The Brief

Half a million property owners in L.A. could participate in an unconventional vote this fall that would determine the fate of the city’s street lighting infrastructure.

The ballots, if necessary steps are first taken by the City Council, will ask property owners whether they’d pay more in fees to increase the city’s street light budget, which has largely remained stagnant for three decades because of state law.

Miguel Sangalang, the executive director of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting, said that an increase in revenue could dramatically reduce the wait time for street light repairs, replace aging infrastructure and provide the funding and staffing he said the bureau needs to fortify infrastructure against relentless copper wire theft.

“We’re trying to right-size operations to match the needs today,” Sangalang told LAist. “We have this 100-year-old infrastructure that we need to start replacing. We’re facing new theft and vandalism.”

Why is the street light budget frozen?

Approximately 90% of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property illuminated by lights pay on their county property tax bill.

The exact assessment per parcel depends on whether it’s commercial or residential and how much the property benefits from street lighting, among other factors.

The average annual assessment throughout the city is about $80, according to a third-party analysis of the bureau’s revenue. Owners of most single-family homes pay around $53 per year, Sangalang told local officials in April.

The rates have been the same ever since California voters approved Proposition 218 in 1996. The initiative limits how much cities and towns can increase local revenue, including from “special benefits” like street lighting.

The city can’t approve a higher assessment for streetlight repairs without approval from property owners.

L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said a fee increase has been a long time coming.

“There’s been no reason why these fees haven’t been updated to meet current standards,” Hernandez said. “It’s just that there hasn’t been the political will to do that.”

The city hired Matrix Consulting in 2024 to analyze the revenue the Bureau of Street Lighting needs to maintain its network.

The third-party study found that the assessments the bureau currently collects equate to 45% of what it needs to “properly maintain and operate the system,” according to a summary of the report from the City Administrative Officer.

The consulting group determined that “property assessments need to increase at an average of 123%” to meet the needs of the bureau in the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year, according to the summary.

“The funding level recommended by Matrix will allow the [Bureau of Street Lighting] to reduce service response times to two days, allow for preventative maintenance to further the lifespan of lighting assets and [establish] a pole replacement program,” the summary said.

What’s the timeline for the vote, and how would it work?

Before ballots are sent out, the L.A. City Council has to approve what’s called an engineer’s report, which will quantify the proposed assessment increases for each parcel and show how the extra revenue will help the Bureau of Street Lighting meet the cost of maintaining service and implementing improvements.

Sanglang said he hopes to present the necessary paperwork before local leaders this summer and have ballots sent out in the fall.

“ We're hoping to share all the information that we have to try and convince the voters to vote in the way that would help the street lighting network,” Sangalang said.

One of the unique aspects of this process is that the power of one vote might not equal the power of another. The ballots will be weighted “according to proportional financial obligation,” a spokesperson for the Bureau of Street Lighting said in a statement.

The city of L.A.'s Bureau of Street Lighting has a staff of about 180 people responsible for maintaining a network of nearly a quarter million street lights scattered across 470 square miles.

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Kavish Harjai / LAist

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“A majority approval exists if weighted ballots submitted in favor exceed weighted ballots submitted in opposition to the assessment,” according to the spokesperson. “If a majority of the weighted votes do not oppose the assessments, the agency may vote to levy the assessment.”

If the timeline holds and property owners approve, the increased assessments could be effective as soon as the start of 2026.

Sanglang said the vote could mean the difference between a two-day turnaround time to fix a broken streetlight and the year-long timeline he said is currently projected if the assessment isn’t increased.

Hernandez acknowledged that convincing property owners to pay more for street lighting could be difficult, especially considering the city recently increased sanitation fees.

“It might feel like we’re just piling on these fees, but also this work should have been getting done,” Hernandez said. “ My colleagues, in the current configuration we're in — we're doing a lot of cleanup of the dereliction of duty from the past.”

Santa Clarita attempted a similar process to increase street lighting fees in 2018. Ballots there were never tabulated after residents complained of poor communication from the city, which terminated proceedings soon after, according to a review of City Council meetings at the time.

As a result, more than 35,600 property owners in Santa Clarita pay, and have paid for the last three decades, just above $12.30 annually for street light maintenance, according to Andrew Adams, the city’s special districts manager.

Forty thousand properties in the city in a different streetlight maintenance district pay a higher rate of $66 that increases with inflation, Adams said.

The city of L.A. also has different streetlight maintenance districts. Unlike in the city of Santa Clarita, where more than half of property owners in the streetlight maintenance district essentially subsidize upkeep for others, 98% of property owners in Los Angeles pay assessments that have been frozen since Proposition 218.

Miguel Sangalang, the director of the Bureau of Street Lighting, talks about the pilot program under one of the new solar streetlights in front of the Children's Community School with Mayor Karen Bass, L.A. City Councilmember Imelda Padilla, and members of the Van Nuys community.

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Makenna Sievertson

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LAist

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The state of street lighting in L.A.

Requests made through 311 for street light service have ballooned from 15,600 requests for service in 2016 to 46,000 requests last year, according to an LAist analysis of data.

Sangalang said the disrepair is partially attributed to an increase in copper wire theft.

It’s an epidemic that today causes 40% of all streetlight repairs, he said. He added that just two years ago, only a quarter of all service calls were because of theft.

Along a six-block stretch of Broadway in South L.A., crews from the Bureau of Street Lighting worked for four days in May to restore streetlights that have been out since 2023 because of copper wire theft.

“By the time we get to 2025 [requests], it’s probably gonna be … 2027,” Daniel Franco, the copper wire theft supervisor for the bureau, told an LAist reporter at the repair site. “We’re trying to catch up. Jobs keep popping up.”

Daniel Franco, the supervisor of the Bureau of Street Lighting's copper wire theft team, said there's a big backlog in street light repairs in the city of L.A.

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Kavish Harjai / LAist

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The crew of about 12 workers first repaired and rewired the lights at the site, then filled the boxes where the wires are stored with rocks and concrete and welded wraps around poles.

The thefts divert attention from routine maintenance and add costs and extra labor, Franco said. The fortification steps make it more difficult for thieves to steal the wire and will also make it more difficult for future crews to perform routine maintenance on the same lights, he said.

Sangalang said the bureau has taken steps to become “an incredibly efficient machine,” including lowering power costs by using LED lighting and beginning to deploy solar-powered lights.

Indeed, since the last time LAist analyzed 311 data in March, the bureau closed an additional 5,560 requests for streetlight repairs made in 2024.

“Our issue is one of scale,” Sangalang said, adding that the bureau has a staff of about 180 people to maintain a network of 220,000 streetlights across 470 square miles.

The issues affecting the bureau, he said, will have “a snowball effect on the larger system.”

“Every machine needs to refuel at some point, and we’re at that point,” Sangalang said.

Beyond the Rose Bowl and historic bungalows, Pasadena has stranger tales to tell. David Kalbeitzer has been seeking out those stories where rocket science meets the occult and ghosts haunt the city’s grandest buildings.

For Kalbeitzer, a Disney executive who investigates the paranormal in his free time, his fascination with the city’s mysterious side started when he bought a Victorian north of Old Town.

He sensed a spirit at the open house a dozen years ago and took it as a reason to move his family to Pasadena. Then he started learning the city’s history.

David Kalbeitzer, a paranormal investigator from Pasadena, is giving a talk about the city's strange history Saturday night in Old Town.

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Courtesy of David Kalbeitzer

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“I realized, ‘Oh, this place called us just as much as we were looking for it,’” he said.

On Saturday night, he’s sharing the lore he’s collected at Mesmer Mesmer an Old Town shop and event space. While the event is full, there’s a waitlist, and more talks featuring Kalbeitzer are in the works.

A city of ghost stories 

Ask Kalbeitzer about haunted Pasadena, and the list stretches from alleyways to the Colorado Street Bridge to Castle Green, the turreted former hotel overlooking Central Park.

“The Pasadena Playhouse theater is, you know, very haunted,” he added.

He says theatergoers have reported hearing disembodied voices.

Theatergoers over the years have described hearing voices and seeing apparitions at the Pasadena Playhouse.

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Jeff Lorch

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Courtesy of Pasadena Playhouse

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“And you look, and there’s no one there, or apparitions that have been seen sort of standing in the corner, and then you walk up, and they kind of disappear like shadowy figures,” he said.

As for the spirit that helped draw him to his current Pasadena home?

Kalbeitzer says she’s still around — and his psychic friend Michael Kouri shared her name: Dolores.

“It’s actually haunted by a very kind ghost that looks out for the house, protects my family and has been able to activate our alarm,” he said.

Having a Dolores in the house might send some people running, but Kalbeitzer said he grew up in a haunted house in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

And when his family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a teenage Kalbeitzer started seeking out places known for paranormal activity.

Rocket science, ritual magic and mind-reading

Having lived in different neighborhoods in L.A., Kalbeitzer says there’s something uniquely otherworldly about Pasadena — and it goes beyond ghost stories.

He said the city has an energy that draws people exploring the unknown, perhaps most famously Jack Parsons.

The rocket pioneer who helped launch the Jet Propulsion Laboratory also practiced ritual magic at his Pasadena home with the likes of L. Ron Hubbard before he founded Scientology.

“Many people call it the occult," Kalbeitzer said. "I don’t know that I fully subscribe to that, but there is spiritualism and occult mixed in there."

Then there was Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle, whose interests while living in Pasadena extended to telepathy and séances.

Upton Sinclair, pictured with his wife Mary Craig Sinclair in 1935, several years after he published a book examining her reported telepathy.

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Los Angeles Times via Wikimedia Commons

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In 1930, Sinclair published Mental Radio, a book about experiments in mind-reading. Albert Einstein provided a preface. Yes, that Einstein, who would spend the following winter at Caltech expanding on the theories of relativity and cosmology.

“It’s the craziest mixture of things that were happening at that time and all of it at the same time,” Kalbeitzer said.

A presence in the shop 

The event couldn’t have found a more appropriate venue.

Since opening five months ago in Old Town, Mesmer Mesmer has embraced the dark and mysterious, offering tarot and crystal readings and hosting events on subjects such as hip-hop’s relationship with ghosts.

Tyke O'Brien opened her shop Mesmer Mesmer earlier this year to create a third space and offer books and esoterica alongside clothing.

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Tyke O'Brien

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At that event, a medium told owner Tyke O’Brien she could sense a presence in the shop, which formerly housed a bridal store.

“She goes, ‘Do you ever feel it?’ And I’m like, ‘I am such a bummer,” O’Brien recounted. “I wish I could say yes."

The same can be said for this writer who’s lived and worked in and around Pasadena for years without so much as a brush with the otherworldly.

Kalbeitzer, on the other hand, reports supernatural encounters all around town.

“Everyone has the ability to have those experiences," he said. "But I do think how you see yourself in the world has a lot more to do with it, and whether you want to have those experiences."

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027. 

At a community meeting Thursday night at MacArthur Park Elementary School, officials said fence installation is now expected to continue through fall 2027, overshooting the previously announced spring 2027 completion date.

Thursday’s meeting highlighted the divide over the city’s plan to fence off MacArthur Park, with tensions rising during public comment. The Los Angeles Police Department says the fence will make drug enforcement easier, while some in the community who volunteer around the park questioned whether it will improve safety enough to justify the cost.

The city has allocated $2.3 million for the project, but officials have not said whether that will cover the full cost.

Installation of the green metal fence around the park’s perimeter is expected to begin in November and take about a year. A second phase, adding decorative elements to the fence, is planned for fall and winter 2027. Officials said the schedule could change because of weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

The park is expected to remain open during construction.

Capt. Ben Fernandes with the LAPD’s Rampart Division said the fence would create a barrier along Alvarado Street and other areas where officers have seen people using narcotics. That would allow police to focus more of their enforcement efforts inside the park, he said.

“So if people are going deeper into the park to use, that’ll make it easier for us to go in and do enforcement on them and arrest them for that use,” Fernandes said. 

MacArthur Park will close every night once an 8-foot-tall fence goes up around the green space, with Los Angeles police officers sweeping the park for encampments and people sleeping there before the gates shut. The Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners approved the plan Thursday.

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LA Recreation and Parks

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“I’ve been an officer for 29 years, and I’ve always known I can go buy drugs there, and I did as a narcotics officer. So what I’m saying is, we are trying to make it not convenient,” he added. 

Fernandes also said the city plans to enhance the park’s existing camera network. LAPD officers and Los Angeles Park Rangers will be able to monitor the cameras from their respective stations, he said. City officials are still evaluating whether additional cameras will be needed to address blind spots in the park after construction is complete.

Ariana Walker, who visits MacArthur Park every Saturday with a group of friends who pool their own resources to distribute food and hygiene kits, questioned whether the city had shown that the fence would improve safety and how much it would cost to maintain.

“The fence is a $2.3 million fence at the base level,” she said. “And they haven’t given us any indication of how much more it’s going to cost for upkeep, to keep anybody safe. There’s no conclusive evidence that a fence is going to stop crime the way that they’re suggesting.”

The meeting grew tense when John Alle, a local property owner whose family owns the building that houses Langer’s Delicatessen across the street from the park, objected to having his comments read from a written comment card rather than speaking directly to officials. Alle has been a vocal critic of the city’s response to drug activity and public safety concerns around MacArthur Park.

He was allowed to comment during the meeting and said the city needs to take a tougher approach to drug use and sales around the park. 

“We see knife attacks at all hours of the day. It’s out of control. And it’s not gotten any better,” he said. “We want to bring it back to where it was 15 or 20 years ago.”

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027.

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Gary Coronado

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The LA Local

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Alle pointed to public events at the park, including an upcoming Día de los Muertos celebration and a Labor Day weekend picnic hosted by Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman as positive developments for the space. But he added those events do not reflect conditions throughout the park.

Officials also outlined other planned improvements, including restoring access through the tunnels connecting the park’s north and south sides, making accessibility upgrades and providing free Wi-Fi for parkgoers. 

Residents who want to provide input on the fence’s decorative elements can email admin@themorcosgroup.com or call (310) 479-4727 for more information.

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