BEND, OR -- City crews are busy putting holiday lights back up in Downtown Bend, after business owners and residents complained they were missing. Strings of lights were removed when tree branches were trimmed earlier this Fall.

“All the trees downtown had to be trimmed for quite a while. They were very overgrown. And why it connects to the parking guidance system is that we knew the trees needed to be trimmed. We aligned it around that project to not spend money twice and to spend money once,” the city’s Parking Services Manager Tobias Marx admits they made an error not getting them back up sooner, “We are replacing all the twinkle lights. And by the end of this week, a lot of trees will be back with twinkle lights. And then over the following week, we are going to catch up to make sure that all the other trees that used to have twinkle lights, and actually probably a few more will have twinkle lights in them again. We have crews working on that with the exact same materials and type of light that was installed before,” He adds the newly installed parking space availability sensors aren’t affected by the lights. “… there is no reason that the parking guidance system can't have twinkle lights.”

Businesses and shoppers voiced their disappointment in the lack of lights over the past several days.

“We realized that we made a mistake on that. We thought it a much easier process because we have traditionally not handled the lighting of the trees,” Marx says. The lights are managed by the Downtown Bend Business Association. KBND News reached out to the organization, but they did not want to comment.