This fall, approximately half a million property owners in Los Angeles may participate in a unique voting process that could change the city’s street lighting system.
The City Council must first take specific actions before ballots can be sent out, which will ask property owners if they are willing to pay higher fees to bolster the city’s street light budget. This budget has remained largely unchanged for over three decades, primarily due to regulations established by state law.
Miguel Sangalang, executive director of the Bureau of Street Lighting, expressed that increased revenue could significantly decrease repair wait times and allow for the replacement of old infrastructure, as well as provide essential funding and staffing to address the ongoing issue of copper wire theft.
Sangalang stated, “We’re trying to right-size operations to match the needs today. We have this 100-year-old infrastructure that we need to start replacing. We’re facing new theft and vandalism.”
The street light budget’s stagnation arises from the fact that 90% of it relies on assessments collected from property owners benefiting from the street lights, which are billed through county property taxes.
How much each property owner pays depends on various factors, including whether their property is residential or commercial and how much they benefit from street lighting services. On average, the annual assessment is approximately $80, with most single-family homeowners paying around $53 per year.
These rates have not been adjusted since California voters approved Proposition 218 in 1996, limiting the ability of cities and towns to increase local revenue from services like street lighting.
Therefore, any increase in assessment rates for streetlight repairs requires approval from the property owners themselves.
L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez remarked on the long overdue need for such fee adjustments, stating, “There’s been no reason why these fees haven’t been updated to meet current standards. It’s just that there hasn’t been the political will to do that.”
In 2024, the city employed Matrix Consulting to assess the financial requirements of the Bureau of Street Lighting for maintaining its infrastructure.
The consulting firm’s findings revealed that the current assessments equate to only 45% of what is necessary for the Bureau to “properly maintain and operate the system.” Their analysis concluded that assessments would need to rise by an average of 123% in order to meet the Bureau’s needs for the fiscal year 2025 to 2026.
The recommended funding level would allow the Bureau to reduce service response times to just two days, facilitate preventative maintenance, and establish a pole replacement program, according to the City Administrative Officer’s summary of the report.
In terms of the voting timeline, the City Council must first approve an engineer’s report detailing the proposed assessment increases for individual properties. This report will clarify how additional revenue will assist the Bureau in maintaining and improving its services.
Sangalang anticipates presenting the necessary paperwork to local leaders this summer and sending out ballots to property owners in the fall.
He remarked, “We’re hoping to share all the information that we have to try and convince the voters to vote in the way that would help the street lighting network.”
An interesting facet of this voting process is that each ballot will be weighted based on the proportional financial obligation, meaning not every vote carries the same weight.
“A majority approval exists if weighted ballots submitted in favor exceed weighted ballots submitted in opposition to the assessment,” a Bureau spokesperson explained. “If a majority of the weighted votes do not oppose the assessments, the agency may vote to levy the assessment.”
Should everything proceed as planned and property owners give their approval, the increased assessments could potentially take effect as early as the beginning of 2026.
Sangalang emphasized that these changes could drastically impact service timelines, reducing the average repair wait time for broken streetlights from a projected year to just two days if the assessments are approved.
However, convincing property owners to accept fee increases may prove challenging, especially following a recent hike in sanitation fees.
Hernandez acknowledged the difficulty of presenting a case for an increase, adding, “It might feel like we’re just piling on these fees, but also this work should have been getting done. My colleagues, in the current configuration we’re in — we’re doing a lot of cleanup of the dereliction of duty from the past.”
In a similar attempt, Santa Clarita tried to raise street lighting fees in 2018, but residents expressed dissatisfaction with the city’s communication, leading to the termination of the process before ballots could even be counted.
Currently, over 35,600 property owners in Santa Clarita have been paying just above $12.30 annually for street light maintenance for the last three decades. An additional 40,000 properties in a separate streetlight maintenance district are paying a higher fee of $66, which adjusts for inflation.
The situation in L.A. is distinct, as 98% of property owners are still paying assessments that have been frozen since Proposition 218, whereas in Santa Clarita, many property owners essentially subsidize the streetlight upkeep for others within their district.
The condition of the street lighting system in L.A. has reached a critical point, with requests made through the city’s 311 service increasing from 15,600 in 2016 to around 46,000 last year.
This surge in service requests can be partly attributed to the rising incidence of copper wire theft, which currently accounts for around 40% of all streetlight repairs.
Sangalang shared that just two years ago, only a quarter of service calls were theft-related. This increasing problem has caused significant delays in repairs; for instance, crews worked intensively for four days on a six-block stretch of Broadway in South L.A. to restore lights that had been out since 2023, primarily due to copper wire theft.
“By the time we get to 2025 [requests], it’s probably gonna be … 2027,” remarked Daniel Franco, the Bureau’s copper wire theft supervisor. Sangalang stated that current staffing resources are stretched thin and problems continue to compound with every service call.
The Bureau’s crew of around 180 workers is tasked with maintaining a daunting network of 220,000 streetlights across a sprawling 470 square miles, illustrating the significant pressure on the organization.
Sangalang believes that the ongoing issues facing the Bureau will have a “snowball effect” on the overall system, underscoring the urgency in addressing the funding shortfall.
“Every machine needs to refuel at some point, and we’re at that point,” Sangalang concluded.
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