Rampant thievery of copper wiring around Long Beach is taxing the city’s ability to repair streetlights and plunging more neighborhoods into darkness — or dimness. Frustrated by mounting public ire, the city’s elected officials are demanding a solution.
In the span of just two years, the amount Long Beach spent on streetlight repair rose 724% ($37,000 in 2022 to $305,000 in 2024), with the number of requests to fix them quadrupling in the same period. In 2025, the city went about 500% over budget for repairs, according to a city spokesperson.
In the last three months of that year alone, the department was slammed with more than 400 work orders for streetlights, 385 of which have since been closed. About one-fifth of those were linked to copper wire theft, which can cause massive damage and require full-circuit rewiring…