Lake Charles, LA Outdoor Lighting: Light Trespass & Shielding (2026)

The City's only zoning text addressing light spilling onto a neighbor's land sits inside the Business District regulations, not in a standalone light-trespass ordinance. Sec. 24-5-304 lists towers as a minor conditional use permitted in the Business District, and subsection (3)(a)(viii) attaches a single, specific condition to that use: all outside lighting is shielded and/or directed to ensure that light does not shine directly onto adjacent property. Towers approved this way still carry the district's dimensional standards from the Business District's Figure 4 table: a tower under 120 feet needs at least a half-mile buffer to the nearest limiting use and one at or above 120 feet needs a full one-mile buffer, and the required front, side and rear setbacks each equal half the tower's height.

Because a tower is a conditional use rather than a permitted use, the lighting-shielding condition is enforced through the conditional use process itself under Sec. 24-4-203: the Planning Commission or City Council can attach it as a binding term of approval, and a tower that later shines light directly onto neighboring property is out of compliance with its own conditional use permit, not merely with a general nuisance standard. This is narrower than a citywide light-trespass ordinance: it only reaches outdoor lighting mounted on towers approved under the Business District's conditional-use track, and it does not, by its text, regulate light trespass from other structures such as parking lot lighting, signage or residential floodlights outside that specific use.