For runners, walkers and neighbors in Boyle Heights, several streets are a little brighter these days.
After months of navigating darkened streets, members of the Boyle Heights Bridge Runners are finally seeing the results of a new streetlight repair team mobilized by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado.
Along Boyle Avenue, between 1st and 4th streets, streetlights are shining bright, helping 25-year-old Chelsea Rosales feel safer on her weekly run.
“It’s a basic need for our community to have met,” she said. “I’m really happy to see our city officials are taking action and listening to their constituents.”
Boyle Heights resident Nicolas Arenas Rivera, 25, has been running with the local running club for more than a year and has noticed many lights along the route in need of repair.
“Sometimes there’s debris on the sidewalk or streets, and if it’s dark we can’t see that,” he said. “Visibility is the most important thing.”
The repair team, formed with $1.07 million in discretionary funds approved by the City Council in October, is focused on maintaining, repairing and upgrading streetlights across Council District 14 for the rest of the fiscal year.
Jurado said the move addresses long-standing outages that have been a safety concern for constituents long before she took office.
“When streetlight outages leave working-class neighborhoods in the dark, it’s not just about inconvenience: it’s about inequity,” Jurado wrote in a news release. “These outages reveal long-standing gaps in service and leave residents vulnerable. This motion is a critical step toward ensuring every community has reliable, well-maintained streetlights.”
The team will prioritize repairs in Boyle Heights, downtown and El Sereno, where blocks of residential and commercial areas have grappled with darkness for years. Aging infrastructure, copper wire theft and delayed repairs have led to nearly 2,000 service requests in Boyle Heights in the last year, according to the motion.
According to a spokesperson from Jurado’s office, work is ongoing to repair lights along 4th Street in Boyle Heights, and extra security measures have been installed in existing infrastructure to deter copper wire thieves from accessing wiring from the latest repairs.
While the lights along the 6th Street Bridge, a leg of the Boyle Heights Bridge Runners’ three-mile route, are still dark, Jurado has committed to relighting the bridge before the 2028 Olympic Games.
After joining the City Council last year, one of Jurado’s first actions was directing the Bureau of Street Lighting to conduct a comprehensive analysis of streetlight outages in District 14, although the results of the analysis have not yet been made publicly available.
Meanwhile, a Bureau of Street Lighting ballot measure to expand the department’s yearly budget is expected to go before property owners this winter, according to LAist. The measure would ask residents whether they would agree to pay higher annual fees to help the city of Los Angeles more quickly repair and fortify its streetlights — a frequent target of copper wire thieves.
For runners such as Arenas Rivera, the recent improvements are already noticeable. Though much of the route remains in darkness, crews have begun restoring lights along key stretches.
“I think fixing the lights would benefit the running community I’m in as well as the people who need to travel at night,” he said. “It’s nice to see that things are starting to get fixed.”
Andrew Lopez writes for the Boyle Heights Beat.
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