Los Angeles property owners voted against an increase in an assessment for maintaining streetlights that would have collected an additional $80 million a year, as the city faces a backlog of broken streetlights due to stagnant funding and a rise in vandalism.
The assessment has not changed since 1996. Property owners had until June 2 to submit their votes, which were weighted by the amount of their parcel’s proposed assessment. According to results released Thursday, nearly 80% of the weighted vote went against raising the assessment, which currently generates about $45 million a year.
For the average single-family home, which make up the majority of parcels, the current payment is $58 annually, or about $5 a month, according to Miguel Sangalang, executive director and general manager of the Bureau of Street Lighting. The increase would have brought the average annual bill to $117, or about $10 a month.
The proposed increase would have brought the total amount collected by the assessment to $125 million a year.
In a joint statement Thursday, Mayor Karen Bass, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and City Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Katy Yaroslavsky said that despite the result, the “critical work will continue” to address the broken streetlights that have plunged neighborhoods into darkness across the city.
“Despite this outcome, the City remains committed to improving streetlight reliability, repairing outages faster, and building a sustainable funding path for streetlight operations and maintenance,” the group statement said. “Every Angeleno deserves to feel safe walking their dogs, returning home from work, and parking their cars at night, and the City is committed to delivering the reliable street lighting that makes that a reality.”
The Bureau of Street Lighting owns and operates nearly 225,000 streetlights across the city, which have historically been covered by the assessment. The average repair time for a streetlight was one year, bureau officials said in February.
Without more revenue from the assessment, city officials have been looking for alternative funding. The City Council has said it will finance $65 million for solar-powered streetlights.
Bass recently announced an initiative to repair and replace 60,000 streetlights over the next two years, and several council members have turned to their district’s discretionary funding to fix broken streetlights in their districts.
Hernandez, who chairs the council’s Public Works Committee, said in a statement that the result doesn’t change the fact that the city is trying to maintain a 21st century lighting system with an outdated funding model.
“If this assessment isn’t the path forward, then it’s our responsibility to build one through better leveraging City assets like light poles, exploring new revenue opportunities, and pursuing reforms to outdated state laws like Proposition 218 that make it extraordinarily difficult for cities as large as Los Angeles to maintain basic public infrastructure,” she said.
Broken streetlights have emerged as an issue in the mayoral election, with Councilmember Nithya Raman citing broken lights as an example of how the city “can’t seem to manage the basics.” Raman is facing Bass in a Nov. 2 runoff.
In February, city council members announced a plan to replace streetlights with solar-powered versions, in an attempt to deter copper wire theft. About 1 in 10 streetlights are out of service because of disrepair or copper wire theft, according to the city.
A well-known example is the Sixth Street Bridge, where thieves stole seven miles’ worth of wire.
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