Los Angeles has a streetlight problem. For years, copper thieves have been stealing the copper wiring that powers the streetlights so they can resell it for cash. This crime has been surging recently as the price of copper has gone up. The end result is that the city now has a massive backlog of lights that need to be repaired and entire street that are completely dark at night, creating a safety issue.
This report by CBS LA is from mid-January.
The cost of repairing even a single streetlamp can be thousands of dollars, no doubt thanks in part to union labor.
The cost of their crimes has skyrocketed to seven figures, with thousands of poles across LA in need of attention, the official said. A single pole can cost up to $2,000 to repair.
The thieves then sell the lucrative wiring for cash, no questions asked, with buyers often turning a blind eye to its origins, the official claimed.
“It’s an epidemic. They do it very very quickly,’ LA Councilwoman Traci Park, whose district includes Mar Vista, told The Post. “These are brazen criminals and it happens in broad daylight.”
No one seems to have any doubt about this being a crime problem. The reason this particular crime has grown is because the criminals don't feel deterred, likely because very few of them are getting caught and prosecuted.
But LA doesn't want to take any responsibility for failing to stop the crime that created this problem. Instead, Mayor Karen Bass is proposing a new solution: tax property owners more to pay for repairs.
A citywide plan to replace thousands of broken streetlights across Los Angeles could come with a cost increase for property owners under a proposed Proposition 218 assessment.
Mayor Karen Bass is urging voters to approve the measure, which would raise property-owner fees by an estimated 120% to help fund a $125 million program aimed at replacing more than 200,000 streetlights citywide. City officials say the current system generates roughly $45 million and has not been significantly updated since the 1990s, when Proposition 218 was adopted by California voters to require property-owner approval for new or increased local assessments.
Under the law, the city cannot raise streetlighting fees without a majority vote from affected property owners, a process that has kept much of the funding system largely unchanged for decades.
The mayor's plan isn't just to replace the copper, it's to avoid replacing the copper by installing solar-powered lights instead. In effect the city is just giving up on dealing with the thieves. Now the plan is to make property owners pay for crime-proof streetlights.
The plan, aimed at repairing streetlights continuously damaged by vandals and copper thieves, would increase the current budget from $45 million to $125 million — wire theft is currently costing LA more than $20 million a year. The ballot is expected to be sent to 600,000 property owners.
The Democrat-dominated LA City Council voted overwhelmingly in favor of the measure last month — with only one “no” vote — arguing more money is needed to cover permanent fixes to lighting infrastructure while copper-wire bandits have run rampant pillaging streetlights.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has voiced strong support for the initiative. “As long as voters support the street lighting assessment, we’ll be able to replace all 200,000 lights across the city,” she said. Calling the repairs “something long overdue.”
The one "no" vote on the city council came from Monica Rodriguez.
Monica Rodriguez — the lone city councilmember to vote against the plan to charge property owners — told The Post that “it’s unreasonable to ask them to shoulder yet another cost.”
“You can’t ask people to pay more when you haven’t even done the work to rein in the expenses you’ve already passed on to them,” she said. “Before moving forward with any fee increase, the city should present a clear, up-to-date plan for maintaining and protecting this infrastructure.”
How about doing something to stop the thieves? Isn't that the city's responsibility? If the city just replaces the damaged streetlights, that's a message to thieves that no one really cares about them destroying the rest of the city's infrastructure. Just ask the people who are actually contributing something to the city to cover the cost because that's easier (and, again, it's good for the unionized labor who will make a killing replacing all the streetlights).
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