Black & McDonald hired to maintain Prairie Village streetlights
Prairie Village is the proud owner of more than 2,000 streetlights it bought last week from Kansas City Power & Light.
On Tuesday, the City Council hired Black & McDonald to keep the streetlights running.
The company, which is based in Toronto but has a regional headquarters in Kansas City, will receive $176,175 for annual maintenance and to upgrade 1,736 of them to LED lights.
Black & McDonald is well-acquainted with the streetlights as the company maintained them for KCP&L. Black & McDonald was also the lowest of two bidders.
The City Council agreed this summer to pay $3.2 million to buy the 2,070 streetlights that KCP&L operated within city limits. The city was paying $765,000 annually to lease the lights. Combined with switching the lights to LED, which use about half the electricity and last longer, city staff estimated the city could recoup the costs of the purchase in about seven years.
More than 300 of the lights were already switched to LED under a Mid-America Regional Council grant.
In other business, the council decided against installing a higher concrete barrier and metal railing along the north side of 75th Street and Rosewood Circle to address traffic concerns from residents.
Along that stretch of 75th Street, nearby homes are seven to 10 feet below the roadway and protected by a 4-foot-tall chain-link fence. In June, a sport-utility vehicle crashed through the chain-link fence and ended up hanging over the wall into a homeowner’s backyard.
Those homeowners, Katie Danner and Steve Reardon, said they were worried a larger or faster vehicle could have launched off the top of the wall and struck their house. They asked councilmembers this summer to consider building a stronger traffic barrier along that section of road.
Public Works Director Keith Bredehoeft on Monday, however, said the road has a maximum speed limit of 35 miles an hour and doesn’t warrant stronger traffic barriers. He said replacing the current retaining walls and installing stronger railing would cost up to $300,000 while just replacing the chain-link fence with railing would cost up to $75,000.
Ultimately, the council agreed with Bredehoeft to wait until the section of 75th Street is redesigned in the next seven to 10 years.
“It’s not about just what would work or what might provide ‘more safety’ at that point of the road,” said Councilman Andrew Wang. “It’s whether that spot deserves Prairie Village citizens’ road money more than any other point along that street.”
David Twiddy: widdy913@gmail.com
This story was originally published November 8, 2016 at 12:50 PM with the headline "Black & McDonald hired to maintain Prairie Village streetlights."