There is no timeline on when Katherine's street light drama will be sorted out.
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Katherine Town Council's update last night failed to give a possible cost for repairs, or when broken lights would be fixed.
Residents took to social media this week questioning the size of the bill which could be expected to pay for the streetlight repair.
Several callers to the Katherine Times also questioned whether council had checked on the state of the lights before it signed a deal in 2017 to take over maintenance of the lights.
Council has discovered a fault in the wiring which is causing many lights to fail.
The council took over maintenance of the town's 850 lights in 2017 from the Power and Water Corporation with a NT Government-paid upgrade of the lights to much brighter LED quality.
The council has been told "many" of those new lights are failing because of ageing wires from the power line to the lights' fuse.
Councillors were told last night some of the wiring is 20 to 30 years old and is further damaged by harsh wet seasons.
Power and Water says the wires were part of the handover and it is council's responsibility to fix them.
Power and Water this week met with council and council's contractors, Power Projects NT, in a bid to fix the immediate problem of those that aren't working through a new service agreement.
The "legalities" of who owns the actual wiring would be sorted out later, the council was told.
Power and Water would help to fix the "backlog" of broken lights but based on current information would likely present a bill for their repair.
Two years after signing the deal, council now wants to do an audit of the lights to discover the size of the problem.
Mayor Fay Miller said the safety of the community came first and it was most important to fix those which had failed first.
Mayor Miller said a resident told her this week she was "frightened" after being faced with a darkened street.
Council was told last night whole banks of lights in a street can fail even though only one light had the actual fault.
"It is 20 to 30 year old infrastructure we have inherited which is the problem," council was told.
Once the audit was complete then council would better know the expected cost for the repair, last night's meeting was told.
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