Municipalities turn off street lights at night to save electricity

Due to high electricity prices, more and more municipalities are starting to save on street lighting. Seven villages from the municipality of Lesichovo in Pazardzhik have already switched to electricity on a schedule for each settlement.

The electricity bill for December in Lesichovo municipality was BGN 27,000, while a year earlier it was BGN 8,000. The drastic increase in bills forced the municipality to introduce a street lighting regime.

"We impose this restriction because we have to deal with the payment for street lighting throughout the year. We have been working on a budget since last year, you know that the budget was not adopted this year," said Lesichovo Mayor Seryozha Lazarov.

In each of the seven settlements, the electricity saving regime will be on a schedule coordinated with the mayors of the villages.

Except for street lighting, the municipality has limited its electricity costs wherever possible. The mayor hopes the measures will work, but he will still receive the promised compensation from the government for December and January.

A little earlier, several other municipalities in our country introduced measures to save electricity. The mayor of Pazardzhik, Todor Popov, recently warned that municipalities face a serious problem with paying for electricity at the new threefold increase in prices. In just one month, the Pazardzhik municipality paid nearly BGN 500,000.

Mayors from municipalities and settlements throughout Bulgaria are already warning about the problem, calling on the state to help prevent citizens from being deprived of basic amenities such as bright and safe streets.

In just one year, the electricity bills in the municipality of Avren have almost tripled. On social networks, the mayor of Varna municipality Emanuil Manolov announced that the high price of electricity is the reason to resort to the regime of street lighting, a reporter told FOCUS Radio - Varna. Here is what Emanuil Manolov wrote in his personal profile.

"Light reflections on electricity prices and the upcoming" change "in the monthly costs of the municipality of Avren for electricity:

Account for November 2020 around BGN 21,000, 2. Account for November 2021 a little over BGN 49,000 and the "most pleasant" part - the bill for December was issued for BGN 6,079.

So far, we have considered stopping the street lighting as a last resort, but we hoped that it would last, but after such a brutal bill, I am now officially announcing it:

We will stop the street lighting in the time interval from 22.00 to 06.00 and it will take some time to switch from photocells to clocks to adjust the hours of illumination.

A few days ago, a similar measure was introduced in the municipality of Valchi Dol, and the municipality of Dulgopol introduced a regime of street lighting on January 5th.