LED light bulbs displayed at the Home Depot store in Londonderry, N.H., July 11, 2019. A 2023 Oregon law barring sale of fluorescent bulbs has schools wrestling with flickering lights – and major costs.
Charles Krupa / AP
Oregon lawmakers concerned about climate change had reason to feel good in 2023, when they passed what appeared to be a common sense bill: mandating that buildings swap out fluorescent lights for highly efficient, mercury-free LED bulbs.
But it turns out no one bothered to ask school districts what they thought. Now some of those districts are coming to the Legislature with not-so-feel-good stories.
In Lebanon and Sheridan, district officials complain of LED bulbs that flicker and burn out quickly, distracting from learning because they are ill-suited to work in the existing light fixtures.
“They buzz, they hum, and they produce less than optimal light,” Sean Vesper, operations and facilities manager for the 700-student Sheridan School District, told OPB. “It affects these kids in ways that I can’t explain.”
And swapping outdated fixtures for better options can be prohibitively expensive, school officials say. In the Salem-Keizer School District, the state’s second-largest, Superintendent Andrea Castaneda told lawmakers it could cost $42 million the cash-strapped district can’t afford to pull from its general fund to retrofit schools to use LED bulbs.
“Schools, generally, were not asked for a fiscal analysis of this bill,” Stacy Michaelson, a lobbyist for the Oregon School Boards Association, testified last week, calling that fact “problematic.”
The 2023 legislation causing all the heartburn, House Bill 2531, barred the sale of some fluorescent bulbs in Oregon beginning in January 2024, and phased in more types of fluorescents this year.
The bill was largely opposed by Republicans, but didn’t come with major red flags about new costs. The state’s sprawling Department of Administrative Services told lawmakers it had already transferred 70% of buildings under its purview to LEDs, and may need to stockpile bulbs while it completed the rest, but costs to cities, counties and other agencies was labeled “indeterminate” or “minimal.”
Now, school districts are looking for a reprieve. A bill they’ve asked for in this year’s legislative session, House Bill 2307, would allow them to purchase fluorescent bulbs until 2030. Schools say this will give them time to find money – via bond measures, grants or other means – to make the switch to LEDs.
“As we say in legislative lingo, this bill has legs,” said state Rep. Kevin Mannix, R-Salem, who introduced HB 2307 after a conversation with Castaneda about how to help schools manage costs. “So far I’m only getting positive reflections from my colleagues.”
Mannix’s bill is just the latest this year that raises an issue school districts say has been persistent: unfunded mandates from lawmakers that make it harder to steer dollars toward the classroom at a time schools are struggling to boost test scores following the pandemic.
School district leaders are opposing another bill, Senate Bill 916, that would allow striking workers to receive unemployment pay while on strike.
Because of how public employers pay into the state’s unemployment fund, schools could be responsible for reimbursing any benefits paid out during a teachers’ strike if that bill passed. Portland Public Schools recently estimated that a one-month strike would cost the district $8.7 million.
Schools say they are already seeing ramped-up costs from bills granting unemployment benefits to some school employees during summer breaks.
“When we pass things in the Legislature that are broadly good ideas with honorable goals, we need to also be assessing what is the impact on our school district budgets,” said state Rep. Courtney Neron, the Wilsonville Democrat who chairs the House Education Committee, referring to the problem posed by HB 2307.
Vesper, the facilities director for Sheridan schools, was roughly one month into the gig when he learned that fluorescent bulbs would soon be on their way out.
The news came at an unfortunate time for Sheridan, which in 2015 upgraded its lighting system to accommodate a more efficient form of fluorescent bulb.
“It was 10 short years ago, and now we’ve got this mandate to go full LED,” he said. “We’ve got to scramble and upgrade or spend outrageous amounts of money on these basic plug and play LEDs.”
Vesper said the LED bulbs he uses in schools these days are incompatible with the systems that power fluorescent bulbs. That means he’s paying more for bulbs that’ often perform poorly.
“We are lucky to get a year out of them,” Vesper said. “It’s terrible.”
If lawmakers pass HB 2307, he said, Sheridan schools will have time to find money to retrofit light fixtures, and those same bulbs could last up to a decade.
The bill currently has no further hearings scheduled, but Neron, the committee chair, told OPB she considers it an “important” fix.