More than 200,000 streetlights across Los Angeles are broken or out of service. The city didn’t fail to maintain them. Thieves stripped the copper wire out of them — systematically, across years, across neighborhoods — leaving entire blocks of the nation’s second-largest city in darkness.
Now Los Angeles is asking its property owners to pay 120% more to fix the damage.
Ballots began arriving in mailboxes this week for more than 550,000 Los Angeles property owners, asking them to approve a Proposition 218 assessment that would raise annual streetlight fees by an estimated 120% to fund a $125 million replacement program. The current fee system has not been meaningfully updated since 1996. The city says it generates roughly $45 million annually — nowhere near enough to address a backlog built by decades of stagnant funding and accelerated in recent years by an organized copper theft epidemic…