The Brief

Not long after the Palisades Fire broke out Jan. 7, firefighting aircraft began drawing bright red lines with fire retardant across the Santa Monica Mountains, in an effort to slow and contain the flames.

By the time the fire was out about three weeks later, the MD-87s, S-2Ts and mammoth DC-10s had performed more than 280 drops across 20 square miles, according to data from Cal Fire obtained via public records requests.

LAist partnered with researchers at USC to test samples of the fire retardant gathered from fire zones in the weeks after the Palisades, Eaton and Franklin fires where it remained on the ground.

Those tests found toxic heavy metals including lead, arsenic, cadmium and chromium, which can accumulate in the environment and pose risks to humans and wildlife, according to federal and state environmental agencies.

Fire authorities say retardant is a critical component of the firefighting arsenal.

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Tests USC conducted on LAist's behalf found the presence of heavy metals in unused retardant and in samples collected after the recent fires.

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A product called MVP-FX, a variant of Perimeter Solutions' Phos-Chek, was the primary aerial retardant dropped on the Eaton and Palisades fires, according to the company.

The presence of heavy metals in MVP-Fx has not been previously reported.

LAist shared the USC lab results with Perimeter Solutions. Jeff Emery, Perimeter’s president of global fire safety, said the company’s products, including Phos-Chek MVP-Fx, have passed extensive testing. He added that the amount of heavy metals found by LAist was far below limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency and “any concerning levels for human health and safety.”

The presence of heavy metals isn’t noted in safety documents publicly shared by Perimeter Solutions.

Aircraft often drop more retardant than water each year on fires in California. From 2006 to 2024, more than 194 million gallons of various types of fire retardant were dropped by aircraft, according to data from Cal Fire.

“We don’t check into every single thing that’s in there,” said Chris Jurasek, deputy chief of tactical operations at Cal Fire.

He said his agency relies on the U.S. Forest Service to test and verify the safety of the retardants it uses. The use of fire retardants is a “critical” component of the firefighting arsenal, according to both Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service.

Why we had to run our own tests

Late last year, LAist requested samples of MVP-Fx from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions, which manufactures the product, for the purpose of running an independent analysis for heavy metals. All declined.

“It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,” Jurasek said at the time. “You are not the first person to ask for us to give them fire retardant. It happens. It’s not something we do.”

Fire retardant coats laurel sumac in the Santa Monica Mountains after the Palisades Fire.

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A bag of laurel sumac covered in Phos-Chek, gathered in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was later taken to USC for testing.

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So over the next few months we gathered our own samples from the field.

After the Franklin, Eaton and Palisades fires were under control, I hiked to remote sites and collected vegetation, trash and dirt that had been caked with fire retardant. The samples were placed into baggies and taken to the Environmental Chemistry Laboratory at USC, where the fire retardant was tested for heavy metals.

Marella Schammel, a Ph.D. student, scraped dried red flakes into tubes filled with a diluted mixture of nitric acid and ran them through an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer.

Flakes of Phos-Chek were scraped into tubes along with diluted nitric acid for testing.

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Arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, manganese, nickel, lead, antimony, thallium, vanadium and zinc were all found in the samples.

Emery told LAist that any trace heavy metals found in testing were “naturally occurring.”

Phos-Chek MVP-Fx is primarily made of ammonium phosphates, which are derived from phosphate. That rock, when mined, can contain trace amounts of heavy metals.

“There are no heavy metals added to any of our formulations,” Emery said.

Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions all dismissed the results of the testing — saying that the samples couldn’t be relied on because they were gathered in the field. That the potential for contamination by ash from burning structures and brush after the retardant was dropped from planes was too great.

Eventually, LAist obtained unused, unmixed MVP-Fx and verified the source and authenticity of the material.

What we found

Marella Schammel, a Ph.D. student at USC, prepares samples of Phos-Chek for testing.

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Samples of Phos-Chek loaded into an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry machine for testing.

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Like the materials collected in fire zones, this unused sample was sent to the USC lab.

Schammel processed the MVP-Fx and found the same heavy metals present as the field samples we gathered.

There were some differences. However, it’s unclear if those differences are due to contamination on the ground or if there’s a variance in the amount of heavy metals present in different batches of the product.

“I’m not too surprised,” said Daniel McCurry, professor of civil and environmental engineering, who oversaw the testing process. Last year he and Schammel analyzed another Phos-Chek variant — LC95 — and found heavy metals as well.

LC95 is one of several USDA approved retardants in use today and one of the variants manufactured by Perimeter Solutions. Cal Fire doesn't use the LC95 variant.

Those results — from tests sparked in part by questions I’d asked McCurry in 2019 about whether we should be concerned about what was in fire retardants — made me want to know more about what is in the fire retardants in use now.

In an effort to compare USC’s test results to the official safety testing required by the federal government, LAist reached out to both Perimeter Solutions and the U.S. Forest Service, an agency within the USDA, for detailed test results for MVP-Fx. Neither would provide them.

In a statement, the U.S. Forest Service said that retardants that qualify for use have to show “nondetectable or trace levels” of certain heavy metals. However, the test results are proprietary information protected by nondisclosure agreements.

'Let people know what they're dealing with'

LAist’s review of publicly available documentation related to MVP-Fx, including its safety data sheet — which is required to warn those who may come in contact with the product of potential risks — found no reference to the presence of heavy metals.

A firefighting aircraft drops fire retardant as the Palisades Fire burns amid a powerful windstorm in January.

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After reviewing LAist’s results and the company’s safety data sheet, Claudia Polsky, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, said the company is likely in violation of multiple California laws and regulations including Cal OSHA standards, unfair competition law and Proposition 65.

“The Cal OSHA hazard communication standards require that a safety data sheet identify every hazardous ingredient in the product,” Polsky said. “Companies often resist disclosure requirements.

“To me this situation is disturbing if unsurprising.”

When asked about the safety data sheet, Emery said that the company works to “ensure compliance with all applicable regulatory requirements concerning our product.”

A firefighter stands amid vegetation covered in retardant in the hills of Mandeville Canyon in January.

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Some who regularly work with Phos-Chek said that LAist’s findings were a surprise to them.

“ The heavy metal thing, I can tell you, was news to me,” said Joel Lane, air tactical group supervisor with the Orange County Fire Authority. He’s worked in the industry for decades and has come in contact with different variants of Phos-Chek, both during preparation and when it’s been dropped on him by aircraft.

Lane said that he’s never been told or read in official documentation that heavy metals could potentially be present in retardant, which he finds upsetting.

He said the lack of transparency is concerning, but that it wouldn’t be the first time.

Lane feels firefighters were left in the dark about the risk of PFAS — long-lasting chemicals used in firefighting foam and in the heavy gear firefighters wear — that have been tied to elevated rates of cancer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Lane himself recently survived prostate cancer.

“ Be transparent, be open. Let people know what they're dealing with,” Lane said. It’s only then that they can make informed decisions about risks for themselves, he added.

LAist asked the U.S. Forest Service about potential risks to firefighters, to which they responded that “risk assessments of firefighter exposure to retardants do not indicate an increased risk for health effects,” pointing to a health assessment conducted by the agency, which includes MVP-Fx.

Although the assessment says risks are expected to be generally negligible, it doesn't explicitly mention heavy metal exposure. The U.S. Forest Service didn’t respond to whether heavy metal contamination was taken into consideration for the assessment.

What’s the risk to you?

Heavy metals can pose a serious health risk and have been tied to increased rates of cancer, as well as reproductive and developmental issues in humans.

That said, multiple health experts told LAist that the risk to members of the public exposed to the retardant when doing activities like hiking, is likely low, given the concentration of contaminants present in our samples.

“It should not be a reason for panic, but maybe it's a reason for caution,” said Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, professor and chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, who reviewed the results.

Retardant coats a playground at a Mandeville Canyon home after the Palisades Fire.

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Fire retardant covers a pool and lounge chairs dropped from a firefighting aircraft.

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Sanjay Mohanty, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA, agreed, saying that the risk for people with limited exposure, such as homeowners or hikers, is “very low.”

If you or your pets are exposed, it’s a good idea to wash it off.

Environmental effects

Retardant is a particular concern if it gets into aquatic ecosystems.

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Fire retardants can be particularly dangerous to aquatic ecosystems, according to a U.S. Forest Service environmental impact study published in 2011.

Once retardant enters waterways it can lead to elevated ammonia levels, which in turn can be toxic to salmon and trout. And there’s a possibility that an influx of nutrients from retardant can boost algal growth and create dead zones, killing off organisms there.

Because of these risks, the U.S. Forest Service prohibits the dropping of retardant within 300 feet of waterways, though it does happen. There have been more than 240 intrusions since 2012, according to another U.S. Forest Service environmental impact study from 2023.

However, even if the retardant doesn’t get dropped directly on waterways, it can get washed into them by rain. Heavy metals can settle in streams and ponds and potentially have devastating impacts on organisms there.

William Clements, a professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Colorado State University, homed in on the cadmium LAist found in the MVP-Fx.

“ If even a small fraction of that ends up in that stream, that is cause for concern,” he said.

If you or your pets are exposed to fire retardant, it's a good idea to wash it off.

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The heavy metal can get taken up by sponge-like algae, which is then eaten by aquatic insects such as mayflies and stoneflies, which can die when exposed to the cadmium. Exposure to the heavy metal can also inhibit their reproduction, growth and ability to emerge from streams, compromising a source of food for fish and birds, according to Clements.

“ The levels of metals will increase and will be bioconcentrated over time. Not now, but in a year, two years, maybe five years from now,” said Dmitri Deheyn, a marine toxicologist at the  Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“ People need to make the association that the impact is a lingering impact that will be diffused and diluted over time and space.”

In an effort to figure out how much heavy metal was spread throughout the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains during the Eaton and Palisades fires, LAist requested information on the total number of gallons of retardant dropped, from both the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire, via records requests. None were fulfilled.

If you’re in the firefighting world and have any samples of Phos-Chek or another type of fire retardant you’d like to share, please reach out.

In April 2023, the FBI discovered that Rafael Silva, an officer with the Delano Police Department in California’s Central Valley, had made violent threats against transgender people on TikTok.

Under a pseudonym, Silva posted several comments that the FBI found imminently dangerous. One read, “You ain’t safe. We finna change your pronouns soon. Was/were.” Another said that Silva’s “AR will track y’all down.” And yet another read, “The only power you’ll see is the one from a barrel and a 9mm,” according to investigative documents.

Silva is one of the 148 California law enforcement officers who engaged in explicitly biased conduct between 2014 and 2024, according to an investigation by The California Newsroom and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program. Records show the officers used racist, sexist and homophobic slurs; mocked transgender people; made violent comments about Black people; and demeaned members of the public, co-workers and incarcerated people, records show.

Yet only about 12% were fired because of their conduct. Silva was not one of them. After leaving Delano, he went on to work for police departments in Avenal and Wasco.

The news organizations reviewed thousands of pages of internal affairs investigations, disciplinary records and court filings obtained from nearly 500 law enforcement and oversight agencies. The records show that some officers accused of overtly biased behavior often faced limited consequences, such as a letter of reprimand or training.

The California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST, determines whether to decertify officers, barring them from working in law enforcement in the state. However, the responsibility to investigate misconduct and impose discipline generally falls to individual agencies and local oversight boards, according to POST.

An investigation of California law enforcement records found officers accused of racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ conduct often remained employed.

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Despite that system, more than 40% of officers identified by the news organizations still work in California law enforcement, excluding corrections officers.

Silva did not respond to requests for comment. The Delano Police Department confirmed that Silva worked there until 2023, but declined further comment.

Attorneys, law enforcement officials and academics said the behavior erodes public trust, raises questions about officers’ credibility in court and undermines efforts to recruit and retain diverse police forces.

Law enforcement officers stand guard during a protest on June 14, 2025, in Los Angeles. 

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Law enforcement officers should be held to a high standard, said Vida Johnson, a Georgetown University law professor who has testified before Congress on white supremacy and policing.

Johnson said people who express explicit bias have no place in law enforcement.

“With such an important job, if someone is exhibiting any type of bias against a member of their community, I just don’t think they should have that job,” she said.

How biased conduct can undermine public trust and the courts

When officers exhibit explicit bias, it erodes trust between law enforcement and the communities they are sworn to protect.

“It undermines our cohesion as a country when you have different perceptions of who our institutions work on behalf of,” Johnson said.

Experts said bias against protected groups — including Black people, LGBTQ people and immigrants — sends a clear message to those communities: We are not here to serve you.

A billboard put up by the Orange County District Attorney’s office that reads, “crime doesn’t pay in Orange County. If you steal, we prosecute,” stands on the southbound 710 Freeway near Del Amo Boulevard in Long Beach, California, on March 11, 2024.

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In a 2022 case, Orange County District Attorney’s Office investigator Eric Franke called a security guard who had asked him to leave a building an “angry Black lady.” In a separate incident, he remarked that Mexican people drink excessively. He received a letter of reprimand and still works for the DA’s office.

In separate cases in 2015 and 2018, Los Angeles Police Officer Armando Magana and San Diego Police Officer Alan Dyemartin ridiculed people for not speaking English. Both received letters of reprimand and kept their jobs.

The LAPD declined to comment on the incident for this story. Spokespersons for the Orange County DA’s office and the San Diego Police Department said the agencies take prejudiced behavior seriously and noted that both employees were disciplined. Franke did not comment. Magana declined to comment, and Dyemartin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The distrust created by explicitly biased behavior can have real-world consequences, experts said.

When people believe police are prejudiced against them, they are less likely to call 911 or seek help from law enforcement, according to Stefan Vogler, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Vogler and other experts refer to this as the “overpolicing, underprotection paradox,” a phenomenon they say is common in communities of color and LGBTQ communities.

“They’re not getting the services that they’re promised by the state,” Vogler said.

Explicit bias can also undermine trust in the courtroom.

“You become concerned about using their testimony without corroboration,” said Richard Drooyan, former Los Angeles police commissioner. Drooyan recalled the O.J. Simpson case, when defense attorneys used audio recordings and witnesses to discredit an officer who had been a key witness.

Under the Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, defense attorneys have a right to any information that impacts the credibility of officers who are called to testify.

For justice to be served, it’s imperative that information affecting an officer’s credibility makes its way before the court, said Joseph Trigilio, a Loyola Marymount University law professor and executive director of the Loyola Project for the Innocent.

“A fact finder should look at all that and consider it,” he said. “A jury should hear all of that and ask that question.”

Reporters requested lists of officers whose records must be disclosed to the defense if they’re called to testify, commonly called Brady lists, from every district attorney’s office in counties where the investigation found cases of biased behavior. One office — the Madera County District Attorney’s Office — said it does not maintain such a list. Several district attorneys said they could not locate Brady material on the officers in question, while most declined to say whether the officers appeared on their lists.

Bias extended beyond the public to incarcerated people and fellow officers

The investigation also revealed dozens of instances of biased behavior against Black people, including 23 officers who were disciplined for using the n-word.

“In our profession, there’s no room for us to be able to do that,” said Sheryl Victorian, the chief of police in Waco, Texas, who advocates for strong relationships between police and the communities they serve.

The cases include a number of officers who made comments or shared images mocking George Floyd in the wake of his murder by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Two weeks after Floyd’s death, an officer shared a meme congratulating Floyd on being “2 weeks drug free.” Another shared a photo of Floyd being held on his stomach with a photoshopped image of a naked man sitting on him.

Two children view a mural of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Friday, as a Hennepin County court weighed the sentence to impose on former police officer Derek Chauvin. 

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Ben Grunwald, a law professor at Duke University, said negative bias is especially troubling because of the vast power given to police officers. He described officers as “street-level bureaucrats” with the capacity to use force, arrest people and put them in jail.

“The idea that these decisions that are really high stakes might be influenced by things like racism, sexism, homophobia — those should raise really serious concerns for everyone,” he said.

More than half of the 61 correctional officers identified by the investigation were still employed at the end of 2024, according to state controller data. CDCR, which employs more law enforcement officers than any other state agency, would not confirm whether they remain employed today.

In two cases at Pelican Bay State Prison, officers made casual comments about killing or shooting at Black people, and both received reprimands. At the California Men’s Colony, an officer taunted a transgender inmate to put lipstick on before going out to the yard, and the officer’s salary was temporarily reduced.

In response to questions from The California Newsroom and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, a CDCR spokesperson said the agency takes corrective and disciplinary action when appropriate and that it has “implemented new staff misconduct regulations, designed with the goals of eliminating bias, increasing transparency and improving staff accountability.”

Correctional officers wield immense power over incarcerated people, who depend on them for their basic needs and access to programs that can help them successfully reenter society, said James King, program director for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a criminal justice reform organization.

“It becomes much deeper than mere words because there’s so much power and authority behind those words,” King said.

Witnessing prejudiced behavior, even when it happens between officers, undermines rehabilitation, he said.

James King stands for a portrait outside the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, on June 9, 2026. King, who is formerly incarcerated, is now Director of Programs at the Ella Baker Center, where he oversees and works on legislation that provides opportunity for communities that have historically been left out of policy considerations. 

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“If we are really committed to creating a safer world for all of us, then it starts with how we treat people, even as they are incarcerated and preparing to return to society,” he said.

Most of the cases we analyzed — 79% — involved comments or actions between police officers and other members of the criminal justice system, including fellow officers, court clerks, civilian employees and even a judge while court was in session.

In the case files, officers described how explicit bias in the workplace impacted them.

In the Southern California city of Orange, a Black officer reported applying to a different law enforcement agency due to Orange Police Sgt. Darrin Hall’s use of racist jokes and homophobic slurs in the workplace between 2020 and 2022. Hall received a letter stating that he would be demoted and retired later that month.

The Orange Police Department declined to comment on the incident, as it was a personnel matter.

A Los Angeles police officer wears an AXON body camera.

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Drooyan, the former L.A. police commissioner, said prejudiced behavior can create difficult working relationships between officers, leading to a morale problem, and even physical danger in high-risk or volatile environments.

“When they get into a tough situation, if they can’t trust each other, I think it becomes problematic,” he said.

Grunwald said fraught relations among law enforcement officers pose an existential problem as law enforcement leaders are trying to diversify their ranks.

“At a time when police departments are really struggling to retain good officers, and especially at a time when [departments] are struggling to attain officers of color, you’d think that this could be an important area of policy,” he said.

Uneven discipline allowed many officers to remain on the job

Despite the seriousness of explicitly biased behavior — and the fact that it can get an officer decertified — discipline varied across the 148 officers in the investigation.

Of these officers, 39% were demoted, suspended or had their pay reduced. About 20% received a letter of reprimand or were ordered to undergo training — discipline that may not permanently remain in their personnel files.

Experts said the cases uncovered by the investigation likely represent only a fraction of incidents involving explicit bias.

“We have every reason to believe that most of these types of incidents go unreported,” Johnson, the Georgetown law professor, said. “The Blue Wall of Silence. The fact that people are fearful of police. Making a police complaint isn’t easy.”

Even with those barriers, people filed more than 19,600 complaints alleging prejudiced behavior by California law enforcement officers between 2016 and 2024, according to data submitted to the state. Agencies sustained just 349 of those complaints. The figures do not include racially biased traffic stops.

Reporters were only able to examine cases that fell within a narrow band of misconduct dictated by California’s public records laws.

King said officers like Silva, the Delano police officer who threatened to shoot and kill transgender people, are not simply just “a few bad apples.”

“Law enforcement [officers] develop deep-seated cultures that you cannot train away, you cannot address through the hiring process or through the selection process,” he said.

Swift, appropriate action — via verbal reprimand, retraining or more severe discipline — is key to creating a culture of service to the community, according to Victorian, the Waco police chief.

“If nobody actually addresses the behavior when it occurs, then they continue to talk that way, and that behavior becomes acceptable,” she said.

Some officers appealed discipline and succeeded in having penalties reduced at least 38 times. Others resigned before agencies completed disciplinary proceedings.

Silva was allowed to resign rather than be terminated. The California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training declined to decertify him.

The city of Wasco confirmed that Silva was still one of its police officers as of June 24, 2026.

Nicole Nguyen of Stanford’s Big Local News and Marquis Mahone-Chambers, Katey Rusch, Elizabeth Santos and Julian Wray of UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program contributed to this story. A grant from the Google News Initiative supported the project.

About the data analysis

The Police Records Access Project obtains records from law enforcement and oversight agencies across California involving cases in which agencies determined that officers violated certain policies, including policies prohibiting prejudice against members of protected groups. Project staff compile those files and use algorithms to identify cases in which agencies found policy violations. Staff then review the records to confirm that an agency sustained the allegation.

Reporters from The California Newsroom and UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program searched the text of the files and AI-generated summaries of misconduct cases using slurs and terms such as “racist” and “prejudice” to identify cases for further review. Reporters consulted academics, attorneys and law enforcement officials to develop a definition of explicit bias. Three journalists analyzed the cases to determine whether officers exhibited explicit bias against members of a protected group. Experts also reviewed a subset of cases.

To determine whether officers challenged discipline or sought to seal misconduct records, reporters searched local courts for civil lawsuits. Staff also obtained certification and employment records from POST and the state controller’s office to determine whether officers remained employed in law enforcement, including those working for CDCR.

Reporters reached out to district attorneys in the counties where we identified officers who were disciplined for biased conduct to determine if they were on Brady lists. While a few offices confirmed that the officers did not appear in their Brady materials, most said those records are exempt from public disclosure and declined to provide the information.

Los Angeles city property owners voted down a fee increase that sought to address a massive backlog of streetlight repairs.

The L.A. city clerk certified the results Wednesday: Just under 80% of the weighted votes cast rejected the idea.

The city sent ballots to owners of more than 580,000 public, commercial and private parcels in April. They were asked if they would pay more in a yearly assessment to boost the city’s streetlight budget, which has essentially been frozen since the 1990s.

Currently, it takes about one year to repair streetlights from the time the issue is reported.

In a joint statement, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and other leaders said they remain committed to improving the city’s streetlighting network.

“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 statement said. It was signed by Bass, L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Katy Yaroslavsky.

The background

Most of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property near streetlights pay on their county property tax bill.

The amount people pay depends on the kind of property they own and how much they benefit from lighting. A typical single-family home currently pays $53 annually, and in total, the assessments bring in about $45 million annually for the city to repair and maintain streetlights.

According to a report from the city, the amount needed in assessments from property owners to meet the needs of the city’s streetlights in the upcoming fiscal year is nearly $112 million. That's well over double the amount the city will collect during that time period now that property owners rejected the fee increase.

Changing the amount the Bureau of Street Lighting gets from the assessment requires a vote among property owners who benefit from the lights. This year’s vote was the first attempt to increase the fees.

What happens now?

Nothing changes, really.

According to the Bureau of Street Lighting’s website, the city “will operate within its parameters, including funding … in other words, status quo.”

Had property owners voted in favor of the higher assessment, the extra funds would have been used to double the number of staff to handle repairs and to procure solar streetlights, according to Miguel Sangalang, the head of the Bureau of Street Lighting.

In previous interviews with LAist, Sangalang said that with a larger budget, the timeline to repair simple fixes could be brought down to a week.

What else is the city doing to turn the lights back on?

In March, Mayor Bass announced an initiative to convert 60,000 streetlights to solar power over the next two years. The Mayor’s Office has said the partnership with LADWP will not have an impact on the city’s general fund.

Then in May, she said hundreds of solar streetlights had already been installed as part of the initiative near city parks, including those hosting World Cup watch parties.

City Council members have also used discretionary dollars to convert lights to solar technology, which are less vulnerable to theft, and also to fund overtime for repair teams.