If you own property in Los Angeles, there’s a good chance you’ve already seen a new ballot show up in your mailbox.
About a half-million property owners across the city received ballots last month asking whether they’re willing to pay more each year to repair and maintain LA’s struggling streetlight system — the first proposed system-wide fee increase since the 1990s.
The ballot includes an estimate of how much more property owners would pay annually for street lights in their neighborhoods if the reassessment passes.
The Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting reports that the fee change depends on various factors, including the property’s size and whether it is residential or commercial.
Miguel Sangalang, the bureau’s director, said in April during a community forum that property owners are currently paying an average of about $68 a year to repair and maintain street lights.
The fee would increase to an average of about $115 a year, he said. The Bureau of Street Lighting has posted answers to various questions about the assessment on its website and launched a web portal where residents can look up the proposed increase for specific properties.
The bureau maintains about 220,000 street lights and the 27,000 miles of copper wire that electrify them. The city’s public lighting system has been under significant scrutiny in recent years as many lights have been reported out and the time needed to repair them has ballooned to about a year.
Theft of copper wire has fueled the outages. The LA Local found the LAPD quietly disbanded a task force investigating copper wire theft last year but is considering funding it again in the next budget cycle.
Many streetlights have also failed due to age. “Half of our current infrastructure is actually at the end of life when it comes to the bulbs themselves,” Sangalang said.
Calls reporting streetlight outages peaked in the last few years at about 45,000 in 2024 and 2025. Some neighborhoods saw calls about light outages increase significantly during that period. Several City Council members have spent millions in discretionary funding to supplement the bureau’s work in their districts.
The Bureau of Street Lighting had a budget of about $50 million last fiscal year. The department has estimated it needs a budget of about $125 million to tackle its backlog and reduce the expected repair time from about one year to less than one month.
The Los Angeles City Council voted in March to approve putting the possible fee increase on the ballot, which requires voter approval under Proposition 218.
Mayor Karen Bass, separately, signed an executive directive in March committing to replace about 60,000 street lights with solar lights over the next two years. Solar lights are said to be less vulnerable to outages because they don’t require the same copper wire targeted by theft.
Sangalang said that the fee increase being considered by voters will provide the staffing and resources needed to maintain the lights the mayor’s office has committed to installing and implement a long term plan to better equip the bureau to meet its responsibilities.
The special assessment establishing the fees for property owners was last updated in 1996. When asked what would happen if the reassessment did not pass, Sangalang said at the community forum that Angelenos can expect the delay for repairing broken streetlights to remain at about a year.
Ballots are due June 2, 2026.
