Copper thieves in Los Angeles are ripping the wiring out of streetlights so fast that the city can’t keep up. Thousands of poles are dark across the city. Entire neighborhoods look like post-apocalyptic movie sets. So what’s Mayor Karen Bass’s big plan to fix it?
Tax the victims, obviously. Welcome to Democrat governance, folks.
Bass and the LA City Council just voted to send a Proposition 218 ballot measure to roughly 600,000 property owners that would jack up their streetlight assessment by approximately 120%. That would balloon the city’s streetlighting budget from $45 million to $125 million a year. Not to catch the thieves, mind you. Not to prosecute the criminals who are brazenly stealing copper in broad daylight. No — the extra $80 million is to replace the stuff the criminals stole and swap the wiring for solar-powered lights so criminals won’t want to steal it anymore.
Read that again. Their solution to crime isn’t to stop the crime. It’s to redesign the infrastructure so the criminals lose interest.
Councilwoman Traci Park — one of the few people on the council who seems to own a functioning brain — actually described the problem correctly: “It’s an epidemic. They do it very, very quickly. These are brazen criminals and it happens in broad daylight.” Brazen criminals. Broad daylight. And the city’s answer is a tax increase on property owners.
Here’s what the numbers look like. Copper theft is costing LA more than $20 million a year. Over 200,000 streetlights need work. A single pole repair can run $2,000. That’s a LOT of stolen copper. You’d think — you’d really, sincerely think — that a city spending $20 million a year cleaning up after copper thieves might consider, oh, I don’t know, arresting the copper thieves?
Nah. Too simple. Too effective. Too Republican.
This is the Democrat playbook distilled to its purest form. Step one: refuse to enforce the law. Step two: watch the predictable chaos unfold. Step three: use the chaos to justify a new tax. Step four: spend the tax revenue on everything except solving the actual problem. Step five: repeat.
To her credit — and we don’t say this often about anyone on the LA City Council — Councilmember Monica Rodriguez was the lone “no” vote. Her argument was refreshingly sane: “It’s unreasonable to ask them to shoulder yet another cost” without first reining in existing expenses. One person. ONE person on that entire council thought maybe they should try spending the money they already have more wisely before dunking property owners for another $80 million.
And here’s the beautiful irony that only California can produce. The city that won’t prosecute shoplifters, won’t clean up homeless encampments, won’t hold anyone accountable for anything — that city wants property owners to trust them with an extra $80 million a year. For streetlights. That criminals will probably just destroy again because nobody’s stopping them.
Bass actually said this with a straight face: “As long as voters support the street lighting assessment, we’ll be able to replace all 200,000 lights across the city.” Replace them with WHAT, Karen? Solar lights that the same criminals will figure out how to strip for parts in about six weeks? You’re not fixing the problem. You’re buying more expensive stuff for criminals to break.
This is what happens when you let progressives run a city for decades. The criminals run wild. The streets go dark — literally. And the law-abiding citizens who stuck around get handed the bill. Every single time.
If you’re a property owner in Los Angeles and you vote “yes” on this thing, we honestly don’t know what to tell you. You’re paying criminals’ cleanup tab while the people you elected refuse to put those criminals in jail. That’s not a lighting plan. That’s a protection racket — except the mob at least had the decency to keep the lights on.
