1) To reduce light pollution. My town has a big problem with this, because of its very poorly designed lighting system. Lots of light escapes up into the sky, where reduces the number of stars I can see from my roof to eight. If the streetlights were well engineered, however, this shouldn't have been a problem (which does, of course, not preclude rich voters complaining about it).

2) The city managers have been taken over by evil alien influences who want crime to run rampant in Millinocket so as to destroy the city from the inside out. This is . . . unlikely.

3) Negligence. No maintenance on the non-income-intensive streets will result in darkness and decay. And after all, who cares what happens to some slum rats? They don't have money.

4) Sunspots.

One can only hope that it's none of these, that the Folks In Charge had some good reason for not lighting up most of the city. But I'm neither inventive nor from New England, so that's the limit of my ideas. Oh well, it was good for a chuckle.

Mike Thedford
Dark Nation
Dictator at Large

Oh, it's really very simple. Streetlights cost money; Town Manager Conlogue was specifically brought in to reduce the town's expenditures. Ripping down more than half of the streetlights in town cut both the municipal electric bill and the maintenance costs. Millinocket has neither discernible street crime (aside from the occasional fistfight in which all the participants know each other and have long-standing enmities) nor rich citizens.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/