With roughly 80 percent of ballots against paying to fix the lights, the dark has secured its strongest mandate in city history.
VAN NUYS, California (Screw The News) – The long and unlit campaign to keep Los Angeles in the dark reached a decisive victory after property owners rejected a streetlight fee increase by a margin of almost four to one, and the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting responded by announcing that it will “operate within its parameters,” a phrase the bureau defines as the status quo and everyone else defines as Tuesday.
The numbers, as LAist reported after the city clerk certified the tally, were not close. Ballots went to the owners of more than 580,000 parcels, and just under 30 percent bothered to return one. Of those, nearly 80 percent of the weighted votes said no. A typical single-family home pays about $53 a year for streetlights, a figure that has not moved in decades, and a large majority of voters decided that figure was exactly right for a service whose repairs can take the better part of a year.
In the same week, the incoming mayor, Councilwoman Nithya Raman, was cited in ABC7’s coverage of the concession as pointing to 30,000 out-of-service streetlights as evidence that Los Angeles is worse off than it was four years ago. Darkness, reached for comment, did not respond, which supporters say is how it prefers to operate.
Darkness Declares Mandate, Thanks Voters for Staying Home
At a rally held near a corner in Panorama City that no one could find, the unofficial spokesperson for the dark, a retired electrician named Thaddeus Okonkwo-Brandt, said the result sent a clear message. “The people of Los Angeles have spoken, and what they said, mostly by not mailing the envelope, is that they are comfortable,” he said. “You cannot ask a city to pay more to see the sidewalk it has already learned to walk on blindfolded.”
Okonkwo-Brandt added that the dark has been unfairly blamed for a long list of problems, including tripping, wrong-door entries, and one incident last spring in which a man in Sun Valley tried to unlock a stranger’s Honda for eleven minutes. “The dark didn’t do that,” he said. “The dark was just there. It’s always just there. That’s the whole point of it.”
A Brief Guide to the Repair Process
Residents seeking to report a dead streetlight are encouraged to use the city’s official channels, which are summarized below in the interest of transparency.
- Step one: Report the outage through the 311 system, which will thank you and assign a tracking number with eleven digits.
- Step two: Wait. The bureau has said that a simple repair can take about a year from the date of the report, though a spokesperson has previously described the figure as closer to eight months for some lights, which the bureau considers a speedy turnaround.
- Step three: Discover that the cause was copper wire theft, which accounts for around 40 percent of repaired outages, according to the Eastsider’s reporting on council districts scraping together their own cash.
- Step four: Watch a council office spend its discretionary funds, such as the $500,000 in overtime money and the $200,000 set aside for lights in the Los Feliz hills, to fix what the citywide budget could not.
- Step five: Return to step one.
Comedians Find the Silver Lining, Which Is Also Unlit
Stand-up comic Ignacio Fairweather-Delgado said the result had improved his set. “I do a bit about how the whole city is a haunted house and the mayor is the guy in the rubber mask,” he told a small crowd at an open mic in Van Nuys. “Now I don’t have to explain it. The lights are out, the building is creaky, and half the wiring has been stolen by a ghost who sells it for scrap.”
His fellow performer, Rosalind Pennywhistle-Ayala, said she had started leaving the house with a headlamp and was now stopped by neighbors who think she is an official. “Last week a woman asked me to inspect her porch light,” she said. “I said I’m just a comedian. She said, that’s close enough, we have no one else. I’ve been on three site visits. I’ve scheduled a fourth for next year.”
Bureau Considers Doing More With a Frozen Budget
The bureau’s budget has been essentially frozen for about three decades, according to its leadership, and it has been funded largely by a property assessment that has not been raised since the 1990s. Officials have said that a higher assessment would have doubled field staff and made room for more solar streetlights. With the measure defeated, the bureau has announced a bold alternative: a plan to do the same thing with half the staff, no new money, and what it called “a renewed spirit of patience.”
A leaked internal planning document describes the approach in more detail. It lists three pillars of the new strategy: wait for solar, wait for the thieves to move on to a different metal, and wait for someone, possibly in a different department, to have an idea. The final page is blank, and a handwritten note in the margin reads, “Do not fill. This is the budget.”
Where the Money Is Not
Citywide, the city estimates it needs nearly $112 million a year from street lighting assessments, which is more than double what it collects. Closing that gap has been compared by one budget analyst, Cornelius Abernathy-Zhao, to “filling a swimming pool by staring at it in a stern manner.” He added that the city has also turned to solar conversions, which can be installed without touching the general fund, and that these could eventually brighten some blocks. “The sun, for the record, has agreed to participate at no cost,” he said. “It is the only party in this process that has never asked for a study.”
That level of cost-free cooperation puts the sun ahead of many of the city’s agencies, and it brings to mind the ranchers who discovered their fences now come with a subscription. The difference is that Angelenos have already been paying for years, for a service that arrives, in some neighborhoods, at the pace of geological time.
The dark, meanwhile, has no plans to rest. Its press office, reachable through a series of increasingly unlit corridors at Bohiney, said it would continue to expand into new neighborhoods “as demand allows,” and confirmed that it is accepting no questions at this hour.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/