For nearly two years now, Marvin and Suzanne Wies have been blinded by the lights from a parking lot near their west-central Omaha home.

"I can stand in the bedroom or the bathroom in the back of the house and read a novel with no lights on," Suzanne says. "We can't even watch TV at night because of the glare."

The city ticketed the lot owner for a lighting violation in 2001, but the city ordinance that regulates lighting was deemed "unconstitutionally vague," leaving the Wieses and others little remedy.

It's a problem that stretches beyond the Wieses' Royalwood Estates neighborhood near 129th Street and West Center Road. Families in The Ridges, about 50 blocks farther west, are having a similar problem.

The glow and glare at night from a Wal-Mart Supercenter, a Lowe's Home Improvement Store and a bevy of other businesses near 180th Street and West Center Road - where the land is flat and trees are spare - have them pulling the blinds and feeling like they can't enjoy their back yards on mild evenings.

There is concern, too, among city officials and leaders that some business and parking-lot lights are affecting drivers and contributing to traffic accidents.

All that may be changing.

The City Council will consider an ordinance Tuesday that would clarify lighting rules in Omaha and may give the Wieses and others with lighting woes some recourse if businesses don't comply.

Franklin Thompson and other councilmen have been working with city officials, industry attorneys and neighborhood leaders for months to find a compromise that will satisfy residents bothered by glare and business owners who don't want to spend thousands to replace lights and potentially decrease their properties' safety, particularly in places where no one's complaining.

The final amendments to that ordinance haven't yet been written, but the city's chief electrical inspector and an attorney representing scores of convenience stores, apartment complexes and commercial property owners agreed in principle Friday to a version that would:

• Add height, intensity and shielding requirements for new exterior lighting and set limits for how much light can cross onto another's property or into the public right of way.
• Require that all new exterior lights meet those requirements and that owners submit conforming lighting plans as part of their building permits on future projects.
• Allow owners of existing exterior lights a 17-year "grandfather" period to comply with the ordinance - unless the city deems the lights a nuisance to neighbors or the public, based on specific and substantiated complaints.
• Require businesses to replace, redirect or block glare from existing nonconforming lighting within six months of a legitimate complaint from neighbors and a nuisance ruling by the city for specific lighting violations.
• Provide an appeal process for those who disagree with a city's nuisance ruling.

Jerry Slusky, an attorney representing about 30 convenience store, apartment complex, shopping center, commercial and office building owners, said he was satisfied with the emerging compromise.

Terry Scholl, the city's chief electrical inspector, said he feels the ordinance goes a long way toward making lighting better in the city, but he has been frustrated by some of the demands of business interests.

"It's a very difficult, unusual situation because we have a select group of building and commercial owners that has gone to a great expense by hiring this lawyer to negotiate their point of view," he said. "I'm trying to take the point of view of the average citizen and address the problems that way. But of the 400,000 people that live here in Omaha, the only person I'm negotiating with and the people who are rewriting this are people representing select companies."

Both Scholl and Slusky agree some issues still remain and may be addressed in last-minute amendments:

• If the business interests have their way, neighbors may have to hire a licensed electrical engineer to determine if bothersome lighting truly does not comply with lighting regulations before the city could consider their complaint. And proof of an accident or a report from a police officer may be required before complaints about light interfering with traffic would be considered.
• The ordinance now offers no remedies for business-to-business complaints. For example, if a convenience store's lights are sending glare into a nearby restaurant's windows, the restaurant's owners have no recourse other than persuading their neighbors to play nice or suing under some other ordinance or law.
• Businesses still are lobbying for some provision that would allow them to replace existing lighting in small increments under the protection of the grandfather clause. In other words, if two of 10 grandfathered lights in a parking lot break, they'd like the option of replacing those two with the old-style lights, instead of putting in new ones that might look different, until the 17 years are up.
• Depending on one's interpretation of "adjacent" and the final language in the ordinance, the changes may not help folks out in The Ridges. Their residential properties are north of West Center Road and don't directly abut the stores they say are causing the glare.

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