Campus Safety Lighting Walk offers a chance to share thoughts about lighting improvements on campus
By NOAH HARRIS — features@theaggie.org
The annual UC Davis Campus Safety Lighting Walk gathered around 100 people this year, including many working for the University of California Police Department (UCPD) or the UC Davis Facilities Management Department. While it might not be the flashiest or biggest event on campus, the annual UC Davis lighting walk offers community members a chance to discuss lighting problems and potential improvements with those who hold the power to light up our campus.
Next to the Memorial Union (MU) flagpole, a small gathering began to assemble at 4:30 p.m. on Jan. 22. By 5 p.m., several dozen people were talking with friends and coworkers, eating free pizza and waiting to go on a two-hour walk.
Jeff Rott, UCPD’s director of security, spoke to reporters and student advocates alike before speaking in front of the entire group. Rott shared the community-driven goals of the lighting walk.
“We really want community members to come out: students, staff [and] faculty [to…] walk the campus with us, [to] see [the] campus through a different light, so to speak — no pun intended,” Rott said.
Clint Lord, the associate vice chancellor of the Facilities Management Department at UC Davis, expressed similar sentiments to Rott, describing that the walk is intended to promote and improve on-campus safety.
“We’re obviously looking to get the campus community involved, see what we’re trying to do to make them safer and identify those areas that we feel are risks for the students and the staff and the faculty,” Lord said. “We want to have the safest environment possible for everybody to come and enjoy.”
The lighting walk began with a few speeches from those involved with UCPD and the Facilities Management Department before attendees were split into nine different groups, each covering a large area of campus. On the roughly two-hour walk around their assigned areas, attendees were shown spaces that were going to become more well-lit and what areas had already been improved, as well as were told to report any lights that were damaged or out.
Rott walked around with a 10-person group during the lighting walk, answering questions about lighting and sharing the occasional story about his own time at UC Davis. Rott described many potential improvements, including plans to create a more well-lit pathway from the Housing Administration Building to downtown, with emergency call boxes visible the whole way to downtown to promote student safety, particularly during the weekends.
Part of the walk aimed to highlight improvements specifically around Kleiber Hall Drive. In addition, they pointed out new LED lights that are more energy efficient, reducing glare and light pollution.
Lord said that while the lighting walk is an important part of identifying issues with lighting on campus, it is not the only way that these problems are addressed.
“We [also] have crews that go around and check street lights and things like that on a regular kind of rotation,” Lord said.
Derek Benson, an employee on the exterior lighting team at Davis, explained the day-to-day process of checking up on lights.
“So when we come in, we do a morning drive,” Benson said. “Whichever lights are out, we generate our own work orders.”
Significant lighting changes are pending for the UC Davis community. In October 2023, UC Davis announced that they were putting $20 million toward improving security on campus. The first projects in 2024 and 2025 are focused on significant lighting improvements to the campus, among other things such as outdoor security cameras and emergency call boxes.
As of right now, there are seven areas scheduled to increase lighting that will be completed by the end of 2025. These lights will cover around one mile of pedestrian pathways.
“I’ve been trying to really pump this out a lot this year for students to recognize how significant it is that our facilities team, they genuinely take the feedback from these lighting walks, and it has a direct impact on what happens with lighting improvement[s] in the coming years,” Tim Jefferies, the advocate for student community and safety at UC Davis, said.
There are over 13,000 lights on campus, and according to Benson, just four people work on fixing any issues that arise, including himself. Despite the small number of employees, 94% of the issues that were raised during the January 2023 walk have since been addressed, according to the UC Davis Finance, Operations and Administration.
“We just take it one task at a time,” Benson said. “I mean, the work orders come in, we assign them and then we just take it one task at a time.”
Vrinda Vutukury, the chair of ASUCD’s Sexual Assault Awareness Advocacy Committee (SAAAC). Lighting has become an unexpected passion of hers, and she has become much more knowledgeable about it.
“I didn’t even enter the school year thinking I would care about lighting,” Vutukury said. “I never really thought about it that intensely to be completely honest.”
She first started focusing on lighting improvements after an instance of sexual assault that took place at Kleiber Hall in October 2023, which she said many thought was partially due to a lack of lighting.
After that, a friend who was doing a project about lighting reached out to her. Vutukury decided to contact someone in the administration who had the power to help spark change.
“I was like, I can definitely talk to some people and see if it is possible to increase lighting around the area,” Vutukury said. “So that [was] the spark to get in here because the [SAAAC] committee has been grappling [with] how to address that case from last year around that area. And then when this friend kind of talked about this idea, I was like, let me follow through with it. So I got in touch with the campus safety director. His name is Tim Jefferies.”
Jefferies is the first person to hold the advocate for student and community safety role at UC Davis.
“A big portion of my role is just helping reveal to different students and student communities what’s going on behind the scenes in terms of safety in a bunch of different places,” Jefferies said.
Often, he serves as a voice for students to help create change from the ground up.
“Instead of having administrators and people in roles like that tell students what safety is gonna be like on campus, my job tries to reverse that role,” Jefferies said. “I’m feeding student voices up to administrators in a bunch of different arenas of safety on campus.”
Jefferies has already worked with the city of Davis to create a lighting map, which has markers for street lights, bike lanes, pathway lights and pathways, helpful for planning a route for bikers and walkers, especially at night.
In Vutukury’s case, Jefferies had someone for her to talk to.
“He was like, ‘If you wanna get some sort of lighting placed around [Kleiber Hall], you would have to talk to Jeff Rott from the police department,’” Vutukury said. “So I met with Jeff Rott from the police department.”
A few weeks ago, Vutukury was able to go on an exclusive lighting walk, where Jefferies, Rott and others from the police and facilities departments showed her lighting on campus, including many places that lack adequate lighting.
“It wasn’t like a meeting where I walked out with the XYZ solution and they walked out with a plan,” Vutukury said. “It was more like they were telling me what they can do in their capacity and what they’re limited by.”
Part of their walk around campus involved Vutukury pitching an idea for temporary lighting, while the $20 million funding from the university is being used for more permanent lighting.
“Cornell University had this very interesting lighting project where students, in light of [an act of] sexual violence, just took fairy lights and wrapped [them] around a bunch of trees and lit up the area,” Vutukury said. “That got my gears rolling, and I’m like, we can do that in Davis — or we can at least entertain that possibility.”
She is still working with several people on a specific proposal for Rott, and is collaborating with several people to make it happen.
“Lighting doesn’t just impact us but everybody in all communities because it’s a public safety concern,” Vutukury said. “It pertains to all of us, and I’m happy to work on it a little bit on campus, and make it safer for the freshmen.”
For all lighting-based problems on campus, students and staff are encouraged to text (530)-574-4100. The Campus Safety Lighting Walk is an annual chance to make the campus safer. Changes might not take place immediately, but future students and staff will likely benefit from the work that Rott, Jefferies, Lord, Benson, Vutukury and many others at UC Davis are doing.
Written by: Noah Harris — features@theaggie.org
