Akron, OH Outdoor Lighting: Dark Sky Rules (2026)

Sec. 5 footcandles, with a uniformity ratio (the spread between the brightest and dimmest points) of no more than 4:1 so lighting is even rather than glaring in hot spots. Light sources must carry a Color Rendering Index of 80 or higher, a color-quality standard meant to keep site lighting from reading as harsh sodium-orange or blue-white glare. Fixtures cannot be oriented onto adjacent properties, streets or sidewalks, meaning a business or apartment complex cannot aim a floodlight so it washes across a neighbor's yard or a public sidewalk, and every freestanding fixture's service connection must run underground rather than overhead.

Within parking lots and other motor vehicle use areas, pole-mounted fixtures cannot exceed 30 feet in height; in pedestrian areas, pole-mounted fixtures are capped at 15 feet. The core dark-sky requirement is that all light fixtures must be full cutoff, meaning shielded so no light escapes above the horizontal plane of the fixture, with a narrow exception for low-output, unshielded globe or vertical-glass fixtures under 9,500 initial lumens that carry internal white frosting to diffuse the light. Separate subsections of the same section (not quoted here) extend shielding and downward-aiming requirements to flood lights, flood lamps and building/wall-pack fixtures, reinforcing the same full-cutoff, no-upward-spill approach used citywide in the new form-based code.