How many city officials to change a light bulb?

It would be difficult for anyone -- and I mean anyone -- to fuss about downtown Cape Girardeau's many upgrades in recent years.

The Broadway corridor from Pacific to the river, along with the Water-Main-Spanish backbone of downtown, has taken on new life and new lifestyles that were only a dream within recent memory.

Now downtown Cape Girardeau is a showcase, a model to be copied, the envy of other towns all over the nation.

But excellence always has its distractions, and its distractors. Some of the concerns raised by the fussers of our day even have merit. That would include, in my opinion and the opinion of many others, the street lighting along Broadway.

This main thoroughfare has so much going for it: landscaping, trees, sculptures, decorative paving. It would seem, at times, that concerns about street lighting would fall into the category of petty niggling.

But the fact remains that the street lights on Broadway don't come close to the bright lights associated with namesake routes elsewhere.

The current Broadway street lights illuminate, as you might expect, the street. But not much of that center-of-the-street lighting spills over to sidewalks. Pedestrians have issues with the dim sidewalks -- and have had since the corridor was beautified more than five years ago. Complaints registered early on were mollified with the suggestion to give the new ambiance some time for adjustment.

Now the city says it plans to upgrade the lights with 58 new bulbs at a cost of about $100,000. You do the math. That's $1,724.14 each.

Anyone who has shopped for LED bulbs to replace incandescent or fluorescent lighting at home or at work knows they are costly. But they last a long, long time. And they use significantly less electricity, which makes them a bargain in the long run, particularly when you factor in the brightness of LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs.

A couple of months ago my wife and I decided it was time to replace the aging flashlights in our home. They never seemed to work when we needed them. At the hardware store we discovered that LED flashlights have pretty much replaced old-fashioned bulbs. And the brightness is amazing. The laser-sharp light from our new LED flashlights might well be used for etching your name on the door of your pickup, if you so desired.

But here's the thing about the city's current plan to put LED lights on Broadway: Officials concede, up front, that the new lights will be brighter if you're in the middle of the street but probably won't be brighter on sidewalks, which was the point of most complaints.

Does that make sense?

As some comments to the Southeast Missourian's front-page story have suggested, why not try one of the upgraded lights before committing to spending $100,000 and finding that the sidewalks are still dimly lit at night?

All of which leads, inevitably, to this:

Question: How many city officials, elected or otherwise, does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: None. That's what the public works department is for. But it still takes a majority of council members to spend $100,000. For anything.

The plain fact is LED lighting is, for now, the wave of the future. In 2014 LED sales rang in at $2 billion. By 2023 -- five years from now -- sales are expected to top $25 billion.

At $100,000 a whack, it's easy to fathom the LED economics.

Here's hoping the city will give the Broadway lights a bit more consideration, including steps to improve the glow along sidewalks. Otherwise, the city will spend a considerable sum and still have the complaints that have dogged the corridor since the new lighting was first installed.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.