By KALIN KROHE
Panhandle Post
At the May 16 Chadron City Council meeting, the council approved a resolution for the Chadron Parks Foundation for solar lights to be installed in Wilson Park.
"We have a number of those lights in Memorial Park already, they've been performing well, and providing a very nice ambient light there during the night time hours," Chadron City Manager John Sutherland said. "We're going to do a similar installation in Wilson Park."
Sutherland said the City of Chadron will be using community development funds to install the solar lights.
One of the many benefits of installing the lights will be to help with vandalism.
"It also assists a little bit with vandalism and it helps minimize anything that might be going on out there in the park late at night," Sutherland said. "Maybe some things that the dark of night would otherwise disguise; now we'll have the daylight out there provided by solar lighting."
Sutherland said the city parks have had a "disappointing amount of vandalism."
"We've made some new installations out there with very nice picnic tables, and those were destroyed," Sutherland said. "We bought replacements and put those in...and a couple of those were likewise destroyed. It's just a darn shame that we have bad actors in the community who insist on damaging things."