On Friday, Los Angeles councilmembers Katy Yaroslavsky and Traci Park announced they are pooling some discretionary money to pay for a repair crew to fix the lights in their council districts.
“One in 10 street lights out means thousands of blocks across Los Angeles are darker than they should be,” Yaroslavsky said.
Park said this is about more than just restoring light.
“It's about restoring safety,” she said. “It's about making sure our neighborhoods don't sit in the dark while the bureaucracy catches up.”
Residents in a Mar Vista neighborhood said the streetlights started going out about a week after Christmas, after thieves stole the valuable copper wire inside the lights. One man told KNX News’ Jon Baird that he came home to find the street pitch black.
“We were shocked, and it just gradually got larger and larger and larger, so it's just one side of the street, and a couple of days later, it was the second side of the street,” he said. “Then it was two blocks of the street, then three blocks, then the street over, then the street behind us.”
Both councilmembers hope to convince property owners to approve an increase in streetlight maintenance fees, which haven't gone up in 30 years. They also want to work on financing a conversion from the current street lights to solar-powered street lights, which don't contain copper wire.
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