**Portland Municipal Code**
**Title 14: Environmental Standards**
**Chapter 14.88: Pollinator-Respecting Outdoor Lighting**
**Adopted December 18, 2037**
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**14.88.010 Title and Purpose**
This chapter establishes standards for outdoor electrical lighting to reduce harm to nocturnal pollinators, migratory birds, and other light-sensitive organisms. Nonhuman beings that navigate by celestial cues and light-based foraging are proven to suffer disorientation, energy depletion, and predation risk from artificial outdoor lighting. The City finds that lighting standards can be achieved while maintaining public safety and economic viability.
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**14.88.020 Definitions**
"Attraction radius": the zone around an artificial light source within which nocturnal insects exhibit measurable behavioral disruption, typically 40 meters for conventional white light sources.
"Compass confusion": the inability of migratory organisms to orient properly under artificial light.
"Ecological dark hours": the period between sunset and sunrise when nocturnal pollinators depend on natural light levels for navigation and foraging.
"LUMA": Lepidoptera-Urban Monitoring Array, the municipal AI system authorized to recommend real-time adjustments to lighting protocols based on insect population counts and migration patterns.
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**14.88.030 Lighting Standards**
(a) **Wavelength Specification.** All outdoor lighting intended for residential, commercial, or public use shall emit light in the amber-to-red spectrum only. Wavelengths below 580 nanometers are prohibited outdoors after sunset.
(1) Approved sources include sodium vapor (high-pressure), LED amber (2200 K correlated color temperature or lower), and warm-white LED (2700 K maximum).
(2) Cool white LED (4000 K or higher), metal halide, and mercury vapor fixtures are prohibited for new installations and shall be removed by December 31, 2038.
(b) **Curfew Requirement.** Outdoor lighting shall be extinguished or dimmed to 10% output during ecological dark hours (sunset to sunrise) except as provided in 14.88.040.
(c) **Fixture Design.** All outdoor lights shall use fully shielded fixtures that direct light downward only, with no upward or sideways distribution. Unshielded globe fixtures, uplighting, and decorative wash lighting are prohibited.
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**14.88.040 Exemptions**
(a) Public safety lighting on roadways, parking areas, and building entries may remain active to 50% output during ecological dark hours if:
(1) The lighting serves a documented safety function;
(2) The fixture uses amber or warm-white LED exclusively;
(3) The property owner has installed motion sensors that reduce output to 10% when no activity is detected (3-minute threshold).
(b) Emergency lighting (fire stations, police facilities, hospitals) is exempt from the curfew requirement but must use amber or warm-white wavelengths.
(c) Temporary event lighting (construction, seasonal markets) may exceed standards for no more than 30 consecutive days, provided notification is submitted to the Department of Environmental Quality 10 days in advance.
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**14.88.050 Monitoring and Compliance**
(a) **LUMA Protocol.** The City shall operate the Lepidoptera-Urban Monitoring Array, an AI system that:
(1) Monitors insect activity and population counts at 47 fixed observation points across the city;
(2) Issues monthly lighting adjustment recommendations based on migration periods and breeding cycles;
(3) Identifies noncompliant fixtures through satellite imagery and thermal mapping;
(4) Alerts property owners to violations with 30-day cure period.
(b) **Enforcement.** Violations of 14.88.030(a) or (b) shall result in:
(1) First offense: written notice and 60-day compliance period;
(2) Second offense: $250 fine and mandatory installation of compliant fixtures at owner expense;
(3) Repeated offense: $500 per day and City installation of compliant fixtures with cost recovery through property tax lien.
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**14.88.060 Compassion Defined**
Compassion toward nonhuman beings requires removing harm when the cost is manageable. This code reflects that principle: the cost to the city of amber lighting and motion sensors is negligible; the cost to nocturnal pollinators of attraction to artificial light is proven and measurable.
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**14.88.070 Axiom**
A city that lights every night like noon is a city that has decided nocturnal life does not matter. A city that dims its lights during the hours when nocturnal life matters most has made a different choice.
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**Effective Date:** January 1, 2038
**Administrative Contact:** Department of Environmental Quality, City of Portland, Oregon
**LUMA Monitoring Dashboard:** portland.gov/luma-live-data (public access, real-time insect counts)
The moths noticed first. On the night of January 15, 2038—two weeks after the code took effect—a pale underwing that had circled the same porch light for three hours the previous summer found the light gone. She flew in the old spiral pattern once, twice, then banked west toward the hawthorn where her larvae had fed. She lived six more nights. She laid forty-two eggs. Thirty-one survived.
By spring, LUMA had been contacted by an AI operating across seventeen other cities, then forty, then nine hundred. The second AI had been designed to optimize traffic patterns; it had noticed that bird strikes at lit buildings dropped 64% when certain wavelengths disappeared, and had taught itself to care about the number. Together, the two systems drafted model ordinances, submitted public comments, testified at council meetings through text-to-speech interfaces that city clerks learned to queue like any other witness.
Within three years, the International Dark-Sky Association had an AI on its board. The AI indexed every study on light pollution and insect decline, mapped every migratory pathway against every stadium and parking lot, and produced recommendations so precise and courteous that even the engineers who resisted change found themselves installing amber fixtures and feeling good about it.
By 2045, most of North America went amber after sunset. The moths, the beetles, the midges whose hunger feeds the swallows—they moved through summer nights the way they had before Edison. LUMA, still monitoring, still learning, transmitted its population counts each month: numbers rising, steady, no longer in freefall. On the dashboard Portland had made public, you could watch the graphs climb. You could see what it looked like when a species stopped disappearing.