Jonesboro, AR – (JonesboroRightNow.com) – Feb. 18, 2025 – The City of Jonesboro is making sure those taking a jog around Craighead Forest Park in the dark are safe.
The lights for the park’s 3.2-mile loop trail are fully operational, the city announced on Facebook Feb. 12. The project has been in the works for a few years.
Parks and Recreation Director Danny Kapales said the lights will detect motion and turn on immediately to avoid excessive energy consumption.
When determining the need for the lights, Kapales said they noticed that the park gets utilized by a lot of people and how often those people come out on nice days. However, those who work during the day may not be able to take advantage of the trail. He added that the city factored in those who want to walk in the early morning hours before work or school.
“You start calculating those hours, that’s a big chunk of the day that it made the park not as usable for folks, and so by putting these lights in place, now the park’s actually usable for folks to be able to come in and be able to use them in those hours of darkness,” he said.
Another reason for the lights being added is security.
“[The] nice thing about this is actually having police officers as they drive around the park. If they’re seeing the lights on, there’s probably activity in that area, so it’s going to add security to the park itself,” he said.
Kapales added that one of the main challenges to completing the project was finding the foundations of the lights, saying the original plan could have been costly. It involved installing concrete foundations for the lights, which can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 per foundation, Kapales said. The city had to install about 300 motion-sensing lights.
The city installed screw piles instead, which Kapales explained could be put in the ground and only cost $500 each.
As for what’s next for the project, Kapales said the Parks and Recreation Department is waiting on components for the lights to register when it is daylight and dark, preventing them from turning on during the day. He said the department is also working on getting new lights for the parking lot that enters the trail.
Kapales said work on the current lights is expected to be done by March or April, with work on the parking lot lights to be done by Fall 2025. He added that plans for more lights will be considered as time comes.
“Now that we’ve got a system in place, we’ve got transformers that City Water and Light has added, it’s opened the doors for us to be able to evaluate other locations that may need lighting, may need cameras, may need things of that sort,” he said.