Caddo Parish, LA Outdoor Lighting: Dark Sky Rules (2026)

Section 7.2 of the Caddo Parish Unified Development Code governs exterior lighting, and subsection C sets the standards a fixture must meet to qualify as a cutoff luminaire. Ordinance No. 6386 of 2023 amended that subsection. The change is narrow but it changes which application a property owner files: a luminaire taller than 25 feet used to require special use approval, and now requires a variance.

As amended, the subsection reads that to be considered a cutoff luminaire the cutoff angle must be 75 degrees or less, and that the maximum total height of a cutoff luminaire, whether freestanding or attached to a structure, is 25 feet, with anything greater requiring a variance. The third standard, untouched by the 2023 ordinance, requires that a cutoff luminaire be designed to completely shield the light source from an observer three and one-half feet above the ground at any point along an abutting lot line. That observer height is the test: the shielding is judged from roughly eye level of a person standing just over the line, not from the fixture's own geometry.

The practical sequence for a taller pole is therefore to design to the 75-degree cutoff and the shielding rule first, and to treat the 25-foot line as the trigger for a separate application rather than a hard ceiling. Because the amending ordinance has not been folded into the online code, a reader checking Municode's Unified Development Code will still see "special use approval" at Section 7.2.C.2; the parish's adopted ordinance is the later word.

These standards apply to the part of Caddo Parish inside the Metropolitan Planning Commission's planning area but outside the corporate limits of the City of Shreveport, which is how Section 1.1 of the Unified Development Code defines its own reach. Shreveport maintains a separate Unified Development Code for land inside the city.