Residents in Point Loma are fed up with street lights that don’t work. Entire neighborhoods have lacked working street lights for years – many of them are placed in the middle of streets – and residents have filed numerous Get It Done complaints with the city. Still, years later, many remain off.
The city says the situation in Point Loma is complex due to multiple points of damage and a lack of replacement parts. In the meantime, the city has installed some solar lights in the area, but repairs needed for a more permanent solution are currently unfunded.
Other neighborhoods, like in North Pacific Beach and South Park, have similar issues with the non-functioning street lights.
In North Pacific Beach, entire blocks have been without functioning street lights for years. Local TV station, CBS8 , reached out to some residents and spoke to John Maloney, a local, who said:
“It’s truly pitch black on some of these blocks. You can’t see. You need your phone flashlight just to make sure you don’t trip.”
Maloney voiced concerns about pedestrian safety and potential crime risks.
There is some hope in PB however. Pacific Beach residents who pay an extra assessment on their property taxes for street light maintenance as a capital project has been funded and aims to restore service to approximately 50 streetlights sometime next year. It’s currently in the design phase.
Residents in South Park face the opposite problem. Mike Gruby told CBS8 that the lights in his neighborhood have been on continuously for nearly nine years. He was concerned about energy waste and said:
“It’s probably been on, almost all that entire time and it’s day and night.. it’s 24 hours a day.”
In response to CBS 8’s inquiries, the city inspected and repaired eight faulty photocells in South Park and the lights are now off during the day.
CBS 8 also spoke to the City’s Transportation Director, Bethany Bezak, looking for answers. On the subject of Get It Done, Bezak conceded that, “Unfortunately, the average Get It Done response time right now for street light outage is around 350 days.” That’s nearly a complete year.
Her department only has 18 electricians to maintain and repair over 60,000 street lights, some of which are more than 70 years old. She acknowledged that her Transportation Department needed more funding to hire additional electricians, and actually encouraged residents to participate in the budget process. She told the station:
“You know, we’re really trying to do our best to get through this, but it is a challenge with all of this aging infrastructure. …Ultimately we close the gap and we restore the lights by getting more funding allocated to street light repairs.”
CBS8 reported:
The complexity of repairs often extends beyond simple bulb replacements. In a demonstration at a Mission Beach work site, crews discovered that the issue wasn’t with the bulb or pole, but with wiring under concrete more than 20 yards away. …
As San Diego grapples with these widespread lighting issues, residents continue to seek solutions, with some even resorting to installing their own solar street lights on city poles, highlighting the urgency of the problem.
Yet, this problem of non-functioning street lights has plagued residents for years. People living on Abbott Street in OB, for instance, have the same complaint as they’ve had for many years. Why hasn’t the city budgeted monies for more electricians over all these years? It seems a no-brainer.
‘Why hasn’t the city budgeted monies for more electricians over all these years? It seems a no-brainer.’ True. When you have to budget for the many unqualified desk jockeys making well over 6 figures creating ridiculous plans like ‘street calming’ to justify the 6 hours they spend behind their desks, its a no-brainer.
Lol, nailed it!
Unfortunately 55% of voters seem to want more of the same. Who needs working street lights or storm drains or water meters when you can have transgender-friendly bathrooms instead. (For homeless to sleep in).
No street lights, roads in disrepair, trash everywhere…..and still people voted to keep Gloria in office! These things and more must not be important to them. Expect more of the same nonsense.
Instead of repair, City work crews opt for flat-out removal.
Case in Point, the Loma Portal street lights.
On my block in Clairemont, our one (and only) street light failed 4-5 years ago, and has been reported multiple times on GetItDone by myself and others as a safety issue (the street is quite dark). In April, when I checked the status of a GID report filed in February, I was surprised to find it marked as “resolved and closed”. The City subsequently advised me that my GID report had been superseded by a new report. I later discovered several other GID reports by neighbors that were handled the same (declared fixed then reopened as a new case). Some of those represented a string of 3 or more fixed/reopened GIDs. The City claimed that these strings are marked as duplicates on some level, which is not visible to GID users.
Copied below are parts of an email I sent to the City, protesting what I think is their abuse of the GID system:
It seems to me that the way this has been handled (by opening a new GID report) is problematic. I see three reasons why this approach is beneficial to the City, but not to the residents:
1) The original report remains marked falsely as “resolved/closed”, without reference to the issuance of a replacement report. If this approach is now common, and the false reports are treated as legitimate, then this inflates the City’s claims of success and solving problems (artificially boosting those metrics).
2) A new incident report, disconnected from prior report(s), also creates false statistics on the average time it takes to resolve issues. The true repair time is the sum of the entire string of reports. The prior-report durations (fractions of the actual repair time), if treated as legitimate and counted separately, lead to average times that are artificially low.
3) Opening a new incident report, without upping its priority, basically resets the clock on this problem. Your FAQs give an estimate of ~11 months to resolve street light problems. So an issue that has persisted for over four years is given another year to resolve.
It seems evident that the City is closing and opening GID reports to basically “kick the can down the road”, while at the same time creating misleading (favorable) metrics.