Springville family asks city to dim their streetlights for Halloween

SPRINGVILLE — A Springville family said the streetlight in front of their house interferes with their Halloween setup.

The Darling family goes all out with their Halloween decorations every year. The highlights of their front yard include a 12-foot skeleton and a 15-foot phantom.

“People are like, ‘Oh we love that your skeleton is up! It makes us so happy!'” said Amanda Darling.

She said about two years ago, the city switched out their orange hue lightbulbs in the streetlights for LED.

“We had to get wall-to-wall blackout curtains in our rooms upstairs because it’s so bright,” Darling said.

She and other residents said they struggled with sleep. However, Darling said she is grateful for the safety it brings.

“You can’t get away with prowling around,” Darling said. “We’d spot you from a mile away.”

Darling said she preferred if the streetlight could be dimmed or redirected so it wouldn’t wash out her decorations. She said, as it is, it casts light across her house, into the street and clear into her neighbors’ yards. She said the LED light mimics daylight.

“I want to get really cool lighting effects and we have plans to do a smoke machine and there are these laser lights that you can shine on smoke, fog machines that looks like water,” she said. “If the light gets washed out, then there isn’t any point in investing the money into that.”

Darling turned to social media for help.

“I saw someone in another city, in another state say that they asked their city to turn off their streetlight temporarily or put a blocker,” she said.

Another poster told her to call the Springville Power Department.

“The girl that I talked to was like, ‘Yeah, sometimes those LED lights are way too bright and we don’t know that they’re too bright until someone calls us,'” Darling said.

She was told the city can come and dim the lights any time, regardless of the holiday.

“She’s like, ‘You could’ve gotten that dimmed as soon as it was installed,'” Darling said. “Better late than never I guess.”

The mom and her three children hope the light will dimmed by Halloween.

“There’s only one guy in the city that handles streetlights,” Darling said. “They’ll just dim it, they’ll just change the brightness. I’m not sure how they judge that. She says he goes out really early in the morning and does it.”