Connecticut state law is dotted with references to light pollution, according to a state resident who is battling the state to comply with a statute he says forces any state facility to turn off outdoor lighting during certain hours of the night.
Leo Smith is co-founder of The Coalition to Reduce Light Pollution in Connecticut, and he has a suit pending against the Connecticut Judicial Branch, naming Chief Justice Raheem Mullins and Deputy Chief Court Administrator Judge Elizabeth Bozzuto as defendants.
The Suffield resident claims the court administration has for years ignored state statutes requiring that outdoor lighting located at state facilities be designed to minimize light pollution, and for nonessential outdoor lighting be turned off from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m. daily.
Bozzuto issued a directive exempting all outdoor lights at all court facilities statewide.
“Filing a lawsuit against the Judicial Branch was done reluctantly and only as a last resort, following two years of efforts to ask those responsible for court operations to comply with state laws on outdoor lighting at state-owned property,” Smith said. “The lawsuit was filed under the Connecticut Environmental Protection Act against the Supreme Court, responsible under state law for the operation of courthouses throughout Connecticut.”
Smith contends outdoor lighting laws in Connecticut went into effect 20 years ago, and were designed by the legislature “to minimize the harm caused by light pollution occurring on state property. All court facilities were covered by the law. Yet few, if any, court facilities complied with those requirements for outdoor lighting.”
“Natural darkness is a natural resource critical for our environmental well-being, including our ecology, the health of plants and animal and even our own health,” he said.
The state now is trying to get rid of the lawsuit, and claims Smith is citing laws and cases that do not apply and is not correctly interpreting what state lawmakers intended when it adopted laws on protecting the environment more than 50 years ago.
A request for comment from the office of the attorney general was deferred to the court documents.
According to the state’s new brief in the case, written by Assistant Attorney General Michael Rondon, Smith argues that Connecticut law, which it said protects “air, water, and other natural resources of the state,” also extends to darkness, and therefore “waives the state’s sovereign immunity over claims alleging light pollution.”
However, also according to the state, “it does not” waive such immunity.
To do so, the scope of the environmental law would have to “be confined strictly to the extent the statute provides,” the state contends, citing previous cases for which rulings had been made.
The state said, “the Court should decline to extend the waver beyond its plain meaning (‘air’ and ‘water’) and other binding authority (e.g., trees, wildlife) and that extratextual evidence of the scope of the term ‘natural resources’ does not help Plaintiff” and the state Supreme Court has held that the phrase covers things like trees and wildlife.
The state maintains that “evidence showed that trees and wildlife were clearly within the General Assembly’s consciousness when they passed” the environmental act in 1971 and that concerns that prompted protection of air and water “applied equally to flora and fauna, and other courts and legislatures recognized them as ‘natural resources.’”
However, the state contends, “darkness is different.” This is because a natural resource “requires enhanced protection because it is scarce and in danger of being destroyed. But darkness is neither—it is infinitely and easily renewable. Moreover, the concept of light pollution would have been foreign to Connecticut lawmakers when they passed CEPA in 1971. At that time, it appears no other similar laws extended to darkness and no cases existed on the subject in Connecticut or elsewhere.”
The state memo reports that it appears no other legislature or court has used the term natural resource to described darkness in the time since Connecticut’s law passed. The state maintains Smith therefore can’t meet the burden to establish “subject-matter jurisdiction and the court should dismiss his claims.”
The state memo also notes legislative history and maintains it found no evidence the General Assembly considered darkness as a natural resource. The floor “debates do not mention darkness, light pollution, or any other related terms. Indeed, the notion that darkness needed special protection would have been foreign to our legislature” when it passed the environmental law in 1971, the memo says.
Further, “it appears the term light pollution was not even used in any state laws or reported cases until the 1980s,” the state memo contends and the concept of “light pollution was not included in state law until 1995 and it is not found in any Connecticut case until 1999.”
The state also contends the court “must construe the term ‘natural resources’ narrowly: “[B]ecause statutes that waive the state’s sovereign immunity do so in derogation of the common law, [a]ny statutory waiver of immunity must be narrowly construed . . . and its scope must be confined strictly to the extent the statute provides.”
The court “should simply decline to extend the wavier beyond its plain meaning (‘air’ and ‘water’) and other binding authority (e.g., trees and wildlife). Alternatively, the Court should presume that the legislature did not intend to waive sovereign immunity for claims concerning darkness,” the memo says.
Smith, however, contends in court documents that use of the term light pollution in state law “does away with any need for the court to determine whether a violation of that statute constitutes an unreasonable impairment of any natural resource contemplated” under state law.
Smith said, “This effort is focused on full compliance by state agencies, in this case the Judicial Branch, with the law’s requirements to minimize light pollution.”
He maintains his suit is “the first legal case in the country to address the question of whether natural darkness is a natural resource.”
“Hundreds of scientific research papers have pointed out the harm from excessive light pollution, and its effects on the decline in insect population, pollinators such as bees, bird migration and more,” he said.
Smith also said that excessive light at night has been linked to increased rates of heart disease and a decrease in melatonin levels that results in sleep disorders.
Smith also noted that Deputy House Speaker Josh Elliott wrote to Connecticut State Auditors requesting that the Judicial Branch, as well as other state agencies, be audited to ensure that there was full compliance with statutory requirements that applied to purchase and installation of outdoor lighting.
Rondon has said in previous documents filed in the case, that Smith is seeking “state-wide relief concerning each and every one of the hundreds of outdoor light fixtures installed at courthouses across Connecticut. Specifically, he asks the Court to order” Mullins and Bozzuto “to conduct a fixture-by-fixture audit at Connecticut courthouses for compliance with unspecified lighting standards, and a corresponding order directing them to modify or replace all noncompliant fixtures.”