Lighting the Way: Miguel Sangalang on Maintaining & Modernizing the City of LA’s Lighting Infrastructure

In this TPR interview, Miguel Sangalang, Executive Director of the Bureau of Street Lighting of the City of LA, reflects on the operational scope and evolving challenges of maintaining LA’s 250,000-light system across a 500-square-mile metropolis. Addressing rising copper wire theft, a static funding model, and a growing demand for improved service and technological upgrades, Sangalang outlines how the Bureau is delivering circuit fortification, solar lighting, and EV charging infrastructure. He also discusses the multi-benefits of investment in the city’s lighting and how transparency and measured reinvestment are key to sustaining the city’s ability to “light the way.”

Miguel, for our readers, where within City of Los Angels’ organizational chart is the Bureau of Street Lighting situated?

The Bureau of Street Lighting is part of the Department of Public Works in the City of Los Angeles. We report to a full-time board, the Mayor, and the City Council. We’re responsible for operating and maintaining the city’s street lighting system, which is about a quarter million lighting assets. 

It’s all connected by roughly 9,000 miles of underground conduit and 27,000 miles of copper wire, and our mission is to light the way for Los Angeles.

Knowing how both professional and candid you are, let’s address a tough issue for the Bureau: copper wire theft. How has the Bureau been meeting this challenge?

Absolutely. I want to first clarify that the street lighting network is working as designed, but this is a system we've pieced together over 100 years. It was originally built for ease of maintenance, and not necessarily for restricted access. That makes parts of it more fragile compared to modern infrastructure.

It’s a big system—covering two-thirds of the city, with half a million points of entry when you include pull boxes next to lights. All of those areas become vulnerable to theft and vandalism. Copper wire is valuable, and with the push toward electrification across society, demand has gone up and will only continue to go up. So, this isn’t new, but the scale and brazenness now are much higher.

To address this, we’ve taken several steps. One is circuit fortification—building steel and concrete enclosures, basically castles, around our infrastructure from the DWP power source to the last light on the line. We're also piloting solar-powered lights to bypass copper wiring entirely. On the tech side, we’ve added sensors to detect when lights go out, helping us respond faster and build enforcement cases. It's a layered strategy to reduce vulnerabilities and improve accountability.

Is this a problem that's unique to Los Angeles?

No. It's not unique, and as I mentioned, theft and vandalism are common in electrical systems across the country. What’s different here is that we've been more vocal about it. 

We've published reports for several years. Other cities in California, and across the nation, face it too and have contacted us for our best practices, but Southern California—and L.A. in particular—seems to be hit harder right now.

Is a shortage of Bureau funding hampering your response? If you’re going to address this problem and innovate simultaneously, is not the city and state’s financial stress, along with declining federal support handicapping your maintenance efforts?

That’s a challenge for us, which we have been discussing, and we will be presenting a new assessment ballot to stabilize that funding. One thing about the Bureau of Street Lighting is that our main funding source, the assessment, has stayed static for the past 30 years. So, 90% of our revenue source has been frozen at 1996 rates. 

That makes it hard when you have years, like a couple of years ago, when material costs have risen by 30%. It becomes increasingly difficult for us to balance expectations of repairs when we have less that we can buy or do  with a  very constrained resource.

I do want to talk about how much we’re doing to abate having to ask for more money. One of the things we did was become one of the first cities in the world to adopt LED, and now 99% of all of our street lights are LED, with cost and energy savings. That alone has helped us save $10 million on our power bill. And now we’re looking to replace the older generations, which will even drive that down further.

But we’re at the point where we’re faced with the march of time and our increasing need for a systems refresh coupled with the added issues of theft and vandalism. We’ve become a very efficient engine, but with any engine, you have to refuel at some point, be it electric or gas, right? We’re at that point right now.

Help our readers better understand the scale of what the Bureau services in a 500-square-mile city. Add the devastating fires, which destroyed City infrastructure, how do you approach accomplishing what needs to be done?

You talked about staff—that’s how we do it. It’s been a collaboration, a collective effort—where we have our field office out there day in and day out, trying to repair everything.

We get it done because they do the jobs that they need to do. I’ll say, it has been a challenge. Especially when we’re talking about multiple things hitting the city at the same time. That’s when we have to remember our North Star—that we are here in service of the public. 

We help light the way for Los Angeles, and we’re going to do that in the best supporting role we can, which means taking advantage of the fact that we’re right there at your front door—there to help you.

How does the Bureau interface with the Department of Water and Power? Elaborate on that relationship.

We're very similar in that we have a shared history. The Bureau of Street Lighting and LADWP share the same birthday, and once we were known as the Bureau of Power and Light until it split off.

We both deal in electrical systems. Theirs are to buildings—mine is in the right-of-way and for a different purpose. So some of the work is similar, but diverged in purpose. The Bureau of Street Lighting services a public good; LADWP is a proprietary department of the city.

It’s been great. They have been partners with us around energy savings, and we partner to drive down the costs, like increasing rebates for deployment, LEDs, etc. They’ve been a partner when it comes to more innovative things around transportation electrification. The Bureau of Street Lighting is one of the largest municipal deployments in the nation for EV chargers, and that brings EV charging to dense neighborhoods that might not have otherwise had the option—or like a public option—for people to access it.

Many have long reported that the recurring challenge for successfully upgrading and reforming our City’s infrastructure is LA’s unworkable procurement process. What can be done to improve that process to allow the Bureau to respond faster, more efficiently, and with less cost?

Yes, I think there are always opportunities for us to improve procurement, right? If it takes us nine months to a year-plus to get something, we’re actually talking about outdated technology at that point, especially when we’re looking at sensors to help us manage on a real-time basis.

So, cutting that cycle time is one thing. I also think there’s a greater need for us to see what the lay of the land is—what other technologies are out there that we can test early on to help us understand what we’ll need to buy in the future? 

It’s a two-part issue. There are also other things that we’ll need to work on, like trying to cut down the amount of time we’re spending on paperwork by using technology such as AI, or reducing the process itself because one of the ever-constrained resources is staff and people power. As we face some of the same staffing shortages that sister departments do, we won’t have the same type of workforce that will be able to move through some of our older processes that have been here for several years.

Related to that is the Palisades fire, which was within the jurisdiction of the City of LA, and the need to rebuild infrastructure with resiliency. What role is your department playing in that kind of rethinking?

With that one, we’re thinking about the infrastructure itself. One of the things we did first, as an emergency response, was to quickly deploy solar and battery-enabled street lights. That helped us in areas where the power was out or the infrastructure had burned and couldn’t produce light.

We were able to switch a few things out very quickly. We deployed around 50 units within weeks to light neighborhoods in that area as our immediate emergency response.

Long term, when we talk about recovery, we’re thinking about how to embed greater technology into the system—incorporating solar and battery-enabled lights as emergency tools, rethinking how we build conduit and foundations to support other future tech deployments.

LA’s been taking some hits lately in the media, with some saying there’s no accountability in city government. You’re in the middle of that world. Talk about public accountability: how it’s seen and practiced in City Hall.

From a values and principles standpoint, accountability and transparency are of utmost importance to us and the whole City. We take it seriously. We take the responsibility of communicating the work of the city as clearly as we can. That’s why we haven’t shied away when people ask us directly about repair times. I’ve been very transparent in saying: it can take up to a year now to repair streetlights. We’ve been upfront about that. We publish reports, and we get the data out.

I think part of the challenge is there’s a difference in the speed at which people consume information versus the speed at which we produce it. And most government agencies globally are facing that. We’re  facing the bigr question of: how do we get civic engagement back up, and how do we improve information flow?

We’re trying to improve—doing more on social media, publishing official reports, releasing open data, and using the web to present it better, but it’s going to be something we constantly work on and iterate.

Let me offer a contrast. LA Sanitation built a great reputation—if your waste bin was broken, you’d call and they’d replace it the next morning. Amazing. But now we’ve got situations where someone calls, and their streetlight takes a year to fix. How do you rebuild trust in that kind of environment? How do you respond?

It connects to your earlier question about transparency. We’ve built the most efficient and effective machine we can, and I’ve got the paperwork to prove it. We’re not shy about showing our costs, the repairs needed. But it’s a scale issue. 

I’m confident in what we’re doing because, for example, our solar and battery-enabled lights, even the pilot ones from a few years ago, are still working. That’s in comparison to places like the LA River, where we’ve had to return repeatedly because of theft.

Where we’ve fortified infrastructure, our data shows it holds up 90% of the time, and we’re verifying, testing, adjusting…but here’s the reality: two years ago, theft and vandalism made up 25% of our service request issues. Now, it’s 40%. That’s a massive jump.

This is why we’re talking openly about what we’re doing, how effective it is, and what it costs. Eventually, we’ll need to have a real conversation about whether the current assessment funds the level of service people expect. That conversation has to include cost.

Pivoting, what responsibilities does the Bureau have regarding the rollout of new Bus Shelters?

We do have a partnership with the Bureau of Street Services, our sister bureau in the city. We help them by taking advantage of the fact that, again, over the past 100 years, we’ve quilted together this penultimate electrical system.

I’ll say that the power behind it is that you can break up large conversations down into basic assets. Let’s talk about conduit. Let’s talk about copper. Let’s talk about the pull boxes and access points. All of those are different things we can use to facilitate multi-use infrastructure.

It allows us to then partner with our sister bureau to create new forms of service—powered shelters that can provide Wi-Fi, digital displays, or even just light them up if they’re the static kind. That’s a great thing. That’s the city being efficient and effective with the portfolio that it has. You’ll also find the Bureau of Street Lighting out on the further edge of this. We’ve had partnerships with NASA, JPL, and Cal State LA on an initiative from a couple of years ago called Predicting the Air We Breathe. That involved placing sensors on our infrastructure, matching it with school data to give policymakers better insights about what’s happening on the ground.

We’re also doing EV chargers—another form of technology we’re deploying using the existing system. All of these things create better services and improve quality of life by unlocking more value from what we’ve invested in the long term.

It’s budget season, and the city budget is stressed, as everyone in the civic space knows. When you go before the Council to make your case, within Public Works, for why you need resources to respond to threats and do your job, do you have a champion on the Council?

I think you’ll find, uniformly, that the Council is very open to discussions around right-sizing the Bureau, services more generally. They’ve taken steps to restore services. Public Works Committee has brought us before them to talk about the assessment and what the costs are, so I think they’re open to it.

The issue then becomes, along the lines of transparency, making sure the information gets out to the public. That’s going to be key.

I’ll say one more thing on information getting out there, because I want to convey that we’re a really effective service for the cost, for multiple reasons. There are studies I can point to. The University of Chicago did one that showed that adequate street lighting is a powerful environmental factor that helps reduce crime. That’s an environmental design and infrastructure providing a public safety benefit, not just aesthetic.

We can make a strong case, in hard numbers and value, for why this infrastructure deserves continued investment.

Related to funding, Miguel, obviously is insufficient staff—very much the result of layoffs and compounded by senior staff retiring. Does the Bureau now have a workforce with enough expertise to meet the current challenges? 

The short answer is: we’ll always need more. People retire all the time, and different things go on. One of the things that we’ll have to grapple with again is making sure that we have a pipeline that continues to feed the rest of the organization the talent it needs.

Right now, our in-house staff is all very knowledgeable and forward-thinking. We’ve been looking at plasma cutters, 3D printers—to help with some of the things that we’re doing in-house for fortification, other projects…we’re leaving no stone unturned for that, but that doesn’t mean we can rest there. We should always be thinking about what’s next, and that will require a constant supply of new thinking, with a supportive workforce. 

To close, what benchmarks in the next year or two should be relied upon to gauge any improvement of Bureau of Street Lighting services?

I’ll say two things. One: our number one focus is getting the lights back on as quickly as we can. That’s the biggest issue we’re working on.

Two: I think people will start to get excited with what the Bureau has to offer, once we get past the stage of catch up for fixing the lights. When people understand we're doing our core work of fixing the lights,  they’ll be able to soon recognize how dynamic the city and its infrastructure can really be.

For example, change the color of the light, and you change the character of a neighborhood. What if we could have block parties at night and change the lights to red, blue, and orange—to celebrate your winning team? What if we could install an EV charger on a pole within a day near you? What if you could do a public art installation, like the medallions in front of Grand Central Market that honor Jonathan Gold?

Most people think of infrastructure as a 5-to-10-year thing, but we’re more agile than that. When people start seeing that, I think they’ll engage with us—and the government as a whole—in a new way.