I must say, I think that Los Angeles City Attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto, does a good job. We Angelenos are fortunate to have her in office. She’s wicked, smart and as tough as nails. Not long ago, I had a chance to speak with her, and discussed, among other things, the issue concerning copper wire thieves and the proposed new Streetlight Maintenance District to pay for the massive expenditure the city must undertake to repair streetlights (let alone private property owners faced with the same stolen copper wiring that must somehow cover the cost of their loss on their own).
Ms. Feldstein Soto told me about copper thieves who are looking for their next drug fix. She estimated that the thieves sell the copper wire they steal from each streetlight for about $50, but that the city gets stuck with a bill for about $5,000 to repair each light pole. She was frustrated about the situation, and her hands are seemingly tied between lacking Los Angeles Police Department attention and lack of funding for the City Attorneys’ Office, which budget she requested but was adamantly denied by Mayor Karen Bass. She is clearly as frustrated as I am and feels the city really has no workable solution to fix this copper theft situation other than to repair the streetlights, and she felt a plan to install solar panels on light posts would never work.
I must admit that I am still trying to process the conversation with Ms. Feldstein Soto. I thought to myself, “is she telling me that the city’s way to address marauding gangs of junkie copper thieves running free throughout the city would be to tax victims like us through this proposed Streetlight Maintenance District? So, the city’s solution is tax non-criminals rather than have the Los Angeles Police Department and City Attorneys’ Office enforce the law? My sense was, Ms. Feldstein Soto is as frustrated about this issue as me!
This nonsensical thinking by Mayor Bass and the City Council is nothing new. It is like if Councilmember Nithya Raman were to blame Toyota for making it easy to steal catalytic converters off their cars. Did I say, “as if”? Come to think of it, Raman did actually say that in 2023: “In this case, I think one of the things that infuriates me, is that we have a company — whatever, Toyota — who makes the Prius, that essentially has a device on their cars which is super easy to remove.” The thieves aren’t the problem…the Prius is – and Raman wants to become the mayor!
Here’s the Problem
The city of Los Angeles has had 220,000 streetlights for decades with copper wires sitting inches under the same sidewalks since before most of us were born. For nearly the entire history of this city, nobody was stealing it. But, unfortunately for Angelenos, enforcement disappeared, and the drug addict crooks showed up and began stealing the copper wiring.
In fiscal year 2016-17, the Bureau of Street Lighting reported 376 copper theft incidents across the entire city. By fiscal year 2024-25, that number was close to 16,000. That’s a more than 40-fold increase in eight years! (By the way…there were 8,000 catalytic converter components that had been stolen across Los Angeles in 2022, a 728 percent spike since 2018, around the time Raman placed blame on Toyota with her injudicious statement).
All these years had gone by without incident. The copper didn’t change. The streetlights didn’t change. But what changed is that the city of Los Angeles stopped treating this as a crime worth solving. And so what’s City Hall’s big fix here? Catch the crooks? Prosecute the scrap yards buying stolen copper by the pound? Fund and rebuild the Los Angeles Police Department’s Heavy Metal Task Force that the department quietly killed off in July, right when copper wire thefts were finally falling?
Hell no! The plan is to send you the bill.
Here’s What You Don’t Know
Here’s what City Hall won’t tell you. The crews ripping out copper wiring aren’t teenagers grabbing pocket change. The Los Angeles Police Department’s own deputy chief told reporters stolen copper turns up in abandoned buildings and homeless encampments, sometimes with extension cords running from the gutted pole right into the camp to power it.
These are pros. They’ve got rap sheets. Every dollar the city of Los Angeles spends catching and charging these thieves is a dollar that prevents the next burglary, the next car break in, the next smash-and-grab robbery. Take one prolific offender off the street and half the neighborhood gets safer. That’s how policing works.
Unfortunately, the city of Los Angeles is doing the exact opposite. It killed the Los Angeles Police Department’s Heavy Metal Task Force. It’s allowing the copper theft crews to freely operate in the city. And it’s mailing the invoice to the property owners whose taxes were supposed to pay for public safety in the first place.
Here’s the “Fix” Proposal
On a 13-to-1 vote, the City Council rammed through a Proposition 218 to create a new, Streetlight Maintenance Assessment District that intends to stick rate payers with a $125 million-a-year line item on property tax bills. For owners of, for example, a single-family home on a quarter-acre lot, that will cost them an extra $147.08. For a half-acre lot…that’s another $176.50 per year. If you own a 50-unit apartment building, get ready to cough up $1,529.68 every year, forever. Plus, the new assessment will be indexed to inflation, and that isn’t 90% of Consumer Price Indexed inflation like your rent increases, that’s going to be full, 100% inflation.
Ballots have been mailed to ratepayers, and we can only hope enough of them take time to return the ballots and vote “NO” to the creation of the new assessment district. Under California law, this assessment requires a majority protest vote to fail. Ballots were mailed in April 2026, with a final deadline for submission by June 2, 2026.
And while you’re writing that bigger property tax check, Department of Water & Power crews will be working, and may already be, swapping out streetlights for solar. So, you can see…the strategy here isn’t catching the thieves. It’s building lights the thieves supposedly can’t break and monetize to pay for their next drug fix. Sadly, this plan will never work and what will happen when there’s no sunlight?
Only in Karen Bass’ Los Angeles
We can only just imagine where all this will end up. Today, if you walk into any CVS Pharmacy in the city of Los Angeles you find your favorite toothpaste brand behind a locked glass. Shampoo is behind glass too as is the laundry detergent and deodorant you buy. All of us have experienced this…you stand there pressing a call button or calling out for an employee who may or may not show up, so you can buy yourself a $6.00 tube of Crest.
Angelenos should be proud of our ranking. The National Retail Federation ranks the City of Los Angeles Number One in the country for organized retail theft. That’s an honor we should be proud of. Retailers aren’t locking up the merchandise because they want to. They did it because nobody’s stopping the shoplifters.
Now Karen Bass’ Los Angeles is rolling out the same playbook for public infrastructure. If you “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Can’t stop the shoplifters? Lock up the Crest. Can’t stop the copper crooks? Tax the property owners and install solar-panels on lamp posts. Sadly, the criminals are getting treated just like bad weather – just something you plan around.
It’s perfectly obvious. The Los Angeles City Council no longer believes that drug addicted, copper stealing thieves are still a problem. They have now made the streetlights the problem, and property owners the problem. In fact, everyone in the city is the problem, except the actual criminals doing the actual crimes. Let that one sink in.
This is blame-the-victim government with a tax bill stapled to it. Not one dime of your new assessment goes to policing. Not one dime to prosecutors. Not one dime to the City Attorneys’ office that would help to stop these crimes. It all goes to hardware and a solution that most likely will just not work.
The brave Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez was the lone no vote, and she said the quiet part out loud. At a time when everyone’s screaming about affordability, you don’t bolt another permanent tax onto housing to paper over a law enforcement failure. And that $1,529 hit on the apartment building? It doesn’t stay with the owner. The assessment will get passed through so that renters are about to pay for the copper thieves too. They just won’t see the line item.
The city of Los Angeles doesn’t have a streetlight problem. It has a prosecution problem. This city kept 220,000 streetlights lit for a century without a copper theft epidemic. What collapsed wasn’t the infrastructure. It was the enforcement.
Daniel Yukelson, AAGLA Executive Director. Daniel Yukelson is currently the Executive Director of The Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles (AAGLA).