West Lake Hills City Council intends to update the city's outdoor lighting ordinance at its March 12 meeting. The council, which appointed a subcommittee of council members David Moore, Linda Anthony and Taylor Holcomb to work on the ordinance, has been debating the issue for nearly a year and sought to pass the updated ordinance during its Feb. 26 meeting.

Concerns about safety, conflicting sections of the newest draft ordinance, cost to residents and pitting neighbors against each other were the main concerns raised by residents at the meeting.

Resident Kathy Wirt said she was concerned about how much updating exterior lighting to comply with the ordinance would cost residents.

"I spent over an hour with the draft ordinance at the lighting store trying to price out what it would cost me to come into compliance," she told the council. "It would cost me more than $4,000 for just the fixtures—that doesn't event count installation. That is millions of dollars you are asking the residents of West Lake Hills to pay to come into compliance."

"We don't patrol looking for violations," Mayor Pro Tem Stan Graham said. "Most of this ordinance has been around for more than 20 years, and we have only had a handful of violations reported."

Resident Tim Nutt said he is afraid that if enforcement is done by neighbors it will lead to conflicts.

"While we prefer neighbors handle the issue themselves, it shouldn't be the only resolution to the problem," Graham said. "An updated ordinance gives us the framework to resolve those differences between neighbors, and I think this [draft] is a pretty good start."

Several residents voiced concerns over potential safety hazards, saying they would not feel safe in their homes and decreased safety lighting could encourage crime.

"Safety lighting has always been exempt from the 11 p.m. curfew," Holcomb said. "The only thing we changed was to specify what sort of lighting qualified as safety lighting."

The draft proposed at the Feb. 26

meeting listed safety lighting as standard security lighting, such as lights that illuminate garage doors, windows or doors; manually operated lighting such as floodlights; and motion-sensing lighting, all of which would be exempt from the curfew.

The ordinance, which has not been updated since the 1990s, also includes revisions referencing new technologies that did not exist at the time of its creation, Holcomb said. Changes also outline the permit application process for new construction, something that wasn't specified in the previous ordinance, Graham said.

Nutt also noted the lack of regulations for outdoor living space in the proposed updated ordinance.

"Under what you are currently proposing there is no way I could use my outdoor porch [at night]," he told council members.

Holcomb said he would revisit outdoor living spaces for the next draft of the ordinance, which will be discussed and possibly adopted at the March 12 meeting.