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THE BOTTOM LINE - Los Angeles loves to present itself as a world-class city, but every night our streets tell a far uglier truth. Entire corridors sit in darkness. Blocks remain unlit for months. Residents walk through unsafe, shadowed neighborhoods while City Hall insists everything is “being addressed.” It isn’t. And the crisis inside the Bureau of Street Lighting (BSL) — driven by political negligence, internal tensions, budget cuts, and a hiring freeze — is far worse than leaders want to admit.
For years, communities across Los Angeles have begged for functioning streetlights. Outages linger for months. Seniors refuse to leave their homes after sunset. Parents avoid walking with their children in darkened neighborhoods. Businesses lose nighttime customers. Crime thrives in poorly lit corridors. What should be a basic city function has collapsed into a public safety emergency — and residents are paying the price.
At the center of this breakdown is a bureau City Hall has weakened for nearly three decades. BSL’s primary funding mechanism — a streetlighting assessment frozen since 1996 — has never been modernized. Meanwhile, infrastructure has aged, vandalism has surged, and copper theft has exploded. Yet BSL is expected to maintain 220,000–250,000 streetlightswith a budget designed for another era.
The consequences are predictable. The bureau is severely understaffed. Acitywide hiring freeze has blocked new positions, leaving fewer than 200 field workers to maintain an entire metropolis. Budget reductions have forced BSL to defer upgrades, scale back proactive maintenance, and operate with aging equipment that breaks more frequently and takes longer to repair. Outage complaints have soared into the tens of thousands. Copper-wire theft ballooned from roughly 600 incidents in 2017–18 to more than 6,300 in 2021–22, a tenfold explosion that no department of this size could manage.
But beneath the visible failures lies a deeper story City Hall avoids: theinternal friction and escalating tension inside BSL.
First, tension between BSL leadership and City Hall is constant. The bureau has repeatedly warned that the frozen funding model is unsustainable. Those warnings go nowhere. As outages grow, elected officials shift blame to BSL instead of addressing the real cause — chronic underfunding and inadequate staffing. BSL is trapped between the expectations of residents and the indifference of political leaders.
Second, the hiring freeze has pushed internal operations to the brink.Crews are overworked and stretched impossibly thin. Managers face relentless pressure from Council offices demanding immediate repairs. Morale suffers as employees are blamed for delays they have no power to prevent. This is not incompetence — it is the direct result of a workforce restricted and reduced by political decisions.
Third, BSL faces conflict over priorities. Engineers and planners push for modernization — LEDs, solar poles, theft-resistant wiring, and smart controls that could transform the system. But because of budget cuts and the hiring freeze, field crews spend nearly all their time reacting to emergencies. Every hour spent repairing vandalized equipment is an hour taken away from modernization. The bureau is forced into survival mode instead of strategic rebuilding.
Fourth, the city’s slow procurement system compounds the crisis.Approvals for basic parts or contractors routinely take nine months to a year. This causes friction across internal divisions — project managers, procurement staff, supervisors, and administrators — all stuck in a bureaucratic bottleneck while neighborhoods remain dark. Repairs that should take days stretch into weeks or months.
Fifth, political interference distorts service delivery. When influential Council offices push aggressively for priority repairs, limited crews are diverted to those districts. Less politically powerful neighborhoods — often lower-income areas — wait the longest. This creates internal resentment and a patchwork service model based not on public safety, but on political pressure.
And every time the media reports on a major outage, BSL enters emergency scramble mode — reprioritizing jobs, reallocating crews, and absorbing pressure from City Hall desperate to limit embarrassment. Workers feel attacked for failures rooted in structural issues well beyond their control. The bureau functions in perpetual crisis because leadership refuses to fix the system.
City Hall wants residents to believe the crisis is caused by vandalism, copper theft, or slow repairs. But the truth is far more damning: Los Angeles’ streetlighting system has been hollowed out by budget cuts, a hiring freeze, outdated funding, and decades of political avoidance. Internal tensions at the bureau are symptoms of a system deliberately neglected.
If Los Angeles wants to call itself a modern city, it cannot continue operating with frozen funding, shrinking staff, and a procurement process that moves at a glacial pace. Leaders cannot demand world-class service while imposing 1990s budgets and blocking new hires. The streetlighting system will not recover until the city commits to real investment, real staffing, real modernization, and real accountability.
Los Angeles does not have a lighting problem.
Los Angeles has a leadership problem.
Until City Hall confronts its own failures, our city will remain exactly where it is now — in the dark.
(Mihran Kalaydjian is a seasoned public affairs and government relations professional with more than twenty years of experience in legislative affairs, public policy, community relations, and strategic communications. A respected civic leader and education advocate, he has spearheaded numerous academic and community initiatives, shaping dialogue and driving reform in local and regional political forums. His career reflects a steadfast commitment to transparency, accountability, and public service across Los Angeles and beyond.)
