SALISBURY — The Salisbury Planning Board recommended approval of an ordinance amendment making it so the city’s lighting ordinances now governs interior lighting that affects neighboring residences instead of solely exterior lighting.

The text amendment would make two changes to the city’s current lighting ordinances, removing language from the ordinance that limits it to only regulating exterior lighting on properties as well as updating language that made it so that outdoor features such as parking lots had to meet a “nearly impossible” lighting requirement.

The former portion of the amendment was proposed mainly to make it so that interior lighting in multi-family residential and commercial developments will not adversely affect motorists on nearby roads as well as adjacent property-owners, according to the staff report presented by Senior Planner Victoria Bailiff.

“The reason why this has come before you is we’ve had some actual lighting inside a building that’s been shining through a window, and it’s just so bright that it’s actually affecting adjacent properties but we can’t enforce it,” said Bailiff.

If the amendment receives official approval, the main change would now be that interior lighting would now be prohibited from shining directly into an adjacent residence’s yard or windows.

The secondary amendment was brought before the planning board because staff noticed the issue while reviewing proposed plans for developments, said Bailiff.

The issue was that the ordinances, as they currently stand, require lighting levels on property lines to be one foot-candle while also requiring the lighting in specific areas, such as landscaped areas or parking lots, that are typically near property boundaries to have a minimum of one foot-candle.

In essence, the two ordinances combined to make it so that certain property types, specifically those zoned residential mixed-use and neighborhood mixed-use, were effectively required to meet the “nearly impossible” requirement of having exactly one foot-candle along its entire property line, said Bailiff.

The ordinance governs all residential mixed-use and neighborhood mixed-use districts as well as governing most of the other districts if they border residential properties.

The amendment proposed a change to the minimum requirements to 0.5 foot candles, which would give property owners some leeway in the lighting level, said Bailiff.

The members of the planning board voted unanimously to recommend approval of the amendment. The board’s decision is not final, as the recommendation will go before the Salisbury City Council at a future meeting for a final decision.