The Brief

The time between reporting a broken streetlight and getting it repaired keeps growing in the city of L.A.

By the end of 2025, city officials say, it’s expected to take a year for maintenance teams to respond to complaints about broken street lights.

Increasing maintenance and equipment costs and growing reports of copper wire theft have contributed to the lag, according to Miguel Sangalang, the head of the city's Bureau of Street Lighting.

But the main issue, Sangalang said, is that the bureau’s revenue has essentially remained stagnant.

“We have had challenges on our maintenance and operations sides because of the structure of the bureau, where most of our revenues have been frozen in time since 1996,” Sangalang told the City Council’s public works committee on Wednesday.

The increasing lag time for repairs tracks with a growing number of 311 complaints about broken street lights.

Last year, the city received nearly 46,000 complaints about broken street lights. That’s 43% more than in 2023, according to an LAist analysis of 311 data.

A decaying streetlight was at the center of one of the largest payouts for civil liability over the last year. In all, L.A. paid out $21 million after a jury found the city liable for a serious injury caused by part of a damaged streetlight falling on a man.

Frozen revenue

The bureau’s main source of revenue is a fee, or assessment, that property owners who benefit from streetlights pay twice a year. But despite inflation and increasing maintenance needs, that fee — around $53 annually for most single-family homes — has brought in roughly the same $45 million a year for almost 30 years.

“Just in terms of [inflation] alone, if you’re looking at assessment revenue, it would have been doubled by this point in time,” Sangalang said.

The fee, which applies to residential and commercial properties alike, has been stuck since 1996 because that’s when California voters approved Proposition 218. The initiative limited how much local governments, including the city of L.A., can increase fees for “special benefits.” Street lighting is considered a special benefit because not all city streets have the infrastructure.

Instead of the city itself approving an increased fee, a majority of property owners who benefit from street lighting would need to vote in favor of it.

How would an increased fee help?

Sangalang said an increased fee could allow the bureau to increase its staff by 50% and reduce the repair lag time to just a week.

Just under 200 people work for the bureau now.

Sangalang also said that more revenue would mean more innovative solutions to fixing the city’s aging street lighting infrastructure.

A more resilient street lighting system

Forty percent of street light outages are because of people stealing copper wire and power, Sangalang said Wednesday.

The bureau’s maintenance teams are focused on restoring street lights that have been affected by theft and fortifying systems to prevent theft.

But another potential solution is removing the wires altogether in favor of solar-powered street lights.

Though expensive, the technology has the backing of Mayor Karen Bass.

On Wednesday morning, the mayor visited Historic Filipinotown, where crews were installing “hundreds of new solar-powered lights,” according to a news release from her office.

“We are using new and innovative ways to improve city services for Angelenos — from modernizing the MyLA311 system to installing new solar lighting,” Bass said in the statement. “The city is taking action to make your neighborhoods safer and cleaner.”

Councilmember and chair the public works committee, Eunisses Hernandez, whose district includes Filipinotown, also sees the potential of solar street lights.

“Investing in sustainable infrastructure like these solar street lights is a win for our communities and our planet. We’re reducing our carbon footprint, we’re deterring copper wire theft, and we’re tackling the streetlight backlog in the neighborhoods that need it most,” Hernandez said in the statement.

Last year, the bureau installed solar-powered lights in Van Nuys. It will also add the technology to lights in Watts.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has mostly blocked efforts to investigate misconduct within its ranks, according to the county inspector general, who announced his retirement Tuesday after 12 years on the job.

In an open letter, Max Huntsman cited examples of how the county has thwarted his efforts to watchdog the department, which in the past has been plagued with accusations that deputies use excessive force and lie on the job.

Huntsman said one example is former Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s misuse of criminal enforcement powers to discredit critics, such as opening an investigation into former County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.

Villanueva was sheriff from 2018 to 2022.

“My requests for investigation were rejected,” Huntsman’s letter reads. “Even after receiving an official subpoena, the Sheriff’s Department has failed to turn over records regarding the improper surveillance.”

He added: “Sometimes members of the public wonder if frightening new surveillance techniques will be used for improper purposes under the guise of criminal investigation. Sadly, the answer is yes.”

Before becoming inspector general in 2013, Huntsman, 60, was a deputy district attorney who specialized in public corruption. He told LAist on Tuesday that the inspector general job wasn’t something he wanted initially.

“I didn’t want to go work for politicians,” he said. “But the need to provide some kind of independent reporting and analysis was significant.”

The Sheriff’s Department issued a statement saying it valued the Office of the Inspector General and all county oversight bodies and that it wished Huntsman and his family well in his retirement.

The department said it “continues to make great strides in advancing the department in a transparent manner.”

LAist also reached out to the county CEO and county counsel for comment, but they declined.

After George Floyd

In the letter, Huntsman says the state of California has come a long way in strengthening the power of local law enforcement oversight bodies, in part because of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

After widespread protests — and lobbying by Huntsman — the state provided authority to inspectors general to enforce subpoenas requiring law enforcement agencies to hand over documents and authorized external investigation of police misconduct, including deputy gang conduct.

The Sheriff’s Department — backed by county lawyers — has resisted.

“Los Angeles County may not follow those laws, but it will not be able to avoid them forever,” Huntsman wrote. “The county refuses to require the photographing of suspected gang tattoos in secretive groups that the undersheriff has identified as violating state law.”

“Just a few weeks ago, we requested some information regarding an investigation, and a pair of commanders refused to give it to us,” Huntsman said in an interview with LAist.

Origin of the office 

The Inspector General’s Office was created by the county Board of Supervisors in 2013 in response to a scandal that included former Sheriff Lee Baca covering up the abuses of jail inmates.

Baca went to federal prison.

Since then, the office has issued dozens of reports with recommendations for improving living conditions inside jails that some have described as “filthy,” stopping abuses of juveniles inside juvenile halls and providing shower privacy for inmates as part of the requirements under the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

“All of these abuses were reported by the Office of Inspector General and recommendations were ignored,” Huntsman wrote. Often, it took court orders to enact change.

“When we first blew the whistle on the torturous chaining of mentally ill prisoners to benches for 36 hours at a time, it was only a court order that ended the practice,” he wrote. “Time and time again, this pattern repeated itself.”

Huntsman wrote the county has permitted the Sheriff’s Department to block oversight and defunded the Office of Inspector General by removing a third of its staff.

“It's not surprising the county has driven out two successive chairs of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission,” he wrote.

“Government always claims to value transparency and accountability, but shooting the messenger is still the most common response to criticism,” Huntsman wrote.

Despite setbacks, Huntsman values work 

Huntsman told LAist on Tuesday that he was proud of his career as a public servant.

“I’ve really enjoyed the work and I’m sad to have it end,” he said.

It’s a sentiment he echoed in his letter, adding that despite the setbacks and roadblocks, he was proud of the people with whom he shared the office.

“It has been my honor to work with a talented, brave and tireless group of public servants to ensure that the public knows what its government is doing,” he wrote.

He noted the inspector general’s reports are fact-checked by the office and public.

“When government abuses occur, they are sometimes kept secret, but that is no longer the case for much of what is happening in Los Angeles County,” Huntsman wrote. “What you do about it is up to you.,”

Huntsman’s last day is Friday.

Topline:

The backstory: Last month, the council's Transportation Committee voted to bring a proposal forward to implement a policy change that allows the city to impound and immediately destroy abandoned or inoperable RVs worth less than $4,000. The change is inspired by new state law AB 630, which was created to prevent previously impounded RVs from ending back up on the street.

The motion, authored by Councilmember Traci Park, reports that abandoned RVs pose as public and safety hazards.

What's next: Councilmember Nithya Raman requested that an implementation plan be presented to the council's public safety and housing and homelessness committees.

Go deeper: L.A. pushes policy to make it easier to remove RVs from city streets.

The U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday that it had reached a proposed settlement agreement to end a popular, yet controversial Biden-era student loan repayment plan.

The Saving on a Valuable Education plan, better known as SAVE, was the most flexible and generous of all income-driven repayment plans, promising expedited loan forgiveness and monthly payments as low as $0 for low-income borrowers. Republican state attorneys general, led by Missouri, sued the Biden administration, arguing in court that SAVE was too generous.

The legal challenges put all SAVE borrowers in limbo for months, during which they were not required to make payments on their loans — even after many had already spent years in a pandemic payment pause. Interest resumed accruing on SAVE loans in August.

"The law is clear: if you take out a loan, you must pay it back," Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a statement announcing the proposed agreement. "Thanks to the State of Missouri and other states fighting against this egregious federal overreach, American taxpayers can now rest assured they will no longer be forced to serve as collateral for illegal and irresponsible student loan policies."

Tuesday's agreement, pending court approval, would end the long legal battle over SAVE by ending SAVE itself. The Education Department would commit not to enroll more borrowers in SAVE, to deny all pending SAVE applications and to move the roughly 7 million borrowers still enrolled in SAVE into other repayment plans — though some of those plans are also in flux.

The department also said student loan borrowers would have "a limited time to select a new, legal repayment plan." Borrowers will have to choose between two types of plans: 1.) fixed payment plans or 2.) plans with payments based on a borrower's income.

The two new plans created by Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will roll out in July 2026, and will include a revised standard plan and a new income-driven plan called the Repayment Assistance Plan. Though SAVE borrowers will be expected to change plans before then.

The SAVE plan's days were already numbered. Under the OBBBA, borrowers would have had to change plans by July 1, 2028. Tuesday's news would move that deadline up, though the administration has not provided a timeframe for the changes.

If the proposal is approved by the court, transitioning millions of borrowers to other plans will be a Herculean feat for loan servicing companies that handle day-to-day loan operations.

"It's gonna be bumpy," says Scott Buchanan, head of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance. "Remember, SAVE borrowers have not been in repayment for years. They're gonna have a ton of questions and will need a ton of hand-holding to get back into repayment."

The settlement arrives as millions of borrowers are struggling to keep up with their payments.

"We are sitting on the precipice of millions of borrowers defaulting on their loans," says Persis Yu, of Protect Borrowers. "And instead of choosing to defend a plan that would have been affordable for these borrowers, this Department of Education has capitulated to the AGs and is going to make life much more expensive."

The American Enterprise Institute, AEI, recently published an analysis of the latest federal student loan data: In addition to the 5.5 million borrowers who are currently in default, another 3.7 million are more than 270 days late on their payments and on the edge of default. Another 2.7 million borrowers are in the earlier stages of delinquency. In all, some 12 million borrowers are worryingly behind.
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