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Middleton hears expert caution, will test draft outdoor lighting ordinance against local projects
Summary
At a public hearing on the draft outdoor lighting ordinance, Smart Growth Greater Madison warned that overly strict rules can make parking and entrances unsafe. Staff will tighten waiver language, run the draft against recent Middleton projects and consult lighting experts before the ordinance returns for adoption.
The Middleton Plan Commission heard public comment and staff discussion on proposed revisions to the city’s outdoor lighting ordinance on Oct. 4, with a nonprofit policy expert urging staff to evaluate real projects before finalizing strict limits.
Bill Connors, executive director of Smart Growth Greater Madison, testified that Madison’s recent, more stringent code has produced problematic outcomes for developers and argued the draft could make it "very difficult in in many situations to provide adequate lighting in parking areas and by entrances and exits to new buildings to provide enough lighting for people to feel safe and for people to actually be safe." He urged staff to test the draft against recently approved local projects and to consult lighting experts.
Commissioners raised several editorial and map-related concerns in the draft, including ambiguous wording in a new paragraph on waivers, exceptions and exemptions and potential mismatches between zoning labels and functional land use on the lighting district map (one example discussed was parcel 7621 Terrace and whether it is conservancy-zoned or functions as conservancy).
Staff said they had reviewed the draft with a local project representative and planned to seek additional lighting-expert review; they also said they would rewrite the waiver section for clarity and run the draft code against a selection of recent Middleton developments to check how photometric requirements would apply in practice.
The commission did not adopt the ordinance at the hearing; staff will return revised language and the results of the empirical review at a later meeting.
