The Los Angeles city staff installed solar-powered lights in Lincoln Heights and Cypress Park to keep the neighborhoods bright and prevent copper wire theft.
Anthony Hernandez lives and works in Lincoln Heights, where he said the streetlights have not worked for years.
“I’m a pretty big guy, but I’d feel afraid, scared, walking around here,” he said. “Pretty cool to have these lights installed.”
On Monday morning, crews from LA’s Bureau of Street Lighting started converting 91 streetlights
The push comes from Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who represents the area. She invested $500,000 from her discretionary fund for the new lights.
“Street lighting is the biggest priority for almost all my constituents,” Hernandez said. “The number of calls I get just for streetlights is incredible.”
CBS News California Investigates obtained and analyzed city data and found that more than 37,000 streetlight repair requests were submitted by the fall of last year. More than half were still waiting for service.
At that time, the Bureau of Street Lighting said 15% of the system was affected by outages and nearly half of service requests were due to wire theft.
“About 60% of the lights that are out are not actually because of theft,” Hernandez said. “They’re out because of deferred maintenance, because we haven’t fixed them. That’s what happens when you under-invest in municipal services year after year.”
New lights have been installed near a school and park.
“A lot of people get up early to bring their kids to school or walk their pets before they go to work,” resident Conrado Guerrero said. “They come in late to bring their kids to the park, walk their dogs at night.”
The Department of Public Works said the new solar lights don’t have copper wires to steal and have lower repair costs.