By MADDY VITALE
The festive holiday season may seem a long way off, especially as the temps soar into the 90s for much of the area and around Ocean City this week.
But the holidays will come soon enough and Ocean City is sparing no time to get ready. That includes installing new decorative lighting in the downtown.
The new lighting would not only illuminate the shopping district, but also replace the fixtures that are not tall enough to provide adequate height for the swag, bows and garland, that create the festive atmosphere each year.
City Council approved a resolution at Thursday night’s Council meeting to go out to bid for light improvements along Asbury Avenue from Eighth to 10th Streets.
The project would cost an estimated $1 million for every two blocks of new lighting. The city’s goal is to complete Sixth to 14th Streets in the city’s main corridor for shopping, in yearly increments, city officials explained.
The city has already bonded for the project which would be coming out of the capital improvements budget, the city’s director of Operations and Engineering Vince Bekier explained after the meeting.
“We plan to go out to bid in the fall and start after the decorations come down in January,” Bekier said, noting that the new lighting would be in place for the holiday season in 2024.
According to Bekier, there will be six lights per block with two at each intersection. There will also be a little bollard in the fixture so that the festive music could be played on the street level instead of from buildings.
For years, the city would install each November, temporary, 20-foot-high poles to provide a way to display the swag, wrapped garland and bright red bows. They were taken down every January. The current light fixtures are from Atlantic City Electric and are only eighth and 10 feet high.
Bekier described the advantages of new lighting.
Each fixture, he said, is a “black pole with a hook on the top to connect the wires for the swag to attach to and the bows and the wreaths. There will be one light that will shine down as opposed to now, where they shine up, so there will be better light and spill control.”
“We will be able to dim one light or all lights,” he explained. “When the businesses close at 10 p.m., they will go down a little bit. And at midnight, they will go down a little bit further, to not disturb the residents on the second and third floor.”
He noted that the Smart Technology fixtures also will be the property of the city.
“They will be our lights. They will no longer be Atlantic City Electric lights so when they don’t work, we can fix them,” Bekier pointed out. “We were constantly having power outages and we had to rely on Atlantic City Electric. They were responsive to us, but they couldn’t fix things sometimes until the next day. This is something now, where with the new fixtures, we have total control.”
