As the sun sets on Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the streetlights lining its perimeter flicker on.
Well, some of them do. Others don’t.
Visitors arriving to remember loved ones, see celebrity graves or attend the cemetery’s concerts and film screenings typically enter the grounds from bustling Santa Monica Boulevard.
Depending on where they park, they don’t always find a fully lit path. Hollywood Forever’s western and eastern edges are lined with streetlights that don’t work. Calls to the city’s 311 line for streetlight repairs on North Van Ness Ave., to the cemetery’s east, and North Gower St., to its west, picked up in late 2022 and haven’t gone away.
No matter how you look at it, LA has had a major public lighting problem for years now. Hollywood experienced a nearly 40% increase in requests for streetlight repair in 2025. Nearby Los Feliz saw a jump of 125%. The Hollywood Hills saw the largest surge in such calls last year, with a staggering 270%.
And no matter how you do the math, the LA Bureau of Street Lighting’s $50 million budget isn’t enough to properly maintain the city’s 220,000 lights or replace the large share that need it. Estimates of funds needed to pay just for streetlight repair and replacement nearly exceed what the department has set aside for all of its work. It hasn’t been able to adequately budget to maintain the lights that work for years.
The bureau’s director, Miguel Sangalang, recently presented to the LA City Council a plan to ask voters in the coming election to more than double the agency’s budget in hopes of reducing the time it takes to fix lights from one year to a month or less and restart a regular maintenance program.
Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Katy Yaroslavsky introduced a motion earlier this year to allocate $65 million to speed up the installation of thousands of solar lights that are less vulnerable to theft.
Other City Council members have given the bureau money out of their own budgets to cover the overtime and hire crews needed to address problematic areas while other solutions are drafted.
Repair times surge from 45 days to a year
Heath Thomas stood on the curb in front of his apartment on Alexandria Avenue in Koreatown. The sun was setting and he was waiting for a dinner delivery. It was one of the hottest days of the year, and residents were starting to come out as the weather cooled down.
The streetlights were not on and they hadn’t been for the six months he’s lived there. He hoped his food came before it got too dark.
Nearby, Gigi Ahringhoff was walking her dog. Having lived in the neighborhood for a decade, she said the lights have been off and on for years. But mostly off. Ahringhoff begrudgingly accepted that this was just part of living in the area.
“It’s terrible for safety,” Ahringhoff said, adding that her dog is easily startled walking in the dark.
Streetlights go out because they break with age and because people tear out their valuable copper wire for resale.
The LA City Controller reported that the lights bureau received in fiscal year 2024-2025 about 11,400 calls about lighting issues related to wire theft and about 41,600 related to maintenance. The total number of calls for repair remained steady at about 45,000 between 2024 and 2025. Such calls were a fraction of that in years past.
The LAPD established a task force to investigate and combat wire theft in early 2024. It resulted in hundreds of arrests and trained officers to do these complex investigations. But the department disbanded the Heavy Metal Task Force in July 2025, while some of those trained remain in several police divisions.
The lighting bureau reported that it took about 45 days to repair a streetlight in 2022. That time has now ballooned to about a year.
The bureau has attempted to cut costs to repair lights and has made some progress by developing the ability to build pole boxes in-house.
But costs remain high:
It’s about $500 per light for regular maintenance.
It’s $1,500 per light to repair after wire theft
It’s $2,500 per light to fortify lamps against theft
Councilmembers spend millions from district budgets to fill gaps
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, of District 13, which includes Hollywood and its storied cemetery, recently paid about $1.2 million to help the lights bureau in his district.
“They’re already hard at work speeding up repairs, preventing copper theft, and installing solar lights that eliminate the need for copper wiring entirely,” Soto-Martinez said.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, of District 3, provided almost $1 million to install solar lights in his district, according to the lights bureau.
Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, of District 14, reported in February that she spent $1.07 million to address streetlight service gaps in the neighborhoods she represents.
She was among the first to pay the lighting bureau to hire new workers focused on addressing her district’s most problematic lights. The crew has welded shields onto lamp posts where thieves previously broke open panels to steal wire and repaired circuits that tree roots have pierced.
For Eunises Hernandez, of District 1, the cause of the city’s public lighting problem has been painfully obvious: Its budget has remained virtually flat for years.
“It’s not by accident that it takes us a year plus to fix a street light.” Hernandez said. “It’s because literally we’ve had their budget frozen for decades.”
The bureau’s backlog for lamp repairs has steadily grown to about 32,000 open service requests as of early March.
She stressed that city leaders can’t keep hoping to fix the problem with the same solutions that haven’t been working.
She identified areas in Lincoln Heights and Cypress Park where theft and vandalism repeatedly knocked out the same lights. Solar lamps that don’t contain the same wiring prone to theft can help, she said. She spent about $500,000 to install 90 solar lights there, and said the lamps haven’t been targeted.
These problem spots, Hernandez said, “need to be replaced with solar. It doesn’t need copper wire and right now its failure rate has been 0%.”
Many of the City Council members who have paid the lights bureau out of discretionary funds admit it’s only a temporary solution to a problem that has been growing for years.
“Like many Council offices, we are putting our district’s limited discretionary funds to pay for repairs, but it shouldn’t have to be this way!” said Nithya Raman, whose District 4 includes neighborhoods that have experienced some of the most dramatic increases in street light outages.
According to the lights bureau’s council report, Raman has provided about $115,000 for overtime and extra crews in her district. And she’s blunt about who should be held responsible.
“If the mayor and council leadership had made better fiscal decisions, we would not be in this dire situation,” Raman said by email.
Raman announced her run for mayor in February soon after posting a video on social media similarly criticizing city leaders who “can’t keep the damn lights on” because they didn’t ask voters to increase the bureau’s budget in the past.
Others have taken the same frustration to a different conclusion. Monica Rodriguez, of District 7, argued during the March 3 council meeting that she wanted to see the lights bureau do more to address thefts and repairs. She challenged the director to take a regional approach to dispatching repair crews to cut down on travel time.
“We’re always gonna talk about more money,” Rodriguez said. “But how do we make good with what we got?”