May 7
2025
Buffalo’s streetlight maintenance “haphazard”
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A streetlight pole falls on a moving car on Pearl Street in downtown Buffalo in February 2023.
The streets of Buffalo are illuminated by more than 30,000 streetlights, the majority of them installed decades ago, according to the engineer who once oversaw the entire system.
And every year the city’s 311 citizen complaint line receives hundreds of reports of damaged or missing streetlights, according to city data.
And yet the city’s Department of Public Works can produce no records of the city inspecting, maintaining or replacing any streetlights in the past seven-and-a-half years.
That’s according to DPW Commissioner Nate Marton, to whom Investigative Post in February directed a Freedom of Information request, seeking all documents tracking the city’s management of its street lighting system, going back to 2015.
In response, Marton provided Investigative Post a database titled “Down Light Pole Listing,” which documents fallen streetlights but includes no records of regular inspections or maintenance.
The database contains 578 entries. The most current dated entry is from November 2017.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomIn the years since, the city’s 311 citizen complaint line has received 2,112 calls reporting damaged or missing streetlights, according to city data. But Marton could provide no records detailing light pole inspections or maintenance performed in that period.
He told Investigative Post in an email there existed no “current consolidated log kept of every street light pole inspection conducted.”
Asked repeatedly over the course of a month for the opportunity to inspect whatever records might exist — paper or electronic, consolidated or not — Marton did not respond.
The database DPW produced is “not current,” according to a retired city engineer who used to oversee the city’s streetlights, nor is it an inspection and maintenance log. And its accuracy and utility are suspect, given the unevenness of the data entered into it.
For example:
- More than a quarter of the entries have no date listed.
- There’s one entry for July 2005, then the database skips ahead six years to 2011, for which there are two entries, both marked January 1 of that year.
- There are no entries for 2012.
- A suspiciously high number of the entries between 2011 and 2015 — 57 of them, or nearly 10 percent of the total — were made on January 1 of the year in which the pole purportedly came down. That includes all but one of the 20 entries listed for 2014.
Only one downed pole listing includes a “date up” entry, indicating the erection of a replacement pole, even though 84 of the poles are marked “priority.”
That pole with a “date up” entry is located at 89 Delaware Ave. — one of the streetlights that ring Niagara Square. There’s no date offered for when the pole came down, but a new one purportedly went up on Aug. 7, 2015.
“DO NOT PAY,” someone wrote in the database columns provided for notes and comments. “POLE NOT PLUMB.”
Lights out on Pearl Street
The city earlier this year agreed to pay $600,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a Riverside man injured when a light pole fell on his head in a February 2019 windstorm.
Investigative Post’s report on that settlement drew a flurry of complaints from readers about missing or dysfunctional streetlights across the city: on the East Side, in Allentown and the Lower West Side, along the Scajaquada Expressway and the S-curves on Delaware Avenue.
One reader claimed “at least one-third of the lights along Lincoln, Chapin and Bidwell Parkways and around Soldiers Circle are out.”
Another reader sent videos of a light pole at 320 Pearl Street in downtown Buffalo falling onto his Ford Bronco.
That incident occurred on February 9, 2023. A week later the vehicle’s owner, a local attorney named Michael Smith, delivered to the Office of the City Clerk “a written notice of the dangerous and defective conditions” of the city’s light poles.
Smith said a collision shop had appraised the damage at “nearly $14,000,” but he did not pursue a claim against the city. He wrote the letter, he said, “so that the condition of the light poles may be addressed and fixed before another pole falls and someone is seriously injured or killed.”
He included photos of the corroded pole, which he said “had clearly ‘snapped’ off at the base.” He said that in the days after the incident he’d inspected other city light poles and found “most … are in serious disrepair and rust has been covered with black spray paint.”
The base and fallen streetlight pole at 390 Pearl Street in February 2023.
More than two years later, the pole at 320 Pearl Street has not been replaced. Its rotted base and wiring is covered by a yellow traffic cone.
The base of the streetlight pole at 390 Pearl Street in April 2025.
A two-year wait for a replacement would not be a record, if the database DPW provided is to be taken at face value.
A pole at 92 Cleveland Place in the Elmwood Village was marked “down” on January 1, 2011. Its replacement was labeled a “priority” five-and-a-half years later, in October 2016, according to the database.
There’s no “date up” listed. As of Wednesday morning, there was no streetlight at 92 Cleveland.
“Haphazard and substandard”
Michael Hoffert, the former senior engineer in charge of streetlights for the city, told Investigative Post the database provided by DPW is called a “knockdown list.”
“It lists downed poles and necessary repairs to the locations,” said Hoffert, who retired in November 2017, which is also the latest date entered in the database.
“According to this report none of these locations have been updated or repaired,” he added, “and it appears not to be current.”
He said a genuine inspection and maintenance log would include a description of a light pole’s general condition, along with an installation date and a “last serviced” date.
That information is not entirely absent from Marton’s “knockdown list.” Some of the notes and comments indicate “rot” at the base of a pole, as well as missing, broken or bent anchor rods, which secure the base to the concrete foundation on which it rests. Some of the bases are recorded as “not plumb” with the foundations, causing the poles to lean. Some entries indicate crews tightened loose nuts.
Hoffert provided expert testimony on behalf of Donald Williams, the Riverside man injured in 2019 by a falling light pole. He said in his affidavit for the lawsuit that “inspections, maintenance and replacement of light poles by the city has been haphazard and substandard.”
“There should be a maintenance schedule for street light pole inspections that should be annually adjusted for age and end of service life,” Hoffert said. “The city of Buffalo has never maintained such a schedule. Instead, street light pole inspections only happened based on citizen complaints and council members’ requests for updated street light poles in their districts.”
He described the city’s street lighting department as “chronically and badly understaffed.”
Two current members of the city’s three-man street lighting crew were deposed in the Williams lawsuit. One of them, Jermaine Skillon, described in his deposition an “inspection log” or “spreadsheet” kept on a “shared drive,” where inspection reports would be entered. Investigative Post’s Freedom of Information request, as well as subsequent exchanges with the public works commissioner, referred to Skillon’s testimony.
But Marton, the commissioner, confirmed Hoffert’s assertion, telling Investigative Post via that “current record keeping is focused on addressing the complaint.”
“If no issue is found with the original complaint, the other lights inspected in the area of the complaint may not have their own records,” Marton said.
In his testimony for the Williams lawsuit, Hoffert said most of the city’s streetlights were installed more than 30 years ago.
“There are countless street light poles in the city that have never been inspected since they were installed,” he said.
