Troup County, GA Outdoor Lighting: Light Trespass & Shielding (2026)

Building on the general full-cutoff mandate in Section 5.6, subsection (3)(b) targets light trespass directly: fixtures "must be located, aimed, or shielded to minimize glare and stray light trespassing across lot lines and into the public right-of-way." The ordinance backs that language with a table of maximum illumination levels measured at property lines including rights-of-way. A property abutting a residential, agricultural, agritourism, or rural tourism use may not receive more than 0.5 foot-candles of spill at the line; a property abutting an office or institutional use is capped at 1.0 foot-candle; every other abutting use is capped at 1.5 foot-candles.

The same section separately regulates flood and spot lamps: subsection (3)(c) requires that any flood or spot lamp visible from an off-site residential property or public roadway be positioned no higher than 45 degrees above straight down, halfway between vertical and horizontal. Parking lot lighting gets its own trespass control in subsection (4): fixtures serving a parking lot must be directed downward and away from buildings or other areas, though flood lights mounted on the buildings themselves are excluded from that rule. Compliance is checked by the Community Development Department as part of the building and electrical permitting and inspection process required under subsection (2), so a property owner installing a new pole light or wall pack near a shared boundary has to show the fixture's output meets the property-line ceiling before the permit issues.

Because the standard is a maximum foot-candle reading at the line rather than a fixture type, code enforcement can measure light levels directly with a meter at the boundary to document a trespass violation.