NORWAY — The Board of Selectmen voted unanimously Thursday evening to hire a Maryland-based energy company to provide an estimate for converting streetlights to LED bulbs.

After RealTerm Energy inventories the lights and provides an estimate for the conversion, a special town meeting would be held for voters to decide whether to approve the proposal, Town Manager Dennis Lajoie said.

Residents voted at the annual town meeting in June to approve up to $13,000 for the first phase. The estimate for the audit is $10,302, Lajoie said.

He said the audit would not include streetlights in the municipal parking lot.

“We could use that leftover money to audit those lights, if we wanted,” he said.

Town officials from Norway, Oxford, Paris and Poland met in February with Paul Vesel of the Maryland-based company, which specializes in LED conversions for municipalities. Vesel told them their towns could save “somewhere between 75 and 80 percent” on streetlight costs if they switched to LED bulbs.

Lajoie said he and Paris Town Manager Vic Hodgkins and Oxford Town Manager Butch Asselin met recently and agreed their towns should move forward with the first phase of the project.

mdaigle@sunmediagroup.net

Norway Town Manager Dennis Lajoie, right, discusses a plan Thursday evening to have LED bulbs installed in town streetlights with Selectmen Mike Twitchell, left, and board Chairman Bruce Cook. (Matthew Daigle/Sun Journal)

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