Council has been reviewing areas of where it can make savings. One of these was to recover merchant fees, which is standard practice across businesses and local government authorities. Council opted for the lowest fee applicable to all of its online payments, and will introduce a 0.42% surcharge from 1 April 2024.
In November 2019 Essential Energy, in partnership with Council, commenced deployment of LED streetlights to replace old and inefficient streetlight technology throughout the Bathurst Local Government Area.
The project was completed in 2023 with over 6000 streetlights now converted to LED, delivering improved streetlight quality across the city and villages, and reducing Council’s spend on energy for streetlighting by 60%.
The new luminaires are ‘Smart Control’ enabled, meaning that they are designed to accept a smart controller which can monitor and control the operation of the streetlights. When coupled with a communication network the smart street lighting controls will be able to:
Bathurst Regional Council and Essential Energy (supported by the Southern Lights group of councils) are currently conducting a pilot of streetlighting smart controls in Central Bathurst. The pilot includes several dimming trial locations whereby streetlights will be dimmed between 11pm and 5pm to the minimum level required to still meet Australian Standards for streetlighting levels. A network of about 200 streetlights also have a second ‘Zhaga’ port which will enable future smart city applications to be deployed as they are needed. Some applications which are possible are traffic counting and environmental monitoring. Zhaga compatible sensors are still in the development phase and Council will trial various sensors as they become available.