For 68-year-old retiree Blanca Ornelas, stepping outside after dark in Boyle Heights is no longer an option. Broken streetlights have left her neighborhood shrouded in darkness, creating an environment where safety feels out of reach.
“It’s dangerous. Now that it’s going to get dark [earlier], it’s going to get worse,” Ornelas said.
Her concerns aren’t isolated. Across Los Angeles, streetlight outages have surged in recent years largely due to copper wire thefts. Between 2016 and 2022, streetlight outages went from 15,500 to over 35,000 respectively, according to an October report from LA’s Bureau of Street Lighting (BSL). From 2016 through 2021, streetlight outages averaged 17,817 each year, according to the report. From 2022 to 2023 they averaged 33,864, a 90% increase.
Currently, close to 10%, or around 20,000, of LA’s streetlights are out of working order, according to Miguel Sangalang, Executive Director of the BSL.
At the same time, copper wire thefts targeting streetlights have soared. All of LA’s 223,000+ streetlights require copper to function.
In 2023, 40% of all streetlight repair requests stemmed from copper wire and power theft, up from 5% in 2016, according to the October report.
In the first quarter of fiscal year 2024, beginning on July 1, that average reached 43%.
“This upward trend is expected to continue,” noted the report.
The rise in affected streetlights has put a strain on resources causing a backlog of repairs and keeping neighborhoods in the dark longer. Streetlight repair times for LA residents currently average at around six months, according to the report.
Wait times for streetlight repairs used to be significantly shorter for LA residents. A few years ago, in fiscal year 2017, the average repair time for streetlight outages ranged from a week to about two months, depending on the type of repair needed, according to the Bureau.
Ornelas first reported the streetlight outages near her Boyle Heights home back in August. She said the 311 operators she spoke to told her it would take around three months to repair the reported streetlights.
Since the outage, she said it’s been too dangerous to safely cross the street after dark. She often hears drivers racing down the street and noted how poor lighting makes the streets unsafe for the neighborhood kids who like to ride their bikes around.
“Say we want to go outside and walk or whatever, you can’t because it’s really dangerous… And a lot of people work later at night or get home later,” Ornelas said.
Ornelas, like other Boyle Heights residents, leaves her porch lights on at night, “for security purposes.”
Boyle Heights ranked 11th in pedestrian fatalities among LA’s 114 neighborhoods in 2023, according to Boyle Heights Beat.
Those most impacted by traffic related deaths are people aged 29 and below and over 50, like Ornelas, according to a 2022 study by an advocacy group Streets Are For Everyone (SAFE) on LA traffic fatalities.
Now that Daylight Savings has ended, it’s that time of year where it’s getting darker earlier and research shows that adequate street lighting can reduce night time crashes and crime.
“Pedestrians are the most vulnerable population on roads at night and in terms of crash reduction appear to benefit the most from street lighting,” stated in a 2009 review prepared for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.
Night time pedestrian crashes can be reduced by about 50% with street lighting, according to the same 2009 review.
A 2019 University of Chicago study found that introducing adequate lighting to a community led to a decrease in nighttime crime by about 36%.
Boyle Heights is one LA community facing the brunt of street lighting outages, according to an analysis of publicly available data from the city.
LA City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez is the chair of the Public Safety Committee and said street lighting is an important part of a public safety strategy. “Lighting is an important part of serving as a deterrent for criminal activity. When the streets are lit, people feel safer, you have better visibility of what’s happening,” she said.
All streetlight repair requests are routed to the BSL, the city’s agency that is responsible for maintaining almost a quarter million streetlights.
But the influx of repair requests has been a challenge for the Bureau’s team of about 200 people.
Regular streetlight maintenance is funded by the Bureau’s annual assessment revenues. This assessment fee is charged to property owners for benefits received, like street lighting, and is included in property tax bills.
The annual cost for most residential areas in LA, that have had street lighting since 1996, is around $53. For single-family homes in newly created street lighting areas, that annual fee is about $95.
Those revenues have remained stagnant at about $43.5 million annually since 1996, in compliance with prop 218, despite cumulative inflation exceeding 90%.
The price of repairing streetlights hit by theft and vandalism are resource consuming. Sangalang from the BSL said there have been instances where crews of 12 to 18 people have been deployed to one repair site. Some repairs can take several days to several weeks to complete. “The cost of material alone, three to four hundred dollars [for] that burned out kind of infrastructure… The repair of theft and vandalism [is] in the thousands of dollars,” Sangalang said.
Councilmember Rodriguez, who also serves on the budget committee, noted the financial challenges the city faces. “We have a lot of obligations to meet, you know, street lighting infrastructure, sidewalks. You name it, right. And so balancing all of those pieces and in a time when we’re in a constrained budget time,” she said. “So there’s a lot that we’re in the process of discussing to recalibrate.”
The Bureau’s 10-year fiscal and operational plan includes almost tripling the annual assessment revenue to $125 million. The report says the revenue increase, “is necessary to cover current one-time funding sources and to expand to meet the true scope of work needed to manage and sustain the operation of our infrastructure.”
That money is proposed to come from an increase in the existing assessment revenues. The increase in funding would also be used to create a theft and vandalism program, infrastructure replacement, and creating a regular LED replacement program.
The Bureau is looking at other options in powering the city’s streetlights.
“We are, at the direction of the mayor, looking at as many different ways that we could solve [copper wire and power theft], which includes using battery-enabled solar powered street lights,” Sangalang said.
The Bureau launched a pilot program in the summer that rolled out 104 solar powered streetlights in Van Nuys. Copper wire is more difficult to steal from these types of streetlights, and would address the city’s need for sustainable and resilient lighting solutions.
Do you need to report a streetlight outage in your neighborhood? Here are three ways to do so:
Call 3-1-1
Email bsl.streetlighting@lacity.org
Download the MyLA311 app