This year’s festival kicks off on Saturday and the ice rink, which operates until 9pm each evening, and nightly Illuminations are among the popular attractions.

Cr Warren Aubin says street lighting, including the heritage lamp standards, was the responsibility of Essential Energy, not Bathurst Regional Council

He said council had reported the outages to Essential Energy “on a number of occasions”, but the lights were yet to be fixed and the winter festival was about to commence.

“I drove around last night and there were 24 separate lights not working on George, William and Howick streets,” Cr Aubin. “We’ve got the winter festival coming up … there’s safety issues with trip hazards and people walking around in the dark.

“It’s a really bad look and it’s not council’s fault.”

However, Essential Energy spokesman Mark Summers said not all public lighting was its responsibility and while it conducted night patrols of main roads lights every six months, it also relied on the public and council to report faults.

“There are currently 19 street lights in the Bathurst Regional Council area which have been reported by the public as faulty, with two of these located in Howick Street and none in William or George streets,” he said.

“Nine of these street lights were only reported to Essential Energy today [Thursday].”

Mr Summers said Essential Energy had already repaired 21 street lights in Bathurst this week – 12 on Wednesday and nine on Thursday.

“No further work is scheduled for this week as all available field crews are engaged in planned network maintenance and upgrade work on Friday,” he said.

He said that the low decorative street lighting near crossings outside the post office and near the NAB Bank were regularly vandalised.

“Delays can also occur with repairing the historic Bathurst street lights as parts can be difficult for the council to source,” Mr Summers said.

In 2017/18, Essential Energy repaired 2388 streetlights in the Bathurst Regional Council area, with 2162 of these identified by Essential Energy and 226 reported by the community. These streetlights were repaired in an average of 1.96 days.

Mr Summers encouraged people to report streetlight outages to 13 20 80, online at essentialenergy.com.au/streetlights or through the NeatStreets smartphone app.