cope with vanishing state aid.
“I think you're going to see many more initiatives like this in the future,” he said. “It's about services. You can't have every service in the world and not pay for it.”
Dave Graves, a spokesman for National Grid, said he knows of no other community in Rhode Island that has asked the utility company for street light reductions. Though he did not identify them, he said perhaps a half-dozen of National Grid's municipal customers in Massachusetts have reduced street lights, but the programs have triggered so many complaints that some of them have asked for the lights to be turned back on again.
“We do whatever the customer wants,” Graves said. “Some towns have turned them back on again because the residents were not happy with the dark streets.”
The measure approved by the City Council Monday allows the city to shut off 1,200 to 1,500 street lights. The savings will range from $90,000 to $120,000 after the program has been in effect a full fiscal year, officials say.
With a shutoff fee of $25 per light, the net startup costs for the maximum number of shutoffs envisioned by the new law amounts to $37,500. The fee is for the labor associated with placing an opaque red hood over a sensor on each light to be deactivated,  a process known as “red-capping.” The hood blocks the sensor from reacting to daylight, which tells the street light when to turn on and off, according to Graves.
The city will not gain a 100 percent savings from National Grid for each light included in the program because the company will still charge the city a fee for maintaining the equipment, whether it's in use or not. Graves said he was unsure what the charge would be for Woonsocket because the figure varies by contract.
Also, Graves said, if the city wants to turn any lights back on, National Grid will charge just as much as it did to turn them off  – $25 each.
Hamilton, the North Smithfield town administrator, wasn't happy about the red-capping charges, so she simply instructed National Grid to remove the lights altogether, along with the metal arm affixing them to the poles. Hamilton said National Grid isn't charging the town for that. She said the company told her there would be no charge to replace the armature if the town wants to restore any of the lights.
Hamilton said reducing street lighting is a topic of lively discussion among members of the Mayor's Coalition to Improve Rhode Island as they explore myriad cuts in programs and services to save money. Though but a handful have so far asked National Grid to reduce street lighting, she said most of the group's 15 municipal chiefs are at least considering it.
“People are grasping at straws,” said Hamilton. “You're going to see more and more communities going this way.”
While the Woonsocket City Council passed the street light reduction program on a vote of 6-0, the panel gave itself some wiggle room to reconsider at the end of next fiscal year. On a motion by Councilman William Schneck, the panel added a sunset provision to the measure that will force the city to turn the lights back on after June 30, 2011 unless the City Council explicitly votes to do otherwise.