Los Angeles is grappling with a severe streetlight crisis, with about 1 in 10 of its 225,000 streetlights out of service and a repair backlog of roughly 33,000 open service requests, many due to copper wire theft and vandalism. Residents in multiple neighborhoods have been left in darkness for months, with the average repair time now about 12 months, and some residents being told to expect waits close to a year for restoration. The Bureau of Street Lighting, with a staff of only 185 and a stagnant budget, says these constraints, along with rising copper wire theft, are driving the long delays.
Streetlight outages have become a major political issue in Los Angeles, shaping this year’s City Council elections and even being used as an example of the city’s failure to manage basic services. Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running against Mayor Karen Bass, has highlighted the broken lights to argue that city agencies cannot handle fundamental responsibilities. Residents describe feeling less safe, altering their routines, and worrying about crime as streets remain dark for months at a time. One homeowner in Mar Vista reports that nearby streets had their lights restored after intervention, but his own street has remained dark since shortly after Christmas, despite being told repairs would take about 270 days.
In response, a group of City Council members is promoting a large-scale shift to solar-powered streetlights as both an infrastructure and public safety solution. Councilmembers Katy Yaroslavsky and Eunisses Hernandez have introduced a proposal to spend about $65 million converting at least 12% of the city’s streetlights—about 60,000 eligible fixtures, or roughly 500 per council district—to solar power. They argue that solar streetlights are less vulnerable to copper theft because they are not wired into the traditional electrical grid in the same way, which would reduce outages and break the cycle of repeatedly repairing and replacing stolen wiring.
If this proposal were adopted, it would easily represent the largest solar street lighting project ever implemented in the United States. The two largest claimed to-date are:
- Calhoun County, Texas – countywide parks project (EnGoPlanet)
In 2024, Calhoun County and EnGoPlanet announced what they describe as the nation’s largest solar street light installation, using an all‑inclusive service model. The project consists of roughly 300 solar streetlights plus 20 advanced solar poles with cameras, spread across multiple public parks and remote areas of the county lacking conventional grid access. The system is designed to be off‑grid, motion‑activated, DarkSky‑oriented, and resilient to Gulf Coast storms and blackouts, and is framed as the largest U.S. solar street lighting deployment when measured by a single coordinated countywide project and overall number of poles in that specific configuration. - Rowlett, Texas – state highway corridor project (Fonroche Lighting America)
In 2025, the City of Rowlett, working with Fonroche Lighting America, completed 425 off‑grid solar streetlights across about 5.5 miles of Highway 66, Dalrock Road, and Rowlett Road. This is described as the largest solar streetlight project on a U.S. state highway, creating the longest continuous stretch of solar‑lit state highway in the country, and is sometimes highlighted as one of the most ambitious corridor‑scale solar street lighting projects in the U.S.
The L.A. City Council proposal is over 60 times larger in scale, at 27,000 solar streetlights. Several other L.A. city council members, including Traci Park, Monica Rodriguez, and Hugo Soto‑Martínez, have signed onto the plan, and all five are running for reelection, underscoring the political stakes of the issue. Beyond the citywide proposal, individual council offices are also funding targeted efforts: Soto‑Martínez has directed about 1 million dollars to a dedicated repair team in his district, and Hernandez has allocated $500,000 from her discretionary funds to convert 91 streetlights in Lincoln Heights and Cypress Park to solar power. These localized projects focus on both clearing the repair backlog and “hardening” infrastructure to prevent future theft, for example by reinforcing existing copper wiring or replacing it with theft‑resistant solar systems.
Copper wire theft has hit a wide range of neighborhoods, from Hancock Park and Lincoln Heights to Mar Vista and Pico Union, and even high‑profile locations like the 6th Street Bridge, where thieves stole about seven miles of wire. This pattern of theft has repeatedly plunged entire blocks into darkness and exposed gaps in city maintenance capacity. Councilmembers and city officials present solar conversion as a way to increase reliability, enhance public safety, reduce operational costs over time, and modernize the city’s streetlighting.
There is also a financial structure underpinning the streetlight system. The city’s assessment on property owners for streetlight maintenance has not been updated since 1996. Because that fee has stayed flat for decades, city leaders have increasingly relied on alternative funding sources and discretionary funds to cover maintenance and upgrades. Some council members argue that adjusting this assessment and investing in sustainable infrastructure like solar lighting are necessary steps to address chronic underfunding, shrink the repair backlog, and restore public confidence in basic city services.
More information is available here.
Image above: A Bureau of Street Lighting worker installs a solar-powered light in Historic Filipinotown. Courtesy City of Los Angeles.
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