Friday Night No Lights?

     Have you ever heard of the show Friday Night Lights? Even if you haven’t you probably lived through it – going to high school football games on Friday nights underneath the large lights in the stadium cheering on your team.Well, in my case this never happened. See in order to have this type of experience you actually have to have lights on your high school football field. In my town, the town council has been working for years to get approval for a plan to put lights on the field, but the houses surrounding the location of the high school field always rallies to reject the idea. They are not okay living with the negative externalities, such as longer periods of noise and light pollution, that would be inflicted upon them. Similar excuses were used when the town wanted to invest in building turf fields with lights behind an intermediate school. There were additional worries about parking spots and the environmental detriments of turf. In both cases it was decided that the positive benefits – more practice time for the team, minimal need to rent out lighted fields, profit from renting out lighted fields for longer – outweighed the negatives. 

    To me, and maybe the rest of ECON 4300, there is a possibility this could be solved with a Coasian solution. If we push aside the fact that one party is the government, then we would first need to determine who has the property rights in this scenario. If the town council has rights to the property, then in order to avoid some of the negative externalities of the lights/fields, the households impacted by the town council’s decision would pay the town to reduce the use of the lights/fields with an amount equivalent to the loss of additional profit from lights/fields. The opposite is true if the household has property rights. In that case the town council would have to pay an amount to the households in order to use the lights or fields for some portion of the night with an amount equivalent to the loss of utility the households would experience. An interesting thought experiment this problem poses is the fact that the town council requires support from the town to make their decision. If there was a compromise that was able to be reached, each side would be better off in general, simply with negotiation.