Since the first special lighting district was created in Syracuse in 1914 properly charging residence for the service has been difficult. This has become one of the issues that has been pushing the city of Syracuse into debt with $1.7 million of lighting fees uncollected. Today the Cities 134 special lighting districts charge residents $220,000 a year but pay National Grid 1.9 million in fees. This shortfall adds to a chronic budget deficit which the city will be spending $20 of it's savings to cover.
A major cause of this problem is that once created lighting districts fees are not raised for decades. In one case the fees for one district had never been raised since the district had been created in 1926. In the case of 400 property owners the simply were not billed at all. The City Council has moved to correct these discrepancies. The sudden spike in fees would be a nasty shock to many property owners who would in some cases see their bills go up by thousands of dollars and as a result these increasise are being phased in over the course of three years.
This situation has dragged on for so long due to how incomplete the city hall records are. For Beth Rougeux the Director of Administration auditing all the special lighting districts has been a two year project that stated in the City Hall's attic. With all 2,700 "ornamental" lights now accounted for Beth as purposed to merge the cities 134 special lighting districts into 6 in the hopes of making better record keeping possible.
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