125 new LED light fixtures on their way to Broadway bridges in Ann Arbor

Nate Geisler, the city's energy programs associate, said the city anticipates a 50 percent savings in energy and maintenance costs after installation of the LED streetlights.

With the latest fixtures being installed on the Broadway bridges, Geisler said the city will have completed the conversion of more than 2,000 city-owned streetlights to energy efficient LEDs.

"I want to thank the city staff and the administrator for moving forward on this particular contract because I don't think a week has gone by in the last three months that someone in my ward hasn't commented to me that the lights were out on the Broadway bridge," said Council Member Sabra Briere, D-1st Ward.

"But it's most interesting to me that we're now going to have LED lights that hopefully will last longer than what we have seen in the past decade," she added.

The city began the process of converting all city-owned streetlights to LED fixtures in 2007 to save on energy and maintenance costs. Crews began the project with the conversion of 1,000 downtown streetlights through a grant from the Downtown Development Authority.

The effort was then expanded to include the conversion of the city-owned streetlights outside of the DDA area using funding from various state and federal grants.

The city is paying for the latest installation using a small portion of a $1.24 million Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Geisler said a large portion of the grant has been spent now and the city is nearly complete with the conversion to LED streetlights throughout the city.

"Broadway is one of the last remaining locations of city-owned lights that remain," he said.

He said DTE Energy owns about another 5,000 streetlights in the city. City officials have said in the past that DTE wasn't as cooperative as they'd like about converting those to LEDs, though.