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Greetings!

I've been noticing lately that we have quite a lot of businesses that are installing Bright LED Spotlight Lights that illuminate a huge swath of area in front of them. I'm including a couple of images of these businesses here and below. I have been contacting the mayor and City Council members to try to get them to see this emergency.

If you agree with me, please write to all of your City Council members and the mayor, and potentially all City Council members (see list below). And if you can think of other people, organizations, or newspapers to write a letter to the editor about this issue, I would appreciate it.

Dark Sky Oregon meets monthly. If you are interested in joining that organization and meeting with folks via Zoom, please let me know, and I will make sure that you get the information that you need. Going forward, I'll try to keep you up to date on all the information that I can find on this topic, and hopefully, we can together reduce the amount of light in the night sky in Portland.

Right now, I think our focus should be on the convenience stores and supermarkets that are installing these incredibly bright floodlights and see if we can stop their spread. Thanks for your help with this.

If you are interested in meeting in person and having coffee and discussing this I would be happy to do so. Also come join our Facebook group and also get the word out about the effort that we putting together to try to bring dark skies energy to the Portland area. The more people see the beautiful stars at night the more success we will know we've had and hopefully someday we can be an accredited Dark Skies City.

Also, if you have any volunteer energy: graphics, website, social media, print, let me know. Maybe you'd like to write the next newsletter?

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This is from an email I got a couple of years ago from the Bird Alliance: "BAO did get PBOT to update its streetlighting specs to reflect best practices in lighting design, so the new specs call for 3000K max on arterials and 2700K on residential streets. Here is a link to the streetlighting design guide: https://www.portland.gov/transportation/traffic-operations/documents/pbot-street-lighting-design-guide

NPR covered the issue of glaring LED headlights! Pulling from this 2-year old article. - On this topic, this subreddit is interesting.

I've created a new FB group to support our effort. Please come join in!

Here are some recommended amber light bulbs! And an explanation about amber bulbs (Thanks to Bill in Bend for this one!)

Albert Kaufman

Mayor’s Email: Mayor@portlandoregon.gov

City Councilor Emails:

District 1:

councilor.avalos@portlandoregon.gov

councilor.smith@portlandoregon.gov

councilor.dunphy@portlandoregon.gov

District 2:

councilor.ryan@portlandoregon.gov

councilor.pirtle-guiney@portlandoregon.gov

councilor.kanal@portlandoregon.gov

District 3:

councilor.novick@portlandoregon.gov

councilor.koyamalane@portlandoregon.gov

councilor.morillo@portlandoregon.gov

District 4:

councilor.zimmerman@portlandoregon.gov

councilor.green@portlandoregon.gov

councilor.clark@portlandoregon.gov

Or, all at once:

Mayor@portlandoregon.gov, councilor.avalos@portlandoregon.gov, councilor.smith@portlandoregon.gov, councilor.dunphy@portlandoregon.gov, councilor.ryan@portlandoregon.gov, councilor.pirtle-guiney@portlandoregon.gov, councilor.kanal@portlandoregon.gov, councilor.novick@portlandoregon.gov,

councilor.koyamalane@portlandoregon.gov,

councilor.morillo@portlandoregon.gov, councilor.zimmerman@portlandoregon.gov,

councilor.green@portlandoregon.gov,

councilor.clark@portlandoregon.gov

Here's a NEW link to the sign-up form for this newsletter. You can share it on Nextdoor, Social Media, Email or wherever you like. Thank you!

https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/sl/GETBaV3/friends